Balance of Power

    In obvious disgust, Lenihan put down his fork. "That's what I'm afraid of. You don't have to be a prophet to see that we'll never get to trial before they pass that fucking law. And even if they don't pass it, we'll never get the evidence we need to prove our case." With an accusatory stare, he finished in a tone as acidic as Judge Bond's, "Assuming, as to your case, that the evidence exists."

    Unflinching, Sarah took her time to answer. "You've made your point, Bob. A hundred times. And the only winner is John Nolan.

    "We can sit here and whine. Or we can suck it up, and try to figure out how to get what we need . . ."

    "What we need," Lenihan retorted, "is a fucking miracle. Or, at the least, a whistleblower. Someone inside Lexington or the SSA who despises what they're doing."

    Sarah nodded. "That's why I asked them for a list of former employees—I was hoping to find a malcontent, or someone who left in a dispute. You already know what happened: Nolan and Fancher refused to comply, and Bond refused to make them."

    Lenihan stared at the remnants of his seared ahi tuna. "Fuck Bond," he said at length. "We'll set up a web site asking for information about Lexington and the SSA, and publicize it in Washington and Hartford. To find ex-employees, we'll hire an investigator.

    "The formal discovery process is all that Bond controls. Anything we get outside it, we can feed to the press."

    Sarah pondered this. "If anything's traced back to us," she cautioned, "Bond will take it out on us."

    "As long as we didn't violate his order, how could things be worse?" Lenihan's jaw set. "We need a mole, and we need publicity. Simple as that."

    Sarah toyed with her soup spoon. "Look at Bresler, though. It's hard to imagine what the SSA would do to an employee who betrayed it. Or even what Lexington would do."

    Lenihan gave a somewhat melancholy smile. "How many times," he observed, "have I seen a whistleblower who thinks he understands the risks.

    "They never do. They never imagine how bad it will be—divorce, bankruptcy, all the friends who turn their backs on them, the ruin of a whole career. The last whistleblower I had killed himself in the driveway of his ex-wife's home."

    And yet, Sarah thought, Lenihan was prepared to ferret out another one. With a shrug, he finished, "But what can we do? By tomorrow, we'll have our invitation on the net."

THREE

On the same day, also for the third consecutive week, Senator Chuck Hampton took the floor of the Senate during morning business, and eulogized a victim of gun violence who had died in the week before.

    He had begun this ritual on the morning after his meeting with Frank Fasano. Hampton's calculus was simple—the best way to corner the Republicans, including on gun immunity, was to remind the press and public that Fasano had not yet scheduled a vote on the President's gun bill. And his choice of victims from Lara Kilcannon's web site was artful: invariably they were mothers, fathers, or children; in each case the murderer—as with John Bowden—had acquired the gun without a background check; each murderer, because of a criminal conviction or record of domestic violence, would have failed the universal background check required by the President's bill. At the end of his statement, Hampton totalled the number of people killed with guns since the moment Lara's family was murdered. On this morning, after fifty-one days, the toll of death stood at four thousand one hundred and twenty nine—personified by a four-year-old boy killed by his abusive father in a murder-suicide which had also claimed his mother and two sisters.

    "If the President's bill were law," Hampton concluded, "Scotty Morris would be dressing for preschool as we speak. How, I would ask, can any of us even look his picture in the eye?"

    With that, Hampton yielded the floor, glancing at Frank Fasano. As in the last three weeks, the Majority Leader was impassive in the face of Hampton's daily torment. For the moment, Fasano had little choice: Hampton had stalled the Civil Justice Reform Act by threatening to introduce poison pill amendments—deleting the gun immunity provision, or adding the entirety of Kilcannon's gun bill—which a handful of moderate Republicans like Cassie Rollins, fearing the effects of the First Lady's tour and her confrontation with the Commerce Committee, had no current appetite to vote on. But centrist Democrats, as Hampton well understood, were similarly beset—some fearful of the SSA; others sympathetic to tort reform; still others waiting to gauge the longer-term effects of the Costello murders on the public temper. And so, beneath the surface, a core group of senators waited and watched, as did Fasano, waiting for his moment, and Hampton, watching Fasano.

    By tomorrow, Hampton knew, another eighty or so Americans would have died.

* * *

    "My people need cover," Fasano told Charles Dane that afternoon. "Especially the moderates. As I've been telling you for weeks."