No Safe Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

your partner’s a draftee.” She smiled again. “As long as you’re reelected, Patricia will manage to forgive your wife. She always needs an extra man at dinner.”
    Kerry felt himself relax. There was something inherently kind about her, and honest; perhaps for that reason, Kerry thought, he did not feel the need for self-protection. It was onlyat the end of the dinner that he identified another reason: Jeannie Mason did not feel required—or perhaps was too perceptive—to say anything about his brother.
    As the dinner broke up, he turned to her again. “I’ve really enjoyed this,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
: ‘We’re not in Kansas anymore.’”
    His light comment had an undertone—betraying, Kerry feared, how at sea he often felt. As if sensing that, Jeannie gave his hand a brief sisterly touch. “Welcome to Emerald City,” she said. “And now you have two friends in town. At least whenever we’re here.”
    On the evidence of his wife, Kerry had reflected, Dick Mason must surely be worth knowing …
    Twelve years later, Kerry thought, Jeannie and the kids still made him consider that there might be more to Dick than he had come to believe. And, Kerry had to concede, he felt something else he did not wish to feel: envy of Dick Mason, and not just because his family was an electoral asset—a change from the President’s tattered marriage, a reflection of the ideal most people still seemed to want.
    “Jeannie Mason,” Kerry murmured, “is a truly great woman.”
    Clayton grunted. “Win in California, and you can offer Jeannie Dick’s job.”
    Kerry read this for what it was: a grudging reference to a handicap that Patricia Hartman had first identified and that no campaign manager could fix—Kerry’s lack of children or even an ostensibly adoring wife. But even before their divorce, Meg had considered Kerry’s first run for the Senate a betrayal tantamount to adultery. She would not have come here happily.
    Abruptly, Clayton stood. “Let’s go, young Lochinvar,” he said to Kerry. “It’s showtime.”

THREE
    They took the freight elevator to the ballroom with two agents from Kerry’s Secret Service detail, Joe Morton and Dan Biasi. Kerry chatted with them easily. With all the selfishness, Clayton thought, the tunnel vision that running for President required and with which Kerry was fully equipped, Kerry still saw the people around him. He did not need help to remember their spouses, their children, their hobbies, the things they were proud of, the favors they had done for him.
    Some of Kerry’s secret was that he genuinely liked people—except, Clayton added wryly to himself, when Kerry
didn’t
like them. That, and the fact that Kerry never lied to them, was part of why so many of his colleagues in the Senate had supported him despite the political risks. And it was one of the clues to what kind of President Kerry Kilcannon might become.
    “You still working out?” Kerry asked Joe Morton.
    Joe nodded. “Got to keep up with you, Senator.”
    “Great.” Kerry grinned. “How about San Diego tomorrow, say about five a.m. I’m sure the hotel will open its gym early to accommodate our great crusade.”
    Joe grinned back; he had loved Kerry, Clayton knew, from the day—in a teasing gibe at Joe’s sober garb, bland even for the Service—that Kerry had sent out Kevin Loughery to find Joe a set of love beads and a Nehru jacket so garish that the Partridge family would not have worn it. “If you’re that crazy,” Joe said now to the prospective President of the United States, “I guess I am.”
    “Don’t you need sleep?” Clayton asked Kerry.
    Kerry turned to him, no longer smiling. “There’s a very longlist of things I need, pal. But I’m putting adrenaline ahead of sleep.”
    Clayton caught the look in Kerry’s cool blue-green eyes, the silent reference no one else would have understood. And where would
she
have fit, Clayton wondered, if the