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  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 rubb
ish?”

  “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 chan
nels 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.