“What can he do?”

“He helped you with your publishing contract. He’s a lawyer, a smart man. Maybe he can give you some-”

“Geoff?” Marienthal said into the phone. “It’s Rich.”

Lowe took the call at Senator Widmer’s desk in his office suite in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, at First and C Streets.

He’d just come from a meeting convened by the crotchety senior senator from Alaska, a white-haired stentorian orator who’d recently celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday. Despite his advanced age, Widmer never failed to impress colleagues and staff with his seemingly boundless energy. A widower for many years, he’d made the Senate his life, his only life. The few friends who had had the privilege of visiting him at his Foggy Bottom home couldn’t help but come away surprised at its spartan furnishings and decor. It wasn’t a matter of money, they knew. Senator Karl Widmer was a wealthy man. But his lifestyle, which included many nights sleeping in his office and an abhorrence of fancy restaurants, parties, and expensive clothing, indicated something quite different. “Cheap” is what many on the Hill said behind his back. “Mean-spirited,” others said among themselves, careful to not trigger the legendary temper in the halls and on the floor of the United States Senate, one that left colleagues and staffers quaking.

Despite these less than sanguine personal traits, Widmer was respected and even well liked by many on the Hill. Of course, sharing his steadfast conservative views went a long way to being on his good side. He was a rock-ribbed old-line right-wing Republican who wore his disdain for liberals and their views on his sleeve. The Democratic administration now occupying the White House, led by President Adam Parmele, represented everything the senator stood against. His determination that Parmele not see a second term was pervasive, some said pathologically obsessive.

The meeting from which Geoff Lowe had just emerged lasted longer than had been allotted for in the daily schedule. Widmer’s subcommittee on intelligence had been preparing for weeks to hold a hearing on the current readiness of the Central Intelligence Agency to deal with future terrorist threats. The subcommittee’s Democratic ranking minority member and some of her Democratic colleagues had recently waged a public fight with the chairman over the choice of witnesses to appear. The ironfisted Widmer, whose epitaph would never include credit for being a great conciliator, held fast to his rule that the Republican majority would be the sole arbiter of who would be called to appear before the committee.

“A dictatorial tactic,” the ranking Democrat said on a meet-the-media Sunday morning TV news show. “Chairman Widmer seems to have forgotten that we function in a democracy.”

Widmer, who seldom spoke with reporters, particularly television reporters, issued a written statement through his press secretary: “The Democrats would like to whitewash the inadequacies of the CIA. The truth is, that agency has been weakened by the Democratic administration of President Parmele and his unwillingness to stand up for a strong and effective intelligence effort, even though this nation is faced with continuing and evolving terrorist activities against its citizens. The people my Democratic counterparts on the committee want to parade before us represent nothing other than business as usual, and I will not waste the committee’s time, nor that of the American people, with such a transparent ploy.”

And so the war of words went.

Widmer’s mood was particularly foul this day, and few escaped his wrath during the meeting, with Lowe receiving his share of the senator’s anger. When he was finished berating his staff for failing to think things through, Widmer abruptly adjourned the meeting and announced he was going home for the day. That left Lowe to do what he often did in his boss’s absence, abandon his own office to sit at the senator’s desk in his spacious suite. It was filled with mementos of a long career, dozens of photographs of political bigwigs inscribed to him, his arm about the shoulders of past presidents, plaques and framed citations extolling his contributions to America, family pictures, a glass-front cabinet filled with antique handguns, and other spoils of having been a public figure for so long.

“Did I hear?” Lowe said into his cell phone in answer to Rich Marienthal’s first question. “Did I hear?” he repeated, his voice louder and angrier. “Yeah, Rich, I heard. Where the hell were you?”

“We got tied up in traffic,” Marienthal replied. “There was an accident on the Lee Highway and-”

“I don’t give a goddamn about some fender bender, Rich. Do you realize what a spot this puts me in?”

Marienthal started to say something, but Lowe cut him off.

“Do you realize what a spot it puts the senator in, Rich? Do you realize that the senator doesn’t care why Russo was killed or why he’s not here to testify before the committee? Christ, I just came from a meeting with Widmer. For starters, he climbed all over me, reamed me out, nailed me to a cross and left me to bleed to death.”

Ellen Kelly came to the doorway to Widmer’s office, but Lowe brusquely waved her away.

“Look, Rich, I didn’t go along with your goddamn idea to see it get screwed up at the last minute.”

Had Lowe been talking with Marienthal face-to-face, he would have seen a quizzical expression cross the writer’s countenance. Marienthal didn’t say what he was thinking, that the idea had come from Lowe after he’d heard about the book Marienthal was in the process of writing. But maybe that wasn’t entirely accurate. The scenario that had unrolled just seemed to develop as they talked, at first an almost whimsical scheme that soon developed into something much more serious and complex. Besides, what did it matter who’d come up with it first? What did matter was what to do now that the highlight of the plan had so dramatically and definitely unraveled.

Lowe drew deep breaths to calm himself. He said, “Look, Rich, there may be a way to salvage this. I told the senator I’d come up with something by the morning. Where are you now?”

“Home.”

“Meet me in an hour. Downstairs at Kinkead’s.”

Public life is a situation of power and energy. He trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he who goes over to the enemy.”

Chet Fletcher, political adviser to President Adam Parmele, liked to quote Edmund Burke’s take on power, loyalty, duty, and their uses. He was fond of such sayings and seemed always to have a dozen of them ready to be dropped into conversation.

Fletcher watched the news on a small, cable-connected TV set while eating breakfast in the kitchen of his Rosslyn, Virginia, home. He’d gotten up at five, his usual hour, and went through what seemed a daily morning routine. “You really should exercise,” he told his puffy, blotchy face in the bathroom mirror. A room off the master bedroom held a representative assortment of exercise equipment, which his wife, Gail, used with some regularity. But while Fletcher thought a great deal about exercising, he never seemed to get around to it, as evidenced by his soft girth and weary legs when climbing stairs.

Silently, he rationalized once more on not living an active physical life. He was, after all, an intellectual, with a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. He’d played some tennis as an undergraduate but wasn’t very good at it, and managed to avoid campus softball and volleyball games by proving those few times he did participate that he was even worse at those sports. No one fought to have him on their team.