Absolute Power by David Baldacci

couldn’t.
    Russell watched his face carefully. Burton looked back at her. His eyes twitched perceptibly; they would not meet hers now. She had won. She smiled benignly and nodded. The show was hers to run.
    “Go make some coffee, a whole pot,” she ordered Burton, momentarily relishing this switching of roles. “And then stay by the front door just in case we get any late-night visitors.
    “Collin, go to the van, and talk to Johnson and Varney. Don’t tell them anything about this. For now just tell them there was an accident, but that the President’s okay. That’s all. And that they’re to stay put. Understood? I’ll call when I want you. I need to think this out.”
    Burton and Collin nodded and headed out. Neither had been trained to ignore orders so authoritatively given. And Burton didn’t want to be calling the shots on this one. They couldn’t pay him enough to do that.
    *   *   *
    L UTHER HADN’T MOVED SINCE THE SHOTS HAD BLOWN APART the woman’s head. He was afraid to. His feelings of shock had finally passed, but he found his eyes continually wandering to the floor and to what had once been a living, breathing human being. In all his years as a criminal he had only seen one other person killed. A thrice-convicted pedophile whose spinal cord had collided with a four-inch shiv wielded by an unsympathetic fellow inmate. The emotions sweeping over him now were totally different, as though he were the sole passenger on a ship that had sailed into a foreign harbor. Nothing looked or seemed familiar at all. Any sound now would do him no good, but he slowly sat back down before his trembling legs gave way.
    He watched as Russell moved around the room, stooped next to the dead woman, but did not touch her. Next she picked up the letter opener, holding it by the end of the blade with a handkerchief she pulled from her pocket. She stared long and hard at the object that had almost ended her boss’s life and had played a major role in ending someone else’s. She carefully put the letter opener in her leather purse, which she had placed on the nightstand, and put the handkerchief back in her pocket. She glanced briefly at the contorted flesh that had recently been Christine Sullivan.
    She had to admire the way Richmond accomplished his extracurricular activities. All his “companions” were women of wealth and social position, and all were married. This ensured that no exposé of his adulterous behavior would appear in any of the tabloids. The women he bedded had as much to lose if not more as he, and they understood that fact very well.
    And the press. Russell smiled. In this day and age the President lived under a never-ending barrage of scrutiny. He couldn’t pee, smoke a cigar or belch without the public knowing all of the most intimate details. Or so the public thought. And that was based largely on the overestimation of the press and their abilities to nudge out every morsel of a story from its hiding place. What they failed to understand was that while the office of the President might have lost some of its enormous power over the years as the problems of a troubled globe soared beyond the ability of any one person to confront them on an equal basis, the President was surrounded by absolutely loyal and supremely capable people. People whose skill level at covert activities were in another league from the polished, cookie-cutter journalists whose idea of trailing down a tough story was asking puffball questions of a congressman who was more than willing to talk for the benefit of the evening news coverage. It was a fact that, if he so desired, President Alan Richmond could move about without fear that anyone would be successful in tracking his whereabouts. He could even disappear from public view for as long as he wished, although that was the antithesis of what a successful politician hoped to accomplish in a day’s work. And that privilege boiled down to one common denominator.
    The Secret