Balance of Power

    Lara knelt in front of Marie. 'I'm like Kerry,' she told her niece. 'I absolutely demand that you come back.'

    Marie looked at her solemnly, then gave her mother a tentative glance. 'Do you think we can bring Daddy?' she asked Lara, then looked hastily away. 'If he's good to Mommy, I mean. I don't want him to feel bad.'

    Lara and Joan shared a look of surprise; with a child's sensitivity to forbidden subjects, Marie had not mentioned her father since arriving. And yet, Lara knew, a child's desire for the archetypal family, a mother and father who loved her and each other, was profound, and the slow death of such a dream created damage of its own. At six, Marie still nurtured the dream, an image of family where her father did not feel the pain she felt. Kneeling, Joan put her arms around her daughter. 'We'll see,' she told Marie. 'I want Daddy to feel better, too.'

    Lara saw the ambiguity of Joan's answer reflected in the child's eyes. But there was little else to say. And so she kissed Marie's forehead and then, standing, hugged her sister. 'I'm sorry,' Lara told her. 'Sometimes I'm a hard sister, I know. But I love you very much.'

    Joan looked at her steadily. 'So do I,' she answered, and kissed Lara on the cheek. Suddenly, Lara recalled them sleeping together as children, heads beneath the sheets, whispering so their mother would not hear, innocent of all that would come. Silent, she held her sister close.

    But it was nearly time for them to go. Turning to Mary, Lara said, 'I meant that bouquet for you.'

    Mary flashed an ironic smile. 'You can't manage everything, sis. But Marie's promised I can be her Maid of Honor.'

    Lara kissed her mother last. 'Go,' Inez said firmly. 'You'll be late for your own honeymoon.' But she fought the tears in her eyes.

    Lara smiled at this. 'I won't,' she promised. 'You have no idea what a good wife I'm about to be.'

    In spite of her emotions, this elicited from Inez a look of wry humor. 'Oh, I believe you, Lara. You've never failed at anything you wanted.'

    Tentative, a policeman approached, waiting until Lara acknowledged him with a look. 'Ready, Mrs. Kilcannon? We should get your family on the plane.'

    Lara glanced at her mother. 'We're ready,' she affirmed. And then her family was off, Inez turning to wave for a final time.

    Lara watched them go; her sisters, whom she loved despite all of their differences; the child who would be the first of the next generation of Costello women; the mother who still cared for them all. And then she turned, escorted by two Secret Service agents, and hurried off to continue her life with Kerry Kilcannon.

* * *

    Four hours later, a little before five, Lara and Kerry walked the beach on Dogfish Bar, trailed at a distance by a skeleton crew of reporters and photographers.

    'A honeymoon,' Kerry said dryly, 'unlike most others.'

    In truth, Lara knew, it was a bastard compromise—the product of a four-sided dogfight between the First Couple, who wanted a measure of privacy; Peter Lake, who wanted to keep them safe; the media, who wanted images of the Kilcannons for their covers, front pages, and newscasts; and Kerry's political advisors, who considered the honeymoon spun gold, its choreographed 'private moments' an invaluable piece of political property. The result was a limited schedule of photo opportunities, interspersed with much longer periods of media banishment, wherein the press scraped for news where there was none. This process had reached a premature apotheosis when CNN had asked Kit Pace for the First Couple's reading list. ' 'Reading list,' ' Kit had echoed, barely suppressing laughter. 'Is that a serious question?'

    'What are we reading?' Lara asked now.

    Kerry took her hand. 'I told Kit to say the Kama Sutra,' he

answered. 'In all sixteen editions.' Nodding toward the cameras, he added, 'It helps to have a sense of the absurd.'

    It did. But Lara knew all too well the dark side of the press pool watching every move. When Lara had covered Kerry's campaign in California, her peers had openly called it 'the death watch'—even on a slow day there lurked, beneath the surface, the prospect that another madman would make history as one had done with Kerry's brother. And it was against this threat that Peter Lake had arrayed a security presence far more elaborate than the press would ever know.

    Pausing, Lara surveyed the locus of Peter's challenge. The beach was a mile of white sand and half-buried rocks, stretching toward the final red clay promontory on which the Gay Head lighthouse stood, a deserted spike against the blue sky of early evening. To one side were the blue swells of the Atlantic, bathed in pale sun and tamed by a sandbar on which, at low tide, they could walk a quarter mile out; behind them was a gentle slope of sand and sea grass, at the top of which was the beach house where they stayed, all wood and glass and light. Starting with the house itself, Dogfish Bar was not what Peter would have chosen: there was a half mile of low vegetation beyond the house, and then a ridge of hills, looking down on them, dotted with homes and blanketed with trees which offered cover to intruders. Only the water was at all to Peter's liking: no one but a frogman could approach without being seen, and Peter had frogmen of his own.

    They were among the more hidden aspects of Peter's plan. To ward off danger, he had chosen to advertise the area surrounding Dogfish Bar as an armed camp, with roadblocks, choppers, and Coast Guard cutters patrolling a half-mile perimeter. Close residents had been displaced—for exorbitant rents—by Secret Service agents, a medical staff, and the personnel essential to the continuing conduct of the Presidency or, should the worst occur, to confronting an emergency. Yet Peter had done all this, Lara appreciated, without depriving the Kilcannons of the sense that, the media aside, they existed in a cocoon of privacy.

    Wearing jeans and cotton sweaters, they faced the ocean, a light breeze cooling their faces. In the distance, a patrol boat, barely audible, left a white skein in its wake. 'Are you regretting all this?' Kerry asked.

    'Not yet. How long until it's just us and the frogmen?'

    'Six o'clock.'

    Lara glanced at the distant clump of photographers and cameramen, lenses glinting in the sun. Grinning, she said, 'Then I suppose we should give them something,' and, on tiptoes, kissed her husband for precisely seven seconds.

* * *

    On the screen, the distant profile of the ice queen met that of the little prick. 'The President and Mrs. Kilcannon,' the anchorwoman said cheerfully, 'have begun their honeymoon on Martha's Vineyard.'

    In the sterile motel room which he knew to be his final shelter, John Bowden drank from his last bottle of vodka and stared at his photo of Marie. His only food was a Snickers bar; his credit card was maxed out, his bank account overdrawn, and the twenty-one dollars in his wallet all that remained after prepaying for this pea-green nightmare. His life was done, his manhood stolen, his family pried from his grasp. Consciousness was agony, and yet he could not sleep. Not even alcohol could dull the pain which gripped him like a fever.

    Only, he thought, the gun lying next to him.

    The magazine of the Lexington P-2 held forty hollow-tipped Eagle's Claw bullets. For this he would need only one.

    With a deliberation born of alcohol and despair, Bowden placed the P-2 to his temple.

    Tears filled his eyes. The lightest pull of the trigger would end his suffering.

    Slowly Bowden lowered his eyelids, still gripping the photograph of Marie.

    There was a sharp rap on the metal door. Bowden's fingers twitched; quickly, he relaxed his grip on the gun.

    'Who is it?' he called out in a trembling voice.