Three Jack McClure Missions Box Set (15 page)

Normally, she loved these functions; they allowed her to feel senatorial—and now presidential—all on her own without feeling like Edward’s elbow. But these days, she was so preoccupied with thoughts of Alli that the luncheons, fund-raisers, photo ops … these days what an effort it was to keep her smile intact, the tasks that usually filled her with joy dragged by like a ragged filmstrip.
What a useless process life is,
she thought as the armored limo sped her crosstown, traffic peeling away, pedestrians peering briefly, wondering which member of the government was passing by.
Without Alli, my life is without purpose.

In desperation, she pulled out her cell phone, dialed an overseas number. Checking her watch, she calculated it would be just after dinnertime in Umbria. Blue shadows would have already fallen over the olive groves, the ancient stone house would be lit by warm light and the smells of tomato sauce and roasted meat would have permeated the thick-walled rooms. Perhaps music would be playing softly.

“Hi, Mom,” she said when the familiar voice answered. “Yes, I’m fine, everything’s fine. Of course, Alli misses you, too.”

She listened for some time to the melodious drone. Not that she was uninterested in what was fresh in the market that day or the old
man who pressed their olives into fragrant green oil, the one who was teaching her to speak like an Umbrian. It was simply that her parents’ world seemed so far away, so carefree it was almost criminal. She felt suddenly older than her own mother, who continued rabbiting on about this year’s oil, the
cinghiale
they’d eaten for dinner, the series of paintings her father was completing.

Suddenly, she realized that this was no respite. As long as Alli was missing, there was no respite for her. She could run herself ragged with daily tasks, mindless work, but it wouldn’t change reality one iota. The nightmare descended on her once again, roosting on her shoulder like a vulture.

“I’ve got to go now, Mom.” She almost choked on her emotions, had to bite back the words that threatened to keep tumbling out:
Mom, Alli’s been abducted. We don’t know whether she’s alive or dead.
“Our love to you and to Dad.”

She snapped the phone shut, bit down on it until the metal showed the marks of her small white teeth.

“On that note, maybe we should talk about Emma, your best friend,” Ronnie Kray said. “Our mutual acquaintance.” He slipped a photo out of the file, held it up for Alli to see. It was a snapshot, slightly grainy, of two girls walking across the Langley Fields campus. “Recognize the two of you? You and Emma McClure.”

Alli, staring at the photograph, remembered the moment: It was October 1, just after noon. She remembered what they were talking about. How could she forget! Seeing that intimate moment preserved, knowing that she and Emma had been spied upon gave her the willies. Then it hit her like a ton of bricks: The surveillance had been going on a long, long time. Someone—maybe the man facing her—had wormed himself into her bed, under her skin, wrapped himself around her bones, lying out of sight while she, unknowing, went about her life. She had to fight the queasy churning of her stomach.
Having read both
1984
and
Brave New World,
having her own life so tightly controlled, she was under the impression that she knew the meaning of intrusion. But this invasion was monstrous, Big Brother on steroids.

“I told Emma about Bark.” Her mind was racing so fast, she grew dizzy, even more disoriented. “Emma told you?”

“Did she? What do you think?”

“What do I think?” she echoed stupidly. She felt as if she were in an elevator whose cable had been cut, was now in free fall. “I knew her. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t.”

He cocked his head. “May I ask what might seem an impertinent question? What in the world were you doing slumming? Emma McClure wasn’t from your socioeconomic class. She was rough-and-tumble, from the wrong side of the tracks, as we said back in the day. Not your kind at all.”

Alli’s eyes blazed. “That just shows how much you
don’t
know!”

His face hardened like a fist. “I thought we were friends. I was even thinking of untying you, despite the danger it would put me in. But now …”

“Please untie me. I’m sorry I talked to you that way.” Her cresting fear made her voice quaver like a glass about to shatter. “I’ll never do it again, if only you’ll untie me.”

He shook his head.

The pain congealed with outrage into an intolerable barb inside her. “You can’t treat me like this! My father will move heaven and earth to find me!”

Abruptly, Kray took out surgical pliers. Alli thought she was going to pass out. What was he planning to do to her? She’d seen plenty of films filled with scenes of torture. She tried to remember what happened in those scenes, but her mind was blind with panic. Her terror mounted to unbearable heights.

She watched him stand up. She was shaking now, couldn’t take her
eyes off the pliers, which, glowing, swung in a short arc, back and forth. Then, without any warning, Kray disappeared into the blackness.

Alli couldn’t believe it, but she actually began to weep. She tried to stop, but her body wouldn’t obey. Some animal part of her nervous system had been activated. What she was feeling she could neither believe nor abide: She wanted him back. The feeling was so powerful, it was as physical as the pliers.

He was her only connection to the outside world, to life. “Don’t leave me alone!” she wailed. “I don’t care what you do to me, I’ll
never
tell you about Emma,” she said through her tears.

“Quite the little loyalist, aren’t you?” His voice came from the darkness. “No matter. As it happens, I already know all I need to know about Emma McClure.”

She felt a wave of nausea as her terror ratcheted up.

“No, no! Please!”

She wanted to shrink into the chair, to disappear like him, but she remained in the cone of light. She hung her head, the blood pounding in her temples.

“What is it?” Kray said, his voice suddenly soft. “I’m a reasonable man. Tell me.”

She shook her head. Her fear clouded her eyes.

Kray stepped into the light. “Alli, please speak to me.” His features took on a rueful cast. “It’s not my fault. You forced me to frighten you. I didn’t want to, believe me.”

For a moment, utter stillness held her in its grip; then she began to weep, her breath fluttering like a spent leaf. “I need … I need to go to the bathroom.”

Kray expelled a tender laugh. “Why didn’t you say so?”

He unstrapped her from the chair, and she whimpered.

“There,” he said.

She stared at him, wide-eyed, so stunned, her brain refused to function.

He brought over a bedpan.

“This can’t be happening,” she said more to herself than to him. “I won’t.” She was sobbing and begging all at once. “I
can’t.”

He stood in front of her, arms crossed like a corrections officer, detached, observant, his smoke-colored eyes on hers.

“Please!”
she begged. “Don’t look. Please, please, please turn away. I’ll be good, I promise.”

Slowly, he turned his back on her.

Stillness overcame her then, as her mind tried to accommodate. But it was so hard. Each time she thought she had a handle on her new reality, it turned upside down: good was evil, kindness was pain, black was white. She felt dizzy, alone, isolated. Terror crept into her bones, freezing the marrow. But, oh, her bladder would burst unless she peed, peed right now! But she couldn’t.

“Emma didn’t tell you a thing.” She was trembling, the muscles in her thighs jumping wildly. “How do you know about me and Bark?”

“I’ll tell you, Alli, because I like you. I want you to trust me. I know because there was a microphone in your dorm room. When you confessed to Emma, you were also confessing to me.”

Alli closed her eyes. At last, head bowed, shivering, she let go, the sound like rain spattering a tin roof.

14

The POTUS and Secretary Paull sat together in the backseat of the president’s heavily armored limo on the way from the White House to where Air Force One was waiting to take the president and his small party to Moscow to meet with the Russian president, Yukin. In the briefcase that straddled the president’s knees was the Black File Paull had provided, proof that Yukin’s handpicked head of the state-owned RussOil was his still-active ex-KGB assassin.

The president could have taken Marine One, his helicopter, to the airfield but with its privacy shield between the passenger compartment and the driver, the limo provided absolute privacy, something with which the president, in the waning weeks of his Administration, had become obsessed.

“This abduction business,” the president said, “how is it progressing?”

“We’re following every lead,” Paull said noncommittally.

“Ach, Dennis, let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?” The president stared out the bulletproof smoked-glass window. “We’ve been blessed with a bit of great good luck. This business, unfortunate as it may be
for the Carsons—and God knows every day I pray for that young woman’s safe release—has provided us with the excuse we need to excise the missionary secularists—
all
of them.” He turned back, his eyes burning with the fire of the devout. “What I want to know is why hasn’t that already happened?”

“The president-elect’s agent—Jack McClure—has been following a very promising lead.”

“Well, you see, Dennis, now you’ve just put your finger on the nub of the problem.”

Paull shook his head. “I don’t understand, sir,” he said, though he was quite certain he was reading the president all too well.

“It appears to me that Jack McClure is gumming up the works.”

“Sir, I believe he’s on to a lead that could bring us Alli Carson’s abductor. I was under the impression that our first priority was her safe return.”

“Have you forgotten our previous discussion, Dennis? Give the order to Hugh Garner, and let’s get on with it. By the time I return from Moscow, I want the First American Secular Revivalists in custody. Then I’ll address the nation with the evidence he’ll have trumped up from his FSB security force.”

“I’ll inform Garner as soon as you board your flight, sir,” Paull said with a heavy heart. He wondered how he was going to finesse this ugly—and quite illegal—situation the president had dropped into his lap. At the moment, he saw no alternative to turning Garner loose on the FASR, but he held out hope that if he insisted that Jack McClure assist in the operation, the president-elect’s man could find a way to mitigate the damage. Of course, that would put McClure squarely in everyone’s line of fire. He’d take the heat if he got in Garner’s face, but that couldn’t be helped. Agents in the field were designed to deal with whatever heat was thrown at them. Besides, McClure was expendable; Paull’s agent in the Secret Service wasn’t.

During the secretary’s ruminations, the limo had arrived at Andrews
Air Force Base. Paull, who had been debating all morning whether or not to bring up an extremely delicate subject, finally made his decision as the presidential limo rolled to a stop on the tarmac twelve yards from the near-side wing of Air Force One.

“Sir, before you leave, I have a duty to inform you …”

“Yes?” The president’s bright, freshly scrubbed face seemed blank, his thoughts already thousands of miles away in bleak, snow-driven Moscow. He was, no doubt, licking his chops at the prospect of putting Yukin in his place.

“Nightwing missed his last rendezvous.” Nightwing was the government’s most productive deep-cover asset.

“When was that scheduled for?” the president snapped.

“Ten days ago,” Paull replied just as crisply.

“Dennis, why on earth are you telling me this moments before I leave for Moscow?”

“He missed his backup dates four days ago and yesterday, sir. I felt it prudent not to bother you before this, hoping that Nightwing would surface. He hasn’t.”

“Frankly, Dennis, with your plate so full, I don’t understand why you’re even bothering with this.”

“Assets are a tricky lot, sir. We ask them to do a lot of dodgy things—wet work. There’s a certain psychology to people who kill without remorse. They tend to think of themselves as the center of the universe. This is what makes them successful, it’s what keeps them going. But I’ve seen it happen before—every once in a while some developmental aspect becomes arrested. Their urge to be someone—to be special, to become known—overrides their self-discipline.”

“What is this, psychology one-oh-one?” the president said testily.

“Sir, I want to make my position clear. When an asset’s self-discipline disappears, he becomes nothing more than a serial killer.”

The president’s hand was on the door handle. His expression revealed that he already had one foot on Russian soil. “I’m quite certain
that isn’t the case with Nightwing. My goodness, he’s been an invaluable asset for upwards of thirty years now. Nothing’s changed, I assure you. Stop jumping at shadows. I’m quite certain there’s a good reason for his silence.” He smiled reassuringly. “Concentrate on the missionary secularists. Let Nightwing take care of himself.”

“The trouble with the president’s suggestion,” Paull said, “is that no asset—even one as productive and, therefore, sacrosanct as Nightwing—should be allowed to be so independent. In my opinion, that’s a recipe for lawlessness and, ultimately, the corruption of basic moral principles.”

“The president came to see me.” Some wavering spark inside Louise’s mind had roused her from her stupor. “Isn’t that nice?”

“Very nice, darling.”

Paull sat with his wife on the glassed-in porch of the facility where she lived. He could feel the radiant heat coming up through the flagstone floor.

“Daddy,” she said, “where am I?”

“Home, darling.” Paull squeezed her hand. “You’re home.”

At this, Louise smiled blankly, lapsed back into her mysterious inner world. Paull stared at her face. The dementia had not dimmed a beauty that still made his heart ache. But now there was this glass wall between them, this horrifying divide he could not bridge no matter how hard he tried. She was as lost to him as she was to herself. He couldn’t bear the thought, and so as he’d done before, he’d come and talk to her as if she were the close confidante she never could have been when she’d been young and vibrant. He had of necessity shut her out of his work life; now, to fashion his time with her into a memory he could take back with him into the real world, he spoke his mind to her.