The Devil's Bed

The novel opens with Randall Coates returning to his Virginia home under extreme security precautions, only to be ambushed by a figure he calls Moses. Bound to his kitchen table, Coates is tortured with a car battery. Moses warns that he still has two more betrayers to deal with.

Elsewhere, a man calling himself Nightmare watches a television interview with President Daniel Clay Dixon and First Lady Kathleen "Kate" Jorgenson Dixon, training a laser-sighted pistol on the screen. When the First Lady appears, Nightmare declares she must die for what he considers the murder of David Moses. Though he speaks in the third person, Nightmare is Moses, a man who considers his former identity destroyed by betrayal.

President Dixon, a former professional quarterback, basks in the success of the interview, but his marriage and administration are fracturing. His oldest friend and White House chief counsel, Robert Lee, warns that the influence of Dixon's father, Senator William Dixon, has grown toxic since the death of Alan Carpathian, Dixon's mentor and former chief of staff. That night, Kate confronts her husband, accusing him of becoming unrecognizable, and threatens to leave. Meanwhile, Domestic Affairs Adviser Lorna Channing, who shares a deep personal history with Dixon from their neighboring Colorado ranches, delivers her report on Kate's signature compulsory youth service initiative. Dixon, following his father's and Chief of Staff John Llewellyn's advice, shelves it until after the election. A moment of emotional intimacy hints at Dixon's growing attachment to Channing.

In Minnesota, Kate's father, Tom Jorgenson, a former vice president who established a peace institute at his family estate, Wildwood, maintains a nightly ritual of watching the moon from the bluffs overlooking the St. Croix River. One evening, while driving his tractor through the orchards, he is struck from an overhanging branch and knocked from his seat. The flatbed he is towing crushes his pelvis.

Special Agent Bo Thorsen of the Secret Service Minneapolis field office is dispatched with his partner, Stuart Coyote, to manage security at Wildwood as the First Lady flies in. Bo was once a teenage runaway rescued from that life by Annie Jorgenson, Tom's sister and a former juvenile court judge. He grows suspicious about Jorgenson's accident: The tractor's ignition was switched off, and the tree limb shows bent and broken branches suggesting someone crouched on it. Special Agent Christopher Manning, head of the First Lady's protective detail, dismisses Bo's concerns and refuses an electronic sweep of the property.

Nightmare has been surveilling Wildwood for weeks, having planted hidden cameras and microphones throughout the estate. His backstory emerges in alternating chapters: Raised in a farmhouse basement by a domestic terrorist grandfather, the boy called Nocturne was forced to build increasingly sophisticated bombs. At sixteen, he discovered his grandfather sexually assaulting his mother, who then attempted suicide. He killed both by detonating the farmhouse and emerged as Nightmare.

Operating under an alias, Nightmare takes a laundry job at the hospital where Jorgenson lies unconscious. When security guard Randy O'Meara catches him near Jorgenson's room, Nightmare kills O'Meara and stages the death as an accident. Bo connects the killing to Jorgenson's floor, discovers the alias is fabricated, and traces it to the Minnesota State Security Hospital. There, psychologist Dr. Jordan Hart reveals that the man Bo seeks is David Moses, a patient of extraordinary intelligence who escaped two months earlier. Hart describes Moses as a likely former hired assassin who has paranoid schizophrenia and operates by an internal ethos of perpetual warfare. Two men posing as Secret Service agents had also asked about Moses, suggesting covert government interest in his history.

Bo traces the connection between Moses and Jorgenson through Father Don Cannon, the retired priest who ran the orphanage where Moses was placed after the farmhouse explosion. Cannon recounts how Moses fell in love with teenage Kate while working in the Wildwood orchards. One night, Moses claimed he witnessed Tom Jorgenson assaulting Kate on the river bluff and intervened. Tom denied everything. Annie Jorgenson brokered a deal: Moses would enlist and stay silent or face criminal charges. Cannon believed Moses but saw no path to justice and signed the enlistment papers.

Nightmare launches his assault on Wildwood, crawling through a tunnel he dug under the stone wall over previous weeks. He kills four agents, wounds Manning, enters Kate's bedroom, and forces her at gunpoint to the river bluff. Bo arrives as the perimeter alarm triggers. Moses demands Kate confess she lied about the assault. She kneels and does so. Bo blinds Moses with the tractor's headlights and fires. Moses springs back with a knife, stabbing Bo, but stumbles over the cliff and falls fifty feet. Kate presses Bo's arterial wound until help arrives, saving his life.

Moses's body is reportedly found on a burned houseboat downriver. Bo recovers in the hospital, where Kate visits daily. He discovers Kate's handwriting matches an anonymous note that paid for Moses's gravestone. She confesses the truth: It was not her father on the bluff that night but her uncle Roland Jorgenson, with whom she had been having an affair born of grief after her mother's death. She framed Moses to protect the family from scandal. Roland later killed himself. Bo promises to keep her secret and realizes he loves her, a feeling he acknowledges is impossible to act upon.

In Washington, Senator Dixon pressures his son to control Kate, going so far as to suggest that her death at Wildwood would have been politically advantageous. Meanwhile, Robert Lee drowns in a sailing accident while investigating the senator's activities. Dixon suspects his father orchestrated the death and asks Bo to investigate. Bo uncovers National Operations Management (NOMan), a shadowy division ostensibly responsible for standardizing government communications but concealing a hidden budget and ties to every major intelligence agency. NOMan was co-founded by allies who escaped a Japanese prison camp alongside the senator during World War II, and its enabling legislation was co-sponsored by the senator and Jorgenson.

Bo is suspended and framed. Operatives attempt to kill him and then murder his boss, Special Agent-in-Charge Diana Ishimaru, staging the scene to blame Bo. He becomes a fugitive, hiding in a church basement with help from Otter, a childhood friend who works there as a janitor. Bo deduces that NOMan plans to assassinate Kate and her father when the family gathers on the Wildwood bluffs to watch the moonrise, with a sniper positioned on a sandstone outcropping across the river. Moses, who is alive, finds Bo and reveals that a covert team recovered him after the fall and tried to recruit him to pull the trigger. He escaped instead. Bo tells Moses the truth about the assault, and Moses departs without committing to a course of action.

Bo reaches the outcropping but falls and injures his knee. He regains consciousness to hear the assassins preparing above. Silenced gunshots ring out: Moses has killed both men. Bo confronts Moses, who insists he came to protect Kate. Moses leaps from the rock; Bo fires and hits him. Moses dies gazing at the stars, whispering his final word: home.

Coyote arrives with law enforcement, having tracked Bo and coordinated with agents to keep the First Lady off the bluffs. FBI and Secret Service officials pressure Bo to sign a false statement omitting NOMan and attributing all events to Moses acting alone. Bo refuses.

President Dixon fires Llewellyn, appoints Channing as chief of staff, and announces Kate's youth service initiative. He confronts his father in the Oval Office; the senator defends NOMan as having protected the nation for decades. Kate offers the senator the Ojibwe legend of the Windigo, a creature you can only defeat by becoming a monster yourself, and tells him she forgives him. Phone records connect a Secret Service assistant director to Ishimaru's killers, and Jorgenson provides testimony about NOMan. Manning drops his allegations against Bo. Kate gives Bo a framed copy of the tabloid photo and kisses his cheek in farewell. Coyote drives Bo home to his Tangletown duplex, where Otter waits on the porch. They sit together under the rising moon, and Bo allows himself to be happy.