Wildcard

The file in Tom’s hands was supposed to be part of the new-and-improved data management system. Cross-indexed on a secure database, the idea was that an agent could follow hyperlinked threads between various groups, looking for motives and capabilities that matched a given pattern. At Miriam’s request, an agent had searched for individuals or groups with both the motive and means to commit murder in order to keep Grant Lawrence out of the White House. The results were the scores of files on his and Miriam’s desks, and the one in his hands.

The Idaho Freedom Militia was archetypal in its ordinariness. Its founder was Wesley Aaron Dixon, a West Point graduate who had grown disillusioned with army life and left for a sheep ranch outside Boise. The file photos were unremarkable. Dixon looked about like Tom expected of a sheep rancher: grizzled and lean, with a slight middle-age paunch.

The group’s ideology was apparently cookie-cutter Western individualism: the government in Washington was too powerful; the Supreme Court was counter-democratic; the nation should return to its federalist roots; government was inherently bad, and so on.

One sentence was highlighted, a quote from a letter to the editor Dixon had written in 1998: “Every person should be trained and ready to defend himself and his community against the excesses of Washington, and to strike blows against a government which conspires daily to undermine his private property and his family.”

With that one sentence, Dixon had earned an FBI file for himself and the Idaho Freedom Militia. Such was the tidal wave of information through which Miriam and Tom were wading, for no other reason than to establish that the FBI had, indeed, left no stone unturned.

An hour later, Miriam returned. “Find anything?”

“Typical stuff,” Tom said, finishing the file. “Except for a letter to the editor, it’s pretty much mainstream libertarian.”

Miriam leaned over to see which file he was scanning. “Except for the part about women.”

Tom scanned down to the passage. It was a copy of a personal letter to a former militia member. Apparently the man had turned the letter over to the FBI after having been dismissed from the organization. From the context, the man had been kicked out because his wife had taken a job.

“The proper role of the woman,” Dixon had written, “is to bear and care for the children and the home. When a man allows her to abdicate that role, he allows her to betray God’s plan for womanhood, abdicates his own role as head of the house, and undermines the Divine balance of the family.”

“Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, I guess,” Tom said. “Even a stupid one.”

“Yeah, well, Dixon kicked this guy out of the militia, which is more a favor than a punishment, as I see it. But he also blackballed the guy around town. Guy lost his job, couldn’t get another. He finally had to move to Oregon and start over. All because his wife took a job.”

Tom shook his head. Having grown up in small towns, he could see how it had happened. Close-knit communities were a two-edged sword. They could rally around someone in times of grief, as the townspeople had done with him and his father after his mother died. But they could also cut someone out of the herd over the most trivial matter. Or, as had been the case with his father two years later, the not-so-trivial matters.

“So why did this group get flagged?” Tom asked.

Miriam shook her head. “Damned if I know. I didn’t see anything that connects Dixon to Grant Lawrence. But the computer spat it out, so we have to go through it. No stone unturned, right?”

“Yeah,” Tom said, looking at his watch. He took three more files from the pile. “Look, it’s almost ten. I’m going to make this my bedtime reading. And you need to get some sleep, Miriam. Sitting here all night stewing isn’t going to do the Bureau, Grant, Terry or me any good.”

“You’re right,” she said, reaching for a handful of files to take home with her. “Life will be better in the morning, right?”

Tom forced a smile. “At the very least, it’ll be a different day.”

Watermill, Long Island

Edward Morgan flipped through the channels until he hit on an all-sports network running classic NFL films. This particular episode was the famous 1968 “Heidi Bowl” game between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, so named because the network had cut away from the final minutes of the game so as not to overlap its scheduled broadcast of the movie Heidi.

“Oh, God,” Rice said, looking at the screen. “I remember that damn game. Freshman year. In fact, we had a bet on it.”

“Twenty bucks,” Morgan said. “I got stuck with the Raiders, even though the Jets were my home team, because Joe Namath was an Alabama graduate and there was no way you were going to root against an Alabama man.”

Rice nodded. “Cost me twenty bucks, too.”

“I seem to remember you got that money back in the playoffs,” Morgan said. “And we made a killing when the Jets won the Super Bowl. You had half of the brothers betting the Colts.”

Rice laughed. “Pledge year got real easy after that. They all still owed us money.”

They fell silent for a few minutes, watching the game film. It had been a bizarre time for Harrison Rice. Most of his high school friends had been drafted and were headed for Vietnam. Rice’s father, a banker in Birmingham, had forced his son to forgo football in his senior year and focus on his schoolwork. While obeying his father had hurt at the time—Debbie Mays had dumped him for someone who could get her a letter sweater—it had paid dividends. His grades had shot up enough that he could follow in his father’s footsteps at Yale, and the student deferment had kept him out of the rice paddies.

As the country had torn itself apart, Rice and Morgan had pulled all-nighters, studying economics and finance, Morgan poking fun at Rice’s Alabama drawl, while Rice needled Morgan about his silver spoon childhood. Rice was a big man, and had been even then. Morgan was slight and half-a-head shorter. They were in many ways as different as night and day, and yet in the late nights pouring over expectation curves and compound return formulae, they had forged a bond.

Rice had gone back to Birmingham after college to work in his father’s bank, then moved into state politics. Morgan had gone on to Harvard Business School and a stellar career in international finance. But they’d always kept in touch, had always been the anchors to which each could turn when the pace of achievement became too frantic and one of them needed to get away and decompress. Just like tonight.

“What a shame about Lawrence,” Edward said.

“Yes,” Rice agreed. “I wanted to win. But not this way. Never this way. Christ, he’s got two little girls who are probably already scarred for life from all the shit that’s happened. And now this.”

Edward nodded silently and seemed about to speak, then stopped and looked at the television. It was what he had always done when there was something he wanted to say to someone but was afraid of offending him.

“Oh, come on,” Rice said. “You know that doesn’t work with me. It never has.”

“Well, it’s just…that’s exactly it. The girls. Their mom is dead. And all the mess last year. Why put them through the hell of a presidential campaign? Why not at least wait four years for life to settle some? I’m not saying he deserved what happened. Hell, no. Nobody does. But why take the risk?”

Rice could see his point. He’d had the same thought last night. Once the wave of sympathy passed, he was sure the press would pick up the same theme. A psychiatrist would probably say it was a way of dealing with the sense of collective grief. Blame the victim. Nihil mea culpa.

“Well, let’s just hope he pulls through,” Rice said. “The girls need him. And frankly, the country needs men like Grant Lawrence. I don’t always agree with him, but I can’t question his convictions or his courage.”

Edward shook his head. “You’re not talking to the press here, Harrison. It’s me. Don’t tell me a part of you didn’t jump for joy when you realized he was out of the race.”

“Of course it did,” Rice said. “And that part of me makes me sick. I don’t like to think I’m the kind of man who could feel that way.”

“None of us does,” Edward agreed. “But we are. At some level, we’re all looking out for number one.”

“So what are you saying?” Rice asked, anger rising in his belly. “That I should be celebrating because a friend of mine was shot? Sorry. I can’t do that. It was wrong.”

“Whoa,” Edward said, holding up a hand. “I’m not saying that at all. All I’m saying is, you didn’t pull that trigger. You didn’t make it happen. And yes, it’s a damn shame. But it’s also an opportunity.”

“A curse, you mean. Even if I win, I’ll be living under his shadow. Every decision I make will be weighed against what people think Grant Lawrence would have done. It’s almost not worth it.”

“That’s bullshit, Harrison. And you know it.” He paused for a moment. “Look, remember that high school game you told me about, the one where you finally got to play because the starting quarterback got hurt?”

Rice nodded. It was the only time he’d played in three years of high school football. Homecoming game. Junior year. Brad Mellows had sprained an ankle halfway through the fourth quarter, and the coach had nodded to Rice. He remembered the churning in his stomach as he’d strapped on his helmet and jogged onto the field. They were three points behind and driving down the field. On the first play, he’d almost tripped over his own feet as he’d handed the ball to the fullback, but big Buck Ledger had bulled his way to a first down.

Rice had called an option on the next play, and as he’d swept around the right side and prepared to pitch the ball to Gary Thomas, he’d seen a crease form in front of him. He’d tucked the ball in, turned upfield and burst into the open. Seventeen yards later, he’d crossed the goal line, winning the game and, briefly, Debbie Mays’s heart.

“Nobody said, ‘What would the other guy have done?’ then, did they?” Edward asked. “No, they talked about what you had done. Stepping up to make a play when the team needed you.”

“Yes,” Rice said.

“So it’s the same thing here, Harrison. You have to step up and make a play for the country. And not the play Grant Lawrence would have made. He might be a great guy, but he’s not always right and you’re not always wrong. You have to make your play, just like you did in that game.”

Rice nodded. “Well, you’re right there. I’m not going to stand by while these damn terrorists blow up our bases and murder our ambassador. They’re not going to kill our people and get away with it.”

“Nor should they,” Edward agreed. “That’s an issue where you were right and Lawrence was wrong. We do need to continue what we’ve started in the Middle East and create a real peace. And if you do that—put an end to those fundamentalist fanatics and let those people have peace and hope and prosperity again—I guarantee you, no one will be talking about what Grant Lawrence would have done. They’ll be talking about what Harrison Rice did.”

Rice nodded slowly. Trust Edward to get him out of his funk and back on the right track. It was time to step up and make a play.

Later that night, after Rice had left, Edward picked up the telephone and dialed.

“How did it go?” a voice asked, without a greeting.

“He was feeling guilty, like you said.”

“No reason he should,” the man said. “He’s the right man for the job.”

“Yes, of course,” Edward said. “But I understand his feelings. He and Lawrence are friends, after all. Anyway, he seemed to be feeling better when he left. More like his old self.”

“And he’s on board?”

“Yes. I think we can count on him.”

“Make sure it stays that way,” the man said, then disconnected to end the conversation as abruptly as he had begun it.

Edward Morgan was no fool. His own life was on the line here, as well. Failure was not acceptable. There was too much at stake. Harrison Rice would be president, must be president. The men Morgan worked for could count on Rice to do the right thing. American resolve in the war on terror was wavering in the absence of concrete progress. Left to their own devices, the people would want their sons and daughters to come back home. Grant Lawrence had already laid out his proposed policy for disengagement, and even the Republican nominee was backing away from his predecessor’s rhetoric.

Only Harrison Rice was resolved to stay the course. A course that, day by day, brought Morgan’s colleagues closer to their goal. No one could be permitted to stand in their way. Harrison Rice must be president. And, once elected, he would do his masters’ bidding.

5

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Tom sat propped up in bed, the reading lamp on the nightstand competing with the flickering light of the muted television. On the screen, Bruce Willis was using a POW camp murder trial as cover for a mass escape, even if it cost a black pilot his life. Down the hall, judging by the quiet murmurs since the ring of the telephone ten minutes ago, Miriam was talking to Terry. Tom tried to ignore the movie, the barely audible sound of Miriam’s voice and the all-too-audible noise in his own head, as he paged through the files he’d brought home.

Colin Farrell, the black pilot’s attorney, had just discovered that the court-martial was a ruse, and that his client was to be sacrificed to protect the escape. The pain of betrayal was evident on the actor’s face. Tom didn’t need the dialogue to know what was happening. He had seen that look before.

“It’s a DEA operation, Lawton. All you have to do is stay out of the way.”

He’d read somewhere that it was possible to be an honest drug dealer but impossible to be an honest undercover cop. It had taken him months to gain the trust of a midlevel trafficker, and over the next two years, Tom had been able to pass along intelligence that had allowed LAPD detectives to close three homicides, and DEA and Customs officials to seize a half-dozen shipments.

And all without compromising his cover—or the twelve-year-old girl who had become his best informant.

She was his subject’s daughter, an only child, just as Tom had been. One of the homicides he’d closed had been the murder of the girl’s mother, cold retribution by a rival trafficker. Tom had seen his own childhood mirrored in the bond between the girl and her father. He’d watched them work through the grief, just as he and his father had done. Like Tom, she’d seen enough of Daddy’s “business” to know he did bad things. Unlike Tom, she’d had a kindly uncle figure to talk with and share her concerns. Someone she thought she could trust.

“The DEA thinks they’ve gotten all they’re going to get, Agent Lawton. This guy has killed two people that we know of. Including your partner, John Ortega. Carlos is bad news, and they’re taking him out. And you will get out of the way. Understood?”

John Ortega. He’d been Tom’s best friend at Quantico and probably the reason Tom had stuck with the difficult training rather than giving up. Whenever he’d felt low, John was there to cheer him up with an ancient Cheech & Chong imitation that kept Tom holding his sides too tightly to bang his head against the wall. John Ortega, who’d been sent to L.A. two months before Tom had, and had been the first to penetrate Carlos Montoya’s L.A. network.

When Tom had heard he was being transferred to L.A., he was elated. He had looked forward to working with his old Quantico buddy. When he learned that John was in a deep cover operation, it made perfect sense. John always was an actor. And then, only two months after Tom reached L.A., John Ortega had been found dead in a Dumpster, his face and hands cut off, teeth crushed. He had, in the words Carlos Montoya would later use in a private conversation, “become a nobody.”

Tom had remembered John’s death and nodded obediently to his SAC. Tom had told Carlos he had to attend his brother’s funeral back in Ohio on the day that Carlos was supposed to meet a new contact. Carlos hadn’t objected. After all, this was only a first meeting with a new contact. It was in a public place. Carlos said it would be a fine day to take his daughter to the beach.

Tom couldn’t say, No, don’t take your daughter! He’d set up the meeting, and even suggested the time and place. Any objection would be suspicious. And in this business, suspicion alone was enough to get you killed.

Instead, he’d sat in the surveillance van and watched as things began to go horribly wrong. Carlos might not have had any formal training, but he had a lifetime worth of street smarts. He’d spotted the first tail—a young agent who had too little tan and too much curiosity to be the surfer he was portraying—within five minutes. So he’d given his bodyguard a subtle signal and taken his daughter for a walk down the beach, toward the rocky cove where lovers snuck away in the moonlight and behind which his bodyguard had parked a second car.

Tom had stiffened as he stared at the monitor. “He knows. Let him go. Pick him up another time,” he’d said. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead, the contacts had decided to move in then, approaching Carlos, following him over the sea-weathered rocks and into the cove. Out of sight of the cameras.

Tom had heard the rest. The agent’s too-casual greeting. The wariness in Carlos’s voice. The girl asking if she could go down to the water. Her father saying the riptides were too strong. The overeager scene commander giving the order. The shouts. The gunshots. The girl’s scream.

Always, always, the girl’s scream.

In the next three minutes, Tom’s life had gone to hell. He’d tried to get out of the van, but the SAC had planted himself squarely in front of his seat and ordered him to stay put. “Fuck that,” Tom had said, grabbing the man by his shirt front and pulling him down as he rose himself and lowered his head just enough to drive his forehead squarely into the SAC’s face. He’d heard the satisfying crunch of cartilage and bone in the instant before he’d shoved the man aside and bolted from the van.

Tom had sprinted across the sand, arriving in time to see Carlos’s eyes glaze over, an agent pulling the girl away as she beat on his chest, screaming for her father to wake up. Then she’d seen Tom, and the yellow FBI logo on his navy-blue windbreaker.

There had been no question of trying to approach her, hug her, explain who he was and what he’d done. Her dark eyes stripped bare two years of trips to the zoo, walks in the park, shared entries in her diary, and exposed them for the lies they’d been. He’d simply turned and climbed back over the rocks, walking numbly down the beach under a flat, haze-dimmed sun….

A knock at the door shook him out of his reverie. The anger that never quite died surged again, burning away the guilt and grief. At least for now.

“C’mon in,” he heard himself say.

“Good movie?” Miriam asked, glancing at the screen.

“It probably would be if I were watching it,” Tom said, holding up the file in his hands. “Was that Terry?”

She nodded. “Grant is stable, at least. And there’s brain activity, although he’s still not conscious.”

“Sometimes the body just needs time.”

“That’s what the doctors told Karen,” she said. “They can’t say how long, of course.”

Tom nodded. “Any word on what’s happening with the case down there?”

She smiled. “Now why would you think I’d know anything about that?”

“Because I know you,” he said. “Detective Sweeney still has contacts in Tampa. So you told Terry to keep an ear to the ground down there.”

“Are you suggesting I don’t trust official channels?” she asked. “That I think Kevin might let us spin our wheels on the sidelines and not tell us what’s going on? Perish the thought.”

“So what did Terry say?” Tom asked, knowing she suspected exactly that.

Miriam put a hand above her eyebrows. “They have this much of the top of a head in the news footage. Male. Blond. Short hair but not remarkable. Same head, from the back, on the hotel street video as he’s leaving the scene. His body is obscured by a woman leaving behind him, an underling on Grant’s campaign staff. She was across the lobby when Grant was shot and doesn’t remember who was in front of her as she left the hotel.”

“In short, useless,” he said.

“That’s my guess, and Terry agrees. Of course, the SAC in Tampa is trying to run this guy down through everyone who was there. But I’d be stunned if they found enough to ID the shooter.” She sighed. “So how about you? Anything in those files?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They need to reprogram their damn computer. We might as well be sifting the Sahara looking for a particular grain of sand.”

“That bad?” she asked.

He held up the Idaho Freedom Militia file. “Take these guys, for example. You know what the connection was, why the computer spat this out?”

She shook her head, and he continued.

“Wes Dixon, the guy who runs this outfit? Turns out that after West Point he married a girl he met at a social there. His wife’s maiden name is Katherine Hodge Morgan.”

“So?” Miriam asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Exactly,” Tom agreed. “So Katherine Dixon-née-Morgan’s brother is Edward Thomas Morgan. He’s some banker in New York or London or wherever he is this week. Whoop-de-doo, right?”

“Except?”

“Except that he was a college fraternity brother of Senator Harrison Rice.”

Miriam laughed. “It’s like that game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Grant Lawrence is running against Harrison Rice, whose old college buddy is a banker named Edward Morgan, who has a sister named Katherine, who married a young army lieutenant named Dixon, who later formed this Idaho-militia thing…so…”

“So,” Tom continued, “the new-and-improved computer spits out the Idaho Freedom Militia as possible suspects in the Grant Lawrence shooting. And that’s the kind of absurd horseshit we’re wading through.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Okay, well, do the usual checks in the morning. Then we can sign off on the file and move on.”

“To more absurd horseshit.”

“Probably,” Miriam agreed. “But they say the system is better than before. Used to be we couldn’t get from A to B in those files without a compass and a road map and a Saint Bernard. I suppose we should take their word for it.”

“If this is any indication,” Tom said, tossing the file on the floor beside the bed, “we can get from A to pi just fine. But A to B is still impossible.”

“Hey,” she said, “it’s still a government operation.”

The bitter irony was not lost on him as she said good-night. He put the rest of the files aside and turned up the sound on the movie, just as Bruce Willis stepped forward to assume responsibility and forfeit his life to save his men. Hollywood heroism. If only the real world were as tidy.

Then, suddenly, he jumped out of bed and went to fling the door open. “Miriam?”

“Yeah?” It sounded as if she were in her bedroom.

“Do you know somebody who can get us a copy of every bit of video, TV and security tape there is on that night?”

She popped her head out the door of her room. “Tom, you know we can’t go there.”

“I know.”

“As long as you know that.” She pulled her head back in, then stuck it out once more. “I bet we can have it by noon tomorrow.”

He was grinning for real as he closed his door. He would bet she was calling Terry right this minute.

Then, flopping back down on his bed, he picked up another file.

Savannah, Georgia

Father Steve Lorenzo loved the smell of peach blossoms. His daily midmorning jog was one of his few self-indulgences, and he made it a point to cherish every moment of it. The warm spring sun on his face, the comfortable burn in his thighs, the sound of his steady breaths and, this week, the smell of peach blossoms. His seminary training had taught him to live in prayer, to seek God in every moment of the day. Sometimes that was hard, but this was not one of those times. Only God could create a morning such as this.