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“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“He may have guessed, but I made sure the delivery couldn’t be traced back to me. I did, however, send a message along.”
“What kind of message?”
“I only sent three photos. I wrote one word with a black Sharpie on each photo.”
“What word?”
“Three words. You’ll never win.”
“You and Garret have a history?” asked Kennedy.
“You could say that. We’ve been on the opposite sides of some pretty big battles.”
“And let me guess,” said McMahon, “one of your favorite sayings with him was, You’ll never win.”
“Actually, he was the one who was fond of the saying.”
“So you thought you’d rub his nose in it.”
Baker nodded. “And if I’d just left it alone, I’d be the one getting ready for an inauguration, and they,” Baker pointed at the photos on the table, “would still be alive.”
“What do you mean, they?” asked McMahon.
“Jillian and the man she had the rendezvous with.”
McMahon picked up one of the photos and pointed to the person underneath Jillian Rautbort. “This man is dead?”
“That man is Special Agent Matt Cash of the United States Secret Service.”
2
M cMahon couldn’t sit any longer. He’d been down this road before, just never on such a high-profile case. Instinctively, it was a nightmare. Law enforcement was in great part about maintaining order in society. There were rules, and they needed to be enforced. The people who enforced them tended to be very organized individuals who approached their jobs in a methodical manner. Never more so than when they were investigating a crime. And with a sensational crime such as this one, you investigated the case with one eye on the crime, and one eye on the eventual prosecution of the perpetrators. Usually prosecutors were brought in later, but on this one they’d been looking over his shoulder every step of the way.
This steaming pile of crap that this Republican shark had just dropped in his lap was now forcing him to rethink all of the suppositions and evidence that he and hundreds of agents had spent months running down and collecting. He wanted to dismiss it as inconsequential bullshit. Tell him to take his envelope and his confidentiality agreement and take a flying leap off a cliff. But, as much as he hated to admit it, his gut told him that there was something here.
McMahon wished Kennedy would break the ice and speak, but she wasn’t going to. That wasn’t her style. She was too smart. For all he knew, this was a setup. She could have known about this for weeks. McMahon didn’t like any of this. He stopped his pacing and looked down at Kennedy.
“How long have you known about this?”
She looked at her watch. “For about six minutes.”
McMahon studied her placid face and fought to conceal his own rage. He loved Kennedy and he trusted her, but at the end of the day she was still a spy. A professional perpetrator of deceit and lies. As much as he wanted to believe her, he could never really be sure. He turned his attention back to Baker.
“Why s
hould I believe any of this, and why in the hell did you wait two months to tell anybody about this?”
“I’m no saint, Agent McMahon. I’m not afraid to bend the rules here and there. Especially when it comes to stuff like these moronic campaign finance laws, but this…” Baker gestured to the photos. “If someone on the other side decided to make this go away and do it in such a way as to make it advantageous to their cause…then they stepped way over the line.”
“That’s a big if, and you still didn’t answer my question. Why did you wait until now? Why didn’t you come forward the day after the explosion?”
“Are you kidding me? The opposing candidate’s wife gets incinerated by a car bomb, and you think I should have gone public with a bunch of pornographic photos of her screwing her bodyguard, who, by the way, also got killed in the explosion? I would have been branded the biggest bastard in the history of politics.”
“I didn’t say go public. Why didn’t you bring it to me?”
