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“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.
