She thought of the sheikling her mission had just inherited and said ruefully, "Wanna go for a ride?"
"What?"
She shrugged and drank champagne. "Probably no harm in telling you, it'll be all over the news soon enough."
He heard her out, and at the end of it said, "Hard on the rest of the astronauts waiting to be assigned to their own missions."
She was surprised at his instant comprehension, and grateful. "Exactly."
"And," he added, continuing to follow her thoughts with an accuracy that made her distinctly uneasy, "I hate taking on new crew the day I'm supposed to leave the dock. Taking on an untrained, unknown crewman on a space shuttle mission seems to me to be a thousand times more dangerous. Short of an actual sinking, there isn't a hell of a lot an inexperienced crewman can do to Munro. But to Endeavour?"
She nodded. "Yes," she said, serious, "very dangerous. You should hear the stories the other crews tell about getting stuck with a part-timer." She sipped champagne. Again, excellent, dry and crisp. She looked at him with approval. "Worst story I ever heard. His experiment broke, he had a gold medal case of space sickness, and he couldn't defecate. Seven days on orbit, this guy's constipated, puking nonstop, and his entire reason for being on board has just gone away. The CDR said he thought he was going to have to put the guy on a suicide watch."
Cal laughed before he could stop himself. "Sorry," he said. She chuckled. "No, it's okay. It is funny and they made it home in one piece." Her smile faded. "But the last thing we need on orbit is no faith in a crewmate. One of these days one of these part-timers is going to elbow the wrong switch and the mission's going to go balls up." "I see they're retiring the space shuttle," he said. "Not before I get my turn," she said, and he laughed again. "How'd you get to be captain of one of the biggest ships in the Coast Guard fleet?"
"Grew up in Massachusetts, where we spent the summers in Cape Cod in a house with its own boat dock that was never without a boat. Can't remember sailing for the first time, but it was probably before I could read." He smiled, reminiscent. His mother loved sailing, too. Aside from the fact that his father was (a) loaded, (b) Beacon Hill aristocracy, and (c) on his way to becoming a U.S. senator for the first time, that he owned his own sailboat was probably why she had married him. It was the one uncontested point of reference between mother and child. He shook his head and smiled at the woman next to him, admiring the sight of toned muscle beneath smooth skin as her bathrobe slid from her shoulder, revealing the curve of one breast. She saw him watching, and didn't pull her robe closed. "Any day I get a ride on a boat is a good day for me," he said. "It's all I ever wanted."
She nodded, understanding without question. "All I ever wanted to do was fly."
The sun had faded completely into the west. The glow of lights from the Miami skyline was subsumed by a star-covered sky. There were faint sounds of traffic from the street below. "Married?" he said, much more idly than he felt.
"Wouldn't be here if I was."
Her answer was firm and she met his eyes straight on. She meant it. He nodded. "Understood. Me, either. Ever really listen to those vows?"
" 'For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health'?"
" 'Forsaking all others, so long as you both shall live'?"
They shivered in unison. "Very scary," he said. "Nope, I'm a practicing coward. Never had the guts."
"I heard that," she said. "And, you know, the job."
"And the job," he said. He put down his glass and reached out to brush her hair out of her eyes. It was short and silky, and her eyes were big and brown with laugh lines gathering at the corners. He slipped one hand behind her head and pulled her into a kiss while the other untied her robe and slipped inside to explore.
She pulled back and said a little breathlessly, "Possibly we should go back inside."
His eyes were very blue, their pupils a little enlarged, the corners crinkling as he answered her smile with his own. "Possibly we should."
They were in less of a hurry this time-they even made it to the bed- and the result was even more satisfactory.
The next morning he said, trying not to invest the question with anything more than a casual interest, "You get down to Florida a lot?"
She said, trying not to look as pleased as she felt, "You get to Houston much?"
"There are ways," he said.
"Yes," she said, "there are."
5
WASHINGTON, D.C., NOVEMBER 2006
In spite of Patrick's best efforts, it hadn't taken long before Khalid's version of Kallendorf's all! new! and improved! plan for agency operations was setting off ring tones and melting down blogs all over Washington. Well, nothing Patrick could do about that, or about the fact that three months later Khalid was exiled to the U.S. Embassy in Tajikistan.
Patrick had spent the year since collating and culling information on terrorist activities foreign and domestic, real, planned, anticipated, and suspected, trying to match events to perpetrators, and failing signally. He wasn't dismayed, or even disappointed. Such was the nature of intel on prospective guerilla warfare actions that too much of it was gleaned after the fact. The forces arrayed against al Qaeda and all its offspring were oftentimes too slow to recognize a threat. When at last it was recognized, action was all too often stifled in a welter of interagency and international rivalries and protocols, not to mention the occasional ripe diplomatic snafu.
He spent as much time as he could justify collecting data on Isa. Something about the shadowy figure-the ballsy name, perhaps? the Baghdad bombing, which had been the very model of the modern urban terrorist attack?-had captured his imagination. He was determined to gain on this man, and he would spare no energy, no agency resource until he had his hand on Isa's shoulder.
His wife had divorced him two years before. They'd been unable to have children, and he'd signed over the house so he didn't even have a lawn to mow. It had been pretty bloodless, all things considered, a marriage contracted in the fumes of a college lust that faded soon after graduation, leaving behind a civility that over time chilled into indifference. He was grateful that she'd had the courage to make the break, and they were both relieved when it was over. She had already remarried, relieving him of any guilt or anxiety over how she was getting along. There was nothing to distract him from the job at hand. Truth to tell, he'd always been more interested in it than in his marriage.
One day, when he'd assimilated as much information as he could hold, he told his assistant that he wasn't in and closed the door on her disapproving but unsurprised face. With movements that had become ritual, he sat, carefully unbuttoning the jacket of his three-piece bespoke suit, swiveled his desk chair to face the window, propped his feet up on the windowsill, folded his hands over the incipient potbelly that didn't worry him as much as the hairline which appeared to be in full retreat from his forehead, both aging him beyond his forty-two years, and regarded the well-polished toes of his black wingtips with a contemplative frown.