"What surprises me," Fleur said, "is who you're keeping company with these days." She took a step closer and touched his wrist. Jack managed barely to keep from jumping out of his skin. "Senator Hartmann is surely the moral heir of the Roosevelt-Holmes clique that almost destroyed our country in the forties. You saved us from those people then, and now you've fallen for the liberal humanist line again."

"That's me." He managed to grin. "Fallen."

"I thought I might raise you again." Her fingers ran up and down his strong wrist.

Slut for the Lord indeed, thought Jack.

"I wanted to talk to you in person. That's why I'm here in the-" She gave a bell-like laugh. "These unhallowed halls."

"Everyone needs to go slumming now and again." He stared at her, sickness rising in his belly. Fleur van Renssaeler, he realized, was the most twisted bitch he'd ever met in his life. His third wife included.

"I thought perhaps we could get together. Talk about… politics. Talk about Senator Hartmann, Reverend Barnett."

"Barnett wants to put me in a concentration camp."

"Not you. You're a proven patriot. The Lord has turned your curse into a blessing."

Jack could taste bile. "Glad to know I'm immune to the Lord's roundup. How about every other poor sucker who's got a wild card?"

"If I could just explain it to you. Talk you back onto the right path. The path of Reverend Barnett and my father." Finally Jack's anger rumbled to the surface. He saw Logan's head above the crowd of delegates, and knew it was time to go.

"Barnett's path I can't say anything about," Jack said as he picked up his briefcase. "But your father's I knew fairly well. He ate like a hog at the public trough, and for fun he fucked black boys in Harlem."

The first time he'd ever used the F word to a woman, he thought as he headed for Logan.

Though he had to give Fleur credit. She was a real professional. The smile hadn't gone, though it had, he thought, stiffened a bit.

He felt slightly cheered. Cheap and lukewarm triumph was better than none.

2:00 P.M.

"Listen, Sara," Charles Devaughn said. "Whatever happened between you and Gregg on that world tour is history. It's over. Accept that." Hartmann's campaign manager had the sort of brusque preppie good looks people felt the senator had; nobody envisioned Hartmann as the round-shouldered ordinary he was.

Sara felt her cheeks begin to glow like a spoon in a microwave. "Damnit, Charles, that's not the point. I need to talk to you about the way the senator's been acting-"

He turned a shoulder to her, immaculately tailored and midnight blue. "I have no further comments for you, Ms. Morgenstern. I would like to ask that you refrain from harassing the senator's campaign staffers any further. The press has certain responsibilities you'd be wise not to overlook."

He walked. "Charles, wait! This is important " Her words bounced off his wedge of back and chased each other like arboreal animals up the Marriott's soaring organiformatrium, which she'd overheard a reporter from some fringe journal describe as Antoni Gaudi's trachea. Delegates bumping elbows in the lobby outside the function rooms turned to stare, their faces pale blank moons hanging over gardens of gaudy ribbons and campaign buttons, and in the middle of each a little square shine of plaque, like an exhibit at a botanical garden, identifying which subspecies of small-time political hustler or wanna-be this specimen belonged to.

She struck herself twice on the thighs with the heels of her hands in frustration. You're losing it, Sara.

On cue, the projector inside her mind brought up an image of Andrea, her elder sister, fine and beautiful as an ice sculpture. A laughing, taunting crystal voice, eyes like snowmelt: perfection tiny, mousy Sara could never hope to attain. Andrea, who had been dead for thirty years.

Andrea, murdered by the man who would be president. Who had the power to twist others to his will. As he had twisted her.

There was no proof, of course. Lord knew it had taken her years to acknowledge first the suspicion and then the awful certainty that there had been more to her sister's brutal death than the random urges of a retarded adolescent. It had taken her long enough to realize that that was why she went into journalism in the first place, why she was drawn to Jokertown: deep down, she knew there was more. And over the years, as she was establishing a rep as the reporter on joker affairs, she had come to be aware of a presence in the joker slum, covert, manipulative.. evil.

She'd tried to track it down. Even a star investigative reporter-even an obsessed investigator-didn't find it easy to trace the invisible strings of a demented puppet master. She persevered.

She was convinced it was Hartmann even before she boarded the Stacked Deck. She was certain she would discover the final evidence to convict him on the W.H.O. tour.

She had. She felt cool sweat start at the roots of her hair as she remembered how her suspicions had begun to erode, then whirl away beyond her reach, like driftwood from a drowning woman's fingers. She had actually come to think she loved him-and all the time a minute internal voice cried, no, no, what's happening to me?

She recalled sweaty skin friction, and him thrusting inside her, and she wanted to douche and never stop.

He had controlled her, as he had controlled poor Roger Pellman that Cincinnati afternoon when her sister died. Had used her because he perceived her as she perceived herself as a poor imitation of her beautiful lost sister. At least they shared that obsession with what was lost.

She had her proof, all right; she could still feel the points in her psyche where the puppeteer's strings had been attached. And sometimes when they coupled she heard the word Andrea grunted among the endearments, and something within her chilled even as her body and mind responded with eager need.

But it was no proof at all to anyone who could not read her thoughts.

She found herself drifting, realized she was being drawn by some journalist tropism toward Cluster 3, the function rooms clumped beyond the circular escalator well. In her growing frenzy to nail down some evidence that might convince an outsider, make him look beyond the sober statesman's mask, the air of compassion for all those touched by the wild card, that hid the puppet master from view, she had paid little attention to the phenomenon of the convention itself. The guilt stung her: You're supposed to be dealing with wild card affairs.

Self-anger flared: What could be more important to jokers-to anybody-than that a psychopathic ace may become the next president of the United States? She thought of the puppet master's finger poised above the famed red button and wanted to vomit.

Delegates and reporters were streaming from the big corner Sidney Room, flushed and noisy as schoolkids. "What's going on?" she asked one, mainly because he was little taller than she was.

"It's Barnett's crazies," he told her. "They came up with something juicy on Hartmann." He was vibrating with gratified malice. He wore glasses and a big Dukakis button.

Could this be it? she wondered, starting to feel cheated that it wasn't her hand that had driven the stake through the monster's heart.

"They got to someone who was on the W. H. O. tour last year. Turns out Hartmann spent the whole time having himself a fling with some bimbo reporter from The Washington Post."

The parade of delegates and politicians through Gregg's suite seemed endless-Gregg had to admit that Amy had done a tremendous job contacting people on extremely short notice.

But then most delegates were anxious to meet with the front-runner among the candidates, and none of the elected officials wanted to offend the man who might possibly be the next president.