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“Heard you signed yourself out of the hospital against doctor’s orders,” Silas says, setting the tray of coffees down, taking one for himself. Clearly, the other two are for Harry and Monica.
“You’re nosy.” I slug down more liquid pain.
“Just doing my job. My boss is a stickler for detail.”
“Which boss? Paulson or me?”
“Both.”
I raise an eyebrow and drink.
“I’m sorry we couldn’t get there faster, Drew.”
“You did fine.”
“A few more seconds and we might have saved Lindsay from being shot.”
“No. A few more seconds and John might have grabbed her and played hostage with her. Those seconds before you crashed the place were unpredictable.”
“I saw the footage.”
“Who in the world hasn’t seen the footage?”
He shrugs. The entire nightmare has been played on international television for the past day. Post-mortem analysis follows the same basic news cycle script. It all becomes pretty simple once you know who was trying to destroy whom.
Nolan Corning decided four years ago, when Harry was making his bid for a second Senate term and also clearly shoring up a path toward the White House, that this would not do. For all of his political career, Harry had been a Teflon man, impervious to scandal.
Corning needed a news story so big it would bury Harry forever.
How he reached out and found Blaine Maisri is anyone’s guess, and I know we’ll find out in the coming days and weeks. Killing all three attackers was, in retrospect, terrible for investigating what happened, but in the life-or-death heat of the moment, you don’t pause to consider the future.
And Lindsay’s moves against Stellan were self-defense. The video makes that clear.
Even if the knife plunge made every man who’s watched it sit with his legs crossed.
Silas snaps his fingers in front of my face. “You there?”
I ignore him and drink half my coffee, staying quiet.
“That video Jane released to the media, the one with Blaine, John and Stellan not wearing masks? It’s been proven to be legit. She hacked into John’s hard drive and got it somehow, along with some coded notes between Blaine and an aide in Corning’s camp. The rest will fall in place as the search of all their electronic records unfolds.”
He’s trying to reassure me.
I can’t stop staring at Lindsay’s door.
“Drew?”
“Heard you. Good. I want the least bureaucratic mess for Lindsay. Her recovery is more important than media time or interrogations.”
“Investigators have to interview her eventually.”
“Not without me present.”
“You’re still not cleared yet,” says a deep voice from behind me. Paulson appears, wearing a crisp suit, a well-ironed shirt, a dark purple tie with gray accents, and a look that says he wants to kill me or give me a medal.
Could go either way.
“I don’t give a shit about being cleared. I’m staying here until she talks to me. If that were your woman in there, you’d do the same.”
