one the victim, and the other an observer, wondering in a distant intellectual
way if she had participated at all.
“I mean, he’s who he is, and I worked for him, and I liked him …” The
voice broke again. The woman swallowed hard and paused a moment before
going on. “I mean, I admire him, all the things he does, all the things he
stands for.” She looked up, and it seemed so odd that her eyes were as dry as
cellophane, reflecting light from a flat surface devoid of tears. “He’s so
charming, and caring, and-”
“It’s okay, Barbara.” As she often did, the psychologist fought the urge
to reach out to her patient, but she knew she had to stay aloof, had to hide her
own rage at what had happened to this bright and capable woman. It had
happened at the hands of a man who used his status and power to draw
women toward him as a light drew moths, ever circling his brilliance, spiral-
ing in closer and closer until they were destroyed by it. The pattern was so
like life in this city. Since then, Barbara had broken off from two men, each
of whom might have been fine partners for what should have been a fine life.
This was an intelligent woman, a graduate of the University of Pennsyl-
vania, with a master’s degree in political science and a doctorate in public
administration. She was not a wide-eyed secretary or summer intern, and
perhaps had been all the more vulnerable because of it, able to become part
of the policy team, knowing that she was good enough, if only she would do
the one more thing to get her over the top or across the line, or whatever the
current euphemism was on the Hill. The problem was, that line could be
crossed only in one direction, and what lay beyond it was not so easily seen
from the other side.
“You know, I would have done it anyway,” Barbara said in a moment of
brutal honesty. “He didn’t have to-”
“Do you feel guilty because of that?” Dr. Clarice Golden asked. Barbara
Linders nodded. Golden stifled a sigh and spoke gently.’ ‘And you think you
gave him the-”
“Signals.” A nod. “That’s what he said, ‘You gave me all the signals.’
Maybe I did.”
“No, you didn’t, Barbara. You have to go on now,” Clarice ordered
gently.
“I just wasn’t in the mood. It’s not that I wouldn’t have done it, another
time, another day, maybe, but I wasn’t feeling well. I came into the office
feeling fine that day, but I was coming down with the flu or something, and
after lunch my stomach was queasy, and I thought about going home early,
but it was the day we were doing the amendment on the civil-rights legisla-
tion that he sponsored, so I took a couple Tylenol for the fever, and about
nine we were the only ones left in the office. Civil rights was my area of
specialty,” Linders explained. “I was sitting on the couch in his office, and
he was walking around like he always does when he’s formulating his ideas,
and he was behind me. I remember his voice got soft and friendly, like, and
he said, ‘You have the nicest hair, Barbara’ out 6f the blue, like, and I said,
‘Thank you.’ He asked how I was feeling, and I told him I was coming down
with something, and he said he’d give me something he used-brandy,” she
said, talking more quickly now, as though she was hoping to get through this
part as rapidly as possible, like a person fast-forwarding a videotape through
the commercials. “I didn’t sec him put anything in the drink. He kept a bot-
llc o! Rdmy in the creden/.a behind his desk, and something else, too, I
ttucss. I drank it right down.
“He just stood there, watching me, not even talking, just watching me,
like he knew it would happen fast. It was like … I don’t know. I knew
Mtinelhing wasn’t right, like you get drunk right away, out of control.” Then
her voice stopped for fifteen seconds or so, and Dr. Golden watched her-
like he had done, she thought. The irony shamed her, but this was business; it
wits clinical, und it was supposed to help, not hurt. Her patient was seeing it
now, You could tell from the eyes, you always could. As though the mind
iciilly were a VCR, the scene paraded before her, and Barbara Linders was
merely giving commentary on what she saw, not truly relating the dreadful
personal experience she herself had undergone. For ten minutes, she de-
*cribcil it, without leaving out a single clinical detail, her trained profes-
sional mind clicking in as it had to do. It was only at the end that her
emotions came back.
“He didn’t have to rape me. He could have . . . asked. I would have … I
mean, another day, the weekend … I knew he was married, but I liked him,
•nil…”
“But he did rape you, Barbara. He drugged you and raped you.” This
lime Dr. Golden reached out and took her hand, because now it was all out in
Ihc open. Barbara Linders had articulated the whole awful story, probably
for the first time since it had happened. In the intervening period she’d
relived bits und pieces, especially the worst part, but this was the first time
»he’d gone through the event in chronological order, from beginning to end,
und the impuct of the telling was every bit as traumatic and cathartic as it had
lobe.
“There has to be more,” Golden said after the sobbing stopped.
‘ ‘There is,” Barbara said immediately, hardly surprised that her psychol-
ogist could tell. “At least one other woman in the office, Lisa Beringer.
She . . . killed herself the next year, drove her car into a bridge support-
thing, looked like an accident, she’d been drinking, but in her desk she left a
note. I cleaned her desk out . . . and I found it.” Then, to Dr. Golden’s
stunned reaction, Barbara Linders reached into her purse and pulled it out.
The “note” was in a blue envelope, six pages of personalized letter paper
covered with the tight, neat handwriting of a woman who had made the deci-
sion to end her life, but who wanted someone to know why.
Clarice Golden, Ph.D., had seen such notes before, and it was a source of
melancholy amazement that people could do such a thing. They always
spoke of pain too great to bear, but depressingly often they showed the de-
npairing mind of someone who could have been saved and cured and sent
back into a successful life if only she’d had the wit to make a single tele-
phone call or speak to a single close friend. It took only two paragraphs for
(ioldcn to see that Lisa Beringer had been just one more needless victim, a
woman who had felt alone, fatally so, in an office full of people who would
have leaped to her aid.
Mental-health professionals are skilled at hiding their emotions, a talent
necessary for obvious reasons. Clarice Golden had been doing this job for
just under thirty years, and to her God-given talent had been added a lifetime
of professional experience. Especially good at helping the victims of sexual
abuse, she displayed compassion, understanding, and support in great quan-
tity and outstanding quality, but while real, it was all a disguise for her true
feelings. She loathed sexual predators as much as any police officer, maybe
even more. A cop saw the victim’s body, saw her bruises and her tears, heard
her cries. The psychologist was there longer, probing into the mind for the
malignant memories, trying to find a way to expunge them. Rape was a
crime against the mind, not the body, and as dreadful as the things were that
the policeman saw, worse still were the hidden injuries whose cure was Cla-
rice Golden’s life’s work. A gentle, caring person who could never have
avenged the crimes physically, she hated these creatures nonetheless.
But this one was a special problem. She maintained a regular working
relationship with the sexual-crime units of every police department in a
fifty-mile radius, but this crime had happened on federal property, and she’d
have to check to see who had jurisdiction. For that she’d talk to her neighbor,
Dan Murray of the FBI. And there was one other complication. The criminal
in question had been a U.S. senator at the time, and indeed he still had an
office in the Capitol Building. But this criminal had changed jobs. No longer
a senator from New England, he was now Vice President of the United
States.
ComSubPac had once been as grand a goal as any man might have, but that
was one more thing of history. The first great commander had been Vice