“Who’s behind all this?” he whispered.
She took a step toward him. “Do it to me, baby. Do it to me
good
.”
The second shot spun her halfway around.
Now she gazed out at the mountains and the valley and the sky beyond, a woodland nymph facing the dawn. She had a look of sheer childlike wonderment on her face.
She turned back toward him one last time, her bare arms held out to him beseechingly. “Love me, Carl … once more … if you love me …”
He fired at her once, twice, three more times. The force of the shots pitched her over backward and out into oblivion. Momentarily she was like a bird in flight, soaring on a current of air. But then she was just something heavy and dead that didn’t belong up there, and she free fell for hundreds of feet before crashing into a million pieces on the rocks down below.
A shudder went through his body. It occurred to him that he was about to throw up. But the feeling passed quickly. He stared down at the thing that had been Toni. That wasn’t really her name. He knew that. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she was gone. Never to return.
Gradually he became aware of the others again. Amanda. His dear, sweet Amanda.
“I’m sorry, she was saying. “I’m sorry I couldn’t—”
But he didn’t even let her finish her words. He just grabbed her and they held each other tightly. Their lips met and lingered. And lingered for a little while longer. Hers tasted like salt. Then slowly, when it was time, he released her. Turned to Father Patrick, who was crossing himself, his lips moving in silent benediction.
“Father,” Carl said, “I believe it’s time for us to tell each other what we know.”
The Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington, D.C., was a madhouse.
Dignitaries were flying in from all over the world for Tom Adamson’s funeral. Traffic was bumper to bumper. Car horns were honking, limo and cab drivers were swearing. There were more security officers patrolling the gates, runways, and baggage claims than there were cups of Starbucks coffee being sold.
That’s why Carl, Amanda, and Father Patrick were sitting in their car in the short-term parking lot across the street from the USAir terminal. That’s why Shaneesa, good old unrecognizable, nonwanted, hungry-for-the-final-story Shaneesa was at Gate 9 right now, waiting to pick up the very special passenger they were flying into town.
Sitting in the car, there was no need for any more conversation. The three of them had talked for hours, sitting at the rough-hewn stone table, along with Father Thaddeus at the retreat. Carl had gone first, telling his story from the beginning, leaving nothing out, including the gaps, the events that just didn’t make sense, connections he and Amanda couldn’t make or wouldn’t believe.
Father Patrick had the connections. And as he spoke, they knew they had to believe.
Crossing himself, asking for forgiveness, he told them about the confession he had taken in Washington, D.C. He explained how President Adamson had previously used him as a confessor on occasion, but always with advanced preparations and with security provided. But on this day, the early morning visit had come as a surprise. The president was accompanied by only one man. He looked to be Secret Service, the priest thought , he had that air, and when he described him in surprisingly vivid detail to Carl and Amanda, they realized it was Harry Wagner who had driven the president to his final confession.
Harry Wagner knew that Tom Adamson had talked.
Father Patrick spoke precisely, recounting the story told to him by President Adamson. It was almost word for word the history Carl knew so well. It was the story of Gideon and how nine-year-old Tom Adamson had murdered him.
It was then that Carl learned exactly how he’d been used. The president told the priest about a partial manuscript that had been delivered to the White House. Carl’s manuscript. It had come to the First Lady and she had shared it with her husband. The minutely detailed truth it contained was an extraordinary threat to their future, and it was an even more extraordinary shock to the president that it existed. As far as he knew, the only living people who could possibly know about the baby Gideon were his mother and his wife. His mother had lived it. His wife had been told. The night before their wedding he had fallen into her arms, weeping, and confessed his crime. He did not think the young woman he loved so very much, so absolutely, could enter into a life-long union without knowing what was truly within his soul. So he told her, in all its graphic detail, about killing his only brother. She already knew of his great ambitions—she shared many of them herself—so all she did was hold him, letting him cry, and rocked him in her arms.
It’s no longer your secret,
she’d said.
It’s our secret now, and it well make us stronger. We’ll keep it as long as we live. It will be our past. It will bind us in
our
future. And no one else will ever know. Ever
.
They rarely discussed their secret after that, the president told Father Patrick. Only twice. Once was when he’d discovered that his mother had been keeping a diary. She was getting older, a bit careless, and she’d let the fact slip in a conversation. He had panicked. The distant memory of his awful crime came roaring back into his mind with the force of a freight train. That night, for the first time in his life, Adamson woke up screaming. Once again Elizabeth held him and soothed him. She would talk to his mother, she said. She would make sure the diary was destroyed or safely locked away. She would, as always, protect him. And though he went back to bed that night, never again did he have a dreamless, peaceful sleep.
The second time was when Carl’s manuscript had appeared at the White House.
Now, according to Father Patrick, Elizabeth was the one who was distraught. She could not explain the book’s existence or its mysterious appearance. Someone had to have gotten hold of the diary. But who? They discussed every possible source. Walter Chalmers, the Republican presidential nominee. Their other political enemies on the religious right. The jackals of the media. They even considered Jerry Bickford. Could Adamson have unknowingly revealed his dark secret to the vice president after a night of drinking and camaraderie? Would Bickford descend to blackmail to realize his own lifelong dream of controlling the seat of absolute power?
Whoever it was had the upper hand, they both realized. More than just a hand—a fist that could come hurtling down upon them. Neither of them could let this secret come out, for it would destroy not only Tom Adamson’s future but his past. Even if never proven in a court of law, it would make him a pariah. It would wipe out every one of his accomplishments and drive him not just from power but from society itself. He would become a leper, joining and even surpassing such historical outcasts as Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, and Richard Nixon.
At first President Adamson seriously considered giving in to the blackmail—resigning with his reputation and his legacy intact.
Retire
, she said.
Let the bastards win
. And why not? It would be quiet, peaceful, and safe. But his nature was to fight. He was, after all else, a political animal. He couldn’t just slip away. Instead he went into overdrive, racking his brains, searching desperately for an answer—any answer but the one he gradually began to understand had to be the true one. And this time there was no avoiding it. He could not run from this as he had run from his childhood. So the president faced the truth and, on his knees in the cramped confessional of St. Stephen’s Cathedral, had told Father Patrick the conclusions he had forced himself to accept. He told it all to the shaken priest: who had conceived the idea of the Gideon manuscript, who had manipulated all the pieces and brought the idea to fruition, who was now poised to become the world’s most powerful politician.
“There’s a partner,” Tom Adamson had revealed. “It can’t possibly work otherwise. Not without a very powerful partner. It can only be one of a small handful of people. I believe I know who it is. I believe I even know when it started. And if I’m right, God help you, Father. They’ll know that I’ve talked to you. They’ll come after you. You’ve got to disappear.
I’m
going to disappear—and as soon as I’m gone, there will be proof that what I’m telling you is true. It will be big and bold. It well be right in front of you in black and white.”
But none of them knew what this meant. Not until Amanda had left the table and logged into Father Thaddeus’s computer, desperately searching the news services for headlines, for answers. And as she began to read, her eyes widened. “Carl!” she cried out.
He’d rushed to her and started reading over her shoulder. And now they knew.
They knew who the very powerful partner was. They knew who had organized the blackmail scheme. Who had manipulated the president into committing suicide. Who had been trying to kill them. They knew the name of the mysterious inside source, first mentioned by Maggie Peterson what seemed to Carl years and years ago. In another lifetime.
“It will be big and bold,” President Adamson had told Father Pat. “It will be right in front of you in black and white.”
It was.
Front-page editorial carried by the
New York Herald,
the
Washington Journal
, the
Chicago Press
, the
Loss Angeles Post
, the
Denver Tribune
, and the
Miami Daily Breeze:
WHY NOT LIZZIE?
By Lindsay Augmon
Chairman Apex Communications Corporation
My friends, these are dangerous times in America. As we stand on the precipice, poised to take the leap into the unknown of the new century, our nation faces its gravest challenge since the end of World War II.
Never before in history has a nation enjoyed such unrivaled power and prestige. Never before has a nation enjoyed so much prosperity. And never before has a nation had so much responsibility. For I do not exaggerate when I say that the continued stability of the entire world is in our hands, my friends. We are the mighty captain of its armed forces and the master of its marketplaces. We are its peacemaker. We are its moral compass. We are its hope.
Meanwhile, here at home, the forces of government tyranny would tell us what to think and how to live, suppressing the very liberties that make this country the greatest in the history of the world.
Meanwhile, we are witnessing what can only be described as anarchy in the Oval Office. First, we have suffered the tragic loss of President Thomas Adamson, who somewhere along the winding trail lost his own faith in life. And now his mentor, President Bickford, has pronounced himself physically and mentally unfit for the challenge that lies ahead.
My friends, these are dangerous times indeed.
We have a choice to make in November. Possibly the most important choice we will ever make. That is why I am taking this unusual step of addressing you myself, of sharing with you, humbly and with great sincerity, my own personal view. It is a view tempered by years of firsthand experience in this, my adopted country, and shaped by my years in my native Great Britain.
My personal view can be summed up in three words:
Why not Lizzie?
Let us examine the alternative. Walter Chalmers of Wyoming is an able veteran of the congressional trenches, a loyal party man, an estimable scrapper. I admire his bedrock conservative principles and his impeccable personal character. But can Senator Chalmers lead this planet into the twenty-first century? Is he the leader to unite East and West, Muslim and Christian, Protestant and Catholic, Arab and Jew? Is he the leader to manage the complex, multinational economy of which I am living proof? I think not.
Why not Lizzie?
I freely admit that I have a long history of respectfully dissenting from her husband’s views. I felt that the late president clung to his human rights agenda at the expense of the very progress and job growth that could bring to those same humans the rights of which he spoke. I felt he placed too much faith in the big hand of government control and not enough in the free hand of the marketplace. In that view, I was not alone. My views were and are consistent with those of the heads of the other Fortune 500 companies.
But in spite of our many disputes, I never doubted Tom Adamson’s integrity or his intelligence. He was a good man and a great public servant. He deserves our gratitude and our respect. He deserves a funeral befitting the office and the man. He died from a loss of faith, and there is no shame in that. Just as there would be no shame if he had died from any other disease, such as cancer.
Why not Lizzie?
The two greatest political leaders of my adult live, I would submit, are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. President Reagan was the Great Communicator, a man whose singular gift was the common touch. He was a figure of genuine warmth and humanity, a builder of bridges. Prime Minister Thatcher was a tower of indomitable strength, a determined free-marketeer who brought Britain back from the brink of economic collapse and made it into the lean and thriving modern powerhouse that it is today.
For me, Elizabeth Cartwright Adams combines the very best of them both.
I know Lizzie. I spent several days with her at the World Conference on Emerging Nations in New Zealand last fall. I joined her for the Children’s Literacy Crusade in Chicago last May, when I pledged—at her vigorous and irresistible urge—to make my newspapers more accessible to children. The weekly Kid’s Page and monthly Kid’s Edition, staffed entirely by local schoolchildren, are evidence of that commitment by each and every Apex newspaper across North America.
I found the former First Lady to be an individual of boundless vitality and enthusiasm, a vibrant and intelligent leader who understands that the needs of people and those of business are not two separate and distinct priorities but a single interlocking one. When Elizabeth Cartwright Adamson views an issue, she sees it not in simple black and white but as a broad spectrum of colors. I do not pretend to agree with her on every issue, but I do agree with her on most. And I have found her to be a uniter, a seeker of common ground, a builder of consensus. She is capable. She is strong. She is steady. She has the right stuff.