Slim To None. Taylor Smith

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      Fitzgerald wasn’t naïve. He knew that Americans were less than universally loved in some parts of the world, and he could sometimes even understand why that might be. He wasn’t some ugly American who thought that U.S. citizenship gave an automatic right to megalomania. He recognized that other people might interpret facts differently than his compatriots, and that other countries’ national interests might not always dovetail with those of the United States. Some conflicts were inevitable.

      Unlike many of his business peers, he had grave doubts about the current campaign in Iraq. Although he hadn’t joined street marches to protest the war, he had made phone calls to members of Congress and other friends in the administration to express his concern that the legitimate hunt for Osama bin Laden and others responsible for acts of terror against America was being hijacked by an obsessive preoccupation with Saddam Hussein who, for all his brutality, hardly posed the threat to this country that other bad actors out there did.

      Fitzgerald was a moderate Republican, economically conservative but not without a sense of noblesse oblige. He considered himself cosmopolitan, politically astute and culturally sensitive. In addition to numerous domestic charities, he donated significant sums to international refugee assistance, Third World education and health care for the planet’s poorest wretches. Fitzgerald and his wife Katherine had also raised their five children to understand their responsibility to give back to a world that had been uncommonly generous to the Fitzgeralds. In light of the disaster that had befallen them now, however, he found himself rethinking the wisdom of that approach. Had they somehow gone overboard with Amy, their youngest?

      A brutal rage seized him once more. If he weren’t so wretched with fear, he might be appalled at having been reduced to the same level of animal passion as the terrorists who’d taken his daughter. To hell with civility, however. He wanted them all dead.

      Most of all, he wanted Amy home safe.

      She was a medical doctor. After completing her studies at Johns Hopkins, Amy had done her residency at a tough inner-city Baltimore E.R. After that, Fitzgerald and his wife had been hoping she’d move on to something a little less risky. Instead, when the International Red Cross put out a call for medical personnel to help rebuild the battered health care system in post-Saddam Iraq, Amy was quick to volunteer her services, signing up before her parents could express their misgivings.

      Fitzgerald could almost hear her laughing voice. “Come on, Dad! You know what you’ve always said—to whom much is given, much is expected. And I’ve been given a lot, starting with great parents.” Her mischievous eyes sparkled, making it impossible for him to remain upset with her for long. “I’ll be fine. You worry too much.”

      Now, she was a prisoner—or worse, Fitzgerald thought, a knot tightening in his gut. There’d been no word from her captors since she’d been taken from a Red Crescent clinic north of Baghdad five days earlier. No ransom demand, none of the usual ranting, cliché-ridden communiqués ordering the withdrawal of American forces. Nor had there been any credible response to the million-dollar reward for her safe return that Fitzgerald had posted two days ago. Of course, the crazies and fraud artists had crawled out of the slime pool in quick enough time, forcing him and his advisors to sift through reams of deceitful, bizarre and mean-spirited messages, looking for the one that might provide a genuine lead or ray of hope. From Amy’s captors, however, there’d been nothing but total, bloody silence.

      What kind of political cause justified attacking a medical clinic and kidnapping a young doctor whose only reason for being in their country in the first place was to help rebuild it after the long, dark nightmare of Saddam’s reign? Amy didn’t have to be there. She’d gone in to help the sick, the wounded and the poor. How did that make her a target for terrorists?

      Fitzgerald gazed down on the cruciform shape of Trinity Church. If the glass that held him back were suddenly to vanish, he would plummet down and be impaled like an insect on the spire that topped the cathedral’s central tower. It couldn’t possibly be worse than the agony he was going through now—sheer, gut-wrenching terror. Never in his entire sixty years had he felt so helpless.

      He exhaled a shuddering sigh and turned back to his massive, burled walnut desk, willing the phone to ring. It was nearly an hour since he’d put in the latest call to a highly placed source in the administration in Washington. Why hadn’t it been returned? They were certainly quick enough off the mark when campaign fund-raising time rolled around.

      The law offices of Fitzgerald-Revere occupied the entire fifty-third floor of the John Hancock Tower. Softly lit and trimmed out in warm woods and buffed marble, the suite smelled of leather and lemon oil. The deep-carpeted corridors and rich furnishings fairly hummed with the subtle but unmistakable message that behind these heavy doors and silk-papered walls, powerful people carried out important business, defining law and business practices that would guide the nation for decades to come.

      To facilitate its extensive commercial and government work, Fitzgerald-Revere had branch offices in New York and Washington, but the firm’s headquarters had always been in Boston, since it was here that the founders’ family roots had first been set down. Clients could be forgiven for assuming that those roots went back to the American Revolution, if not the Mayflower itself, given the name “Revere” on the firm’s letterhead. Nor did the partners go out of their way to disabuse anyone of the notion that the “Fitzgeralds” in Fitzgerald-Revere were the same ones whose family tree intertwined with that of the Kennedys.

      In fact, however, the founding Revere had originally been a Reinhardt who had legally changed his too-German-sounding name about the time that Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops began mowing down young American manhood in the trenches of World War I. And if old Ernest Fitzgerald, the other co-founder of the now-venerable firm, had no DNA in common with the man who was later to become President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, neither did he have to answer for the kind of Prohibition-era rum-running shenanigans that underpinned the wealth of that other prominent Boston family. Instead, Ernest Fitzgerald had been an Irish potato famine descendant who’d made his fortune by dint of hard work, a brilliant, precedent-setting legal mind and astute deal-making.

      There was no longer a Revere (much less a Reinhardt) in the firm of Fitzgerald-Revere, but Ernest’s son, Patrick, was the current senior partner of the firm which had opted to keep its original name, with that convenient if misleading cachet.

      Sick of waiting, incapable of turning his attention to anything else, Fitzgerald picked up the phone and punched in his secretary’s extension.

      She answered immediately. “Yes, sir?”

      “Still nothing from Myers?”

      Evan Myers, White House deputy chief of staff, had been a junior associate at Fitzgerald-Revere when Patrick Fitzgerald had introduced him to the former governor of Texas, then given him leave of absence with full pay while he ran the northeastern office of the governor’s first presidential campaign. Since then, and in short order, Myers had risen to stratospheric heights of power. Up to now, his former boss had never called in the marker. Fitzgerald rarely did, preferring to exercise influence subtly through ongoing access and dialogue rather than the tit-for-tat trading of favors. Now, however, the time for subtlety was over. It was payback time.

      “I tried calling Mr. Myers again about ten minutes ago,” his secretary said, “but apparently he’s still in a meeting.”

      “Damn.”

      “His office did promise that he’d get right back to you as soon as it wrapped. Also…” she added, her voice hesitant.

      “What?”

      “Mrs. Fitzgerald called a while СКАЧАТЬ