Lukas flipped open her phone.
Cage said, “No way.”
“Ah,” she said, “you don’t have the corner on miracles, you know.”
The brass clock.
It meant so much to him.
Mayor Jerry Kennedy looked at it now, resting prominently on his desk in City Hall.
The gift was from students at Thurgood Marshall Elementary, a school square in the war zone of Ward 8, Southeast D.C.
Kennedy had been very touched by the gesture. No one took Washington the City seriously. Washington the political hub, Washington the federal government, Washington the site of scandal—oh, that was what captured everyone’s attention. But no one knew, or cared, how the city itself ran or who was in charge.
The children of Thurgood Marshall had cared, however. He’d spoken to them about honor and working hard and staying off drugs. Platitudes, sure. But a few of them, sitting in the pungent, damp auditorium (itself a victim of the school board scandal), had gazed up at him with the look of sweet admiration on their faces. Then
they’d given him the clock in appreciation of his talk.
Kennedy touched it now. Looked at the face: 4:50.
So, the FBI had come close to stopping the madman. But they hadn’t. Some deaths, some injuries. And more and more panic around the city. Hysteria. There’d already been three accidental shootings—by people carrying illegal pistols for protection. They thought they’d seen the Digger on the street or in their backyards and had just started shooting, like feuding neighbors in West Virginia.
And then there were the press reports berating Kennedy and the District police for not being up to the challenge of a criminal like this. For being soft on crime and for hiding out. One report even suggested that Kennedy had been unavailable—on the phone trying to get tickets to one of his beloved football games—while the theater shooting was going on. The reviews of his TV appearance were not good either. One interviewee, a political commentator, had actually echoed Congressman Lanier’s phrase, “kowtowing to terrorists.” He’d also worked the word “cowardly” into his commentary. Twice.
The phone rang. Wendell Jefferies, sitting across from the mayor, grabbed the receiver first. “Uh-huh. Okay . . .” He closed his eyes, then shook his head. He listened some more. He hung up.
“Well?”
“They’ve scoured the entire theater and can’t find an iota of evidence. No fingerprints. No witnesses—no reliable ones anyway.”
“Jesus, what is this guy, invisible?”
“They’ve got some leads from this former agent.”
“
Former
agent?” Kennedy asked uncertainly.
“Document expert. He’s found something but not much.”
The mayor complained, “We need soldiers, we need police out on every street corner, we don’t need
former
paper pushers.”
Jefferies cocked his smooth head cynically. The possibility of police on every street corner of the District of Columbia was appealing, of course, but was the purest of fantasies.
Kennedy sighed. “He might not have heard me. The TV broadcast.”
“Possibility.”
“But it’s twenty million dollars!” Kennedy argued with his unseen foe, the Digger. “Why the hell doesn’t he contact us? He could have twenty
million
dollars.”
“They nearly got him. Maybe next time they will.”
At his window Kennedy paused. Looked at the thermometer that gave the outside temperature. Thirty-three degrees. It had been thirty-eight just a half hour ago.
Temperature falling . . .
Snow clouds were overhead.
Why are you here? he silently asked the Digger once again. Why here? Why now?
He raised his eyes and looked at the domed wedding cake of the Capitol Building. When Pierre L’Enfant came up with the “Plan of the City of Washington” in 1792 he had a surveyor draw a meridional line north and south and then another exactly perpendicular to it, dividing the city into the four quadrants that remain today. The Capitol Building was at the intersection of these lines.
“The center of the cross hairs,” some gun-control advocate had once said at a congressional hearing where Kennedy was testifying.
But the figurative telescopic sight might very well be aimed directly at Kennedy’s chest.
The sixty-three-square-mile city was foundering and the mayor was passionately determined not to let it go under. He was a native Washingtonian, a dying species in itself—the city population had declined from a high of more than 800,000 to around a half million. It continued to shrink yearly.
An odd hybrid of body politic, the city had only had self-rule since the 1970s (aside from a few-year period a century earlier, though corruption and incompetence had quickly pushed the city into bankruptcy and back under congressional domination). Twenty-five years ago the federal lawmakers turned the reins over to the city itself. And from then on a mayor and the thirteen-member City Council had struggled to keep crime under control (at times the District had the worst murder rate in America), schools functioning (students testing lower than in any other major city), finances in check (forever in the red) and racial tensions defused (Asian versus black versus white).
There was a real possibility that Congress would step in once more and take over the city; the lawmakers had already removed the mayor’s blanket spending power.
And that would be a disaster—because Kennedy believed that only his administration could save the city and its citizens before the place erupted into a volcano of crime and homelessness and shattered families. More than 40 percent of young black men in D.C. were somewhere “in the system”—in jail, on probation or being sought on warrants. In the 1970s one-quarter of families in the District had been headed by a single parent; now the figure was closer to three-quarters.
Jerry Kennedy had had a personal taste of what might happen if the city continued its downward trajectory. In 1975, then a lawyer working for the District school board, he’d gone to the Mall—the stretch of grass and trees presided over by the Washington Monument—for Human Kindness Day, a racial unity event. He’d been among the hundreds injured when racial fighting broke out among the crowd. It was on that day that he gave up plans to move to Virginia and run for Congress. He decided to become the mayor of the nation’s capital. By God, he was going to fix the place.
And he knew how. To Kennedy the answer was very simple. And that answer was education. You had to get the children to stay in school and if you could do that then self-esteem and the realization that they could make choices about their lives would follow. (Yes, knowledge
can
save you. It had saved him. Lifting him out of the poverty of Northeast D.C., boosting him into William and Mary Law School. It got him a beautiful, brilliant wife, two successful sons, a career he was proud of.)
No one disagreed with the basic premise that education could save people of course. But
how
to solve the puzzle of making sure the children learned was a different matter. The conservatives bitched about what people
ought
to be like and if they didn’t love their neighbors and live by family values then that was their problem. We home-school; why can’t everybody? The liberals whined and pumped more money into the schools but all the cash did was slow the decay of the infrastructure. It did nothing to make students stay
in
those buildings.
This was the challenge for Gerald David Kennedy. He couldn’t wave a wand and bring fathers back to mothers, he couldn’t invent an antidote to crack cocaine, he couldn’t
get guns out of the hands of people who lived only fifteen miles from the National Rifle Association’s headquarters.
But he did have a vision of how to make sure kids in the District continued their education. And his plan could pretty much be summarized by one word: bribery.
Though he and Wendell Jefferies called it by another name—Project 2000.
For the past year Kennedy, aided by his wife, Jefferies and a few other close associates, had been negotiating with members of the Congressional District Committee to impose yet another tax on companies doing business in Washington. The money would go into a fund from which students would be paid cash to complete high school—provided they remained drug free and weren’t convicted of any crimes.
In one swoop, Kennedy managed to incur the political hatred of the entire political spectrum. The liberals dismissed the idea as a potential source of massive corruption and had problems with the mandatory drug testing as a civil liberties issue. The conservatives simply laughed. The corporations to be taxed had their own opinion, of course. Immediately, the threats started—threats of major companies pulling out of the District altogether, political action committee funds and hard and soft campaign money vanishing from Democratic party coffers, even hints of exposing sexual indiscretions (of which there were none—but try telling that to the media after they’ve gotten their hands on blurry videotapes of a man and a woman walking into a Motel Six or Holiday Inn).
Still, Kennedy was more than willing to risk this. And in his months of bargaining on Capitol Hill to get the measure through committee it appeared that the measure might actually pass, thanks largely to popular support.
But then that city employee—Gary Moss—had summoned up his courage and gone to the FBI with evidence of a huge kickback scheme involving school construction and maintenance. Early investigations showed that wiring and masonry were so shoddy in some schools that faculty and students were at serious physical risk. The scandal kept growing and, it turned out, involved a number of contractors and subs and high-ranking District officials, some of them Kennedy appointees and longtime friends.
Kennedy himself had extolled Moss and thrown himself into the job of rooting out the corruption. But the press, not to mention his opponents, continued to try to link him to the scandal. Every news story about payoffs in the “Kennedy administration”—and there were plenty of them—eroded the support for Project 2000 more and more.
Fighting back, the mayor had done what he did best: He gave dozens of speeches describing the importance of the plan, he horse-traded with Congress and the teachers’ union to shore up support, he even accompanied kids home from school to talk to their astonished parents about why Project 2000 was important to everyone in the city. The figures in the polls stabilized and it seemed to Kennedy and Wendy Jefferies that they might just hold the line.
But then the Digger arrived . . . murdering with impunity, escaping from crowded crime scenes, striking again. And who got blamed? Not the faceless FBI. But everyone’s favorite target: Jerry Kennedy. If the madman killed any more citizens, he believed, Project 2000—the hope for his city’s future—would likely become just a sour footnote in Kennedy’s memoirs.
And this was the reason that Jefferies was on the phone at the moment. The aide put his hand over the receiver.
“He’s here,” Jefferies said.
“Where?” Kennedy asked sourly.
“Right outside. In the hallway.” Then he examined the mayor. “You’re having doubts again?”
How trim the man was, Kennedy thought, how perfect he looks in his imported suit, with his shaved head, his silk tie frothing at his throat.
“Sure, I’m having doubts.”
The mayor looked out of another window—one that didn’t offer a view of the Capitol. He could see, in the distance, the logotype tower of Georgetown University. His undergrad alma mater. He and Claire lived not far away from the school. He remembered, last fall, the two of them walking up the steep stairway the priest had tumbled down at the end of
The Exorcist.
The priest who sacrificed himself to save the girl possessed by a demon.
Now, there’s an omen for you.
He nodded. “All right. Go talk to him.”
Jefferies nodded. “We’ll get through this, Jerry. We will.” Into the phone he said, “I’ll be right out.”
* * *
In the hallway outside of the mayor’s office a handsome man in a double-breasted suit leaned against the wall, right below a portrait of some nineteenth-century politician.
Wendell Jefferies walked up to him.
“Hey, Wendy.”
“Slade.” This was the man’s first name, his
real
given
name, believe it or not, and—with the surname Phillips—you’d think his parents had foreseen that their handsome infant would one day be a handsome anchorman for a TV station. Which in fact he was.
“Got the story on the scanner. Dude lit up two agents, did a Phantom of the Opera on a dozen poor bastards in the bleachers.”
On the air, with an earplug wire curling down his razor-cleaned neck, Phillips talked differently. In public he talked differently. With white people he talked differently. But Jefferies was black and Slade wanted him to think he talked the talk.
Phillips continued. “Capped one, I think.”
Jefferies didn’t point out to the newscaster that in gangsta slang the verb “cap” meant “shoot to death” not “chandelier to death.”
“Nearly got the perp but he booked.”
“That’s what I heard,” Jefferies said.
“So the man’s gonna rub our uglies and make us feel better?” This was a reference to Kennedy’s impending press conference.
Jefferies had no patience today to coddle the likes of Slade Phillips. He didn’t smile. “Here it is. This quote dude’s gonna keep going. Nobody knows how dangerous he is.”
“How dangerous is—”
Jefferies waved him quiet. “This is as bad as it gets.”
“I know that.”
“Everybody’s going to be looking at him.”
Him. Uppercase
H.
Jerry Kennedy. Phillips would understand this.
“Sure.”
“So, we need some help,” Jefferies said, lowering his
voice to a pitch that resonated with the sound of money changing hands.
“Help.”
“We can go twenty-five on this one.”
“Twenty-five.”
“You bargaining?” Jefferies asked.
“No, no. Just . . . that’s a lot. What do you want me to do?”
“I want him—”
“Kennedy.”
Jefferies sighed. “Yes.
Him
. To get through this like he’s a hero. I mean,
the
hero. People’re dead and more people’re probably gonna die. Get the focus on him for visiting vics and standing up to terrorists and, I don’t know, coming up with some brilliant shit about catching the killer. And get the focus
off
him for fuckups.”