Allende was wearing a filmy black negligee. Pacino became aware that he was only wearing underwear. He sat up straighter in bed and looked at his phone to find out the time, but he couldn’t find it. He found his old, scratched Rolex Submariner and put it on. It read 3:40, barely more than a half hour since he’d awakened in the room in the middle of a dream. He shook the Rolex. The watch had been stopping during the night lately. He needed to have it sent out to be cleaned and overhauled, but it seemed he never had time to visit the jewelers and get that taken care of. Plus, he thought, he hated relinquishing control of the watch. It had belonged to his father before the old man had gone down with Stingray under the polar icecap, the unwitting target of a rogue Soviet submarine captain. Before that run, his father had turned the watch in for its month-long overhaul. Two months later, the jeweler had called the house, wondering why Commander Anthony Pacino hadn’t picked up his Rolex. Time was funny, Pacino thought. The day he was told about his father dying seemed more recent than the day he himself sank in the same ocean, two decades later.
“It’s three-forty in the morning, Patch,” Allende said, her voice soft and gentle.
“Is there news?” he asked, rubbing his eyes.
She nodded. “I won’t know what the news is until we’re in a secure room. Let’s head back to the Situation Room.”
Pacino rubbed his head. It felt like an anvil had fallen on it.
“My guys got you some fresh suits and shirts,” Allende said, “and, of course, underthings. We’ll keep them here until this crisis is over. Just leave yesterday’s clothes here, I’ll have them dry-cleaned and laundered for you. Why don’t you take a quick shower before we go in? There’s a robe on the back of your bathroom door.”
Pacino shook his head, but that made the headache worse. He opened the bathroom door of the room and walked under the water long enough to get clean, toweled off, shaved, brushed his teeth with a new toothbrush Allende left for him, combed his hair and left it wet, then went back to the guestroom, found the clothes hanging for him, also provided by Allende, and got dressed. Downstairs, in the kitchen, Allende was dressed in a different outfit, this one a business suit, but she looked as alluring as she had several hours ago. Either that, or he was just seeing her through a different lens. She swept her shining auburn hair off her shoulder and looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read. It occurred to him that there was something on her mind.
He climbed into her long, low-slung black Jaguar for the drive to the White House.
“So,” she said. “I couldn’t help but notice.”
“What’s that?” Pacino asked.
“You’re not wearing your wedding ring. I don’t mean to intrude, Patch, if you want to keep that private.”
“It’s okay,” Pacino sighed. “It’s about Anthony, my son. His stepmother, my wife, Colleen, was there on the rescue ship when they pulled him out of the deep submergence rig of the Piranha. I couldn’t be the one to be there — I was at sea trying to hunt down the drone that sank Piranha. Colleen was there when they pronounced Anthony clinically dead. And she was there when he came back. Seeing all that changed her. It made her crack somehow, made her fragile. She just couldn’t tolerate the idea of him being in harm’s way again after all that. They always had a strong bond until, just before his Annapolis graduation, he announced he would be joining the submarine force. Then things went to hell fast. Colleen, like Anthony’s biological mother, lost her mind at the idea that Anthony would be back aboard a nuclear fast attack sub. It was her worst nightmare. Colleen wouldn’t even go to Anthony’s girlfriend’s funeral, she was so furious.”
“Wait a minute,” Allende said, stopping at a nonsensical red traffic light, since they were the only car on the road and it was before four in the morning. “Didn’t you and Colleen, quote, meet cute, unquote? Didn’t you rush into a burning torpedo room to rescue her? Saved her skin, quite literally?”
Pacino pursed his lips. “We met in the shipyard months before that happened, and it may as well have happened a thousand years ago, at least to Colleen. Anyway, she blamed me that Anthony made his choice. She and Anthony’s mother both. They insist that he’s trying to get my approval somehow. Like he doesn’t already have it, for God’s sake. The day Anthony made his career announcement, Colleen moved out of our bedroom into the spare room. She stopped speaking to me that day. She still spoke to him, trying to get him to change his mind, but Anthony was set on being a submariner. Then, the day he set foot on the hull of the USS Vermont, Colleen moved out of the house. I haven’t seen or heard from her since then, but for the divorce papers her attorney served me with.”
“Oh my God, Patch, I’m so sorry that happened to you,” Allende said, shooting him a quick empathetic look, taking her hand and briefly touching his forearm. “If it’s any comfort, I think she’s wrong. I think your son has enough character to choose his own path. I mean, I don’t know him, but I watched him volunteer for the Panther boarding party. You just don’t get any gutsier than that. There’s no force on earth that would keep that kid out of a submarine. Colleen’s being an unfair bitch. You deserve so much more from your woman.”
“Thanks, Margo. But this will be my second divorce. I figure you’re only allowed to have one of those in your life. One is forgivable. Two? If that’s not an indication of a major character flaw, I don’t know what is.”
“Oh hell, Patch, I’ve been divorced twice. So has Carlucci. So has Admiral Rand. So has my operations director, Angel Menendez. All it means is that life is long, people grow and change, and compatibility changes with them. The man who was perfect for me when I was twenty-five was the opposite of what I wanted and needed five years later. Ditto the man I fell in love with when I was thirty, who made no sense at all when I was forty. Both were good guys. Both still are. But neither one rang my bell after a few years. But I’ll tell you this — you talk to my exes. Both will testify on a stack of bibles that Margaret Isabelle Allende knows how to take care of her man. They were both crushed that I wanted out.”
“Ten years,” Pacino mused. “Maybe that’s all we can expect from a modern relationship. All the wear and tear of adult life — adults like us, anyway — what romance can stand up to that?”
“Maybe you’re right, Patch. But still, that’s no reason we can’t seek the companionship of the opposite sex. Romance and love — and sexual attraction — are real, even if they don’t last forever.”
“We could debate that all night,” Pacino said.
Allende laughed and glanced at him with an arch look. “Maybe we should.”
Interesting, Pacino thought, how her voice had sounded on that last sentence. An invitation, perhaps. Not that he felt up to taking advantage of it. Between the anxiety over Anthony being on Panther and the devastation of losing Colleen, for whom he still had feelings, there wasn’t much left of his energy to see anyone new. He wasn’t even sure young forty-six-year-old Allende, a woman almost two decades younger, was even his type. Certainly she was gorgeous — when she wanted to be, with that beautiful figure, those big blue eyes, those apple-red lips, that alabaster complexion of hers with a sprinkling of freckles on her nose and that gleaming auburn head of hair — but still, he didn’t know whether at his age, he’d be able to keep a woman like Allende happy. And with their careers, they’d seemingly only have time to see each other during times of crisis. It would be the equivalent of a wartime romance, he thought. Eventually, he’d leave the Carlucci administration and go back to being a private citizen — a retired private citizen. And by that time, Allende would still be in the peak of her career.