Balance of Power
Richard North Patterson
Balance
of
Power
ALSO BY RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON
Protect and Defend
Dark Lady
No Safe Place
Silent Witness
The Final Judgment
Eyes of a Child
Degree of Guilt
Private Screening
Escape the Night
The Outside Man
The Lasko Tangent
Balance
of
Power
Richard North Patterson
B a l l a n t i n e B o o k s • N e w y o r k
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2003 by Richard North Patterson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
Balance of Power is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents are a product of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patterson, Richard North. Balance of power / Richard North Patterson.—1st ed.
p. cm. eISBN 0-345-46988-7
1. Firearms—Law and legislation—Fiction. 2. Firearms industry and trade—Fiction. 3. Presidents' spouses—Fiction. 4. Washington (D.C.)— Fiction. 5. Gun control—Fiction. 6. Presidents—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.A8242B35 2003 813'.54—dc21
2003051848
Design by C. Linda Dingler
v1.0
For Philip Rotner
A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
—THE SECOND AMENDMENT TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION
C H A R A C T E R S
The White House
Kerry Francis Kilcannon, President of the United States
Lara Costello Kilcannon, First Lady of the United States
Ellen Penn, Vice President of the United States
Clayton Slade, Chief of Staff to the President
Kit Pace, Press Secretary to the President
Liz Curry, Director of Legislative Affairs
Alex Cole, Congressional Liaison
Jack Sanders, Chief Domestic Policy Advisor
Connie Coulter, Press Secretary to the First Lady
Francesca Thibault, White House Social Secretary
The First Lady's Family
Inez Costello, Lara's mother
Joan Costello Bowden, Lara's younger sister
John Bowden, Lara's brother-in-law
Marie Bowden, Lara's niece
Mary Costello, Lara's youngest sister
The United States Senate
Senator Francis Xavier Fasano of Pennsylvania, Senate Majority Leader
Senator Charles Hampton of Vermont, Senate Minority Leader
Senator Chad Palmer of Ohio, Chairman of the Commerce Committee
Senator Paul Harshman of Idaho
Senator Cassie Rollins of Maine
Senator Frank Ayala of New Mexico
Senator Vic Coletti of Connecticut
Senator Macdonald Gage of Kentucky
Senator Dave Ruckles of Oklahoma
Senator Jack Slezak of Michigan
Senator Leo Weller of Montana
Senator Betsy Shapiro of California
Senator Kate Jarman of Vermont
Senator Hank Westerly of Nebraska
The Gun Lobby
Charles Dane, President of the Sons of the Second Amendment ("SSA")
Martin Bresler, former President of the Gun Sports Coalition
Bill Campton, Communications Director for the SSA
Carla Fell, Legislative Director for the SSA
Jerry Kirk, Vice President of the Gun Sports Coalition
Kelsey Landon, former senator from Louisiana and outside legislative strategist for the SSA
The Lexington Arms Company
George Callister, President and CEO
Mike Reiner, Vice President of Marketing
Norman Conn, Manager of Quality Control
Costello versus The Lexington Arms Company, etal.
Sarah Dash, co-counsel for Mary Costello
Robert Lenihan, co-counsel for Mary Costello
John Nolan, counsel for Lexington Arms
Harrison Fancher, counsel for the SSA
Gardner W. Bond, Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California
Avram Gold, outside counsel to President Kilcannon
Evan Pritchard, counsel for Martin Bresler
Angelo Rotelli, Judge of the Superior Court for the City and County of San Francisco
Other Victims and Their Families
Laura Blanchard, a sophomore at Stanford University
Henry Serrano, a security guard
Felice Serrano, his widow
George Serrano, his son
David Walsh, a security guard
The Witnesses in Costello versus The Lexington Arms Company, etal.
Dr. Callie Hines, trauma surgeon, San Francisco General Hospital
Charles Monk, homicide inspector, San Francisco Police
Ben Gehringer, felon, member of The Liberty Force, a white supremacist group
George Johnson, felon, member of The Liberty Force
Dr. Frederick Glass, expert witness for Lexington Arms
Dr. Larry Walters, expert witness for Mary Costello
Dr. David Roper, expert witness for Mary Costello
The Media
Cathie Civitch of NBC, interviewer
Taylor Yarborough of ABC, interviewer
Carole Tisone, San Francisco Chronicle reporter
The Lobbyists
Tony Calvo of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Mary Bryant of the National Association of Manufacturers
John Metrillo of the National Federation of Independent Businesses
The President's Family
Michael Kilcannon, Kerry's father
Mary Kilcannon, Kerry's mother
James J. Kilcannon, Kerry's brother and predecessor as Senator from New Jersey, assassinated while seeking the Democratic Presidential nomination
Others
Elise Hampton, wife of Senator Chuck Hampton
Allie Palmer, wife of Senator Chad Palmer
John Halloran, District Attorney for the City and County of San Francisco
Marcia Harding, Chief of Halloran's Domestic Violence Unit
Caroline Masters, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Anna Chen, Lara's bridesmaid
Nakesha Hunt, Lara's bridesmaid
Linda Mendez, Lara's bridesmaid
The Reverend Bob Christy, Head of the Christian Commitment
Warren Colby, former United States Senator from Maine and predecessor to Senator Cassie Rollins
Leslie Shoop, Chief of Staff to Senator Rollins
Lance Jarrett, President and CEO of Silicon Valley's largest chip maker
Rep. Thomas Jencks, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives
The Prime Minister of England
The Prime Minister of Israel
The President of the Palestine Liberation Organization
Mahmoud Al Anwar, terrorist and leader of Al Qaeda
PART ONE
THE
WEDDING
JULY 4–LABOR DAY WEEKEND
ONE
Feeling the gun against the nape of her neck, Joan Bowden froze.
Her consciousness narrowed to the weapon she could not see: her vision barely registered the cramped living room, the images on her television—the President and his fiancée, opening the Fourth of July gala beneath the towering obelisk of the Washington Monument. She could feel John's rage through the cold metal on her skin, smell the liquor on his breath.
"Why?" she whispered.
"You wanted him."
He spoke in a dull, emphatic monotone. Who? she wanted to ask. But she was too afraid; with a panic akin to madness, she mentally scanned the faces from the company cookout they had attended hours before. Perhaps Gary—they had talked for a time.
Desperate, she answered, "I don't want anyone."
She felt his hand twitch. "You don't want me. You have contempt for me."
Abruptly, his tone had changed to a higher pitch, paranoid and accusatory, the prelude to the near hysteria which issued from some unfathomable recess of his brain. Two nights before, she had awakened, drenched with sweat, from the nightmare of her own death.
Who would care for Marie?
Moments before, their daughter had sat at the kitchen table, a portrait of dark-haired intensity as she whispered to the doll for whom she daily set a place. Afraid to move, Joan strained to see the kitchen from the corner of her eye. John's remaining discipline was to wait until Marie had vanished; lately their daughter seemed to have developed a preternatural sense of impending violence which warned her to take flight. A silent minuet of abuse, binding daughter to father.
Marie and her doll were gone.
"Please," Joan begged.
The cords of her neck throbbed with tension. The next moment
could be fateful: she had learned that protest enraged him, passivity insulted him.
Slowly, the barrel traced a line to the base of her neck, then pulled away.
Joan's head bowed. Her body shivered with a spasm of escaping breath.
She heard him move from behind the chair, felt him staring down at her. Fearful not to look at him, she forced herself to meet his gaze.
With an open palm, he slapped her.
Her head snapped back, skull ringing. She felt blood trickling from her lower lip.
John placed the gun to her mouth.
Her husband. The joyful face from her wedding album, now darkeyed and implacable, the 49ers T-shirt betraying the paunch on his toothin frame.
Smiling grimly, John Bowden pulled the trigger.
Recoiling, Joan cried out at the hollow metallic click. The sounds seemed to work a chemical change in him—a psychic wound which widened his eyes. His mouth opened, as if to speak; then he turned, staggering, and reeled toward their bedroom.
Slumping forward, Joan covered her face.
Soon he would pass out. She would be safe then; in the morning, before he left, she would endure his silence, the aftershock of his brutality and shame.
At least Marie knew only the silence.
Queasy, Joan stumbled to the bathroom in the darkened hallway, a painful throbbing in her jaw. She stared in the mirror at her drawn face, not quite believing the woman she had become. Blood trickled from her swollen lip.
She dabbed with tissue until it stopped. For another moment Joan stared at herself. Then, quietly, she walked to her daughter's bedroom.
Marie's door was closed. With painstaking care, her mother turned the knob, opening a crack to peer through.
Cross-legged, Marie bent over the china doll which once had been her grandmother's. Joan felt a spurt of relief; the child had not seen them, did not see her now. Watching, Joan was seized by a desperate love.
With slow deliberation, Marie raised her hand and slapped the vacant china face.
Gently, the child cradled the doll in her arms. "I won't do that again," she promised. "As long as you're good."
Tears welling, Joan backed away. She went to the kitchen sink and vomited.
She stayed there for minutes, hands braced against the sink. At last she turned on the faucet. Watching her sickness swirl down the drain, Joan faced what she must do.
Glancing over her shoulder, she searched for the slip of paper with his telephone number, hidden in her leather-bound book of recipes. Call me, he had urged. No matter the hour.
She must not wake her husband.
Lifting the kitchen telephone from its cradle, Joan crept back to the living room, praying for courage. On the television, a graceful arc of fireworks rose above the obelisk.
TWO
President Kerry Francis Kilcannon and his fiancée, Lara Costello, watched as a red flare rose above the Mall, bursting into a galaxy of falling stars which framed the Washington Monument.
For this rarity, an evening alone, they had left the annual party for staffers and retreated to the porch on the second floor of the White House. Spread across their table was a white linen cloth, a picnic of cheese and fruit, and a bottle of light chardonnay which cooled in a silver cylinder, a gift from the President of France. Lara took Kerry's hand.
"When I was six," she told him, "our father took us to the fireworks at Crissy Field. I remember holding his hand, watching all those explosions above the Golden Gate Bridge. That's my last memory of being with him."
Turning from the fireworks, Kerry studied the sculpted face—intense dark eyes, high cheekbones, pale skin framed by jet-black hair—which, to her bemusement, had helped Lara rise from a semianonymous political reporter for the New York Times to celebrity as a television journalist. Like many women, Kerry supposed, her self-concept had been fixed in adolescence: then she had not thought of herself as beautiful—though she surely was—but as the perfect student, the dutiful oldest daughter who must help her mother and sisters. It was the dutiful daughter who had achieved success, driven to make Inez Costello proud, to free her younger sisters from the struggle caused by their father's desertion. Even at thirty-two, Kerry knew, her family still defined her.
"What I was hoping you'd remember," he said, "is the scene from To Catch a Thief. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Monaco, watching fireworks from her hotel room."
Lara faced him with an amused, appraising look. "I remember that they lay down on the couch, and then the camera panned away. The fireworks were a metaphor."
"Uh-huh. Very 1950s."
Leaning forward, Lara kissed him, a lingering touch of the lips, then rested her cheek against his shoulder. "This is the twenty-first century," she told him. "No metaphors required."
• • •
Afterward, they lay in his canopied bed listening to the last, faint whistling of fireworks. One table lamp still glowed—making love, and after, both needed to see the other's face.
Smiling, she lightly mussed his hair. "You're not too bad," she told him. "At least as Presidents go."
As she intended, this elicited the boyish grin which lit his face and crinkled the corners of his eyes. There had been too little lightness in Kerry's life. Even his first success in politics, election to the Senate at age thirty, had been as surrogate for his brother, Senator James Kilcannon, assassinated in San Francisco while running for President. Lara had been nineteen then; she remembered watching the telecast of James's funeral, the haunted look on Kerry's face as he attended to his widowed mother. So that when, as a reporter for the New York Times, she had met him seven years later, the first thing she noticed was not his fine-featured face, incongruously youthful for a potential President, nor his thatch of chestnut hair, nor even the scar at the corner of one eye. It was the startling contradiction presented by the eyes themselves: their green-flecked blue irises, larger than most, gave Lara the sense—rare in a white male politician—of someone who had seen more sadness than most. Then, she had thought this an illusion, abetted by her memory of the fu
neral; only later, when Kerry shared the private history he had entrusted to almost no one, did she understand how true it was.