“I think you’re…” He looked at the gun. “Sir, I’m not sure that you are fully, uh, aware…”

“I’m not nuts,” I said. I looked past him. “Is there anybody else home?”

He hesitated, then said, “Not at the moment. My wife… should be home momentarily.”

“I don’t want to frighten your wife. But if there’s a telephone close by, you could make a call to someone who would tell you that I’m a reliable, mmm, source. There’s a Rosalind Welsh at the NSA.”

“I don’t know her.” He backed away a couple of steps, and I followed him inside.

“Maybe you can introduce yourself,” I said. “I’m going to let you make the call, but if you have a panic code, or something, I’ll probably figure it out, and I’ll be gone. I’ll be gone from here before anyone can get here, anyway, so there’s no point in trying to yell for help-and if you do, you might not find out the rest of what I’m going to tell you.”

“You said Jimmy Carp killed this boy… this, uh, man in Jackson.”

“Murdered him. According to your FBI investigation, he beat in his head with an oxygen tank. Bobby was crippled and in a wheelchair and couldn’t defend himself.”

“I saw the story. You’re sure it was Carp?”

“Yes. Not only that, he probably would have killed a little girl if we hadn’t stopped him, and he definitely killed your two men. Set them up and shot them down outside his apartment.”

“Sonofabitch.” Now he was worried.

“The whole thing started when he was doing research for your committee on Bobby. Now he’s got Bobby’s laptop and he’s decoding stuff from it. He’s got something with your name on it.”

His eyes narrowed, and his head tipped skeptically. “My name? Like what? I’ve never done anything.”

“Other people might not see it that way,” I said. “Now the woman at the NSA, she’s one of their top security people.”

I followed him down a hallway, past a coat closet, past a living room entrance, and finally to a big kitchen with a phone on the wall. The kitchen smelled like bread and peanut butter. I didn’t give him Welsh’s number and he didn’t ask for it. Instead, he dialed a number out of his head and when the phone was answered at the other end, he said, “This is me. There’s a woman at the NSA named Rosalind Welsh. She’s in their security branch. I need her home phone number right now. Instantly. Call me back.”

He hung up and said, “There wasn’t any panic code. What’s Carp got on me?”

“I don’t know everything he may have-or may not have-but he knows all about your bank loans from Hedgecoe Bank. What he actually has is scanned documents with your signature on them. I’m not a banker, but it seems like you got extraordinarily good terms, without collateral except for the stock you were buying. In fact, from the paper on the computer, it looks like the loans made you rich. You borrow big chunks of cash during the nineties, drop it into the stock market, Amazon, AOL, that whole crowd… you got to be a multimillionaire, right?”

“Nothing wrong with it,” he snapped. “Nothing wrong. Just good business. I paid all the money back, with interest.”

“Yeah, but how many ordinary guys could get a two-percent loan in 1990, with no collateral, and use it to speculate?” I looked at him, and answered the question: “None. You pulled a million bucks out of thin air, used it to make, what? Five million? Ten?”

“It was just…”

“You know where the money came from?”

“I knew some people on the board of directors,” he said hoarsely. “They know me and my reputation.”

“From the Saudis. From the Saudi Arabians.”

“What?”

“The Saudis are the money behind the bank, and 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.”