James Patterson - I, Alex Cross

"Maybe they're trying to tell you something," I said, but he ignored the joke. It was pretty lame, anyway. I just wanted to calm Ned down a little if I could. I wanted him to speak slowly enough that I could follow.

He stopped by the big Rodin in the garden, took my hand, and shook it in an oddly formal way. "I've got to go," he said.

"Mahoney, you're freaking me out a little here -"

"See what you can get done. I'll find out what I can, but don't depend on the Bureau in the meantime. For anything. Do you understand?"

"No, Ned, I don't. What about this bank list you were just talking about?"

He was already walking away, up the stone stairs toward Jefferson Drive.

"Don't know what you mean," he said over his shoulder, but he was patting his coat pocket when he said it.

I waited for him to leave, then checked my pocket. There, along with my keys, was a black-and-silver thumb drive.

NED COULD LOSE more than his job for handing over the kind of sensitive information he'd just given me. He could go to jail too. I owed it to him to do as much with the list as I could. So I took his advice and started right at the top – with Tony Nicholson's biggest single "benefactor."

If someone had told me a month ago that Senator Marshall Yarrow of Virginia had a connection to a scandal like this, I would have been highly skeptical. The man had too much to lose, and I don't mean just money – though he had plenty of that too.

Yarrow was a billionaire before he was fifty, riding the dot-com wave in the nineties and then getting out. He'd turned part of his fortune into a Bill Gates-style foundation, run by his wife, focused on children's health initiatives in the United States, Africa, and East Asia. Then he leveraged all that good will, and another big pile of money, into a Senate campaign that no one took too seriously – until he won. Now Yarrow was in his second term, and it was an open secret in Washington that he'd already formed an off-the-books exploratory committee, with his eye on the next presidential election.

So yes, plenty to lose – but he wouldn't be the first Washington politician to blow it all on hubris, would he?

With a little calling around, I found out that Yarrow had a working lunch in his office that day, followed by a one thirty TVA caucus meeting, both in the Russell Senate Office Building. That would put him in the southwest lobby just before one thirty.

And that's when and where I went after him.

At one twenty-five, he came off the elevator with a retinue of power-suited aides, all of them talking at once. Yarrow himself was on the phone.

I stepped into his line of sight with my badge out. "Excuse me, Senator. I was hoping for a minute of your time."

The one woman in the group of aides, strikingly blond, attractive, late twenties, stepped between us. "Can I help you, Officer?"

"It's Detective," I told her, but kept my eyes on Yarrow, who had at least put a hand over his cell. "Just a few questions for Senator Yarrow. I'm investigating a large credit card fraud case in Virginia. Someone may have been using one of the senator's cards – at a social club out in Culpeper?"

Yarrow was very good. He didn't even flinch when I referred to the club at Blacksmith Farms.

"Well, as long as it's quick," he said, just reluctantly enough. "Grace, tell Senator Morehouse not to start without me. You all can go ahead. I'm fine with the detective. I'll be right along. It's okay, Grace."

A few seconds later, the senator and I were alone, as much as you could be in a place like this. For all I knew, the three-story coffered dome over our heads carried sound everywhere and anywhere.

"So, which credit card are we talking about?" he asked, with a perfectly straight face.

I kept my voice low. "Senator, I'd like to ask you about the half-million-dollar transfers you've made to a certain overseas account in the past six months. Would you rather talk about this somewhere else?"

"You know what?" he said, as brightly as if he were being interviewed by Matt Lauer on the Today show. "I just remembered a file I need for this meeting, and I already sent my aides on. Would you mind walking with me?"

THE FIRST THING I noticed about Marshall Yarrow's private office was how many pictures of himself he had mounted on the walls. There seemed to be a visual clique of "important" people he wanted to be seen with. There was one with the president and one with the vice president. Tiger Woods. Bono. Arnold and Maria. Bob Woodward. Robert Barnett. He was obviously a well-connected man, and he wanted everyone who walked into this office to know it right away.

Yarrow perched on the edge of a huge cherry inlaid desk and made a point of not asking me to sit down.

I'd known I was going to have to be aggressive at first, but now I wanted to back off and see what I could accomplish with a little tact. If Yarrow chose to put up a firewall, it would be hard to get around without subpoenas.

"Senator, let me start by taking any association you may have with that social club off the table. It's not why I'm here," I told him. That wasn't entirely true, but it was good enough for the time being.

"I never said I was associated with any club," he said. It was a balls-of-steel moment on his part, especially considering the sex acts I'd seen him performing on more than one of Nicholson's tapes.

I didn't push it. "Fair enough, but you should know that my focus here is extortion, not solicitation."

"Please don't push your way in here doling out some puzzle pieces and holding onto others, Detective," Yarrow said, suddenly more aggressive. "I'm too smart and too busy a man for that. What exactly are you hoping to walk away with here?"

"Good question, and I have an answer. I want you to tell me that those bank transfers are exactly what I think they are."

There was a long standoff; I guess he was waiting for me to blink.

Then he finally said, "Yeah, okay, let's get this out on the table. I've been to Blacksmith Farms, but for entertainment purposes only. And I don't mean myself. We're talking about out-of-town guests, contributors, visitors from the Middle East, that sort of thing. It's a part of the job, unfortunately.

"I get them in, have a drink or two, and then leave them to it. That's it. Believe me" – he held up his left hand and waggled a gold-banded finger – "I can no sooner afford to piss Barbara off than I can my whole constituency. There's been no solicitation here. Nothing to be blackmailed for. Am I clear on that?"

I was starting to get real sick of people pretending that none of this was happening.

"I'm sorry, Senator, but I have evidence to the contrary. Digital video evidence. You sure this is the way you want to go?"

Senator Yarrow never missed a beat, and he even remembered to pick up the file he'd supposedly forgotten in the office.

"You know, Detective, my caucus meeting started five minutes ago, and if I don't get this important water bill moving today, it's not going anywhere. Assuming there aren't any charges here, you're going to have to excuse me."

"How long is your meeting?" I asked.

He flipped a card from his pocket and held it out between two fingers for me. "Give Grace a call. We'll get you on the schedule," he said.

I could feel the firewall starting to rise, higher and higher, faster and faster.

I BROUGHT SOME music to Nana's room that night, a mixed artist CD, the Best of U Street, with a lot of the big names from when she went to the clubs there with my grandfather and friends – Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, and Sir Duke himself, the great Mr. Ellington.