"The who is simple," said Kessler. "Kate Sinclair can do nothing on her own and neither can her son-not that he has the sense. No. The who is definitely Mr. Harris. As to the rest-look for an event or a person, a time or a place where havoc would reap the most benefit. And look for it soon. Time is of the essence. It must come before our new vice president leaves the news cycle. Put Mr. Harris in such a place at such a time and you will have your answer."
"Any ideas?" Holliday asked.
"One or two," said Kessler, smiling thinly.
PART FOUR
31
The Abbey School in Winter Falls predated the entire concept of tourism, and had been established in the early 1800s by a group of monks fleeing from the charred remains of what had once been the Petit Clairvaux Abbey in France. Over the previous centuries Petit Clairvaux had been ravaged by everything from plague and murderous kings to the destruction of the Templar Order, Napoleon Bonaparte's distaste for the monastic life and organized religion in general, and finally by fire.
The twelve remaining monks set sail for the new world, found an out-of-the-way spot in the forests of New Hampshire and settled down to a contemplative life and the making of cheese from sheep's milk.
Unfortunately the rich, smoky cheese they produced proved to be unpopular, and by the early 1900s St. Joseph's Abbey transformed itself into a tuberculosis sanitarium and survived as such until most of the monks and their patients died during the deadly second wave of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.
In 1920 the Abbey transformed itself once again and became the Abbey School, a Catholic boarding school with the explicit mandate to produce priests and monks who would extend the Benedictine creed in America. That didn't work any better than the sheep's milk cheese, and in 1930, as Winter Falls itself became a popular summer retreat for the rich and powerful, the Abbey School, by now a sprawling compound of hundred-year-old buildings and more modern structures, opened its doors to the children of anyone with the means to pay the hefty tuition and boarding fees, regardless of race, creed or color-with the exception of members of the Negro race, the Chinese and above all members of the Jewish faith. It was, in fact, relentlessly male, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant for the next half a century.
During those fifty years the Abbey School attained a certain level of prominence as a prep school where A-list celebrities, politicians and the superwealthy of nations around the world sent their not-quite-A-list sons. The school had a number of advantages: it stressed sports-or games, as the school called them-rather than academics; it was in out-of-the-way New Hampshire, which meant it was both difficult for the school's privileged students to get into too much trouble with drugs, sex or alcohol, and it was distant enough to provide an excuse for parents not visiting except under the most extreme circumstances.
By the sixties there was regular limo service from New York and Boston and there was floatplane service from both those cities for parents who couldn't wait to see their sons ensconced behind the mossy granite wall that surrounded the old monastic compound.
It was the perfect spot to send a World War Two naval hero and retired admiral's son with a relentlessly B-plus average and utterly average SAT scores whose father wanted him to become president. Likable, handsome and with a great smile, but basically just an ordinary guy with a good haircut and great hockey skills.
Hockey was the only thing he'd ever excelled at, beyond being heir to a billion-dollar oil fortune on his mother's side. The game was, in the end, the real reason for his attendance at this fortieth reunion. More than his eventual graduation from the Abbey and his nudge-and-a-wink entrance into Yale, it had been his win over the Winter Falls Wolves as captain of the Abbey Argonauts and the winning of the coveted St. Joseph's Cup that had been the proudest moment of his pre-presidential life. As Morrie Adler had once put it in a Charlie Rose interview, "It gave him the green light for the rest of his life."
In his heart of hearts he'd known it was the single thing that finally spurred him on to success; if he could win that game he could win anything. It was one of his biggest benders, too, as he got bombed out of his gourd on the foul crabapple moonshine Morrie Adler made in his hidden basement still, and compounded by Lucky Strikes rolled in Polaroid film emulsion, a dimethyltryptamine, acidlike high discovered by his cousin, Mickey Haines.
Now, with his presidential library being built in San Diego, his $200,000-a-year pension, travel budget, office expenses, a decade's worth of Secret Service protection and top-of-the-line health insurance coming out of the taxpayer's pocket all ready to go and waiting for him at the end of his term in a year and a half, it only seemed right to cap it all off with a visit to the Abbey.
The President of the United States thought about that while seated in the luxuriously appointed passenger's compartment of Marine One as it droned across the late-afternoon Vermont sky on its way to Winter Falls. Beside him, Morrie was going over the most recent intelligence reports on the jihad slayings, trying to make sense of it all and coming up empty. Below them the snow-mantled forest stretched to the horizon. Morrie lit a Cohiba, took a deep drag and leaned back in the butter-soft leather armchair, a cut-crystal glass of 107-proof Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve on the rocks in the holder by his right hand.
"You think Shannon O'Doyle will be at the game?" Morrie asked wistfully.
"The Snow Queen?" The president laughed. Shannon O'Doyle had been the sexual fantasy of every boy at the Abbey and at Winter Falls High. Naturally ash blond and shy, her nylons made that terribly erotic whispering sound when she crossed her legs. "She's probably a gray-haired old lady by now."
"So what?" Morrie replied. "Some dreams go on forever." He smiled around the fat Cuban cigar. Those really were the good old days. "And, anyway, we're gray-haired old men."
The president sighed. Why was it that it took so long to get where you were going but the time spent after arriving was so brief? It was the one real problem with the American Dream: inevitably you woke up. The helicopter rumbled onward over the trees and the president stared out the window, thinking about Shannon O'Doyle's nylons and the shivering, dangerous sound of skates rushing on ice.
"What are the odds this Kessler guy is right?" Peggy asked. They were sitting in the back booth at Gorman's, overlooking the dock and the flat, bright white of the lake ice, turning gold now with the fading light of the winter sun. The iceboats were drawn up in a row, their sails furled, the roaring wind off the lake sending up a strange, cicadalike hum through their taut rigging.
Holliday sipped his coffee and stared out the window at the bleak, frozen scene. In the summer the docks and the lake probably looked about their best at this time of day. "Pretty good," he said, feeling as bleak as the frigid scenery. "He seemed pretty convincing."
"He sounded convincing in his living room at the Dakota in New York," said Peggy. "Reality is a little different." She lifted her shoulders. "It could just be coincidence. There's nothing going on here, I swear."
"Kessler doesn't believe in coincidence any more than I do," answered Holliday. "He believes in synchronicity." He put down the coffee and began to tick off points on his fingers. "A president is coming to visit. Conveniently assigned to the event is Mike Harris, who's also a direct relation of Kate Sinclair. The timing is right-these days it's a short news cycle, and our new, distinguished vice president, Richard Pierce Sinclair, is soon to go off the radar. Winter Falls was voted the safest place in America, which makes it a perfect target. Easy to crack and shocking to see destroyed. If Sinclair and Rex Deus want to make a statement, this is the moment and this is the place."