Dead Watch

by John Sandford

  He called Gina, told her his problem, got routed through to the White House travel office, and booked on a jet leaving National at one o’clock. He’d have to hustle.

  He cleaned up, shaved, showered, dressed, shoved a Dopp kit and a change of clothes in a carry-on bag, called a cab.

  The cabdriver was named Charlie, a morose man so fat that he’d crushed the front seat in his aging Chevy. Charlie’s head barely protruded over the back of the seat, showing an untidy mop of hair that looked like a stand of ornamental grass, yellow-white and erect. He worked eighteen-hour days, and was Jake’s cabbie of choice. Charlie took his cab calls in the back room of a twenty-four-hour newsstand, and so could provide a summary and commentary on news from around the country.

  He had a disaster that Jake hadn’t heard about: “Big shoot-out between the Border Patrol and the coyotes, down around El Paso. There were some Chinese involved, I guess they were coming across, and somebody started shooting. Two or three dead Border Patrol, a bunch of dead Chinamen. I don’t know about the coyotes. They say the Border Patrol crossed the river chasing them . . .”

  “Ah, boy.”

  “Well, what you gonna do?” Charlie asked. “Gotta keep them out somehow.”

  “The penalty for crossing the border isn’t death,” Jake said. “What else happened?”

  “Mostly bad weather. Lots of tornadoes out in Oklahoma and Kansas. Some small town got it, but nobody was killed. Still on strike in Detroit. The Canadian prime minister got a nosebleed during a press conference and he’s at the hospital for a checkup. One of the jurors in the Crippen trial got thrown out because he got caught watching trial news . . .”

  Charlie concluded with, “By the way, you look terrible. What’s the story on your scalp?”

  “Got mugged last night. Beat the heck out of me.”

  “You all right?” Charlie asked. “You think you ought to be flying?”

  “They gave me some pills. I’m okay.”

  “Huh. Tell you what—you got a Frankenstein vibe going, them stitches sticking out like that. You ought to buy a hat.”

  He arrived at the gate at National with fifteen minutes to spare. He bought a couple of hunting magazines, and Scientific American, and a ball cap to cover the scalp wound. There wasn’t much in the way of ball caps at the gate, and only one that fit: a pink cap with a Hello Kitty logo on the front.

  He took the cap, got on the plane. A headache had been lingering in the background all morning, and in the plane, it got worse. Bad enough that he couldn’t read for the first half hour of the flight. He had the window seat, and kept the window shutter closed to avoid the light. Tried to relax, took a pill that the doc said wouldn’t make him too woozy. That helped a bit.

  When the headache backed off, he punched up his laptop and read the information he’d pulled on Patterson. The quality was poor, mostly on the level of gossip, but he could read between the lines.

  Patterson was a political hack, number two or three in a campaign management team, the guy who did the stuff that had to be done but nobody wanted to admit to. The disinformation guy; the fixer. He’d worked on both of Bowe’s senatorial campaigns, one winner and one loser, and two dozen other campaigns scattered around the country. A photograph, from Washingtonian magazine, showed a man in his midforties, in a suit that was rumpled but expensive, a drink in his hand, a glassy smile on his face. There were a dozen people in the photo, three posing, including Patterson, the rest just milling around, most with drinks, at a charity ball.

  There were, Jake thought, a hundred thousand people like Patterson within thirty miles of the Capitol.

  Like Elizabethan courtiers with machine-readable IDs.

  Madison Bowe had just gotten off the shuttle and was walking through LaGuardia in New York, when she turned on her cell phone and found a message: Call Johnson Black.

  She pushed the speed dial, and when she got through, Black asked, “Did you hear about Jake Winter?”

  She stopped for a moment, turned to face a wall, plugged her opposite ear with her fingertip—traveler’s privacy—and said, “What happened?”

  “He got beaten up last night. One of my guys heard it from a cabdriver, and I called a friend downtown. He was in the hospital overnight, but he’s out now.”

  “Goodman?”

  “I don’t know. The cops have it as a mugging. But Jake—I’m not sure he’d let himself get mugged.”

  “Oh, God. I’ll call him,” she said.

  But when she called, she got a cell-phone answering machine. She said, “Jake. Call me. It’s important. Here are the numbers . . .”

  She took a cab to the apartment, worrying about him: How bad, how bad, how bad? Then thought, Why am I worried about him?

  10

  The Four Seasons was an ungainly building, pale gray, with an acre of marble floor inside, white pillars and crystal chandeliers and what looked, against the odds, like it might be a decent bar. Jake called up to Patterson’s room from the house phone, expecting no answer, prepared to wait.

  But Patterson picked up on the third ring, his voice stiff, cranky, as though he’d just gotten up. “Patterson.”

  “Mr. Patterson, my name is Jake Winter. I work for Bill Danzig, the president’s chief of staff. I need to talk with you. Right now.”

  Patterson was confused. “Bill Danzig? Who?”

  “The president’s chief of . . .”

  “I know who Bill Danzig is. Who are you again? Where are you?”

  “I’m downstairs. I work for Mr. Danzig. If you want to call and check, you can do that. I need to talk.”

  “Okay . . . Do you want to come up, or should I come down?”

  “Better that I come up.”

  A “do not disturb” light was still blinking at Patterson’s door when Jake knocked, then knocked a second time. As he waited, he adjusted his cap, then saw an eye at the peephole. The door opened on a short chain, and Patterson, still in pajamas, looked out: “Do you have some identification?”

  Jake dug out the White House ID. Patterson looked at it for a moment, then said, “Let me get the chain . . .” The door closed a couple of inches, the chain rattled, and then the door opened fully and Patterson said, “Are you sure you got the right guy? I’m in the other party.”

  “Yeah. You’re the right guy.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “I got the message on your answering machine, and called all the Atlanta hotels that a political consultant might stay at.”

  Patterson smiled at that. “Okay. Come on in. I was up all night last night, didn’t get to bed until after six this morning. Raising money.” He yawned, rubbed the back of his neck, led the way into the small suite. “I was afraid the CIA had planted a bug in my toenails or something. The way you tracked me.”

  He was taller than he’d looked in the magazine photograph, and heavier. His double-extra-large burgundy pajamas were printed with thumb-sized black-and-white penguins. He dropped into a chair, pointed at the sofa across the coffee table, asked, “What’s going on? You want some coffee?”

  “You know about Senator Bowe?”

  “Of course. You couldn’t avoid it. What does that have to do with me?” But Jake picked up the defensive note in his voice. Patterson suspected what was coming.

  Jake said, “A while back, you met with Barbara Packer at the Watergate and asked her what would be the best time, from a Republican point of view, to drop a scandal on the vice president. Was the scandal provided by Senator Bowe?”

  Patterson stared at him for a moment, calculating, then said, “Give me a minute.” He stood up, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. A minute later the toilet flushed, and a minute after that, his face damp from splashed water, he came back out of the bathroom, sat down heavily, and asked, “Is the FBI on the way up?”

  “Not yet; but they may be later,” Jake said.

  “You said you work for Danzig. Are you a cop, or not?”

  “I’m not a cop. Technically,
I’m a research consultant. I will tell you, though, that the FBI is all over the case. If I think that what you know is relevant to the Bowe investigation, I’d have to give you up. Sooner or later.”

  Patterson studied him for a minute, then said, “Maybe I should get a lawyer and talk straight to the FBI.”

  “You could do that,” Jake said. “But the FBI is nervous. The more heat that’s put on them, the more likely they are to find somebody to send to prison. I’m just looking into the politics, not the crime.”

  After another moment of silence, Patterson said, “The truth is, it’s all politics.”

  “So what about Bowe? Was he retailing this scandal to you?”

  He leaned back on the couch. “Yeah. Essentially.”

  “What does that mean?” Jake asked.

  “Linc knew about this package—I don’t know who’s got it now, and I didn’t even see all of it. There are papers, e-mails, bank records, even a video recording involving the construction of a four-lane highway in Wisconsin. Highway sixty-five. It runs between the Twin Cities area and a resort town up north. The state and federal government spent three hundred and fifty million dollars on it. If the package is accurate, quite a bit of the money stuck to the vice president and his friends. Seven, eight million, anyway. Probably more.”

  “Where’d the documents come from?” Jake asked.

  “The general contractor. The overall management contract went to a company called ITEM, and somebody with ITEM apparently documented the graft. Why, I don’t know. Who, I don’t know. The fact is, it could be a very clever forgery, one of those little Internet assholes gone crazy. But if it’s real, and if it gets out in public, the vice president is gone. Maybe the president with him. Depending on the timing.”

  “The timing.”

  “Yeah. The timing. Think about it,” Patterson said. “If somebody drops the package now, there’ll be a huge stink and in a month or so, the vice president goes away. Everybody starts maneuvering for a trial, but that won’t come for a year or two. We—the Republicans—squeal and holler, but the administration says, ‘Look, we didn’t know he was a crook, it happened before we picked him. We’re gonna put him in jail now that we know.’ You lose thirty points in the polls, then pick a good man to replace Landers. You have a big happy convention, talk about the fact that the vice presidency doesn’t mean shit anyway, you recover the thirty points, and us Republicans are back at square one.”

  Jake crossed his legs. “Okay . . .” When you got somebody rolling with a story, you let them roll.

  Patterson continued: “If we dropped the package in the first week of October, the scandal would peak on election day. It’d take you two or three weeks to get rid of Landers. You know how that goes, he denies it, he maneuvers, his wife cries for the cameras and defends her man. But this stuff is undeniable, if it’s real. So a week before the election, Landers is dumped, and you’re down thirty points in the polls. Nobody wants the VP nomination because the Dems are about to get creamed. You wind up with some loser on the ticket, which makes everything worse—makes you look weak—and the president goes down.”

  “All because of the timing.”

  “Oh, yeah. If this thing is real, it’ll come out, sooner or later. But the timing is absolutely critical.”

  Jake stood up, limped around the suite, over to the window, and looked out over Atlanta. Turned back and said, “You don’t know where the package is?”

  “Nope. Linc took that information with him. Some place in Wisconsin, obviously. Maybe Wausau, that’s where ITEM’s headquarters is. But they’ve got several offices around Wisconsin.”

  “None of this connects to Senator Bowe’s last campaign, does it?”

  Patterson looked away, touched his fingertips together, rubbed them for a moment, and then said, “No. Not exactly.”

  “ ‘Not exactly’?”

  “He would have loved to fuck this president, and to have gotten word back about who did it to him, after what they did to him,” Patterson said. “Linc had a mean streak. Big mean streak—but then, he was a U.S. senator. You don’t get that job without a mean streak.”

  “Huh. But no involvement with Arlo Goodman.”

  Patterson produced a rueful smile. “Arlo Goodman,” he said. “How long did it take you to find out about this package? Track me down? After you started looking?”

  Jake shrugged: “A couple of days.”

  “Right. I bet fifty people have had a sniff of it by now. It’s like a great big Easter egg, and everybody’s hunting for it. I will bet you one thousand American dollars that Arlo Goodman and his boys have heard about it. I will bet you that that’s the reason they snatched Linc.”

  “You think Goodman . . .”

  “Damned right, I do. A couple of those Iraq veterans that Goodman has hanging around, those special forces assholes, took Linc out in the woods and drilled holes in his head until he told them about the package.”

  “That’s . . . quite the statement.”

  Patterson made a helpless gesture with his hands. “I can’t prove it. I don’t have a single atom of proof. But I bet that’s what happened. If Landers gets dumped now, who better for the vice presidency than Arlo Goodman? He’s popular, he’s good-looking, he’s a hell of a campaigner, he’s the governor of a big swing state, and he can’t succeed himself. He’s available. In four years, he’s got a shot at replacing the president.”

  “And for that to work, Landers has to get dumped now,” Jake suggested.

  “Absolutely. Goodman needs that package out there now, or in the next month. If it doesn’t come out until October, he’s outa luck. The Dems lose, Goodman’s out of his governorship next year, with nothing political available. And he has no real claim for the presidential nomination in four years.”

  They both thought about that for a minute. “If your guess is right, about Goodman and Bowe,” Jake said, “I’d think you’d be a little worried.”

  “I am—but not as worried as somebody else must be,” Patterson said. “I was downstream from the package. I never had it. Linc was the only guy who could point you upstream, to whoever has it now.”

  “Does Madison Bowe know about it?”

  Patterson scratched his head. “You know, I just don’t know about that. They were . . . separate . . . although they liked each other okay. And he was pretty protective of her. I don’t know if he would have told her about it. This thing could be real trouble for people who know about it.”

  Jake said, “Huh.” Then, “Have any idea where I could look? Who I could ask?”

  “I’d find Linc’s closest asshole buddy, and ask him. Somebody both in politics and in bed with him. But it’s just possible that he didn’t tell anyone.”

  Jake thought: Barber. And, Patterson knew that Lincoln Bowe was gay.

  “How many people knew about Lincoln Bowe’s sex life?” Jake asked. When Patterson hesitated, he added, “I don’t need a number, I’m just looking for a characterization.”

  “So you know?”

  “That he was gay? Yes. Madison told me.”

  Patterson nodded. “So who knew? Anybody who knew him for a while—knew him well. If you were close enough to see who he was looking at.”

  “Quite a few people.”

  “Yeah. He was careful, but people knew. Two dozen? Three or four dozen? I don’t know. I don’t know if his parents knew . . .”

  “Would Goodman know?”

  “Ah . . .” Patterson ruffled his hair with one hand, squinting at the bright light from the window. “That’s hard to tell. I would be surprised if Goodman hadn’t put a spy or two in our campaign, but it’d be at a pretty low level—a volunteer, somebody running our computers. If Goodman knows, it’s probably only at the rumor level. And then you look at Madison, and you think, ‘The guy’s gay? With pussy like that in the house? No way.’ ”

  They talked for another twenty minutes, with Jake trying to nail down every piece of information Patterson had about the Landers p
ackage. When they were finished, Jake stood up, dropped his legal pad back in his briefcase, and asked, “What’re you going to do?”

  “Keep my mouth shut, for the time being,” Patterson said. “Until I find out where the trouble is coming from. If I talk to the FBI, they’re gonna want to know why I didn’t bring this up right away. Then the whole Landers thing will blow out in the open, and you guys get what you want—Landers is off the ticket, and we’re fucked. If I don’t talk to them, I might still be in trouble, but there’s a possibility that I can slide through. Right now, at this moment, I think I’ll try to slide. But that could change.”

  “You gonna let me know?”

  Patterson showed a shaky smile: “Maybe. I might need a little help. I’ve given you a little help, I might need a little help in return.”

  “Call me,” Jake said. “Things can always be done.”

  As Jake headed for the door, Patterson called after him: “Have you got something going with Madison?”

  That stopped him: “Why?”

  “Because when I said ‘pussy,’ your eyeballs pulled back about two inches into your head. I thought you were gonna jump down my throat.”

  “I talk to her,” Jake said.

  “Sorry about the ‘pussy,’ then.”

  “Yeah . . . well. You were right about the thought, anyway.”

  “One more thing,” Patterson said. “What’s with that goofy Hello Kitty cap?”

  Jake touched the cap: “Short version, I’ve got a cut with a bunch of stitches and a white patch of scalp where they shaved it. A cabdriver told me I was giving off a Frankenstein vibe. I was on the run, and didn’t have time to get a different hat.”

  Patterson smiled again: “The hat . . . I’ve never been questioned by a guy wearing a Hello Kitty hat. Kinda scary, in a chain-saw-massacre way.”

  When he left, Patterson was still on the couch, drinking a Coke from the minibar, staring at the television. Jake walked down to the front desk, asked the bellman to get a cab for him, saw an Atlanta Braves hat in the gift shop, bought one, shoved the Hello Kitty hat into a trash can, walked out on the front steps, and punched Danzig’s number into his cell phone. Gina put him straight through.