Father Night (10 page)

Near their struggle, Jack was entwined with the gunman he had attacked. The man had bounced off the wall, hurling himself bodily into Jack’s side, knocking him across the stairwell. Jack stumbled into the man Annika had doubled over and fell to his knees. His antagonist was on him, using hand strikes to keep Jack off balance and disorient him, until he delivered a blow that had Jack on the verge of unconsciousness. Jack struggled to breathe, but something was obstructing his chest. He was being systematically plowed under.

Annika’s only chance for survival was to release her grip on the railing. The moment she did so, the gunman, seizing the opening, moved quickly in and leaned forward to tip her over the top. She had counted on this, however, and she used his own momentum against him, swiveling her body at the last moment, her feet on the floor again as she swung him around her, rather than through her, and he pitched over the railing, her intended fate now his. His head and shoulder struck solid concrete and he was dead before his body came to rest on the floor below.

Jack blinked back the darkness that lapped at his consciousness. He felt as if he were in a twilight world, where the only movement he could see were blurred shadows. He had lost all sense of where he was, but he knew what was happening to him, that he was close to death. And then his hand slammed against what seemed like a side of meat. A sharp smell of a foreign body odor acted to clear his mind enough to see that he was lying beside the doubled-over gunman. His own antagonist was astride him, continuing the relentless attack with his fists.

Jack’s hand moved, scrabbling inside the jacket of the man lying next to him, and his fingers felt something cold and hard—metallic! Another blow from above splashed his own blood across his face and all the breath went out of him.

Rallying himself, he drew the gun out of its shoulder holster and, turning it in the cramped space, shoved the muzzle into his antagonist’s armpit. No time for thought or to aim, he was driven now by pure survival instinct. He pulled the trigger once, twice, and the weight lifted off him as his assailant was slammed against the far wall and collapsed like an abandoned marionette.

*   *   *

D
ICK
B
RIDGES
had come within a rat’s whisker of offing himself. That was during the dark week after his charge, President Edward Carson, had been killed in a car accident on the way from Moscow to the airport during winter’s last snow. The limousine had skidded on a patch of black ice and rammed headfirst into a utility pole, which had come down, among a tangle of live wires, onto the limo’s top. Carson had been killed; his wife, sustaining grievous internal injuries, had lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered.

Bridges had failed in his primary mission to protect the president with his life, if need be, a sacred duty to which he had, up until the moment of impact, dedicated himself. Without that mission, he had wondered, what was he? How could he look at himself in the mirror without being reminded of that dreadful morning, which for many months he relived in nightmares of excruciating detail?

Now he had been tasked with protecting Alli Carson, the last member of the former first family, and he planned to carry out this mission with precision and valor. He had vowed to himself that nothing would happen to Alli on his watch. She had been incredibly brave in the face of tragedy; more horrifying things had happened to her than most people experience in a lifetime.

Bridges turned these thoughts over once again as he walked across the Fearington campus. He had Alli in sight, hands in his coat pockets, carefully observing the vectors of the students and teachers around her as she moved along the pathways.

This assignment had come as a breath of fresh air; he felt as if he were being given a second chance, a shot most people never received, at redemption. True, he hadn’t liked the smell of it, but that hadn’t stopped him from insisting on taking it.

Alli was with her roommate, Vera Bard. Bridges could not help wondering about their relationship. He knew how close Alli had been with her former roommate, Emma McClure. He also knew that Alli did not easily form bonds with other people. She was close to Jack McClure, of course, but to no one in her family, including that prick of an uncle, Henry Holt Carson. Bridges didn’t like Edward’s older brother, nor did he trust him. There was something of the sly operator, the slick politician, though Henry Holt was a businessman through and through. He liked Alli all the better for her antipathy to her uncle.

Alli and Vera went into one of the classroom buildings and Bridges followed at a discreet distance. Memories flooded through him. He remembered how the interior had the look of an English college, with wooden wainscoting, massive staircases winding upward, and colossal portraits of important-looking men, keen-eyed, square-jawed, staring out at a horizon only they could discern. Some wore the uniforms of various branches of the armed forces. The sun shone at their backs, as if rising at their command. It was all meant to be inspiring, but Bridges found the atmosphere oppressive, as if, come heaven or hell, he could never live up to these men’s lofty expectations.

He settled into the hallway outside the classroom Alli and Vera entered, leaning against the wall. Taking out a paring knife, he industriously dug bits of dirt from under his nails. He whistled softly to himself, then shoved off and went to the door, peering in at the candidates sitting attentively in neat rows, typing on their laptops as they transcribed the instructor’s lessons.

Seeing that all was well with Alli, he returned to his position holding up the hallway wall. He thought about his ex-wife, about their attempts to have a child—halfhearted because she told him she’d be an unenthusiastic mother, even though he insisted that she couldn’t know what sort of mother she’d be until she was holding her own baby in her arms.

It was a moot point now. They’d never had a child, and now they were divorced and hadn’t even spoken to each other in a decade. Since then, there had been the occasional girlfriend, but no one had lasted as much as a year. Bridges was the one who wanted a child, and now, with no little irony, he was surrounded by young men and women, any one of whom could have been his. But not in this lifetime. Apparently, he wasn’t destined to have much of anything in this lifetime. Once in a very great while, he found himself wondering what terrible crime he had committed in a previous life, to find himself in this current purgatory. Mostly, though, it seemed childish to believe in reincarnation.

All of which explained why it was so important to him to take care of Alli now. Not that he was under any illusion that he could have any kind of friendship with her, but in some faraway island of his mind he could fantasize her being the daughter he never had.

The class was over, the candidates streaming out of the classroom. An hour passed quickly when you were sunk deep inside your own thoughts, Bridges knew. Alli studiously ignored him when she appeared, walking past after she and Vera went their own ways.

He followed her at a discreet distance, out onto the campus grounds. The late afternoon was the color of a spent rifle shell, the temperature had dropped, and, with a shiver, he could sense the incipient fall of night.

Alli cut diagonally across the campus, taking the path that led to the firing range and obstacle courses. Bridges had just enough time to wonder where she was headed when he lost sight of her. Following her into a copse of whip-thin pines, he looked quickly around, but there was no sign of her. He knelt down to check for signs of her passage, but the light had gone out of the sky and under the pines it was already past twilight. He pressed down on the mat of the needles and pine straw, grabbed a handful, and threw it back down, staring at it as if trying to read tea leaves.

He rose, walked farther into the copse and out the other side, his nostrils flaring as if trying to catch a hint of her scent, but she had vanished utterly and completely.

*   *   *

A
NNIKA CROSSED
to where Jack was woozily getting to his knees.

“My God, your face looks like you’ve been through a meat grinder.” Pulling him up, she ripped off one of the men’s shirts and wiped the blood off Jack’s face. “Are you okay?”

“In a couple of days, probably.” Jack cracked a lopsided grin. “That bastard really packed a wallop.”

“We’ve got to get back to the elevator,” Annika said, finishing her cleanup.

It wasn’t until he started to move painfully up the stairs that he saw that Annika was limping and turned back to her. “What the hell hap—”

The man Annika had kneed in the groin hurled himself at them. His right hand was filled with an evil-looking switchblade that glinted as it shot out toward Annika’s spine. Shoving her roughly aside, Jack felt the blade penetrate his coat, the razor-sharp edge of the blade slicing open a wound in his side. Grasping the man’s knife wrist, he pulled him in toward him and smashed his forearm into the man’s nose. The man’s head shook and he gave an animal snort as blood spattered him, but he managed to get the heel of his hand under Jack’s chin, pushing his head up and back. That was when Annika grabbed the gun out of Jack’s hand and beat a tattoo with the butt on the man’s head. She kept at it, her teeth clamped tight in a fury of blood rage, even after his eyes had rolled up in his head. Jack had to pull her away and turn her to face him so that she slowly refocused.

He wrenched the switchblade from the near-dead man’s fist, and together he and Annika sprinted down the fourth-floor hallway.

*   *   *

A
S THEY
had agreed during their last class of the day, Alli and Vera met outside the northwest wall of Fearington. Under cover of the gathering darkness, they made their way for about a mile across fields and stands of deciduous trees to the back road where the iron-colored Infiniti sedan sat waiting for them, its engine purring softly.

Vera climbed into the front passenger’s seat and Alli got in back.

“Any trouble losing your chaperone?” Caro said from behind the wheel.

“None at all,” Alli said. “He wasn’t expecting it, but next time won’t be easy. He’s a clever cookie.”

“If this works out right,” Caro said, putting the Infiniti in gear, “there won’t have to be a next time.”

She drove at a sedate pace until the road merged with the highway, and then she put on speed. Alli intuited Caro had no desire to be pulled over by a cop. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with Dick Bridges, which was perfectly understandable, given her father’s long reach and his enduring efforts to find her. Now that the two of them were in the same city, Caro had to increase her vigilance to keep herself from flying under his extensive radar.

As they sped north, Alli sat back, catching Caro’s reflection in the rearview mirror. She had not gotten over the shock of her cousin’s sudden appearance from out of nowhere. Caro had remained such a mythic figure in her imagination that adjusting to the real flesh-and-blood person was going to take some getting used to. She kept catching herself thinking of Caro as her uncle had described her. She hated herself for that. Henry Holt Carson had proved himself to be a liar, a chiseler, and, worse, power-hungry. With his younger brother as president, he’d had an unbeatable chip to play. Now he had to deal with Edward Carson’s successor, the prickly Arlen Crawford. In a way inexplicable to her, her uncle had managed to forge what seemed to be an alliance with the president. Was he advisor to Crawford as well as being a highly visible lobbyist for the items on the president’s foreign and domestic agendas? Jack might know, but Alli didn’t.

Alli missed Jack, as she always did when he was far away. She understood her attachment to him in the abstract, but the fact was their relationship was so complex—surrogate father, mentor, friend, and ally—that she had trouble parsing both the depth and the breadth of her feelings for him. When, as now, he was overseas without her, she was terrified he would die in some awful foreign country, that the next time she would see him was in a coffin flown into Dulles on Secretary Paull’s official aircraft.

On the surface, her attachment to Jack—and to Annika—seemed to fly in the face of her detachment from everyone around her, but she knew better. Jack had saved her from Morgan Herr. More than that, though, he had believed in her when everyone else had given up on her, including her parents. And there was another aspect she could not discount: he was Emma’s dad. Their mutual sorrow at her death bound them more tightly than blood ever could.

“Where are we going?” Alli asked.

“To meet a man,” Caro said, her eyes glued to the road.

Alli, heart beating fast, leaned forward, her hands on the back of the front seat. “Does that mean you found who put up the rogue Web site?”

“We’re closer than we were yesterday.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Vera said.

“I’ll let the man we’re seeing explain.” If Caro was aware of Vera’s annoyance she gave no sign of it. “But you were right about one thing, Vera. This is a challenge.”

Alli wanted to ask so many more questions, but she could sense that it would be useless to ask. It was clear that Caro had said as much as she was going to on the subject. Reluctantly, Alli melted back into the backseat, brooding about this creature, her cousin, who had suddenly appeared from out of nowhere, who now seemed to have taken over the immediate trajectory of her life.

Fifteen minutes later, Caro pulled the Infiniti into a space on Ninth Street NW, between G and H. Out on the sidewalk, she led them into Spares’n’Strikes, one of those new-style bowling alleys with lounges and party spaces attached. Inside, the atmosphere was totally clublike—there were as many flat-screen TVs blasting a variety of sports matches and music videos as there were bowling lanes. In keeping with the place’s play-on-words name, the Stars and Stripes were the decor pattern of choice. All very psychedelic, in a postmodern kind of way.

“You guys go rent shoes and take a lane,” Caro said, “while I go take care of business.”

She was more enigmatic than the spies Alli knew. She and Vera got shoes that fit tolerably well, then took over Lane 13, which no one else seemed to want. Le Tigre was playing over the loudspeakers. Very retro-chic.