Dead Watch

“How did your husband know about all the different parts of the deal?”

“He watched the whole thing get set up. There’s a man named Carson, Ron’s boss, he told Ron to keep his nose out of it. That stuff goes on in any big state project. But Ron knew there’d be trouble sooner or later, and he didn’t want to be the one who went to jail, so he made copies of everything. On the sly. Carson’s still one of the big shots at ITEM. He held Sam Landers’s hand through the first couple of apartment projects. And he kept books, on the computer, you know, and Ron made copies. Those are the DVDs.”

They spent an hour sitting on the front-room couch, looking at paper, loading the DVDs into Jake’s notebook, going through the notes, the records, the bank documents, the real estate titles, and tax documents. Altogether, the package was as devastating as advertised. If true.

“If true,” Jake said.

“Well, Al Green said that the thing is, everything here has a public record behind it. Records that the Landerses can’t dodge,” Levine said. “It’s all visible, but nobody could ever tie it together without inside knowledge.”

Jake looked at his watch. “I gotta get you out of here.”

Now she was nervous again. “What’s going to happen?”

“I think, because of what happened in Madison, that you should take a trip,” Jake said. “Do you have any place that you can go? A friend’s, or a sister’s, that’s away from here? Somebody who doesn’t have the same name?”

“I have a sister in Waukesha.”

“Would she put you up for a few days?”

“I’m sure she would,” Levine said.

“Then you should go. Right now—I’ll wait until you’re ready. Leave me a phone number and I’ll get back to you. I’ve got to talk to some people back in Washington.”

“The president?’

“I don’t actually talk to the president that much,” Jake said. “But I’ll talk to some people and see what can be done. If you’ve been straight with us.”

“I’ve been straight,” Levine said. “I knew it was going to cause trouble, but . . . after they took Ron’s pension away, I have no money. I mean, we had some in Fidelity, but it’s mostly gone now. I need to get a job. I can’t work at Wal-Mart, that’s the only thing I can get here, there aren’t any jobs. I might have to sell my house . . .”

Tears were running down her cheeks; Jake wanted to pat her on the shoulder, but he didn’t know quite how to do it. “Let me get you out of here, and get this package to Washington. We’ll figure something out. This is gonna work for you, one way or another.”

She took forever to get dressed and pack: more than an hour, by Jake’s watch. Jake suggested that she call her sister from outside the house.

“You think I’m bugged?”

“I don’t want to take any chances with anything,” Jake said.

When she was ready, she got her dog, a nervous gray whippet, and Jake helped wedge it into a carrying case and carried it down to the tuck-under garage and put it on the front seat of her car.

He carried three more suitcases down, told Levine to give him a week.

“You’ll hear from me, or from somebody with the federal government, in no more than a week. We have to get experts to evaluate the package—you can understand, this is really, really sensitive stuff.”

Jake also gave her a thousand dollars from his stash. “Personal loan,” he said. “Pay it back when you can.”

He followed her out to the Wal-Mart that she didn’t want to work at, watched as she made the call to her sister, then waved good-bye.

The package was in the back of the SUV. He called Gina again and said, “It’d be really helpful if you could get me a ticket back. From Eau Claire, Madison, Milwaukee, or the Twin Cities.”

“Just sit right where you are,” she said. “We’ve got a plane on the way.”

15

On the way to the Eau Claire airport, Jake stopped at a Kinko’s, spent a half hour making a duplicate of the package, and FedExed it to himself in Washington. His next stop was at an OfficeMax, where he bought a cheap plastic briefcase and stuffed the original copy of the package inside. The plane was due at twelve-fifteen; Madison called promptly at noon.

“I talked to the FBI this morning. Your friend Novatny. I didn’t tell them that Howard killed Linc. I was afraid to,” she said. “Although, I think they know. I gave them some names, including Howard Barber’s. I called Howard from a pay phone after I talked to you last night, and told him that the FBI doesn’t know about the package.”

“Okay. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’ve been thinking about it,” Jake said. “Can you come to my place tonight? Bring an overnight bag? I’ve got a guest room.”

“Well . . . Why?”

“I don’t want you staying at your house, alone, but I need you in Washington,” Jake said. “I’d rather explain it to you face-to-face. Try to settle this.”

“Then I’ll do it. What time?”

“I ought to be there by seven or eight. Say, eight o’clock. If I can’t make it, I’ll call you,” Jake said. “Madison: don’t talk about anything sensitive in your living room. Don’t use that phone in the hallway, by the kitchen. Just don’t.”

“You think? I’m bugged?”

“It’s a definite possibility. Keep people around you, don’t get isolated. If you call me, call from a pay phone. When you come tonight, just bump up to the back gate, the way you did last time, and I’ll let you in.”

The jet was assigned to the Department of Homeland Security. It wasn’t fancy, but the turnaround was quick. Jake spent the air time reviewing the package, putting together a presentation. Every once in a while, he’d look out at the countryside below: most of the time, he saw the eyes of Green’s blond secretary.

They flew into National at four o’clock in the afternoon and taxied down to a government hangar. Jake found a driver, from the White House motor pool, waiting on the tarmac, and followed him out to a nondescript Daimler station wagon that smelled of onions and motor oil. He walked into the Blue Room a half hour after the plane touched down.

A navy lieutenant was waiting to escort him up to Danzig’s office. Inside, Gina waved him through.

Danzig was standing beside his desk with his hands in his pockets. He looked like he’d been doing nothing but waiting.

“Did you get it?” Danzig was usually intense; now he was actually vibrating.

Jake nodded, dropped into a chair, his briefcase on his lap. Tired. Stress beginning to bite at him. “The only question is whether it’s real. I’m almost sure it is. I think research will prove it. But I’ve gotten tangled up in a murder investigation, and to tell you the truth, my statement to the FBI and the Madison cops wasn’t exactly complete.”

“How not complete?”

Jake patted the package. “This thing is involved in the killings. We’ve got to give it to the feds as soon as we can. We don’t have more than a few days. I can already feel an obstruction charge out there.”

“If you deliver it to them, the most they can say is that you were late,” Danzig said.

“Yeah, bullshit. If they want me, they can get me,” Jake said. “What I’m going to need is the silken breath of the president blowing down somebody’s back. Words like national security, Someone’s ass is grass, like that.”

Danzig nodded, avoiding Jake’s eyes: “Anyway.”

“Yeah.” Jake started unpacking the cheap briefcase. “Here’s the stuff. Here’s how it worked. . . .”

Danzig wanted to review each piece of paper, to crawl through the books on the DVD disks, to find inconsistencies. They took two hours, the longest time Jake had ever spent in Danzig’s office. They found inconsistencies, but they appeared to be paperwork mistakes, rather than logical errors that would suggest a fraud. When they were done, Danzig stood up, walked around the room in his stocking feet, sighed, and said, “Shit.”

“What do you think?” Jake asked.

“They’re real. I’ve seen stuff like this before, and they have the feeling of reality about them. The grit. A few pieces are missing, but that’s what you’d expect if it was real. The inconsistencies are consistent with reality.”

“I agree. You could get somebody else, maybe, to do some specific checks on the public records, to nail it down.”

Danzig nodded. “Of course. We’ll start that tomorrow. Tonight, if we can, maybe some of the stuff is online.”

“I’d want to see the actual paper, where it exists . . .”

“So would I,” Danzig said. Then, “Okay. You wait here for a minute. I’m going to get the boss.”

“There’s another thing, somewhat related,” Jake said. “And it’s about to pop. Lincoln Bowe was gay. His death was a conspiracy that Bowe set up himself, carried out by a close friend, or a few close friends, in an effort to embarrass Goodman.”

Danzig’s face didn’t move for a moment, as though he hadn’t heard. Then he said, “Holy shit.”

“I had to tell the feds. They’re now investigating Bowe’s gay friends. It’s gonna leak in the next day or two, and the whole investigation is going to lurch that way, away from the package. But it’ll come back.”

Danzig ran one hand through his oily hair and then said, “You’re a hell of a researcher, Jake. I hope you never come after me.”

Danzig padded out of the office, returned five minutes later, trailed by the president. The president was a tall, white-haired Indianan, a former governor and senator, a middle-of-the-roader chosen to lead the ticket when the Democrats decided to get serious. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt, without a tie, and like Danzig, was in his stocking feet. Jake stood up when he walked in.

“Hey, Jake,” he said. They shook hands and the president asked, “What the heck did you drag in this time?”

They spent another twenty minutes combing through the package, and finally the president said to Danzig, “I believe it. What do you think?”

Danzig glanced at Jake, then back to the president, who said, “Go ahead. He’s in deeper than we are.”

“We’ve got to do some verification and then we talk to Landers,” Danzig said. “He’s in town. We’ll get his ass over here, stick this thing up it. Come to some kind of agreement.”

The president looked at Jake. “You say there’s another copy?”

“At least one more—probably in the dead man’s safe-deposit box,” Jake said. “The FBI will get to it sooner or later. Probably sooner, since Novatny’s working the case.”

“I don’t know him,” the president said.

“He’s pretty good, sir. Also, there are quite a few other people who know about it, know enough details to cause trouble, even if they don’t have the package. It’s possible that the package could be replicated, at least a good part of it, from public records. If the Republicans talk to the L.A. Times, and they put a couple of investigators on it, they’ll hang the vice president; and maybe get us in passing.”

“All right,” the president said. To Danzig: “Get Delong and Henricks here tonight. We want to get this taken care of, and I want to turn this over to the FBI by the end of the week. I want Jake to do it. We need to cover him.” Delong was Landers’s chief of staff; Henricks, the president’s legal counsel.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Danzig said to the president. He was tense, but seemed happier than he usually was. He liked an outrageous problem, Jake decided. And this would make a hell of a scene in a what-really-happened book, five years after the president left office.

“We do,” the president said. “We don’t need Jake to do that.”

“Mr. President, I do have one thing to suggest,” Jake said. “When you’re talking about the other stuff, don’t spend too much time thinking about Arlo Goodman as a replacement for the vice president.”

The president nodded, but asked, “Why not?”

“Because there are strings floating all over this mess and I suspect some of them lead back to Goodman. Maybe even to the murders in Wisconsin.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” the president said.

Jake went out the White House gate, stood in the street for a moment or two, then walked down a block, flagged a cab, and went home.

He was home at seven-thirty. He took a shower, shaved again, just to feel fresh, brushed his teeth, put on clean jeans, a black T-shirt, and a sport coat. Then he went down to the study, pulled some books out of a shelf, found the green-fabric pistol case, took out the .45, slipped a clip into it, and dropped the gun in his jacket pocket.

At ten minutes to eight, he went out and sat on the back stoop. At five after eight, a car turned down the alley. He recognized it as Madison’s, opened the back gate, and she drove into the yard. She got out of the car and asked, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. Come on, let’s get you out of sight.”

Inside the door, she asked, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

She had a soft leather carry-on bag and a briefcase. Jake took the bag, led her into the house, up the stairs to the guest room. “Bathroom, first door down the hall,” he said. “Come on: I’ll get you a glass of wine or a beer and tell you the story.”

She took a beer, settled into a chair in his living room, while he sat on the couch across from her. “Tell me about the gun,” she said.

“The two people killed in Madison were executed. They were killed in an office building and nobody heard any shots,” Jake said. “The gun was probably silenced, and the killers are probably professional—at least, they’d done it before. The only reason there weren’t more dead people in the building is that nobody happened to bump into them in the hallway.”

“Why didn’t they come after you?”

“I was behaving unpredictably, maybe. Or maybe they didn’t know I’d been there already,” Jake said. “After I found the bodies, I called the cops, and then there were cops all over the place.”

“That’s why you’re carrying a gun,” she said. “You’re afraid they might come here.”

“Yeah. Or to your place.”

“You think my house is bugged. Why wouldn’t you think this place is?” Madison asked.

“Because somebody followed me out to Wisconsin, or maybe even tried to get there before me. We talked about it in your living room. That’s the only place I talked about it. The thing is, I was on the earliest plane to Milwaukee and there was no way to get into Madison faster than I did, unless they’d rented their own jet and flown directly to Madison. That would leave too much of a trail.”

“If they come here, you plan to shoot it out?” She sounded skeptical.

“I’ve got alarms. The woman who used to own the place thought she might be raped and murdered at any minute, and she covered everything,” Jake said. “If anybody comes, we’ll know it. The gun would give us a chance to call for help. A little time.”

She pushed off her shoes, curled her feet beneath her, and said, “It’s not Howard Barber, Jake. I know him well enough to tell you that he wouldn’t have executed a secretary.”

“How about Schmidt? I know what he told you, but I want to see the guy.”

She looked away from him, her tongue touching her bottom lip, and then she said, “We’re coming up on that trust thing. I made you feel bad the other night, when I asked if you trusted me, and made you admit that you weren’t quite there yet.”

“You did make me feel bad,” he admitted.

“Well, you were right . . . I’ve been lying to you a little. I didn’t know about Linc. That was a shock. But I knew about the package. I didn’t know the details, but I knew it was out there, I knew that it might bring down this administration. I didn’t tell you about it when you really needed to know.”

Jake watched her for a moment, suppressing reaction. The truth was, he’d known that something wasn’t quite right. He hadn’t trusted her. “Then why did you send me out to Madison?”

“I thought I was sending you on a wild-goose chase. I’m sorry. Howard had already talked to Al Green, and Al denied knowing anything about the package. We wanted to get you out of the way for a few days, hoping the whole hunt for the package would die down, so we’d have more time to find it. We sort of expected the gay thing to get out . . .”

“You expected me to put it out to the media?” She’d expected betrayal of what she’d portrayed as a personal confidence.

“Well, yes. It would have solved some of your problems.”

“Thanks,” he said, his voice dry. He felt as though he should be angry, but he wasn’t—not yet.

“We just wanted . . . delay,” Madison said. She knotted up her hands, twisted them. “We wanted the package to come out in the fall. Or if not that, just before the convention, to ruin the convention. But Howard didn’t think Green had it. Green swore he didn’t.”

Jake peered at her for a moment, then said, “Now you’re telling me the truth.”

“I didn’t want to mislead you,” she said. “I really didn’t. But you were working for Danzig and we were working against him.”

“Why tell me now?”

“Because I’m tired of lying to you,” she said. “I just want this to stop. I want the girl in Madison to be alive again. And I don’t want to be . . . on the other side from you.”

Jake thought about it, then said, “If Howard Barber didn’t do the killing, it must have been Goodman. Or somebody acting for him.”

“That’s all I can figure out. Unless there’s a third party that nobody knows about. The CIA, the DIA.”

“Ah, that’s not it. Outside of the movies, they don’t murder all that many people.”

“I’ve got more bad news,” Madison said. “I didn’t know that Howard had been involved in Linc’s disappearance until you told me. I accused him of it, and he admitted it.”

“So that’s clear.”

“The problem is, I did it in my living room. Which you think is bugged.”

“Ah, man.”

They were working through the implications of her confrontation with Barber when the phone rang and Jake stepped into the hallway to pick it up.

“Jake, this is Chuck Novatny. When did you get back?”

“This afternoon. What’s going on?”

“Have you seen, or spoken to, Madison Bowe since we talked yesterday?”

“Yes. She’s here. I’m not plotting with her, I just don’t want her to be alone with these killers out there. You want to talk to her?”

“Jake, goddamnit.”

“Hey, pal, if you want to put a few FBI bodyguards in her house, I’ll send her back home. But I’m not going to have her sitting there like a big goddamn jacklighted antelope while the FBI tiptoes around, trying to get its protocols right.”

“Fuck you,” Novatny snapped.

“Yeah, well, fuck you, too.”

Silence. Then, “All right. Let me talk to her.”

Jake carried the phone into Madison, said, “Novatny.”

Her eyebrows went up and she took it and said, “Hello? Yes. I can do that. Can I bring Johnson Black with me? Okay.”

She handed the phone back to Jake. Novatny said, “We need her here tomorrow for another statement. We need to talk to her about who else is in this gay ring . . .”

“I’m not sure it’s exactly a ring.”

“You know what I mean,” Novatny said.

“Yeah, I do, but I’ll tell you what, Chuck. ‘Ring’ sounds bad. It sounds like a supermarket tabloid. And if I were you, I’d start choosing my words carefully. This thing . . .”

“I know. It’s run completely off the tracks. Officially, I don’t like the fact that you’ve got Madison Bowe at your place. Unofficially, keep an eye on her. You’ve got a gun?”

“Yup.”

“Okay. She’s got an ocean of money, I could give her the name of a good security outfit if she needs it—all ex–Secret Service guys.”

“I’ll tell her,” Jake said.

“And, Jake—best of luck.”

Jake had to think about it for a half second and said, “Yeah, fuck you again.”

Novatny laughed and hung up.

Jake told Madison about the security service and suggested that she might try it: she said she’d think about it. “It might be inconvenient to have those people underfoot,” she said. “What about the bug? If there is a bug.”

“Leave it. I have an idea for a pageant.”

“A pageant?”

“You know, a play,” Jake said. “A drama. We’ll need the bug.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’d have to trust you to tell you,” he said.

“I know . . . ah, God. Jake: you can trust me. Not before, but now you can. I don’t know how I can prove it.”

They sat in silence for a while, and then another idea popped into his head. He said, “Hang on a minute,” went into the study, dug in his briefcase, and found a hospital room number for Cathy Ann Dorn.

She picked up the phone and said “Hello” with a broken-tooth lisp. “My dad said you called,” Dorn said when he’d identified himself.

“Are you okay? Are you getting back?”

“No. I’m really, really messed up. Not hurt bad, but my nose is broken . . .” She started crying, caught herself, and then said, “And they broke my teeth so I look like some kind of fu-fu-fu-fucking hillbilly or something. . . .” And she started crying again.

“Can I come and see you?”

“Yes. I’m just sitting here, with this thing in my arm. I have to go to imaging tomorrow morning, but I’ll be back before noon. A dentist is coming tomorrow afternoon . . .”

“I need to see you privately. Is there any possibility . . . ?”

“Dad comes in the morning and then he goes to work, and he and Mom come for lunch about twelve-twenty. If you were here after ten, it should be private.”

“I’ll be there,” Jake said.

“Don’t look at me weird when you get here,” she said. “I’m ugly now, so don’t look at me weird.”

“Cathy, I’ve got a friend who was hit in the face with a piece of shrapnel the size of a butcher knife and it almost took his face off. We folded it back over and got him to the hospital, and today he’s got this little white scar. You can’t even see it unless he’s got a tan. The docs can do anything. In a couple of months, you’ll be looking great, and I’ll introduce you to the president.”

She hiccuped, then said, “Really?”

“Count on it.”

“Now I’m going to have to trust you,” he told Madison, back in the living room. “I have a possible source into Goodman.”

He told her about Cathy Ann Dorn: “I’d love to get her into Goodman’s office, take the hard drives out of his computer.”

“Jake: think,” Madison said. “She nearly gotten beaten to death. That’s not a coincidence. You’d send her back in there?”

Jake frowned: Cathy Ann wasn’t exactly in the army. “Okay, that’s not the best idea. But she’s a resource. I’ll think of something.”

“Interesting job you have . . .”

Madison asked him how he came to work for the president. Jake filled her in, told her about his grandparents’ ranch, and the distance between himself and his parents. Then, “You want another beer?”

“Sure. One more couldn’t hurt.”

She came back to his grandparents, and he talked about working the ranch, about how his grandfather resisted the transition from horses to ATVs. “I used to envy those kids with the big Hondas and Polarises riding around in a cloud of smoke, tearing up the countryside. I’d be sitting up there on some mutt, take me fifteen minutes to get somewhere you could get in one minute on a Honda,” Jake said. “Now, I’m nothing but grateful. Would have been nice if the family had been a little tighter, you know, my parents, but hell. I had a pretty good childhood, all in all. Thought I’d die myself, though, when Grandma went . . .”

She told him about her childhood, in Lexington and Richmond. Her father had been a lawyer, her mother a housewife. Her father committed suicide when he was fifty.

“I hated him for it,” she said, getting out of her chair, wandering around the room with the bottle in her hand. “I was in college, and we’d had some growing-up troubles, and some arguments, and they got pretty hot and I did some screaming and I never had a chance to make it okay before he went out in the backyard and shot himself.”

“Was there . . . ? Did you know why?”

“Yes. He was depressed. Major depression of the medical sort. He wouldn’t go to a shrink, because he still thought he might run for a serious political office—he was on the Richmond City Council twice. He didn’t want a ‘mental illness’ brought up. So he had some pills from his M.D., but they weren’t working . . . And one day, a really nice day, he went out in the yard and sat in a swing for a while, and then blam. A neighbor heard it and came running . . . Maybe that’s why I married an older guy. Maybe I was trying to get back to Daddy.”

She sat down again, but when she sat down, she sat on the couch with Jake. Feeling precisely like a teenager in a movie theater, Jake let his left arm fall along the top of the couch. He started thinking about his breath, and what he’d eaten. Beer should cover it, he hoped.

She was talking about riding, and did a little butt-hop closer on the couch, and he thought, Man, she’s sending out semaphore signals, just go ahead and do it. And he thought about Novatny and his good luck. Amazed at his own boldness, he moved a little closer to her himself, reached a hand behind her far shoulder, and pulled her a bit closer and kissed her. She sank into it, leaning against him, said, mmm, and when he started to pull away, caught him, and they kissed again.

The conversation grew confused.

After a minute or two, Jake’s hand wandered down her body, and the conversation grew even more confused. And he realized that with the second beer in him, he was going to have to pee, and fairly soon. He also realized that he would cut his legs off before he’d leave the couch.

He thought, What small heads women have, when his hand was behind her head, and at another moment, when his hand was wandering from one breast to another, she misinterpreted it as a fumble and said, “Here, wait a minute,” and helped him unbutton her blouse. He popped her brassiere one-handed and she mumbled, “I see you’ve had some training in brassieres,” and he said, “I was just lucky,” and she said, “Right . . .”

After that, the conversation seriously languished until she laughed, a little breathlessly, and said, “Jake. Stop. Jake, I really, really have to pee. Let me up, you oaf.”

She ran up the stairs to the bathroom. Jake hurried into the first-floor bathroom, flushed a few seconds before she did, washed and dried his hands, checked his hair in the mirror, gargled some water, just in case, and was standing in the living room with his hands in his pockets when she came back down the stairs.

“Hi.” He took her hand and pulled her in and kissed her on the forehead and said, “This brings up the whole question of sleeping arrangements.”

“My God, Jake. Do I have to do all the heavy lifting?”

He slept his four and a half hours. He woke up and felt the weight and remembered she was beside him, listened to her breathe, and then thought about the evening. He should, he thought, quit trying to work the problem. He should take Madison on a trip to London, or Paris, and lie low until the whole thing was done. Then they could come back and go wherever the relationship took them.

Ride horses.

But that wasn’t what he was going to do.

He could close his eyes and see the face of the dead girl in Madison. Cold, bloody, cruel murder.

16

They ate breakfast together, English muffins, marmalade, and coffee, and Jake said, “You can either come with me or I can ditch you with a friend. I know a retired professor at Georgetown, you’d be pretty secure at his place.”

“Silly goose,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”

He called Gina at the White House and asked, “What’s my schedule, if I have a schedule?”

“Jake, it’s a nightmare here,” she said. For the first time since he began working for Danzig, Jake could hear excitement in her voice. “The guy wants to talk to you, but he hasn’t had time. Let me see if I can interrupt him.”

He listened to electronic noise for a minute, then two, and then Danzig came up abruptly and said, “Stay in touch. I’ll want you on two hours’ notice. Not today or tomorrow, but maybe the day after . . . or the day after that. We’ll want you to talk to Novatny, give him a deposition on the retrieval of the package.”

“Things are proceeding?”

“Yes. We should have it wrapped up in forty-eight hours. Sixty at the outside.” And he was gone.

They took Jake’s car, leaving hers behind in the garage, moving slowly with the congestion across the bridge into Virginia, fighting traffic every inch of the way, a full hour before they broke into a steady flow.

They were in Richmond a little after ten, followed the navigation system to the hospital. As they came up to it, Jake said, “It might be better if she didn’t see you. If you want to shop for a few minutes or maybe talk to your mother.”

She shook her head: “I couldn’t visit Mother for less than four hours. Give me the car, I’ll run over to a bookstore.”

Jake had gotten a room number from Dorn, and went straight up to the surgical-care center on the third floor. He’d spent a lot of time in hospitals, and the smell of the place brought it all back: everything from the scramble to get him to a med unit, to the flight out to Germany, to the hospital in Bethesda, and the small stuff—the sound of the overhead speakers, the beeping of monitors, the hollow sounds of voices in tile hallways, and all the drawers; drawers everywhere.

Cathy Ann Dorn was being wheeled into her room as Jake came down the hall. She lifted a hand and said, “Mr. Winter, I think it’ll be a minute.”

“We have to get her into bed,” the nurse said.

“She’s afraid my ass’ll show,” Dorn said.

Dorn and the nurse went into the room, and two minutes later the nurse came out and said, “She’s got a mouth.”

“Yes, she does.”

Dorn was propped up in bed, a bottle of water in her hand, with a bent straw sticking out of it, sunlight slanting through the window across the bed and her covered toes. Jake said, “Hi,” and checked her out, let her see it. Her face was a mottled black, blue, and yellow, with small healing cuts still showing black. Her upper teeth were ragged: broken or completely missing.

She said, “The surgeon this morning said that they could fix my nose pretty much, but it might not be perfect.”

“Mmm,” Jake said. “How about the rest of you?”

“They kicked me pretty bad, they were afraid my liver might be lacerated, but they didn’t have to go in.” She’d started picking up the surgeon talk.

“So you’ll heal,” Jake said, pulling a chair toward the bed. He sat down and said, “When the oral surgeon finishes with you, your teeth will look better than new. You can even pick your shade of white. You ought to tell them to take it easy with the nose. Keep a little bit of a bump.”

“What?” She was amazed at the thought.

“You’re a pretty girl, but prettiness—no offense—straight prettiness can be bland. I could see you with a little bump on your nose; you’d be gorgeous. You’d be network-quality.”

A light popped up in her eyes. “You think so?”

“I know so. And I wouldn’t have minded getting a look at your ass—from what I saw down in the hallway, the first time we met, it’s pretty terrific. Another network-quality asset.”

“It is pretty terrific,” she said. “I work on it.”

They sat in silence for a moment, and then Jake asked, “What do you think happened? A robbery?”

She rolled her eyes. “It wasn’t a robbery, Jake. Arlo did it. His fuckin’ brother, Darrell. Somebody told him I talked to you, and then when you knew about Carl V. Schmidt, they knew I told you—so they caught me and beat me up. Arlo visited and patted my hand and said they miss me.”

“Did you tell your father that? Did you tell Goodman?”

“No . . . I’m still thinking about what to do.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” Jake said. “I was just in Madison, Wisconsin. You’ll be hearing about this in a few days probably . . .” He told her about the killings in Madison. “Things are seriously screwed up, Cathy Ann. Right now, you’re okay. But I wouldn’t mess with Goodman and I wouldn’t have your father mess with him. I would not mention Darrell Goodman to anyone.”

“They’re just going to get away with it?” She was horrified, in the plain-faced way that young people sometimes were.

“They’ll get away with it because you can’t identify anyone, and the people in Madison are dead. Knowing he did it, and proving it, are two different things,” Jake said. “On the other hand, we can get the word around to the right people, and absolutely fuck them. They won’t be able to get Goodman nominated as dogcatcher.”

She looked at him speculatively, and then said, “You’re here for something. Other than to cheer me up.”

“You said you were smart,” Jake said.

“I am smart.”

Jake had decided that the best way to ask was to go straight ahead: “I’d like to get something out of Goodman’s office. I’d like to copy the hard drives on his computer. It’d probably take ten or fifteen minutes. I was hoping you might know somebody, or know some way we could do it.”

She was shaking her head. “I’d do it, but they won’t take me back. Arlo said that I should take it easy and get back to school and concentrate on my studies. Even if I got back, Dixie—that’s his secretary—watches everything like a hawk.”

“Shoot.” He scratched his head. What to do?

“What do you think’s on the hard drives?” Dorn asked.

“I don’t know. But there’d probably be a lot of e-mail in and out, and I’d dearly love to see it,” Jake said. “I’d like to see who he’s involved with, so that maybe we can catch a couple of them in the net, and get them to talk about Goodman.”

“That’d be illegal, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t copy his computer and then use it as evidence.”

“If you know something for sure, the details of it, then it makes it a lot easier to find evidence outside the original source,” Jake said. “If I can do that, I could give it to a friend of mine in the FBI.”

She thought for a moment and then smiled and said, “There’s a tunnel between the governor’s mansion and the capitol. I used to go down there with a friend and smoke. But . . . that’s impossible. There are guards, and there’s an alarm system that even covers the inside of the house. We weren’t allowed to go in before a certain time, because the system had to go off.”

“And his office is impossible.”

She nodded. “Yeah. It really is. There are the outside guards, the Watchmen, and the inside guards, and alarms. I mean, he’s the governor. And since I left, his secretary is the only other person in there, and she’s in love with him.”

“All right.”

“Would you have a problem breaking into a police car?”

“A police car?”

“Arlo gets driven around by a highway patrolman. Several of them, actually. They have this big black Mercury. He goes to lunch at Westboro’s almost every day, a little after noon.” They both looked at a wall clock. Ten-thirty. “It’s where all the legislators hang out. He goes there and meets people and they have lunch and do politics. He takes his briefcase and his laptop with him and he usually leaves it on the floor of the backseat when he gets out. The cop leaves the car in a parking garage. It’s pretty dark in there.”

“You’re saying . . .”

“You might be able to grab the bag and run. You wouldn’t be able to copy it without him knowing.”

“Where’s the cop?”

“In the restaurant,” she said. “He’s also a bodyguard, he eats across the room from Goodman. I ate with him a couple of times. The cop.”

Jake thought about it for fifteen seconds. “That’s pretty iffy.”

“That’s all I can think of,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Jake slapped his legs, said, “Well. Time to go to Plan B.”

“What’s that?”

“You don’t want to know. But I’ll tell you what: you keep quiet about this visit, get well, stay away from Arlo, go to school like a good girl, and when everything quiets down, give me a call. I’ll get you something you’ll like.”

“You promise?” The light in the eye again, just like when he told her that she’d be gorgeous.

“We take care of people,” Jake said.

Back in the car, Madison asked, “Get what you needed?”

“Maybe.” He thought about it for another moment, and then asked, “Do you know a place called Westboro’s? A restaurant?”

“Sure. Everybody in Richmond does. Political hash house.”

“Let’s go over there,” Jake said. “I’d like to look at a parking garage.”

“Who’re you meeting?”

“No one, I hope.”

He told her about the laptop. She said, “That’s pretty iffy,” picking the word right out of his head.

“We’re hurting pretty bad here,” Jake said. “We need a way to break something out.”

“Jake, there’ll be alarms . . .”

“It’s all in the timing,” Jake said. Thought about the package. “Everything’s in the timing.”

“Well,” she said, “whatever happens, it’ll be a heck of a rush.”

Westboro’s was a low red-brick building four blocks from the capitol, with an old-fashioned lightbulb marquee out front, and under that, a red neon script that said, THE CAPITAL’S BEST STEAKS, CHOPS, SEAFOOD. The parking structure was an ugly poured-concrete lump fifty yards farther down the block. Jake looked at his watch: almost eleven.

He took the car into the garage, saw the entrance, but no gate. “How do you pay?” he asked.

“Parking meters inside. The meter guy enforces the meters.”

“Excellent.”

He turned into the ramp. As Cathy Ann Dorn had said, it was dark inside. He could see no cameras. The ramps were two-way; you went out the same way you went in. The first upward-slanting ramp was full;the next, around the corner, was only half full. A man walked past them, down the ramp, and out. Jake went onto the next four ramps, then turned around and started down again. On both the back and front walls of the ramps, there were staircases going down.

He pulled into a parking space, let the engine run, stepped into one of the back staircases, walked down two floors and out. The door opened on a sidewalk along another street, less busy than the front, but still with cars moving along it.

Jake went back up, got in the car, and they drove back out. Madison asked, “What?”

“We could do it,” he said.

“If we get caught, Goodman’ll put us in jail,” she said. “If the cop hasn’t shot you.”

“I might be able to blackmail my way out of it. If the cop hasn’t shot me.”

“Tell me . . .”

He outlined his idea, and she said, “If anyone sees you going in, they’ll tell the police that it was a man with a limp. They’ll know who it is.”

“If I walk on a left tiptoe, I don’t limp. I can’t do it for long, but I can do it for a few hundred yards.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked. “Wait at Mom’s house until I find out whether you’re dead?”

“That would be the pessimistic version of it,” Jake said.

“Bullshit. I’ll drive.”

He smiled at her: “I was hoping you’d offer.”

He got a ball-peen hammer at a Home Depot on Broad Street and a pair of cotton work gloves. They drove back to Westboro’s and parked a block away, where they could see the front of the parking garage.

“There’ll be a lot of traffic, starting just before noon,” Madison said. “People grabbing the good seats that aren’t reserved.”

Jake looked at his watch and yawned nervously. She picked it up and yawned back. “We could neck for a while,” he said.

“I’m too scared.”

“You don’t have to drive . . .”

“No-no. I’ve been talking big,” she said. “I’ll do it. But I’m still scared.”

“Good. Scared is realistic. Just don’t freeze and leave me on the street.”

Now she nodded: “Maybe you’ll learn to trust me.”

Tried to make conversation as they watched politicians and hustlers streaming into Westboro’s: “Was Howard Barber the guy who had me beaten up?”

“I hope not,” she said.

“I’m not asking what you hope,” Jake said. “I’m asking what you think. At that point, Goodman had no reason to go after me. You guys did.”

“Kind of narrows the range, doesn’t it.” She pursed her lips, looking out the windows, and then said, “I asked him. He didn’t say ‘yes,’ but he never said ‘no.’ He avoided the question. And he definitely knows people who’d do it. You scared him. He wanted to slow you down.”

“I’d like to get his people alone. One at a time. With my stick.”

“I’d like you to stay over tonight,” Jake said. He yawned again, and she yawned back. Both nervous. The hands on the car clock seemed to be plowing through glue. “You know, mostly because . . . I’d like you to stay over.”

“We could talk about the role of NATO in the new Europe,” she said.

“Yeah, yeah . . . but tomorrow, I want you to go home. Carry on as usual, don’t do anything cute, don’t play to the bug, if there is one. Just carry on. There’s gonna be a lot to talk about anyway. The shit is already headed for the fan.”

“Where are you going to be?”

“Running around,” he said.

“You’re not going to get hurt?”

“Certainly hope not.”

“Maybe I ought to run with you.”

“That won’t be . . . uh—here’s a Mercury.”

Cathy Ann Dorn would have made a good spy, Jake thought. The Mercury was right on time, six minutes after twelve. The car disappeared into the parking garage, and four minutes later, Arlo Goodman walked out, trailed by a big man in a dark suit and sunglasses. Both were empty-handed.

“The bottom of my stomach just dropped out,” Madison said. She started the car.

“Don’t leave me on the street.”

“You do it, and get out in a hurry,” she said. “What . . . what if there’s some kind of booby trap?”

“There’s not even a booby trap in the president’s car,” Jake said.

“What if there’s a camera or something?”

“There won’t be a camera . . .” But he reached into the backseat and found the Atlanta Braves hat he’d bought in Atlanta. He put it on and popped the door.

She said, “Wait. Wait for five minutes, so we know Goodman hasn’t sent the cop back to get something.”

They sat for three minutes, then Jake popped the door again. “Gotta go. Don’t take any phone calls.”

“Wait.” She was digging in her purse, pulled out a silk scarf, said, “Put this over your face. Like a bandanna. In case there’s a camera.”

“Jesus.” But he took the scarf. “My biggest worry is that a car’ll turn in . . .”

“There haven’t been too many . . . ,” she said anxiously.

“I’m going.”

This time he went, walking on one tiptoe. He was ten yards from the garage when another car pulled in. “Shoot.” He stopped and walked back down the block, past Madison, forty yards, fifty yards, then headed back toward the garage. Two men walked out into the sunshine, turned away from him, toward Westboro’s. He closed into the garage, was twenty yards away, his tiptoe foot getting tired, when they went into the restaurant.

A minute later he was inside, walking up the ramp, feeling the hammer heavy in his pocket. Watching behind for another car. Hurrying now. Up the first ramp, around the corner. He thought about the scarf, thought fuck it, then got it out anyway, did a quick wrap around his lower face. Pulled on the gloves. Between that and the hat, nothing would be visible but his eyes. And it was dark.

He got the cell phone out, pushed the button, heard it start to ring. Madison would be moving.

He took a deep breath, listened for a car, heard nothing, started counting, “One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two . . .” stepped quickly over to the Mercury, pulled the hammer out of his pocket and hit the back window with it. The glass exploded inward, and the car alarm went. He knocked out the rest of the glass with the hammerhead, reached through the window into the screaming wail of the alarm, pulled open the back door, spotted the briefcase on the floor, grabbed it, and ran.

Down to the back door. Nothing coming up the ramp at him. Down the stairs and around, counting, “One-thousand-nine, one-thousand-ten . . .”

He stopped at the door, pulled down the mask, pushed it under his shirt collar, and stepped out. Madison was just cruising along the street, pulled over. Jake got in the car, still counting, but now, aloud. “One-thousand-fourteen, one-thousand-fifteen.”

He looked out the back window.

Nothing moved around the parking garage. They turned the corner and were gone.

“I had a thought,” she said. She was cool, contained, but with a little pink in her cheeks. “If Arlo thinks about this and thinks, ‘Jake Winter,’ what if he has the Highway Patrol look for us? Stop us on some phony drug charge? Search the car.”

“Huh.” He considered the idea for a minute, then said, “We can’t take a chance. Let’s go to the airport. We can rent another car, you can follow me back. If you see me get stopped, you can keep on going.”

“I’m so scared I could pee my pants,” Madison said.

“Those are obscenely expensive leather seats you’re sitting on,” Jake said. She started to laugh, and then he started, and he said, “I’m sweating like a horse myself. Let’s get the fuck out of Virginia.”

17

Russell Barnes was a double amputee with a mop of red hair tied in a ponytail with white string. A long, thin red beard straggled down the front of his green army T-shirt. He met them at the front door, took a long look at Madison, and said, “Jake, nice to see you. How’s the leg?”

“Not bad. How’s the pain?”

“I’m so hooked on the drugs that even if it goes away, I’m gonna have to deal with the drug problem. I don’t know if I can do that,” he said.

As they talked, they followed him, in his wheelchair, back through the dimly lit tract house to what had once been a family room, now jammed with computer equipment. A ten-foot-long wooden workbench, littered with electronic testing equipment, three keyboards, and a half dozen monitors of different sizes, was pushed against one wall, under a photograph of a man in an army uniform posed as the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The workbench was low, made for a man in a wheelchair; the room smelled of Campbell’s tomato soup.

“Whatcha got?” Barnes asked.

“Laptop,” Jake said, taking it out of his bag. “Password protected.”

He handed Barnes the HP laptop. Barnes looked it over, plugged it into an electric strip on the top of the workbench, brought it up. “This might take a couple of minutes.”

There was no place to go, no place to sit, so Jake and Madison stood and watched as Barnes played with the computer. He said, “Commercial password program. That’s not good.”

“You can’t get around it?”

“I can get around the password, but I suspect that a lot of the stuff on it is going to be encrypted. Encryption is part of the program.”

“Can you beat the encryption?” Madison asked.

“Sure, if I had a computer the size of the solar system, and five or six billion years to work it . . . Let’s look at the drives.”

He flipped the laptop over and started pulling it apart, moved a black box from one part of the workbench to the laptop, connected a couple of wires into the guts of the laptop, pushed a switch. A monitor lit up, and a program started running down the screen. He stared at it for a while, tapped some keys on one of the keyboards, and unencrypted English began running down the screen.

“Whatcha got is a small amount of encrypted stuff, looks like e-mail, and a fair amount of unencrypted stuff. The encrypted stuff is only accessible if you get me the key. The unencrypted stuff I can print out for you. Most of it looks like crap, though. Some of it’s part of programs he bought . . . you know, illustrations from Word, that kind of thing.”

“The encrypted e-mail . . . are the addresses encrypted? The places they were sent from?”

“No. I can tell you where incoming messages originated and where outgoing messages were sent to.”

“That’d be good. What we need are e-mails, letters, any text that appears to be, you know, independently generated.”

“Take a while,” Barnes said. “I got a fast printer, but there’s quite a bit of stuff in here. Probably, mmm, I don’t know, could run eight hundred or a thousand pages.”

“We can wait,” Jake said.

Madison took the car and went out for coffee and snacks, while Jake and Barnes watched the pile of paper grow in the printer tray, talked about Afghanistan and hospitals and drugs and old friends, including some who were no longer alive.

“This chick you got with you, is this serious?” Barnes asked.

“Hard to tell,” Jake said. “She lies to me sometimes.”

“She’s Madison Bowe, right?”

“No. Just looks like her,” Jake said.

Madison came back and said to Jake, “CNN has the gay story. I saw it at the Starbucks.”

“Oh, boy. I wonder where it leaked from?”

“What’s that?” Barnes asked.

Jake explained briefly, saying only that Lincoln Bowe had gay connections. Barnes shook his head and smiled at Madison and said, “They’ll be on you like fleas on a yellow dog. The media.”

“Yes. I’m sure.”

“Doesn’t bother you?”

“The possibility that people would find out, that there would be a story . . . it’s been out there for a long time. Lincoln and I talked about it, how to handle it. I’ll be okay.”

They were out of Barnes’s house an hour later, carrying two reams of paper and the restored laptop, blinking in the sunlight; Barnes had kept a copy of the hard drives, and would continue working through it. “What next?” Madison asked.

“Back to my place. Read this stuff. Figure out what you’re going to do.”

“I’m going to call Kitty Machela at CBS. Next week, I think. We’ll arrange for one of her famous interviews.”

“Woman-to-woman chat.”

“Dark set, conservative clothes, sympathy,” Madison said. “She’d sympathize with Hitler if she could get him in an exclusive interview. It’ll kill the story. My part of it, anyway.”

At Jake’s, they got comfortable in the study, flipping through the paper, while the television ran in the background, the gay story blossoming like a strange fungus. There were shots of the outside of Madison’s town house, pictures of reporters knocking on the door.

“Every network has to show its guy knocking on the door, even when they just saw another guy knocking on the door,” Madison said.

“Keep reading,” Jake said.

In a thousand sheets of paper, they found one thing, and Madison found it.

“The murders in Madison happened . . . there’s . . . mmm . . . there’s a note, a duplicate receipt for a private plane flying from Charlottesville to Chicago for two passengers, charged to a state account, early in the morning, five A.M., arriving back in Richmond at nine P.M. Charged to a state police account. I wonder why the cc would come back to Goodman?”

Jake took it, read it, then looked up. “Because Goodman ordered the plane, or had it ordered. Had to approve something. Somebody flew into Chicago, which must be three or four hours from Madison by car, the morning Green and his secretary were killed. They were back that night.”

“But why a state plane? There’d have to be a pilot, there’d be paperwork.”

“Because you can’t carry weapons on a commercial flight, not without registering them,” Jake said. “And they’re not going to register weapons with silencers, huh?”

“Why didn’t they fly into Madison?”

“Because the name might come up in a search, if someone like the FBI looked for flights going into Madison or Milwaukee, or anywhere in Wisconsin. They had to take a risk, but they minimized it by going to Chicago. Without this note . . . digging this out of the woodwork would be impossible, believe me. This is in the bottom of a computer file somewhere, and nobody will ever look at it again, without somebody asking for it. But since we know about it, they can’t escape. Because the paperwork is there.”

“But they’ll have some kind of story about what they were doing in Chicago,” Madison said.

“Probably. But this is a piece of the puzzle. And it tells me something. It tells me that your pal Barber probably didn’t do it.”

They locked eyes for a moment, but she didn’t say it: I already told you that Barber didn’t do it. Don’t you trust me?

“I trust you enough to plan a murder with you,” Jake said. “I wouldn’t even do that with Russell Barnes.”

She asked, “What murder?”

He said, “Just a minute. I’ve got to call Russell.”

Jake went to the phone and called. “Russell. Look at the encrypted stuff, the encrypted messages. See if you can find one for the day before yesterday, originating in Chicago or anywhere in Illinois or Wisconsin.”

“Hold on. I’ll queue them up.”

Barnes was back in four minutes: “There’s one from Chicago at eight A.M., very short. There’s another from Madison, Wisconsin, at two o’clock, even shorter.”

“They did it,” Madison said. “You think his brother . . . ?”

“Yeah. Darrell.”

“Is that who we’re going to murder?”

“Let me tell you about my idea for a play,” Jake said. “For a pageant . . .”

“You mentioned that, but you didn’t tell me what you were talking about.”

“That’s before I hired you as a wheelman,” Jake said.

He told her about it, about the drama that he was planning for her living room. “If you do this, and I’m not telling you not to, you have to think it out like a chess game,” Madison said. “Right down to the last little move. You have to have a backup story in case anything goes wrong . . .”

“But you’re not saying ‘no,’ ” Jake said. “You’re not arguing against it.”

“No, I’m not,” she said. “Sometimes, justice isn’t enough. You need revenge.”

“So. You’ll do it.”

“Yes.”

They stared at each other for a moment, then Jake said, “Call Johnson Black, have him come here to pick you up. You stand on your porch, make a brief statement about the gay stories. You go inside and talk to Black about whatever. When the TV people are gone, probably after the evening news, you call me. I’ll come over and we’ll do the drama.”

She nodded. “Now I’m scared again. That’s twice in a day.”

“We’re all in trouble here, Maddy,” Jake said. “This whole thing has been so complicated. But if there’s a bug—and there’s gotta be a bug, I’d bet on it now—Goodman knows that you know what Barber did to your husband. If he can find a way to make the tape public, you could go to prison. Maybe for a long time. You know what judges do to celebrities, just to prove that they’re not above the law . . . And if I don’t get that package to the FBI, I’m in trouble for the Madison shootings, myself. The drama might settle it.”

“But we’re going to kill somebody. We’re premeditating.”

“Yeah.” Again, they stared at each other for a bit, then Jake said, “Look. We’ve got a huge problem: we’ve got a psycho on our asses—or on yours, anyway. I might still skate. Sooner or later, though, they’ll have to do something about you. The new vice president can’t have any vocal opposition that alleges any kind of scandal, any kind of problem. If they’re thinking about Goodman, and you’re out here screaming that Goodman is a killer and a Nazi . . . it’s easy enough to choose somebody else. Arlo Goodman needs for you to go away, or to be discredited, or humiliated. And they’ve got a psychotic killer willing to do the heavy work.”

“But there’s a hole in your idea. The way you set it out.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. What are you going to do with the other car?”

Jake blinked. Then, “God. I’m a moron.”

“You’re not a moron. You just need somebody to go with you. You need a wheelman, again.”

He blinked again. “Oh, no. No, no, no . . .”

“Oh, yes. It’s the only way.”

They argued, went around and around, and finally she said, “I’m going, and that’s it; I’m going, or you’re not.” Then she called Johnson Black. Black arrived an hour later, took her away.

Ten minutes later, Jake watched CNN as Madison made her statement from the front porch. She said that there had been an assumption that sexuality was private, but that the FBI were apprised of the situation with Lincoln Bowe, and that it was part of their investigation. That she was distressed that people were pounding on her door, hounding her, and that one certain way of NOT getting any information was to pound on her door.

She would refuse to answer anyone who came to the door, and the thrill-seeking reporters should be ashamed of themselves. More information would be made public at an early date.

With a bunch of reporters yelling “When?” at her, she went inside. Then a ranking D.C. cop took the microphone and said that anyone who stepped on Mrs. Bowe’s yard or any of the other yards down the block, without permission, would be arrested for trespassing. That all the TV trucks were a hazard in case of emergency, and they would have to leave the street. That anyone not leaving would be ticketed and the trucks would be towed, and the bill would have to be paid before the trucks were released. That towing a big truck would cost upward of $2,000. He added that once the tow truck was there, as in all police tows, there would be no last-minute decision to leave—if the tow truck showed up, the TV trucks would be towed.

After a flurry of cell-phone calls, the trucks began leaving. An hour after the porch statement, a reporter from the Post stood alone on the sidewalk, shifting from foot to foot.

An hour after that, the sidewalk was empty.

18

Darrell Goodman stepped into the governor’s office, around the departing maids. The first maid was carrying a silver coffee service, the second a basket of scones, the remnants of an appropriations meeting with the leaders of the statehouse and senate. Darrell hooked one of the scones out of the basket and said to his brother, “Rank has its privileges. Free bakery.”

Arlo Goodman made a flapping gesture at the door. Darrell closed it, and Arlo made a “What?” gesture with his open hands.

Darrell held up a finger, said, “I’ve been talking to Patricia, the numbers of the Watchmen are up pretty strong this month. We’re starting a new chapter in D.C.”

“That’s great,” Arlo said. “There’s a chapter out in California now, I just saw it on the Internet.”

“Yeah. The leader over there, in D.C., may have been in Syria at the same time you were . . .” He rambled on about D.C. numbers as he opened his briefcase, took out a folded piece of paper, and pushed it at Arlo. Arlo took it, looked at it. A laser printout, a letter:

I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what I was getting into. I was one of the four people who helped take Lincoln Bowe away. The other three are Howard Barber, Donald S. Creasey, and Roald M. Sands. I thought it was a complicated political joke on Arlo Goodman. We were supposed to look like Goodman’s hit men. I didn’t know that they were going to shoot Linc. Now I read in the newspapers that he was still alive when he was killed. I don’t know. He was supposed to commit suicide, not be shot. I don’t know what happened to his head. Howard Barber would know. Howard Barber organized this. He’s responsible. Roald and Don don’t know anything. Now everything is coming apart. I’m so sorry, but I can’t stand the thought of prison. I know what would happen in there.

—Dan White

Arlo read it and his eyebrows went up. Darrell bent over the desk and whispered in his brother’s ear, “He committed suicide with his own gun after writing the note. The original is signed with his own pen. The pen’s in his coat pocket. An anonymous call went to the Fairfax cops, and Clayton Bell got another anonymous call, supposedly from a Fairfax cop, and he’s there now. Bell will almost certainly call us. He’ll want some guidance.”

Arlo nodded and pulled his brother’s head down, whispered back, “Nobody else knows anything?”

“George was there with me—but next week, I’ll settle that.”

“He can’t feel it coming,” Arlo whispered. “I don’t want him to leave an envelope somewhere.”

“We’re okay,” Darrell whispered. “After I take him, I’ll go through everything he’s got, just to double-check. But there’s nothing. One thing he is, is loyal.”

Arlo breathed, “Excellent.”

Lt. Clayton Bell, a state police officer who’d been running the Bowe investigation, read the note through a plastic envelope put on by the crime-scene people; he was reading it for the third time.

“I’ll need some advice on how to proceed,” he told the Annandale chief. “I think we pick up the three of them, handle them separately, see what their stories are. But I’m going to talk to the prosecutor’s office first. Maybe call . . . I don’t know, maybe the governor.”

“That’s up to you, Clay. We don’t have a crime here, so there’s nothing for us. If you just want to handle it . . .”

Bell nodded. “We’ll handle it. I’ll get a crime-scene crew here, just in case. If you guys can keep the scene sealed off, I’d appreciate it.”

“We can do that.”

Roald Sands called Howard Barber on his cell phone.

“Yes—Barber.”

Sands was screaming. “Howard, Howard. I just went by Dan’s place, there are cops everywhere. There’s a crime-scene truck there, the state police, the local police. Something’s happened.”

“Whoa, whoa . . . take it easy.” But even as he said it, Barber’s heart sank. “Where are you?”

“I’m headed home. I’m afraid the police will be there. I think they know.”

“How far are you from home?”

“Five minutes,” Sands said.

“Call me just before you get there. Let me know if the police are there: I’ll be at this number, just hit redial. If they’re there, remember your story. That it was voluntary, you were just picking him up and dropping him with me. You were bodyguards . . . Bring it back to me. I’ll handle it.”

“Okay, okay. Jesus Christ, Howard, I’m scared.”

“Take it easy, man. Take it easy. Call me in five.”

Barber ran through the list on his cell phone, picked out Don Creasey’s number, touched it. Creasey’s secretary answered, and Barber said, “This is Howard Barber. Let me talk to Don, if you could.”

“Um, he’s indisposed at the moment . . .”

“You mean, in the bathroom?”

“No, I mean, I mean I just don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Barber. There’s just been some kind of trouble. I don’t think I’m supposed to talk to people about it.”

“Well . . . okay, I guess. I’ll catch him later.”

He kicked back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, thought it out. The cops had broken it down somehow. He’d known it could happen. He’d taken every possible precaution, and nevertheless, here they were. He laughed, then looked around his office. Been good for a long time.

Sands called back, said, “There are cars across the street with people in them. I can see them from here, they’re looking down toward me.”

“Remember your story, Roald. Just remember the story.”

He hung up, thought about it some more, then opened the office blinds and looked down at the parking lot. Nothing yet. He ran through various permutations of the story: that Lincoln Bowe had been frightened of Arlo Goodman, and that he, Barber, had sent the other men to act as bodyguards, that they’d brought him north to Barber’s office, and that Barber had secretly driven him to New York, and he’d disappeared from there . . .

But that wouldn’t hold, he thought. Too many things didn’t happen. He couldn’t answer questions—what car had he taken, where had he stopped for gas, had they stopped to eat anything . . . He flashed to the last time he’d been to Rapid Oil; they’d put a mileage sticker on the window of his car, with a date. Maybe he could run down . . .

No. One way or another, they’d poke holes in it. They’d hang him. Huh.

And they might hang Madison Bowe along with him. Somehow, the Goodmans were involved in this—and if they pushed the cops to play Madison against him, the two of them would be stuck. Whatever else, Madison didn’t deserve to go to prison.

Barber went back to the window and cranked the blinds fully up, walked to his office door. His secretary sat in a bay off the main room; in the main room, four women and two men sat in cloth cubicles talking on phones and poking at computers, like high-tech mice in a maze. To his secretary, he said, “Jean, I need you to run an errand. Could you drive over to Macy’s and pick me up a dress shirt, white or blue? I’ll give you cash . . .”

“You mean, right now?”

“If you could,” Barber said. “I’ve gotten my ass in a bind, I’m going to have to run out of town tonight . . .” He fumbled four hundred dollars out of his wallet and gave it to her.

“But you’ve got the Thirty-first Project Managers at ten o’clock tomorrow.”

“I should be back,” he said. “Just get the shirt, huh? If you’ve got stuff that has to be done here, I’ll pay overtime anytime you have to stay late.”

“That’s not necessary . . .” She got her sweater and purse and went mumbling off, and Barber went back to his office windows just in time to see the cops arrive. There were two cars, both state police. Not FBI. The Goodmans, for sure.

He could go with them, stick with the story. Another guy was going to pick up Lincoln Bowe, so he merely transferred him . . . but the other three, Creasy, Sands, and White, all knew bits and pieces of the story, and the cops would play them off against one another, and sooner or later, one of them would fold.

Barber had always been an outside guy, a guy who liked to move around. A cell the size of a bathroom. He rubbed his face with his open hands and looked back into the parking lot. Had an idea, smiled at it. He wore a gold Rolex on his left wrist. He reached into his desk drawer, took out a paper clip, straightened it, and using the edge of the Rolex bracelet as a guide, scratched his wrist until it bled, in two small scratches both back and front. He changed the watch to the other wrist and did the same thing.

He was putting the watch back on his left wrist when he heard the voices in the outer room: cops asking for his office. He walked around and sat behind his desk. Calm. More than calm: cold.

A plainclothes cop stuck his head in the office door and asked, “Mr. Barber?”

“Come in. Close the door, please.”

Three cops. One of them pushed the door closed with his foot. The plainclothesman said, “Mr. Barber, I’m Lieutenant Clayton Bell, Virginia State Police . . .”

Barber stood up.

In the outer office, a saleswoman named Cheryl Pence was standing in her office pod when the screaming started: “No, no, don’t, don’t, help, help . . .”

There was an impact like an explosion, and without thinking, Pence ran to Barber’s office door and yanked it open, the other five office employees all standing, staring. When the door came open they saw three Virginia state cops looking out through a broken window. Pence screamed at them, “What did you do, what did you do . . . ?”

Bell, shocked, white-faced, turned and muttered, “We didn’t do anything. We didn’t do anything.”

He was talking to air. Pence had backed away and then started to run for the outer door, the other five stampeding behind her. Bell said to the other two cops, “We didn’t do anything.”

Outside, three television crews, tipped by what they believed to be local police, had been waiting to film the arrest. They hadn’t been ready for a man to come hurtling out through the wall of glass, five stories above them. One cameraman, saddled up and ready to roll, got a shot of the three cops at the window, looking down.

The three reporters stood there openmouthed, and then one of them said, “Holy shit.” He turned toward his cameraman: “You get that? Tell me you got that?”

“I got the cops,” the cameraman said.

A hundred miles away, Arlo Goodman screamed, “What? What?”

19

Madison Bowe heard about Howard Barber’s death from Johnson Black, who heard about it from a television reporter who was calling Black to ask him to call Madison for a comment. She turned on the television, watched for a moment, then found the maid and said, “Harriet, I’m going shopping for a few minutes. I’ll just run down the hill, I’ll be back in half an hour.”

Afraid reporters might already be lurking, she put on a hat, went out through the back door, cut through the yards of a half dozen neighbors, then out to the street, not quite running.

Jake was working on the script for the evening’s drama when Madison called. “I’m down on M Street. Did you hear about Howard?”

“What about Howard?”

“He’s dead.” Her voice was hushed, nervous. “Three of Goodman’s cops went to arrest him, they supposedly got some information that he was involved in Linc’s disappearance. But something happened, and he crashed through his office window and fell five stories and he’s dead. Some of his office workers told the television that he was screaming for help and then they heard the crash . . .”

Jake was astonished, groped for words. “Jesus. What do the cops say?”

“All three claim he threw himself through the window. Right through the plate glass. I don’t know. I just don’t know. The FBI is there, I guess they’ve taken over.”

“I’ll call Novatny, see what I can find out.”

“What about tonight?”

“It’s still on, unless the cops delay you . . . I’ll come in, we’ll talk about Barber, I’ll tell you everything I know, you tell me what you found out—you should start calling people about it, because that’s what you’d naturally do. Then we’ll go into our play. Just follow my lead.”

“What if there’s no bug?”

“Then nothing will happen,” Jake said.

“Should I make a comment about Howard? For the media? They’re going to start calling. They were already calling Johnnie Black to see if I’d do one.”

Jake scratched his forehead, thinking for a minute, then said, “I guess . . . That’s up to you. It won’t make any difference, one way or another, to the play tonight. But we can’t have anyone else in the living room when we talk. We have to be alone, or we wouldn’t do it.”

“All right. Maybe . . . I’ll tell Johnnie that I could have a comment tomorrow, but I want to wait and see what happens.”

“What do you think about Barber? Could it be suicide?”

She hesitated, then, “Maybe. He’s depressive. He’s excitable. He could do it . . . I don’t know.”

“All right. Hang on: manage it. See you at nine.”

Jake called Novatny, but the FBI man wouldn’t talk. “You’re too deep in this, ol’ buddy.”

“I’m not asking for a state secret—I just want to know if it was suicide.”

“That’s what the Virginia State Police say.”

“What do you say?”

“Too early to tell.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Jake called Danzig’s office and talked to Gina. “Tell Bill that there’s a story on television about a guy who jumped, fell, or was thrown out a window over in Arlington. Virginia State Police were there and some of the witnesses say the guy was thrown. The thing is, this guy is mixed into the Lincoln Bowe disappearance. There’s going to be a stink around Goodman, at least for a while.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“You almost done over there?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t.”

She knew everything, of course. They were building some distance between themselves and Jake, just in case. “Talk to you later.”

They were getting into the endgame on Lincoln Bowe: Jake could feel it coming. In a week, there’d be nothing left to do but the cleanup. The cleanup, depending on who was doing the cleaning, could send a few people off to jail.

For the moment, there was still room to maneuver.

He climbed the stairs to his junk room, unlocked his gun safe, took out the Remington .243 and a semiautomatic Beretta 20 gauge with two boxes of shells. He’d last used the .243 six months earlier, on an antelope hunt in Wyoming. When he left Wyoming, he could keep three slugs inside three-quarters of an inch at a hundred yards, shooting off sandbags. It was sighted a half inch to an inch high at a hundred, so any shot he wanted to take, from muzzle-tip to two hundred yards, was point ’n’ shoot.

Or back in Wyoming, had been. He’d traveled with the gun in a foam-padded case, but it generally wasn’t healthy to assume that a scope sighted-in six months earlier, and moved two thousand miles, was still on.

He looked at his watch: he had just enough time to get to Merle’s and back to Madison’s at nine o’clock. He whistled a line from Eric Clapton’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” took the rifle, shotgun, and hunting-gear bag down to his bedroom, packed an overnight bag, and carried it all down to the car.

Made a mental note to stop at Wal-Mart.

Endgame coming.

Arlo Goodman was in the mansion’s front parlor, feet up on an antique table donated by the Virginia Preservation Society, talking to Darrell. “Can we wall ourselves off? That’s the only question that matters.”

“Absolutely. Nothing points at us,” Darrell said. “Nothing. Bell and the others swear to God that Barber jumped. I think the feds believe them. For one thing, his office would have been wrecked if a guy Barber’s size was thrown out the window. He was like a goddamn weight lifter, and Bell’s fifty-five years old and is fifty pounds overweight. He threw Barber out the window? He’s lucky Barber didn’t throw him out.”

“The problem is, eighty percent of the equation is image,” Arlo said. “They have an image they want. They want a guy who’s an economic liberal, but who’s in touch with the prayer people, who’s in touch with the gun people. Right now, I’m it; but with just a little twist, I become Hermann Göring. Then I’m not it. Then my fifteen minutes are up.” He stood up, took a lap around the room, gnawing at a thumbnail, tugging at it. He wrenched a sliver of it free, spit it into the carpet. “Look. We need a leak. We need to leak to the media that the feds think Barber killed Bowe. We need that out there right now. Everything’s right on a knife edge . . .”

“We can do that. I can do it,” Darrell said.

“If we can get that out for tomorrow—even if the feds equivocate—we’re in good shape. If we can get that out there tomorrow, it’ll make suicide more reasonable. It’ll take the story away from Bell and those other fuckups, no matter what they did.”

“I’ll move,” Darrell said eagerly. “The Post, the Times, three or four TV channels . . . I’ll talk to Patricia. He’s got contacts everywhere. He’s got the phone numbers. We can reel it back in, Arlo. They won’t be naming a new guy until after Landers is gone, and that’ll take a while. We’re still good.”

Merle’s was a long, low concrete-block building painted an anonymous cream, buried in a block of warehouses in the flight path of Dulles International. The sign outside, an unlit wooden rectangle, said, MERLE’S, and nothing else, in fading red paint.

Jake parked, carried the rifle around to the front door, pushed in, was hit in the face by the not-unpleasant tang of burned gunpowder. The shooting lanes took up the back of the building; the first fifteen feet in the front was the salesroom, isolated from the shooting lanes by a double concrete wall, with panes of double vacuum-glass on both walls. You could still hear the gunfire, but distantly.

Merle Haines was leaning on the counter, paging through a copy of American Rifleman, while Jerry Jeff Walker sang “I Feel Like Hank Williams Tonight” from a buzzing speaker mounted in the ceiling. Haines nodded at Jake, who was a seasonal regular, and asked, “How’s it going?” Jake nodded back and said, “I need to tune up the .243.” He handed over his car keys and Haines hung them on a Peg-Board and said, “Lane nine.”

“And two boxes of that Federal Vital-Shok, the one-hundred-grain Sierra, if you’ve got it, and two targets.”

“Goin’ huntin’,” Merle said. He took two boxes of 100-grain Federal off the shelf and two target faces from under the counter, and passed them over. Jake paid him, took his earmuffs out of his pocket, put them on, and pushed through the door into the range. The first eight lanes were for pistols, the last three lanes for rifles, with shooting tables. He walked past two fat guys shooting revolvers and one in-shape military-looking guy shooting a Beretta, down a short flight of stairs, to lanes nine, ten, and eleven. He was alone.

He’d be shooting down an underground tunnel at fifty yards—not long, but long enough to get an idea of where the gun was. He sat down at a table, arranged a pile of sandbags on the table in front of him, took the rifle out of its case, pressed three rounds into the magazine, and jacked one into the chamber.

The .243 was a comfortable gun, accurate and easy on the shoulder, if a little slow to reload. He fired five shots slowly, carefully, breathing between shots, then pulled the target in. Four of the shots were tight and all over the bull, right where they should have been. The fifth was a half inch to the right; he’d pulled it. Nothing had moved since Wyoming.

He fired five more shots at the second target, and got one ragged hole three-quarters of an inch wide, across the lower face of the bull. He packed the gun up, collected the remaining cartridges, and walked back out through the salesroom.

“Short and sweet,” Merle said, as he handed over Jake’s car keys. “Good luck with them critters.”

On the way to Madison’s, she called and said, “I’m in the backyard. Johnnie Black is here, I’m calling on his phone. We’re talking about Howard. Johnnie’s got a source who said that the FBI crime-scene investigators have found something weird with the body. There were some scratches on his wrists like he might have been handcuffed and they’ve gone to the three cops and collected their handcuffs.”

“Jeez. How could they, he wasn’t . . .”

“The thinking is, they cuffed him, he didn’t resist, then one of them hit him on the back of the head with something heavy, and they threw him out the window—but because he went out and landed on his back and head, there’s no evidence that he was slugged. That’s what the thinking is.”

“The FBI’s thinking?”

“No, no, that’s Johnnie, trying to figure out what could have happened. But he’s going to talk to a couple of his media pals, just pass the speculation around. It’ll be on the air tomorrow—keep Goodman shuckin’ and jivin’.”

“All right. I doubt that’s what happened, though,” Jake said. “Too complicated—especially with witnesses right there in the office.”

“Maybe . . . Listen, I really need you. I’m scared, I’m sad, I’m messed up by everything that’s happened.”

“I need you too,” he said. “But if your place is bugged . . .”

“If the place is bugged, if the bedroom is bugged, then they’ve heard it all before. I don’t care anymore, Jake. I’m going to send Johnnie home. But I need to spend some time with you. Right now.”

“I’m on my way,” he said.

He parked a block from her house, got his stick, tapped down the sidewalks, a glorious April evening, sunlight still warming the sky, but cool with a touch of humidity to soften the air. Another car was parked farther down the street, and when he turned in at Madison’s sidewalk, a woman jumped out of the car and called, “Sir, sir, could I speak to you a minute? Sir, I’m from the New York Times . . .”

Jake called back, “I’m sorry, I really can’t speak to you.” On the porch, he knocked, saw the woman was still coming along the sidewalk, a notebook in her hand, and she called again, “Sir, sir . . .”

Madison opened the door. He said, quickly, “New York Times coming up fast.” Madison looked behind him, grinned, said, “Come in, Mr. Smith. Good to see you again . . .”

“It’s a sad day,” Jake said, as the door swung closed. When he heard the snick of the lock, he pushed her back and said, “Not so close to the glass . . .”

Then her arms were around his neck and his hands were on her hips, and he steered her toward the stairs. At the bottom step she broke away long enough to whisper, “There would be a certain frisson to know that Arlo Goodman was listening, but I freshened up the guest room . . .”

“Just hope the bed can take a beating,” Jake said.

The first time they’d slept together had been one of the first time situations that combined curiosity with wariness and possibly courtesy, an effort both to discover and to leave a favorable impression. This time was a collision, with Jake pulling at her clothing, with Madison ripping at his shirt, falling together on the bed, no preliminaries, nothing but in, and consummation, Madison groaning with him, her short rider’s nails digging into his shoulder blades, as he forced himself into her and pressed her down.

When they finished, she gasped, “God . . . bless me.”

He was sweating, breathing hard, his heart thumping, and he wanted to do it again, right then, but was temporarily hors de combat. He rolled away, stood up, shook himself, crawled back to her, put his mouth next to her ear, and said, “No jokes about bugs.”

She said, aloud, “I wonder if anyone has figured us out? The first time we met, Johnnie Black was there, he picked up a little electricity.”

“Probably me,” Jake said. He was on his back now, his arm under her head. “I was asking a million questions and all I really wanted to do was jump you.”

“That’s pretty romantic,” she said.

“Hey. It’s the truth. The first reaction was sexual. Only later did I begin to appreciate your fine mind and deep understanding of Arab culture.”

She sat up. “My ‘fine mind.’ More like my fine ass.”

“You do have a terrific ass,” Jake said. “When Danzig sent me to see you, one of the things he mentioned in the briefing was your ass. I’ve noticed that a lot of serious women riders have great asses. Probably all the pounding. Anyway, I’m thinking of nominating you for Miss Ass, USA. We could create a pageant in Atlantic City . . .”

“We could call the contestants ‘aspirants’ . . .”

“Your spelling sucks,” Jake said. “Anyway, we could have the Atlantic City Ass Parade, like the Rose Parade in Pasadena, but instead of flowers on the floats . . .”

“That’s enough. Did Danzig really mention my ass?”

“Yes, he did. And your . . . breasts.”

“Except he called them tits.”

“Yes, he did.” He rolled up on one shoulder. He lightly dragged his index finger from the notch of her collarbone to her navel, and on south. “It’s a weird thing. With most good-looking women, you might want to play around a little. You know, get them up on top, or just . . . fool around. With you, all I want is in. And I want to stay in. I just want to be inside, be as close as I can get.”

After a moment, she said, “That’s nice, I think. After a while, you’ll probably notice my fine mind.”

“And your understanding of Thai culture.”

“Arab.”

“That’s what I meant, Arab.”

They made love twice more, and after the second time, with her arms wrapped around his neck, she whispered, “I think . . . we could be onto something here.”

“At my age, I’m almost afraid to think that,” Jake said. “But I hope so.”

She pushed herself up on her elbows. “We have a huge tub in the master bath . . .”

They spent a half hour in the bath, which was big enough to float them both simultaneously, and then climbed out, retrieved their clothes. While Jake got dressed, Madison changed into jeans, boots, and a plaid shirt. She already had a bag packed. “You ready?”

“I’m ready.” She touched her hair, as though for a TV appearance. “Let’s do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“I think about the girl in Madison. You described her a little too well.”

“I could figure out something with the car,” Jake said.

“Nah—I’m going.”

He trailed her down to the front room. Launching the play, she said, “You’re sure you don’t want another glass of wine? You have to go?”

“Yeah, I’ve got to get this done,” Jake said. “I could use a Coke. It’s a long drive.”

They went out in the kitchen, still talking, and Madison got two Cokes out of the refrigerator and said, “Take another one for the road.”

“Thanks.”

They drifted back into the front room and he twisted the top off the Coke bottle; Jake wondered if the pfffttt it made would be audible on a tape.

“I don’t understand why you can’t look at it here,” Madison said. “I mean, in Washington, at your house.”

“Because I’m tied into the Wisconsin thing. If Novatny smells a rat, the feds might come crashing through the door. And they must be getting frantic, with Barber going out the window. If I’ve got the package, I’m toast. I don’t even know everything that’s in it yet. It might be impossible to hold on to . . .”

“You’ve got to hold on to it, Jake,” Madison said, urgency in her voice. He thought, Not bad. “You’ve got to. All of this will have been pointless if that thing gets out there now. All you have to do is hold it until after the convention. Or even just before the convention, that would do it. Just hold on to it for a few weeks.”

“I’d like to. But I gotta find out what’s in it, sugar,” Jake said. “The cabin has everything I need—it’s got Internet access, got a computer, and nobody’s gonna find it. I talked to Billy and nobody’ll be there all week. For the rest of the month, for that matter.”

“When are you coming back? I might need you here.”

“I need you, too.” He kissed her, spent some time with it, then broke away, breathing hard again. “We gotta stop. I gotta get going.”

“Please try to hold on to it,” she said, an urgent, pleading tone in her voice. “If Landers gets knocked out now, they’ll give the job to Goodman in a flash. He’s the one they want. Landers won’t do them any good this year.”

“I will, I’ll hold on to it.” Sounding a little harassed now. “I’ll try to hold on. If there’s nothing in it that would push it out there right now, I’ll stick it in a safe-deposit box, somewhere that’s not obvious, and we’ll break it out in October.”

“Where are you going to be? Give me a phone number . . .”

“You can’t call from here, if there’s trouble, they could trace it back, they’d know you knew where I went.”

“Only for an emergency. I’d call you from outside.”

“All right. Got a pen? It’s 540-555-6475.”

“540-555-64 . . .”

“6475. Don’t use your cell phone, either. We don’t want any tracks that the feds can find later. For one thing, that might drag Billy into it, just for loaning me the place.”

“What if I have to call you, and you’re not there?”

“I’ll be there. Or I’ll be on my way back here. I’m gonna get up early and work on it all day; I won’t be going for a walk in the woods.”

In the doorway she kissed him a last time and whispered, “How was that?”

“Perfect.” Though he wasn’t sure about that: some of it sounded like dialogue from a bad novel.

He left her in the doorway, headed back down the walk, tapping along with his cane. He was twenty feet down the walk when he heard a woman’s voice calling, “Sir? Sir, I’m with the New York Times.”

He thought, Damnit, and turned back, scurried up the front steps to the house, rang the bell. Madison appeared at the door, puzzled, and Jake stepped inside, held her close, and whispered, “The Times still has the place staked out. I’ll give you a single ring when it’s clear.”

“Okay. I’ll start turning out lights.”

Back outside, the Times reporter was standing on the sidewalk, carefully outside the property line. As Jake came down the front walk, she called, “Sir, could you tell me who you are?”

“I do paperwork for Miz Bowe and the law firm. You’ll have to call Johnson Black, I’m sure you have his number.”

“If you . . .”

“Miss, if I said one more word, they’d fire my ass. Think of the guilt you’d feel.”

“I’d manage somehow,” she said, but she was smiling at him.

“Call Johnson Black.” He glanced back at the house. “Miz Bowe is going to bed. If you’re planning to stay all night, I hope your car has a heater.”

Inside the house, the lights were going out.

20

Jake cruised the neighborhood for half an hour before the Times reporter left. He saw her car pulling out of its parking space, followed the taillights until she turned left at the bottom of the hill, eased up to the stop sign, then far enough out into the street to make sure that she’d kept going. When she was out of sight, he touched the speed dial on his cell phone, let it ring once, then turned the car around. Madison came down the side of the house carrying her overnight bag.

“I hate doing this,” Jake said when she got in the car. “This is way more dangerous than stealing that laptop. Maybe we just oughta call the cops.”

“No. If it’s the wrong guy’s DNA in Madison, we’d never find him. And we’d look like morons for pointing the FBI at Goodman. We’d have no credibility left at all—and I don’t have that much now.”

“But hanging you out there . . .”

“I won’t be hanging out. Besides, the car’s a problem that you can’t solve without me.”

“If it weren’t for that . . .”

“Did you bring me the shotgun?”

“Yes.”

“Then drive.”

They got out of Washington in a hurry, stopped at a Wal-Mart and picked up a box of contractor cleanup bags, kitchen gloves, and four infrared game-spotter cameras. From there it was west and south on Interstates 66 and 81, stars out, listening to classic rock on satellite radio, lights sparkling above them on the mountains as they drove down the length of the Shenandoah. As they went past Staunton, Madison said, “We’re getting close?”

“Another half hour.”

They could see the lights of Lexington when they cut right into the mountains, good roads narrowing to twisting black-topped lanes. Jake stopped at a dark place, a hillside looming to their left in the starlight, a deep valley on the right. “This is the trailhead for the park,” he said. “It’s three miles across the hill down to Billy’s place. If they come in navigating with maps, I think it’s about 90 percent that they’ll leave their car here. It’s what I’d do. They’ve got a straight shot across the hill and they’d come down on top of us. If they’re good in the woods, nobody would ever see them.”

“We can’t be locked into this, though,” Madison said. “We’ve got to work out some options.”

“Yeah. They could leave their car along the road, but the problem is, it might attract attention. Might have a cop note the tag number. There’s really no other place to park, and if you put it back in the woods, then it might really attract attention; you’d be trespassing. This parking area, you see a car in there fairly often. We just have to take care that they don’t blindside us.”

“Or send in the Virginia State Police. We don’t want to shoot any policemen.”

“That’s a problem. But they won’t. They won’t want anybody to see the package until they get a look at it first. It’s gonna be Darrell and whoever was with him at Madison.”

“You’re too confident, Jake,” Madison said.

“I know how these guys think,” Jake said. “That’s how they’d do it. That’s how I’d do it.”

“What if they’re already there?”

Jake smiled: “Then we’re toast. But I don’t think they’d start shooting if they saw you. You’d be too hard to explain.”

The question of Darrell Goodman’s arrival was the one that bothered them most: they talked about it, off and on, all the way down to the cabin. If the bug in Madison’s house was monitored often, Jake thought, they’d come in at dawn. If it was monitored less frequently, they might not come until evening, or the next morning.

“If they’re not here by then, we’ll have to pull out,” Jake said. “Danzig will be going public with the package.”

From the parking area to the end of Billy’s driveway was a long loop of narrow blacktop. The driveway began with a nearly invisible indentation in the tree line. Fifty feet in, invisible from the road, was a locked gate and the beginning of a gravel track. “Billy’s is the only place back here,” Jake said. “We’re on his land now.”

“Dark,” Madison said. Then: “What if they have those night-vision things? Darrell was military, he probably could get National Guard equipment.”

“If they can’t see us in the daytime, they can’t see us at night. And if you keep yourself down, they won’t see us.” He got out and opened the gate with his key, drove the truck through, and locked the gate behind them.

The cabin was built on a wide spot of a crooked valley nestled in a series of steep, heavily forested hillsides. Just below the cabin, on the creek that cut the valley, Billy had excavated a three-acre pond and filled it with bass. The shallow, six-foot-wide creek trickled down over a rocky bottom, past the cabin, into the pond, over a concrete lip, and then down and out of the valley.

They came around the last turn in the gravel track, and the cabin glowed like a piece of amber in the headlights. A motion-sensing yard light flicked on. Jake parked, and feeling the hair rippling on the back of his neck, climbed the porch, unlocked the door, turned on the lights. Madison helped carry the gear bags inside.

Were they out there? Up the hill, arguing what to do about Madison? Hurried calls going out of the ridgetop? He didn’t think so, but it was a possibility.

The cabin was big enough to sleep eight, with two bedrooms, a bath, and storage on the upper level. The first floor had two more bedrooms, a bath, a kitchen and a great room, and a set of high windows that looked out over the pond. A large-scale geological-survey map of the property was framed and hung on the wall of the great room.

Jake took Madison to the map. “This is probably the same map they’d be looking at, if they pull it off the Internet.” He tapped a tightly bunched strip of contour lines south of the cabin. “Up here, we’ve got this really steep hillside—it’s virtually a bluff. It’s unlikely they’d come in over the bluff, because it’s just too steep, and there are springs all along the side of it, it’s pretty slippery in there. I don’t think they’d come in from the west, because they have to cross too much of the open valley, and the creek, and it’d add a couple of miles to the approach. They could come north, up the drive, park far enough up the driveway that you couldn’t see their car from the road. The thing is, they can’t be sure from this map that there aren’t any more cabins up here, or that we might not have a gate with an alarm.”

“We have an alarm on our gate at the farm . . .” She peered at the map. “So the best way is over the hill.”

He nodded. “From the east. From the parking lot I showed you. That’s right here.” He tapped the map again. “They leave their car at the trailhead, cross the hill in the dark, taking it slow, watch the cabin for a while, then come in at dawn and take me out. They dump the body in a hole somewhere, then exfiltrate during the day, taking it slow again. One of the guys moves my car, dumps it in Lexington. Nobody would ever know.”

“What if there are three or four of them?”

“That would be another problem,” he said. “But this would be murder, so there won’t be. They’ll try to keep it as tight as they can. Could be only one guy. A pro that they bring in for the job.”

“I’m worried that we’re overconfident,” Madison said.

“You keep saying that. But with this kind of deal, you do the intelligence and you make your play,” Jake said.

“I hope you’re not fantasizing that you’re back in Afghanistan.”

“So do I. Fantasy could get us killed.”

While Madison unpacked the gear bags, Jake figured out the game-spotter cameras. They were cheap digital cameras with flashes, in camouflaged plastic, meant to be posted along game trails to check for passing deer. They worked on infrared motion-sensing triggers, and had been around for twenty years, long enough to become reliable. He put batteries in them and left them on the table.

“We’ve got walkie-talkies like these at the farm,” Madison said. Jake had two Motorola walkie-talkies in his hunting gear.

“Put new batteries in and we’ll check to make sure the channels are synced,” Jake said.

“What if somebody hears them from the outside? The range is pretty long . . .”

“Not here. We’re too deep in the valley. When we’re turkey hunting, if we go over the top of the bluffs, we can’t pick up a call from the cabin. And you can’t call out from the cabin on your cell phone. You have to be up on top.”

“Okay.” She glanced at her watch. “You better change.”

He got into his cool-weather camo, got his sleeping bag, put three power snacks and two bottles of springwater in his hip pockets. He took a full box of shells, loading four into the rifle, the rest into the elastic loops of the cartridge holders on the camo jacket; he’d never used the loops before, and fumbled the shells getting them in.

Nervous. And getting a little high on the coming combat.

Madison had taken the shotgun out of the case and was looking it over. “It’s just about like mine,” she said.

As Jake checked a flashlight, he watched her handling it. She knew what she was doing. “Snap it a few times, then load it up.”

She dry-fired it, pointing it across the room at a framed photo of the hunting group, using a trapshooter’s stance. Satisfied, she shoved some shells into the magazine.

“If one of them comes through the door, keep pulling the trigger until he goes down.” She nodded, and Jake said, “I’m going to run outside. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He slung the rifle over his shoulder and picked up the game-trail spotters and the flashlight. If they were out there . . . but they wouldn’t have been able to move that fast. If they’d moved deliberately, but hadn’t done anything weird, like rent a helicopter, they’d arrive in perhaps four hours. He had time.

Outside, the night was cool, damp. The leaves would be quiet; he would have preferred a crisper, drier night. He carried the game cameras around to the west side of the house, the side he wouldn’t be able to see, and began tying them into trees between the cabin and the pond. If they did come in from the west, they’d trip the infrared flashes, and he’d see the flashes . . .

Unless, of course, a deer came in. Then he’d get a false alarm. But the grasses on the open slopes around the cabin didn’t pull many deer in. He’d have to hope for the best.

Back in the cabin, they synced the radios. Jake switched his to “vibrate” and said, “When you get up in the morning, turn the TV on, first thing. Change channels every few minutes, but news channels. Leave the one window open just an inch, so they can hear it. Keep the blinds down, except the one over the kitchen sink. Leave that half up. When I give you four chirps, that means . . .”

“Walk past the window,” she said.

Jake nodded. “Not too fast, not too slow. You don’t want to give them time to fire a shot, but you want them to see your body. For Christ’s sake, don’t look outside—they might see your face and take off. If they just see the flannel shirt, your arm, all they’ll pick up is the movement.”

She touched her lip with her tongue. She was nervous, too. “Okay.”

“If they get me, then they’ll have to come after you,” Jake said. “That’ll only happen if there are several of them. If there are several, you know what to do.”

“I call for you, at the open window, so they can hear my voice.”

“That should scare them off,” Jake said. “If not, I’ll take them on. You call nine-one-one, you yell at me that the cops are coming, so they’ll know. Then you tip the tables as barricades, make them come through the doors to get you. If they think the cops are coming, if they don’t have time to organize, I think they’ll run, even if I’m dead.”

She shivered. “Jake . . .”

“We’ll be okay.” He grinned at her. “Maybe.”

When they were ready, Jake kissed her, said, “Keep shooting until you see them go down,” and stepped outside. The porch light was on, and he hurried away from it, into the dark. Probably three hours before they’d arrive, at the earliest, he thought. At this moment, they’d probably be somewhere in the Blue Ridge.

If they’d monitored the bug at all. But, he thought, they would have: too much was happening all at once, and the bug would be invaluable.

He walked away from the cabin in the narrow slash of light from his headlamp, the rifle slung over his shoulder, climbed the east hill on a trail he’d walked fifty times before, heading toward a crease in the hillside, hoping it wasn’t too wet.

When he got there, he tested it with his bare hands. No more damp than the rest of the hillside, and not bad. He unrolled his quiet pad in the low vegetation, trying not to crush any more of the leafy plants than necessary, unrolled his sleeping bag on top of it, then slipped inside.

Inside the bag, he could move with absolute silence; and he’d stay loose and warm. He’d jacked a shell into the rifle’s chamber in the cabin; he tested the safety, to make sure it was on, then snuggled up to the rifle, the muzzle just outside the top of his head.

And went to sleep.

He’d learned a long time before that sleep was protective; you were silent in your sleep, as long as you didn’t snore, and if you were in an ambush, you didn’t snore. You also woke up at any non-natural sound, and at fifteen- or twenty-minute intervals.

He did that for an hour, then two hours, then three, the minute hand on his watch seeming to jump around the dial as he went in and out of sleep. At four, he was done with the sleep. He’d heard several small animals in the dark—skunks, maybe, possums, raccoons—but nothing larger. There’d been no flashes from behind the cabin.

At five-thirty, he heard movement above him and to the south. Listening, hard. Turned his head that way, looking for a light. Moving in the dark was difficult in the Virginia woods; even a red LED lamp would help some, and shaded, pointed at the ground, normally wouldn’t be visible. But since he was below them, he might catch just a random flash . . .

He saw nothing. The movement stopped, and he listened, breathing silently, his nostrils twitching, an atavistic effort to find a scent. Down below, the cabin porch lights, and the yard light near the shed, lit up the yard. There were two lights on inside the house, but no sound. Jake had told Madison not to turn the TV on until six o’clock, after turning on lights first in the upstairs bedroom, then in the bathroom, and finally in the kitchen.

After twenty minutes of silence, he’d begun to wonder if he’d actually heard the movement, if it might not have been a departing deer. But he always thought that when he was hunting. You’d hear the sound, then you’d doubt it, and then you’d hear it again, and then you’d figure out where it was going, the angle, the speed, the shooting possibilities.

Sunrise wouldn’t be for another half an hour. If it had been Jake, he’d have gotten into a shooting spot before there was any movement in the cabin. If they were up there, they’d be watching the cabin and making last-minute plans. In a few minutes, they’d start down the hillside, probably a few yards apart. They’d go in as a team, he thought, rather than breaking up and circling against each other.

At a minute before six, he heard movement again, and at the same time got a single alert vibration from the walkie-talkie. Madison was up and moving. The light came on in the upper bedroom, and then in the bathroom. The movement stopped when the first light came on; it started again when the second light came up.

So they were here. A deer wouldn’t have frozen. And whoever it was, was doing it right, moving with almost imperceptible slowness, placing every foot carefully—but it was impossible to move through the woods without making some noise. If there’d been wind, Jake wouldn’t have been able to pick out the footfalls; but there was no wind. They were pretty decent at it, he thought. He’d have to keep that in mind.

By six-fifteen, daylight was coming on, enough to shoot, and he’d heard the movement pass him to the south, heading down the hill. A moment later, Madison turned on the kitchen light, and then the television. He gave her four beeps on the walkie-talkie, and she walked by the half-open blind of the kitchen window, fast enough that he caught just a flash of shirt.

If the men below were watching the cabin, they should have seen it. And they should have focused on the idea that the quarry was inside . . .

Fixing on any specific idea was a killer.

Five minutes later, he saw them for the first time. For a moment, he thought there was only one, a man in military camo, complete with head cover, carrying a short black weapon. The gun had a fat snout, as big around as an old silver dollar: a special forces military silencer, a gun they’d bought from the Israelis.

Then he saw more movement ten yards away, a second man. There’d been no flashes from the cameras on the backside of the cabin. He hadn’t expected any, because the approach was so much poorer on that side. There could be a backstop guy on the other side, but it didn’t feel that way. This felt like a hunter-killer team, well coordinated, moving in on a target.

A scraping noise came from the cabin, the sound of a chair being moved. Madison was improvising. The TV channels, barely audible from Jake’s position, changed. When they did, one of the men flicked a hand at the other. The other man scurried across the opening to the cabin, ducked down next to the porch steps.

They waited for a moment. Then the second man crossed the clearing, joining his partner. They both were wearing head and face covering, probably against the possibility of security cameras. Jake was tracking them both in the scope now, clicking the safety off, waiting for the shot. He wanted them on the porch. If he took the first one before they were on the porch, the second man might be able to roll under the cabin before he could get another shot off.

One of the men gave a hand signal, and they moved up the steps, slowly, slowly, ready to crack the front door, or maybe a window.

Window. One of the men slid toward the larger window looking into the cabin, while the other crouched next to the door. He was going to do a peek. Jake put the crosshairs on him, watching the other man with his off-scope eye.

The man at the window did a slow peek, then moved his head back, gave the other some kind of hand signal; the man near the door may or may not have gotten it, but it didn’t make any difference.

Because at that moment, Jake shot the window man in the back.

21

The window man went down and Jake tracked right to the second man as he worked the bolt, but the second man was already moving fast, up in the air, over the porch rail, onto the ground and rolling. Jake snapped a shot at him, had the feeling that the shot was a good one, but the man flipped under the cabin and disappeared.

Jake said into the walkie-talkie, “One down, but we’ve got a loose one, he jumped the railing, he’s under you, watch the back.”

Madison said, “Yes.”

A moment later, a flash went off behind the cabin, one of the game-trail cameras. The loose man had continued under the cabin, putting it between himself and Jake, and was heading for the trees. Jake started moving as soon as he saw the flash, sideways across the hill, running. The walkie-talkie vibrated in his hand and Madison called, “He’s crossing the creek, he’s across the creek . . .”

Jake jacked another shell into the chamber as he ran, saw the second man ten feet from the tree line, hobbling, straining for the trees. Jake pinned the rifle to a tree trunk to steady it, but had no time, no time, and wound up snapping another shot into the brush where the man disappeared.

On the walkie-talkie, Jake said, “There’s one on the porch, I think he’s gone. Be careful, though. I’m tracking the other one.”

“Be careful, be careful . . .”

Now it was a game of cat and mouse. The man in the woods had big problems: he’d probably been hit, though it was impossible to tell how hard. But if he had been, he was bleeding and under pressure to get medical help. His car was three miles away, over tough country, and even if he was able to walk to it, he’d have to keep moving. If he stopped, he might bleed out; and he’d certainly stiffen up.

Jake had problems, too: he couldn’t take a chance that the man might get away. He had to block him. If the other man realized that, he might simply hide, tend to the wound, and hope that Jake would stumble into him. If he killed Jake, he might not have to walk to his car: he might get Jake’s.

Jake paused just long enough to press three more cartridges into the rifle, then began jogging across the hillside. He was making a lot of noise, but he had to get in position to block. Once he was there, he could slow down into a stalking mode.

The walkie-talkie vibrated. He stopped, put the radio to his face, said, “Yes.”

“He’s moving south. He’s going up the west side of the bluffs.”

Jake started moving again, climbing higher on the valley wall. If the other guy was moving, he wouldn’t be able to hear Jake. In his mind’s eye, Jake could see a perfect ambush spot overlooking a deer-food plot with a shallow ravine running along its side.

From there, he should be able to see anybody coming along the top of the bluffs. The spot was two hundred yards away. He windmilled toward it, refusing to let his bad leg slow him, his own breath harsh in his ears. Brush lashed his face, tore at his body and legs, scratching his face. He kept moving, gasping for air, up a last short slope and into the nest at the top.

Billy had stacked tree branches in a two-foot-high triangle, an impromptu ground-blind looking down at the deer plot. Jake eased into it and settled down. Listening, listening . . .

The sound of the slug was unmistakable as it hit George Brenner, a snap-whack so fast as to be inseparable, but distinct from the sound of the shot, which followed a few milliseconds later. Darrell Goodman didn’t think about it; he was too thoroughly trained to think, he simply moved, vaulting the porch railing, scrambling for the cover of the cabin. He felt an ankle go when he hit the ground, and he rolled toward the inviting darkness under the porch, felt the bite of a slug cutting into the same leg with the damaged ankle, never heard the second shot.

The shooter was quick.

He threw his weapon over his back on its sling and scrambled toward the right side of the cabin. The support beams were only eighteen inches over the ground, and in a few uneven places, even closer than that. Animals had been under the porch; he could smell them on his hands, in his face, and still he scrambled and dragged himself, ignoring his leg, out the other side, and then he was running toward the trees, staggering, his left leg weakening, the cabin between him and the assassin.

In the course of the scramble, his brain had processed the cabin as a trap. It provided immediate cover, but that wouldn’t last. He had to get out. If he could make it to the trees . . .

He didn’t think about being hit again. There was a bright flash to his right, and he dodged, thinking it might be a muzzle flash, but then he registered it as too bright, and a second later plunged into the tree line. As he did, there was another snap-whack four inches from his face, as a slug tore into a tree trunk.

Jesus!

He went down, on his belly, slithered into a depression, damp with dew on moldering leaves, and then he stopped.

Listened, trying to suppress his heavy breathing, his heart pounding. He could hear the other man—had to be Winter. Jesus Christ, he’d set them up, he must’ve known about the bug, how long had he known, what had he fed them? He groped into the leg pocket on his injured leg, took out a cell phone, looked at the connection bar. No connection. He was too deep in the valley. He’d had a solid link at the top of the ridge, three hundred yards away. He had to get to a spot where he could link up, had to move quickly.

Winter wasn’t alone. There was at least one more guy in the cabin, then there’d been the flash on the hillside when he was running, so there might be two more. The fag group? Was Winter working with Barber’s guys? No time to think: had to move. Couldn’t let them pin him down.

He slid one hand down his injured leg, probing for the wound, came away with a wet red-stained hand. No first-aid kit. Still, he had to do something about the bleeding, soon.

If he could get to the top of the ridge, he could make a call, hunker down, wait. If they came for him, he could make them pay.

He pushed off from the depression, nearly groaned with the pain, and using his arms as much as his legs, began moving as quietly as he could toward the west side of the bluffs south of the cabin.

Jake heard him, but at first couldn’t see him. The second man was probably no more than a hundred yards away, but the woods were so thick that he simply couldn’t see more than a few yards into it. A good thing: the other man couldn’t move quietly.

So Jake tracked him by the sound of his movement, and after two or three minutes, realized that the other man didn’t seem to be getting closer. He seemed, instead, to be working toward a neighboring bean field, though that was five or six hundred yards away to the southwest, not far from where Jake had set up during the turkey season. Away from the car park, from the direction he’d come in from.

Why would he go there?

The walkie-talkie vibrated in his pocket, and he slipped it out, gave her a single beep of acknowledgment. “The first one is gone. There’s blood on the ground where the second one jumped.”

Jake muttered, “Okay,” then, as quietly as he could, “You’re out? Go back in.”

“I’m okay here, I just came out to check. The runner was hurt.”

“Get back in. I’m tracking him, he’s well south of you.”

And getting farther south, Jake decided a minute later. Then: high ground. The other man was looking for a place to make a cell-phone call.

He had to move. He slipped out of the makeshift blind, risked walking on the grass on the edge of the food plot, exposed, but too far from the second man to be seen, he thought. Still, the hair rose on the back of his neck, and some danger gland in his brain was shouting at him to get out of sight.

He paused inside the tree line. Listened, heard just a bit of movement, still heading up. Found a game trail, worn leaves and slightly thinner brush where deer had cut across the slope. Passed an old buck-rub, made a mental note. Moved slowly, slowly, still-hunting.

Stopped every six feet. Listened. When he heard nothing, he froze. When he heard movement, he moved. Five minutes into the stalk, he saw a tree limb shake; a little jiggle of new bright-green leaves, like a squirrel might make, but too low. Sixty yards out, two-thirds of the way to the top of the bluff.

From experience, he knew that the other man would have to get nearly to the top before the cell phone would work. Jake watched until he saw another leaf-jiggle, and then moved, sideways, across the hill, until he found a seam in the trees. Not a trail, not a gully, but simply a seam, the result of random seeding . . .

But it gave him a shooting lane.

He eased down, put the scope on the last spot he’d seen movement, and glassed the area.

He saw the first hard movement a minute later. Watched, watched . . . green, brown, black: camo.

He fixed the scope on it, pulled the trigger.

Goodman heard him coming. Couldn’t see him, but thought the footfalls were a man’s—the sky was too bright, and the sound wasn’t explosive enough to be a large animal. He was being stalked. He couldn’t pick out an exact direction; but there was only one. Had he been wrong about another man in the woods, in addition to whoever was in the cabin?

He could feel that he was still losing blood, he was weakening. He had to do something.

Moving slowly, he slipped the weapon off his shoulder, cocked it, clicked it onto full-auto. There was a downed branch a few feet away. He edged over to it, pulled off his camo hood, snagged it over the tip of the branch, and slowly pushed the branch out in front of him. Before moving again, he dug into the damp earth around him, rubbed it over his face to kill the face-shine. Then he moved along for ten feet, the branch out in front, pushing the camo mask, another ten, another ten, climbing higher and higher. He might possibly be able to make a phone call from where he was, but couldn’t risk turning the cell phone back on. If it rang, he was dead.

He pushed the stick ahead a fourth time. A sudden crack, a slug plucked at the hood, the gunshot from the trees no more than thirty or forty yards to his right. He snapped his gun over, pulled the trigger, and hosed the trees with thirty rounds of nine-millimeter, shredding leaves and vines and bark and twigs and dirt.

He flipped the mag out and slammed in another as he rolled away from his shooting position; another shot plucked at the ground behind him. Damnit, he’d missed. He fired three quick bursts and this time let himself roll back down the hill, scrambling, falling, turning, trying to control it as he let himself go, his gun pointed up the hill. He saw a flash of movement and fired another squirt, and then was scrambling right back to where he started.

He was fucked, he thought. They had him.

One last chance . . . He fired the last few rounds in a single burst into the trees where he’d seen the stalker, slammed his last magazine into the weapon, and burst out of the trees. He was weak, his eyes were going dark, but he only had to make it thirty yards to the shelter of the porch.

If he kicked in the door he’d be face-on with the guy inside, maybe, maybe the guy would be surprised enough, after the fight up the hill, that he wouldn’t be ready. If he could get inside the cabin, if he could just get a break from the hunter, if he could barricade himself, if he could do something about his leg, if there was a hardwired phone inside that hadn’t been disabled.

If . . .

He ran.

The burst of full-auto didn’t hit Jake, but it knocked him down. The slugs were shredding the landscape six feet away from him, uphill, then swung toward him, tearing up the tree branches overhead, and he was on his face, jacking a round into the rifle.

Another burst behind him, not loud, more of a chattering sound: the weapon was silenced, it had looked like one of the Israeli commando jobs, meant for killing terrorists in a quiet way . . .

Two more bursts, and then he registered the guy moving, snapped a shot at the movement, got another burst in reply, jacked another round, lay flat listening, realized that the movement was fast now, and farther away. He lifted his head just in time for another burst, thought, He’s heading for the cabin, pulled out the walkie-talkie and shouted, “He’s coming right at you, I think. He’s coming right at you . . .”

Jake was on his feet now, listened for one second, heard the continuing thrashing below, and started running. Blood on the ground: the other man had been hit. He must be desperate, he was going for the cabin. Jake had to get clear of enough brush to take the shot, he’d have just one, if the man could still run, but getting clear would be a struggle . . .

With the woods all around him, it would be possible to see the other man, but impossible to get a decent shot. He’d see him as flashes between trees, but as he swung the rifle barrel to track the target, he’d be as likely to hit a tree as anything else. He needed a shooting lane.

But when Goodman broke out of the trees, running for the cabin, Jake was too far up the hill. He saw him, saw the movement, had no shot . . .

Goodman was fifteen feet from the cabin when he saw the movement, then registered the face.

Madison Bowe, wearing a flannel shirt. And in her hand . . .

Madison dropped the walkie-talkie, picked up the twenty-gauge, and stepped out on the porch. She heard, rather than saw, Goodman break from the trees. She leveled the shotgun and let him come.

Saw him then.

And from fifteen feet, fired a single shot into his face, and he went down like a rag doll.

Was stunned by the act. Stood, motionless for a moment, then said, “Oh, God,” to nobody.

Jake got there a minute later, flailing along on his bad leg. He stopped next to Goodman, his rifle pointed at Goodman’s heart, probed him with a foot, but there was no point in probing: most of Goodman’s head was gone.

Jake came up on the porch, his face almost as hard as hers.

“What’d I tell you?” he asked.

“What?”

“I told you to pull the trigger and to keep pulling it until the gun was empty. I don’t need any of that single-shot bullshit.” He glanced back at Goodman’s body, then stepped close to her, touched her forehead with his. “You did good.” He started to laugh, high on the rush: “You did so fuckin’ good.”

They saw it differently, but to the cops, it probably would have been murder—hard to explain that first shot in the man’s back. Jake checked the body where it was still lying on the porch. He’d died instantly, hit in the spine and the heart. The slug had passed through his body, digging into a four-by-four upright next to a window. The bullet hole was smaller than his smallest fingernail, and looked like a routine defect in the wood.

“What do I do?” Madison asked.

“Pick up all the brass you can find—the shells thrown off by Goodman’s gun. I’ll point you at the spots, and there’s a blood trail going up the hill. You’ll need gloves to pick it up. Don’t touch it with your bare fingers.”

He showed her where Goodman had climbed the hill. “I don’t think I can get it all,” she said. “It’s all scattered around, in the trees.”

“Get what you can.”

While she did that, he searched the two dead men, got car keys, put the bodies in two of the contractor cleanup bags, dragged them to his car, fitted them in the trunk. When they were out of sight, he got a bucket and soap and washed the blood off the porch. That done, he hosed down the places where Goodman had been hit and then had died, eliminating as much of the blood trail as he could find.

Now would be a time for a good solid rain, he thought, looking up at the sky: and it was possible that he’d get it.

Madison came back down the hill with a bag of brass and two magazines. Jake counted them: eighty-eight out of ninety shells accounted for, assuming that all three mags had been full.

“Now what?”

“Now’s the dangerous part,” he said. They had to move the bodies and the other car.

“You’re not still going to Norfolk?” she cried. “You said we might be able to do something else. I mean, it’s crazy, Jake, if anything goes wrong . . .”

“But it’ll work for us, it’s the only thing that’ll really work for us.”

Madison was adamant, and so was Jake; they snarled at each other as they drove out to the car park. Goodman had been driving an SUV: they found it in the park, just where Jake had thought it would be. When they clicked the remote control at it, the taillights blinked.

There were no other cars in the parking space, and Jake moved the bodies from his own car trunk, and threw the guns, the empty mags, and some of the clean empty shells in the back with them, then pulled one of the contractor’s bags over the driver’s seat.

Madison was pleading with him. “Jake: don’t do this. It’s not necessary.”

“It is,” he insisted. “Just stay on the other route. You’ll get there quicker than I will, because it’s shorter. I doubt that I’ll see a cop all day . . .”

He did see cops, two of them. Neither one gave him a glance. He saw one near Farmville, and another near Franklin, both on back highways. He stopped only once on his way, to empty the bag of 9mm brass into a creek on a back road. The bag he threw out the window when he was sure there were no cops around.

Norfolk is a complicated place, and not easy to get around. He took it slowly, ultracautious through traffic, and finally found a spot to dump the truck. He left it on a grimy industrial back street, in a collection of other trucks from a nearby light assembly plant.

Before he left it, he took the plastic bag off the driver’s seat, stuffed it in his pocket, closed the truck’s doors, and locked them. Madison picked him up at a gas station six blocks away.

“Still think it was foolish,” she said.

“It’s not. We’ve given them a story. We’ve given them something they can work with. Darrell was involved in cleaning up the gangs down here, and there are stories about his interrogation techniques. Stories about bodies that went in the Atlantic. We gave them the payback story.”

“What about the slug in the cabin?”

Jake shrugged: “Means nothing. First of all, it’d be almost impossible to find. The hole is tiny and I rubbed it over. Neither guy has a slug in him, so there’s nothing to match. Goodman’s full of shotgun shot, but that’s not diagnostic. We’ll get rid of the rest of the shotgun shells, buy new ones of a different brand, clean the guns.”

She looked at him for a long moment. “I didn’t mean to get on you for driving to Norfolk, but I was pretty scared. I haven’t done this before.”

“Neither have I. Not like this,” Jake said. “Are you pretty freaked out about the dead guys?”

She shook her head. “No. They were killers and they were coming to kill us. As for the blood . . . I’ve got two hundred head of angus. They get butchered and sold for meat. Blood’s not a new thing if you raise farm animals.”

They left Norfolk, headed back to Washington. Jake drove, fast now, seven miles over the speed limit, and after a while, she said, “Actually, we’re pretty good at this.”

“It ain’t fuckin’ rocket science,” Jake said. “The only problem is the stakes. You make a mistake, you go to prison. Or worse.”

“Even if Arlo Goodman knows what happened, what can he say about it?” Madison asked, building her confidence. “That he knows we did it, because he sent his brother to kill us?”

“And if they investigated, what could they prove? Nothing. On top of all that, there’s the credible alternate story: hoodlums did it, in Norfolk. I think we’re good.”

She straightened herself in the passenger seat, pulled down the vanity mirror, and checked her face. They’d heard the stories about Howard Barber; television was waiting for her in Washington. “You’re gonna be hard to train,” she said.

“My first wife said the same thing.”

“She was right.” She pointed out the windshield. “Now shut up and drive for a while. I’ve got to think about what we might have missed.”

Arlo Goodman sat at home and waited for his brother to call. He expected a call around seven o’clock in the morning, or maybe eight, depending on how long it took to get through the forest above Winter’s hideout. But Darrell had warned him that it might take longer, and it would be unwise to use cell phones from the site of a murder . . .

Especially with the murder victim in bed with Madison Bowe, and Bowe so willing to make accusations.

Darrell had also suggested that after they did Winter, and got him in a suitable hole, he might put George in with him. That’d take some extra work.

At eight, with no call, Goodman still wasn’t too worried. He sat in his office and watched television, the breaking story on Howard Barber—the FBI was investigating the possibility that Barber had killed Lincoln Bowe, with Bowe’s own connivance, the anchors said, with convincing excitement. The media was camped outside Madison Bowe’s house, waiting for a statement.

At ten o’clock, he was apprehensive.

At a little after ten, he learned that Madison Bowe was not in her town house, although she’d been there at midnight the night before, and the first newsies had arrived by 5 A.M. Had she slipped out? they asked. Had she gone into seclusion? Where was Madison Bowe? The last person to be seen at her house was a man with a cane.

Arlo Goodman heard that and thought, Uh-oh. If she’d slipped out to be with Winter, if Darrell had killed them both, if something had gone wrong . . . He continued working: the state of Virginia doesn’t stop for a simple news story, or a missing brother.

At eleven, he tried Darrell’s cell phone, and it rang but cut out to an answering service. Where the hell was he?

At noon, now seriously worried, he was working at his desk when a thought popped into his head. Darrell and George had only gone to Wisconsin, where the pollster and his secretary had been killed, because of a conversation they’d overheard on the bug in the ceiling of Bowe’s town house. A conversation between Winter and Bowe, with no other witnesses.

Winter hadn’t known the pollster’s name. Had never heard of him. When the killings were done, and Winter had a chance to think, might he have asked, “How did these people get here so fast?”

If he was smart—and he was—he might have suspected a bug. If he suspected a bug . . .

Had he set them up? Jesus Christ: had Winter dragged them into a trap?

By six o’clock, he knew something had happened, but he didn’t know what. He could ask somebody to check on the location of Darrell’s cell phone, but he was unsure whether he should make the request. Better to wait until Darrell was obviously missing, let somebody else notice.

The TV was still on, and he caught Madison Bowe, escorted back to her house by her attorney: she had been talking to the FBI, she said from her porch. She refused to believe that Howard Barber had killed Lincoln; refused to believe that it was all a fraud. Broke into tears for the first time: refused to believe that Lincoln could have done this without giving her a hint; done it to her, as much as anybody else.

A good performance, Goodman thought. In fact, he was riveted.

Not by Madison, though.

The camera swung across the crowd of newsies, clustered on the porch. On one of the swings, it picked up a man leaning against a Mercedes-Benz, a half block away. One arm was braced against a cane.

“That fuckin’ Winter,” Arlo Goodman said aloud to his television set. “That fuckin’ Winter.”

Darrell, he thought, was dead. So was George.

He suspected that he should cry, that he should feel some deep emotional choke at the loss of his brother. He didn’t. He didn’t feel much at all.

What he did do was smile ruefully at the television and think,

Darrell’s dead—and that’s not all bad.

22

They got back to Washington late in the day, went to Jake’s house, unloaded the car, turned on the television. Jake went up to the junk room and got a gun-cleaning kit. When he came back down, Madison, pale faced, said, “There’s a story out that Howard killed Linc and that the FBI knows it.”

“Then they’re probably looking for you,” Jake said. “The media, anyway. Let me check my phones.”

He’d had a call from Novatny early that morning: “Get back to me if you know where Madison Bowe is. We need to talk to her.”

“What do you think?” she asked.

“People may have seen you here,” Jake said. “Neighbors, when we came in. I should call Novatny—but you should call Johnson Black first.”

“That’ll make it look . . .” She paused, shook her head. “Never mind.”

“What?”

“That’ll make it look like I’m trying to hide something—but that’s silly. Everybody in Washington would call their lawyer first.”

Johnson Black arrived thirty minutes later. The guns had been put away, they’d taken showers, the clothes from the cabin were running through the wash cycle. Black was beaming when he came through the door, kissed Madison on the cheek, shook Jake’s hand, said, “Now it’s getting interesting. Jake, if I could talk to Madison alone for a minute?”

“He can stay here,” Madison said. “What do you want to know?”

Black peered at Madison for a moment, then said to her, “I have to warn you that your interests might not be identical. Maybe it’d be better if I talked to you alone.”

“Forget that,” Madison said. “I want him here.”

Black shrugged. “All right. The FBI will ask if you know anything about Howard Barber killing Linc.”

“I guessed. Howard came over, I accused him of it. He more or less confessed, and I threw him out.”

“You didn’t tell the FBI or anyone else?”

“It was two days ago, Johnnie. I was going through a nightmare.”

“All right. When the FBI asks, I’ll advise you to stand silent. If they really want to know, they’ll take you before a grand jury, but they’ll have to give you immunity.”

“If I won’t talk to them, then they’ll know . . . I mean, they’ll really know.”

“Having them know, without going to prison, is better than going to prison. Period. End of story.”

“All right.”

“Besides, if you and Barber had a private conversation, well, Barber’s dead—so who’s there to contradict you?” Madison glanced at Jake, and Black caught it. “What? Who else was there?”

“Nobody. But Jake thinks my house might have been bugged.”

“Uh-oh.” Black looked at the ceiling. “How about this place? Who would have given them a warrant. You think Homeland Security . . . ?”

“We think it’s Goodman,” Jake said. “No warrants, just the Watchmen. Every time Madison has a conversation in her living room, it seems to wind up in the papers the next day.”

“Huh. Well, I know the people who can find it, if it’s there,” Black said. He looked at his watch. “Let’s go. First to the FBI, then home. You’ll have to make a statement to the press.”

He looked at Jake, then back to Madison: “Did you tell Jake? About Barber and Linc?”

“No. Not then. Not until we heard on the car radio that the FBI was looking into it.”

“What exactly is your relationship with Mr. Winter?”

Madison shrugged, then said, “Intimate.”

Black said, “That may not have been wise. To have become . . . intimate . . . under the circumstances.”

“I would have said ‘athletic,’ ” Madison told Black, hands on her hips. “And screw the circumstances.”

Black said, “Okay. Now, let me phrase this next question as carefully and fully as I can. Was Howard Barber suicidal because of his relationship with Linc? If he was, and if you were willing to say that, we might be able to smooth over some embarrassment that everybody’s feeling about his death. We might be able to . . . apply some political salve. Can you say that Howard was suicidal?”

Madison didn’t hesitate: “I pleaded with him not to do anything rash. He seemed absolutely despondent. He had a history of clinical depression. He told me that he’d thought about going along with Linc—when Linc died.”

Black showed a smile, then said, “Let’s call the feds. Jake, you’ve got the connection . . .”

Novatny picked up the phone and asked, “Have you seen Madison Bowe?”

“She’s here, hiding out,” Jake said. “She’s afraid a Watchman will find her and throw her out a window.”

“That’s about eighty percent bullshit,” Novatny said. “I think Barber jumped.”

“That’s not what they’re saying on TV—and the FBI’s not talking to us, if you remember. Ol’ buddy.”

“Yeah, well . . . Is she going to talk to us?”

“She’ll talk to you or a DOJ lawyer. Her attorney’s with her now,” Jake said. Across the living room, Johnson Black wiggled his thick eyebrows. “I don’t know what they’re talking about, but they’ve been in the study for a while.”

“We’re talking about Johnson Black?” Novatny asked.

“Yup. They told me to call you. Do you want to come here, or do you want them to come there?”

“Really?” Novatny was skeptical.

“Really.”

“It’d be more convenient if she came here.”

“Give her half an hour,” Jake said. “Where do you want her exactly?”

“My office. Call ahead—I’d like to take a walk around the block with you, before we go upstairs.”

“With me?”

“Yup. A chat. Nothing sworn, no wires, no games. Just talk. Two ol’ buddies.”

“See you in an hour,” Jake said.

They went in two cars, Johnson Black leading in his limo, Madison and Jake following. They called ahead and found Novatny waiting at a pull-in parking strip, accompanied by what looked like an intern or possibly a random teenager. Novatny said, “Park where you are.”

“The signs say that’s illegal,” Jake said; a row of signs warned of heavy fines and immediate towing.

“Joshua here is going to guard the cars. He’ll shoot anybody who objects,” Novatny said. “C’mon, Jake. Two hundred yards.”

They went off together, Jake tapping along with his stick, Madison moving up to Black’s limo for a last-minute conference. Jake said, “So. What do you need?”

“I want to know what the White House is doing,” Novatny said. “If we’re about to have nine million pounds of shit land on our heads.”

“Judging from the television . . .”

Novatny stopped and turned. “Fuck the television, Jake. I want to know if we’re going to get hammered. If I’m on my way to Boise, if Mavis is going to get shuffled off to a basement somewhere.” Mavis Sanders was Novatny’s boss. “If I should quit and get a security job before it’s too late.”

Jake shook his head: “Chuck, I honest to God don’t know. The White House cut me loose a couple of days ago, closed the consulting contract. I may be on my way back, though. Something else came up.”

Novatny was interested. “Having to do with this case?”

“Having to do with something serious. Maybe related, maybe not. I can tell you, just between us ol’ buddies, it’s not this penny-ante shit you’ve been dealing with so far. Lincoln Bowe and Howard Barber.”

Novatny rubbed his forehead. “Not like this penny-ante shit? This penny-ante shit? Jesus Christ, Jake.”

“I’m telling you this because we’ve worked together, and I like you, and I like Mavis,” Jake said. “Get yourself braced for something coming from an entirely new direction. Political. You should know about it in twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the outside. I’ll try to get them to bring it directly to you and your office. You’ll be a star for bringing it in. You’ll go in a history book.”

“What do you want? For doing that?”

“Consideration,” Jake said.

“Consideration?”

“Yeah. We want some consideration. If we don’t get it, somebody’s going to shove some consideration up your ass and break it off. With what’s coming, you can look at it two ways—you can decide whether every niggling little procedure’s been followed, or you can go for the substance. If you go for the substance, you’ll be okay. I think. But that’s just me doing the thinking.”

Novatny licked his lower lip. “They’ve got some good hunting out of Boise.”

“Didn’t know you hunted,” Jake said.

“I don’t. That’s what I hear from the guys who’ve been there,” Novatny said. “That’s what they always say. ‘There’s some good hunting out of Boise.’ ”

“Well, that’s one thing.”

Novatny looked up and down the block. Joshua was guarding the cars like a hawk. “I’ll tell you, Jake. I’ve never worried too much about procedure. I’ve always been a substance guy. So’s my whole office.”

“You’re speaking for the office? For Mavis?”

“I am.”

“Substance is good. This new thing that’s coming, it has everybody so scared that we’ve literally been hiding out,” Jake said. “I’m afraid to let Madison out of my sight. I’m afraid somebody’s going to kill her, like those people in Wisconsin.”

“Ah, shit. The new stuff has to do with that?”

“It might. I’m not sure. You’ll know soon enough.”

They finished their walk and Novatny said, “Do what you can, man.” He collected Madison and Black and disappeared into the building, Madison turning to give Jake a finger wave before she went in. Novatny walked beside her, awkwardly straightening and restraightening his tie. If you didn’t know better, Jake thought, you might have thought Novatny was the one being investigated.

Jake got on his cell phone, called Gina in Danzig’s office.

“I need to talk to the man.”

“Things are intense right now,” Gina said. “Let me see if I can find him. I’ll call you back.”

“Tell him it’s critical. He has a real need to know this.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said. Her voice was absolutely neutral.

Fifty-fifty, Jake thought when she’d hung up. Fifty-fifty that they’d call. If they didn’t, he’d really been cut loose.

But Danzig got back in five minutes. “What’s going on?”

“Things are moving. There may soon be a settlement in the FBI/Madison Bowe/guy-thrown-out-the-window situation. My guy Novatny says he’s not interested in procedural matters. Only in substance.”

“You think that’ll hold?”

Jake nodded at his phone. “I do. It’s in everybody’s interest.” The Rule: Who benefits?

“You better get over here. I’ll have Gina put you on the log.”

Gina was five degrees on the warm side of neutral when Jake got to Danzig’s office. She shipped him straight through: “He’s tired. Take it easy.”

Danzig was wary: “There are rumors that you’ve gotten close to Madison Bowe.”

“They’re true,” Jake said. “But I’m still working for you—my loyalty runs to you. You don’t want to know everything that’s happened, but I think we’re in a place where everybody can be accommodated.”

Danzig nodded, and waited. He wasn’t giving anything away.

Jake said, “We need to get the package to the FBI. To Novatny, specifically. Novatny is willing to argue a particular view: that they should stick to the substance of the package, and not nitpick the procedure that got the package to them. So the question is, Where are you with the vice president?”

Danzig exhaled, relief showing on his face. “If they’ll do that . . .”

“We’re in a position to insist on it. I’ve already had a preliminary talk with Novatny, and he agreed; he said he was talking for Mavis Sanders, his boss. They have no idea of what’s coming and we’re delivering it to them. We had an absolutely solid reason for holding it for a few days, to check and make sure that it wasn’t a complete election-year fraud. When we realized it wasn’t, we acted as swiftly as anyone could expect . . . as long as we get it to them soon.”

Danzig nodded. “The vice president will resign tomorrow night. At one o’clock tomorrow afternoon, he’s going to call a press conference for seven o’clock, and he’ll announce that he’s leaving immediately. He wanted time to consult with his brother, which he’s done. If you were in a . . . condition . . . to take the package to the FBI, we thought you should do it, accompanied by the president’s counselor.”

“When?”

“Well, I think before the one-o’clock announcement. Word will start leaking about that time.”

Jake nodded. “I’ll need the originals.”

Using Danzig’s telephone, Jake called Madison on her cell phone. “Are you still talking to Novatny?”

“He’s here. We’re just finishing. And we’re not talking. We’ve offered to talk to a grand jury, if there is one, if we get immunity.”

“Are they going to go for it?”

“Nobody knows yet,” she said. She was crisp, controlled.

“Let me talk to him.”

He could hear Novatny fumble the phone: “Yeah?”

“Tell Mavis that we have a hot political package coming to you tomorrow, just after noon. She should alert the director, but don’t let it outside that circle. That’s absolutely critical. I’ll be at your office at noon, and you should have a lawyer with you to receive the package.”

“Is this the thing we were talking about?”

“It is—and Chuck, this is going to be the biggest deal since Bill Clinton’s blow job. You’ve got to be ready. You’ve got to be ready to brief the director, you’ve got to be ready for a media blitz.”

“I’ll move. I’m sending Mrs. Bowe home now.”

“Let me talk to her.” Madison came on and Jake said, “There’ll be about a million reporters at your house. I think it’s better to face the music now, rather than hide out.”

“I can handle it,” she said.

“I’m going to come by—I’d like to watch. From a distance.”

Late evening, Jake dealt the cards.

They were at Jake’s house, in the living room, the shades drawn. Somebody had tipped the media, or part of it, anyway, and three media trucks were parked in the street at the side of the house. “I’d have a hard time in prison,” Madison said. She picked up her hand, looked at it, picked three cards and tossed them in the discard pile, and added, “Give me three.”

“You’re not going to prison,” Jake said. He dropped three cards in the discard pile, dealt three to Madison, took three for himself.

“That’s really comforting.” She showed her hand to Jake: “Two sevens.”

Jake said, “Two jacks.”

Madison said, “Damnit, I can’t win with these cards.” She stood up, blew a hank of hair out of her face, and took off her blouse. “The TV people probably think we’re in here plotting strategy.”

“I am plotting strategy,” Jake said.

He collected the cards and shuffled. He hadn’t lost a hand yet. Madison watched him shuffle and her eyes narrowed: “Hey, are you cheating?”

“Would I cheat?” He shuffled a second time, glanced at her. She was watching his hands, and he thought how solemnly she was doing it. She was solemnly playing strip poker. He’d seen her laugh, frown, cry, groan—had seen any number of expressions, including a really nice snarl—but he’d never seen her smile with simple pleasure.

Late morning. One of Johnson Black’s assistants brought over two sacks of groceries, mostly vegetables, and Madison began making veggie chili, which she told Jake that he’d love. At noon, dressed in a blue suit with a green tie—not an intuitive match, Madison said, but it looked terrific—he got in the car and headed for the White House. The moment he backed into the alley, he was surrounded by shouting reporters. He eased through them and headed east.

Danzig, Gina, and the president’s counselor, a sober middle-aged woman from Indianapolis named Ellen Woods, were waiting in Danzig’s office. Woods had the package in a black leather portfolio. She was dressed in a blue power suit; her eyes were like black flint. “We want you to inventory the items before we go over,” she said, glancing at her watch.

Jake went through it quickly: it was intact. “It’s all here.”

“Then let’s do it,” she said.

They went in a presidential limo. Danzig called twice while they were en route, though the trip took only five minutes. “Just wondering if we were there yet,” Woods said dryly.

Novatny, Mavis Sanders, and three other high-ranking FBI functionaries and lawyers met Jake and Woods in Sanders’s office. Woods pointed Jake at a chair, gave the feds a brief oral explanation of the materials, and then handed over the package.

Though he’d been warned, Novatny was astonished. He asked Jake, “Wisconsin? Wisconsin? You knew about this when Green and his secretary were killed?”

“There were rumors here in Washington of a package like this. I was checking them out—I went out to Wisconsin because I’d learned that Green and Bowe had been lovers, and that Green was well connected around the state,” Jake said. “My feeling was, if he didn’t know about the package, he might be able to point me at somebody.”

“And he pointed you at this Levine woman? Wait a minute . . . I don’t understand the timeline.”

Jake took him through his arrival in Madison, the morning interview, the afternoon discovery of the bodies, and then he began to lie a little.

“Green told me he didn’t know about it but he could make some calls,” Jake said. “I gave him a specific name: he denied knowing it. Later, when I tracked the woman down—this was the next day—she admitted that she did, in fact, know Green. By that time, I had the feeling that I was in the grip of a political conspiracy to damage the administration, and that it might all be a fraud set up by Lincoln Bowe. I brought the package back for evaluation, and the instant we realized that it might be valid, the president ordered me to turn it over to you guys.”

The FBI people all sat back. “You’re willing to talk to a grand jury?” one of them asked.

“Absolutely. But I don’t have a lot of information. All I have is fragments. I pressed Madison Bowe on the subject and she knows even less than I do. It appears that Mrs. Bowe was deliberately kept out of the circuit by her husband, as a way to protect her.”

“I understand from media reports that you and Mrs. Bowe are friendly,” one of the feds said.

“Yes. We are. But most of this developed before we became . . . friendly.”

“And you think there was a conspiracy,” one of the suits said.

“Yes, I do. I think—I’m not sure—that it was set up by Lincoln Bowe, when he found out that he was dying from brain cancer. I think it was carried out by Howard Barber. I think the body was burned to attract the kind of intense press attention that it got, and I think the head was removed so that an autopsy would not show the cancer. I think if he is exhumed, an analysis of his spinal fluid would show the presence of cancer cells. Mrs. Bowe knew none of this—she never even saw him after the cancer diagnosis. They lived apart.”

The feds all looked at each other, and one of them said, “Heavy duty.”

“Did Barber kill Green?” Novatny asked.

“Barber or one of his group,” Jake said. “I don’t know that for sure, but that’s what I suspect.”

“Jesus Christ.”

One of the functionaries, looking like he couldn’t wait to get to a telephone, said, “And the vice president is going to resign?”

“Yup,” Jake said. “He’s toast.”

After a moment of silence, the sober, middle-aged presidential counselor said, “Given his home state, more like a grilled-cheese sandwich.”

When Jake got back home, a little after three o’clock, the place smelled wonderful, though meat-free. Madison was still cooking, barefoot in jeans, wearing one of his T-shirts, crunching on a stick of celery. She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him, asked, “All done?”

He thought, What a gorgeous woman this is, and said, “Everything we’re going to do, unless there’s a grand jury—and I’m sure there will be. But that’s probably not going to happen until after the election. You Republicans don’t want to talk about what Lincoln did, we Democrats don’t want to make the Landers mess any bigger than it is . . . so it’ll be a while.”

“I still don’t want to go to prison,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it. You could get hit by a car before then.”

“God, you’re such a comfort.”

“Mmm . . .” He looked at the potful of chili. “Think we could stick a pork chop in there?”

They ate early. As they were eating, Fox flashed a newsbreak: “Sources at the White House are telling Fox News today that there is speculation the vice president will resign. We repeat: Vice President Landers may be resigning his office. Sources say he has been accused of corruption going back to his administration in Wisconsin . . .”

“In my day, when I was on TV, you generally didn’t let your nipples show through your blouse,” Madison said.

“Poor girl’s excited,” Jake said. “She can’t help herself.”

“I think we should go into seclusion,” Madison said. “The New York apartment—we could leave a phone number for Novatny.”

“If we did that, we could walk over to the Met, down to MoMA.”

“Museum of Natural History.”

“Spend a lot of time in the bathtub,” he said.

“Down on Madison Avenue. I could use a new hat.”

“Hide out until midnight,” Jake said. “Catch the red-eye out of National.”

“Good idea.”

A minute later, he said, “Sooner or later, I’ll go down to talk to Arlo. We need an understanding.”

“Is he going to be vice president?”

“No. As I understand it, the front-runner is the senator from Texas.”

“Hmm. Our first female VP,” Madison said. “It’s gonna be tough to get you fuckin’ Democrats out of there, if all the girls are voting for you.”

“That was the thought,” Jake said.

The vice president announced his resignation at seven o’clock, his weeping wife, in a pale orange dress, seated behind him. Landers was a large man, pink and fleshy, with thick political hair going white.

“If these absurd and tendentious charges came at any other moment, I would fight them from office, as the president has urged me to do. But they are being made, as Lincoln Bowe was perfectly aware when he began this conspiracy, at the one moment when I could not afford to fight them from office—at the beginning of a long and difficult reelection campaign.

“Bowe and his criminal gang have succeeded to an extent: I am going. But they attacked me not because they wanted to damage a mere vice president. They attacked me as part of a greater game, to damage our party, our president, and indeed the aspirations of the American people, as reflected by this presidency. I won’t allow that to happen. I will fight with all my might, but I will not allow the best American president since John F. Kennedy to be handicapped during a campaign of such great importance to the American people.”

The speech was widely ridiculed in the papers and the television talk shows the next day, as was his wife in her orange dress, and his daughter, who was overweight, and who was filmed eating a caramel-and-pecan bun at a bakery near her apartment in Cambridge.

The bodies of Darrell Goodman and George Brenner sat in the SUV for four days, until somebody got curious about the fact that the truck hadn’t been moved. When the somebody got close enough, he noticed a “peculiar odor” and called the cops.

Arlo Goodman blamed the gangs, and vowed to free up more funds for gang-suppression efforts.

The FBI announced a massive investigation under the direction of a special prosecutor, the federal district attorney from Atlanta, Georgia.

“You remember when I begged you to appoint him,” Danzig said to the president. They were in the president’s private office, drinking a wonderful single-malt Scotch that the president had extorted from the distiller, using the British prime minister’s office as the pry-bar.

“I remember that. I was reluctant. There was some question about his integrity . . .”

“There was no question at all,” Danzig said. “He’s crookeder than Landers, and I’ve got the sonofabitch’s testicles locked in my desk drawer. That ‘independent counsel’ theory can kiss my ass.”

Jake and Madison hid out in New York for two weeks, talking only to Danzig and Novatny. Then Jake called Arlo Goodman from a pay phone, and flew out to Richmond on a Wednesday afternoon. Goodman walked out of the governor’s mansion at six o’clock, the sun sliding down in the sky, told his bodyguard to take a break, and met Jake at the corner.

They walked along for twenty yards without speaking, looking at the day: a good day in Richmond, summer heat coming on, but not there yet; flowers in the gardens next to the sidewalk. Two men walking, one with a limp and a cane, the other with a bad hand half curled in front of him.

Goodman opened. “That was a cold thing with Darrell.”

“I didn’t invite him out there.”

Goodman grunted. “Don’t bullshit me, Jake. You had him on a string and you pulled.”

Jake said, “I wouldn’t have done it, if it weren’t for Wisconsin.”

Goodman looked at him. “Wisconsin? You don’t think . . .”

“I do think. I can prove it,” Jake said. “And I think I can prove you knew about it. Enough to thoroughly fuck you. Maybe, with the right jury, get you sent away for first-degree murder.”

Goodman thought it over. Then, “Gimme a hint.”

“Did they do an autopsy on Darrell?”

“Of course.”

“Then they would have found some scratches on his arms, already partly healed. Wouldn’t have been a big deal, given the rest of the damage. The thing was, the scratches were put there by the secretary out in Madison. The FBI took skin and blood off her fingernails. They don’t know who it belongs to; don’t know where to look.”

“Darrell was cremated,” Goodman said.

“Yeah, but you weren’t,” Jake said. “You share most of Darrell’s gene load. If they did a test on you, they’d know that the skin didn’t belong to you, but that it did belong to your brother. And I’ve rounded up a few pieces of paper. Cell-phone calls, state airplane records . . . they don’t make it a sure thing, but they would cause you some trouble.”

“The dumb shit,” Goodman said. They walked along. “You can believe me or not, but I didn’t want those people in Madison to get hurt. Wasn’t any point in it. We wanted the package, but if we didn’t get it, knowing that you had it was almost as good.”

Jake nodded. “You could have pushed it out there, the way you did on Howard Barber and Lincoln Bowe.”

Goodman smiled, not a happy smile, but resignation. “Yup. But that fuckin’ Darrell . . .” He sighed. “If you mess with me, Jake, they’ll probably find the Madison Bowe surveillance tapes in Darrell’s safe-deposit box. They’d pretty much establish that she knew about the Landers package, and that she’s been lying about it.”

“We know about the tapes, of course,” Jake said. “We’d hate to see them get out. Also, Madison has some . . . ethical . . . concerns about the investigation into Darrell’s death. We’d hate to see some poor broken-ass Mexican hauled up on murder charges, just so you can clear it.”

“Won’t happen. I got my dumbest guys running that investigation.” A few more steps. “So we’re dealing?”

“Mmm. We think everything is fine as it is now. We’ve got a good vice-presidential nominee, you’re the respected governor of the great Commonwealth of Virginia, Madison is recovering nicely from her husband’s death. Why stir the pot?”

“That was exactly my thought,” Goodman said. “There’s no reason at all—no reason to stir up anything.”

“What’re you going to do next year?” Jake asked. “When you leave office?”

“I don’t know. Go fishing. Go on television. But I’m a pretty damn good public executive, Jake. I like the work and people like me. Would’ve been a good vice president . . .” He sighed. “Well. I’ll find something. Maybe the president will have something for me. A year from now, all this noise will be ancient history.”

They didn’t shake hands; Arlo just peeled off as they walked back toward the mansion, said, “If you ever need anything, I’d hesitate to ask me for it.”

“I will,” Jake said. “Hesitate.” And on the way back to his car, thought about Goodman hoping for a job offer from the president. Over my dead body . . .

Danzig said to Jake, about the national convention, “There’s a big goddamn hang-up on the electrical work. We’ve got three different unions and two city councilmen going at it tooth and nail, and we need somebody to go talk some serious shit with them. Figure out who to talk to, how to get it done. The media’s already screaming about their booths, they can’t plan their setups until they can configure their booths . . .”

“I’ve been spending some time in New York,” Jake said. “I’ve got a couple of guys I can call there. Probably a matter of money more than anything.”

As Jake stood up to leave, Danzig asked, “You figure out what you want?”

“I want peace and quiet,” Jake said. “However I can get it. However Madison and I can get it.”

“I believe that can be had,” Danzig said. “I have a relationship with the special prosecutor, although you don’t know that. What else?”

“That’s a lot. But there’s this girl who used to work for Arlo Goodman, as an intern. She’d like to move up to the White House. She’s smart, she’ll take anything. No big deal, though.”

“Tits and ass?”

“Excellent.”

“Give me her name—we’ll find something,” Danzig said.

“Thanks. I’ll get going on New York. What’s the timeline there?”

“Gotta be done by yesterday,” Danzig said. As Jake got to the door, he asked, “Is this gonna be a full-time thing? You and Madison Bowe?”

“We’re pretty tight. I don’t know—it could work out.” Jake hesitated, then asked, “Is Goodman gonna get behind us for the election? I know he wanted the vice presidency.”

“The president’s talking to him next week,” Danzig said. “We’re worried about what happened down in Norfolk, with his brother. Unregistered machine guns, camouflage suits, it looked like an assassination went bad. Now all this stuff is coming out about interrogation techniques, and the Watchmen. I don’t know . . .”

“I’ve been talking to people,” Jake said, and thought, Just take a second to fuck Goodman for good. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s going to surface when Goodman’s out of office, when he’s out of power down there. There are literally going to be bodies coming up. Death-squad stuff. I thought you guys should know about it. I leave the decision up to you; this is the only place I talk about it.”

One of Carl V. Schmidt’s neighbors called an FBI man who’d left him a card. “Agent Lane? This is Jimmy Jones down by Carl Schmidt’s house, you asked me to call you if I saw anything going on down there? Yeah? Well, Carl just got back. What? Yeah. He’s standing right here. He’s a little pissed . . .”

Carl V. Schmidt took the phone: “Hey. What’ve you guys been doing in my house? The place is wrecked. What the hell is going on here?”

After an active phone call, Schmidt agreed to wait at his house for an FBI man to get there for an interview. When Schmidt hung up, the neighbor asked, “Where’n the hell you been, Carl? Where’d you get that tan?”

The president said to Arlo Goodman, in the Oval Office, “How the heck have you been, Arlo? Man, has this been a month, or what?”

“This has been a month and a half, Mr. President,” Goodman said, as they sat down. Goodman crossed his legs. “The Lincoln Bowe thing . . . who would have thought?”

“The man was crazy,” the president said. “Maybe the medication . . . or maybe he was just nuts.”

“That’s my theory,” Goodman said.

The president allowed the slightest frown to glide across his face: “I was shocked to hear about your brother. How’s that investigation going?”

Goodman shook his head. “It’s going nowhere. Darrell was off on his own. I may have screwed up, letting him run too free, but he solved a lot of problems down there. Now . . . might be time to tighten the reins on the Watchmen.”

The president nodded. “They seem a little too . . . what? Executive? A little too military?”

“It bothers me,” Goodman confessed. “I think there are still uses for the organization, but more as a goodwill brotherhood. Remove any idea that there might be police functions.”

“Excellent,” the president said, rapping the top of his desk with his knuckles. “Listen, I’m almost embarrassed to ask, but how heavily can we lean on you for the campaign? You must be tired, you have your own problems. I suspect you might have liked the vice presidency . . .”

“You did exactly the right thing, there, Mr. President.” Goodman was embarrassed; he could feel himself brownnosing. “She absolutely guarantees that you’ll carry Texas—and she’ll be a good vice president, to boot. As for me, I’ll do whatever you want. Work as hard as you want me to, or go as easy. Actually, I think this campaign is gonna be fun. We’re gonna kick ass and take names.”

The president said, “We’re counting on you, Arlo. And it could be tough. Now let me ask you one other thing . . .” He glanced at his watch. “What do you think of Ham Peterson?”

Ham Peterson was the former governor of Nevada and head of Homeland Security. The calculator in Goodman’s head began to churn. “He’s a good guy, but he’s had some problems . . .”

“He steps on his own dick every time he turns around,” the president said. “I’ll tell you, Arlo, we won’t fire anybody right after the election. Leaves a bad taste. But Ham should retire back to the ski slopes. Why don’t you bone up on Homeland Security? I’ll have Bill Danzig send you some materials . . .”

A half hour later, the president was talking to Danzig, and said, “Send that Homeland stuff over to Arlo.”

“He bit?”

“Like a ten-pound bass,” the president said. “He’ll bust his ass during the election, finish out his term, and then . . . he’ll just go away.”

“He’s not going to like that,” Danzig said.

“We have an old farm saying in Indiana that covers the situation,” the president said. “Fuck him.”

Jake sat on top of the horse, one knee curled up over the flat saddle. Madison sat one horse over. Jake said, “I feel like an asshole. These pants, these boots . . .” He was wearing knee-length riding boots and jodhpurs.

“You look terrific,” Madison said. “You’d look even more terrific if you’d get rid of that ridiculous cowboy hat.”

“That won’t happen,” Jake said, touching the hat. “My grandfather gave me this hat. He wore it on the Old Chisholm Trail.”

“Jake, you bought it last week in New York,” Madison said. “At a gay boutique in SoHo. I was with you.”

“Oh, yeah.” Good hat, though.

“Eventually, if I can teach you to jump, you’re going to land on your head and kill yourself because you’re not wearing a helmet,” Madison said.

“Maybe I could rent some stall space from you,” Jake said. “Put in a couple of decent quarter horses. Get a real saddle.”

Across the fence, a dozen head of black angus drifted along, grazing down the spring grass, like inkblots on green baize. Cows liked to watch people; Jake had, on occasion, wondered if they were plotting something.

Madison asked, “How’re we doing?”

Jake thought for a moment, then said, “We’re doing better than expected.”

“Expected by who?”

“By us,” he said.

“You trust me yet?” She asked it in a light voice, but she was serious.

He bobbed his head. “I do. It’s not like I figured something out. I trust you in my gut. I trust you like I trusted my guys in Afghanistan.”

More angus drifted by, chewing.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” Madison said. “I didn’t expect to, but I couldn’t help it.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he said, “Jeez.”

She said, “If I’m going to have kids, it’ll have to be soon. I’m getting on in years.”

“I’d like a few kids,” Jake said. “I’d be good at being somebody’s old man.”

“We oughta start working on it, then.”

“Fine with me. As long as I can keep my hat.” He touched the horse with his heels, moving down the fence line.

She called after him, “So we have a basis for negotiation.”

“Yup.” He turned in the saddle to look back at her and caught a quick flash of teeth. “Made you smile,” he said.

Table of Contents

Cover

Copyright

ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

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