He punched in her number, forgetting Hawk Elliott.
"Hello?" The voice seemed small and faraway.
"Lori, this is Burke. Are you all right?"
"Burke, did you hear?" She seemed to be sobbing softly.
"I heard. Look, I'm at National. I just got back. I'll grab a cab and get over there as fast as I can. Is anyone with you?"
"No, I haven't… please come over."
Burke claimed his bag, grabbed the camera case and rushed out to the taxi stand. He gave the driver Lori's address and sat back in the darkness. With Washington cabbies mentioning rush wasn’t necessary. They only operated at one speed, breakneck. He watched the lights flash by as they sped up the George Washington Parkway. Everything was changed now from the way it had been two days ago when he had driven along this same route, going in the opposite direction with Lori. Maybe Elliott was wrong. Cam might still live. He had to.
By the time Burke arrived at the fashionable condominium complex, he found a completely different person from the voice on the phone. There were no more tears. She was calm, efficient, organized. He would have been shocked except that he recalled Cam's description of how she had stood by him like a trouper after her mother's death.
"Thanks for coming, Burke," she said. "I'm afraid I had just been rather overwhelmed by the news when you called."
"Did you talk to Hawk Elliott?"
"No. I had an urgent-sounding message from Kingsley Marshall on my answering machine. When I returned his call, he told me what had happened. He said Dad was in critical condition. I've already called for reservations. We can get a flight out at six in the morning." She looked up at him through troubled eyes. "You did want to go?"
“Absolutely.” He had been told to forget Jabberwock, which was fine with him. But Cam Quinn was in a hospital in critical condition. He felt that both Cam and Lori needed his moral support. "I've been worried sick about Cam all the way from Tel Aviv. I started to head to Hong Kong from there, but they had no flights for several hours.”
"You've already been traveling a full night. You must be exhausted. I have a spare bedroom you can use. It won't be too long, though, before we'll have to head back to National Airport."
Chapter 23
Burke and Lori enjoyed the privacy of their own two-seat row on the left aisle of the crowded 747. They had caught a direct flight out of San Francisco, and as the big jet streaked westward, Lori questioned him about his FBI career, a subject he had barely mentioned at dinner the previous Friday. After weighing his options, Burke decided to tell her the full story. He related all the details, distressing as well as favorable, as he had done for Cam earlier. The Goon Squad episode, how it had sabotaged his marriage, the abortive effort to infiltrate the mob and its agonizing aftermath. He also recounted his adventures, and sometimes hilarious misadventures, in concert with Cameron Quinn.
"Now you know all about my checkered past," he said finally. "It's your turn for show and tell. I'd like to know what you did during those years with the Agency. Cam said you had used your work as a writer and a travel agent as cover. That meant you were out in the cold, didn't it? No diplomatic immunity."
"That's true. But I wasn't in all that much danger most of the time."
"I'm a little surprised Cam didn't try to talk you out of following in his footsteps," Burke said.
"He did when he found out," she said with a grin. "It was a little late by then, though."
"You signed on without his knowledge?"
She nodded. "One of his old colleagues, a close friend from over the years, was chief of the Soviet/East Europe Division when I was at Wisconsin. He was in the Madison area on business and came by to see me. That was in January of my senior year. In those days, when somebody invited you out to lunch at a nice restaurant, you didn't hesitate. Anything to get away from campus for awhile. Anyway, he asked what my plans were after graduation, if I was interested in working for a newspaper. Of course, I said I was. He knew I was fluent in French, and he asked if I would like to work in Paris. That hooked me. It didn't matter that I would have a few non-journalistic duties now and then, or that I'd have to go through a CIA training program first. I was primed for adventure."
"Did he get you the job?"
"He set it up. He knew the right people."
A smiling flight attendant stopped with a drink cart. Burke chose coffee and Lori took a Coke. When she moved on, Burke looked back at his seatmate.
"When did Cam find out?"
"At graduation. By then they had already done my background investigation, and I had a reporting date for processing."
"What did he say?"
She laughed. "What could he say? I knew he worked for the Agency, but I didn't know what he did. He told me intelligence work wasn't the glamour thing the movies tried to make of it. He said much of the time it could be as boring as any other job. But on occasion it could become as dangerous as anything you could think of. He just wanted to make sure I knew what I was getting into."
"Did you find it that way?"
"What way?"
"Boring."
She shrugged. "Oh, sure. A lot of the time. A lot of what I did at first was like an extension of my newspaper work. I just dug a little deeper into the facts than normally."
"I got the impression from some things you said before that it wasn't all that boring."
Lori sat in the window seat and gazed out at the billowing clouds that floated below like piles of foamy white suds on an invisible sea. How right he was. There had been many times when she wondered what had led her to choose a job like that, one where at any moment you might find yourself caught out on a limb with one of the bad guys wielding a saw. She was convinced that only her thorough training, the support of her Agency colleagues, and her Dad's timely advice had brought her through.
"That's why I cautioned you about being prepared for anything," she said. "I guess the hairiest operation I got involved in was my last one. I was working for the travel agency then. I had taken a tour group to Czechoslovakia and Hungary when I received instructions from my Agency contact to get an important Soviet scientist out of Budapest. Seems he wanted to defect, but Langley strongly suspected that most of the local station's assets had been compromised. They thought I could get him out with my tour group."
Burke frowned. "Did something go wrong?"
"Everything went wrong." She gave him a pained look. "He was to slip away in the midst of a conference he was attending. I had a French passport for him. I bought a couple of suitcases and filled them with men's clothing to serve as his luggage. I put his new name on the tags and added them to the group's baggage on the morning we were to leave."
"You were going to pass him as one of the tourists?"
"That was the plan. But when I took a taxi to the agreed upon meeting spot near the conference hotel, he didn't show. I waited as long as I could, then rushed back to my hotel. I found him there, hiding behind a large potted plant in the lobby."
Burke grinned. "What was his problem?"
She smiled, too. "It sounds amusing now, but believe me, it wasn't then. When he was leaving the meeting, he bumped into his KGB escort. He was resourceful, though. Told the guy he was looking for a place to buy some pain medicine. Claimed he had a terrible headache and was going to his room to lie down. The escort obligingly gave him a couple of pills. He took the elevator to his floor, then walked down the stairs and out the back way. It was past our rendezvous time, and he was afraid I wouldn't wait for him, so he had taken another cab to my hotel."