“Hi, Tom. Good of you to come.”

It was the voice from his mysterious phone calls, now coming from a woman sitting in an armchair.

“How did you get in here?” Surprise gave way to anger, and Tom felt distinctly vulnerable, with nothing but a towel around his waist and an unknown woman in his hotel room.

She shrugged. “Hotel-room doors are good. But manageable.”

“Then how about you manage it again and get the hell out?”

She laughed; then her eyes hardened. “You don’t really want me to do that, Tom. You want me to tell you why you’re here and what you’ve gotten yourself into. You’ll want to get dressed, however. You’ll find a Glock nine millimeter in your overnight bag. Standard Bureau issue. I knew you hadn’t traveled with one.”

He flipped open the travel bag, and sure enough, a black handgun lay atop his clothes. Hefting it, he popped out the clip and counted off twelve rounds. Although he knew nothing about her, she apparently knew a great deal about him. As a former undercover agent, that was not a situation he found palatable. But she didn’t seem stupid enough to arm a would-be opponent. Which meant she didn’t see him as an opponent….

“So why am I here?”

Wildcard
Rachel Lee

www.mirabooks.co.uk

WILDCARD

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Epilogue

Afterword and Acknowledgments

Prologue

Akhetaten, Egypt

1329 B.C.E.

Tutu watched the wanton destruction with a heavy heart. His ruler and patron, Akhenaten, was dead, along with the Pharaoh’s beautiful wife, Nefertiti, savagely murdered in a religious coup, their bodies hacked to pieces and fed to desert jackals.

Tutu himself had escaped the bloodletting, thus far, only because he had been out of the city at the time. But when they found him, they would kill him. Of that, Tutu had no doubt. The royal chamberlain could not be allowed to survive. Tutu had studied too much, learned too much, even if he had not been at Akhenaten’s side to make use of that knowledge when it most mattered. He must die, and what he had learned must die with him.

Tutu cared not for his own life. He was an old man, and death would claim him, one way or another, soon enough. But the knowledge must live.

Hiding amidst the rocks above what had once been the workers’ village, Tutu could not help but chuckle at the irony of it all. Had Akhenaten not grown up with a Hebrew, he might well have kept his birth name, Amenhotep the Fourth. Like his father and his grandfather before him, he would have ruled in the city of Thebes. He would have remained in the good graces of the priests of Amun. He might still be alive.

Instead, Tutu and young Amenhotep had grown up and played with a boy whom Tutu’s mother had plucked from a reed basket in the Nile. Tutu and the young prince had hidden in the shadows as his Hebrew friend listened to the wisdom of his people. Afterward, the three would sneak away together to discuss in secret what they had heard that day. Secrets had shaped Akhenaten’s life from childhood, and in the end they had consumed him.

Perhaps it had been all his fault, Tutu thought, not for the first time. Would young Amenhotep and his friend have tumbled onto the hidden codes by themselves? Probably not. Writing and its mysteries were Tutu’s gift—and his curse. As fluent in Hebrew as he was in Egyptian, even as a child, Tutu had transcribed from memory the stories he had heard. The Egyptian stories he wrote in the royal picture script. The Hebrew stories he wrote in their own language. That had been both his triumph and his downfall.

For once Amenhotep had ascended to the throne, Tutu no longer had to conceal his fascination with the Hebrew scrolls he had written down as a child. The scrolls that had begun to reveal coded mysteries beyond Tutu’s wildest imagination. The scrolls that now lay in a leather bag at his feet. Tutu had shared those mysteries with his two boyhood friends, and their fascination had spurred further study and the discovery of more mysteries.

It was those mysteries that had led Amenhotep to abandon the priests of Amun, change his name to Akhenaten and build the city that was even now being laid to ruin.

The mysteries of the Light. Tutu was now their sole surviving guardian. Akhenaten was dead. Their childhood friend had vanished into the desert, a fugitive wanted for murder. If the mysteries were to be preserved, it was up to Tutu.

With a sad sigh, he took a last look at the once beautiful city that had been his home for the past decade. Then he picked up his precious leather bag and the lone waterskin he had been able to scavenge from the home of a long-departed workman, and crept around the northern rim of the city. It would be a long walk down the Nile to the camps of the Hebrews. But they would offer him sanctuary in his last days.

And, perhaps, he would find among them a young man or two whom he could teach. If only the Light would grant him the time.

1

Guatemala City, Guatemala

Present Day

Miguel Ortiz sat on a bench in the Parque Centro-América and watched the morning traffic build—shopkeepers and businessmen en route to their daily labors, diplomats to their offices, tourists peeking out of their hotels like so many ants looking for honey. The sun was well over the horizon, already warming air still heavy from last night’s tropical rain. A couple sat on a nearby bench, and Miguel nodded to them. Almost time.

It seemed he had spent his entire life preparing for this day, although in truth he had never imagined himself doing such a thing until four years ago. Had it been that long since the day he’d come home from school to find his father hanged from a lamppost outside their house? He had looked up into his father’s face, bulging and purple, tongue distended, and in that moment he had known what his future would be.

His father had been an innocent man, a Quiché farmer eking out an existence from the impoverished earth. The gringos hadn’t cared. Miguel’s uncle had died defending the family secret, but not before he had killed two of the gringos who had tortured him. In Miguel’s country, blood cried out for blood. His uncle had taken gringo blood, and they had taken the blood of Miguel’s father. Today, he would take theirs. It was the way of the world. His world and, probably, his children’s world. If he lived long enough to have them.

That vision of the future had dimmed in the past four years. He had once imagined himself with a wife, working his father’s farm, raising children. He had once been so foolish as to imagine that his father’s optimism was not misplaced, that the peace accord would stand up, that his country would know stability, that he would someday walk into town and not see men in uniform with machine guns hanging from their shoulders. In his youth and naiveté, that had seemed possible.

That vision had been torn apart as he’d stood on a dirt street beside a drying puddle at the base of the lamppost, a testament to the moment of his father’s death. Blood cried out for blood. Nothing more. Nothing less.

He reached inside the shopping bag beside him and fingered the stumpy stock of the AK-47. The wood was rough where he’d sawed it off. He’d considered sanding it smooth and decided against it. Life was not smooth. It grated on the nerves and left splinters in the mind. A weapon should be no less. And do no less.

The couple were also armed, he with another AK, she with a 9 mm pistol and a block of plastic explosives in her handbag. The guerilla lieutenant had provided the C-4. The use of gringo explosives was a delicious irony. Miguel didn’t know their exact provenance—that a corporal in Georgia had sold them to a wild-eyed friend who sought to restore the purity of the white race, to be sold and resold again by those who lived and died by a warrior creed, until what looked like a block of gray clay had made its way to the Guatemalan highlands. He didn’t know the details, but he had learned enough about the ways and means of killing to recognize U.S. Army issue. It was perfect.

It was perfect, because the guerillas had also taught him about his country’s history, about the endless cycle of violence that had nearly bled his people white, touched off in 1954 when the American CIA—to protect the profits of the United Fruit Company—had instigated and funded the coup that had replaced an elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Gudman, with a military dictator. In the years since, the gringos had continued to fund a reign of terror, training the death squads at the School of the Americas. Over two hundred thousand of Miguel’s countrymen had died. All so American children could have their bananas.

That was the official story.

The truth, Miguel knew, was something else altogether. Gudman would not only have nationalized Guatemala’s farms and thereby ensured a better quality of life for the Quiché Mayan people. He had also been working to authenticate and publish a document that would change the world. The gringos could not permit that. Everyone known to be associated with the document had been killed, including Miguel’s grandfather.

Now, today, Miguel would strike back. Today’s operation would not be the first blow. It might not even be the largest blow. But it would be Miguel’s blow.

He heard the heavy rumble of the engine before he saw it, and checked his watch. Right on time. The armored limousine, bearing the gringo ambassador, passing through the streets like a Roman governor through a slave nation. Well, Miguel thought, this is not a slave nation. And you are not welcome.

He rose from the bench and lifted the shopping bag, striding casually, as if he were on his way to work. And, in a brutal way, he was. The couple saw him and got to their feet, as well, walking arm-in-arm, two young lovers out to greet the new day. Miguel stood at the corner and lighted a cigarette. He made as if to put the lighter in his pocket but dropped it in the bag instead. Shaking his head, he set the bag on the sidewalk and stooped, watching the limousine and the couple from the corner of his eye.

The timing was perfect. Just as they’d rehearsed it.

The couple had almost crossed the street as the car approached. The woman touched her forehead and stepped back from her partner, as if she had left something behind. Miguel gripped the stock of the AK-47 and rose, just as the limo slowed to avoid the woman. He fired, knowing the bullets would not penetrate the glass, but also knowing the spiderweb of cracks across the windshield would cause the driver to pause momentarily before his training took over and he gunned the engine. In that pause, the woman moved with well-drilled speed and precision, looking as if she were diving for cover behind the limousine, when, in fact, she was slapping the plastic explosive to the underside of its frame.

Now her partner drew his weapon from beneath his business suit, and the car was riddled with enfilading fire. The limousine surged forward, the driver reacting exactly as he had been taught to do. Get out of the kill zone. Protect the principal.

Miguel and the man held their fire as the car passed, so as not to hit each other, then opened up again as it pulled away. The rattle of rounds being discharged, the comforting recoil, the ping and whine of bullets ricocheting off hardened metal, were exactly as he’d imagined.

As was the fireball, moments later, when the plastic explosive detonated beneath the fuel tank. The heavy, almost hollow crump reached his ears a split second later, followed by the rush of heat. But he was prepared for that, as well, knowing he and his comrades had been protected from the blast itself by the limousine driver’s training to speed away from the shooting.

They were already advancing on the burning vehicle, weapons at the ready, as the doors popped open. The woman fired first, two Teflon-coated 9 mm rounds cutting through the driver’s Kevlar vest like hot knives through butter, shredding internal organs as they went. The ambassador was the next to crawl out, and by then Miguel was only three meters away, waiting for him. The ambassador was raising his hands, his eyes pleading, as Miguel smiled and sighted his weapon on the man’s forehead.

“Vaya con Dios,” Miguel said bitterly.

Then he squeezed the trigger.

A white Honda squealed into the intersection, the lieutenant at the wheel. Miguel yanked open the passenger side door and climbed in as the couple piled in back.

“Vámonos!” the lieutenant said, stepping on the gas even before their doors were closed.

“Sí,” Miguel answered. “Vámonos.”

“Sangre para sangre,” the lieutenant said, glancing in the rearview mirror as they sped away.

Yes, Miguel thought, remembering his grandfather, his uncle, and his father. Blood for blood.

2

Fredericksburg, Virginia

As the primary returns were posted, Terry Tyson jumped from the sofa and let out a whoop that almost deafened Tom Lawton.

“Yes!” Terry said. “He’s got it!”

Grant Lawrence had indeed sewn up the Democratic nomination for president, with solid wins in Florida, Texas and Louisiana pushing him over the top.

Beside him, Miriam reached for a napkin to dab champagne from her slacks. “Terry!”

“Oh,” he said, looking down. His ebony features fell. “Sorry, honey.”

She smiled back at him and laughed. “Hey, I’m excited, too. But you just about blew out poor Tom’s eardrums!”

Tom joined in the laughter, finding it more difficult than it should have been. Here he was, in the home of his Bureau mentor, having spent the evening basking in the obvious warmth that passed between her and Terry. It had been an evening of good food, lighthearted banter and ready smiles. No undercover role-playing. No reading between the lines for veiled threats. None of what he’d endured the past three years living in the underside of the Los Angeles glitter. He ought to have been a warm puddle. But the old instincts, the quiet, life-or-death whisper in his mind, wouldn’t go away.

The fury wouldn’t go away, either. It had gotten him suspended. Now it gnawed at him remorselessly.

Miriam had seen it, of course. So had Terry. They understood. They’d both been there, she with the FBI, he as a career homicide detective in Washington, D.C. They knew the signs. But they were too considerate and too experienced to offer casual bromides. Instead, they had simply fed him, welcomed him into their living room and allowed him to sit quietly as they watched the primary election returns and held hands like teenagers.

“I hope,” Senator Grant Lawrence was saying on the television, hands raised to quiet a crowd of ecstatic supporters, “I hope tonight shows that the American people can rise above their outrage and see that it is not only the ends that matter, but also the means by which we achieve those ends. That it is important not only to do the right thing, but to do it in the right way. And if the American people grant me their trust in November, I can promise you there will be a reckoning. Not a time of vengeance, but a time of justice. Not an orgy of violence, but a veneration of principle. Not a feeding of hate, but a nourishment of hope. That, my friends, is the American way. And America will lead the way!”

His words and the passions of the moment ignited a cheer that drowned out further speech. Endlessly, they chanted, “Lawrence! Lawrence! Lawrence!”

“Damn, he’s good,” Terry said, pumping his fist.

“He’s more than good,” Miriam said, grinning from ear to ear. “He’s amazing. And what’s more, with him it’s not an act. He’s the real deal.”

Tom gave her the required nod of agreement. Amidst the mess in L.A., he’d taken a private moment to smile at her handling of the Lawrence kidnapping case. She, together with Terry and then-Tampa-detective Karen Sweeney, had rescued Grant’s children and saved him from a sniper’s bullet. Detective Sweeney had moved to Washington, where she was now Terry’s partner and—as the tabloids spared no ink to remind America— Lawrence’s girlfriend. There was no doubt in Tom’s mind which way the votes in this room would go.

And perhaps the man truly was as worthy as his words. He had faced down his chief Democratic opponent, Alabama Senator Harrison Rice, who had repeatedly called for continuing the U.S. war on terrorism in the Middle East. Rice had made those arguments even more forcefully yesterday, after the murder of the Guatemalan ambassador.

Tom had half expected Lawrence to rise to the bait, to use the assassination as a reason to reverse his policy and thus bolster his image on national security issues. Certainly no one would have faulted him for doing so, and in fact many pundits had predicted exactly that. But Lawrence had not wavered. His response had been brief and direct.

“The murder of our ambassador,” he had said, “while barbaric, is a reflection of the violence that has torn that country apart. There is no reason to connect this crime with the recent attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq. The solution to war is not more war. The solution to war is a just peace. And, as president, I will work toward that just peace.”

That kind of backbone impressed Tom. He wished Grant Lawrence had been his Special Agent in Charge back in L.A. Things might have gone differently. A little girl might not now hate him, and he might not have broken his boss’s nose.

Then his fists tightened, and he told himself he was just being wishful. Grant Lawrence was probably just another political chameleon. Like his former boss, with his eye on promotion, not on the lives that would be affected.

Tom forced his attention back to the television as Lawrence finally quieted the crowd and resumed speaking.

“As joyous as this night is,” Lawrence said, his voice now softened, “I must pause to acknowledge the grief of Mrs. Kilhenny and her children. Nothing I can do or say will ease their loss. I met Bill and Grace Kilhenny a month ago, when I went to visit Guatemala to see for myself the conditions that prevail there. He was a skilled diplomat, a gracious host and a brave man.”

A long moment of silence passed, both in the Lawrence campaign headquarters and in the apartment. In the space of that minute, the senator had swept away the trappings of power and politics and attended to the pain of one woman. Even Tom was reluctantly moved.

Tampa, Florida

Grant Lawrence looked out into the sea of faces and finally found the one he really wanted to see. Karen. She was standing near a side door, smiling. He wished she could be up here with him. But that would be tantamount to a public proposal of marriage, and that was a step they weren’t ready to take.

She was, after all, a cop. It wasn’t merely her job. It was a big part of her identity. If he won this thing—and tonight even that dream seemed within reach—they could not be together. She couldn’t function as a homicide detective with a Secret Service retinue. And the country wouldn’t stand for a First Lady who held a job regardless. He knew it. She knew it. It was the bitter cloud around this silver lining. He had wanted to bow out of the race, to remain in the Senate, so they could be together. She had steadfastly refused to let him do it. She said she loved him, and her country, too much to allow it.

And so here he was. And there she was. The gulf between the podium and that door seemed insurmountable.

It was with that thought in his mind that he looked again at his supporters, then at his prepared text, and pushed the text aside.

“Friends, we have work to do. Not just for the next eight months, but for the next four years. That work will not be easy. Justice, peace and prosperity are not easily won. These past months have tested our commitment, but they are only the beginning. Greater tests lie ahead. But I am sure that if we commit ourselves to facing those tests together, to meeting those challenges, to giving wings to our dreams and life to our ideals, we can transform both ourselves and this nation. We can be, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, that last, best hope. Tonight I say to you, I am committed to that last, best hope. Join with me. Stay with me. And together we will go on to victory!”

The roar was almost deafening. He turned and saw Jerry Connally’s smile. His old friend stepped toward him, extending first a handshake and then a bear hug. Grant chose the bear hug, for this bear had been at his side throughout his eight years in the Senate, in the lean times, and in the worst of the ugliness that politics and life can offer. This night was Jerry’s as much as it was Grant’s.

“Wow, boss,” Jerry said, almost yelling in his ear to be heard above the crowd. “I don’t know where you got that from. But you’d better bottle it for safekeeping.”

“Thank you, friend,” Grant said.

“Thank you,” Jerry said. “But the best is yet to come. For all of us.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“By the way, boss, there are about two hundred people in the lobby that couldn’t fit in here. You should make your way out there and let them know they’re not on the outside looking in.”

“Right,” Grant said. “You’re right. Lead the way.”

“Wasn’t he amazing?” Miriam asked.

“As always,” Terry said. “If the country doesn’t elect him this fall, they’re passing up one hell of an opportunity.”

For his part, Tom simply nodded and forced a smile. Yes, Lawrence’s speech had been an effective piece of political rhetoric. Whether it was any more than that remained to be seen. He watched as Lawrence left the stage and waded into the crowd. The man certainly seemed to enjoy people.

Tom could still remember a time when he’d felt the same. Lately, people were to be avoided. Even here, with Miriam and Terry, he avoided any real contact. Contact only led to betrayal and hurt.

His thoughts were interrupted by a sound like popping corn, emanating from the television.

“What the…?” Terry said, looking at the screen.

“God, no,” Miriam said, eyes wide.

The camera caught it all in stomach-turning detail. Lawrence’s smile faded in an instant, replaced by a blank look of shock as he slid to the floor. Tom Lawton had seen that look before and didn’t need to hear the reporter’s next words.

“My God, he’s been shot. Grant Lawrence has been shot!”

3

Washington, D.C.

“I want Tom Lawton on my team,” Miriam said firmly.

“No,” Kevin Willis replied. “I’m sorry, but no.”

She gave him a look of disgust and pressed on. “Tom is the smartest investigator I’ve ever worked with. He thinks outside the box. That’s exactly the kind of mind we need on this case.”

In that sense, she was right. It was all too easy for an agent to fixate on a suspect to the exclusion of other evidence. Kevin knew that as well as anyone in the Bureau. In the mid-nineties, early in his career, he’d been assigned to the Atlanta field office, putting him among the dozens of agents who’d responded to the Centennial Olympic Park bombing. He’d witnessed firsthand the near ruin of an innocent man before investigators finally stepped back to reexamine the evidence.

Grant Lawrence was a media darling. He had been for years, and the kidnapping of his children had only pushed his star higher in the public consciousness. The firestorm over his shooting was already under way, and there would be pressure for a quick, clean solution to the case. Exactly the kind of conditions under which investigators were most likely to develop tunnel vision.

So yes, in that sense, Tom Lawton was exactly the kind of agent the Bureau needed on a case like this. But on the other hand, the psych evaluation was clear as day.

“Look,” Kevin said, “I know you like Tom. You’ve mentored him ever since he joined up. Heck, I worked with him for six months in Dallas before he was sent out to that mess in L.A. I liked him then. I like him still. But the simple fact is, he assaulted his superior. The guy needs plastic surgery, for crying out loud. Did you read Lawton’s psych evaluation? The report is four paragraphs long, and the phrase ‘distrust of authority’ appears four times. He’s on suspension for a reason, Miriam.”

“Can you blame him?” she asked.

“Hell no! The way things went down out there, any one of us could be in the same boat. I’d have done the same damn thing he did. But if I use him on this case, the director is going to be stepping all over me.”

She sighed heavily and nodded reluctantly.

“I feel for the guy, Miriam. I do. But right now he’s too damn volatile. He needs time to recover. You’re his friend, for crying out loud. You of all people should realize that.”

She looked away, the hurt evident in her eyes. He hadn’t meant it to come out the way it had, even if it was the truth. But there it was.

“You’re right,” she said, turning back to him. “He is my friend. I’ve read the reports on L.A. And his psych sheet. But I know Tom Lawton better than anyone. Better than that doctor. Better than you. What he needs is a way to prove to himself that he’s not a screwup. Which you and I both know he’s not.”

Kevin nodded. He’d never gone through what Lawton had, thank God, but he’d had his share of cases gone bad. After every one, he’d felt exactly what she was saying. He’d wanted to get right back at it. Do it right. Regain his confidence. The Bureau recruited Type A personalities. Goal oriented, driven to excel. The kind of individual for whom failure was almost a worse fate than death.

But he’d had enough trouble just getting Miriam on the case. She knew Grant Lawrence personally. Like any other law enforcement agency, the FBI had a clear rule about agents who were personally involved with a victim, witness or suspect. They were off the case, period.

He’d fought for Miriam for the same reason she was fighting for Tom Lawton. He’d mentored her. He knew her capabilities and her limitations. And he knew her well enough to know that she would not stay away from this case, regardless.

Ultimately, his argument had been simple. Special Agent Miriam Anson was a consummate professional, and if she were on his team, working the case officially, she would exercise professional judgment and restraint. If she were left to pry into the case on her own, she would have fewer inhibitions and might cause more damage. His bosses had bought that argument, with the caveat that she was to work under his personal supervision. And that she would be his responsibility.

That was good enough, then and now. Except that now she was pushing him out on a limb with Lawton. He could understand it, much as it irritated him.

“Okay,” he said, “here’s the deal. Tom works with you. No one else. Hell, I doubt there’s anyone else he trusts, anyway. And he’s all you get, for the same reason—I doubt he’d trust anyone else I put with you. He’s your responsibility, Miriam.”

She nodded. “Fair enough.”

Kevin looked at his watch. “How soon can you get him in here?”

“Five minutes. He’s downstairs in the cafeteria.”

Kevin shook his head, then laughed. “You knew what I was going to say, didn’t you?”

She didn’t join in the laughter. “You trained me, Kevin. Let’s get to work.”

Tom was the last person to enter the conference room, and he had no illusions about finding a chair. Instead, he squeezed into a space along the back wall. He caught Miriam’s eye and gave her a quick nod. He would thank her properly later. Any piece of the action right now was better than staring at walls and waiting for his next appointment with the psychologist.

“Here’s what we have so far,” Kevin Willis said, standing at the front of the room with a notepad in one hand and a remote control in the other. “At twenty-two nineteen hours last night, someone fired three shots in the lobby of the Hyatt Harborside in Tampa. Two of those shots struck Grant Lawrence. The other struck a campaign staffer named Ellen Bates. Ms. Bates was wounded in the left arm and is in stable condition after surgery.

“Senator Lawrence was not so fortunate. One bullet hit him in the chest, the other in the midtorso. He’s still in surgery. The doctors are saying fifty-fifty.”

Tom saw Miriam’s face sink at that statement, although he knew she was already aware of Grant’s condition. Karen Sweeney had called within an hour after the shooting, and Terry was already on a flight to Tampa. Still, hearing it described in the cold, clinical language of a briefing had to be hard to bear.

“Lawrence had just finished his victory speech after the Florida primary,” Kevin continued. “Apparently he’d gone out into the lobby to shake hands with staffers who couldn’t fit into the main ballroom. Powder residue on the victims and two bystanders put the shooter within three or four feet, but it was a tight crowd. So far, we haven’t found anyone who can identify the shooter or even give us a firm description.”

Tom saw heads nod around the room. It made sense. In close like that, with bodies packed in tight, a hand with a gun could easily slip beneath the arm of someone in front. Pop-pop-pop. Victim goes down. The shooter slips away in the panic. It was the nightmare scenario for protective services, worse even than a sniper. It was the reason the president never waded into a crowd.

“What happened to his security?” an agent in front asked. “Why’d they let him get into that situation?”

More nods from others who’d had the same training and followed the same line of reasoning Tom and the questioner had. It wasn’t rocket science. This was a basic breakdown in procedure.

“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision by Lawrence,” Kevin said. “He didn’t want the people in the lobby to feel left out. That fits with his profile. He’s the type who will stop and talk to people on the Capitol steps. I doubt he gave it a second thought. But his security team should have. We’ll need to talk to them, but you all know how the Secret Service is. They’re going to want to take care of their own.”

Just like the FBI, Tom thought. Or any other police agency. It was a mind-set as old as the human species. You look out for your own kind, because they look out for you. When they didn’t, it got very ugly, very fast. As he knew from personal experience.

“We did catch a break, though,” Kevin said. Fifty sets of eyes instantly became alert. “The hotel has good security, including video cameras in the parking garage and covering the sidewalk in front of the lobby. So we ought to have the shooter on tape. The guys in Tampa are trying to cross-match the news footage of the event with the video of people leaving the hotel. With any luck, that will leave us a short list of suspects. Then we’ll split them up among our teams and run them down.”

The brute force method, Tom thought. Standard Bureau procedure. It reminded him of a joke about a collection of law enforcement types looking for a beaver in a forest. The NSA put a surveillance camera in every tree. The CIA sent in an agent dressed as a beaver, who returned a week later scratched, dirty, breathless and pregnant. The L.A.P.D. sent in two officers, who returned in ten minutes with a bloodied, beaten raccoon that was ready to admit it was a beaver. As for the FBI, they rounded up every animal in the forest and held them for six months while a forensic veterinarian examined their dental impressions.

It had been the Bureau’s modus operandi since the reign of Hoover. Overwhelm the problem with manpower and science. It was effective. It was also slow. In most of the Bureau’s investigations, that wasn’t an issue. When you were going after a John Gotti or a Ted Kaczynski, whose crimes weren’t daily front-page news, you could afford to take your time and build a case brick by brick. But that wasn’t the situation here. The media, not to mention the attorney general, would be demanding daily briefings, with each one detailing new information and positive progress toward an arrest.

The brute force method was not designed to achieve that. When it was misapplied toward that end, the Bureau inevitably ended up with egg on its face. Fifteen hundred Arab-American detainees were only the most recent case in point. Tom could see the writing on the wall, and the message wasn’t promising. He began to feel sparks of anger in the pit of his stomach. By sheer force of will, he battered them down.

Willis continued the briefing, dividing the task force into teams, handing out assignments. Tom paid only cursory attention until Willis looked at Miriam.

“Miriam, you and Tom will eliminate the wacko groups. I want to say we’ve left no stone unturned. Dig around on the Net. Get a list from our domestic surveillance guys. Crazies who’ve written against Lawrence. Run their files. I’m sure you’ll find a bunch.”

“No doubt,” Miriam said. “He’s liberal, Catholic, handsome, single, a dad whose kids were kidnapped, running for president while dating a cop. Put it all together and he’s probably the darling of half the fringe organizations in the country.”

“Probably,” Kevin agreed. “And it’s probably a waste of time. But I don’t want conspiracy nuts coming along to say we didn’t look. So look.”

In short, Tom thought, he and Miriam were supposed to run down bullshit. On the case, but safely out of the way. It made sense. Miriam was too close to Grant to be in the middle of things. And Tom had no doubt where he stood in the Bureau’s hierarchy of competence.

Then Willis spoke again, and this time his eye fixed on Tom. “I want everyone in this room to remember that at this time we are acting in a support capacity to the Florida offices, which are heading the investigation. If you find anything, it goes through me to them.”

In short, no running off on your own. Tom gave Willis the nod he was looking for, but his neck felt as stiff as if it hadn’t moved in centuries.

Watermill, Long Island

“He might have been what?” The man tried to suppress his anger as he listened to the voice on the phone.

“He might have been caught on videotape,” the caller said. “Word is the hotel had good security, and the FBI’s getting the tapes.”

“And you can make sure that doesn’t happen?” the man asked, clearly expecting an affirmative answer.

“No,” the caller replied. “I can’t. They know those tapes are out there. If the tapes vanished, that would just pile more shit on the doorstep. Besides, he can be sacrificed. We knew that from the start.”

“So long as there’s no trail,” the man said.

“I can handle the trail,” the caller replied. “I have that part covered. Don’t worry.”

He hung up in disgust. What an absurd statement, after calling on his daughter’s wedding day, with two hundred guests arriving in an hour, to tell him an assassin he’d paid for might have been caught in the act on videotape, and then to say, “Don’t worry.” There was too much at stake for him not to worry.

“Daddy, are you ready?”

He turned and looked at his one and only daughter. This was the last afternoon that she would truly be his. In two hours, she would belong to another. A fine young man, of course. He wouldn’t have permitted anything less than the best for his girl. But still… The old bromide about not losing a daughter but gaining a son just didn’t work for him. Not when it came to her.

He’d held her as a baby, taught her to walk and ride a bicycle, tended skinned knees and later skinned hearts, watched her graduate from high school, then college, then law school, quietly opened doors as she’d begun her career, and all the while she had been the one pure, abiding joy of his life.

He rubbed his nose briskly and nodded. “Yes, darling. I’m ready.”

She saw his face, read his thoughts, and came to him with open arms. Their embrace was tight.

“Oh, Daddy. I will always love you first.”

“I know, precious. I know.”

If only it were true. If only anything were true.

“Lovely ceremony, Edward,” Harrison Rice said, extending a hand. “Your daughter is a stunning bride.”

“Thank you, Senator. I don’t quite know how to feel about it, but…thank you.”

Rice held on to his friend’s hand for an extra moment while flashbulbs popped in the fading evening light. Some were wedding photographers. Others were society press on hand to cover “the wedding of the season.” The rest, and that was most of them, were covering Rice’s campaign…again. Or still, depending on one’s perspective. He pressed his face close to his friend’s ear and whispered, “I know exactly what you mean there.”

Edward Morgan met his eyes for a moment and nodded. “Yeah, I guess you would.”

For Rice, the past forty-eight hours had been an emotional whirlwind. It had begun with the assassination in Guatemala and its aftermath, as news camera crews chased him across Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas to secure him as a guest on one talk show after another. He’d had to cancel a scheduled campaign appearance, although his staff had assured him that he would get far more mileage out of the TV time.

He supposed they were right. The speech probably wouldn’t have made enough of a difference, even if he himself would have found it more reassuring. He always preferred a live audience to the blank eye of a camera. But he’d had too high a mountain to climb yesterday. Lawrence had been a lock in his home state of Florida. Rice had known he would have to win Texas and split the other two Southern states to have a chance. He hadn’t. Grant won decisively in Texas, Louisiana and Florida, easily giving him enough delegates to lock up the nomination.

And Rice’s campaign had been over. For about an hour.

Unlike most Americans, Rice had not been watching as Grant Lawrence was shot. He’d been sitting with his wife, taking a few minutes of silent consolation, away from the press and the cameras and his staff and even his friends. Some moments should be private, and that had been just such a moment. Until a staffer began pounding on his door, shouting, “Someone shot Lawrence!”

Rice had emerged in time to see the first of the now endless reruns of the attack. He’d had to turn away. While they had been rivals in this campaign, he and Grant had been Senate colleagues for years. They had been guests in each other’s homes on numerous occasions. Rice had never felt as if he was on Grant’s short list of true confidantes, but he’d liked and respected him. He’d watched Lawrence cope with the death of his wife, and, years later, the brutal murders of his lifelong nanny and a former girlfriend that culminated in the kidnapping of his children. The man had endured enough. And now this…

Now Rice was expected to carry the Democratic banner, the Grant Lawrence banner. His campaign had gone from dead to full steam ahead in the few seconds it had taken for a would-be assassin to squeeze the trigger of a handgun. Rice couldn’t help feeling sick about it, even as the object of his lifelong ambition loomed nearer than ever.

“You look like you need to talk,” Edward said, too quietly for anyone else to hear.

Rice realized his thoughts must have been showing on his face, a trait he’d picked up from his mother, a former stage actress in Birmingham. Edward had, intentionally or not, reminded him that appearances are everything in the world of presidential politics.

Rice nodded. “It’d be nice to catch up.”

“After the reception,” Edward said. “We’ll go sit in the den, drink a couple of beers and pretend we’re back in college.”

It was, Rice thought, the nicest invitation his old friend could possibly have made. It was certainly better than brooding about the rest of his life.

4

Washington, D.C.

“Coffee?” Tom asked, holding out a foam cup.

Miriam looked up and smiled. “You read my mind.” She took a sip and pushed a stack of papers away. “What a waste of time.”

Tom sat and sipped his coffee. It was Bureau issue: too strong, too bitter. If he let himself think about such things, it was probably a subtle tribute to the Bureau’s founder and the man for whom this building was named. John Edgar Hoover had also been too strong, too bitter. And his ghost still walked these halls.

“What did you expect?” Tom asked. “There was no way Kevin could put us in the middle of this. We’re damaged goods. So we get to waste time while the rest of them do the real work.” He eyed the stacks of files with distaste. “Prove there was no conspiracy to assassinate Lawrence. Helluva job, proving a negative. And we get it because I freaked in L.A.”

“And because I know Grant personally,” Miriam reminded him. “It’s not that bad. Face it, Tom, like it or not, somebody’s got to do it or we’ll be hearing conspiracy theories for the next fifty years. It’s just…”

“What?” Tom asked.

He’d spent enough time with her to recognize the subtle cues that flickered through her eyes. She wasn’t thinking about the case.

“Terry called while you were out,” she said. “Grant is out of surgery, but it’s not promising. The bullet in his chest took a lung. The other one perforated his liver and spleen. He still hasn’t regained consciousness. They don’t know if he ever will. Karen’s a wreck, and apparently there’s a big debate about whether she should even be allowed in to see him. Dammit, Tom, you’d think in the twenty-first century it would be okay for a president’s wife to have a job! You’d think it would be okay for Grant and Karen to get engaged, get married.”

Tom nodded quietly. He didn’t bother to remind her that Karen would be seriously hampered as a detective with a couple of Secret Service agents always at her side. Besides, Miriam Anson didn’t open up often. On the few occasions when she had, he’d quickly decided the best course of action was to simply sit and listen, offering the occasional question more as a way of letting her know it was okay to continue than because he needed more information. It was a technique he’d learned while trying to help his father work through the death of Tom’s mother, and again two years later, when the last shreds of his father’s confidence had turned to dust during the trial. Now Tom often used the same technique in his work.

“Grant’s daughters are a mess, of course,” Miriam continued. “Karen’s doing her best to comfort them. I think about what I’d be like if it were Terry. They say helplessness is the most depressing thing in the world.”

“It is,” Tom said.

He knew from experience. He’d never met Karen Sweeney, but simply knowing she was a career homicide cop told him a lot about her. She would want to fix things. To do something…anything. To help the doctors. To help the Tampa cops and the Bureau. Something to make it better. But for now, all she could do was to sit in the hospital with Grant’s daughters. And pray. And wait. Like Tom and his father had done in those last days. Watching his mother fade away. Like Tom had done as his father slipped into a dark and dangerous obsession.

For a moment Miriam’s eyes shimmered. Then they hardened. “Damn it. Where is it writ large on the cosmos that the world has to be such an ugly place?”

It was a question cops had to ask themselves far too often. A question Tom had asked countless times over the past three years and almost nonstop for the past month. A question for which there was no answer.

“Like this garbage,” Miriam continued, holding up one of the files on her desk. “Why on earth would people believe this stuff? Commit themselves to this kind of rubbish?”

“Hey,” he said, “why would people commit themselves to the kind of shit we do? Just because we’re on the right side doesn’t mean we’re always doing the right thing.”

The anger in his question silenced her. For an instant, regret pierced his fury. “Miriam, I’m sorry. I’m just… I’ll get over it, all right?”

Miriam looked at him; then a small chuckle escaped her. “Miracles happen.”

“Right. Now, let’s get on with this chickenshit. Who knows? Maybe for once there really is a conspiracy.”

“Wouldn’t that be something?” Miriam said, trying to shift her mood and possibly his.

“This whole conspiracy thing…” Tom shook his head. “I know they happen. I mean, we’ve got a stack of files to choke a horse here, and these are just the incompetent idiots we’ve managed to get wind of. People conspire all the time in business. Take Enron as an example. But to go after a politician…that’s a different can of worms.”

Tom leaned over the desk and caught her gaze, holding it tight. “If there’s a conspiracy to kill a major contender for the presidency, what have you got?”

She hesitated, not quite sure where he was heading.

“You’ve got a coup,” he said. “You’ve just influenced the entire outcome of the election. You’ve made sure that only people you can live with are running for the office.”

Miriam nodded, still not sure where he intended to go with this.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said. “Look at the Kennedy hit.”

“Oh, damn, Tom. You can’t…”

He shrugged. “I can. I’m probably one of the few still-living people in the world who has read the entire Warren Report. It’s suspicious as hell. Anyway, my point is…if there was a conspiracy, we’ll find it.” He waved at the pile of files. “I’ll start here. You take those.”

“Just remember,” she said, “if you crawl into rabbit holes, you’re crawling through rabbit dung.”

Tom nodded and flipped open a file as she left the office. The Bureau had files on thousands of fringe groups. Radical environmentalists. White supremacists. Terrorist cells. Anarchists, even today. Drug and crime cartels.

When Hoover had interviewed for the top spot in the unnamed investigative branch of the Justice Department, he had promised his boss, Attorney General and later Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Stone, that the agency would be divorced from politics. It would investigate crimes and not political opinions. That was what Stone had wanted to hear, and Hoover had been given the job.

In fact, Hoover had headed the General Intelligence Division in 1920 under Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, and Hoover’s index card files had provided the information for the infamous Palmer Raids of 1920. In those raids, the Justice Department picked up thousands of alleged alien radicals across the country. Most were in fact citizens. Fewer than six hundred were ultimately deported.

Four years later, despite his words to Harlan Stone, Hoover had wasted no time in setting his agents to work developing files on suspected communists, labor leaders, and other groups and individuals whom he deemed to be anti-American.

That practice had swelled into the COINTELPRO excesses of the 1950s and 60s, until Congress and an irate public finally called for an end to domestic espionage. There were some who said the lack of such domestic espionage had enabled Al Qaeda terrorists to escape notice and kill three thousand Americans.

Tom knew better. The Bureau still kept tabs on violent organizations and suspicious resident aliens. As a congressional inquiry had shown, there had been enough information floating among the various agencies to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Had that information been collated and presented in a single briefing, the plot and the plotters would have been obvious. It had not been a failure of data collection but rather a failure of data management. The pieces of the puzzle had been spread across too many desks in too many agencies.

The file in Tom’s hands was supposed to be part of the new-and-improved data management system. Cross-indexed on a secure database, the idea was that an agent could follow hyperlinked threads between various groups, looking for motives and capabilities that matched a given pattern. At Miriam’s request, an agent had searched for individuals or groups with both the motive and means to commit murder in order to keep Grant Lawrence out of the White House. The results were the scores of files on his and Miriam’s desks, and the one in his hands.

The Idaho Freedom Militia was archetypal in its ordinariness. Its founder was Wesley Aaron Dixon, a West Point graduate who had grown disillusioned with army life and left for a sheep ranch outside Boise. The file photos were unremarkable. Dixon looked about like Tom expected of a sheep rancher: grizzled and lean, with a slight middle-age paunch.

The group’s ideology was apparently cookie-cutter Western individualism: the government in Washington was too powerful; the Supreme Court was counter-democratic; the nation should return to its federalist roots; government was inherently bad, and so on.

One sentence was highlighted, a quote from a letter to the editor Dixon had written in 1998: “Every person should be trained and ready to defend himself and his community against the excesses of Washington, and to strike blows against a government which conspires daily to undermine his private property and his family.”

With that one sentence, Dixon had earned an FBI file for himself and the Idaho Freedom Militia. Such was the tidal wave of information through which Miriam and Tom were wading, for no other reason than to establish that the FBI had, indeed, left no stone unturned.

An hour later, Miriam returned. “Find anything?”

“Typical stuff,” Tom said, finishing the file. “Except for a letter to the editor, it’s pretty much mainstream libertarian.”

Miriam leaned over to see which file he was scanning. “Except for the part about women.”

Tom scanned down to the passage. It was a copy of a personal letter to a former militia member. Apparently the man had turned the letter over to the FBI after having been dismissed from the organization. From the context, the man had been kicked out because his wife had taken a job.

“The proper role of the woman,” Dixon had written, “is to bear and care for the children and the home. When a man allows her to abdicate that role, he allows her to betray God’s plan for womanhood, abdicates his own role as head of the house, and undermines the Divine balance of the family.”

“Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, I guess,” Tom said. “Even a stupid one.”

“Yeah, well, Dixon kicked this guy out of the militia, which is more a favor than a punishment, as I see it. But he also blackballed the guy around town. Guy lost his job, couldn’t get another. He finally had to move to Oregon and start over. All because his wife took a job.”

Tom shook his head. Having grown up in small towns, he could see how it had happened. Close-knit communities were a two-edged sword. They could rally around someone in times of grief, as the townspeople had done with him and his father after his mother died. But they could also cut someone out of the herd over the most trivial matter. Or, as had been the case with his father two years later, the not-so-trivial matters.

“So why did this group get flagged?” Tom asked.

Miriam shook her head. “Damned if I know. I didn’t see anything that connects Dixon to Grant Lawrence. But the computer spat it out, so we have to go through it. No stone unturned, right?”

“Yeah,” Tom said, looking at his watch. He took three more files from the pile. “Look, it’s almost ten. I’m going to make this my bedtime reading. And you need to get some sleep, Miriam. Sitting here all night stewing isn’t going to do the Bureau, Grant, Terry or me any good.”

“You’re right,” she said, reaching for a handful of files to take home with her. “Life will be better in the morning, right?”

Tom forced a smile. “At the very least, it’ll be a different day.”

Watermill, Long Island

Edward Morgan flipped through the channels until he hit on an all-sports network running classic NFL films. This particular episode was the famous 1968 “Heidi Bowl” game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, so named because the network had cut away from the final minutes of the game so as not to overlap its scheduled broadcast of the movie Heidi.

“Oh, God,” Rice said, looking at the screen. “I remember that damn game. Freshman year. In fact, we had a bet on it.”

“Twenty bucks,” Morgan said. “I got stuck with the Raiders, even though the Jets were my home team, because Joe Namath was an Alabama graduate and there was no way you were going to root against an Alabama man.”

Rice nodded. “Cost me twenty bucks, too.”

“I seem to remember you got that money back in the playoffs,” Morgan said. “And we made a killing when the Jets won the Super Bowl. You had half of the brothers betting the Colts.”

Rice laughed. “Pledge year got real easy after that. They all still owed us money.”

They fell silent for a few minutes, watching the game film. It had been a bizarre time for Harrison Rice. Most of his high school friends had been drafted and were headed for Vietnam. Rice’s father, a banker in Birmingham, had forced his son to forgo football in his senior year and focus on his schoolwork. While obeying his father had hurt at the time—Debbie Mays had dumped him for someone who could get her a letter sweater—it had paid dividends. His grades had shot up enough that he could follow in his father’s footsteps at Yale, and the student deferment had kept him out of the rice paddies.

As the country had torn itself apart, Rice and Morgan had pulled all-nighters, studying economics and finance, Morgan poking fun at Rice’s Alabama drawl, while Rice needled Morgan about his silver spoon childhood. Rice was a big man, and had been even then. Morgan was slight and half-a-head shorter. They were in many ways as different as night and day, and yet in the late nights pouring over expectation curves and compound return formulae, they had forged a bond.

Rice had gone back to Birmingham after college to work in his father’s bank, then moved into state politics. Morgan had gone on to Harvard Business School and a stellar career in international finance. But they’d always kept in touch, had always been the anchors to which each could turn when the pace of achievement became too frantic and one of them needed to get away and decompress. Just like tonight.

“What a shame about Lawrence,” Edward said.

“Yes,” Rice agreed. “I wanted to win. But not this way. Never this way. Christ, he’s got two little girls who are probably already scarred for life from all the shit that’s happened. And now this.”

Edward nodded silently and seemed about to speak, then stopped and looked at the television. It was what he had always done when there was something he wanted to say to someone but was afraid of offending him.

“Oh, come on,” Rice said. “You know that doesn’t work with me. It never has.”

“Well, it’s just…that’s exactly it. The girls. Their mom is dead. And all the mess last year. Why put them through the hell of a presidential campaign? Why not at least wait four years for life to settle some? I’m not saying he deserved what happened. Hell, no. Nobody does. But why take the risk?”

Rice could see his point. He’d had the same thought last night. Once the wave of sympathy passed, he was sure the press would pick up the same theme. A psychiatrist would probably say it was a way of dealing with the sense of collective grief. Blame the victim. Nihil mea culpa.

“Well, let’s just hope he pulls through,” Rice said. “The girls need him. And frankly, the country needs men like Grant Lawrence. I don’t always agree with him, but I can’t question his convictions or his courage.”

Edward shook his head. “You’re not talking to the press here, Harrison. It’s me. Don’t tell me a part of you didn’t jump for joy when you realized he was out of the race.”

“Of course it did,” Rice said. “And that part of me makes me sick. I don’t like to think I’m the kind of man who could feel that way.”

“None of us does,” Edward agreed. “But we are. At some level, we’re all looking out for number one.”

“So what are you saying?” Rice asked, anger rising in his belly. “That I should be celebrating because a friend of mine was shot? Sorry. I can’t do that. It was wrong.”

“Whoa,” Edward said, holding up a hand. “I’m not saying that at all. All I’m saying is, you didn’t pull that trigger. You didn’t make it happen. And yes, it’s a damn shame. But it’s also an opportunity.”

“A curse, you mean. Even if I win, I’ll be living under his shadow. Every decision I make will be weighed against what people think Grant Lawrence would have done. It’s almost not worth it.”

“That’s bullshit, Harrison. And you know it.” He paused for a moment. “Look, remember that high school game you told me about, the one where you finally got to play because the starting quarterback got hurt?”

Rice nodded. It was the only time he’d played in three years of high school football. Homecoming game. Junior year. Brad Mellows had sprained an ankle halfway through the fourth quarter, and the coach had nodded to Rice. He remembered the churning in his stomach as he’d strapped on his helmet and jogged onto the field. They were three points behind and driving down the field. On the first play, he’d almost tripped over his own feet as he’d handed the ball to the fullback, but big Buck Ledger had bulled his way to a first down.

Rice had called an option on the next play, and as he’d swept around the right side and prepared to pitch the ball to Gary Thomas, he’d seen a crease form in front of him. He’d tucked the ball in, turned upfield and burst into the open. Seventeen yards later, he’d crossed the goal line, winning the game and, briefly, Debbie Mays’s heart.

“Nobody said, ‘What would the other guy have done?’ then, did they?” Edward asked. “No, they talked about what you had done. Stepping up to make a play when the team needed you.”

“Yes,” Rice said.

“So it’s the same thing here, Harrison. You have to step up and make a play for the country. And not the play Grant Lawrence would have made. He might be a great guy, but he’s not always right and you’re not always wrong. You have to make your play, just like you did in that game.”

Rice nodded. “Well, you’re right there. I’m not going to stand by while these damn terrorists blow up our bases and murder our ambassador. They’re not going to kill our people and get away with it.”

“Nor should they,” Edward agreed. “That’s an issue where you were right and Lawrence was wrong. We do need to continue what we’ve started in the Middle East and create a real peace. And if you do that—put an end to those fundamentalist fanatics and let those people have peace and hope and prosperity again—I guarantee you, no one will be talking about what Grant Lawrence would have done. They’ll be talking about what Harrison Rice did.”

Rice nodded slowly. Trust Edward to get him out of his funk and back on the right track. It was time to step up and make a play.

Later that night, after Rice had left, Edward picked up the telephone and dialed.

“How did it go?” a voice asked, without a greeting.

“He was feeling guilty, like you said.”

“No reason he should,” the man said. “He’s the right man for the job.”

“Yes, of course,” Edward said. “But I understand his feelings. He and Lawrence are friends, after all. Anyway, he seemed to be feeling better when he left. More like his old self.”

“And he’s on board?”

“Yes. I think we can count on him.”

“Make sure it stays that way,” the man said, then disconnected to end the conversation as abruptly as he had begun it.

Edward Morgan was no fool. His own life was on the line here, as well. Failure was not acceptable. There was too much at stake. Harrison Rice would be president, must be president. The men Morgan worked for could count on Rice to do the right thing. American resolve in the war on terror was wavering in the absence of concrete progress. Left to their own devices, the people would want their sons and daughters to come back home. Grant Lawrence had already laid out his proposed policy for disengagement, and even the Republican nominee was backing away from his predecessor’s rhetoric.

Only Harrison Rice was resolved to stay the course. A course that, day by day, brought Morgan’s colleagues closer to their goal. No one could be permitted to stand in their way. Harrison Rice must be president. And, once elected, he would do his masters’ bidding.

5

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Tom sat propped up in bed, the reading lamp on the nightstand competing with the flickering light of the muted television. On the screen, Bruce Willis was using a POW camp murder trial as cover for a mass escape, even if it cost a black pilot his life. Down the hall, judging by the quiet murmurs since the ring of the telephone ten minutes ago, Miriam was talking to Terry. Tom tried to ignore the movie, the barely audible sound of Miriam’s voice and the all-too-audible noise in his own head, as he paged through the files he’d brought home.

Colin Farrell, the black pilot’s attorney, had just discovered that the court-martial was a ruse, and that his client was to be sacrificed to protect the escape. The pain of betrayal was evident on the actor’s face. Tom didn’t need the dialogue to know what was happening. He had seen that look before.

“It’s a DEA operation, Lawton. All you have to do is stay out of the way.”

He’d read somewhere that it was possible to be an honest drug dealer but impossible to be an honest undercover cop. It had taken him months to gain the trust of a midlevel trafficker, and over the next two years, Tom had been able to pass along intelligence that had allowed LAPD detectives to close three homicides, and DEA and Customs officials to seize a half-dozen shipments.

And all without compromising his cover—or the twelve-year-old girl who had become his best informant.

She was his subject’s daughter, an only child, just as Tom had been. One of the homicides he’d closed had been the murder of the girl’s mother, cold retribution by a rival trafficker. Tom had seen his own childhood mirrored in the bond between the girl and her father. He’d watched them work through the grief, just as he and his father had done. Like Tom, she’d seen enough of Daddy’s “business” to know he did bad things. Unlike Tom, she’d had a kindly uncle figure to talk with and share her concerns. Someone she thought she could trust.

“The DEA thinks they’ve gotten all they’re going to get, Agent Lawton. This guy has killed two people that we know of. Including your partner, John Ortega. Carlos is bad news, and they’re taking him out. And you will get out of the way. Understood?”

John Ortega. He’d been Tom’s best friend at Quantico and probably the reason Tom had stuck with the difficult training rather than giving up. Whenever he’d felt low, John was there to cheer him up with an ancient Cheech & Chong imitation that kept Tom holding his sides too tightly to bang his head against the wall. John Ortega, who’d been sent to L.A. two months before Tom had, and had been the first to penetrate Carlos Montoya’s L.A. network.

When Tom had heard he was being transferred to L.A., he was elated. He had looked forward to working with his old Quantico buddy. When he learned that John was in a deep cover operation, it made perfect sense. John always was an actor. And then, only two months after Tom reached L.A., John Ortega had been found dead in a Dumpster, his face and hands cut off, teeth crushed. He had, in the words Carlos Montoya would later use in a private conversation, “become a nobody.”

Tom had remembered John’s death and nodded obediently to his SAC. Tom had told Carlos he had to attend his brother’s funeral back in Ohio on the day that Carlos was supposed to meet a new contact. Carlos hadn’t objected. After all, this was only a first meeting with a new contact. It was in a public place. Carlos said it would be a fine day to take his daughter to the beach.

Tom couldn’t say, No, don’t take your daughter! He’d set up the meeting, and even suggested the time and place. Any objection would be suspicious. And in this business, suspicion alone was enough to get you killed.

Instead, he’d sat in the surveillance van and watched as things began to go horribly wrong. Carlos might not have had any formal training, but he had a lifetime worth of street smarts. He’d spotted the first tail—a young agent who had too little tan and too much curiosity to be the surfer he was portraying—within five minutes. So he’d given his bodyguard a subtle signal and taken his daughter for a walk down the beach, toward the rocky cove where lovers snuck away in the moonlight and behind which his bodyguard had parked a second car.

Tom had stiffened as he stared at the monitor. “He knows. Let him go. Pick him up another time,” he’d said. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead, the contacts had decided to move in then, approaching Carlos, following him over the sea-weathered rocks and into the cove. Out of sight of the cameras.

Tom had heard the rest. The agent’s too-casual greeting. The wariness in Carlos’s voice. The girl asking if she could go down to the water. Her father saying the riptides were too strong. The overeager scene commander giving the order. The shouts. The gunshots. The girl’s scream.

Always, always, the girl’s scream.

In the next three minutes, Tom’s life had gone to hell. He’d tried to get out of the van, but the SAC had planted himself squarely in front of his seat and ordered him to stay put. “Fuck that,” Tom had said, grabbing the man by his shirt front and pulling him down as he rose himself and lowered his head just enough to drive his forehead squarely into the SAC’s face. He’d heard the satisfying crunch of cartilage and bone in the instant before he’d shoved the man aside and bolted from the van.

Tom had sprinted across the sand, arriving in time to see Carlos’s eyes glaze over, an agent pulling the girl away as she beat on his chest, screaming for her father to wake up. Then she’d seen Tom, and the yellow FBI logo on his navy-blue windbreaker.

There had been no question of trying to approach her, hug her, explain who he was and what he’d done. Her dark eyes stripped bare two years of trips to the zoo, walks in the park, shared entries in her diary, and exposed them for the lies they’d been. He’d simply turned and climbed back over the rocks, walking numbly down the beach under a flat, haze-dimmed sun….

A knock at the door shook him out of his reverie. The anger that never quite died surged again, burning away the guilt and grief. At least for now.

“C’mon in,” he heard himself say.

“Good movie?” Miriam asked, glancing at the screen.

“It probably would be if I were watching it,” Tom said, holding up the file in his hands. “Was that Terry?”

She nodded. “Grant is stable, at least. And there’s brain activity, although he’s still not conscious.”

“Sometimes the body just needs time.”

“That’s what the doctors told Karen,” she said. “They can’t say how long, of course.”

Tom nodded. “Any word on what’s happening with the case down there?”

She smiled. “Now why would you think I’d know anything about that?”

“Because I know you,” he said. “Detective Sweeney still has contacts in Tampa. So you told Terry to keep an ear to the ground down there.”

“Are you suggesting I don’t trust official channels?” she asked. “That I think Kevin might let us spin our wheels on the sidelines and not tell us what’s going on? Perish the thought.”

“So what did Terry say?” Tom asked, knowing she suspected exactly that.

Miriam put a hand above her eyebrows. “They have this much of the top of a head in the news footage. Male. Blond. Short hair but not remarkable. Same head, from the back, on the hotel street video as he’s leaving the scene. His body is obscured by a woman leaving behind him, an underling on Grant’s campaign staff. She was across the lobby when Grant was shot and doesn’t remember who was in front of her as she left the hotel.”

“In short, useless,” he said.

“That’s my guess, and Terry agrees. Of course, the SAC in Tampa is trying to run this guy down through everyone who was there. But I’d be stunned if they found enough to ID the shooter.” She sighed. “So how about you? Anything in those files?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They need to reprogram their damn computer. We might as well be sifting the Sahara looking for a particular grain of sand.”

“That bad?” she asked.

He held up the Idaho Freedom Militia file. “Take these guys, for example. You know what the connection was, why the computer spat this out?”

She shook her head, and he continued.

“Wes Dixon, the guy who runs this outfit? Turns out that after West Point he married a girl he met at a social there. His wife’s maiden name is Katherine Hodge Morgan.”

“So?” Miriam asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Exactly,” Tom agreed. “So Katherine Dixon-née-Morgan’s brother is Edward Thomas Morgan. He’s some banker in New York or London or wherever he is this week. Whoop-de-doo, right?”

“Except?”

“Except that he was a college fraternity brother of Senator Harrison Rice.”

Miriam laughed. “It’s like that game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Grant Lawrence is running against Harrison Rice, whose old college buddy is a banker named Edward Morgan, who has a sister named Katherine, who married a young army lieutenant named Dixon, who later formed this Idaho-militia thing…so…”

“So,” Tom continued, “the new-and-improved computer spits out the Idaho Freedom Militia as possible suspects in the Grant Lawrence shooting. And that’s the kind of absurd horseshit we’re wading through.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay, well, do the usual checks in the morning. Then we can sign off on the file and move on.”

“To more absurd horseshit.”

“Probably,” Miriam agreed. “But they say the system is better than before. Used to be we couldn’t get from A to B in those files without a compass and a road map and a Saint Bernard. I suppose we should take their word for it.”

“If this is any indication,” Tom said, tossing the file on the floor beside the bed, “we can get from A to pi just fine. But A to B is still impossible.”

“Hey,” she said, “it’s still a government operation.”

The bitter irony was not lost on him as she said good-night. He put the rest of the files aside and turned up the sound on the movie, just as Bruce Willis stepped forward to assume responsibility and forfeit his life to save his men. Hollywood heroism. If only the real world were as tidy.

Then, suddenly, he jumped out of bed and went to fling the door open. “Miriam?”

“Yeah?” It sounded as if she were in her bedroom.

“Do you know somebody who can get us a copy of every bit of video, TV and security tape there is on that night?”

She popped her head out the door of her room. “Tom, you know we can’t go there.”

“I know.”

“As long as you know that.” She pulled her head back in, then stuck it out once more. “I bet we can have it by noon tomorrow.”

He was grinning for real as he closed his door. He would bet she was calling Terry right this minute.

Then, flopping back down on his bed, he picked up another file.

Savannah, Georgia

Father Steve Lorenzo loved the smell of peach blossoms. His daily midmorning jog was one of his few self-indulgences, and he made it a point to cherish every moment of it. The warm spring sun on his face, the comfortable burn in his thighs, the sound of his steady breaths and, this week, the smell of peach blossoms. His seminary training had taught him to live in prayer, to seek God in every moment of the day. Sometimes that was hard, but this was not one of those times. Only God could create a morning such as this.

The day hadn’t begun so wonderfully, of course. The alarm clock had seemed especially rude, probably because he’d been called out late last night to visit a parishioner who’d been injured in an accident. The man’s injuries had not been as severe as he had feared, but Father Lorenzo had given him the Anointing of the Sick regardless. It was no longer reserved for persons on the brink of death.

After the alarm clock had intruded into a comfortable dream, he had risen to shower, shave and perform the same morning ritual that had anchored his days for nearly thirty years: celebrating morning Mass at his parish. Of course, with the priest shortage, he’d had to drive across town to a neighboring parish to celebrate Mass for them, as well. It was a small sacrifice, and he understood the need for it, but it did eat into his morning jogging time.

But the last hour had been his own. He’d left the rectory and headed for the waterfront, taking an easy pace past stately, antebellum mansions. It was the same route he jogged each day, four and a half miles at a comfortable eight minutes per mile. He no longer trained for races, though he’d done his share of ten-kilometer events and even a couple of marathons. That had been years ago, when he saw running as a mission, a contest between his body and his will. Now it was simply a joy.

Running was a solitary practice, and he’d more than once had to apologize to some parishioner who had seen him, waved and received no reply. The outside world existed only in soft focus, enough for him to avoid traffic and obstacles as his attention turned inward. Because of that, he almost missed the dark-haired man who waved to him from a park bench.

Almost.

In an instant, he became aware of the slight twinge in his right ankle, a pain that usually disappeared into the biological magic called “runner’s high.” The rhythm of his breath broke for just an instant, allowing the beginnings of a stitch in his side. He let out a soft curse and pressed on for the last half-mile to the rectory.

He didn’t need to be told what to do. He took a quick shower, changed into civilian clothes, told the parish secretary that he would be out for lunch and headed across town to a small diner near the university. Although he occasionally filled in at a nearby parish, he doubted any of those parishioners would recognize him without the clerical collar. Few people did, even from his own congregation, so fewer still would know a priest they had seen only once or twice.

The man was waiting for him, sitting in a booth away from the window, perusing the menu as if he actually cared what the lunchtime offerings might be. Father Lorenzo knew better. He doubted if the man would even eat.

“Hello, Father,” the man said as Lorenzo sat.

At least we’ll speak English, Lorenzo thought. Most of their discussions in Rome had been in Italian, and while Lorenzo was modestly capable in his ancestral language, he was by no means fluent.

“Hello, Monsignor.”

“I see you remembered,” the man said, with no trace of a smile, no trace of expression whatever on his strongly Roman features.

“It wasn’t complicated,” Lorenzo replied. “If I ever saw you in town, I was to come here within the hour.”

“Yes, well, for some things it is better not to use telephones. Even e-mail might be read by others, on my side of the Atlantic or on yours.”

Lorenzo nodded, hoping against hope that the overly dramatic words were merely preamble to a routine request. It would not have been unlike this man to do that. He was, after all, given to hyperbole. Still, the steady look in the man’s eyes did not convey the sense of over-inflation. This was serious.

“It seems our old enemies may be closer than we thought,” the man said. “We have intercepted some…disturbing communications.”

The man didn’t have to identify the enemies, nor the subject in question. Father Lorenzo had no doubt to whom and to what he was referring. Theirs was a cause to which he had dedicated himself in a solemn oath, even if at the time he’d deemed it ridiculously unlikely that the oath would ever compel him to action.

He was, after all, merely a parish priest of no great account. He had never imagined for himself a bishopric or cardinal’s red. He had never wanted such positions or the political responsibilities that accompanied them. He was content to serve God in the small ways, and his sabbatical in Rome two years ago had been simply an opportunity for a prolonged pilgrimage in the host city of his faith, a chance to breathe the same air and walk the same ground as Peter, Paul and countless other saints.

Instead, he had made the acquaintance of this man. A casual acquaintance, at first, born of the coincidence that this man had been born and raised in the same village from which Lorenzo’s great-grandfather had emigrated. It was one of those curious quirks of fate, destiny or Divine Providence—depending on one’s perspective—of which life was made. Over a dinner that would have pleased the Almighty, coupled with an Italian wine that might have been vinted by the angels themselves, they had discussed cousins, old family stories and, of course, their mutual vocation.

Like Father Lorenzo, this man had been gravely troubled by the emerging scandals in the American Church, and by the ways those scandals might undermine the Church’s mission and message. And, like Lorenzo, he saw an undercurrent of political prejudice in the timing and persistence of the media frenzy accompanying those scandals.

But unlike Lorenzo, he had expressed the belief that something could and should be done about the situation, and not only in terms of reforms within the Church.

“This is an ongoing battle that has raged for millennia,” he had said. “Sometimes openly, but most often in the shadows. The Church needs warriors. It always has. It always will.”

Their conversations had continued over the course of Lorenzo’s year-long sabbatical. Step by step, the man had offered a view of church history that differed from the official accounts in both substance and tone. It was a story of conflict, of a struggle against misguided but dangerous heresies within and ruthless enemies without.

Had he been at home, in the relative religious sterility of the everyday life, Lorenzo would have thought it absurd. But caught up in the fervor of Rome, where he could attend morning mass at St. Paul’s Cathedral and noon mass at the Basilica of St. Peter, where he could gaze at the Sistine Chapel, where every prayer seemed uttered from a half step closer to heaven, it had struck a chord. More and more, he had found himself nodding as he listened. More and more, it had made sense. In Rome.

Now, in a diner in Savannah, it seemed almost silly. And yet the man’s eyes were every bit as intense as they had been eighteen months ago, when Lorenzo had been walking through the catacombs. The man not only believed, he had the kind of moral certainty that Lorenzo found only rarely. A moral certainty in the faith, practice and future of the Catholic Church. The kind of certainty a priest could not easily ignore.

“The murder of your ambassador in Guatemala,” said the monsignor, shaking his head. “It has created serious problems. Problems we cannot afford to ignore.”

Lorenzo was familiar with the problems of Guatemala, having been posted to a mission there early in his career as a priest. For eight years, he had watched the people struggle with poverty, disease and war. Although they might not have understood all the reasons why, they knew the military dictator who ruthlessly wiped out one village after another was a CIA puppet. Anger was widespread, and the U.S. a common and, to Lorenzo’s mind, justified target of that anger.

Still, Lorenzo had no idea how that connected to the monsignor’s stated mission in life, or to his own vow.

“The rebels’ success will encourage others to make bold moves,” the monsignor said. “More people will die senselessly. It will be difficult for our allies to keep an eye on things that need watching. And our enemies will use that confusion to find what they are searching for and get it out of the country. That cannot happen.”

“The fabled Kulkulcan Codex,” Lorenzo said, his heart sinking.

“It might not be a fable,” the monsignor replied. “They have good information. They may be close to finding it. If it says what they think it does…”

He didn’t have to finish the sentence.

When Pedro Alvarado and Hernando Cortez led the Spanish conquest of Central America, they had found and destroyed the Mayan libraries, thousands of volumes setting forth the history, culture, religion and literature of that great people. Some archaeologists believed that as much as two thousand years of recorded history had been obliterated by the “cleansing” fire of the invaders.

Only a handful of texts had survived. The most prominent of those, the Popol Vuh, had been translated into Spanish from the Quiché Chichicastenango by a Dominican priest, Francisco Ximénez. Unfortunately, the Popol Vuh was only a fragmentary record of the Quiché Maya and their creation story. But even those fragments had disturbing correlations to the Bible. And when the Spanish had arrived, they’d also found symbols of the cross and stories of a god-man who had been sacrificed for his people.

Cortez had initially taken advantage of the legends that said the bearded, white-skinned god would return from the East, playing them for all they were worth, accepting as his due the title of Quetzalcoatl/Kulkulcan. But in the end, he was racked with guilt, wondering if he had betrayed God by playing God, wondering if he had stepped into a prophecy about Christ himself.

By themselves, the stories could be dismissed as native folklore and often were. But among the remaining poetry about Kulkulcan found in the Mayan book of prophecy called the Chilam Balaam, the Church found cause for greater concern:

When there shall be three signs on a tree,

Father, son, and grandson hanging dead on the same tree

The lost volumes, supposedly written by disciples, were rumored to have described the historical figure of Kulkulcan in detail, including his arrival in the early second century and his teachings. If copies of this Mayan codex existed, and if they said what they were rumored to say, Kulkulcan, also known as Quetzalcoatl to the Aztecs and Viracocha to the Incas, was none other than the firstborn son of Sara, the daughter of Mary Magdalene. None other than the grandson of Christ, descendant of a marriage the Church had denied for two thousand years.

Kulkulcan—a priest who claimed to be the son of the only god, who taught monotheism, peace and justice, who condemned human sacrifice and whose arrival catapulted a people to hitherto unknown heights of civilization—could well be the grandson of Jesus of Nazareth.

“What do you want me to do, Monsignor?” Lorenzo asked.

“Go back to Guatemala.”

“Are you mad?” Lorenzo asked. “Need I remind you that Americans are not popular down there right now? That was why I was removed in the first place, and it’s gotten much worse in the last fifteen years.”

The monsignor shook his head. “You still have friends there among the people. They will remember you. They will trust you.”

He leaned forward and looked into Lorenzo’s eyes. “Find the codex, Father, if it exists to be found. And if you find it, guard it with your life.”

6

Washington, D.C.

“Anything?” Miriam asked as Tom scanned the computer printouts spread across his desk.

“Maybe,” he said.

She’d been watching his growing excitement for the past hour and a half. She recognized the signs, the subtle cues of a born predator that has caught whiff of prey. These were the same facial tics, the same body posture, the same gleam in his eyes that had first attracted her notice. He had not been just another eager beaver law school grad who had signed on with the FBI. He’d had that air of a relentless hunter about him, even then.

“What do you know about sheep ranching?” Tom asked.

Miriam looked at him. “Are you back on that Idaho militia thing? I thought we’d dismissed them as cranks.”

Tom shrugged. “I decided to run the financials on all the groups. No stone unturned, eh?”

“I suppose,” Miriam said. “I’d feel better if I knew we were turning over stones in the right garden.”

“Well,” Tom said, “that’s just it. Most of the groups we’ve looked at are unfunded nutcases. Many of them aren’t even groups at all, judging by their financials. Turns out most of them are some lone wacko with a Web site and an inflated sense of his own importance.”

“But you found something in the Idaho financials?” she asked.

Tom nodded. “Maybe. I mean, have you ever been to a sheep ranch?”

“No,” Miriam said. “Have you?”

“Once, as a kid. School field trip.”

“And?”

“It was a small operation, like Dixon’s,” Tom said. “A lot of grazing land. The rancher showed us how his dogs rounded up the sheep, and the shearing shed, and so on.”

“And your point is?” Miriam asked.

“Why would a sheep rancher need a fleet of five Hummers? One, I can see. But five?”

“Employees? I dunno. Something to bounce over the pastures and round up the strays?”

Tom shook his head. “He’d use a horse or dogs. An SUV wouldn’t be agile enough. A sheep rancher might use a Hummer for riding his fences, or for towing, but neither of those is an every day or even an every week chore. As for employees, from what I can see, Wes Dixon doesn’t have a huge operation. It’s a small ranch. So why five Hummers?”

She held up her hands. “You’ve got me, Tom. Maybe he bought them for his militia?”

He shook his head, studying the printouts again. “Maybe. But they wouldn’t be all that useful for your run-of-the-mill citizens’ militia group, and a Hummer is an expensive SUV, even if it’s a base model rigged out for ranch work. He took out a loan for two hundred fifty thousand dollars to buy a fleet of five. And guess where he got the loan?”

Miriam’s heart skipped a beat. “His brother-in-law’s bank?” she asked.

“Bingo. Now, there’s no big surprise there. Edward Morgan is a nice brother-in-law, so he pulls a string or two to make sure his baby sister’s husband can get a loan for some new ranch equipment.”

“Why would he need to pull strings?” Miriam asked. “Couldn’t Dixon get a loan?”

“Like I said, the ranch is a small operation. And, judging by Dixon’s tax returns, not all that successful. I’d guess it would be hard to find some local Idaho banker to spring for a quarter million on a fleet of monster SUVs for a small-time sheep rancher. I’d be surprised if Dixon could get fifty grand to buy new stock at this point.”

Miriam nodded. “So Dixon’s wife talks to her brother, and voilà. New Hummers for all.”

Tom looked at her, once again shaking his head. “Not exactly. And that’s the interesting part. Dixon’s wife talks to her brother and gets a loan for new Hummers for all.” He paused for a moment. “But there’s no record that anyone ever bought them.”

“When was the loan?” Miriam asked, sensing where he was going with this.

Tom flipped through the printout. “Eighteen months ago.”

“So this wasn’t an ordinary car loan,” she said.

“Nope. The Hummers weren’t put up as collateral. In fact, I can’t find any security for the loan. Morgan’s bank just issued a check for a quarter million. And Dixon never bought the Hummers.”

“Payments on the loan?” Miriam asked.

“Not a one.”

“Dixon’s credit report?”

Tom held up another printout. “The loan isn’t even mentioned. Apparently the bank never posted it to the credit bureaus.”

“So what you’re saying,” Miriam said, “is that Wesley Dixon got an unreported loan for a quarter of a million dollars from a major New York bank with no collateral, and he’s made no payments.”

“And has no fleet of big, shiny new Hummers,” Tom added.

“So where’s the money?” Miriam asked.

“Not in his personal accounts. And I can’t find it in his business accounts, either. Or in the militia’s. Or any record that a sum like that passed through any of those accounts. But I’m no bookkeeper.”

She’d picked up the scent, just as Tom had. The scent of prey. She reined in her excitement. “You know this is a long shot, Tom. It’s a hundred to one—hell, a thousand to one—that this means what we think it might mean.”

Tom nodded. “But if it does, we might just have found the money that paid for the hit on Grant Lawrence.”

“That’s a stretch,” Miriam said. “Eighteen months ago… Would someone plan an assassination attempt that far in advance?”

But someone might, she knew. Her pulse accelerated. If someone wanted to make sure all the trails were really cold, they might well plan that far in advance. And Edward Morgan was a lifelong friend of Harrison Rice, who was now the Democratic nominee for president.

“It’s a helluva stretch,” Tom agreed. “And it’s probably exactly what I said last night. Horseshit. This Morgan guy wanted to bail out his brother-in-law’s failing business, so he jimmied up a loan to slip Dixon some extra operating cash. That’s probably all it is, right?”

“If it’s even that,” Miriam said. “He probably got the loan for the Hummers, discovered his barn was about to collapse or some such crisis du jour, and had to spend the money on that instead. And he kept it off the books to dodge the IRS.”

“It’s horseshit,” Tom said.

“It’s absolute horseshit,” Miriam agreed.

There was a long moment of silence. She knew what he was thinking. She was thinking the same thing. Yes, this was probably a waste of time and Bureau resources. But then again, their entire assignment was probably a waste of time and Bureau resources. At least this had a vague hint of illegality. Banking and IRS regulations, sure, and probably an innocent, well-intentioned, charitable violation, at that. But it was still far more interesting than the rest of what they’d read. And within the purview of the FBI.

“So you’re going to run it down?” she asked, forcing herself to sound casual.

“Damn right I am,” he said. “Any luck on those videos?”

She glanced at her watch, and both brows lifted. “Listen, we need to go to lunch.”

“Now?”

“Sure. Then we’ll be ready to dig into those files again.”

He grabbed his suit coat and without another word followed her. Miriam never did anything without a reason.

Rome, Italy

Monsignor Giuseppe Veltroni sat on a stair at the Trevi Fountain, watching the tourists. They came in all sizes, great and small, all colors of the human rainbow, and speaking the babel of dozens of languages. At this time of evening, however, the fountain was even more crowded than usual. The most irritating thing was the tour guide using a megaphone to speak to his flock in Japanese. The Japanese didn’t bother the monsignor, but the volume did. It nearly drowned out the soothing sounds of cascading water.

He himself was clad like the rest, or nearly so, in civilian clothes of slacks, windbreaker and jogging shoes. The air was chilly for spring. While the tourists looked comfortable, the monsignor was not. A creature of the Vatican, he vastly preferred his cassock. Even a clerical suit was preferable to this open-throated shirt. He missed his collar and felt deceptive without it. But privacy was his primary concern in this public place.

A pigeon alighted beside him and cocked its head, indicating a demand as clearly as if the bird had spoken. “I’m sorry, little one,” the monsignor murmured. “I have no food.”

Moments later the pigeon departed, joining its fellows across the fountain, where a young boy was scattering bits of cannoli. The flocking birds alarmed the child’s mother, and she whisked him away, leaving a trail of pastry crumbs in their wake.

Monsignor Veltroni returned his attention to the fountain. Begun by Bernini, it had been finished by Salvi, who earned most of the credit for the fantastic beauty of Neptune riding a seashell chariot drawn by winged steeds. The monsignor especially liked the winged horses. They appeared to rise right out of the fountain itself along with the water, as if emerging from the sea, and to his mind they carried a message of hope. Out of the darkness and depths we shall rise into the light….

The monsignor very much hoped he would rise into the light, which was the reason he was sitting here on this hard marble step, surrounded by people who tossed coins into the fountain to ensure their return to Rome.

A man sat beside him, a dark man, weathered hard by deserts and the suns of many years. They were a contrast, these two, the monsignor soft and pale from his duties, the other hardened and darkened by his. Yet they were players in the same game.

“You have difficulties,” the man said in flawless Italian.

Veltroni wondered how many languages the man spoke, having heard him converse in no fewer than four. Rome was an international city, and this spot a tourist attraction, so Italian was as private as any language they might have used. Certainly no less so than English, Veltroni’s only other language of competence.

“You requested a meeting to tell me something I already know?” Veltroni asked.

“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “I requested a meeting to offer you my assistance.”

Veltroni let out a short, silent, derisive laugh. “Thank you, but no thank you. The Church prefers to handle such matters itself.”

“The Church,” the man said, “doesn’t even know about this matter. We both know your group is not recognized by the Vatican. I doubt the Pope knows you exist.”

“The Holy Father has many responsibilities,” Veltroni replied. “He cannot have his finger on everything.”

“We both live with secrets,” the man said.

“You more so than I, apparently,” Veltroni murmured, “as you seem to know all of mine.”

These meetings always troubled him for that reason. More than once had he tried to pry open the wall of stone that shielded Nathan Cohen, if that was indeed his name. He had found very little. Certainly not enough. The man beside him was too much of a mystery, placing Veltroni at a distinct disadvantage. In this game, information was power.

“Like you, I am but a humble man of God,” Cohen said.

That part might have been true, though Veltroni knew this man was no rabbi. He doubted the man was even Jewish, although he sometimes presented himself as such. Rabbis operated within the structure of the Jewish community, and while that structure was not as rigid as the Catholic Church, neither was it anonymous. For a while Veltroni had wondered if the man was Mossad—Israeli intelligence—but discreet inquiries had ruled that out, as well.

“You don’t believe me,” Cohen said.

It was not a question.

“No,” Veltroni answered. “But you already knew that.”

“You tried very hard to locate me after our last little chat,” Cohen replied. “Your people are good, but…well…mine are better.”

“And who are your people?” Veltroni asked. “You’re offering to help in a confidential matter known to very few. I’m not such a fool as to believe that help would come with no strings attached. If I were to accept your offer, I’d want to know who I would be beholden to.”

Cohen looked up at the clouds for a moment, as if he were considering what to say, although Veltroni had no doubt he had long since rehearsed every possible move and countermove in this verbal sparring match.

“Is it not enough to say I am a man who thinks the world would not be improved by the chaos that would arise from these discoveries?” Cohen asked.

“No,” Veltroni said. “I am far too old to believe in convenient altruism.”

“You are a cynic, my friend.”

“I am a realist,” Veltroni answered.

“The defense of all cynics and depressives,” Cohen replied with a quick chuckle. “You don’t see the glass as half-empty. It simply is half-empty, correct?”

“Mockery is a dangerous game, Mr. Cohen. Even a dog tires of being poked with a stick. And I lack the saintly patience of that species.”

“Please, Monsignor, let us not devolve into boys, strutting about the schoolyard with our chests out. That would demean us and serve no one but your enemies.”

Veltroni was not accustomed to being lectured, nor to being patronized. His temper flared, his jaw clenching for a moment, before he bit back his reply and forced himself to take a long, slow breath. Wading into battle with an unknown enemy was the height of folly, and he was no fool. But signing a blank check to a stranger was equally foolish.

“It seems,” Veltroni said, “that we have little more to discuss. I cannot consider your offer unless I know what is involved. My superiors—and I do have them, even if my organization is not a formal organ of the Church—would not permit it. We could sit here and joust all day, but, as I said, I am not blessed with saintly patience.”

Cohen watched Veltroni rise and walk away. Another man might have regretted the course of the conversation, but Cohen had expected nothing more. Veltroni might lack patience, but Cohen did not. The Guardians had waited over three thousand years for a conjunction of opportunity such as now existed. A few more weeks were but a drop in a vast river of time.

Veltroni was not yet desperate. But he would be, and sooner than he knew.

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