Baker glanced at Kennedy. “This is where it gets interesting, and I apologize in advance, but you need to see this.”

He laid down the next photo. Jillian Rautbort was now standing with her dress around her waist; her tanned and perfectly sized breasts exposed. Baker put the next photo down. Now Jillian and the man were kissing. The photo after that captured Jillian on her knees, her face buried in the mystery man’s groin. Baker began lying the photos down like a blackjack dealer would cards. They showed Rautbort and her lover in an escalation of sexual acts culminating with him on his back on a lounge chair and her completely naked on top of him.

Baker placed the empty envelope on the table next to the photos and said, “That’s pretty much it.”

“Are you sure,” asked Kennedy, “that the woman in these photos is Jillian Rautbort?”

“Yes.”

“When were they taken, and how the hell did you get your hands on them?” McMahon asked.

“I think they were taken over Labor Day at the Rautbort estate in Palm Beach, and no, I didn’t hire someone to do this.”

“Then how in the hell did you get your hands on them?”

“I was contacted by the man who took them,” replied Baker.

McMahon scoffed. “So you didn’t hire him, but in the end you paid him.”

“There is a distinction, Agent McMahon. I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m an angel. Politics is a rough business. Since you were willing to sign my confidentiality agreement, I’ll give you the straight facts. I paid for these photos. I paid a lot of money for these photos, and it was all legal. My only regret now is that I didn’t destroy them the moment I received them.”

“Why is that?” asked Kennedy.

“Because I allowed my ego to get in the way, and in the end it cost my candidate the White House.”

“How could these photos have cost your candidate the White House?” asked a skeptical McMahon.

“There are very few people in the world who I truly despise. Mark Ross and Stu Garret are two of them.”

Kennedy and McMahon shared a look, and McMahon said, “You’ll get no argument from us.”

“Well, with a month to go in the race, my guys had an eight-point lead, which, if you know how polls are conducted-who answers their phone, who doesn’t, who says they vote, and who actually votes, and all these national polls have a built-in bias for the Democrats-with four weeks to go is huge, especially if you’re on the Republican ticket. I never really wanted to buy these photos, and I certainly never wanted to use them. At least, not in terms of releasing them to the press.”

“Then why did you buy them?” asked McMahon.

“To take them out of play,” Kennedy answered.

“That’s right. Elections are about controlling as many factors as possible, and I’ll be damned if I was going to allow these things to float around and do God only knows what. The conventional wisdom would be that they would hurt the Alexander camp, but one never knows for sure. The smart thing is to leave nothing to chance. We were flush with cash, so I paid the guy.”

“That was the only reason why you bought them?” Kennedy asked in a slightly skeptical tone.

Baker grinned. “There was one other small reason.” He shifted in his chair and crossed his right leg over his left. “I wanted to make Garret and Ross sweat.”

“You sent them these?” McMahon asked with his mouth agape.

“Only a few. I had them personally delivered to Garret’s hotel room during a campaign stop in Dallas.”

“Did he know you sent them?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“He may have guessed, but I made sure the delivery couldn’t be traced back to me. I did, however, send a message along.”

“What kind of message?”

“I only sent three photos. I wrote one word with a black Sharpie on each photo.”

“What word?”

“Three words. You’ll never win.”

“You and Garret have a history?” asked Kennedy.

“You could say that. We’ve been on the opposite sides of some pretty big battles.”

“And let me guess,” said McMahon, “one of your favorite sayings with him was, You’ll never win.”

“Actually, he was the one who was fond of the saying.”

“So you thought you’d rub his nose in it.”

Baker nodded. “And if I’d just left it alone, I’d be the one getting ready for an inauguration, and they,” Baker pointed at the photos on the table, “would still be alive.”

“What do you mean, they?” asked McMahon.

“Jillian and the man she had the rendezvous with.”

McMahon picked up one of the photos and pointed to the person underneath Jillian Rautbort. “This man is dead?”

“That man is Special Agent Matt Cash of the United States Secret Service.”

McMahon couldn’t sit any longer. He’d been down this road before, just never on such a high-profile case. Instinctively, it was a nightmare. Law enforcement was in great part about maintaining order in society. There were rules, and they needed to be enforced. The people who enforced them tended to be very organized individuals who approached their jobs in a methodical manner. Never more so than when they were investigating a crime. And with a sensational crime such as this one, you investigated the case with one eye on the crime, and one eye on the eventual prosecution of the perpetrators. Usually prosecutors were brought in later, but on this one they’d been looking over his shoulder every step of the way.

This steaming pile of crap that this Republican shark had just dropped in his lap was now forcing him to rethink all of the suppositions and evidence that he and hundreds of agents had spent months running down and collecting. He wanted to dismiss it as inconsequential bullshit. Tell him to take his envelope and his confidentiality agreement and take a flying leap off a cliff. But, as much as he hated to admit it, his gut told him that there was something here.

McMahon wished Kennedy would break the ice and speak, but she wasn’t going to. That wasn’t her style. She was too smart. For all he knew, this was a setup. She could have known about this for weeks. McMahon didn’t like any of this. He stopped his pacing and looked down at Kennedy.

“How long have you known about this?”

She looked at her watch. “For about six minutes.”

McMahon studied her placid face and fought to conceal his own rage. He loved Kennedy and he trusted her, but at the end of the day she was still a spy. A professional perpetrator of deceit and lies. As much as he wanted to believe her, he could never really be sure. He turned his attention back to Baker.

“Why should I believe any of this, and why in the hell did you wait two months to tell anybody about this?”

“I’m no saint, Agent McMahon. I’m not afraid to bend the rules here and there. Especially when it comes to stuff like these moronic campaign finance laws, but this…” Baker gestured to the photos. “If someone on the other side decided to make this go away and do it in such a way as to make it advantageous to their cause…then they stepped way over the line.”

“That’s a big if, and you still didn’t answer my question. Why did you wait until now? Why didn’t you come forward the day after the explosion?”

“Are you kidding me? The opposing candidate’s wife gets incinerated by a car bomb, and you think I should have gone public with a bunch of pornographic photos of her screwing her bodyguard, who, by the way, also got killed in the explosion? I would have been branded the biggest bastard in the history of politics.”

“I didn’t say go public. Why didn’t you bring it to me?”

Baker stood and waved his hand in frustration at McMahon. “You’re where I was in the weeks after the attack, except I still had a campaign to manage. A campaign that we almost won, which is amazing, when you think about it.” He grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair. “I didn’t want to believe any of this. Things were happening so fast those final two weeks. There were the funerals, and then Alexander decided to go on with the debates, after we’d been informed that he was pulling out. We were in a street fight with our hands cuffed behind our backs. We couldn’t fight back. We had to just sit there and take it.”