by a gaggle of reporters as soon as they stepped off at the basement floor. Dorn let the yellow phone message fall from his hand, confident that when the crowd moved on, some enterprising reporter would find it. The number would be called and the Illinois congressman would be linked to the phone number of a gay escort service.
It didn’t matter whether the congressman had ever patronized the service. In fact, Dorn assumed he hadn’t. But the note would raise the question. Actual indiscretions might surface and if not, gossip would take over. It would not play well in the congressman’s conservative downstate district.
Personally, Dorn was not specifically opposed to gays. He understood there were a number of them closeted among his colleagues, even on his side of the aisle. But the representative had crossed him one too many times, most recently voting against Dorn’s energy bill which he had previously promised to support. Outing was the price. Of course, his well-honed leak technique ensured that no one would have any way of connecting the assassination to Harry Dorn.
Four hours later Dorn was boarding a Cessna Citation V for a trip back to the district. His phone rang just as he reached the top of the gangway. He couldn’t believe his ears.
“No black people?” he exploded into the phone. “What the hell do you mean there won’t be any black people?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and handed the phone to Clendenin. “Fix it.”
Dorn selected one of the plush leather seats and stretched out. He could afford to. Of the eight seats on this particular plane, only three were occupied this Tuesday night—by himself, by Clendenin, now across the aisle, and further to the rear, by another aide. The curtain between the cabin and the cockpit slid open and the co-pilot emerged. “Drink, sir?”
“Scotch.” Dorn nodded to Clendenin who was still on the phone. “One for him, too.” Dorn looked at Joel Richey, the aide in the back. “Nothing for him.”
His cabin mates couldn’t be more different, Dorn thought. Peering at maps and screens of polling data through horned-rimmed glasses while working his calculator and Blackberry, Dan Clendenin looked like the reigning genius of American political strategists. Snoring, with his hair uncombed, his tie askew and his mouth open, Joel Richey looked like what he was—a deadweight slacker who owed his position to his father’s campaign contributions, an irritating daily reminder that money came with strings and could lead to problems—like a TV commercial with no blacks in the crowd shots.
Strategists. Gurus. Aides. Advisers. He could barely keep track of them all. He’d always had a fair-size office staff, dozens of different people if he thought back over the years, bright-eyed young people who came to Washington looking for glamour and believing that they could make a difference. A few stayed—those like Richey who couldn’t get better jobs anywhere else—but most left much wiser a few years later, turning over so quickly he remembered a few of them only as “the blonde” or “the black guy” or “the sissy” or whatever fit. Add a senatorial campaign, with new hires like Clendenin, a high-powered itinerant political guru who only joined campaigns he thought could win, and other consultants for every conceivable thing from wardrobe to political issues, and the personnel lineup became a parade of faces.
The co-pilot delivered the drinks and disappeared into the cockpit. The plane tore down the runway and lifted into the sky moments later.
Through wispy clouds Dorn picked out the bright spike of the Washington Monument, the pale lunar glow of the Capitol, the Rayburn office building, the White House.
He got a clear view of Dulles and, beyond that, snaking red arteries of tail lights—the cars like corpuscles being pumped out from the city’s heart each evening before being sucked back to its chambers beginning before dawn. A half moon hovered over the right wing, illuminating the folds of the Blue Ridge.
He identified Interstate 66 and Interstate 270. West Virginians could thank two of his colleagues for them—United States senators who understood that the highways would serve as neural pathways connecting their mountainous, nearly impassable state to the outside world. One had grown northwest toward Fairmont, Morgantown and Wheeling (where one of the senators lived) and the other had branched west and south toward Beckley and Charleston and Huntington (where the other senator lived), not coincidentally passing White Sulphur Springs and the Greenbrier resort, home of the government’s Cold War emergency capital. Those highways, Dorn devoutly believed, represented true public service, the kind of service he would deliver when he succeeded one of the senators, who was retiring.
The roads, he had to acknowledge, had come at a price. They had slashed through the mountains and bled the state of people—whole communities which seeped from the hollows and flowed out the hillbilly highways to the factories and cubicles in far-away cities. Over the past few decades, the population of the state had actually declined. But the highways also nourished new development—vacation homes, wood chip mills and ski resorts crucial to further growth. And, it could be argued, the roads brought an infusion of federal spending that spawned many new government jobs for the state. And incumbent congressmen could now drive home from Washington in hours instead of days, facilitating their repeated reelection and, therefore, their seniority on important committees. He was an example.
Dorn was grateful he no longer had to make the drive very often. He was well into in his eighth term in the U.S. House and he had done it plenty of times in the early years. But as easy as the interstates made things, why drive when courtesy of some corporation or lobbying group, he could be at Chuck Yeager Airport in Charleston two hours after leaving his House office building and at his retreat on the river an hour after that?
Or, if traffic was particularly light, Dorn reflected as he sat on his front porch watching the river the next morning, in forty-five minutes.
He called his retreat Possum Island.
The actual Possum Island was a spit of land that broke the surface of the Ohio River about fifty miles south of Winston. Dorn had spent his favorite times there as a boy, poling a log and plywood raft across a shallow channel that separated the island from the West Virginia side, catching crawfish that hid in the detritus that collected on the downstream shore, climbing the tall beech trees that grew in the island’s center, watching the endless procession of river traffic—barges mostly, heaped with symmetrical hills of coal. Much of what he knew about the river came from observing the island—how it could be a mile long and a quarter mile wide with flat muddy banks extending even further into the riverbed in the fall after a dry summer; how it could shrink to the size of a football field in the late spring when the melting snow in the mountains and the ice in the Monongahela and Alleghany tributaries flooded the river basin; how, inevitably, the island grew longer every year—no matter what the season—as the grains of rich topsoil eroded from upstream farms caught and collected on the island’s north end.
He had adopted the Possum Island name for his splendid compound because the location overlooked the island proper and because of what the retreat recalled for him. It was his refuge and his touchstone to real life, life outside the Beltway, a place to think.
It seemed like the perfect place to spend a few days working out the details of his campaign’s first television commercials—commercials that would immediately thrust him into the position of front-runner. Unfortunately, there was an array of problems. Not surprisingly, Richey was in the middle of them.
Conceptually, things were perfect. The plant itself, everyone had agreed, was exactly the right backdrop, a strong visual connection to Dorn’s major campaign theme of economic liberty. That, after all, was where it had all started. As a young representative, Dorn had called in some of the few favors he was owed and arranged passage of a local bill that allowed Recovery Metals to shortcut several onerous and unnecessary environmental regulations and build a facility near Winston. Jobs had been created. The facility and the
