Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  Jake had been waiting for forty minutes, and was still paging through media commentaries, when his cell phone rang. Gina. “You’re on the log. Come on up.”

  Jacob Winter was thirty-three years old, six feet two inches tall, rangy, bony, with knife-edge cheekbones, a long nose, black hair worn unfashionably long, arty-long, and pale green eyes. His ex-wife referred to him as Ichabod-in-a-suit, after Ichabod Crane. He did wear suits: a saleswoman at Saks had once taken two hours of her life to coordinate neckties and shirts and suits with his eyes, and to explain how he could do it himself.

  “Your eyes are the thing,” she’d said. “The right tie brings them out. Frankly, you would not normally be considered a great-looking guy, too many bones in your face, but your eyes make you very attractive. Your eyes and shoulders . . .”

  Yes. The kind of guy who attracts saleswomen from Saks. Not a bad thing; her comment had cheered him for a week. A man of style . . .

  Jake had been born in Montana and raised on a ranch. His mother was an engineer, his father a rancher’s son and a lawyer and eventually a congressman. Jake came late in their lives. Since his parents were both Catholic and pro-life, and politics were involved, the pregnancy was tolerated, but they weren’t much interested in raising another kid—Jake’s siblings were fifteen years older than he.

  When he was two, his parents, moving between Billings and Washington, began leaving him for longer and longer periods with his grandparents. By the time he was five, they were out of his life. His grandmother died when he was nine; his grandfather followed when he was fifteen. His parents didn’t want him. After a year of prep school, he went to college at the University of Virginia, a lonely sixteen-year-old with a history book under his arm.

  He graduated at nineteen and could afford to do as he wished—when his grandfather died, his will specified that the ranch be sold, and that the money go to Jake, rather than to his father . . .

  Two weeks after graduation, he was in Army Officers Candidate School. He spent eight years with Army Intelligence. The first two years had been in training. The third, fourth, and fifth he’d spent in Afghanistan with a series of Army special forces teams.

  At the beginning of the sixth year, he was standing too close to a roadside bomb when it went off on the outskirts of the town of Ghazni. A piece of shell the size of a softball cut through his hip. A medic had stuffed Stop-Flo padding into the hole in his leg and butt and on the medevac chopper, said, “Shit, man, you’re lucky. If you’d been standing ninety degrees to the right, that would’ve been your balls.”

  The rest of the sixth year was spent at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, getting his leg to work again.

  Then, still in therapy, he was posted to the Pentagon, where he discovered an uncanny ability to navigate the world of bureaucracy. While his military colleagues worked on assessments of Chinese special-forces training or the electronic characteristics of Indian shoulder-mounted missiles, Jake’s work had been done inside the Pentagon, the various limbs of Congress, and the rat’s nest of bureaus and departments that surrounded the intelligence agencies.

  He found things out; became the Sam Spade of the circular file, the Philip Marlowe of the burn bag.

  And though he could eventually run five eight-minute miles, in a hobbled, windmilling way, the Army would never consider him fully rehabilitated. That career was gone—he could stay in, take staff jobs, and someday retire as one of the colonel-intellectuals who argued war theory. Not interested.

  Instead, as he worked through rehab and then in the Pentagon, he’d gone to graduate school at Georgetown, with the idea that he might teach at the university level. He’d written his PhD thesis on twentieth-century modernist ideas as they’d bled into politics, and had then rewritten the thesis as a book, Modernism & Politics: The Theories That Changed the World.

  He’d gotten solid reviews in the important journals, and followed the first book with New Elites, a study of professional bureaucracies. That had nailed down his status as a political intellectual. He didn’t do television. Television, he thought, was sales. He was research and design.

  He’d gotten married before he’d been wounded; the marriage hadn’t survived rehab. Wouldn’t have survived anyway, he thought. The woman was a crocodile. Although, he thought, if she’d known that he would wind up at the White House . . .

  His most influential publication had never seen hard covers. At the urging of a military friend, he’d written Winter’s Guide to the Inside, a map and guide to the military/intelligence complex. It had become the best-selling Pentagon samizdat.

  The Guide had also gotten him a part-time job with the second most important man in the country.

  Ten seconds after Gina called down, Jake met a Marine Corps captain on the indoor side of the waiting room, and followed him into an elevator, up, and then down the eggshell white halls to Danzig’s office.

  Going to see the guy. The guy was Bill Danzig, the president’s chief of staff. Danzig had been a deputy secretary of Defense two administrations back, then a Pentagon consultant when the party was out of power. He’d been given a copy of Winter’s Guide, and when he moved to the White House, Jake went on his consultants list.

  Jake had done twenty jobs for him in three years, tracking down problems in the bureaucracy. As Danzig came to trust him, the problems became more difficult, the assignments more frequent.

  Not quite a full-time job, but lucrative. The job also gave him access to some interesting government computers. Interesting, anyway, for a man who wanted to know what really happened.

  A Secret Service agent was standing in the hall outside Danzig’s office door, wearing the neat suit, crisp shirt, and a burgundy necktie, with ear-bug. He nodded at Jake and the jar-head, stepped into the middle of the hallway, blocking a farther walk down the hall, toward the president’s office, and politely indicating the entrance to Danzig’s office.

  Jake nodded and took the turn. The Secret Service man said, “Nice to see you again, Mr. Winter.”

  “Nice to see you, Henry,” Jake said. Jake remembered everybody’s name; it was part of his talent.

  Danzig’s outer office was twenty-five feet wide and twenty feet deep, with a small room to one side for printers and copy machines. He had three secretaries. Two sat opposite each other against the side walls, at identical cherry-wood desks, peering at computers.

  A third sat behind a broad table, an antique with curved, carved legs pressing into the deep-blue carpet, under a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, beside the door to the inner office. The table was littered with paper, bound reports, a few family photographs, and a vase of cut cattleya orchids, large yellow blooms dappled with scarlet.

  The third woman was Gina, the important one, the one who’d called him. She was in her forties, with a dry oval face and close-cropped hair, bright blue eyes, wrinkles in the skin of her neck. She nodded and smiled, as though she wouldn’t cut his throat in an instant if her boss asked her to. She said, “Great tie,” and touched a button on her desk. Danzig now knew Jake was waiting.

  “Great halter,” Jake said. “Is that new?”

  Gina touched the ID halter at her neck, from which her White House ID dangled; turquoise cabochons set in Navajo silver. “I just got it—my husband bought it for our anniversary.”

  “Nice antique look,” he said. “I like it.”

  ID cards separated Washington insiders from the tourists. The elite-insiders were now separating themselves from the clerk-insiders with gemstones: the sale of jeweled ID halters had been booming.

  Gina glanced at her desktop, where a diode had gone green. She said, “Go on in. He’s waiting.”

  Bill Danzig was tying his shoe. He looked up as Jake came through the door, grunted, and said, “Don’t buy round shoelaces.”

  “I’ll make a note,” Jake said.

  Danzig pointed at a chair and Jake sat down. “What’s your schedule?” Danzig asked. “Do you have any time?”

  Jake shrug
ged. “I can always make time. We’re on Easter break this week, so I’ve got a week and a half clear.”

  “Excellent. Now. What do you know about Madison Bowe?” Danzig asked, settling back. He was a fat man, with shoulders slanting down from a thin neck. He had small black eyes and thinning, slicked-back, dandruff-spotted black hair. The odor of VO5 hung about him like the scent of an old apple.

  “What I’ve seen on television and been reading in the papers,” Jake said.

  “Give me a one-minute version.”

  Jake shrugged: “Madison Bowe, thirty-four years old, married money in the shape of former U.S. Senator Lincoln Bowe, forty-six. Tells the networks that Lincoln Bowe gave a quote moderately hot-tempered speech to a group of Republican law students at the University of Virginia.”

  Danzig made a farting noise with his lips; Jake paused, then continued.

  “Afterward, she said, he was seen getting into a car with three men in suits, and disappeared. Witnesses told her that the men seemed to be law-enforcement personnel, complete with short haircuts and ear-bugs. Mrs. Bowe says she was told by a highly placed source that the Watchmen picked him up. She fears for his life, since they would never be able to admit afterward that they actually did that.”

  “That’s true,” Danzig said.

  “She also says that she was being watched on her farm near Lexington, and had been threatened by Watchmen. She has a videotape to prove it. The intimidation part. If the tape isn’t a complete fake, I’d say she had reason to be frightened. The guy, the Watchman, acted like he was in the SS or something . . . and that’s about it. I mean, there are more details . . .”

  “Fucking media,” Danzig said. He picked up a yellow pencil and began drumming it on his desktop. “Fucking little right-wing Virginia Law assholes, fucking horse-farm owners. This is the biggest circus since Bill Clinton’s blow job.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She’s good-looking, too. Madison Bowe. Blond. Good tits, great ass. The media like that.”

  Jake said, “Yes, sir, I’ve seen her on TV.”

  “Lincoln Bowe did not give a quote moderately hot-tempered speech,” Danzig said. He paused, watching Jake’s face from under his hooded eyes. “If you actually heard it, it was borderline nuts. He sounded like he might be drunk. He essentially said that the president and the Senate minority leader are criminals. It was completely out of control.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Danzig flashed a thin-lipped fat-lizard’s smile: “I should ask, Jake—have any questions occurred to you?”

  “The obvious one. Did the Watchmen take him?”

  Danzig spun in his leather chair, a complete turn, caught himself before going around a second time: “That’s the question. And the answer is We don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose. God only knows what Goodman is cooking up down there.”

  “So what’s our problem?” Jake asked.

  “Embarrassment. Goodman is one of us, we can’t deny it. We loved that whole Watchman idea, the idea of volunteering for America—it was like the Peace Corps, but for us. Like something John Kennedy might have thought of. Best of all, it didn’t cost anything. Now people are starting to say that they’re a bunch of Nazis. We wanted to get rid of Lincoln Bowe, we wanted to get him out of the Senate, and we gave Goodman everything he needed to do the job. Then Bowe disappears, and it all comes back to bite us in the ass.”

  Jake nodded. There wasn’t much to say. The Democrats, with the president leading the way, had poured seventy million dollars into the Virginia election, had used Goodman as their point man.

  “So. Find out what happened to Bowe,” Danzig said. “Legal as you can. Use the FBI for the technicalities. But find him and give me updates through Gina.”

  Jake said, “What’s the FBI doing? I’m not sure I could help.”

  Danzig was irritated: “The FBI—they’re doing a tap dance, is what they’re doing. They know a dead skunk when they see one. They’re out looking around, but I’ve been talking to the director, and I know goddamned well that they don’t have their hearts in it. They’re saying that there’s no evidence of a kidnapping, no evidence of force, no evidence of anything. They just stand around and cluck.”

  “So, what do I do?”

  “Kick some ass. Turn over some rocks. Go threaten somebody,” Danzig said. “Do what you do. We need to get this thing out of the way. We can’t carry this through the summer, into the election, for Christ’s sake.”

  “How much time?”

  Danzig shook his head. “No way to tell. It’s already a mess. Right now, we’re sitting tight, going back-door to all the media, talking about how it’s a Virginia problem, not a White House problem. They’ve bought it so far. But you know how that works: one thing changes, and they’ll turn on you like a pack of rats.”

  “What’s my authority?” Jake asked. Sometimes Danzig didn’t want anyone to know who was interested.

  “I am,” Danzig said. “You can use my name. Gina will back you up.”

  “Okay.” Jake slapped his thighs. “I’ll move on it.”

  As he got up and turned to go, Danzig asked, “Kill any turkeys?”

  “Nope. Interrupted by a phone call.”

  “Life in the big city, son,” Danzig grunted, already flipping through the paper in front of him. “Maybe you can squeeze a little blood out of this job.”

  Out of Danzig’s office, Jake walked with an escort to the working door, then into the sunshine through the security fences to the street, where he caught a cab home. The magnolias were in full bloom, pink and white, beds of daffodils jumped up like yellow exclamation marks. Early April: the cherry trees would be gorgeous this week down at the Tidal Basin, if you could get to them through the tourists. He made a mental note to stroll by, if he found the time.

  Several days of rain had washed the city clean. The Washington Monument needled into the sky, telling the world exactly who the studhorse was. The streets were lined with flowers, busy with bureaucrats with white ID tags strung around their necks, fat brown briefcases dangling from their hands. Good day in Washington when even the bureaucrats looked happy.

  Jake lived in Burleith, north of Georgetown, in a brick-and-stone town house that might have been built in the early twentieth century, but was actually a careful replica only fifteen years old.

  At the moment, his street was torn up. The owner of a town house three down from his, a stockbroker, had convinced the other residents to rip out the old concrete sidewalks and replace them with brick walkways. Bricks would enhance the value of the neighborhood, the broker said, and would increase the resale value of their houses by making the neighborhood more like Georgetown. Jake was indifferent to the idea, but went along because everybody else agreed to do it. Besides, the noisome little asshole was probably right.

  Because of the street work, he had the cabbie drop him at the entrance to the alley at the back of the house, carded through the fence lock, and climbed the stoop to the back door.

  He ran a bachelor house: a functional kitchen, a compact dining room, a living room with a wide-screen television, a den used as a library and office, and a half-bath; and on the second floor, a master bedroom suite, a guest bedroom, and a third bedroom where he hid all his junk—obsolete golf clubs, a never-used rowing machine, old computer terminals that were not good enough to use, but too good to throw away, three heavily used backpacks and two newer ones—he was a bag junkie. He also had a gun safe, a bow locker, and a pile of luggage.

  The furnace, a washer and dryer, the telephone and electric service panels, and the master box for the alarm system were all tucked away in a small basement. A two-car garage had been added to the back of the house and occupied most of the backyard.

  He kept the place neat with two hours of cleaning a week, usually done on Saturday morning. He wasn’t a freak about it, simply logical. Two hours a week was better than two straight days once a quarter.

  By the time he got home, the workday was over. He went o
nline with the Virginia State website, found a name for the governor’s chief of staff—Ralph Goines—and tracked him down through the FBI telephone database, then called him on his unlisted home phone. He identified himself and said, “I need to see Governor Goodman. Tomorrow if possible.”

  “Could I tell the governor why you want to talk to him?”

  “It’s about Lincoln Bowe. If you saw Randall James’s show . . .”

  “We did see it. Absolutely irresponsible,” Goines said. “Mrs. Bowe has been carrying on a campaign of slander and innuendo.”

  “So which one was the big guy in the videotape, the one with the leather jacket?” Jake asked. “Slander? Or Innuendo?”

  Bitch-slapping bureaucrats was one way to wake them up. Pause, five seconds of silence: “We are looking into that. It’s possible that it was a setup.”

  “Right,” Jake said. He let the skepticism show in his voice. “Maybe the governor could tell me about it.”

  Back and forth, and eventually an appointment: “One o’clock, then. Be prompt. The governor’s a busy man.”

  Jake nodded at the phone, said, “Sure,” and hung up, turned to his computer, and went back online.

  Because of his work with Danzig, he had limited access to government reference files. He went into the FBI telephone database again. The Bowes had a place in Georgetown, not far from him, and were also listed at a place in the Blue Ridge, and in New York. He found an unlisted cell-phone number for Madison Bowe and called it.

  She answered on the third ring.

  3

  Madison Bowe lived in a four-story red-brick town house in Georgetown, up the hill from M Street. Jake paid the cabdriver, straightened his tie, climbed the front steps, and rang the bell. She met him at the door, barefoot, wearing black slacks and a hip-length green-silk Chinese dressing-gown. She didn’t smile, but looked up and asked, “You’re Jacob Winter?”

  “Yes, I am.” Jake had only seen her on television, where everyone was cropped to fit the screen and gorgeous blondes were a dime a dozen, and you paid no attention. But Madison Bowe was real, and the reality of the woman was a slap in the face. She was smaller than he’d expected, had short blond hair, a sculpted nose, direct green eyes, and a touch of pinkish lipstick. She spoke with a soft Virginia country accent, in a voice that carried some bourbon gravel.