A God In Ruins

“Well, who in the hell is Hedgehog?”

Quinn ignored the remark. “Dickie Darling is going to pocket all your hard-earned money.”

Bingo! Quinn heard Hooper wince.

“I’m on the fast track, and we’ve got time to make a bust. Where are they going to deliver the guns sold at the convention?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“You have a forty-year sentence that has been reduced to twenty by your guilty plea. Give me the information, and I’ll do everything in my power to reduce your sentence to ten or twelve. That means, with good behavior you could be out in six.”

“You should be speaking to my lawyers, Mr. Governor.”

“No way. I’d have to expose the operation and my associates, and there’s not time to argue with attorneys. It is you and me, Hooper, you and me, us.”

Hooper ran over the governor’s figures. It meant going in with a forty-year sentence, coming out with six. I have to take his word that Sedgewick has fled, and he sure has his facts right on the VEC’s. “How do I know you’ll deliver?” Hooper asked.

“You don’t. You’re going to have to trust me.”

“I ain’t never trusted nobody and never will.”

“Well, today is a real fine day to start.”

Hooper huffed, grunted, and snarled. The tattoos reading MOTHER COUNTRY GOD on his left arm pulsated. He looked over at George Appleton, who was fixed on him with hatred. Hoop knew hatred when he saw it. Sure did. He knew if he rejected the governor, prison life was going to be brutal.

“Give me some time to think about it,” Hooper said.

“Sure, you’ve got thirty seconds and I hang up.”

“Hold on, Governor. The gun run from Wisconsin to the Denver convention was planned seven months ago, when we were unable to sell them. I’ve been in prison for five months. They sure as hell must have changed the delivery location.”

“What was the former location?” Quinn snapped back.

“Friehoff’s Furniture Outlet, somewhere out on West Coster. Can you get me a single cell?”

“Maybe. Tell me about the truck and the drivers.”

“They’re crazy, man. Three brothers and a cousin named Jensen. They’ve been running contraband out of the Great Lakes ports for years. On this run their pay will be on delivery.”

“What are they advertising on the side of their truck, and tell me about their plates.”

“Governor, I don’t know. They’re probably driving a hot rig they stole recently. On a few runs I know they put up Old Milwaukee beer sheets with magnets. I don’t know.”

“All right, give me a solid gold name of an exhibitor at the convention who is dealing in the VEC’s.”

Jesus! Hooper had already exposed the Jensen brothers, and he’d exposed himself. Chuck it in and pray, he told himself.

“I want to get moved to another facility,” Hooper whispered hoarsely.

“Why?”

“I, uh, ran into a number of militia boys and Klan people. All of a sudden I’m organizing them against the niggers, and the niggers are out to get me.”

“Hoop, it’s not in my power. Let me speak with the deputy director,” Quinn said.

“Hello, Governor,” George Appleton said.

“Hoop is about to give us the key piece of information, but he thinks he’s been fingered by the black prisoners. He’d like to be transferred to a facility where he isn’t known and can be isolated.”

Appleton blew a long whistle. “You’d better pull this off or God save us all. Here’s Hooper.”

“Well, now,” said Hooper, “I’ve met two guys I don’t trust in the same day.”

“Let’s have it!” Quinn said abruptly.

“It’s me or him,” Hoop Hooper thought. “If he was in my place, he’d snitch on me.” “There will be an exhibition table belonging to Chad Murtha. He exhibits plastic, Teflon, titanium handguns, ammo, and clips.”

Lovely, Quinn thought. Everyman’s weapons to beat the metal detectors!

Dawn Mock was at her door jotting notes for her assistant: Get a layout and index of the exhibition tables .. . Chad Murtha is the exhibitor .. . Call up Detective Boedecker and draw ten thousand dollars in marked hills, mixed .. . Try Tennessee penal system and drivers license hureau to see if we can hring up a photo of Chad Murtha .. .

“Okay,” Quinn went on. “Does Murtha’s exhibit have any kind of identification sign or banner?”

“Yeah, the back banner reads “Clock Almighty!” and a smaller one under it reads “Clock “Em All!””

“Now tell me about you and Chad.”

“Me and him been on the circuit twelve years or something. He hit on the plastic weapons because they’re a big-turnover item. They’ll only shoot up a few clips when they start to crack.”

“All right. After I find the Clock Almighty sign and I’m talking to Chad Murtha, what do I say?”

“Say, “I think I got the wrong table. Billy Joe said I could get some real metal here.” Chad’s gonna say, “I ain’t seen Billy Joe in a coon’s age,” and he’s gonna ask you where you last saw him. Then you say you seen him at the gun show last year in Fort Smith, Arkansas.”

“I follow you,” Quinn said. “What does Chad look like?”

“Heavy guy, big gut, used to wrestle professionally. Blond hair, he dyes it, like sixty years old and usually wearing a baseball cap.”

“Can we get a photograph of him?”

“Probably. He’s done some time in Tennessee.”

“Continue, Hoop.”

“Chad’s gonna say something like, “What kind of metal you looking for?” and you say, “Swedish metal.” He’ll want a ten percent deposit. Then he’ll give you the location of his camper park and the number of his parking space. He’ll probably tell you to show up at two or three in the morning.”

“Couldn’t he just take off with the deposit?”

“No, not and deal in gun shows for a dozen years. Honor among thieves.

That’s the standard time when the deliveries take place.”

“Hmmm.”

“See, he’s got to keep his exhibits open at the convention hall until they close, usually around ten-thirty to midnight. Then he has to get the guns.”

“And, in theory, he’ll lead us to the mother lode.”

“That’s the ticket, Governor.”

“Next,” Quinn said, “there is a special parking lot for exhibitors at the convention center. What’s he driving?”

“A light blue Ford pickup, trades it in every other year for another light blue Ford pickup. It has a stainless steel camper shell over the truck bed. He’ll have Tennessee plates.”

“Hoop, think hard, are there any other exhibitors who can be as helpful to us as Chad Murtha?”

“No, he’s the main man. He’ll look over the exhibitors, and if there are some who have worked with him, he’ll select maybe four or five, depending on how sales are going.”

Hooper was unaware of pressure in his chest. He had always thought the pain was a part of his being. As he spoke, he blew out words coming from his deep interior, and it was like a relief from a tremendous crushing machine.

“Let me speak to George,” Quinn said.

“Apple ton.”

“I’m setting some things into motion. Can you put Hooper in a holding cell so I can stay in contact, if needed?”

“The present setup is very secure,” Appleton answered, and gave his phone number. “We’ll be here. For Christ’s sake, don’t forget to inform us.”

“Semper Fi, buddy,” Quinn said.

“Semper Fi,” Appleton said.

Quinn grabbed the stale bread on Dawn’s desk and bit a hunk off it, starved. In a moment Harry Chin spread out a map of the exhibition hall, and they scoured it with magnifying glasses. Quinn went down the list.

“Bingo! Murtha, Chad, Knoxville, Tennessee, plastic handguns and paraphernalia. Side booth on west wall, stall number seven hundred twenty-three.

“Dawn, I need a half dozen detectives in three two-man teams to locate Murtha’s pickup truck. I know we’ve gotten burned with signals from the big truck, but can you slap something on Murtha’s vehicle to give off a radio signal?”

“I’ve got a dandy, and it will work.”

“All right, your three CBI cars will follow Murtha some time after

ten-thirty. As soon as his signal gives us a general direction, I can

set Yancey’s team into motion. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute!” Quinn said, slapping his forehead. “Position a plainclothes pair in an unmarked car near Friehoff ‘s Furniture Outlet so he has a bead on 10101 West Coster. I’ve a wild hunch these people may not have changed the drop-off location.”

“It’s sure as hell worth a shot,” Harry Chin said.

“God, I wish I could go in with Yancey,” Quinn said.

“With all due respect, Governor,” Chin answered, “keep your ass right where it is.”

Chin made a log at Dawn’s computer.

1800 Clock Almighty! reads the banner at the back of booth number 723.

A second small banner reads Clock “Em All.

1822 Photo of Chad Murtha arrives CBI. Description, excellent.

1830 Detective Lieutenant Mary Boedecker contacts Quinn from convention hall. She has located booth. Description of Murtha equals man at the booth.

1835 Mary Boedecker proceeds to booth.

Her appearance belied her profession. Mary Boedecker was thin, fifty-something with black and gray hair pulled back in a penny-plain knot. She wore no make-up and was dressed ranch style. Mary pointed at Chad and said she’d like to look at a pistol. Murtha unlocked chain from trigger guard.

Mary made a sour face and set the pistol down. “I think I must be at the wrong table,” she said.

Chad scrutinized her so keenly, Mary could nearly feel heat from his

glare

“I’m looking for Chad Murtha,” she said.

*

“I’m Chad.”

“I ranch some up in Lodgepole County.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

“Billy Joe said I could obtain some real metal from you.”

“Billy Joe.”

“Yes, suh, Billy Joe.”

“I ain’t seen him, must have been a hundred shows back. I thought for sure he quit the circuit,” Chad said.

“I saw him a couple months ago in Fort Smith, Arkansas,” Mary said.

“I missed that show. I was doing something around Helena. Just what kind of metal are you interested in?”

“Swedish. The best Swedish.”

It connected! The lady was talking major money.

“Well, now, top-grade Swedish is hard to come by,” Chad gurgled, counting dollars as he spoke.

“I want ten of them,” she answered, opening her large purse and giving him a flash of her bankroll. Chad Murtha’s eyeballs clicked.

“That’s a mighty big order,” Chad said.

“You ever tried to get anything done with the United States government?” she snapped. “Me and some of my neighbors had our grazing rights on public land terminated. For two goddamn years we tried to get it reversed. It was like walking in hell and trying to argue with the devil.”

“Government is at the root of all evil,” Chad sympathized. “What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Mary Decker. My neighbors and me think that if we form a militia unit, we could change the government’s mind.”

“Sounds like a plan, Mary. Could I have your phone number and the name of someone who might be at the ranch?”

“Thank you, Chad,” she said, smiling broadly. She gave the number slowly. “My husband, Harry, will be there.”

“You realize, now, the class of weapon you’re looking for is top-of-the-line fully automatic and pretty near fingerprint-proof. Ten VEC-44’s, new, ten thousand rounds in long clips. We’re looking at around a thousand a copy.” “Get them,” Mary ordered.

1802 Detectives locate Chad Murtha’s pickup truck in exhibitors’ lot and attach a radio signal under its tailgate.

1831 Photograph of Chad Murtha arrives at the CBI. Record shows some small-time robbery convictions. He has been fairly clean in past five years.

1840 Detective Lieutenant Mary Boedecker contacts Dawn Mock. From description of photo, Mary is certain they have the right man.

1841 Detective Hymes has security point a camera down from roof to tape Chad Murtha’s booth. Murtha checks the deposit for marked bills. He is satisfied. Murtha proceeds to pay phone and dials the number.

The number is routed into Dawn Mock’s office on phone line two. Harry Chin lifts the receiver.

“Hello,” he says, “Harry Decker speaking.”

“Oh, hello, Harry. How are things going on the ranch?”

“Shitty. Who am I talking to?”

“Just a friend down at the AMERIGUN convention. Thought I might get to see you.”

“I sent my old lady down.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for her.”

Chad hangs up with a big “cat in the fishbowl” smile. Mother fucker, there is going to be a big old payday!

1900 State trooper Sergeant Hap Cronin in plain clothes and unmarked car takes up vigil in sight of Friehoff’s Furniture Outlet at 10101 West Coster.

1930 The evening’s “Barbecue and Bash” opens its doors to the microsoft GRAND BALLROOM.

2001 Detective Mary Boedecker returns to Chad Murtha’s booth.

“I’ve got some good news for you, Miss Mary. I managed to find the last pieces in Western America. The VEC-44 is a beauty, a real man-stopper. Aren’t you worrying about all that money you’re carrying?”

“Well, now, don’t you fret, Mr. Chad. I can hit a mosquito’s ass at forty yards with my little Beretta 25.”

“I sure bet you can,” Chad said, feigning what might be a chuckle. “Here’s the way it works. Don’t write none of this down, just remember it. You be at the Foothills Trailer Camp on Lawson Street at two in the morning. You’ll be observed, so come by yourself. I am in space number eighty-four, in a small mobile home.”

Mary repeated the numbers, then asked, “What kind of vehicle do you have? I don’t want to go knocking at the wrong door at that time of morning.”

“Blue Ford pickup, Tennessee license plate. Maybe we can split a beer or two.”

She gave a noncommittal shrug that didn’t exactly say no.

2014 Mary Boedecker contacts Dr. Mock’s office, reports on gun-delivery instructions, and confirms the blue Ford pickup truck as vehicle to follow.

2100 Ribs and chicken and beans proliferate as the bash rolls into motion at the microsoft GRAND BALLROOM.

2134 State trooper Sergeant Hap Cronin reports that a single automobile with driver and one passenger is buzzed through the main gate at 10101 and parks near the loading docks. Automobile is this year’s Mercedes and appears to belong to a top-echelon person.

2145 Quinn ups the ante, deciding that 10101 is still the designation. He orders Yancey to move his people very quietly to within a mile of 10101 and hold.

It was the best damned evening AMERIGUN ever put on. There were lots of country and western performers, some Nike all-stars, sitcom stars, and finally, Senator Darling moved the crowd to tears.

Line dancing up to forty yards long pounded the deck and skirts flared, showing the ladies’ legs, and the bars damn near ran dry.

2200 Chad Murtha secures his booth for the night, departs convention center, has two beers at the Londonderry Bar.

2235 Chad Murtha repairs to convention parking lot, locates and drives off in Ford pickup.

2226 Detective Solomon at parking lot catches signal, alerts other teams, and pursues Chad Murtha at a distance.

2236 Three CBI teams depart parking lot in unmarked cars and have Murtha under surveillance as he drives west for the interstate.

“By God, Governor,” Harry Chin said with uncharacteristic emotion, “you were right! It’s going to be 10101.”

“What kind of stupid fools are they?” Quinn thought aloud.

“Repetition,” Dawn Mock said. “If a mode of operation works ten times, it will work the eleventh. All criminals leave a signature. Maybe no one was certain who was supposed to be in charge of changing locations, so nobody did.”

“Folks, could I have your kind attention?” the loudspeaker boomed. “There’s a line of yellow cabs at the main entrance. They have been provided for your safety. If you feel you’ve had a couple of drinks too many, take one of these tipsy taxis. You will be delivered to your lodging without charge, compliments of the Colorado Tourist Board.”

A sweet and hurting voice continued singing. The revelers were beginning to get weary, soaked, and grow heavy-legged. Quick action by the police stopped a fight before punches were thrown. “Don’t you go looking at my wife that way.”

“Well, tell your wife not to look that way.”

The police nudged them into separate taxis.

As the wearies trod from the microsoftGRANDBALL ROOM, the singer was closing out with slow dancing, loves lost, losers, loves strayed, loves betrayed, all in heartache three quarter time.

“Ladies and gentlemen, fellows and gals. Shooters! Tomorrow night is the grand awards banquet.. .”

Could I have this dance, For the rest of my life, Will you be my partner, Eeewerrry night!

“Give me the governor!” “Quinn here.”

“Detective Solomon. Chad Murtha has turned off the freeway. He’s heading for 10101.” “Hang on.”

Quinn, Mock, and Chin spread the map and returned to the phone. “Have your teams come in steadily on Petroleum Boulevard. Park your cars in the Colo Computers’ lot and proceed by foot three blocks east to Oakdale and Bancroft. Trooper Hap Cronin will be advised you are coming and will update you. And remember guys, no casualties if humanly possible.”

2330 Chad Murtha in blue Ford pickup stops before the gate at 10101 and flashes headlights. He drives immediately inside the gate, which remains open. In the next seven minutes, four vehicles driven by dealers are waved in by Chad. Gate is clicked shut. Vehicles drive to loading dock.

2340 Eighteen-wheeler bearing Old Milwaukee sign is buzzed in and maneuvers to loading dock.

2342 First units of Yancey Hawke’s people make connection with Hap Cronin. State troopers followed by guardsmen surround the entire chain-link fence, set up tear gas, spotlights and a loudspeaker system.

2343 The rear of the Old Milwaukee truck is opened.

Owner of Mercedes identified as Franz Friehoff, owner of the furniture outlet.

Franz Friehoff and Chad Murtha check off an order sheet.

“Morrison.”

“Here.”

“Seventeen pieces, seventeen thousand rounds.”

Innowski. “Right here.” “Sixty-five pieces, sixty-five thousand rounds.”

“Here’s my own order,” Chad said. “I’ve got two hundred and seventy pieces. I’m buying the beers. I’ve been looked up by a dozen militias.”

“Spotlights!” Yancey Hawke ordered.

Friehoff’s warehouse and grounds lit up as though an as tro from outer space were making an earth landing. Blinding!

“Now hear this!” Yancey Hawke boomed. “You people are surrounded and cannot escape. If you resist or open fire, we will shoot to kill!”

First to leap off the loading dock screaming, “Don’t shoot,” was Jessup Jensen, the trucker’s middle brother. He had run a few steps toward the gate when his younger brother Darren shot him in the back.

“First volley,” Yancey Hawke ordered.

A number of stun grenades arched over the fence, followed by a barrage of tear gas that hit the loading dock and crashed through the windows into the warehouse.

“Shall I bust open the gate, Colonel?”

“Hell, no, they are penned in. Just leave them penned in.”

It seemed that everyone among the gun runners reached for a weapon at the same time and appeared to be shooting at each other.

“Drop your weapons! Walk to the fence with your hands over your heads and stand, holding the fence facing us, or we will fire. This is not Waco or Ruby Ridge or the Montana Freemen! You have thirty seconds to raise a white flag. Anyone who tries to hide in the warehouse will not come out alive! You now have twenty seconds!”

2415 Mary Boedecker contacts Dawn Mock. The ballroom is an empty mess.

Clean-up crew and a dozen security guards are it.

2425 Reb Butterworth and his force in intelElway Stadium dash for their trucks and roll the short distance to the convention center.

Unloading and setting up a picket looks as though it were an illustration from the Army manual. Twenty state troopers and CBI detectives enter exhibition hall and move the night watchmen aside.

“Now hear this,” Butterworth said to the empty ballroom. “This facility is hereby seized under Colorado statute six-oh four-A as a clear and present danger to public safety, and other crimes.”

breaking story breaking story breaking story

“We take you now to our Denver affiliate. Don, are you there?” “Yes,

this is Don Fender, CNN, Denver. In the late hours of last night and

the early hours of this morning, Colorado state troopers and the

Colorado National Guard carried out a lightning raid intercepting a

gun-running scheme. A second task force seized the Colorado convention

center where the national AMERIGUN conclave was being held.” “Can you

tell us—“

“The operation apparently depended on secrecy and speed. Details are very slow coming in ...”

breaking story breaking story breaking story

“... interrupt this program to bring you a breaking story from Denver.”

“This is Anita McG lore MS NBC Denver. The cock has crowed and Denver citizens are waking up this morning to the electrifying news of a major gun bust and the closure of the AMERIGUN convention. Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell has scheduled a news conference for one o’clock this afternoon, Rocky Mountain time. It will be held at the historic Brown Palace Hotel.”

Rocky Mountain News GOVERNOR QUINN PADLOCKS ARMS

SHOW

Denver Post MAJOR ARMS CACHE RAIDED

USA Today TWO KILLED IN ARMS RAID. A PAIR OF BROTHERS,

IDENTIFIED AS DRIVERS, DIE IN SHOOTOUT

New York Times (See story inside, section A, page 31)

A truckload of assault weapons was captured by the Colorado State Patrol and a small unit of the Colorado National Guard. Two drivers were killed in the operation and several hundred guns recovered.

New York Post GUN MUGGERS MUGGED

The “historic” Brown Palace buzzed with anticipation. Its atrium lobby soared nine stories to a glass roof which held an American flag four stories long.

By one o’clock some sixty print journalists and a dozen camera crews had assembled, each with their own rumors.

Deadly silence. One could hear people parting as Governor O’Connell made his way to the rostrum. A smattering of applause. A half dozen journalists came to their feet cheering. Now, sustained applause as Quinn fooled with the microphone.

“First, I want to sing you all a little song,” Quinn opened. “I’ve never been involved in a press conference of this magnitude, and it’s a little frightening. Half of you I don’t know, so please give your name and organization. We okay with that? Thank you.”

breaking news breaking news breaking news

“.. . switch you now to a press conference at the historic

Brown Palace Hotel in downtown Denver.”

Announcer in a whisper: “.. . that is Governor O’Connell at the

rostrum. The three people sitting at his left are identified as Adjutant General Butterworth, commander of the Colorado National Guard, Colonel Yancey Hawke, chief of the Colorado troopers, and Dr. Dawn Mock, head of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, a well-known figure in law enforcement circles.”

Quinn held up and waved a sheet of paper. “You all have received a rap sheet like this. It brings us up to an hour ago, noon. Questions?”

“Vernon Creech, Rocky.”

“Hi, Vern, I thought you’d never ask.”

“Governor,” Creech went on, “the rap sheet says your initial tip was anonymous. Are you saying, sir, that it wasn’t someone in the federal government or that you didn’t have assistance of the FBI or BATF?”

“First, we aren’t going to blow our sources. Second, the operation is still going on, and third, we might want to use the same sources again in the future. It was my belief that the entire AMERIGUN invasion of Denver was meant to be as intimidation, a warning about future anti-gun legislation. If any of you listened to the rhetoric at the convention, you’ll understand my drift. I considered it a crude attempt to bully Colorado out of its sovereign rights. This was a state operation from beginning to end. My colleagues and I felt we could only be successful if we held the secret to just a few people. I determined that we had sufficient state forces to do the job. The weapons are Canadian—made VEC--44’s of Belgium origin and were smuggled into Wisconsin via the Great Lakes. Apparently, the drivers, the Jensen brothers, had been running contraband for several years.”

“There must have been middlemen, sir,” Creech said, not yet sitting down.

“The manufacturer, a Roy Sedgewick of Toronto, has disappeared. Friehoff, whose warehouse was the drop spot, has been placed under arrest, and we also arrested five weapons dealers working from the exhibition tables.”

“Governor,” Chita Mendez of the Pueblo Chieftain said. “It sounds like no officials of AMERIGUN were involved.”

“Just one,” Quinn answered, “Senator Richard Darling of Wisconsin.”

BLAM

breaking news breaking news breaking news

“Governor O’Connell has named Senator Darling of Wisconsin as the chief operator of a longstanding smuggling ring from Canada. Apprehended at the Denver International Airport, the senator has vociferously claimed his innocence. We switch you now to the Denver International ...”

When the press conference regained its sanity, Len Sanders of the New

York Times threw the question:

“Did you use computer surveillance, and how did you follow the weapons from Wisconsin to Denver?”

“Yes, we used computers. Our entire operation was covered by appropriate court warrants. Moreover, we took abnormal caution to see that there were no casualties. The two Jensen brothers were apparently killed by their own gunfire. I’m not totally free to give you the method we used to trail the weapons to Colorado.” “Can we have some more dope on the VEC--44’s?” Quinn held up the assault gun. “Here she is. It’s a 9mm, about .38 caliber, fully automatic machine pistol using thirty five round clips. She only weighs three pounds, and the barrel is a few inches. You couldn’t hit a bull in the ass at twenty feet with one of these little buggers. They are designed to be in close and personal killers particularly for street gangs and burglars.” “What is the current status of the operation, Governor?” “Well, let’s see. Three thousand VEC-44’s have been logged and impounded. Some five or six hundred weapons were due to be delivered to buyers last night. They are part of the cache. The dealers have been taken into custody. More important, we have a search-and-seizure warrant in effect. Our teams are in the convention center checking all the weapon ID numbers. So far we have turned up well over a hundred laundered guns. In addition, a dozen exhibitors are wanted by police elsewhere.”

“What you going to do with all these weapons, Governor?”

“Melt them down for sewer lid covers. Let me say that any exhibitor selling legitimate material can have it returned by merely going to the Exhibition Desk.”

“You don’t expect any dirty dealers to actually try to claim an unregistered gun, do you?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Quinn said. “I wish to apologize,” he went on, “to the AMERIGUN delegates and directors and exhibitors of legitimate items. The vast majority of folks are honorable, law-abiding citizens. Unfortunately, an ugly element pervades any gun show, and there are hundreds of them every year. There is always an aura of fear and danger emanating. This was a rare opportunity to inspect all the contents of the exhibition tables.”

“You rat!” a voice screamed from the rear of the room. King Porter was held at bay by his confederates. “You entrapped us!”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Quinn said, “that is King Porter, CEO of AMERIGUN. King, you are free to come up here and join the news conference.”

“What! To your Goddamned fucking liberal press! This is war!”

“You bet it is,” Quinn answered.

In the days that followed, Governor O’Connell was deluged with messages of approval. The raid rang a note that a peaceful people had at last given the neighborhood bully a punch in the nose.

Quinn pressed forward with a gun-ownership bill, the sane bill for sane citizens that encompassed provisions that would have been defeated a few weeks earlier. It was to be a model for other states.

The polls in and out of Colorado showed high approval ratings on the governor’s action.

Polls showed 78.6 percent for, 21.4 percent against.

J. Malcolm Dunlay, a former attorney general, appeared on two dozen panels of experts in the following fortnight as part of the 156 TV panels to discuss the pros and cons of the sting.

The Civil Liberties fanned the fire by declaring that the gun dealers had been denied their civil rights.

Others accused O’Connell of usurping the federal charters of the FBI

and the BATE

More panel shows.

Quinn and his people withdrew as a ravenous media started searching through the capital’s trash cans and toilet stalls.

A count total was lost as to the number of Internet communications, but it appeared that they ran 78.9 percent in favor of the operation.

The public was smitten. Replays of High Noon abounded. Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell was thrust into national prominence.

At the end of the month, the AMERIGUN bust and cowboy O’Connell dissolved and were replaced when a star of one of sitcom’s royal series chopped up his wife with a carving knife.

Homicide panels replaced weapons and legal panels, although J. Malcolm Dunlay slid from one to the other effortlessly.

Even though Governor O’Connell was out of the immediate spotlight, a buzz had started around him. Instead of taking the glory road, he seemed to withdraw, dazed and wondering.

Rita was finally able to tear him loose from Denver and lure him to Troublesome. They would stay at Mal’s, where they could enjoy more isolation than at the ranch.

The rain plopped hard on the skylight, perhaps the last rain before the snows. Rita’s knowing hands rubbed out his sore spots. At first he was not even up to making love.

Wind misted with rain and bombarded threateningly, then softened to a mellow tattoo of little raindrops. A moment for resurrection was at hand.

Rita and her father rocked on porch swings, watched the storm drift south, and smelled the freshness of after rain.

They stopped talking as Quinn, in floppy bathrobe, yawned his way out to them. He had crashed, for this particular nap, for four hours.

“Well, my wife and father-in-law seem to be in a conspiracy . what? And assassinate the cruel governor with daggers and gain the state house?”

“You are, my dear son-in-law, a victim of your own success. Anything not clear to you, Quinn?”

“Like what?”

“Like I saw you on your knees at the family chapel for the first time in the four decades I’ve known you,” Mal said.

“It was between me and God,” Quinn said. “Please tell me, Lord, who I am and what do you have in mind for me. Do I have veto powers? Be still my heart.”

“You know what’s going on,” Mal said. “Rita and I have fielded calls from every big hitter in the Democratic Party. They’ve a golden boy. Get used to it.”

“I love the people’s politics—“ Quinn started.

“And are the most beloved governor in Colorado history,” Rita said.

“I was thinking maybe an embassy. Maybe Australia or New Zealand. No cabinet posts, just a non-trouble-making embassy.”

“Well,” said Mal, “why not try to open a consul general in St. Earth’s and lie on the beach and look at tits all day?”

“And I’d get to look at peckers,” Rita said.

“Out with it, Quinn,” Mal pressed.

“First the Urbakkan raid,” Quinn mumbled, “now this AMERIGUN bust. All the sudden adoration is bound to fade, and they will say, Quinn’s a man of violence. Who needs him? The good life depends on peace and prosperity. Moral imperatives like the defeat of slavery come at too high a price. So long as we remain fat and free, we will avoid the lingering festering issues. At any rate, I am not going to be the one to gather up the people on a moral issue. It makes for a dull person.”

“You’re anything but dull,” Rita said.

“And what about you and Duncan and Rae? Are you ready for a million maggots at your door every morning?”

“What I am worried about,” Rita retorted, “is that if you walk away from the call, we’ll spend the rest of our lives in our own form of self-imposed hell. I knew this was going to happen even before you ran for governor.”

“Don’t raise the stinker that you’re retreating because of your family.

They know their daddy is a great leader ...” Mal said.

“Mea culpa time,” Quinn said. “I wanted clean in and clean out. Before the bust I made up my mind that I would stand for reelection if I had a chance to get this legislation through and impound about eighty-five percent of the guns in Colorado. When plans for the raid became a reality, I treated myself to massive doses of mendacity, the ancient art of lying to oneself. I lied, I made dirty deals, I was very selective of people’s rights, I put a lot of folks in harm’s way, I endangered the careers of some very gifted people. I went into Urbakken clean and escaped by a miracle. I went into AMERIGUN tainted and again escaped clean, except for those sad Jensen brothers. Am I cursed to have to always ride in on wings of a raven? Must I blow up half of the state to prove my point? Do the people really want a cowboy?”

“Well, right now they’ve got one,” Mal snapped back.

“You are their hero, Quinn,” Rita said.

“I love you guys,” Quinn whispered, “and I know what you are thinking but dare not say. Play it cool for your next term, Quinn, then go take a shot at the presidency.” Quinn had balled up both fists. “Nothing,” he banged out, “nothing can happen, no disaster can befall so great as to go through the agony of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Nothing,” he said, “nothing, nothing, nothing.”

*

THE WHITE HOUSE, 2007

From the get-go Thornton invoked a formal operation of the White House. It was a more serious place with a serious dress code. No more roller-blading in the halls outfitted like a member of the chorus of Guys and Dolls.

Serious young people were nominated for internship by serious Republicans. No more liberal punk kids. No more showing of thigh or cleavage and improper hairdos.

Intimacy among staff was more risky.

Under control, the hordes of legislators, consultants, media, public relations hired guns, and lobbyists entered a correct and hallowed place.

Daringly, the press facility near the Oval Office was exiled to the nearby Executive Building. The media went into a rage. Darnell knew that this was one the President could win. After the media debacles at the end of the last century, the public was delighted that the press was learning manners.

Thornton Tomtree was the first fully computerized president. He

installed a crew of the finest computer analysts. No matter what the

chore, background on a political appointee, weather in Alaska, cabinet

meeting, they could dissect and translate information faster than any

like team in the world. Tomtree went into his meetings with

up-to-the-second data,

the sway of public opinion, every nuance of the financial world.

Darnell Jefferson had the run of the place. He pulled together a public relations staff of rare genius to counter any idea that the Oval Office was rigid.

With his first years scandal free, the nation’s social agenda was soon overtaken by power bestowed on the corporate world, allegedly to keep America as the only superpower.

If Thornton was smart about one thing, it was human greed. Every American owned some. His programs were designed so the public saw a payoff for them.

Pucky had grown into a stylish sixty-year-old. She and the President had been long unfamiliar with one another’s bed. This did not result in her anger, but in a strange sense, it gave her freedom. She did all the First Lady things, often adding spice and humor and throwing the most elegant banquets in memory.

Thornton understood her value and rewarded her by endowing the cultural scene.

I am sleeping and I can’t wake up! I can’t wake up! Where the hell is Pucky? Where am II It will be daylight, and O’Connell is addressing the nation .. . enormous consequence.

Where the hell is Pucky?

“Mr. President,” my steward, Eric, repeated, pulling me out of a deep, confusion-filled sleep. I pointed at my mouth. He handed me a glass of mouthwash and held a spittoon, then put drops into my eyes.

“It is four A.M.” Mr. President, two o’clock Rocky Mountain time.”

That got my attention. I asked for Darnell’s whereabouts. Eric had hunted him down before he awakened me. Darnell was tied up for ten minutes or so in the press room. “Hold my calls until Darnell can brief me,” I ordered.

Come on, Darnell, God dammit! That’s funny. The first time I said those words to him was when we were teenagers.

Darnell Jefferson, the first black billionaire in American history

he who sat on three dozen corporate boards, he who endowed the black community and colleges handsomely, he who personally went to Moscow as the Soviet Union was breaking up and snared the twenty best computer scientists in the country for T3, he who talked me into building a pleasure palace for my workers which became the model for all industry, he who, he who, and so forth and so forth.

Well, I’ve done damned well for Darnell .. . and he’s done right well for me. He is the only one whom I can trust in this vacuum I carry. I trust no one in there but him. Suppose we had never met? Suppose he had decided not to spend his life keeping my public image pure and dynamic?

On New Year’s Eve of 1999 I told him I was going to make a run for the presidency in 2004. Darnell was way ahead of me and charted out a brilliant campaign.

We rode to the White House right after the turn of the century. The care, feeding, and control of the Internet had created great answers and greater confusion.

All of a sudden the world had potentially three billion would-be writers, not only with free and unfettered access, but hidden by anonymity.

The great computer firms were bent on speed and shrinking chips. Packaging, marketing them were the berries. Competition had become slaughterhouse-mean and fighting off an antitrust suit the most noble form of corporate life. No one seemed to have a vision of the future, or where this electronic colossus was taking us.

Darnell took a team of experts and science writers and Grafted a manuscript: The T3 Commonsense Guideline for International Internet Ethics: A Primer for the 21st Century.

I wrote the final draft and subsidized a major publisher to put it on

the market. Damned if it didn’t sell over a million copies in the

bookstores and another million over the various web sites. I made T3

Commonsense a must in every convention and salesroom at sweetheart prices and sent hundreds of thousands of copies to schools and universities.

Like According to Hoyle and Burke’s Peerage before it, T3 Commonsense established the rules of the road on a road sorely needing them. I had taken my first step on the golden carpet which climaxed with my election as president of the United States.

All the above may sound funny to you in light of the nation coming out of the closet by the end of the nineties. However, many of the things we let out of the closet would serve us better if they were shoved back in.

The point of this is to say, I myself, Thornton Tomtree, am a clean, moral, progressive, self-made entrepreneur.

The Four Corners Massacre was not my doing, but it happened on my watch. Darnell Jefferson and Pucky literally forced me to travel a nation in mourning and share the people’s grief.

Awkward and stumbling in the beginning, I learned the art of compassion. Even though I never personally knew or understood it. I acted it out, people responded to my “sincerity”.. . I never felt the depth of their anguish. Isn’t that what a leader is all about: not to go down in an ash heap, but demonstrate strength and ability to endure after a tragedy?

If a leader felt pain in every flood, hurricane, shooting, epidemic, school bus overturning ... he would cave in and no longer be a leader.

Darnell and Pucky forced enough of the mundane stuff into me to help me regain my position for reelection.

Speaking of tragedy! I was gaining on Governor O’Connell in the polls, and at the Great Debate I expected to bury him. I blew it! As for Pucky’s part in this, it is history better left, unwritten.

We are now less than two weeks away from the presidential election of 2008. I’m not doing so well. Or am I?

Why, out of clear blue sky, did O’Connell call for national TV coverage of an announcement?

Darnell came in with a handful of pages. He glimpsed at the dark suit Eric had laid out. “Put away that mourning outfit,” Darnell ordered Eric. “I want the President to wear a green sports jacket and open collar.”

“Darnell.. .”

“A lot of folks downstairs need their morale lifted.”

No use arguing over so trifling a matter.

“What’s the latest?”

“We have some data from the NYPD. This Ben Horowitz visit seems to have set off some kind of chain reaction in the O’Connell camp. Ben Horowitz is a detective lieutenant, thirty years’ service, semi-retired or detached to teach at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Horowitz’s father was a professor of Russian studies at NYU. Horowitz’s own expertise is missing persons.”

“Got any photos?”

I lifted my magnifying glass, studying the pictures. “There may be a resemblance, there may not be. I can’t tell from these. What else?” Tomtree asked.

“I’ve spoken personally to our main man inside the Church hierarchy. There are no official records in Church adoption files about O’Connell’s birth. Two people were intimately involved in the adoption, namely, Cardinal Watts of Brooklyn and a Monsignor Gallico, both deceased. They did this on behalf of a priest who was Siobhan O’Connell’s brother but gave him no details. He is also deceased. The convent that raised and delivered O’Connell to Colorado could not give us any information as to the child’s biological parents.”

I liked what I was hearing. Some kind of moral blister was ready to

pop, the kind the media could seize on to devour whomever. Sure,

Horowitz and O’Connell were connected. Yes, I have turned a corner,

and the polls in a few days would see me back in the lead. The miracle

of my reelection would happen. It would be an upset even greater than

Truman’s defeat of Dewey. I was chomping at the bit. Was there a way

to find out what O’Connell was going to say before he went on? If so, we could be planning our counter strike right now.

“You’re drooling, Thornton,” Darnell said.

“You bet I am. If Horowitz senior was an academic teaching Russian, there has to be an FBI file on him.”

Darnell gave me a “shit for brains” look. “Wait, for Christ’s sake. Do not fart with FBI files. Do not jump the gun and step into a pile of shit. We will know in a matter of a few hours. I believe O’Connell has painted himself into a corner. It has to be good news for us.”

COLON, PANAMA, 2007

The free-trade zone at Colon was a long hour’s drive from Panama City. The zone sat plunk in the middle of the north south axis of the Western Hemisphere and was the transit point of anything and everything going up to North America and down to South America. Anything, everything.

The town itself epitomized a thieving, seedy, peeled, steamy, muddy-floody, baking, dangerous Central American place where eyes and ears seemed behind every corner and wall in a greedy hunt for deals.

Red Peterson, an old West Texas wildcatter, was scarcely moved to perspire even though the overhead fan grunted its last days.

Across from Red sat Moshe Rosenthal in ear locks beard, yarmulke, and prayer shawl. He took an envelope from his safe and handed it over the desk to Red.

The envelope contained a blue-white seventeen-carat diamond, in a diamond cut. The stone was a blinder.

“Now, which South American dictator’s wife did this little gem come off of?” Red asked.

Moshe held up his hands in innocence.

“Did you set your price on this?”

“Mas o’ minus.”

“For you and only you, a hundred and fifty thousand.”

Red replaced the diamond in its envelope, folded it securely, placed it in his top shirt pocket, and buttoned it. He signed an IOU marker to Rosenthal which the jeweler could cash later at Villa Hans Pedro Oberg, one of the main clearinghouses and banks of Colon.

“You made a good buy,” Rosenthal said. “It might be a little risky to sell it as one stone. If so, it could fetch over a half million. I’ll give you the name of a tip-top merchant on Forty seventh Street in New York. He can figure out the cuts like no one else. He’ll double your money.”

“Moses, you know I don’t deal in this crap. This is just a little present for the big, tall Swedish bombshell I’m married to.”

“Such a stone for your wife! Well, it will look beautiful in a necklace setting.”

“It’s like this, Moshe. I got her this G-string.”

“A G-string, you know, a G-string?” Red said tentatively.

He stood up and pretended he was wearing a G-string. “Up the left side, I call that first base, the string has a row of little rubies. Up the right side, I call that third base, a row of emeralds. This diamond is going right in at home place.”

“You’re such a romantic,” Moshe said.

The teakettle whistled. How the fuck can he drink hot tea? Red always wondered. He never winced, but it annoyed him whenever he saw Moshe Rosenthal’s concentration camp tattoo. Moshe produced a bottle of Red’s stuff. They clicked on the deal; prayers would be said tonight at shul.

“You delivered a hell of an order here. Some guys were around this morning looking for your pilot, Cliff Morgan. Apparently some kind of parachute drop.”

“Smells like CIA, doesn’t it, Moshe?”

“The guns are going into the Sierra Maestra Mountains in Cuba to a half

dozen anti-Castro guerilla bands. Strange, I remember in fifty-nine or sixty when the Americans parachuted guns to Castro back in the Sierra Maestra.”

“Nothing changes,” Red said. He looked outside. It was darkening for the daily downpour. “Guns coming out of the United States, sold to the CIA in Colon, and flown into rebel Cuban camps. At the same time I’m going to buy Bulgarian AK’s for shipment from Colon to the United States.”

Red caught forty seconds of hard rain and reached Kelley’s Klub dripping. Cliff Morgan occupied a table with a half-dead bottle and a dancer on his lap. Christ, Red thought, that little concita reminds me of why a fellow can never go on a diet of straight blondes.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me to your little friend?” Red said on entering.

“This is Choo-Choo,” Cliff said. “Her and her sister, Candi, do a real artistic number together. They’d like to be broadened by a mature man.”

Red took his hotel key out and handed it to ChooChoo. “Arrange to get off about nine or ten o’clock,” Red said, “I’ll square it with Kelley.”

She took the key. Red’s hand felt the beautiful curve of her hip and she left.

“Thanks,” Red said to Cliff.

“My treat,” Cliff answered. Red wished to hell Cliff Morgan had paid the installment on his jet.

“I hear the CIA was looking for you.”

“Yeah, they want me to fly our delivery in a transport and drop them in the Sierra Maestra. Fifty thousand in it.”

“You take the job?”

“After I finish up our charter. When we leaving?”

“I’ve got a little business at the Villa. Was going to leave tonight, but Choo-Choo and Koo-Koo .. . well, tomorrow morning. File a flight plan for Lubbock.”

The guards passed the Villa Pedro Oberg’s limo through the gates. Red emerged and with Hans Pedro disappeared into the safe room that had no eyes or ears. It was one of the most protected civilian buildings from the Rio Grande to the tip of Argentina.

The fucking little Swiss banker, Claus Von Manfried, was at hand to pick up droppings of the deals. Could he operate! He spread the large accounts into a half dozen to a dozen banks, all numbered and inaccessible accounts.

“Let’s see what I’ve got here,” Hans Pedro said. “I have a verification of the pieces you sent down. Payable to you in the sum of two million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Minus four hundred and seventy thousand you owe for the Bulgarian AK’s.”

“Yeah, I owe Moshe Rosenthal a hundred and fifty thousand.”

“Have you verified your purchase?”

“Yeah, I checked this morning. They’re all there. They’ll be going up on a Greek freighter, Kaspos. What have I got left over?” Clauf Von Manfried’s calculator added in bribes, transportation, Hans Pedro Oberg’s clearinghouse fees.

“Slightly under a million.”

“What’re my total deposits?” “Thirty million in eight accounts.”

Red scratched his head. “Bank a half million of the new money and give me the rest in cash.”

“I’ll prepare it, sir.”

You bet your sweet ass you’ll prepare it, you Swiss fart, Red thought to himself. “I’ll pick it up at six in the morning.”

Handshakes and curt nods all the way around.

Red smirked as he left the villa. Bunch of thieves, he thought. But then Coo-Coo and Du-Du would be ... waiting .. . and, he broke into his first smile in days, Greta would wear the G-string. Not a bad deal.

Hosanna Corner in the godforsaken outskirts of godforsaken Lubbock had ministered to the righteous and the sinner in its alternative histories. Hosanna Corner had come into being after the Civil War as the last watering hole before the wagon trains plunged into the southwest desert.

Nearly a century later, during the heyday of the West Texas oil strike, it naturally evolved into a saloon with gambling and prostitution amenities. When the oil patch collapsed, thousands lost it all and were left with land that could scarcely grow a crop.

Lubbock turned into a mean and nasty place where the American dream had betrayed the wildcatters, roughest of all men.

Hosanna Corner returned to a sense of grace as a local gathering house where a variety of Christian sects tried to gain a foothold among the discontent.

This was a big meeting night. Passwords and identification were required. Red Peterson entered and spotted a lone chair in the rear. The big main floor had been reconfigured with tables removed and chairs set up in auditorium style.

Red seated himself, alone, tilted his chair against the wall, and

squinted at the cast of characters. On one side of the bar, a poster

of a lynched Negro. On the other side, a photograph of the Waco burning. The bar served as an altar, bearing a standing cross. Klansmen unhooded themselves, feeling relief to be among their own. More secret greetings.

Now a half dozen Oregon skin heads tacked a poster of Adolf Hitler on a wall.

Words across the back bar mirror told them that YAW EH IS here!

A dozen men wearing silk shirts adorned with an orange cross and an

orange quasi-swastika took their seats in the first row. These were

the new preachers to be sworn in to the White Aryan Christian

Arrival,

WACA.

The room lowered to dim light, a reminder that most of their work was carried out in darkness.

Members of the West Texas Militia, sporting tattoos and Uzis and gigantic mustaches and red bandanas, encircled the chairs.

“This is an important meeting,” a Klansman opened. “We are gathered to swear in a dozen new preachers of the White Aryan Christian Arrival.”

As the Klansman lay fist against heart, the room leapt to its feet and returned the salute. The chant of “White power!” resonated, shaking the Hosanna Corner to its foundation.

The dozen new preachers took their oath of office.

“.. . we will cleanse this nation of ethnic adulteration. We will defend the purity of our women against mongrel infestation and our children from heathen perverts and homosexuals. We swear all this in the name of Jesus Christ and the memory of His forgotten son, Adolf Hitler.”

“White power! White power! White power!”

“And now the moment has come to hail our spiritual leader, the moderator of the White Aryan Christian Arrival .. . Pastor Ed Jenkins .. . Pastor Ed.”

Cheers, half bows, arm-thrusted salutes welcomed Pastor Ed to the

altar. They hoorayed a small bespectacled man, everyone’s Uncle Ed dressed in polyester civilian clothing, frayed and unkempt, a tireless worker for the movement.

Red Peterson snuck a drink, as did a fair number of flask carriers about the room.

“There are government spies here tonight,” Pastor Ed began. “Look at your neighbor. Is he one of them?”

“No!”

“As you know, brothers, I have been discharged from prison when the foul and dishonest government dropped their sedition case against me. But for six months I moldered in a stinking cell amid sexual deviates, drug addicts, Mexicans, rapists, and murderers, all for the crime of trying to defend my blessed wife and our four blessed children from a government terrorist raid in the middle of the night by the so-called Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.”

The hissing and booing zoomed round and round the room, and the stomping and pounding caused the place to rumble.

Pastor Ed held up his hands for silence.

“I was beaten unconscious by the aTF. people, who then planted drugs and firearms around my house, ripped the place to pieces, and carted off my legal weapons that we must have to defend ourselves from governmental tyranny.”

The whiny-modulated voice now opened into that of a rasping serpent with flicking tongue:

“In that dark and dangerous prison cell, at the lowest point of my life, Jesus Christ came to me. Pastor Ed, Jesus said, I come to you in the name of my Father, and my Father wants you to tell the truth about the government conspiracy against the decent people of the white race.”

Pastor Ed drank from his water glass as he commanded silence. Red Peterson yawned.

“Listen up, Ed, Jesus told me. Jesus told me that at the beginning of

1900 the czar of Russia instituted a series of fake pogroms against the

Jews .. . which never happened. It was a ruse to ship millions of Jews to America and infiltrate and infest our beloved country. When Jews got to New York or other hymie cities, all they had to do was draw cash from Jewish bankers and move into every town and village.”

“White power! White power!”

“Seig Heil!”

“Them Jews took over the press, they own all the department stores, and they own Hollywood—and look where Hollywood has taken us. And the banks and financiers, the Goldmans, the Saks, the Lehmans, the Rothschilds, and television, and the web of secret Jewish societies has choked off the air from decent Christians. The Jews got ownership of companies to feed us poison any time they want to. And the Jews got the niggers all riled up so that the niggers were put into high places to do the Jews’ work .. . that is, when the niggers weren’t looking for white women.”

Pastor Ed held up his worn copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “Here speaks the truthful expose of the international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world. Got it? The kikes bought their way into American colleges. And the Jews won all the Nobel prizes because their committee was made up of Swedish and Norwegian Jews.”

Pastor Ed had brought the room to rage. Now to tears.

“See, they look down on you and me as scum. You don’t see no Jews as poor dirt farmers. You don’t see no Jews in the wasteland of a dried-up oil patch. No Jew kids picked cotton and peanuts or fished for shrimp .. .”

Now came the big sweat. Off came Pastor Ed’s wettening jacket.

“... and Jesus told me in my prison cell of the shiftiest conspiracy of

them all. Adolf Hitler was a Christian, a nationalist, a man who loved

his country. Rather than see his own country collapse by Jewish

putrifaction, he sent his small and proud and humble and unarmed brown

shirts into the streets to cleanse the nation. The Jews, children of

the Devil and Eve,

cringed as Hitler moved to rid the world of them by attacking Russia.”

“Seig Heil!”

“Franklin D. Roosevelt, the greatest traitor this planet has ever known, sent American boys to war fighting on the side of Jews and communists. When the Jews vomited out of Europe at the end of the war, to set up an advance base for world conquest, it gave the world the biggest of all lies, the so-called Holocaust! By now the kikes had infiltrated every branch of the government. The only thing sad about the Holocaust is that it didn’t happen.”

He waited for a retort of rippling laughter.

“You are here,” he said, “because you’ve seen the plot unfold. With all the Jews and government traitors in place, farms of decent Americans like me and you, farms that had been in the family for a hundred years, were foreclosed in Nebraska and Kansas and the Dakotas. Them little shit-ass local banks done it on direct orders from the big Jew financiers. And they moved in with giant food-growing corporations. You got the picture! Jews control the press. Jews control the money. And soon they will control the food!”

Now the sweat of a hundred men gave their rage a smell. Pastor Ed was speaking of Yaweh again and his prison visit from Jesus Christ.

“It all comes down very plain. I’ve seen with my own eyes, NATO trucks and artillery in a warehouse in Houston. I seen with my own eyes the interplanetary space people who landed in Roswell, who were snatched and hidden by the federal government. I’ve seen reports from our Canadian brothers that their border is filled with NATO and Russian troops .. . ready to move in the name of the New World Order. Brothers! There is only you and me to rise up and stop them and save this nation.”

PROVIDENCE—THE WEEK BEFORE LABOR DAY--2007

What was it that annoyed President Tomtree about Labor Day? After all, he had once built a model workforce environment. Or was it Darnell Jefferson? No matter, it was the proper move to make at the time. T3 had felt far more at home in the boardrooms.

He’d travel to Detroit, make a “read between the lines” speech extolling the partnership of labor and management, and slip out of town without offending anyone.

Today, though, was a day to laze on the water, which was unusually calm near Noah’s Rock. The mini-yacht Yankee Pride was rigged for serious fishing. There were not too many days the President could drop a line in the water.

In a moment he heard the sharp report of the yacht club’s cannon, indicating that the sun was under the yardarm and, most important, the bar was open. The President ordered the outriggers to be reeled in and once again reviewed the report of his brother-in-law, Dwight Grassley.

In the years since Dwight Grassley had first bet on young Thorn ton Tomtree, he had risen from family donkey to family patriarch. Inside the Republican Party, Dwight took on a role of what might be called a hatchet man.

Grassley was a superb fund-raiser who bent and twisted the soft-money rules to their limits. Not that T3 needed funds. He could draw from his own accounts, and legally. Tomtree insisted that the widest net was cast to have each and every individual CEO make their contribution.

Soft money had become a basic canon of American politics, protested by all but stopped by none.

Napkins with the presidential seal were laid on a cocktail table with assorted yum-yums. Eric, the steward, offered hot lemoned towels to deodorize the fish smell from their hands.

“Black Label on the rocks with a side of Black Label on ice,” Dwight said. His fringe of hair was white, yacht club white, a waxy silver white that growled at his plaid pants and startling crested jacket. Tomtree pontificated on the beauty of soft money ... to let every big donor feel he had an insider’s look .. . soft money was just a way of covering bets .. . soft money was soft graft with a three-thousand-year history. Throw it out the front door, it will return by the back door. If Tomtree turned back soft contributions, the CEOs would hold his feet to the fire for the next five years. T3 knew them all. All of them had Bulldog networks operating from his great computer center in Pawtucket.

“Goddamned Labor Day,” Thornton growled and sipped. “My daddy was drowned on one of those Labor Day weekends. Seems to always bring bad news.”

“Well, the news can’t be better,” Dwight interrupted. “We have our coffers filled. We can channel funds on joint advertising to our candidates, and the economy is great. You’re going to be reelected in a landslide.”

Eric brought the news that the commodore’s skiff was on the way out with Mr. Jefferson aboard. Well, get on with it, T3 told himself.

“Dwight,” he began, “we are planning to formally announce after Labor

Day. It is the best tactical time, before Christmas and the January

doldrums. Announcing early will have any other candidates scrambling for money and key people. We’ll have it all. However, I want to enter the campaign with no lingering shadows hanging over my head.”

Dwight froze. In all their years, he had never felt fully comfortable with Thornton. In his years of serving the man, Dwight wanted only a small reward: second or third man at Justice or Treasury.

The President was fully aware of Grassley’s value. He commiserated. “There are things you cannot do,” he said, “even as president. I can’t keep the pope from overrunning the planet with scrawny diseased little brown people with perpetual hatred in their eyes. I cannot stop the annual flooding of Bangladesh. I can’t stop the corruption of Mexico and Indonesia.”

Thornton stalled out and scanned the ocean and his trappings of power:

helicopter overhead, a picket of Coast Guard craft, the finest sailors and Secret Service the nation had to offer, electronic equipment that could reach Moscow in three seconds. And out there, a launch filled with media. He had positioned Yankee Pride so that the press boat would catch a nasty riptide and have them all green and queasy.

“You seem in a hurry to leave,” the President said. “Got a date?”

“That doesn’t sell papers anymore,” Dwight said. “Who cares?”

“I care,” Thornton answered. “Get rid of him.”

Dwight squelched his desire to scream out as he had always squelched it.

“Look, not that I’m gay bashing or have homophobia, God knows. We have a lot of guys who’ve done Trojan work for the Republican Party. So, God knows I’m not into gay bashing. You’ll thank me, Dwight. I personally have never allowed passion with either sex to rule me. You know, Dwight, I can tell the minute a man walks into the Oval Office if he’s into adultery.”

Dwight wept.

“I take it,” Thornton pressed, “that you do not want to resign as my financial chair.”

Right now, goddammit, Dwight thought, stand up and tell him to shove it! The sonofabitch has never felt anything in bed. Ask my sister!

“So, tell Bruce to move out of your New York condo.”

“His name is Randy,” Dwight whimpered. “I’ll tell him.”

The commodore’s launch pulled alongside. Darnell Jefferson, now a white-haired and distinguished gentleman, hit the boat’s ladder like a point guard slashing to the basket, quick and graceful. Darnell was greeted by a pale number in Dwight, who winced out a smile and greeting, then was helped into the launch.

Darnell downed a catch-up drink as T3 studied the political atlas.

“What the hell’s the matter with Dwight? He looks as though he was shot out of a cannon and missed the net.”

Thornton punched that sweet-sounding little bell and pointed at his drink. Darnell knew when Thornton had one drop more than allowable, sometimes drifting into forbidden territory. Darnell reckoned it was the President’s fourth.

“Christ, don’t glower,” Thornton said. “You’re getting like those Navy doctors. They’re on automatic. Cut down on the booze, Mr. President. You know what the Navy doctors remind me of—a sidewalk filled with wind-up dolls all going in different directions and yakking, “Cut down on the booze.””

“You and Dwight have words?” “I had words for him. Get rid of that sweet thing, Rodney or Rudy or whatever the hell its name is, or resign the party.”

“Dwight Grassley is your devoted slave, and he is family.”

“Sure, the same kind of family Jimmy Carter had with that heehaw brother of his.”

“What about me? I bring white girls to the White House banquets.”

“You are not currently married.”

“Dwight and Brenda have not had sex in a quarter of a century. Both of them are entitled to their lives. You know, fucking A, when Dwight suggested a divorce twelve years ago, you flipped out. For the first time in his life, Dwight has a sweet young man to love him.”

The President’s face screwed up in disgust. “That is very ugly.”

“Mr. President, the American people don’t give a big rat’s ass if Dwight Grassley is fucking rattlesnakes.”

“Oh, sure,” Thornton answered, “take a look at the press launch. You think the Clinton scandal has put an end to our prurient curiosity?” He changed the subject. “Anything in your reports that needs attention?”

“No. A few small blips. I don’t want to sound cocky, but unless there is an unforeseen disaster, you can’t lose the election next year. Neither volcano nor ice storm can knock you off the mountaintop.”

“That’s what George Bush thought after the Gulf War.” Lifting the phone to the bridge, “Captain, have we got a few rays left?”

“We should be heading in in forty minutes, Mr. President. The Secret Service wants us to land before dark.”

Thornton stared at the sea pensively. “We don’t get to see many sunsets, Darnell. It’s been a long time since we sat here watching sunsets with our daddies.”

“Why did you change your Labor Day itinerary?” Darnell asked.

“I didn’t like it. Besides, I like to outfox the press. From Detroit we fly to Kirkland Air Base in Albuquerque and helicopter to Glen Canyon. Three columns of Eagle Scouts are converging for a twelve-hundred Scout jamboree. We will sing, “Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree,” pin on a few merit and bravery badges, and address them as the new leaders of the new generation.”

“What the hell has that got to do with Labor Day?”

“I hear say,” Thornton answered, “that architects will soon be redundant.. . obsolete. In fifteen seconds a Bulldog can put up on the screen detailed plans of every major structure that has been built in the last two thousand years.”

Thornton Tomtree stared at Noah’s Rock in puzzlement. To Darnell he looked like Orson Wells about to say the word, “Rosebud.”

“Architects are done. Writers are going. We can put every known piece of literature on the screen in seconds. Creative arts were once the beacon of civilization. But now the people have come to realize that the one perfect and infallible mechanism on earth is the computer,” the President said. “I am the man who can control the Internet. The people know that.”

In his Nanatuck study, the President etched out his Labor Day speech.

Who could he offend by going to the Eagle Scouts? What the hell! These were lads who knew to get a sane haircut and wear a necktie and polish their shoes.

Eric brought dinner to his desk, and Pucky came in. She looked rather interesting. Thornton had never seen her in his office in exactly this kind of configuration.

Pucky had a gossamer-draped material over her breasts, which had remained surprisingly young. She was otherwise flashy and elegant, her height allowing her to wear whopping jewelry.

“I’m off to the Van Aldens’. Some new Vivaldis have been unearthed. The Juilliard String Quartet will be playing. Are you all right, Thornton?”

“I’ve a rotten week coming up.”

“You are always in a snit when you go out to Noah’s Rock.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Should I stay in with you? I’d like to.”

“No, no, you run along,” he said reflexively.

The worst part of this job, Maud Traynor thought, was moments like this, flying into a smuggler’s redoubt in a single-engine penny glider. All of them were hidden in jungle and scorched mesas. The Cessna woofed up on a sortie of hot air off the desert floor. Now ponderous, brooding rock formations of dull color flipped quietly beneath their wings.

She tried to rest and closed her eyes, but the plane’s motion made it impossible. Maud lit up.

Already ten years she had been “special counsel” for The Combine. She

had been working in a massive Washington law firm as a labor lawyer,

married Morton Traynor, also a labor lawyer, and settled into dull

dom

Yet her appearances at legislators’ offices on the hill had gained her a measure of notice. The Combine had offered her a position that assured her a life of creature comforts.

Her husband had objected. With The Combine she would be immersed in secrecy, among sleazy characters, and straddling the line of legal and illegal.

One thing was for certain. Morton had to go. She divorced him.

A short while later, Maud proved her mettle to The Combine, and she purchased a horse farm over the state line in Virginia.

Maud’s daughter, also divorced with a pair of children,

became the centerpiece of her life. Maud did not struggle long or hard to make peace with the morality of her work: three hundred fifty acres, a very rapid sports car, eye-dazzling finger rings, and a roustabout’s lust.

Maud always had a tall and handsome and manicured Washington first-stringer after her short and uncommonly plain body. She seduced whomever at will. Earthly rewards? The devil pays mighty wages. Maud didn’t let morality compromise her lifestyle. Once in a while, when a jet carrier was bombed out of the sky, she winced.

That was the way of things, straddling the line. Legally, America exported more weapons than any other nation. Below the line in the gray and black world of gun runners, America exported more weapons than any other nation. Fall into wrong hands? Who decides wrong hands when you put Stinger missiles in the hands of Afghans to shoot down Soviet planes, then have to buy them back from the Afghans?

That was the way it worked. Morality was best kept at arm’s length.

Maud mulled over the coming meeting with Red Peterson, who had become a major player. The Combine had decided it would be best to ally with Peterson, who had gained inside control of the distribution point in Colon, Panama. Two of The Combine’s top dealers had been erased, one tossed from a helicopter at sea. No one had accused Red Peterson. Yet no one failed to get the message.

Maud’s Cessna blessedly set down on a baked dirt strip on the far side of the mountains from Los Alamos near Yucca Bend.

The plane turned and taxied back to where a Wagoneer waited.

“Maud Traynor?” Red asked.

“Red? Do I call you Red?”

“Christ, I don’t even remember what my Christian name was.”

They sized one another up quickly. That old bird will fly, he thought.

Maud had looked into the eyes of the crudest men in Afghanistan and Guatemala. Red Peterson was in their league. His skin was spotted and wrinkled from too many years in the oil fields.

“Here, let me give you a hand.”

Strong old bastard, Maud thought. Red was put together in quality tailor-made shirts and jeans and the prerequisite turquoise and silver trimmings. His voice was politely soft. He could let his eyelids drop in such a manner as to block him from looking on another’s eyes but at the same time look directly at you.

Peterson’s villa was halfway up a thousand-foot butte, negotiated by a series of switchbacks. The building was unevenly integrated into the natural contours of the hill. A smashing flying wing seemingly hung way out with no apparent support, its vista nearly to infinity.

Maud took quick takes. Five-car garage. His and hers Mercedes.

Furnishings a daring but easy mix from ultramodern to staunch Western. Paintings were expensive, partly Western and the balance from Impressionism, nearly to modern.

Maud had not seen a more magnificent suite since the Peninsula Hotel. Marble floors with soft Navajo coverings, huge and fluffy monogrammed towels, hot jets, seating for two or more, and every electronic convenience imaginable. It’s going to be interesting, she thought.

They took drinks on the flying-wing veranda. Staff, well trained and silent. Maud lifted a pair of binoculars and scanned beyond the valley where a set of book cliffs threw off their covers to take a vibrant fling before the sun dropped. She picked up a car ripping around the curves to the house and into the garage. In a moment, Red Peterson’s wife, once among the most beautiful show girls in Vegas, appeared with a pair of preteen girls.

Maud watched him turn into an affectionate pussycat daddy. “My wife, Greta, and my daughters. Joan is named from my momma and Tammy after Tammy Wynette.”

They found their presents in Daddy’s pockets and traded talk to catch him up. He’s just like I am with my grandchildren, Maud thought. Maybe they will be both of our salvations.

Greta gathered them up and moved them to their desks for homework. Greta was still extremely beautiful, a Walkure, an Amazon. She had little to say as she curled his long gray hair with her forefinger.

It certainly did not appear to be a dysfunctional house. What a show girl Greta must have been, not a high kicker in the chorus line, but at six feet she stood on the platform of the ascending staircase, arms out, breasts out, and packing forty pounds of glitter.

The daughters were animated and seemingly at ease with themselves and strangers.

It all broke up the snarling, leathery image of Red Peterson. And Greta? What the hell! A six-foot Swedish lady comes to Vegas to find herself a Red Peterson. He pampered her, and she knew what to do in return.

Not a bad life, winters in Mexico and high-roller trips to Vegas or a New York or Paris spree.

Red’s hand slipped between his wife’s legs.

“I’ll let you two talk,” Greta said. “I’ll have dinner served on the veranda.”

“Sure, Swede,” Red said, “and maybe you’ll join us for dessert.” He patted her backside as she arose. “The donkey is going to ride tonight.”

Now, not to get it mixed up, Maud thought, is Red making a pass at me by getting a rise out of me? Maud realized that Red had held her hand just a little too long and tried to get a peek up her leg in the Wagoneer. That should have delighted ‘most any sixty-year-old divorced grandmother, except that Red was threatening.

“This cognac is magnificent,” Maud commented.

“Ought to be, it cost enough. You’d think it was biblical.”

Red had started life as a son of a Gulf shrimper and went the daring way by taking his best shot at the oil fields of Tyler. In the fifties and sixties it was strike and boom, boom, and bust. He went through three fortunes, and he sang the wildcatter’s song of big winner to broken-hearted loser.

Red smelled a coming collapse of the oil fields early in the sixties and sold off his equipment and leases.

What hot spot remained for an old wildcatter? Mexico for a time. Venezuela for a time. Hell, these countries had so many crooks in office, the guy out in the field didn’t have a chance.

Immigrant smuggling from Mexico showed promise. He knew every bend in the Rio Grande. It led to drug smuggling.

During the Clinton years the North American Free Trade Association reversed the established pattern of traffic at the borders. In the old days Mexican vegetables and fruits and cheap goods had flowed to America. Now America was exporting heavily to Mexico.

American weapons, in eighteen-wheelers, lay under the false bottoms.

The trucks went through without sincere inspection.

Once on the Mexican side, a few friends had to be taken care of, and passage was open to Central America.

An incredible dinner on the veranda followed, but the air turned cold instantly when the sun dropped, and they retired to Red’s office, a tucked-in little room to remind him of the bitter past, complete with rolltop desk and big pictures of oil men and oil strikes. Red had been a wiry and handsome young man in those days.

“Got any more of that thousand-year-old cognac?” They sparred until Greta led Joan and Tammy in to say good night. Maud thought Greta a tiny bit condescending, indicating a feline bent. Or was it that Red went for all women, despite age and configuration?

Promised once more the donkey would ride, Greta departed.

“Well, now, Miss Maud, what brings you to the fleshpots of New Mexico? I’ve been trying to reach The Combine for more goddamn years than I’d like to think.”

“It’s a closed club, Red. We reached you because we feel we can deal with each other now.”

“What kind of deal?”

“There have been virtually no Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms stings since Thorn ton Tomtree has been in office.”

“Yeah, he sure likes unimpeded commerce.”

“Red, we’ve been looking into your operation since some of our top agents started disappearing in Colon.”

“I heard about it; cut to the chase, Miss Maud.”

“Smugglers’ routes have changed. Contraband moves north and south. Vancouver is practically an oriental city. Once an eighteen-wheeler gets into the States, the way is through Route 99, inland California. You’ve put a lock on the border and through Mexico. It’s not friendly to us anymore.”

“You’d think The Combine would be happy enough supplying the new NATO armies.”

“We’re all greed heads in a greed head business,” she said.

“I like that, Miss Maud. I’d like to be on a slow boat to China with a load of weapons heading to Colon and pass a sister ship on the high seas with a load of American guns heading for the Philippines. What level deal are we talking about?”

“Top level. Partners from Vancouver to the southern tip of Argentina.”

Oh, my goodness, Red thought. The power of The Combine was awesome.

“All supplies?”

“Uh-huh. Fifty-fifty split after expenses. Cash. It includes ack-ack, fifty-caliber machine guns, dynamite, water-treatment plants, medical supplies, field boots, you know, you know .. .”

Red was silently adding zeros to his potential take. All the hard work had not been in vain.

“Why?” he asked softly.

“You’ve got a very fine reputation, and you also have what seems to be foolproof access into and through Mexico. You’re a man who is well thought of, a straight shooter. The Combine sees enormous growth in the Southern Hemisphere marketplace. There are now three opposing guerilla groups in Cuba, restless bands along the Amazon, weapons for the dealers, and a half dozen spots in the Caribbean ready to pop.”

“What do you think you’re going to be able to do for me?”

“We can supply you with American weapons, no limits.”

“You supply, I run them over the border.”

“That’s right. And, uh, we go on a handshake. No letterheads, lawyers, websites, contracts. It has to be a matter of trust, Red.”

“Trust among the polecats,” Red mused. “Is that it?”

“You must produce one key element. Not all merchandise can move at all times like a conveyor belt. You have to produce a fail-safe secret depot for storage.”

If Red Peterson wanted to make a stand, The Combine could construct parallel routes and get rid of him. But that would cost The Combine a fortune. Red had it down, to the permanent key officials to be paid off. He knew that Red Petersons would come and go, but The Combine would be there forever, because greed is eternal. Come drought, famine, earthquake, collapse of government, come what may—guns were the currency.

The two went through a long list of figures. Red was coming to realize that in relatively short time he could put upward of a hundred million dollars in his pocket. He offered his hand.

“We’ve got a deal when I approve of your depot,” she said.

“I’ll take you there tomorrow. Want to get laid tonight?”

“Never on the first date, Red.”

Red Peterson groped, caressed, patted his wife’s backside, then hopped up into the pilot’s seat of his Queen Air. Greta touched cheeks with Maud, giving her a mandatory “Ummm” but knowing full well her old bastard was on the prowl.

The rattlesnake knew he was good, Maud thought. They had blended into a merger that would corner the expanding Latin weapons market. Maud had slept with one eye open and one ear trained on the bedroom door, hoping he might pay her a visit. He was menacing, like the men in The Combine.

Red moved with certainty to hold the sassy airplane in check, as though he could see the wind.

That morning after breakfast, Red gave her a briefing of the Hudson Mining and Cattle Co. on the White Wolf Ranch. It lay in southern Utah and was one of the few militia able to keep some full-time “freedom soldiers.” These men were carried on the payroll of the copper mine and ranch.

The White Wolf Brigade commander and ranch owner was a retired Army officer, Oswald “Wreck” Hudson. The mine and ranch barely broke even. Big monies came from Red Peterson, drug and immigrant smuggling, and web-site scams. White Wolf was also part of an underground network supplying a safe haven for criminal militia on the run.

They flew west into Utah past one canyon after another, mesas holding a few determined trees, stone chimney rock formations of a phallic nature, agonized peaks, tan desert and, always, a stone edifice to a sleeping Indian maiden.

Red set the Queen Air down at Cortez, as anonymous as an airfield could be without being illegal.

Maud had pictured Wreck Hudson accurately. Thin man, handlebar mustache in a struggle to get attention and to be brave. He greeted them in civilian garb but packing a pair of ivory-handled pistols finished in silver.

In a Land Rover, Wreck settled in behind a field marshal’s panel. His tutored hand flipped dials, punched buttons, and picked up a microphone.

“This is Rover One to Rover Two,” Hudson said to a second Land Rover nearby filled with a guard detail.

“This is Rover Two to Esteemed Personage. Rolling right behind you.”

“Base One, this is Esteemed Personage.”

“Go ahead, Esteemed Personage,” the ranch called back.

“Base One, we are rolling from Cortez. Do we foresee any security problems en route?”

“Negative.”

Wreck bullied his vehicle like a heavyweight hitting the big punching bag. As yucca and thistle and tumbleweed flashed by, Wreck rambled, as would a braggart.

After a long dirt run through Navajo country, they came to a halt at a guard shack. Three surly members bearing Uzis approached the car and upon recognizing Esteemed Personage snapped to salutes.

“Inform Base One of my entry.”

“Yes, sir.”

The guard placed a pair of four-star pennants on the fenders and waved them through.

Ten miles later, an oasis loomed in the form of a huge Iowa style

Victorian ranch house, where Wreck was greeted by three barefoot Mexican women, all twenty-something or younger. The guard vehicle pulled up behind them.

“Clean up the fucking command car,” he ordered. The women quickly took Maud’s and Red’s luggage, each getting a pinch on the cheek from Esteemed Personage as they passed him. Wreck took Red off to a side:

“Can we show this broad everything?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything more I should know about this?”

“No, but put us in adjoining bedrooms.”

They settled into a powerful Mexican lunch in a huge tiled kitchen, attended by the women. Red’s eyes followed the sway of their hips and rear ends. Wreck joined them, having changed into a military uniform of sorts: a hodgepodge of crossed sabers, gold epaulets, and scrambled eggs.

The lunch, tequila and beer, hit home with a thud, accompanied by Wreck Hudson’s never-ending intoxication with his good self. Between shifts in tales of Wreck’s imagined past, Red popped up. “We’d better get a move on and have Miss Maud look over the facility.”

Miss Maud indeed! Who the hell was she, anyhow? Wreck played with the console of buttons near his chair. “This is Esteemed Personage calling Ranger Two. We are about to embark on a tour of inspection. Is the fucking car clean?”

“Positive.”

“I want four guards to follow in Ranger Two.”

Red had liked the White Wolf setup from the get-go. It abutted Navajo land on three sides. Underpaid Navajo police received innumerable perks and lots of booze to act as an advance warning system. Even if the government was to mount a raid on White Wolf through the reservation or even if helicopters were used, the Navajo would have to be warned in advance.

The other opening into White Wolf Ranch was through Six Shooter Canyon,

a five-mile defile whose path was punctuated by sheer walls of stone up to two thousand feet high. Once past a wide spot in the canyon called Bloody Gulch, it ran another two miles into the rear of White Wolf.

On the mesa, near the ranch house, Wreck Hudson had installed a horseshoe ring of gunfire to cover the two miles of canyon visible to them.

There were six multi-use .50-caliber machine-gun nests and 37mm ack-acks to down helicopters, and another six 150mm mortar posts and four artillery pieces of various measure.

Down in the canyon, every narrow spot past Bloody Gulch held up to a hundred yards deep of barbed wire running from wall to wall.

They had night-vision gear and homemade fire bombs.

All of this played into Red Peterson’s hands. Certainly, government forces could take White Wolf, but the risk of high casualties was too great in a nation that did not like casualties. Losing a hundred- or two-hundred-man army was not going to sit well with the American people. Moreover, there was a lack of government initiative, a hands-off policy.

They drove to the mine entrance, a mile from the ring of fire over the canyon. Hudson had built a spur rail line from the reservation on into the mine.

Enough salable ore, with copper and iron the main metals, justified the operation. The ore cart tracks moved slowly downward inside the cliff entrance. At an unlit, hidden juncture a rail switch moved some tracks into what appeared to be a black hole.

They all climbed into ore carts, the tracks following the narrow tunnel some two hundred yards.

And there before them burst open a humongous cave. With its sister caves, it could have held the Titanic. Weapons of all kinds and apparatus and apparel for war lined the cave walls.

At this point Wreck confided they also had a dozen Stinger missiles, purchased back from the Afghan rebels, the brand that had half destroyed the Soviet air force.

At the ranch, the basement under the cellar was a cell of megalomania for Esteemed Personage. Huge survey maps of the Four Corners region hung on the walls with troop markings to indicate a never-ending mock battle.

A computer on a rudimentary system kept in contact with a plethora of patriots: the White Aryan Christian Arrival and wooded militias. It also tracked gun sales, gun shows, gun legislation, and their inventory of hate literature.

Maud counted a dozen to two dozen men who were probably on the payroll. She distrusted Wreck’s boast that he could pull a thousand patriots onto the ranch on any given weekend; nonetheless, how many festering sore spots like White Wolf existed?

Oswald Hudson dismissed his communications people and ensconced himself behind an enormous desk decorated with phones of different colors. Behind him, a blown-up poster of Tim McVeigh.

One of the Mexican women served coffee and pastry and opened a hidden cart of booze. Red grabbed the woman’s backside as she dared brush past him flirtingly close.

Maud threw questions, trying to get past her feeling that she was in a netherworld of the impossible.

“I got me this little country to run,” Hudson went on. “My men would follow me to hell. These patriots are as good as Army Rangers, Marines, Seals. With a dozen militia ranches in the Four Corners under my command, and another hundred around the country we could coordinate an attack on the Golden Gate Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Capitol, the Superdome, the harlot film studios.”

He poured a bunch of cognac into his glass and wiped the fallen drops on his mustache with the back of his hand.

Maud was damned good at covering her disbelief. “So, tell me, Wreck, what is your target?”

“Hoover Dam,” he answered, not skipping a beat.

“How?” she asked.

Hudson cleared his throat, lowered his voice to “highly confidential.”

“I am in the process of designing a radio-controlled submarine torpedo. We will launch it, when the word comes, into Lake Meade and set it to blow up at the dam footings.”

Now to Nam. Wreck confided that he should have been made a full colonel in Vietnam. “My battalion was sent into a large gook village near Phen Dok. As we advanced up the hill for Phen Dok, can you believe it, my fucking knee gave out. Old football injury at Michigan. Some sports writers said the knee kept me from being one of the great all-Americans. This time, taking the hill, it cost me a Congressional fucking Medal of Honor. My men just broke down and cried. They’d follow me to hell.”

Maud spent the afternoon pondering mightily. She sensed a presence. Red Peterson had entered through an adjoining door and taken up the rocking chair close by.

“He’s not as crazy as he makes out,” Red said. “He does the drill because his people want it and because felons need a place to hide.”

“You knew this White Wolf would shade my thinking,” she said.

“Got a better depot and transit point? No? Then you have to deal with the mad hatter who runs this one. Besides, Miss Maud, you’ll never have to see Wreck Hudson again. Remember, I own him. Like you said—or was it me who said it to you?--it all boils down to trust between us.”

When did I last trust? Maud wondered. She’d built a firewall between her activities and the ultimate end of a gun barrel. The dirty bunch, the dusty road bunch, the busted pickup truck bunch, the beer-sucking bunch at the roadside hell saloon, the bunch who could never face their own failures.

So, what did the bunch do? They created that hovering monster, The Government, who was really responsible for their misery.

“Wasn’t it inevitable, Maud, to come to this place?” she thought. Thank God, Red Peterson was with her. Lust and all, she felt safe with him now.

“Maud, every once in a while we stop, we think, we dislike ourselves. We don’t fire these weapons. Shut us down and ten more like us will pop up. Men were butchering each other with sticks and stones till they discovered bows and arrows. War is intrinsic in the human race, driven by the most passionate of all human drives, greed.”

“Spoken like a true Jeffersonian. Have you ever looked in the mirror and spit?”

“Yeah .. . once. I got a hymie friend in Panama, a jeweler. I saw the tattoo on his arm. What we are doing by comparison is just keeping the boys amused.”

Maud spent the balance of daylight pacing her little porch in contemplation. The White Wolf Ranch was perfect. Red Peterson was some brilliant piece of personnel. She had to weigh that against the questionable mental balance of Oswald Hudson.

Furthermore, who were these people around?

She had trained herself not to be at home when moral issues came knocking at her door. This time they pounded through to her.

Moral issues cause people to think of their grandchildren and become all teary. Red had explained it perfectly. She and he were only a pair of folks servicing a human need for blood lust.

The lunch and liquor caught up to her. The sounds of her wretching brought Red into her room. On her knees over the toilet bowl, Miss Maud just wasn’t all that sexy.

“Deep and abiding love,” he said, adjusting the angle of her throw, “means holding each other’s head over the bucket. You gonna be okay?”

“Ughhh.”

“Shit,” Red thought, returning to his own room and lighting up his hash

pipe. He heard the shower going from her room. Now, that’s a good woman. She don’t want to smell bad.

Maud came to him scented in creamy, dreamy stuff. He’d have to get the name of it for Greta.

Colors!

In the courtyard Esteemed Personage gathered at the flagpole, and while the White Wolf flag was lowered, they all howled “Aaahhhhweeee! Aaaarhaweeee!” after which Wreck, damaged from cocaine, shot off a few clips. Wreck staggered .. .

“Aaaaahhhhhhhuuuuuuwwweeeeee!” his patriots answered, and began shooting off clips of their own.

From a distant place, a coyote responded.

Maud and Red excused themselves from dinner, taking a stomach-settling diet in his room. It made no never mind, because Wreck was unconscious.

“I saw the devil today,” she said, “and I’m part of him.”

“Speaking of the devil, how about a ‘lude?”

“Is that a ‘lude or a lewd proposition1?”

“Take it and find out.” Down the hatch with a back of hashish. And soon the devil was all gone. Red set her up on the high bed and kicked off his boots.

“I’ve got to say, Red, you feel good.”

“Crocodile skin and all.”

“Yeah .. . cowboy .. . yeah .. .”

“Aaaaahhhhwwweeee,” he crooned.

“Assssahhhhhweeee,” she responded.

FOUR CORNERS-LABOR DAY WEEKEND

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2007 Sun’s first rays slithered over the rocky bivouac as the hated reveille sounded from a bugler. A groan rose en masse all over the Eagle Scout encampment. Four hundred of them ran, shoeless for the most part and naked, to where Montezuma Creek trickled past under a bluff.

Scout masters hustled them. The sun went up high, quickly. Sounds of splattering urine as four hundred young men took turns over the slit trenches.

The column had been in the desert for three days, planning to reach their destination of Mexican Hat at the tip of Glen Canyon day after tomorrow.

Two other columns of Eagle Scouts traversed from different directions toward Mexican Hat. When they converged, twelve hundred, one fourth of the total national number of Eagle Scouts, would hold a jamboree: boating, rafting, a thousand contests of skill and endurance, songs, camp fires.

The President of the United States was due to fly in and address them on Monday!

Hank Skelley, a revered old scout master, sat in a circle of his

company leaders, pondering a map. Hank was a lean rod of spring steel

with dedication to the movement emanating from every move and gesture. Around him, a smell of bacon to revive any flagging spirits.

Hank looked at his watch. Five A.M.

“We didn’t pull our weight yesterday. Those trucks breaking down screwed up our entire transport. Darned if we can make it into Mexican Hat tomorrow if we skirt this row of canyons as originally planned.”

Hank’s long, thin, arthritic finger traced an alternative route. “We can cut off about nine and a half miles if we go straight up Six Shooter Canyon.”

“Where does the end of the canyon lead us?”

“Into the rear of an outfit called Hudson Mining and Cattle, a big tumbleweed ranch.”

“I heard that Hudson Mining has some Utah militia training, and they are none too friendly.”

“Well,” Hank answered, “I tried to reach them by cellular phone to get permission to pass through, but their phone didn’t answer.

“Webster,” Hank said to the chief master of Colorado. Webster Penrose inched to the front. “I don’t think anything goes up Six Shooter Canyon anymore, but I’ve flown over it constantly and had occasion to go for three miles to a wide water hole .. . right here .. . Bloody Gulch. Now, I don’t think it’s dangerous, except in a winter flash flood that sets the rocks spilling down.”

“Suppose we go in as far as the ranch and are turned away? What about that, Hank?”

“Then we go back to Bloody Gulch and pick up a goat trail out of the canyon. It will put us on the Navajo reservation, and we still will have saved several hours.”

“Possible injuries, Hank?”

“Nothing we can’t deal with,” Webster Penrose interrupted. “We have a helicopter on standby in Farmington.”

At the rear of the circle a clicking sound accompanied by bells hinging turned attention to Brad Bradley, trying to raise White Wolf on his personal computer.

“What kind of shit is this?” Hank Skelley exploded. “Trucks to carry off our bedding and kitchen, ground-control satellites, computers, evacuation helicopter. Excuse my obscenity, but we are Eagle Scouts and we aren’t ready to come in out of the cold.”

Agreed. No one had disagreed with Hank for five years, maybe longer.

They broke camp. Bedrolls, the kitchen, and dead weight were piled to be picked up by trucks. Each scout had a two canteen limit of water for the five miles through the canyon, and each hoped to find sweet water at Bloody Gulch.

Fall in! Pep-talk time. Ranging back and forth with megaphone, Hank Skelley yelled out that this column held more boys from more states than the other columns. “We will reach Mexican Hat first or croak trying!”

“Let’s hear it for Hank Skelley!”

“Hip-hip-hooray!”

“Number one to Mexican Hat!”

Chester Skelley, Hank’s grandson and one of the most decorated scouts in the West, was called front and center to take his place alongside Hank to lead them into Six Shooter Canyon a few miles past the stream.

Chester felt faint and of throbbing heart as the pride in him swelled. He knew it was probably his grandfather’s last forced march. Getting there first would take daring. Chester knew about courage. He had fought his way back from a near-crippling childhood disease with superhuman determination.

Singing stopped as they faced the sheer walls and narrow path of Six

Shooter Canyon. A huge sign read: CLOSED; DANGEROUS; DO NOT ENTER, and accordion barbed wire covered its mouth.

“You sure about this?” Brad Bradley asked.

“It’s public land and we are American citizens,” Hank responded. He knew it was his last jamboree. He knew he had to get there first even though the other columns had easier routes. This five-mile push through Six Shooter would end up in legend and song.

Fifty yards in, a boulder blocked the trail. Chester scatted up, found the footings, and extended his hand to his grandfather. As the young man pulled the old master up, it became a golden instant. Their eyes met for only a blink, and their smiles were just as quick. One generation was making, one generation was taking its passage.

And on, into the valley.

The red alert phone in Wreck Hudson’s room rang unmercifully. Wreck was flung awry onto the couch, buck naked. The phone persisted. Wreck jerked the cord from the wall, threw the phone through the window, and stood up wavering.

The girls were gone. Second time this week. He’d have to see about assigning a male orderly. Like today, he was having a difficult time with the arms and legs of his clothing.

Wreck felt better when he strapped on his pearl-handled pistol. Shiiiiuuuuut! He didn’t have pants on, and the pistols fell to the ground.

A pounding on his door. Wreck managed to put both legs in one pant leg and fell flat on his face as he reached for the doorknob.

“You dumb son of a bitch!” Wreck greeted Sergeant Floyd.

“Sorry, sir, I got a call from outpost number seven over the center of the canyon. Dust is rising at the far end.”

“Why didn’t you say so!”

“I tried to phone you, but.. . you shot up the outside phone lines last night.”

“Call all stations, a double-red alert and move all personnel to the horseshoe posts.”

“I did that, sir.”

“What the fuck—who authorized you?”

Down the corridor, Red Peterson came out of his reverie. Maud was gone, but Jesus H. Christ, did that old girl give me a time when the lude kicked in. Was there any way Maud could teach some of that screaming and cursing to Greta? Sometimes Greta acted like the statues she portrayed on the stairs in Vegas.

The continuous sound of a racket filled the hallway. Maud, showered and dressed, came in and nodded toward the sounds of confusion.

Wreck blammed open their door. “We’ve got a problem!”

“Well, Christ, let me get my pants on.”

“There’s dust blowing up the canyon.”

“Hey, Wreck, dust is always blowing through the canyons.”

“Maybe it’s a herd of buffalo,” Maud ventured.

“There ain’t no goddamn buffalos, and there ain’t no goddamn wind.”

“Esteemed Personage,” Grand Militia Sergeant Floyd said, “maybe it’s cattle rustled from Mexico and being hidden in the canyon.”

“I don’t think so,” Red said. “You can’t drive a herd of stolen cattle clear through the state of Arizona and into Utah without being spotted. You there, Sergeant, get Wreck’s vehicle warmed up. We’re right behind you.”

They halted on the steep trail fifty yards below a rock strewn summit.

Wreck shifted into compound low to scale the hill. The hill won.

He came to the guard post where a dozen White Wolves had gathered and screamed at them to take up positions.

Red Peterson, meanwhile, scanned through binoculars. His wise old eye always searched for the patch of black gold. “Yeah,” he said softly, “I see them. They’re taking a rest stop at Bloody Gulch.”

“Who? How many?” Wreck cried.

“Wreck,” Red said softly, “I think you’d better get down there and meet them and either turn them back or let them through. Get rid of all that crap you’re wearing and look like a rancher.”

*

“You dumb son of a bitch,” Wreck screamed.

Red seized him and with one hand lifted him off the ground and held him, nose to nose. “No goddamn commander is going to run troops into a box canyon in broad daylight. If this was an attack by armed forces, you’d be obliterated in five minutes. Now, you get down there.”

“You!”

“Grand Militia Sergeant Buck Jones, sir!”

“Get your ass down there and turn those people around.”

“No, sir, I ain’t going.” Jones quivered. He was silenced by Wreck’s .45-caliber slugs. Wreck turned to the other patriots, who slunk off to their posts.

Peterson led Maud a few feet away. “We’re getting the hell out of here,” he whispered. “I’m grabbing one of their Uzi guns and clean this post out. When I open fire, get down the hill and into the Land Rover. He left the keys in the ignition.”

In the next agonizing moments, the cloud of dust stirred up again and spewed. Wreck was frozen .. . immobile. As fast as a lizard’s tongue, Red snatched the Uzi from a patriot and tried to slam a bullet into its chamber. It was stuck!

“You motherfucker!” Wreck Hudson screamed.

Red threw the weapon to the ground and shook his head, crying, “I brought in two hundred thousand of these guns, and I’ve got to get the one that jammed.”

“Kill the motherfuckers,” Wreck ordered.

The five other patriots poured gunfire into Red Peterson and Maud Traynor, shot up until body parts came loose.

Deep in the canyon below, the formation of Eagle Scouts closed up and tested the water in Bloody Gulch. Addition of iodine and a chemical packet would make it potable but terrible tasting.

Fortunately, the canyon walls shut out most of the sunshine and the rocks had a cooling effect on the adventurers, but it was hot!

It had been a hell of a morning! Skating over rocks, clinging to side walls—slow, torturous movement had sucked them fairly well dry in those first three miles.

Chester Skelley now limped slightly in deference to his weaker leg. His grandfather met his eyes. Both of them rolled a glance heavenward. No songs this break.

Chester Skelley knew that if they had to climb a goat trail out of Bloody Gulch, old Hank would be in some kind of trouble. Hank was chilled by the thought he had made a bad decision.

An advance party of scouts went a half mile and returned with good news that the final two-mile stretch seemed flat and friendly.

The scout masters argued respectfully. One of three choices: two miles up the canyon to the ranch or take the goat trail and climb on cliff sides two thousand vertical feet, or return to Montezuma Creek and truck into the jamboree.

To turn back would be heartbreaking. Perhaps prudent, but heartbreaking. They had gotten through, thus far, without a major injury. It had nothing to do with prudence but with pride.

The other masters communicated without words the feeling that Hank Skelley could never make the high climb.

“Form up the column. We will continue down the canyon to the rear of Hudson Ranch. Double file, when possible, and tell the lads, it’s only a short way now.”

From locking fear to a mad euphoria, Wreck Hudson seemed to float over a great battlefield with mighty legions at his fingertips and an impenetrable defense ... as he transformed himself into a George S. Patton.

“Here they come,” Wreck whispered. He contacted his ring of machine gun, artillery, and mortar posts.

“Christ, it looks like a division of them down there,” Floyd said.

“We take no prisoners,” Wreck replied.

On they came, an ant line trudging out of Bloody Gulch toward White Wolf.

“I don’t see no weapons,” Floyd reported.

“They’ve got their machine pistols in their backpacks.”

“Looks like some of them are wearing short pants. Hey, looks like Boy Scout uniforms.”

“It’s a disguise,” Wreck growled. “They’re either Marines or Rangers.”

Now into the steep and narrow defile. Wreck looked down on the entire double line. He rolled his crazed eyes—he had them bagged in a deep well. “I’ve got less than twenty men .. . there were fifty last night at White Wolf! Where the fuck is my fucking brigade!”

“They shagged ass out of here.”

Wreck emitted his animal howl, fell to his knees, and held his face in his hands. Two patriots helped him to his feet. They were coming close, down there.

“Fire!”

Machine-gun fire crackled into the narrow rift, ricocheting off the walls like tennis balls. Some of the invaders went down!

Now they’ll know about Wreck Hudson! Glory! God! Glory! Jew plot foiled. Look at them fall! Fire! Fire! Fire!

The echoes of the bullets were as loud as the bullets, a hailstorm from four machine guns .. . mortars swished down and flamed and the earth bounced and heaved .. . now cannon fire far down range to blow the walls in and seal the canyon from retreat.

This is war! This is fucking war, man! I’ll get my Congressional Medal now!

The racket was so immense, it seemed to be a kind of rumbling that must have happened at the birth of the planet. A burst of small rocks spewed into the defile as machine gun bullets loosened them. Now the mortars fired into the narrowest part of the canyon, and down came boulders from basketball size to Greyhound size.

“Surprised you fuck heads Look at them running around and screaming!”

A huge slab skidded down, bounced off the cliff wall and behind; rocks poured down like a waterfall.

The Eagle Scouts were trapped and machine-gunned and a blizzard of rocks poured down on them and a dozen avalanches ran amok .. . . higher and higher the debris piled on the canyon floor, twenty, thirty feet... far over any scout.

Waves of concussion stirred up with angry dust and dislodged thousands more tons of rock. The waves careened through holes and fissures .. . . and found the cave with eight hundred tons of dynamite.

The mining operation was lifted from the ground and hurled over space.

Now a torrential rock fall as the canyon gave up great hunks.

The ranch house was eviscerated.

The last of the screams came from the patriots as their horseshoe of gun emplacements simply skidded off its moorings and plunged down.

Now the artillery shells and missiles and ammunition in the storage cave belched thunder after thunder after thunder.

Now death .. . now death .. .

NAVAL AIR STATION-SOUTH WEYMOUTH

AT THE SAME TIME

Air Force One moved to South Weymouth so that its departure would not gum up the air traffic around Boston and Providence.

President Thornton Tomtree boarded and went directly up to his office to put final touches on his Labor Day speech to the Eagle Scouts.

Darnell Jefferson oversaw the placement of personnel and that all systems were functioning. Working in a tighter proximity than the White House, the people aboard seemed doubly busy. Beyond Air Force One and two thousand feet lower, a long white plume trailed from the press plane.

Chief of the Secret Service presidential detail, Rocco Lapides, opened the door of his outer station to allow Darnell Jefferson in. Darnell was extremely wobbly, Lapides noted, as he knocked on the President’s door.

“Lapides, don’t answer the door until I tell you. We have to keep the lid on some news for ten or twenty minutes,” Darnell rasped.

No inquiries, ears, eyes, and mouth covered, the Secret Service man took his instructions.

“Mr. President,” Darnell said, addressing Thornton formally, as he always did in the presence of a third party.

“Everything in order?” Thornton asked.

“Not exactly.”

“You look horrible. What did you do? Tie one on last night?”

“We have received confirmed reports of a cataclysmic event. One of the columns of Eagle Scouts moved up a canyon, and the canyon walls collapsed on them.”

“Jesus! How long ago?”

“Maybe forty minutes. The Navajo police say it struck like a nuclear bomb. They flew a chopper to it, but there was such a cloud of dust over the area, they were prevented from taking a close-down look.”

“Oh, my God!” Lapides said, breaking his vow of silence.

“Just how many of these scouts were involved?”

“We don’t know, sir. We’re trying to glean a number. So far the news is frozen, except for a Four Corners emergency network in to us.

Mendenhall and I set up a communications system. The press plane

smells something—“

“They always smell something!”

“Mendenhall is holding them off. As soon as we have a hint of any casualties, you should have a tactic for announcing it to the people.”

Tomtree tried to screw down his focus to laser sharpness, winging through a dozen possible scenarios to hold the information from pouring over the floodgates. Thank God it was an accident! Tomtree immediately thought of his personal position in all of this. In a week he was to announce he was running for reelection in 2008 in order to short-circuit any overly ambitious Republicans from the Baptist crowd.

Mendenhall, who could perspire on an iceberg, was drenched as he came in.

“CIA satellite confirmation,” he rasped. “The canyon walls collapsed along a two-mile stretch. The path is under millions of tons of fallen rock.”

They all feared the next question:

“How many scouts were in the canyon?”

*

“We aren’t sure, Mr. President. There were three columns converging on Mexican Hat for a total of fifteen-sixteen hundred Eagle Scouts.”

“Well, goddammit, divide fifteen hundred by four. That’s four hundred in that column. That doesn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, they’ve all been hurt. In any event, it was a natural disaster. I should be able to rally a great deal of sympathy.”

Good Lord, Darnell thought, he’s acting like divine providence was taking him to the Four Corners. Maybe he could make his presidential reelection announcement right after they reached Four Corners.

Darnell Jefferson had all but collapsed in his armchair. The President and Mendenhall turned Air Force One into a flying White House, sizzling out instructions to the armed forces and connected agencies. . Information went in and out from a dribble to a rush .. .

“Christ, Mr. President. The Internet is running pictures of the canyons near Hovenweep National Monument, Utah. National Geographic is leading the charge.”

“Mr. President,” Darnell said hoarsely, “you’ve got to talk to the press plane.”

“Mr. President, confirmation from the scouts’ supply truck drivers that plans were changed in the morning and the column entered Six Shooter Canyon!”

“How many?”

“We don’t know, sir.”

“Mr. President, Boy Scout Headquarters confirms the column entered Six Shooter Canyon with four hundred scouts and masters. They are from thirty-seven states.”

“Sir, we are hooked up to the press plane.”

“This is Thornton Tomtree. An avalanche of unknown origin apparently

took place in one of the canyons near the Hovenweep National Monument

in Utah. It appears that a number of Eagle Scouts hiking to their

jamboree at Mexican *

Hat might have been trapped. Air Force One is now en route to Albuquerque, where I was to give a Labor Day address. I ask our beloved nation to join hands and pray.”

The emergency team of White House Chief of Staff Tony Rizzoli, Darnell Jefferson, Mendenhall, and political strategist Turnquist had free access to the President. . Get a list of names of the people in that column .. . . The President needs a legal staffer up here to give us a picture of possible government responsibility .. . . Also send up Jacob Turnquist, the political spin meister, to set up damage control and estimate political fallout. Better to announce for reelection now as a calming gesture to the public, or better to announce after the first of the year? .. . . “We can’t say until we have all the facts.”

Admiral Wall, the President’s personal physician, checked blood pressure and pulse rate. “High, but okay.”

“Where in the hell is the vice president?”

Mendenhall eased into the crowding room. He leaned over and whispered in Tomtree’s ear.

“I’m going to ask everyone to clear out for a few minutes except the emergency team. I don’t want to be called until I give you orders. So?”

When the door closed Mendenhall’s expressive face showed terror.

“I just spoke to the Navajo chief of police by cellular. He rounded up a half dozen helicopters and landed at a place called Bloody Gulch inside the canyon. A party of ten pressed down Six Shooter .. . and they ran into a fifty-foot-high wall of fallen rock.

“They climbed for a better view and saw no signs of life. Further here, apparently hundreds of people in the region heard voluminous gunfire around zero seven three zero this morning.”

“Are you saying,” Darnell said, “that the explosion was set off?”

“According to the Navajo police, the adjoining property, a White Wolf Ranch, was headquarters for a Four Corners militia group.”

Admiral Wall gave the President another blood-pressure check, quickly prepared a syringe, and asked the President to lower his pants so the shot could go into his butt.

“Which camera crew is aboard?”

“CBS from the pool.”

“Have them wait in the hall. I’ll be making a statement in ten minutes.”

“Latest report, Mr. President: Navajo police report is confirmed. It is possible, even probable, that no one in the canyon escaped alive.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is Larry Merton aboard Helicopter One, KTM,

Salt Lake City. The clouds of dust over Six Shooter Canyon seem locked

in. In a matter of moments medical teams and mountain rescue will try

to enter the canyon. There have been no signs of life. The canyon

continues to rumble and slide. We are going to try to fly under. Oh,

my God! It is a catastrophe down there. All buildings at the site of

the ranch house and mine have been eviscerated—“

“We interrupt to switch you to Air Force One, en route to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to bring you the President of the United States.”

“My fellow Americans, a great tragedy has befallen our nation. A column of approximately four hundred Eagle Scouts and their scout masters from over thirty states were hiking to a jamboree at Lake Powell. As they passed through a deep ravine known as Six Shooter Canyon, the walls imploded on them.

First reports tell us that there appear to be no survivors. I am sorry beyond measure to have to report to you that we believe it was not an accident, but a deliberate attack by a Hudson Mining and Cattle Company. Information on this may be scarce because all signs of life and property at the ranch were destroyed as well. We, our nation and its people, have entered a terrible period of grief and of outrage. We must rise above our grief and our outrage to be able to make clear decisions.

“I have ordered the largest and most thorough investigation in history to commence forthwith and to issue a preliminary public report within a matter of weeks.

“America is a great and strong nation, the longest existing democracy, and such greatness was not gained without constant challenge and bloodshed and sacrifice.

“Our enemies will play on this tragedy to try to prove the fall of American greatness. Yet we have prevailed where others have fallen into the mists of time, and we shall prevail again.

“As your president, I beg you to open your arms to the families of those young men who have been killed. They must feel the strength and the prayers and the sharing of their sorrow.

“How could such an event happen? Well, we must look back, perhaps generations, to find the link. I believe the link will take us back to our very roots.

“Yet this catastrophe occurred during my watch, and I must bear the responsibility.

“Lord, let a light stream out of this darkness and tell us that these brave young men will light the way to our future.”

“Henrietta Joslin, CNN, Denver. The government has set up the following toll-free numbers for families of the expected casualties. All airlines flying into Albuquerque and Santa Fe are issuing complimentary tickets to the families. Shuttle service will be in effect by tomorrow morning to connect from Denver and Salt Lake City. Lodging in the Four Corners will be provided by the hotels and motels in the area.”

The President was finally able to carve out time for himself and Darnell. Darnell had suddenly become ancient-looking, going through waves of being stunned over and over. What in the name of God am I doing here?

Thornton Tomtree, sitting over there, having given his moment of grief, was torturously trying to think how to wiggle his way out of the catastrophe.

There had to be finger pointing. Already fingers were being loosened by the media, and Democrats were giving middle finger salutes.

The gun issue was always kept low-key, but T3’s laissez-faire attitude on guns and militias was a matter of record. Darnell had argued the gun-control position regularly with the President in his first two and a half years.

“You can’t stop bootleggers, you can’t stop drug dealers,” Tomtree had

answered. “What the hell makes you think we can stop gun running

“They are evils,” Darnell had argued. “Because you see an evil, an overwhelming evil, and say, ‘nothing we can do about it, old chap’ and let it run wild—this is not the behavior of a civilized people. Evil must be fought at every level.”

“So, what are we to do, Darnell, go holy on this subject and watch China or the damned French take over our arms commerce?”

“But we are the United States of America!”

“Exactly my point,” Thornton had responded. “I couldn’t even move the Congress .. . even if I had a notion to. So, looking at the reality of the situation, we must then look at the bottom line.”

Darnell was exasperated. He knew that somewhere along the road with Thornton, a bridge would be down. Time and again during their corporate years, Darnell verged on leaving in anger. Always, the lure of T3 pulled him back into the cycle. Thornton was a genius, a great man, and he, Darnell, would be sackcloth and ashes without him.

Thornton grasped the enormity of the tragedy and sensed he was going to have the most intense scrutiny in history. Did Darnell want to try to save this man?

“We need a plan, we need a plan,” Tomtree said.

Darnell didn’t answer. Thornton looked at him suspiciously. “Are

you—“

“I don’t know!” Darnell answered.

“We must be careful,” Thornton said, “we are on thin ice.”

“Tell me about it,” Darnell said.

“We need a plan.”

Mendenhall came in with several sheets of paper. Tomtree winced that he was not wearing a jacket but perspiring like a man on a chain gang.

“Mr. President, here it is! Spot polls, raw data.”

“Who got it so fast?” Darnell asked.

“Warren Crowder. Ten minutes after the explosion he had reporters

polling gatherings like bus stops and bowling alleys and malls and

firing the information back to Crowder—Washington—“

“That means that bitch, Greer Little Crowder,” the President snapped.

“.. . The printout isn’t bad, sir,” Mendenhall said. “Let’s see:

Gravity of the event—serious 97 percent, don’t know 2 percent. Blame

current lack of gun and militia laws—don’t know 62 percent, yes 33

percent, no 7 percent. Believe President shares responsibility—yes 30

percent, no 30 percent. Believe Congress shares responsibility—yes 50

percent, no 37 percent, don’t know .. . et cetera. White males over

forty—“

“Hold the phone,” Darnell Jefferson said. “Thanks, Mendenhall, just leave the rest of the data here.”

“Here is the way we go, Thornton. We make a two-pronged attack. Attack

number one is an attitude toward the Congress. We admit we put these

issues on the back burner because the Congress was not going to be

moved on them, including dozens of Democrats. That, if done subtly,

opens the Congress to a populist outburst. Congress will know what to

do when they get the heat—“

“We will offend our own power base, Darnell. You’ve got to remember we assumed majority with a fragile coalition.”

“That’s where the second prong of the attack comes in. Remember when we spent twenty million on the millennium party? It was campaign-free money, and it went a long way to get you into the White House. All right, try this one on. You and only you can soothe this anguished nation. Use this next period to travel to twenty, thirty gatherings of the parents. It will be covered by national and local press. The polls will let us know when it is enough. But as their president you will display compassion and strength.”

“Huggy-kissy is not my long suit.”

“We’ll teach you compassion. Once you get the drift of it, you can turn the shaky voice and the tears off and on in a blink.”

Thornton Tomtree had much to weigh. Move quickly to get the onus off the White House and shift the burden to Congress. It sounded like a plan. The compassion stuff? “Well, I got to the White House once,” he told himself, “I’m sure I am as compassionate as Nixon was.”

Darnell shrank back. An hour ago, a half hour ago, he had been filled with disgust, and he had arrived at the moment to tell Thornton to go to hell. In the flip of a poll, he was going to use any and all means of getting Thornton reelected. The disgust now was with himself.

Neither he nor the President had made mention of the Eagle Scouts—just how to spin the story.

IOWA CAUCUS-WATERLOO, IOWA

FEBRUARY 2008 “Hey, good-looking, how about buying a girl a drink?”

Quinn heard her, smelled her, and felt her touch on his shoulder. He turned on his bar stool and smiled apprehensively. Greer Little-Crowder, wearing exquisite pearls, wore no man’s tailored jacket. Her dress was soft and luscious, see-through violet, and gold bracelets anchored her wrists. She was still very slender in her fifties, and had never forgotten how to focus on her endowments.

Quinn’s eyes flashed on her tiny, volcanic breasts, then the hair, not straight anymore, but coiffured with stunning highlight streaks. Quinn opened his arms, and she tucked in. Thin girls wrap up so neatly, he thought.

“Jesus,” Greer said, “you look lousy.”

“You look absolutely delicious,” he replied.

Greer touched his cheek and let her fingers run through Quinn’s hair. Was she saying, “Fasten your seat belt?” Not necessarily. The two on occasion had been at political or media or civic affairs. Otherwise, neither attempted to contact the other on a personal basis.

Greer Little-Crowder had risen to be one of the top women executives in the country. She was a media wizard, a CEO of Warren Crowder’s conglomerate, a queen of the world.

“Can I get you something, ma’am?” the bartender asked.

“Vodka rocks with a twist,” she said.

As some reporters and photographers drifted in, Quinn pointed at a booth out of their sight line. The bartender became so excited, he half spilled her drink. “Hey! You’re Governor O’Connell!”

Quinn held his finger to his lips. Their secret. “Your money is no good here, sir.”

Greer dipped the tip of her little finger into the vodka and slowly traced it about her fawning lips.

“Knock it off,” Quinn said.

“Quinn, have you forgotten we did it once in a little hallway between the bar and the kitchen .. . what was the name of that restaurant?”

It still rang a bell. “There’s a buffalo herd of media coming in looking for someplace to stampede,” she went on. “Did you think I might show up?”

“Always passes through one’s mind. But Waterloo?”

“That’s where the action is, bubba.”

“Run, Quinn, run,” he said. “See Quinn run .. . see Quinn jump .. . jump, Quinn, jump. I am acting out the role of reluctant candidate ... or am I that reluctant?”

“Glad to see me? Mad? Sad? Thinking bad?”

“All of the above,” he said, taking her hand but avoiding her eyes.

“Mostly sad,” his voice croaked.

“It’s been ghastly,” she said. “You should have been in the news room over the holidays. The land is permeated with fear and grief. It has been as though one of those black holes in the universe sucked us in. This tragedy was so terrible you start thinking that the day of a nuclear bomb has got to follow.”

“We lost thirty scouts and scout masters from Colorado. In the middle of singing the anthem or at a cocktail party, people suddenly break into convulsive weeping. It was when the parents begged me: “Governor, is there anything left of my son? Just a finger, anything?” I, uh, got a little bit unsteady, I have to admit. You remember Dan’s Shanty? I just sat crumpled in a corner, getting close to the edge of losing it. I was a madman in a cell tying on the biggest drunk in the Guinness Book of Records. I told Rita I wasn’t coming out until I could walk out and function as their governor .. . look, you hear this story all over the country.”

Greer caught sight of the bartender heading toward them with another man and patted his hand to be quiet.

“I just had to tell the boss,” the bartender said.

“What an honor,” the owner said.

“My pleasure,” Quinn said, giving him a hearty handshake. “Governor,” the man said, “you have to get us through this Four Corners Massacre.”

The words blistered Quinn’s ears. He managed a sigh and a wan grin.

“Governor O’Connell, the restaurant will be filled with press people soon. I would be honored if you’ll let me prepare a special dinner for you and the lady. I’ll bring it up to your room.”

Quinn looked at Greer, who nodded.

“You’ve got a deal.”

“And I’ve got to tell you something, Governor,” the owner said. “This here was my father’s booth, God rest his soul.” He pointed at a photo on the wall. “Nobody’s got their picture on this wall except for my father with Joe DiMaggio. I want yours, too.”

Quinn scribbled the owner’s address and promised a personalized signature.

“Go by the side door. There’s an alleyway to the hotel. Leave your drinks, I’ll send up a couple of pitchers.”

“Thanks, buddy,” Quinn said.

The penthouse suite of the Millard Fillmore Hotel was not all that corny. Old, deep window seats and high molded plaster and mahogany furniture and clanking radiator pipes all seemed in rhythm with a new snowfall outside. It was lovely.

Quinn changed into a running suit and woolly slippers. In a few moments Greer appeared in chic comfort. She went to him and deployed her body against his for maximum contact. They kissed deliciously. Her hand took his and guided it down, between her legs. Quinn held up his other hand weakly to stop.

“That’s got to be it,” Quinn said.

“Before we won’t do again what we won’t do,” she said. “Oh, brother, could we create a scandal.”

“I had hoped that after the humiliation of Clinton, America might have gone beyond such things, but oh, boy, would we sell newspapers. I say, not with a great deal of pride, that we of the boomer generation wanted American society to come out of the closet: stop hypocrisy, be politically correct, no N word, no heroes, no goals, except money. Well, my son understood what homosexuality was in the fourth grade and listened to language on TV that the Marines wouldn’t even use. I think we’d better go back into the closet on some things. Greer, you own a piece of me, forever, but Rita is my life. That’s the real reason.”

The rebuff to Greer was soft and simple but, she knew, final.

“So how’s life by Greer?” he asked.

“Mrs. Warren Crowder or Ms. Greer Little-Crowder? I’ve always given you a wide berth because moments like this one can lead to self-destruction. Anyhow, when your mother and father came to New York and patched me up, years ago, there was no stopping me. Brilliant as he is, Warren was an ignorant innocent about a lot of things, including the birds and the bees.”

“Hadn’t he shed a couple of wives?”

“That’s right, but Greer baby came to play and to stay.”

Pitchers of martinis and vodka came with a lovely bottle of Chianti.

Greer sipped and looked sad like a torch singer at the piano. “Warren wanted a tour guide through the hellfire clubs. I was better than good. I did things to please him and fetched my price:

Mrs. Crowder, stock options, and the top woman in media in the country. You cannot imagine how rich I am, Quinn. Actually, Crowder owes more money than most third world countries .. . but wealth is counted not by what you have, but by what you owe. You see, his banks have to keep him solvent because if he ever defaults, he will take down a dozen banks with him and shake a number of economies.”

“Well, now, that’s power, isn’t it?”

“I care for Warren. I love his ruthlessness. So what if he found a little of his lost youth in menage^ He was a voyeur and we touched the edge of the drug scene, but Warren didn’t want anything that would fuzz his mind. After a while, even my dance of the seven veils became a bit static, so we drifted into a real marriage with a real calling, making hundreds of millions. I’m pretty straight now. I go into heat every once in a while. Maybe I’m still looking for Quinn.”

The food arrived with a robust aroma, as if to say in Waterloo there was something in the world other than meat and potatoes.

Quinn poured the Chianti. “Bang!” he said.

“So what brings you to Waterloo on this snowy night?” she said as she prepared the table.

“Greer, I came here kicking and screaming, and I’m not talking false modesty. All right ... I came here because so goddamn many people told me to come here. So, I’m here, I’ll look around and say, include me out. I’ve been to Waterloo, folks, and there’s no way I can make the presidency.”

“You’re full of shit,” Greer retorted.

“No, ma’am, I’m not going to be meat for buzzards. I’m not putting my family through it. During my first campaign for governor, AMERIGUN threw the book at me, including the rumor that I was buggering sheep.

Truth can be a little pebble that gets washed over a roaring dam. Yet some of those lying, rotten stories will stick on me to the day I die. Is there life beyond the presidency, or do they all leave office as dead meat?”

“I see snow out of the window,” Greer said. “I’m afraid you see acid rain. A tidal wave is forming up and could become unstoppable. You have rung the bell on an issue whose date is due. You are gun control to a nation pleading for it. You can’t walk away, man, no matter how it intersects your own life. Your country is bleeding, and that’s all the reason you have to know. There is another reason you won’t back out. You crave for your birth mother and father to look down from heaven and be proud of you: “Our son is running for president!””

Quinn paled. “Is that why I’m doing this?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I had a grip on it.”

“You lied to yourself.”

Greer responded to a knock on the door with movements that had been polished over the years to gain and hold the observer’s attention.

“Professor Maldonado, I do believe.”

“Greer!”

Mal came in, bussed her slightly, and made for an inspection of the bedroom and bathrooms .. . and the big walk-in closet. “So, what brings you to Venice?” he asked on returning.

“The same thing that brought you,” she said.

Mal went right at their dinners. “The veal is like butter.” He had grown old lovely.

“What’s going on out there?” Quinn asked.

“A phenomenon,” Mal said. “I’m being contacted by several Democratic governors who are interested in your candidacy. The party is lining up quickly behind you.”

“Do not count Quinn as a shoo-in. T3 is no pushover,” Greer said. “He

has done a masterful job of distancing himself from the Congress. Fewer

and fewer people hold him responsible for Four Corners, particularly

with this new humility, stiff back when the flag is lowered, occasional teary eye, and those gripping hugs to the parents. And Pucky Tomtree has done just as good a job.”

“They say that Darnell Jefferson has engineered it,” Mal said. “He and T3 are like non-identical twins. Whatever he’s done, the President has fought his way back.”

Quinn noticed a quick, mousy smile from Greer. “You run with that crowd,” Quinn said.

“Well, I did have an interlude with Jefferson a few years back, on Martha’s Vineyard. He was on a diet of white meat,” she purred.

“I thought Tomtree’s humility schtick was transparent,” Mal said, tossing down the tiramisu.

“People want transparent,” Greer shot back. “Look at the lineup of sitcoms. English not spoken here. Back up the garbage truck and carry off this week’s show. No! It’s worth billions in syndication. We recycle more shit in a year than the Chinese dump into their holes in a decade.”

“Yeah, get the children out of the room,” Quinn said softly. “Some kids today say ‘fuck’ so much they think it’s their middle name.”

Mal pushed his chair back, patted his feel-good stomach, and checked all the pitchers. The vodka looked promising.

“What we have shaping up here,” Mal began in a professorial manner, “is a recurring cycle. The human race is no less cruel, no less murderous than it was ten thousand years ago. Yet every so often it runs into a moral imperative that it has to overcome for civilization to advance. In America? The revolution against England was a moral imperative. The destruction of slavery was a moral imperative. The decision to fight Hitler and commence with atomic energy were moral imperatives.”

“You’re talking about Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt,” Quinn said, laughing.

“And maybe Quinn O’Connell. A great moral imperative ended in bleeding

tragedy in Six Shooter Canyon. AMERIGUN isn’t going to roll over and die easily, but you’re the man who faced them down,” Mal said. “So how are you going to live with yourself without giving it every ounce of fight you have?”

“The nation is ready to do some serious gun control, and the people know they will have a tough-ass president taking it on,” Greer added.

“Thanks for sharing that with me,” Quinn said.

“Wait, there’s more,” Greer jumped in. “It’s nine months till the election, and you have no national, state, or local campaign machinery, no money, no endorsements. But you are the king of the hot-button issue. Can you take the lies and taunts? Can you lead? If you think you can, I want to play!”

“Thanks for your glorious offer, Greer, but, baby, the American people may not be as sophisticated as you believe, and this won’t fly.”

“That’s a point,” Mal mumbled.

“I resigned from Crowder Communications yesterday.”

Her thunderbolt knocked them speechless.

“What? How? You’re a married woman!” Mal said.

“Oh, I’ll bet Warren Crowder likes this,” Quinn said. “It will bring his illustrious lady’s career to a crescendo.”

“Warren’s a player,” Greer said. “And he knows I’ll be back.”

“You two have got to behave yourselves,” Mal said. “I mean, really behave yourselves. If we can put Greer in charge of the nuts and bolts, she knows every political person in the country. She knows all the hired guns. She has access to money overnight.”

“I’d have your national committee in place in five days,” Greer said, “and in a week I’ll have a strategy on the table.”

“The voters will take a long second look at me. Better stay in Colorado, cowboy. Every time they’ve heard of Quinn O’Connell, it’s been the result of a fight. Urbakkan .. . AMERI GUN .. . and now the Six Shooter Canyon Massacre,” Quinn espoused.

“Slight difference,” Greer said. “The people may have the political will to follow a moral imperative.”

“I’ll call Rita,” Quinn said. “It has to be dead right for her.”

“You don’t have to call her,” Greer said. “I talked it over with her before I got my air ticket to Waterloo. Rita said, “Thank God you’re going to him. At least you’ll give him a fighting chance.”” Maldonado answered the phone. Senators Ebendick and Harmon were in the hotel and wanted a few minutes. “Phew!” Mal said, “some real big hitters just blew into town.”

“Who?” Greer asked.

“Ebendick and Harmon.”

“That is a statement,” Greer said.

“I’m going down and enroll them,” Mal said. He wanted to say more about hoping he could trust Greer and Quinn. Once they had melted cannons with their heat. How can an odd moment of stress or passion or joy not hurl them into one another’s arms? But Rita believed. What game was God playing putting a decent man like Quinn into the shredder as he slouches toward Jerusalem?

Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell walked to the rostrum in a crammed ballroom at the Millard Fillmore Hotel. A blast of TV lights blared while still photographers ate up film.

“Hi,” Quinn said when it quieted. “I’m Quinn O’Connell, governor of Colorado. Any national recognition I may have is pretty much based on my penchant for gun control. There is a long list of serious issues on the American agenda, and if my candidacy continues on, I will issue my position within days.

Greer laid her head on Mal’s shoulder and she cried a little.

“But we’re here today because much of America’s bright hope lies silent in the box end of Six Shooter Canyon. It could have been avoided by the political will of the people, and it will happen again without the political will of the people to change it.

“I stand before you, not as a saint running for sainthood or as a sinner dodging hell. I intend to live my private life privately, and I intend to bring back a great measure of dignity and authority that has been missing from the presidency for almost a decade.”

Quinn became silent, and the room suddenly fell under his spell. He opened a small book on the rostrum.

“”Article .. .”” he read, “’.. . A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.””

A murmur of disbelief buzzed about the room.

“When the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights came into being, our new nation had no standing army to contend with hostile neighbors, England, France, Canada, Spain. We also were fighting many Indian nations, and part of the population was still loyal to the king. Therefore! Each colony, each new state set up their own militia. These militias were not very good.

“Now look at this Second Amendment. It has nothing to do with the rights of the citizens to own guns, but the formation of well-regulated militias.”

Quinn was parched, but he feared his hand would tremble if he held a water glass. To hell! He took a swig, steady as a rock.

“If anything in the entire American panorama has been distorted and convoluted, it is the Second Amendment. The militias failed. After the Civil War many state units were converted into a national guard. A well-regulated national guard, as required by the Constitution, with their weapons under government control.

“For far too long, men of questionable intent have hidden behind the skirts of the Second Amendment, claiming it as their divine commandment to own guns.

“Bull! Because of federal inaction on gun control, many towns and cities and counties and states, including Colorado, have legislated their own gun-control laws. But the gun lobby is powerful. One gun comes off the assembly line every seven seconds and during that same seven seconds another gun is imported into the country.

“I intend to cut to the chase!” Quinn belted out, “because most of the court cases in the states and towns could be eliminated with the passage of a single national bill. The right of gun ownership is not and has never been a constitutional guarantee, and in order to get it right and get it clear .. . the Second Amendment of the Constitution must be repealed.”

WASHINGTON, FEBRUARY 2008

If tears had been stars, there would have been enough shed to double the size of the universe. The nation passed to the new year with darkness at noon, in a fetal position. No ball had dropped from Times Square; half the bowl games were rescheduled or canceled. Only the Super Bowl went on bravely, bravely. There was just too much money involved. The stock market plummeted, and soon finger pointing began in earnest. Panel shows of experts begat panel shows of experts.

The Four Corners Massacre was a unique event in American history. No one really knew who to turn to, but Thornton Tomtree was there and made a strong case of distancing himself from Congress. He began to take delight in his new mode of compassion.

After the Superbowl, T3 had emerged as the “tall” man, the shepherd, the big father.

Then came the dispiriting initial findings of the investigation.

All evidence on the ground in the vicinity of Six Shooter Canyon and the White Wolf Ranch had been obliterated. The perpetrators had all been killed in the blasts.

The FBI hunted down White Wolf Patriots who were not present in order

to fashion a line of events. The more the FBI pieced the story of Wreck Hudson together, the more it fell in the realm of fantasy. The existing White Wolf patriots faded into an underground run by the White Aryan Christian Arrival.

As for resolving the fate of Six Shooter Canyon, there was a terrible rub.

In the deepest pit of his life, President Thornton Tomtree moaned over the recommendation on his desk. The investigation commission, which included the breadth of the society from engineering genius to religious leaders, had made a rapid first finding, and it made its way to the Oval Office by late February of 2008. The President had no choice but to take it to the American people.

“My fellow Americans. The report which I am about to render to you was previously communicated to the families of the Four Corners Massacre. The commission has now come to an initial recommendation .. . please bear with me ... I must conjure up some horrible images.

“We cannot get earth moving equipment into this narrow stretch of canyon. The alternative would be to dynamite the walls to widen access. After that, we would be embarking on an earth moving project the size of several Hoover Dams, which would take years to complete.

“Test bores indicate that the victims were crushed by the initial avalanche and then buried under ten to twenty feet of rock. Another forty to ninety feet of rock came down atop them.

“The test bores also tell us we will probably not retrieve sufficient remains for individual burials. The forensics experts and the DNA experts feel that no one is truly going to be identified, as the remains are so interlocked and pulverized.

“If an excavation was ordered, we would remain in the grip of this tragedy for many years. In the end, it would be a futile gesture. The survival of our nation depends upon overcoming our national grief. Therefore, I have asked the Republican and Democratic leadership for a bipartisan bill to seal the canyon and erect a suitable memorial.”

“Some promising news, Mr. President. Three-fourths of the families are in agreement, right from the get-go. On your telecast sixty-two percent of the editorials in the hundred thousand circulation class think that the closure and monument are right on ... only eight percent think we ought to remove the canyon .. . On your message, seventy-two percent of the CNN/TIME/CBSNew York Times/ USA Today polls said we should get on with the life of the nation .. . CBS New York Times has a seven percent of ‘don’t know’ ... If this sampling holds, we’re through the worst of it!”

Thornton Tomtree felt blood circulating through his body again.

“And, sir, a little cream on the pudding. The Iowa Republican caucus wants you to run for reelection by over seventy-three percent.”

“Who took the Democratic caucus:1” the President asked.

“That yahoo, the Colorado Kid .. .”

“Quinn Patrick O’Connell?”

“Yes, sir.”

Would/could the American people ever trust another politician, even if they knew of his warts in advance? They gathered about Thornton Tomtree. At that moment T3 was all that was left. He was super calm, and much in control.

And along came Quinn.

“Savior” was too strong a word, but a nation desperate to get off its knees had moved him onto center stage. An enormous media focus on New Hampshire bespoke the arrival of a new force.

In Denver, down by the railroad tracks, a big old warehouse was donated

for use by the O’Connell for President committee. It had long been

derelict as a warehouse and later went belly-up as a disco. Greer corralled an overabundance of volunteers and opened a bank account.

Contributions of office furniture and computers arrived from Chicago to Salt Lake City.

Quinn’s midnight arguments with Maldonado, Greer, and Rita, his most inner circle, took on a legend of their own. The three of them came to realize that with Quinn, it was “the campaign will be my way or the highway.”

Half a candidate’s time was consumed with fundraising among the high and the mighty. No serious candidacy could go far without the major contributors .. . who found unlimited, ingenious ways to bypass the legal donation limits. Quinn made a daring decision on the night he left for New Hampshire.

“I will not take contributions from PACs. I will not accept soft money. Soft money is slimy and difficult to catch, but you know what soft money is and I know what soft money is. I want my candidacy to be supported mainly by contributions from ordinary people. I’m being asked to do a difficult job, and if you think I’m the man, then let me hear from you.”

For the first of many times, one was certain that O’Connell had shot himself in the foot.

However, by the time he hit New Hampshire, a deluge of pledges came in to Quinn, conveniently charged on Diners Club, MasterCard, VISA, Discover, and American Express cards.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A DIME read the headline. I AM THE

people’s candidate.

Quinn held up his daily press bulletin. On the top were several boxes giving donations of the past twenty-four hours, expenditures, and total in the bank. This degree of openness chilled the American house politic down to the marrow.

At Manchester there was a sudden and urgent feeling of in gathering of

people from Maine and Vermont. They just had to see this fellow. Please, God, make him real. In the winter drearies, the streets were thickly lined, and an unlikely scene unfolded of New Englanders showing public passion.

The pundits dug deeply into the history of the American presidency to find more of a “down-home” candidate: witty, environmentally brilliant, sound on his issues, and completely modest and at ease among the people.

Quinn and Rita skied a treacherous run known as the Oh Shit Trail and ended up on their feet.

Look at that couple!

Was he too good to be true? Have we forgotten the terrible besmirchment of the president’s office in the Clinton era? Have we forgotten the pain? Can we ever trust another politician?

Surely the voters could be venting their pent-up hurt, and surely they could be gambling their own future aspirations. But don’t stop the carnival!

In his town hall meetings, Quinn often shocked with his common sense and candor. He spoke the truth, more than once, to criticize his own failings. Quinn ignited the rebirth of many values thought flown from the society.

The result? Startling! Quinn Patrick O’Connell polled more votes than five other Democrats combined and went head to head with the Vermont governor, running as a favorite son.

Less than a month after the Iowa caucus he had established a legitimacy, even though his insistence on populist financing barely kept the campaign running. The day after New Hampshire was a good day for collections. And, well, it had to be, for there was no time for a pit stop. Quinn and his staff suddenly stared at Fat Tuesday, a few days off.

Fat Tuesday was a coast-to-coast twelve-state primary and caucus with American Samoa thrown in. Quinn might have a foot in the door, but the phone bill had not come in yet.

Quinn needed a strong showing in the Southern states of Georgia and

South Carolina and the quasi-Southern state of Maryland. Unable to visit even a sampling of states, he chose to deliver his message at Emory University in Atlanta.

Through great civic pride, entrepreneurship, leadership, and a migration, the city had become the power center of the South, sophisticated, dancing far into the night, ambitious, and a wonderful place to raise a family.

In the very beginning of his career as a young Colorado state senator, Quinn had been shy as a speaker, but buoyed himself through self-deprecating wit. By the time he won the governorship he had grown into a strong and confident—but measured-speaker.

All things seemed to come together when he arrived in Atlanta as a growing national curiosity. Quinn sensed that the people were longing to hear what he would say. He felt, for the first time, he had the power as an orator to grip his audience.

As Quinn spoke, softly at first, he felt the vibrations, and he fell into a rhythm, dancing a ballet, endowed with a grace, aware of what was happening to him.

Determined not to be labeled a dog with one trick, Quinn set aside the Second Amendment issue and wrote himself a visionary political essay.

Quinn’s staff held their collective breath.

“... we have nurtured a mighty forest of law and values and decency. We are trashing it without planting new trees. Under the disguise of freedom of expression, our boundaries of morality are pushed so far twelve-year-olds know the vulgarisms of our language, or of the explicitness of sexual behavior, or of crime and of drugs. So, have we shed the old hypocrisies, or are we caving in to the claptrap foisted on us by people who are really out to make a buck and will push and push until our sense of disgust is finally stilled?”

Ka-boom! Quinn knew the speech was flying.

“A decade ago, the American people were subjected to listening to a

president forced to give a discourse on oral sex. We swore, never again. But it has happened again and again and again. The nation can no longer afford this prurient blood lust, which is already robbing it of brilliant candidates who no longer want any part of public service.

“The world prays for us, waits for us to get out of the gutter. It is incumbent that each citizen have a long, quiet talk with themselves and not succumb to mendacity.”

Ka-boom! The vibrations from speaker to listener trembled in the air. Quinn departed from the rostrum, microphone in hand and went from side to side of the stage.

“Are we closing out personal relationships, and have we grown distant from one another? We surge on great waves of billions of bytes .. . but do we know each other anymore? We bank, shop, vote, play the market, purchase groceries, fly, vacation, read at the whim of an electronic device that, despite all its miraculous wonderment, has no heart, no soul, no compassion.

“When salvation comes, it will not come in the form of a computer printout but from the Word brought down from Sinai. We must go back to one another and establish the rules of decency.”

It was a strange speech. It hardly seemed political, but more from the pulpit. How did Quinn realize the public’s thirst for a moral direction? Still in mourning over the Four Corners Massacre, they needed a spiritual direction.

Quinn had deftly drawn a line in the sand and taken the moral high ground. Clever or political genius?

Fat Tuesday.

The primaries said that O’Connell was in to stay. He won Maryland by an eyelash, lost Georgia by the same amount, but he polled forty percent of the South Carolina vote. Do the West and South identify with one another? Perhaps in being treated as a cultural wilderness. This stranger from a strange place was no stranger at all.

Quinn and his people staggered into New York for a hit-and-run visit.

This was Greer Little-Crowder country, and she filled the Plaza grand ballroom with a bursting crowd of financial wizards, stars of the entertainment business, developers, attorneys, CEOs, tall athletes, bankers.

(Gawd! He is gorgeous!)

(Well, she’s not exactly chopped liver.)

Quinn went to them as a successful businessman. “To retain our exalted commercial status in the world, let us run a gut check on ethical standards. Hey, soft money is greed money. Greed money is soft money. Soft money erodes our underpinnings.”

Just about everyone in the ballroom was uncomfortable but emptied their wallets to the limitations. Maybe Quinn was not for them, but it was nice to have a spokesman for the conscience before reelecting Thornton Tomtree.

Now for the grand entrance in a late rally at Columbia University with students bussed in from NYU and St. John’s and Fordham and Yeshiva and City College.

“We can no longer afford racism. A short century and a half ago we fought a civil war to erase the ogre of slavery. The twentieth century was all about people liberating themselves, declaring their freedom and dividing the planet into a hundred and eighty-five independent nations. This new century is the century we will get rid of one of mankind’s oldest scourges. We will rid ourselves of the curse of bigotry.”

A hundred cameras ate up several thousand exposures of Quinn shaking hands with Warren Crowder, of Quinn shaking hands with Warren Crowder and Greer Little-Crowder.

Meanwhile, Rita had garnered a great deal of attention of her own.

The Madison Square Garden fund-raiser turned away over three thousand people. The fever was like a Lindbergh parade down Broadway. Quinn left New York with over a million and a half dollars and fifty-eight percent of the Democratic vote.

“Governor O’Connell, Charles Packard, Reuters. Would you care to comment on the Newsweek story concerning your campaign chairperson, Greer Little-Crowder?”

“Without Greer my campaign would have never gotten off the ground, nor could it run so well.”

“Follow-up question, Governor. Were you and Ms. Crowder romantically linked?”

“We sure were. We were sweethearts at the University of Colorado thirty years ago. She was also an excellent baseball coach and raised my batting average almost forty points.”

“Doesn’t it seem newsworthy, sir, that Greer Little-Crowder is now a powerful person, throwing herself into your campaign?”

“Obviously, she was anguished by the Four Corners tragedy and, along with millions of Americans, believes the Second Amendment must be repealed.”

“Louise Markham, Washington Times. Have you and Ms. Crowder had contact in the intervening years?”

“Well, not the kind of contact you are hinting at. We’ve met on public occasions.”

“Governor, Chance Spencer, MS NBC Did Ms. Crowder resign or simply take an extended leave?”

“Hold the phone, ladies and gentlemen. You’re leading me down a dirt road to the woodshed. For God’s sake, don’t throw us back to the dark ages of 1998 and the damage it wrought, and the torture imposed on a great but imperfect man.”

“What about the public’s right to know?”

“That right ends at my front door. I hope I will be able to invite everyone into my parlor. The rest of my home is a private place between me and my wife and family, and God.”

Showdown time in Dixie. Six of the eight primaries were in the South.

Florida and Texas, two of the mega-states, loomed in front of Quinn. A

favorite-son candidate from Florida,

Governor, and later Senator Chad Humboldt, girded to stop the O’Connell train.

Quinn’s family began to surface in the press and interviews. Rita and her smile and her kind ways. One had to think back to Jackie Kennedy, although Rita’s beauty could scarcely be matched.

Hey, that Duncan, what a hunk! He left the daily nuts and bolts of the ranch operation to Juan Martinez. He spent most of his hours in the veterinarian and animal research facility built on the property.

It was only fitting that Duncan fall in love with a Glenwood Springs veterinarian, Lisa Wong, of Asian-American heritage. She came to Troublesome on a research grant, to positively determine the shelf life of eggs. She saw Duncan enter through the chicken coop .. . and that was that.

Duncan went campaigning and saw to his father’s rest periods, filtered the in-coming communications—a lion at the gate.

Lisa remained at the ranch, seeing to the comfort of her

grandmother-in-law Siobhan, who was Falling to cancer.

Rae, a computer scientist at the Atmospheric Research Institute in Boulder, took a leave of absence to set up and operate the campaign headquarters’ computers. She reported to Greer on everything from collections to travel reservations to advertising.

Rae tried one four-day campaign swing with the candidate, and that was

enough! . because everything blurred together: airports, welcoming

committees, Secret Service men moving back TV cameras, shouting

correspondents, “Would you mind a picture with Mrs. Gumport?” “I’d

love it!” Quinn would answer .. . hamburgers, baloney sandwiches,

tourist class, Big 8 motels, polls, TV studios, talk radio shows,

ballrooms, school auditoriums, “Let’s hear a rah-rah O’Connell,” homes

for the aged, beady-eyed big donors, wide-eyed girls with short skirts,

throw out the first pitch, press conferences, more press conferences, short parades in small towns, Irish, Jews, Italians, Gulf Coast fishermen, Mexicans, wheat farmers, black mayors, white mayors, tan mayors .. . Sunday. “Rita, you go pray for me, honey, we’ve got meetings every twenty minutes” .. . Internet, outer nets, books as wisdom, “Can we get this pressed and have it back in an hour?” .. . “What the hell do you mean, I’ve got a fever? I can’t have a fever, because I’ve got to be in Des Moines,” “We need cash, boss,” position papers, “Happy Days Are Here Again!” .. . orange juice, lots of orange juice .. . “Am I going to have time to go to the John?” .. . “Sorry, not till our next stop, Governor.”

Chad Humboldt blistered the South through innuendo. The word Catholic was not used out loud, but it played in the Christian Right churches. The gist of it was that O’Connell is only pretending to be one of us, but he isn’t. He’s a brooding mountain man, and when he looks you in the eye it is impossible to know if he is truthful. “Let us not forget that we have had presidents who looked us in the eye and lied through their teeth.”

Chad Humboldt was a generations fixture supported by a sudden coalition of politicians in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and mighty Texas. Be cautious of the stranger. Be cautious of his inexperienced views on the issues. Humboldt wove around the gun-control issue but warned of a stranger who would steal away the traditions.

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI MONDAY

MARCH 10, 2008 “You’re going to the well once too often,” Greer snapped. “It won’t play in Jackson.”

“It played in Atlanta.”

“It had great surprise and shock value, granted, but that was then and now is now. No electorate is going to keep listening to morality plays. We are in Apache country, Quinn.”

“Ummmm.” “Rita, Mal, help me, for chrissake.”

Mal scanned the polls. “We’re behind in every Southern state—well, you’ve got a small lead in Oklahoma, but they’re a sister state to Colorado.”

Quinn did not speak. He seemed to be drifting off again in some kind of narcoleptic state with an inner concentration that shut out external noises.

“If I were a gambler,” Mal said, “I’d say, go ahead, make your doom-and-gloom population-control speech. This isn’t a gamble. You’re going to lay an egg.”

“So we’re going down either way! What can I do but gamble?”

“Play it safe,” Greer said. “And let’s get out of here with our ass intact and go crazy in the big Midwestern states. That’s only a week away .. . and then California.”

Duncan arrived with a late bulletin. “Dad, Denver reports we picked up over three hundred thousand this week.”

“Good, we won’t have to hitchhike out of here,” Quinn said.

Otherwise, Quinn was stubbornly silent and the rest, gnash ingly frustrated, wanted to shake him.

“Fuck it!” Greer screamed.

“You’ve grown awfully hardheaded,” Mal said. “Your state senate office in Colorado was a place of conciliation and compromise.”

“Because,” Quinn answered drudgingly “whether Democrat or Republican we were all hard-core Coloradans. Maybe we’ve treated these people down here like country bumpkins for too long. There are issues besides the Second Amendment that I have to save for Thornton Tomtree. We have to hold our fire until we see him in the crosshairs. Hey, guys, love you all. I’ve got to get some sleep.”

“And the next president of the United States, Quinn Patrick O’Connell!”

“.. . one thing in this campaign has really bugged me, and that is my challengers trying to put across the idea that I come from a strange place to a place where I have no business. They go further. They say, “What can a governor from a small mountain and prairie state possibly know about Southern history and tradition and politics? If, God forbid, a Coloradan gets to the White House, what will happen to us?” I resent the past isolation of the South, and I resent the Chad Humboldts who want to keep this isolation going.

“I resent it when I am told, do not make a doom-and-gloom speech in Mississippi. Do not bring up overpowering moral issues because the Mississippi electorate can’t get it. They want honey on their hush puppies.

“I believe an informed electorate, an informed American electorate, North, East, South, or West, should be aware of the concerns of our leaders. I am deeply worried about a lot of things which can no longer be shoved into the closet.

“So, muffle the drums. We are gutting this planet close to the point of no return.”

Greer closed her eyes, but the thumping of her heart could almost be heard. Duncan took his mother’s hand. Both hands were wet. Maldonado felt a hard stab, and wanted to stand up and scream for Quinn to stop.

“... In a word, we are taking more out of the planet than the planet has to give in order to sustain life.

“All over we see ominous signs of a lessening quality of life, bald

spots for shopping malls ripped out of the evergreen forests of New

Zealand .. . Indians fighting off elephants coming right to the village

edge to get at the leaves in the tall trees .. . wood bearers having to

go miles to find firewood that used to be on the edge of their fields

.. . dead fish who can’t get over the dam, crushed by generator blades

.. . green slime we spill back into our waters that takes the oxygen

away from millions of shellfish .. . the shark, the most ancient and perfect fighting machine, now facing extinction. Sixteen lanes of blacktop running the length of Florida, covering forever destroyed rich pastures. Deep plowing that has eroded our great prairie farmlands and blown away irreplaceable topsoil.

“Yes, I believe that the people of Mississippi understand this. And I know you understand when I say that fifty thousand people die of starvation and malnutrition every bloody day of the year. Sixteen million deaths from hunger a year—a child dies every six seconds.

“The planet, with all its great agricultural innovations, cannot feed our present world population of four billion people. How in the name of God is it going to feed eight billion, the number that will inhabit the earth this century.

“We must chart an intelligent course through these mine fields. I know that population control offends my church and many of your beliefs. I know that from the beginning of time poor men have counted their riches in the number of children they could produce. It is a luxury we can no longer afford, and it’s going to happen to your children and grandchildren unless we recognize what’s going on and do something about it!”

“Tell me, and I’m listening, how we are going to survive to see the next century without population control? .. .”

“Oh, Jesus, he did it!”

Florida: Humboldt 64% O’Connell 35% Hawaii: Humboldt 21% O’Connell 79%

Louisiana: Humboldt 53% O’Connell 47% Mississippi: Humboldt 50%

O’Connell 48% Oklahoma: Humboldt 40% O’Connell Oregon: Humboldt 33% O’Connell 62% Tennessee: Humboldt 45% O’Connell

46% Texas: Humboldt 51% O’Connell 44%

Thornton Tomtree took two top White House people and moved them to his election campaign. Hugh Mendenhall, a hefty, bubbly wizard of the polls, and Dr. Jacob Turnquist, the analyst. They were close enough to T3 not to be overcome with fear in his presence. Like any great executive, Thornton allowed those close to him to take him on and speak their minds.

The nation had undergone the first anniversary of the Four Corners Massacre. Thornton had flown over Six Shooter Canyon in a helicopter and afterward laid the cornerstone of the permanent memorial.

He had done just enough on his unopposed Republican reelection campaign to keep his name high, and took the convention by acclamation.

But so had Governor Quinn Patrick O’Connell in a boisterous, bombastic Democratic convention in Detroit.

On Thornton’s return to Washington, he called in Hugh Mendenhall and Dr. Jacob Turnquist and repaired with them and Darnell to Camp David.

“Ahhh!” said the President.

“Ahhh!” Turnquist and Mendenhall agreed.

“Ahhh!” said Darnell, and poured from the large pitchers of Bloody Marys. The President’s steward adjusted the awnings to keep the sun off the patio.

Darnell Jefferson lay back in a chaise longue chair as a listener. The time was here to start blazing away at the Democratic opponent. The weekend was to detail strategic warfare. There was the sound of celery stalks being crunched.

“Our jingle-jangle rope-a-dope cowboy is going to be a handful,” the President said.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Mendenhall bubbled. “O’Connell talking birth control in Mississippi. He’s got to trip and fall; he’s too disorganized and reckless.”

Jacob Turnquist always had his authoritative, sincere, goa teed, think-tank expression. “Or,” he suggested, “are we dealing with a political genius? He knows, like a bird riding the wind, just how far he can ride any issue. He is developing quasi fanatic followers .. . and keep in mind, all he has done so far is to present himself with a soft-shoe dance. He has only touched on significant issues superficially. He has given the Second Amendment wide berth. Why? Until he got control of the party—now he can take dead aim at you. Up to the day he won the convention, he took wild gambles to gain attention ... for example, financing through populist means .. . we are now facing close to two million voters who have invested in him, who will show up at the polls.”

“Clever desperation. It worked this time. It never worked before,” Mendenhall said. “We’ve got to look back to Four Corners to understand the trepidation the voters still have.”

Tomtree spoke, and both leaned forward, Darnell still the quiet, removed observer. “What the son of a bitch has done,” the President said, “is deliberately start an erosion of our Southern base. A lot of Baptist women are on birth-control pills, and a lot of Baptist women don’t like the guns in their husbands’ closets. His invasion was either going to blow him out of the race or establish him as a powerful new force. Now, what are we dealing with?”

Turnquist spoke keenly, sincerely, earnestly. “Quinn and Chad Humboldt barely slapped each other’s wrists. Our ace in the hole, Vice President Hope, has held his end of the coalition of the right wing together for twenty years.”

“It’s our imperative,” the President said. “The vice president will be here tomorrow to get his marching orders.”

“We’re still leading in the South,” Mendenhall insisted. “It’s still O’Connell’s to take, and my money is on Matthew Hope.”

“Have we got anything on O’Connell?”

“He’s refused to answer questions of a personal nature,” Hugh Mendenhall went on. “I think, maybe, the press has gotten his message. They now approach him with caution, even respect, one might say.”

“The man has a rock-solid reputation for honesty.”

“Nothing festering on the Greet Little-Crowder hump-up?” Thornton asked.

“That was thirty years ago, Mr. President. They were college students. Besides, we are in an era that flinches away from sex scandals,” Turnquist said.

“Bullshit,” the President shot back. “They’ll stop flinching when they get another juicy one to chomp into. We’re not going to lose sight of this odd relationship. If not O’Connell, Greer Little has had a reputation as a naughty girl.” They all laughed and sipped, save Darnell.

“If we can find one major indiscretion to take him down off his god pedestal, we’ve got to push it, hard. The instant he’s cut down to human status, the coyotes will ravage him.”

“We’ll do a rerun of his history,” Turnquist said. “You are right on, Mr. President. When a holier than thou falls by the wayside, he’s cooked.”

“Having established his persona, O’Connell is going to switch to issues—“ Mendenhall said.

“But,” Tomtree said, “each time we nail him, we also bring up the gunslinger, reckless, irresponsible, dangerous side of the man. This is where the cowboy is most vulnerable.”

The vice president called from Washington. He would be helicoptering to Camp David within the hour. Good!

“Should we do anything about him being an orphan .. . you know, a puzzled childhood ... all that?”

“There could be rumors floated about his biological parents.

Certainly we have friends who can raise the issue. And that wife of his. Any nudes of her around?” Mendenhall asked.

“Look into it, Hugh, but very, very carefully. Now, here’s what we’re going to do. TV and print ads are almost ready. There will be three takes of each ad: high, medium, low, low meaning negative, fuck the truth, innuendo or personal attack. If, for example, the low ads don’t work in Seattle, we try medium and high ads in Kansas City and Chicago until we know what works where. That’s a big, big job for you, Hugh. Don’t make any goddamn accusation we can’t slip out of!”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“I want all future ads run past Darnell.”

“Absolutely, Mr. President.”

“Got that, Darnell?”

“Ummm,” Darnell said, refilling his glass.

“Darnell, you’ve been very quiet,” Tomtree said.

“Just awed by the process.”

“What part of this don’t you like?” Tomtree pressed.

“Most of it. You’ve got to ride out to meet this Quinn on the mountainside. You’re not going to tunnel up to him. He’s breaking down our coalitions, for chrissake. He has become somewhat Churchillian in his speeches. He knows he is on the great issue of the century.”

“And?” the President asked.

“Take the Second Amendment issue away from him or cloud it up. Or, for God’s sake, even join him.”

“Join him?”

“Join him?”

“Join him?”

“It would show that you realize the time of the gun is over and you have’ the courage to come forth with a staggering and enlightened position. That’s how to beat this guy!”

The President pressed his fingers together and closed his eyes. Ballsy idea, but mad. “What are we looking at, Hugh?”

“After the convention you had a fourteen-point lead, plus or minus three percent. It’s down to eleven, but you know, it could be virtually the same.”

“Jacob, do we take this campaign up into the plains of heaven?”

“It’s a political campaign, and my feeling is that he has alienated the press, which will jump on your bandwagon the instant he slips.”

“Excuse me, I stand corrected,” Darnell satirized. “What do you want to do about the debates?”

“Well, he needs to debate me to try to catch me. I’d set down extremely restrictive terms, limitations on questions and positions. If, God forbid, my lead falls down to single digits, then we slide into serious negotiations. No more than two debates and keep the rules confusing.”

“Bear in mind,” Darnell said, “that if O’Connell keeps gaining, we may have to go to him for the debate.”

“It will never happen,” Mendenhall said.

“Never,” Jacob Turnquist agreed.

When it was apparent that Governor O’Connell was going to sweep the Democratic convention, the governors of Texas, New York, Florida, and California, hat in hand, pitched for the vice presidential nomination.

Quinn instead pulled a rabbit out of the hat by reaching back for Senator Chad Humboldt, his main opponent in the primaries, even though there was a difference on some issues. Humboldt was, quite simply, the best man. Moreover, the senator could neutralize Vice President Matthew Hope in the South.

After a year of mourning, the public looked anxiously toward the coming election. Quinn hit the ground running.

As governor he had sought and brokered an environmental and land-use bill that encompassed ranchers, mining interests, the ski industry developers, and private landowners, preserving open space and ranch land forever.

The University of Colorado had been upgraded to one of the top ten state schools.

Colorado was the best-managed tourist state.

Colorado had more foreign import-export deals than any state west of the Mississippi River, other than California and Texas.

The Denver Symphony had been made into one of the nation’s best, and Denver became a cultural oasis.

There was an impressive list of accomplishments in secondary education, child care, welfare, and he had shut down two of the state’s more obnoxious HMOs.

Leading the parade, the issue to repeal the Second Amendment now opened for business.

DENVER, OCTOBER 1, 2008

Greer heard the nasty sound of the phone and put a pillow over her head. The ring persisted. She clicked on her table lamp and simultaneously clicked on her head.

“Greer,” she said.

“This is Darnell Jefferson.”

“Hi, Darnell, what have you been doing with yourself lately?”

“Greer, you’re going to have to excuse the hour, but I just got through with my meetings. Are we on a secure line?”

“You bet.”

“Do we trust each other?”

“To do what?” she asked.

“Anything beyond this phone call. If we meet, where we meet, what we say is not taped or bugged or leaked.”

Greer mulled a moment. “I don’t know. What do you have in mind?”

“The President’s kicked ass on me. We’re trying to complete his campaign schedule, and we can’t ‘do it unless we agree on the debates.”

Bingo! Greer thought.

“All right,” Darnell said, “so we blinked first, but you know and I know every campaign pussyfoots around the debates, then always conducts them. The responsibility falls on both sides. And you know damned well, we’ll end up with debates.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“The President is really leaning on me. He wants it settled in the next couple of days.”

Darnell was calling from Washington. It was two in the morning there. Pretty late to clean one’s desk. Presidential urgency. They must have gotten late polls. Quinn was running neck and neck with Tomtree. Were they soft, or was T3 trying to set Quinn up?

“So, what’s the program?” Greer asked.

“Chicago is midway between Denver and Washington. We have a safe house there, or if you are too suspicious, you can set it up in a hotel of your choice. We’d send a charter jet for your negotiator.”

“And yourself ?”

“I’m authorized to cut a deal.”

“I’ll get back to you in a few hours, Darnell. If I come to Chicago, I can’t leave until tomorrow evening. It should be me and Professor Maldonado.”

“The governor’s father-in-law?”

“Yep.”

“I’ll be waiting for your call. It will be nice to see you again.”

Greer could not fall back to sleep, so she finally arose, yawned and stretched, and set the coffeepot into motion. Since the Iowa caucus in February, she had expected someone to tap her on the shoulder and say, “I know what you know.”

Every day her secret grew, like a tumor, and every day she ignored her own sense of propriety, it enlarged. Greer walked through her arguments again, but she found herself in the same place, with the madness of holding a secret. The fear of letting it go made her shiver.

Call Warren? Christ, she knew what he would say. He’d tell her to press her advantage, as in hostile takeovers. No prisoners.

“Oh, Christ,” she whispered and punched a phone number.

“Hello,” a dreary voice said.

“Hi, Rita, it’s Greer.”

“Anything wrong?”

“Are Mal and Quinn at the condo with you?”

“Yes.”

“Get them up. I’ll be over in a half hour.”