The hunter knew Madison Bowe’s name. He’d seen her picture, had never met her, had no idea where she lived, had no thought that she might be in his future. As she spoke to a half million people on Randall James’s show, he knelt on a rubber tarp, not forty miles from her farm, waiting. Above him, the sun was a dull nickel hidden in the clouds.
The rain had come every night for the past three, courtesy of a low-pressure system stalled over the Appalachians. The night before, the rain began just after 3 A.M. He’d woken in his guest room, upstairs in the cabin, snug under the slanting tin roof. He’d listened for a few moments, the water whispering down a drainpipe, the cotton smell of the quilt around him, and then he’d rolled over and slept soundly until four-thirty.
He woke at four-thirty every morning. When he opened his eyes, he lay quietly for a moment, surfacing, then looked at the bedside clock, stretched, and got out of bed. He did fifty push-ups and fifty sit-ups on the colonial-style hooked rug from China, then a series of stretches, working hard on his bad leg. As he was finishing his routine, he heard an alarm go off down the hall.
He grabbed his jeans and a pair of fresh underpants from his bag, and padded barefoot down the hall to the bathroom. Better first than at the end of the line . . .
He brushed his teeth, skipped shaving, showered quickly. Out of the shower, he dried himself with his designated towel, pulled on the shorts and jeans, and opened the door. Peyson Carter was leaning against the opposite wall, green eyes, sleepy, wrapped in a bathrobe, holding a hair dryer.
“Morning, Jake,” she said, not looking at his bare chest. His name was Jake Winter. “Billy’s just getting up.”
“Yeah, let me get out of your way.”
He slid past her in the hallway, careful not to brush against her. Peyson was his best friend’s wife. Since Billy Carter first brought her around, fifteen years ago in college, he’d been a little in love with her. Some of the feeling, he suspected, was returned. They were always careful not to touch, because there might be a question of exactly when the touching would stop. And she loved Billy . . .
The guys downstairs were slower getting up, but by the time he’d gotten dressed and into his boots, and gathered his coveralls and gear, they were moving around. He could hear the downstairs shower going, and the plop-gurgle of the coffeemaker, the smell of hot coffee on a cool, rainy morning.
As he left the room, Peyson came out of the bathroom, steamy and pink, wrapped in the robe, and he said, “Scrambled?” and she said, “Yes,” and shouted, “Billy, get up,” and he followed her down the hall, watching her ass, and God help him, if Billy his best friend ever died in a car wreck, he would be knocking on this woman’s door the next week.
Peyson went on to the other bedroom and he turned down the stairs.
In the kitchen, he started breaking eggs into a bowl, got some muffin-premix poured into pan-molds, fired up the oven, took a package of bacon out of the refrigerator. Bob Wilson came out of the downstairs bathroom, hair wet from the shower, and said, “Rain.”
“Mist.”
“Gonna make the woods quiet, anyway. Hope the birds don’t hunker down.”
Sam Barger walked sleepy-eyed from the bedroom and asked Wilson, “You all done in the shower?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“Rainin’,” Barger said. “TV says it should be outa here by noon.”
They took a little time over breakfast: the smell of muffins rising in the oven, bacon and eggs, coffee, the pine-wood walls of the cabin. Peyson Carter across from him, curly blond hair, catching his eyes. Did all attractive women keep a spare tire?
They hunted together every spring and fall, looking for Virginia wild turkeys, four men, one man’s wife. They had the routine down. Everybody knew what to bring—bows, boots, camo, pasta, booze, garbage bags, toilet paper, target faces—and everybody knew about where he or she would set up. They were all bow hunters. Between the five of them, they averaged two turkeys per season. Turkeys were tough.
All that brought him to the rubber tarp, where he knelt in the gloom, waiting for his bird to move. A little hungry now, trying to ignore it. The four-foot-square mat made it possible to shift his weight silently; he had to shift frequently because of his lame leg. The tangle of brush around him made it possible to draw the bow without the motion being seen.
He had a Semiweiss Lighting compound bow, the draw weight adjusted down to provide for a very long hold. He was shooting carbon-fiber arrows, one-inch broadheads with stoppers. A good-sized tom hung out in the oaks behind him. And the tom would be coming out to this cornfield, and with luck, following a track along a shallow ravine below him. He knew the bird sometimes did that, because he’d seen the scat and the tracks on scouting trips.
Whether the tom would do it this day, he didn’t know.
He waited, listening, straining to see in through the brush, the problems of the bureaucracy falling away from him. He’d hunted most of his life, since his grandfather had first taken him out when he was six years old. He hunted deer and turkeys in Virginia, elk and antelope out west. When he was hunting, he stepped into a Zen-space and became part of the landscape. Time didn’t pass, nor did it stop; it simply wasn’t. He faded away from himself and his day-to-day problems.
He’d been in place since dawn. The sun came up, rose higher, broke briefly out of the clouds, disappeared again. A breeze sprang up, played with the oak leaves, died again; squirrels ran across the ground, noisy beasts; a chickadee stopped on a branch a foot from his nose.
He saw it all, but didn’t look at it. He was waiting . . . When the cell phone went off.
“Ahhhh . . . Jesus!”
The sound was stunning, like being hit in the face by a snowball. He rushed back to the present, out of the Zen-space to the here-and-now. He unzipped a panel on his camo, pushed his hand through to a shirt pocket underneath, and took the phone out.
“Yes.” The only people who had the number for that phone were people he needed to talk with.
A woman’s voice, quiet, cultivated: “Jake, this is Gina Press. I’m sorry to bother you, I understand you’re on vacation. The guy needs to see you.”
“When?”
“Today. Where are you?”
“Down in the valley. It’ll be a while.”
“It’s pretty urgent. Can I put you on the log for four forty-five?”
He looked at his watch: One o’clock. “Okay—but give me a hint.”
“Madison Bowe.”
“I’ll be there.”
The killer could feel the pull of the .45 in his pocket, pulling down on his shoulders, and maybe his soul.
He was moving Lincoln Bowe. Bowe was pale, naked, unconscious, a sack of meat, for all practical purposes. The killer had him slung in a blue plastic tarp, purchased at a Wal-Mart, and wrestled him down the narrow stairs, under the single bare basement bulb.
He was a big man, straining with the load, trying for a kind of tenderness while moving two hundred pounds of inert human being. He wore blue coveralls from Wal-Mart, purchased for the murder, and a hooded sweatshirt, with the hood pulled over his head, and plastic gloves. He knew all about DNA, and it worried him. A hair, a little spit, and he could wind up strapped to the death gurney, a needle in the arm . . .
He got the load down, puffing and heaving all the way, then looked back up the stairs: two minutes and he’d have to take the body back up. But he couldn’t do the killing upstairs, the neighborhood was too tight, somebody might hear the shot.
He moved Bowe under the light, spread the tarp, exposed him. He was lying on his back, soft and helpless. His body was dead white, touched here and there with blemishes, pimples, the rashes and scrapes of an out-of-shape man in his fifth decade. He looked at Bowe for a few seconds, then said aloud, “Here we are. Christ Almighty.”
No response. Bowe had taken an overdose of Rinolat.
The killer took the .45 out of his pocket, an old, worn gun, made in the first half of the twentieth century, bought a
t a weekend sale, inaccurate at any distance farther than arm’s length. Which was enough for the task.
He cocked it with a gloved hand, then thought: “The phone book. Damnit.” He ran up the short flight of stairs, got the phone book off the kitchen table, and went back down, closing the door behind him. The phone book already had two bullet holes in it: tests he’d done out in the Virginia countryside. He placed it on the naked man’s chest.
He slipped the safety and said, “Linc . . .” and thought:
Ears . . . damnit.
He put the safety back on, ran back up the stairs, and got the earplugs. They were two bullet-sized bits of compressible yellow foam, made for target shooters. He twisted each one, fitted them into his ears, waited for them to reexpand. If he’d fired the gun in the confines of the basement, without the ear protection, he wouldn’t have been able to hear for a week.
He slipped the safety again, teared up, wiped the tears away, pointed the pistol at the point where the phone book covered the naked man’s heart, said, “Lincoln,” and pulled the trigger.
Without the earplugs, the blast would have been shattering; it was bad enough as it was. The naked man bucked upward, his eyes opening in reflex, the pupils milky with sleep. He stared at the killer for a second, then two, then dropped back flat on the floor.
“Holy mother,” the killer said, appalled. He stood staring for a second, shocked by the milky eyes, by a possible gleam of intelligence, the hair rising on the back of his neck. Then, after a moment, he stooped and picked up the phone book. The slug had gone through, and blood bubbled from a purple hole in the naked man’s chest. The hole was directly over his heart. He engaged the safety on the .45, slipped the gun back in his pocket, and squatted.
The naked man wasn’t breathing. His eyes, when the lids were withdrawn, had rolled up, showing only the whites. He pressed a plastic-covered finger against the naked man’s neck, waiting for any sign of a pulse. Didn’t find one. Lincoln Bowe was dead.
He rolled Bowe up, enough to look at his back. No exit wound. The phone book had worked like a charm: the slug was buried inside the dead man.
The killer was silent, kneeling, looking at the face of the man on the floor. So many years. Who would have thought it’d come to this? Then he sighed, stood up, pulled the magazine on the pistol, jacked the shell out of the chamber, replaced it in the magazine. Looked at the stairs.
This would be the dangerous part, moving the body. If the cops stopped him for anything, he was done.
But they’d made their plans, and he was running with them. He had a lot to do. He stood, still looking at the dead man’s face, then said, “Let’s move, Linc. Let’s go.”
2
Jake stopped at home and changed into a suit and tie, and then caught a taxi to the White House. He checked through the west working entrance, walking first past the outer gate, where a guard examined his ID, then through the inner gate with the X-ray machines.
The X-ray tech, a new guy, spent five minutes looking at his cane, until an older guy came by, glanced at it, and said, “It’s okay. Mr. Winter’s a regular.”
Once through security, he was slotted into a waiting room that offered coffee, newspapers, and high-speed Internet. The room had recently been redecorated—the walls painted blue, the First Lady’s favorite color, and hung with portraits of former First Ladies.
One of the formers, Hillary Clinton, smiled down on the bald spot of John Powers, a Georgetown professor and sometime advisor to the Department of Defense. Powers was sitting in an easy chair reading the Wall Street Journal. He and Jake knew each other as consultants, and as denizens of Georgetown.
“I’m much more important than you are,” Powers said to Jake, folding the paper as Jake limped in. He was an urbane man, who looked like he might have run an art gallery. His over-the-calf socks were dark blue with ladybug-sized smiling suns on them. “I publish in Foreign Policy.”
“That may be true, but my neckties are from Hermès,” Jake said, dropping into a chair across from him. “Wait’ll the faculty senate hears that you were reading the Journal.”
“They all read it, in secret, greedy little buggers,” Powers said. He probed: “Are you over for the boat review?”
Jake shook his head and lied. “Nope. I don’t know why I’m over. Probably the convention. History stuff, working it into the program, successor to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, William Jefferson Clinton, great Americans all, blah-blah-blah.”
“The convention.” Powers smiled, showing a set of glittering teeth. Campus rumor said that he’d had them veneered for television. “I’m here for the boats. Vice President Landers is leading the charge.”
“Good luck with that.” Jake opened his case and took out his laptop, balanced it on his knees, turned it on.
“You don’t mean that,” Powers said, tilting his head. Few people at Georgetown would have.
“I do,” Jake said. “I hope they build them all.”
Powers brightened, remembering. “Ah. That’s right. You were in the military.”
“For a while.” The boats were five atomic-powered attack carriers that would cost twelve billion dollars each. “With the budget as it is, and the old people loading up behind Social Security, I don’t think you’ve got a chance in hell.”
Powers frowned, said, “The Chinese and Indians . . .” A tall man in shirtsleeves stuck his head into the room and nodded at Powers. “Whoops, here I go. See you at school.” Powers took a step away, then said, “Really? Hermès?”
“Yup.”
“What do they cost now? Two-fifty?”
“Yup.”
When Powers was gone, Jake plugged into the Net, did a search for Madison and Lincoln Bowe. He got sixty thousand hits, filtered them to the last three days, and caught a reference to a Madison Bowe interview on Channel 7’s Washington Insider with Randall James.
He called it up from the station’s news cache and watched Madison Bowe do her thing: “They’ve got him, I know it.” The camera made love to her face. “They’ve got Lincoln. If they don’t, why are they so worried about me? They did everything they could to shut me up. I’ll be honest, I’m very worried. I’m worried that they’ll kill him when they’re done with him . . .”
She had tapes of a big shambling man threatening her in her own house. The tapes were made more effective by their security-camera, cinéma-vérité quality. “This is how they work,” she said after the tape ran out. She was appealing, with a nervous lip-nibble that made a male hormone jump up and shout, “I’ll take care of you.”
“This is what they’re doing to our America,” she said, speaking directly to the camera.
They, Jake mused, were us.
He was moving fast now, scanning the Net news, learning as much as he could about her, and about Lincoln Bowe, and the circumstances around Lincoln Bowe’s disappearance; and about their friends, their political allies. Lincoln Bowe had been a conservative Republican, faithful to the party and to the conservative cause, and an aristocrat. Madison Bowe was a lawyer’s daughter, smart, media-wise, good-looking, the perfect mate for a rising Republican star.
Then the star had fallen, brought down by Arlo Goodman.
The fight had started with Goodman’s run for the governorship, through the rise of the Watchmen, and then into Bowe’s reelection campaign. Bowe had been the big stud in Virginia politics, Goodman coming up in the other party, a threat to Bowe’s eminence. A fight that started out as political quickly became personal.
Bowe: Have you seen him with his Watchmen? Just like Munich in the 1930s, a tin-pot dictator with his political thugs, a little Hitler without the mustache . . .
Goodman: Did you ever see that picture of him during Iraq I? The baby-faced bigshot lawyer with his aristocratic chums, with his friends from Skull and Bones, playing poker and smoking Cuban cigars. Let the poor boys die; but none of our precious little richies with their snowy white sweaters with the big blue Y on the chest . . .
Bowe must have rued the day he’d worn that Yale sweater, let himself be shot in the sweater and shorts, sockless with tasseled loafers, a big cigar and playing cards on the table, the unruly hair falling over his forehead—a harmless, attractive photograph at twenty-four that would be shoved up his ass at forty-six . . .
Goodman had won the gubernatorial race. Two years later, with a lot of help from the White House, and a nationwide money-raising campaign, he’d spearheaded the campaign against Bowe. Bowe had lost his Senate seat to a Goodman crony.
Bowe had lost, but he hadn’t shut up. He had the money and the family to re-create himself as the administration’s most prominent critic, able to say what sitting members of Congress, too worried about maintaining their share of the pork, could not. Some thought he might run for his old Senate seat again. Some thought if the Republicans came back in, he might be in line for an ambassadorship, the Court of St. James’s, or Paris.
Then he’d vanished. Stepped into a car, and was gone, moments after making a vicious attack on the administration’s Syrian policy, and, domestically, on special-interest groups who supported the president.
The media had gone crazy. And the longer Bowe was gone, the crazier it had gotten.
ABC had compared his disappearance to Judge Crater’s and Jimmy Hoffa’s, with hints of organized crime. CNN had done a special that spoke darkly of Nazi, Middle Eastern, and South American politics. They’d intercut the film with shots of the Watchmen, in bomber jackets and khaki slacks, meeting in a football stadium in Emporia, with Goodman on a stage in front of a huge American flag; the implication was clear.
Fox had won the ratings war with a show on even crazier theories, including alien abduction and spontaneous combustion.