Jack & Jill

held “normal,” boring jobs around Washington for fourteen years, ever since she’d graduated from Hollins College in Virginia. She had a day job now. A perfect job for their purposes. The dreariest and weariest of jobs.
    That morning, she rose early to get ready. She and Sam had separated on Sunday night at the Four Seasons. She missed him, missed his humor, missed his touch, missed everything about him. Every inch.
    She had gotten lost in that thought.
Inches, Millimeters. The essence of Sam. His tremendous inner strength
She glanced at the luminescent face of the clock on her bed stand.
    She groaned out loud.
Quarter to five. Dammit, she was already late.
    Her bathroom had a yoga corner with a custom-made leather mat. No time for that, though her body and mind ached for the discipline and the release.
    She took a quick shower and washed her hair with Salon Selectives shampoo. She put on a navy Brooks Brothers suit, low pumps, a leather-strapped Raymond Weil watch. She needed to look sharp, look alert, look freshly scrubbed this morning.
    Somehow, she always came out like that anyway. Sara the freshly starched.
    She hurried outside, where a grimy yellow cab was already waiting at the curb, wagging a tail of smoke. The wind whooped and howled up and down K Street.
    At five-twenty, the yellow cab pulled up in front of her workplace. The Liberty Cab driver smiled and said, “A famous address, my lady. So, are you somebody famous?”
    She paid the driver and collected change from a five-dollar bill. “Actually, I might be someday,” she said. “You never know.”
    “Yeah, maybe I’m somebody, too,” the driver said with a crooked smile. “You never know.”
    Sara Rosen climbed out of the cab and felt the early December wind in her face. The pristine building before her looked strangely beautiful and imposing in the early-morning light. It appeared to be shining, actually, glowing from the inside out.
    She showed her ID card, and security let her pass inside. She and the guard even shared a quick laugh about her being a workaholic. And why not? Sara Rosen had worked inside the White House for nine years.

Part III

    The Photojournalist

CHAPTER
33

    THE PHOTOJOURNALIST was the last piece in the complex puzzle. He was the final player. He was working in San Francisco on December 8. Actually, the photojournalist was playing the game in San Francisco. Or rather, he was playing around the outer edges of the game.
    Kevin Hawkins sat in a scooped-out, gray plastic chair at Gate 31. He contentedly played chess with himself on a PowerBook. He was winning; he was losing. He enjoyed it either way.
    Hawkins loved games, loved chess, and he was close to being one of the better players in the world. It had been that way ever since he’d been a bright, lonely, underachieving boy in Hudson, New York. At quarter to eleven he got up from his seat to go play another kind of game. This was his favorite game in the world.
He was in San Francisco to kill someone.
    As he walked through the busy airport, Kevin Hawkins snapped off photograph after photograph—
all in his mind.
    The prizewinning photojournalist was outfitted in his usual studied-casual manner: tight black cord jeans with a black T-shirt, tribal bracelets from several trips to Zambia, a diamond stud earring. A Leica camera was looped around his neck on a leather strap decorated with engravings.
    The photojournalist slipped into a crowded bathroom in Corridor C. He observed a ragged line of men slouched at the urinals.
They are like pigs at a trough,
he thought. Like water buffalo, or oxen, taught to stand on their hind legs.
    His eye composed the shot and snapped it off. A beauty of order and sly wit.
The Boys at the Bowl.
    The urinal scene reminded him of a clever pickpocket he had once seen operate in Bangkok. The thief, a keen student of human nature, would snatch wallets while gents were in midstream at a urinal and were reluctant, or unable, to go after him.
    The photojournalist couldn’t forget the comical image whenever he entered an airport men’s room. He rarely forgot any image, actually. His mind was a well-run archive, a rival to Kodak’s vast storehouses of pictures in Rochester.
    He peered at his own image, a rather haggard and pasty-white face, in one of the cloudy bathroom mirrors.
Unimpressive in every way,
he couldn’t help but think. His eyes were war-weary, an almost washed-out blue. Gazing at his eyes depressed him—so much so that he