The way he said this made Ward drop his amused look. “You got something you’d like to talk about?”
“Not in a million years,” Buchanan said with a sudden smile. “If I start telling the sorry likes of you all my secrets, then I’ll have to take my lemonade stand somewhere else and start over. And I’m way too old for that.”
Ward leaned back against the soft cushion and looked his friend over. “What makes you do it, Danny? Not money, surely.”
Buchanan slowly nodded in agreement. “If I did it solely for the dollars, I would’ve been gone ten years ago.” He swallowed the rest of his drink and looked over at the doorway, where the ambassador from Italy and his substantial entourage stood, along with several senior Hill staffers, a couple of senators and three women in short black dresses who looked like they had been rented for the evening, and very well might have been. The Monocle was filling up with so many VIPs now you could hardly spit without nailing some leader of something. And they all wanted the world. And they all wanted you to get it for them. Eat you up and leave nothing and then call you a friend. Buchanan knew all the lyrics to that song.
He looked up at an old photograph on the wall. A baldheaded man with a beak nose, dour look and ferocious eyes peered down at him. Long dead now, he had once been one of the most powerful men in Washington for decades. And most feared. Power and fear seemed to go hand in hand here. Now Buchanan couldn’t even remember the man’s name. Didn’t that speak volumes.
Ward put down his glass. “I think I know. Your causes have become much more benevolent over the years. You’re out to save a world few even care about. You’re really the only lobbyist I know who does it.”
Buchanan shook his head. “A poor Irish lad who brought himself up by the bootstraps and made a fortune sees the light and then uses his golden years helping the less fortunate? Hell, Rusty, I’m driven more by fear than altruism.”
Ward looked at him curiously. “How’s that?”
Buchanan sat up very straight, put his palms together and cleared his throat. He had never told anyone this. Not even Faith. Maybe it was time. He would look insane, of course, but at least Rusty would keep it to himself.
“I have this recurring dream, you see. In my dream America keeps getting richer and richer, fatter and fatter. Where an athlete gets a hundred million dollars to bounce a ball, a movie star earns twenty million to act in trash and a model gets ten million to walk around in her underwear. Where a nineteen-year-old can make a billion dollars in stock options by using the Internet to sell us more things we don’t need faster than ever.” Buchanan stopped and stared off for a moment. “And where a lobbyist can earn enough to buy his own plane.” He refocused on Ward. “We keep hoarding the wealth of the world. Anybody gets in the way, we crush them, in a hundred different ways, while selling them the message of America the Beautiful. The world’s remaining superpower, right?
“Then, little by little, the rest of the world wakes up and sees us for what we are: a fraud. And they start coming for us. In log boats and propeller planes and God knows how else. First by the thousands, then by the millions and then by the billions. And they wipe us out. Stuff us all down some pipe and flush us for good. You, me, the ballplayers, the movie stars, the supermodels, Wall Street, Hollywood and Washington. The true land of make believe.”
Ward stared at him wide eyed. “My God, a dream or a nightmare?”
Buchanan shot him a stern glance. “You tell me.”
“Your country, love it or leave it, Danny. There’s an element of truth in that slogan. We’re not so bad.”
“We also suck up a disproportionate share of the wealth and energy in the world. We pollute more than any other country. We trash foreign economies and never look back. But still, for a lot of big and small reasons that I really can’t explain, I do love my country. That’s why this nightmare disturbs me so much.
I don’t want it to happen.
But it’s getting harder and harder to feel any hope.”
“If that’s the case, why
do
you do it?”
Buchanan stared at the old photograph again and said, “Do you want something pithy or philosophical?”
“How about the truth?”
Buchanan looked at his old friend. “I deeply regret never having children,” he began slowly, then paused. “A good friend of mine has a dozen grandchildren. He was telling me about a PTA meeting he had attended at his granddaughter’s elementary school. I asked him why he was bothering with doing that. Wasn’t that the parents’ job? I said. You know what he told me? He said that with the way the world is now, we all have to think about things beyond our lifetime. Beyond our children’s lifetime, in fact. It’s our right. It’s our duty, my good friend told me.”
Buchanan smoothed out his napkin. “So maybe I do what I do because the sum of the world’s tragedies outweighs its happiness. And that’s just not right.” He paused again, moistness creeping into his eyes.
“Other than that, I haven’t the faintest idea.”
Brooke Reynolds was just finished saying grace, and they all started on their meals. She had burst through the door ten minutes earlier, determined to eat dinner with her family. Her regular hours at the Bureau were eight-fifteen A.M. to five P.M. That was the funniest joke at the Bureau: regular hours. She had changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and exchanged her suede flats for Reeboks. Reynolds took much pleasure in scooping out spoonfuls of peas and mashed potatoes for all their plates. Rosemary poured out milk for the kids while her teenage daughter Theresa helped three-year-old David cut up his meat. It was a nice, quiet family gathering, which Reynolds had come to cherish and which she did everything possible to make each evening, even if it meant going back to work later.
Reynolds rose from the table and poured herself a glass of white wine. While half her brain focused on finding Faith Lockhart and her new confederate, Lee Adams, the other part was looking ahead with much anticipation to Halloween, less than a week away. Sydney, her six-year-old daughter, was dead set on being Eeyore, for the second year in a row. David would be the bouncy Tigger, a character that fit the perpetual-motion child perfectly. After that, Thanksgiving, perhaps a trip to her parents’ in Florida, if she could find the time. Then Christmas. This year Reynolds was taking the kids to see Santa Claus. She had missed last year because of—what else?—Bureau business. This year she would pull her 9mm on anyone who tried to stop her appointment with Kris Kringle. All in all, a good plan, if she could just make it work. Conception was easy; execution was the key that so often fell out of the lock.
As she put the cork back in the bottle, she looked sadly around a home that would not be hers much longer. Her son and daughter sensed that the change was coming. David hadn’t slept through the night in over a week. Reynolds, home after working fifteen-hour days, would hold the quivering, wailing little boy, trying to calm him, rock him back to sleep. She tried to tell him that things would be just fine, when she was as uncertain as anyone whether they would be. It was sometimes terrifying being a parent, particularly in the midst of a divorce and all the pain it caused, which you saw every day etched into the faces of your children. More than once Reynolds had thought about calling off the divorce for that reason alone. But hanging on for the sake of the children wasn’t the answer, she felt. At least not for her. They would have a better life without the man than they’d had with him. And her ex, she thought, might be a better father after the divorce than he had been before. Well, at least she could hope. Reynolds simply did not want to let her children down.
When Reynolds caught her daughter Sydney looking apprehensively at her, she smiled as naturally as she could. Sydney was six going on sixteen, so mature beyond her years that it scared Reynolds to death. She picked up on everything, missed nothing of significance. Reynolds had never in her career interrogated a suspect as thoroughly as Sydney did her mother nearly every day. The child dug deep, trying to understand what was going on, what their future would hold, and Reynolds had no ready answers for any of it.
More than once, she had found Sydney holding her crying brother in his bed late at night, attempting to soothe him, relieve his fears. Reynolds had recently told her daughter that she didn’t need to assume that responsibility too, that her mother would always be there. Her statement had a hollow ring, and Sydney’s face plainly showed a lack of belief. The fact that her daughter had not accepted this statement as dead, solid truth had aged Reynolds several years in several seconds. The memory of the palm reader and her predictions of premature death had come back to roost.
“Rosemary’s chicken is awesome, isn’t it, honey?” Reynolds said to Sydney.
The little girl nodded.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Rosemary said, pleased.
“Are you okay, Mom?” Sydney asked. At the same time, she moved her little brother’s milk away from the edge of the table. David had a propensity for spilling any liquid within his reach.
That subtle act of motherhood and her daughter’s earnest question moved Reynolds almost to tears. She had been on such an emotional roller coaster of late that it didn’t take much to set her off. She took a sip of wine, hoping it would prevent her from actually collapsing into a crying fit. It was like being pregnant again. The littlest thing affected her as if it were life or death. But then her common sense kicked in. She was a mom, things would work out. She had the luxury of a devoted live-in nanny. Sitting around whining, feeling sorry for yourself, wasn’t the answer. So their life wasn’t perfect. Whose was? She thought of what Anne Newman was going through right now. Suddenly Reynolds’s problems didn’t seem so bad.
“Everything’s really good, Syd. Really good. Congratulations on your spelling test. Ms. Betack said you were the star of the day.”
“I like school a lot.”
“And it shows, young lady.”
Reynolds was about to sit back down when the phone rang. She had caller ID and checked the readout screen. The ID screen came up blank. The caller must have ID block or his number was unlisted. She debated whether to answer it or not. The problem was that every FBI agent she knew had an unlisted number. Ordinarily, though, anyone from the Bureau would call her on her pager or cell phone, both of which numbers she closely guarded; and calls to those two she would always answer. It was probably a random computer dialer and she would be told to wait until a real person came on and tried to sell her a time-share in Disney World. Still, something made her reach out and pick up the phone.
“Hello?”
“Brooke?”
Anne Newman sounded distressed. And as she listened to the woman, Reynolds sensed that there was something in addition to her husband’s violent death—poor Anne, what worse could there be?
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” Reynolds said.
She grabbed her coat and car keys, took a bite out of a slice of the bread on her plate and kissed her children.
“Will you be back in time to read us a story, Mom?” Sydney asked.
“Three bears, three pigs, three goats.” David promptly recited his favorite nighttime storytelling ritual to Brooke, his favorite story reader. His sister Sydney favored reading the stories herself, every night, sounding out each word along the way. Little David now took a big gulp of milk, loudly burped and then excused himself in a fit of laughter.
Reynolds smiled. Sometimes when she was tired she would tell the stories so fast they almost blurred together. The pigs built their houses, the bears went for their walk while Goldilocks burglarized the joint and the three billy goats gruff trounced the evil troll and lived happily ever after in their new pasture of grass. Sounded nice. Where could she buy some? And then, undressing for bed, Reynolds would endure spasms of crushing guilt. The reality was that her kids would be grown and gone before she blinked her eyes twice, and she routinely short-changed them on three short fairy tales because she wanted to do something so unimportant as sleep. Sometimes it was better not to think too much. Reynolds was a classic overachiever and a perfectionist, to boot, while a “perfect parent” was the world’s greatest oxymoron.
“I’ll try my best. I promise.”
The disappointed look on her daughter’s face made Reynolds turn and flee the room. She stopped at the small room on the first floor that served as her study. From the top of a cabinet she removed a squat, heavy metal box, which she unlocked. Removing her SIG 9mm, she loaded in a fresh mag, pulled the slide back to chamber a round, clicked the safety on, slid the weapon in her clip holster and was out the door before she could think any more about another interrupted meal in a long string of disappointments for her children. Superwoman: career, kids, she had it all. Now, if she could only clone herself. Twice.
Lee and Faith had made two stops on the way to North Carolina, once for a late lunch at a Cracker Barrel and another at a large strip mall in southern Virginia. Lee had seen a billboard off the highway advertising a week-long gun show. The parking lot was packed with pickup trucks, RVs and cars with fat tires and engines erupting through their hoods. Some of the men were dressed in Polo and Chaps, and others in Grateful Dead T-shirts and ragged jeans. Americans of all backgrounds apparently loved their guns.
“Why here?” Faith asked as Lee got off the bike.
“Virginia law requires that licensed gun dealers conduct on-the-spot background checks on people trying to buy weapons,” he explained. “You have to fill out a form, have your gun permit and two forms of identification.
But the law doesn’t apply to gun shows. All they want is your money. Which, by the way, I need.”
“Do you
really
have to have a gun?”
He stared at her as though she had just hatched from an egg. “Everybody coming after
us
has them.”