Дэвид Балдаччи - Absolute Power

He took a moment to admire the surroundings. It was as though he were touring a museum. All that money. The place reeked of it, from the superlative antiques to the broadbrush paintings that casually hung everywhere, with real signatures at the bottom. Hell, everything in the house was an original.

He wandered into the kitchen and then into the dining room. The table resembled a bridge spanning the pale blue rug spread over the refinished parquet flooring. His feet seemed to be sucked into the thick, heavy fibers. He sat down at the head of the table, his eyes constantly roaming. As far as he could tell nothing had happened in here. Time was slipping by and progress was not coming easily.

Outside the sun momentarily pushed through the heavy clouds and Frank got his first break on the case. He wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been admiring the moldings around the ceiling. His father had been a carpenter. Joints smooth as a baby’s cheek.

That’s when he observed the rainbow dancing across the ceiling. As he admired the parallels of color, he began to wonder about its source, like the folklore of tracking the pot of gold at the end of the striped apparition. His eye scanned the room. It took him a few seconds, but then he had it. He quickly knelt down beside the table and peered under one of the legs. The table was a Sheraton, Eighteenth Century, which meant it was as heavy as a semi. It took him two tries, and perspiration broke across his forehead, a trickle entering his right eye and making him tear for a moment, but he finally managed to budge the table and pull it out.

He sat back down and looked at his new possession, maybe his little pot of gold. The little piece of silver-colored material acted as a barrier between the furniture to prevent the wet carpet from causing damage to wood or upholstery and also stopped leaching into the damp fibers. With the aid of sunlight, its reflective surface also made for a nice rainbow. He had had similar ones in his own house when his wife had gotten particularly nervous about a visit from her in-laws and decided some serious household cleaning had to be done.

He took out his notebook. The servants arrived at Dulles at ten tomorrow morning. Frank doubted in this house if the small piece of foil he was holding would have been allowed to remain in its resting place for very long. It could be nothing. It could be everything. A perfect way to gauge the lay of the land. It would probably fall somewhere in between, if he were very, very lucky.

He hit the floor again and sniffed the carpet, ran his fingers through the fibers. The stuff they used nowadays, you could never tell. No odor, dried in a couple of hours. He would know soon enough how long it had been; if it could tell him anything. He could call Sullivan, but for some reason, he wanted to hear it from someone other than the master of the house. The old man was not high on the list of suspects, but Frank was smart enough to realize that Sullivan re mained on that list. Whether his place descended or ascended depended on what Frank could find out today, tomorrow, next week. When you boiled it down, it was that simple. That was good, because up to now nothing about the death of Christine Sullivan had been simple. He wandered out of the room, thinking about the whimsical nature of rainbows and police investigations in general.

Burton scanned the crowd, Collin beside him. Alan Richmond made his way to the informal podium set up on the steps of the Middleton Courthouse, a broad block of mortar-smeared brick, stark white dentil moldings, weather-beaten cement steps and the ubiquitous American flag alongside its Virginia counterpart swooping and swirling in the morning breeze. Precisely at nine-thirty-five the President began to speak. Behind him stood the craggy and expressionless Walter Sullivan with the ponderous Herbert Sanderson Lord beside him.

Collin moved a little closer to the crowd of reporters at the bottom of the courthouse steps as they strained and positioned like opposing teams of basketball players waiting for the foul shot to swish or bang off the rim. He had left the Chief of Staff’s home at three in the morning. What a night it had been. What a week it had been. As ruthless and unfeeling as Gloria Russell seemed in public life, Collin had seen another side of the woman, a side that he was strongly attracted to. It still seemed like a careless daydream. He had slept with the President’s Chief of Staff. That simply did not happen. But it had happened to Agent Tim Collin. They had planned to see each other tonight as well. They had to be careful, but they were both cautious by nature. Where it would lead, Collin did not know.

Born and raised in Lawrence, Kansas, Collin had a good set of Midwestern values to fall back upon. You dated, fell in love, married and had four or five kids, strictly in that order. He didn’t see that happening here. All he knew was he wanted to be with her again. He glanced across and eyed her where she stood behind and to the left of the President. Sunglasses on, wind lifting her hair slightly, she seemed in complete control of everything around her.

Burton had his eyes on the crowd, then glanced at his partner in time to see the latter’s gaze riveted for an instant on the Chief of Staff. Burton frowned. Collin was a good agent who did his job well, maybe to the point of overzealousness. Not the first agent to suffer from that, and not necessarily a bad trait in their line of work. But you kept your eyes on the crowd, everything out there. What the hell was going on? Burton made a sideways glance at Russell, but she stared straight ahead, seemingly oblivious to the men assigned to protect her. Burton looked at Collin once more. The kid now scanned the crowd, changing his pace every now and then, left to right, right to left, sometimes up, occasionally he would stare straight ahead, no trace of a pattern a potential assailant could count on. But Burton could not forget the look he had given the Chief of Staff. Behind the sunglasses Burton had seen something he did not like.

Alan Richmond finished his speech by staring stonily out at the cloudless sky as the wind whipped through his perfectly styled hair. He seemed to be looking to God for help, but in actuality he was trying to remember if he was meeting the Japanese ambassador at two or three that afternoon. But his faraway, almost visionary look would carry well on the evening news.

On cue he snapped back to attention and turned to Walter Sullivan and gave the bereaved husband a hug befitting someone of his stature.

“God, I am so sorry, Walter. My deepest, deepest condolences. If there is anything, anything that I can do. You know that.”

Sullivan held on to the hand that was offered to him, and his legs began to shake until two of his entourage invisibly supported him with a quick thrust of sinewy arms.

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

“Alan, please, Walter. Friend to friend now.”

“Thank you, Alan, you have no idea how much I appreciate your taking the time to do this. Christy would have been so moved by your words today.”

Only Gloria Russell, who was watching the pair closely, noticed the slight twinge of a smirk at the corner of her boss’s cheek. Then, in an instant it was gone.

“I know there are really no words I can say to do justice to what you’re feeling, Walter. It seems more and more that things in this world happen for no purpose. Except for her sudden illness, this never would’ve happened. I can’t explain why things like this occur, no one can. But I want you to know that I am here for you, when you need me. Anytime, anyplace. We’ve been through so much together. And you’ve certainly helped me through some pretty rough times.”

“Your friendship has always been important to me, Alan. I won’t forget this.”