His guest arrived on time and was announced. One of the guards met her at the elevator and escorted her to the suite. Wilson met her at the door with a rose. It made her smile. The rose seemed to disappear.
They ate caviar on toast tips. They drank champagne. They stood close on the balcony and looked out at the White House. They did not say much. She seemed content just to be there, and he was delighted to have her. As a distant church bell sounded midnight, they went quickly from the balcony to the authentic Hepplewhite mahogany settee to the bedroom.
The woman blew out the candles on the dresser, set her purse on the night table, and pushed him back on the king-size bed. She was as assertive as she was beautiful. Wilson understood that, and he went along with it. To succeed in her business, at her age, took confidence. She was showing that now.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“Just lie there,” she replied as she settled on top of him.
He looked up at her and smiled. She moved her fingers down his arms and pushed them to his side. She placed her knees in his open palms and dragged her long nails across his chest, along the side of his neck, his scalp. Her toned body moved in excited spasms, like a whip. Shining through the window, the lights of Lafayette Park showed Wilson occasional flashes of cheekbone and shoulder.
Lady lightning, Wilson thought. With thunder rolling from deep inside her.
Champagne always brought out the Byron in him. Wilson was about to share his little metaphor aloud when his companion suddenly leaned across his chest and pulled a large, full pillow from behind him. She dragged it across his face and then leaned into it, hard.
“Hey!” Wilson shouted. He repeated the cry but lacked the breath to say more. He shut his eyes and closed his mouth and tried to push up with his head. His neck cramped painfully, and he stopped.
Wilson’s hands were pinned by the woman’s knees. He struggled unsuccessfully to raise them while he wriggled helplessly from side to side. He screamed into the pillow, hoping his bodyguards would hear him. If they did, he did not hear them. He heard nothing but bedsprings laughing beneath his head, his heart punching up against his throat, and his own thick wheezing as he fought to draw breath. His hands throbbed and the flesh of his belly and thighs burned where it rubbed hers. The pillow was wet with perspiration and saliva.
This is a game, Wilson thought hopefully as rusty circles filled the insides of his eyelids. This is what turns her on.
If it was, he did not approve. But he did not dwell on that. His thoughts were not his own. Wilson’s head filled with visual doggerel, images that came from other times and places.
And then, suddenly, the slide show stopped. His face cooled, his mouth opened wide, and his lungs filled with sweet air. He opened his eyes and saw the woman. She was still perched above him, a slightly darker silhouette than the ceiling above. His eyes were misty with sweat. They smeared the woman as she bent close. The park lights sparked off something else, something in her hands. He tried to raise his arms to push her back, but they were still pinned. He couldn’t speak or scream, because he was still desperately sucking air through his wide-open mouth.
She moved closer and put the palm of her left hand against the bottom of his nose. She pushed up.
“What—?” was all he could say as his head arched back. He cried out weakly, but he sounded like a pig calling for dinner.
Or a man having sex, he thought. Christ. The bodyguards would not come, even if they heard him.
A moment after that, Wilson felt a cool sting in his mouth. He felt the weight of the woman leave him. He saw her get up. But that did not help. Within moments a cold, tingling numbness moved down from his ears along the sides of his neck. It filled his shoulders and arms and poured across his chest like an overturned bucket of ice. It tickled his navel and rolled down his legs.
This time there were no mental images, no struggle. The lights, and his lungs, simply snapped off.
THREE
Op-Center was officially known as the National Crisis Management Center. That was what it said on the charter, on the small brass sign beside the front door, and on the badge Paul Hood had just swiped through the lock to enter the lobby. Which was why Hood felt a little schizophrenic when he arrived and there was no crisis. He felt paradoxically relaxed and anxious.
Roughly half of the seventy-eight employees at Op-Center were dedicated to intelligence gathering and analysis. The other half handled crises that were imminent or had already gone “active,” as they euphemistically described rebellions, hostage situations, terrorism, and other crises. When half the team was idle, Hood worried that someone on the Hill would notice. The intelligence community could learn something from Congress. With nothing more than newspapers, gossip, and intuition, they profiled people and agencies with eerie accuracy. After that came the auto-da-fé. After that, people who once moved through the corridors of power became consultants. Hanging out the shingle saved face. What they really were was unemployed.
Hood did not know what he would do if the Inquisition came for him. Ironically, he knew how to stop it. Prior to joining Op-Center, Paul Hood was a two-term mayor of Los Angeles. He got to know a lot of people in the movie industry, and he learned that many of them were extraneous. If they did not find fault with perfectly fine scripts, there would be no reason for them to be employed. The United States military had somewhat the same mentality. Military intelligence financed “cheerleaders,” as they called them. These were both indigenous and undercover teams that fomented conflict around the globe. “Counterfeit mobilization,” they called it. A world at peace did not need increased military spending. And a downsized military would not be prepared to handle a real war when it arose.
There was some sense to the Department of Defense policy. However, counterfeit mobilization only worked one way for intelligence agencies. You had to pick a foreign national, frame him, and have your guys smoke him out. As much as he hated the sense of entitlement diplomatic plates gave diplomatic personnel, Hood had a problem with that. First, it tied up personnel from watching for real spies and saboteurs. Second, it could begin a pattern of escalation abroad until you actually turned allies into enemies. Third, it was wrong. It was not fashionable in Washington, but Hood believed in the Ten Commandments. He did not always keep them, but he tried. And bearing false witness was one of the You shall nots.
Hood greeted the guard, used his card to access the elevator, then descended one level to the heart of the National Crisis Management Center. There, Hood passed windowless offices that were set off a circular corridor of stainless steel. He reached his own wood-paneled office, near the back. He was greeted by his assistant, “Bugs” Benet, who sat in a small cubicle located to the right of the door. The young man was busy at the computer, logging the reports of the evening crew.
“Morning,” Hood said. “Anything?”
“Quiet,” Benet replied.
Hood already knew that, more or less. If there had been any kind of significant development, nighttime director Curt Hardaway or his deputy Bill Abram would have notified him.
“Did you hear about William Wilson?” Benet asked.
“Yes,” Hood replied. “It was on the radio.”
“Heart attack at thirty-one,” Benet said.