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“Your answer doesn’t surprise me. There’s a pretty thick emotional barrier between you and the obvious answer.”

“You mean my father?”

“Nope.”

“Then who?”

He looked away, then back. “Sandra Levy.”

The name took Kate’s breath away. “If you’re talking to me to get to her, you’re really barking up the wrong tree.”

“I think you’re the only shot I’ve got.”

“Sandra Levy hasn’t said a word to anyone since the FBI arrested her and took her out of the building in handcuffs. I’veneverspoken to her.”

“At the very least, she owed your mother an apology. Your mother is gone. Now she owes it to you. With a full explanation.”

“An explanationof what?”

He was clearly struggling, and it was Kate’s sense that he wished he could say more. But she was no mind reader.

“Kate, if this conversation is going to continue, I need a firm commitment from you up front.”

“What kind of commitment?”

“That you will speak to Sandra Levy. I can’t lay my cards on the table only to have you say you’ll think about it or you need to check with your father. I have to know now: Are you in or out?”

Kate drew a deep breath. “I can’t believe you’re going to make me visit that woman in prison.”

“Is that a yes?”

Those two crazy squirrels were back on the jogging path, their chase resuming but the roles reversed, the pursuer having become the pursued.

“Noah, I’m saying yes because you’ve led me to believe that Patrick is in serious danger and this will help him. If it turns out you’re playing me—if you’re stringing me along just to get something the U.S. attorney needs from Sandra Levy—I will never speak to you again. Do we understand each other?”

Their eyes locked, and Kate was determined not to be the first to blink. Finally, Noah nodded. He started walking slowly down the path. Kate went with him.

For the next ten minutes, Noah did all the talking. Kate just listened.

Chapter 28

At noon Christian Gamble and his bodyguard climbed out of the limousine near Ford’s Theatre. Across the street was Lincoln’s Waffle Shop, not far from Abe’s Café and Gifts, which was around the block from Petersen House, where the sixteenth president expired from his gunshot wound. A busload of tourists, oblivious to the irony, were eagerly picking over the colorful “I ♥ DC” T-shirts on sale—“Two-4-One”—on the sidewalk racks outside the historic house. To the west, in Abe’s day, would have been a clear view down a muddy trail all the way to the White House grounds. Gamble walked east, toward the FBI headquarters, which he hadn’t visited since the Sandra Levy investigation. Right around the corner, he entered the restaurant he’d chosen for his lunch meeting with Irving Bass.

“Have a seat at the bar,” he told his bodyguard, and the maître d’ led Gamble to the only open table, where the director was waiting for him.

Gamble had patronized fine restaurants all over the world, but Succotash on F Street was the only place to get soulful Southern dishes reinvented by a Korean American chef. His first visit had been with Kate, years earlier, when he’d taken her to seeA Raisin in the Sunat Ford’s Theatre. She couldn’t stop talking about the play, and while he would have sooner seen her as president of the United States than a playwright, there he was, having lunch with her director.

“Another bourbon on the rocks,” said Bass the moment Gamble was seated.

The maître d’ took his empty glass. “I’ll let your waiter know.”

The alcohol confused Gamble. “Kate said you were in rehab. You’re drinking again?”

“Oh, I don’t drink. I just want to smell it.”

“Yeah? How did that last one smell?”

Bass smiled in a way that said, “Touché.”

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