“Jesus, you guys look awful,” he said.
Jake helped Nick back to his feet. “How nice of you to notice. Diplomacy is still your specialty, I see.”
Nick wanted to laugh-to lighten the moment-but he couldn’t. “Seriously, Jake, are you all right?”
Jake’s look said it alclass="underline" Are you nuts? “It’s been a tough fourteen years.”
“And who’s this?” Nick nodded toward the boy.
“This is our son, Travis,” Jake said proudly. “And our fourteen years don’t hold a candle to his last two days. He didn’t know about any of this.”
Travis offered a boyish, uncomfortable smile and extended his hand, just as he’d always been instructed.
“Nice to meet you, Travis.”
The boy nodded, then took his hand back and chased a rock with his sneaker.
The sound of tires crunching gravel startled them all, but when Jake saw no aggressive movement from Thorne, he relaxed.
“That’s the same car and driver who brought me here,” Nick explained.
As the green Chevy pulled closer, Thorne waved to the driver, who slowed to a stop. The two of them chatted for a while through the window. When Thorne came up for air, he strolled over to Carolyn.
“Okay, Sunshine,” he said. “I’ve got to go now. Mr. Sinclair wants me to keep a low profile. I’ll leave the Caddy here for you to use.”
“You can’t go!” Travis said. “You’re…” He shrank away from Thorne’s piercing glare.
“Everything you asked for should already be in the room. Mr. Sinclair said he’d take care of all the other details, whatever they are. Just be sure to be back at the airport on time tonight.” He delivered his entire speech to Carolyn, as if no one else was even there.
“Thanks, Thorne,” Carolyn said with a smile. She offered him her hand, but he looked confused. “And thank Uncle Harry for me, too.”
Suddenly, Thorne looked like he’d run out of words. He grasped her hand quickly, scowled, and disappeared.
“Well, you certainly have a way with criminal types,” Nick said after Thorne had climbed into the car.
“Stop calling him that!” Carolyn barked. “I owe that man a lot.”
Conversation stopped as everyone watched the Chevy leave. When it was gone, Carolyn abruptly shifted gears again. “So are we going to be able to pull this thing off or not?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Bonnie Jerome checked her watch. She’d skipped lunch to be ready for Frankel’s return call, and now here it was nearly two, and her stomach was ready to consume itself.
To hell with him, she told herself. If Mr. Important didn’t have the common decency to return a simple phone call, then she wasn’t going to wait around all day. What was it about the executive mind-set, she wondered, that made them think people had nothing better to do than wait for them to bestow their precious attention?
The really irritating part was, she didn’t even care about the damn call. It was probably some computer glitch, anyway. With her luck, when Frankel finally rang back, she’d get an earful of just how important he was and how he didn’t have time for petty issues like this. That was certainly the impression she’d gotten from his secretary when Bonnie refused to pass along the substance of the message.
“I’m cleared for everything,” the secretary had pointed out.
“Not according to the message,” Bonnie countered, after which the conversation had ended abruptly.
Maybe she should just call and get it over with; just leave a message with the secretary and get on with her day. Much as she hated to admit it, the prospect of talking to the heir apparent for the directorship had Bonnie a bit frazzled. All things considered, she’d be just as comfortable…
The phone rang, nearly launching her through the ceiling. It had been like this all day. Every time the phone chirped, she’d assumed it was The Man, only to find it was business as usual.
Don’t seem overly anxious, she told herself
The phone rang again. Bonnie hovered her hand over the receiver until it just started into its third ring. “Information Systems,” she said, picking up. “This is Bonnie Jerome.”
“Hold for Deputy Director Frankel, please.” She recognized the secretary’s voice from that morning, and she found herself on hold before she could say a word.
Here we go.
An abrupt click, and he was there. “Hello, Ms. Jerome, this is Deputy Director Frankel. I understand you have a message to relay to me?”
It was him! She recognized his voice from all of the training videos she’d watched and from his appearances on television.
“Um, h-hello, Mr. Frankel,” she stammered. “Th-thanks for getting back to me.”
“What is it you needed?” Suddenly his tone was flat; all business.
“Well, I work down in Information Systems. Actually, I’m a supervisor down here…”
“I know who you are, Ms. Jerome,” Frankel interrupted. “This really is a very busy day. If you could get to the point?”
How does he know who I am? Bonnie’s mind screamed. “Yes, sir. Well, overnight, we got notice that someone over at EPA had accessed a file that was apparently under surveillance at one time…”
“A file?” Where once there had been only annoyance in Frankel’s tone, she heard a trace of interest.
“Yes, sir. A computer file. On a place called Newark, Arkansas?”
“Yes.” The word came fast and hard, as if shot from a nail gun.
“You’ve heard of it, then?” she asked.
“Heard of it! Good God, Jerome, do you live in a cave?”
Whoops! Clearly, she’d revealed her ignorance. At FBI headquarters, everyone assumed that everyone else watched the news and read the newspapers. She struggled on: “In any case, the warning attached to the file said you were to be notified immediately if anyone accessed it. Of course, I nearly didn’t bother you, since the access came from inside EPA…”
“Do you have a name?” Frankel interrupted.
The question caught her off balance. “Well, y-yes, sir. I’m Bonnie Jerome, in Infor-”
“Not you!” Frankel boomed. “The person accessing the file! Do you have a name on who accessed it?”
Bonnie jumped at the sound of his voice and inexplicably felt like crying. Why did he have to yell like that? She fumbled through the printout, looking for the name. It was always in the header, buried among the lines of seemingly meaningless text, yet she always had trouble finding it. “Here it is,” she announced. “Shows up as a Nicholas Thomas.”
She could hear Frankel whisper the name to himself, as if tasting the words. “ Nick Thomas?”
Bonnie shrugged. Like he could see the gesture through the phone. “I suppose so,” she said, but her words were wasted on an empty line.
Melissa Thomas was up to her elbows-literally-in clay when the phone rang. This was the first of her Christmas orders-for a rich museum patron in Los Angeles-and if she didn’t get started on them soon, she’d be giving back a lot of money to a lot of very disappointed people. When she’d first thought of mailing out a catalog of her works, never in a million years did she think she’d get this kind of response.
“Lauren, can you get that, honey?” she called out to her five-year-old. “Tell them Mommy can’t come to the phone.” The thunder of footsteps sufficed as a delighted “yes.”
Now, of course, Nick was off on some dead-end job interview, so not only did she have to fulfill all the orders but she also had to mold, fire, paint, and glaze five pots a day just to make the mailing deadline. It was doable, but a royal pain without a little help.
Melissa heard Lauren pick up the receiver and listened as she ran through the standard street-smart dialogue. “I’m sorry, she can’t come to the phone,” the little voice said, bringing a smile to her mother’s face.
Kneading the clay was therapeutic, created a ruminative state. If Nick could just move away from the past, this marriage could actually survive. But if he thinks, even for one minute, that I’m moving to Arkansas…