The Hanged Man's Song

you were running the Senate energy committee at the time. Unfortunately, it was some of the same Saudis who funded bin Laden. This does not look good, huh? Especially not now, post nine-eleven.” We were staring at each other in the now-gathering gloom; the phone rang to break the spell.
    He picked it up, listened, wrote on a message pad, said, “Thanks,” and, “Talk to you about it later.” He hung up, grunted. “Cell phone, supposed to be full-time,” and dialed a number. It must have rung a couple of times, and when it was answered, he said, “This is Senator Krause. Is this Rosalind Welsh? Yes. I need to ask you a question. Would you prefer to call me back at my house, with your directory, to confirm who I am? Okay. I see. Mmm. Then this is the question. What can you tell me about . . .” He looked at me, and I tapped the mask. “Bill Clinton.”
    Another pause.
    “Yes, a mask. Is he . . . mmm, reliable?” I was already edging toward the door. He listened for another few seconds, then said, “Thank you. I’ll be back in touch.”
    He looked at me and said, “The recommendation wasn’t the best.”
    “But do you think I’m lying about Carp?”
    “No, no.” A car pulled into the driveway, lights playing across the front of the house. “That’s my wife,” he said. I heard the garage door going up.
    “I’ve got to run anyway. Welsh will have her NSA people on the way. I just wanted to let you know the quality of what’s out there. But I guess we’ll find out if you’re telling the truth if the word gets out.”
    “No, no, that word can’t get out,” he said hastily.
    “Give me your phone number. A cell phone. I’m going to call you tonight with a proposition that may get us all out of this mess.”
    He gave me a number and we heard a door opening in the back. I repeated the phone number to him, and backed out the door. “Don’t follow us. Don’t try to spot the car. Just let us go, and maybe we can save your ass.”
    But he said, “Wait. What was that you said about research on Congress?”
    “I can’t believe you don’t know about that,” I said.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Then you may be genuinely fucked,” I said. “There are people in your group who are doing deep background research on a whole bunch of congressmen, on cabinet officers . . . all kinds of people. Heavyweights. And I mean deep background research, including surveillance. They have compiled a series of what I could only call blackmail files.”
    “That’s not right,” he said. He wasn’t quite whining.
    “Bullshit. Ask around. But I’d be very, very careful about who I asked.”
    He was still deep in the house when I headed out toward my car. I heard his wife call to him, and then I was in the driveway and out to the car and backing down the hill, lights still off.
    In the street, LuEllen asked, “How did it go?”
    “It went. Let’s find a place where I can wipe the license plate, just in case.” I threw the Clinton mask in the backseat, and she took us out of the neighborhood.

Chapter Fifteen
    >>> WE CALLED KRAUSE from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—now that the NSA was in it, we wanted to be away from anywhere that might have a tight federal law-enforcement presence, where they could move on us quickly. If we’d called from one of the big Washington-area malls, there was a 95 percent chance that we’d have been okay. That means that you get caught one time in twenty, which is too often. We’re willing to take one time in a thousand.
    In any case, we called Krause from a highway rest stop, and he answered on the third ring. “Yes?”
    “Senator Krause, this is Bill Clinton. Do you want to talk?”
    “Yes. I’ve, uh, talked with my staff director. He does liaison with the working group. He says he’ll check on what you told me, but says he doesn’t know anything about it. I’m afraid he’s lying. There’s more going on than I know about. I could see it.”
    “He has a problem, though,” I said. “He can’t cover forever because some of the files are already out there. We’ve got some, Carp has some, we don’t know what Bobby might have gotten before he was killed.”
    “You said you might have an idea about how to handle this.”
    “Yeah. But before we get to that, let me tell you again. You’ve got to be careful. Really careful. There’s some strange stuff going on.”
    “You can’t think . . . I mean, that there would be any physical