Last Snow (8 page)

She shivered, as if from an intimate memory. Then she turned her head again, abruptly nervous once more. “Shouldn’t we have taken off by now?”

At that moment, an aide came down the aisle toward them.

“I’m sorry for the delay, Mr. McClure,” he said, “but there’s someone who requires a word with you.”

These aides of Carson’s were always so proper, so formal, Jack thought, or perhaps that was just the way things were with any presidential staff, where deference and protocol were a way of life.

Annika looked alarmed. “Who—?”

“Relax,” Jack said as he rose. “Whatever it is, I’ll take care of it.”

He was heading forward toward the door when Naomi Wilde, the head of Lyn Carson’s Secret Service detail, stepped smartly into the cabin.

Damnit
, Jack thought,
what the hell is she doing here? Has something happened to the First Lady?

Wilde was smiling, though in an embarrassed fashion, as if she’d screwed the pooch in some way she couldn’t mend. This was odd, because Naomi Wilde was a take-charge agent, a woman who was
superbly trained. She had confidence enough for her entire team, but now she had the look of a fish on a riverbank, a woman who finds herself in a situation for which she has no answer or, rather, only one answer, which is not to her liking. She was breathing air when she should be breathing water.

“Sorry about holding you up, Mr. McClure,” she said, “but as you’ll see I had no choice.” She stepped fully into the cabin as if impelled, and someone brushed by her as if she didn’t exist or was of no further use.

At once, Jack understood Wilde’s state of extreme discomfort. He thought,
Oh, Christ, no
, because he was staring into the grinning face of Alli Carson, the First Daughter.

“H
I
, J
ACK
, surprised to see me?” Alli said as soon as she stepped into the cabin.

Jack was staring at Naomi Wilde, who winced at the look, then resignedly shrugged her shoulders. It was astonishing how Alli could reduce people like Wilde—professional, superbly trained, loyal, and brave—to Silly Putty. This was her particular genius; in the interval after the inauguration and its immediate aftermath, she had learned to use her fragile mental state to get whatever she wanted. Take me out of school to go to Russia? Okay. Let me hang out with Jack instead of you and Mom? All right, honey. Jack could only imagine the conversation between Lyn and her daughter this time. Had she threatened to run away, a mental fugue state, a bout of depression so serious she might spiral down into suicide? All these possible symptoms of what she had been through had been meticulously explained to her by the doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists at Bethesda, the medical facility where presidents and their families were treated.
Obviously, she had absorbed the details, so that she could wield them like weapons on the field of her family battle. Edward had said that she had begun acting out again. God only knew what her real mental state was.

Regaining his composure, Jack stepped in front of Wilde so as to block her view of Annika. The last thing he needed was to answer awkward questions about who she was and why she was here and the fact that she hadn’t been vetted.

“What the hell is she doing here?”

Wilde again winced visibly as she said, “She’s going with you.”

“What? She can’t. It’s not secure.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Mr. McClure.”

Just then, Jack’s cell phone rang.

“You’d better take the call,” Naomi Wilde said. “It’s the FLOTUS.” She meant the First Lady of the United States.

Jack put his cell to his ear with some trepidation. Alli’s expressed preference to be with Jack had caused some friction between him and Lyn Carson. What he expected now was a severe dressing down, culminating in a stern order to send her daughter back with Wilde.

“Hello, Jack.” Lyn’s voice was cool in his ear.

“Ma’am, if I may, Alli can’t come with me,” he said. “It’s out of the question.”

“Good luck with that.” Wilde gave a brief nod toward Alli. “I’ll wait outside, Mr. McClure. I won’t leave until you escort her to the limo or you take off.”

“I’m afraid neither of us have a choice, Jack,” Lyn Carson said. “Much as I hate to admit it, she’s better off with you.”

“Edward would never allow—”

“Edward’s not here,” the First Lady’s curt voice cut in. “He’s in the air on the way back to the States, he doesn’t have to deal with his daughter or her threats to slip her guards and lose herself in the Moscow streets. Can you imagine what a nightmare that would be? And
you know better than most why I don’t dare keep her under lock and key.”

“But Mrs. Carson, you can’t expect me to take her now.”

“I can and I do. Listen to me, Jack. I know we’ve had our differences, and maybe I’ve never told you how much I appreciate everything you’ve done—and are doing—for my daughter. But tonight I’m asking you to keep her safe. I have important state functions I need to attend over the next week. I don’t want to be at any of them, but I have no choice, it’s my job now and I have to do it. The same goes for you.

“Need I repeat that Alli has threatened to ‘go off the reservation,’ as she colorfully puts it. You know her, Jack, she doesn’t make idle threats. The American press has been on her like flies ever since the . . . incident at the inauguration; they’ll ask too many awkward questions and when she doesn’t appear at the functions with me the Internet blogosphere will go ballistic.”

Jack turned to see Alli walking down the aisle toward where Annika sat, swiveled around to face her.

“Jack is married. He told you that, didn’t he?” she said to Annika.

“The subject never came up,” Annika said. “Not that it matters.”

“No?” Alli eyed her with one eyebrow arched. “I’d have thought otherwise. You look like you’re ready to jump into the sack with the man who’s standing closest.”

Jack, feeling desperate, said, “Lyn, this is a very bad idea.”

“If you have a better one, let’s hear it,” she said.

“Jump into the sack?” Annika repeated in confusion.

“Fuck,” Alli said. “You understand the word ‘fuck,’ don’t you?”

“Okay, okay.” Jack felt boxed in by both Alli’s impetuosity and her mother’s inability to control her. “She stays with me.”

“Thank you, Jack. I won’t forget this kindness.”

“It’s hardly a kindness when—” But he was already talking to dead air. Snapping shut the phone he hurried back down the aisle.

Annika smiled placidly into Alli’s scowling face and said, “Jack McClure, who is this delightful imp?”

Without hesitation, Jack said, “She’s my surrogate daughter.”

This sentence, spoken to a person Alli didn’t know, had the same effect as Aladdin rubbing the grime off the magician’s lamp. The real Alli, or rather the Alli Jack knew in their quiet, private moments together, appeared like a genie with the power to charm whoever laid eyes on her.

“My name’s Alli. Jack’s my father,” Alli said, taking off her midnight blue parka and plopping herself down on the seat across from Annika.

“I’m Annika.” She held out a hand, which Alli took briefly.

She looked Annika over critically, analytically, as if she were Anna Wintour interviewing a potential assistant. “But, really, you
are
thinking of him as a fuck puppet, aren’t you?”

Annika appeared not to have taken offense at any of Alli’s deliberate provocations. Not yet, anyway. “What makes you say that?”

“Look at you, I’d get a nosebleed in those fuck-me pumps. Look how you’re dressed with the tops of your boobs popping out, look how you’re made up with lips and nails the color of blood. And, my God, you smell like a well-used whorehouse.”

“My friend and I were going clubbing,” Annika said mildly.

Alli leaned across the aisle and leered at her. “Oh, yeah, that explains it.”

“You know, I think this is your problem, not mine,” Annika said. “You’re acting like a jealous lover.”

Alli recoiled as if bitten, which, in a sense, she had been. “What the fuck?”

“Yes, you have the best of both worlds. You have a father who isn’t really your father.” Annika pressed her advantage in a way that, though not quite cruel, led Jack to believe that in fact she had been stung, or at the very least had been made to feel that she had entered
a field of battle. “It’s okay to have a crush on this man, isn’t it? To have fantasies about him, sexual and otherwise.”

“You don’t know me at all,” Alli said as stiffly as a soldier addresses his superior.

“On the contrary,” Annika replied, relentless, “I know you quite well. Unlike Mr. McClure, your real father is a constant shadow looming over you. You prefer to think of him as an impostor, even while you crave his approval and his love.”

“Hello, ladies,” Jack said, stepping between them, both literally and figuratively, “getting to know one another?”

“Fuck no,” Alli said, standing up. “She’s a stone-cold psycho.”

Jack put his hand on her shoulder. “Sit down, Alli, we have some things to talk about.”

“Mr. McClure,” Annika said with a certain urgency, “it would be prudent to leave, don’t you think?”

“In a moment,” Jack said as soothingly as he could. “This situation has to be straightened out before we can take off.”

“What situation?” Alli said. “Let’s go. I’m ready, the psycho-bitch is ready, what’s the problem?”

“You,” Jack said. “You’re not going with us.”

Alli crossed her arms over her breasts. “Oh, but I am.”

“Alli, be reasonable—”

“Not my strong suit.”

Despite himself Jack allowed his anger to spill over. “Don’t play the damaged girl card with me.”

“I
am
damaged. You know that better than anyone else.”

“You’re too smart to be damaged in the way your doctors and your parents fear.” Jack stared her down; someone had to be the alpha dog, otherwise things would remain out of control. “You know it and I know it, so let’s cut the bullshit. You know the rules. Whatever mind games you play with other people you don’t play with me.”

She broke off the staring contest and gazed down at the floor.
“I’m dying back in that hotel room, Jack.” Her voice had shrunk to the size of a grain of sand. “I can’t go back. Please, I’m begging you.”

“Where I’m going is too dangerous—”

“Not too dangerous to take the psycho-bitch, is it?” she said acidly.

“Apples and oranges,” Jack said sternly. “Alli, set your mind to it, you’re going back. I can’t let anything bad happen to you.”

She rose again, facing him, her face imploring. “But, don’t you get it, if I stay one more night in that hotel room something bad
will
happen to me. I’m not kidding, no bullshit.”

Jack hesitated, which was when Annika made a tactical mistake.

“Surely you don’t believe her, Mr. McClure,” she said. “You’re not seriously considering letting her stay on board.”

Alli remained silent, which was the smartest thing she could have done. In fact, thinking about it afterward, Jack suspected that she had played him and Annika perfectly. She knew how to get what she wanted in all kinds of weather, the heavier the better. At the moment, however, he was otherwise occupied. He knew her well, better than her parents and certainly better than her doctors, whom she delighted in tricking. The desperation in her eyes was genuine. He’d seen it before when he’d rescued her from the house where Morgan Herr had kept her imprisoned.

That look—the desperation—was utterly naked, unbridled, elemental, a world unto itself, and as such it had the ability to stop time, or, in a less fanciful description, to make the past manifest itself in the present. With that look she and Jack were hurtled back in time to the moment when he’d rescued her, when danger was as palpable a presence as a hand on the throat or the plucking of a sleeve from out of a nighttime crowd. There was an understanding between them that at that moment nothing was safe, nothing was certain, that all around them lay peril and the gaping unknown. There is no more powerful situation in which to forge true intimacy, a bond that cannot, or perhaps more accurately will not, be broken.

Which was why Jack now turned to the waiting aide and said, “Close the door and let’s get under way.”

Alli didn’t look at Annika, she didn’t gloat as she might well have done. Instead, she kissed Jack chastely on the cheek and murmured, “Thank you,” in his ear, before returning to her seat and strapping herself in.

“Don’t make me regret what I’ve done,” he said in return, but in truth part of him was already regretting it. He was ready to ignore his promise to the First Lady. Even as they began to taxi out onto the runway he felt the urge to call the aide over, tell him to stop the plane. As he took a seat, he told himself that Wilde must have already departed in the limo, but whether this thought was a form of consolation in order to lessen the burden of guilt that was already beginning to weigh on him or an actual fact he never found out because he quite deliberately kept himself from looking out the window to see if, in fact, the limo had left and, with it, his other option. He’d made his choice, now he’d have to live with it.