Gideon’s Sword

by Douglas Preston; Lincoln Child

  “Democracy demographics,” I mutter.

  “If they were smart, they’d wait another half hour,” Harris points out. “That’s when the local news numbers really kick in and—”

  Before he can finish, there’s a knock on my door. “Matthew Mercer?” a female page with brown bangs asks as she approaches with an envelope.

  Harris and I share a fast glance. This is it.

  She hands me the envelope, and I struggle to play it cool.

  “Wait… aren’t you Harris?” she blurts.

  He doesn’t flinch. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”

  “At orientation… you gave that speech.”

  I roll my eyes, not surprised. Every year, Harris is one of four staffers asked to speak at the orientation for the pages. To most, it’s a suck job. Not to Harris. The other three speakers drone on about the value of government. Harris gives them the locker room speech from Hoosiers and tells them they’ll be writing the future. Every year, the fan club grows.

  “That was really amazing what you said,” she adds.

  “I meant every word,” Harris tells her. And he did.

  I can’t take my eyes off the envelope. “Harris, we should really…”

  “I’m sorry,” the page says. She can’t take her eyes off him. And not because of the speech. Harris’s square shoulders… his dimpled chin… even his strong black eyebrows—he’s always had a classic look—like someone you see in an old black-and-white photograph from the 1930s, but who somehow still looks good today. All you have to add are the deep green eyes… He’s never had to work it.

  “Listen, you… you have a great one,” the page adds, still staring as she leaves.

  “You, too,” Harris says.

  “Can you shut the door behind you?” I call out.

  The door slams with a bang, and Harris yanks the envelope from my hands. If we were in college, I’d tackle him and grab it back. Not anymore. Today, the games are bigger.

  Harris slides his finger along the flap and casually flips it open. I don’t know how he keeps his composure. My blond hair is already damp with sweat; his black locks are dry as hay.

  Searching for calm, I turn toward the Grand Canyon photo on the wall. The first time my parents took me there, I was fifteen years old—and already six feet tall. Staring down from the south rim of the canyon was the first time in my life I felt small. I feel the same way next to Harris.

  “What’s it say?” I demand.

  He peeks inside and stays totally silent. If the bet’s been raised, there’ll be a new receipt inside. If we’re top dog, our old slip of paper is the only thing we’ll find. I try to read his face. I don’t have a prayer. He’s been in politics too long. The crease in his forehead doesn’t twitch. His eyes barely blink.

  “I don’t believe it,” he finally says. He pulls out the taxi receipt and cups it in the palm of his hand.

  “What?” I ask. “Did he raise it? He raised it, didn’t he? We’re dead…”

  “Actually,” Harris begins, looking up to face me and slowly raising an excited eyebrow, “I’d say we’re very much alive.” In his hand he flashes the taxi receipt like a police badge. It’s my handwriting. Our old bet. For six thousand dollars.

  I laugh out loud the moment I see it.

  “It’s payday, Matthew. Now, you ready to name that tune…?”

  5

  MORNING, ROXANNE,” I call out as I enter the office the following day. “We all set?”

  “Just like you asked,” she replies without looking up. Crossing into the back room, I find Dinah, Connor, and Roy in their usual positions at their desks, already lost in paperwork and Conference notes. This time of year, that’s all we do—build the twenty-one-billion-dollar Rosemary’s Baby.

  “They’re waiting for you in the hearing room,” Dinah points out.

  “Thanks,” I say as I snatch my notebooks from my desk and head for the oversized beige door that leads next door.

  It’s one thing to bet on the fact that I can sneak this item past the Senate folks and into the bill. It’s entirely another to make it happen.

  “Nice to be on time,” Trish scolds as I enter the room. I’m the last of the four horsemen to arrive. It’s intentional. Let ’em think I’m not anxious about the agenda. As usual, Ezra’s on my side of the oval table; Trish and Georgia, our Senate counterparts, are on the other. On the right-hand wall, there’s a black-and-white Ansel Adams photograph of Yosemite National Park. The photo shows the clear glass surface of the Merced River dominated by the snow-covered mountain peak of Half Dome overhead. Some people need coffee; I need the outdoors. Like the Grand Canyon picture in my office, the image brings instant calm.

  “So, anything new?” Trish asks, wondering what I’ve got up my sleeve.

  “Nope,” I reply, wondering the same about her. We both know the pre-Conference tango. Every day, there’s a new project that one of our bosses “forgot” to put in the bill. Last week, I gave her three hundred thousand dollars for manatee protection in Florida; she returned the favor by giving me four hundred thousand to fund a University of Michigan study of toxic mold. As a result, the Senator from Florida and the Congressman from Michigan now have something to brag about during the elections. Around here, the projects are known as “immaculate conceptions.” Political favors that—poof—appear right out of thin air.

  I’ve got a mental list of every project—including the gold mine—that I need to squeeze in by the time pre-Conference is done. Trish has the same. Neither of us wants to show our hand first. So for two hours, we stick to the script.

  “FDR’s presidential library,” Trish begins. “Senate gave it six million. You gave it four million.”

  “Compromise at five mil?” I ask.

  “Done.”

  “Over to Philadelphia,” I say. “What about the new walkways for Independence Hall? We gave it nine hundred thousand; the Senate, for some reason, zeroed it out.”

  “That was just to teach Senator Didio to keep his mouth shut. He took a crack at my boss in Newsweek. We’re not gonna stand for that.”

  “Do you have any idea how vindictive and childish that is?”

  “Not half as vindictive as what they do in Transpo. When one of the Senators from North Carolina pissed off that subcommittee Chairman, they cut Amtrak’s funding so the trains wouldn’t stop in Greensboro.”

  I shake my head. Gotta love appropriators. “So you’ll give full funding to the Liberty Bell?”

  “Of course,” Trish says. “Let freedom ring.”

  By noon, Trish is looking at her watch, ready for lunch. If she’s got a project in her pants, she’s playing it extra cool—which is why, for the first time today, I start wondering if I should put mine out there first.

  “Meet back here at one?” she asks. I nod and slam my three-ring binder shut. “By the way,” she adds as I head back to my office, “there’s one other thing I almost forgot…”

  I stop right there and spin around. It takes every muscle in my face to hide my grin.

  “It’s this sewer project in Marblehead, Mass,” Trish begins. “Senator Schreck’s hometown.”

  “Oh, crap,” I shoot back. “That reminds me—I almost forgot about this land sale I was supposed to ask you about for Grayson.”

  Trish cocks her head like she believes me. I do the same for her. Professional courtesy.

  “How much is the sewer?” I ask, trying hard not to push.

  “Hundred and twenty thousand. What about the land sale?”

  “Doesn’t cost a thing—they’re trying to buy it from us. But the request is coming from Grayson.”

  She barely moves as I say Grayson’s name. If memory serves, she had a run-in with him a few years back. It wasn’t pretty. Rumors said he made a pass. But if she wants revenge, she’s not showing it.

  “What’s on the land now?” she asks.

  “Dust… rabbit turds… all the good stuff. What they want is the gold mine underneath.”

 
“They taking cleanup responsibility?”

  “Absolutely. And since they’re buying the land, we’ll actually be getting money on this one. I’m telling you, it’s a good deal.”

  She knows I’m right. Under current mining law, if a company wants to dig for gold or silver on public land, all they have to do is stake a claim and fill out some paperwork. After that, the company can take whatever they want for free. Thanks to the mining lobby—who’ve managed to keep the same law on the books since 1872—even if a company pulls millions in gold from government property, they don’t have to give Uncle Sam a single nugget in royalties. And if they buy the land at old mining rates, they get to keep the land when they’re done. Like Trish said, let freedom ring.

  “And what’s BLM say?” she asks, referring to the Bureau of Land Management.

  “They already approved it. The sale’s just caught up in red tape—that’s why they want the language to give it a push.”

  Standing behind the oval table, Trish shifts her jaw off center, trying to put a dollar value on my ask. Feeling like spectators, Ezra and Georgia do the same.

  “Let me call my office,” Trish finally says.

  “There’s a telephone in the meeting room,” I say, pointing her and Georgia next door.

  As the side door slams behind them, Ezra packs up his own notebooks. “Think they’ll go for it?” he asks.

  “Depends how bad she wants her sewer, right?”

  Ezra nods, and I turn back to the black-and-white Yosemite photo on the wall. Following my eyes, Ezra does the same. We stare silently at it for at least thirty seconds.

  “I don’t get it,” Ezra finally blurts.

  “Get what?”

  “Ansel Adams—the whole über-photographer thing. I mean, all the guy did was take some black-and-white photos of the outdoors. Why the big fuss?”

  “It’s not just the photo,” I explain. “It’s the idea.” With my open palm facing the photo, I circle the entire snow-capped peak. “Just the mere image of a completely wide-open space… There’s only one place that could’ve been taken. It’s America. And the idea of protecting huge swaths of land from development just so people could stare and enjoy it—that’s an American ideal. We invented it. France, England… all of Europe—they took their open spaces and built castles and cities on them. Over here, although we certainly do our share of development, we also set aside huge chunks and called them national parks. I mean, Europeans say the only American art form is jazz. They’re wrong. That purple mountain’s majesty—that’s the John Coltrane of the outdoors.”

  Ezra cocks his head slightly to take a better look. “I still don’t see it.”

  Turning my head, I wait for the side door to open. It stays shut. I already feel the drips of sweat trickling from my armpits down my rib cage. Trish has been gone too long.

  “You doing okay?” Ezra asks, reading my complexion. “Yeah… just hot,” I say, unbuttoning the top of my shirt. If Trish is playing the game, we’re in severe…

  Before I can finish, the doorknob clicks and the side door swings open. As Trish reenters the room, I try to read the look on her face. I might as well be trying to read Harris. Cradling her three-ring binder like a girl in junior high, she shifts her weight from one leg to another. I bite the inside of my cheek, trying to ignore the numbers floating through my brain. Twelve thousand dollars. Every nickel I’ve saved for the past few years. And the twenty-five-grand reward. It all comes down to this.

  “I’ll trade you the sewer for the gold mine,” Trish blurts.

  “Done,” I shoot back.

  We both nod to consummate the deal. Trish marches off to lunch. I march back to my office.

  And just like that, we’re standing in the winner’s circle.

  “That’s it?” Harris asks, his voice squawking through my receiver.

  “That’s it,” I repeat from my almost empty office. Everyone’s at lunch but Dinah, who, like the phone beast she is, is on a call with someone else. I still watch what I say. “When the Members vote for the bill—which they always do since it’s filled with goodies for themselves—we’re all done.”

  “And you’re sure you don’t have any uptight Members who’ll read through the bill and take the gold mine out?” Harris asks.

  “Are you kidding? These people don’t read. Last year, the omnibus bill was over eleven hundred pages long. I barely read it, and that’s my job. More important, once it comes out of Conference, it’s a big stack of paper covered in Post-it notes. They put a few copies on the House side and some more on the Senate. That’s their only chance to examine it—an hour or so before the vote. Trust me, even the Citizens Against Government Waste—y’know, that group that finds the fifty-thousand-dollar study on Aborigine sweat the government funded—even they only find about a quarter of the fat we hide in there.”

  “You really gave fifty grand to study Aborigine sweat?” Harris asks.

  “Don’t laugh. Last month, when scientists announced a huge leap in the cure for meningitis, guess where the breakthrough came from?”

  “Aborigine sweat.”

  “That’s right—Aborigine sweat. Think about that next time you read about pork in the paper.”

  “Great—I’m on the lookout,” Harris says. “Now you have everything else?”

  Reaching into the jacket pocket of my suit, I pull out a white letter-sized envelope. Checking it for the seventh time today, I open the flap and stare at the two cashier’s checks inside. One’s for $4,000.00. The other’s for $8,225.00. One from Harris, the other from me. Both are made out to cash. Completely untraceable.

  “Right here in front of me,” I say as I seal the lettersized envelope and slide it into a bigger manila mailer.

  “They still haven’t picked it up?” Harris asks. “It’s usually promptly at noon.”

  “Don’t stress yourself—they’ll be here…”

  There’s a soft, polite cough as the door to our office peeks open. “I’m looking for Matt…?” an African-American page says as he clears his throat and steps inside.

  “… any second,” I tell Harris. “Gotta run—business calls.”

  I hang up the phone and wave the page inside. “I’m Matthew. C’mon in.”

  As the page approaches my desk, it’s the first time I notice he’s wearing a blue suit instead of the standard blazer and gray slacks. This guy isn’t a House page; he’s from the Senate. Even the pages dress nicer over there.

  “How’s everything going?” I ask.

  “Pretty good. Just tired of all the walking.”

  “It’s a real haul from the Senate, huh?”

  “They tell me where to go—I got no choice,” he laughs. “Now, you got a package for me?”

  “Right here.” I seal the oversized envelope, jot the word Private across the back, and reach across the desk to put it in his hands. Unlike the other page visits, this isn’t a drop-off. It’s a pickup. The day after the bidding, the dungeon-masters expect you to cover your bet.

  “So you know where this one’s going?” I ask, always searching for extra info.

  “Back to the cloakroom,” he says with a shrug. “They take it from there.”

  As he grabs the envelope, I notice a silver ring on his thumb. And another on his pointer finger. I didn’t think they let pages wear jewelry.

  “So what’s with the stuffed fox?” he adds, motioning with his chin toward the bookcase.

  “It’s a ferret. Courtesy of the NRA.”

  “The what?”

  “The NRA—y’know, National Rifle—”

  “Yeah, yeah… no, I thought you said something else,” he interrupts, rubbing his hand over his closely buzzed hair. The ring on his pointer finger catches the light perfectly. He smiles with a big, toothy grin.

  I smile right back. But it’s not until that moment that I realize I’m about to hand twelve thousand dollars to a complete stranger.

  “Be safe now,” he sings as he grabs the package and pivots towar
d reception.

  He disappears through the door. The bet’s officially on. And I’m left staring at the back of someone’s head. It’s not a good feeling, and not just because he’s carrying every dollar I own and all the savings of my best friend. It’s more primal than that—something I feel in the last vertebra of my spine. It’s like closing one eye when you’re looking at a 3-D image in a View-Master viewer—nothing’s necessarily wrong, but it’s also not quite right.

  I glance at Dinah, who’s still haggling on the phone. I’ve got another half hour before I have to resume the battle with Trish. Plenty of time for a quick run to the Senate cloakroom to check things out. I hop from my seat and race around my desk. Curiosity was good enough for the cat. Why shouldn’t it be good enough for me?

  “Where you going?” Dinah calls out as I rush for the door.

  “Lunch. If Trish starts bitching, tell her I won’t be long…”

  She gives me the okay sign, and I dart through reception. The page can’t have more than a thirty-second head start.

  Darting into the hallway, I turn a quick corner and make a right at the elevators. I spot him about a hundred feet ahead. His arms are swinging at his side. Not a worry in the world. As his shoes tap against the terrazzo floor, I assume he’s headed for the underground tram that’ll take him back to the Capitol. To my surprise, he makes a sharp right and disappears down a short flight of stairs. Keeping my distance, I make the same right and follow the stairs down past a pair of Capitol police officers. On my left, the officers herd arriving staff and visitors through the X-ray and metal detector. Straight ahead, the glass door that leads out to Independence Avenue swings shut. Underground is faster. Why’s he going outside?