Dead Watch

want him. After a year of prep school, he went to college at the University of Virginia, a lonely sixteen-year-old with a history book under his arm.
    He graduated at nineteen and could afford to do as he wished—when his grandfather died, his will specified that the ranch be sold, and that the money go to Jake, rather than to his father . . .
    Two weeks after graduation, he was in Army Officers Candidate School. He spent eight years with Army Intelligence. The first two years had been in training. The third, fourth, and fifth he’d spent in Afghanistan with a series of Army special forces teams.
    At the beginning of the sixth year, he was standing too close to a roadside bomb when it went off on the outskirts of the town of Ghazni. A piece of shell the size of a softball cut through his hip. A medic had stuffed Stop-Flo padding into the hole in his leg and butt and on the medevac chopper, said, “Shit, man, you’re lucky. If you’d been standing ninety degrees to the right, that would’ve been your balls.”
    The rest of the sixth year was spent at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, getting his leg to work again.
    Then, still in therapy, he was posted to the Pentagon, where he discovered an uncanny ability to navigate the world of bureaucracy. While his military colleagues worked on assessments of Chinese special-forces training or the electronic characteristics of Indian shoulder-mounted missiles, Jake’s work had been done inside the Pentagon, the various limbs of Congress, and the rat’s nest of bureaus and departments that surrounded the intelligence agencies.
    He found things out; became the Sam Spade of the circular file, the Philip Marlowe of the burn bag.
    And though he could eventually run five eight-minute miles, in a hobbled, windmilling way, the Army would never consider him fully rehabilitated. That career was gone—he could stay in, take staff jobs, and someday retire as one of the colonel-intellectuals who argued war theory. Not interested.
    Instead, as he worked through rehab and then in the Pentagon, he’d gone to graduate school at Georgetown, with the idea that he might teach at the university level. He’d written his PhD thesis on twentieth-century modernist ideas as they’d bled into politics, and had then rewritten the thesis as a book, Modernism & Politics: The Theories That Changed the World.
    He’d gotten solid reviews in the important journals, and followed the first book with New Elites, a study of professional bureaucracies. That had nailed down his status as a political intellectual. He didn’t do television. Television, he thought, was sales. He was research and design.
    He’d gotten married before he’d been wounded; the marriage hadn’t survived rehab. Wouldn’t have survived anyway, he thought. The woman was a crocodile. Although, he thought, if she’d known that he would wind up at the White House . . .
    His most influential publication had never seen hard covers. At the urging of a military friend, he’d written Winter’s Guide to the Inside, a map and guide to the military/intelligence complex. It had become the best-selling Pentagon samizdat.
    The Guide had also gotten him a part-time job with the second most important man in the country.

    Ten seconds after Gina called down, Jake met a Marine Corps captain on the indoor side of the waiting room, and followed him into an elevator, up, and then down the eggshell white halls to Danzig’s office.
    Going to see the guy. The guy was Bill Danzig, the president’s chief of staff. Danzig had been a deputy secretary of Defense two administrations back, then a Pentagon consultant when the party was out of power. He’d been given a copy of Winter’s Guide, and when he moved to the White House, Jake went on his consultants list.
    Jake had done twenty jobs for him in three years, tracking down problems in the bureaucracy. As Danzig came to trust him, the problems became more difficult, the assignments more frequent.
    Not quite a full-time job, but lucrative. The job also gave him access to some interesting government computers. Interesting, anyway, for a man who wanted to know what really happened.

    A Secret Service agent was standing in the hall outside Danzig’s office door, wearing the neat suit, crisp shirt, and a burgundy necktie, with ear-bug. He nodded at Jake and the jar-head, stepped into the middle of the hallway, blocking a farther walk down the hall, toward the president’s office,