“We’ve got to use her,” Fielding continued. His eyes sunk closed. Bill opened his eyes. “We’ve got to mislead the coup plotters, or the Chinese, or whoever it is that she’s talking to in order to find out who they are. Who killed Vice President Sobo. We’ve got to use her father, too. As we sit here right now, we know nothing. They could be moving against you even as we speak. They could be moments away from ripping the Constitution to shreds and killing you, Mr. President. Now is not the time for compassion or half measures.”
Bill stared out across the Oval Office with an unfocused gaze. “ ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party,’ ” he mumbled before wincing. With his eyes still pinched closed, he said, “I’m setting her up to commit a crime — while under government observation — for which the punishment would be death.”
“Her crime has already been committed, Mr. President. But if you want, I can get with Justice and maybe avoid the death penalty. But there are political considerations to taking that step. There are other traitors — collaborators in occupied territory — with whom we’ll one day have to deal. If you give special treatment to Dr. Leffler, it’s bound to come back at you in the political arena. But I think, maybe, there’s a way to handle that, too.”
Bill was too drained to ask the ever-capable Fielding how. He silently assented with yet another nod. Fielding went on and on about operational details and plans. Security. Staffing. Procedures. He extracted a legal document from his valise, and Bill signed the authorization for the CIA to conduct surveillance inside the White House. It was the same authorization that he had so angrily denied Hamilton Asher’s FBI. Through it all, only one thought echoed through Bill’s mind. All the women that I love betray me.
“Mr. President?” Fielding asked softly, but insistently.
“Hm?” Bill replied, confused momentarily before looking up at the man.
“I was saying, sir, that she mustn’t suspect a thing. There must be no change that would alert Dr. Leffler to the fact that she’s under suspicion. There should be no change in your routine whatsoever. Do you understand? Do you understand how important that is, Mr. President?”
Bill’s gaze had sunk to the man’s tie as Bill drifted with the current of Fielding’s words. Bill blinked, drew a deep breath, and looked Fielding in the eye. Bill nodded his agreement to the plan.
The lights were out when Bill entered his bedroom. He threw his clothes on the back of a chair and climbed into bed wearing his underwear. The bed was warm.
Clarissa rolled against his side. She was naked. Her skin was smooth and warm against him. She smelled of some fragrance. Not perfume, but skin and hair.
She climbed on top of him and began to move against him.
“Merry Christmas,” she whispered.
It took her diligent efforts before their lovemaking could begin. They each ended in shattering ecstasy. In their guilt there was illicit excitement.
Stephie watched trees streak by the truck through the tailgate and through a flapping tear in the canvas at the front. Everybody was on the move. The highways were jammed. The entire army was heading in one direction.
“Washington, DC,” announced the green road sign on an overpass, “32 miles.”
The good life at brigade headquarters had ended hours before. Trucks had arrived unexpectedly. Stephie had assumed that brigade HQ was moving again. But Animal had snapped from where he stood peering inside the back of a truck, “Everybody pack yer shit!”
The trucks hadn’t been empty. Haggard, grimy troops had climbed down from the tailgates. An exhausted John Burns stood staring at Stephie from a distance. Neither said a word as Stephie’s Third Platoon began to gather their gear just ahead of a rippling chain reaction of sergeants’ barks, but Stephie never took her eyes off John.
His silence was how she learned that what was coming was bad.
Everyone but Stephie was sound asleep as their truck rolled through northern Virginia. Stephie could never fall asleep on the road. It took a sense of security she had never possessed.
Suddenly, the truck’s brakes began a long, low moan that rose to a high-pitched whine as the convoy pulled to a stop. In the silence, the roused soldiers jammed into the back heard the steady crackle of rifle fire.
For an instant Stephie was back in Alabama in the early days of the war, fleeing the ever-closing Chinese noose. She turned on her radio and instantly heard Animal’s voice.
“…hell’s goin’ on?” he demanded, angry and agitated. “Did they cut the fuckin’ road?”
John Burns pulled open the canvas at the tailgate. Stephie smiled reflexively.
Then the president of the United States stepped up to John’s side.
He was surrounded by a tight cluster of Secret Service agents. Soldiers from nearby trucks peered out at the sight. The half of Stephie’s platoon crammed into the truck with her wore stunned looks. Stephie climbed down and stood before her father, peering up at him without saying anything until they hugged. He wrapped his arms around her body armor and pulled her tight. She held her rifle by the front grip and hugged him back. She felt the rifle sway slightly in her hand behind her father’s back as a Secret Service agent ensured that the safety was on.
“Let’s go sit somewhere,” Bill Baker said, “so we can talk.”
She followed him up a hill that rose from the highway and quickly spotted the source of the steady small-arms fire. A farmer’s field on the opposite side of the highway had been turned into a noisy, impromptu rifle range. Soldiers lay prone behind rifles and machine guns laying waste to stationary paper targets at the absurdly close range of 100 meters. An NCO passed out single magazines to men and women who waited in line for spots at the range. A civilian woman followed the NCO with Styrofoam cups of coffee and small biscuits. Some of the waiting soldiers wore fatigues covered in the grease of some vehicle on which they had been working. Others wore aprons still stained with the contents of huge vats in which they had cooked first mess. Still others wore scrubs bloodied in some overworked surgical unit. All of the rear-area troops, however, wore helmets and combat webbing.
This is it, Stephie thought, feeling a frisson of fear shoot through her veins.
Her father put his arm around her shoulder. She looked up and found him watching her intently. He squeezed her to his side, and, it appeared, he almost began to cry before he turned away and they headed on.
Agents fanned out through the trees ahead of them. Stephie carried her rifle, as always, but it was unneeded inside the thick cordon of security. They sat beneath a tree on the hillside above the highway. The rest of the 41st Infantry Division gawked as they passed Charlie Company’s small section of vehicles that had halted on the side of the road beside Marine One.
They crested the hill and stopped beside a rock outcropping in the relative quiet of the opposite slope. She rested her weapon against the mossy stone. Agents formed a 360-degree cordon but kept their distance. The rifle reports from the roadside — like the fighting they portended — seemed both comfortably far and dangerously near. Her father didn’t take his eyes off Stephie, who removed her helmet and combed her bangs with her fingertips. He laughed when she looked up cross-eyed at the thin locks on her forehead. She gave up and returned her helmet to her head with a frown.