Dead Watch

the defensive note in his voice. Patterson suspected what was coming.
    Jake said, “A while back, you met with Barbara Packer at the Watergate and asked her what would be the best time, from a Republican point of view, to drop a scandal on the vice president. Was the scandal provided by Senator Bowe?”
    Patterson stared at him for a moment, calculating, then said, “Give me a minute.” He stood up, went into the bathroom, and closed the door. A minute later the toilet flushed, and a minute after that, his face damp from splashed water, he came back out of the bathroom, sat down heavily, and asked, “Is the FBI on the way up?”
    “Not yet; but they may be later,” Jake said.
    “You said you work for Danzig. Are you a cop, or not?”
    “I’m not a cop. Technically, I’m a research consultant. I will tell you, though, that the FBI is all over the case. If I think that what you know is relevant to the Bowe investigation, I’d have to give you up. Sooner or later.”
    Patterson studied him for a minute, then said, “Maybe I should get a lawyer and talk straight to the FBI.”
    “You could do that,” Jake said. “But the FBI is nervous. The more heat that’s put on them, the more likely they are to find somebody to send to prison. I’m just looking into the politics, not the crime.”
    After another moment of silence, Patterson said, “The truth is, it’s all politics.”
    “So what about Bowe? Was he retailing this scandal to you?”
    He leaned back on the couch. “Yeah. Essentially.”
    “What does that mean?” Jake asked.
    “Linc knew about this package—I don’t know who’s got it now, and I didn’t even see all of it. There are papers, e-mails, bank records, even a video recording involving the construction of a four-lane highway in Wisconsin. Highway sixty-five. It runs between the Twin Cities area and a resort town up north. The state and federal government spent three hundred and fifty million dollars on it. If the package is accurate, quite a bit of the money stuck to the vice president and his friends. Seven, eight million, anyway. Probably more.”
    “Where’d the documents come from?” Jake asked.
    “The general contractor. The overall management contract went to a company called ITEM, and somebody with ITEM apparently documented the graft. Why, I don’t know. Who, I don’t know. The fact is, it could be a very clever forgery, one of those little Internet assholes gone crazy. But if it’s real, and if it gets out in public, the vice president is gone. Maybe the president with him. Depending on the timing.”
    “The timing.”
    “Yeah. The timing. Think about it,” Patterson said. “If somebody drops the package now, there’ll be a huge stink and in a month or so, the vice president goes away. Everybody starts maneuvering for a trial, but that won’t come for a year or two. We—the Republicans—squeal and holler, but the administration says, ‘Look, we didn’t know he was a crook, it happened before we picked him. We’re gonna put him in jail now that we know.’ You lose thirty points in the polls, then pick a good man to replace Landers. You have a big happy convention, talk about the fact that the vice presidency doesn’t mean shit anyway, you recover the thirty points, and us Republicans are back at square one.”
    Jake crossed his legs. “Okay . . .” When you got somebody rolling with a story, you let them roll.
    Patterson continued: “If we dropped the package in the first week of October, the scandal would peak on election day. It’d take you two or three weeks to get rid of Landers. You know how that goes, he denies it, he maneuvers, his wife cries for the cameras and defends her man. But this stuff is undeniable, if it’s real. So a week before the election, Landers is dumped, and you’re down thirty points in the polls. Nobody wants the VP nomination because the Dems are about to get creamed. You wind up with some loser on the ticket, which makes everything worse—makes you look weak—and the president goes down.”
    “All because of the timing.”
    “Oh, yeah. If this thing is real, it’ll come out, sooner or later. But the timing is absolutely critical.”
    Jake stood up, limped around the suite, over to the window, and looked out over Atlanta. Turned back and said, “You don’t know where the package is?”
    “Nope. Linc took that information with him. Some place in Wisconsin, obviously. Maybe Wausau, that’s where ITEM’s