She took off her jacket, sat down at the large, bare desk, and stared out the window. The weather was dry and scorching again. She wished she'd worn something cooler. The trees looked half-dead; the grass that ran off into the woods beyond the complex was scorched. She was about to scroll through her E-mail and try to put some priority into the day when the phone rang.
'Wagner,' she said firmly.
'There's a car coming for you in ten minutes. Barnside and I are going on ahead for the meeting right now. We'll see you there.'
Levine's voice sounded as flat and dry as the landscape outside the window.
'Do I need to prepare?'
It almost sounded like a laugh. 'No one's prepared for this one. Not even me. We're going to the White House. There's a long day ahead of us.'
Then the phone went dead.
Her mind went blank. There was nothing on the agenda, nothing in any of the high-priority E-mails she was now calling up, that could explain this abrupt summons. In her years with the Agency she'd never even been to the White House. It was typical too that Levine had left her in the dark.
'Bastard,' she muttered, and got up, hooked her jacket off the peg.
She leaned around the door. Maureen, her executive assistant, had just arrived and was making a pot of coffee.
'It smells great, Maureen, but you're going to have to drink it by yourself. Put all my appointments on hold until you hear back from me. Anything urgent, you can get me on the mobile.'
Maureen smiled at her. 'My, that didn't take long, now, did it?'
She didn't answer, just walked back into the office and took one last look at the empty desk. Then closed the door and walked over to the window. The vent was still dead, not pumping out an iota of cool air. She picked at it with her long, slender fingers, pried it loose, and lifted up the metal grid. There was a half-bottle of Glenfiddich sitting there, half-full. She picked it up, and thought of the hand that had put it there.
'Jesus, Belinda, I wish to God this was you and not me talking to these people. This feels like one big nightmare.'
Briefly, she considered taking a swig from the bottle — for old times' sake — but common sense prevailed and she tucked the bottle back into the vent for another day.
It was a two-minute wait outside the S&T offices in the new wing. Over at the original Agency building that dated back to 1961 she could see a long black limo pulling away, two shapes in the back. Levine and Barnside, she guessed. They could have waited if they'd wanted.
A fawn Chevrolet came up, the driver anonymous behind overlarge Ray-Bans. Helen climbed in, aware that the day was so hot and airless she was sweating and short of breath before she even hit the seat.
When the car was out of the security gates of Langley and mingling with the flow 'of traffic headed for the city, she closed her eyes and tried to picture the day ahead.
CHAPTER 11
A Kind of Love
'Slowly, Joe,' Charley Pascal gasped, breathless, feeling his hardness move too quickly inside her. 'I don't get so much any more.'
The lithe, strong shape shifted position, his pale, half-Japanese face unsmiling, distant, though she didn't like to think of that. His rigidity became more still. Charley Pascal felt this familiar rushing of the blood, the growing wetness between them, and focused on herself, the way she always did at this point in the act, wondered how different this time was from the last, if you could measure it in terms of the electricity, the moistness between their entwined, coupling bodies.
Joe Katayama was poised over her so carefully, palms down on the bed, back arched, making sure to distribute his weight away from her body just enough to slacken the pain, but not so far as to take away the sparking ecstasy that ran between them. She remembered, when this began, how she'd gently move beneath him, placing the soles of her feet on his thrusting buttocks, extemporizing with the circular motion of his bucking, rearing body.
But that was before.
The best she could do now was touch his chest gently, delicately with her hands, feel for his nipples, hard and tiny, surrounded by circlets of hair, stroke the nape of his neck, hope to taste the rime of sweat there, place her fingers in his mouth, moving in and out across the moistness of his tongue, like a mirror image of this older, larger thing that conjoined their bodies, pushing her hard into the soft white mattress, generating the tinny squeaking of springs from the old wood-framed bed.
This time, she thought, it is different. I won't come. I won't get close.
The illness was moving with such speed now, hand in glove with the events that were shaping beyond the closed wooden door of their room, elsewhere in Yasgur's Farm. The discrete shaft of time that was what remained of her life stood in front of her, dwindling by the minute, and, as it shortened, the physicality of the world diminished, putting in its place some filmy, ethereal appreciation of the subtle, peripheral parts of her existence, unseen before the illness came into her head, began to infect her body.
She closed her eyes (trying, in her mind's eye, to bring the physicality back into their fucking) and felt, somewhere inside her partner's writhing, frantic body, the distant god Gaia work its way into his blood, firing the hardness that burrowed deep inside her. There were no thoughts in her head then, just the sudden, urgent need to hold his sweating flesh, to pull him farther into herself, all the while screaming, screaming.
Joe Katayama released himself and she opened her eyes. The warmth ran between them, so copious she could feel it draining from her, feel the dampness coming through the plain cotton sheet.
She reached up with what strength she had left, took his head, forced her tongue into his mouth, tasting the strength of his life, wondering how much this sudden, unexpected shock of a climax so strange, yet so powerful, might have milked her own diminishing store of energy.
He moved slowly inside her again, hardening. She pushed him away.
'No, Joe,' she said. 'Too much for me now.'
He stared at her with his dark, expressionless, half-open eyes and it perplexed her how little she could sense of what was going on behind this flat, unsmiling face.
'You were different,' he said, in a flat Middle American voice, the echo of concern behind the monotone, trying to break through. 'Maybe you're getting better.'
'No,' she answered. 'I don't get better, Joe. We both know that. I just change. We're all changing.'
As he drew back from her, she felt this hard extension of him leave her body, and wondered at the moistness that it left behind. Not all of it was Joe's.
They lay still on the bed, silent, staring at each other, listening to the breeze outside, feeling the stain on the sheet grow to a dry deadness on their skin. After a few minutes, from somewhere close by, they heard the low, soft sound of people talking, happy, a tiny undulation of applause.
He watched her, waiting. She said nothing.
'You think something's happened,' he said finally.
'No. I know,' she said, and wished he spoke French; it would, perhaps, help break this communications block that sometimes lay so obviously between them. 'I never doubted it, Joe. We're agents. We're channels for something that is so powerful, so real it can't be stopped. It rolls forward, like night after day. Like a tide that's come to cleanse us. Can't you feel it?'