“No,” Bobby said. “You’re not. But almost everyone who advises you now speaks for the senator. The truth is he’s casting a huge shadow over the White House, Clay.”
“He’ll get me reelected.”
“Will he? The polls don’t seem to be saying that. You know what I think? The American people want you to step away from your father so they can see clearly again just who you are. They’d love to see you leading the team.”
“Do you have any numbers to back that up?”
“Gut feeling.”
“Thanks, Bobby. I’ll take that under advisement.”
“Are you all right, Clay?”
“Just tired. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Dixon picked up the report Lorna Channing had delivered to him a couple of days earlier. So far, he’d had time only to glance at it. He took the document to his bedroom where he put on his pajamas, washed his face, brushed his teeth, and donned his reading glasses. He lay down on his bed, but found that he couldn’t concentrate.
He was thinking about the things Bobby Lee had said. And he was thinking about Alan Carpathian, the man who’d been more a father to him than the senator had ever been.
When Carpathian died, something significant inside Clay Dixon had died with him. Certainty. That cocky assuredness that Carpathian had teased him about but loved. What replaced it was something very like terror. Without Carpathian’s game plan, Carpathian’s political savvy, Carpathian’s unflagging optimism, Dixon felt paralyzed, absolutely afraid to move. It was like the nightmares he’d had while he was a quarterback, that he was on the field in the middle of an important game and he’d forgotten every play.
The senator had saved him, in a way. But you had to pay the devil sometime, and Dixon was feeling more and more that what was required of him was nothing less than his soul.
He put the report aside, took off his glasses, and thought about something more pleasant. Lorna Channing. Lately, a lot of his thinking eventually worked its way around to Lorna Channing. In the middle of briefings with her, he sometimes found himself amazed at the beautiful green of her eyes, the way she held her lips when she listened. He realized that whenever she walked away, he was already looking forward to the time when she would return. He didn’t fool himself with the idea that it was love. But he knew that in its way, it was a force nearly as compelling.
He glanced at the heavy document that lay on the pillow where Kate’s head used to rest. He’d requested the study to fulfill his promise to his wife and to please her, but she hadn’t even bothered to look at it. The silence of its company was a bitter and lonely statement.
He closed his eyes, and when he fell asleep, it wasn’t the voice of Kate he heard in his dreaming but the soft, chocolate laugh of the woman he’d known so well on the Purgatoire River.
chapter
eleven
When Nightmare was very young, his mother sometimes slept with him. He remembered the feel of her, warm through the flannel of her nightgown, her arms around him protectively. Her smell would stay on his thin pillow and unwashed sheets for a long time. When he was alone, he would bury himself there and breathe in the ghost of her presence.
Often he wouldn’t see her for days. He would find plates of food on the basement stairs, left when he was sleeping, and after he put the empty plates back, they would eventually be gone. When she next appeared, her face would be pale, occasionally bruised, and her eyes would be distant. Her hair was long and dirty. Her clothes were drab. He would sit with her on the bed and they would be quiet together. Sometimes her lips moved as if she were talking to someone in the basement shadows, but if she spoke loud enough for him to hear, her words made little sense. Even these visits he cherished, for she was all he had.
When he was older, she would unlock the basement door after the old man had gone to sleep. She held a finger to her lips to keep him silent, and she led him outside, where they would walk together in the night. She couldn’t see well, not like him for whom the dark was an old friend. He would take her hand and lead her. Away from the rotting old house. Away from the barn that was little more than a loose skeleton of weathered boards. Away from the monster sleeping in the second-floor bedroom. In the winter, nights were silent except for the crunch of their feet on the snow. In summer, the night air was alive with music, the song of tree frogs from the woods and bullfrogs in the marshy meadow and crickets everywhere. Mostly, she was sad, and he never tried to make her happy. He was sad, too, alone all day in the dark beneath the house. That’s just the way people were. Sad. Or they were angry, like his grandfather. They were monsters, or they were the servants of monsters. Their souls were corrupt-born corrupt, beyond redemption-and they deserved to live in the dark, or they lived in the light, as his grandfather did. Above in the light. His mother lived there, too, but she would often visit Nocturne at night, in the basement where the old man seldom came.
Nocturne. That was how he thought of himself then, for that was what she called him. He’d never been given a real name. His existence had never been officially recorded. His grandfather sometimes called him “boy” or “spawn,” but his mother called him Nocturne. It was the music of the night, she explained to him in one of her more lucid moments. Among the junk on the shelves in the basement, he’d found an old phonograph. It hadn’t worked when he discovered it, but he tinkered, something he had a lot of time to do, and he coaxed the turntable into motion and began to listen to the old 78s he found boxed on the shelves. His mother told him they’d belonged to his grandmother and that when she died, the old man had put them in the basement, put away all reminders of her, and that he’d buried her in the fields somewhere. Some nights when Nocturne walked with his mother, she stopped and listened for a long time. She’s crying, she would say. Do you hear her?
Yes, he would answer, although he heard only the frogs and the crickets.
They would walk in silence back to the house, to the basement, and Nocturne would put something gentle and sad on the phonograph, and they would sit on his old bed together in the dark while she wept.
At 10:30P.M., in the laundry of the St. Croix Regional Medical Center, the man known to his coworkers as Max Ableman turned off his boom box. It had been a good evening. Except for the interruption by the Secret Service agent, everything had been quiet. Although Thorsen had surprised him, Nightmare wasn’t greatly alarmed. In fact, there was one aspect of Thorsen’s presence and questions that pleased him. If Thorsen was nosing around the hospital, it meant he was concerned about Jorgenson as well as Jorgenson’s daughter. He was looking in two directions. His attention was divided. Nightmare knew the first rule of any successful operation was focus.
From his clothes locker, Nightmare took a roll of silver duct tape and a sealed glass cylinder fifteen inches long and five inches in diameter. He also lifted a small armload of dirty linen from a pile in front of one of the washers. He descended the stairs to the tunnel, selected a laundry cart, put the cylinder in the cart, and covered it with the soiled linen. Then he headed to the main hospital building. He rode the freight elevator to the fourth floor. The nurses in trauma ICU paid no attention to him as he went about his normal duty of collecting the laundry. He spent a few extra minutes in the room of a man who’d flatlined the night before, then he crossed to the room where Tom Jorgenson lay comatose. He had to wait less than thirty seconds before the alarm went off, signaling another cardiac arrest on the far side of the ICU. He heard the nurses call a Code Blue, and they directed their attention to the situation. He had a window of a few minutes.
He reached into the cart and drew out the glass cylinder and the duct tape. Inside the cylinder, cradled among Styrofoam pellets, was a length of one-and-a-quarter-inch PVC pipe. The pipe, capped and sealed to be airtight, contained C-4, a volatile plastic explosive. The C-4 was fitted with a detonator that could be triggered remotely. A vacuum surrounded the pipe, a precaution that would prevent the scent of the C-4 from being detected by bomb dogs. The inner surface of the glass was coated with common airplane glue. There was enough air in the sealed PVC pipe itself to allow detonation of the C-4. In addition to the destruction caused by the explosion, the glue-coated fragments of glass would be like burning shrapnel, setting the room ablaze. Nightmare intended to attach the device to the underside of the bed with the duct tape and to detonate it the next time the First Lady
