PART TWO

5

There was talk of a winter storm, of air currents rippling off the mountain, but Isaac still hadn’t seen a snowflake. And while he gazed out the window, looking for that lost whitetail, Ramona called. “How dare you, Mr. President? Sneaking out like a common criminal. I should be the first to know if you’ve gone off the track. I could be at Aspen within the hour.”

“Then who would watch over the West Wing?”

He hung up on Ramona, and was tempted to call the camp duty officer about the gray wolf. He wanted the wolf driven off his grounds, and then he realized that this renegade had as much right to be here as he did. But finally, after an hour or two, a mob of whitetails appeared on Isaac’s lawn, tempted by the salt lick. The leader of the mob, a stag with antlers that pierced the sky like a crooked crown, took short, furtive steps. Isaac had seldom seen whitetails near Aspen this late after early light. The stag stood guard, while its herd hopped around the salt lick with their white throats held high. Isaac longed to go outside and dance with the whitetails, but he knew that a lumbering soul like himself would scare them away.

Then he heard a strange report that couldn’t have come from a pistol. It was a riotous beating of wings, as a great scatter of birds flew over his head. Isaac marveled at the pattern, like a series of geometric wheels. The whitetails were frozen for a moment, as if the crack in the air had bewitched them, and then they woke out of their dream and bolted into the forest in one beautiful, whirling line, led by that crooked crown.

Isaac couldn’t abandon the window. He was as transfixed as the whitetails had been, mesmerized by that powerful commotion. He was almost surly when his Seabee chef tackled him.

“Mr. President, you’ll have to move your ass.”

He followed Charles deeper into the sun room as his picture window shattered in a burst of gunfire that sounded like a dull shiver of tin. Both men crept behind a couch. Cushions flew into the air in a second burst of fire, and feathers from the wounded cushions floated across the sun room in a blinding haze. Charles wore a tin plug in his ear.

“Tango One,” he whispered into his chest, “this is the Dancer . . .”

Isaac didn’t hear the crackling spit of a radio. Charles removed his ear plug.

“Mr. President, we can’t raise the dead. All the channels have been scrambled—as a precaution, sir. We’re under attack.”

Pepito—the sage of Medellin—had been right. Sidel was a damn sitting duck. Some money-laundering son of a bitch of a banker would win all the marbles, millions perhaps in a fanciful lottery over the president’s last breath. Isaac shouldn’t have complained about that spindly lone wolf. The attackers, whoever they were, had driven the wolf onto Isaac’s lawn—that wolf was a warning sign, so was the herd’s late arrival. The whitetails were having their last lick.

It was some kind of bewildering Armageddon. Circuits had been cut. There were flashes of brilliant light. For a moment he thought the compound was ablaze. And then the fire vanished with the same stubborn, irrational pull, and he tumbled into a world of silence, broken by an occasional cry and the sullen crack of a pistol. Separated from the Secret Service, Isaac was a commander in chief suddenly adrift. Ramona Dazzle must have been rejoicing that POTUS was hidden somewhere in the ether. Had she installed Bull Latham in the Oval Office as president pro tem, with his own nuclear football and “biscuit,” the little plastic card that carried all the codes of destruction? He and the Bull were the only ones who had the football and the biscuit. Isaac had lost sight of his own military aide and football. But nothing could be launched without him, not yet. Isaac still had his biscuit. And he still had his Glock.

“Charles,” he said to his Seabee, “let’s shoot it out with the cocksuckers. We’ll join the razzia.”

“What’s a razzia, Mr. President?”

“A raid, a romp, a surprise attack. The Bedouins would arrive in the middle of a dust storm, steal another tribe’s horses and drinking water, and disappear into the dust—a perfect razzia.”

But when Isaac tried to get up with his Glock and move toward the sun porch, the Seabee tackled him again.

“I could have you court-martialed,” Isaac said.

“Maybe so. But I have one mission, sir, and that’s to keep you alive. You can’t move from Aspen. We’re in lockdown.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s protocol once we have unfriendly fire. No one can get in or out of Cactus until our boys fine-comb the facility.”

“That could take a year,” Isaac said with a growl. He inspected the scars around Charles’ eyes, souvenirs from Nam. “You’re not really a chef, are you? Who the hell placed you here?”

Charles must have had some Seabee code of honor. Isaac had to stare at him for five minutes flat until Charles finally relented.

“Captain Sarah Rogers, sir. She kind of oversees this mountain from some office in Quantico.”

“You tricked me, Charles. All that jazz about the Polo Grounds. You’re with Navy Intel.”

“Yes and no,” Charles said. “I am the chef attached to Aspen. But Cap’n Sarah put me on special assignment—to watch over your dumb ass. Forgive my informality. Those were Cap’n Sarah’s exact words.”

“And how come I never met this hidden sleuth from Quantico?”

“Sleuth, sir? She considers herself the landlord of Camp David, and you’re her prize tenant. She don’t like to interfere.”

“That’s lovely of her,” Isaac muttered. He’d send this captain of intelligence to the coal mines once the razzia was over. Meanwhile he sat there while Charles crawled into the kitchen and returned with a thermos of coffee and egg salad sandwiches on Italian whole wheat bread imported from a bakery on Long Island. Isaac felt ridiculous having a picnic in the midst of an assault on the mountain. But he ate his sandwich dutifully, drank his mug of coffee with low-fat milk. The president, with his doomsday codes on a little card, was everybody’s child. He was pampered, protected, bullied, buffeted around. Charles had tackled him twice.

The Seabee began to sniff around him. “I can smell the snow, sir. The storm should be coming.”

“That’s ridiculous—a farmer’s tale. I haven’t seen one fucking snowflake.”

“She’ll come,” Charles said. And within ten minutes the air outside Isaac’s shattered window was clotted with flakes, as if Charles himself had summoned the snow, like a mass of ragged white dots in a modernist painting. And then the dots whirled faster and faster.

Charles didn’t have time to play the farmer-philosopher. “The storm will blow right through the cabin like a choo-choo train and wreck everything in sight. You sit where you are, sir—don’t move.”

Charles stacked the furniture in a great pile, and then he took the drapes from the picture window, battened them down, and stapled them to the valence above the window and to the wall. He built his own cluster of sandbags with all the blankets, sheets, and pillows he could find, wedging this cluster close to the battened drapes until he had his own little fort.

The little fort didn’t last. The snarling wind tore into the drapes, and chairs flew across the sun room like murderous missiles. Charles thrust a blanket over Isaac, and covered him with pillows, while he swatted at the flying chairs like Willie Mays—with a broom. Then the wind died down. Isaac crept out from under the blanket, and realized that he sat in a blinding white tomb of snow. The cabin had become a burial ground for the living. Charles had to brush him off with the broom.

They survived the storm, engulfed in that white glare, while Isaac suffered the humiliation of being utterly out of the loop on a mountain that was no longer his. He’d almost forgotten the razzia when Bull Latham burst through the door in a bulletproof vest and a snow cap that covered his ears. Behind him was his aide, carrying the football. Isaac could hear the crackle of flashbulbs, see a cornucopia of television cameras. The press rarely set foot inside the citadel of Camp David, but the Bull had come as Isaac’s savior, and the Bull had to shine. With him was a luscious lady officer with hazel eyes, dark curls, and steel-tipped boots. The Big Guy didn’t have to guess who it was—Cap’n Sarah of Navy Intel.

“Lo, Bull,” he said. “I hope your rescue will be on all the networks. Did you enjoy sitting in the catbird seat? How many pictures did you take with Barbara Walters inside the Oval Office?”

The Bull’s lower lip was trembling. He would have liked to hurl Isaac down the stairs at Aspen and into the arms of the press corps. “I never went near the Oval Office.”

“Come on, didn’t Ramona ask you to stage a coup d’état in front of the television cameras?”

Isaac had a curious affliction—he loved to taunt his vice president. But the Bull had to bite down hard on his lip and swallow his own venom. He couldn’t afford a wrestling match in front of reporters from all over the planet. It was Miss Steel Toes who answered him, protecting her eyes from all that glare.

“Forgive me, Mr. President, but don’t be such a prick. We’ve had a very rough day. It wasn’t that easy to neutralize the mountain. The unfriendlies seemed to come out of nowhere. We had little warning. Not a single one of them should have been able to infiltrate the facility. I’m Captain Sarah Rogers, sir.”

“Ah,” Isaac said, “I know. You’re my landlady on the mountain.”

The Big Guy was beginning to enjoy himself. He liked this young captain with the curly hair.

“Was there any collateral damage?” he asked.

“Very little, sir. These mothers were professionals, mercs of some kind. A couple of our guys had superficial wounds. I suspect we’re dealing with a paramilitary unit that had some training right on the mountain.”

“How is that possible?”

“Beats the shit out of me,” Sarah said. “But we did have some suspicion. The supply orders from the electrical shop didn’t sound right, sir—power plugs strong enough to break every circuit at the facility, and enough high-voltage wire to wrap itself around the Great Wall of China. I couldn’t interrogate the chief electrician; he’d already scattered, and he didn’t leave much of a forwarding address. Some dude must have paid him a whole lot of cash.”

Suddenly Isaac was involved in his first caper as commander in chief. He felt much more comfortable as the nation’s policeman-president, though Teddy Roosevelt had also been a police commissioner, and Isaac had inherited his desk at police headquarters in Manhattan.

“Did we take any prisoners?”

“That’s the problem, Mr. President. The mercs were in and out with the storm. They didn’t leave many footprints in the snow.”

The Big Guy had been right. A perfect razzia. Phantoms with their own flair.

“Do you think they were trying to kidnap me, put out my lights?”

“I’m not sure,” Sarah said. “I had my Marines stationed on Aspen’s perimeter once I discovered that the chief electrician was compromised.”

“The fuckers still shot out my picture window and scared away the whitetails.”

“Mr. President,” the Bull said, “that could have all been for show. They proved their point—that they could infiltrate the mountain despite all our damn security details. They weren’t after the football, or they would have swiped your biscuit. And even then, I can override any order once you’re outside the safety zone. I agree with Sarah. They’ve been here before, on this mountain. And this hit was a trial run.”

“Or a kite,” Isaac said. “Hey, Big Balls, we can get to you anytime and anywhere.”

Sarah and the Bull wanted to know about the two visitors Isaac had—Ariel Moss and Motke Katz—just before the attack on the mountain. But Isaac wasn’t prepared to discuss the Sons of Rossiya and that bankers’ lottery on his life, not while he was at Shangri-La. Ari and Motke must have gotten off the mountain, or else they were lying in some grave.

There was a great deal of clamor on Isaac’s patio; reporters hovered around like beetles in fur-lined coats.

“Isaac,” the Bull said, “sooner or later you’ll have to talk to the press, and it might as well be now.”

“What do they know?”

“Not that much,” Sarah said. “No one alerted them about your ride up the mountain on Marine One. And it’s pretty isolated up here. Some locals might have heard the gunfire. But they’ve heard gunfire before. They figured it was a Marine drill.”

“Then why is the press parked on my porch?”

“That’s Ramona’s mischief,” the Bull said. “She started making a few calls. I stopped her in time. You can make up your own song, Mr. President. The attackers didn’t even leave any of their shell casings.”

“A surgical strike,” Isaac said, “and the only thing that’s missing is a motive.”

Isaac went outside onto the patio in his windbreaker. He stood with the Bull and the beautiful captain; the wind nearly knocked him off the rails. He was still wearing his slippers. He had bits of glass in his scalp, like hard, biting dandruff. He mentioned a power shortage in the blizzard, a president who was cut off from the rest of the world.

“Sir,” one of the reporters asked, “what if there had been a nuclear attack?”

“We’re still covered,” Isaac said. “The Bull has his own biscuit—all the nuclear codes and keys.”

Then he saw them; the whitetails had come back, the entire mob, led by that stag with its crown of thorns. They must have been hungry, starving, to risk this avalanche of human animals on their lawn, and satisfy their craving for salt. Isaac wanted to approach the stag in his slippers, touch its antlers, and he dreamt up his own little ballet while he was with the press. It was well past the mating season, and this stag should have shed its antlers, but it still had its crown of thorns, as if to defy all the gods of winter. And in his dream Isaac did touch the different branches of bone. The antlers had a slight envelope of fuzz, with a greenish tint. And then he was jostled out of his dream, as one of the cameramen approached the mob of whitetails at the salt lick.

“Don’t,” Isaac cried, “don’t.” But the cameraman didn’t heed Isaac. The stag seemed to charge the cameraman with its antlers; the snowstorm must have maddened it a little. Isaac hopped about and hurled his slipper at the cameraman—it struck the side of his head. The cameraman toppled into the snow with all his cargo. And the mob of whitetails, with the stag in the lead, bounded back into the forest. Isaac watched their leaps in midair, and the beauty of it just about broke his heart.

That’s what the press picked up, not a razzia that few people noticed, or a president who was out of touch with a nation during a blizzard, but a president who tossed his slipper at a rogue cameraman about to interrupt the feeding ritual of winter whitetails.

6

The Night Hawk wandered across Maryland and returned to the White House as if it were part of a funeral procession. The Big Guy barely breathed a word. He sat in his king’s chair, reliving the raid on the mountain moment by moment and recovering nothing at all—some army of werewolves might as well have been behind that razzia. He didn’t come into the cockpit once to schmooze. But he whispered to Colonel Oliver just before he disembarked. “Need you, Stef. I’d like you to spend the night.”

The colonel hadn’t been with his little boy in five fucking days, couldn’t even phone Max during the lockdown at Cactus, find out if Max had any problems at school.

So he was in a rotten mood until he looked outside his cockpit and saw Maximilian standing on the South Lawn. He wouldn’t even have to pilot the Night Hawk to Quantico and bed her down. His second in command was also on the lawn in full gear. The Big Guy must have arranged the switch. As uncomfortable as he was in the White House, Isaac was still a master of detail, a strategist in hibernation.

Stef climbed down, saluted his second in command, and watched the Night Hawk float back into the sky like a ghostly gondola.

The Secret Service let him and Max through the gate without a call sign. He was the president’s pilot, Colonel Stefan Oliver, commander of Marine Squadron One, and didn’t require any identification marks. He wove through the labyrinth of the West Wing, shunned the elevator, and hiked up to the attic with his boy. Stef was prince of the third floor, a kind of heir apparent, even though he wasn’t Isaac’s actual heir. The Big Guy had an estranged wife and a daughter who hadn’t visited him at the White House yet.

The attic had its own peculiar feel, filled with ironing boards and maids’ paraphernalia. It also had its own tiny kitchen. And there were usually no other guests; Ramona liked to park her favorite cousins on the second floor, in one of the historic bedrooms. But Stef didn’t want to be surrounded by the stink of history. He preferred the randomness of the attic, where he had his own separate suite.

He scooped up Max and carried him on his shoulder across the threshold like some abandoned bride. The boy was so damn thin. He’d mourn his mother for the rest of his days.

“Problems at school?”

“No, Pa.”

“Has Karina been strict with you, huh?”

Karina was their live-in maid.

“Missed you, Pa,” the boy said, looking at Stef with skeletal eyes. “All that snow. I dreamed you were lost.”

Max was as wise as a witch doctor. Stef had felt disoriented during the lockdown, helpless and abandoned in a nondescript cabin at Camp David, without the least bit of connection, not even to the gunfire outside his own walls. And now his button mike crackled.

“Tango One to Rio, the Citizen would like to see you.”

“Jesus, Tango One, I’m with my little boy.”

“Citizen says you should bring him along to the meet. He’s in the dollhouse.”

The “dollhouse” was the beauty salon on the second floor, the Cosmetology Room that seemed to be Isaac’s favorite haunt in the entire residence. He didn’t have to deal with Ramona in the dollhouse.

“Copy that,” the colonel said, unloosening the button mike while he combed the boy’s hair.

But Max was excited, almost feverish. “Pa, am I gonna wrestle with the Big Guy again?”

The boy loved Isaac, worshipped him. They often played together like a pair of orphans. That was the secret of Sidel. No matter what mantle he happened to wear at the time—president, mayor, or police chief—he still behaved like an orphan, with an essential sadness in his eyes.

They went down one flight, past the Secret Service, and into the Cosmetology Room, and it startled Stef. Captain Rogers sat in one of the salon chairs, like some cosmic beautician in an officer’s blouse. She was still flirting with him, right in front of the Big Guy.

“You’ve both met, I believe—on the mountain,” Isaac said.

“Yeah,” Sarah said. “He’s almost as handsome as his little boy—what’s your name, son?”

“Maximilian,” Max said. “I go to a special school. I can’t spell or recite poetry. And I stutter sometimes.”

“Well, Lincoln’s little boy, Tad, was also a stutterer,” Isaac said. “And he ruled the White House.”

“Perhaps Maximilian doesn’t care to rule,” Sarah sang in a gentle voice, and it troubled Stef, the way she seemed to caress the boy with her hazel eyes. Isaac could sense the discomfort in his helicopter pilot. He hugged Max and delivered him to a pair of Secret Service men, whose assignment was to play hide and seek with the boy on the second floor. Stef was still pissed off. He didn’t want his privileges with the boy usurped by Isaac’s ruffians. But he kept his mouth shut. Sidel, it seems, had absconded with Sarah, plucked her out of Quantico, and made her his liaison to the White House. The admirals at Navy Intel must have been ripping mad, but they couldn’t go to war with the commander in chief. If a single one of them complained to the Secretary of Defense, all these cloak-and-dagger admirals might lose their perks.

“Stef,” the Big Guy said, with a delirious fire in his eyes, “I’m gonna turn this room into a command post. We can get around Ramona and bypass the Bull and the rest of my national security mavens. They can’t help us here. This will be our very own caper.”

Stef was still morose. “Mr. President, I don’t get it. I’m a pilot, not an intelligence officer.”

“Ah,” Isaac said, like a chess wizard, “but you have information in your skull that’s indispensable. You were an eyewitness.”

“Witness to what?” Stef had to ask, more flustered than ever.

“The Camp David Accords.”

“I told you, sir. I wasn’t in command. I was a pick-up pilot, the mascot of the pack.”

“But you took Ariel Moss on a ride across the mountain, and it’s Ariel who interests me right now.”

Isaac told Stef the details of Ariel’s mysterious visit to Aspen Lodge with the former chief of Shin Bet as his bodyguard and companion. Ariel had insisted on meeting Isaac at Camp David, but kept referring to the mountain as Shangri-La, and seemed obsessed with FDR—Roosevelt’s retreat, Ariel called it. But there was hardly a trace of Roosevelt on the mountain—the rustic cabins were gone, so were the outhouses, the water troughs, and the fishing holes. There hadn’t even been a high-wire fence or a gate, just a deserted road, a sentry, and a shack full of Marines. Yet Ariel kept harping back to this earlier time. Someone must have talked to him about Roosevelt’s days and nights on the mountain, and summoned up Shangri-La.

“Who could have talked to Ariel Moss about FDR?”

“I don’t know,” Stef shouted at the Big Guy, with a merciless thumping in his brain.

“Sure you do,” Sarah said. “He was in the archives. I went through all the manifests. He was right there with you, and he was also at Warm Springs with FDR—or Mr. Frank, as he called him. He was one of the rare polio victims who was ever cured.”

Raymond Tollhouse, Stefan Oliver muttered to himself. He was the fool of fools. Tollhouse was commander of Squadron One while Ariel Moss and Sadat were at Shangri-La, and had singled Stef out from the raw recruits, shepherded him right into the squadron. Stef would have remained in Stuttgart, with a remote, forgotten crew, if it hadn’t been for Colonel Ray, who was promoted to general right after his tour with Squadron One. And yet, for some unfathomable reason, Colonel Ray had fallen out of Stef’s universe. Tollhouse had been one of his instructors at Quantico, had first introduced him to the intricacies of the Night Hawk. Now he had to conjure up the same secretive man for Sidel and Sarah.

“Tollhouse,” he said. “Colonel Ray was the only one of us who’d actually visited the mountain with FDR. He was the president’s mascot—in 1942.”

“Like a batboy, but without a baseball team,” Isaac said.

“So he knew the landscape by heart,” Sarah said.

“Every inch of the terrain.”

And suddenly the words flew out of him with all the intricate magic of a musical score.

“He would have remained a cripple if it hadn’t been for Warm Springs.”

Roosevelt himself had contracted infantile paralysis as an adult, and had come to this tiny rural retreat in Georgia with its bubbling spring water, a politician exiled from his own career. He had this insane belief that he could find a miraculous cure in warm mountain water. He stayed at the Meriwether Inn, a run-down hotel for rich people who wanted to escape the infectious summers of Savannah. FDR had his own ambitious plan. He started a little clinic at the Meriwether, a rehabilitation center for polio victims, and invested half his fortune in the clinic. His mother thought he was insane. But Mr. Frank won her over with that patrician charm of his. He also won over the nation and was elected president in 1932. He still visited Warm Springs whenever he could, swam with all the other “polios,” and didn’t have to hide his crippled legs. Warm Springs had become his winter retreat.

And that’s how Tollhouse entered the tale. Polio victims had to travel in the baggage car if they wanted to go anywhere by train. Tollhouse had come all by himself from Savannah, a ten-year-old cripple, to enroll in Mr. Frank’s rehabilitation center. And the president, who couldn’t take a single step on his own, met Tollhouse at the station. Two of his handlers lifted up his wheelchair, and Mr. Frank plucked that boy out of the baggage car with the powerful arms of a swimmer. Tollhouse had been locked in the dark without food or water. Suddenly there was a blaze of light, as the porter opened the baggage car door. And the first thing he discovered was Mr. Frank, biting into his cigarette holder, smiling with all the warmth in the world at a frightened, sickly boy.

“Colonel Ray would have done anything for FDR—strangled a widow, drowned a kitten, anything.”

“Raymond was his poster child, his own big success story,” Sarah said.

“No, no,” Stef insisted. “It wasn’t anything like that. FDR was generous to all the kids at the polio clinic. But he couldn’t visit Warm Springs much after the war began. That’s why he had Shangri-La. It was his mountain retreat in Maryland. And he liked having Raymond around.”

“As his batboy,” Isaac said. “The kid couldn’t have been more than fifteen in ’42. Raymond must have been fixated on Shangri-La—and Warm Springs—most of his life.”

“I suppose,” Stefan said.

Tollhouse had a couple of tours in Nam, where he was on loan to an Air Cav medivac unit; he rescued Marines from every sort of hellhole. He returned to the States a war hero and was assigned to Squadron One. But he developed a mysterious limp, almost a vestige of the polio he’d had as a boy, as if his own body had become a haunted house. He left the Marines and started his own security firm.

“Called it Wildwater,” Stefan said. “He was a sentimental son of a bitch. And he had to name his new company after the wild mountain water he remembered as a boy—at the clinic. He couldn’t bear leaving Roosevelt country. His training grounds are on Pine Mountain, in the hills above Warm Springs.”

Sarah’s smile seemed elliptical; all her flirting was gone. Stef could have been some stranger. “It was a kind of calculated sentiment, Colonel,” she said. “Tollhouse was the helicopter pilot to three presidents—a perfect calling card. He had access to the biggest corporations and banks. Did he try to lure you to Wildwater?”

“Yes, but I didn’t bite.”

“Even so,” she said, “he could rely on your logistics. You were a known item, inside his domain.”

“Then you’re telling me it was a Wildwater strike?”

The colonel felt trapped in the middle of a cockeyed caper in the Cosmetology Room. Did they really think he had conspired with his former commander to harm the president?

“Doesn’t it make sense?” she asked. “That mad mercenary from Warm Springs has access to all the power lines. He bribes the chief electrician—and boom, his men disappear into the storm without harming a soul.”

Stef began to see blood spots in his eyes. This captain with the raven hair had become his nemesis now. “Are you saying that I was his spotter? We were in lockdown, dammit.”

She was sparring with Stef as if he were a child.

“You wouldn’t have to be a communications wizard to override our codes,” she said. “Isn’t it a little too strategic, Mr. President, that the colonel here developed a sudden amnesia about General Tollhouse?”

“Stop it!” Isaac said. “You’re squabbling like a couple of brats. This is the only team we have. If we unravel, we’ll have nothing. And Ramona wins. She’ll send the Bull and his ninjas from the Bureau to Wildwater. We’ll have a bloodbath and won’t learn a thing about Tollhouse’s staged destruction. I’m his one casualty. He caught me with my pants down.”

Stef was more confused than ever. He preferred an ex-cop who stumbled about in a snowstorm rather than a president who played spymaster in a beauty salon.

“Am I gonna go undercover?” Stef asked with a curl of his lip. “Do I make a pilgrimage to Tollhouse on Pine Mountain?”

“No, no,” Isaac said. “We leave Wildwater alone. What matters now is who the hell hired him? We’ll all have to dig.”

“Fine,” Stefan said, feeling like a pilot and a navigator again. “Boss, are we all equals here?”

Isaac mused for a moment. “Sure—we’re equals. Forget that I’m commander in chief.”

“Then you shouldn’t bring any software up to this salon. Ramona will find out, and she’ll shut us down. You ceded this mansion to her, and you can’t take it back. Rogers should do all her digging at Quantico, where she won’t be compromised by a chief of staff who’s a ballbuster.”

“And you?”

“I’m going to collect my little boy from the Secret Service.”

And Stefan Oliver fled this lunatic salon without looking back at Isaac or the captain from Quantico.

He thought of resigning, but he’d miss that white-topped gondola, and he’d miss Sidel, a president who seemed to wear a wound as palpable as the damn Glock in his pants. He had considered joining Wildwater after his last tour, but Stef was a bit naïve. He hadn’t realized that Tollhouse ran a bunch of mercs. He thought he’d be guarding bank presidents on some fancy loop and earning a $100k a year, with his pension as a maraschino cherry. Instead, he’d be carrying mercs on commando raids for South American dictators and drug lords. His $100k would be choked with blood. Tollhouse had lied to him. Stef fell for that tale of a security firm rising out of Roosevelt’s waters. But FDR had died in 1945 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the Little White House in Warm Springs, and there was very little trace of him on Pine Mountain.

Tollhouse was the new manor lord of the mountain springs, and he milked money for his own cause.

The colonel read to his little boy. He wasn’t that inventive. He’d borrowed the same books that his own father had read to him—Bambi, Pinocchio, and The Three Musketeers, stories inherited from generation after generation of military brats. Max loved Pinocchio the best, and his eyes would gleam with terror and delight every time Pinocchio was swallowed by Monstro the whale. Stef had forgotten that there was no whale in the book, just a mile-long shark; Monstro was Uncle Walt Disney’s creation. Perhaps Stef had seen the film too many times, and his own father had also been confused, but Max loved to imagine the boy with the pointy nose, who was as disabled as himself—a bundle of wires and wood—flopping around in Monstro’s belly.

“Aw, Pa, doesn’t Monstro have a heart, like you and me?”

And that’s when Stef heard the double click from the White House operator, who told him that a Mr. Wildwater of Warm Springs was on the line.

“Are you available, Colonel?”

Stef took the call. “You motherfucker,” he said, “why are you pestering me here?”

He recognized the guttural laugh of Raymond Tollhouse.

“Stef, who else can I talk strategy with, huh? You were on the mountain with Big Balls. I would have liked to play a little ping-pong. But I forgot my paddle, and you were in lockdown.”

“Do you want to be in permanent lockdown? Half a dozen agencies must be listening to this call.”

“And I probably do business with every single one of them,” Tollhouse said, with all the cockiness of a retired Marine general. “I’m untouchable, kid. You’ll have to come to terms with that. I broke into the president’s most guarded facility—Shangri-La—and could have tapped him on the shoulder. What does that tell you, huh? His life isn’t worth shit.”

Stefan Oliver felt abused; he’d been Tollhouse’s protégé, had followed right behind him as the president’s pilot and commander of Squadron One, had worshipped his warrior’s unselfish devotion. Tollhouse had bolted from his squadron and attached himself to Air Cav, because the Marines didn’t have a medivac unit in Nam. He didn’t care about rank or prestige; he went deep into Indian country to save the lives of wounded jarheads, carrying Marines for miles across rice fields and mountainous terrain—he was pilot, nurse, marksman, and fairy godmother. He never grandstanded, never even sought recognition for himself and his unit. And here he was with all his hoopla. It sickened Stef.

“Go away,” he said. “You proved your point, General. How many millions did you make on this op?”

“More than you and I could ever spend in our lifetimes. Tell your president that he should come to Pine Mountain. He might have a real revelation.”

“He’s not interested in your mountain, General, only in who hired you.”

“Tell him it was the United States,” Tollhouse said and hung up on his protégé.

Stef considered running downstairs to the beauty salon, but he realized that the Secret Service had tapped into the line and was probably preparing a transcript of the conversation for the president. So he went back to Monstro the whale. Max fell asleep in his pajamas, and Stef couldn’t sit still. He wandered from room to room, his mind ablaze. What could have tempted a war hero like Tollhouse to become such a renegade? Not money alone. He’d never been that interested in loot.

The president’s pilot heard footsteps in the corridor. It couldn’t have been a maid at her ironing board, not at this hour. He stepped out and saw the captain from Quantico, wearing one of Sidel’s fluffy flannel robes. She looked like a transient from the far side of Lafayette Park.

“The Big Guy wants me here,” she said. “It wasn’t my idea.”

His boss was playing Cupid, and Stef was angry at the idea. Isaac could be his own fucking matchmaker. “Did you listen to my conversation with Tollhouse?”

“Of course.”

“He said the United States hired him. What the hell does it mean?”

She had the same damn elliptical smile. “That’s above your pay grade, Colonel.”

He wanted to slap the smugness out of her, teach her a lesson.

She searched his eyes and her face softened a bit. “I’m sorry, Stef. When I realized it was a Wildwater op, I thought you had given away our codes and was steering him from inside the facility. I was wrong.”

She was standing close to Stef, her body like a magnificent furnace in the winter iciness of the attic. Her pungent bouquet of sweat and perfume aroused him. She put one of her arms around his neck. He undid her robe with one flip of his finger. She was wearing a bra and silkies. They leapt at one another like big, strong cats and crashed into an ironing board. Stef hadn’t been near a woman ever since he lost Leona. He delivered a mourner’s kiss, tender and a little cruel. He sucked on her navel like an embalmer, as if he meant to drain her blood. He felt like a captive all of a sudden, overwhelmed by this captain from Quantico.

7

The colonel’s conversation with “Mr. Wildwater” hopped across Washington’s intelligence circuits like a sizzling wire. It seemed that half the planet had listened in, and now Isaac had to meet with his national security mavens in the lower dungeon of the West Wing. He had little faith in these wise men. So he sat with Sarah and Stef.

Tim Vail, Isaac’s national security advisor, was the magician here with his monitors and electronic maps; he could create and destroy entire universes on a side wall with his silver wand, but he couldn’t conjure up a single glimpse of the razzia at Cactus. Some mischievous troll must have pulled the plug—all the surveillance cameras had been shut off.

Tim still had his sense of majesty; he balked at Colonel Oliver’s sudden appearance in the Situation Room.

“Mr. President, your helicopter pilot lacks the clearance to powwow with us.”

“Well, Tim, put on your blinders and pretend he isn’t here. But be a good fellah and explain to me why General Tollhouse has the notion in his head that the United States hired him to shoot up Camp David?”

Isaac’s resident boy genius had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard at nineteen and felt superior to everyone in the room, including his own boss.

“It’s not that simple, sir. We did hire Wildwater to test our security at David and review whatever fault lines we had in our system. His record was impeccable. He’s a war hero, for Christ’s sake.”

“And you gave him our call signs?” Isaac asked, while he swiped away Tim’s silver wand. Tim seemed a little lost. “We had to, sir—it was part of the security package.”

“So he shut his eyes, said ‘Open Sesame,’ and marched right into Ali Baba’s den.”

Tim slumped in his leather chair. “We couldn’t anticipate that—”

“He would make fools of you all and mount a raid on a facility he was supposed to monitor. Why don’t you shut him down?”

Tim fell silent and slumped deeper into his chair, impotent without his silver stick. The Bull had to pinch hit for him. “We can’t, Mr. President. We’d cause a national crisis if it ever got out. He’s still under contract to us. He’s been invaluable. He comes through in all the tight spots.”

“And you couldn’t gallop to Warm Springs and slap the shit out of him—for starters?”

“The Washington Post would have a field day,” Ramona said. “They’d pronounce it a civil war within the president’s closet.”

“Why? Mr. Wildwater doesn’t work for me.”

Ramona wouldn’t slink into her chair like Tim. “I’m afraid he does, sir.”

“That’s grand,” Isaac said. “So Wildwater fucked me and sent us the bill.” He brooded in his chair. “That’s why you wanted to stop Ari Moss in his tracks. It wasn’t about K Street and the Jewish lobby. It wasn’t about politics at all. He sensed that some bad stuff was going down. Ramona darling, was I the very last to learn about the raid? Did Tollhouse warn you of his little exercise in advance?”

Bull Latham broke through that silent wall of static in the Situation Room. “He gave us a few hints.”

“And nobody thought to tell me?”

“It was too late,” the Bull said. “You rushed off to Cactus without giving anyone advance notice. Colonel Oliver couldn’t even prepare the lift package.”

“You’re a fine one, Bull. You left me there to sit in the dark.”

Bull Latham, who wasn’t a cautious man, measured his words. “You were never in harm’s way, Mr. President—not really. Tollhouse was taunting us. He made us squirm, I’ll admit.”

Isaac couldn’t contain his captain from Quantico, who bristled in her chair. “You cunts,” Sarah said, with both her elbows on the table, “you worthless cunts. You abandoned your own president. If Mr. Wildwater hadn’t gotten Colonel Oliver on the horn, it would have been business as usual, and you would have left every single one of us at Cactus to take the fall.”

“Mr. President,” Tim rasped, rocketing out of his chair, “she can’t talk to us in that tone of voice. We have admirals and generals in this room—we’ll resign.”

“I doubt that, Tim,” Isaac said with a touch of pure silk. “What think tank would hire a security wizard who can’t even protect his own commander in chief? Sit down and shut up.”

There wasn’t even a thin stripe of mutiny in the Situation Room.

“Did you pay Tollhouse any ransom money?” Isaac had to ask his mavens.

“We did,” the Bull said, hesitating a bit. “We had to, boss. He’d turned the tables on us. Tollhouse had all the keys to the kingdom, and we had none. We couldn’t risk a battle royal on the mountain. You might have gotten hurt in the crossfire.”

“So I was the hostage, huh? And you’re the president’s wise men. Did you ever stop to think that someone might have hired him to pull off that stunt? It’s not the first time he’s shown his bravura. Didn’t he shadow the Viet Cong and drag wounded grunts and jarheads out of enemy camps? That fucker has no fear. And suppose someone wanted to embarrass us and warn me at the same time. Wildwater would have been the perfect vehicle.”

Isaac snapped Tim’s silver wand like a twig and walked out of the Situation Room.

The general was a ghost rider, Isaac grasped. He’d lived among ghosts in that baggage car as a little boy until Mr. Frank plucked him out of the dark, a savior with spindly legs. He’d lived among ghosts at the clinic—“polios” who’d never walk again—while he rode the parallel bars until his muscles grew lithe and he taught himself to walk like an acrobat. He’d lived among ghosts at Shangri-La, the ghosts of war, and watched Mr. Frank’s face turn white as chalk under his old gray hat. He was a ghost rider in Nam, swirling around the enemy, carrying the wounded in a cradle across his shoulder. And he was a ghost rider at Cactus, walking in and out of his own gunfire. Isaac had misjudged him, seen him as a clever lunatic. But Mr. Wildwater was a man to be reckoned with. Ari had intuited this without ever recalling his presence at the Camp David Accords. The ghost rider danced within an invisible cloak.

Isaac could push back against national security experts who had failed him so. He could push back against the Secret Service. He was going to Pine Mountain to meet with the ghost rider, and he didn’t want Warm Springs neutralized, turned into a risk-free zone. “There are always risks,” he told Matt Malloy.

“But we’ll have to sweep the roads, Mr. President, and place sharpshooters on the mountain.”

“And have every citizen in Georgia hate us? This is sacred ground. FDR would never have returned to politics without Warm Springs. It was his haven. He could be a polio among other polios here, not the president of the United States. You can’t have your sharpshooters, Matt, and Tollhouse might not let you into his camp. He’s the lord of the mountain in pine country. It’s his fiefdom, not yours. I’ll wear a bulletproof vest. And you can keep his camp under surveillance, but that’s my only concession. I don’t want to get into a turf war with him. I need to make the general purr, or he’ll never open up.”

Matt was disturbed by Isaac’s intransigence. “And what if you walk into a trap?”

“Come on, Matt. I’m a ghost rider like the general, living on borrowed time. He had a hundred chances to finish me off. But he kept me alive, and I want to know why. You’ll have to trust my instincts.”

“And what if I remove myself from the detail?”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Isaac said. “You’re as curious about the general as I am. Let’s be bravos, Matt. It can’t hurt.”

And so the lift package was arranged by the colonel. Isaac could have flown to Atlanta on Air Force One. But his private quarters at the front of the plane reminded him too much of a five-star hotel. And he’d have to travel with the press and a whole retinue of retainers, like a little king. No, he preferred the colonel’s White Top. He’d have a tiny caravan of two Night Hawks, while Matt flew down to Warm Springs with his own retinue and swept whatever he could sweep.

The Bull wanted in, and Isaac had a hard time fending him off.

“We can’t risk having both footballs and both biscuits on the same hostile ground.”

“What hostile ground?” the Bull asked.

“Tollhouse’s camp could be the heart of darkness. He must have returned from Indian country like a crazy guy. How else could he have survived Nam? I looked at his record. He was a medic and an angel of death. I’ll meet with him on my own.”

And so he left from the South Lawn in Colonel Oliver’s White Top with Sarah and his own Secret Service detail, minus Matt Malloy. Isaac’s heart was thumping with all the excitement of a man in love—in a windbreaker and a bulletproof vest. They had to hover over barren fields and refuel at three local facilities. The colonel wore his Beretta on this trip.

They didn’t land at Roosevelt Memorial Airport and ride up the mountain in Isaac’s armored car. They rose above the pines in Marine One until the colonel finally spotted a tiny crack among the winter trees. Isaac couldn’t have caught that camouflaged airstrip. Still, he wasn’t utterly blind. He knew that they had come to the general’s own memorial to FDR—Shangri-La on another mountain. Isaac could recognize the rustic cabins, the water troughs, the outhouses, the tents, the old barracks, just as he had imagined them. There wasn’t a soul to greet him or make any hostile noises as they climbed out of the Night Hawks. But they could hear the purl of water from some mountain stream that wasn’t visible from this hump of ground—it was a sweet, intoxicating sound. Isaac felt hypnotized. He shut his eyes for a moment.

And the general appeared out of the pines. He walked with a slight limp. He wasn’t wearing fatigues and a military cap. He had the same windbreaker as Isaac Sidel and a Baltimore Orioles cap with a torn bill. Isaac didn’t see any foot soldiers around, or Indian fighters. Tollhouse must have hid his army somewhere. He had deep fissures on his face and the skin was discolored—souvenirs from Nam. The Viet Cong must have set fire to their own rice fields, looking for a demonic angel with a medicine bag. And Mr. Wildwater must have come walking right out of these fires . . .

Tollhouse welcomed Isaac’s war party. He winked at Stefan Oliver, but gave him no other sign of recognition. Isaac wouldn’t let the Secret Service near Tollhouse with a magnetometer. He looked under the torn bill of the general’s cap. Tollhouse didn’t avoid Isaac’s glance. There was nothing shifty or evasive about his pale blue eyes. At last, Isaac thought. He wouldn’t have to feint and fool around with this man.

“It’s Shangri-La, isn’t it?” Isaac asked, his eyes wandering across the camp.

“Congratulations, Mr. President. I had to reconstruct it from memory—I was still a boy when I visited Shangri-La, with a boy’s fascination for detail. I stayed with Mr. Frank at his own cottage. The Bear’s Den, he called it. I’d have been a deadbeat without him. My papa got rid of me with a railroad ticket, a ten-year-old boy in a wheelchair. I was never invited to Warm Springs, but Mr. Frank took me in, paid all my bills, settled accounts with my papa, had one of the docs become my legal guardian . . .”

The general was still that boy in the baggage car, still Roosevelt’s fellow invalid at Warm Springs, with magical visits to Shangri-La that had given him a taste of immortality. Shangri-La was his survival kit and shield.

The Big Guy and his war party entered a cottage that was like a bear cave. It was lit with electrical torches. There was a small mountain of turkey sandwiches on a crooked table, with a huge canteen of coffee, and a supply of tin cups—a mercenary’s meal. But Tollhouse went off with Isaac into another room, which must have been his own quarters. It had a military cot and a reading lamp; there were no pictures on the walls, no clues of the general’s past. Its tiny window was covered with a black shade. Isaac and the general both sat on the cot in the room’s own diminishing twilight. The general’s burn marks had a queer glow, like the heat coming off a lantern.

Isaac wasn’t offered any liquor or condiments. They sat like two monks with a flask of water and two tin cups.

“I apologize, Mr. President. I should have stopped off at Aspen Lodge and said hello.”

“In the middle of that razzia?”

“It was nothing of the kind,” Tollhouse said. “A training exercise—a maneuver.”

“But you frightened the whitetails and shot out my picture window.”

“It couldn’t be helped. I had my own checklist.”

“But that wasn’t your real mission. You were paid to kill me.”

Tollhouse smiled, and the fissures leapt across his face. “Yes.”

Isaac sucked in that last bit of twilight. “And you didn’t finish the job.”

“I would have dishonored Mr. Frank.”

“Why?” Isaac asked, as Tollhouse sat like a shimmering idol in that little lost land of shadows. “I have none of FDR’s aura. I’m a cop who arrived here by accident.”

“Still,” Tollhouse said, “it would have been like fratricide.”

Isaac laughed bitterly to himself. “General, are we brothers now?”

“Mr. President, your own handlers failed you. They knew I have many clients, each one contradicting the other, and yet these handlers played Russian roulette with your life.”

“Are you surprised? They haven’t walked through fire, like you have. They’re accountants and clerks.”

“Not Bull Latham,” Tollhouse said.

“Ah, the Bull’s a special case. He admires me and also wants my chair.”

They sat in silence. But Tollhouse seemed to tear right into the dark, like a vivid wound. Isaac heard him sigh.

“It’s not certain who hired me to wax you and wind your clock, Mr. President, and it will never be. My clients have lawyers, who have their own lawyers.”

“Then you know about that bankers’ lottery in Basel?”

“The lottery has a double bind,” Tollhouse said. “The longer you’re alive, the bigger the payoff. You’re like a whirling money ball. But I was going to wind your clock. I didn’t want another president sitting at Shangri-La.”

Now Isaac had to wonder if this rescuer of jarheads and grunts had gone off his rocker. “Jesus, you piloted three presidents. You trained Colonel Oliver.”

“And should I tell you how many times I went to bed swearing I would crash Marine One on my next lift package?”

“We all dream of murder,” Isaac said. “That’s built into our fabric. Do ya know how many bad guys I had to whack to get where I am? I climbed right up the golden ladder. So tell me, general—whisper in my ear. Who’s my fucking savior?”

“The tin man.”

“Jesus,” Isaac said, “are we riding all the way back to The Wizard of Oz?”

“No. Our tin man doesn’t come out of a children’s book. He and his associates have cornered the market in tungsten and tin. But I believe you’ve heard of him as a tattoo artist.”

“Viktor and his besprizornye. The Sons of Rossiya.”

“Not the besprizornye. They never had Viktor’s romantic streak. You’re poison to their interests, and they’d love to see you in your grave. But the tin man is another matter.”

The general rolled up the sleeve of his windbreaker and revealed a tattoo of a dragon with many eyes and many tails and one shortened hind leg; the dragon belched a blue fire from its mouth; the “tat” was streaked in blue and red, with a dagger coiled around one of the dragon’s tails.

“Viktor says my autobiography is engraved in the tat somewhere.”

“It looks like the mark of an executioner—how can I meet the tin man? Does he use that Soviet gangster-politician, Pesh Olinov, as his calling card?”

Pesh, it seems, wasn’t really in the picture, except as a bagman or delivery boy.

Viktor depended on that Washington Cave Dweller, Renata Swallow, as his blind. That’s why Isaac had met her in Pesh’s hotel room. She hadn’t come to admire Pesh’s tattoo, but to leave instructions. Why was a blueblood like Renata involved with the besprizornye? Was she laundering money? Had the tin man become her private banker, or had her own fortunes crumbled? Was she in love with the tattoo artist? Isaac would never understand the irrationality of romance.

The tin man had appeared suddenly one afternoon on Pine Mountain with a child’s wooden paint box and not a single bodyguard. He walked into Shangri-La right in the middle of maneuvers. Tollhouse’s mercs looked like ghouls in their black night-fighter paint. Viktor ignored their ferocious grimaces. He sat down with the general in this monk’s closet and removed his works from the paint box—the dyes, the nipples, the ointments, the electric needles. And he engraved the dragon, wiping off the blood and bleeding colors with alcohol dipped in cotton balls.

“He had no uncertainty,” the general said. “None.”

The tin man didn’t bargain or cajole.

“But what did he look like?” Isaac asked with a beggar’s smile.

“Ordinary. Without menace. He didn’t have the arrogance of a billionaire, but of a great artist. ‘Big Balls is not to be touched,’ Viktor said. That’s what he called you—not Mr. President, not Sidel . . .

“But these were not my orders, I told him. And my orders were very specific—eliminate Sidel, and I would never have to work again. I could disband my army. ‘Your own people were persistent,’ I said. The price of tungsten was fluctuating because of a president who did not listen to the markets, who talked of redeeming the poor.

“Viktor sipped a little water from a cup. ‘But it is my pleasure that he stays alive.’ So I listened. And I asked him about the dragon he had carved into my skin.

“This dragon with many eyes was a werewolf, he said. Only a werewolf could have survived Vietnam the way I did—or a dragon high on drugs. I felt no pain. I walked through fields of fire. I was shot in the shoulder, ripped across the face with a knife. My legs were swollen with bruises and bites. The docs wanted to ship me home. ‘It’s Stateside for you, Colonel. A little hula dancin’ in Hawaii.’ But I went back into Indian country. Perhaps I was a werewolf.”

The general took a swallow of water from his own tin cup and then he called Stefan Oliver into the room. He hugged his protégé.

“You take care of this man, sonny. You check that White Top of yours every time you’re on a mission. Don’t trust your maintenance people.”

“General Ray, I picked them myself.”

The general rolled his eyes like a banjo player. “That’s the whole point. The closer they are to your ribs, the less you can rely on them. Didn’t I teach you that? They’ll come at Big Balls from every direction. A little girl with flowers for the president could be carrying a bomb.”

“But we’re a long way from Nam. I’ve never seen a little girl wired up with a bomb.”

The general rinsed his throat and hawked up some phlegm. “She doesn’t have to be a local. They could import her from Turkistan, build a mud shack for her ma and pa, and train her to be a martyr. You’re still living in an age of chivalry, but it’s gone, all gone. They’ll hack him to pieces the first chance they get.”

“But where the hell is this omnipotent gray army?”

The general lit a torch, and his eyebrows twitched within a halo of gloom.

“It includes all the fuckers who would profit from his death—the file clerks and double agents who want to land on the easy side of the dollar.”

“General, how can I prepare a lift package when I can’t trust my own mechanics? We’d be stranded forever on the ground. POTUS couldn’t go anywhere and he couldn’t govern.”

“I suspect that’s what they prefer—ultimate immobility.”

Isaac felt caught in a maze, living in that tangled world inside Tollhouse’s head. He had to get out of the bear’s den. He rushed through the rooms and out into the winter air, with his own retainers and the general right behind him.

There was a satanic gleam in Tollhouse’s pale eyes. “Mr. President,” he whispered, “it isn’t safe.”

“Where’s your own gray army?” Isaac asked. “Where are those mercs who raced through Cactus with mischief on their minds?”

“I hid them,” Tollhouse said, “hid them from you. There’s murder right behind your baggy pants.”

“Ah,” Isaac said, “I’m the master of mayhem now.”

Isaac had asked too much from this poor general, who’d gambled his own blood and bones in Indian country. That romp through Cactus had been his very last maneuver. He was all alone on this mountain. His gray army had deserted him. And then Isaac saw why. Tollhouse hadn’t been wrong. Isaac had brought the angel of death with him. Bull Latham broke into this solitary camp with his ninjas from the Bureau and Matt Malloy.

He must have arrived at Roosevelt Memorial on a transport filled with field agents of every stripe. The Bull had been feuding with Tollhouse all along, and had lied to Sidel. That meeting in the Situation Room was a managed affair.

The Bull strode up to the general with his military aide right behind him, carrying the football. He didn’t even acknowledge his own commander in chief.

“Bull,” Isaac said, “you can’t arrest him. You’re not a peace officer. You’re my vice president.”

“I was deputized,” the Bull said. “And I have a warrant for his arrest. He can’t fuck us over like that. He raided a federal facility.”

“But it’s futile,” Isaac said. “I’ll pardon him.”

“Not until he’s been arraigned. You can’t interrupt due process.”

“Yes, I can,” Isaac said.

He walloped the Bull as hard as he could with his bare knuckles. Bull Latham shook off the blow, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, while his eyes darted with a fierce agility.

His ninjas stood there utterly frozen.

“Bull,” Isaac muttered, “I’m the general’s guest. I won’t dishonor him.”

And then he realized something. If mortality had to be measured, Isaac was a safer bet. Tollhouse wouldn’t survive on this mountain. His own mercs might have already been recruited to kill him. So he decided to let Bull Latham have his moment of glory and grab the renegade general. But he shouldn’t have been so magnanimous with the general’s skin. He’d been concentrating on his own navel and had missed the sheen in Tollhouse’s pale eyes. There was no sign of surrender in the ruts on his face. He didn’t have to move about like a leaping candle. Isaac hadn’t seen past Tollhouse’s magnificent camouflage, and neither had the Bull.

The camp wasn’t deserted at all. The doors of the cabins and outhouses opened with their own quiet steel, and Tollhouse’s mercs appeared. They weren’t dressed as ninjas, like the Bull’s circus soldiers. They looked wild and mean in their windbreakers, men on their last mission. Their faces were marked—they were all wearing tattoos. Had Viktor gone across the entire camp with his wooden box, initiating these soldiers into the rituals of some surreal Siberia? These weren’t common mercenaries, soldiers for hire. They were werewolves in war paint, with machine pistols and sticks of dynamite.

The Bull must have grasped their heartlessness, and glimpsed his own human frailty.

“Stand down,” he told his ninjas and Matt Malloy’s company of Secret Service agents. “We’ll catch you another time, General,” he said with a sneer. “You can’t make war on the United States.”

“I just did,” Tollhouse said.

“Mr. President,” the Bull muttered, “are you coming down with us?”

“No, Bull. I’ll leave you to make your own grand exit. You’re damn good at it.”

And the Bull went away with his armed caravan.

“General,” Isaac said, “you just lost your sanctuary. You can’t stop the Bull once he has a stick up his ass. He’ll be back.”

“Maybe—maybe not.”

The general kissed Isaac on the cheek, kissed the Big Guy’s entire retinue. He’d find some other hinterland, or remain on this mountain. He wouldn’t starve. He belonged to the Sons of Rossiya.

Isaac felt gloomy as he marched away from the cabins. He could hear that purl of water again. And that’s when he stumbled upon a geyser at the base of Shangri-La, shooting jets of bubbly water into the air in a curtain of steam, like a smoke bomb. He cupped his hands and drank from the geyser; the water tasted sulfurous yet sweet. He grew giddy as he approached the colonel’s gondola. He could have sworn that a whitetail had come prancing out of the woods. Isaac blinked, and the whitetail was gone. The wind blew across the winter pines; the trees swayed with their own somber call. He boarded Marine One with his retinue. He sat in his king’s chair and fell into a clotted sleep, dreamt of his own destruction. Sarah had to wake him with a forceful tug of her arm.

“You were crying, Mr. President. I was worried.”

Could he tell her that he was reciting “cafeteria kaddish”—a secular prayer—for his own ragged residency at the White House? Who would have believed him? Not one damn soul.

8

Renata Swallow, the doyenne of Washington’s Cave Dwellers, who was still in her thirties and much more voluptuous than the other Queen Bees, was having lunch with her Swiss banker at the Salamander Club near Dupont Circle. Her late husband, Arthur Swallow, she would sadly learn upon his death, was something of a swindler and had systematically looted her inheritance and emptied their joint accounts. Renata was left with very little—a mansion in Georgetown with a lien on it, a Florentine villa in disrepair, a farm in the South of France that was bleeding cash, servants whose salaries hadn’t been paid, a yacht that sank into the Potomac, etc. The Swiss banker, Pierre, assured her that she had enough liquid assets to keep her afloat for another sixteen months. It was Pierre’s bank that looked after all her bills.

“And what then, Pierrot?”

“Ah, Renata darling, we downsize and sell, sell, sell.”

“Will I lose my house on Orchard Lane?”

“We’ll finesse,” the banker said. “It’s a duelist’s art, you know. We thrust and parry and see where the blood lies.”

“Whose blood?” she asked.

And Pierre laughed, stroking his silver cufflinks. “There’s always the maître.”

“I wouldn’t want to borrow from him.”

“We’re all in his debt,” the banker said.

“I won’t be his mule again—it’s undignified. I’m a Republican Party princess.”

“But you wear his tattoo,” the banker said.

“That doesn’t mean he owns me.”

“But he asks nothing of you,” the banker said.

“He asks—with his big eyes.”

“Well, have creditors been knocking at your door?”

“Pierrot, if he threatens the locals, I’ll be erased from the Green Book and lose my table at this club.”

“He never threatens, Renata. That’s not his style.”

“Yes,” she said. “He cuts your throat with a silk cord, and it doesn’t leave a mark.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” the banker said. “There have been no mortalities—none that I know of.”

“But I could be the first one. My body will be found in the C&O Canal, stuffed with the maître’s little ink bottles.”

“You’re being morbid, darling. Viktor’s asked a few favors of you.”

Pierre was as adroit as a professional pickpocket. He handed her an envelope stuffed with cash. The envelope slid like a fat glove into Renata’s purse. There must have been ten thousand in that sack. She could neigh like a high-strung horse, but Renata was getting a regular allowance from the besprizornye, with Pierrot as the conduit.

“I can’t sink the Republican Party for Viktor’s sake,” she said.

“But you’ve done nothing wrong. He’s contributed millions to the National Committee.”

“That’s the problem. His millions are in my name. I sign the checks, and all the while I’m unraveling.”

“But he’ll save you,” the banker said, “one stitch at a time.”

And she’d have to pay for each stitch with her blood. Yet she was attached to the maître, even if he undermined all her traditions and values. Renata wouldn’t have been surprised if he ended up owning shares in the Salamander Club. He infiltrated, perverted, possessed. Viktor grew out of his own whirlwind. Werewolves, that’s what they called themselves, these besprizornye, rootless boys and men who smothered everything Renata believed in. She was old-line, and the besprizornye had no line at all. They dressed in silken suits from some Jewish tailor along the Arbat. They probably owned half of Moscow. They sucked up Paris and London like a colony of anteaters. Nothing was ever written in their own name. There were Swiss banks and holding companies, even publishing houses. Their emblem was an upside down rose. It must have had every sort of meaning in the tundra, in the ghostly prison camps that had given birth to them. But their pakhan was a pauper on paper. His sole possessions were that silken suit—velvet, really—and a paint box with his medieval instruments and inks.

Yet he must have had a mind for numbers, carried his great fortune around in his head. But why was he suddenly interested in old-line Washington? What could the Cave Dwellers mean to an artist who had to shed your blood, slice into your skin, to create his masterpieces? He was a vulture—or a vampire, with his dark Russian eyes. He was the most delicate lover she’d ever had. No one had Viktor’s touch, despite the blood, ink, and pigment imbedded in his fingernails. Still, death hovered over him somehow—death was his constant companion and pal.

“Pierrot,” she said, “he can’t crash into the Republican Party like a safecracker. It’s immoral.”

“He asks nothing,” the banker said.

“But Viktor’s nothing has its own weight. Nothing doesn’t exist for him.”

“Darling,” the banker said, “your own husband bankrupted you. And the maître is helping you crawl out of that hole.”

She should have been more attentive to her surroundings. The one thing the maître had taught her was vigilance—and paranoia. He couldn’t afford to advertise wherever he was. That’s why he had a half dozen pieds-à-terre and no permanent address.

Why didn’t she recognize a single creature at the tables around her? Renata knew everyone at the Salamander Club. Had her own little descent into crime crippled her, robbed Renata of all her intuition? And then this stranger had the nerve to cop a chair and sit down next to the Republican princess and her banker. This stranger was Sidel.

“Sorry, Renata. You wouldn’t answer any of my calls. And so I had to find you at your favorite canteen.”

And he introduced himself to Pierre.

“Hello. I’m the president of the United States.”

“Stop showing off,” Renata said. “This is Pierrot, my Swiss banker.”

“From Basel?” Isaac asked.

Pierre nodded, and Isaac knew in his own heart’s blood that this was the banker who had started the lottery, or at least had conspired to start it. This fuck wished him dead and was also keeping him alive. That was the double edge of currency, if the rate of exchange was measured in spoons of blood—Isaac’s blood.

He looked at the banker’s silver cufflinks.

“Are you carrying your passport, Monsieur?”

The banker nodded again.

“Give,” Isaac said. He scrutinized the passport—Pierre François Marie de Robespierre, born in Basel. Isaac could have pinched it, but why bother? Sarah Rogers was at the next table, and she could prepare a composite of the banker from her computers at Quantico. So he returned the passport and said, “Please, Monsieur, I have important business to discuss with Madam Swallow.”

“This is outrageous,” Renata said. “Pierrot hasn’t finished his avocado salad. We’re drinking Pinot Noir. I’ll have the manager chuck you and your entire menagerie out on your heels. Wendell—”

“Please,” Isaac said. “Wendell is in the closet.”

“You’re a bunch of hooligans,” Renata said.

“Indeed, we are. And it feels nice. We’ve captured the Salamander Club. It’s our little fort.”

He glared once at Pierrot, who got up, pecked Renata once on the cheek, and walked out. Isaac sat down in the banker’s chair and picked at his avocado salad.

“You’re vile,” Renata said.

“I want to see your tattoo.”

She laughed in Isaac’s face. “It’s on my bottom. And we’re not that intimate. Or are you planning to play the Neanderthal, Mr. President—and carry me upstairs to one of the private rooms? I’ve heard about your Bronx brutality.”

“I’m from the Lower East Side,” Isaac said. “And I couldn’t carry you very far, not at my age. I’d get a hernia.”

Her laughter was less harsh. She almost felt sorry for that bumbling bear of a man. The Cave Dwellers had rubbed him out of their vocabulary long before he arrived in Washington. He had no political grace. He walked around with a pistol in his pants. He had no friends. He was feuding with the Democrats. He was isolated, all alone, in a town that still traded on its Southern elegance. Lincoln had been an outcast with his mad wife. And Sidel was even more of an outcast.

“You’re the Queen Bee,” Isaac said. “You have Viktor’s stamp of approval—a rose or something else on your ass. How can I meet him?”

“Well, you just ruined your chances,” she said. “You shouldn’t have insulted Pierrot. He’s been handing me packets of money from the maître. You and your little bloodhounds should be following him. Why did you lock Wendell in the closet?”

“Because he said I had no business being here. I could have declared this club a firetrap and kidnapped you.”

“You’re not the mayor of Washington—not yet.”

But she was warming to the clumsy bear despite herself. He was as madcap and whimsical as the maître, who always seemed to arrive out of nowhere, with some tiny gift—a trinket from a toyshop in Sochi, a tin lantern from Cracow, a Gypsy heirloom made of marled glass.

“Did you know that Pierre and his banker friends in Basel have taken out a lottery on your life? I hold six or seven lottery tickets. Pierrot says it’s a very good investment. I have an excellent chance to collect.”

She had a sudden urge to undress for this besprizoryne from the wilds of Manhattan, display the upside down rose that Viktor had painted on her bottom, and reveal it to Sidel before he croaked.

“You’ll miss me, Renata. Bull Latham will push much harder into Republican country. He’ll bring down the Cave Dwellers in his wake. Tell me, does Viktor talk about Balanchine with you, is he a balletomane?”

Isaac should never have broached this subject with the Queen Bee. Her face softened in the pearly light of the Salamander Club.

“My poor Mr. President,” she said in the subtle glow of the Salamander’s chandeliers. “The maître saw Balanchine in his last performance—as Don Quixote. Balanchine wore a full suit of armor. He hopped around his Dulcinea for three hours, and died on stage—in the performance.”

Isaac panicked. He had never heard of the ballet master performing in his own ballet. Don Quixote, in a suit of armor, like Isaac’s armored vest.

“Balanchine was in love with the ballerina. You couldn’t possibly recall her name. And I won’t soil it by mentioning who she was. He worked on Don Quixote for years, but no matter how much he shortened it, the ballet was still three hours. Viktor was enthralled. He couldn’t take his eyes off the old man with a wisp of a beard glued on tight, and shivering in front of his Dulcinea . . . but you couldn’t comprehend the pathos of it with your policeman’s mentality.”

She got up from the table, but she glued herself to Sidel for another moment. “I never bet against you with those tickets. I didn’t want you to disappear like that—with a puff. But Pierrot said my little piece of the pie was worth a small fortune. And I’m a widow in serious debt.”

She walked right past Isaac and couldn’t find Wendell or any of the waiters. That wild boy had stripped the Salamander clean. She stepped out onto Massachusetts Avenue a bit forlorn as she watched the Lincoln Continentals drive along Embassy Row. She’d lost her chauffeur in the big money spill after her husband’s fatal heart attack. She lost her servants one by one, even her skeletal staff on Orchard Lane, and had seen the last of her own trusted laundress.

Another chauffeur suddenly appeared in a Lincoln Continental. It puzzled her until she saw a tattoo on the chauffeur’s knuckles and realized that this bounty had come from Viktor, her own wild boy.

He was wearing a silken suit, like the other besprizoryne, and some kind of a military cap, like a general who’d rid himself of his army.

“Please, Little Mother, get into car.”

She didn’t argue. She was still a Republican princess, after all. When she opened her eyes, she was on Orchard Lane. She couldn’t even tell if her key would fit the lock. Her husband’s creditors had put a lien on Orchard Lane, with a notice from the county clerk stuck to the front door. But the chauffeur, who was called Arkady, scraped off the notice and all its stubborn glue with a chisel. He had his own key and let Renata in. But she shouldn’t have been startled. Her husband’s bankers had all abandoned her.

Pierrot had been a gift from Viktor, with all the little “liens” that went with her own private banker in Basel. There was a rose on the foyer table, turned upside down, like the tattoo on her rump. She opened the closet, and inside was a rust-colored velvet suit and a black shirt. She realized that Orchard Lane was now one more of Viktor’s pieds-à-terre.

She dialed a number that Viktor had given her. She couldn’t recognize the area and country codes. It was her only way to get in touch with him. The message on the answering machine was always in a woman’s throaty voice.

This is Siberian Apparel Company. Please leave name and number and brief message.

“Hello,” she said, feeling like a secret agent, or a high-class whore. “This is the Widow. Please have the kindness to tell the Apparel Company”—Viktor—“that the Bald Man”—Sidel—“would like to see him . . .”

She hung up the phone with a dizzying sense of triumph and defeat. She’d become addicted to this strange new life, as the Queen Bee of the besprizornye. A penniless Cave Dweller with clumps of cash, she could bribe Republican politicos to build a vast wall around the White House, neutralize what little power Sidel had left, devour him one toe at a time. That was a besprizornye trademark. But Renata didn’t believe in it somehow. Viktor could never understand these politicos, who would nod yes, yes, yes, and disappear with the money stuffed in their shoes.

What if she were wrong? Perhaps Viktor knew he was lulling Republican lawmakers to sleep with the magical aroma of money. Who could really read his mind?

9

This was a very different Sidel. The Big Guy was vetoing bill after bill, and Congress couldn’t seem to override his vetoes. He lambasted Republicans and Democrats alike and revealed a political savvy he didn’t have before. “Ladies and gents, either you put back provisions for food stamps and public housing, or I won’t sign shit.” The Big Guy also watched as Soviet borders began to crumble. His generals wanted him to rattle his sabers at the Soviets.

“They’re imploding, Mr. President,” said his chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We can catch Gorby with his dick in his hand.”

“That will send a wonderful message to his generals and the KGB. If the hardliners come back, we’ll have to start counting warheads again. We help Gorby wherever we can. We stabilize the ruble, because we can’t afford a currency meltdown. Our own markets will crash.”

“Sir,” said Isaac’s chief economic maven, “the ruble is beyond repair.”

Isaac looked into his maven’s eyes like a gunslinger, Wild Bill Hickok of the West Wing. “Come on, Felix. We’ve manipulated currencies many a time, you and our miracle boys at the CIA. We can have our ghosts buy up rubles.”

“But they’re worthless,” said Felix Mandel, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Economics with his treatise on phantom currencies that could destroy nations like malicious worms.

“So what? We buy, we sell. You’ve never lost a dime, Felix, in any of our currency deals. The rubles will be our bargaining chip.”

Who the hell was advising Sidel? He hadn’t turned to Ramona Dazzle once. She no longer held sway over his agenda. He’d managed to box her out, keep her contained in her corner office. His press secretary didn’t have to confide in her. His speechwriters went directly to Sidel. The Big Guy had found another guru. A certain Dr. Genevieve Robinson of the State Department visited him once a week. She wore dark glasses and a long mantle of brown hair that covered most of her face. The Big Guy himself had initialed her ticket. No one had bothered to check that this stout woman in dark glasses wasn’t the Genevieve Robinson who worked at State. Isaac had smuggled Brenda Brown, his former chief of staff, back into the White House, with an elaborate subterfuge.

It was Brenda who rewrote his speeches and helped him strike down the legislation that irked him. She was smarter than his generals and she understood Felix Mandel’s notion about the peculiar warp of phantom currencies. Brenda was coming out of her breakdown. But Isaac preferred to keep Brenda where reporters couldn’t find her and harp on her love affairs with Isaac’s female ushers. He pulled money from his pension plan to pay her a little gelt. And she was the one who suggested how the Big Guy could have much greater mobility.

“We create a fictitious persona who happens to be real—a foreign diplomat, with epaulettes and other embellishments.”

“But where will we find such a fellah?” Isaac groaned. “I’m surrounded by spooks and every sort of policeman. They’ll see through that disguise.”

Brenda’s younger brother played the diplomat. And Sarah Rogers, his own liaison to Navy Intel, provided him with a convenient persona right off her computer screen. Colonel Alfonso Borges, Argentina’s air attaché.

Now all Isaac needed was the perfect occasion to disappear for a few hours, and not be tied to the Secret Service. He found the occasion—another greeting card left under a hair drier in the beauty salon, with the same stamped tattoo of Isaac’s wandering, headless head and a cryptic note.

THE DUMMY SCHOOL.

LOOK FOR THE WORKMAN’S SHACK ON FLORIDA AVENUE.

TONIGHT AT NINE.

BIG BALLS, DON’T BRING THE BULL.

Isaac was pretty clear about the destination. Gallaudet University, Washington’s own college for the deaf. Isaac wouldn’t be the first president to visit that school.

Lincoln had gone there in 1862, when it wasn’t a college, but a grammar school for the deaf and blind, funded with federal money. It wasn’t called Gallaudet then, but the Columbia Institute for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind. Lincoln sat with the school children, read to them, played with them in the school’s tiny yard. The blind children felt his face, plucked gently on his beard, while Lincoln could hear the rumblings of war across the Potomac.

Isaac could visualize that scene, imagine the president arriving with Tad, who had his own speech impediment, and he could sense the grief on Lincoln’s grieving face. It embarrassed Isaac, who hadn’t bothered to visit Gallaudet on his own—but was summoned there for some monkeyshines. Lincoln had carried a divided nation on his crooked back and prevented it from utterly unraveling. And he took the time to visit a little school for the deaf. What had Isaac done except follow the irregular arc of his own demise? All he had was a bizarre portrait of himself—a winter warning—and a brief encounter with Mrs. Swallow, doyenne of the Cave Dwellers, who wore a tattoo on her ass. The elusive tattoo artist, Viktor, was a lad without a surname.

Captain Alfonso Borges appeared at the West Gate around seven P.M. and was ushered upstairs to Isaac’s residence. Isaac already had a duplicate of the captain’s fanciful uniform. Brenda’s brother, who was an amateur makeup artist, stuffed cotton balls into Isaac’s cheeks—a bit like Brando in The Godfather—and made him wear his military cap at a steep angle, severing half his nose. And while Brenda’s brother waited in Isaac’s private sitting room on the second floor, the Big Guy marched out of the White House as Argentina’s air attaché. A limousine was waiting for him on New York Avenue, with Stefan Oliver behind the wheel and Sarah Rogers in the back seat, both of them carrying Berettas.

“Boss,” Stefan said, “I could barely recognize you.”

“That’s not what bothers me,” Sarah said. “The colonel and I could be court-martialed, Mr. President. This isn’t exactly legal.”

“Come on. The president can’t commit an illegal act. Not while he’s in office.”

“Isn’t that what Nixon said? And look what happened to him.”

“Ah, Tricky Dick should have toughed it out.”

“So now you’re a believer in Watergate,” Sarah said.

“I’ll bet Lyndon did much worse. But he was never caught.”

“Oh, my God,” Sarah said. “I must be mental. I mean, the colonel here is a babe in the woods—Stef, have you ever fired that Beretta of yours at a human target?”

Stefan hunkered down into his seat. “I’ll be fine.”

“And now we’re desperadoes in search of a man who doesn’t even exist. I can’t find the Sons of Rossiya in any of our data banks. And we have a tattoo artist with the shady name of Viktor, who’s the king of a criminal enterprise that’s so enormous it doesn’t have a beginning or an end. Then there’s the Baron Pierre François Marie de Robespierre—he is a baron, you know, a very minor one, without family connections. He launders money for South American drug lords and has his own private bank in Basel—without a legitimate address.”

“That’s a start,” Isaac said.

And the Big Guy seemed so pathetic and foolish in his epaulettes that Sarah sat back and decided she would come along for the ride and see what happened next. She knew that the admirals at Quantico were waiting to pounce. All she had to do was slip once and fall off her trapeze. Yet she was an analyst, and the raid on Cactus—without a single casualty—was like a sportive dance, or hunt, with a seraglio of veils. And she had to crawl under those veils. Besides, she liked the Big Guy and she was drawn to this quiet colonel with his slightly damaged son.

They got to Gallaudet—a miscellany of Gothic mansions with turrets and spires and burnt brick walls on a vast campus that could have been the City of God. Even Isaac was intimidated by the dynamic proportions of this college for the deaf. Frederick Law Olmstead, the father of Manhattan’s Central Park, had designed the current campus in 1866, less than a year after the Civil War. The college that Olmstead envisioned had a greensward, a meadow, a chapel, and academic buildings, all connected by a subterranean tunnel system that would protect students, provide them with refuge and an escape route into the Washington woods in the event of another war.

Isaac wondered if the subterranean route still existed under the campus. He would have loved to explore Gallaudet. The winding road into the campus enticed him, but the workman’s shack was outside the front gate, on Florida Avenue. Isaac didn’t see a light inside the shack.

“Boss,” Stefan said, “you shouldn’t go in there alone. It could be a trap.”

“If we wanted to announce ourselves,” Sarah said, “we could have brought the Secret Service. We’ll never be more than a step or two away—don’t pester him. He’s a big boy, even if he can’t tie his own shoelaces.”

And Isaac stepped out of the limo with his laces untied. He was in his element now, on a deserted street, beside a campus with very few lights in the windows. The shack had a dented door with a missing hinge. The door wasn’t locked. He went inside, stood in the darkened doorway. He was wearing a button mike and could have signaled Sarah and Stef. A hurricane lamp was switched on, and there was the tattoo artist as Isaac had imagined him, sitting on a workbench in a velvet suit with a bandanna around his throat. His face had the brutal twist of a man who had been in many fights. His eyes, which had a liquid calm, were very dark, almost black in the light of the hurricane lamp. His mouth had once been ripped by a razor and still bore several scars. His chin had puncture marks. And yet, even with that brutal twist and all the wounds, he didn’t seem unkind.

“I haven’t come alone,” Isaac said.

“Yes, you have two babysitters across the road—your helicopter pilot and his sweetheart, an intel officer who has annoyed her superiors because of her allegiance to you. Both of them are armed, and they can probably hear every word we say. But I have nothing to hide, Big Balls.”

“Have we ever met before, Monsieur?”

The man laughed, and his wounds leapt about in the glare of the lamp. “Why are you so formal with me? I’m Viktor Danzig.”

“Ah,” Isaac said. “So you do have a surname.”

“It was my mother’s,” he said. “And I use it sometimes, in her honor, and sometimes not. No, we have never met—until now.”

One thing rubbed at Isaac. “Why am I Big Balls if we haven’t met?”

“Because that’s how you are known in penitentiaries around the country. And I admire convicts . . . their fortitude, their endurance under the duress of a prison system that has robbed them of all dignity.”

“Then you’re familiar with the Aryan Nation?”

“I despise their beliefs,” Viktor said, “but I visited them at a penitentiary in Illinois, taught them a few tricks with pen and ink, since they knew about my talents and had asked for me.”

Isaac was suspicious. “How come such lowlife bastards knew more about you than I ever did? And I have half the government’s spooks behind me.”

“It’s the curious propaganda of prisons,” Viktor said. “And your spooks have never seen the inside of a jail.”

“Neither have you,” Isaac said.

“But I still have the stink of Kolyma on me. It’s in my blood. And we do business with the Brotherhood. They peddle drugs for us. And they get rid of FBI rats—sit down, Big Balls, we have a lot to discuss.”

Isaac sat on a workbench a few feet away from Viktor, who wore a Beretta of his own in a little leather cup attached to his belt. “Little Brother, this is not a town for you. It does not welcome mavericks from Manhattan. You had a perfect laboratory—New York. You could break into restaurants, visit abandoned children at Rikers, knock your own police commissioner senseless. Who would dare challenge you? The Republicans didn’t even bother to come up with a candidate. And then you allowed the Democrats to put you on the national ticket. They had to prop up that crook, Michael Storm, and who better than a mayor with a cop’s credentials? The DNC planned to hide you in the Naval Observatory and have you go around the country from time to time to shoot at bottles with your Glock.”

“Like Buffalo Bill.”

“But Michael exploded, and then there was you, only you, with your democratic vistas and ideals. But you were outside your own candy store. The Pink Commish who would have lowered the subway fare if his own City Council hadn’t threatened to lock him inside Bellevue.”

Isaac squinted into the splashes of light and dark in that somber shack. “You started the lottery, didn’t you? Baron Robespierre is one of your clerks.”

“The baron was my father’s banker. But I admit—the lottery was my idea. I had to find the means of capturing the imagination of all the business moguls who recognized you as an immediate threat—a Stalinist in the White House.”

And the Big Guy would have to explain himself all over again. Stalin had murdered millions and sent millions more into the gulag. All the poets mocked his oily fingers and cockroach mustache, but he still kept the Germans out of Moscow. He never had a kopeck in his pockets, wore the same sweaty uniform summer and winter. He was as poor as Isaac Sidel.

“A Stalinist couldn’t have been elected,” Isaac had to say in his own defense.

“But you weren’t elected,” Viktor said. “You’re the accidental president. You can’t be manipulated or massaged. You’re not interested in money and power—you’re a very dangerous man.”

“So were Lincoln and FDR,” Isaac said, incensed. “Who taught you so much about American politics?”

“I spent half my summers here with my mother—in a cold-water flat.”

Ariel had implied that Viktor’s mother was no more important to him than a spool of thread, that Karl, the pakhan prince of Kolyma, had carried the boy from capital to capital, sent him to private schools in Switzerland. But Isaac discovered otherwise. The boy hadn’t despised his mother—it was the pakhan who had cast her out of his domain. She was a seamstress from Danzig he had dallied with. She meant no more to the pakhan than a mote of dust in his eye. He might have given her a wad of dollars or Deutsche Marks for his moment of delight. But when he uncovered that this seamstress, Pauline, had given birth to a child in a charity ward—a boy with eyes as black as his—he was furious. He stole the boy from her, had his lawyers bribe officials to make the little boy’s birth certificate disappear and mark Pauline as a whore. She was tossed out of Danzig, and the pakhan himself paid for her passage to America.

Groomed by Jewish butlers on the Place des Vosges, in the same house where Alexandre Dumas had once lived, Viktor didn’t believe his father’s story of a cruel, careless mother who had abandoned him at birth. He was a resilient, artful boy who searched for her traces. She was still a seamstress.

“Where?” Isaac asked, touched by Viktor’s tale.

“In your kingdom,” Viktor said. “On the Lower East Side.”

“And she never got married?”

“No,” Viktor said. “She was still in love with that gangster from Siberia.”

“But how the devil did you find her? You couldn’t have had any help from your father.”

“But I’m my father’s son,” he said. “I had some capital of my own. I sought out several retired homicide detectives. They located her in a month. And that’s when I heard of the mythical Pink Commish. They were frightened to death of you, that you might catch them in some corruption scheme.”

“I hate corrupt cops,” Isaac said.

“That’s not the point,” Viktor said, leaning into the hurricane lamp. “They would have been guilty no matter what they did. But my mother worshipped you. She said you were out on patrol every night, even escorted her once to a class at the Educational Alliance.”

“You see,” Isaac said, with a sudden excitement. “We have met—through your mother.”

Viktor was also wearing a button mike. He whispered into the mike, then turned to Isaac. “Big Balls, we have to cut this conversation. Bull Latham is two blocks from Gallaudet.”

“Fuck Bull Latham,” Isaac said. “Where’s my tattoo?”

“You haven’t earned it yet.”

The Big Guy panicked. He didn’t want Viktor to leave on such short notice, just when he was warming up.

“Why should the Bull give a damn about you and the Sons of Rossiya? You’re a bunch of ghosts. You’re name doesn’t even appear on the computer screens at Quantico.”

“That’s because you haven’t punched in the right codes. I’m the most feared counterfeiter in the business. My fifties are without a flaw. Speak to your man at Treasury—Felix Mandel; he’s the only one with half a brain. Your advisors have served themselves. They sit you down in the president’s seat, call you POTUS, and give you blinders to wear. Big Balls, you never had a chance. I’m the biggest informant Bull ever had, and also his biggest pain in the ass. He doesn’t own me. I do special favors for the CIA from time to time, me and my band.”

“The besprizornye,” Isaac said.

“Goodbye, Big Balls. I have to run. My mother survived because of you. You wouldn’t let the governor and his cronies ruin rent control.”

“Jesus,” Isaac said, “you could have bought her a penthouse with all your loot.”

“She wouldn’t take a nickel from me—called it blood money. Said she was ashamed of my credentials. I had to buy a plot for her in Woodlawn, near Herman Melville’s grave, or she might have ended up in Potter’s Field. You’re familiar with Herman, yes. He lived underground, like my besprizornye. Goodbye.”

And Viktor bolted out of the shack with all the exuberance and grace of a whitetail buck. He didn’t disappear into some dark street. He raced right into Gallaudet. And Isaac realized that Viktor must have memorized the hidden tunnels of Frederick Law Olmstead. Perhaps he was one of Gallaudet’s donors, a patron of the school, and had seen Olmstead’s original plans—a school that would have been ready for another catastrophic war. He was twice as clever as the Bull, who wouldn’t have known about the tunnels and didn’t have the least idea of where to look.

Isaac waited outside the shack with his arms folded as the sirens blared and the Bull arrived with his armada.

“Mr. President, where’s that little cocksucker with the scars on his lip?”

“The tattoo artist? I thought he doesn’t exist. Is Viktor Danzig in some kind of witness protection program meant for kings? You shouldn’t have lied to me, you son of a bitch, and played me for a sap.”

“I had to lie,” the Bull said, whispering in front of his own men. “He’s diabolic, damn you—no one can forge Ulysses Grant like him. His paper was priceless. He could have destroyed us with his fucking fifty-dollar bills. Ask the people at Treasury. We had to pamper him.”

“And were you ever planning to tell me, Bull?”

“No,” the Bull said. “It was for your own protection, your own good. He’s been betting heavy dollars that you won’t last. That’s why we put you in a cocoon. Matt Malloy shits a brick every time you leave the White House. That rumpus at your dacha was some kind of foreplay, a first act. The little bastard hired General Tollhouse to mock us. He might have finished you off tonight if we hadn’t wised up to your masquerade. You look wonderful in your epaulettes. We let him listen into our frequencies.”

“And you still couldn’t grab him,” Isaac said, walking away from the Bull. He was caught in some merciless web. The people paid to protect him were always a few paces behind someone else’s curve. And the culprits, the killers in waiting, sat on angelic wings and rescued him at the last minute. It wasn’t fair. Isaac should have had more involvement in his own fate.

It was a fool’s paradise. He held on to Brenda Brown as his virtual chief of staff since she wasn’t on any government payroll and couldn’t be fired. He held on to Colonel Oliver as his helicopter pilot because it would have been complicated to remove the commander of Marine Squadron One without the president’s approval. Stef was too damn visible, but Sarah Rogers had never really been assigned to the Big Guy. The chiefs of Naval Intel were fierce about guarding their own entitlements, yet they still pulled Sarah from the White House and hid her deep within Quantico. These admirals dared Sidel to do something about it. He went to Quantico in a presidential caravan, with sharpshooters and a medical team, and was stopped at the gate. The facility was in lockdown, the admirals had declared—no personnel, authorized or not, could enter or leave until the lockdown was lifted. Marine Base Quantico was a sprawling, secretive site that also housed the FBI Academy and half a dozen covert combat schools.

Isaac returned to Pennsylvania Avenue with his tail tucked between his legs. He couldn’t get near Captain Rogers. She was incommunicado as far as the president was concerned. Brenda Brown advised him to look for another intelligence harpy who wasn’t stuck so far up some admiral’s ass. But Isaac wanted Sarah. He summoned Felix Mandel, chief assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury. They sat on a couch in the Oval Office, Felix in a rumpled tie. He could have sunk the Soviet Union by substituting the ruble with one of his phantom currencies. He was the Darth Vader of the currency markets. Economic ministers from all over the planet paid homage to Felix. His Nobel Prize was like an open wound for these ministers, who waited in line to sit with Felix and beg him not to tinker with their currencies. Felix Mandel was a native son of Manhattan, and Isaac had inherited him as assistant manager of the budget in the first year of his mayoralty. Felix worked out of a cavernous closet in the Municipal Building, like some modern Bartleby who was a numbers cruncher rather than a scribe. It was before his Nobel and Felix was utterly unrecognized. But Isaac cherished him. Felix never lied about the budget.

“Mr. Mayor, I can’t tell you how many teachers we have in the public school system. Firemen, yes. But teachers come and go. None of us can keep track. The city payroll is a behemoth that feeds on its own flesh. And our revenue is beyond anyone’s crystal ball. One week we’re bankrupt and the next we’re a fatted calf.”

“Then how can I plan, Felix, how can I take the homeless out of city shelters and put them into public housing?”

“You can’t. The housing might disappear tomorrow.”

“Then were all my campaign promises a lie?”

“Mayor Sidel, that’s the black hole of politics—promises, promises.”

Felix was soon whisked away to Washington, and Isaac was left with a swollen cadre of jesters and clowns. He never solved the housing crisis. The homeless multiplied. He blustered and finagled, walked in and out of Rikers with his Glock. He was visible and beloved. One morning a deranged man at a city shelter tried to carve him up with a kitchen knife. That’s the closest he ever got to a mayor’s immortality. He soothed the man, and they ended up playing pinochle together. But now he’d crept down the rabbit hole and stumbled into the fourth dimension. There was nothing random about the assault on his life.

He drank coffee with Felix Mandel and shared a piece of carrot cake from a local farmers’ market. “Felix, can’t you put some heat on the budget director and cancel the paychecks of certain admirals who are in revolt?”

“You can pension them off for dereliction of duty. But the provost marshal will eat you alive. And God forbid if there’s ever a court-martial. You’ll have to testify, Mr. President.”

“All I want to do is stop their paychecks.”

“Then you’ll have to run up to the Hill and argue in front of Appropriations. Do you want Congress to declare that you’re having a secret vendetta against the admirals of Navy Intel? Get off that track. Your numbers are down. You’ll go into free fall.”

Isaac brooded a bit and summoned up his conversation with Viktor outside Gallaudet. “Why is that tattoo artist such a no-no? His name doesn’t appear on any list.”

Isaac’s maven was silent for a moment. The mention of the tattoo artist had made him ill at ease. He could barely look at Isaac. “You have no idea of that man’s genius, and his power to destroy whatever he has in mind. It’s not just the artistry of his plates. He has half a dozen apprentices, men—and women—who can perform miracles with soft steel. They’re master engravers, every one; and they seem to replicate like rabbits.”

“So how do you deal with Viktor Danzig?”

“We bargain—and we beg. We pay him not to circulate that soft metal of his.”

“Then he holds us at ransom.”

“Worse,” said Felix. “He commits atrocious deeds, sometimes in our behalf, sometimes not. He and his aging orphans are an army within an army.”

“And who’s responsible for keeping him in line? It can’t be the Bull. He tried to capture Viktor.”

“Ah, it’s a game of cat and mouse. But Viktor’s the cat, and we are all his many mice.”

“Viktor said I should ask you about my own slim chance for survival.”

Felix’s face was twitching. “We shouldn’t get onto that subject.”

“What are my chances?”

“Almost none.”

“But the Dow has risen a hundred points since I was sworn in.”

Felix smiled like Bartleby in his old municipal cavern. “There are much better indicators than the Dow. The managers of the biggest hedge funds are all betting you won’t survive your maiden year.”

Isaac suddenly felt as if he’d lost his own language. Perhaps that’s why the tattoo artist had called Gallaudet a dummy school. He hadn’t meant to be cruel. Isaac had become a man without his own proper signals. “Ariel Moss said I should resign.”

“It’s too late for that,” Felix said.

“Then what should I do? This mansion is no safer than my dacha. And I’m not a guy who likes to sit at home. I imagine the Bull can’t wait to inherit my chair, with Ramona right next to him, as the solitary Witch of the West Wing.”

“You’re wrong,” Felix said. “The Bull is as much a policeman as you are. He couldn’t bear to preside over the death of a sitting president.”

Isaac started to laugh. “Then I suppose I’ll have to sit shiva for myself while I’m still alive.”