Part IV
Chapter 24
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Senator Walter Chalmers was in the living room of his house in The City, pacing back and forth across the vast, ornately decorated room, stopping from time-to-time to take a sip from a glass of ice-cold Chardonnay. He had started the afternoon in an angry state-of-mind; now, as the events of this morning came into sharper relief, he was growing more and more afraid of a certain, and, he feared, an inevitably terrible outcome to his brother's latest debacle.
Four years ago Paddy had been approached by two South Americans who desired a meeting with the U.S. Export-Import Bank, their stated aim being to secure financing for a new airline to link Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru to gateways in Miami and Houston. The men claimed that they had secured financing from these countries, but only enough to fund about seventy percent of the proposed airline's first two years of operation. Neither Boeing nor McDonnell-Douglas would commit to sales without one hundred percent of two years operations on hand, leaving the group only one option, to lease their first aircraft from ILFC...and this the group did not want to do.
The group had wanted to know if Senator Chalmers could intercede on their behalf and arrange for the US Ex-Im Bank to provide bridge financing, so Paddy arranged the meeting. After looking into the matter, Senator Chalmers learned that the South American group would need to take on a few U.S. investors, and with U.S. interests represented the Ex-Im Bank would have little reason not to lend the money, and though numerous meetings had been necessary, in the end, the group got their financing - and Boeing sold ten more 757 airliners.
Easy enough, Walter Chalmers had thought at the time, or so it seemed because it looked like everyone had come out winners - even before ink met paper.
Except that the investors Paddy Chalmers located here in the Bay Area soon wanted more return on their investment. A lot more, as it turned out.
Notably, they wanted easy little favors, really easy, at least in the beginning. Simple little things, like getting a nephew a job at one of the Chalmers family auto dealerships. More problematically still, Paddy had not objected to all the little favors that followed, though over time Paddy kept Walter out of the loop as 'things' progressed beyond simple nepotism. In a word, Paddy was in deep.
And by then, both Walter and Paddy had been invited to Medellin, Columbia, to meet with one of the biggest South American investors in the new airline, and Walter had - reluctantly - accepted. Yet he and his brother were both more than impressed with the grand estancia of their host, a soft-spoken man named Pablo Escobar, and when Walter returned to D.C. he did so with a very large campaign contribution in hand - not to mention a promise of more to come as time passed.
Of course, things went downhill even faster after Escobar had a US senator in his pocket.
When Senator Chalmers first met Escobar he had no idea who he was, so he had no idea how Escobar had made his fortune; yet all that didn't matter now because he'd been bought and paid for, and as a result he was neck-deep in the largest criminal drug cartel operating on the West Coast...
"How fucking ironic!" he muttered as he paced the living room. He'd begun his career as a 'Law and Order' Republican riding on Richard Nixon's coattails, only now it looked like he was about to go down in flames, forever linked to the very cartels he'd hoped to run out of the country. Worse than that, he'd be branded as just another corrupt politician bought-off by the most nefarious drug dealer in the world...
Yet the most ironic thought that crossed his mind that afternoon was far more troubling to him, and on a very personal level, because he finally understood where Frank Bullitt had been coming from during their final confrontation at SFO - just before he'd looked on passively as Bullitt killed Johnny Ross. Even worse, Senator Walter Chalmers had begun to see that the only person who could conceivably extricate him from this mess was none other than that very same Lieutenant Frank Bullitt.
"My legal idealism," Chalmers sighed, "pitted against Bullitt's life of experience on the street. I should have known better, even then."
But when he'd called the department earlier that afternoon - hoping to find the detective - he learned that Bullitt had recently retired...and after that bit of news he'd grown utterly despondent.
But ironic or not, his fevered thinking went, one thought kept running through his mind: 'I have to find him...find out where he's living. He's the only one in the department who knows the real score.'
The sun was setting, the temperature falling rapidly now, yet Chalmers walked out onto the huge terrace that almost completely surrounded his house, and he walked over to look at the Golden Gate.
Why, he wondered, had that bridge become such an important metaphor about this city by the bay? Was it a symbol of a real 'can do' attitude that was even now slowly fading into a distant, unrecognizable past? Had the pursuit of easy money crushed that spirit?
But another heavy fog was rolling in, hiding even the bridge from view and, in a way, obscuring the future...and he shivered as a wave of cold, humid air whispered through the pines that flanked his most cherished view of the world.
"Easy money," he said to the wind. "That's all I wanted."
Paddy was on his way over for dinner now, and he'd seemed jolly enough on the telephone. His brother had told him he'd found the answer to all their problems.
And they really needed to talk about it over dinner.
He looked at the pines bending to the suddenly insistent wind-borne flow, then he looked down on the city as it disappeared is this sudden, plaintive evensong.
'Disappearing like this life,' he thought. 'Because without Frank Bullitt, there's no way out. He's the only person I can trust now.'
"...Like sand running down in an hourglass," he said as he turned to go inside.
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Colonel Goodman paced the dock slowly, thinking about the cascade of events that had befallen his world over the last week.
First, Imogen's unexpected cancer diagnosis, then her sudden, if a little mysterious death.
Avi's heart attack, and with it another dear friend taken from this life.
And now, foremost in his mind was a promise he'd made to Avi years ago, that he was to protect Harry Callahan at all cost, and see to it that Avi's final instructions were carried out.
'But now Harry is out of reach,' Goodman thought. 'Worse still, he was sailing into harm's way, carrying out the plan I have devised. If he is killed, his death will be blood on my hands, and I will have let Avi - and Imogen - down...and in the worst possible way.'
He came to the edge of the dock and looked down into the water, down to his tiny reflection thirty feet below.
'My face? That is my face down there, isn't it?
'And the eyes? Yes, those are mine, too.'
And yet, there was Harry, too. Looking up at him, pleading with him to let the team go, to let them finish what they'd started.
But that was why he was here. In Osaka. Waiting for Lloyd Callahan.
Because of all the people left in the world, Lloyd had the most at stake in this operation. So it was only fair that he talk to the elder Callahan before deciding how to proceed.
'But this entire operation,' he reminded himself, 'is all about Hate. About cops killing cops because of ethnicity, or because of religious beliefs. That's why we are there, why I am there. That, and because Avi Rosenthal wanted me there to protect Harry Callahan.'
And still he looked at his reflection.
"Or...was it ever really about Hate?" he said aloud.
His reflection was silent as he questioned himself.
"Killing is killing, whether carried out as simple revenge or legally sanctioned retribution. Look what we did after Munich. We hunted the killers down and killed them one by one, but that didn't make those killings morally 'right,' did it? No, we killed them to settle a score. We killed them to let others know that we are not weak. We killed them as deterrence. So doesn't that mean we killed them to stop even more killing? And if so, wasn't that the right thing to do? But...what if those killings spawn even more violence? More death? Then what? Were we justified killing the killers of our athletes? Can killing ever be justified?"
"My," his reflection said, "but that is a very strange question indeed, coming as it does from a man who has killed so many people."
"But that was war! You can't judge me for that?"
"Can't I?"
Goodman was startled by the voice and he turned and looked around, his eyes settling on an old man in a loden cape. His white hair had yellowed as by extreme age, and he was leaning on a cane. But...something within the cane was alive...
Lightning? Inlaid silver strands of...lightning?
Goodman shook his head, tried to clear his mind...but the old man was still there, staring at him.
