First Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

the mother of all coincidences.”
    “Okay, but what can we do? The police and the FBI are involved. I don’t see much room for us to operate.”
    “Never stopped you before,” she said stubbornly.
    “This is different.”
    “Why’s that?”
    He didn’t say anything.
    “Sean?”
    “I heard you!”
    “So what’s different?”
    “What’s different are the people involved.”
    “Who? The Duttons?”
    “No. The First Lady.”
    “Why? What does she matter?”
    “She matters, Michelle. She just matters.”
    “You sound like you know her.”
    “I do.”
    “How?”
    He started walking off.
    “What about Triple A?” she called after him.
    Michelle didn’t get an answer.

5
    S AM Q UARRY loved his home, or what was left of it. The Atlee Plantation had been in his family for nearly two hundred years. The property’s footprint had once extended for miles with hundreds of slaves working it. It now had been reduced to two hundred acres with migrant laborers from Mexico doing the bulk of the harvesting. The plantation house itself had seen better days, but it was still sprawling, it was still livable, if one didn’t mind the leaky roof, the drafty walls, or the occasional mouse scurrying across the brittle wooden floors. These were surfaces that had encountered the booted steps of Confederate generals and even Jefferson Davis himself on a brief stopover during the losing effort. Quarry knew the history well, but had never reveled in it. You didn’t pick your family
or
your family history.
    He was now sixty-two years old with a cap of thick snowy hair that seemed even whiter because of his sun-beaten skin. Long-boned and strongly built with a big, commanding voice, he was an outdoorsman both by choice and necessity. He made his living off the land but also enjoyed the rustic trappings of the hunter, fisherman, and amateur horticulturist. It was just who he was; a man of the earth, he liked to say.
    He sat behind his cluttered and scarred desk in the library. It was at this same desk that generations of Quarry men had perched their behinds and made important decisions that affected the lives of others. Unlike some of his ancestors who’d been a bit freewheeling in their oversight, Sam Quarry undertook this responsibility seriously. He ran a tight ship as much to provide for himself as for thepeople he still employed here. Yet in truth, it was more than that. Atlee was really all he had left now.
    He stretched out his six-foot-four-inch frame and settled wide, callused, and sun-reddened hands over his flat stomach. Gazing around at the bad portraits and grainy black-and-white photos of his male ancestors hanging along the wall, Quarry took stock of his situation. He was a man who always allowed the time to think things through. Almost nobody did that anymore, from the president of the United States to Wall Street barons to the man or woman on the street. Speed. Everybody wanted it yesterday. And because of that impatience the answer they got usually turned out to be wrong.
    Thirty minutes went by and he didn’t move. However, his brain was far more active than his body.
    He finally hunched forward, slid gloves on, and under the watchful eye of the portrait of his grandfather and namesake Samuel W. Quarry, who’d helped lead the opposition to civil rights in Alabama, he started tapping the faded keys on his old IBM Selectric. He knew how to use a computer but had never owned one, though he did have a cell phone. People could steal things right off your computer, he knew, even while they were sitting in another country. When he wanted to use a computer he traveled to the local library. To get his thoughts from his Selectric, though, they would have to invade his domain at Atlee and he seriously doubted they would walk out alive.
    He finished his two-fingered pecking and pulled out the paper. He read over its brief contents once more and then placed it inside an envelope, sealing it not with his saliva but with a bit