Wu nodded.
“If you really want her returned home safely,” Han persisted, “if that’s your ‘thing,’ then I can help, but you’ve got to trust me.” Han’s pitch hung in midair. Wu stared back at him. “I’m your father. You should trust me,” Han said, breaking into a calculated, self-confident smile.
But the smile faded when Wu abruptly brushed past Han for the door, which Wu slammed in his father’s face.
Clarissa found her father sitting alone in a park where she had played as a child. He didn’t notice her approach as he mumbled aloud to himself. His conversation was animated. The public display of his rapidly advancing senility pained her greatly.
When the old man realized that his daughter was close, he was startled. She smiled at him as she would at an infirm. It was a smile meant to ease his passage through this difficult period of his life, but it appeared to do him no good. He was pale. His bleary eyes were bloodshot. His back under thick clothing was rounded and permanently humped.
Clarissa, by contrast, was young, slim and straight. She drew a deep breath and said, “Do you remember when we used to come here?” She sat on the strap seat of a child’s swing opposite her father. She began to sway, propelled gently by her toes. “You met Mom and me here once, do you remember?”
From the faraway look on his face, she assumed that he hadn’t heard her, but then he nodded. Far from easing his worries, her remark seemed to have agitated and upset him. His face looked stricken. “You were wearing a…” he began, but the words were choked off. He swallowed. “…a yellow dress. It tied in the back. It was one of those things. Those… What do you call them?”
“A sundress, Dad,” she supplied in a soft voice.
“You were eight,” he said. She thought he would start crying. He was in far worse condition than she had realized. The war must be taking a toll. Or is it something else? she wondered.
Clarissa crunched across the smooth gravel to join her father and put a hand on his shoulder. “Has the coup been called off?” Clarissa asked in a low voice. Tom Leffler’s face shot up as he looked at her in sudden alarm. His eyes went from riveted focus to darting and shifting evasion. As he became overwrought, she became defensive. “When you asked me to meet you here,” she said, gushing words, “I thought, surely now, after we won the Battle of Washington, there’s no need for a nuclear strike!”
The old man acted as if he were nodding off to sleep. His eyes sank nearly closed. His lips moved, but no sound came out. She realized that he was praying.
“Dad,” she said quietly, but with urgency, “talk to me.” She sat beside him and took his gloved hands in hers. “Concentrate,” she exhorted. He opened his eyes and looked at her, and his lips still moved, but said nothing intelligible. “If you’re telling me,” she continued, filling the silence, “that they’re still going forward with the coup, then we’ve got to stop it. I’llstop it if I have to!”
“Gotta go,” her father said, rising abruptly.
The child sensed the extreme danger from the behavior of her parent. Clarissa felt a prickly, unpleasant sensation as she rose from the bench. She tried to act normal, but her eyes were drawn to the long rows of dark windows at the nearby elementary school, to the ice-covered cars and vans parked along the sleepy residential street. Something was wrong. She could feel it.
“Okay,” Clarissa whispered, her eyes darting about in search of the threat. She turned to leave, but her father surprised her by reaching out and grabbing her face in both hands. He pressed his lips against her forehead and held her. Awkwardly, Clarissa hugged his rounded back. As the kiss turned into a father’s hug, she could’ve sworn she heard him mumble, “Forgive me, Beth.”
Clarissa jammed her eyes shut and squeezed him tight. The closer Tom Leffler came to death’s door, the closer he drew to his wife.
She broke the clench. “Let’s talk tonight,” Clarissa said, and then marched toward her car. There was no one anywhere. No movement. Nothing. Maybe it was just an old man’s frail nerves. In her father’s current condition, she couldn’t really tell. Maybe he was imagining things. Remembering things from long ago. Maybe the coup had already been called off. Ofcourse it had! We had stopped the Chinese! For the very first time! Somehow, Bill had managed both to defend Philadelphia from invasion and Washington from attack. He was a genius. A savior. Everyone must see that now. History certainly would.
By the time she started her car and pulled away, she was elated. Her last sight of her father, however, elicited sickening pity again. He still stood where she had left him. Head bowed. Baffled. Clueless. Unable even to make the simplest decisions or take the most basic acts.
After Clarissa drove away, Tom Leffler stumbled toward the unmarked van at the service entrance of the elementary school. He raised his gloved fist to knock, and the doors burst open. Agents sprang outside, grabbed the old man under each arm, and roughly pulled him inside. The thin daylight was extinguished with the slamming doors.
“No death penalty!” Tom yelled at the top of his lungs as they stripped the wires from the lining of his overcoat. They were rough with him. Tom was shocked. He stared up at the banks of cameras focused intently upon his park bench. “I’ll tell you everything,” he bellowed, “but Clarissa gets a plea!” Handcuffs were slapped on his wrists. He repeated his mantra in a loud voice, each word clear and forceful. “No-death-penalty-for-Clarissa!”
“That’s the deal,” confirmed Richard Fielding, director of the CIA.
Bill’s head lay on arms crossed on the historic desktop. He heard the door open, and he debated lifting the heavy weight to see who it was.
“Mr. President?” came the familiar voice of Richard Fielding.
Oh, he thought, that. With the greatest of effort, Bill looked up at the director, who again unzipped a locked valise. The door behind Fielding, Bill confirmed, was closed. “Is it true?” Bill asked. “Is Clarissa…?”.
He couldn’t speak the words, but Fielding clearly could. “Yes, sir. She’s part of the ongoing coup attempt.” He extracted a single sheet of paper that he held suspended in air. Bill glanced at the short paragraph printed on it. “But that’s not why I’m here, Mr. President.”
Bill screwed up his face in confusion. The printout, now extended to him, obviously held the explanation.
Bill reached for it, but couldn’t take it into his hands. He saw Stephanie’s name in the body of the paragraph. His fingers, just inches away, couldn’t find the edge of the paper. Fielding guided the sheet into Bill’s hand. The page shook like a leaf in the wind. Bill seized it with both hands, but still it shook as if he were palsied.
Arching his eyes wide and blinking to clear them, he took a deep breath and read what he expected to be the report that he had long feared. “Roberts, Stephanie, Lieutenant, U.S. Army, was confirmed killed in action…”
To: The President of the United States of America.
From: General Sheng, Commander, Eleventh Army Group (North).
Subject: Prisoner Exchange.
Under the provisions of the Geneva Convention, I propose an exchange of prisoners at the Highway 301 bridge across the Potomac River at noon on December 31. The Chinese army will deliver into U.S. custody ten thousand American prisoners of war, including Second Lieutenant Stephanie Roberts. In exchange, we demand that the president of the United States surrender himself into Chinese custody for trial on charges of crimes against humanity. If this offer is not accepted by 1700 hours today, you will be tried in absentia and Second Lieutenant Stephanie Roberts will suffer your punishment.