Dark Rivers of the Heart

recordings that she had of him in his Vegas hideaway, engaged in sex with several different little girls and boys below the age of twelve, had ensured his prompt acceptance of her proposal of marriage and the strict terms of convenience under which their relationship would be conducted.
        Jackson didn't pout too much or too often about the arrangement.
        He was keen on the idea of being president. And without the library of recordings that Eve possessed, which incriminated all of his most serious political rivals, he wouldn't have had a chance in hell of getting close to the White House.
        For a while, she had worried that a few of the politicians and power brokers whose enmity she had earned would be too thick headed to realize that the boxes in which she'd put them were inescapable. If they terminated her, they would all fall in the biggest, dirtiest series of political scandals in history. More than scandals. Many of these servants of the people had committed outrages appalling enough to cause riots in the streets, even if federal agents were dispatched with machine guns to quell them.
        Some of the worst hard-asses hadn't been convinced that she'd secreted copies of her recordings all over the world or that the contents of those laser discs were destined for the airwaves within hours of her death, from multiple-and, in many cases, automated-sources. The last of them had come around, however, when she had accessed their home television sets through satellite and cable facilities-while blocking all other customers-and had played for them, one by one, fragments of their recorded crimes. Sitting in their own bedrooms and dens, they had listened with astonishment, terrified that she was broadcasting those fragments to the world.
        Computer technology was wonderful.
        Many of the hard-asses had been with wives or mistresses when those unexpected, intensely personal broadcasts had appeared on their television screens. In most cases, their significant others were as guilty or as power mad as they were themselves, and eager to keep their mouths shut.
        However, one influential senator and a member of the president's cabinet had been married to women who exhibited bizarre moral codes and who refused to keep secret what they had learned. Before divorce proceedings and public revelations could begin, both had been shot to death at different automatic-teller machines on the same night. That tragedy resulted in the lowering of the nation's flag at all government buildings, city-wide, for twenty-four hours-and in the introduction of a bill in Congress to require the posting of health warnings on all automated tellers.
        Eve turned the air conditioner control to the highest setting.
        Just thinking about those women's expressions when she'd put the gun to their heads made her hotter than ever.
        She was still two miles from Cloverfield, and the Washington traffic was terrible. She wanted to blow her horn and fling a stiff finger at some of the insufferable morons who were causing the snarls at the intersections, but she had to be discreet. The next First Lady of the United States could not be seen flipping off anyone. Besides, she had learned from Roy that anger was a weakness. Anger should be controlled and transformed into that only truly ennobling emotion-compassion.
        These bad drivers didn't want to tie up traffic; they were simply lacking in sufficient intellect to drive well. Their lives were probably blighted in many ways. They deserved not anger but compassionate release to a better world, whenever that release could be privately given.
        She considered jotting down license numbers, to make it possible to find some of these poor souls later and, at her leisure, give them that gift of gifts. She was in too great a hurry, however, to be as compassionate as she would have liked.
        She couldn't wait to get to Cloverfield and share the good news about Daddy's generosity. Through a complex chain of international trusts and corporations, her father-Thomas Summerton, First Deputy Attorney General of the United States-had transferred three hundred million dollars of his holdings to her, which provided her with as much freedom as did the laser-disc recordings from two years in that spider-infested Vegas bunker.
        The smartest thing she had ever done, in a life of smart moves, was not to squeeze Daddy for money years ago, when she'd