Born to Run by John M. Green Read Free Book Online Page A

Diaz?
    Isabel was clearly her own woman—few others had ever turned such hardship into a fortune anywhere near as big—yet there she was locking horns with yet another pundit
over who’d really be wearing the pants in her White House. Ed, and everyone watching, knew the journalist’s biased intent: to pitch Isabel as a floppy female glove-puppet who’d
dance to the finger-touch of an unelected military, outfitted in the regalia of him, her husband.
    If it had been him being interviewed, he thought at the time, he would have stared the liberal bitch down, but Isabel declined the dignified silence route and shrugged it off. After a few
theatrically demure blinks from her green eyes, she flicked her black bob behind her ear and said, “Molly, Ed Loane is my husband, not my ventriloquist. If the people elect me ,
they’ll get me .”
    He doubted the answer would finally park the topic. With the frequency it had been coming up in one offensive form or another, Ed knew it was no trivial issue for many people.
    Soon enough, when America would be forced to confront it seriously, it would be no joke either.

 
10
    E VEN WITH WILLY Nesbit’s interview in the can, Mandrake needed his crack LA researcher to burn a bit more midnight oil. He’d seen that
Elia Cacoz got results. She had spine too, so maybe, he thought, he’d consider letting her screw him. Being on TV had to have some side-benefits.
    A simple internet search of “Isabel Diaz’s mother” got you Maria Rosa Diaz in a millisecond. But where was Maria Rosa now? That was Mandrake’s question. Nesbit had
speculated she had returned to Bolivia. Mandrake already knew from one slammed down phone that she wasn’t the Argentinean senator of the same name. One down, a thousand or more Maria Rosas to
go.
    Locating Isabel’s mother, even just discovering whether she was still alive… that was Mandrake’s mission. Voters needed to know what really triggered the fifteen-year-old
Isabel to run away. If Nesbit was to be believed, it was rape… and an especially horrific one. It gave more colour to the scar. Mandrake was already convincing himself that this was the dark
secret that drove the candidate.
    He’d already got Willy Nesbit on camera drooling the snippet that Maria Rosa had been loose with her morals, if not a whore, and was relishing how the Republican National Committee might
choke over that morsel on prime-time. But that was only an appetiser, nowhere near enough for the splash he wanted to make… needed to make. Nesbit’s memory of the rape was too vague to
pin his story on. He needed more.
    Another key, he was convinced, was Isabel’s father, Hernandes Diaz, but so far he’d drawn a blank there too, despite it being a name that was as common in many South American phone
books as a Kennedy was in Cape Cod.
    Virtually every Isabel Diaz feature ever written painted Señor Diaz as a successful Bolivian industrialist whose life ended when he was kidnapped and killed in La Paz, sentencing his
pregnant wife—who he’d had the foresight to send to the US shortly before—to penury. Mandrake might have read it a hundred times, but he wanted proof. Mandrake always wanted
proof.
    According to Elia, such murders were commonplace in Bolivia back then but official information from that era of Bolivia’s past no longer existed. The Presidential Palace in La Paz, Elia
told him, was called Palacio Quemado, the Burnt Palace, for good reason.

    “NO find no empresario Hernandes Diaz, Señor Mike… no, er, businessman. But…”
    “But, nothing…,” Elia heard Mike yelling into the phone as if it would motivate the La Paz gumshoe she herself had spent hours tracking down and hiring. As well as being a
part-time investigator, Carlos was also a cocalero , a coca trafficker, which she guessed might be a synergistic vocation.
    “…but I find ’nother Diaz,” Carlos continued, ignoring the interruption. He knew he’d have Mike’s attention even if