“I should get going,” said Donny.

“Sounds good,” said Slider. “We need to get going too.”

“Where are you headed?” asked Donny.

“New Orleans,” he said. “Back to work for me.”

Donny looked at Heather. She didn’t need to work. But you could see which side she was on.

8

Inspectors Blonk and Abboud left Donny alone with these and other thoughts. What he needed to do was start digging through those boxes of research for other plaintiffs who could replace Slider as the anchor of his lawsuit. But instead he found himself replaying the untrustworthy reels of his own memory, wondering what story lines he had missed in his self-absorption.

The idea that Slider had been on a team to kidnap Heather, even if they called it an arrest, was hard to believe. They had tried to downplay it that day when Heather walked in on Donny talking to Slider. But he saw how Slider looked at her. And even if they weren’t hooking up, or weren’t anymore, the suggestion that they or their leaders treated Heather as an enemy of the people seemed a stretch when you could see where her sympathies lay. Then again, loyalties were mercurial in those days, especially among the radical factions. You never knew what you might do or say that would have your face erased from the class photo. Donny knew. They had erased him from the roster of friends of the revolution, for doing what he thought the same principles that had first compelled him to help those people out required.

Was it really possible that, rather than saving the President from execution, he had sealed his fate by revealing his whereabouts to Slider? The official story, supported by separate reports from both the Secret Service and the Justice Department inspector general, was that the President had been murdered by his own former loyalists—security personnel inside DOJ and the Bureau of Prisons acting on orders from others within what remained of the President’s party, to keep him from incriminating them for helping him suppress the opposition and enrich themselves through illegal and often murderous means. It made sense. But so did the idea that the President’s former victims would want the punishment Donny and his colleagues had persuaded the court to withhold.

Free of his Interpol guests, Donny logged back in to the research web to see if he could find better answers. Maybe they had been hiding in plain sight all along.