Bowe must have rued the day he’d worn that Yale sweater, let himself be shot in the sweater and shorts, sockless with tasseled loafers, a big cigar and playing cards on the table, the unruly hair falling over his forehead—a harmless, attractive photograph at twenty-four that would be shoved up his ass at forty-six . . .
Goodman had won the gubernatorial race. Two years later, with a lot of help from the White House, and a nationwide money-raising campaign, he’d spearheaded the campaign against Bowe. Bowe had lost his Senate seat to a Goodman crony.
Bowe had lost, but he hadn’t shut up. He had the money and the family to re-create himself as the administration’s most prominent critic, able to say what sitting members of Congress, too worried about maintaining their share of the pork, could not. Some thought he might run for his old Senate seat again. Some thought if the Republicans came back in, he might be in line for an ambassadorship, the Court of St. James’s, or Paris.
Then he’d vanished. Stepped into a car, and was gone, moments after making a vicious attack on the administration’s Syrian policy, and, domestically, on special-interest groups who supported the president.
The media had gone crazy. And the longer Bowe was gone, the crazier it had gotten.
ABC had compared his disappearance to Judge Crater’s and Jimmy Hoffa’s, with hints of organized crime. CNN had done a special that spoke darkly of Nazi, Middle Eastern, and South American politics. They’d intercut the film with shots of the Watchmen, in bomber jackets and khaki slacks, meeting in a football stadium in Emporia, with Goodman on a stage in front of a huge American flag; the implication was clear.
Fox had won the ratings war with a show on even crazier theories, including alien abduction and spontaneous combustion.
Jake had been waiting for forty minutes, and was still paging through media commentaries, when his cell phone rang. Gina. “You’re on the log. Come on up.”
Jacob Winter was thirty-three years old, six feet two inches tall, rangy, bony, with knife-edge cheekbones, a long nose, black hair worn unfashionably long, arty-long, and pale green eyes. His ex-wife referred to him as Ichabod-in-a-suit, after Ichabod Crane. He did wear suits: a saleswoman at Saks had once taken two hours of her life to coordinate neckties and shirts and suits with his eyes, and to explain how he could do it himself.
“Your eyes are the thing,” she’d said. “The right tie brings them out. Frankly, you would not normally be considered a great-looking guy, too many bones in your face, but your eyes make you
Yes. The kind of guy who attracts saleswomen from Saks. Not a bad thing; her comment had cheered him for a week.
Jake had been born in Montana and raised on a ranch. His mother was an engineer, his father a rancher’s son and a lawyer and eventually a congressman. Jake came late in their lives. Since his parents were both Catholic and pro-life, and politics were involved, the pregnancy was tolerated, but they weren’t much interested in raising another kid—Jake’s siblings were fifteen years older than he.
When he was two, his parents, moving between Billings and Washington, began leaving him for longer and longer periods with his grandparents. By the time he was five, they were out of his life. His grandmother died when he was nine; his grandfather followed when he was fifteen. His parents didn’t want him. After a year of prep school, he went to college at the University of Virginia, a lonely sixteen-year-old with a history book under his arm.
He graduated at nineteen and could afford to do as he wished—when his grandfather died, his will specified that the ranch be sold, and that the money go to
Two weeks after graduation, he was in Army Officers Candidate School. He spent eight years with Army Intelligence. The first two years had been in training. The third, fourth, and fifth he’d spent in Afghanistan with a series of Army special forces teams.
At the beginning of the sixth year, he was standing too close to a roadside bomb when it went off on the outskirts of the town of Ghazni. A piece of shell the size of a softball cut through his hip. A medic had stuffed Stop- Flo padding into the hole in his leg and butt and on the medevac chopper, said, “Shit, man, you’re lucky. If you’d been standing ninety degrees to the right, that would’ve been your balls.”
The rest of the sixth year was spent at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, getting his leg to work again.
Then, still in therapy, he was posted to the Pentagon, where he discovered an uncanny ability to navigate the world of bureaucracy. While his military colleagues worked on assessments of Chinese special-forces training or the electronic characteristics of Indian shoulder-mounted missiles, Jake’s work had been done inside the Pentagon, the various limbs of Congress, and the rat’s nest of bureaus and departments that surrounded the intelligence agencies.
He found things out; became the Sam Spade of the circular file, the Philip Marlowe of the burn bag.
And though he could eventually run five eight-minute miles, in a hobbled, windmilling way, the Army would never consider him fully rehabilitated. That career was gone—he could stay in, take staff jobs, and someday retire as one of the colonel-intellectuals who argued war theory. Not interested.
Instead, as he worked through rehab and then in the Pentagon, he’d gone to graduate school at Georgetown, with the idea that he might teach at the university level. He’d written his PhD thesis on twentieth-century modernist ideas as they’d bled into politics, and had then rewritten the thesis as a book,
He’d gotten solid reviews in the important journals, and followed the first book with
