She continued to drink her champagne, all too aware that she was taking tiny, overly
dainty sips. She’d like nothing better than to take Kiki’s advice, forget about her
problems for a couple of hours, kick back, get drunk, let herself go. The only trouble was, she knew it would never happen. She was too controlled, too closed in. What I ought to
do, she thought morosely as she watched a redhead with gravity-defying breasts and hips
that seemed unattached to the rest of her, is get smashed, pull off my top, and do some
pole dancing myself. Then she laughed at the absurdity of the notion. She’d never been
that kind of person, even when it might have been age-appropriate. She had always been
the good girl-cool, calculating to the point of overanalysis. She glanced over at Kiki,
whose magnificent face was lit up not only by the colored strobe lights but also by a
fiercely experienced joy. Wasn’t the good girl’s life drained of color, of flavor? Soraya
asked herself.
This thought depressed her even more, but it was just the prelude, because a moment
later she looked up to see Rob Batt. What the what? she thought. He’d seen her, all right,
and was making a beeline right at her.
Soraya excused herself, rose, and walked in the other direction, toward the ladies’
room. Somehow Batt managed to snake his way to a position in front of her. She turned
on her heel, threaded her way around the tables. Batt, running up the waiters’ aisle from
the kitchen, caught up with her.
“Soraya, I need to talk to you.”
She shook him off, kept going, out the front door. In the parking lot she heard him
running after her. A light sleet was falling, but the wind had failed entirely, the
precipitation coming straight down, melting on her shoulders and bare head.
She didn’t know why she’d come out here; Kiki had driven them from Deron’s house,
so she had no car to get into. Maybe she’d been disgusted by the sight of a man she’d
liked and trusted, a man who’d betrayed that trust, who’d defected to the dark side, as she privately called LaValle’s NSA because she could no longer bear to utter the words
National Security Agency without feeling sick to her stomach. The NSA had come to
stand for everything that had gone wrong in America over the last number of years-the
power grabs, the sense felt by some inside the Beltway that they were entitled to do
anything and everything, laws of democracy be damned. It all boiled down to contempt,
she thought. These people were so sure they were right, they felt nothing but contempt
and perhaps even pity for those who tried to oppose them.
“Soraya, wait! Hold on!”
Batt had caught up with her.
“Get out of here,” she said, continuing to walk away.
“But I’ve got to talk to you.”
“The hell you do. We have nothing to talk about.”
“It’s a matter of national security.”
Soraya, shaking her head in disbelief, laughed bitterly and kept on walking.
“Listen, you’re my only hope. You’re the only one open enough to listen to me.”
Rolling her eyes, she turned to face him. “You’ve got some fucking nerve, Rob. Go
back and lick your new master’s boots.”
“LaValle sold me out, Soraya, you know that.” His eyes were pleading. “Listen, I
made a terrible mistake. I thought what I was doing would save CI.”
Soraya was so incredulous she almost laughed in his face. “What? You don’t expect
me to believe that.”
“I’m a product of the Old Man. I had no faith in Hart. I-”
“Don’t use the Old Man routine with me. If you really were his product you’d never
have sold us out. You’d have hung in there, become part of the solution, rather than
making the problem worse.”
“You didn’t hear Secretary Halliday, the guy’s like a goddamn force of nature. I got
sucked into his orbit. I made a mistake, okay? I admit it.”
“There’s no excuse for your loss of faith.”
Batt held up his hands, palms-outward. “You’re absolutely right, but, for God’s sake,
look at me now. I’m being thoroughly punished, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know, Rob, you tell me.”
“I have no job, no prospect of getting one, either. My friends won’t answer my calls,
and when I run into them on the street or a restaurant, they act like you did, they turn
away. My wife’s moved out and taken the kids with her.” He ran his hand through his
wet hair. “Hell, I’ve been living out of my car since it happened. I’m a mess, Soraya.
What could be a worse punishment?”
Was it a flaw in her character that her heart went out to him? Soraya wondered. But
she showed no trace of sympathy, simply stood, silent, waiting for him to continue.
“Listen to me,” he pleaded. “Listen-”
“I don’t want to listen.”
As she began to turn away again, he shoved a digital camera into her hand. “At least
take a look at these photos.”
Soraya was about to hand it back, then she figured she had nothing to lose. Batt’s
camera was on, and she pressed the REVIEW button. What she saw was a series of
surveillance photos of General Kendall.
“What the hell?” she said.
“That’s what I’ve been doing since I got canned,” Batt said. “I’ve been trying to find a
way to bring down LaValle. I figured right away that he might be too tough a nut to crack
quickly, but Kendall, well, he’s another story.”
She looked up into his face, which shone with an inner fervor she’d never seen before.
“How d’you figure that?”
“Kendall’s restless and bitter, chafing under LaValle’s yoke. He wants a bigger piece
of the action than either Halliday or LaValle is willing to give him. That desire makes
him stupid and vulnerable.”
Despite herself, she was intrigued. “What have you found out?”
“More than I could’ve hoped for.” Batt nodded at her. “Keep going.”
As Soraya continued to scroll through the photos her heart started to hammer in her
chest. She peered closer. “Is that… Good God, it’s Rodney Feir!”
Batt nodded. “He and Kendall met up at Feir’s health club, then they went to dinner,
and now they’re here.”
She looked up at him. “The two of them are here at The Glass Slipper?”
“Those are their cars.” Batt pointed. “There’s a back room. I don’t know what goes on
in there, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. General Kendall is a God-fearing family man, goes to church with his family and LaValle’s every Sunday like
clockwork. He’s very active in the church, very visible there.”
Soraya saw the light at the end of her own personal tunnel. Here was a way to get both
her and Tyrone off the hook. “Two birds with one photo shoot,” she said.
“Yeah, only trouble is how to get back there to snap ’em. It’s invitation only, I
checked.”
A slow smile spread across Soraya’s face. “Leave that to me.”
For what seemed a long time after Kendall had kicked him until he vomited, nothing
happened. But then, Tyrone had already taken note that time seemed to have slowed
down to an agonizing crawl. A minute was made up of a thousand seconds, an hour
consisted of ten thousand minutes, and a day-well, there were simply too many hours in a
day to count.
During one of the periods when his hood was taken off, he walked back and forth the
narrow width of the room, not wanting to go near the far end with its ominous
waterboarding tub.
Somewhere inside him he knew he’d lost track of time, that this slippage was part of
the process to wear him down, open him up, and turn him inside out. Moment by moment
he felt himself sliding down a slope so slick, so steep that whatever he did to try to hold on to it failed. He was falling into darkness, into a void filled only with himself.