The Gun Runner's Daughter Read Online Free

Her father would never come to trial: pleas would be bargained, assets exchanged. This was business as usual.
    That she thought this was because she did not yet know how deeply her father was in trouble, and how dearly he was going to be made to pay.
    Nor could she. The percolation of events that would, by Thanksgiving, erupt again on the front pages of every major newspaper in America was, for the moment, so removed, so secret, that even Bob
Stein had no inkling of it.
    Which was, in many ways, fortunate.
    For as the summer of 1994 crept across New York in a suite of indistinguishable days of ferocious heat, an epic dry spell that was breaking all previous drought records, days of high cerulean
skies at noon and brilliantly clear starlit nights, it was, for Allison Rosenthal, the end of a kind of innocence she wasn’t aware she possessed but which she would miss for a long time to
come.
    6.
    Michael Levi, her father’s second in command and lifelong friend, was arrested in mid-July. The press missed the importance of it and Levi’s problems were relegated
to section B, city news.
    Allison didn’t get it either. She read the item in the morning over coffee and juice at Brigitte’s on Greenwich, the morning sun splashing through the high windows onto the
newsprint. She was tired of how long they were taking to settle her father’s messy, embarrassing problems. And for the first time the prospect of sitting in the offices of Dykeman, Goldfarb
& Barney struck her as attractive: it would stop her thinking about her father.
    When, a week later, Levi turned State’s evidence in return for limited use immunity, the papers missed that too.
    That evening—as every evening—Allison met Martha Ohlinger at a table in the Corner Bistro. At the
New York Observer,
Martha reported on Wall Street and Washington, and had
often told Allison things she didn’t want to know about her father. In doing so, of course, Martha was immeasurably helped by the fact that her own father was no less than the national
security adviser and a close confidant of Clinton, as he had once been of Carter. Pushing back to Allison through the crowded room in jeans, sandals, and a black silk blouse, Martha sat and threw a
copy of the
Observer
onto the table.
    “You seen this, Alley girl?”
    Allison watched her friend shaking her black curls free from under a baseball cap, letting them fall in a frame around her dark, complex, sharply delineated face. Her eyes, black and alive, were
showing excitement, and not for the first time Alley thought that what made Martha attractive was intellect more than any of her more obvious assets. Just now, she was very attractive indeed.
    “Martha? If you’re going to tell me about my father, I don’t want to know.”
    “You’re going to want to know this, Alley.”
    The paper carried the story that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York had announced her intention to pursue a conviction of Ronald Rosenthal, in absentia, using Michael
Levi’s immunized State’s evidence.
    And still, Allison Rosenthal did not understand.
    “Big deal. My dad’s sitting in a million-dollar house in Jerusalem. They’ll never convict him, Marty. Peres’ll come over and whisper a word to your dad, Falcon’ll
pay a fine. It’s just making rain for Bob Stein.”
    Martha shook her head emphatically. The two had known each other since Alley’s first day, eleven years old, at St. Ann’s, and since then they had shared not only every emotional
experience, but almost every intellectual one, arguing their way through to joint American studies B.A.s at Yale before their paths diverged, Alley to Paris, Martha to the London School of
Economics.
    “I don’t think so, Alley, and unlike you I know what I’m talking about. The case has been given to Shauna McCarthy. U.S. Attorney, Southern District.”
    “And McCarthy’ll make a deal. It’s not about foreign policy, Marty. It’s about an exchange of