Wildcard

Grant Lawrence was a media darling. He had been for years, and the kidnapping of his children had only pushed his star higher in the public consciousness. The firestorm over his shooting was already under way, and there would be pressure for a quick, clean solution to the case. Exactly the kind of conditions under which investigators were most likely to develop tunnel vision.

So yes, in that sense, Tom Lawton was exactly the kind of agent the Bureau needed on a case like this. But on the other hand, the psych evaluation was clear as day.

“Look,” Kevin said, “I know you like Tom. You’ve mentored him ever since he joined up. Heck, I worked with him for six months in Dallas before he was sent out to that mess in L.A. I liked him then. I like him still. But the simple fact is, he assaulted his superior. The guy needs plastic surgery, for crying out loud. Did you read Lawton’s psych evaluation? The report is four paragraphs long, and the phrase ‘distrust of authority’ appears four times. He’s on suspension for a reason, Miriam.”

“Can you blame him?” she asked.

“Hell no! The way things went down out there, any one of us could be in the same boat. I’d have done the same damn thing he did. But if I use him on this case, the director is going to be stepping all over me.”

She sighed heavily and nodded reluctantly.

“I feel for the guy, Miriam. I do. But right now he’s too damn volatile. He needs time to recover. You’re his friend, for crying out loud. You of all people should realize that.”

She looked away, the hurt evident in her eyes. He hadn’t meant it to come out the way it had, even if it was the truth. But there it was.

“You’re right,” she said, turning back to him. “He is my friend. I’ve read the reports on L.A. And his psych sheet. But I know Tom Lawton better than anyone. Better than that doctor. Better than you. What he needs is a way to prove to himself that he’s not a screwup. Which you and I both know he’s not.”

Kevin nodded. He’d never gone through what Lawton had, thank God, but he’d had his share of cases gone bad. After every one, he’d felt exactly what she was saying. He’d wanted to get right back at it. Do it right. Regain his confidence. The Bureau recruited Type A personalities. Goal oriented, driven to excel. The kind of individual for whom failure was almost a worse fate than death.

But he’d had enough trouble just getting Miriam on the case. She knew Grant Lawrence personally. Like any other law enforcement agency, the FBI had a clear rule about agents who were personally involved with a victim, witness or suspect. They were off the case, period.

He’d fought for Miriam for the same reason she was fighting for Tom Lawton. He’d mentored her. He knew her capabilities and her limitations. And he knew her well enough to know that she would not stay away from this case, regardless.

Ultimately, his argument had been simple. Special Agent Miriam Anson was a consummate professional, and if she were on his team, working the case officially, she would exercise professional judgment and restraint. If she were left to pry into the case on her own, she would have fewer inhibitions and might cause more damage. His bosses had bought that argument, with the caveat that she was to work under his personal supervision. And that she would be his responsibility.

That was good enough, then and now. Except that now she was pushing him out on a limb with Lawton. He could understand it, much as it irritated him.

“Okay,” he said, “here’s the deal. Tom works with you. No one else. Hell, I doubt there’s anyone else he trusts, anyway. And he’s all you get, for the same reason—I doubt he’d trust anyone else I put with you. He’s your responsibility, Miriam.”

She nodded. “Fair enough.”

Kevin looked at his watch. “How soon can you get him in here?”

“Five minutes. He’s downstairs in the cafeteria.”

Kevin shook his head, then laughed. “You knew what I was going to say, didn’t you?”

She didn’t join in the laughter. “You trained me, Kevin. Let’s get to work.”

Tom was the last person to enter the conference room, and he had no illusions about finding a chair. Instead, he squeezed into a space along the back wall. He caught Miriam’s eye and gave her a quick nod. He would thank her properly later. Any piece of the action right now was better than staring at walls and waiting for his next appointment with the psychologist.

“Here’s what we have so far,” Kevin Willis said, standing at the front of the room with a notepad in one hand and a remote control in the other. “At twenty-two nineteen hours last night, someone fired three shots in the lobby of the Hyatt Harborside in Tampa. Two of those shots struck Grant Lawrence. The other struck a campaign staffer named Ellen Bates. Ms. Bates was wounded in the left arm and is in stable condition after surgery.

“Senator Lawrence was not so fortunate. One bullet hit him in the chest, the other in the midtorso. He’s still in surgery. The doctors are saying fifty-fifty.”

Tom saw Miriam’s face sink at that statement, although he knew she was already aware of Grant’s condition. Karen Sweeney had called within an hour after the shooting, and Terry was already on a flight to Tampa. Still, hearing it described in the cold, clinical language of a briefing had to be hard to bear.

“Lawrence had just finished his victory speech after the Florida primary,” Kevin continued. “Apparently he’d gone out into the lobby to shake hands with staffers who couldn’t fit into the main ballroom. Powder residue on the victims and two bystanders put the shooter within three or four feet, but it was a tight crowd. So far, we haven’t found anyone who can identify the shooter or even give us a firm description.”

Tom saw heads nod around the room. It made sense. In close like that, with bodies packed in tight, a hand with a gun could easily slip beneath the arm of someone in front. Pop-pop-pop. Victim goes down. The shooter slips away in the panic. It was the nightmare scenario for protective services, worse even than a sniper. It was the reason the president never waded into a crowd.

“What happened to his security?” an agent in front asked. “Why’d they let him get into that situation?”

More nods from others who’d had the same training and followed the same line of reasoning Tom and the questioner had. It wasn’t rocket science. This was a basic breakdown in procedure.

“It was a spur-of-the-moment decision by Lawrence,” Kevin said. “He didn’t want the people in the lobby to feel left out. That fits with his profile. He’s the type who will stop and talk to people on the Capitol steps. I doubt he gave it a second thought. But his security team should have. We’ll need to talk to them, but you all know how the Secret Service is. They’re going to want to take care of their own.”

Just like the FBI, Tom thought. Or any other police agency. It was a mind-set as old as the human species. You look out for your own kind, because they look out for you. When they didn’t, it got very ugly, very fast. As he knew from personal experience.

“We did catch a break, though,” Kevin said. Fifty sets of eyes instantly became alert. “The hotel has good security, including video cameras in the parking garage and covering the sidewalk in front of the lobby. So we ought to have the shooter on tape. The guys in Tampa are trying to cross-match the news footage of the event with the video of people leaving the hotel. With any luck, that will leave us a short list of suspects. Then we’ll split them up among our teams and run them down.”

The brute force method, Tom thought. Standard Bureau procedure. It reminded him of a joke about a collection of law enforcement types looking for a beaver in a forest. The NSA put a surveillance camera in every tree. The CIA sent in an agent dressed as a beaver, who returned a week later scratched, dirty, breathless and pregnant. The L.A.P.D. sent in two officers, who returned in ten minutes with a bloodied, beaten raccoon that was ready to admit it was a beaver. As for the FBI, they rounded up every animal in the forest and held them for six months while a forensic veterinarian examined their dental impressions.

It had been the Bureau’s modus operandi since the reign of Hoover. Overwhelm the problem with manpower and science. It was effective. It was also slow. In most of the Bureau’s investigations, that wasn’t an issue. When you were going after a John Gotti or a Ted Kaczynski, whose crimes weren’t daily front-page news, you could afford to take your time and build a case brick by brick. But that wasn’t the situation here. The media, not to mention the attorney general, would be demanding daily briefings, with each one detailing new information and positive progress toward an arrest.

The brute force method was not designed to achieve that. When it was misapplied toward that end, the Bureau inevitably ended up with egg on its face. Fifteen hundred Arab-American detainees were only the most recent case in point. Tom could see the writing on the wall, and the message wasn’t promising. He began to feel sparks of anger in the pit of his stomach. By sheer force of will, he battered them down.

Willis continued the briefing, dividing the task force into teams, handing out assignments. Tom paid only cursory attention until Willis looked at Miriam.

“Miriam, you and Tom will eliminate the wacko groups. I want to say we’ve left no stone unturned. Dig around on the Net. Get a list from our domestic surveillance guys. Crazies who’ve written against Lawrence. Run their files. I’m sure you’ll find a bunch.”

“No doubt,” Miriam said. “He’s liberal, Catholic, handsome, single, a dad whose kids were kidnapped, running for president while dating a cop. Put it all together and he’s probably the darling of half the fringe organizations in the country.”

“Probably,” Kevin agreed. “And it’s probably a waste of time. But I don’t want conspiracy nuts coming along to say we didn’t look. So look.”

In short, Tom thought, he and Miriam were supposed to run down bullshit. On the case, but safely out of the way. It made sense. Miriam was too close to Grant to be in the middle of things. And Tom had no doubt where he stood in the Bureau’s hierarchy of competence.

Then Willis spoke again, and this time his eye fixed on Tom. “I want everyone in this room to remember that at this time we are acting in a support capacity to the Florida offices, which are heading the investigation. If you find anything, it goes through me to them.”

In short, no running off on your own. Tom gave Willis the nod he was looking for, but his neck felt as stiff as if it hadn’t moved in centuries.

Watermill, Long Island

“He might have been what?” The man tried to suppress his anger as he listened to the voice on the phone.

“He might have been caught on videotape,” the caller said. “Word is the hotel had good security, and the FBI’s getting the tapes.”

“And you can make sure that doesn’t happen?” the man asked, clearly expecting an affirmative answer.

“No,” the caller replied. “I can’t. They know those tapes are out there. If the tapes vanished, that would just pile more shit on the doorstep. Besides, he can be sacrificed. We knew that from the start.”

“So long as there’s no trail,” the man said.

“I can handle the trail,” the caller replied. “I have that part covered. Don’t worry.”

He hung up in disgust. What an absurd statement, after calling on his daughter’s wedding day, with two hundred guests arriving in an hour, to tell him an assassin he’d paid for might have been caught in the act on videotape, and then to say, “Don’t worry.” There was too much at stake for him not to worry.

“Daddy, are you ready?”

He turned and looked at his one and only daughter. This was the last afternoon that she would truly be his. In two hours, she would belong to another. A fine young man, of course. He wouldn’t have permitted anything less than the best for his girl. But still… The old bromide about not losing a daughter but gaining a son just didn’t work for him. Not when it came to her.

He’d held her as a baby, taught her to walk and ride a bicycle, tended skinned knees and later skinned hearts, watched her graduate from high school, then college, then law school, quietly opened doors as she’d begun her career, and all the while she had been the one pure, abiding joy of his life.

He rubbed his nose briskly and nodded. “Yes, darling. I’m ready.”

She saw his face, read his thoughts, and came to him with open arms. Their embrace was tight.

“Oh, Daddy. I will always love you first.”

“I know, precious. I know.”

If only it were true. If only anything were true.

“Lovely ceremony, Edward,” Harrison Rice said, extending a hand. “Your daughter is a stunning bride.”

“Thank you, Senator. I don’t quite know how to feel about it, but…thank you.”

Rice held on to his friend’s hand for an extra moment while flashbulbs popped in the fading evening light. Some were wedding photographers. Others were society press on hand to cover “the wedding of the season.” The rest, and that was most of them, were covering Rice’s campaign…again. Or still, depending on one’s perspective. He pressed his face close to his friend’s ear and whispered, “I know exactly what you mean there.”

Edward Morgan met his eyes for a moment and nodded. “Yeah, I guess you would.”

For Rice, the past forty-eight hours had been an emotional whirlwind. It had begun with the assassination in Guatemala and its aftermath, as news camera crews chased him across Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas to secure him as a guest on one talk show after another. He’d had to cancel a scheduled campaign appearance, although his staff had assured him that he would get far more mileage out of the TV time.

He supposed they were right. The speech probably wouldn’t have made enough of a difference, even if he himself would have found it more reassuring. He always preferred a live audience to the blank eye of a camera. But he’d had too high a mountain to climb yesterday. Lawrence had been a lock in his home state of Florida. Rice had known he would have to win Texas and split the other two Southern states to have a chance. He hadn’t. Grant won decisively in Texas, Louisiana and Florida, easily giving him enough delegates to lock up the nomination.

And Rice’s campaign had been over. For about an hour.

Unlike most Americans, Rice had not been watching as Grant Lawrence was shot. He’d been sitting with his wife, taking a few minutes of silent consolation, away from the press and the cameras and his staff and even his friends. Some moments should be private, and that had been just such a moment. Until a staffer began pounding on his door, shouting, “Someone shot Lawrence!”

Rice had emerged in time to see the first of the now endless reruns of the attack. He’d had to turn away. While they had been rivals in this campaign, he and Grant had been Senate colleagues for years. They had been guests in each other’s homes on numerous occasions. Rice had never felt as if he was on Grant’s short list of true confidantes, but he’d liked and respected him. He’d watched Lawrence cope with the death of his wife, and, years later, the brutal murders of his lifelong nanny and a former girlfriend that culminated in the kidnapping of his children. The man had endured enough. And now this…

Now Rice was expected to carry the Democratic banner, the Grant Lawrence banner. His campaign had gone from dead to full steam ahead in the few seconds it had taken for a would-be assassin to squeeze the trigger of a handgun. Rice couldn’t help feeling sick about it, even as the object of his lifelong ambition loomed nearer than ever.

“You look like you need to talk,” Edward said, too quietly for anyone else to hear.

Rice realized his thoughts must have been showing on his face, a trait he’d picked up from his mother, a former stage actress in Birmingham. Edward had, intentionally or not, reminded him that appearances are everything in the world of presidential politics.

Rice nodded. “It’d be nice to catch up.”

“After the reception,” Edward said. “We’ll go sit in the den, drink a couple of beers and pretend we’re back in college.”

It was, Rice thought, the nicest invitation his old friend could possibly have made. It was certainly better than brooding about the rest of his life.

4

Washington, D.C.

“Coffee?” Tom asked, holding out a foam cup.

Miriam looked up and smiled. “You read my mind.” She took a sip and pushed a stack of papers away. “What a waste of time.”

Tom sat and sipped his coffee. It was Bureau issue: too strong, too bitter. If he let himself think about such things, it was probably a subtle tribute to the Bureau’s founder and the man for whom this building was named. John Edgar Hoover had also been too strong, too bitter. And his ghost still walked these halls.

“What did you expect?” Tom asked. “There was no way Kevin could put us in the middle of this. We’re damaged goods. So we get to waste time while the rest of them do the real work.” He eyed the stacks of files with distaste. “Prove there was no conspiracy to assassinate Lawrence. Helluva job, proving a negative. And we get it because I freaked in L.A.”

“And because I know Grant personally,” Miriam reminded him. “It’s not that bad. Face it, Tom, like it or not, somebody’s got to do it or we’ll be hearing conspiracy theories for the next fifty years. It’s just…”

“What?” Tom asked.

He’d spent enough time with her to recognize the subtle cues that flickered through her eyes. She wasn’t thinking about the case.

“Terry called while you were out,” she said. “Grant is out of surgery, but it’s not promising. The bullet in his chest took a lung. The other one perforated his liver and spleen. He still hasn’t regained consciousness. They don’t know if he ever will. Karen’s a wreck, and apparently there’s a big debate about whether she should even be allowed in to see him. Dammit, Tom, you’d think in the twenty-first century it would be okay for a president’s wife to have a job! You’d think it would be okay for Grant and Karen to get engaged, get married.”

Tom nodded quietly. He didn’t bother to remind her that Karen would be seriously hampered as a detective with a couple of Secret Service agents always at her side. Besides, Miriam Anson didn’t open up often. On the few occasions when she had, he’d quickly decided the best course of action was to simply sit and listen, offering the occasional question more as a way of letting her know it was okay to continue than because he needed more information. It was a technique he’d learned while trying to help his father work through the death of Tom’s mother, and again two years later, when the last shreds of his father’s confidence had turned to dust during the trial. Now Tom often used the same technique in his work.

“Grant’s daughters are a mess, of course,” Miriam continued. “Karen’s doing her best to comfort them. I think about what I’d be like if it were Terry. They say helplessness is the most depressing thing in the world.”

“It is,” Tom said.

He knew from experience. He’d never met Karen Sweeney, but simply knowing she was a career homicide cop told him a lot about her. She would want to fix things. To do something…anything. To help the doctors. To help the Tampa cops and the Bureau. Something to make it better. But for now, all she could do was to sit in the hospital with Grant’s daughters. And pray. And wait. Like Tom and his father had done in those last days. Watching his mother fade away. Like Tom had done as his father slipped into a dark and dangerous obsession.

For a moment Miriam’s eyes shimmered. Then they hardened. “Damn it. Where is it writ large on the cosmos that the world has to be such an ugly place?”

It was a question cops had to ask themselves far too often. A question Tom had asked countless times over the past three years and almost nonstop for the past month. A question for which there was no answer.

“Like this garbage,” Miriam continued, holding up one of the files on her desk. “Why on earth would people believe this stuff? Commit themselves to this kind of rubbish?”

“Hey,” he said, “why would people commit themselves to the kind of shit we do? Just because we’re on the right side doesn’t mean we’re always doing the right thing.”

The anger in his question silenced her. For an instant, regret pierced his fury. “Miriam, I’m sorry. I’m just… I’ll get over it, all right?”

Miriam looked at him; then a small chuckle escaped her. “Miracles happen.”

“Right. Now, let’s get on with this chickenshit. Who knows? Maybe for once there really is a conspiracy.”

“Wouldn’t that be something?” Miriam said, trying to shift her mood and possibly his.

“This whole conspiracy thing…” Tom shook his head. “I know they happen. I mean, we’ve got a stack of files to choke a horse here, and these are just the incompetent idiots we’ve managed to get wind of. People conspire all the time in business. Take Enron as an example. But to go after a politician…that’s a different can of worms.”

Tom leaned over the desk and caught her gaze, holding it tight. “If there’s a conspiracy to kill a major contender for the presidency, what have you got?”

She hesitated, not quite sure where he was heading.

“You’ve got a coup,” he said. “You’ve just influenced the entire outcome of the election. You’ve made sure that only people you can live with are running for the office.”

Miriam nodded, still not sure where he intended to go with this.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” he said. “Look at the Kennedy hit.”

“Oh, damn, Tom. You can’t…”

He shrugged. “I can. I’m probably one of the few still-living people in the world who has read the entire Warren Report. It’s suspicious as hell. Anyway, my point is…if there was a conspiracy, we’ll find it.” He waved at the pile of files. “I’ll start here. You take those.”

“Just remember,” she said, “if you crawl into rabbit holes, you’re crawling through rabbit dung.”

Tom nodded and flipped open a file as she left the office. The Bureau had files on thousands of fringe groups. Radical environmentalists. White supremacists. Terrorist cells. Anarchists, even today. Drug and crime cartels.

When Hoover had interviewed for the top spot in the unnamed investigative branch of the Justice Department, he had promised his boss, Attorney General and later Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Stone, that the agency would be divorced from politics. It would investigate crimes and not political opinions. That was what Stone had wanted to hear, and Hoover had been given the job.

In fact, Hoover had headed the General Intelligence Division in 1920 under Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, and Hoover’s index card files had provided the information for the infamous Palmer Raids of 1920. In those raids, the Justice Department picked up thousands of alleged alien radicals across the country. Most were in fact citizens. Fewer than six hundred were ultimately deported.

Four years later, despite his words to Harlan Stone, Hoover had wasted no time in setting his agents to work developing files on suspected communists, labor leaders, and other groups and individuals whom he deemed to be anti-American.

That practice had swelled into the COINTELPRO excesses of the 1950s and 60s, until Congress and an irate public finally called for an end to domestic espionage. There were some who said the lack of such domestic espionage had enabled Al Qaeda terrorists to escape notice and kill three thousand Americans.

Tom knew better. The Bureau still kept tabs on violent organizations and suspicious resident aliens. As a congressional inquiry had shown, there had been enough information floating among the various agencies to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Had that information been collated and presented in a single briefing, the plot and the plotters would have been obvious. It had not been a failure of data collection but rather a failure of data management. The pieces of the puzzle had been spread across too many desks in too many agencies.