NO SAFE PLACE Read online

  “Kilcannon wasontonight,” someone said behind him—Ann Rush of theTimes, Nate was pretty sure.

  “He always is when he believes it.” The voice belonged to Ed Foster of theGlobe. “I think Mason pissed him off with the abortion thing. Kilcannon already thinks the guy’s a whore.”

  Ann laughed. “Mason just cares about my reproductive rights.”

  “Wealldo,” Ed answered. “But Kilcannon cares about your soul.”

  Thatwas what Nate was doing with his life, he admitted to himself—chronicling the only interesting politician in the race.

  For Nate and his colleagues, Kerry Kilcannon was a relief. The last years of the nineties had not been a heroic time—not for politicians and not for the press. The politics were small-bore, he often thought: petty men taking small chances for selfish reasons, trying to manipulate just enough of a cynical public to keep themselves in office. The depressing result for journalists was that they, too, had become less important, reduced to covering politics as if it were a horse race, their thought pieces demoted from the front page to a place well behind the coverage of the latest celebrity murder trial. And just as damaging for all concerned was the competition to report on personal scandal, warmed to a white heat by the tabloids and Internet gossip columns, which seemed to have diminished both the standards of reporting and the standing of politicians generally. So that both reporters and the politicians they reported on seemed smaller than their ambitions—except, perhaps, for Kerry Kilcannon.

  Nate did not think that Kilcannon’s “lapse” the day before was a slip of the tongue at all; it was something Kilcannon needed to say, an act of rebellion against being packaged, a blow for his own authenticity. This element of surprise was what kept Nate sharp through the mind-numbing repetition, the sense that he and his colleagues had been hijacked by a process meant to ruin their lives and make them crazy. There might be a campaign book in Kerry Kilcannon, and if he won, Nate Cutler figured to be the next White House correspondent forNewsworld.

  Like most of his colleagues, he viewed Kerry Kilcannon with a mixture of journalistic detachment and personal regard. In his dealings with the press—the professional adversary of any politician—Kilcannon was honest, accessible, and often humorous, leaving the impression that he liked reporters and accepted their role. And Nate credited Kilcannon, more than most politicians, with the sincerity of his beliefs, a willingness to take risks.

  Of course, Nate did not flatter himself that heknewKerry Kilcannon; perhaps no one but Clayton Slade did. Kilcannon gave off a sense of inner complexity that was unusual in a politician. This was enhanced by his refusal to indulge in contrived self-revelations about personal traumas and familial tragedies; in fact, the biggest mistake a reporter could make was to press Kerry Kilcannon about his brother. The answer to what drove Kilcannon the man remained a puzzle.

  Nate started. There was a vibration in the pocket of his sport coat. Tired as he was, it took him a moment to remember that he had put his pager there.

  He took out his cell phone and called the sky-page center. The message was terse: Call Katherine Jones ASAP, at a San Diego number.

  Nate sat back, curious. The only Katherine Jones he knew of was the executive director of Anthony’s Legions, a group named after Susan B. Anthony and devoted to raising money for pro-choice women candidates. Nate had never met her; her call could only relate to the campaign.

  Glancing around at his colleagues, Nate decided not to return the call until they reached the landing strip.

  Kilcannon’s chartered plane was on the runway, a shadowy silver and black. The bus dropped them near the rear of the plane; a Secret Service agent stood by the metal ramp, ready to inspect the ID tags the press wore around their necks and to check their names against the security list. From experience, Nate knew that this process would give him the time he needed.

  He walked out on the darkened tarmac so that no one could hear him and dialed the number he had been given.

  It was the Meridian Hotel in La Jolla. Nate asked for Katherine Jones; after a moment, a brusque woman’s voice answered.

  “This is Nate Cutler,” he told her.

  “Good. I want to meet with you tomorrow morning, early. In confidence.”

  Perhaps because of the hour, Nate found that her peremptory phone manner annoyed him. “On what subject?” he asked.

  There was the briefest hesitation, and then the woman answered, “Kerry Kilcannon.”

  * * *

  Kerry Kilcannon’s voice rose. “We will protect our right to choose in the deepest and broadest sense. For it is not justwomenwho deserve a choice; it is everyone who chooses to work for a better job and a brighter future . . .”

  Rising from the edge of the bed, Sean Burke turned up the volume. His fingers felt awkward.

  Now Kilcannon seemed to look straight at Sean. “It is every mother, father, son, or daughter who refuses to lose one more person they love to a coward with a gun . . .”

  Sean’s hands began to shake. Abruptly, Kilcannon vanished from the screen, replaced by a woman reporter.

  “Senator Kilcannon’s speech,” she began, “was an effort to confront the Vice President and put the choice issue behind him. But Kilcannon finds himself criticized by leading members of his church for his pro-choice stance, and now some pro-choice leaders question yesterday’s remarks on when ‘life’ begins. This poses an uncomfortable dilemma for Kerry Kilcannon as he heads for California, where, in his party’s primary four years ago, women accounted for fifty-eight percent of the vote.

  “In this increasingly volatile campaign, suddenly refocused on the issue of choice by today’s anti-abortion violence in Boston, a portion of the women’s vote may become volatile as well . . .”

  He was not violent by nature, Sean told himself. He had never killed before today; he had not wished to shoot the nurse or the receptionist. But the lesson of history was that soldiers must kill aggressors and their tools so that the innocent might live . . .

  The motel room seemed to close in on him, making Sean feel trapped and smothered, the two sensations he feared most. He got up and turned on both bedside lamps, the ceiling light, and the fluorescent tube in the bathroom. His stomach hurt again.

  When he turned back to the television, Sean saw a body on a stretcher.

  He flinched. Paramedics were hauling the body through the same glass doors Sean had entered that morning, now three thousand miles away. Staring at the stretcher, Sean wondered whether it was the receptionist, the nurse, or the abortionist; covered by the white sheet, the body could be any one of them.

  Another newswoman was speaking. “The sole witness, a twenty-two-year-old woman who had come for birth control advice, told police that the unidentified assailant was slender, about six feet tall, with dark hair and blue eyes.”

  Closing his eyes, Sean prayed that they would not find him.

  “The Boston police are asking anyone with potential information about this crime to call 1-800-JUSTICE.” Sean returned to the bathroom, spat blood into the sink, and swallowed two antacid pills.

  The television, he realized, was eroding his resolve, making him weak. He forced himself to turn it off.

  Sitting on the edge of the bed, Sean began listening for sounds.

  He had done this when he was a small boy, covers pulled over his head, waiting for the echoes of his father’s rage—an angry voice, a slammed door, his mother’s cries. Now the only sounds he could hear were the hum of car tires, the deep motor sounds of ponderous trucks, the unearthly whir of air-conditioning in a cheap motel room—strange noises in an alien city. Sean felt both scared and angry, a pygmy bent on his final, enormous task.

  He could not stay inside this room.

  He opened the door and stepped out into the parking lot facing Lombard Street. Breathing deeply, Sean tried to absorb his new surroundings—the slow night traffic, the chill air, the fog swirling around him, misting the neon sign of the gas station across the street. He had never b
een to San Francisco: he had not known it would be so cold.

  Shivering, Sean promised himself that he would begin tomorrow. Seven days was not much time.

  FOUR

  At four in the morning, when the Washington bureau chief called, Lara Costello had been awake for the last five hours.

  She had returned from Africa three weeks earlier, after nearly two years in the Middle East, Bosnia, Rwanda—anywhere there was an election, a conference, a famine, a war. Three weeks was plenty of time to readjust sleeping patterns. What was happening to Lara was different.

  She was not burned out, Lara told herself; she was having trouble making the transition. Her memories seemed indelible: drunken parties in Sarajevo while mortars fell all around them; mutilated bodies with their genitals missing; her translator Mira, who, when the fighting broke out again, disappeared in the rubble of her own apartment; dying children with distended stomachs; tortured prisoners. She could not accept that they were suddenly irrelevant to her life, her work.

  After several hours of this, she had walked to the bedroom window of her rented town house and gazed out at the quiet Georgetown street, imagining her neighbors resting up for tomorrow’s bureaucratic turf wars, a meeting on the Hill, a gallant effort to make some client safe from the scourge of FDA regulation. Washington was a true company town, she thought; everyone worked for the government or wanted something from it, and, at least in Georgetown, the company was keeping all of them nicely fed. This would become her reality, she knew—just as she had learned to make a good restaurant in London her reality for a night when she was fresh from Africa and starvation. It would just take time.

  Time. In her three weeks back, Lara had come to realize that two years could be a long time when you were thirty-one. While she was overseas she had force-fed herself new cultures, made new friends, developed new skills and new defenses—in short, learned how to survive. Those two years had filled a void; to leave all that behind, even for a major promotion, hurt. Perhaps it was melodramatic, but the best analogy Lara could find was tearing a fishhook out of her own stomach. Even the worst things were part of her.

  There was no explaining this. To old friends and family, her most intense experiences were distant and abstract, Bosnia or Africa places on the map, a half-remembered headline. But to Lara they were people whom her broadcasts had sometimes helped, perhaps by shaming a warring faction into allowing shipments of food to pass, or by pressuring her own government to try to relieve hunger or stop the systematic slaughter of one group by another. Sometimes she had been able, at the margins, to influence a small piece of foreign policy. It was difficult to have worked so hard, and cared so deeply, and then to leave. But Lara’s work had made her a public figure, and the network wanted her home.

  She understood how this had happened: the image of a young woman broadcasting from harsh conditions was compelling, and overseas there had been far less competition. And, the president of the news division had observed with irony, she had a quality as important as her gender or her Latina mother: high cheekbones. Lara had black hair, intense dark eyes, a sculpted face, and pale flawless skin. Though it had never mattered to her much, she was a pretty woman, and in television that counted. Especially if one’s next assignment was on what a colleague had labeled “the star track”: anchorwoman for the weekend news and a prime-time weekly news show.

  Lara had turned from the window, gazing at her bedroom. She would rebuild her life in the city she once had wanted desperately to leave. Then, she told herself sardonically, somehow she could bear the burdens of celebrity, a million dollars a year, and a job most of her colleagues would kill for. She did not expect sympathy from anyone. Less than two years earlier, Lara had been an underpaid reporter for theNew York Times, one of those semianonymous print journalists who combed Capitol Hill for news and nuance. The only people who would understand her restiveness were overseas: journalists in sub-Saharan Africa, diplomats, AIDS workers, human rights activists . . .

  Hewould have gotten it, she suddenly knew; at times she had believed that he could grasp what it was like to be an old woman, or a small child. But the thought of him deepened her sense of solitude.

  “We go through life alone,” he had said to her once, “and then we die.” It was said wryly, as though he did not truly believe it; he had a gentle way of making fun of anyone who inflated their own difficulties. She would remember that in the weeks ahead.

  That was what she was thinking when the telephone rang.

  * * *

  It was the bureau chief, Hal Leavitt. He did not apologize for the lateness of the hour.

  “We’ve got a problem,” he said without preface. “Mike Devore’s broken his ankle. There’s no one to cover Kilcannon in California.”

  Lara felt stunned. She sat on the edge of the bed, trying to collect herself.

  “Are you there?” Hal asked.

  “Yeah. Just waking up.”

  “Look, I know you’ve got another week’s vacation, but I thought of you right away. This primary’s the tie-breaker, you’re from California, you started your career in San Francisco, and you know Kilcannon from covering the Hill.”

  Lara drew a breath. “And if that’s not reason enough, I’ve been overseas for two years, haven’t followed the primaries, don’t know the issues, and am open to charges of bias—every other month or so, the President’s or Mason’s people complained that I was picking on them. Or have you forgotten?” She paused. “You must have been out late, Hal, drinking with the boys. It’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

  Hal’s voice was level. “It’s only seven days, Lara. I’ll take the heat from Mason. If there is any.”

  “That’s one thing. But I’ve always thought that ignorance was a problem for a reporter. It makesmeuncomfortable, anyhow.”

  For the first time, Hal sounded annoyed. “We’ll have a clippings file ready. You can read it on the plane. When you land in Los Angeles, call Mike Devore from the limo. He’ll get you up to speed.” His voice became crisp. “We’ll make this as easy as possible—limousines, prepaid ticket, anything you need. The car’s coming at nine.”

  Desperate, Lara searched for excuses. “There’s something else,” she said more evenly.

  “What’s that?”

  “I have my own biases here.” She paused, choosing her words with care. “When I first came to the Hill, Kerry Kilcannon helped me get oriented and gave me a little credibility. I liked him, and I came to respect him as a senator. Idon’tadmire Dick Mason: to me, he’s one of those politicians who view everything, including dead African babies, in terms of their career. Unless Kilcannon’s completely changed, I know whoI’dvote for. I worry about my own professionalism here.”

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Hal responded in a voice of strained patience. “Allreporters have personal feelings, Lara. Weallvote for someone.”

  Lara felt sick at heart. She could go over his head to the president of NBC News, but what could she say? Only the truth would get her off this assignment. And the truth could destroy not just her career, but his.

  “Seven days,” she said at length.

  “That’s right.”

  Mechanically, Lara walked to her desk and picked up a pen. “Give me some names—campaign manager, communications director, press secretary, press travel person.”

  He did that. Lara found herself staring at the name Clayton Slade.

  “Do you have their schedule tomorrow? Where they start, where they’ll have been by the time I catch up?”

  “Sure. I’ll fax it to you.”

  Lara thanked him, and got off.

  She was still sitting at her desk, hands over her face, when the fax came through.

  She picked it up. The Kilcannon campaign was overnighting at the Hyatt in downtown San Diego. With the three-hour time difference, it was roughly one-thirty.

  Lara waited until eight forty-five, just before the limousine came, to place the call.

  * * *

&n
bsp; At six o’clock, when the Secret Service escorted Kerry back to his room, Clayton was waiting. He had already brewed the pot of coffee provided by the hotel.

  Kerry wiped the sweat off his forehead. “Good workout?” Clayton asked.

  Kerry stopped to look at him; if Clayton had a weakness, it was his discomfort with confronting Kerry in personal matters. Clayton had that look now—narrow-eyed and pained, like a man with an unaccustomed hangover. His bulky form slumped in the chair.

  “What is it?” Kerry asked.

  Clayton sat back, watching his friend’s face. “Lara Costello just called me.”

  Kerry felt himself become still.

  “She’s replacing Mike Devore.” Clayton’s voice was quiet, unhappy. “She clearly doesn’t know ifIknow, but she figures I probably do.”

  It was hard for Kerry to respond. “What did she say? Exactly.”

  “It was very understated, professional. She’s joining us today in Los Angeles. She’ll be gone after Tuesday. There was no one else to take Mike’s place.” Clayton folded his hands. “What she was telling me, between the lines, is that she couldn’t get out of it. I think she wanted you to be prepared but didn’t feel it was right to call you. I certainly agree with that.”

  Kerry tried to absorb this. “How did she sound?”

  “Like I said, professional.” Clayton’s voice softened. “I don’t know her, Kerry. It just seems like I do.”

  Kerry stood, arms crossed, head down.

  “I’m sorry,” Clayton said. “It’s bad timing. A few hours isn’t long to get used to this.”

  Kerry rubbed the bridge of his nose. After a time, he murmured, “I’ll be all right.”

  “You’ll have to be.” Clayton rose from his chair. “There’s a speech that goes with this, pal, and it’s my bad luck to have to give it. Remember how we always used to know who was screwing who at the prosecutor’s office? The only clueless ones were the couple themselves—somehow they always thought they were invisible.

  “You’re a candidate for President of the United States. The reporters who follow you around are trained observers, at the top of their game, out of their minds half the time with too fucking little to think about. Start giving Lara Costello meaningful glances across the tarmac, and somebody will wonder why.”