When Maggie was offered a job at the Admissions Office at Georgetown University, Connor realised just how determined Jackson was to recruit him. He wrote to his old company commander the following day and said he would be delighted to join ‘Maryland Insurance’ as an executive trainee.
That was when the deception had begun.
A few weeks later Connor, Maggie and Tara moved to Georgetown. They found a small house on Avon Place, the deposit being covered by the Army paycheques Maggie had deposited in Connor’s account, refusing to believe he was dead.
Their only sadness during those early days in Washington was that Maggie suffered two miscarriages, and her gynaecologist advised her to accept that she could have only one child. It took a third miscarriage before Maggie finally accepted his advice.
Although they had now been married for thirty years, Maggie was still able to arouse Connor simply by smiling and running her hand down his back. He knew that when he walked out of customs and saw her waiting for him in the arrivals hall, it would be as if it was for the first time. He smiled at the thought that she would have been at the airport for at least an hour before the plane was scheduled to land.
His case appeared in front of him. He grabbed it from the conveyor and headed towards the exit.
Connor passed through the green channel, confident that even if his luggage was searched, the customs officer wouldn’t be that interested in a wooden springbok marked clearly on the foot ‘Made in South Africa’.
When he stepped out into the arrivals hall, he immediately spotted his wife and daughter standing among the crowd. He quickened his pace and smiled at the woman he adored. Why had she even given him a second look, let alone agreed to be his wife? His smile broadened as he took her in his arms.
‘How are you, my darling?’ he asked.
‘I only come alive again when I know you’re safely back from an assignment,’ she whispered. He tried to ignore the word ‘safely’ as he released her and turned to the other woman in his life. A slightly taller version of the original, with the same long red hair and flashing green eyes, but a calmer temperament. Connor’s only child gave him a huge kiss on the cheek that made him feel ten years younger.
At Tara’s christening, Father Graham had asked the Almighty that the child might be blessed with the looks of Maggie and the brains of — Maggie. As Tara had grown up, her grades in high school, and the turned heads of young men, had proved Father Graham not only to be a priest, but a prophet. Connor had soon given up fighting off the stream of admirers who had knocked on the front door of their little house in Georgetown, or even bothering to answer the phone: it was almost invariably another tongue-tied youth who hoped his daughter might agree to a date.
‘How was South Africa?’ Maggie asked as she linked arms with her husband.
‘It’s become even more precarious since Mandela’s death,’ Connor replied — he’d had a full briefing from Carl Koeter on the problems facing South Africa over their long lunch in Cape Town, supplemented by a week of local papers that he read during the flight to Sydney. ‘The crime rate’s so high in most of the major cities that it’s no longer against the law to drive through a red light after dark. Mbeki is doing his best, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to recommend that the company cut back its investment in that part of the world — at least until we’re confident that the civil war is under control.’
‘“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”’ Maggie said.
‘I don’t think Yeats ever visited South Africa,’ said Connor.
How often he had wanted to tell Maggie the whole truth, and explain why he had lived a lie for so many years. But it was not that easy. She may have been his mistress, but they were his masters, and he had always accepted the code of total silence. Over the years, he had tried to convince himself that it was in her best interests not to know the whole truth. But when she unthinkingly used words like ‘assignment’ and ‘safely’, he was aware that she knew far more than she ever admitted. Did he talk in his sleep? Soon, though, it would no longer be necessary to continue deceiving her. Maggie didn’t know it yet, but Bogota had been his last mission. During the holiday he would drop a hint about an expected promotion that would mean far less travelling.
‘And the deal?’ Maggie asked. ‘Were you able to settle it?’
‘The deal? Oh, yes, it all went pretty much to plan,’ said Connor. That was the nearest he would get to telling her the truth.
Connor began to think about spending the next two weeks basking in the sun. As they passed a news-stand, a small headline in a right-hand column of the Sydney Morning Herald caught his eye.
Maggie let go of her husband’s arm as they walked out of the Arrivals hall into the warm summer air and headed for the parking lot.
‘Where were you when the bomb went off in Cape Town?’ Tara asked.
Koeter hadn’t mentioned anything about a bomb in Cape Town. Would he ever be able to relax?
Chapter Six
He instructed his driver to take him to the National Gallery.
As the car pulled away from the White House staff entrance, a Secret Service Uniformed Division officer in the guard booth opened the reinforced metal gate and raised a hand to acknowledge him. The driver turned onto State Place, drove between the South Grounds and the Ellipse, and past the Department of Commerce.
Four minutes later, the car drew up outside the gallery’s east entrance. The passenger walked quickly across the cobbled driveway and up the stone steps. When he reached the top step, he glanced back over his shoulder to admire the vast Henry Moore sculpture that dominated the other side of the square, and checked to see if anyone was following him. He couldn’t be sure, but then he wasn’t a professional.
He walked into the building and turned left up the great marble staircase that led to the second-floor galleries where he had spent so many hours in his youth. The large rooms were crowded with schoolchildren, which was not unusual on a weekday morning. As he walked into Gallery 71, he looked around at the familiar Homers, Bellows and Hoppers, and began to feel at home — a sensation he never experienced in the White House. He moved on to Gallery 66, to admire once again August Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial to Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment. The first time he’d seen the massive life-size frieze he had stood in front of it, mesmerised, for over an hour. Today he could only spare a few moments.
Because he couldn’t stop stopping, it took him another quarter of an hour to reach the rotunda at the centre of the building. He walked quickly past the statue of Mercury and down the stairs, doubled back through the bookstore, ran down another flight of stairs and along the underground concourse before finally emerging in the East Wing. Taking one flight of steps up, he passed below the large Calder mobile hanging from the ceiling, then pushed his way through the revolving doors out of the building onto the cobbled driveway. By now he was confident no one was following him. He jumped into the back of the first taxi in the queue. Glancing out of the window, he saw his car and driver on the far side of the square.
‘A.V.’s, on New York Avenue.’
The taxi turned left on Pennsylvania, then headed north up Sixth Street. He tried to marshal his thoughts into some sort of coherent order, grateful that the driver didn’t want to spend the journey offering him his opinions on the Administration or, particularly, on the President.
They swung left onto New York Avenue and the taxi immediately began to slow down. He passed a ten-dollar bill to the driver even before they had come to a halt, then stepped out onto the street and shut the back door of the cab without waiting for the change.