The Zero Game
Brad Meltzer
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Warner Books
ISBN: 0446530980

Clandestine gambling among congressional staff members turns into murder.

Matthew Mercer & Harris Sandler have been friends since college & for a decade in Washington as staffers for a Senator. Three years ago, bored & disillusioned & looking to add a bit of juice back into their work days, they join a pyramid betting scheme -- placing anonymous inconsequential bets on equally inconsequential addenda to Senate bills & the bills themselves: Who will vote for what, by what count, by which party. Someone, neither Matthew nor Harris knows, sets what the race will be.

This time it's a sure thing: Matthew has been piloting a tag-on piece of pork having to do with a few hundred thousand dollars for an extinct gold mine in the middle of South Dakota in exchange for a sewer project closer to home. It's all just to add an edge to otherwise routine days sparring in the Appropriations committee meetings. No one takes it seriously. No one has ever placed high bets ... until today.

The lowly, idealistic Senate pages are used to carry the bets back & forth between the closed circle of players. None of them know what is in the manila envelopes they bear from office to office.

Today, the bet is on something Matthew has been working on & he absolutely knows it's a winner. So he goes out on a limb, urged on by both his best friend & ante-upped by a newcomer into the scheme. Before he knows it he's putting $16K into the kitty envelope for the Senate page to take to the cloakroom betting center.

Except Matthew notices something hinky, not quite right about this particular page. Is it his uniform, or rather the lack of one? Is it the odd name tag? Or is there something else? Matthew, seeing his & his friend's life savings walk out the door, decides to follow ... & is led to his death.

Enraged & grief-&-guilt-ridden, Harris Sandler begins to investigate why his best friend is killed by a hit-&-run in a seedy part of Washington, who in turn wraps himself & his auto around a lampost. What was Matthew doing there in broad daylight? The cops are sure he was cruising for drugs & simply close the case. Harris is far from sure & goes to the crime scene, there he finds, under a dumpster, the Senate page name tag.

That's when he meets Viv Parker, a tall, African-American 17 year old who is going to change his life ... not only because she is going to help him, she is also going to be a surprisingly good partner as they race just a few steps ahead of Janos, a stranger clad in an FBI windbreaker, wielding a deadly little black box that is meting out heart attacks like handshakes.

The Zero Game gallops along the hallowed halls & secret rooms of the Capitol, out into the nation's capital where a Senator's name conjures up private jets that will whisk these unwitting heroes away into the night, to the middle of nowhere, looking for a gold mine worth attaching to an Appropriations bill.

What they find is something else entirely, & when they creep back to their home turf, Janos, in the pay of homegrown terrorists, is still on their heels, forcing them deeper & deeper into the bowels of the Capitol, where a friend becomes a lethal foe, & Harris & Viv find what stuff they are made of.

The Zero Game is a fine political adventure! Heavy on the yawn-inducing stuff of congressional bartering, & lively in the tight spots into which the innocents are herded by invisible shepherds. Shepherds with a lot to lose, no scruples & fingers in very high up pies.

Brad Metzer's style is to get inside the head of each of his characters ... even when they're about to die! So settle in because The Zero Game is one bumpy, entertaining ride!

More from Brad Meltzer:
The First Counsel
The Millionaires
The Tenth Justice
Dead Even
(12/28/03)

Rebecca