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would be bad; just not this bad. ‘I’m nobody’s fucking assassin.’ Hatfield said, ‘At Tsavo—’
    ‘Kill or be killed, Jack. Not like this.’ He wouldn’t do it, no matter what. ‘I believe Wallberg will be a hell of a president. I even voted absentee for him, the first time since 1988. I won’t figure out a way to kill him for you assholes.’
    ‘I really do hope you’ll reconsider.’ Thorne turned. Advancing with outstretched hand from the door in the far wall was President Gustave Wallberg, heavyweight charisma in his grin. ‘Out of curiosity, who did you vote for in eighty-eight?’
    ‘Bush. The first one. He and Nixon are the only statesmen we’ve had in my lifetime. And maybe Gorbachev.’
    ‘Not of my party, but a wise choice,’ said Wallberg.
    Brendan Thorne sat on the President’s right, Jaeger on his left, Hatfield across from him. The two kids were just there. A third mid-twenties man, redheaded and with shrewd blue eyes in a round ruddy drinker’s face, came in from the far wall door. The shrewd eyes took them in with a single bitter sweep.
    ‘Could you bring us some coffee, Johnny?’
    ‘Coming right up, Mr. President,’ Johnny said moodily.
    Obviously part of the original team along with Hastings and Crandall, reduced to a gofer, and not likingit. Had he gotten aced out by them? Or by Jaeger? Or by the booze?
    Wallberg said, ‘When I was in high school in Rochester, Minnesota, my best friend was a kid named Hal Corwin. We played football and hockey together. After graduation I went to the U of Minnesota, he went to Rochester JC. After four months, Hal quit college to join the army. I have not seen him since. Just last year I learned he had been a sniper behind enemy lines in ’Nam. An assassin. Apparently, on his return, like many Vietnam vets, he had a hard time adjusting to civilian life.’
    Jaeger took over. ‘He reputedly became a foreign mercenary – this gun for hire. His wife was killed by a drunk driver when he was out of the country. In some roundabout way his daughter, Nisa, blamed him for the death of her mother. I guess he accepted that guilt; in any event, he became a recluse in the forests of northern Minnesota.’
    Thorne felt as if all the air had been driven out of his body by the parallel with himself. Did they know about Alison and Eden? No. They couldn’t. No one in government knew.
    Hatfield said, ‘A year ago last November, Corwin was wounded in a hunting accident. In retrospect, we believe that while recovering he developed some sort of bizarre paranoid fantasy that his son-in-law had shot him. Deliberately.’
    Jaeger cleared his throat, his heavy face solemn.
    ‘At the time, President Wallberg was Governor of Minnesota and was developing… what should I say?’
    ‘Presidential ambitions,’ said Wallberg. He added with a grin, ‘God, Brendan, did I have presidential ambitions!’
    ‘The Governor was assembling a campaign evaluation team. Myself, Hastings, Peter…’ Jaeger gestured at the redhead just returning with a carafe of hot coffee andaccessories, ‘Johnny Doyle here. Nisa, Corwin’s daughter. When we committed to the campaign, she said she was worn out and resigned. Her husband, Damon Mather, stayed on.’
    ‘She volunteered for my first gubernatorial campaign when she was in college,’ explained Wallberg, ‘and worked on my second campaign as an adult. She came back aboard when I won the Democratic party nomination. She had a fine political mind. But in the last weeks of the campaign, both she and her husband resigned from my staff without telling us why.’
    Jaeger said, ‘We believe now that Corwin had started stalking them, and they went to hide out on a houseboat in the California Delta. Nisa called on election day in a panic. Somehow Corwin had learned where they were. I grabbed a couple of private guards at campaign headquarters, but we had to drive up from LA because the tule fog had grounded air traffic in the valley. A