Once through security, he was slotted into a waiting room that offered coffee, newspapers, and high-speed Internet. The room had recently been redecorated—the walls painted blue, the First Lady’s favorite color, and hung with portraits of former First Ladies.
One of the formers, Hillary Clinton, smiled down on the bald spot of John Powers, a Georgetown professor and sometime advisor to the Department of Defense. Powers was sitting in an easy chair reading the Wall Street Journal. He and Jake knew each other as consultants, and as denizens of Georgetown.
“I’m much more important than you are,” Powers said to Jake, folding the paper as Jake limped in. He was an urbane man, who looked like he might have run an art gallery. His over-the-calf socks were dark blue with ladybug-sized smiling suns on them. “I publish in Foreign Policy.”
“That may be true, but my neckties are from Hermès,” Jake said, dropping into a chair across from him. “Wait’ll the faculty senate hears that you were reading the Journal.”
“They all read it, in secret, greedy little buggers,” Powers said. He probed: “Are you over for the boat review?”
Jake shook his head and lied. “Nope. I don’t know why I’m over. Probably the convention. History stuff, working it into the program, successor to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, William Jefferson Clinton, great Americans all, blah-blah-blah.”
“The convention.” Powers smiled, showing a set of glittering teeth. Campus rumor said that he’d had them veneered for television. “I’m here for the boats. Vice President Landers is leading the charge.”
“Good luck with that.” Jake opened his case and took out his laptop, balanced it on his knees, turned it on.
“You don’t mean that,” Powers said, tilting his head. Few people at Georgetown would have.
“I do,” Jake said. “I hope they build them all.”
Powers brightened, remembering. “Ah. That’s right. You were in the military.”
“For a while.” The boats were five atomic-powered attack carriers that would cost twelve billion dollars each. “With the budget as it is, and the old people loading up behind Social Security, I don’t think you’ve got a chance in hell.”
Powers frowned, said, “The Chinese and Indians . . .” A tall man in shirtsleeves stuck his head into the room and nodded at Powers. “Whoops, here I go. See you at school.” Powers took a step away, then said, “Really? Hermès?”
“Yup.”
“What do they cost now? Two-fifty?”
“Yup.”
When Powers was gone, Jake plugged into the Net, did a search for Madison and Lincoln Bowe. He got sixty thousand hits, filtered them to the last three days, and caught a reference to a Madison Bowe interview on Channel 7’s Washington Insider with Randall James.
He called it up from the station’s news cache and watched Madison Bowe do her thing: “They’ve got him, I know it.” The camera made love to her face. “They’ve got Lincoln. If they don’t, why are they so worried about me? They did everything they could to shut me up. I’ll be honest, I’m very worried. I’m worried that they’ll kill him when they’re done with him . . .”
She had tapes of a big shambling man threatening her in her own house. The tapes were made more effective by their security-camera, cinéma-vérité quality. “This is how they work,” she said after the tape ran out. She was appealing, with a nervous lip-nibble that made a male hormone jump up and shout, “I’ll take care of you.”
“This is what they’re doing to our America,” she said, speaking directly to the camera.
They, Jake mused, were us.
He was moving fast now, scanning the Net news, learning as much as he could about her, and about Lincoln Bowe, and the circumstances around Lincoln Bowe’s disappearance; and about their friends, their political allies. Lincoln Bowe had been a conservative Republican, faithful to the party and to the conservative cause, and an aristocrat. Madison Bowe was a lawyer’s daughter, smart, media-wise, good-looking, the perfect mate for a rising Republican star.
Then the star had fallen, brought down by Arlo Goodman.
The fight had started with Goodman’s run for the governorship, through the rise of the Watchmen, and then into Bowe’s reelection campaign. Bowe had been the big stud in Virginia politics, Goodman coming up in the other party, a threat to Bowe’s eminence. A fight that started out as political quickly became personal.
Bowe: Have you seen him with his Watchmen? Just like Munich in the 1930s, a tin-pot dictator with his political thugs, a little Hitler without the mustache . . .
Goodman: Did you ever see that picture of him during Iraq I? The baby-faced bigshot lawyer with his aristocratic chums, with his friends from Skull and Bones, playing poker and smoking Cuban cigars. Let the poor boys die; but none of our precious little richies with their snowy white sweaters with the big blue Y on the chest . . .
Bowe must have rued the day he’d worn that Yale sweater, let himself be shot in the sweater and shorts, sockless with tasseled loafers, a big cigar and playing cards on the table, the unruly hair falling over his forehead—a harmless, attractive photograph at twenty-four that would be shoved up his ass at forty-six . . .
Goodman had won the gubernatorial race. Two years later, with a lot of help from the White House, and a nationwide money-raising campaign, he’d spearheaded the campaign against Bowe. Bowe had lost his Senate seat to a Goodman crony.
Bowe had lost, but he hadn’t shut up. He had the money and the family to re-create himself as the administration’s most prominent critic, able to say what sitting members of Congress, too worried about maintaining their share of the pork, could not. Some thought he might run for his old Senate seat again. Some thought if the Republicans came back in, he might be in line for an ambassadorship, the Court of St. James’s, or Paris.
Then he’d vanished. Stepped into a car, and was gone, moments after making a vicious attack on the administration’s Syrian policy, and, domestically, on special-interest groups who supported the president.
The media had gone crazy. And the longer Bowe was gone, the crazier it had gotten.
ABC had compared his disappearance to Judge Crater’s and Jimmy Hoffa’s, with hints of organized crime. CNN had done a special that spoke darkly of Nazi, Middle Eastern, and South American politics. They’d intercut the film with shots of the Watchmen, in bomber jackets and khaki slacks, meeting in a football stadium in Emporia, with Goodman on a stage in front of a huge American flag; the implication was clear.
Fox had won the ratings war with a show on even crazier theories, including alien abduction and spontaneous combustion.
Jake had been waiting for forty minutes, and was still paging through media commentaries, when his cell phone rang. Gina. “You’re on the log. Come on up.”
Jacob Winter was thirty-three years old, six feet two inches tall, rangy, bony, with knife-edge cheekbones, a long nose, black hair worn unfashionably long, arty-long, and pale green eyes. His ex-wife referred to him as Ichabod-in-a-suit, after Ichabod Crane. He did wear suits: a saleswoman at Saks had once taken two hours of her life to coordinate neckties and shirts and suits with his eyes, and to explain how he could do it himself.
“Your eyes are the thing,” she’d said. “The right tie brings them out. Frankly, you would not normally be considered a great-looking guy, too many bones in your face, but your eyes make you very attractive. Your eyes and shoulders . . .”
Yes. The kind of guy who attracts saleswomen from Saks. Not a bad thing; her comment had cheered him for a week. A man of style . . .