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Beantown was in the grip of a stifling summer heat wave that crackled with the electric charge of an imminent thunderstorm. Sweaty, lethargic pedestrians dragged themselves through the streets, ignoring blue-black clouds that had shown up like violent bruises on the heavy-laden sky. It was too hot to hurry for shelter, too humid to care about the approaching afternoon tempest.
Patrick Burton Fitzgerald stood high overhead at the windows of his fifty-third-floor offices in the John Hancock Tower, gazing down on Trinity Church, the Charles River and the gracious shops and tree-lined avenues of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. The Hancock office complex was entirely encased in glass, so that the windows on which he rested his clenched fists ran floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall.
Fitzgerald had never considered himself a violent man. At the moment, however, he trembled with the kind of rage that could spark murder. If he got his hands on the bastard who had ordered his daughter’s kidnapping, he would cut his throat without hesitation or regret. How dare these people use Amy as a pawn in their power games?
Fitzgerald wasn’t naïve. He knew that Americans were less than universally loved in some parts of the world, and he could sometimes even understand why that might be. He wasn’t some ugly American who thought that U.S. citizenship gave an automatic right to megalomania. He recognized that other people might interpret facts differently than his compatriots, and that other countries’ national interests might not always dovetail with those of the United States. Some conflicts were inevitable.
Unlike many of his business peers, he had grave doubts about the current campaign in Iraq. Although he hadn’t joined street marches to protest the war, he had made phone calls to members of Congress and other friends in the administration to express his concern that the legitimate hunt for Osama bin Laden and others responsible for acts of terror against America was being hijacked by an obsessive preoccupation with Saddam Hussein who, for all his brutality, hardly posed the threat to this country that other bad actors out there did.
Fitzgerald was a moderate Republican, economically conservative but not without a sense of noblesse oblige. He considered himself cosmopolitan, politically astute and culturally sensitive. In addition to numerous domestic charities, he donated significant sums to international refugee assistance, Third World education and health care for the planet’s poorest wretches. Fitzgerald and his wife Katherine had also raised their five children to understand their responsibility to give back to a world that had been uncommonly generous to the Fitzgeralds. In light of the disaster that had befallen them now, however, he found himself rethinking the wisdom of that approach. Had they somehow gone overboard with Amy, their youngest?
A brutal rage seized him once more. If he weren’t so wretched with fear, he might be appalled at having been reduced to the same level of animal passion as the terrorists who’d taken his daughter. To hell with civility, however. He wanted them all dead.
Most of all, he wanted Amy home safe.
She was a medical doctor. After completing her studies at Johns Hopkins, Amy had done her residency at a tough inner-city Baltimore E.R. After that, Fitzgerald and his wife had been hoping she’d move on to something a little less risky. Instead, when the International Red Cross put out a call for medical personnel to help rebuild the battered health care system in post-Saddam Iraq, Amy was quick to volunteer her services, signing up before her parents could express their misgivings.
Fitzgerald could almost hear her laughing voice. “Come on, Dad! You know what you’ve always said—to whom much is given, much is expected. And I’ve been given a lot, starting with great parents.” Her mischievous eyes sparkled, making it impossible for him to remain upset with her for long. “I’ll be fine. You worry too much.”
Now, she was a prisoner—or worse, Fitzgerald thought, a knot tightening in his gut. There’d been no word from her captors since she’d been taken from a Red Crescent clinic north of Baghdad five days earlier. No ransom demand, none of the usual ranting, cliché-ridden communiqués ordering the withdrawal of American forces. Nor had there been any credible response to the million-dollar reward for her safe return that Fitzgerald had posted two days ago. Of course, the crazies and fraud artists had crawled out of the slime pool in quick enough time, forcing him and his advisors to sift through reams of deceitful, bizarre and mean-spirited messages, looking for the one that might provide a genuine lead or ray of hope. From Amy’s captors, however, there’d been nothing but total, bloody silence.
What kind of political cause justified attacking a medical clinic and kidnapping a young doctor whose only reason for being in their country in the first place was to help rebuild it after the long, dark nightmare of Saddam’s reign? Amy didn’t have to be there. She’d gone in to help the sick, the wounded and the poor. How did that make her a target for terrorists?
Fitzgerald gazed down on the cruciform shape of Trinity Church. If the glass that held him back were suddenly to vanish, he would plummet down and be impaled like an insect on the spire that topped the cathedral’s central tower. It couldn’t possibly be worse than the agony he was going through now—sheer, gut-wrenching terror. Never in his entire sixty years had he felt so helpless.
He exhaled a shuddering sigh and turned back to his massive, burled walnut desk, willing the phone to ring. It was nearly an hour since he’d put in the latest call to a highly placed source in the administration in Washington. Why hadn’t it been returned? They were certainly quick enough off the mark when campaign fund-raising time rolled around.
The law offices of Fitzgerald-Revere occupied the entire fifty-third floor of the John Hancock Tower. Softly lit and trimmed out in warm woods and buffed marble, the suite smelled of leather and lemon oil. The deep-carpeted corridors and rich furnishings fairly hummed with the subtle but unmistakable message that behind these heavy doors and silk-papered walls, powerful people carried out important business, defining law and business practices that would guide the nation for decades to come.
To facilitate its extensive commercial and government work, Fitzgerald-Revere had branch offices in New York and Washington, but the firm’s headquarters had always been in Boston, since it was here that the founders’ family roots had first been set down. Clients could be forgiven for assuming that those roots went back to the American Revolution, if not the Mayflower itself, given the name “Revere” on the firm’s letterhead. Nor did the partners go out of their way to disabuse anyone of the notion that the “Fitzgeralds” in Fitzgerald-Revere were the same ones whose family tree intertwined with that of the Kennedys.
In fact, however, the founding Revere had originally been a Reinhardt who had legally changed his too-German-sounding name about the time that Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops began mowing down young American manhood in the trenches of World War I. And if old Ernest Fitzgerald, the other co-founder of the now-venerable firm, had no DNA in common with the man who was later to become President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, neither did he have to answer for the kind of Prohibition-era rum-running shenanigans that underpinned the wealth of that other prominent Boston family. Instead, Ernest Fitzgerald had been an Irish potato famine descendant who’d made his fortune by dint of hard work, a brilliant, precedent-setting legal mind and astute deal-making.
There was no longer a Revere (much less a Reinhardt) in the firm of Fitzgerald-Revere, but Ernest’s son, Patrick, was the current senior partner of the firm which had opted to keep its original name, with that convenient if misleading cachet.
Sick of waiting, incapable of turning his attention to anything else, Fitzgerald picked up the phone and punched in his secretary’s extension.
She answered immediately. “Yes, sir?”
“Still nothing from Myers?”
Evan Myers, White House deputy chief of staff, had been a junior associate at Fitzgerald-Revere when Patrick Fitzgerald had introduced him to the former governor of Texas, then given him leave of absence with full pay while he ran the northeastern office of the governor’s first presidential campaign. Since then, and in short order, Myers had risen to stratospheric heights of power. Up to now, his former boss had never called in the marker. Fitzgerald rarely did, preferring to exercise influence subtly through ongoing access and dialogue rather than the tit-for-tat trading of favors. Now, however, the time for subtlety was over. It was payback time.
“I tried calling Mr. Myers again about ten minutes ago,” his secretary said, “but apparently he’s still in a meeting.”
“Damn.”
“His office did promise that he’d get right back to you as soon as it wrapped. Also…” she added, her voice hesitant.
“What?”
“Mrs. Fitzgerald called a while ago.”
“Why didn’t you put her through?”
“She didn’t want to bother you. She just wondered if you’d heard anything.”
Fitzgerald sank down in his leather chair and leaned forward on his desk, resting his forehead in his free hand. “I told her I’d be calling Evan this morning.”
“Yes, sir, that’s what she said. She just wanted to know if you’d spoken to him and if there was any news.”
Poor Katherine, Fitzgerald thought. This was even harder on her than it was on him. He at least had the office, where he could go and pretend to be busy.
He didn’t bother telling her about the frustrating calls they’d been getting from crackpots and fortune hunters looking to claim that million-dollar reward. Since there was nothing to report from his calls to Washington either, Fitzgerald could do nothing but tippy-toe around his wife, terrified of saying or doing something that would set off the howls of rage and grief they both felt—terrified they might lash out at each other simply because there was no one else to pummel or scream at in their impotent fury.
Katherine would have been sitting at home all morning, unable, like him, to do anything or step away from the phone for fear of missing that one critical call that would bring news about Amy. Reluctant, as well, to ask what else Patrick had done today for fear of sounding critical, as if he didn’t care enough to pull out all the stops to bring their daughter home. Fitzgerald himself was afraid to say anything that might get his wife’s hopes up, or of saying too little and plunging her even deeper into despair. In the end, he said little or nothing, skulking around with what must seem like stoic reserve at best and, at worst, like cruel indifference.
Behind him, a searing flash of lightning suddenly ripped open the sky and a sharp crack of thunder rattled the windows. Bullet-sized raindrops splattered against the glass.
This wasn’t how he’d seen himself spending his golden years, Fitzgerald thought. Now, if anything happened to Amy, there would be no golden years. Only grief and rage to his last pained breath.
CHAPTER
3
Baghdad, Iraq
Hannah was in a hurry to make her call and get down to the weapons locker before the team leader started making any cracks about the hazards of working with women, but she opened the hotel’s rooftop door cautiously, one hand resting on the gun holstered at her waist. It was her personal weapon, a Beretta nine millimeter semi-automatic, just like the one she’d been trained to use when she became a cop. No matter what equipment her employer made available, she never went out on a job without her own gun, the one she kept cleaned and oiled, the one she knew would never fail in a pinch.
That kind of security was especially critical here. Only a fool walked around Baghdad unarmed. Insurgents and snipers had a habit of popping up at the most inconvenient times. No point in getting shot stupidly.
The graveled rooftop was in darkness, lit only by the ambient light of the surrounding city. She stepped cautiously over the threshold, keeping the door propped open behind her in case she needed to beat a quick retreat, pausing to let her eyes adjust to the dark.
A low murmur sounded from different directions around her, the words indistinguishable but overlapping, the voices clearly engaged in separate conversations. She squinted until she made out four figures scattered around the rooftop, all of them up there for the same reason she was—to get a clear shot at one of the orbiting communications satellites that would bounce their telephone calls to far-flung home bases.
Suddenly, the night air shook with the boom of a mortar round landing somewhere nearby. Conversations paused, then went on as if nothing has happened. Hannah smiled grimly. They were a gutsy bunch, these people who chose to work in the world’s hot spots.
The figure closest to her she recognized, their path shaving crossed in previous strife-tornlocales. The woman worked for National Public Radio, and by the sound of it, she was calling in a story. Spotting Hannah, the reporter gave her a wave.
Hannah nodded back and closed the door to the stairwell, heading for her own isolated patch to place her call. She found an empty corner and set her satellite phone case down on the low wall that ran the perimeter of the rooftop. Then, she paused again as the scents of the city rose to meet her.
There was a particular smell to the Middle East, one as familiar and comforting as her grandmother’s cooking. Even now, years since those summer visits, the smell of lemons and oranges, garlic and ginger, or olive groves and the sea instantly sent her back in her mind to a safe, warm place where loving arms had always opened to welcome her.
Here in landlocked Baghdad, however, there were no salty sea breezes to temper the desert heat or damp down the powder-fine, pervasive yellow sand that insinuated itself into ears and noses and every other bodily crevice. And if the smell of spices and cooking fires drifted on the night air as they did in so many other cities of Hannah’s memory, here the scent was tinged with the acrid sting of weapons fire and explosives recently detonated.
Hannah ducked low behind the parapet as she flicked on the sat phone, directing the antenna southwest toward the Indian Ocean regional satellite. Leaning back against the wall, she scanned nearby rooftops for possible snipers as she dialed the Los Angeles number of her ex-husband.
Normally, in the Middle East’s hot summers, parents and children gravitated to rooftops and balconies in the evening, dragging out mattresses to make their nighttime beds, eager to catch the slightest breeze. These days, however, sleeping outdoors in Baghdad could prove suicidal. Four months after the capital had fallen to coalition forces and major hostilities had been declared over, the streets were still deserted and dangerous at night. No one ventured out after curfew except military patrols and the insurgents trying to kill them. Even peeking out a taped-up window could invite a bullet or rocket-propelled grenade.
Hannah glanced at her watch. It was late afternoon back in L.A. Gabe had been attending a summer day camp in the Santa Monica mountains, but it had finished a week earlier. Now he was supposed to be enjoying a few lazy days before heading off to third grade at Dahlby Hall, the exclusive private school he attended, where classes were due to resume the Tuesday after Labor Day. As always, Hannah’s presence at his first day of school was neither required nor encouraged.
She closed her eyes as a wave of guilt and anger passed over her. It wasn’t right that another woman got to see her child over these milestones. For two years now, Cal’s wife had been taking Gabe to his dentist appointments, his soccer games, his play dates and his friends’ birthday parties. Christie had been the one to read him the Harry Potter stories before tucking him into bed. It was Christie his teachers had called when Gabe had broken his arm in a fall from a schoolyard jungle gym.
When she was back in L.A., Hannah had her son on weekends, for two weeks in the summer and for alternate holidays, but how much longer would even that unsatisfying schedule last? Already she felt pressured to relinquish her visitation days on those occasions when Gabe was pulled between her and a chance at doing something special with his friends. It was no use making him feel guilty about it. That way lay only resentment. What was going to happen when he hit his teens and had a girlfriend or played team sports? How eager then would he be to pack up his bag and move for the weekend to his mother’s little condo across the city?
On the other side of the world, she heard the phone ring in Cal and Christie’s Mulholland Drive mansion. It picked up on the third ring and a Spanish-accented voice said, “Hello, Nicks residence.”
The satellite connection was as clear as if Hannah were calling from next door. She pictured Cal and Christie’s housekeeper standing by the phone in their massive granite and travertine kitchen. It overlooked a sprawling hillside garden with an infinity swimming pool that seemed to drop off the edge of the earth.
“Hello, Maria. This is Hannah, Gabe’s mother. Is he there?”
“Oh, hello, Miss Hannah. No, he’s not, I’m sorry,” the housekeeper said. “He just left with Mrs. Nicks to get some new shoes and his school uniforms.”
Even now, three years after Cal’s remarriage, it still grated to hear someone else besides his mother called “Mrs. Nicks.” It wasn’t that Hannah had an emotional attachment to her ex-husband’s name. She’d seriously considered going back to Demetrious after the divorce, but in the end, had decided against it. It wasn’t just the paperwork hassle. Sharing a name with her son seemed more important than severing that link to the man who’d cheated on her and then dumped her. God knew, she shared little enough with Gabe, the way things had worked out.
“They should be back in a couple of hours,” the housekeeper said. “Would you like Gabriel to call you when he gets in?”
Damn, damn, damn.
“No, I’m out of town on business and I’m going to be out of touch for a while. I’ll have to call back. Could you tell him I called and said I love him?”
“Yes, of course. I am sorry you missed him,” the housekeeper said.
“How’s he doing?”
“Oh, very good. He had some friends here for a sleepover last night. They put up the tent in the backyard and slept out there.” Maria laughed. “Mookie wanted to sleep with them, but the boys put her out. She had gone into the pool with them earlier and she was getting their sleeping bags all wet. And she smelled, Gabriel said.”
“Ah, yes, the ripe odor of wet border collie,” Hannah said, smiling. The puppy had been Cal and Christie’s gift on Gabe’s sixth birthday two years ago—a bribe, maybe, or a consolation prize. Lose your mom, gain a dog. A fair trade, right?
Whatever it was—the dog, the fabulous house, the new school and many friends—the strategy had obviously worked. Although Gabe had originally been unhappy with the changed custody arrangements, crying to move back with his mother, he clearly considered the Mulholland Drive mansion his home now and no longer even mentioned going back to living full-time with Hannah. Though he assured her he understood why the change had been necessary, she couldn’t help feeling she’d let him down—and that once more Cal, damn him, had ended up looking like the hero.
Hannah had met Calvin Nicks during her freshman year at UCLA. Barely eighteen years old when she arrived in Los Angeles from her parents’ home outside Chicago, she’d been swept off her feet by the handsome pre-law senior who lived down the hall from her dorm room. Being young and on her own for the first time was no excuse for her incredible stupidity about practical matters like birth control when she’d fallen in love with Cal. She might have come from a sheltered background in an immigrant family, but she’d grown up in the freewheeling 1980s, for crying out loud, not ancient Greece. What a dope.
When she’d discovered she was pregnant, Cal had been no more eager than she to consider the possibility of a termination. Whatever happened later, he had loved her then, she was pretty sure. To marry her and provide for their child, he’d been ready to give up his dream of law school and becoming a criminal prosecutor, but Hannah couldn’t let him do that. Instead, she’d dropped out and taken a job as a dispatcher with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, working right up to her delivery date, then going back to night shifts three months later while Cal stayed home to study and take care of Gabriel.
Maybe the drift had started then, with the two of them coming and going from their little apartment on completely opposite schedules. Or maybe it was when she decided to take up an offer to enter the police academy. Thanks to her cosmopolitan family, she spoke three languages in addition to English—Greek, Arabic and passable high-school Spanish. That made her too valuable an asset to waste on the dispatch desk, the sheriff’s department personnel management decided.
Had she loved police work too much and Cal not enough? Did he resent the excitement of a career that put her on the street and then into undercover work in record time? Despite the claims he made later during the custody hearing, she’d been conscientious about being there for Gabe and juggling her schedule as much as possible to meet his needs. At the end of the day, though, maybe too many of her husband’s needs had gone unmet. Maybe she had to take some of the blame when he drifted into a series of affairs, first with a fellow student, then some miscellaneous women he met in his first job at the district attorney’s office, and finally with Christie Day, the local television news anchor who became his second wife. But even if Hannah accepted some of the blame for the end of the marriage, that didn’t mean that Cal had had the right to jump at the first opportunity to steal her son.
If only the courts had agreed.
It was an undercover job, a major drug, arms and money laundering sting carried out in cooperation with the FBI, DEA and ATF, that had done her in, putting the final nail in the coffin. She and Cal had been divorced for nearly two years by then, and he’d left his job at the district attorney’s office and gone over to the dark side, working for a high-end defense firm with a stable of bad-boy clients. She’d been working long and irregular hours. With no family around to provide backup care and less than flexible babysitting arrangements, she hadn’t been in a position to turn down Cal and Christie’s offer to keep Gabe full-time for the few summer weeks the sting operation was expected to last. Christie had even rearranged her schedule at the TV station, taking the crack-of-dawn news shift in order to be home by 9:00 a.m. to care for Gabe while Cal was at work. In retrospect, Hannah realized, it had all been part of Cal’s master plan, but at the time, she’d been absurdly grateful.
It didn’t help that a few weeks had turned into four months as the sting operation dragged on and on. By the time it ended and the case went to trial, Gabe had already been enrolled at Dahlby Hall, made friends and begun to settle into a new routine with no need for the kind of outside caretakers that Hannah had to rely on. Yet even then, Hannah thought, with Cal determined to petition the court to reverse their original custody arrangements and having the money and the legal connections to press the matter until he got his way, she might have kept her son.
The bomb had ended her hopes. Planted by one of the defendants in the sting, who’d somehow discovered the identity of the undercover cop set to testify against him, the explosive had blown up more than her little house in Los Feliz. It had also destroyed any chance of convincing the courts she was the better parent to provide a secure and stable environment for a child. Even Hannah, shaken to the core by the assassin’s near-miss of her and Gabe, had conceded that, barring a lottery win, there was no way she could afford the kind of advantages Cal and Christie could offer her son.
Most people thought it was the events of September 11, 2001 that had pushed Hannah out of the sheriff’s department and into the freelance security game, but the truth was, it was sheer financial need. She made nearly five times her police salary doing the kind of work she was doing now. She was on track with a plan that would allow her, if she were very careful, to take several years off and devote herself full-time to her son’s needs without having to worry about where the grocery money would come from. She had a real shot at petitioning for a review of her case, she thought—if only she could survive long enough to see her game plan to fruition….
CHAPTER
4
Washington, D.C.
Evan Myers felt his cell phone vibrate inside the breast pocket of his subtly pinstriped, two-thousand-dollar navy-blue suit. He silently cursed both the interruption and the twitch of anxiety it set off in his gut.
He was perched on one of Richard Stern’s low, armless visitors’ chairs, forced—by design, he was certain—to gaze up at the older man who occupied the massive leather chair on the business side of a broad oak desk. As Myers pulled out his phone and flipped it open, he couldn’t fail to notice the irritation that flickered across Stern’s lined face. Myers hoped his own expression didn’t reveal how that made him feel—like a misbehaving schoolboy caught passing notes.
Not even his Armani suit could quite overcome the youthful impression cast by Myers’s slight, five-foot-eight stature, his thick mop of red hair and his rosy, puckish face. He’d just passed his thirty-sixth birthday, had graduated summa cum laude from Yale Law School, and had fast-tracked with the prestigious Boston firm of Fitzgerald-Revere. Now, as White House deputy chief of staff, his carrot-topped head could often be spotted in close proximity to the president during press scrums and state visits. Yet in spite of all that, Myers still found himself being carded by clueless bouncers at trendy Washington watering holes. It was unbelievably irritating.
As for Richard Stern, the man on the other side of the desk, his demeanor was as humorless as his name. With a shock of steel-gray hair and flint-colored eyes behind rimless glasses, the assistant national security advisor had a reputation for ruthlessness and a background as sketchy as his current mandate seemed to be. Stern was portly in girth and close to sixty years of age, yet there was nothing avuncular about him. Having spent most of his adult life swimming in the murky back channels of covert operations, he had a sharklike slipperiness and a corresponding cold disdain for any poor sap whose blood he scented.
Stern and his small gang of handpicked associates occupied a suite of first-floor offices at the northeast corner of the Old Executive Office Building at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, adjacent to the White House. A five-story, white, Empire-style monstrosity that Mark Twain had deemed the ugliest building in America, the OEOB had been the site of numerous watershed events in U.S. history, as well as some notable scandals—cursed, perhaps, by the ghost of its architect, who committed suicide over his much-maligned creation. Built in the late 1800s and originally called the State, War and Navy Building, the OEOB’s ornate rooms had been at the center of all of the country’s early international dealings. Here, in 1898, America declared war on Spain and then, two months later, signed a treaty of peace. More than a thousand other international treaties had been signed on behalf of America in its ornate halls, including the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, and the 1942 United Nations Declaration.
In recent decades, with White House office space at a premium and much in demand by politicos hovering at the hub of power like flies at a sugar bowl, the neighboring building had been housing administration overflow as well as a few power brokers who deliberately sought to maintain a lower profile. In the late 1980s, Colonel Oliver North had secretly orchestrated the Iran-Contra affair out of Room 392 of the OEOB. In a failed bid to keep her boss from going to jail over his criminal dealings, Colonel North’s secretary had shredded incriminating documents in a basement cubbyhole of the same building—documents detailing illegal sales of U.S. arms to Iran and the equally illegal diversion of those proceeds to President Ronald Reagan’s favorite “freedom fighters,” the anti-government Contras of Nicaragua.
With so much tradition, both grandiose and disreputable, behind it, it was little wonder that a figure such as Richard Stern would have chosen to establish his lair in the OEOB.
The entire White House office complex was surrounded by blastproof concrete barriers, high wrought-iron fences, armed guard posts and countless security scanners and cameras. In spite of that already elevated level of vigilance, entering Dick Stern’s personal domain took things one step further, requiring even an official as highly placed as Evan Myers to pass through yet another security barrage and—the ultimate insult—to be accompanied at all times by an authorized escort. Myers had never fully grasped the precise nature of Stern’s mandate, nor understood the reason for these obsessive security arrangements. Although he chafed at having been summoned like some junior flunky to this meeting on Stern’s turf, however, he was damned if he was going to let the man intimidate him as he did most everyone else.
When his phone vibrated again, Myers flipped it open and glanced at the text message on the screen.
“Again, Evan?” Stern asked peevishly.
“Nature of the beast, Dick,” Myers said, reading the third communication his assistant had sent in the past forty minutes. “We’re at the president’s beck and call over there.”
This latest message, however, did not concern demands of the Oval Office. Apparently Patrick Fitzgerald had called yet again. Myers had never seen his former boss and mentor so rattled, but considering the kidnapping of Fitzgerald’s daughter, it wasn’t surprising.
“Anyway,” Myers added, tucking the phone away, “that’s why I wanted to meet in my office.”
Stern grunted. “Not possible.” He almost never entered the White House. Myers wondered whether the president even knew the man, much less what he was up to over here.
Hundreds of characters circled around any administration, drawing power and authority from it. Much as they needed and wanted that presidential imprimatur, however, some of those people made a point of flying beneath the radar of Congress, the media and the public, their activities largely invisible even within the administration’s inner circle. Dick Stern was a case in point. The man seemed to answer to no one, yet when problems of a certain sensitive nature arose, he was inevitably tagged as the go-to guy.
“Patrick Fitzgerald has called again,” Myers said. “We can’t keep putting him off. God knows, the State Department isn’t giving him any joy. If I don’t get back to him with an update on his daughter, the next call he’ll make will be to the Oval Office. And you know he’ll get through, too, Dick. Fitzgerald is too big a fish to ignore if the party has any hope of making inroads in New England next year. And when he does make that call, the president’s going to be calling us both in for a sit rep.”
“You can’t let that happen.”
“Explain to me why not. A young American woman’s been kidnapped from under the noses of our own forces in Iraq. The press is saying she’s being held by some fundamentalist warlord. The State Department, like I said, is clueless. Meantime, both the CIA and the Pentagon claim to have no idea where she is or what this Salahuddin character wants. For the life of me, I can’t figure why we haven’t already launched a rescue mission. Are we in control or not over there?”
“It’s not that simple. That part of the county is still influx.”
“Are we at least talking to this Sheikh Salahuddin who’s supposed to have taken her? I mean, is somebody who speaks for us talking to him, since Langley’s spooks and the military don’t seem to be in the loop?”
“I can’t say.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
