“How not complete?”
Jake patted the package. “This thing is involved in the killings. We’ve got to give it to the feds as soon as we can. We don’t have more than a few days. I can already feel an obstruction charge out there.”
“If you deliver it to them, the most they can say is that you were late,” Danzig said.
“Yeah, bullshit. If they want me, they can get me,” Jake said. “What I’m going to need is the silken breath of the president blowing down somebody’s back. Words like national security, Someone’s ass is grass, like that.”
Danzig nodded, avoiding Jake’s eyes: “Anyway.”
“Yeah.” Jake started unpacking the cheap briefcase. “Here’s the stuff. Here’s how it worked. . . .”
Danzig wanted to review each piece of paper, to crawl through the books on the DVD disks, to find inconsistencies. They took two hours, the longest time Jake had ever spent in Danzig’s office. They found inconsistencies, but they appeared to be paperwork mistakes, rather than logical errors that would suggest a fraud. When they were done, Danzig stood up, walked around the room in his stocking feet, sighed, and said, “Shit.”
“What do you think?” Jake asked.
“They’re real. I’ve seen stuff like this before, and they have the feeling of reality about them. The grit. A few pieces are missing, but that’s what you’d expect if it was real. The inconsistencies are consistent with reality.”
“I agree. You could get somebody else, maybe, to do some specific checks on the public records, to nail it down.”
Danzig nodded. “Of course. We’ll start that tomorrow. Tonight, if we can, maybe some of the stuff is online.”
“I’d want to see the actual paper, where it exists . . .”
“So would I,” Danzig said. Then, “Okay. You wait here for a minute. I’m going to get the boss.”
“There’s another thing, somewhat related,” Jake said. “And it’s about to pop. Lincoln Bowe was gay. His death was a conspiracy that Bowe set up himself, carried out by a close friend, or a few close friends, in an effort to embarrass Goodman.”
Danzig’s face didn’t move for a moment, as though he hadn’t heard. Then he said, “Holy shit.”
“I had to tell the feds. They’re now investigating Bowe’s gay friends. It’s gonna leak in the next day or two, and the whole investigation is going to lurch that way, away from the package. But it’ll come back.”
Danzig ran one hand through his oily hair and then said, “You’re a hell of a researcher, Jake. I hope you never come after me.”
Danzig padded out of the office, returned five minutes later, trailed by the president. The president was a tall, white-haired Indianan, a former governor and senator, a middle-of-the-roader chosen to lead the ticket when the Democrats decided to get serious. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt, without a tie, and like Danzig, was in his stocking feet. Jake stood up when he walked in.
“Hey, Jake,” he said. They shook hands and the president asked, “What the heck did you drag in this time?”
They spent another twenty minutes combing through the package, and finally the president said to Danzig, “I believe it. What do you think?”
Danzig glanced at Jake, then back to the president, who said, “Go ahead. He’s in deeper than we are.”
“We’ve got to do some verification and then we talk to Landers,” Danzig said. “He’s in town. We’ll get his ass over here, stick this thing up it. Come to some kind of agreement.”
The president looked at Jake. “You say there’s another copy?”
“At least one more—probably in the dead man’s safe-deposit box,” Jake said. “The FBI will get to it sooner or later. Probably sooner, since Novatny’s working the case.”
“I don’t know him,” the president said.
“He’s pretty good, sir. Also, there are quite a few other people who know about it, know enough details to cause trouble, even if they don’t have the package. It’s possible that the package could be replicated, at least a good part of it, from public records. If the Republicans talk to the L.A. Times, and they put a couple of investigators on it, they’ll hang the vice president; and maybe get us in passing.”
“All right,” the president said. To Danzig: “Get Delong and Henricks here tonight. We want to get this taken care of, and I want to turn this over to the FBI by the end of the week. I want Jake to do it. We need to cover him.” Delong was Landers’s chief of staff; Henricks, the president’s legal counsel.
“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Danzig said to the president. He was tense, but seemed happier than he usually was. He liked an outrageous problem, Jake decided. And this would make a hell of a scene in a what-really-happened book, five years after the president left office.
“We do,” the president said. “We don’t need Jake to do that.”
“Mr. President, I do have one thing to suggest,” Jake said. “When you’re talking about the other stuff, don’t spend too much time thinking about Arlo Goodman as a replacement for the vice president.”
The president nodded, but asked, “Why not?”
“Because there are strings floating all over this mess and I suspect some of them lead back to Goodman. Maybe even to the murders in Wisconsin.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” the president said.
Jake went out the White House gate, stood in the street for a moment or two, then walked down a block, flagged a cab, and went home.
He was home at seven-thirty. He took a shower, shaved again, just to feel fresh, brushed his teeth, put on clean jeans, a black T-shirt, and a sport coat. Then he went down to the study, pulled some books out of a shelf, found the green-fabric pistol case, took out the .45, slipped a clip into it, and dropped the gun in his jacket pocket.
At ten minutes to eight, he went out and sat on the back stoop. At five after eight, a car turned down the alley. He recognized it as Madison’s, opened the back gate, and she drove into the yard. She got out of the car and asked, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Come on, let’s get you out of sight.”
Inside the door, she asked, “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”
She had a soft leather carry-on bag and a briefcase. Jake took the bag, led her into the house, up the stairs to the guest room. “Bathroom, first door down the hall,” he said. “Come on: I’ll get you a glass of wine or a beer and tell you the story.”
She took a beer, settled into a chair in his living room, while he sat on the couch across from her. “Tell me about the gun,” she said.
“The two people killed in Madison were executed. They were killed in an office building and nobody heard any shots,” Jake said. “The gun was probably silenced, and the killers are probably professional—at least, they’d done it before. The only reason there weren’t more dead people in the building is that nobody happened to bump into them in the hallway.”
“Why didn’t they come after you?”
“I was behaving unpredictably, maybe. Or maybe they didn’t know I’d been there already,” Jake said. “After I found the bodies, I called the cops, and then there were cops all over the place.”
“That’s why you’re carrying a gun,” she said. “You’re afraid they might come here.”
“Yeah. Or to your place.”
“You think my house is bugged. Why wouldn’t you think this place is?” Madison asked.