He craned his neck and shouted, “Clarissa!” repeatedly. Finally at a turn in the hallway he caught sight of her. A single Secret Service agent with his machine pistol drawn waited while Clarissa bent over double and vomited onto the Oriental rug.
The air was cool, but the smoke from the last dawn attack had cleared, and the sun had burned through the haze and was now warm on Stephie’s neck, arms, and feet. She sat atop the stinking hulk of a Chinese tank they had destroyed the night before. The river flowed around the treads with a gentle trickle. Her socks were laid out on the armor, which was still warm from the conflagration that had consumed it. Her combat boots, which had been soaked while wading out to inspect the kill, were unlaced and peeled back to dry. She had removed her helmet from her matted hair and itchy scalp.
She was studying a newspaper she’d bummed off a medevac pilot but only had time to scan in the hectic minutes after the fight. When they had hoisted Sergeant Chambers into the chopper’s well equipped medical bay, she had seen the picture of Marine One’s wreckage lying in a heap on the South Lawn on the folded paper pressed against the Plexiglas canopy. She now read the article under the banner headline that dominated the front page of the Washington Post: “Vice President of United States Assassinated.” Underneath, the subheadline read, “President Baker Was Assassins’ Likely Target.”
According to the article, Stephie’s father and his lover had been saved by a last second change of plans. A news analysis down the center of the page cautioned not to assume automatically that the murderers were Chinese. Its author remarked that rumors of coups had abounded in Washington for weeks, which was the first that Stephie had heard of it.
She was shocked. A coup? she thought in disbelief. A coup!
Stephie looked up from her paper to confirm that their now veteran platoon was busy policing the battlefield. They fished Chinese rifles from the water where they had been dropped. They pried the pistol grips of machine guns from their dead crewmen’s hands. They climbed over armored fighting vehicles and unscrewed mounts atop which sat 12.7 mm heavy guns and automatic grenade launchers, stripping vehicles of their weapons. But because they knew they would be falling back, the Americans left the Chinese bodies for the Chinese to bury.
She returned to her newspaper. The FBI was going to lead the investigation.
“You should put your helmet back on,” John Burns said.
Stephie looked down at him as he waded through the shallow water from the nearby bank. “Where’s Becky?” Stephie asked.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever asked that question,” John replied. “I don’t know where she is. At company HQ, I suppose. Put your helmet on.”
Stephie held her hand up to the quiet horizon. “We sent patrols three miles south of here. I don’t hear anything.” The water trickled around the treads.
“Is that tank clear?” John asked.
“I haven’t checked it yet,” Stephie replied.
“Don’t you think you should before you set up camp and take a break from the war?”
Stephie angrily put the newspaper down and rested her rifle atop it like a paperweight. She yanked a flashlight off her webbing and peered inside the hatch. Everything was charred black and thick with ashes. Three shapes generally in the form of humans sat upright around the breach of the main gun. Their features were melted, burned, and carbonized.
“All clear!” Stephie yelled at John as she grabbed her paint can and sprayed a large, white X on its turret. She then settled down to read the newspaper again.
John climbed up onto the tank and sat beside her. “What’s gotten into you?” he asked.
“I should ask you the same fucking question,” Stephie replied without raising her eyes from the article.
John was silent for a long enough time that Stephie’s eyes wandered over at him surreptitiously. He was staring at a box on the lower lefthand corner of the front page. In it were listed the names of the vice president, her aides, the Marine flight crew, and the Secret Service agents who were killed in the assassination. It was the same box that he had scrutinized when she had first looked over the paper, and he fell into the same funk as before.
Their eyes met. Their faces were close. “Don’t worry,” John said, “your father will be okay.”
“Yeah, well, there’s talk in here about a coup.”
“He’s a helluva lot safer than you are,” John replied, and he put Stephie’s helmet on her head.
She kissed him — again surprising him — and began to pull her now dry socks on her feet.
“You’ve got to be careful, Dad!” Stephie’s warning echoed through Bill’s head. “Don’t go anywhere!” she had said urgently from the small window on his computer. “It’s too risky. Stay in the White House. Double your guard. Triple it! And don’t trust anybody. Treat everybody like they’re out to get you, because somebody sure is.”
Bill knew Clarissa was awake even before he entered his bedroom. He could see light under the door. But he still turned the doorknob carefully, soundlessly.
Clarissa half sat, half lay in bed with both hands clutching the comforter to her chin and her head on an upturned pillow. She looked at Bill with only her eyes, which arched once in a greeting that was joined by a perfunctory wave with the fingers of one hand. Her toes pedaled hyperactively under the covers.
“How are you doing?” Bill asked.
“Fine,” she said a little too quickly. She had been waiting up for him and was wide awake.
He began to undress in silence. He lay his cuff links in a small saucer on the dresser and looked into the mirror. She was staring at him.
Bill turned to Clarissa. “Are you all right?”
“Sure!” she said without a trace of sarcasm. Her toes wiggled nonstop. The shadows from the lamp on the nightstand that her body cast moved rhythmically with the blanket, dramatizing the slight evidence of her anxiety.
There were some papers lying on top of a manila envelope on the night stand under the lamp. Bill hadn’t noticed them before. Wearing only the trousers from his suit, he wandered over to Clarissa and kissed her on the lips. There was no passion in the formality.
“What are those?” he asked, nodding at the papers as he sat beside her.
“Oh, a subpoena,” she said as if at the minor irritant.
Bill snatched up the stapled papers. She was being summoned to appear at the District Court for the District of Columbia to give testimony. At the top was the uninformative style of the case: In re the United States of America. The only things that appeared the least bit informative were a passing citation to the National Secrecy Act and a full-blown Miranda rights warning on the second page.
“What is this?” Bill asked.
“I don’t know!” she blurted out, looking stricken.
Bill wrapped his arms around her, and she dissolved into tears. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry,” he repeated in a calm, soothing voice. “Don’t worry, Clarissa.”
Her sobbing subsided, and she slumped back against her pillow.
He rose and finished undressing. Again, he felt her gaze boring into his back. When he climbed into bed beside her, she still sat in exactly the same position that he’d found her in. And her toes still pedaled up and down. Up and down. He looked at her, and she reacted as if she were forgetting something and quickly reached for and turned off the lamp.