At the front of the room, on either side of her stood a pair of Secret Service agents, heavily armed and wired into one another. One of them was Agent Smith, in charge of this detail. He was taking what had happened to her father very hard—which was only right, she thought. She had more faith in Uncle John, a wall of a man standing at the back of the room, his eyes moving over the crowd of reporters and cameramen, his big right hand never far from his left armpit.

  Or for Cap, for that matter. He may have been a clown, but he was a reliable clown who could shoot almost a straight as she could.

  Faith-Anne conspicuously said nothing until the noise died down. “There are plenty of reasons,” she said, “why people sufficiently afraid of individual liberty might want my father killed, Mr. Raker. Freedom can be frightening, a terrible burden. And slaves, as we know, may come to love their chains and resent anyone who would offer to take them away. As to Chip Sheridan, the assassin, that should be obvious—but then you mean who was behind him, don’t you?”

  More pandemonium, pushing and shoving, jostling equipment, shouted obscenties and impertinent questions, gave her a chance to think. Old Media people, it suddenly occurred to her, were like a roomful of ugly, spoiled children with nasty little teeth, filed to a point. What was that old journalist’s expression? “If it bleeds, it leads.” And if it didn’t already, then they’d make it bleed. The atmosphere today—for them—was almost festive. Nothing like a good old-fashioned assassination. Faith-Anne was deeply ashamed that she had ever taken any of these creatures seriously.

  With her father’s blood still wet on the hallway carpet upstairs, Uncle John and the Secret Service had both insisted that she talk to these carrion-eaters as soon as possible, before they started making the story up for themselves. There probably wasn’t anything that could stop them from doing that, she’d told them, but she’d reluctantly agreed on the condition that it would only be for five minutes. It already felt like half an hour. Unfortunately, she didn’t dare be photographed looking at her watch.

  The plain truth, then: “I have no idea whether anybody else was behind Sheridan. There’s no way I can think of to find out. There are other people, supposedly qualified, working on that, but I don’t know how much good that’ll do. Nobody ever really found out who killed Jack Kennedy, did they? All I know is that Sheridan shot my father and now he’s dead.”

  Somebody toward her left, wearing a terrible toupee, said, “By your own hand, Miss Hope! How does it feel—“

  “You mean what do I think, Mr. Donaldson?” Faith-Anne shrugged and shook her head. “Because that’s all you’re going to get out of me. What I feel is my business—private, off limits—and it would be a much cleaner, far better world if everybody else followed the same personal policy.”

  She waited for that to sink in and, to her astonishment, the room grew quieter. “What I think is that I’m very glad I spent so much time at the Hope Corporation’s company shooting range just outside San Diego. The three shots I put into Sheridan weren’t more than an inch apart.”

  Agent Smith’s mouth dropped open; the buzzing in the room dropped an octave. Uncle John and Cap both shook their heads and grinned. She’d refused to answer their favorite question, answered one of her own, instead, and made them angry because she was able—and willing—to use deadly force to defend herself and others. Well, what did she care what they thought? The election was over and her father—she wished Dana were here, asking the questions.

  Or helping to answer them.

  Another voice: “Christiane Amanpour, CNN. So you’re proud of what you did, Miss Hope?”

  Faith-Anne exhaled. “Are you proud when you do the things—wash the dishes, cut the lawn, repair the car, step on a cockroach—that are necessary for survival and a decent life? I suppose I’d be proud of what I did, if I’d given it any thought before now. Ask me the same question tomorrow. Next?”

  She pointed to a middle-aged, overweight female with extremely short hair and adolescent skin problems, sitting on a folding chair as close to the lectern as she could. “Parva Poverish, Miss Hope, WiccaNewsDaily.com. While it’s true that you’ve empowered women by your act, it could hardly be described as heroic, since you took him by surprise, from behind. He never had a chance—“

  Faith-Anne nodded. “You’re right. He’ll never have a chance—to hurt anybody else. Are we speaking the same language, here, lady? Are we even on the same planet? It all happened in about four seconds. The guy was shooting my father, had shot my father. Your next president. I shot him to make him stop. What would you have done, diaper him and powder his nose? Take his picture?”

  ***

  “You’ve got to be kidding—or insane.”

  Faith-Anne brushed a strand of copper-colored hair off of her forehead. She wore no makeup—she didn’t need to, ordinarily. Her eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot from tears and lack of sleep. She wore a gray UCLA sweatshirt from her undergraduate days and faded jeans. At the moment, her mouth was set in an expression of angry resolution.

  Outside, “unusually seasonal weather”, as Ernie had put it, was attempting to plaster a layer of wet snow across the huge plate glass hotel windows. Faith-Anne was sitting on a sofa in the living room area of the large suite her father had paid for in the Portland hotel where he’d been shot the night before. Among those with her were Dana, John, and Cap, along with the original Austrian Mafia, Ernie, Mick, Katie, and Rick.

  The mood they shared was tense and unhappy.

  On their feet and facing Faith-Anne, their backs to the hall door, were Forrey Nadalindov, who had just arrived despite the blizzard, one of his official Secret Service escort, the Nomex-covered suppressor of an Uzi machine pistol conspicuously hanging at an edge of his damp, lightweight topcoat, and a well-dresed older man carrying a briefcase. None of them had been invited to sit down.

  “I assure you, Miss Hope, that I am neither,” Nadalindov replied. “I am merely doing what I consider my duty as Vice President Elect, under Section Four of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution.”

  He glanced at the man with the briefcase as if for confirmation, then shifted his gaze to focus on John, seated in an upright chair to Faith-Anne’s left. “I believe this matter could be settled more easily and quickly if you were to ask this thug of your father’s to step into the other room until we’re finished. Otherwise, well, I feel he might attack me at any minute”

  “You don’t get it, Mr. Nadalindov, do you?” she smiled sweetly. “Uncle John is here to keep you from being attacked. By me. Believe me, if I had even a microscopic shred of evidence to support my suspicion that it was you—and your buddies Horrwyrne and Moure—who arranged for my father to be assassinated, you wouldn’t be standing there right now. You’d be lying in a steaming pool of your own blood!”

  Nadalindov’s government bodyguard stiffened visibly at her words, while John laughed out loud. “You’d better take her seriously, Nada! After all, she’s the one who plugged the assassin—and he was her own fiance!”

  “Half a second too late,” Faith-Anne sighed, shook her head with regret, and looked ruefully at Dana sitting beside her. In her heart of hearts, she was chagrined at having been taken in, cruelly used by a cold-blooded killer who merely saw her as a way of getting at her father. But she had sworn to herself never to let anybody see it.

  She went on. “In any case, Mr. Nadalindov, the 25th Amendment doesn’t apply in this instance, as I’m sure you must be aware. You’re not the Vice President Elect, because my father wasn’t the President Elect when he was shot—the Electoral College won’t meet until day after tomorrow. And even then, the law only applies to a sitting President, not the—“

  Nadalindov protested, “But under the precedents established following the election of 2000—“

  She cut him off. “There weren’t any precedents established following the election of 2000!”

  Ernie and his friends laughed heartily. “You know before 2000,” Cap observed, “I’d always thought that ‘dimpled chad’ was some kind of surfer dude.”

  “Are you an attorney, Miss Hope?” asked the older man with the briefcase. Under an expensive camel-colored topcoat, its shoulders still damp from the snow outside, he wore a dark blue suit worth at least 3,000 dollars, and a red “power” necktie that screamed “lawyer” at hundreds of imaginary decibels. His tone implied that that question usually stopped the opposition cold.

  “Last time I looked,” she replied evenly, “Yes. And if you were any good, you’d already know that. Are you an attorney?”

  The man didn’t acknowledge her question. “An officer of the court should know better than to make death-threats, especially against the Vice President Elect.”

  Ernie said, “An officer of the court should know that it isn’t a genuinely manly threat for manly men as long as it’s couched in the subjunctive mode.”

  “And that this pompous ass you’re working for,” Rick added, “is not the Vice President Elect! As Faith-Anne just told you, the Electoral College—“

  “Besides, counsellor” a new voice came from a corner of the room, where a slender young man in black was seated in a comfortable chair, idly playing with a pair of dark glasses. A coiled bit of wire led from beneath his jacket collar to a plug in his ear. “If she tried to shoot the Vice President Not-Quite-Elect, I’d have to shoot her first—that is, if Agent Sanchez, there, didn’t do it with that Buck Rogers Blart-and-Bonkus-gun he’s not concealing very well.”

  Sanchez, the younger man standing beside Nadalindov, tucked the business end of his machine pistol back under his coat and scowled at his colleague, his expression plainly saying that Agent Smith had learned entirely too many bad habits from this disreputable collection of anarchists.

  “You’d try, Agent Smith,” Pondoro chuckled. “You’d try.”

  Smith nodded amiably. “Count on it, Uncle John.”

  Nadalindov shouted, “This is absolutely infuriating! You’re all nothing but barbarians, shooting this person, shooting that person, as if it were all some kind of video game! Don’t you understand that this is serious? Don’t any of you have even the slightest regard for the future of this country?”

  “Without Alex Hope,” Dana spoke for the first time, addressing the not-quite Vice President Elect in a voice so flat that it sent chills up the spine of everybody in the room, “this country has no future. And you know it.”

  Ernie and the rest of the Austrian Mafia sobered abruptly and muttered their agreement.

  Dana had been sitting on the sofa beside Faith-Anne, holding Alex’s daughter’s hand in both of hers. Now, waving off the gallant help of Mick and Ernie and Rick, she struggled to her feet and got her crutches under her.

  “If you’ll all excuse me,” she said, indicating Nadalindov, ”I’ve had just about as much of this man’s company as I can take, and there are some arrangements that still have to be made.” She turned to touch Faith-Anne’s cheek briefly, nodded fondly at Katie, sitting at Faith-Anne’s other side, then at John and everyone else in the room she considered friends. Then, pushing past Nadalindov and his small entourage, she stormed out of the suite.

  “Besides,” Nadalindov wasn’t about to give up the floor. He’d started speaking before Dana slammed the door behind her. “You don’t have the time or energy to spare, Miss Hope, for a foolish and futile attempt to keep your father’s idealistic dreams alive. I’d think your hands would be full enough, with the criminal charges that are being pressed against you.”

  When the police had finally arrived, 20 minutes after her father’s shooting, it had appeared their first and only priority was to arrest Alex’s daughter for carrying a concealed weapon and discharging it within the city limits. Until this moment they’d been shoved aside by the Secret Service as far as next-presidential security was concerned, limited to manning street barriers. They resented it, and now they meant to make up for it.

  At the same time, the Portland city government was as famous as that of Denver for its lack of tolerance where individual rights were concerned. It had required a battery of Hope Corporation attorneys, and the full weight of the United States Secret Service, to keep Faith-Anne from being taken to jail then and there.

  By telephone, a judge had been persuaded to “release” her on her own recognizances, pending her arraignment shortly after the first of the year.

  Under pressure, the police had surrendered her little revolver to Agent Smith, who had handed it, then and there, in front of their noses, back to Faith-Anne. She would always treasure the expressions on the officers’ faces as she reloaded it and tucked it back into her handbag. A little later, John had told her that if the police had seized her weapon, he’d have given her his backup—a short, stubby miniaturized Glock .45—to defend herself with. This morning, Agent Smith had informed her, a bit shyly, that he’d have gladly taken “credit” for shooting Sheridan, sparing her the legal difficulties, if only she had been using the same caliber ammunition he did.

  “Mine is .38 Special,” she’d replied. “What’s yours?”

  He’d pulled his jacket back to reveal the webbing of a shoulder harness and the butt of a SIG-Sauer P220 autopistol. “Same as Uncle John’s,” he’d grinned at her, “.45 ACP.”

  Now she stood and took a step toward Nadalindov. “It’s a little early to pronounce my father’s idealistic dreams over with, don’t you think? No matter how much you wish they were? In any case, they’ll never die as long as I’m alive, or anybody else whose life my father touched! Now I suggest that you leave, Mr. Nadalindov, before I do something you’ll regret!”

  “If I leave now, young lady,” he pulled himself up to his full height and puffed out his chest, “without some negotiation in good faith on your part, it will be to file a lawsuit, get an injunction that will allow me to seize control of this campaign organization, and then call a press conference to demand that I be declared President Elect!”

  John sat up suddenly and started to get to his feet. Agent Smith rose with him and for a moment the two stood face to face with their eyes locked.

  “You do that,” Faith-Anne told Nadalindov. She then turned to his attorney. “Have you bothered yet to inform this goof that no legal provision exists to let him do what he wants? Or are you the other goof, who led him to believe there are applicable precedents from the election of 2000?”

  The man took his client’s elbow and steered him toward the door. “We’ll be leaving now, Miss Hope.”

  As the door swung shut behind them, John suddenly reached inside his coat, startling Agent Smith, who almost—but not quite—snatched for his pistol.

  The big man pulled out a cellular telephone which was vibrating visibly. “Tickles,” he told Smith. “Hello,” he told the phone, then waited to hear what it had to say.

  Faith-Anne went back and sat down on the sofa, punching buttons on her own phone as she opened up her laptop computer. She was finished as her father’s campaign manager, but she still had his multibillion dollar corporation to run. For a while, Agent Smith listened as they each attended to their separate chores. Then he decided it was time to attend to his, pulled out his own telephone, and began checking informally with members of his security detail, stationed outside the door, along the corridor, and in various other places in and around the hotel. He preferred to reserve their Secret Service-issue radio frequencies for more formal occasions.

  He’d starting to call the other half of his detail, far across town, when suddenly, John swore aloud. “Say that again!” he shouted into the phone, paused, and then, “Agent Smith, have your men let a lady through their ranks downstairs. They’ll recognize her right away, she’s a professional lady, if you know what I mean. And she’s taking a terrible risk coming to us here, so make sure she gets up here in one piece.”

  “Professional lady?” Faith-Anne mouthed the words silently, with a questioning expression on her face. At the same time, something in John’s demeanor made her terminate her phone conversation, close her laptop, and stand up.

  Agent Smith nodded at John and, taking what comfort he could in the fact that those he was charged with protecting had proven pretty good at protecting themselves, hurried out the door and toward the waiting elevator.

  Still holding his phone to his ear, John approached the sofa to stand beside Faith-Anne. “I’ll stay with our friend on the phone until she walks through that door over there. I’d go fetch her myself, but that would leave you unguarded. You still there?” he asked the phone.

  Apparently he got the answer he wanted.

  “Professional lady?” Faith-Anne repeated her earlier question aloud.

  “Right,” John told her. “She says she was with Ghillie Moure the evening the former First Lady was killed, when he and Abe Horrwyrne interviewed—“

  “Whose story is this, anyway?”

  The door to the hallway slammed open. Striding through it, Agent Smith immediately behind her, came an extremely blond young woman wearing tight designer bluejeans, a red gingham plaid shirt tied in the front so that it exposed her flat, smooth midriff, an elaborate diamond necklace and dangling earrings, six-inch patent leather pumps, and a floor-length blue-gray chinchilla coat.

  She still held a cell phone to one ear.

  Faith-Anne took a step toward her. “Interviewed whom?” she asked.

  “Chip Sheridan, honey.” The blond young woman was chewing gum. “Cute, but it looks now like they were hiring him to kill Mr. Hope. Say, you’re his daughter, aren’t you?” She threw an enormous purse on the floor, ran across the room to Faith-Anne and threw her arms around her. “I voted for your daddy, you poor baby!”

  ***