Dead Watch

And that scratched semicircle on the floor of the basement. He’d been pleased with himself for detecting the possibility that the bench had been moved so somebody could stand on it. But now that he thought about it, Schmidt might as well have painted an arrow pointing to the hiding place. Was he really that dumb?

He dug around in his briefcase, found the note that had been given to him by Goodman’s treacherous intern, Cathy Ann Dorn. If he could catch her before she went to work, maybe he could get a little insight on the Goodman team’s reaction. He dialed the number on the paper, and a young woman answered: “Delta-Delta-Delta. How can I help you?”

“What?”

“TriDelts. How can I help you?”

He was nonplussed. A sorority house? “Uh . . . do you have a Miss Cathy Ann Dorn?”

There was a second of ominous silence, then, “Are you a friend of hers?” The voice had hushed.

“I was supposed to call her back about a job,” Jake said.

“Oh . . . God, I don’t know what to tell you.”

Suddenly, bad vibrations, thick as syrup. “Is she there?”

“Actually, let me have you talk to somebody else.”

“Could you . . .” But the woman was gone, replaced fifteen seconds later by a sharper voice. “You’re looking for Cathy Ann?”

“Yes.”

“Could I ask who’s calling?”

“My name is Chuck Webster. I’m calling her back about a political internship she’d applied for, a White House internship. Is there something wrong?”

The woman hesitated and then said, “Cathy Ann was injured last night. She’s in the hospital.”

“Oh, my God. Is it serious?”

“Pretty serious,” the woman said. She sounded grim. “They beat her up pretty bad. At least she wasn’t raped.”

“Oh, my God,” he said. Again. “Could you give me her parents’ number, or at least their names? I really need to talk to somebody. This is awful.”

He meant it, and the vibe got through to the woman on the other end of the line. “Of course. Sure.”

“Could you tell me what hospital? I can promise you that this is official . . .”

He got through to David Dorn in his daughter’s hospital room. Jake said, “I just talked to her about an internship and I was appalled . . . How serious is it?”

“She won’t die, but she’s hurt pretty bad. They got her doped up pretty strong right now, she’s out of it. I’ll tell her you called when she wakes up.”

“Please do that. Tell her to call me. The White House fellowship. She’ll know. Do the police have any idea who did it?”

“None. Not a clue. Took her purse, took her computer and iPod. She was a target, I guess, young woman at night carrying a briefcase. I warned her so many times . . .” His voice caught; a crying jag. “I’ll tell you what, if I ever get my hands on these sonsofbitches . . .”

Jake got off and thought: Goodman?

A military unit doesn’t take kindly to traitors. Had they picked up on the fact that she’d talked to him? He thought about the security cameras in Goodman’s office building . . .

Nothing to do about it, not yet.

He picked up the phone again and called Thomas Merkin at the Republican National Committee offices. “Tom, Jake Winter here.”

“Hey, Jake. I heard you were tangled up in the Lincoln Bowe thing.”

“Yeah. Was. I’d like to come over and talk to one of your staffers,” Jake said. “Barbara Packer?”

“Barbara? About what?”

“About Senator Bowe,” Jake said. “What she’s heard, if anything. She’s a friend of his, I think.”

“Well, hang on, will you? Let me see if she’s in.” He clicked away, and thirty seconds later, clicked back. “She’s in, but she doesn’t know anything about Senator Bowe.”

“All I’d like to do is chat,” Jake said.

“Hang on.” He was gone again, longer this time, then came back: “Should she have a lawyer?”

“I’m not a prosecutor, Tom, I’m not an investigator.” But he put a little steel in his voice. “I’m just trying to tidy things up. If she wants a lawyer, that’s fine with me, but I haven’t even started a file on this thing.”

“All right.” Merkin was wary. “Hour?”

“See you then.”

He called Howard Barber at his office. A secretary said that he was out for the morning but should be back after lunch. Jake left a message.

To the RNC.

He decided to take a cab down to the Tidal Basin, check out the cherry blossoms, then walk on over. And the cherry blossoms were excellent, a pink so pale that it was almost white. In fact, he thought, scratching his chin, they were white. Had anybody ever noticed before?

The cherry blossom festival was starting, crowds of Japanese tourists with cameras, so he moved along, stopped at a café and got a bun and a cup of coffee, sat outside and watched the Washington women in their new spring ensembles blowing along the sidewalks. . . .

He tapped his cane as he walked, and whistled a little Mozart. The ice was breaking up; lock tumblers were turning. He’d be done with Bowe in two days, he thought. Then maybe he could talk to Danzig about doing something with the conventions . . .

There’d been a couple of unhappy events at the RNC, most recently a schoolteacher who claimed he had a dynamite belt and attempted to blow himself up on the committee’s front porch, in protest of Republican educational policies. A protest, in Jake’s view, that was fully justified.

As it happened, the teacher himself was poorly educated. He didn’t have a dynamite belt, but a blasting-cap belt. He had confused the high-tech-looking caps, which he’d stolen from a quarry, with dynamite, and instead of blowing himself up, he’d blown off several hamburger-sized chunks of meat and fat, and had blinded himself in one eye.

In any event, the RNC had installed heavy-duty security, and now was protected almost as well as the White House. Not that a passerby would know it. A glass wall showed off a plush lobby, with an unprotected woman sitting behind a wooden desk, friendly and open. The wall behind her, though, was a couple of feet thick—a blast wall—and between that wall and another inner, concrete wall was an airport-style scanner system.

He walked through the security, the guard raised an eyebrow at the cane, X-rayed it, gave it back, and passed him through the inner wall to the real reception area, with a less expendable receptionist. She recognized him, though he’d never seen her before—she was one of the smiling, chatty women who were always out front. She’d pulled his bio, of course.

“Mr. Winter. Good to see you, sir. Tom and Barb and Jay are waiting for you.”

Merkin and Barbara Packer and Jay Westinghouse were sitting in a conference room at the back of the building; Jake knocked and stepped inside. From their faces, he suspected that he might have interrupted a heated discussion. Merkin he’d met several times, and Merkin introduced Packer and Westinghouse: “Jay is our lawyer. We thought, what the heck, he might as well sit in.”

Yeah, what the heck. “Fine with me,” Jake said.

Merkin was thin but soft, a guy who didn’t eat much, but who never worked out. Westinghouse was polished, a little too heavy, a man who liked his martinis.

Packer looked harried. She was in her late forties, dark complected, with an efficient hairdo. She wore an efficient blue suit, as close to a man’s suit as she could get without being obvious about it, and a cobalt-and-gold silk scarf for a tie. They spread around the rosewood conference table and Jake webbed his fingers and smiled at Packer and said, “Do you have any idea of why Senator Bowe might have been killed? Some kind of political or personal issue that might have resulted in violence?”

The other two men looked at her and she said, “No, of course not.” She had a grim mouth, a thin line turned down at the ends. At the same time, she seemed genuinely puzzled.

Westinghouse said, “Is this . . . What’s the status here?”

Jake shrugged. “I’m asking Ms. Packer about Senator Bowe. If she has no idea of why he might have been murdered, then okay. If she does, she better say so, or she better be prepared to kiss the kids good-bye for a few years.”

“I don’t want to hear that,” Westinghouse said.

“Hear it from me, unofficially, or hear it from the FBI when they cart her out of her house,” Jake said, half to Packer, half to Westinghouse. “We’ve been hung out to dry on this Bowe thing and we’re not putting up with it. The only people who are benefiting are you guys. The press is gonna start whipping Goodman, and by implication us, with Judge Crater stories, with black helicopters, with conspiracy theories. When we’ve worked our way through it, somebody’s going to pay. If there’s some kind of political thing going on . . .”

“Jake, that’s crazy talk,” Merkin said, pushing his chair back. “You’ve got to know that.”

“No, I don’t know that,” Jake said. “What I’m afraid of is that somebody at a low level, an operator—Ms. Packer, for instance—knows that something’s going on, and they think they’re being smart. I don’t really believe that you guys know about it, because you really are smart.” He nodded at Merkin as he said it, the flattery principle, “. . . but somebody, somewhere does. And if it’s somebody who thinks he, or she, is being smart . . . well.” He shrugged.

Merkin looked at Packer: “You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.” She looked at neither Merkin nor Jake, and Jake felt a tingle. She knew something.

“What did you and Tony Patterson talk about, over at the Watergate three weeks ago?” Jake asked.

Her face turned white. She looked at him for a moment, as though he’d turned into a viper, then shook her head and pushed her chair back. “Oh, no.” She turned to Westinghouse. “I won’t talk to this man anymore.”

“What the hell is going on?” Merkin asked.

Jake had pushed the situation to a breaking point: now he could back away. Now he had to back away, since he didn’t have anything else, other than the one cryptic suggestion.

“The Wisconsin thing could blow up on you. There’s a murder now,” he said. “At this point, none of this has to go anywhere. It’s just a bureaucratic dance. But, Tom, I suggest that you and Jay sit down with Ms. Packer and have a talk. She’s been acting in your name and you’ve got enough problems already. This Bowe thing is a nightmare. There’s going to be serious trouble, and even if you’re on the very far fringe of it, it could still be the three-to-five at Marion, Illinois, kind of trouble.”

“Ms. Packer hasn’t been acting in our name. If she’s been acting in any way, it’s on her own. The RNC has nothing to do with . . . anything.”

Jake smiled: “I wish I could take a tape recording of that back to Bill Danzig. He’d put you on TV.”

Merkin didn’t smile back: “We’ll have a chat about this, and I’ll get back to you. Soon.”

“Do that.”

On the way out the door, he gave Merkin his private phone number.

“If you hear anything, call me anytime. I mean it: three A.M.” He said good-bye, nodded at Packer without smiling. They were already snarling at each other when the door closed behind him. He backed out through the building security, and figured that about the time he got to the bottom of the steps, they were putting the red-hot rebar on the soles of Packer’s feet.

Maybe something would bleed out; and maybe not.

But from the way Packer was acting, he thought it probably would.

8

Jake hadn’t expected to hear from Howard Barber until after lunch—but Barber called back as he was on his way home.

“Can you tell me what exactly you want to talk about?” Barber asked.

“Not on a cell phone,” Jake said. “Basically, I spoke to a friend of yours last night, and she said that I should get in touch with you. About her husband.”

“Ah.” Pause. “I’m in Arlington. Where are you?”

“Burleith, north of Georgetown.”

“Why don’t I come there? One o’clock?”

Jake would have preferred to see Barber at his office, to get a look at it, to make a judgment, but couldn’t turn the offer down. “That’d be great.”

Jake had one egg left, so he fixed himself a last egg-salad sandwich, then went out to his stamp-sized backyard to swing a golf club, working on his hip release. Get ready for summer. He made fifty swings, struggling not to lose his bad leg on the follow-through, and was sweating when he finished. He’d just put the six-iron away when Barber arrived.

Howard Barber was a tall black man wearing a steel gray suit, a black golf shirt, and opaque blue-glitter sunglasses with a phone bug dropping to one ear. Jake saw him clambering over the ditch in the front yard, and went to get the door. Barber had just rung the bell when Jake popped the door open.

Jake said, “Mr. Barber? Come in. I should have told you about the construction. I should have had you come around back. . . .”

Jake took him into the study, pointed him at a reading chair in the corner. Barber sat carefully, looking around the office, then crossed his legs and leaned back. “Nice place,” he said. “That new sidewalk ought to kick the value up.”

“That’s what my neighbors tell me,” Jake said.

They chatted about real estate values for a moment, then, “I talked to Maddy this morning after I called you back,” Barber said. “She filled me in on what you’re doing. I don’t understand how I can help.”

“She said you were Lincoln Bowe’s closest friend. Bowe may have been kidnapped and murdered . . .”

“What do you mean, may have been?” Barber said, frowning, and leaning forward. “The boy’s dead. Decapitated. Burned. I mean, Jesus Christ, what do you want?”

“It’s not all that clear,” Jake said. “The FBI is chasing a suspect, but there are problems, quite frankly.”

“What problems?” Barber asked, frowning.

Jake shrugged. “Anomalies. Like the fact that he had a huge collection of guns, but left one where it would be found, and it may be the gun that ties him to Lincoln Bowe. Like the fact that he’s become invisible. Can’t find him, nobody’s seen him. In the opinion of a number of people, the suspect was set up and is probably dead himself.”

Barber said, “Huh.” Then, “I could think of reasons for all of that. If I was trying. I mean, the guy obviously ain’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.”

“Yeah, but I’m not trying to alibi him,” Jake said. “I’m noticing anomalies.”

“Okay.” Barber lifted his hands, slapped them down on his thighs. “All I can tell you is, Linc and I talked the day before he disappeared. We were going to play golf the next week, but by that time, he’d been gone for four days. I didn’t know he’d disappeared until I saw the first story in the papers. Then I called Maddy down at the farm, and she told me.”

“Was he . . .” Jake hesitated. “Look, I’m trying to ask if he had any gay friends that you may know about, who were passionately involved with him. I’m trying to figure out if this could have been a relationship thing.”

“Gay murder.” Barber settled back, shaking his head.

“Yeah.”

Barber exhaled, said, “Shit,” looked at the ceiling, then said, “I can’t tell you for sure. He was not, mmm, monogamous. But I don’t think . . . I think if he was involved in something really hot, really difficult, he would have told me. The sex cooled off for him the last few years. Gays get older, too, you know.”

“Never thought about it,” Jake said.

“Well, it’s true. Anyway, I could call a couple of people and ask.”

Jake smiled. “I’d really prefer to do it myself.”

Barber shook his head. “Linc moved in political circles. Political gay circles. Some of the people are already out, but some absolutely couldn’t afford to be outed. You’re doing staff work for some Bible-thumper from Alabama, you get outed, you lose your job.”

“I wouldn’t out them.”

“I might believe you, except . . . what would you do if it became expedient to out them? If it helped the cause?” Barber asked. “I don’t know you well enough to trust you on it.”

“Okay. But you’ll ask around.”

“I’ll ask, and I’ll get back to you.”

“I’ll take it, if that’s the best I can do,” Jake said. “But if it’s a relationship thing . . .”

“Then I’ll call the FBI. I’m not going to let somebody walk on Linc’s murder.”

Jake: “So who do you think did it?”

“The Watchmen,” Barber said, without hesitation. “One way or another. Linc had a lot of influence, both through his family and through his political contacts, and he couldn’t keep himself from going after Goodman. Couldn’t help himself. Looked at Goodman’s combat records, made some comments he shouldn’t have.”

Jake broke in: “There’s a question about Goodman’s records?”

Barber shook his head again. “No. That was one of the problems. Linc thought there was, and couldn’t keep himself from saying so. He believed there were problems with his Silver Star and with the Purple Heart. But there were twenty guys there when Goodman got hit, and several of them actually saw it happen. They were down in a road cut, some Iraqis were lobbing RPGs at them. Goodman was directing traffic, running on his feet, and whack! He gets it in the hand. A couple of guys actually got sprayed by his blood. And Goodman stayed on his feet and kept directing traffic until his guys got on top of it.”

“So there was no doubt.”

“None. Not only that, the guys in his unit say he was a pretty good officer. Took care of them. But you know how it is when a politician has a medal and a war wound—there are always people ready to piss on them. Linc bought into the stories, repeated them. Goodman proved they weren’t true, but Linc wouldn’t shut up.”

“Really bad blood, then.”

“They hated each other,” Barber said. “Goodman took Linc’s Senate seat away in a dirty campaign. Linc went out of his way to smear Goodman every chance he got, and with his family connections and old Virginia loyalties, he’s caused Goodman some problems. Social problems. Not getting the old-boy invitations he should get, not playing golf with the old money.”

“Status.”

“Yup. Status. Goodman thinks he’s terrifically important, and he wants to be treated that way.”

“When Senator Bowe vanished, did you think he’d been kidnapped?” Jake asked. “Or did you think something else was going on?”

“At first, I thought something else might be going on,” Barber said. “Then two, three days went by—that wasn’t Linc’s style. A week out, I thought he was probably dead.”

So there it was: Barber had thought Bowe was dead, as Madison suspected . . . but the way Barber put it, the feeling was purely rational. Nothing to lie about.

“So, shoot. I go back to my boss and tell him it’s a straight kidnapping case,” Jake said.

“That’s what it looks like to me,” Barber said.

Jake laced his fingers, rubbed his palms together, thinking, then, “What do you think of the Watchmen? Could somebody say that you’ve got a reason for pointing us in their direction? Is there something personal . . . ?”

“I think two things. First, when we—the Bowes and I—say Watchmen, we’re not really talking about the guy on the corner in a jacket helping an old lady across the street. We’re not talking about the Boy Scouts. When Goodman was still a prosecutor, he put together a group to do intelligence work. Half dozen guys, maybe. John Patricia was the first guy . . .”

“I’ve met him.”

“Patricia was air force intelligence. He brought military interrogation to Norfolk. And Darrell Goodman joined up. He’s Arlo’s brother and he’s a crazy mother. He’d take a guy apart with a pair of wire cutters if he needed some information. There are stories down in Norfolk about Goodman’s boys fuckin’ up some people pretty bad. Of course, they cut way down on prostitution and street crime about disappeared, and drugs went away. Everybody was happy to look the other way, ’cept the druggies and the stickup men.”

“Okay . . .”

“The thing is, Arlo carried those same guys over to his campaign for governor. Dirty tricks, spies, disinformation, the whole works. Intelligence operations, in other words.”

“I saw a guy outside the governor’s mansion,” Jake said. “He had a special forces look about him—he was wearing a raincoat and one of those floppy-brim tennis hats, black tennis shoes. Looks like he had some kind of complexion problem, like really bad acne . . . but then I thought, maybe a burn, maybe service-connected.”

“That’s Darrell Goodman,” Barber said, snapping his fingers, then pointing his index finger at Jake. “Always that raincoat. You ought to look him up. Take a look at his military records. I mean, there’s nobody in the Pentagon who really wants to know what those guys did in Syria. They might think it needed to be done, but they don’t want to know about it.”

“So. An asshole.” Jake made a note.

“Yes. A major asshole.”

“You said you thought two things about the Watchmen. What’s the other one?”

Barber nodded. “Okay. From what Maddy told you, you know that I’m a gay black man. The Watchmen are a proto-fascist group, with their own little charismatic führer. What should I think about them? I’d like to see them run out of the country.”

“They don’t seem to have a problem with blacks,” Jake said. “Or gays, for that matter. Not that I’ve read about.”

“Give them a while,” Barber said. “Being antiblack or antigay or anti-Jew isn’t useful to them yet. But they’ll get to it. Right now, they’re against immigrants. That’s not going to be enough, not when Goodman runs for national office. You know that thing he says, about how he never met a Commandment he didn’t like? Well, do not fuck your brother is in there somewhere.”

“You’re a pessimist, Mr. Barber.”

Barber smiled and spread his hands: “Hey. I’m a gay black guy. Pessimism keeps me alive.”

“Last question, then,” Jake said. “I don’t know if you’ll know what I’m talking about, so I’m going to come at it obliquely—because if you don’t know, I don’t want you to guess.”

Barber studied him for a moment, then: “Okay.”

“Did you know that your friend Lincoln Bowe was involved in an effort to . . .” Jake hesitated, hoping he’d leave the impression that he was groping for the right word, though he’d spit at Barber exactly what the unknown man had told him on the phone, “. . . that he was, uh, what shall we call it: examining nonconventional means of destabilizing this administration. Does that mean anything to you?”

Barber’s eyes went opaque: “No. What the hell does it mean?”

Jake thought: He knows. “All right. I really can’t tell you . . .”

They talked for a few more minutes, and Barber, as he was leaving, promised to get back on the question of Bowe’s ongoing love affairs. At the door, Barber said, “When is the gay thing going to hit the streets?”

Jake shrugged: “I haven’t told anybody yet. I’m afraid it’d derail the investigation. You want a call before I do it?”

“I’d appreciate it . . . and if you could take it a little easy?”

“I’ll try. But it’s going to be out of my hands at that point.”

Jake let Barber out the back door, then spent an hour making notes of the conversation and listing questions. He’d noticed how Barber’s language switched easily back and forth from a street-flavored lingo to postgraduate sophistication. From Goodman’s boys fuckin’ up people at one moment to proto-fascist charismatic führer the next.

And he’d been lying about Bowe and the destabilization thing. Bowe had been into something. Now Jake had to work through it. Whatever it was, how did it tie in to Goodman? Or did it?

He made another call about Cathy Ann Dorn—he got the nursing desk and was told that she had been awake, had eaten some cottage cheese, and was asleep again.

He talked to Novatny.

“Bowe was alive when he was shot, but he was full of drugs. Enough painkiller to knock him on his ass. They may have kept him sedated to control him. Shot him in the heart. The debris in the wound canal was newsprint. The thinking is, they may have tried to use a wad of paper to muffle the sound of the shot.”

“That’s weird.”

“Shooting a drugged guy is weird,” Novatny said. “Cold, ice-cold, murder. Don’t get no colder than that.”

Jake went online, into the federal records. He had only limited access as a consultant, but he found a file on Darrell Goodman. The file was informative in an uninformative way—parts of his military record had simply been removed from the unclassified files. And that meant, almost certainly, that he was a snoop-and-pooper. Goodman had himself a hit man.

Jake was thinking about it when Merkin, the contact at the Republican National Committee, called back.

“Jake, we gotta talk. Where are you?”

“I’m home. Is this about Packer?”

“About Packer and Tony Patterson.” Merkin sounded worried.

“Okay. I can come there, or you could come here. . . .”

“No, no. How about at the National Gallery? Like in the nineteenth-century French paintings?” Merkin suggested. “I could walk over. Meet you outside in an hour?”

“I should be there by then. If not, pretty quick after that.” And he thought, Doesn’t want to talk to me at his office . . . doesn’t want to be seen with me.

Barber called Madison Bowe on her cell phone, caught her on the way back from the funeral home. “I talked to Winter,” he said. “He says he hasn’t told anybody about the gay thing.”

“Huh. I was all braced.”

“He’s afraid it’d derail the investigation.”

“Ah, jeez,” she said. “I feel like I’m . . . It makes me feel rotten. I’m not made for this.”

“I know, I know. Maybe you oughta just get out of it, get away from Winter. The guy is pulling stuff out of the air. I didn’t even want to look at him. I was afraid he could read my eyes.”

“He is that way . . . ,” Madison said.

“I’ll tell you, it doesn’t really make sense. He should have told Danzig by now,” Barber said. “I’m wondering . . . Maybe Winter is trying to do right by you.”

“He likes me,” Madison said.

“I could tell. And you like him back.”

“Mmm.” She realized it was true. She hastened on. “About the other issue . . .”

“Not on the phone,” Barber said. “Tell you what. I’ll stop over and see you when we both have time. We can talk it all out.”

The National Gallery looks like a WPA post office. Jake found Merkin on the main floor, morosely examining Cézanne’s House by the Marne.

“In Cézanne’s day, the Marne wasn’t the Marne,” Jake said, taking in the painting.

“Looks like a creek,” Merkin said. “Not like a million dead men, or whatever it was.”

“I didn’t know you were an art fan, Tom.”

“Ah, it calms me down, coming here,” Merkin said. “I never see anybody from work.”

“Probably be better if you did,” Jake said. “I mean, for the Republic.”

Merkin nodded. “Let’s walk.”

They walked toward the American wing, talking in hushed voices, Whistler’s huge White Girl peering at them down the long hall. Merkin said, “As far as I know, nobody did anything illegal.”

“Then what’re we talking about?”

“Patterson had worked with Packer in North Carolina on the Jessup campaign, and out in New Mexico on Jerry Radzwill’s. They saw each other around. Patterson is with ALERT! right now. He was an advisor on the Bowe campaign. He was set for a decent job if Bowe won, but Bowe didn’t, so he wound up at ALERT!”

“He’s a Bowe guy.”

“Was. Anyway, he got in touch with Packer and said he had a hypothetical for her. If, hypothetically, somebody had a package that would dump Vice President Landers off the ticket, when would be the best time for the package to be delivered?”

“What’s in the package?”

“Don’t know. Neither does Packer. Here’s the thing, here’s what Patterson was saying. He was saying that somebody has a package that’s so specific, so criminal, so irrefutable, that as soon as somebody respectable gets it, he’s gonna have to turn it over to the FBI or face criminal charges himself. But until then, it’s a figment of the imagination, floating around out there.”

“The implied question was, when did the Republicans want the package dumped to do the most damage?”

“That’s about it,” Merkin said.

“What was the answer?”

Merkin’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. “Jake, you know how the talk goes on these hypotheticals. People talk about this stuff all the time. Dump it October first, there’s plenty of time for the scandal to blow up, not enough time to recover . . . but who knows, maybe it could be suppressed until it’s too close to the election. So maybe September fifteenth. And maybe . . . Hell, you pick a date.”

“Sometime in the fall.”

“I would say that.”

“And you’re telling me this now because . . .”

“Because now that it’s out there and somebody knows about Patterson and Packer, we don’t want to get caught in the obstructing-justice squeeze,” Merkin said. “We’re reporting this to you, as the president’s point man on the Bowe investigation. I’m going to make a record of our talk here, and date it, get it notarized, and stick it in a safe-deposit box. If I never need it, that’s great. If I wind up talking to a Senate panel or a grand jury . . .”

“All right,” Jake said. “This information, whatever it is . . . Patterson got it from Senator Bowe?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Patterson.” He swung his sport coat off his shoulder, dug in a side pocket, and came up with a leaf torn from a desk calendar. A phone number and address were written in the memo block. “I happen to have his name and address with me.”

Jake stuck the paper in his pocket. “I’ll probably have to tell the feds.”

“We’ll do everything in the world to cooperate. Packer understands that. We don’t have anything to do with Patterson, so that’s not our problem. Remember: the whole thing was presented to Packer as a hypothetical. And it was all so vague, what was she going to report? Anything we did could be interpreted as an unsupported and scurrilous attack on the vice president.”

They walked to the end of the wing and stood looking at White Girl. She looked back with a boldness that was disconcerting, as though she were personally interested in their conspiracy. After a moment, Jake said, “Well, shoot, Tom. I was planning to sit in the tub tonight. Nice soothing soak.”

“It’s an election year, Jake.”

“Yeah, it is. But let me tell you something, Tommy. If I were you, I wouldn’t go leaking this around. If it’s real, it’ll come out. But there are elements of a conspiracy here—a conspiracy with a murder, and you guys are in it. We’re not talking about six weeks in minimum security anymore.”

“I know that.”

“So don’t mess with it. Talk to your people, too. Sit on them. This is gonna be . . . this is gonna be difficult.”

Danzig would still be in his office: Jake said good-bye to Merkin and called. Gina picked up the phone.

“It’s Jake, Gina. I gotta see him.”

“He’s done for the day. The president’s back and they’re talking.”

“Get him out when you can. I’m down by the Mall, but I’m headed that way. Clear me through to the blue room.”

“Can you give me a hint?”

“You don’t want to know about it, Gina. Best if you asked the guy about it. I’m really telling you that for your own good, if we all wind up in front of a special prosecutor someday.”

“Uh-oh. I’ll clear you through.”

Jake flagged a cab. Five minutes later, he was checking through White House security, heading for the waiting room. The place was crowded, but nobody spoke, simply sat and stared, poked keys on laptops, or browsed through week-old copies of the Economist.

He’d waited twenty-five minutes before an escort touched his sleeve: “Mr. Winter?”

Danzig’s two junior secretaries were gone, their desk lights out. Gina sat in a quiet glow, working with pen on paper. When Jake came in, she touched a desktop button and said, “I hope it’s not that bad.”

“Bill can fill you in,” Jake said.

The green diode came up, and she said, “Go on.”

Danzig was standing behind his desk, frowning at a stack of paper. When Jake came in, he looked up and asked, “Is it bad?”

“It could be,” Jake said. “Really bad.”

Danzig pointed at a chair: “What?”

Jake sat down and said, “A low-level operator for the RNC has been talking to another operator, a guy who worked a bunch of Senate and gubernatorial campaigns, including Bowe’s last campaign. He’s a Bowe guy, now with ALERT! His name is Tony Patterson. He was making tentative inquiries about dropping a scandal on you. On us. Supposedly, a rock-solid accusation against Vice President Landers that would dump him off the ticket. The question he was putting to the RNC was, when to drop the package on us. The timing.”

“Why would he ask the RNC?” Danzig asked. “Why not Bowe? Bowe would know.”

“I don’t know. I do know that he and this woman, the woman at the RNC, were old campaign buddies. So it was partially old-buddy stuff. And there was just a hint that the package might be coming from Bowe. That Bowe might be trying to distance himself from it.”

“Goddamnit,” Danzig said. They looked at each other in silence for a moment, then Danzig said, “If it’s true, one obvious conclusion would be that Bowe was killed to stop this package from coming out.”

“Yes.”

“That’d be a disaster.” Jake said nothing and Danzig spun his chair away, thinking. Then he said, coming back around, “On the other hand, if we push the investigation into this hypothetical package, and it turns out that Bowe was killed for some completely unrelated reason, we’re still in trouble. Because once anybody knows about the package, it’s gonna leak.”

Jake nodded. “If the package exists. If it’s not part of some scheme by Bowe, including his disappearance, to mess with us.”

“He had himself killed to mess with us?”

“I haven’t worked out that part,” Jake said.

Danzig smiled, a rueful smile, said, “Ah, God,” twirled again in his chair, came back around, said about the vice president, “Landers is a crooked sonofabitch and we’ve known it from Day One. But he gave us Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, and we needed them.”

Jake said nothing.

Danzig said, “He’ll deny everything. He’ll ride it right to the end. There’s no way we could go to him and say, ‘Is there anything in your past?’ because we all know there is, and we all know he’ll deny it. Deny, deny, deny.”

“Want me to jack up Patterson?”

Danzig rubbed his face, suddenly looking old and tired. “Wait overnight. Let me sleep on it,” he said.

“Okay.”

Danzig leaned forward. “The problem is this: the RNC may be feeding you this rumor, knowing it will get to me. I talk to the president, we ask around. Even if we keep it secret, the RNC feeds it through the back door to some conservative sheet or cable station. The L.A. Times, maybe. Tells them that we know about it. Then we’re in trouble, whether or not it’s true. We can’t even deny that we asked around. Landers gets investigated all summer, into the campaign.”

Jake nodded. That’s what would happen.

“If we have to dump Landers, we’ve got to do it before summer,” Danzig said. He was talking to himself as much as to Jake. “We can’t carry him into the convention. But if the accusation is bullshit, then Landers pees on us.”

“We need some specifics,” Jake said.

“Just like with Bowe,” Danzig said. “If we could only get the specifics, we could move. Without them, we could be screwed no matter what we do.”

“But if we don’t look into it . . . we could get into pretty deep trouble ourselves,” Jake said. “I mean us, personally. Obstruction of justice and all that.”

Danzig nodded: “Of course. But everybody would give us a day or two. Working through the bureaucracy.”

Jake stood up: “I’ll be on the phone. Call anytime.”

“What about Schmidt?”

“Nothing new. Can’t find him,” Jake said.

“But we’re looking.”

“Novatny’s tearing up the countryside. He’s pretty competent.”

Danzig picked up a pencil, drummed it, stuck it behind an ear, rubbed his face with both hands. Tired. Finally he said, “Best thing that could happen is, we find Schmidt and pin the killing on him. Or on the Watchmen,” Danzig said. “Then we find the package and get rid of Landers, and never let anybody even hint that there might have been a connection.”

“Gonna be tough,” Jake said. “The media’s running around like a herd of weasels, putting every rumor they can find on the air. Looking for somebody to hang, somebody to blame.”

“When the going gets tough, the tough blame the CIA,” Danzig said. He paused, then said, “But I don’t think that applies here.”

“Not yet, anyway,” Jake said.

“Goddamnit. Goddamnit.” Danzig flipped a desk calendar: “Four months to the convention.” He stared at the calendar, then said, “Listen: I’m going to talk to the president. We’ll want you to see Patterson in the morning. Get some sleep. I’ll call you early, one way or the other.”

9

Jake left the White House, tapping along in the night with his cane, looking for a cab. Lots of traffic, not many taxis. He’d walked three blocks before he finally spotted a ride, flagged it. “Daily News, in Georgetown.”

The driver grunted, and they drove wordlessly down M across the bridge, six blocks down. The driver grunted again, Jake passed him a couple of bills, and got out. The Daily News was a surf-and-turf joint, with enough light to read by, and an Amsterdam-style newsstand in the front entry, like a brown bar. He chose a battered copy of New York, ordered the mangrove snapper and the house white, and settled into a quiet booth to read some gossip and enjoy the fish.

Was nagged by the thought that he should have told Danzig about Bowe being gay. The issue was one of loyalty: he was taking Danzig’s money, and he even generally agreed with the president’s program, versus that pushed by the Republicans. Bringing up the gay issue would advance the cause. Yet . . . whether or not Madison Bowe knew it, she’d be trashed. And she’d blame him, and he didn’t want that. Actually, he thought, he wanted Madison Bowe: honor versus testicles. The thought made him smile at his own foolishness . . .

He had a second glass of wine at the end of the meal, something with an edge to cut the sweetness from a crème brûlée, then gathered his case and stick and went outside. Nice night. He decided to walk, a little more than a mile. He ate at the Daily News twice a week, and the walk was just right for his leg.

The light was dying as he strolled along the uneven sidewalks, puzzling out the problem of what to do. He took twenty-five minutes to get home.

The front walkway to the house was still torn up, so he automatically continued around to the back, to the alley entry.

He heard the car doors open. Paid no attention to it until he got his key in the gate lock, realized that he hadn’t heard them close again. Not that it was odd, exactly . . . then he saw the man coming, too fast, way too fast, too close, something raised above his head. And a second man, coming in a rush, a step behind the first. They were big, rangy, fast, one black and one white, he thought, and then they were on him . . .

Somebody shouted and Jake raised his cane and flinched away from a movement and took the first stroke of what might have been an axe handle—or maybe just a stick, but he had axe handle in his mind’s eye—on the side of his cane and his arm, and he shouted, heard himself shout, more like a scream, then the second man swung at him, another ax handle or stick and Jake caught the blow with a push of the flat of his left hand, and then the first man caught him on the back of the neck, then on the head, and dazed, he went down, flailing, rolling, rolling, rolling, trying to make them miss, trying to get back in the fight, off the defensive. The two men were flailing at him, one of them saying, “Git him, git that mother, git him,” a kind of chant, and he tried to stay faceup so he could see the blows coming, fending with his cane and hands, and he heard a man scream, Hey you sonsofbitches and he was hit again and again and then there was a powerful, shattering blast and a flash of light and the man closest to him froze for just an instant and Jake slashed his knee with the steel handle of his cane and felt it crunch home, saw the man stagger, then a woman was screaming and another flash of light and another blast, a gun, he thought, and then he was hit one last time and he was gone . . .

Jake woke up in an ambulance, rolling hard downtown. “What happened?”

He struggled to sit up, but couldn’t. A phlegmatic black man looked down at him and said, “You rest easy. You got mugged.”

“Mugged?”

A few minutes later, he woke up in the ambulance, struggled to sit up, couldn’t, and asked a phlegmatic black man, “What happened?”

“You got mugged.”

“Mugged?”

The doc told him later that he asked the question twenty-five times over the next hour, both in the ambulance and in the OR. Then he woke up in an intensive care unit, still in his street clothes, minus his shoes, and looked at a young Indian doc and asked, “What happened?”

“You got mugged.”

“Mugged? Where? My house?”

Now the doctor smiled: “Ah. You’re awake. Yes. As I understand it, you got mugged at your house. You have a concussion, of course, but not too bad, I don’t believe, and a whole bunch of bruises. Good bump on your head, and a cut. It’s going to hurt in a while. Your skull is in one piece—we took a picture—but we had to cut some hair away from the head wound. After it stops hurting, it’s going to itch like fire. You have five stitches there. A couple of your neighbors are outside, by the way. Would you like to see them? They witnessed the event, I believe.”

“Yeah. Sure. Mugged? I can’t believe I was mugged.”

A woman came in and said, “Mr. Winter?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Winter, do you have health insurance?”

“Sure.”

She seemed to step back. “Really?”

“Why wouldn’t I have?”

“Well, that’s nice.” She seemed skeptical. “Rami, the doctor, said you had good shoes and I should check. Would you have the card?”

She went away, clutching the card; seemed amazed at the turn of events.

A moment later, Harley Cunningham, his across-the-alley neighbor, pushed through the door, trailed by his wife, Maeve. Cunningham sold home bars and pool tables for a living. He did a double take, said, “Man. They beat the hell out of you, Jake.”

“What happened?”

“My back window was open, I heard you come tapping up the alley, I looked out, and I saw these assholes get out of a truck and I could tell they were coming after you. They had these clubs—they might have been pool cues—but I had my shotgun in the bedroom closet and I yelled and Maeve yelled and they were beating the shit out of you and I ran and got the shotgun and let off a couple of shots up in the air and they run off.”

“Who were they?”

“Fuck if I know,” Cunningham said.

Maeve gave her husband an elbow and said, “Watch the language, he’s all beat up.”

“He’s not gonna hurt any worse because I said ‘fuck,’ ” Cunningham said.

“Didn’t hit you in the face,” Maeve said to Jake. She patted him on the arm. “That’s a blessing.”

“The doc said I was mugged,” Jake said. Now that he was awake, he was beginning to feel the ache in his back, arms, legs, and one hip. “Just a couple of guys . . . ?”

Cunningham shrugged. “They were layin’ for you, man. That truck was parked there, and they jumped out when they saw you comin’. You been playin’ around with somebody’s wife?”

Maeve: “Harley, my God.”

“You see the car?” Jake asked.

“Yeah. It was an SUV. I think, like, a Toyota maybe. Dark in color. I told the cops. They’re gonna come see you. I think one guy was black and one guy was white. Salt ’n’ pepper.”

“Harley, that’s bigoted,” Maeve said.

“That’s what they call them, black and white guys together,” Cunningham said.

“Maybe in nineteen fifty-five,” Maeve said.

Cunningham to Jake: “I liked firing that twelve-gauge, man. It made a wicked flash in the night. Scared the hell out of ’em.”

“You say they were laying for me?”

“Oh, yeah. That truck was there for a while, I noticed it earlier on. Didn’t know anybody was inside. When I heard you in the alley, I was going to yell something down about those jackhammers on your sidewalk, and I saw them coming after you. I’ll tell you something else—that wasn’t no cheap SUV. It was brand-new, from the looks of it. They weren’t looking for a quick fifty bucks.”

“Did you tell the cops that?”

“Sure. But they didn’t pay too much attention to me. They were too busy typing stuff in their computers.”

The Cunninghams left after a while—they’d picked up Jake’s briefcase and cane, and left them with him—and the cops did come. Jake had nothing to tell them, partly because he couldn’t believe that anything he was doing would get him beaten up, and partly because talking to the cops wouldn’t help track down the guys who’d jumped him. They had nothing to go on, except that the men were driving a dark SUV, maybe a Toyota.

“Ten percent of the trucks on the street meet that description,” one of the cops said. “At least you managed to hang on to your wallet and your briefcase.”

“Maybe they picked you out because you’re disabled, homed in on that cane,” the second cop said. “Believe me, some of these assholes like nothing more than seeing a well-dressed disabled person.”

They went away, leaving the strong impression that they would file a report but that nothing would be done.

The headache arrived a few minutes later. The doc came in, said they would keep him overnight, and, “I can give you a little something for that head. When you get home, you can take a Tylenol when you need it, but no aspirin or ibuprofen. You want to stay away from any blood thinners for at least a couple of days . . .”

When he woke up, at five in the morning, he was embarrassed. Embarrassed that he’d gotten beaten up, hadn’t managed to defend himself better. He enjoyed a decent fight, but what happened the night before, he told himself, hadn’t been a fight. It had been a mugging, cold and calculated. He thought about Cathy Ann Dorn. Not a coincidence?

But why would Goodman want to slow him down? He’d been cooperating with Goodman . . .

Another thought popped into his head. They’d known he used the back door, because of the sidewalk. Howard Barber had had trouble with the front door . . . if he remembered right, he’d said something to Barber about using the back.

Barber? But why?

Overnight, in the back of his bruised brain, he’d filtered out a few more conclusions.

The attackers had been large, tough, and in good condition. One of them had a hill accent, Kentucky or eastern Tennessee, like that. They were good at what they did. They hadn’t meant to kill him—they could have done that with a single gunshot, or even a couple of axe-handle or pool-cue strokes to the back of the head.

Instead, he’d taken two glancing blows to the head, another on his neck, and a dozen on his back, legs, and one hip. They’d meant to do what they had—to put him in the hospital. If Harley hadn’t been there with his shotgun, and if they’d had another minute, Jake might have been in bed for a week, or a month, or a year. They’d hit him hard enough that if they’d hit bone, squarely, instead of meat, they would have broken the bones . . .

He’d never had a chance: and he was still embarrassed.

And he thought that if he encountered the two men again, in a place where he could do it, he’d kill them. The thought made him smile, and he drifted away on a new shot of drugs, not to wake until eight.

At eight o’clock, he rose back to the surface, thrashed for a moment, and a nurse came in and asked, “How are we feeling?”

“We’re feeling a little creaky,” Jake said. He could feel the bruises, like burns. “Could you hand me my briefcase?”

“The doctor will be here in a minute.”

“Yeah, but my wife is probably going crazy, wondering where I am,” he lied. “I just want to call her.”

He got the phone. When he switched it on, he found four messages from Gina, starting at six-thirty, all pretty much the same: “Jake, where are you? We’re calling, we can’t get you. Call in . . .”

He called. Gina picked up and he said, “You won’t believe what happened, where I am . . .”

Danzig came on a moment later, his voice hushed: “Jesus Christ, Jake, how bad are you hurt?”

“Ah. Not bad. I’m bruised up. I got a few stitches in my scalp, got a headache. They say I’m fine.”

The doc came in to hear the last part of it, pulled on his lip, and shook his head. Jake said to Danzig, “The doctor just got here. I’ll call you from the house. I’m still working.”

“You think, I mean—the Watchmen? Or just muggers? Or what? I mean, it’s a pretty big coincidence.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking about that. Give me an hour or two.”

“What about this Patterson? We wanted you to go see him, but maybe Novatny . . .”

“No, no. Keep Novatny out of this part, or you’re gonna see it all over the papers.” He glanced at the doc. “Listen, I can’t talk right now, they’re about to do something unpleasant to me.”

“Okay. Okay. Well, Jesus, take care of yourself. Call me.” Danzig sounded like his father.

“I’ll call.”

He punched off and the doc said, “Not that unpleasant. Get a light shined in your eye, pee in a bottle, give up a little blood. Is it true that you have health insurance?”

He was on the street at ten o’clock, a vague ache in his brain, a hotter, harsher pain where the stitches were holding his scalp together. Sunlight hurt his eyes; he needed sunglasses. And he was really beginning to hurt now. He got a cab, had it drop him at the alley. Cunningham came out on his back balcony and shouted, “That was quick.”

Jake called back, “I owe you, Harley. Big-time.”

“Ah, bullshit, man, glad you’re okay.”

“Couple bottles of single malt, anyway.”

Cunningham threw up his hands. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “you do owe me . . .”

Inside, Jake did a quick check of the house, then went into the bathroom and looked at himself. They’d cut a bit of hair away from the scalp gash and put a piece of tape over the stitches. That didn’t look so good. He peeled off his clothes, turned to look at his back. He had a row of cue-width bruises on his shoulder blades, back, butt, and legs, already in the deep-purple stage, with streaks of red. They’d be a sickly yellow-black in a week.

If Cunningham hadn’t been there with his shotgun, if they’d had time to really work on him, he would have needed all the insurance that he had . . . or none at all.

Despite the headache and the bruises, he got Patterson’s home phone number and called. He got an out-of-office phone message that said he was in Atlanta and would be back in the office in four days. The message gave his e-mail address and said that it would be checked daily.

Uh-uh. No waiting in modern times. He went online, got a list of Atlanta hotels, and started calling, beginning with those he thought a political consultant might patronize.

He hit on the third try: Patterson was at the Four Seasons.

He called Gina, told her his problem, got routed through to the White House travel office, and booked on a jet leaving National at one o’clock. He’d have to hustle.

He cleaned up, shaved, showered, dressed, shoved a Dopp kit and a change of clothes in a carry-on bag, called a cab.

The cabdriver was named Charlie, a morose man so fat that he’d crushed the front seat in his aging Chevy. Charlie’s head barely protruded over the back of the seat, showing an untidy mop of hair that looked like a stand of ornamental grass, yellow-white and erect. He worked eighteen-hour days, and was Jake’s cabbie of choice. Charlie took his cab calls in the back room of a twenty-four-hour newsstand, and so could provide a summary and commentary on news from around the country.

He had a disaster that Jake hadn’t heard about: “Big shoot-out between the Border Patrol and the coyotes, down around El Paso. There were some Chinese involved, I guess they were coming across, and somebody started shooting. Two or three dead Border Patrol, a bunch of dead Chinamen. I don’t know about the coyotes. They say the Border Patrol crossed the river chasing them . . .”

“Ah, boy.”

“Well, what you gonna do?” Charlie asked. “Gotta keep them out somehow.”

“The penalty for crossing the border isn’t death,” Jake said. “What else happened?”

“Mostly bad weather. Lots of tornadoes out in Oklahoma and Kansas. Some small town got it, but nobody was killed. Still on strike in Detroit. The Canadian prime minister got a nosebleed during a press conference and he’s at the hospital for a checkup. One of the jurors in the Crippen trial got thrown out because he got caught watching trial news . . .”

Charlie concluded with, “By the way, you look terrible. What’s the story on your scalp?”

“Got mugged last night. Beat the heck out of me.”

“You all right?” Charlie asked. “You think you ought to be flying?”

“They gave me some pills. I’m okay.”

“Huh. Tell you what—you got a Frankenstein vibe going, them stitches sticking out like that. You ought to buy a hat.”

He arrived at the gate at National with fifteen minutes to spare. He bought a couple of hunting magazines, and Scientific American, and a ball cap to cover the scalp wound. There wasn’t much in the way of ball caps at the gate, and only one that fit: a pink cap with a Hello Kitty logo on the front.

He took the cap, got on the plane. A headache had been lingering in the background all morning, and in the plane, it got worse. Bad enough that he couldn’t read for the first half hour of the flight. He had the window seat, and kept the window shutter closed to avoid the light. Tried to relax, took a pill that the doc said wouldn’t make him too woozy. That helped a bit.

When the headache backed off, he punched up his laptop and read the information he’d pulled on Patterson. The quality was poor, mostly on the level of gossip, but he could read between the lines.

Patterson was a political hack, number two or three in a campaign management team, the guy who did the stuff that had to be done but nobody wanted to admit to. The disinformation guy; the fixer. He’d worked on both of Bowe’s senatorial campaigns, one winner and one loser, and two dozen other campaigns scattered around the country. A photograph, from Washingtonian magazine, showed a man in his midforties, in a suit that was rumpled but expensive, a drink in his hand, a glassy smile on his face. There were a dozen people in the photo, three posing, including Patterson, the rest just milling around, most with drinks, at a charity ball.

There were, Jake thought, a hundred thousand people like Patterson within thirty miles of the Capitol.

Like Elizabethan courtiers with machine-readable IDs.

Madison Bowe had just gotten off the shuttle and was walking through LaGuardia in New York, when she turned on her cell phone and found a message: Call Johnson Black.

She pushed the speed dial, and when she got through, Black asked, “Did you hear about Jake Winter?”

She stopped for a moment, turned to face a wall, plugged her opposite ear with her fingertip—traveler’s privacy—and said, “What happened?”

“He got beaten up last night. One of my guys heard it from a cabdriver, and I called a friend downtown. He was in the hospital overnight, but he’s out now.”

“Goodman?”

“I don’t know. The cops have it as a mugging. But Jake—I’m not sure he’d let himself get mugged.”

“Oh, God. I’ll call him,” she said.

But when she called, she got a cell-phone answering machine. She said, “Jake. Call me. It’s important. Here are the numbers . . .”

She took a cab to the apartment, worrying about him: How bad, how bad, how bad? Then thought, Why am I worried about him?

10

The Four Seasons was an ungainly building, pale gray, with an acre of marble floor inside, white pillars and crystal chandeliers and what looked, against the odds, like it might be a decent bar. Jake called up to Patterson’s room from the house phone, expecting no answer, prepared to wait.

But Patterson picked up on the third ring, his voice stiff, cranky, as though he’d just gotten up. “Patterson.”

“Mr. Patterson, my name is Jake Winter. I work for Bill Danzig, the president’s chief of staff. I need to talk with you. Right now.”

Patterson was confused. “Bill Danzig? Who?”

“The president’s chief of . . .”

“I know who Bill Danzig is. Who are you again? Where are you?”

“I’m downstairs. I work for Mr. Danzig. If you want to call and check, you can do that. I need to talk.”

“Okay . . . Do you want to come up, or should I come down?”

“Better that I come up.”

A “do not disturb” light was still blinking at Patterson’s door when Jake knocked, then knocked a second time. As he waited, he adjusted his cap, then saw an eye at the peephole. The door opened on a short chain, and Patterson, still in pajamas, looked out: “Do you have some identification?”

Jake dug out the White House ID. Patterson looked at it for a moment, then said, “Let me get the chain . . .” The door closed a couple of inches, the chain rattled, and then the door opened fully and Patterson said, “Are you sure you got the right guy? I’m in the other party.”

“Yeah. You’re the right guy.”

“How’d you find me?”

“I got the message on your answering machine, and called all the Atlanta hotels that a political consultant might stay at.”

Patterson smiled at that. “Okay. Come on in. I was up all night last night, didn’t get to bed until after six this morning. Raising money.” He yawned, rubbed the back of his neck, led the way into the small suite. “I was afraid the CIA had planted a bug in my toenails or something. The way you tracked me.”

He was taller than he’d looked in the magazine photograph, and heavier. His double-extra-large burgundy pajamas were printed with thumb-sized black-and-white penguins. He dropped into a chair, pointed at the sofa across the coffee table, asked, “What’s going on? You want some coffee?”

“You know about Senator Bowe?”

“Of course. You couldn’t avoid it. What does that have to do with me?” But Jake picked up the defensive note in his voice. Patterson suspected what was coming.

Jake said, “A while back, you met with Barbara Packer at the Watergate and asked her what would be the best time, from a Republican point of view, to drop a scandal on the vice president. Was the scandal provided by Senator Bowe?”

Patterson stared at him for a moment, calculating, then said, “Give me a minute.” He stood up, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. A minute later the toilet flushed, and a minute after that, his face damp from splashed water, he came back out of the bathroom, sat down heavily, and asked, “Is the FBI on the way up?”

“Not yet; but they may be later,” Jake said.

“You said you work for Danzig. Are you a cop, or not?”

“I’m not a cop. Technically, I’m a research consultant. I will tell you, though, that the FBI is all over the case. If I think that what you know is relevant to the Bowe investigation, I’d have to give you up. Sooner or later.”

Patterson studied him for a minute, then said, “Maybe I should get a lawyer and talk straight to the FBI.”

“You could do that,” Jake said. “But the FBI is nervous. The more heat that’s put on them, the more likely they are to find somebody to send to prison. I’m just looking into the politics, not the crime.”

After another moment of silence, Patterson said, “The truth is, it’s all politics.”

“So what about Bowe? Was he retailing this scandal to you?”

He leaned back on the couch. “Yeah. Essentially.”

“What does that mean?” Jake asked.

“Linc knew about this package—I don’t know who’s got it now, and I didn’t even see all of it. There are papers, e-mails, bank records, even a video recording involving the construction of a four-lane highway in Wisconsin. Highway sixty-five. It runs between the Twin Cities area and a resort town up north. The state and federal government spent three hundred and fifty million dollars on it. If the package is accurate, quite a bit of the money stuck to the vice president and his friends. Seven, eight million, anyway. Probably more.”

“Where’d the documents come from?” Jake asked.

“The general contractor. The overall management contract went to a company called ITEM, and somebody with ITEM apparently documented the graft. Why, I don’t know. Who, I don’t know. The fact is, it could be a very clever forgery, one of those little Internet assholes gone crazy. But if it’s real, and if it gets out in public, the vice president is gone. Maybe the president with him. Depending on the timing.”

“The timing.”

“Yeah. The timing. Think about it,” Patterson said. “If somebody drops the package now, there’ll be a huge stink and in a month or so, the vice president goes away. Everybody starts maneuvering for a trial, but that won’t come for a year or two. We—the Republicans—squeal and holler, but the administration says, ‘Look, we didn’t know he was a crook, it happened before we picked him. We’re gonna put him in jail now that we know.’ You lose thirty points in the polls, then pick a good man to replace Landers. You have a big happy convention, talk about the fact that the vice presidency doesn’t mean shit anyway, you recover the thirty points, and us Republicans are back at square one.”

Jake crossed his legs. “Okay . . .” When you got somebody rolling with a story, you let them roll.

Patterson continued: “If we dropped the package in the first week of October, the scandal would peak on election day. It’d take you two or three weeks to get rid of Landers. You know how that goes, he denies it, he maneuvers, his wife cries for the cameras and defends her man. But this stuff is undeniable, if it’s real. So a week before the election, Landers is dumped, and you’re down thirty points in the polls. Nobody wants the VP nomination because the Dems are about to get creamed. You wind up with some loser on the ticket, which makes everything worse—makes you look weak—and the president goes down.”

“All because of the timing.”

“Oh, yeah. If this thing is real, it’ll come out, sooner or later. But the timing is absolutely critical.”

Jake stood up, limped around the suite, over to the window, and looked out over Atlanta. Turned back and said, “You don’t know where the package is?”

“Nope. Linc took that information with him. Some place in Wisconsin, obviously. Maybe Wausau, that’s where ITEM’s headquarters is. But they’ve got several offices around Wisconsin.”

“None of this connects to Senator Bowe’s last campaign, does it?”

Patterson looked away, touched his fingertips together, rubbed them for a moment, and then said, “No. Not exactly.”

“ ‘Not exactly’?”

“He would have loved to fuck this president, and to have gotten word back about who did it to him, after what they did to him,” Patterson said. “Linc had a mean streak. Big mean streak—but then, he was a U.S. senator. You don’t get that job without a mean streak.”

“Huh. But no involvement with Arlo Goodman.”

Patterson produced a rueful smile. “Arlo Goodman,” he said. “How long did it take you to find out about this package? Track me down? After you started looking?”

Jake shrugged: “A couple of days.”

“Right. I bet fifty people have had a sniff of it by now. It’s like a great big Easter egg, and everybody’s hunting for it. I will bet you one thousand American dollars that Arlo Goodman and his boys have heard about it. I will bet you that that’s the reason they snatched Linc.”

“You think Goodman . . .”

“Damned right, I do. A couple of those Iraq veterans that Goodman has hanging around, those special forces assholes, took Linc out in the woods and drilled holes in his head until he told them about the package.”

“That’s . . . quite the statement.”

Patterson made a helpless gesture with his hands. “I can’t prove it. I don’t have a single atom of proof. But I bet that’s what happened. If Landers gets dumped now, who better for the vice presidency than Arlo Goodman? He’s popular, he’s good-looking, he’s a hell of a campaigner, he’s the governor of a big swing state, and he can’t succeed himself. He’s available. In four years, he’s got a shot at replacing the president.”

“And for that to work, Landers has to get dumped now,” Jake suggested.

“Absolutely. Goodman needs that package out there now, or in the next month. If it doesn’t come out until October, he’s outa luck. The Dems lose, Goodman’s out of his governorship next year, with nothing political available. And he has no real claim for the presidential nomination in four years.”

They both thought about that for a minute. “If your guess is right, about Goodman and Bowe,” Jake said, “I’d think you’d be a little worried.”

“I am—but not as worried as somebody else must be,” Patterson said. “I was downstream from the package. I never had it. Linc was the only guy who could point you upstream, to whoever has it now.”

“Does Madison Bowe know about it?”

Patterson scratched his head. “You know, I just don’t know about that. They were . . . separate . . . although they liked each other okay. And he was pretty protective of her. I don’t know if he would have told her about it. This thing could be real trouble for people who know about it.”

Jake said, “Huh.” Then, “Have any idea where I could look? Who I could ask?”

“I’d find Linc’s closest asshole buddy, and ask him. Somebody both in politics and in bed with him. But it’s just possible that he didn’t tell anyone.”

Jake thought: Barber. And, Patterson knew that Lincoln Bowe was gay.

“How many people knew about Lincoln Bowe’s sex life?” Jake asked. When Patterson hesitated, he added, “I don’t need a number, I’m just looking for a characterization.”

“So you know?”

“That he was gay? Yes. Madison told me.”

Patterson nodded. “So who knew? Anybody who knew him for a while—knew him well. If you were close enough to see who he was looking at.”

“Quite a few people.”

“Yeah. He was careful, but people knew. Two dozen? Three or four dozen? I don’t know. I don’t know if his parents knew . . .”

“Would Goodman know?”

“Ah . . .” Patterson ruffled his hair with one hand, squinting at the bright light from the window. “That’s hard to tell. I would be surprised if Goodman hadn’t put a spy or two in our campaign, but it’d be at a pretty low level—a volunteer, somebody running our computers. If Goodman knows, it’s probably only at the rumor level. And then you look at Madison, and you think, ‘The guy’s gay? With pussy like that in the house? No way.’ ”

They talked for another twenty minutes, with Jake trying to nail down every piece of information Patterson had about the Landers package. When they were finished, Jake stood up, dropped his legal pad back in his briefcase, and asked, “What’re you going to do?”

“Keep my mouth shut, for the time being,” Patterson said. “Until I find out where the trouble is coming from. If I talk to the FBI, they’re gonna want to know why I didn’t bring this up right away. Then the whole Landers thing will blow out in the open, and you guys get what you want—Landers is off the ticket, and we’re fucked. If I don’t talk to them, I might still be in trouble, but there’s a possibility that I can slide through. Right now, at this moment, I think I’ll try to slide. But that could change.”

“You gonna let me know?”

Patterson showed a shaky smile: “Maybe. I might need a little help. I’ve given you a little help, I might need a little help in return.”

“Call me,” Jake said. “Things can always be done.”

As Jake headed for the door, Patterson called after him: “Have you got something going with Madison?”

That stopped him: “Why?”

“Because when I said ‘pussy,’ your eyeballs pulled back about two inches into your head. I thought you were gonna jump down my throat.”

“I talk to her,” Jake said.

“Sorry about the ‘pussy,’ then.”

“Yeah . . . well. You were right about the thought, anyway.”

“One more thing,” Patterson said. “What’s with that goofy Hello Kitty cap?”

Jake touched the cap: “Short version, I’ve got a cut with a bunch of stitches and a white patch of scalp where they shaved it. A cabdriver told me I was giving off a Frankenstein vibe. I was on the run, and didn’t have time to get a different hat.”

Patterson smiled again: “The hat . . . I’ve never been questioned by a guy wearing a Hello Kitty hat. Kinda scary, in a chain-saw-massacre way.”

When he left, Patterson was still on the couch, drinking a Coke from the minibar, staring at the television. Jake walked down to the front desk, asked the bellman to get a cab for him, saw an Atlanta Braves hat in the gift shop, bought one, shoved the Hello Kitty hat into a trash can, walked out on the front steps, and punched Danzig’s number into his cell phone. Gina put him straight through.

“We’ve got to be really careful,” Danzig said, without preamble.

“I know. I talked to Patterson. We need to talk, tonight, if I can get a flight. Could be late.”

“Call the travel office.”

He called the White House travel office and found he was already being booked on a seven o’clock flight back. He’d had his phone turned off during the first flight and his talk with Patterson, and when he checked messages, he found a voice mail from Madison Bowe.

“Please call me. It’s important.” She left both her home and cell-phone numbers. The cab came, and he put the phone away until he was at the airport. He got a ticket, walked through security, and called her from the gate.

She answered on the first ring: “Hello?”

“Madison, Mrs. Bowe—this is Jake Winter.”

“Jacob. Jeez, I’ve been trying to get you everywhere,” she said. “Johnson Black heard that you were beaten up last night, and they took you to the hospital. Where are you?”

Interesting. She seemed concerned. “Atlanta.”

“Atlanta?” She seemed less concerned. “How did you get to Atlanta?”

“By air,” he said.

She laughed and said, “No, stupid, I didn’t mean, I meant—oh, fuck it, I don’t know what I meant. You’re not hurt?”

“Bruised. Got some tape on my head.” He felt himself sucking for sympathy. “Are you . . . mmm, the funeral is tomorrow?”

Somber now: “Yes. One o’clock. It’ll be a circus. Listen, does Danzig still have you looking around, or are you all done?”

“We’d still like to know what happened,” Jake said.

“Good. You’re still looking. I’ve got more problems.”

“What happened?” He let the alarm show. “You don’t think, I mean, you haven’t seen anybody . . .”

“No, no. I’m in New York, I’m about to head back to Washington. We better talk face-to-face. I’m getting really paranoid.”

“Will you be up late?” he asked.

“Probably. When do you get back?”

“I’m scheduled in at nine o’clock,” he said. “I’ve got to stop to talk with Danzig. I don’t think I could be any earlier than ten or ten-thirty at the earliest.”

The airport had universal wireless, and while he was waiting for the plane, he went online to the State of Wisconsin website, and then to federal DOT records, adding file information to what he’d been told by Patterson. The road project had been real enough, and the money was just what Patterson had said it was. Much of the money had come from the federal government—which meant that if the Landers package was legit, then Landers had committed federal felonies.

The flight was called on time and the trip back was as quick and routine as the flight out: short, boring, noisy. When he got out of the seat in Washington, he had a little trouble standing up: his bruised muscles were cramping on him, and he stopped in the terminal to stretch a bit.

Nothing helped much: he simply hurt. Outside, he grabbed a bag, took a cab to the White House, called ahead, and had an escort waiting at the Blue Room. Gina was in Danzig’s inner office, shoes off, twitching her toes in her nylons. The other two secretaries were gone. When Jake walked in, she asked, “How’s your head?”

“Little ache. Could be hunger, though.” He had to explain exactly what had happened.

Danzig: “So after you were down and before your friend fired the gun, they didn’t go after your wallet? They didn’t get your briefcase?”

“No. That worries me.”

Gina shivered: “I don’t like the sound of it.” Then she stood up. “You want coffee? I could get you a sandwich?”

Jake said, “Yeah. Both. That’d be great.”

“Ham and cheese? Tuna?”

When she was gone, Danzig said, “She’s relentless . . . So?”

Jake dropped into a chair across the desk from him, dug in his case, brought out a yellow legal pad, looked at his notes. “In Wisconsin, under the Landers administration, the state began work on a ninety-one-mile improvement of Federal Highway 65. The improvements began at I-94 east of the Twin Cities and ran up to a resort area called Hayward, in the Wisconsin north woods. There were about three hundred million federal dollars spent on it, plus about fifty-five million in state money. Landers and his friends allegedly stole about eight million dollars of it.”

“Jeez, more’n two percent. That’s pretty good,” Danzig said. “How’d they do it?”

“Don’t know. There’s this package . . .”

Halfway through the briefing, they heard Gina come back, and Danzig put a finger to his lips, a “be quiet” signal. Gina came in with the sandwiches and coffee, and Danzig said, “Gina: take off.”

“Oh, if you’ve still got things . . .”

“Gina: go home. Say hello to your husband. I’m going to talk to Jake, get this whole project out of the way, then I’m going home myself. Tomorrow, I want to set up a daily report process for the convention, so get me a list of anyone critical that we need to bring into it.”

“I could start that tonight.”

“Gina: go home.”

When she’d gone, reluctantly, Danzig turned back to Jake. “You were saying . . .”

Jake finished the briefing, then Danzig asked, “How many people know about this package?”

“Patterson thinks that quite a few have had a smell. If he’s right about Goodman . . .”

Danzig was shaking his head. “That Goodman stuff sounds phony. Goodman’s way too smart to get mixed up in a kidnapping and murder. Or in beating you up, if you were thinking that.”

“I don’t know,” Jake said, shaking his head. “They seem to have a thing going on down there. Goodman develops a wish and somebody does something about it.”

“Like killing Lincoln Bowe?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said. “But if this package is out there, and Goodman knows about it . . . I can see why Patterson’s worried. Goodman likes power. He’s going to lose it. He’s got a year left. He might see this package as a way back.”

“Yup.” Danzig twiddled his thumbs: elementary.

“The question is, do I take all this to Novatny, or do I keep looking around, or do we just forget about it?”

Danzig studied him for a minute, then said, “This is the thing, Jake. Patterson was right about Landers, for sure. If we need to dump him, we need to do it soon. And we need to do it. We don’t need the New York Times or the Washington Post to break this on us. We need to look proactive.”

“We need the package.”

“Yes. Landers won’t go if we don’t have it. He’ll just dig in.”

“Maybe we could . . . Never mind.”

“You were going to say?” Danzig asked.

“I was going to say, maybe we could replicate it. Put it together independently. But that would take an investigation, the word would bleed out, and we’d be twisting in the wind.”

Danzig nodded: “Exactly. If there’s a package, we need it now, and we need it all. If there isn’t a package, we need to know that. What we don’t need is a long investigation, a special prosecutor, a controversy. We don’t need a long-brewed scandal. We need either to get it over with, or buried for good.”

“You want me to keep looking?”

Danzig said, “Jake, I do want you to keep looking—but I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I’m going to tell Gina tomorrow morning that we’re all done, to tote up what we owe you on the consult. I want you to continue on your own hook, and if you find the package, I want you to deliver it.” Another moment of silence, then Danzig said, “You get my drift.”

Jake said, “You want me to be deniable.”

“Took the words right out of my mouth,” Danzig said. “I want the best of both worlds. I want you off the payroll, so we don’t have any backfires. I want you to keep looking, so that if there is something we need, you’ll find it and we’ll get it. Us, not anybody else. And I want it so if you get caught doing something unethical or criminal, we can throw you to the wolves.”

Jake smiled: “Thanks, boss.”

“You’re not a virgin.”

“One part of me is. I wouldn’t want that changed in a federal prison.”

“I can understand that,” Danzig said. “But believe me, there’s a terrific upside if you pull this off.”

“What upside?”

“What do you want?”

The question hung there. Jake stared at him, then said, “You’re serious.”

“Absolutely.”

“I might want a lot,” Jake said.

“I can’t give you a billion dollars, but I can get you something good.”

Jake thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “You’ll pay off this consult?”

“As of tonight.”

“Should I stay in touch?”

“Call me if you get it,” Danzig said.

“And if I don’t?”

“Then don’t call me. But Jake: you gotta get it.”

Jake stood up, leaned on his cane for a moment, then took a slow turn around the office, looked at the Remington bronze that sat on the credenza, touched the buffalo head, turned back, and said, “The whole thing, the package thing, started with an anonymous tip. A guy calls in the middle of the night and says, ‘See what Packer and Patterson talked about at the Watergate.’ So—who was that, and what was the motive? There’s somebody else out there. I can’t see him. I can’t see what he wants.”

Danzig tapped on his desk with a yellow pencil, staring at Jake but not focused on him, and finally sighed and said, “Shit, Jake, there’s always somebody out there. What he wants . . . he might want anything. The simple pleasure of knowing he took down Landers. Maybe there’s a better job in it for him. Maybe he figures they’ll make a movie about him, he’ll get to go to Hollywood and fuck Brittany West.”

“Patterson suggested that Goodman could benefit. Take a big step up,” Jake said.

Now Danzig’s eyes snapped. “Well. We’ll see how things work out. I know why he’d say that, though. God help us.”

Jake headed for the door: “I’ll see you.”

“You’re gonna do it?”

Jake smiled. “You don’t want to know, right?”

11

Jake arrived at Madison’s town house at 10:30, wrestled his overnight bag out of the cab, hung it over his shoulder, carried his briefcase on the other side, tapped his way up the walk with his cane. He’d called Madison from the cab. Halfway up the walk, the porch light came on and she opened the door.

“Mrs. Bowe . . .”

“Did you have a good time at the White House?”

“You hardly ever have a good time at the White House, unless you’re the president,” Jake said. He thought about Danzig, and the What do you want? “You can have interesting times.”

“Gonna tell me about it?”

“No.”

She had a black dress hanging on a hook in the entryway, still in a plastic dry-cleaning bag, and a shoe bag sitting on the floor beneath it. Funeral clothes, Jake thought, as he went by into the living room. She had a gas fireplace. The fire was on, flickering behind a glass door. He dropped his bags, sat on the couch, and she asked, “A glass of wine?”

“That would be great.”

She was back in a minute, with two glasses. The wine was already open, and she held it up to the ceiling light and peered through it. “I started without you,” she said. She poured and handed him a glass. “I talked to Novatny. They have no ideas, other than this Schmidt man.”

“But Schmidt’s a pretty good idea,” Jake said. “What happened in New York? You said something odd happened.”

“First of all, tell me what happened the other night. When you got mugged.”

He told her, succinctly, trying not to show his embarrassment, nipping at the wine while he talked. She listened intently, and then said, “Doesn’t sound like a robbery.”

“I know,” he said. “And I know what you’re going to say. I don’t think the Watchmen are involved. Goodman thinks I’m out scouting around for him. I was actually thinking that your friend Barber might be a possibility—though I don’t see what beating me up would have gotten him.”

She frowned: “He has a violent streak in him. I’ve seen that in the past. I think Linc was attracted to it. But remember when you told me about The Rule? Who benefits from your getting beaten up?”

“The Rule doesn’t say that the benefit has to be obvious. In fact, it usually isn’t. We just don’t know enough yet . . . So: New York?”

“Yes.” She poured a glass of wine for herself, set the bottle on the coffee table, and perched on an easy chair, folding her legs beneath herself as women do. “I took the shuttle up early this morning and went to the apartment. To check it, make sure everything was okay, to look for some papers, to pay the maid. I needed to get Linc’s will, for one thing, some insurance policies that Johnnie Black needs to see. I got everything I needed, but . . . his medical records were gone. There were two big folders, in the top drawer of the file cabinet, and they were gone. They aren’t here and I know they aren’t at the farm. I can’t see why they’d be in Santa Fe, his doctor is in New York.”

Jake thought about it and shrugged. “I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I. Except that underneath the bed sham, I found a bottle of prescription medicine, Rinolat. I looked it up online, and it’s a painkiller. I didn’t understand it all, something about monoclonal antibodies. Anyway, he was taking a heavy dose. The stuff would put a horse to sleep.”

“I know . . .” He slapped his leg. “I have some experience with it. Was it dated?”

“Yes. A month before he disappeared.”

“He was sick?”

She shook her head: “Not as far as I know. I haven’t seen him for a while. The last time I saw him, he was a little cranky, but he wasn’t in pain. Not that I could see.”

“Huh. The stuff isn’t of any use recreationally . . . Are you sure it was his?”

“The prescription was in his name, from his doctor.”

Jake sipped the wine, swirled it in his glass. He didn’t know much about wine, but it tasted fine; tasted like money. And he thought about the autopsy report. Novatny said that Bowe’s body had been suffused with painkiller, possibly to keep him helpless. But was that what happened? “You think somebody stole the medical file? Have you talked to the maid?”

Madison nodded. “Yes. I did. This is the other funny thing. She saw his doctor. At the apartment. With medical equipment.”

“What doctor?”

“James Rosenquist. He’s an old friend of Linc’s. One of his special friends, or once was. I called him, and he said he hadn’t seen Linc for six months, since a physical. But James has a white streak in his hair—he’s a little vain about it—and the maid said the man she saw in the apartment, the doctor, had a stripe like a skunk.”

“Ah, man.” Jake leaned back, rubbed his face, and yawned. Shook his head and admitted, “I still don’t know what it means.”

“Neither do I. It’s just that there seems to be another mystery in New York and there shouldn’t be two mysteries at the same time. Not unrelated ones,” Madison said. “I was thinking about siccing Johnnie Black on James, but since James denies even seeing Linc . . .”

“Rosenquist is in New York City?”

“Yes. He has one of those practices on the bottom floor of a co-op, on the Upper East Side.”

“One of the rich guys,” Jake said, “who’ll be all lawyered up.”

“Absolutely.”

Jake sighed, gulped the wine, bent forward to pick up his case, winced at the pain. “Mrs. Bowe. Let me check around, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know what I can do.”

“What if James, what if Rosenquist is hooked up with Goodman somehow? I mean . . .” She flapped at him.

“There’s no reason to think that? That there’s a connection?”

“No, but it seems odd. Linc didn’t hide things from me. We no longer had a sexual relationship, but we were still married. We were certainly fond of each other. I didn’t know anything about an illness. I didn’t . . . I mean, what if Rosenquist drugged him somehow? Delivered him?” Her voice trailed away, and she frowned. “Am I being a dingbat?”

“Not at all,” Jake said. “Nothing you said is crazy, I just don’t see where you’re going with it. Or where it can go.”

She chewed her lip for a moment, looking at him, then said, “You don’t trust me.”

“I do, as far as . . .” He stopped.

“As far as what? You can throw a Toyota?”

“No. I do trust you.” Another little lie. Or was it? She felt trustworthy. On the other hand, apparent trustworthiness was a quality that Washingtonians spent a lifetime perfecting.

He’d thought of asking her about the Landers package, but decided not to: he had to do more checking. If she had it, or knew who did, he didn’t want to do something that might inadvertently pull a trigger, get the package dumped to the Times. Not until Danzig was ready for it, anyway.

He stood up, said, “I’ll call you tomorrow. Let me think about all of this. I’ll call you.”

She leaned back in the chair for the first time, took another sip of wine, looking at him over the top of the glass, and then said, “All right. This probably won’t help you learn to trust me, but I need to tell you something. I thought about it when we started talking about his sexual orientation.”

“Okay.”

“Linc had his outside relationships—but so did I. I’ve had two affairs in the last nine years. Both of them lasted about two years, with nice, discreet men, and then they stopped. They stopped basically because they weren’t going anywhere. Linc knew about both of them, and it was okay with him. I mean, he was a little wistful—but he understood.”

Jake said, “Mrs. Bowe . . .”

“You should call me Madison, under the circumstances.”

“What circumstances?”

“The circumstances of me using you as a confessor. But let me finish. I thought you should know, because it’s another thing about us . . .” Her forehead wrinkled, and she gestured with the glass, then, “. . . it’s another thing, that if I hadn’t told you, and you found out later, you’d wonder about. You’d wonder if there might be some reason that somebody would want to get rid of Linc. But: I promise you, I have had exactly two relationships, no more. Neither of the men involved would have any reason to wish harm to Lincoln. Neither affair continues. Everybody is more or less happy. So . . .”

He nodded now, and said, “You really didn’t have to tell me. I don’t think people do what was done to Lincoln because of your outside relationships. In the most extreme cases, somebody might get shot, I suppose. But in this day and age . . .”

“You’re a little cynical,” she said.

“I work in Washington.”

That night, he lay awake for a while, considering possibilities. One seemed clear: all roads to the truth ran through the dead body of Lincoln Bowe. And he thought about Madison Bowe and the medical records . . .

He was gone before he knew it, awake again before five o’clock. He cleaned up, stretched, worked his leg. He ached from the beating, and the bruises, if anything, were darker, bluer. The lingering headache was still there, a shadow, annoying but not limiting. He’d been lucky.

Or possibly, he thought, he was being manipulated, not only by Madison, but by the men who’d beaten him up. Perhaps they’d beaten him for some reason that he couldn’t even imagine, pushing him toward . . . what?

From his office, he used his access to government records to go online with the Social Security Administration. There, he checked the records of one Donald Patzo, a man from deep in his past. Patzo had skills he might need . . .

There were twenty-four Donald Patzos in the records, but only one fit by age and by employment. Patzo was sixty-six years old. He’d started drawing Social Security when he was sixty-two, and his employment record suggested that he wouldn’t have much of a pension—he’d had twenty-four jobs in the forty years after he’d gotten out of the military, and hadn’t worked at all for the fifteen years he’d spent in prison.

Jake noted his address, then looked it up on his laptop map program. At seven o’clock, he called Madison.

“This is Jake. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, no, this is going to be a hellish day,” she said. “I’ve been up since five.”

“Can I stop by and pick up the key to your New York apartment?”

Pause. “What are you going to do?”

“I want to go over it inch by inch. I’ll try to preserve your privacy, if there’s anything you don’t want me to look at.”

“No, no.” Another pause. Then, “I guess I’d rather have you tear it apart than the FBI. When are you going up?”

“Right away. I’ve got to do some running around, but I’d like to get the shuttle out of National at noon.”

“Soon as you can get here.”

He was at her door at seven-fifteen. Two television trucks were parked in the street, but neither bothered to film Jake. A man with a funny hat was just leaving, heading for a florist’s van. Another woman was inside, Madison’s best horsey friend from Lexington, she said. She gave him the key with a note to the doorman. “I called the doorman, told him you were coming and to let you in.”

“Is there a computer in the apartment?”

“Of course.” She was wearing jeans and a golf shirt, and was standing close to him, her voice pitched down. Jake could hear her friend talking on a telephone.

“Do you know his password? If it has a password?”

She rolled her eyes. “He was in Skull and Bones at Yale. It’s ‘Bonester.’ ”

“You gotta be kidding me . . .” He shook his head, smiled: the Ivy League. “Is there a safe?”

“Yes, but it’s empty. I emptied it yesterday. It’s in the kitchen, actually, under what looks like a built-in chopping block.”

Her friend was in the living room. They’d walked out to the entry, and as he turned to leave, she caught his jacket sleeve, pulled his shoulders down, and kissed him quickly on the lips. “Be careful. Be careful, please.”

Then he didn’t want to leave; but he did. He stopped at a convenience store, made a call to Don Patzo in Baltimore. Patzo picked up on the fourth ring, sleep in his voice: “What?”

Jake hung up. He wanted to talk to Patzo face-to-face.

Traffic was bad, and all the way to Baltimore, he could feel the kiss.

There was, in his experience, a wide variety of kisses, ranging from Air, on one end of the spectrum, to Orgasmic on the other. Included were Affectionate, Hot, Friendly, First, Promising, Intense, Good-bye for Good, See You Later, Desperate, Mom, and French, not to be confused with French Officer.

Had this been a First—which implied a Second—or had it been an Affectionate or Friendly, which weren’t necessarily good? Had she pushed up against him a little? Had he recoiled? He didn’t think he’d recoiled, but he’d definitely been surprised. Should he have taken hold of something? Like what?

He remembered the old Irish joke, and smiled at it: “Sweet lovin’ Jesus, Sweeney, didn’t you have nothin’ in your own hand?”—“Nothing but Mrs. O’Hara’s ass, and though it’s a thing of beauty in its own right, it ain’t worth a damn in a fight . . .”

Like being fourteen again.

He was in Baltimore a few minutes after nine o’clock, used the car’s nav system to find Don Patzo’s house. He got lost, even with the nav system—the maps showed streets going through where they didn’t—wandered around for a half hour, and finally found the place down a dead-end street not far from the water, but with an unpleasant fishy smell about it.

Patzo was the man who’d tried to teach him burglary before Jake left for Afghanistan. He’d been in prison a half dozen different times in three states, before taking the contract with the CIA, and in class said he didn’t know the exact number, but thought he might have done better than two thousand burglaries. “Quality jobs: wasn’t stealin’ no fuckin’ boom boxes or video games.”

Jake asked him how he’d gotten caught so often. “Percentages, sonny. Just like in gambling. You figure the odds are a hundred to one against getting caught, then you go in a hundred times, and guess what? The percentages just ran out.”

Patzo lived in a small, frame house with shingle siding, a concrete-block stoop, and a neatly trimmed lawn. A dozen freshly planted petunias struggled for life in a window box. Jake knocked, knocked again. Patzo came to the door. Jake recognized him, but only because he’d known who he was.

The Patzo he’d met ten years earlier was a thick-necked, buzz-cut hood in his middle fifties. This Patzo had shriveled, although the hood was still there in his black eyes. His face was gray, the color of heart trouble, and his nose was large and soft. He was wearing a shabby flannel shirt and jeans with a too-big waist, and white athletic socks.

He pushed open the screen door and said, “Yeah?”

“Don Patzo,” Jake said. “You once taught a burglary class to a bunch of special forces guys.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“So I was one of those guys. I need a little help.”

“Ah, fuck you, pal.” Patzo started to pull the door closed. “And I didn’t teach no gimps.”

“I wasn’t a gimp back then,” Jake said. “I got to be a gimp later. What I want you to do is easy, not dangerous, will be all done by tonight, and will get you a thousand bucks in tax-free cash and a couple of decent meals. The best part is, it’s legal.”

Patzo didn’t shut the inner door. “How legal is that?”

Jake fished the apartment key from his pocket: “The owner gave me the key and called the doorman to clear the way. You’re more of a consultant than a burglar.”

Patzo pushed the door open: “I’ll give you five minutes to talk to me.”

They talked, and Patzo agreed. Jake loaded the old man into his car, headed back to Washington. Stopped at Riggs, opened his safe-deposit box, took out ten thousand of the twenty-five thousand he kept there, just in case; stopped at a drugstore, bought a package of vinyl gloves; and drove them both to National. Patzo kept his mouth shut, but he watched everything. The only emotion he showed was a tightening of his fists when the plane took off, and again when it landed.

They were in New York at one o’clock, a cab across the Triborough to the Upper East Side. The doorman had a note from Madison, and sent them up to Bowe’s apartment.

They stepped inside, facing an oval, gilt-framed mirror above an antique table with a cut-crystal bud vase.

Patzo said, “Jesus Christ, that fuckin’ table is worth thirty grand.”

“You know antiques?”

“Enough. Used to do a lot of woodwork. You know—when I was working for the state.” He touched the table gently. “How the fuck would I get it out of here?”

“Don’t even think about it,” Jake said.

The apartment had two bedrooms, but was bigger than that implied. The kitchen was long and narrow, but complete. The living room was expansive, oak floors and three Oriental carpets, contemporary abstracts on the wall, including, over the fireplace, an excellent Rothko. A den opened off the living room; and down a hall were two bedrooms, a master bedroom suite and a smaller guest room. The master bedroom had a bathroom that contained a tub big enough for three or four people. All of it was wallpapered in delicate pastels.

Jake gave Patzo a pair of the vinyl gloves and a short instruction: “Look, but don’t leave any prints. If you find anything that looks like it’s been hidden, or interesting—legal papers, medical documents—come get me. The owner had all the stuff inventoried for the IRS, so if anything goes missing, it’s gonna be embarrassing for us both.”

“Place like this has a safe,” Patzo said.

“It does,” Jake said. “It’s empty—the owner emptied it yesterday. See if you can find it.”

“Like a test.”

“Yeah.”

As the older man prowled the apartment, Jake sat on the floor and started through the filing cabinets. There were two, in the den, under a built-in computer table. He checked each individual file folder and found paid bills, financial records, co-op apartment records, tax forms, receipts and registrations for automobiles, and account papers for mutual funds at Fidelity and Vanguard. He totaled it up in his head, and found that Bowe’s accounts at two banks, at U.S. Trust, at Merrill Lynch, and the mutual fund companies totaled some eighty-five million dollars.

He checked every file folder, looking for hidden papers. Found none.

Patzo came by: “There’s a gun hanging off the headboard of the bed in the big bedroom.”

Jake went to look. The revolver looked like a self-defense piece, an old blue hammerless .38. The gun was in a black rubber holster that had been screwed to the headboard. Jake said, “Keep looking.”

As Madison said, there were no medical records at all. He checked the bank accounts, and there had been several large checks cashed in the months prior to Bowe’s disappearance, but the records didn’t indicate whom the checks were paid to.

He pulled up the computer, signed on with the Bonester password, and started reading e-mail. The e-mail, both incoming and outgoing, was remarkably bland. Too remarkably. He went into the address book, found addresses for fifty or sixty people, including Howard Barber. Yet when he looked for mail involving Barber, either outgoing or incoming, there was none.

The e-mail had been purged.

Patzo came back. “The safe is under the cutting board in the kitchen. It’s open. You want to look?”

Jake went to look. As Madison had said, it was empty. “Now, what does this teach you?” Patzo asked.

“Beats the heck out of me,” Jake said.

“It teaches you that the guy who put the security in this place knew what he was doing,” Patzo said. “He knows he won’t fool a pro, if you give the pro all day to look, but no goddamn junkie on this green earth is ever going to find this safe. Not except by accident. So, if there’s more stuff hid, it’s gonna be clever, and you’re gonna have to look for spaces where there shouldn’t be spaces.”

“That’s why I dragged your ass up here.”

Jake went back to the computer and checked the history setting. The history had been wiped, and the time period for saving documents had been set to zero.

Bowe, Jake thought, was wiping out traces of himself right up to the time he disappeared. He could get Madison to go to the banks, and find out whom Bowe had written checks to, but that usually took a few days, and it might take longer, and involve lawyers, in the case of a dead man.

But if Bowe wasn’t worried about all the personal financial records he’d left behind, why was he so worried about e-mail, about websites he’d visited, about his medical records? Why had this skunk-striped doctor denied seeing Bowe? Jake was thinking about the doctor when Patzo came back.

“Got another one.”

“Another safe?”

“Another something.”

This one was in the living room, in a built-in DVD-CD case. “You see the way it looks like this is a trim panel, on the side, but it’s not a panel?” Patzo said, tracing the wood with his hands. “There’s eighteen inches of space there, a foot high, a foot deep. It could just be a measuring mistake, except everything here is done too well. Everything is very tight, and then you have this . . .”

He kept probing at it, but finally gave up. “I don’t know how it opens. But if you went after it with a crowbar, I think you’d find something.”

“Maybe it opens remotely,” Jake said. “A button, or you think the TV remote?”

“There’d have to be an electric eye for a remote. Probably not that. Probably . . . Let’s see, they’d have to wire it, they probably wouldn’t want to run the wires all over the place, so it’d be close.”

They looked at the edges of the paneling, under the shelves, around the edges of the fireplace, groped behind the TV. Then Patzo said, “Huh,” put his foot out, and pressed a piece of base molding. A drawer slid silently out of the DVD case, and Jake said, “Holy shit,” and Patzo said, “Like one of them pyramid movies, where the tomb opens,” and they both went over to look.

A few worn pieces of paper on top. Jake lifted them out. Below them, they could see a jumble of leather, with the flash of gemstones. Peering in the drawer, Patzo said, “Your friend is a fagola. Or something. A freak.”

“My friend is the guy’s wife,” Jake said. He pointed. “What is that?”

“I used to know a fella in the adult novelty business, he had a whole caseful of this stuff,” Patzo said. “That thing is a dog collar for people, and that’s the dog chain. I don’t know what that thing is, but I ain’t gonna touch it.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Jake said.

“Other cultures,” Patzo said.

“What?”

“Other cultures. The fagola is other cultures. They do what they do.”

Jake looked at the paper he’d lifted out: three photographs, a hippie couple perhaps from the sixties, a young girl on a swing, a young boy. The photos were smooth, aged, but with a certain curve to them. They’d been in a wallet.

There was also a three-by-five card with a phrase written on it with a felt-tipped pen: All because of Lion Nerve. Nothing else.

“I never seen a dog collar with diamonds in it,” Patzo said. He was holding it up by the buckle. “But that’s what it is.”

“I doubt they’re real diamonds,” Jake said. “They’re too big.”

“In a place like this? They’re real. And that dog chain is eighteen-karat gold,” Patzo said. He looked at Jake. “Can I have them?”

“What?”

“The dog collar. The chains. And that other thing. I mean, it’s gonna be really embarrassing if your friend finds it, the wife. I couldn’t help noticing that the wife is Mrs. Lincoln Bowe and her husband is the dead senator, so if this stuff is his . . . I mean, I could get rid of it. Nobody would ever know. I couldn’t tell anybody, because they’d send me back to the joint.”

“How much is it worth?”

Patzo said, “Less than Bowe’s reputation.”

They finished combing the apartment, and Jake called Madison on her cell phone just after six o’clock.

“You okay?”

She’d been alone after the funeral. “I couldn’t stop crying. It got on top of me, Jacob.”

“But you’re okay now?”

“No. I’m pretty messed up,” she said.

“Ah, jeez,” he said. After a moment of silence, he said, “I need to brace Dr. Rosenquist. Would that cause you an endless amount of trouble?”

“No. He’s not my doctor,” she said. “I don’t even know him very well. What’d you find?”

“It’s what I didn’t find. Your husband seems to have prepared for his disappearance. He destroyed his personal e-mail, he wiped the history off the computer. All of his tax records and bank records are intact, though, and very neatly filed, as though he was getting ready for an audit—or an estate examination. The question is, Why did he remove the medical records, and why did the doctor deny seeing him? That’s one mystery we need to clear up.”

“Go ahead. Do it, Jake. But please, please, be careful.”

“Yes. I’ll figure out a way to keep you out of it. There’s one other thing. We found another hideaway in the apartment and there were some items related to your husband’s sexual life. Leather stuff, chains. I’m wondering, my consultant says they may have some value, maybe even substantial, but given their nature . . .”

“Get rid of them,” she said.

“There were three photos in the same drawer. They’re flat and warped, like they were in a wallet. There’s a picture of like a hippie couple back in the sixties or seventies, probably, the guy’s wearing plaid pants . . .”

“Oh, no,” she said. “There’s one of a young girl, and a young boy.”

“Yeah. Are they important?”

After a long silence, she said, “He’d never take those out of his wallet. Those are . . . If he left them behind, they’re a suicide note.”

“A suicide note?”

“Yes. He would have known that I would know. He was sending me a message. They’re pictures of his parents, his sister, and himself. They were personal icons. He never would have left them behind, anywhere. They’re a suicide note.”

“A suicide note only works if somebody finds it,” Jake said.

“There’ll be something in his papers, somewhere, that’ll tell me where to look. Or maybe his mother knows, she’s still alive. But Jake: he knew he was going to die. Either he was being stalked, or he’d do it himself. But he knew.”

He opened his mouth to tell her about the three-by-five card, and then stopped. He’d rather see her face-to-face for that. If all this meant his disappearance, he wanted to see her face when he gave her Lion Nerve. To see if it registered . . . What’s this, Jake? You don’t trust her?

They talked for another two minutes, and Jake said, “I’m going to see Rosenquist.”

“Call me tonight. Tell me what he says.”

When he got off the line, he said to Patzo: “Your lucky day. I’d like to see your buddy’s face when you ask him to get rid of a diamond-studded dog collar.”

Patzo’s face broke into a beauteous smile. “Jesus, man. I mean, this is my life, right here. This dog collar . . .” He held it up, half wrapped in a piece of toilet paper. “I got a retirement.”

“You think you can get back to Baltimore on your own?” Jake asked.

“Sure. Lemme make a few calls, maybe take a train back. Could you gimme a couple hundred bucks? I don’t like those fuckin’ airplanes,” Patzo said. “What are you going to do?”

Patzo made his calls, gave the antique table a long, lingering look, patted it good-bye, and left Jake alone in the apartment.

When he was gone, Jake found the most comfortable chair, pulled it over to a window, where he had a clear view down Park Avenue, and thought it all over. All of it, from the circumstances of Bowe’s disappearance, to Schmidt and the poorly hidden gun, to Barber, to the mystery call that led him to Patterson, to the missing medical files.

To that morning’s kiss.

Everything that had happened ended in a mystery. He had almost no resources to solve any of them . . . with one exception.

He sat until it was dark, working it out. And when it was dark, the red taillights streaming up Park Avenue, electronic salmon on the way to spawn, he pushed himself out of the chair, turned on a single light, went into the master bedroom, and got the gun and holster from the back of the headboard.

He pulled the gun out, checked it, ejected the five .38 shells from the cylinder.

When they’d gone through the apartment, they’d found a toolbox in a kitchen drawer. Jake used a pair of pliers to pull the slug out of one of the .38s, dumped the powder down the sink, washed it away.

He loaded the empty case back in the pistol, turned it until it was under the hammer, found a knee-high woman’s boot in the closet of the second bedroom—part of Madison’s New York clothing cache—shoved his hand in the boot, holding the gun and the boot between two pillows, and pulled the trigger. There was a muffled crack, and the smell of burning primer.

“Hope the cops don’t do any forensics up here,” he muttered to himself, as he was putting the boot back in the closet. He opened a couple of drawers in Madison’s dresser, took out a pair of black panty hose. He pulled them over his head, asked the mirror, “How do I look?” He considered himself for a moment, then said, “Like some moron with a pair of underpants on his head.”

He took them off, refolded them, put them away. He couldn’t wear them past a doorman anyway.

He went back to Madison’s dresser, sat down, looked at himself in the mirror. He looked all right, he thought. Like a bureaucrat or a college professor just back from vacation, who hadn’t had a chance to get his hair cut, who stayed in shape with handball.

There was nothing he could do, without a makeup expert, to make himself look like a thug. He didn’t have the scars under the eyes, he didn’t have the oft-broken nose, he didn’t have the shiny forehead. He did have the scalp cut. If he combed his hair just so . . .

He could definitely go for the insane look, he decided. He half smiled, thinking that he should have kept the Hello Kitty hat.

He went through Madison’s drawers, then through Lincoln Bowe’s, found a comb and a tube of hair gel. Went to the bathroom, gelled his hair, swept it straight back. Gelled it some more. The gel made his face look thinner, his head smaller, like a Doberman’s. And it made him look a little trashy. Expensive trashy, a street guy who’d lucked into a thousand-dollar suit. Better.

Stared at himself in the mirror again, took a quarter out of his pocket, put it between his upper right gum and his cheek. Talked to himself in the mirror, while holding the quarter in place with cheek and lip pressure: “Hi. I’m a killer for the CIA, and I’m crazy. I’m here to put a bullet in your head . . .”

No. He was being cute. He didn’t want cute, he wanted cold. He rehearsed for another moment: “Get your fuckin’ ass on the couch, fat man . . .” More gravel in the voice: “Get your fuckin’ ass on the couch . . .”

Rosenquist lived on the twelfth floor of a co-op apartment in the Park Avenue six-hundreds, a bulky granite building with a liveried doorman. One of the residents, leading a dog only slightly larger than a hoagie, went through ahead of Jake. The doorman nodded and she took the elevator. When the lobby was clear, Jake walked in. The doorman straightened and Jake asked, “Dr. Rosenquist?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Andy Carlyle.” No point in going on record with the doorman. “A friend of his died and I helped clean out the apartment. I found some, mmm, personal items that I believe belong to Dr. Rosenquist.”

The doorman called up. After a brief chat, he handed the phone to Jake. Jake took it and said, “Hello?”

“This is James Rosenquist. What do you have?”

“Your friend’s wife asked me to clean out, mmm, his apartment.” Ostentatiously not using the name. “I found some, ahh, jewelry. There were some personal papers, plus a note that said that you should get the jewelry. One of the pieces is leather with diamonds, two are separate gold chains.”

“Give the phone back to Ralph. I’ll tell him to send you up.”

In the elevator, Jake said aloud, “Tough and mysterious. Tough and mysterious. CIA killer. Movie killer, movie killer, movie killer . . .”

Looking at himself in the elevator mirror, he did a quick recomb of his hair, baring the shaved strip and the stitches. The Frankenstein vibe. When he was done, one lobe of the greased hair had fallen over his forehead, and he liked it, a vague Hitleresque note to go with the Frankenstein. He put the quarter between his gum and his left cheek and said, “Here’s lookin’ at ya.”

No. He was being cute again. No cute. He needed crazy.

Rosenquist was a blocky, round-faced man dressed in sweatpants, a half-marathon T-shirt that said, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, and slippers. A soft man, fifty pounds overweight. He had a glass in his hand. Dance music played from deeper in the apartment. Jake bobbed his head and held up his cane and the briefcase, tried to look like a polite CIA killer, and asked, “Dr. Rosenquist?”

“Better come in. You recovered these things from Linc’s apartment?”

Rosenquist had closed the door and Jake took two quick steps down the hallway and looked into the living room. Empty; music playing from a stereo in the corner. Jake turned back and said, his voice as hard and clipped as he could manage, “Yes, but we disposed of them. I used them as an excuse to get in here. I want to know what you did with Bowe’s medical records.”

Rosenquist stopped short, his lips turning down in a grimace, and he growled, “Get out.”

“No. We no longer have room to fuck around.” Jake stepped closer to him, and then another step, and Rosenquist stepped backward. “You’re right in the middle of this, Rosenquist, and people are getting hurt. I need the records.”

Rosenquist moved sideways, his hand darting toward an intercom panel. “I’ll get . . .”

The gun was in Jake’s hand, pointing at Rosenquist’s temple. “You don’t seem to understand how serious this is, fat man,” he said. “I’ve been told to get the records. I will get them, one way or another.”

Rosenquist’s hands were up, his eyes wide: “Don’t point the gun at me. The gun could go off, don’t point the gun.”

“The records . . .” The quarter slipped and Jake caught it with his upper lip: a snarl, a sneer.

“There are no records, there are no records,” Rosenquist babbled. “Whatever records there are, are in my office, but they’re meaningless. He never had anything wrong with him.” But he was lying; his eyes gave him away, moving sideways, then flicking back, judging whether Jake was buying the story.

He wasn’t. Jake waggled the gun at him. “In the living room. Put your ass on the couch, fat man.”

“There are no records . . .” Rosenquist sat on the couch.

Jake said, “What were you treating him for?”

“I wasn’t treating him, honest to God.” Lying again.

Jake looked at him, then said, in a kindly voice, “I’ve had to kill a few people. In the military. And a couple of more, outside. You know. Business. I didn’t like it, but it had to be done. You know what I’m saying? It had to be done. These people were causing trouble.” He hoped he sounded insane. The quarter slipped, and he pushed it back.

“I know, I know.” Rosenquist tried a placating smile, but his voice was a trembling whine.

“This is the same kind of deal, when you get right down to it,” Jake said. He said, “If you move, I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

“Listen . . .”

Jake flipped open the gun’s cylinder, shucked the shells into his left hand, and Rosenquist shut up, his eyes big as he watched. Jake picked out the empty shell, with the firing pin impression on the primer. Held it up so Rosenquist could see it, slipped it back into the cylinder, snapped the cylinder shut.

“Now,” he said. He spun the cylinder.

“Gimme a break,” Rosenquist said. “You’re not going to do that.”

Jake pointed the pistol at Rosenquist’s head and pulled the trigger. It snapped, nothing happened. Rosenquist jumped, his mouth open, his eyes narrowing in horror: “You pulled the trigger. You pulled the frigging trigger.”

Jake spun the cylinder: “Yeah, but it was five-to-one against. Against it blowing your brains out. Though maybe not. I can never do the math on these things.” The quarter slipped, and he stopped to shove it back in place with his tongue. Drooled a bit, and wiped his lips with his hand; saw Rosenquist pick up on the drool. “It’s supposed to be five-to-one every time, right? But if you do it enough, it’s gonna go off eventually, right? How many times on average? You’re a doctor, you should have the math. Is it five times to fifty-fifty? Or is it two and a half times to fifty-fifty? I could never figure that out.”

He pointed the gun at Rosenquist’s head again and the doctor’s hands came up as if to block the bullet, and he turned his face away and blurted, “He had cancer.”

“Cancer.” Jake looked at him over the barrel. “Where, cancer?”

“Brain. A tumor.”

“How bad?” Jake asked.

“Untreatable.”

“How long did he have it when he disappeared?”

“He’d had it for probably a year, but we’d only known about it for a few weeks. Growing like crazy. Nothing to do about it. When he went, he was already showing it. He was losing function, physical and mental. He had some deep pain. We could treat that for a while, but not for long.”

“Was he planning to suicide?”

“I think so. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened with this . . . beheading. I don’t know. He told me to keep my mouth shut. He was my friend.”

Jake stepped back, flipped the cylinder out again, reloaded the gun.

“You’re going to kill me?”

“I don’t have to,” Jake said. “If you say anything about any of this, it’ll all come out. Prison’s not the best place for a fat soft gay guy. You’d have to deal with it for a long time.”

“I can’t believe Madison had anything to do with this,” Rosenquist said, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Jesus Christ.” Jake laughed, his best dirty laugh, shook his head, drooled again, wiped his lips. “You’re just so goddamned dumb, fat man. This is way past Madison Bowe. You don’t know what you’ve done with this little game. You don’t know what you’ve stepped into. The FBI’s in it, the CIA, God only knows what the security people are doing. I know the Watchmen are working it and there’re some guys working for Goodman you wouldn’t want to meet. They’ll cut your fuckin’ legs off with a chain saw. Madison Bowe? You fuckin’ dummy.”

“If you’re not with Madison . . .” Rosenquist was confused. “Who are you with?”

“Best not to know,” Jake said. He smiled the crooked coin-holding smile. “It’s one of those deals where I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Old joke; Rosenquist recognized it, at the same time he seemed to buy it. Jake pushed on: “So. Mouth shut, ass down. Maybe you’ll live through it—though I don’t know what the other side’s thinking. Wouldn’t destroy any records, but you might put them someplace where your lawyer can get them if he needs them. They’re about the only chip you’ve got in this game.”

And he was out of there.

On the street, clear of the building, walking fast, he called Madison. “I think I should come and see you,” he said.

“Come on,” she said.

Then he started to laugh. If his grandmother had heard him up there, using the language, she would have washed his mouth out with soap.

So he laughed, and the people on the sidewalk spread carefully around him; a man, alone, laughing aloud on a New York street, in the dark. Not necessarily a threat, but it pays to be careful.

12

On the way back in the plane, Jake tried to work through what he knew: that Lincoln Bowe had been dying, and that Bowe had known about a scandal, a package, that would unseat the vice president of the United States, and, if delivered at the right time, probably the president as well.

They did not fit together. He kept trying to find a way, and not until they were coming into National, the Washington Monument glowing white out the right-side window, did one answer occur to him.

He resisted the idea. Struggled again to find a logic that would put all the pieces together—but Occam’s razor kept jumping up at him: the simplest answer is probably the right one.

And the simplest answer was very simple indeed: they weren’t related at all.

Jake got out of the cab at Madison’s a little after midnight. The front-porch light was burning, and Madison opened the door as he climbed the stairs.

“What happened?” she asked. “Come in . . . You look exhausted.”

“I’m fairly well kicked,” Jake admitted. “The days are getting long.”

They drifted toward the front room. “Tell me,” she said.

“I’ll tell you, but you can’t ever admit knowing, all right? It could put you in legal jeopardy. If you have to perjure yourself, and say you didn’t know, that’s what you do,” Jake said.

“What happened?”

“Rosenquist didn’t want to talk. I faked a Russian roulette thing, using a pistol of your husband’s. I pointed it at Rosenquist’s head and pulled the trigger. That’s a felony, aggravated assault. But he started talking. I hinted that I was from some political group, maybe even an intelligence organization. I told him I didn’t know you.”

“Jeez, Jake.” She was standing close to him, and put her hand on his elbow.

“We had to know,” Jake said. “Here’s the thing: he told me that your husband had brain cancer. He was terminal. Rosenquist said there was no chance he’d make it. When he died, he was already showing functional problems, both physically and mentally. That explains the press reports that he’d been drunk in public. That he seemed to be on the edge of control . . . He was medicated. I think he killed himself—had himself killed—and tried to hang it on Goodman.”

Her hands had gone to her cheeks. “My God. But . . . his head?”

“He might not have known the details, might not have worked through the logic of it. On the other hand, maybe he did. They couldn’t leave the head. They had to know that it would be destroyed, completely, or an autopsy would have shown the tumor. Best way to get rid of it would be . . . to get rid of it.”

“That’s unbelievable.” She was pale as a ghost.

“You don’t believe it?”

“No, I sort of do—but I can’t see anybody planning that. It’s too cold.”

“I was told by somebody who knew him that Lincoln had a mean streak . . . a mean streak can mean a coldness. Maybe he could do it.”

She walked away from him, both hands on top of her head, as if trying to contain her thoughts. “I just, I just . . .”

“Novatny told me the autopsy indicated that Lincoln had been drugged—painkillers. We thought it was to control him; it was actually for the pain. I’d bet he was unconscious when they did it and I’ll bet you anything that Howard Barber set it up. He was Lincoln’s best friend, they share both a sexual orientation and a set of politics. They both hated Goodman, and Barber had done some rough stuff in the military. He had the skills, the guts, the motive, and Lincoln could trust him to do it right.”

“The Schmidt man?”

“I think he was set up. By Barber. I didn’t have a chance to dig for connections, but they were both in the military at the same time. Schmidt was given a general discharge, which usually means a kind of plea bargain. He did something, but they didn’t want to waste time with him, or maybe they didn’t want the publicity. I’ve got some access to military records. I can probably figure out what happened.”

“But why can’t they find . . . oh. You mean, Howard killed him, too? Killed Schmidt?”

“That’s what I think.”

“If Howard killed him, there had to be a plan, Linc would have to have known . . . I don’t think Linc . . . Linc wouldn’t go away without feeding the cats, he wouldn’t kill a man who was innocent.”

“Your husband didn’t have to know the whole plan,” Jake said. “May have preferred not to.”

“Another thing . . .” He fished the note out of his pocket. “I found a note in the second safe. It says, ‘All because of Lion Nerve.’ Do you have any idea what it means? It was right on top of the safe, with the pictures, like it was important.”

She looked at it for a moment, and a thoughtful frown wrinkled her forehead. “I don’t know what it means, but I know what it is. It’s an anagram for something. Linc talked in anagrams—he could come up with an anagram for anything, off the top of his head. He used them as mnemonics.”

Now Jake smiled: “You’re the first person I’ve ever heard pronounce mnemonics,” he said. He took the note back. “The ‘Lion Nerve’ is the anagram?”

“I’d think so.”

He tucked the note in his pocket. “One last thing . . .”

He told her about the package, about the attempt to push Vice President Landers out of his job, about Patterson, about a Wisconsin connection. She listened carefully, then asked, “I know Tony Patterson from the campaign. He’s a smart man—so why couldn’t it be Goodman? How do you know Goodman didn’t take Linc, to get this package? You say that’s what Tony Patterson thinks. That makes perfect sense to me.”

“Because then, Schmidt doesn’t make any sense,” Jake said. “What I think is this: I think we have two groups fighting it out in the dark. Goodman’s people have gotten a sniff of the package, and they are desperately trying to find it, to push it out early. Maybe even to make an explicit deal that would get Goodman into Landers’s job. Barber’s group has the package, or knows where it is, or who has it, and they don’t want it pushed out until the last minute, when it’ll do the most damage.”

Madison thought about it for a minute, then said, “Wisconsin.”

“That’s where the package is supposedly coming from.”

“There’s a man there named Alan Green,” Madison said. “He runs a polling company called the PollCats, something like that.”

“You think?”

She nodded. “He was an aide to a congressman here for ten years or so, before his guy lost and Alan went back home to make some money. He’s gay. He and Linc had a relationship. They’ve always been tight politically. If the package is coming from Wisconsin, Al knows everybody in Wisconsin. He could be the tie between Wisconsin and Lincoln.”

Jake thought about it for a few seconds, then, “I’ll go out there. Tomorrow.”

“Can I come with you?” she asked. “I know Alan fairly well, he’d talk to me.”

Jake was shaking his head. “You’re too visible. If there’s ever an investigation, you don’t want to have been anyplace around Wisconsin. You want to be able to claim that even if your husband was involved in the package deal, he didn’t tell you, specifically to protect you. If you’ve gone to Wisconsin . . .”

“What about you?”

“I’ll go to a little trouble to cover my tracks, though nothing’s ever perfect. You have to hope that the tracks get lost in the clutter.”

“All right.” She put her hands to her face and rubbed. “What will you do if you find the package?”

“Break it out,” Jake said. “I’ll have no choice.”

“You could just walk away,” she said. “Right now. Go back to the university. Write another book.”

“I could. But there are two factors here. If the Republicans—you guys—have it, you’ll break it out anyway, and wreck someone I like. The president. He’s a pretty good guy. But the other thing is, as long as there’s a scramble going on, you’re going to be near the center of it. Everybody’s going to at least check you. Both sides, Barber and Goodman, have people who I suspect would kill for it. I don’t want you to become a target.”

She shook her head. “Howard wouldn’t hurt me. We’ve always been sympathetic . . . simpatico.”

“This isn’t a friendship thing anymore,” Jake said. “Listen, I’ve got to . . . mmm . . . I don’t want to think that you’re playing me. That Madison Bowe is playing Jake Winter. Because there are some real problems. They’ve got lethal injection in Virginia. Even if Barber could beat the charge of killing Lincoln, making it out to be assisted suicide, he’s got the Schmidt thing hanging over his head. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that Schmidt’s buried out in the woods. If you know about it, you could be in trouble with him. You could be part of a murder conspiracy. If you don’t, you could still be a serious danger to him, and he to you. Either way, you could be in trouble.”

She stared at him for a second, then stood up and dusted the seat of her pants. “Maybe I should go to New York. Or Santa Fe. Tell a couple of people I can trust, and just split.”

“That might not be a bad idea, going to New York,” Jake said. He looked at his watch, stepped back toward the door. “I’m going to try to work this through. You—don’t isolate yourself. The more people you keep around you, the safer you’ll be.”

She walked him back to the door. “What you said a minute ago . . . whether I’m telling you the truth about Schmidt.”

“Yeah?”

He turned on the porch, his stick and briefcase in hand, hoping for a good-bye kiss, and she said, “You don’t trust me.”

“Not yet, not entirely,” he confessed. “But I’m trying as hard as I can.”

“Try harder.” She closed the door, and he walked down to the curb to wait for the taxi.

The governor was asleep when Darrell walked through the front door, punched a code in the burglar alarm, flipped on a hall light, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. He tripped another alarm, a silent alarm, on the way up, and a strobe began blinking at the governor’s bedside.

Goodman woke and heard Darrell call, “It’s me, Arlo.” Goodman sat up, turned on the bedside lamp. “Come in. What happened?”

Darrell pushed into the bedroom. “Sorry. It’s important. I want you to know what I’m doing.”

“What?”

“We’ve got a lead on the package. Winter was in New York, he came back to talk to Madison Bowe, we got the whole conversation. They must’ve been sitting right under the bug.”

“What’s the lead?”

“Bowe thinks it might be with a guy named Alan Green, out in Madison. Should have thought of him, but I didn’t know he was from Wisconsin. He was a staffer on Bowe’s last campaign.”

“Holy shit.” Goodman jumped out of bed, took a turn around the bedroom. “This is fuckin’ wonderful. Get the package, Darrell.”

“We’re trying to get out to Madison, me ’n’ George. Winter’s going tomorrow morning, I don’t think we can beat him out there. We’ve lined up a state plane, we’re getting the paperwork done now, but we can’t take it right to Madison. Somebody might see it. So we’re flying into Chicago, we’ll drive from there. It’ll be close.”

“Get the package, okay? That’s what you’re for. Get the package,” Arlo said. “You get it, I’ve got one foot in the White House.”

Darrell smiled a thin dark smile. “If Winter gets it, do we take it away from him?”

Goodman pondered for a moment, then said, “No. If you’re sure he’s got it, we can float a rumor that the administration has it, and that’d force their hand. But we’ve got to be sure they have it.”

“There’s another thing,” Darrell said. “Bowe had brain cancer. He probably planned his own murder—it was probably carried out by Howard Barber.”

Goodman whistled. “How sure?”

“Ninety-five percent. That’s why the body was full of painkillers. If we do an analysis of the people around Barber, we could probably pick out the ones who helped pick up Bowe. We could grab one of them, stick a battery up his ass, and get enough detail to hang Barber.”

Goodman said, “The package first. We can handle Barber later. Was Madison Bowe in on it? The killing?”

The man shrugged. “We don’t know that yet.”

“If we could find out . . .”

“Grab a guy, stick a battery up his ass.”

Goodman was irritated. “You’re a little too quick with that, Darrell. We’re not talking about cats. When people disappear, other people ask questions.”

“If the guy disappears, we could probably hang that on Barber, too. A smear of blood in the trunk of his car . . .”

“Get the package, Darrell.”

13

Jake was moving early. The fastest way from Washington to Madison was through Milwaukee, driving the last ninety miles into Madison. He got a car from Hertz and headed west, a drive of an hour and a half, including the time spent fighting traffic going out. He’d gone back into the end of winter—the trees were just opening up, the wind was from the south, warm and smooth, telling of spring.

The car’s navigation system took him off I-94 down into the city, to Johnson Street, two or three blocks from the Wisconsin capitol. He must not be far, he thought, from the university—the sidewalks were full of buzz-cut students with book bags. Undoubtedly, he thought, full of that fuckin’ Ayn Rand and Newt Gingrich.

The PollCats’ address was a shabby two-story brick-and-glass professional building left over from the 1970s. The narrow parking lot, in back, had only four cars in it, with grass and weeds growing through a jigsaw pattern of cracks in the blacktop. Jake got his cane and his case, walked in the back door through a long dim hallway smelling of microwave chicken-noodle soup, to a cramped lobby, and found a listing for PollCats on the second floor.

He went up, stepped off the elevator: PollCats had an office at the end of another gloomy strip of carpet, one of eight doors off the hallway. The hall was silent. Two of the doors had signs next to them, six did not, and through the glass door-inserts, appeared empty.

At PollCats, through the glass door panels, he could see a blond receptionist reading a Vanity Fair. Jake turned the knob and went inside. The receptionist dropped the magazine into a desk drawer when she heard the doorknob rattle, perked up, and smiled at him. He smiled back and said, “I’m here to see Alan Green.”

She was pretty, peaches-and-cream complexion, blue eyes, hair done in a French twist. “Do you have an appointment?”

“No, I don’t. I’m a government researcher, visiting from Washington. It’s quite important.”

She picked up her phone. “What branch of the government?”

“The executive,” he said. He took his White House pass from his wallet and handed it to her. She looked at it for a second, then put the phone down and said, “Just a moment.”

She disappeared through a door into the interior. Jake waited, ten seconds, fifteen, she was back. “He just has to get off a phone call.”

At that moment, they both heard, faintly, the flushing noise from a toilet, and she got a little pink: Jake said, “I would have told me the same thing.”

“It seemed better than the alternative,” she said. Then, “When was the last time you were at the White House?”

“Last night.”

“Did you see the president?”

“No. But once I did, and he nodded at me.”

“Must give you a feeling of power,” she said, tongue-in-cheek.

“I repeat the story whenever I can,” Jake said. “I’ve been to a half dozen dinner parties on it.”

They were still chatting, the girl a little flirty, but way too young, Jake thought—twenty, maybe, twenty-two—when Alan Green popped through the interior door. Green was short, bald, and burly, wide shouldered and narrow waisted, like a former college wrestler or gymnast. He wore khaki slacks, a white dress shirt, and striped tie, the tie loose at his thick neck, and a corduroy jacket with leather patches at the elbows. He smiled and asked, “Mr. Winter? Can I help you?”

“I need to speak to you privately,” Jake said.

“Could you tell me the subject?”

“Lincoln Bowe.”

“I heard the news. The news was terrible,” Green said. “What is your involvement?”

Jake glanced at the receptionist, then said, “I can tell you here, or privately. If I tell you here, you may pull this young lady into what’s about to happen.”

Green’s smile faded. “What’s about to happen?”

“You should know that as well as I do, Mr. Green. The, mmm, package is about to break into the open. A number of people think it may be the motive for this murder.”

The blood drained from Green’s face, and Jake knew that he’d connected. He looked at the receptionist, who shook her head, confused, and Green said, “You better come in. Katie, stop all my calls. Call Terry and tell him I can’t make it. I’ll call him later. Tell him I had an emergency.”

Green’s office was a twenty-by-twenty-foot cubicle furnished with a cheap Persian rug over the standard gray business carpet, leather chairs, and photographs: the faces of fifty politicians, ninety-nine predatory eyes and one black eye-patch worn by the former governor of Colorado, all signed. There were ten more of Green with two presidents and a selection of Washington politicians; and three personal photos, all of striking young men.

“What about this package?” Green asked. He picked up a short stack of paper, squared it, put it in an in-box.

“I have a general outline of what the package is, the highway deal,” Jake said. “I don’t yet have it. The package has apparently caused at least one and perhaps two murders. Very likely two. I’m coordinating with the lead investigator for the FBI on this, a man named Chuck Novatny. You can call him if you wish.”

“I don’t know this package,” Green said.

Jake let the annoyance show on his face: “Don’t bullshit me, Mr. Green. I got your name from one of the principals in this case. And if you really didn’t know, we’d still be talking out in the hallway.”

Green blinked. He’d felt the trap snap. Jake continued: “We can handle it as a political issue or we can handle it as a criminal matter. Once this package gets out there, nobody’s going to much care about the route—but they will care about who tried to suppress it, who tried to keep it undercover, because those are the most likely motives for the murders.”

“I don’t know . . . What murders? Lincoln Bowe, I’ve heard there’s some question . . .”

Jake shook his head: “There’s no question. There are people who’d like you to believe it was a suicide, but he was alive and heavily drugged when he was shot through the heart, and that makes it murder. The killers tried to frame a second man, a Virginia man, for the murder—and the second man is missing and we believe he’s also dead. You are playing with fire, Mr. Green. You are in deep jeopardy, not only from the law, the FBI, but from people with guns . . . unless you’re one of the gunmen yourself, or are cooperating with them.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Green snapped. They stared at each other for a minute, then Green asked, “Another gentleman came to see me about this. I told him that I had no idea where this package might be.”

“Who was that?”

He shook his head: “I won’t tell you that, if you don’t already know.”

“I probably know, but there are several possibilities,” Jake said.

“A black gentleman.”

“Yes. I know him. A good friend of Lincoln Bowe’s, and possibly of yours.” Jake’s eyes flicked toward the pictures of the young men, and then back to Green. “The black gentleman shares a cultural . . . choice . . . with you.”

Green said nothing.

“And he doesn’t have the package?” Jake asked.

“Apparently not. He didn’t when he was here.”

“Mr. Green, I’m sure you’ve done the calculations that we’ve all done. I know from your background that you’d like the package to be broken out later in the year. That’s not going to happen now. I don’t care how it comes out, only that it comes out soon. So that we can have a fair election, straight up. If I leave here without it, I am going to sit in my car and call my FBI contact on the telephone, and tell him about it. I think you’ll almost certainly be in jail tonight. I don’t think you’ll be getting out any time soon.”

“Jesus Christ,” Green said. He pulled a Kleenex out of a box in his desk drawer and patted his sweating scalp. “You don’t mess around, do you?”

“There’s no time. There’s just no time,” Jake said. “There are some violent people looking for this package, and I’m afraid more people will wind up dead if they keep struggling to find it.”

“That goddamned woman,” he said. “If she hadn’t put that paper together . . .”

“What woman?”

Green took a cell phone out of his coat pocket and began working one of the buttons with his thumb. As he did, he said, “Mr. Winter. I don’t have the package. I know about it. I’ve actually been through it. I’ll probably tell you who has it, but I’ve got to talk to her first. I can’t just have you show up . . . I mean, what if you’re the guy with the gun? I’ve never seen you before. And maybe the best thing would be if she went to the FBI. I’ve gotta have some time. I’ve gotta think.”

Jake looked at his watch. “How much time?”

“I don’t know if I can get her. If she’s out . . . she doesn’t have a cell phone. Anyway, she didn’t the last time I talked to her.”

“So try her,” Jake said.

“Not with you sitting here. We may have to talk . . .”

“I’ll come back in an hour,” Jake said. “Get in touch with her.”

“I’ll tell you right up front that she was hoping to get a little something out of the package,” Green said. “Linc suggested that she could get a decent job, if the package came out at the right time. Maybe I could . . .”

“Our friends get taken care of,” Jake said. “Nothing illegal, or unethical, but they get the attention they deserve. They wind up with decent jobs and benefits and pensions.”

“Okay . . . I’ll try to call her,” Green said. He looked at the cell-phone screen, then laid it on his desk, pulled out another tissue, and patted his scalp again. “Jesus Christ.”

Jake got up, stepped toward the door, said, “See you in an hour.”

Green called after him, “You’ve seen the FBI reports on Linc?”

“I have not—but I talk to the lead investigator every day.”

“There are rumors . . . barbed wire, no head, that sounds like he was tortured,” Green said.

“I wouldn’t want you to pass this around . . .”

“No, no, of course not.”

“We think that was an effort by his friends—your friends—to increase publicity,” Jake said. “I can’t tell you everything behind the supposition, and you might know more about it than I do . . .”

“I do not,” Green protested.

“. . . but he was definitely dead before he was decapitated, and before he was burned. The whole burning scene seems to have been set up to imply that the Watchmen were involved somehow . . . it was set up to resonate with the idea that the Watchmen are Nazis, or Klan, who kill people and burn them as examples.”

“And they don’t? How about the Mexican kid . . . ?”

Jake held up his hands, shutting Green off: “I don’t want to get in a political argument. The Watchmen may be Nazis, for all I know. But the scene itself seems to be a setup, managed by Lincoln Bowe’s friends. That’s what we believe.”

He left Green staring at the cell phone. In the outer office, the secretary ditched the Vanity Fair again and stood up. “All done with the secret talks?”

“Nope. I’ll be back. Could you tell me where I could get a bagel and a book?”

She drew a quick map on a piece of printer paper, pointing Jake toward the campus and the campus bookstore, at the far end of State Street. As she gave him the directions, she patted him on the arm: a toucher, he thought. She was nothing but friendly, smiling as she sent him on his way. If he’d been fifteen years younger, he would have been panting after her.

Might be panting a little anyway.

Of course, there was Madison—the woman, not the town. Madison, who’d once kissed him. And then didn’t. He thought about that as he got oriented with the hand-drawn map, and started toward the campus.

The girl’s map was accurate enough, but didn’t have a scale. He had to walk nearly a mile; flinched at the sight of a big GMC sports-utility vehicle with blacked-out windows, rolling along beside him. Remembered the beating he’d taken. If God gave those guys back to him . . .

He smiled at the thought.

The day was a nice one, the beginning of warmer weather, and the college girls were coming out of their winter cocoons, walking along with their form-fitting jeans and soft breast-clinging tops. Excellent.

Maybe get a novel, Jake thought: he’d just read the first of a series of novels about British fliers during World War I, by Derek Robinson, and was anxious to get another. And, of course, university bookstores were the most likely place to find his own books; like most authors, he always checked.

The store was a good one. He found The Goshawk Squadron and copies of both of his books, though only one of each, in what he thought was an obscure location. When he was sure nobody was looking, he reshelved some outward-facing books so that only their spines showed, and then faced out his own book. The shelf was still too low, but there was nothing he could do about that.

Nevertheless, two copies. With a sense of satisfaction, he walked across the street, got a bagel with cream cheese, and sat on a bench in the sun and started reading about the Goshawks . . .

Madison Bowe stood behind the etched-glass insert in the front door, watching as Howard Barber climbed out of his car, straightened his tie, patted his pockets as though checking for keys, then headed up the walk onto the porch. He was wearing the usual wraparound blades–style sunglasses and dark suit. He was reaching for the doorbell when she opened the door.

He stepped inside, took his sunglasses off, said, “Maddy, what happened, you sounded . . .”

She hit him hard. Not a slap, but with a balled-up fist, hit him in the cheekbone as hard as she could; but she was not a big woman, hadn’t thrown many punches, and he twitched away before the punch landed and that took some of the impact out of it.

She tried again, but he was ready this time, brushed her off. “Hey, hey, what the hell?”

She shouted at him: “You killed Lincoln and you killed Schmidt and now the whole thing is coming down on us.”

“No, no, no . . .” He had his hands up now, backing away from her.

She was spitting, she was so angry, the words tumbling out of her. “Don’t lie to me, Howard. I know about the brain tumor, I know about the medication. I stayed up all night, trying to work out explanations, and there aren’t any. You killed Howard and you killed Schmidt. Now Jake Winter knows about the package and he’s looking for it.”

“Ah, jeez,” Barber said, dropping his hands. She took a step toward him and he said, “Maddy, don’t hit me again. That hurt like hell. Just listen for a minute, huh?”

“Howard . . .”

“Linc died at . . . a friend’s place. He’d worked out the whole thing, the whole thing involving Schmidt. When he’d died, we took him down to the basement and shot him. We shot him in a way that would keep the slug in the body and we planted the pistol at Schmidt’s place.”

“And killed Schmidt,” Madison shouted: but she was pleading for a denial.

He gave it to her. “We didn’t kill Schmidt. Schmidt’s in Thailand, screwing twelve-year-olds. We’re not gonna kill some innocent guy.”

“Thailand?”

“Schmidt has a thing about hookers,” Barber said. “Young brown hookers. He’s also tied to Goodman. They were on the same base at Latakia, at the same time, and he kept trying to get into the Watchmen. And he likes guns.”

“Guns . . .”

“Guns. On top of it all, he was desperate for money. We told him about a job possibility in Thailand, tending bar in an American place down south of Bangkok. He took the job. We’d fixed it up through a pal of mine—had to pay most of his salary, so the Thai guy who runs the place essentially has a free American bartender for a couple of months.”

She wasn’t sure whether or not to believe him, but she pushed ahead. “Lincoln was dead?”

“I sat with him until he stopped breathing. He took an overdose of Rinolat.”

“And Schmidt?”

“Schmidt’s in a beach town about the size of my dick,” Barber said. “We told him he was hired to play the part of an old expat China hand. He’s grown a beard, makes drinks, he’s getting along pretty well for the first time in his life.”

“Why don’t they know this? Why don’t the police know this?”

Barber shrugged. “You don’t have to check out of the country yet. You just have to check in. We gave him the ticket, so there’s no financial record.”

“Howard, if you’re lying . . .”

“I’m not lying. Schmidt has no idea of who we are, of who bought him the ticket, of how it worked,” Barber said. “He just saw a good deal being handed to him by a guy in a bar, and he took it. If somebody thinks we killed him, if there were ever any legal question . . . he’ll be ‘discovered’ by an American tourist.”

“Jesus, Howard. How can you keep this shut up? There must be so many people involved . . .”

“The same people who’ve kept their mouths shut about Linc and friends all these years.”

She stepped back to think about it; reeling from information overload.

Barber said: “Now tell me about Winter. How’d he hear about the package?”

“I don’t know how he heard about it, but he tracked down Tony Patterson, and Tony gave him the outline,” Madison said. “He doesn’t know where it is, or who has it. He doesn’t even know if it’s real. I told him about Al Green out in Wisconsin. A wild-goose chase. I mostly wanted to get him away from here. Away from you. You guys are the ones who mugged him, right? You could have killed him . . .”

“Listen, listen . . . He goes to see Green, that’s another day or two. Maybe I can talk to a couple of people, get him shunted off again, in another direction.”

“You didn’t answer the question. You’re the guys who mugged him . . .”

Barber’s eyes shifted: that was an answer. She stepped toward him again, lifted her fist, but he stepped sideways, one hand up to block, and asked, “Is he the one who told you about the brain tumor?”

“Yes. He . . .” She started to tell him about Rosenquist, but suddenly shifted, suddenly thought she might not want to. She still wasn’t sure about Schmidt, what Barber might have done to him. And her feelings about Jake were confusing: Wasn’t he the enemy? “He apparently found a computerized medical record somewhere. He’s got all kinds of computer access, intelligence services, the FBI.”

“That sounds a little hinky,” Barber said.

“That’s what he told me.”

“You gotta manage the guy, Maddy,” Barber said, his voice urgent. “He’s talking to you, he’s coming to you, you gotta manage him.”

“I’m trying. That’s why I sent him to Wisconsin.”

Barber nodded: “That was quick thinking. If I hadn’t grilled Green myself, I would have said he’d be the guy who’d know . . .”

“I just hope he doesn’t,” Madison said. “I just hope he wasn’t lying to you.”

“Nah. He would have told me. He knew about me and Linc . . .”

“So where is it? Why can’t you find it?”

“We’re still looking, but we’ve decided that if we can’t find it, we wait until after the convention, and then we leak what we’ve got. We get people looking at that highway project. We have enough details that we can redo it—maybe even force the guy with the package out into the open.”

She pressed her fingertips to her forehead. “How did this ever start? How could you and Lincoln . . . What could possibly be worth it?”

Barber examined her for a moment, as though he were puzzled, and then said, “We’re talking about the presidency, Maddy. We might be talking about changing the history of the country. If people like Goodman get their way, this place could go down like Rome. A hundred years from now, two hundred years from now, people will look back . . .

“Spare me,” she said. “I don’t need any historical analysis. I need to get back to the farm. I need to go riding. I need to get away.”

“Hang on, baby. We’re almost there. Hang on.”

The whole thing had gone to hell, and Darrell Goodman didn’t quite know how to get out of it. He and George had flown to Chicago on a state plane, on Watchmen business. At O’Hare, they’d rented a Dodge van, the most inoffensive and invisible car that he could think of, and had headed north for Madison.

The trip had taken longer than he thought. Both he and George were wasted from the overnight flight, and the stress; and Darrell was annoyed with George, because George kept having to stop at roadside rests and gas stations to pee.

George had been an operator with the CIA, a contract guy, but wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Arlo Goodman had once said to Darrell, “Even the CIA needs guys who carry stuff. That’s what George did.”

Darrell had driven: George had ridden silently along, half asleep, waking up every hour or so to ask if they could stop. George thought he had an infection, Darrell thought it might be his prostate, but whatever it was, George couldn’t drink half a Coke unless he was standing next to the can.

And that seemed wrong; that simple problem had unbalanced Darrell. You didn’t have a mission fouled up because a guy had to take a leak. That wasn’t the way the pros did it.

They’d gotten to Madison later than they’d hoped, but had just spotted the PollCats building when they saw Winter walk out the front door, tapping along with his cane. “Knew he’d beat us,” Darrell said. They watched as Winter turned away from the building, going on down the street. George, sleepy eyed, said, “Want to take him?”

“No. No, for Christ’s sake. We find out if he got it, and if he didn’t, who’s got it, and we take it away from them.”

They watched until Winter was out of sight, then pulled into the parking lot in back. From the parking lot to the PollCats front door, everything went fine. They saw nobody, heard nobody. George said, “This place is a ghost town.”

Then they opened the door and everything went to hell.

Now the blond-chick secretary was pressed back against the office wall, eyes wide with fear, George in front of her, dressed all in black like a movie villain from Batman, not letting her move. Darrell pointed a leather-gloved hand at Alan Green and said, “If you don’t give me that fuckin’ package, you fuck, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ weasel neck.”

He knew that wasn’t the idea. There should have been an urbane approach, an understated threat, a sly blackmail, and instead, it had gone straight in the dumper, and here he was . . .

And then he made the mistake of pushing Green in the chest. Green didn’t just look like a wrestler: he’d been one, at the University of Wisconsin, twenty years earlier. He was scared and angry and strong. He caught Goodman’s arm and made a move, so quick that Goodman, good athlete that he was, was spun off balance and found his arm locked and bent and choked off a scream and Green said, “I oughta throw your ass out. . . .”

Nobody found out where he was going to throw Goodman, because George, in one quick motion, pulled a silenced .22 from a shoulder holster and shot Green in the back of the head. The gun made a spitting sound, clanked as the action moved, and Green went down like a load of beef.

Goodman twisted in surprise, said, “Jesus Christ,” looked at George, looked at Green. The blond secretary looked at both men, looked at Goodman’s eyes, knew she was dead: she launched herself at him with her fingernails, slashing, as quick as Green had been, cutting Goodman at the neck and down his arms, and Goodman said, “Jesus, Jesus,” trying to fend her off, and there was another quick spit and the blonde went down, bounced, landed on her back, naked blue eyes staring lifelessly at the ceiling.

Goodman was breathing hard, stunned, astonished, looked at George, gasped, “We gotta get the fuck outa here,” and he led the way out, said, “Put away the fuckin’ gun, we gotta get out,” and panic clutched at him and he shook it off, and they were out, the door locking behind them . . .

Jake lost some time with The Goshawk Squadron ; glanced at his watch and was shocked to see that it was after one o’clock. He got up, put the novel in his case, and headed back to the PollCats office.

Up State, down Johnson, watching the ass on a tall slender blonde, and when she turned, thought, my God, you’ve been watching the ass of a child. She stopped at a curb to cross the street, caught his eye and smiled a bit; not a child’s smile.

In the old brick building, the smell of rug and flaking paint, up the stairs, to the PollCats door. It was locked. He rattled the handle, then knocked. No answer. And he thought, Ah, man.

They’d run on him, and he hadn’t seen it coming. He rattled the door again, exhaled in exasperation. The critical thing was, time, and Green must know that. All he had to do was stay out of sight for a while. . . .

He was turning away from the door when he noticed the shoe. The shoe was in the open doorway of Green’s private office. He couldn’t see all of it, just a heel and part of the instep. It was a woman’s shoe, upside down, the short stacked-heel in the air, and there, in the corner, an oval, that might be a toe in a nylon stocking.

Jake backed away from the door. Wondered what he’d touched. Thought, Maybe it’s not what it looks like. Thought, What if somebody’s not dead, what if I can save a life by calling the cops? Thought, The big GMC with the blacked-out windows.

Thought, That’s ridiculous, there’s gotta be a thousand of those trucks in Madison . . .

But he knew what was in the office. Felt it like an ice cube in his heart.

He walked to the end of the hall, searching the corners of the ceilings, listening for voices. Heard nothing; but did see a woman in one of the offices, hunched over a stack of paper, working with a pencil. No cameras. But: he’d not tried to hide his approach. He’d used his cane, carried his case, hadn’t worn a hat. If anybody had seen him, they’d remember. And he’d for sure wrapped his fingers around the arm of a chair in Green’s office.

“Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” He walked back to the PollCats office, knocked once, then again, rattled the door. Nothing. The shoe sat there. “Goddamnit.”

He used the steel grip on the cane to punch a hole in the glass panel. He punched out enough that he could get a hand through, didn’t try to hide the noise; but then, there really wasn’t much noise.

He stepped inside the door, crossed to Green’s office.

The blond secretary lay on her back, a palm-sized spot of blood under her head. Green was also on his back, a stain on the rug beneath his head. There was a spatter of blood on the glass of the pictures on the wall.

Jake looked for a moment, then took out his cell phone and dialed. Novatny came up: “Yes?”

“Chuck, this is Jake Winter. We’ve got a hell of a problem, man.” He looked at the blank dead face of the young secretary. “Jesus, Chuck, we’ve got, ah . . .”

“Jake, Jake . . . ?”

Novatny told him to walk out of the office and wait in the hallway, not to let anyone in the office. “I’ll have somebody there in five minutes. I don’t know who yet.”

Jake hung up, took a step toward the door. Hesitated. Stepped back to Green. Reached beneath him, toward his heart. Felt the cell phone. Slipped his hand inside, took the phone, put it in the phone pocket of his briefcase. Looked at the office phone for a second, then took a tissue out of a box of Kleenex on Green’s desk, picked up the desk phone and pushed the redial button. The phone redialed and a man answered on the first ring, “Domino’s.” Nothing there—not unless Domino’s Pizza was delivering the package.

He hung up, stepped toward the door, caught the glaze on the secretary’s dead, half-open eyes. The rage surged: the same rage that he’d felt in Afghanistan when he’d encountered dismembered civilians, killed by dissidents to make some obscure point. The secretary had been a kid. Probably waiting to get married; probably looking forward to her life. All done now. All over.

His hands were shaking as he turned away and stepped past her, out into the hallway.

An agent from the Madison FBI office arrived one minute ahead of the Madison cops.

14

The FBI man took a look and backed away, pointed a finger at Jake and said, “Wait.”

The first cops walked in and walked back out, shut the door on the PollCats office, faced Jake to a wall, checked for weapons, read him his rights, and sat him down in the hallway, on a chair they borrowed from one of the occupied offices.

Jake told them that he didn’t want a lawyer, but he did want to talk to Novatny privately, and wouldn’t make any other statement. The FBI man went away for a while, then came back and said, “Agent Novatny will be here in three hours. He’s flying straight in from Washington.”

The Madison homicide cops, who arrived ten minutes after the patrolmen, were pissed, though the lead investigator, whose name was Martin Wirth, allowed that Jake probably wasn’t the killer, since he’d reported the crime. “But he knows something about it and I want to know what it is,” Wirth told the FBI man. “This is my town, this is my homicide, and the entire FB fuckin’ I can kiss my ass. This guy’s going nowhere until I say so.”

The FBI man put his sunglasses on, looked at the investigator, and said, “Uh-huh.”

Wirth asked Jake, “Where’d you get that cut on your head?”

“I was mugged, in Washington.”

“Right.”

“I have a copy of the police report in my briefcase,” Jake said.

“You know, these guys are getting away . . .”

Jake said, “Look: Nothing I know can get you to anyone. Everything I know is background. I didn’t see anything you haven’t seen. I don’t know who might have done this.”

“Then how come you won’t make a statement?”

“I can’t tell you why I won’t make a statement, because then you’d know something I’m not sure I should tell you,” Jake said. “Okay?”

“Fuck no.”

“I will make a statement to agent Novatny and then agent Novatny can either tell me to make a statement to you, and I will. Or he’ll tell me not to, for national security reasons, and I won’t,” Jake said. “I’m probably saving your life. If I told you what I know, the FBI might have to come in here and kill all of you.”

“You’re being a wiseass,” Wirth said. “We don’t like wiseasses in Madison.”

“Marty,” the FBI man said, “Madison is the national capital of wiseasses. What are you talking about?”

The police kept Jake sitting outside Green’s office as their crime-scene people came and went; investigators talked to everyone in the building, but nobody had seen any strangers coming or going at the time of the murders. Nobody had heard any shots. The building, it seemed, was more than half empty, and the offices that were occupied were mostly sedentary businesses without much traffic: two bookkeepers, a State Farm agent, an insurance service bureau, the office for a medical waste-disposal service.

In the end, to make the city cops happy, Jake had to go down to the police headquarters and sit in a conference room. He felt as if he should be sitting on a stool, with a pointed hat on his head, facing into a corner. On the other hand, the cops were exceptionally mellow, and gave him coffee, doughnuts, and magazines.

Novatny showed up four hours after Jake called him, Parker trailing behind. Wirth was still working, bared his teeth at Jake when he showed the two Washington FBI men into the conference room, and said, “I’ll be waiting.”

Parker nodded and pulled the door shut.

“What happened?” Novatny asked. He took a seat across a conference table, while Parker braced his butt on a windowsill.

“I was following up a possibility on Bowe,” Jake said. “Just cleaning up. I thought it was thin. Then this. Either it’s not related at all or somebody killed Alan Green to shut him up.”

“Keep talking.”

“Bowe was gay,” Jake said. “He was also dying of brain cancer. That’s why he was full of drugs, for the pain. I think—but I don’t know—that Bowe and a group of his gay friends plotted a way to make his death look like a murder, and to blame Arlo Goodman for it.”

They both stared at him for a moment, then Parker, his forehead wrinkling, asked, “Why?”

“Because they think Goodman is the point man for a fascist political movement—or a populist movement, whatever. Profamily, prochurch, semisocialist, antigay, intolerant, authoritarian. They set up Schmidt for the fall, because he was linked to Goodman. Then, I think, they killed Schmidt. But I don’t know that. That’s just what I think.”

“Green was in on it? I saw the pictures in his office . . .”

“Green was gay, a former lover of Bowe’s. He might have been about to fold up. I mentioned Schmidt to him, how he disappeared. He sorta freaked. I got the feeling that he looked on the whole Bowe-death thing as a complicated political joke. Certainly didn’t think murder was involved . . . Anyway, I came out to talk to Green about it and scared the hell out of him. He said he had to talk to some friends about what to tell me, so I walked down to a bookstore, bought a novel, ate a bagel, and when I came back . . . there they were.”

“Sonofabitch,” Parker said.

“How long have you known this, Jake?” Novatny asked. “That Bowe was gay? That the whole thing might have been a setup? Why in the hell didn’t you tell us?”

“I’ve known Bowe was gay for a couple of days. Madison Bowe told me, asked me not to pass it along if I didn’t have to, but left it to my discretion. She was afraid that it would leak—and it would have—and that would have ended the investigation. It would have become a gay thing. She still believes that her husband was murdered, and that Arlo Goodman was involved. And she had a point.”

“But now . . .”

“Now things have changed,” Jake said. “I didn’t think it was a gay thing. That was too far-fetched and that’s why I didn’t tell you about it. Nobody cares about gay anymore—and Bowe wasn’t even in office. Then I got Madison Bowe’s permission to go to New York and look at Bowe’s apartment. I found an empty pill bottle there—it’s still there—and tracked it back to Bowe’s doctor, who told me about the cancer.”

“And then you thought . . .”

“I thought it was all too much: Nobody can figure out where Bowe went. He was smiling when he disappeared. His body is found in this spectacular way with an arrow pointing straight at Schmidt. Why did Schmidt get rid of every gun in the house, except the one that could convict him of killing Bowe? That was goofy. I started thinking that the whole thing was faked. And I’ll bet you something: I bet if you look at Schmidt, that you’ll find some kind of tie to Arlo Goodman. One that Goodman might not even know about, but that would look suspicious if somebody got tipped off.”

“So it’s all a fraud. The Bowe murder,” Parker said.

“Yes. I started to think it was basically a suicide, and it occurred to me that, if that’s what happened, that his friends had to be involved. People he could trust absolutely—and that suggested it might be this group of gay lovers, people who’d kept the secret all those years. And who had reason to fear Goodman.”

Novatny and Parker looked at each other, then Novatny rubbed his face with his hands and said, “On the way out here, I figured out twenty reasons why you were here and there were dead people, and how it might be related to Bowe. Nothing I thought of was this weird.”

“Is Madison Bowe in on it?” Parker asked.

“No.” Jake shook his head. “She and Lincoln Bowe haven’t been together for years. She’s just been a cover for him. And she’s the one who’s been pushing the investigation. She got me started in this direction. She gave me Green’s name. She gave me the key to her apartment, pointed me at the doctor. I think that Lincoln Bowe deliberately kept her in the dark. Maybe because she wouldn’t have gone along; or maybe to protect her.”

Novatny was skeptical. “You have no idea who the killers might be.”

“Bowe’s gay friends. You could ask around, you’ll turn them up. Madison still thinks that Goodman is involved. She thinks the idea of a bunch of Bowe’s friends getting together to kill him is ludicrous. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Assuming that you’re telling us the truth—and I think you are, even if we’re not getting all of it—then the killer’s somebody from here in Madison,” Parker said. “Got to Green inside of an hour.”

Jake scrubbed at his hair with the palms of his hands, then said, “That doesn’t seem right. That just doesn’t seem right. But that’s what happened.”

“Have you figured out how it went down in Green’s office?” Jake asked.

Novatny frowned. “We think the killers were professional—nobody heard any shots, but the shots were probably fired from a .22. Those are not so quiet, so it must have been silenced.”

“How do you know it was a .22?”

“Took a slug out of a wall,” Parker said. “The base was intact, looks like a .22.”

“Could be a .22 mag. The damage was pretty big,” Novatny said.

“They were executed, then,” Jake said.

Novatny brightened: “Not exactly. We think that the secretary tried to resist, tried to fight them off, went after somebody with her nails. She got some skin and a little blood, so we’ve got DNA. If we can find the guy, we can nail him.”

“And Green . . .”

“He took it right in the back of the head. He was executed. We think the secretary tried to resist, that’s when she lost her shoes, got her hands on someone, and Green just stood there and boom.”

“What now?” Jake asked.

Novatny got a tape recorder, read Jake his rights, and got him to repeat the statement. Jake did, but insisted that most of what he said, other than the basics about Bowe’s sexuality and the cancer revelation, was speculation. “I just want out of this,” he said. “I’m a research guy, not a cop. I just want out.”

Novatny talked to the Madison chief, but didn’t tell Jake the outcome. They did cut Jake loose, at seven o’clock. “Are you going back to D.C.?” Novatny asked.

“Yes. But first, I’m going to check into a hotel and get some sleep,” Jake said. “I’m really screwed up.”

“One thing,” Novatny said. “Do not go back to Madison Bowe. She’s going to be a critical witness. Don’t mess with her.”

“Believe me. All I want is out,” Jake said.

Jake walked down to State Street, through a couple of alleys, in and out the back of a pizza place, and found a phone near the restrooms in a sports bar and called Johnson Black, Madison’s lawyer. He got lucky, made the connection, talked to Black for a moment, then ordered a beer at the bar and stood next to the phone. Madison called him back twenty minutes later from a phone in an M Street lounge. “Listen to me,” he said. “There’s been a disaster.”

He told her about it, then said, “So the feds are going to come to you. You confirm the homosexual angle and you tell them why you didn’t want that made public—that you were pushing the investigation into Goodman, and were afraid the homosexual angle would end it. You tell them that sexuality is a private matter, and you had no reason to think that it was involved in Lincoln’s death. You tell them that you had no idea that there was a setup . . .”

“I didn’t,” she said. “But now you’re telling me . . . I caused this girl’s death somehow. If I hadn’t sent you there . . .”

“You didn’t cause her death,” Jake said. “Somebody else did. You can’t anticipate the outcome of everything you do; you can go crazy trying. Somebody else killed them, not you.”

“But if I hadn’t sent you . . .”

“Madison, get a grip. It’s really critical right now. If you’re going to feel guilty, feel guilty about something you actually did.”

“But you don’t know . . .”

“Tell me later,” Jake said. “Not on the phone . . . Has anything happened there that I should know about? Is anybody pushing you?”

“One thing, but . . . ah, jeez, I can’t keep the girl out of my head.”

“Focus, goddamnit. What happened?”

“I talked to Howard, I confronted him. He killed Linc, but it was essentially a suicide. Linc had already taken an overdose. He claims that Schmidt is in Thailand, working as a bartender. That Schmidt is obsessed by brown hookers. Those are Howard’s words. He says that they can bring him back anytime they need to.”

“Ah, jeez. Listen, stay away from Barber. Stay away from him. He’s about to become the eye of a hurricane. He might be involved here . . .”

“Jake . . .”

“Tell the truth, but don’t tell them about the package,” Jake said. “Not yet. Just omit it. Don’t tell them what Barber said. And don’t tell them about this call. This never happened.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ve got to think. Listen, call me tomorrow, on my cell phone, from a public phone. At noon. If anything’s happened, I’ll let you know then. I can’t call you, because if there’s an investigation, they’re going to pull the phone records to see who was talking to whom.”

Off the line, Jake walked back to his car, found a Sheraton hotel, checked in, and began working Green’s cell phone. He’d been talking about a woman who had the package, and had automatically taken the cell phone out of his pocket, as though her number was there.

The phone was unfamiliar, but it took him only a minute to figure out the menu system. The call log showed one outgoing call after Jake’s arrival, lasting twenty-four minutes. The call was to the 715 area code.

Jake found a Yellow Pages in the closet, checked area codes. The 715 code covered most of the north half of Wisconsin. Now for the three-number prefix after the area code.

He signed on to the hotel’s wireless service, went out on the Net, found a listing for Wisconsin prefixes. The three-number prefix was in Eau Claire. He checked an online map: Eau Claire was probably three hours away by car. If the killers had gotten a name, somebody in Eau Claire might already be dead. In fact, if the killers had gotten either the phone number or the name, that person almost surely was dead . . .

He didn’t want to use the FBI search service to find the name behind the number; that could be tracked back to him.

But . . .

He lay on the bed, covered his eyes with his forearm, tried to think about it. If the killers had threatened Green and his secretary to get information on the package, did the killers get the information and then do the killing? Is that why the girl resisted, attacked a gun with her fingernails? Maybe she saw the bullet coming . . .

But if they’d killed the secretary to force the information from Green, there wouldn’t have been any percentage in giving it to them, because Green would have known at that point that he was doomed.

So maybe the killers didn’t have a name . . .

He needed to know whom Green had called without leaving obvious tracks. A thought popped into his head: the public library. Could it be that easy? He went back online, looking for an address of the local public library. When he found it, on the library website, he also found a list of telephone references available online. He worked through the menu, tracking the number: and found it. The Eau Claire number went to a Sarah Levine. He checked another directory and had an address. He said her name aloud, tripping a memory: “Sarah Levine, Sarah Levine . . .”

Lion Nerve. He picked up a pen, crossed out letters. He had Levine, plus o-n-r. Ron Levine.

Back online, using his government access to Social Security records. Ran Ronald Levine against ITEM: Got an immediate hit. Ronald Levine worked for ITEM for seventeen years. Retired, started collecting Social Security, then showed a change-in-status. He checked: Levine had died.

Okay. He knew who had the package—Ron Levine’s widow, Sarah. If she was still alive.

If whoever had killed Green had done it to get the package, and if they had gotten Sarah Levine’s name, then she was probably dead. They’d had more than eight hours to get to her. If they hadn’t, then what? Then, Jake thought, they didn’t get her name, and they could be watching me. Or coming for me.

The Dane County airport had an all-night Hertz car rental service. He called, gave them the rental information on his car, told them that it sounded funny to him—the engine would hesitate when it downshifted, after it got warm. Wondered if he might trade it for another. No problem. He told them he’d be in early.

Tried to sleep. He got his four and a half hours, but he was restless, waiting for something to happen. At two-thirty he was up and moving. He cleaned up, packed, did the on-screen check-out, and carried his overnight bag and case down to the car. Moving fast. If they were going to try to take him, they’d have to catch him in the hundred feet between the hotel and the car, and at three o’clock in the morning, they might be a little slow to react.

He saw nobody in the parking lot, but felt the chill in his spine as he was backing the car out. He made it to the Dane County airport, did the paperwork, upgrading to a Ford SUV, saw nobody out of place. As he was waiting for the Hertz guy to finish the paper, another thought popped into his head. If the watchers were good, and trained, he wouldn’t see anybody.

But now, at least, he wouldn’t be driving a car that he’d been seen in, that might even have a locator hidden on it; maybe a change of cars would throw them.

Out on the interstate, he headed north, driving a little too slow, watching for headlights that stayed back. Got off at a rural highway intersection, watched for lights behind him, saw one car getting off. Took another left, and another quick one, waited, then headed back to the interstate. If they had a team, they could still be with him. If they were in the air, they could still be with him.

But he could do more loops on country roads all the way up, and even, in the last few miles, maybe wrap up a trailing team in the streets of Eau Claire. Whatever: it’d have to be good enough.

All the way north, whenever his headlights swept across the black backdrop of trees, like a projector’s light in a darkened theater, he could see the flickering face of the dead secretary. The face would stay with him for a while, he thought. Cruelly, he found himself wishing she’d fallen facedown, so he wouldn’t have to see it.

Darrell Goodman, worn and scared, put a finger to his lips, hooked Arlo Goodman’s arm, and pulled him toward the staircase. Arlo Goodman followed him down and around to the concrete tunnel in the basement.

“We had a big problem in Wisconsin,” Darrell whispered.

“Not too big,” Arlo said.

“Pretty big. The Green guy went after me, and George shot him. The secretary . . . we had no choice with the secretary. We had no choice.”

Goodman peered at his brother as though he’d gone crazy. “Are you telling me you killed them?”

“There was no choice,” Darrell protested.

“Sweet bleedin’ Jesus.” Arlo stared for another few seconds, trying to grasp it. “I should have strangled you when you were a kid.”

“Listen. Nobody knows,” Darrell said. “We rented the car in Chicago. We put a little mud on the plates, so they’re not on any camera. We went into a parking lot at the back of the building, and nothing faces the back except a brick wall and a door. We went up, nobody saw us. No cameras, we checked. We went in. We put the guns on them to scare them, I slapped Green a couple of times, and the next thing I know, he’s all over me. Then the chick . . . but we got out. Not a sign of anybody looking at us. Went right straight back to Chicago, fast as we could, dumped the weapons on the way, turned in the car and got out of there. I’m going to root the IDs out of the license bureau, nobody’ll ever know.”

“You dumb sonofabitch,” Arlo groaned. “No guns, no guns. Why’d you take guns? You were supposed to blackmail him, for Christ’s sake.”

“He came after me, man. And then George . . .”

Arlo waved him silent. “Where’s George?”

“Sitting in my office.”

“George has to go away,” Arlo said.

Darrell licked his lower lip. “That can happen.”

“Make it happen soon. The next few days. I don’t want to see him anymore.”

“Don’t worry about that . . .”

Arlo slapped his brother on the side of the head with his good hand. “This might screw us for good, dummy. I take it you didn’t get even a sniff of the package?”

“Not a sniff. But Green knew something, I think. We might’ve had a chance, until he came after me. Things just got out of control, you know?”