When Kevin was twenty-two and just out of college, Daniel had come home early one afternoon after an extended sales trip to find his beautiful wife Janine in bed with his best friend and partner Fred Bronin.

Being a good ol' boy, Daniel's reaction perhaps should have been to take up the nearest gun and shoot them both, but he fooled them. Kevin's father had always had a streak of insecurity, a tendency to melancholy, and though he had raised a good family (two boys and a girl) and become, after a fashion, successful, he never quite believed in the worth of anything he accomplished, that it had any real meaning. And the double betrayal of a wife and best friend rocked him – so he turned the gun on himself instead.

In the aftermath, the Sheas' world and everything in it fell apart. Janine and Fred Bronin did not get married and live happily ever after. They had a bitter legal and personal battle over Flexitech, which Fred eventually lost because he had a stroke in the middle of it, leaving Janine with de facto ownership of the company. She, having never spent a moment of her life on business, subsequently orchestrated the company into bankruptcy in just under two years.

Meanwhile, Kevin Shea and his younger brother Joey had both appalled their Vietnam-era mother, as they had intended, by enlisting in the army. During their three-year hitch the boys had been trained in survival, weapons, strategy, then sent separately to Desert Storm. Kevin had done a lot of marching and sweating but saw no action. His brother Joey was inside the one bunker that had been destroyed by an Iraqi Scud missile – and had been killed. Kevin's mother and little sister Patsy blamed Kevin for talking Joey into enlisting in the army in the first place, and they had made it clear he was unwelcome in Texas forever, not that it had been his intention to go back there anyway.

Kevin Shea was completely alone. Sometimes he even felt he deserved to be.

Kevin had really made only one connection since he had gotten out of the army and decided to settle in San Francisco and go to graduate school on his GI Bill. There was an older guy – maybe late forties – named Wes Farrell, who was in his program at SFSU. Farrell and Kevin had done some drinking together, had a few semi-serious talks about life. Farrell had been a lawyer, raised his own family, then something had happened – Kevin didn't know what exactly – and he had quit. He didn't believe in the law anymore. Or justice. Or in most people much either.

They had both gravitated to studying history. Somehow it was more acceptable that all they were studying was in the past and so, presumably, couldn't effect anybody ever again.

They were, in their fashion, a good team. They also both liked to drink, which tended to help.

Shea was at a public phone in the Julius Hahn Playground at the southern edge of the Presidio. The smell of smoke was everywhere now in the heated air, even here in the shade of the cypresses, and he could hear sirens and see spires of smoke rising to his left in what he presumed was the Fillmore District and to his right, over the big hill, around what must be Clement.

'Wes? Kevin.' He didn't know what he was expecting – that Wes would hang up, yell at him, be astounded at the call? Something.

'Hey, Kev. What's happening?'

Kevin waited a long moment. Surely Wes knew all about his problem, about the Arthur Wade tragedy, what was going on in the city – he must be pulling Kevin's leg. 'So what's up?' he asked. 'Can you believe this heat?'

Then again, maybe not.

The mayor saw to it that Loretta Wager got a temporary office – after all, she was a U.S. senator – downtown at City Hall. It was on the second floor, up from the rotunda, down an echoing corridor, behind an anonymous door. And that suited her fine.

Her feet were sore. For some reason, her feet always hurt after plane flights. After she became president, she'd modify something on Air Force One that would…

Smiling, she settled for rubbing her bare feet. Her shoes were off under the desk. She leaned back in her chair, checked her watch. Twelve-fifteen. Elaine should be here any time.

She wasn't sure how she felt about the level of Elaine's ' involvement. On the one hand, it was good to be in the middle of things, in the loop, with a hand in the outcome. Elaine, thanks to Chris Locke, had already drawn the short straw – she was, single-handedly it seemed, handling the prosecution of Kevin Shea. And seemed to her mother to be doing a good job of it. The downside was that Elaine would shoulder a lion's share of the blame if anything went wrong. And this early in her career, that could hurt her. But, Loretta thought, that was the price of playing with the big boys.

Loretta had left a message at Elaine's as she was leaving Washington last night, and her daughter had called back within two hours, reaching her on the Airfone, filling her in on the status of events so that by the time Loretta had landed, she'd not only grasped those events but had had time to put the right spin on them in front of the media who had gathered to meet her at the airport.

Kevin Shea, she said, was the symbol of what was wrong, not only here in San Francisco but across America. The fact that he had not yet been apprehended, arrested, even located, was proof that the white man's system wasn't working, didn't work for the black man.

Her plan was simple: the crisis had come at a moment when she could use it to her political advantage. If she could now just keep the focus on apprehending Shea, Loretta might in fact have a forum that would take her a large forward step toward the Oval Office. And no smiles this time.

It really wasn't out of the question. She was the right age – only forty-seven and a young-looking one at that. There wasn't much doubt in her mind that within sixteen years there would be a woman candidate. There would also, she felt, be a black candidate. And if they were one and the same person…

Now, nearing the end of her first term as senator, she had an interesting and, she thought, ironic problem to solve, and her instinct had told her, as soon as it had arisen, that this crisis, if properly handled, could be the solution. For Loretta Wager had spent the better part of the past six years learning the historic lesson of survival in American politics – compromise. If you wanted to get ahead, especially in the white men's club that was the Senate, you had to move within an extremely narrow band of exposure.

Loretta had been good at that, had always been skilled with people. Unfortunately, the pre-campaign polls she'd conducted were beginning to confirm what she had already begun to suspect – while she'd retained and even added to her fund-raising rolls, her voting record, her perceived moderation had gone a long way toward alienating her so-called 'natural' constituency of African-Americans, and this turnaround had to be corrected or it could, and quite probably would, cost her everything she'd worked for up to now.

In her last campaign she had won eighty-seven percent of the African-American vote. Now the polls were giving her thirty-five to forty-five percent. Even if she picked up another one or two percent of the white vote she wouldn't win with those black numbers. She needed the perception that she'd reconnected with her community.

And Kevin Shea was the way to do it.

'Where's the staff?'

Her daughter smiled tentatively, closing the door behind her, putting down a brown paper bag. Elaine looked exhausted, her sculpted, angular face now blotched with worry, lack of sleep, and something else that Loretta didn't recognize.

But Loretta put her questions on hold and got up and came around the desk barefoot, her arms outstretched, letting herself be enfolded in her daughter's embrace. Elaine was several inches taller than her mother and held her tightly for a long moment.