She turned her cards over and let Jeffrey collect them. "The Manchurian Candidate is going to be on."
Tony sighed. "Politics, mind-control, and assassination. Not the kind of thing kids should be watching. I'll talk to Shelly and... "
"Don't do that Uncle Tony," Tina pleaded. She looked over at Spector. "Mister, don't let him do it. Mommy promised."
Spector shrugged. "Don't want to have to get rough with you, old friend."
Tony threw up his hands. "Democracy at work," he said, walking back toward the living room.
"Yay," said Tina.
"My queen kills your last ace." Jeffrey fanned the cards with his toes. " I win."
"Congratulations, kids," Spector said. "Sometimes that's what it takes. Just remember that."
After the crash, after he'd landed right in the middle of the piano and then driven through the floor to the function space on the lower level, the thing that surprised jack was that he started to float upward again through the hole he'd just made.
Hiram had made him lighter than air. Crap.
Before he could float out into space again, jack grabbed some of the twisted rebar that had been supporting the atrium floor. He hung upside down. Flashbulbs dazzled him. A TV floodlight drilled between his eyes. The pianist was lurching about like a drunk. From out of the burning light he could see Hiram peering at him out of his doughy face.
"There's an assassin loose!" he yelled. "Little guy in a leather jacket! He's a wild card!"
"Where?" Hiram goggled at him. "The senator's floor!"
Hiram turned dead-white. He spun and ran, arms and legs pumping. The crowd dissolved into pandemonium. "Hiram!" Jack yelled. "Worchester, goddamn it!"
He was still lighter-than-air. And he was the only one who knew what the assassin looked like, and how to stop him. The pianist danced before him in his white tuxedo. He pointed at Jack. "He tried to kill me! He threatened me earlier!"
"Shut the hell up," said jack.
The pianist turned white as his tux and faded away. Hiram's shot of antigravity diminished in a few minutes, and jack tried to run for an elevator. He was still very light and he bobbled like an astronaut on the moon. He kept jumping across the atrium without going near the elevators. Security people were in the process of barring all the doors, which wasn't going to do very much to stop someone who could walk through walls. Some stranger finally led jack to the elevator by the hand.
As jack shot upward, he tried not to think of the skinny hunchback sitting up on top, slicing the cables with buzz saw hands. The security was concentrating on the hallway leading to Hartmann's apartment and HQ. Billy Ray was prominent in his white suit, flexing his muscles in front of a battery of gray-suited Secret Service. Some of them were carrying their Uzis in plain sight.
Shaking pulverized concrete dust out of his ruined clothes, Jack walked up to Ray and gave him a description of the assassin, including the fact he could make himself insubstantial. Ray took his job seriously for once and didn't give Jack a single sneer. He passed on the information with his radio and asked Jack to step into another room for a debriefing. Jack asked if he could change first-his clothes were ribbons. Ray nodded.
Jack headed back to his room. As he stepped through the open door, he realized that he hadn't bothered to tell anyone that this was where the fight had taken place.
He headed for his bedroom and his foot hit something lying on the carpet. He looked down and saw part of Sara's shoulder bag. He bent down and shook it open. One-third of a laptop computer slid out, along with scraps of paper that fluttered to the floor.
Jack reached down and picked up the papers. There were several sheets stapled together and cut neatly off near the top, a press handout giving Leo Barnett's appearances for the days leading up to the campaign.
Another was the top of a yellow legal sheet written in scrawled blue ballpoint. "Secret Ace," it said, underlined several times.
Below were just doodles, a row of crosses, a tombstone. The next sheet was a photocopy on old-fashioned slick photocopy paper. It was obviously some official document.
DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, it said. DOD#864-558-2048(b)
BLOOD SERUM TEST XENOVIRUS TAKIS-A
The rest was sliced off.
Jack stared at it for a long moment.
The secret ace, he thought, might not be secret much longer.
10:00 P.M.
Spector was relieved when it was time to leave. Everyone said their goodbyes, except Armand, who didn't look