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at her when it came to national party politics.
    Darden glanced out the window to the patio where the gentlemen of the press milled around smoking cigarettes. Smoking cigarettes and salivating, he thought uncharitably. There were two women in the bunch: a skinny bleach-blonde from Austin, and Gerry Schneider. Gerry was an old warhorse in her late fifties. She’d covered the last year of the Vietnam War from Saigon, one of the few women they let get close to the front lines. He’d met her in D.C. when Hinckley had taken a potshot at Ronald Reagan. Darden liked Gerry. She was tough. With a woman like her a man wouldn’t have to check every darn thing that went bump in the night. From what Darden had heard, a while back, she’d gotten out of the fast track and moved back to Houston to get a job at the Herald .
    Gordon and Kevin arrived looking as stiff and out of place in their suits as Darden did. Parks were rumpled, quick-dry, bandanna sorts of places. Darden’s agents had made a case for going native, but Darden hadn’t bought it. A man in a suit was like a cop on a horse; he got respect whether he deserved it or not.
    Force of habit made him look at his watch, but they were on time. He’d had a lot of good men working for him during the years he’d been on Judith’s staff. Maybe because the marshal service inducted a bunch to put on airlines and the job was so boring they quit as fast as they could hire new ones. A lot of men and women trained to handle weapons were wandering around with shiny new guns and nobody to shoot.
    Gordon was good but Darden had hired him because he looked like an agent: big with a square head, square shoulders and short neck. Judith looked great with Gordon hulking behind her, the brawn behind the brains. Kevin was a different kind of hire altogether and one Darden had never been comfortable with, though he’d worked with good men acquired this way. Kevin had been the client’s choice—Judith knew the guy from somewhere and she’d wanted him on the team. He was twenty-seven and looked like a younger, beefier, studlier, more dangerous version of Judith’s husband. That might have been why she’d wanted him. The two could be thick as thieves when the spirit moved them.
    Darden wouldn’t have been surprised if Judith was having an affair with the kid. If she was, it was discreet. He’d never seen anything to suggest it. It wouldn’t have mattered to him one way or another. Power did that to some people. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe power didn’t give them greater appetites for sex, maybe greater appetites in general gave them a hunger for power. Kevin wasn’t going to be around long enough for anything to get out of hand. He hungered for the big show, the cloak-and-dagger, like agents had in the movies. Darden had news for him: agents only had what they had in the movies in the movies.
    He’d chosen both Gordon and Kevin for this detail because they did what they were told without questions. “Get something to eat,” he told them. “That or wait till the festivities are over. I’m going to clean up a little. I’ll be back here at nineteen-forty-five. Either of you seen Charles?”
    “No, sir,” Gordon said.
    “I haven’t seen him,” said Kevin, his eyes following a waitress. Annoyance tweaked Darden till he realized Kevin wasn’t gazing lasciviously at her bottom but at the pot of freshly brewed coffee she was carrying.
    “Call me when he shows,” Darden said. Then: “Doggone it. The nearest cell tower is behind a pile of rock and lizards two hundred miles from here. Remind me to get satellite phones in the budget when we get back to civilization.” Rustic charm and, probably, profit margins dictated that the rooms in the Chisos Lodge have no phones, televisions or radios. “Gordon, you come and get me. Got it?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Charles Pierson was Judith’s second husband. Darden had never liked the guy, not even when he was doing a better job of