Molly left the Jackson house that afternoon and headed back to her hotel. Sam Jackson and agent Dugan remained at the residence. Dugan seemed to think that the kidnappers would call after they saw Sam on the Rivera show that evening. Molly wasn’t quite so sure. If she was a kidnapper, she doubted that any of the lies Sam told would encourage her to make contact; in fact, the opposite would be true. But then she wasn’t a kidnapper, she reminded herself. She was just an employee of Bill Ford, undertaking an increasingly unpleasant task. The only satisfactory part of the relationship was that she was being wellcompensated. Which sounded like something a prostitute would say. She tried not to think about it.
Back in her suite she spent the better part of two hours on the phone to different aides and volunteers back in Wyoming. The numbers were up, the coverage was ever-expanding. They were handing out No Surrender signs and T-shirts and pins faster than they could make them. The word of the day seemed to be momentum. Molly knew it to be an elusive entity. Momentum. It was hard to find and harder to sustain. You couldn’t buy it or rent it. It had its own whims, like a rainbow or a hurricane. It could be unstoppable or unstartable and nobody possessed the formula for either.
Molly poured bourbon in a glass and sat down on the couch. She’d changed into yoga pants and a T-shirt when she got back to the suite and now she sat there, the glass resting on the arm of the sofa, staring across the room.
She tried to imagine herself as someone who only knew the Sam Jackson of sound bites and truncated media interviews. Would she be tempted to vote for him? On one level, it was a compelling story—a man whose daughter has been abducted, standing firm in the face of whatever evil was behind it. Who wouldn’t consider a man like that? The maverick, the independent. Gary Cooper in High Noon, taking on the bad guys all on his own? Of course, in this instance, Molly wasn’t persuaded because she knew who he was, what he was. But the people of Wyoming didn’t and that was all that mattered.
As she was thinking about it, the man who would be Gary Cooper called. He was downstairs, he said, and he wanted to talk about the campaign. He used the word momentum.
“I’ll come up to your suite.”
“The hell you will,” she said.
She changed her clothes and went down to meet him in the bar. He was sitting at a corner table, scotch in hand. He’d shaved since the taping of the show and changed into a dark blue suit. Molly sat and ordered a glass of red wine.
“We need to go back,” he said after she gave him an update on the situation in Wyoming. “Build on this. This will carry us right up to the election.”
“But can you go back?”
“I can do whatever I want,” he told her. “You haven’t figured that part out? Smart woman like you?”
Molly would rather not have her intelligence heralded by a man like Sam Jackson. As compliments went, it was insulting.
“What’s the FBI going to say?”
“They go where I go,” Sam said. “They’re working for me, not the other way around. We tie up whatever we need to here, and then head back tomorrow. As long as this thing with my daughter is unresolved we can cherry-pick whatever media outlets we want. Left, right, center—it doesn’t matter. They all want me now.”
This thing with my daughter, Molly repeated to herself. She started to respond and her phone rang. She took it from her purse and answered. It was Bill Ford. He’d just watched the Rivera interview.
“Matter of fact he’s sitting across from me,” Molly said when he asked about Sam. “We’re talking about heading back to Wyoming tomorrow.”
“Who is it?” Sam asked but Molly ignored him.
“The interview?” she said. “Oh, for the most part it was all bullshit but what did you expect? Bullshit baffles brains. Where would we be without it?”
“Who are you talking to?” Sam demanded, his voice growing loud.
“It’s Bill Ford,” she told him.
“Let me talk to him.”
“He wants to talk to you, Bill,” Molly said into the phone. “Okay, not a problem. Catch up to you later.”
She ended the call and looked at Sam. “He was tight with time. He says to keep up the good work.”
“I asked to talk to him,” Sam said sullenly.
Molly shrugged her indifference as she had a drink of wine. “Tell me something—what happens to this campaign if they release your daughter tomorrow? What happens to No Surrender then?”
“I’ll tell you what happens,” Sam snapped. He was still pouting at being ignored by Bill Ford. He drained his glass in a gulp. “No Surrender shifts from being a concept to being a reality. I go from being the guy who preaches no surrender to the guy who didn’t surrender.”
“And I suppose,” Molly said, “that we’d have a great photo op. You and your daughter, the tearful reunion. All that.”
“For sure.”
“I think the voters would like to see some pics of the two of you together,” Molly said. “Because, if I can recall, I haven’t seen a one so far.”