NO SAFE PLACE

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NO SAFE PLACE Page 26

by Richard North Patterson


  Sean felt a helpless anger. “Four,” he said finally. “Right here.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  Without another word, the man turned and sauntered across the street as if Sean did not exist.

  * * *

  When Clayton’s telephone rang again, it was the special agent in charge, Peter Lake.

  “Where are you?” Clayton asked.

  “Fresno. About to go to Elk Grove, then Sacramento. That’s what I’m calling about. Three local stations there just got the same death threat.”

  Clayton sighed. “No reason today should be any different. What didthis threat say?”

  “What the receptionists wrote down was: ‘Don’t you know what day it is? We’re going to kill him on the six o’clock news.’ That probably means Sacramento.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Talk to the senator.” Peter’s voice was dispassionate, professional. “Probably it’s some fraternity kid. But this is the day his brother got shot, and the place where he’s chosen to talk about gun control. The gun nuts have been all over the Internet, asking people to show up there for the rally, egging each other on: ‘Term limits isn’t good enough’—that kind of thing. It could be pretty tense.”

  Clayton stared out the window. Since the death of their young son, his deepest fear was for Carlie or the twins, as powerful as superstition. The long nights at the hospital were engraved in his memory—Carlie’s sunken eyes, Kerry’s quiet presence, more eloquent than words of grief he knew they could not stand to hear. Once Kerry had entered the primaries, Clayton’s second fear had been a stranger with a gun, another tragedy without reason. There was never a day that Clayton did not think of it; never an outdoor rally that Clayton did not suffer through until Kerry was back in the limousine.

  “We can’t cancel the event,” Clayton said at last. “And Kerry wouldn’t. You can hear him now, can’t you—‘If I don’t speak, they’ve already won.’ ”

  “I’d never ask himnot to speak. Just to factor in safety in decidingwhen to speak, and where.” Peter paused a moment. “I know we’ve had this discussion before. But I’d have put this rally indoors, not in a park.”

  “Kerry wanted it there. You know why.”

  “Then maybe it’s time he wore a vest. Starting tonight.” Peter’s voice was soft. “He’s no good to anyone dead, Clayton. Including himself.”

  The comment was as oblique, Clayton realized, as it was acute. “I’ll fly on up,” he answered.

  FIVE

  The flight to Sacramento, Nate Cutler reflected, had begun to remind him ofLord of the Flies, a descent into the Hobbesian state of nature.

  Everyone seemed restless. Other than the pool reporters, no one had seen Kilcannon up close; he had not visited the press section at all. Even Kit Pace was more brisk than normal, guiding local reporters to the front. Needing amusement, the guy fromNewsweek had taken a plastic food tray and butt-surfed down the aisle on takeoff, drawing whistles, scattered cheers, and one wadded napkin tossed at his head. Watching him whiz by, Lee McAlpine observed, “That’s the tough thing about this gig—it really spoils you for coach class on United.”

  Next to her, Sara Sax was scrawling on a grapefruit with Magic Marker, vowing to “penetrate the iron curtain.” Proudly, she showed off her handiwork. The grapefruit now asked: “Senator K—do you favor partial-birth abortion to protect the psychological health of the mother?”

  With a flourish, she signed it “Love, Sara,” stood, and rolled the grapefruit beneath the curtain separating the press from Kerry Kilcannon.

  Edgy, Nate stood in the aisle, looking about him. Around the table where the food was laid out, four reporters were playing a desultory game of hearts, and in the special section at the rear of the plane, the camera guys were bitching that the new woman reporter from Fox, by ripping down theirHustler pinups, had “pissed on the First Amendment.” Heading for a sandwich, Nate felt something hit his foot.

  Looking down, he saw the grapefruit.

  Nate picked it up. Beneath Sara’s question were the words “I don’t know, Sara—how crazy are you?” In his distinct scrawl, the candidate had signed it “Kerry.”

  Solemnly, Nate presented it to Sara. “I can’t be sure,” he told her, “but there seems to be life in the front cabin.”

  Reading Kilcannon’s answer, Sara grinned. “It’s a sign,” she proclaimed, and began passing the grapefruit among her colleagues. Only Lara Costello, Nate noticed, read it without smiling.

  As Nate watched her, Rich Powell from Reuters, who had known Lara in the Congo, knelt beside her in the aisle, kissing her hand with the grave obeisance that befit a new princess of the media. “Millions,” he said in tones of awe. “TV Guidesaid you’re getting millions. Can this be true?”

  Lara smiled. “Every word. Tomorrow I’m incorporating, and endorsing my own line of panty hose. You get two free samples.”

  Rich placed his hand over his heart. “Used, I hope.”

  Lara tilted her head. “Howare you, Rich?”

  “All right. If I had to draw a candidate, I’m glad it’s Kilcannon.” He paused for a moment. “You know him, right?”

  Watching her, Nate felt her awareness of him, standing two rows away.“Knew,” she answered. “I haven’t seen or spoken to him since he decided to run.”

  “Big decision, if you’re him.” Rich sat in the aisle, cross-legged. “See Stacey Tarrant’s introducing him in Sacramento? That’s kind of amazing, I think. Or maybe just manipulative.”

  Lara shrugged. “The subject’s right, for both of them. And the day. She’ll certainly help draw a crowd.”

  “That she will. But I want you to know something, Lara: I’d rather sleep with you than Stacey Tarrant, any day.”

  Lara gave Rich a wan smile, patting him on the arm. “I don’t think I’ll be on the ship of fools quite long enough. But thanks for asking.”

  Rich shook his head, mournful. “Still monastic.”

  “Uh-huh. How can I do my job if all I think about is you?”

  Rich laughed at this. Turning, Nate sat down again, reflective.

  Lara’s tacit message was clear enough: she had not seen or spoken to Kilcannon; by leaving the campaign, she was taking her ethical problem with her. That would be part of Clayton Slade’s argument to Nate’s editors when—once Nate asked the question—the Kilcannon people tried to kill the story. As Nate was certain they would.

  Time was running: in five days, the voters would go to the polls. The real story of the California primary, hidden from all his colleagues but Lara, was the dark corner in which Nate and Kerry Kilcannon now competed for control. Resuming his silent watch for Kit, Nate felt an intensity that bordered on obsession.

  This was not personal, Nate felt sure—no matter what Lara might suspect. Though he had almost never voted for a Republican, Nate had achieved a certain detachment from his own beliefs, and there was little any politician could do to either offend or please him. Nate’s job was to interpret, to separate rhetoric from reality, to cut through the mind-numbing repetition, the robotic determination to avoid error, the protective armor of spin, through which most candidates try to obscure hard truths and manipulate the news. If Kerry Kilcannon was often better than that, it made no difference now. Nate had a legitimate question to ask; for reasons he understood but could not honor, he believed that Kilcannon was trying to avoid him.

  The curtain opened.

  Instead of Kit Pace, it was Sara’s new love object, Dan Biasi, the Secret Service agent. From Dan’s look of deep preoccupation, Nate guessed that he was searching for an empty bathroom. As Dan hurried past, Nate rose from his seat and casually followed. But for Lara, no one else looked up.

  When Nate got to the rear, the bathroom door was locked.

  Nate leaned against the baggage closet, as if waiting his turn. The door opened and Dan Biasi emerged, his dark hair freshly combed.

  “Better?” Nate asked.

  Dan laugh
ed good-naturedly. “Too much coffee. The senator says I’ve got the smallest bladder in the Service.”

  For Dan, Nate realized, the airplane was a zone of relaxation, relief from the terrible alertness the Service must show on the ground. Beneath the young agent’s eyes were the etchings of fatigue.

  “Now that your head is clear,” Nate said amiably, “can you tell Kit Pace I need to see her, ASAP? There’s a fact I need to check.”

  Dan’s smiled faded. Scrupulously apolitical, the agents avoided anything that fell outside their mission. “Yeah,” he said at length. “I can do that. Unless she’s tied up with someone.”

  “Thanks. Appreciate it.” With that, Nate stepped inside the bathroom, waited for a moment, and then returned to his seat.

  He resumed watching the curtain.

  A few minutes before landing, Kit appeared. She knelt by his seat with a professional smile that conveyed neither warmth nor its absence. “I hear you’re fact-deficient, Nate.”

  “Uh-huh. Can you give me a couple of minutes in Elk Grove, after the speech?”

  Across the aisle, Nate saw, Lara seemed to study her nails. Kit’s smile narrowed fractionally. “I’ll try. But no promises. If I leave Kerry by himself too often, God knows what he’d say.”

  Nate did not smile. “It won’t take long,” he answered.

  * * *

  The rally at Elk Grove was in a stretch of the American heartland, a patch of dirt near some stables that could have been a fairground. The platform was surrounded by tractors and bales of hay, and in the distance, Lara saw silos and wavy fields of grain she supposed were wheat. Her lack of agrarian knowledge reminded her of a piece of family lore she had once shared with Kerry: the day that the nine-year-old Lara, a child of the city, had driven with her parents past a field of grapes. “Look,” she had told them, “wine plants.” For minutes, her father could not stop laughing. Hearing the story, Kerry had eyed her with feigned puzzlement. “Why?” he had asked her. “What else do they call them?”

  Remembering, Lara smiled briefly to herself, thinking of Kerry in this setting.

  She stood on the press bleachers, surrounded by her colleagues with their tape recorders, laptops, Minicams. The PA system blared Bruce Springsteen singing “Born in the U.S.A.”; it was a point of pride that Springsteen, another New Jersey boy, supported Kerry. The candidate himself was climbing the speakers’ platform. Filling the fifty square yards between the platform and the press was the kind of eclectic crowd that Kerry seemed to draw: farmers, small-business owners, Asians, high school kids, some Mexican farmworkers. It was four o’clock, and a waning sun fell gently on the platform—a metaphor, Lara thought suddenly, for the last days of a campaign, perhaps of a career.

  A few moments before, Lara had checked her voice mail in Washington. There had been one message—from her first roommate, a friend from Stanford now working on the Hill. A reporter fromNewsworld had called, Maria explained, asking about Lara and Kerry Kilcannon. But Maria had told them nothing, had nothing to tell. Whatwas this? her message asked.

  Nothing, Lara must tell her. Nothing at all. Suddenly she felt a piercing loneliness: she and Kerry, trapped within their secret, could not even speak.

  Two steps behind her, Nate stood with his tape recorder.

  He would stay close, Lara knew. For the next five days, her world would be claustrophobic.

  To rising cheers, Kerry walked to the podium holding a scrap of paper, no doubt with the names of the local worthies he should acknowledge—the mayor, the county commissioners. But when he set down the paper, it blew away in the wind.

  Kerry froze, eyes following the paper as it drifted into the crowd, a pantomime of the nonplussed politician. “Oh, no,” he said, “there goes my farm program.”

  It was a risky joke, Lara knew—self-parody with a core of truth. But there was a chorus of good-natured laughter, from farmers most of all. Flawlessly, Kerry acknowledged everyone on the platform.

  There was a soft buzz in the pocket of her sport jacket. Watching Kerry, she took out her cell phone and answered, “Yes?”

  “Lara?” The mere sound of her bureau chief’s voice startled her; for a sickening moment, Lara thought she had been exposed. “There’s been a death threat,” Hal continued, “against Kilcannon. Someone phoned our affiliate in Sacramento.”

  Lara felt numb. “What did they say?”

  “That they’d kill him on the six o’clock news. We think that means at the rally in Sacramento.”

  Lara took a deep breath. “I’ll ask the Service about it. Kit too.”

  “Good. By the way, I liked your report last night.”

  Still speaking softly, Lara thanked him, then slid the telephone back into her pocket.

  Quickly, she surveyed the area for vantage points—trees, the roofline of the stables. She saw the billed caps of three Secret Service sharpshooters on the roof of the barn, then the top of one’s head, his eyes trained on the platform. How, she wondered, must it feel to be Kerry?

  She turned to watch him. The crowd was silent now, solemn.

  “The death penalty,” he said, “is one of the most painful questions facing a civilized society.

  “Once, several years before I was a senator, I toured a prison. I saw the faces of men waiting to be executed, and I thought of the sadness, the loss, the waste of those lives. And if it were humanly possible, I would have an America where no life is so blighted, so warped, that its defining act is the taking of another life.”

  Kerry, Lara realized, was not speaking from notes. His voice, though quiet, carried easily.

  “For a time,that was all I could think of. But I since have had occasion to think of all the faces I wouldnever see: those of the men, women, and children these men had killed. For when we give up the notion of private revenge, we do so with the expectation that our laws will pay proper tribute to the value of an innocent life: that, if warranted, the death of the murderer may follow the murder of the innocent.”

  How they had argued, Lara recalled—for hours, alone in Kerry’s apartment because they could not be seen together. “Like college,” Kerry had said with gentle humor. “Beer, pizza, and the death penalty.”

  She knew why Kerry felt the way he did. Even without the pressure of politics, perhaps he could not have felt otherwise. But still she had challenged him. “Murder is murder,” she had argued. “There’s no such thing as a public service killing, or where does it end?”

  “Murder is murder?” Kerry had rejoined. “Perhaps the Senate’s made me a connoisseur of irony. My pro-life colleagues love them till they’re born but don’t mind a righteous execution afterward. Whereas death row is where many of my pro-choice friends at last develop scruples, even if they’re saving Charles Manson . . .”

  As Lara watched, the crowd was still, attentive.

  “But before we take a life,” Kerry went on, “we must be certain that the race or status of the murderer can no more count than that of the victim.

  “The least the death penaltydemands of us, if we choose it, is fair jury selection, a just trial and a just review, and a scrupulous regard for the rights of the accused. Because if we follow the siren song of law and order—a shortcut here, a right abandoned there—we will surely be complicit in the murder of the innocent. And that is too great a price forany of us to pay . . .”

  It was a moment before Lara felt Nate next to her.

  “Did you two ever talk about this?” Nate asked. “I remember howyou felt.”

  Lara turned to him.You bastard, she thought. “No,” she answered coolly. “Why would we?”

  She turned away, looking for her cameraman.

  * * *

  The question had hurt, Nate thought. He could see in her eyes that it struck too close to home.

  She was lying, had to be. But his near certainty, however important, gave him little pleasure.

  He went to find Kit.

  She did not have the excuse of sticking with Kerry Kilcannon, he quickly saw
; the Service had hurried him to his limousine. Kit stood near the speakers’ platform amidst the pool, its members slowly dispersing to their bus. Though Nate was only a few feet back, Kit seemed not to see him.

  Hands shoved in his pockets, he waited her out.

  When only two reporters remained, Kit acknowledged him with her eyes. After the others had left, she walked slowly to Nate, squinting against dust kicked up by the wind.

  “What was that movie?” Kit asked. “The Grapes of Wrath?Or was it a book?”

  Nate smiled; like most of the reporters, he admired Kit for her tart humor, and for her professionalism. She might duck, but she seldom lied.

  “So,” Kit said, “what can I tell you?”

  Nate looked around them. “I need to see the senator,” he answered.

  Kit frowned. “Not until after Tuesday, Nate. It’s not that we don’t love you, but most of your readers aren’t California voters, and we lovethem best of all.”

  Nate shook his head. “What I have won’t wait that long.”

  Kit raised her eyebrows. “Donations from extraterrestrials? Right now, ‘won’t wait’ doesn’t get it.”

  “The question I have is sensitive.” Nate kept his tone low, patient. “It’s something he should answer directly.”

  Kit folded her arms, gazing at the dust around her feet. Carefully, she asked, “Are we talking about some sort of illegal activity?”

  She knows, Nate thought; she’s trying to be a filter for Kilcannon. “It doesn’t involve a crime. It’s about the senator’s personal life.” His voice became harder. “So when do I get to see him?”

  Kit looked up again, her eyes less friendly. “As soon as you tell me what it is. And why it’s credible enough to take Kerry’s time before Tuesday.”

  “Quit being the Stepford Press Secretary, Kit.” Nate made his voice soft again. “You don’t want me asking him along the rope line. If this is something Kilcannon can deny, he’ll want to do that in private. I’m trying to give him that chance.”

  “Or?”

  “Or we go with the story next Tuesday. Based on what we have.”

 

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