He stomped along the hallway, stopped at the cipher room door, and scowled through tiny spectacles at Halsey and the detective. The scowl, the long graying beard, and the shaven upper lip gave him the look of a prophet who believed in a god of vengeance, not of love. “What dispatches have come in overnight?”

Halsey pulled himself to attention: “Three from Tennessee, sir, two from Manassas, and—”

“The Peninsula! What news from the Peninsula? From McClellan?”

“Just a moment, sir.” Halsey went to the desk and got the pile of dispatches.

Stanton snatched them and hurried on. “Stay close, Lieutenant. I’ll be answering to these presently.”

“Yes, sir.”

McNealy watched Stanton step into his office; then he said to Halsey, “The secretary cannot abide General McClellan.”

Stanton’s disembodied voice boomed out, “I also cannot abide War Department detectives wasting time here when the whole city is crawling with no-gooders.”

“Yes, sir,” answered McNealy, “I’m heading out now, sir.” Then he turned back to Halsey and whispered, “The only thing he can abide less is a man who works for him who is not working for him. You follow?”

“No.”

“A man who may be working for himself. A man who may be pocketing War Department information when everyone’s off drinking coffee. Something worth a pretty penny to some rebel spy, maybe.”

Halsey reddened now. He could feel it in his cheeks. It wasn’t embarrassment but anger. He knew how to draw a perfect five-pointed star with five pistol shots at a hundred paces. He knew what it felt like to take a bullet for his country. He knew what the generals were thinking before the president did. He would not brook the suspicions of this Chicago door-peeper. But as he grabbed McNealy’s lapel, he heard Stanton’s voice echo down the hallway: “Lieutenant Hutchinson. Come in here!”

McNealy’s eyes shifted. “Best see what your boss wants.”

Halsey brought his face close to the detective’s. “No man questions my integrity.”

“Integrity is a young man’s luxury, Lieutenant. My job is too important for integrity.” McNealy then peeled Halsey’s fingers one-by-one from his lapel. “I’ll be watching.” And one of the most accomplished rebel-catchers in the War Department detective service set out to catch a few more.

II.

It was not until an hour later that Halsey’s shift ended and he could hurry down the stairs and step into the sunshine.

Ordinarily he relished April mornings on the Potomac. No New England chill in the air, no east wind puffing the last exhalations of winter off the Atlantic. Here spring days came in gentle and warm and could make a man forget for a few moments the cataclysm engulfing the nation. But not that morning.

Halsey looked around to make sure that McNealy was not watching from behind some pillar or post. Then he took the path through the trees to the White House carriage drive, where he was reminded that one man’s cataclysm could be another man’s opportunity… … or another woman’s.

They were already lining up, as they did each dawn—office seekers, favor seekers, friends, relatives, relatives of relatives, men bearing letters of introduction, women bearing petitions of mercy, widows, orphans, inventors, scoundrels, scalawags, the sons of scalawags, and the sons of rich men, too—all waiting for nine o’clock, when the White House would officially open and they would crowd in under the portico, into the foyer, up the stairs, and if they were lucky, all the way to the reception room outside the president’s office, their petitions in one hand, their business cards in the other, their expectations high that before the day ended, the president himself would summon them to a personal audience and satisfy their petition or solve their problem.

It was said that at the beginning, Lincoln had spent most of his day with these people.

His secretaries had imposed some order on the process, so that he could put in a proper day’s work. But he still insisted on seeing them. He called it his “public opinion bath.”

Halsey ignored the dirty looks as he bypassed the line and went up to Edward McManus, the doddering majordomo who had been answering the White House door since the days of Andy Jackson.

McManus had a fringe of chin whiskers like the president’s and a florid Irish face. “The gates open at nine,” he said. “The line forms at the back. Just give me your card and go to the back. The president decides who he sees and who he don’t, but the back is where the line forms.”

“Official business.