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.”