Dead Watch

He’d gotten married before he’d been wounded; the marriage hadn’t survived rehab. Wouldn’t have survived anyway, he thought. The woman was a crocodile. Although, he thought, if she’d known that he would wind up at the White House . . .

His most influential publication had never seen hard covers. At the urging of a military friend, he’d written Winter’s Guide to the Inside, a map and guide to the military/intelligence complex. It had become the best-selling Pentagon samizdat.

The Guide had also gotten him a part-time job with the second most important man in the country.

Ten seconds after Gina called down, Jake met a Marine Corps captain on the indoor side of the waiting room, and followed him into an elevator, up, and then down the eggshell white halls to Danzig’s office.

Going to see the guy. The guy was Bill Danzig, the president’s chief of staff. Danzig had been a deputy secretary of Defense two administrations back, then a Pentagon consultant when the party was out of power. He’d been given a copy of Winter’s Guide, and when he moved to the White House, Jake went on his consultants list.

Jake had done twenty jobs for him in three years, tracking down problems in the bureaucracy. As Danzig came to trust him, the problems became more difficult, the assignments more frequent.

Not quite a full-time job, but lucrative. The job also gave him access to some interesting government computers. Interesting, anyway, for a man who wanted to know what really happened.

A Secret Service agent was standing in the hall outside Danzig’s office door, wearing the neat suit, crisp shirt, and a burgundy necktie, with ear-bug. He nodded at Jake and the jar-head, stepped into the middle of the hallway, blocking a farther walk down the hall, toward the president’s office, and politely indicating the entrance to Danzig’s office.

Jake nodded and took the turn. The Secret Service man said, “Nice to see you again, Mr. Winter.”

“Nice to see you, Henry,” Jake said. Jake remembered everybody’s name; it was part of his talent.

Danzig’s outer office was twenty-five feet wide and twenty feet deep, with a small room to one side for printers and copy machines. He had three secretaries. Two sat opposite each other against the side walls, at identical cherry-wood desks, peering at computers.

A third sat behind a broad table, an antique with curved, carved legs pressing into the deep-blue carpet, under a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, beside the door to the inner office. The table was littered with paper, bound reports, a few family photographs, and a vase of cut cattleya orchids, large yellow blooms dappled with scarlet.

The third woman was Gina, the important one, the one who’d called him. She was in her forties, with a dry oval face and close-cropped hair, bright blue eyes, wrinkles in the skin of her neck. She nodded and smiled, as though she wouldn’t cut his throat in an instant if her boss asked her to. She said, “Great tie,” and touched a button on her desk. Danzig now knew Jake was waiting.

“Great halter,” Jake said. “Is that new?”

Gina touched the ID halter at her neck, from which her White House ID dangled; turquoise cabochons set in Navajo silver. “I just got it—my husband bought it for our anniversary.”

“Nice antique look,” he said. “I like it.”

ID cards separated Washington insiders from the tourists. The elite-insiders were now separating themselves from the clerk-insiders with gemstones: the sale of jeweled ID halters had been booming.

Gina glanced at her desktop, where a diode had gone green. She said, “Go on in. He’s waiting.”

Bill Danzig was tying his shoe. He looked up as Jake came through the door, grunted, and said, “Don’t buy round shoelaces.”

“I’ll make a note,” Jake said.

Danzig pointed at a chair and Jake sat down. “What’s your schedule?” Danzig asked. “Do you have any time?”

Jake shrugged. “I can always make time. We’re on Easter break this week, so I’ve got a week and a half clear.”

“Excellent. Now. What do you know about Madison Bowe?” Danzig asked, settling back. He was a fat man, with shoulders slanting down from a thin neck. He had small black eyes and thinning, slicked-back, dandruff-spotted black hair. The odor of VO5 hung about him like the scent of an old apple.

“What I’ve seen on television and been reading in the papers,” Jake said.

“Give me a one-minute version.”

Jake shrugged: “Madison Bowe, thirty-four years old, married money in the shape of former U.S. Senator Lincoln Bowe, forty-six. Tells the networks that Lincoln Bowe gave a quote moderately hot-tempered speech to a group of Republican law students at the University of Virginia.”

Danzig made a farting noise with his lips; Jake paused, then continued.

“Afterward, she said, he was seen getting into a car with three men in suits, and disappeared. Witnesses told her that the men seemed to be law-enforcement personnel, complete with short haircuts and ear-bugs. Mrs. Bowe says she was told by a highly placed source that the Watchmen picked him up. She fears for his life, since they would never be able to admit afterward that they actually did that.”

“That’s true,” Danzig said.

“She also says that she was being watched on her farm near Lexington, and had been threatened by Watchmen. She has a videotape to prove it. The intimidation part. If the tape isn’t a complete fake, I’d say she had