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of its leaders.
    One of its leaders. The man in front of the cameras, but not necessarily the man pulling the strings. Over the last few months, that had become obvious.
    Lucas gazed out the tinted window of the limousine into the predawn darkness. It was parked in the loading area of a strip mall somewhere in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. He wasn’t exactly sure where, because he hadn’t paid attention during the half-hour ride out here from his apartment in the city. He’d been too distracted.
    The challenge was immense. No one seemed to know where the smoking gun was, whose fingerprints were on it, or what form it took. In fact, they weren’t sure it existed at all. Still, he’d been ordered to make certain nothing came to light. With three months until the election, party leaders were terrified that the president’s bid for a second term would be crippled if something came to light now.
    A thrill coursed through Lucas’s small body as a delivery truck rumbled past. This was his first major assignment and important pairs of eyes were watching. He could make his career in the next ninety days. He’d been waiting so long for this chance.
    Fragile looking, Lucas was thirty-four and single. His passion was chess, which he played constantly against anyone willing to challenge him. Friends, strangers on the outdoor tables at Farragut Square, and anonymous opponents on the Internet. And he almost always won. He never tried to overpower an opponent with an early rush. Instead, he set his defenses during the initial moves, then waged a war of attrition. He was a marathon man of the sixty-four squares. A grinder, who methodically forced his foe into a corner. Then, and only then, did he attack. Crushing the opponent into submission with a final fury.
    Lucas had followed the same kind of long-term strategy in his career. Biding his time until he saw an opening, then acting decisively when the opportunity presented itself. Unlike in chess, this patient strategy hadn’t paid huge dividends in his career—until now.
    His other passion was baseball, though he’d never once put a glove on and had a catch. He’d always been awkward, too uncoordinated to be any kind of athlete. His affection for baseball came from his love of statistics. They were everywhere in baseball. Batting averages, fielding averages, earned run averages. Myriads of categories to comb through every morning on the Web.
    Lucas was self-conscious about his lack of athletic ability. And about his height. He was five eight, but people usually thought he was much shorter. Five five or five six, he often heard. Maybe it was because he was paper thin—he weighed only 140 pounds—or because he was balding. Without hair, he reasoned, he didn’t have that extra half-inch or so of perceived height other men enjoyed.
    It irritated him to no end when his Northwestern University roommates nicknamed him Shorty a month into his freshman year. Because, statistically speaking, he wasn’t short. The average American male was five ten. So he was
slightly
below average, not short. But the nickname had stuck right away, and he’d carried it around like an anchor for four years. Fortunately, he’d been able to keep it out of Washington. But he worried every day that it might be resurrected by some arrogant intern.
    Lucas was worth ten thousand dollars, most of that in a savings account earning a smidgen of interest. But it was safe there, protected by the federal government, and that gave him comfort. His family wasn’t wealthy, and he’d spent his entire career in politics—traditionally a low-paying job. Several of his Northwestern roommates had gone to Wall Street after graduation and made millions. Roommates he knew he was smarter than. Roommates he’d lost touch with over the years because they took vacations that cost more than his life savings. And lived in homes he could only dream about. He’d gone to his five-year reunion, but not his tenth.
    Once