Danzig nodded. “The vice president will resign tomorrow night. At one o’clock tomorrow afternoon, he’s going to call a press conference for seven o’clock, and he’ll announce that he’s leaving immediately. He wanted time to consult with his brother, which he’s done. If you were in a . . . condition . . . to take the package to the FBI, we thought you should do it, accompanied by the president’s counselor.”
“When?”
“Well, I think before the one-o’clock announcement. Word will start leaking about that time.”
Jake nodded. “I’ll need the originals.”
Using Danzig’s telephone, Jake called Madison on her cell phone. “Are you still talking to Novatny?”
“He’s here. We’re just finishing. And we’re not talking. We’ve offered to talk to a grand jury, if there is one, if we get immunity.”
“Are they going to go for it?”
“Nobody knows yet,” she said. She was crisp, controlled.
“Let me talk to him.”
He could hear Novatny fumble the phone: “Yeah?”
“Tell Mavis that we have a hot political package coming to you tomorrow, just after noon. She should alert the director, but don’t let it outside that circle. That’s absolutely critical. I’ll be at your office at noon, and you should have a lawyer with you to receive the package.”
“Is this the thing we were talking about?”
“It is—and Chuck, this is going to be the biggest deal since Bill Clinton’s blow job. You’ve got to be ready. You’ve got to be ready to brief the director, you’ve got to be ready for a media blitz.”
“I’ll move. I’m sending Mrs. Bowe home now.”
“Let me talk to her.” Madison came on and Jake said, “There’ll be about a million reporters at your house. I think it’s better to face the music now, rather than hide out.”
“I can handle it,” she said.
“I’m going to come by—I’d like to watch. From a distance.”
Late evening, Jake dealt the cards.
They were at Jake’s house, in the living room, the shades drawn. Somebody had tipped the media, or part of it, anyway, and three media trucks were parked in the street at the side of the house. “I’d have a hard time in prison,” Madison said. She picked up her hand, looked at it, picked three cards and tossed them in the discard pile, and added, “Give me three.”
“You’re not going to prison,” Jake said. He dropped three cards in the discard pile, dealt three to Madison, took three for himself.
“That’s really comforting.” She showed her hand to Jake: “Two sevens.”
Jake said, “Two jacks.”
Madison said, “Damnit, I can’t win with these cards.” She stood up, blew a hank of hair out of her face, and took off her blouse. “The TV people probably think we’re in here plotting strategy.”
“I am plotting strategy,” Jake said.
He collected the cards and shuffled. He hadn’t lost a hand yet. Madison watched him shuffle and her eyes narrowed: “Hey, are you cheating?”
“Would I cheat?” He shuffled a second time, glanced at her. She was watching his hands, and he thought how solemnly she was doing it. She was solemnly playing strip poker. He’d seen her laugh, frown, cry, groan—had seen any number of expressions, including a really nice snarl—but he’d never seen her smile with simple pleasure.
Late morning. One of Johnson Black’s assistants brought over two sacks of groceries, mostly vegetables, and Madison began making veggie chili, which she told Jake that he’d love. At noon, dressed in a blue suit with a green tie—not an intuitive match, Madison said, but it looked terrific—he got in the car and headed for the White House. The moment he backed into the alley, he was surrounded by shouting reporters. He eased through them and headed east.
Danzig, Gina, and the president’s counselor, a sober middle-aged woman from Indianapolis named Ellen Woods, were waiting in Danzig’s office. Woods had the package in a black leather portfolio. She was dressed in a blue power suit; her eyes were like black flint. “We want you to inventory the items before we go over,” she said, glancing at her watch.
Jake went through it quickly: it was intact. “It’s all here.”
“Then let’s do it,” she said.
They went in a presidential limo. Danzig called twice while they were en route, though the trip took only five minutes. “Just wondering if we were there yet,” Woods said dryly.
Novatny, Mavis Sanders, and three other high-ranking FBI functionaries and lawyers met Jake and Woods in Sanders’s office. Woods pointed Jake at a chair, gave the feds a brief oral explanation of the materials, and then handed over the package.
Though he’d been warned, Novatny was astonished. He asked Jake, “Wisconsin? Wisconsin? You knew about this when Green and his secretary were killed?”
“There were rumors here in Washington of a package like this. I was checking them out—I went out to Wisconsin because I’d learned that Green and Bowe had been lovers, and that Green was well connected around the state,” Jake said. “My feeling was, if he didn’t know about the package, he might be able to point me at somebody.”
“And he pointed you at this Levine woman? Wait a minute . . . I don’t understand the timeline.”
Jake took him through his arrival in Madison, the morning interview, the afternoon discovery of the bodies, and then he began to lie a little.
“Green told me he didn’t know about it but he could make some calls,” Jake said. “I gave him a specific name: he denied knowing it. Later, when I tracked the woman down—this was the next day—she admitted that she did, in fact, know Green. By that time, I had the feeling that I was in the grip of a political conspiracy to damage the administration, and that it might all be a fraud set up by Lincoln Bowe. I brought the package back for evaluation, and the instant we realized that it might be valid, the president ordered me to turn it over to you guys.”
The FBI people all sat back. “You’re willing to talk to a grand jury?” one of them asked.
“Absolutely. But I don’t have a lot of information. All I have is fragments. I pressed Madison Bowe on the subject and she knows even less than I do. It appears that Mrs. Bowe was deliberately kept out of the circuit by her husband, as a way to protect her.”
“I understand from media reports that you and Mrs. Bowe are friendly,” one of the feds said.
“Yes. We are. But most of this developed before we became . . . friendly.”
“And you think there was a conspiracy,” one of the suits said.
“Yes, I do. I think—I’m not sure—that it was set up by Lincoln Bowe, when he found out that he was dying from brain cancer. I think it was carried out by Howard Barber. I think the body was burned to attract the kind of intense press attention that it got, and I think the head was removed so that an autopsy would not show the cancer. I think if he is exhumed, an analysis of his spinal fluid would show the presence of cancer cells. Mrs. Bowe knew none of this—she never even saw him after the cancer diagnosis. They lived apart.”
The feds all looked at each other, and one of them said, “Heavy duty.”
“Did Barber kill Green?” Novatny asked.
“Barber or one of his group,” Jake said. “I don’t know that for sure, but that’s what I suspect.”
“Jesus Christ.”
One of the functionaries, looking like he couldn’t wait to get to a telephone, said, “And the vice president is going to resign?”
“Yup,” Jake said. “He’s toast.”