CHAPTER FOUR

      THE OFFICES OF the Coalition for Responsible Media consisted of four cramped rooms at the top of three flights of stairs in an ancient, crumbling nineteenth-century building on the fringes of Old Town.

      Enthusiastic volunteers teemed in and out of cubicles crammed with file cabinets, beat-up desks, computers and a perpetually zipping photocopier.

      “Where do all these people come from?” was Mark Masters’s first question as he observed the beehive of activity, already at a fever pitch at eight in the morning.

      Before Kitt could answer, a young man hailed her. “Ms. Stevens, Senator Goins on line one.”

      She pushed her back-to-normal bangs aside, and said, “Take a seat,” to Masters without introducing him to anybody. She had no intention of making this guy too comfortable.

      Then she got so busy bending congressional ears that she didn’t see him for the next hour. Which was just as well. Their beginning this morning had been rocky.

      The first thing out of his mouth when he picked her up in the disgusting foreign Lexus was, “What a relief! I was afraid you’d still have your hair up in that snaky braidy thing.”

      Little snot.

      Kitt had blushed at her own folly. The expense. The discomfort. For nothing. “Oh, you didn’t like my wig?” she cracked as she settled herself into the leather seat.

      He grinned as the precision engine purred to life. “You borrowed it from the Star Trek props room, right?”

      Kitt pursed her mouth sourly. Normally, she loved this kind of repartee. With four brothers, she’d grown up on a steady diet of it. But from this man, it rankled. Because he’d known who she was the whole time, stupid hairdo or no stupid hairdo. Had he even known at the ice-cream social? Had he been mocking her instead of flirting with her? Pride prevented her from asking.

      She looked over at him. Again, he was immaculately groomed in a navy-blue worsted-wool suit—the same tailored suit he’d worn before, she was certain—and a starched white shirt. Only his tie was a contradiction to his classic apparel. Today it was panda bears tumbling over themselves, munching bamboo. The black-and-white pandas and kelly-green bamboo looked absolutely ghastly with the navy suit. But rich boys, she supposed, could wear any ugly tie they pleased.

      She stared out the windshield at the hazy morning scene of Alexandria-near-the-Potomac and wondered why she had agreed to let this spoiled brat pick her up this morning.

      “So,” she said as she adjusted her seat belt, “you’re Marcus Masters the Third. Marcus Masters’s kid.”

      “No. I am Mark Masters. The adult son of a man whose name is Marcus Masters, whose father also happens to be named Marcus Masters.”

      He was still smiling, but not quite so brightly now, and Kitt thought, Touchy, touchy. She wanted to say, No, you are the spoiled son of a man who doesn’t care how he pollutes the culture as long as it makes a profit. But she steered clear of that honey pot. This was the congressman’s new intern, and she couldn’t do anything to jeopardize the CRM’s position with Congressman Wilkens.

      “Well, Mr. Masters—” she couldn’t help the sarcasm “—exactly how did you happen to obtain this plum of an internship with Congressman Wilkens?”

      “Don’t call me Mr. Masters.” The smile was gone and his face looked suddenly older, hardened. “That’s my father. I’m Mark.”

      So this is some kind of sore point, his father. “Not Marcus?”

      “That’s my father as well. And Mac is my grandfather. I’m Mark.”

      “Does everybody call you that?”

      “Only since I’ve been born.” Now he smiled.

      “Okay. Mark. How?”

      “My father didn’t pull strings for me if that’s what you’re asking. I applied for the internship like everybody else, and I got it.”

      “Yes,” Kitt said, eyeing the supple leather upholstery, the walnut trim, his handsome profile as he steered the car smoothly through the tangle of rush-hour traffic, “I imagine it was just that simple.”

      He cocked an eyebrow at her, a dark slash of disapproval. “Rich does not equal spoiled.”

      She blushed at his perceptiveness, and he smiled, but not warmly. “I get this all the time, Ms. Stevens.”

      Kitt turned her face to the window. All this Mr. and Ms. doo-doo was purely antagonistic posturing, but even so, she did not invite him to call her Kitt. A tense silence ensued as they waited at one of the interminable stoplights that control the infamous five-way intersections in northern Virginia.

      “So you study at the Carl Albert Center?” she said after a moment, trying to be civil.

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      She ignored the ma’am. “Is that your major? Political Science?”

      “I study writing.”

      “Writing?” Kitt’s own undergraduate major had been journalism, in its own way as tough a nut to crack as law school. “I’d think writing would be somewhat quaint and antiquated for the LinkServe genius.”

      “Do you actually know anything about my LinkServe experiment?”

      “I know it’s a comprehensive communications technology that you’ve been working on ever since you graduated from creating video games in high school. I know it’s the technology that threatens to make other technologies obsolete. I know you—and your father—don’t want LinkServe—and others like it—regulated by the new bill designed to control the glut of filth and violence in the media.”

      “I see I’m not the only one who does my homework.”

      “Is that what you call it? Homework?”

      “Yeah. What do you call it?” He watched the stoplights above them.

      “Espionage. Skulduggery.”

      He had glanced over then, blue eyes sparkling with challenge, and had given her a crooked little smile, which she had wanted to slap off his pretty-boy face. “You don’t like me much,” he said. “I can tell.”

      “I wouldn’t say that I don’t like you personally, Mark,” she answered.

      “Oh, what don’t you like impersonally, then?”

      Your father, the way he’s polluting the mindscape of this country’s