No Safe Place Read Free

the United States …”
    Frank Wells turned to Kerry. “Congratulations, Kerry.”
    Kerry shook his head. “Seven days yet,” he murmured, and turned back to the television.
    “It’s been a remarkable insurgent candidacy,” the news-woman was saying. “A few short weeks ago, the conventional wisdom was that Kerry Kilcannon could not overtake a sitting Vice President. But Kilcannon has managed to persuade more and more voters to hold Dick Mason responsible for the President’s recent misfortunes—a near recession; the collapse of welfare reform; a thousand-point drop in the Dow; recurring allegations of adulterous affairs, one involving the President’s principal economic adviser and the breakup of her marriage; and a series of revelations arising from apparently illegal contributions made to the Democratic Party within the last year, which have underscored Kilcannon’s attack on the current system of campaign finance.
    “Dick Mason has been Vice President for eight years, Kil-cannon hammers home in speech after speech, and in that time their party has ‘lost its majority, then its identity, and finally its soul …’”
    “So we should lose the White House too?” Kit murmured.
    On the television, Kerry heard a new voice, the anchorman’s. “What can we expect in California, Kate?”
    “Seven more days with no holds barred,” the newswoman answered. “So far, Kerry Kilcannon hasn’t missed a single opportunity. You’ll remember just last week, when it was revealed that Dick Mason worked behind the scenes to amend last year’s budget bill to protect tobacco growers from his home state of Connecticut. Within hours Senator Kilcannon countered with a proposal for a new tobacco tax for programs to ‘help our children read instead of die.’”
    Frank Wells laughed aloud. “I still wish
I’d
thought of that,” he said—the new member of the team, flattering the candidate.
    Feeling Frank’s need, Kerry smiled a little. “I hope it was succinct enough.”
    “The base which Kerry Kilcannon has assembled,” the reporter went on, “has elements of the party’s old coalition—particularly minorities—as well as a clear majority among women attracted by his proposals on education, day care, job training, and crime …”
    No, Clayton thought to himself. It was far more than that.
    Standing to Kerry’s right, he watched him in the dim light of the television. After their fifteen years of friendship, Kerry’s profile was as familiar to Clayton as the profiles of his wife and his daughters, as the painful memory of the younger son Clayton and Carlie had lost. Kerry’s thin Irish face, at once boyish and angular, reminded Clayton of the young lawyer he had first met, scarcely more than an impulsive kid. The wavy ginger hair was also much the same and, as always, Kerry’s blue-green eyes reflected the quicksilver surfaces of his moods—sometimes cold, at other times remote and almost absent, at still others deeply empathic or crinkled in amusement or outright laughter. But the man who had emerged from the cross-country gauntlet of primaries was changing as Clayton watched.
    Kerry’s hypercompetitiveness was the least surprising: his astonishing ability to get up every morning in a strange town; to give the same speech six or seven times, making it seem fresh, until falling into bed again; to give dozens of important local politicians private time in his limousine; to fight the fatigue of mind and body and spirit that running for President imposed; to set aside all doubt that he could beat Dick Mason. Clayton had seen elements of this molten single-mindedness—sometimes ruthless and close to angry—since Kerry had prosecuted his first big case. To Clayton, it was still the least attractive, most troubling, and now perhaps most necessary aspect of his friend’s persona.
    No, the key was that Kerry could touch people in ways Clayton had never seen—not from anyone else or even, before this, from Kerry