Danzig was standing beside his desk with his hands in his pockets. He looked like he’d been doing nothing but waiting.
“Did you get it?” Danzig was usually intense; now he was actually vibrating.
Jake nodded, dropped into a chair, his briefcase on his lap. Tired. Stress beginning to bite at him. “The only question is whether it’s real. I’m almost sure it is. I think research will prove it. But I’ve gotten tangled up in a murder investigation, and to tell you the truth, my statement to the FBI and the Madison cops wasn’t exactly complete.”
“How not complete?”
Jake patted the package. “This thing is involved in the killings. We’ve got to give it to the feds as soon as we can. We don’t have more than a few days. I can already feel an obstruction charge out there.”
“If you deliver it to them, the most they can say is that you were late,” Danzig said.
“Yeah, bullshit. If they want me, they can get me,” Jake said. “What I’m going to need is the silken breath of the president blowing down somebody’s back. Words like
Danzig nodded, avoiding Jake’s eyes: “Anyway.”
“Yeah.” Jake started unpacking the cheap briefcase. “Here’s the stuff. Here’s how it worked. . . .”
Danzig wanted to review each piece of paper, to crawl through the books on the DVD disks, to find inconsistencies. They took two hours, the longest time Jake had ever spent in Danzig’s office. They found inconsistencies, but they appeared to be paperwork mistakes, rather than logical errors that would suggest a fraud. When they were done, Danzig stood up, walked around the room in his stocking feet, sighed, and said, “Shit.”
“What do you think?” Jake asked.
“They’re real. I’ve seen stuff like this before, and they have the feeling of reality about them. The grit. A few pieces are missing, but that’s what you’d expect if it was real. The inconsistencies are consistent with reality.”
“I agree. You could get somebody else, maybe, to do some specific checks on the public records, to nail it down.”
Danzig nodded. “Of course. We’ll start that tomorrow. Tonight, if we can, maybe some of the stuff is online.”
“I’d want to see the actual paper, where it exists . . .”
“So would I,” Danzig said. Then, “Okay. You wait here for a minute. I’m going to get the boss.”
“There’s another thing, somewhat related,” Jake said. “And it’s about to pop. Lincoln Bowe was gay. His death was a conspiracy that Bowe set up himself, carried out by a close friend, or a few close friends, in an effort to embarrass Goodman.”
Danzig’s face didn’t move for a moment, as though he hadn’t heard. Then he said, “Holy shit.”
“I had to tell the feds. They’re now investigating Bowe’s gay friends. It’s gonna leak in the next day or two, and the whole investigation is going to lurch that way, away from the package. But it’ll come back.”
Danzig ran one hand through his oily hair and then said, “You’re a hell of a researcher, Jake. I hope you never come after me.”
Danzig padded out of the office, returned five minutes later, trailed by the president. The president was a tall, white-haired Indianan, a former governor and senator, a middle-of-the-roader chosen to lead the ticket when the Democrats decided to get serious. He was wearing a dark suit and white shirt, without a tie, and like Danzig, was in his stocking feet. Jake stood up when he walked in.
“Hey, Jake,” he said. They shook hands and the president asked, “What the heck did you drag in this time?”
They spent another twenty minutes combing through the package, and finally the president said to Danzig, “I believe it. What do you think?”
Danzig glanced at Jake, then back to the president, who said, “Go ahead. He’s in deeper than we are.”
“We’ve got to do some verification and then we talk to Landers,” Danzig said. “He’s in town. We’ll get his ass over here, stick this thing up it. Come to some kind of agreement.”
The president looked at Jake. “You say there’s another copy?”
“At least one more—probably in the dead man’s safe-deposit box,” Jake said. “The FBI will get to it sooner or later. Probably sooner, since Novatny’s working the case.”
“I don’t know him,” the president said.
“He’s pretty good, sir. Also, there are quite a few other people who know about it, know enough details to cause trouble, even if they don’t have the package. It’s possible that the package could be replicated, at least a good part of it, from public records. If the Republicans talk to the
“All right,” the president said. To Danzig: “Get Delong and Henricks here tonight. We want to get this taken care of, and I want to turn this over to the FBI by the end of the week. I want Jake to do it. We need to cover him.” Delong was Landers’s chief of staff; Henricks, the president’s legal counsel.
“We’ve got a lot to talk about,” Danzig said to the president. He was tense, but seemed happier than he usually was. He liked an outrageous problem, Jake decided. And this would make a hell of a scene in a what-really- happened book, five years after the president left office.
