Thank You for Smoking

Nick wondered, as he was forced back into his seat by the g-forces as Akmal hit the accelerator, if he had done a wise thing. There was a lot of honking and screeching of tires. When he opened his eyes and looked back, the tan sedan was fifty yards behind. Even highly trained government drivers are no match for the ordinary Middle Easterner.

By the time they'd reached the Arlington end of Memorial Bridge, Akmal had gained more yardage. Then, without any warning, he did a breathtakingly precise bootleg turn into the oncoming traffic, setting off an angry chorus of horns and anti-locking brakes. Nick was slammed into the side of the car.

"We lose them!" Akmal shouted triumphantly.

Nick peered cautiously through the rear window and saw the FBI sedan trying to catch up by speeding around the rotary in front of the cemetery. But by now Akmal had a couple of hundred yards on them. After another stunningly illegal turn, south onto Rock Creek, onto Independence, he did another 180-degree boodeg. Then it was back onto Rock Creek, right on Virginia, left onto Route 66, off at the Iwo Jima Memorial, left onto Route 50, and onto the George Washington Parkway south. Nick tipped Akmal fifty bucks and agreed with him that God was indeed great, then caught the flight to Charlotte, where he connected into Winston-Salem, arriving at the Bowman-Gray Medical Center after the Cardiac Care Unit visiting hours, making it necessary to adopt a rather broad southern accent as he told the head nurse that he was Doak Boykin III, uhgently come to see his deah old grandpappy.

"You're his grandson?" she inquired, a little suspiciously.

"Yay-ess," Nick said, sounding like Butterfly McQueen.

She peered at him. "You look familiar."

Doubtless, Nick's face had been prominently splashed across the front page of the Tar-Intelligencer.

"They say ah look jus like him. May I please see him? Ah been so wurried."

"Well," she said, "all right. But only ten minutes. He's very tired." "Is he gone to be all rayht?"

"Oh, he just likes to make us all worried. He'll be all right. If he behaves"

The Cardiac Care Unit was top of the line, paid for with tobacco money, just another example of how tobacco and progress go hand in hand. The Captain was hooked up to a number of machines. In the semidarkness, their screens cast a cool glow of light onto the Captain's face, which seemed to Nick very pale and drawn. He stood next to the bed. "Captain?"

The old man's eyes opened, blinked a few times. "I told you," he said, "that I will not have any more pig parts put in me. I want human parts, damnit."

"Captain. It's me, Nick."

The Captain looked up.

"Why son. Sit down, have some oxygen."

"I came to explain to you. About the arrest."

"Yes," the Captain said, coughing. "It could use some explaining. BR called me in the middle of the night to say you were in custody."

"Thank you for the bail money."

"I don't suppose it'll bankrupt us. That Jewish lawyer fellow we hired you probably will, though. Four hundred and fifty dollars an hour. "

"This is going to sound a little strange," Nick said, "but here's what I think has happened."

Nick drew a breath and laid it out: BR wanted to fire Nick and replace him with his squeeze, Jeannette, but his appearance on the Oprah show had made him the Captain's gold-haired boy, and that had made BR jealous. The threatening caller on the Larry King show had probably given BR the brainstorm to kill two birds with one stone: remove Nick and drum up some sympathy for tobacco by creating a martyr. BR, who'd come up from the mafia-murky world of vending machines, would have had the connections to hire people to do it. But, to judge from the 'Executed for Crimes Against Humanity' sign, the kidnappers had screwed up by dropping him off on the Mall, still alive. So BR and Jeannette contrived to pm the kidnapping on Nick by having Jeannette seduce him and get his fingerprints all over the boxes of "condoms" and plant them in the cabin on the Virginia lake, along with a few other compromising clues. Nick would go to jail, disgraced, and BR's suspicion would turn out to have been correct, so he'd look like a hero. Of course, the real loser in all this was tobacco.

Nick finished. The Captain looked at him with lowered eyebrows, took a long breath, and said, "You sound like one of those people who thinks there were five gunmen on the Grassy Knoll in Dallas that day."

"I know," Nick said. "It'll probably sound that way in court, too."

"On the other hand," the Captain said, pulling himself up in bed, "preposterous though it sounds, elements of it have a certain," he sighed, "ring to them that make my liver twitchy." He frowned. "BR's been telling me since the week after the kidnapping that he thought you were involved."

"Oh?" Nick said.

"And I have it from my own man in there that he and that blond gal Jurnelle—" "Jeannette."