She addressed the rest of the heavy brass in the room, and then excused herself before she started crying. Drake had that effect on women — a fact that kept his chief of staff perpetually busy fending off civil suits and blackmail threats. At least Crosby thought he was fending them off. Ran, McKeon’s Japanese friend, had done the heavy lifting, sorting out many of Drake’s women before they even hit Crosby’s radar.
JFK and Bill Clinton were his heroes, but the Warren G. Harding White House made their liaisons seem like college indiscretions. Drake had outdone them all in his first six months in office. If things continued as planned, Drake would have a great deal in common with the twenty-ninth president.
The baby-faced Marine Corps sentry posted outside the West Wing did not acknowledge Ran when she walked by, but three uniformed Secret Service officers and two plainclothes agents nodded in turn as she walked down the colonnade toward the Rose Garden. Armed with pistols and expandable batons and radios on their belts, these agents stood by with a twitchy hyperawareness that made them jump at the click of a cicada. Counter-snipers patrolled the roof and some of the agents carried small submachine guns on hanging harnesses under their jackets. It had been nearly half a year since the assassinations, but security personnel, from the president’s bodyguards to the uniformed mounted DC Park Police who patrolled the Capitol on horseback, still operated as if they were under immediate attack. Staffing in and around the White House had tripled. Ran had to stifle a laugh at all the precautions since the greatest threat to their way of life was sitting inside the Oval Office. If these men and women knew what their precious POTUS was up to, they would kill him themselves. Ran had certainly thought about it.
Ran viewed everyone she met as a possible opponent whom she would eventually have to crush. She had vague recollections of a mother who was pretty, but essentially soft and flawed. From the time she was old enough to walk, her father had drilled into her an exactness of spirit, a focus that cut through weaker souls and saw them for what they were — nothing. She’d killed her first human being before she was six — a boy two years older than her. He had sneered when he saw he was fighting a girl — and then vomited up his own blood when her dagger had pierced his belly. One of her father’s counselors, a lusty wrestler with rippling muscles and an ego the size of the sea, made advances on her when she was thirteen. He fell to her sword like rice stalks before a fire. She’d counted at first, seen the faces in her dreams, but by the time she was twenty, there were too many.
The fact that she wore no ID badge hanging around her neck was a sign of her importance. Virtually everyone working or visiting the West Wing wore a color-coded badge identifying their work status and clearance level. Only four people were exempt: POTUS, VPOTUS, David Crosby, and the Vice President’s special advisor, Ran Kimura. The fact that she was included in that list caused no small amount of jealousy among staffers.
Ran stopped at the east door off the Rose Garden. Through the rippled glass, she watched several generals from the Joint Chiefs spill out of the Oval Office into the main corridor. The Vice President stood at the threshold with the President’s chief of staff, having a heated discussion about something. She watched as Crosby’s posture softened. He nodded, as if caught in some hypnotic spell. The man didn’t like McKeon — no, Ran thought, that wasn’t strong enough. Crosby despised McKeon, seeing him as usurping the power of the presidency. But those feelings melted when the two men were together. That’s the way it worked with Lee McKeon. He had a way. An inexplicable force that twined its way into your good sense, into your strategy and will, and made you think you were the most important thing in the world.
At first glance, it was impossible to see how a tall, gawky skeleton of a man with dark skin and deep-set eyes ever got elected to public office. His Pakistani blood gave him the features many Americans saw as a personification of the enemy — and yet, each speech saw hundreds more followers jumping on board his political machine, writing checks and donating time, because Lee McKeon, the Chindian underdog with the Scottish name, looked like a very tan Abraham Lincoln and entranced others as surely as the mad monk Rasputin.
Ran had seen the power of his presence firsthand, two years before, when he’d talked her out of killing him.
Chapter 49
Quinn turned to check on Mattie one last time before venturing closer to the body.
She peered over the top of her new book, craning her head in order to sneak a look up the stairs. She had inherited his curiosity for anything that smelled of adventure and danger — even if she was only seven.
“Stay put, you,” Quinn said. “There are some things you just can’t un-see. Got it?”
“I know, Daddy,” Mattie said, sounding decades beyond her years. “I’ve seen them.”
Her directness took Quinn’s breath away. She was definitely his daughter — and he was pretty sure that was not something she’d put on the plus side of her ré-sumé in the future.
Quinn was nearly fourteen when he’d stumbled upon his first body — a hunter who’d frozen to death in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Anchorage. The bears were in hibernation and he’d found him before the wolves did. But pine martens and weasels had begun to nibble away at the man’s hands, leaving nothing but finger bones hanging from the frozen cuffs of a wool shirt that was oddly clean. They radioed the troopers and watched when a ski plane landed in a snowy clearing among the gnarled black spruce. The plane looked barely large enough for the pilot, a tall man with a blue uniform and thin mustache. The Quinn brothers and their father helped the trooper stuff and cram the body into the airplane, frozen in a seated position, where it sat, staring blankly at the back of the trooper pilot’s head as he took off for Anchorage. There was no blood, no guts, nothing but emptiness — and bones where fingers should have been. Quinn’s conscious mind found the experience more reverent than traumatic, but the skeletal hands of that first dead man had shaken him awake from his dreams many times over the decades since.
Violent brushes with evil men already gave Mattie plenty of cause for nightmares. Quinn knew from hard experience that these things had a way of adding up. “Stack-tolerance,” they called it. At some point, the mind couldn’t handle any more. The last thing he wanted to do was put her near another grisly murder scene while she was still young enough to be reading Lemony Snicket.
“That’s how we found him.” Carly’s voice pulled him back to the present.
Quinn moved slowly, searching step by step for any clue before he put his foot down. Apart from a cascading pool of blood and the lifeless body draped across the stairs, the polished teak was remarkably clean.
Early in his OSI career, before he found a natural home in counterintelligence, Quinn put in some time in Criminal Investigations — known as “Crim.” He helped local authorities and the FBI with several homicides where Air Force personnel were involved, both on and off base. Two cases had been robberies gone bad, but most were crimes of passion. In all cases, clutter and chaos ruled the day. The scenes were in shambles.
Even at first glance, Quinn could tell this was no crime of passion. The killing had been quick and precise, by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. It all had to have happened in seconds, while the victim was alone on the stairs, without alerting the other passengers above or below. When done by an expert, assassinations — something with which Quinn had a certain amount of experience — very often appeared as sterile as an operating room.