Runner-up 2

Falco looked across at the young man with the chrysanthemum tie and Yale class pin, who eyed him warily as he quietly chatted into his phone in Mandarin.

The young man looked around at the cheesy topiaries that Falco’s ex-wife had forced him to plant on her expansive front lawn, then glanced across the street at a mansion in a perpetual state of supersizing.

“My first time in Beverly Hills,” he said, sniffing. “My uncle’s place in Diamond Bar is twice the size of this.”

“It’s not easy living on a congressman’s salary,” Falco said.

The young man laughed knowingly.

“When Bonner arrives, please tell him that I’ve just made alternate arrangements for the flight to Shanghai,” the young man said. “He’ll no longer be flying out by way of Colombia. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be watching you from my car. Don’t try to find the surveillance device.”

He ran his hands along Falco’s photos with a young Villaraigosa, an aging Bradley, a dark-haired Clinton and the one of O.J. half-hidden behind the autographed Feinstein shot. Finally, he came to rest on the shot of a smiling Falco on the set, with his arm around Charlie and Genie, both looking a bit bleary-eyed.

“Reality TV . . . the sure sign of an empire in decline,” the young man said as he slipped out the servant’s entrance, ducked into his 2008 Mercedes coupe and drove to the street straight across Falco’s lawn, leaving a tank-track sized gash in the grass.

Falco could outwork and outfox anyone. Charlie loved thinking he was the smartest guy in the room, and that he had squeezed Falco out of the Shanghai action. Falco detested Bonner, who wasn’t any smarter than he was, just more ruthless. All he’d been doing was enmeshing Charlie so deep that he couldn’t get out.

At the time, he thought the Shanghai guys were just a smarter version of Ken Lay. Wouldn’t promoting Chinese mega-capitalists bring down the Communist Party once and for all?

But the more he knew about them, the more alarmed he got. They’d done it all. Shoddy death-trap skyscrapers, tainted medicines, diseased livestock, poisoned rivers. Even the PLA was afraid of them. And now they were taking advantage of the real estate crisis (which they’d partially help trigger) in order to engineer the biggest land development grab in U.S. history.

Charlie had been funneling some of the money through a bogus remake of King Vidor’s 1932 “Bird of Paradise.” Falco’s job was to push an “economic stimulus” package through his committee and snooker the leadership and the White House into going along.

Falco hadn’t any choice. He’d be out after the 2010 redistricting and that meant no mansion, no car, nothing but a rapacious ex and huge child support bills. And now Genie had the flash drive, with all the details, the secret account numbers, the payoffs, the passwords. It even had that bogus donor committee that Falco had set up.

He turned on the wall-sized HDTV to check out C-SPAN, but the maid had left it on Channel 7, which was showing a freeway car chase.

Bonner pulled up and, slipping the cabbie a huge tip, told him to forget where he’d just driven.

“Another freeway chase?” Bonner said as he walked in the door. “Why hadn’t they ever made that chase-of-the-week series I pitched? I woulda made us all mill -- Jesus Christ!”

He pointed at the screen as the camera zoomed in on the fugitive’s car.

“That’s Ernesto’s Crown Victoria!”

Even from the sky cam, Falco could see Genie’s strawberry blond hair blowing out the passenger side window.