Battat wondered how many foreign invaders had stood on these shores, perhaps in this very spot. The Persians in the eleventh century. The Mongols in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Russians in the eighteenth century, then the Persians again, then the Soviets. He couldn’t decide whether he was part of a dramatic historical pageant or an ugly, unending rape.
Not that it matters
, he told himself. He wasn’t here to safeguard Azerbaijan. He was here to redeem himself and to protect American interests.
Crouched among the high reeds at this isolated section of beachfront, Battat felt as though he had never been away from the field. Danger did that. It was like a fond song or a familiar food smell, a bookmark in the soul. He loved that, too. He also felt good about what he was doing. Not just to atone for Annabelle but because it was right.
Battat had been here for nearly seven hours now. The cell phone communications they’d intercepted said that the pickup was scheduled for eleven-thirty P.M. The Harpooner was supposed to be there to examine the parcel, whatever it was, then pay for it and leave.
Just then, something happened on the boat. A hatch door opened, and a man climbed out onto the deck. Battat looked out at the water. The man turned on a radio. It was playing what sounded like local folk tunes. Maybe that was a signal. Battat’s gaze swept across the water.
Suddenly, an elbow locked around Battat’s throat from behind and yanked him to his feet. He gagged. He tried to tuck his chin into the elbow, to relieve the pressure on his throat so he could breathe, but the attacker was well trained. He had locked his right arm around his throat and was pushing Battat’s head with his left hand so he couldn’t turn it. Battat tried to drive an elbow back into the attacker’s gut, but the man was standing to the side. Finally, he tried to reach back and grab the shoulder of the choking arm and pull the attacker over.
The attacker responded by tilting his own body back and lifting Battat from the ground. Although Battat was able to grab the man’s shoulder, he couldn’t throw the attacker. Battat’s feet were in the air and he had no leverage.
The struggle lasted five seconds. The attacker’s arm squeezed against the American’s carotid arteries from the side, immediately cutting the blood supply to the head and causing Battat to black out. Taking no chances, the attacker kept pressing the arteries for another half minute. Then he dropped the unconscious body to the sand.
The Harpooner reached into the pocket of his windbreaker. He removed a syringe from his pocket, pulled off the plastic tip, and injected the man in the neck. After wiping away the small drop of blood, he took out a flashlight and flicked it on. He waved it back and forth several times. Another flashlight answered from the
Rachel
.
Then both lights went dark. Moments later, a motor dinghy lowered from the boat and headed toward shore.
TWO
Camp Springs, Maryland Sunday, 4:12 P.M.
Paul Hood sat on an armchair in the corner of the small, TV-lit hotel room. The heavy shades were drawn and a football game was on, but Hood wasn’t really watching it. He was watching reruns in his mind. Reruns of over sixteen years of married life.
Old pictures in my new home,
he thought.
Home was an anonymous fifth-floor suite at the Days Inn on Mercedes Boulevard, located a short distance from Andrews Air Force Base. Hood had moved in late Saturday night. Though he could have stayed at a motel right next to the base where Op-Center was located, he wanted the option of being able to get away from work. Which was ironic. It was Hood’s dedication to Op-Center that had cost him his marriage.
Or so his wife maintained.
Over the past several years, Sharon Hood had become increasingly frustrated by the long hours her husband kept at Op-Center. She grew tense and angry each time an international crisis caused him to miss one of their daughter Harleigh’s violin recitals or their son Alexander’s ball games. She was bitter that virtually every vacation they planned had to be canceled because of a coup attempt or assassination that demanded his attention. She resented how he was on the phone, even when he was with his family, checking with Deputy Director Mike Rodgers on how the mobile Regional Op-Center was performing in field tests or discussing with Intelligence Chief Bob Herbert what they could do to strengthen the new relationship with Op-Center’s Russian counterpart in Saint Petersburg.
But Hood had never believed that work itself was really the problem. It was something older and deeper than that.
Even when he had resigned his position as director of Op-Center and went to New York for Harleigh’s performance at a United Nations reception, Sharon still wasn’t happy. She was jealous of the attention that other mothers on the junket gave him. Sharon realized that the women were drawn to Hood because he had been a highly visible mayor of Los Angeles. After that, he had held a powerful job in Washington, where power was the coin of the realm. It didn’t matter to Sharon that Hood put no stock in fame and power. It didn’t matter to her that his replies to the women were always polite but short. All Sharon knew was that she had to share her husband again.
Then came the nightmare. Harleigh and the other young musicians were taken hostage in the Security Council chambers by renegade United Nations peacekeepers. Hood had left Sharon at the State Department’s understaffed crisis center so that he could oversee Op-Center’s successful covert effort to rescue the teenagers and the captive foreign delegates. In Sharon’s eyes, he had not been there for her again. When they returned to Washington, she immediately took the children to her parents’ house in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Sharon had said she wanted to get Harleigh away from the media zoo that had pursued the children from New York.
Hood couldn’t argue with that. Harleigh had seen one of her friends seriously wounded and several other people executed. She was almost killed herself. She had suffered the clinical consequences of classic stressor triggers for post-traumatic stress disorder: threats to the physical integrity of herself and others; fear and helplessness; and a guilt response to survival. After all that, to have been surrounded by TV lights and shouting members of the press corps would have been the worst thing for Harleigh.
But Hood knew that wasn’t the only reason his wife had gone back to Old Saybrook. Sharon herself needed to get away. She needed the comfort and safety of her childhood home in order to think about her future.
About
their
future.
Hood shut off the TV. He put the remote on the night table, lay back on the bunched pillows, and looked up at the white ceiling. Only he didn’t see a ceiling. Hood saw Sharon’s pale face and dark eyes. He saw how they had looked on Friday when she came home and told him she wanted a divorce.
That wasn’t a surprise. It was actually a relief in some ways. After Hood had returned from New York, he met briefly with the president about repairing the rift between the United States and the UN. Being back at the White House, being plugged into the world, had made him want to withdraw his resignation from Op-Center. He
liked
the work he was doing: the challenge, the implications, the risk. On Friday evening, after Sharon had told him of her decision, he was able to withdraw his resignation with a clear conscience.
By the time Hood and Sharon talked again on Saturday, the emotional distancing had already begun. They agreed that Sharon could use their family attorney. Paul would have Op-Center’s legal officer, Lowell Coffey III, recommend someone for him. It was all very polite, mature, formal.
The big questions they still had to decide were whether to tell the kids and whether Hood should leave the house immediately. He had called Op-Center’s staff psychologist Liz Gordon, who was counseling Harleigh before turning her over to a psychiatrist who specialized in treating PTSD. Liz told Hood that he should be extremely gentle whenever he was around Harleigh. He was the only family member who had been with her during the siege. Harleigh would associate his strength and calmness with security. That would help to speed her recovery. Liz added that whatever instability was introduced by his departure was less dangerous than the ongoing strife between him and his wife. That tension would not show Hood in the light Harleigh needed to see him. Liz also told him that intensive therapy for Harleigh should begin as soon as possible. They had to deal with the problem, or she ran the risk of being psychologically impaired for the rest of her life.
After having discussed the situation with Liz Gordon, Hood and Sharon decided to tell the kids calmly and openly what was happening. For the last time as a family, they sat in the den—the same room where they had set up their Christmas tree every year and taught the kids Monopoly and chess and had birthday parties. Alexander seemed to take it well after being assured that his life wouldn’t change very much. Harleigh was initially upset, feeling that what had happened to her was the cause. Hood and his wife assured Harleigh that was not the case at all, and they would both be there for her.
When they were finished, Sharon had dinner with Harleigh at home, and Hood took Alexander out to their favorite greasy pit, the Corner Bistro—the “Coroner Bistro” as the health-conscious Sharon called it. Hood put on his best face, and they had a fun time. Then he came back to the house, quickly and quietly packed a few things, and left for his new home.
Hood looked around the hotel room. There was a glass-covered desk with a blotter, a lamp, and a folder full of postcards. A queen-sized bed. An industrial-strength carpet that matched the opaque drapes. A framed print of a painting of a harlequin whose outfit matched the carpet. A dresser with a built-in cabinet for a minirefrigerator and another cabinet for the TV. And, of course, a drawer with a Bible. There was also a night table with a lamp like the one on the desk, four wastebaskets, a clock, and a box of tissues he had moved from the bathroom.
My new home
, he thought again.
Except for the laptop on the desk and the pictures of the kids beside it—last year’s school photos, still in their warping cardboard frames—there was nothing of home here. The stains on the carpet weren’t apple juice Alexander had spilled as a boy. Harleigh hadn’t painted the picture of the harlequin. The refrigerator wasn’t stocked with rows of plastic containers filled with that wretched kiwi-strawberry-yogurt juice that Sharon liked. The television had never shown home videotapes of birthday parties, pool parties, and anniversaries, of relatives and coworkers who were gone. Hood had never watched the sun rise or set from this window. He had never had the flu or felt his unborn child kick in this bed. If he called out to the kids, they wouldn’t come.
Tears pressed against the backs of his eyes. He turned to look at the clock, anything to break the steady succession of thoughts and pictures. He would have to get ready soon. Time—and government—stopped for no man. He still had professional obligations. But lord God, Hood thought, he didn’t feel like going. Talking, putting on a happy face the way he did with his son, wondering who knew and who didn’t in the instant message machine known as the Washington grapevine.
He looked up at the ceiling. Part of him had wanted this to happen. Hood wanted the freedom to do his job. He wanted an end to being judged and criticized by Sharon. He also wanted to stop constantly disappointing his wife.
But another part of him, by far the largest part, was bitterly sad that it had come to this. There would be no more shared experiences, and the children were going to suffer for their parents’ shortcomings.
As the finality of the divorce hit him, hit him hard, Hood allowed the tears to flow.
THREE
Washington, D.C. Sunday, 6:32 P.M.
Sixty-one-year-old First Lady Megan Catherine Lawrence paused before the late-seventeenth-century gilded pier mirror over a matching commode. She gave her short, straight, silver hair and ivory satin gown one last check before picking up her white gloves and leaving her third-floor salon. Satisfied, the tall, slender, elegant woman crossed the South American rug collected by President Herbert Hoover and entered the private presidential bedroom. The president’s private dressing room was directly across from her. As she stepped out, she looked out at the lamp-lit white walls and light-blue Kennedy curtains, the bed that was first used by Grover and Frances Cleveland, the rocking chair where delicate, devoted Eliza Johnson awaited word of her husband Andrew’s impeachment trial in 1868, and the bedside table where each night the seventh president, Andrew Jackson, would remove a miniature portrait of his dead wife from its place beside his heart, set it on the table next to her well-read Bible, and made certain that her face was the first thing he saw each morning.
As she looked out at the room, Megan smiled. When they first moved into the White House, friends and acquaintances would say to her, “It must be amazing having access to all the secret information about President Kennedy’s missing brain and the Roswell aliens.” She told them the secret was that there
was
no secret information. The only amazing thing was that, after nearly seven years of living in the White House, Megan still felt a thrill to be here among the ghosts, the greatness, the art, and the history.