Turned out Denise Greenspan was a good person to know. She took him around to a side entrance that was just for campaign staff. There was a line of about twenty people waiting to be checked through by security. Denise breezed right to the front, which he expected to cause a riot but didn’t raise so much as an eyebrow. This was Lombard’s party now, and everyone knew it.

Denise knew every Secret Service agent by name. “Hey, Charlie, I’m taking this gentleman up to interview Mrs. Lombard. Last-minute thing. He doesn’t have credentials, but I put him on the list last night.”

Charlie scanned a clipboard, nodded, and waved them through the metal detector, where a second agent patted Gibson down, went through his bag, checked his ID, and ran a wand over him. They handed him a temporary credential and wished him a good day.

Denise took him down a hallway to a bank of elevators. There were eight in total. The first six elevators were for general use. The two on the end were cordoned off, and Secret Service had set up yet another checkpoint.

“These two elevators are locked out,” Denise explained. “One goes to the vice president’s staff headquarters. The other elevator goes to Mrs. Lombard’s suite. She will see you there.”

“Out of curiosity, where’s the vice president now?”

“He’s tied up in meetings. He’ll be busy right up until the speech.”

“Yeah, but where?”

“One floor down.”

That didn’t sound nearly far enough away for comfort.

The Secret Service stopped them again, and they went through the whole procedure a second time: pat down, wand, ID check. Gibson held his breath, but his ID came back clean again. Fortune favors the stupid, he thought.

Nah, said the voice, they’re just taking you somewhere quiet, out of sight.

An agent rode up with them and started the elevator with a key. A claustrophobic sweat crawled down Gibson’s back, and when the elevator stopped on a middle floor, he flinched. Heart beating hard.

Calm down. Now.

“Figured Lombard for a penthouse kind of guy,” he said.

“It varies,” Denise said. “Not advisable to be predictable about where you stay in a hotel. Makes you vulnerable to an exterior strike on the building.”

She stopped them in the hallway and made a call to say they had arrived.

“What now?”

“Now we wait.”

“Here? You’re kidding me, right?”

Denise shrugged. “You think it’s easy to clear her entire staff and schedule without raising eyebrows? You wanted private. Private takes time.”

“It’s a hallway.”

“Well, then, try not to make a scene.”