Balance of Power

by Richard North Patterson

  She would be late for her date with Jeff.

  TEN

  "Cassie Rollins hasn't budged," Dane told Fasano over breakfast at the Metropolitan Club. "When was the last time you talked to her?"

  "Ruckles did. I'm prepared to make this a loyalty test, but I thought I'd save myself until you'd done your worst. What is your worst, by the way?"

  Dane held the pepper shaker above his eggs, frowning as only a few black specks broke loose despite a vigorous flicking of his wrist. "A mass mailing, to start—every person in Maine who bought a hunting license, went to a gun store, bought a concealed carry permit, or is registered as owning a pickup truck . . ."

  Fasano laughed aloud. "That would work in my state. Especially the trucks."

  "The mailer should start hitting tomorrow," Dane continued in a satisfied tone. "Then comes a half-million dollars in spots. We put Cassie's face on the screen, tell everyone about the threat to gun rights and ask if she's standing up for Maine values . . ."

  " 'Call Cassie Rollins,' " Fasano intoned.

  "Exactly. We'll put her office number on the screen and ask her constituents to let her have it."

  Fasano spread marmalade across his English muffin. "We want to scare Cassie—but not kill her. I'm not willing to lose a senator because you want tort immunity."

  Shrugging, Dane contemplated the scattered flecks of pepper. "When are you scheduling a vote?"

  "I'm going to have to deal with Hampton, who seems to have cast his lot with Kilcannon. But what I'm thinking now is that tort reform comes first—maybe in two weeks."

  "That'll give us time." Looking up from his plate, Dane added pointedly, "And give you time with Cassie."

  * * *

  Three days later, Air Force One swooped down into Portland, Maine. Kerry traveled from the airport followed by a horde of local media, commencing a day of public exposure no amount of money could buy and only a President could command. His first public meeting was with a victims' rights group; his second with members of a police union who supported gun control; his third with the widows of three former officers who had been killed by felons with guns. "My dad was a beat cop," he reminded each audience. "There were nights I stayed awake until he came home, worrying about what might happen." He did not mention that the fear he felt was for his mother, not his father, or that, in the guilty recesses of his soul, he had wished that his father would never come home again.

  His last stop was for dinner with local hunters. They met in a rustic restaurant outside town, with long, family-style tables and a deer head on the wall. In a work shirt and jeans, Kerry sat amongst them, working on pot roast, potatoes and a Budweiser. Leery of the cameras, the hunters were quiet and unanimated. After a few edgy moments, Kerry cut to the core.

  "Here you are," he said pleasantly, "stuck with the President of the United States, trying to be polite. Even though pretty much all of you voted against me."

  A few of the men looked sheepish; one shifted in his chair. In front of Kerry, a large, gentle-looking man with a seamed face repressed a nervous smile. "It's not that hard to figure out," Kerry continued amiably. "It was because of guns, right? The gun lobby kept saying I'd take your guns away."

  As did others, the man across from him avoided his gaze. "That's okay," Kerry assured his listeners. "That's why I'm here. I don't even take it personally.

  "Why should I? Six years ago, you turned down a good man who wanted to be your senator—Sam Towle—who had the guts to vote for the assault weapons ban. And I bet a lot of you remember hearing that Sam and the assault weapons ban would take your guns away."

  Eyes still averted, the man across from Kerry permitted himself a more reflective smile. When Kerry glanced around the room, more faces seemed to have opened to him.

  "So let me ask you this," Kerry went on. "Since Sam Towle helped pass the assault weapons ban, how many of you have missed a day of hunting season because of it?"

  There was silence, a few more smiles, expressions newly alert and engaged. "Because if you did," the President told them, "you should keep on voting against folks like Sam and me every time you get the chance. But if you didn't—if all you've missed is giving Sam Towle a fair shake—then you've got to figure the SSA lied to you to get him."

  Pausing, Kerry jabbed at the table with his index finger. "Well, they did. They lied about Sam, and then they lied about me. And now they're clogging your mailboxes and flooding the airwaves with more lies about these gun bills, trying to scare Senator Rollins with what they did to Sam.

  "I won't try to speak for Senator Rollins. But their latest lie involves asking you to defend the right of a criminal or a wife-beater to walk out of prison, cross the street, buy a weapon you'd never think of using and kill whoever suits him.

  "If that's got anything to do with hunting deer, it's escaped me." Pausing, Kerry permitted himself a smile. "I know one thing—when people keep on lying to me, I do my damnedest to get back at them. Maybe you've heard that's how I am."

  There were quiet chuckles around the room. "We've heard rumors," someone said.

  Sitting back, Kerry spread his arms. "So ask me anything, and tell me what's on your mind. Because I don't want to leave here until we've gotten straight with each other."

  Three hours later, Kerry was still there, drinking beer and talking. No one else had left.

  ELE VEN

  In a stark motel room just off a highway interchange outside of Hartford, Sarah waited for her caller.

  His rules were strict and unbending. Sarah must come alone. She must take a room in this motel. She must wait until he came. She could not know his name, or anything about him.

  Apprehensive, she looked about the depressing rectangle—cheap pastoral art; a spindly fake brass lamp; an aqua bedspread; one dirty window with a view of the parking lot. Her caller had insisted that she take a smoking room, and the bedcover reeked of cigarettes. She wondered whether he would need a smoke after slitting her throat and raping her. Instead of a gun there was pepper spray in her purse.

  When the telephone rang, she started.

  "Are you alone?" the reedy voice inquired.

  "Yes."

  "I'm in the lobby. But they won't give me your room number."

  Sarah felt her flesh crawl. "Two-oh-three."

  There was a click as he hung up.

  It would be all too easy, Sarah thought. A predator prowling the Internet had found their web site and, drawn to Sarah by the Tierney case, decided to lure her by posing as a tipster. His rules—designed to suggest excessive caution—were a cover for sexual pathology, or perhaps an antiabortion fanatic. She had never felt so vulnerable.

  When the quiet knock came at last, Sarah put the pepper spray in the pocket of her suit coat. Slowly, she cracked open the door.

  He was perhaps fifty—slight and fairly short, his red thinning hair streaked with silver. The skin drawn tight over his face had a shiny, scalded look and his blue eyes were sharp and wary. "Are you alone?" he asked again.

  Wordless, Sarah backed inside.

  He was carrying a battered briefcase. In a flash of black humor, Sarah wondered if that was where he kept the Lexington P-2.

  "Why all the secrecy?" she demanded.

  Softly, he closed the door behind them. She barely heard the latch.

  With a mute gesture, Sarah directed him to the Swedish modern chair she had moved to the corner farthest from the door. He hesitated, resistant, before perching on its edge. Only then did Sarah sit at the end of the bed, saying, "You didn't answer my question."

  To her alarm, his lips formed a dissociated smile which did not display his teeth. "Long ago, Sarah, I learned that people can't be trusted. That includes my superiors at Lexington."

  "You know who I am," Sarah persisted. "I've done exactly what you asked—however foolish that may be."

  Comprehension entered his piercing eyes. "You think maybe I'm some sort of pervert."

  "No. Maybe a particular sort of pervert."

 
This elicited a harsh, disturbing laugh. "Look," Sarah said with the force of apprehension, "I promise to play it straight with you. But I'm not staying another minute without knowing who you are."

  The mirthless smile returned. Softly, he answered, "I'm Norman Conn."

  His tone carried an assertion of his significance. Searching her memory, Sarah struggled to recall whether she had seen the name. Then the numbing hours spent sifting through worthless files in Lexington's warehouse yielded their first useful scrap of knowledge.

  "You're in quality control."

  "The manager," Conn amended. "My department also processes trace requests for crime guns."

  This was real, Sarah knew at once. She felt herself release a breath. "Why did you call me?"

  He gave her a withering look of amusement. "You don't remember Vietnam, do you? Do you even know anyone who served?"

  Whatever this question signified, Sarah sensed that he expected candor. "Not well," she acknowledged. "Somehow my father got out of the draft. He doesn't talk about that much."

  This time the smile held a sour hint of bitterness and moral superiority. "Neither do I, Sarah. But I've had thirty-five years to think about it."

  His repetition of her name made Sarah uneasy. And yet it hinted at a certain intimacy; were she patient, he would deign to tell his story. She was suddenly sure that this was indispensable to their transaction. "The war?" she asked.

  "The deaths."

  There was nothing to say. Silent, Sarah tried to convey an empathic patience for what surely must be difficult to express.

  "I was in the infantry," Conn said abruptly. "One morning I was walking point. In twelve days I was going home, and they still had me rooting for land mines." The smile twitched. "I missed one.

  "Three men were mangled beyond help. But it took Boynton—the black guy—two hours to die." A film moistened his eyes, and his smile betrayed an effort of will. "In the movies, he always told me, the black guy dies first."

  For Sarah, this last detail invested the banal sparseness of Conn's account with the echo of a long-ago psychic explosion. But the glimmer of empathy did little to ease her fear that he might be unstable, or that his view of reality was skewed by guilt, the distrust of authority bred by having become flotsam in a senseless war.

  "If what you know can help us," she admonished, "we'll have to list you as a trial witness. Not only would your employers know, but they'd take your deposition. Secrecy's not an option."

  Conn's gaze was implacable, almost contemptuous. "I was nineteen," he said. "Ever since, I've wished I could go back and save three lives. Now I've got a second chance, even if I never know how many lives, or whose."

  For the first time, Sarah acknowledged the briefcase at his feet. "What's in there?" she inquired.

  Reaching for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket, Conn's eyes bored into hers. "The documents they told me to destroy."

  * * *

  Alone in the motel room, Sarah called Lara Kilcannon on her private line. She felt exhausted. The brown briefcase lay beside her on the bed.

  "I'm glad you called," Lara said without preface. "I've got something to tell you. We need to find the person who sold John Bowden the P-2, correct?"

  Lara seemed so intent that Sarah decided to defer her discovery, however important. "To start," she answered. "Ultimately, we need to prove that Bowden bought it because of Lexington's ad."

  Lara was briefly silent. "There may be more to it than that. Let me tell you where to look."

  TWELVE

  On the crisp Sunday morning before Thanksgiving, Kerry and Lara kayaked across Chilmark Pond.

  Martha's Vineyard was sunny, fortuitous for their weekend away. The rambling home on the pond, new to them, was quiet and filled with books. They did not stay on Dogfish Bar, or even visit. On Saturday, they had read and talked and enjoyed each other, renewing themselves. On Sunday, more ambitious, they packed bagels and a thermos of coffee and set out in two kayaks for the beach. They moved steadily across the water toward the dune concealing the ocean, Lara rotating her paddle with a graceful, almost mathematical precision, Kerry making up in vigor what he lacked in form. A breeze rippled the pond, bright with sunlight, stirring the sea grass at its edge. The only sound was the soft thudding of outboard motors powering the rubber rafts driven by the Secret Service; the only other humans visible were two more agents atop the dune.

  Beaching their kayaks, Lara and Kerry climbed the wooden catwalk which traversed the dune, pausing at its top to gaze out at the blue sweep of the Atlantic, curling outward on their right to the Gay Head cliffs. In late fall, the water seemed a chalkier blue, and the confluence of sand and surf and distant cliffs had a stark severe beauty marred only by the figures of more agents stationed along the shoreline. Taking the catwalk to the beach, Kerry and Lara spread out a woolen blanket and poured steaming black coffee into two mugs, warm in their cupped hands.

  "I almost hate to bring this up," Lara said. "But where do we stand on gun immunity?"

  It was the first reference since their arrival to politics or, more obliquely, to the loss of Lara's family. Kerry chose to address the question as asked. "In the House," he answered, "the SSA will jam it through. But it's close in the Senate and the final push begins tomorrow.

  "Chuck Hampton thinks we've got roughly two weeks. It's time for me to start personally leaning on the Democratic swing votes—promising to campaign or swapping dam projects and jobs for relatives; pressing Chuck to withhold money from the Senate Campaign Committee for senators who vote with Fasano."

  "Will he do that?"

  Kerry sipped his coffee, its warmth as bracing as the cool breeze in his face. "Maybe," he replied. "As with Fasano, Chuck's leadership is on the line. The carrot is that we've done some polling, to show people like Torchio and Coletti how they can sell a vote against the SSA." Kerry put down his mug. "I'll do whatever I need to do. Losing this would feel like death to me."

  Lara turned to him. "How can I help?"

  Her words reminded Kerry—despite all that had happened—of the ways in which the tragedy united them. Not only did they share a common goal, but Lara understood what a President must do and accepted it without judgment.

  "Joe Spivey," Kerry answered, "wants you to campaign for him. He thinks that could help him clean up his problems with pro-choice women—especially his vote against Caroline Masters."

  As Lara smiled at this, Kerry saw the irony of an ex-reporter who once had covered the senator from Missouri—with all the disillusion bred by that experience—and who recognized that, as First Lady, she now had the power to help him perpetuate his mediocrity for yet another term. "Tell Senator Spivey," she authorized her husband, "that I've got no more shame than he does. But only if he gets it right this time."

  * * *

  Monday morning, the President began calling, or summoning senators for breakfast or lunch or cocktails in the residence or Oval Office.

  On the telephone with James Torchio, he promised a personal call to Torchio's principal fund-raiser. Over breakfast with Ben Jasper of Iowa, he politely inquired if the SSA could help the senator with flood relief, or whether that was something which might require a President. In the Oval Office, he more pointedly asked Jason Christy of Maryland—who badly wanted to succeed him when Kerry's term was over— whether he thought he could win their party's nomination over the opposition of the incumbent. All of this involved the usual trafficking in favors, a knowledge of each senator's motivations reinforced by their clear understanding of Kerry's; hence none of it surprised him. The exception was Hank Westerly of Nebraska.

  They sat in Kerry's private quarters in the White House, sipping Scotch from crystal glasses. Westerly seemed so tormented by his dilemma that Kerry felt something close to pity. "I often thought," he told his former peer, "that being a senator would be terrific if we never had to vote."

  But Westerly seemed beyond the salve of humor. He blinked at Kerry behind thick glasses, his genial midwestern
face a portrait of uncharacteristic misery. "I'm afraid of these people," he blurted out.

  "The SSA?"

  "Yes." His tone became confessional. "I mean, physically."

  This was one fear for which Kerry was not prepared. Reading the President's face, Westerly seemed to wince, recoiling from this admission to a man who had not only lost his brother and the greater portion of Lara's family to guns, but had also been shot himself. Softly, Kerry answered, "Unlike the pro-life fanatics, the pro-gunners don't seem to shoot their adversaries. Although I suppose there's always a first time. But if my experience is any guide, it probably won't be you."