Balance of Power

public interest diverges from your own.' Sarah faced Lenihan. 'Every lawyer has an agenda. Sometimes it's a cause, sometimes glory, sometimes money. Sometimes it's all three.

    'I don't care about 'glory'—I had enough exposure in the Tierney case to despise it. I don't want any piece of the verdict. All I want is our expenses, and the chance to help Mary make this lawsuit matter.'

    Mary regarded her gravely. When Lenihan began to speak, she placed her hand on his wrist. 'I want you both,' she told him. 'I'd just feel more confident if you could work together.'

    Lenihan's eyebrows flew up. 'That's fine with me,' Sarah answered promptly. 'In fact, I'd be very grateful for the opportunity.'

    With a theatrical sigh, Lenihan sat back, regarding Sarah with a complex look of enmity, amusement, annoyance and calculation. 'Then come along with me, Sarah. I imagine we'll both learn something.'

SE VEN

'This is our biggest challenge,' Charles Dane told Senator Frank Fasano. 'At least since 1968.'

    He did not mention the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. He did not need to. That they met in Kelsey Landon's K Street office, not the SSA's or Fasano's, said enough about the volatility of the moment.

    The SSA's choice of Kelsey Landon as its consultant spoke to this as well. A small, well-knit man with silver hair and a perpetual expression of shrewd but pleasant alertness, the former senator from Colorado's fund-raising prowess had secured him a unique influence among Senate Republicans, cementing his closeness to Frank Fasano: when Fasano had set out to succeed Macdonald Gage, Landon had quietly passed the word that major Republican donors and power brokers favored his aspirations. Now, deferring to Fasano, Landon merely responded to Dane's comment with a wry smile of acknowledgment—a cue, Fasano sensed, that he should remind Dane of how much the SSA needed them both.

    'It's the worst I've seen,' Fasano said bluntly. 'Especially in the Senate. My moderates are worried—they've seen the numbers for Kilcannon and the First Lady. And Lexington's not warm and fuzzy.'

    Seated in an elegant wing chair, Dane wore a pin-striped Savile Row suit which accented his air of power and ease. 'In the end,' he told Fasano, 'Americans will respect individual responsibility. Bowden pulled the trigger, not George Callister.'

    'That's not good enough,' Fasano said. 'At least right now.' Pausing, he added softly, 'Some would say that Martin Bresler had the right idea on trigger locks and gun shows. And that it's too bad someone crushed him.'

    From behind his desk, Fasano noticed, Landon followed the exchange with the air of a connoisseur of tennis watching two veteran players testing each other's game. 'Bresler crushed himself,' Dane admonished. 'Sometimes you'd be better off, Frank, envisioning gun owners not as a 'special interest,' but as members of one of the great religions of the world. The core of our membership would give us everything they owned before they give Kilcannon an inch on guns.'

    'Sounds like religion,' Fasano answered. 'I know it isn't politics. The Kilcannons have hung Lexington with an image problem that'll be hard to overcome.'

    'That's the real problem,' Landon told Fasano. 'It's not just Kilcannon's gun bill—it's our old friend Robert Lenihan. He can't help bragging—seems like he's signed up Lara Kilcannon's sister for a wrongful death suit against Lexington. If Lenihan's doing this, Kilcannon's pulling his strings . . .'

    'It's been like synchronized swimming,' Dane interjected in sardonic tones. 'First the tape of Bowden killing them, then Kilcannon's speech, then Callister turns him down, and then Mrs. Kilcannon gives her interview. At this rate Lexington will have to look for neutral jurors in caves.'

    'The gun manufacturers,' Landon added smoothly, 'are petrified. Lenihan can finance this with millions in tobacco money. If he delivers George Callister's head on a platter, the trial lawyers can write their own ticket in the Democratic Party. And the gun industry may well cave in to whatever Kilcannon wants.'

    So far, Fasano reflected, the meeting had gone as he had expected. The SSA, he suspected, had compelled the manufacturers to take a hard line, and now had to show that it had the power to protect them. And Dane needed results for special reasons of his own: he was both intimidator and beseecher, whose tenure as SSA president depended on pleasing a board of governors whose intransigence on gun rights was equalled only by its hatred of Kerry Kilcannon. Evenly, Fasano inquired, 'What is it that you want, Charles?'

    Dane folded his arms. 'A bar on lawsuits by people like Mary Costello.'

    'Just 'people like Mary Costello'? Or do you want us to kill her lawsuit?'

    'What we want,' Dane said succinctly, 'is a law barring all lawsuits against the manufacturers of guns for deaths and injuries caused by someone else's criminal misuse. That means suits by anyone.'

    Fasano found himself studying Landon's bust of an Indian warrior, the gift from a grateful tribe for whom he had secured exclusive gaming rights. 'If you're right about Lenihan,' he told Dane, 'Mary Costello will file any day now. We'd have to cut her off in mid-lawsuit.'

    Dane frowned. 'No choice, Frank. We've passed laws like this in other states, but we lack the wherewithal in California. So you're the only game in town.'

    Though Fasano was prepared for this, the pressure building in the room had begun to feel like a vise, tangible and sobering. 'You don't want much,' he told Dane. 'Only that the United States Senate stomp all over Lara Kilcannon's sole surviving relative, with the bodies of the others barely cold.'

    'Not just the Senate,' Dane responded coolly. 'The House of Representatives. Speaker Jencks is ready to go.'

    'Well, good for Tom,' Fasano said dismissively. 'Even if both of us can pass this bill of yours, Kilcannon will veto it. To override a veto, you may recall, we need a two-thirds vote of the Senate.

    'By my count, that means sixty-seven senators will have to spit in the President's eye. Or, as Kilcannon will have it, on the graves of the First Lady's family.' Turning to Landon, Fasano continued, 'You can do the math as well as I can, Kelsey. I've got fifty-four Republicans. I can count at least five who are up for reelection next year and don't want Kilcannon's very warm breath on the backs of their necks. They'd sell their souls not to cast this vote.'

    Kelsey Landon smiled. 'You remind me of what my predecessor used to say: 'Half my friends are for it, half against, and I'm all for my friends.' Except that your friends are in this room, and we're all for you.'

    For Fasano, the soothing bromide eliminated all doubt—the SSA had engaged Kelsey Landon not just as an advisor, but to bring all the pressure at his command to bear on Frank Fasano. For a brief, intoxicating moment, Fasano imagined telling them both to go to hell. Then he weighed yet again the political impracticality of offending the SSA, the risks and rewards—both monumental—of waging this fight against Kerry Kilcannon.

    'I don't like these lawsuits,' he said to Dane and Landon. 'And Kilcannon's fully capable of running this lawsuit from the White House. But you're asking me to put five seats at risk—which, as it happens, would lose us the majority.'

    'You wouldn't have a majority,' Dane said bluntly, 'without our help. In the last election cycle, the SSA gave the Republican Party over $2.5 million in soft money and spent millions more in support of progun candidates. We turned out our people in nine close Senate races, and you won six.'

    By whose count? Fasano wondered. 'Charles,' Landon told him in a soothing voice,