After a brief rustle of fabric as she settled down under the covers, there was no other sound but the toes working up and down. Up and down. She obviously remained wide awake.
He reached out to comfort her, and she immediately rolled on top of him. Kissing his face, and forehead, and eyes. Kissing him with her open mouth and moving — hungrily — against his body.
They had waited until the moon had dwindled to at least a quarter crescent and the weather seemed reasonably clear. Hart had wired his weapons cache to blow before striking out for free America. The Green Beret, the unemployed waitress, the teenager with a crush on Hart, and the young boy to whom Hart was a hero left the drunk husband and father standing mute in the doorway. His cursing had ended hours before and given way, by degrees, to pitiful pleas for his family to stay. But the tiny group was resolute and tightly bound in the face of the man’s relentless desperation. The man’s trump card — his beatings of his wife and children — had been taken by Hart six nights earlier in the kitchen.
For no one had any doubt that Hart would kill the man on the slightest provocation, and in that they had been right. Hart had had to stop Jimmy from rubbing it in. The boy had bravely stood his ground as his father had berated him for being a worthless and no good shit, knowing full well that Hart stood beside him ready to break his father’s neck if he so much as raised his hand. And it was during those tense few days of a family rending itself apart that Hart had caught Amanda looking at him. Her mother had noticed the girl’s infatuation long before Hart, a fact she’d told him with a knowing and stern glance.
The glance had been so stern, in fact, that Hart had confronted the woman in the kitchen. “Look, about Amanda…” he’d begun before faltering.
“She’s too young,” the woman had said.
“What? No-no-no! All I mean is she’s just got a crush. Jeeze, I’m thirty-one!”
“You don’t look it,” she’d replied skeptically. “You two ain’t done nothin’?”
“What? Good god, no! Jesus!”
It had been an awful conversation, and it had left a lingering and vaguely nauseating aftertaste. Amanda’s mother had departed, apparently still dissatisfied with Hart’s answer that Amanda’s frequent visits to the storm cellar had been to talk, just like Jimmy’s. And the woman had kept her eye on her daughter, who had made murderously fierce faces in reply.
The four of them now trudged over the dark hills with two weeks of supplies on their backs.
For days they had debated whether they could pass themselves off as a family, with Hart playing the father and the real mother in her original role. Amanda had bitterly, excessively, and repeatedly mocked the prospect. “Him? Married to you!” she had said, hurling more insulting laughs her mother’s way. Later, Jimmy had told Hart — in private — that Amanda had suggested to their mother that Amanda play the role of wife, and that her mother could be their grandmother.
Jimmy had laughed in recounting the shouting match that had ensued, but had then gotten to the real point of his visit. “Since, you know, we’re gonna go, like, cross-country. And you’ll be wearin’ a uniform and carryin’ a gun. I mean we won’t be tryin’ exactly to hide from ’em. Well, ya see, actually I’m a crackerjack shot with a deer rifle! Got a buck at near 350yards last year! And I’d like to take my rifle. I’d like to carry it. Loaded.” When Hart had failed to reply, the boy had hung his head in dejection. Hart hadn’t been able to see his downcast eyes. When the boy spoke again, he’d been on the verge of tears. “I feel, sorta, bad,” he had almost whispered with his voice quivering and cracking. “About runnin’ away. Leavin’ home, ya know,” his tear-rimmed eyes had looked up at Hart, “without a fight.”
Hart had explained how they weren’t spoiling for a fight. How if they were ever spotted, they would probably all die. How he carried a weapon for use only as a last resort or if their sole option required killing a sentry, hopefully silently.
When they reached the dark county road, Hart dropped his gear and rifle and climbed over a barbed wire fence. His fellow travelers handed his gear over after him. Jimmy then passed his pack to Hart and unslung the deer rifle he carried. Hart took the weapon and waited while Jimmy joined him in the ditch beside the road.
The mother came next. Hart took her pack and helped her over as the staples holding the wire to the posts began to give with croaking sounds. He offered the same assistance to Amanda, and the wire gave entirely. She collapsed into him — rocking him back a step — and never turned her face from his.
“Be careful!” her mother chastised from the darkness.
From the look on Amanda’s face Hart realized the girl — in her mind — was playing the role her mother had denied her.
“Please state your name,” the assistant U.S. attorney prompted.
“Clarissa Jane Leffler,” Clarissa answered. She sat in a dingy grand jury room facing two dozen silent accusers. Mostly old, mostly women, mostly black, they watched her impassively, their heads filled with… what? What evidence had the government put on before her appearance?
The Justice Department lawyer, who had treated Clarissa with apparent politeness on meeting her outside the grand jury room, was now chilly and correct. “And where do you currently reside?”
“Currently?” Clarissa asked. He nodded. “Well, I guess… the White House.” Most of the grand jurors found her answer cause for significant looks at one another. Was it titillation, or did it prove some significant element in the government’s case? She had met with her lawyers for days. They had no idea what facts Hamilton Asher had mustered that might possibly put her in legal jeopardy. But how could they have known? She hadn’t told them the truth.
Her reluctant inquisitor — mid-thirties, short hair, glasses, in a conservative suit with jacket buttoned — proceeded with the preliminary phase of her questioning. Date of birth, addresses of prior residence, the particulars of her education and career. He ended with her current job. “As head of the State Department’s China desk,” he asked, segueing into what could only be phase two, “do you have access to national security secrets?”
“Yes, of course,” Clarissa replied, taking time to sip from the government-supplied glass of water. “I have,” she cleared her throat, “top secret clearance.”
He nodded, conveying the impression that he was on her side. Secretly rooting for her. He turned to walk toward his table as if to get his notes, but surprised her by asking a question with his back turned. “Ms. Leffler, have you ever had an unauthorized discussion of classified military information?”
There it is, she thought. “Excuse me?” she asked, although she’d heard the question clearly. Her examiner repeated his query word for word. She cocked her head in confusion. This was her chance. He was offering her the opportunity to come clean. To bare her breast. To purge herself of the poison that had seeped into every cell of her body until she felt sickened from head to toe.
To ruin her life and her father’s life, and to spend the next however many years in prison.