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“The Chair recognizes the member from Illinois.”

One of the country’s best-known congressmen rose on the half-empty floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Nearby, a representative from California scrolled through the Sporting News on an iPad concealed within a copy of Congressional Quarterly. A knot of members huddled near the Speaker’s chair erupted in guffaws at the conclusion of a colleague’s joke. The Illinois representative propped a poster of a half-dozen mug shots on an easel and launched into speech lauding outstanding federal employees, undeterred that no one was listening.

Congressman Harry Dorn yawned. His Illinois colleague really wasn’t that bad a guy. Too bad his political career was about to be cut short, and by scandal at that.

Dorn pushed away from his desk—a real conversation piece since it contained a bullet hole from 1954 when Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the balcony and injured five members—and made his way to his party’s cloakroom, the hallway-like area just off the floor housing easy chairs, a row of dark wood phone booths, portraits of partisan heroes, political cartoons lampooning the opposition and a snack bar, recently outfitted with two flat screen televisions. The two House cloakrooms were the political parties’ clubhouses, havens during official sessions where members like Dorn could suck down a cigarette, take a phone call or engineer a deal away from public view.

Dorn grabbed one of the cloakroom’s official yellow phone message pads. He filled in the Illinois representative’s name. He checked the boxes labeled ‘Returned Your Call’ and ‘Please Call Back’ and wrote down a phone number he had seen in one of DC’s alternative newspapers.

A recess followed the Illinois congressman’s speech. Dorn crowded on to an elevator with his colleagues who were were set upon by a gaggle of reporters as soon as they stepped off at the basement floor. Dorn let the yellow phone message fall from his hand, confident that when the crowd moved on, some enterprising reporter would find it. The number would be called and the Illinois congressman would be linked to the phone number of a gay escort service.

It didn’t matter whether the congressman had ever patronized the service. In fact, Dorn assumed he hadn’t. But the note would raise the question. Actual indiscretions might surface and if not, gossip would take over. It would not play well in the congressman’s conservative downstate district.

Personally, Dorn was not specifically opposed to gays. He understood there were a number of them closeted among his colleagues, even on his side of the aisle. But the representative had crossed him one too many times, most recently voting against Dorn’s energy bill which he had previously promised to support. Outing was the price. Of course, his well-honed leak technique ensured that no one would have any way of connecting the assassination to Harry Dorn.

Four hours later Dorn was boarding a Cessna Citation V for a trip back to the district. His phone rang just as he reached the top of the gangway. He couldn’t believe his ears.

“No black people?” he exploded into the phone. “What the hell do you mean there won’t be any black people?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and handed the phone to Clendenin. “Fix it.”

Dorn selected one of the plush leather seats and stretched out. He could afford to. Of the eight seats on this particular plane, only three were occupied this Tuesday night—by himself, by Clendenin, now across the aisle, and further to the rear, by another aide. The curtain between the cabin and the cockpit slid open and the co-pilot emerged. “Drink, sir?”

“Scotch.” Dorn nodded to Clendenin who was still on the phone. “One for him, too.” Dorn looked at Joel Richey, the aide in the back. “Nothing for him.”

His cabin mates couldn’t be more different, Dorn thought. Peering at maps and screens of polling data through horned-rimmed glasses while working his calculator and Blackberry, Dan Clendenin looked like the reigning genius of American political strategists. Snoring, with his hair uncombed, his tie askew and his mouth open, Joel Richey looked like what he was—a deadweight slacker who owed his position to his father’s campaign contributions, an irritating daily reminder that money came with strings and could lead to problems—like a TV commercial with no blacks in the crowd shots.

Strategists. Gurus. Aides. Advisers. He could barely keep track of them all. He’d always had a fair-size office staff, dozens of different people if he thought back over the years, bright-eyed young people who came to Washington looking for glamour and believing that they could make a difference. A few stayed—those like Richey who couldn’t get better jobs anywhere else—but most left much wiser a few years later, turning over so quickly he remembered a few of them only as “the blonde” or “the black guy” or “the sissy” or whatever fit. Add a senatorial campaign, with new hires like Clendenin, a high-powered itinerant political guru who only joined campaigns he thought could win, and other consultants for every conceivable thing from wardrobe to political issues, and the personnel lineup became a parade of faces.

The co-pilot delivered the drinks and disappeared into the cockpit. The plane tore down the runway and lifted into the sky moments later.

Through wispy clouds Dorn picked out the bright spike of the Washington Monument, the pale lunar glow of the Capitol, the Rayburn office building, the White House.

He got a clear view of Dulles and, beyond that, snaking red arteries of tail lights—the cars like corpuscles being pumped out from the city’s heart each evening before being sucked back to its chambers beginning before dawn. A half moon hovered over the right wing, illuminating the folds of the Blue Ridge.

He identified Interstate 66 and Interstate 270. West Virginians could thank two of his colleagues for them—United States senators who understood that the highways would serve as neural pathways connecting their mountainous, nearly impassable state to the outside world. One had grown northwest toward Fairmont, Morgantown and Wheeling (where one of the senators lived) and the other had branched west and south toward Beckley and Charleston and Huntington (where the other senator lived), not coincidentally passing White Sulphur Springs and the Greenbrier resort, home of the government’s Cold War emergency capital. Those highways, Dorn devoutly believed, represented true public service, the kind of service he would deliver when he succeeded one of the senators, who was retiring.

The roads, he had to acknowledge, had come at a price. They had slashed through the mountains and bled the state of people—whole communities which seeped from the hollows and flowed out the hillbilly highways to the factories and cubicles in far-away cities. Over the past few decades, the population of the state had actually declined. But the highways also nourished new development—vacation homes, wood chip mills and ski resorts crucial to further growth. And, it could be argued, the roads brought an infusion of federal spending that spawned many new government jobs for the state. And incumbent congressmen could now drive home from Washington in hours instead of days, facilitating their repeated reelection and, therefore, their seniority on important committees. He was an example.

Dorn was grateful he no longer had to make the drive very often. He was well into in his eighth term in the U.S. House and he had done it plenty of times in the early years. But as easy as the interstates made things, why drive when courtesy of some corporation or lobbying group, he could be at Chuck Yeager Airport in Charleston two hours after leaving his House office building and at his retreat on the river an hour after that?

Or, if traffic was particularly light, Dorn reflected as he sat on his front porch watching the river the next morning, in forty-five minutes.

He called his retreat Possum Island.

The actual Possum Island was a spit of land that broke the surface of the Ohio River about fifty miles south of Winston. Dorn had spent his favorite times there as a boy, poling a log and plywood raft across a shallow channel that separated the island from the West Virginia side, catching crawfish that hid in the detritus that collected on the downstream shore, climbing the tall beech trees that grew in the island’s center, watching the endless procession of river traffic—barges mostly, heaped with symmetrical hills of coal. Much of what he knew about the river came from observing the island—how it could be a mile long and a quarter mile wide with flat muddy banks extending even further into the riverbed in the fall after a dry summer; how it could shrink to the size of a football field in the late spring when the melting snow in the mountains and the ice in the Monongahela and Alleghany tributaries flooded the river basin; how, inevitably, the island grew longer every year—no matter what the season—as the grains of rich topsoil eroded from upstream farms caught and collected on the island’s north end.

He had adopted the Possum Island name for his splendid compound because the location overlooked the island proper and because of what the retreat recalled for him. It was his refuge and his touchstone to real life, life outside the Beltway, a place to think.

It seemed like the perfect place to spend a few days working out the details of his campaign’s first television commercials—commercials that would immediately thrust him into the position of front-runner. Unfortunately, there was an array of problems. Not surprisingly, Richey was in the middle of them.

Conceptually, things were perfect. The plant itself, everyone had agreed, was exactly the right backdrop, a strong visual connection to Dorn’s major campaign theme of economic liberty. That, after all, was where it had all started. As a young representative, Dorn had called in some of the few favors he was owed and arranged passage of a local bill that allowed Recovery Metals to shortcut several onerous and unnecessary environmental regulations and build a facility near Winston. Jobs had been created. The facility and the town of Winston had prospered. Along with recruiting a three hundred-job defense facility for another county in his district, the legislation was one of Dorn’s proudest achievements as a public servant.

Soon, lawyers discovered Dorn’s bill permitted a number of facilities in every state to take a self-policing approach to many regulations. Savings on environmental control equipment and improved profits soon followed. Right behind them were political contributions, access to corporate jets, and luxurious vacations for Representative and Mrs. Dorn. Encouraged, he had begun to give speeches on the topics of individual and economic liberty—ideas more powerful than any fanatical religious or totalitarian movements, he liked to remind his audiences.

His timing had been good. The public, fed up with an over-governed, politically correct economy, had responded to his demands for lower corporate taxes and a rollback in government. And too much government was a problem worldwide. Others had taken up the call. The Liberty Agenda, as the movement he championed had become known, was gaining international traction. The plant was the perfect symbol of all that.

Not only that, his aides had learned that by happy circumstance the next week represented the tenth anniversary of the plant’s groundbreaking. Given that he was responsible for its existence and that it was about to be the lynchpin of his effort to achieve higher office, Dorn did not find it at all surprising when his consultants reported that the good folks at the plant had been happy to integrate their celebration with the congressman’s effort—quickly agreeing to erect a stage in front of the facility’s least unattractive side and to shut the entire operation for an hour the following Monday so every worker on the day shift could leave to attend as happy, dedicated workers, the whole tableau a picture of progress.

The news media had already risen to the bait. CNN was dangling the possibility of live coverage in exchange for an exclusive interview with the congressman following the event.

But, as always, there was the unexpected. Folding chairs, flags, red, white and blue bunting—even long tables to display his campaign literature—all had been reserved for the upcoming River Days celebration. Replacements had to be trucked in from Charleston and Cincinnati.

While ultimately accommodating, management had been unusually greedy during discussions about how long and how prominently the company logo would be displayed during the campaign commercial. Vince Bludhorn, the plant attorney, had insisted on at least one-eighth of the screen for a minimum total of six seconds during the thirty-second spot. The campaign’s ad agency, which had scrambled a top-flight production crew on short notice, agreed in principle but insisted on final creative control. Dorn had been forced to end the discussion in a way that satisfied no one—telling the agency that he, not the agency, had creative control and telling the folks at the plant, as he had learned to do so artfully on the Hill, that he was personally committed to their point of view and that he would do his very best but could make no promises.

Now, the problem was that there weren’t enough blacks employed at the plant, at least on the day shift, to reflect the new ideal of a racially diverse America. Women were adequately represented and so were Hispanics. But not the blacks.

Most of his aides, he believed, were competent. Manipulative, backstabbing, self-promoting, certainly. But competent. He couldn’t say the same for Richey who had once mistakenly handed him a copy of a press release about his speech instead of a copy of the speech itself, leading Dorn to give a talk in which he ended a stirring sentence by saying, “Congressman Harry Dorn declared today,” in effect quoting himself. The fact that Richey’s chief interest was using his business card to impress the district’s women had never been an issue before. Now, all the aide’s shortcomings were becoming glaring liabilities.

The sound of Clendenin’s heels on the wooden front porch interrupted Dorn’s thoughts.

“The crowd problem’s handled,” he said. “The plant’s promoting a black guy and a black woman from the night shift to the day shift. When the camera shoots the crowd from over your shoulder, they’ll be front and center.”

“What about the big crowd shots?” Dorn asked.

“We’re busing in the whole congregation of the Tabernacle Church of the Cross in Charleston.”

What’s in it for them?”

“New church bus.”

“You’re amazing.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Dorn stared at a bend in the river. The wind had picked up, creating little wavelets that made the Ohio look like it was flowing upstream, against its natural current. “We need to dump Richey. He’s bad news.”