The Nomination (3 page)

Brody nodded noncommittally. “What about abused women and children, deadbeat dads, the sanctity of marriage? The president is very big on family values, you know.”

“So am I,” said Larrigan. “You are talking about legal matters. Crimes. I have a record on abuse. I prosecuted dozens of cases when I was an A.D.A.” He shrugged. “I'm against breaking the law.”

Brody smiled. “We know. Just checking. You are tough on abuse. Your decisions reflect a solid commitment to family values, women's rights, children. Not radical, but solid. That's good stuff.” He glanced into his notebook, then looked up. “There'll be more of this. Every case you've ever prosecuted, every closing argument you've ever delivered, every decision you've ever handed down, every quote you've ever given a reporter, every country club you've ever joined, every gardener you ever employed, every woman you ever danced with, all of it will be dredged up. The media has no compunctions, and the Senate takes its advice and consent function very seriously.”

“Sure. I know how it works, Mr. Brody.”

“I need to ask you a harder question.”

Larrigan smiled. “You want to meet all the skeletons in my closet.”

“Yes. Now. Today. There must not be any surprises down the road.”

“I inhaled when I was in law school.” Larrigan grinned. “Drank beer in high school a couple times, too. Never got caught.”

“Twenty years ago,” said Brody, “I would've shook your hand and said, oh well, too bad, thanks just the same. Today, those things are not a concern.”

Larrigan folded his arms and frowned. “I'm an alcoholic,” he said quietly.

Brody nodded. “We know that. It's very much to your credit that you are forthright about it.”

“I've never tried to make it a secret.”

“You've been dry for sixteen years,” said Brody. “The president believes that fact can work to our advantage. What you've done is heroic, Judge. You've overcome a very common and terrible disease and risen to the top of your profession. It makes you human and ... interesting. A kind of role model.”

“I never thought being an alcoholic would work to my advantage for anything.”

“Did you ever do anything, um, regrettable in those years?”

“Lots of things that I regret,” said Larrigan. “I suppose I embarrassed myself and my friends and family more than once. But I was never arrested for DUI, never hit my wife, never ended up in the wrong bed, never a public nuisance, nothing like that. I wouldn't have been confirmed for the seat I presently hold if I had. I sought help, and I got it, and I've been dry all this time.” He cleared his throat. “Of course, I'm still an alcoholic. Always will be. Nobody is cured.”

“You understand,” said Brody, “the scrutiny will be a lot more intense when the Senate Judiciary Committee holds its confirmation hearings. More scrutiny than you've ever had before. Your friendship with the president and the senators and congressmen from Massachusetts will not protect you. Probably intensify the scrutiny, in fact.”

“There's nothing.”

“What about when you were in Vietnam?”

“I'm proud of my record.” Larrigan's forefinger went to his eye patch. It was no doubt a meaningless, unconscious gesture, but Brody had the odd sense that Larrigan was staring at him right through his patch. “It was a crazy, nightmarish time, of course, those last months in Saigon before the evacuation. I saw friends, men under my command, die. I saw innocent civilians, women and children, die. I was responsible for the deaths of many of our enemies. I lost my eye in combat. The nightmares still come back sometimes.” He leaned forward and fixed Brody with that unnerving one-eyed gaze. “You know that I spoke out about the war after my discharge.”

Brody nodded. “We do know that. What you did, the way you went about doing it, was admirable. You served your country honorably as a soldier, and then you came home and served your country as a citizen.”

Larrigan smiled. “I never thought of it that way.”

“The president does.” Brody shut his notebook, shoved it into his briefcase, and snapped it shut. “If you are nominated, you can expect your entire life history to be made public. Are you prepared for that?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Good.” Brody stood up. “For now, the president must have your assurance that our meeting today will remain confidential.”

“What about my wife?”

Brody shook his head. “I'm sorry.”

Larrigan stood up, too. “I understand.”

Brody held out his hand. “You'll be hearing from us. The president wants me to tell you that he's very much looking forward to seeing you again.”

Larrigan gripped Brody's hand. “Please tell the president that I am greatly honored.”

THOMAS LARRIGAN WATCHED the little man with the big briefcase walk down the wide pathway and disappear around the bend. It took all his willpower not to leap in the air and click his heels together.

Justice Thomas R. Larrigan. Oh, yes. It had a nice ring to it. It sounded good.

What lawyer didn't dream of someday sitting on the Supreme Court? He wanted it. Of course he wanted it. If Brody only knew how badly he wanted it . . .

Surprises, Brody had called them. Skeletons—that was Tom Larrigan's own word. Shit, who didn't have skeletons? Nobody who'd spent three years in Southeast Asia during the war. Certainly nobody who'd been a drunk for twenty years. If you looked close enough, you'd find a skeleton in every closet in America. If you looked close enough, you wouldn't find anybody who'd qualify for the Supreme Court.

Old dusty skeletons, long dead. Skeletons can't tell stories.

Larrigan reached into his pants pocket, took out his cell phone, and pecked out a number. When the voicemail recording invited him to leave a message, Larrigan said, “Meet me at five-thirty. You know where. I've got some news. Semper fi.”

He snapped the phone shut, shoved it into his pocket, turned, and strode back into the courthouse.

DURING THE FORTY-FIVE-MINUTE limo ride to Hanscom Field in Bedford, where the anonymous private jet waited to take him back to Andrews A.F.B., Pat Brody transposed his cryptic handwritten notes into his laptop, then shaped them into an eyes-only memo to the president.

He concluded with these words: “You are right. Larrigan's perfect. Almost too good to be true.”

Brody liked everything about Thomas Larrigan. He liked his record as both a prosecutor and as a judge. He liked the way he insisted on putting the law above his personal views. He liked the man's life story. American dream stuff. And he liked his appearance and his personality. He was handsome and likable. Charismatic, even. He'd play well in the media.

The president needed someone exactly like Larrigan. The reelection campaign was looming, and he needed a slam dunk. He needed something that would make everybody in both parties stand up and cheer. He needed an appointee that the Judiciary Committee would approve unanimously and enthusiastically.

The president desperately needed some good wound-healing, bipartisan, no-controversy, polls-spiking, feel-good publicity, and this Judge Larrigan should give him just that. To oppose the appointment of this perfect nominee would appear mean-spirited and partisan. It was a no-lose situation for the president.

Pat Brody couldn't figure out why he felt vaguely uneasy about the judge. He
was
perfect.

He sighed. He'd been in the political game too long. He was too damned cynical.

Brody had earned his Ph.D. in history, and in all of his studies, not even to mention his fourteen years in public service, nobody yet had been perfect.

Somewhere along the way the rules had shifted. Now a one-eyed alcoholic federal district court judge who'd never handed down an important decision in his career, never made a decision with constitutional implications, a plodding jurist at best, but an attractive man—okay, a charismatic man with an interesting personal history and a spotless but bland professional history, and a good golf swing—such a man looked like the perfect Supreme Court appointee.

A Bronze Star and an eye patch and a blank slate on every controversial issue of the day. That was the ticket. It was all about perception.

The times they were a-changin', all right, and Pat Brody supposed he just wasn't keeping up.

Like his daughter kept saying: Nobody listens to the Kingston Trio anymore, Dad.

The president would be pleased, though. That, he reminded himself, was what counted.

Pleasing the president. That was Patrick Brody's job.

T
hat evening Pat Brody was sitting at his desk in his windowless basement office almost directly underneath the most powerful office in the world. Brody's own little workspace was dim, lit only by the single fluorescent bulb on the desk lamp and the glow of his computer screen.

He had delivered his memo to the president, debriefed him, and chatted for the allotted five minutes.

The president had seemed pleased. “So far so good, then,” he had said. “Do what needs to be done.”

And Brody understood his meaning: “Don't tell me anything else. What I don't know I can't be responsible for. But don't let me make a mistake.”

Brody typed in his password—an utterly random eight-digit number that he changed daily, memorized, and wrote down nowhere—hit the “write letter” icon, and typed in the six-digit address, also random, that he had also memorized.

His fingers hovered over the keyboard as he stared up at the ceiling. Then he wrote:

Blackhole: Your professional services needed for deep backgrounding, utmost discretion, time of the essence, usual extravagant fee for OYO job well done. Meet Bellwether, regular place, Thursday 01:00 for details. Read and delete.

He signed it: “Shadowland.”

He read it over, clicked the “send” icon, deleted it from his “mail sent” file, then opened the “deleted mail” file and erased it from there, too.

Brody knew that somewhere out there in cyberspace this e-mail would continue to exist even after it had been deleted at both ends, and that, in theory, it could be recovered and traced back to his and Blackhole's computers. That was highly unlikely, but should it happen, and if it were then decrypted, which was unlikely bordering on impossible, it would still take a lot of other knowledge to make any sense out of the message. Minimal, acceptable risk. Nothing was absolutely without risk.

He paused, stretched and yawned, then wrote another e-mail:

Bellwether: Need for Patchman scrutiny confirmed. Meet Blackhole OYO, usual place, Thursday 01:00, specify assignment per previous instructions. Read and delete. Shadowland.

Again he sent the mail then deleted it from his computer.

Brody checked his own incoming mailbox, found no important messages, logged off, and shut down his computer.

He leaned back in his chair, cradled his neck in his laced fingers, and smiled up at the dark ceiling.

Pat Brody loved this shit. He loved the Byzantine complexity of it all. He loved pulling the strings, making things happen. He loved the fact that he was Shadowland.

Somewhere out there two men—or, for all he knew, two women, or one of each, or whatever—were reading his words in virtually untraceable secrecy. “Blackhole,” whoever that was, did the important jobs that official government agents could not do. He—or she—got his or her assignments from another ghostly character, an intermediary known to Brody only as “Bellwether.”

He communicated with them in the anonymity of cyberspace, safely insulated from the president and his immediate circle. Whatever services they rendered, they did OYO—“on your own.” Nothing could be traced back to the white mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue, never mind to the Oval Office within it. They were free to use any method that promised to work. The end justifies the means. Introductory Machiavelli. Raison d'état. Realpolitik.

Their OYO activities were, in the delicious jargon of bureaucratic survival theory, “plausibly deniable.”

Pat Brody didn't want to know what they did or how they did it. If Brody didn't know, there was no way the president could know. And if the president didn't know, he couldn't be blamed. He might be accused of naïvete, or of ignorance, or even of failing to maintain sufficient control of his staff. That was the worst-case scenario. But in the final analysis, with the proper degree of spin, what the president didn't know could do him no harm.

If Blackhole, or Bellwether, or Shadowland himself—if any one of them should get careless, all of them would be sacrificed, no questions asked. Brody would become the victim of the president's self-righteous indignation. He would be “the man I thought I could trust,” the maverick, the loose cannon.

Blackhole and Bellwether ... they would simply disappear.

Everyone understood how it worked.

The system had always been there. Nixon had exposed it to public attention. Reagan had refined it, perfected the illusion, mastered the art of plausible deniability. Their successors—hello, Dick Cheney—with the benefit of personal computers and cellular telephones and other technology, and with their cynical scruples, had made it into an art.

Fuck up and your head rolls. That was part of Brody's job description.

The president needed to be sure that nominating this Larrigan—or even announcing his possible candidacy—created no problem. The one-eyed war-hero judge could be an attractive feather in the president's political cap.

Of course, he could also be a disaster.

It was Pat Brody's job to avert disasters. That's why he had activated Blackhole.

JESSIE CHURCH WAS sitting in her anonymous Honda Civic across the street from Anthony Moreno's dingy little bungalow in Mill Valley on San Francisco Bay. Jessie's camcorder was braced on the window ledge, and her Canon EOS with its 600-millimeter lens sat on the seat beside her. She was sipping bottled water and sweating under the unrelenting midday sun, waiting for the poor schmuck to do something stupid.

Anthony Moreno had found an orthopedist willing to testify that Mr. Moreno's work-related back injury, quote-unquote, would forever prevent him from performing his job, which was driving a bus around the streets of Oakland, and that Mr. Moreno should therefore, in accordance with the contract negotiated between the bus drivers' union and the city, be entitled to full retirement benefits plus workman's compensation.

The city's insurance company assumed that both the orthopedist and Anthony Moreno were lying—anybody could fake a back injury, and it was not exactly unheard of for a doctor to help out a friend, so they hired BSI—Bay Security and Investigations—to get the goods on Mr. Moreno.

Today was Thursday. Jessie had been on the case since Monday, and so far the most back-breaking thing she'd seen Moreno do was squat down to retrieve his newspaper from his front stoop, which he did, carefully, every morning at 7:15. He opened the front door, stepped out onto the stoop, slowly bent his knees, keeping his back straight and one hand on the wrought-iron porch railing, picked up the paper, and slowly pushed himself upright.

She'd recorded that performance each time. The man was either one hell of an actor—and playing, as far as he knew, for an imaginary audience—or a man with a bad back.

Moreno stayed indoors most of the time. For all Jessie knew, he was moving furniture and doing jumping jacks in there, but he kept the curtains drawn all day long.

Tuesday after supper, with the help of his cane, he'd hobbled out to the Dodge minivan under his carport. Jessie followed him to the Sons of Italy hall a few blocks from his house. She guessed he'd normally walk there, but now he drove. She couldn't follow him inside, of course. It was a private club. But the square one-story building had four big floor-to-ceiling windows facing the street. So she found a place to park from which, through her 600-millimeter lens, she could see what was going on inside. There were a few pinball machines and a pool table and a little dance floor. But all Anthony Moreno did was sit at a table and drink a couple of beers. He used his cane whenever he stood up. He didn't shoot any pool or dance with any of the women. He just sat there stiffly and sipped his beer. When somebody spoke to him, he turned his head slowly to look at them without twisting his body.

Maybe Moreno was performing for her, although there was no way he could know he was being observed. Jessie was too good for that. But as far as she could tell, Anthony Moreno behaved as if he really did have a bad back.

She'd stick with it through the weekend, then file her report. If they wanted her to keep at it, well, it was their money.

She found herself shaking her head at the irony of it, though. Jessie Church, the heroic bodyguard who'd saved the abortion doctor's life, and look at her now, a little over a week later, on a crummy insurance stakeout, and it wasn't even going to pan out. The only assignment Jessie found more distasteful than insurance work was to follow husbands around so she could photograph them sneaking their blonde receptionists into motel rooms.

But she'd asked for the Moreno job. That damn picture of her taking down that guy at the clinic had appeared in the newspaper, and even though they'd used her invented name, Carol Ann Chang—Chang being the most common Asian name in the Greater San Francisco phone book, the Smith or Johnson of Asians—she decided she better lay low for a while, if it wasn't too late already.

After she nailed the wacko at the abortion clinic, she'd taken a few days off to wait for the insane ringing in her right ear to subside. It could've been worse, of course. The .38 revolver had discharged barely a foot from her head. Luckily, it was aimed straight up.

No luck involved, actually. Jessie had the guy's wrist in her grip, and one second after he'd yanked on the trigger she'd snapped his finger.

It was just a minute after that the damn photographer took her picture.

When she went back to the office after her mini-vacation, Del, her boss, told her that Sharon Stone had called. Sharon had seen the story in the
Chronicle
and wanted Jessie to bodyguard her on a trip to Europe in June. Del was pretty excited.

“Awesome opportunity, Jess,” Del had said. Del was the only person in her new life who knew her real name. Sometimes she wondered if that had been a mistake, but she trusted Del, and he made out her paychecks to Carol Ann Chang, and she deposited them in bank accounts in the name of Carol Ann Chang. Her credit cards, her driver's license, the lease on her apartment, her fake Social Security card—her entire new life in San Francisco was Carol Ann Chang's life, not Jesse Church's.

But now, with her picture circulating on the Internet and in national publications, she wasn't at all confident that a fake name was enough.

“I'm not working with Sharon Stone,” Jessie told Del.

“Aw, jeez, Jess,” Del said. “It'd be great for you, great for the company. Sharon loves you. She wants to get together for lunch, go over a few things with you before we do a contract, but it looks good. I got it all set it all up, tomorrow, one-thirty—”

“No,” Jessie said.

“Aw, Jess. Do this for me.”

“No bodyguarding.”

“But Sharon—”

“You gotta get somebody else, Del.”

“You don't get it,” he said. “She's asking for you. You specifically. I mean, she wouldn't've called in the first place if she hadn't seen—”

“No,” said Jessie. “You're the one who doesn't get it. Listen. I don't care who it is. I don't care what she pays. I don't care what it will do for business. I'm sorry. I'm not doing it. Get somebody else.”

Del blinked. “Hey, come on, babe. Sharon's really a down-toearth person. Great sense of humor. Smart as hell. You'll like her.”

“Don't call me babe,” said Jessie. “How many times've I got to tell you?”

He'd leaned forward, folded his hands on top of the desk, and peered at her over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses. “I'm sorry, kid,” he said. “I didn't realize that abortion clinic thing shook you up so bad. That nutcake came a whisker from killing you.”

“I'm not shook up,” she said. “That's not it. And don't call me kid, either.”

He rolled his eyes, then leaned back in his chair. “I need you to do the Sharon Stone thing, Jess. Whaddya say? Please?”

Jessie laughed. “Did you actually say please?”

Del grinned. “Don't tell anybody, for God's sake.”

“The answer's no anyway,” she said.

“Listen,” he said. “I'm the boss, remember? I own this fucking business? You're the employee? You're supposed to take the jobs I assign to you?”