The former president he had served was now in the grave; dead, he became far more popular than when he was breathing. An average president on his best day, compared with the sorry losers who followed in his stead, he had been lionized as one of the greats, an afterglow that trickled down to his retainers and aides.

They were the sage architects, the wise elder statesmen of an administration notable for one unforgettable achievement: it produced no great disasters. Two full terms. Eight years without a single market meltdown, no big wars, and, in a modern record, slightly less than half his cabinet ended up under indictment or in prison.

No successive administration had even come close.

Mid-seventies, craggy-faced, tall, thick white hair, portly, but not too much, Daniel Bellweather had weathered nicely into the picture of an eminent Washington mandarin. For eight years before Walters, he had been the CEO. He steered the ship and attended to the details. He roared into the office screaming at six every morning and didn’t mellow out until six in the evening. He stoked the ranks with as much greed, fear, and insecurity as he could manage, and kept the immense profits flowing.

His tantrums were legendary. Firm lore had it that after one of Bellweather’s calmer tongue-lashings, a senior VP fled down to the parking lot, withdrew a pistol from the glove compartment, and reupholstered the interior of his Mercedes with his brains.

That myth was a wild fabrication. The man had flung himself from an upper-floor window and painted the car’s exterior.

But after eight years at the helm, eight years of steadily increasing profits, and after getting richer than he ever believed possible, Bellweather suffered his first stroke. A mild one. Little more than a bad headache, really; his first scary glimpse, however, that all good things come to an end. In shock, he stepped back from the unrelenting pressure and retreated into the fringe role of director.

Time to kick back and relax, he told himself; enjoy the fruits of thirty years of juking and jiving around Washington, of draining the swamp of as much cash as he could stuff into his pockets. It had been a terrific run; flee now, enjoy the good life, go on an epic spending spree, escape before it killed him.

A year rolling through the coastal enclaves of enormous wealth followed. Then six months bouncing around the Caribbean on his mammoth yacht-a full year and a half of lovely tranquillity, eighteen months removed from the mad hustle-bustle of D.C.-before he decided he had made a horrible mistake. He became bored and miserable. Always a pathetic golfer, if anything, he became more terrible.

And hanging around with a bunch of rich has-beens only reminded him of his own sorry diminished status. The perks, the sense of self-importance, and the action were calling him back. Plus, with all that time together, his rather young third wife suddenly discovered what her predecessors had learned: she loathed him. She took to sleeping in another bedroom, which was fine by him because the sex had turned dull and he was tired of her snoring anyway.

Also he learned about the yardman, Juan, a handsome young Latin hunk who trimmed a little more than the hedges.

Bellweather promptly sold the yacht, fired the gardener, dumped the wife, and had himself installed as managing director, a vague title that required very little work, yet gave him carte blanche to nose into any nook or cranny that interested him. The position of institutional magpie suited his tastes immensely, the exquisite privilege of looking over his successor’s shoulder and second-guessing him at every turn.

“Think it’s real?” Walters asked, sounding deeply depressed.

“Maybe. Who knows?”

“Good question. Who knows?”

“Well, Wiley-I guess he knows.”

“Yeah, and he didn’t sound like a guy who’s shooting blanks.”

“The Holy Grail project,” Bellweather repeated, letting the sound roll off his tongue. “If Wiley’s even half on the mark, that’s exactly what this polymer is. Do you know how much the military would pay for this miracle coating?”

Walters rolled forward in his chair and pinched his eyebrows together. He had a pretty good idea, and that depressed him all the more. “Who’s this company he’s talking about?”

“Could be anybody, really. He was very cagey.”

They had both listened to the tape, three times, replaying certain key sections until they thought they’d be sick; Wiley had never once slipped. Not once, not a clue, not a breadcrumb. Walters quickly summed up the little they knew: “The CEO of this mysterious company is a chemical engineer. Two years ago, his firm pushed sales of about four hundred million. It’s a penny stock.” He rubbed his shiny forehead in frustration and said, “Any of ten thousand companies fit that bill, Dan. Could be Hostess Twinkies, for all we know.”

“Who do you think he’s meeting with now?” Bellweather asked after a long moment of staring at the walls.

“No idea. But they probably look a lot like us. He mentioned New York and Pennsylvania. Could be corporate, say, GE or United Technologies. I hope it’s not another big takeover outfit.”

The names of a dozen fierce competitors rattled through their brains and for a long ugly moment they shared the same depressing thought. In the small, intensely competitive world of big-league equity firms, word would spread like a flash fire that CG had let the biggest catch of the year slip out of its grasp. Worse, CG, for a variety of reasons, specialized in defense work. It dabbled in countless other areas, diversifying to protect itself against the eventuality of an outbreak of world peace, unwelcome and unlikely as that might be. War, however, was its mainstay. Gouging a large chunk of defense pork remained its bread and butter.

Oh yes, the story of how CG clumsily let Wiley and the most remarkable defense product of the decade walk out the door would roar around town.

It would be more than Walters could bear. He could almost hear the snickers from his buddies at the Congressional Club. Could almost picture the insufferable smirks. “Yo, Mitch, what does fifteen billion slamming the door sound like?”-he could make up the sorry insults himself. Maybe he’d give up golf for a month or two.

Actually, a decade or two might be more like it, he sadly admitted to himself.

“We need to find our boy Jack,” Bellweather announced very firmly, an idea that got a quick nod from Walters. “Tonight. Before he has time to settle on somebody else.”

“He’s going to make us eat dirt,” Walters prophesied with a mournful scowl.

“We deserve it. Let him rub it in till he gets tired of it. Who do you want to handle it?”

“Keep it low-key, for now. He’s got us on the ropes and he knows it. But we can’t afford to cede leverage.” Walters folded his arms, recovered his composure, and calmly said, “Bill Feist. He has a real gift for this sort of thing.”

“Yep, a born ass-kisser. Send him up on the jet. Not the small one, the big one. Tell him to forget the normal wine-and-dine, and forget the half-measured approach. Think fifteen billion dollars.”

“Bill’s good at that, as you know.”

“This time, it’s worth every penny.” Bellweather pushed off from the wall and over his shoulder said, “And find out whatever we can about this Jack Wiley.”

Locating Jack turned out to be loaded with more complications than anybody expected. This task was handled by a private security firm located in Crystal City, a midsize, discreet outfit loaded with washed-up former Feds and spooks who often did work for CG.

TFAC, it was called, a cluster of initials that stood for absolutely nothing but seemed to have a nice ring to it. TFAC was among a growing number of private outfits in D.C., fueled by the explosion of clandestine services and operations after 9/11 that slid easily in the shadows between government and private-sector work. The Capitol Group was their second largest client, right behind Uncle Sam. The U.S. government could wait; the snoops dropped everything and promised instant results.