Jericho's Fall (2 page)

“False alarm,” Beck muttered, furious at herself for having let Jericho back into her head, gleefully whispering his mad cautions.

She set the brake and opened the door and found, to her relief, that she was not in a ditch or a snowbank. She could back the car uphill onto the tarmac. But turning around would be easier, if there was room. Shivering as the cold leached into her fashionable boots, she squinted ahead, checking to make sure that she had room enough. The whirl of snow was slowing. She had trouble judging the distance. The beams of her headlights were swallowed up by a stand of conifers dead ahead, but there was plenty of room. Except, when she looked again, the trees were a forest, and miles away, on the other side of a steep gorge. Her toes skirted the edge. She shuffled backward. Had she tried to turn around instead of backing up, she would likely have gone over.

There in a nutshell was life since Jericho: backing up and backing up, never taking chances. One plunge over the cliff was enough for any life.

Beck stood at the edge and peered into the yawning darkness. High up on the opposite slope, she could pick out what had to be the lights of Jericho’s vast house. His family wealth had purchased the property, and the scandal of their relationship had sentenced him to life imprisonment within. She had dropped out of college. He had dropped out of much more. She did the arithmetic, all the presidential ears into which he had whispered his devious advice. She remembered the year they met, the start of his indefinite sabbatical from public life, spent among the lawns of Princeton, the hushed and reverent tones in which the faculty murmured Jericho’s name. She remembered how his seminars were interrupted almost weekly by protesters branding him a war criminal; and the relish with which he had baited his young accusers, demanding that they explain which of the regimes he was alleged to have overthrown they would have preferred to preserve, and why.

Since leaving government service, Jericho had published half a dozen books on international politics, but nobody cared any more. Hardly anyone remembered who he was, or had been. Not two months ago, she had found his recent nine-hundred-page tome on the achievement of peace in the Middle East remaindered at Barnes & Noble, going for three dollars and ninety-nine cents.

Her cell phone vibrated on her hip. Beck was surprised. Usually there was no service up here, but every now and then one found a patch of mountain digitally linked to the rest of the world. She fished the phone from her jacket. The screen said the number was unknown. When she answered, she got a blast of static in her ear, followed by a whine like a fax signal. Annoyed, she cut off the call. The phone immediately rang again, another unknown number, the same screech in her ear. No third ring. She decided to test her momentary connectedness by checking her messages, but when she tried she had no bars.

So how had whoever it was called her? She walked back and forth in the clearing, but found no service anywhere.

Never mind. Time to get moving. Rain was falling again, big freezing drops, and she managed a smile at the absurdity. Rain, fog, snow, rain again—all she needed was a flood to complete a biblical weather cycle, because, in her current mood, she was ready to believe in anything.

The
whup-whup
of an approaching engine caught her ear. Another car, she thought, but then an inky form shot across her vision, and she crouched protectively until she realized that her perspective was still playing tricks: it was a helicopter, flying low but still hundreds of feet in the air. She had not realized they built them so quiet. The helicopter passed directly over her, then swooped down the valley, joining other shadows. It climbed again, reaching Jericho’s house, where the pilot seemed to hesitate, circling, cutting back for another look. Was she too late? Could this be the medevac chopper, preparing to rush the patient down to Denver? Or was it perhaps carrying a VIP, come to say farewell, the trip too secret for daylight?

The answer was neither. The helicopter never landed. For a long moment the pilot hovered. Another false departure, another circle. Then, evidently satisfied, the craft rose once more, returning the way it had come, and Beck found herself shutting off the headlights. An unnamable instinct warned Beck not to let whoever was aboard see her.

The media, she told herself firmly, climbing back into the car as the craft vanished over the hills. Television networks, compiling footage for the obituary. No question, that’s who it was.

And yet—

And yet, why risk a flight through the Rockies to shoot the house in the dead of night? Atmosphere, she decided, starting the engine. They wanted to convey the sense of dread.

There was plenty to go around.

CHAPTER 2
The Redoubt

(i)

For another ninety minutes, the mountain owned her, hiding the small car against its immensity the way mountains do after nightfall. She popped in and out of forest and descended into the valley, then climbed the other side, winding upward until she reached the plateau that she remembered. The helicopter had it easier. The passage of time had altered the landmarks along the road. The storm-split tree that used to mark the way was gone, and the little culvert had disappeared. By hit or miss, she eventually found the turnoff, an unmarked gravel lane that fifteen years ago had rated an unmarked security car. A bumpy mile farther along was the empty guardhouse, its roof caved in, and a pair of wrought-iron gates, wide open. A faded sign announced
STONE HEIGHTS
, Jericho’s pretentious name for his mountain redoubt. In the spill of her headlamps as she passed, she could see the mounds of snow-speckled brush and debris that had collected along their hidden base. It occurred to her that the gates had not been closed in years, and now might never be closed again. She felt bad for Jericho, who had been proud of the security even as he had pretended to hate it, back in the days when he wandered his stronghold with a head chock-full of Cold War secrets, sleeping with a gun near at hand because, as he whispered to her in bed, sooner or later the Russians or the Chinese or somebody worse would be coming for him.

The driveway climbed farther up the mountain, still in the trees, and, finally, she glimpsed the black Suburban she had been looking for, complete with polarized windows. The driver was a pallid smear in the darkness. Beck slowed down automatically, but he did not even lift his head. As the house loomed into view, boxlike and stolid, trees and brush cut back fifty yards on every side to provide clear lines of fire, Rebecca almost smiled. Just one guard nowadays, but at least they were watching. State Department, Secret Service, state trooper, whoever it was, the dying man still rated security. Rebecca felt a warm wash of relief, for Jericho’s sake.

Cars were scattered in the forecourt, dusted with varying amounts of snow. The silver Prius probably meant that Pamela was here, the younger of Jericho’s daughters, although both were older than Beck, a distinction that had put the fat in the fire from the first. The battered brown van would likely be Audrey’s, borrowed from the abbey where she was cloistered, or whatever they called it. Rebecca, who despite her churchgoing mostly kept a careful distance from the overly religious, was none too sure of such details. Outside the garage stood a shiny pickup truck, and pickup trucks were what Jericho liked, although it was difficult to imagine that he did much driving these days.

Jericho had an unforgiving son named Sean, who helped run an environmental foundation in New York, but Sean would no more attend his father’s final days than he would fund a coal mine. Besides, Sean would not be caught dead in a pickup. Jericho used to have friends spread over his mountain, quiet, self-reliant men who attached themselves to the land and sported National Rifle Association decals on their bumpers. Maybe the truck belonged to an old acquaintance. But the snow lay thick on the hood, and the same instinct that had counseled Beck to hide from the helicopter proposed that the pickup truck had another significance entirely, one she had not fathomed. It was Jericho’s, and there was a reason it was not in the garage.

Never mind. Not her business.

Rebecca parked her modest rental next to Audrey’s decrepit van. Climbing out, she was struck by the silence. In the old days, Jericho
would have bounded from the house to sweep her, literally, off her feet, and pepper her with ribald jokes in four languages about her mode of transport. The house had always been boisterous, the forecourt thick with the cars of visitors who wanted his wisdom or his money or his liquor or his connections, or just to shake his hand. He would have dragged her inside and forced her into whatever party he had going, even if the party consisted of two or three cold-eyed men from the clandestine services division of the Central Intelligence Agency, discussing a project in Malaysia or Peru or Iran. That was what Jericho called them, projects, even after the men stopped coming to the house.

Her good humor began to fade. She wanted an excuse not to go inside. If Jericho was not partying, he was not Jericho. The bounding, energetic, globe-straddling man she had loved, if love was what they had shared, was upstairs suffering in a bed from which he would never rise. The house was lonely now, merely the residence of a rich but no-longer-important man, whose encroaching demise rated not even a television truck at the bottom of the hill. The attendants of his last days were few, and, although Jericho had been the epitome of the man’s man, all were female: a pair of daughters who were distant from him, and, mounting the steps, the woman who had wrecked his career.

Except that another observer was present.

As Rebecca stepped onto the gravel, noisily dragging her suitcase, her friends in the helicopter whup-whupped overhead once more, then circled back, dipping the dark nose briefly as if in salute.

(ii)

The woman who opened the heavy door was tall and slim and so pale that one might have been forgiven for thinking her the patient. She wore aged jeans and an ageless sweater, neither bearing a designer label, and pearls that didn’t need one. Her feet were bare. Her dark hair was comfortably awry. Her clear eyes were appraising. She had achieved
that ethereal beauty that attaches to certain coolly distant women from their late thirties onward after having eluded them most of their lives.

“I see you made it,” she said, in the sullen voice of one already seeking out your faults.

“Sorry I’m late. Hello, Pamela.”

“The drive from Denver’s only two and a half hours. It’s almost midnight.”

“My flight was delayed,” said Beck, already on the defensive; but, with Pamela, she always was. The two women had spoken on the phone twice over the past twenty-four hours, and, so far, Pamela had yet to concede the possibility that Rebecca might do anything right. “The storm.”

“You should have called.”

“I couldn’t get through.”

Pamela said nothing to indicate what she thought of this pitiful excuse. She had inherited from her father the effortless assurance of a person with more important things to do, and when she stepped aside her body language said she was doing Rebecca a favor.

Beck crossed the threshold. She had to hold her breath to do it. The vast space was as empty as she remembered, and as sad. The wide plank floors were ancient, and devoid of rugs, creaking with every step, because Jericho, as he used to say, wanted to hear them coming. This was what Jericho called the great room. A central fireplace dominated the space, but although logs were heaped in the grate, no fire had been lighted. The ceilings were two stories high, bordered by colorful clerestory windows salvaged from a burnt church. At human height, attractive seating arrangements stood near picture windows, but near the stairs, a handful of stout wooden chairs were scattered haphazardly, obstacles over which invaders might stumble. They looked like the same chairs from fifteen years ago, when Jericho had fired the maid for moving them.

“How is he?” said Beck, not daring to meet Pamela’s eye.

“Dying.”

“Are they sure?”

A snicker of disdain from the prim mouth. “You’re here, aren’t you? That means you’re sure.”

Rebecca moved toward the wide windows that, during the day, provided dizzying views down into the valley, but at night were bright with the wash from the floodlights Jericho required. Where there were no windows, bookshelves covered the walls, crammed with thousands of volumes, most of them hardcover and dog-eared. Jericho used to point his young lover to a shelf and command her to pull a book at random, and give him a report by the end of the week. He had loved these little games. But tonight the room pulsed with animosity. Pamela had been twenty-two and about to graduate college when her father announced that he was leaving her mother for a nineteen-year-old.

“Audrey said he was asking for me,” Rebecca said.

“He’s been asking for you for years,” said Pamela from behind her. “That never got you up here before.”

Beck said nothing. She looked up at the balustrade. She heard a door slam. She assumed that Jericho was in his old suite, commanding the magnificent views suitable to a man of his station. In the Rockies, if you angled your windows just right, the mountains went on forever, and his windows were angled right. Her own, smaller suite had been next door, but she spent most nights in his.

“Rebecca?” said Pamela. “Hello?”

Still Beck did not speak. She stood very still. She did not want to go up there. She wanted to be back home in Alexandria with Nina and their cat, Tom Terrific. She wanted to be back at the office, listening to Pfister’s rants while pretending not to be as smart as he. At this moment, she would even rather be down in Florida, sitting across the living room from her poisonous mother, soaking up the gospel according to Nancy Grace. Anything to avoid seeing Jericho again. Not because he had wrecked her life: after all, she had wrecked his, too.

No.

Beck was beset by the same emotion that had flattened her yesterday, when she got the call. Jericho was supposed to be immortal. His distant presence, not just in her memory but here in his mountain fastness,
had formed the background of her adult life. They might never again be lovers, but a world where he did not exist seemed unimaginable.