PUERTO GOLFITO, COSTA RICA

Stu Garret was not known for his patience. In his mind this was the singular trait that had propelled him to such great success. He was a decisive taskmaster who worked people as if they were his serfs. He wanted positive results and nothing less, and compliments to subordinates were almost unheard-of. In the world of political consulting and campaign management he was king. No other living person had successfully managed two separate bids for the Oval Office. His ability to orchestrate a campaign had taken on an almost mythical aura in the media and Democratic circles. His opponents, on the other hand, thought of him as the most underhanded, unethical jerk ever to stalk the wings of American politics.

Garret wore this reputation as a badge of honor. If his opponents were dumb enough to follow the rules, that was their fault. He was a practitioner of all the most underhanded techniques. To him politics was guerrilla warfare. Hit-and-run tactics were the marching orders he gave his staffers and operatives. Go on the offensive and never let up, and absolutely never ever admit any wrongdoing to the press or your opponent. Elections were a competition that took place over a relatively compressed period of time. Garret often carried the day by sheer inertia, like slowly moving a rugby scrum toward the goal line. This bullish attitude and uncompromising vision served him well in politics, but was about to fail him in another arena. One with a far more serious endgame.

Garret and his wife were asleep in the master cabin that was tucked up in the bow of his brand-new Baia sixty-three-foot Azzurra. Garret rolled over, his left leg dangling off the side of the king-size bed. His eyes opened, blinking several times. Slowly the blue numbers of his bedside digital clock came into focus. It was 2:11 in the morning. He let his eyelids close and rolled onto his back. Occasionally, if he changed positions it would take the pressure off his bladder and he could fall right back asleep.

People all over the world are creatures of habit and Garret was no different. He liked to start his day with several cups of very strong black coffee and end it with a bottle of Chardonnay-sometimes two. These habits and an enlarged prostate made a certain nightly ritual inevitable. At roughly 3:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. he awoke to alleviate the pressure on his bladder. Simply cutting back on the coffee and wine would have been an easy solution, but Garret didn’t like depriving himself of anything he liked. The way his mind worked, getting up to relieve himself wasn’t the problem. It was falling back asleep. The magic bullet he’d found was sleeping on the water. When on land Garret found it almost impossible to get a good night’s rest. On the water, however, he could relieve himself as many times as his swollen prostate required and the motion of the ocean was guaranteed to rock him back to sleep.

The other benefit of boating lay in its solitude. The older Garret got, the more he realized he simply didn’t like people. Most he found to be irritating and obnoxious, but even the endearing ones wore thin over time. He’d made a small fortune getting men and women elected to public office. Professional charmers who could change personas to fit each potential voter. Even these chameleons found a way to get under his skin. After a while their feigned can-do attitude and politically correct speak became intolerable. Garret was at his core an irascible man who believed everyone acted in their own selfish interests.

The evangelist who spoke of his love of Christ did so not out of adoration for his savior, but out of a need for others to hold him in high regard. Garret had met one too many Hollywood types who professed their desire to save Mother Earth, while ensconced in one of their several ten-thousand-square-foot homes of which they were the sole occupants. Did they really believe in global warming or were they simply hypocrites? The town had its fair share of sanctimonious phonies, to be sure, but most simply wanted to be accepted and to be thought of as enlightened, intelligent, and compassionate. Garrett had no such need. He yearned for the acceptance of others about as much as he wanted a sturdy kick in the groin.

The visual brought a sly grin to Garret’s face. He was very happy with the way his life had turned out. Especially in light of how things were going just a year ago. He’d just finished running his second successful presidential campaign. Having helped orchestrate one of the greatest come-from-behind victories in the history of the country, he was flushed with a sense of omnipotence. Manufacturing a victory was probably a more accurate definition of what he’d done, but he wasn’t about to go there.

The important thing was that he had done his job. Politics was a rough game, each side willing to do the most unseemly things to win. None of it surprised Garret. History was filled with examples. Over time untold numbers of siblings had poisoned and been poisoned while jockeying for the throne; civil wars fought over mere ideas had killed millions; there’d been too many assassinations, bloody coups, and revolutions to even count that had upset entire continents. Julius Caesar had been stabbed twenty-three times by a cabal that included some of Rome ’s most learned and intellectual senators. Hitler burned the Reichstag to the ground and blamed the Communists. The examples of men lying, cheating, and murdering their way to power was long and illustrious.

For Garret, if there was any lesson to be learned from history, it was that victory went to whoever was bold enough to take it. Pitted against some of history’s more sensational power grabs, Garret felt that what he had participated in was pretty mild. After all, he would have never joined in the plot if the photos hadn’t been thrown in his face-a clear effort by the other side to play dirty. Garret knew it had been his old nemesis Cap Baker, who had sent him the pictures. Garret’s candidates, presidential nominee Josh Alexander and his running mate Mark Ross, were getting their asses handed to them by the Republicans. Money was drying up and the time left to close the gap was shrinking quickly, but they still had a chance. That was, until the photos arrived.

There were a lot of obstacles Garret could overcome, but the wife of his candidate caught on film having sex with a Secret Service agent was not one of them. Garret showed the photos to Mark Ross, Alexander’s vice president on the ticket. Ross nearly lost his mind, but after a good thirty minutes of a profanity-strewn tirade, he composed himself. He was not prepared to quit so easily. He had fought too hard to see his lifelong ambition destroyed by some little slut. Ross had contacts from his days at the CIA and as Director of National Intelligence. He went to work on finding a way to neutralize the problem, and in less than a week had reached a deal with a very shady expatriate named Cy Green.

Now it had been a little more than sixteen months since the attack on the motorcade that had killed Jillian Rautbort and fourteen others, including the Secret Service agent who had been sleeping with her. Garret had deluded himself into thinking that his role in the entire matter had been that of a bystander. He had neither condoned nor criticized the plans that had been set in motion. He had merely followed orders.

Garret remembered the shock and surprise he’d felt when the bomb attack had worked. The press, the public, even law enforcement bought the entire thing. A splinter terrorist group took credit for the attack on the motorcade, and the hunt was on to track them down. The voters rallied behind Alexander and Ross and several weeks later they rode the tide of sympathy to victory. Everything was going smoothly up until the week before the inauguration. That was when Mitch Rapp, Langley ’s top counterterrorism man, had somehow managed to track down the assassin who had detonated the car bomb. In just a few short days, everything they had worked so hard for began to unravel.

Just days before the inauguration the two men who had helped them pull off their miraculous come-from-behind victory disappeared, never to be seen by anyone again. That was unnerving enough, but mild compared to the shock Garret felt when he received the news that Vice President-elect Ross had died of a heart attack the morning of the inauguration. In the Oval Office, of all places. Garret knew Ross had a history of heart problems, but he found it hard to accept the timing of his departure. He had no real evidence that Rapp was to blame, but the odds of all three conspirators dying in the same week were impossible to swallow. Garret’s gut told him the CIA was behind the entire thing, but he was hardly in a position to run to the authorities or the media. He left Washington and promised himself that he would never return. A year later, however, he was already rethinking that decision.

He missed manipulating the media and the voters. He missed outfoxing the Republicans and watching them complain about his dirty tactics. President Alexander’s people were courting him as if it was a foregone conclusion that he would run the reelection bid that would begin in a little over a year. No man in the history of the republic had ever managed three successful campaigns. Being the first, and likely only, man to do so would be hard to refuse.

Garret threw the sheet off himself with no regard for his wife lying beside him. He placed his feet on the floor, grabbed the edge of the recessed bookshelf, and stood. As was his habit, he was buck naked. He began walking across the cabin toward the open door. A strip of lights along the floor illuminated the way past the bathroom. Garret used the onboard toilet as little as possible and never for a simple piss. One of his other defining traits was that he was cheap, and he’d be damned if he was going to pay the extortionate rates the marinas charged to pump his waste tanks.

He reached the door that led topside and undid the lock. As he climbed the steps he thought of the adrenaline rush he got from running a presidential campaign. Maybe it was time to get back in the game. Surely, if they were going to kill him they would have done it months ago.

Garret stepped into the spacious cockpit with careless confidence, blinded by his own lack of patience. It was simply unthinkable to him that anyone would wait to do anything. He walked over to the port side and along the narrow passageway that led down to the swim platform. Reaching out with his right hand, he steadied himself against the side of the boat as he moved down the steps. His knees and back were stiff. When he reached the expansive platform he turned immediately to his right as he always did.

Garret moved his toes to the edge and grabbed hold of himself. He flexed his knees several times and let out a yawn while he waited for his prostate to release its grip on his bladder. As he was looking out across the bay at the lights of the small town, he noticed a slight tremor beneath his feet. He started to turn his head to look over his shoulder, but before his head moved more than an inch a gloved hand clamped down on his mouth. A startled scream leapt from his throat but never made it past his lips. Garret felt the warmth of the attacker’s breath on his right ear and then he heard a voice. It was a growl, barely louder than a whisper, and it sent shivers down his spine.

“One fucking peep, and I’ll snap your neck like a toothpick.”