Dead Watch Read online

  She still didn’t smile; looked up and down the block, then said, “I hate it when I have to trust a Democrat.”

  “I apologize,” Jake said. “I’ll go home and kill myself.”

  Small blondes were his personal head-turner. His ex-wife might have been airmailed to him directly from hell—but she, too, had been a small blonde, and right up to the end, even at the settlement conference, the sight of her had turned him around. As did Madison Bowe. And Madison smelled good, like lilacs, or vanilla.

  “You better come in,” she said, ignoring the wisecrack. “We’re in the parlor.”

  He limped after her. He noticed her noticing it.

  The other half of the “we” was a lawyer named Johnson Black, who was sitting on a sofa facing a coffee table, a delicate china cup in his hand. Jake saw him a half-dozen times a year at different lobbyist dinners. He was balding, with merry, pink cheeks and half-moon glasses. In his late sixties, he was one of the classic Washington regulars who moved between private practice and federal appointments.

  Black wore a dark suit, as always, but had taken off his brilliant tie, which was draped over a shoulder. He stood up, smiling, to shake hands: “Jake, goddamnit, I couldn’t believe it when Maddy said you were coming over. I told her you were a good guy.”

  “I appreciate that,” Jake said. “How’ve you been, Johnnie? How’s the heart?”

  “Ah, I’m eating nothing but bark and twigs. It’s either that, or they do the Roto-Rooter on me.”

  Madison was watching Jake. “Johnnie says you’re teaching at Georgetown,” she said. “Why’s a professor . . . ?”

  “I’m not a professor. I teach a seminar. I work for the government as a consultant,” Jake said. “I specialize in . . .” He paused, looked at Johnson Black, and said, “I don’t know. What do I specialize in, Johnnie?”

  “Hard to tell,” Black said. “Maybe forensic bureaucracy?”

  “That’s it,” Jake said, turning back to Madison. “Forensic bureaucracy. When something goes wrong, I try to find out what really happened.”

  Madison sat on the couch next to Black. She didn’t smile back, hadn’t smiled yet, and he really wanted to see her smile. Jake took an easy chair, facing them across the coffee table, put his case on the floor by his feet, leaned forward.

  “The president has ordered me to find Senator Bowe. I’m going to start kicking bureaucrats, I’m going to raise hell over at Justice, with the FBI, with Homeland Security, and I’m going to talk to Governor Goodman.”

  “In other words, you’re going to make a big public relations show, because the president is feeling the heat,” Madison said.

  Jake shook his head: “No. No show. That’s an explicit part of my deal—I don’t do public stuff. But I will find your husband. There’s a reason he’s gone.”

  “Because he spoke out. Because he was critical of Arlo Goodman and his thugs, and was tying them to this administration,” Madison said.

  Jake held both hands up, palms toward Madison: “Mrs. Bowe: I heard you on television. I will keep that possibility in mind. But there are other possibilities, and I’m not going to let any of them go.”

  “What other possibilities?”

  “That your husband disappeared for reasons of his own,” Jake said.

  “You can’t believe that,” she said, her back rigid. Her hands twisted in her lap, and he was happy that his neck wasn’t between them.

  “I don’t believe anything in particular, Mrs. Bowe,” Jake said. “But there’s been speculation to that effect. That this is an effort to embarrass Arlo Goodman. That you’re jerking him around. There are radio talk show people saying that your appearance on TV was part of that effort.”

  Her face was intent, earnest: “It was not . . .”

  Jake overrode her: “I’m outlining the possibilities, as I see them. I didn’t come over here to argue with you, or to comfort you. I need to ask some questions and to make a request.”

  She settled back on the couch and crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you want?”

  “Your husband is too important a public figure to disappear on his own,” Jake said. “If he disappeared of his own volition, then either you, or some close friend, knows where he is. I want you to call all of his close friends. Tell them that if they know anything about Lincoln Bowe, I want them to get in touch with me. We are now at the point where somebody’s going to jail, to prison, for involvement with this disappearance. That if this started as a joke, nobody’s laughing anymore.”

  Now Madison leaned forward, her eyes locked on his: “That’s what I want! I want somebody to say that in public. The president. The attorney general. That we’re talking about prison. Or the death penalty. Or something. Finally get some pressure on whoever’s got him. They’ve just been out there playing around . . .”

  “So you’ll make the calls?”

  “Yes—but that won’t help,” she said. “He did not disappear on his own. He is not with a friend. He would have told me. Even more . . .”

  She hesitated, and Jake said, “What?”

  “He spends most of his time at our New York apartment,” she said. “He had two cats there. When he disappeared, probably that Friday afternoon, nobody realized that he was gone until Monday, when he missed appointments. When we called the apartment, the maid answered. She said he wasn’t there, but not only that: nobody had fed the cats over the weekend. They had no food or water, they were drinking from a toilet. Linc would never have done that, let the cats go like that. Even if he was planning to disappear, he would have made up some excuse to see that they were taken care of.”

  Jake looked down at his lap and touched his forehead with his middle finger, unconsciously rubbing. In any hunt, any interrogation, there were key moments, when somebody said something that might seem obscure, that looked like a minor point but was, in fact, critical.

  Madison misinterpreted his reaction: “What? You don’t believe me?”

  “No, no,” Jake said, looking up again. “It’s the single piece of information I’ve gotten so far that makes me think you’re right. That he didn’t go away voluntarily.”

  For the first time, her attitude softened. “I’ve been trying to tell everybody that. He’d never abandon the cats.”

  He watched her for a few seconds, then said, “You say he spent most of his time in New York. Did you spend that time with him?”

  “No, I . . .” She stopped, looked at Black, and then said, “We’re not exactly estranged. We’re friendly. But we don’t live together much anymore. He spends most of his time in New York, I spend most of mine at our farm. We mostly intersect here, in Washington . . . when we do.”

  Jake took that as a complex of evasions suggesting that they no longer were in bed together.

  “Do you think . . . if you’re only friendly, that he might have another friend? Somebody that he might have gone off with for a while?”

  She was exasperated: “No, I do not. Frankly, if he was going to do that, he would have told me. And he would have fed the cats.”

  Okay. Enough of that.

  Jake looked at Black, then Madison: “There’s a concept, in the bureaucracy, called The Rule. Have you heard of it?”

  Madison shook her head, but Black nodded. “From Winter’s Guide: You ask, Who benefits?”

  Jake said, “Exactly—though I didn’t think of it. I just picked it up.” He held Madison’s eyes: “In any analysis of a confusing political problem, the rule is to ask, ‘Who benefits?’ You will find the answer to any political or bureaucratic question, if you can answer that one correctly. Now, Senator Bowe vanishes under suspicious circumstances, and you ask, ‘Who benefits?’ ”

  “So?” she asked.

  Jake shook his head: “It sure as hell isn’t this administration. The biggest beneficiaries so far have been your husband’s political allies. The biggest loser so far has been Arlo Goodman.”

  “But . . .”

  “I know what you think about Gov
ernor Goodman, that you dislike him.”

  “He’s an asshole,” she said.

  “So you see my problem. Your husband disappears, and almost nobody is hurt except Arlo Goodman. And, by extension, other Democrats. The election is in seven months . . .”

  Madison looked at Black, and then back at Jake, anger again surfacing as a red flow up her neck and into her cheeks: “All right, let’s work through it again—because you’re wrong about who benefits. It’s not just a few Republicans against Arlo Goodman—a lot of people are scared of him. The Watchmen are like the Klan, or the Mafia, or the Gestapo. They take their orders from Goodman. If Lincoln’s never found, and nobody is ever caught, people become even more afraid of the Watchmen. That’s what they want. They want the fear. They want control. Who benefits if we don’t find Lincoln? The Watchmen do.”

  “That’s a little overblown,” Jake said. “They’re a bunch of guys in leather jackets. Boy Scouts who got old.”

  Her voice rose, never became shrill, but he could feel the anger in it: “That’s how they started. Most of them are still that way. Old Boy Scouts. But some of them . . . In Lexington, the Watchmen came to my house and tried to put me under house arrest. No warrant, no crime, just the Watchmen. Now they’re starting up in other states. You don’t know how dangerous Goodman is. He won’t stop with the governorship. That’s small potatoes. He’s aiming for the presidency.”

  “I’m seeing the governor tomorrow,” Jake said. “I’ll talk to him about it.”

  “For all the good that’ll do,” she snapped.

  “Back to the point: we don’t benefit. I’m not sure I buy the analysis on the Watchmen, but I’ll keep it in mind. So: who else? Is there another party?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. If you start thinking it’s Arab terrorists or the Masons or the Vatican or a thousand-year-old conspiracy, you’ll probably kill him. The answer is closer than that.”

  Jake nodded and picked up his case. “Okay. Make those phone calls, please. I’ll leave my private number for call-backs.”

  “You’re going to find him.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I will. He was last seen getting into a car with two or three other men. That was not an innocent ride, because not a single person has come forward to explain. So that, I think, must be the moment he disappeared, or began disappearing. And that means there’s a group of men who know where he is, what happened. I am going to hound everyone who can do anything to help us break that group. I will find him.”

  “Be careful where you look. Especially in Virginia.”

  “The Watchmen don’t frighten me,” Jake said.

  “That bothers me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because that might mean that you’re too stupid to find Lincoln.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, poised over the coffee table, and then Jake cracked a smile: he really liked her. “Okay.”

  When he left, she shook his hand. Her hands were harder and rougher than he’d expected, probably from riding, or working around the farm, he thought. He turned on the stoop and said, “I’ll talk to the governor about you—get you back to your farm, make sure you’re not harassed. If I need more information, can I come back?”

  “Yes, you may, anytime,” she said. “If we don’t find Linc pretty soon, he’s gone. We’ll never find him.”

  Black, standing behind her, said, “And hey, take it easy, huh? Listen to what Maddy’s saying about the Watchmen. From what I hear, you were always a little too quick to jump out of the airplane.”

  When Jake was gone, Madison said to Johnson Black, “The Virginia state police and the FBI are looking for Linc. They’re not getting anywhere, so the president sends some bureaucrat to look for him? This is going to help? Am I going crazy?”

  “He’s not exactly a bureaucrat,” Black said.

  “That forensic bureaucracy thing was cute,” she said, as they idled back into the living room. “But what does it mean?”

  “Jake fixes things,” Black said. “If there’s some really screwed-up problem, that nobody can fix, and that must be fixed, Jake fixes it. He makes lists of people who need to be fired, who need to be promoted. He has ears all over the bureaucracy . . . he scares the heck out of those people. And that’s what’s got to be done if you want to find Linc.”

  “We need to scare bureaucrats?”

  “That’s right. People are looking for him, they’re paying attention because of all the media coverage, but they’re not desperate to find him. Jake can make people desperate. He can make them feel that their careers are on the line if they don’t—and sometimes, they are.”

  “Hmmp.” She settled back on the couch. “I suppose it’s better than nothing.”

  “He used to be married to Nikki Lange, you know.”

  Her eyebrows went up: “You’re kidding me. He’s the guy?”

  “He’s the guy. Couldn’t last, of course. Nikki’s too deeply involved with herself.”

  “And her money,” Madison said. “Did he get alimony?”

  “No. He told the judge that all he was asking for was his life. The judge almost fell on the floor laughing—she knew Nikki, too. Besides, Jake’s pretty well fixed. Inherited a Montana ranch. Sold to a movie star for big bucks.”

  “Maybe he rides,” she said.

  “I’m sure he does.” Black smiled. “I was watching you two talk—you got sort of engaged.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him, then said, “He’s not entirely unattractive.”

  Black snorted. “Just . . . take it easy. Jake is a little strong for most people. As I understand it, he pretty much held his own with Nikki.”

  “He jumps out of airplanes?”

  “Jake was in Afghanistan for years. He killed people—that was his job. So. You can toy with him, but I wouldn’t annoy him.”

  “Mmm,” she said again. “Maybe he can do something. Maybe we need somebody who’ll jump out of an airplane.”

  Jump out of an airplane.

  He dreamed of jumping out of airplanes that night, jumping all mixed up with the face and figure of Madison Bowe; but mostly jumping. Other jumpers talked about their best moment; popping the chute, flying . . . but for Jake, it had always been that instant when he hit the wind, hit the slipstream, the slap and tickle, the moment of commitment.

  He’d liked Afghanistan, the fighting, the comradeship, the countryside, the Afghanis. In Washington ex-military circles, the fashion called for a grudging, manly acknowledgment of having been there, of the toughness of it, but nobody was supposed to have actually liked it, to have loved the exhilaration of combat.

  But he did. He’d liked the night runs, he’d liked the ambushes, he’d liked the assaults. He hadn’t minded, too much, the occasional pain, right up until the time he took the bad one. He hadn’t even minded that pain, though he hated the disability that came with it.

  He didn’t dream of the disability, though: he dreamed of the airplane door, of the helicopter rope, of the night-vision stalks through the rocky ravines . . .

  He didn’t wake up smiling, but he didn’t wake up unhappy, either.

  In the morning, after his usual four and a half hours of sleep, he cleaned up and went downstairs, ate toast and eggs, then spent an hour with online newspapers, catching up. When he’d finished with the papers, he went out on the government networks, going deeper on Lincoln Bowe and Arlo Goodman. By seven-thirty, he had their biographies down. He made a call to the FBI, then called a cab.

  The day would be warm, he thought, as he locked the door. It must have rained sometime overnight, because the gardens and sidewalks were still wet, but now the skies were clearing again, and sun slanted down through the trees along the street. Because of the torn-up sidewalk, and construction equipment in the street, he walked out to the end of the block to wait for the taxi.

  The driver was maybe twenty-one, silent, sullen even, wearing an old tweed coat over a T-shirt, and a flat tweed hat.

  “Har
d night?” Jake asked.

  The driver’s eyes went up to the mirror. “They’re all hard, buddy.”

  Jake suppressed a smile: the cabbie was living in a movie, delivering movie lines.

  The FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building was a bland outcrop of bureaucratic rock on Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the Capitol. Jake checked through security, got an elevator. He didn’t need directions.

  Mavis Sanders was the FBI’s assistant deputy director for counterterrorism. She met him at the door to her inner office. “Another headache,” she said. She was smiling, but her voice wasn’t.

  “How have you been, Mavis?” Jake asked. He kissed her on the cheek.

  “My day wasn’t too bad until seven-thirty A.M., when I got the note that said you were coming over,” she said.

  “C’mon, we’re old chums.”

  “Yeah. Sit down, old chum.” She was a slender fine-boned black woman who’d made her reputation tracking Iranian-based jihadists. She dropped into her chair, looked at a piece of paper, set it aside, knitted her fingers on top of her desk, and asked, “What’s up?”

  “The president and the chief of staff have decided that I should find Lincoln Bowe. I need access to your investigative files, and then I need you—somebody, but preferably you—to make this thing a priority and get it settled.”

  “It is a priority.”

  “Bull. Everybody’s playing pass-the-hanky, hoping for the best,” Jake said. “Your Richmond guys are doing liaison, you’ve got nobody really senior involved, except in PR.”

  “Jake, I really don’t know anything about it.”

  “I’d like to get Novatny working on it.”