Dead Watch

a bit.
    When the headache backed off, he punched up his laptop and read the information he’d pulled on Patterson. The quality was poor, mostly on the level of gossip, but he could read between the lines.
    Patterson was a political hack, number two or three in a campaign management team, the guy who did the stuff that had to be done but nobody wanted to admit to. The disinformation guy; the fixer. He’d worked on both of Bowe’s senatorial campaigns, one winner and one loser, and two dozen other campaigns scattered around the country. A photograph, from Washingtonian magazine, showed a man in his midforties, in a suit that was rumpled but expensive, a drink in his hand, a glassy smile on his face. There were a dozen people in the photo, three posing, including Patterson, the rest just milling around, most with drinks, at a charity ball.
    There were, Jake thought, a hundred thousand people like Patterson within thirty miles of the Capitol.
    Like Elizabethan courtiers with machine-readable IDs.

    Madison Bowe had just gotten off the shuttle and was walking through LaGuardia in New York, when she turned on her cell phone and found a message: Call Johnson Black.
    She pushed the speed dial, and when she got through, Black asked, “Did you hear about Jake Winter?”
    She stopped for a moment, turned to face a wall, plugged her opposite ear with her fingertip—traveler’s privacy—and said, “What happened?”
    “He got beaten up last night. One of my guys heard it from a cabdriver, and I called a friend downtown. He was in the hospital overnight, but he’s out now.”
    “Goodman?”
    “I don’t know. The cops have it as a mugging. But Jake—I’m not sure he’d let himself get mugged.”
    “Oh, God. I’ll call him,” she said.
    But when she called, she got a cell-phone answering machine. She said, “Jake. Call me. It’s important. Here are the numbers . . .”
    She took a cab to the apartment, worrying about him: How bad, how bad, how bad? Then thought, Why am I worried about him?

10 

    The Four Seasons was an ungainly building, pale gray, with an acre of marble floor inside, white pillars and crystal chandeliers and what looked, against the odds, like it might be a decent bar. Jake called up to Patterson’s room from the house phone, expecting no answer, prepared to wait.
    But Patterson picked up on the third ring, his voice stiff, cranky, as though he’d just gotten up. “Patterson.”
    “Mr. Patterson, my name is Jake Winter. I work for Bill Danzig, the president’s chief of staff. I need to talk with you. Right now.”
    Patterson was confused. “Bill Danzig? Who?”
    “The president’s chief of . . .”
    “I know who Bill Danzig is. Who are you again? Where are you?”
    “I’m downstairs. I work for Mr. Danzig. If you want to call and check, you can do that. I need to talk.”
    “Okay . . . Do you want to come up, or should I come down?”
    “Better that I come up.”

    A “do not disturb” light was still blinking at Patterson’s door when Jake knocked, then knocked a second time. As he waited, he adjusted his cap, then saw an eye at the peephole. The door opened on a short chain, and Patterson, still in pajamas, looked out: “Do you have some identification?”
    Jake dug out the White House ID. Patterson looked at it for a moment, then said, “Let me get the chain . . .” The door closed a couple of inches, the chain rattled, and then the door opened fully and Patterson said, “Are you sure you got the right guy? I’m in the other party.”
    “Yeah. You’re the right guy.”
    “How’d you find me?”
    “I got the message on your answering machine, and called all the Atlanta hotels that a political consultant might stay at.”
    Patterson smiled at that. “Okay. Come on in. I was up all night last night, didn’t get to bed until after six this morning. Raising money.” He yawned, rubbed the back of his neck, led the way into the small suite. “I was afraid the CIA had planted a bug in my toenails or something. The way you tracked me.”
    He was taller than he’d looked in the magazine photograph, and heavier. His double-extra-large burgundy pajamas were printed with thumb-sized black-and-white penguins. He dropped into a chair, pointed at the sofa across the coffee table, asked, “What’s going on? You want some coffee?”
    “You know about Senator Bowe?”
    “Of course. You couldn’t avoid it. What does that have to do with me?” But Jake picked up