Mercy Killing (Affairs of State Book 1) (3 page)

“I just stepped out of the reception for a moment,” she said, “to make a phone call.”

“Someone was in here with you,” he persisted. His gaze flicked toward the door she hadn’t seen until Clay disappeared through it. Midnight-blue had been her favorite color from her cherished Crayola box when she was a little girl. It had seemed pretty then. Exotic. Celestial. But not now—not in this stranger’s eyes. They made her shiver, though why she couldn’t have said. “He frightened you,” he said.

Mercy managed what she hoped was a convincing smile. She curled the calling card into her palm, out of sight. “Not at all. He seemed to think I wanted company. I told him I didn’t. He left. End of story.”

“Ah.”

She couldn’t tell if he believed her.

“I need to return to the party,” she said briskly. “Excuse me.” Before he could ask any more questions she darted around him, back into the foyer, and up the stairs.

On the landing outside the reception room, Mercy took a moment to settle herself before rejoining the other guests. The guards still stood outside the massive doors, looking bored. Neither spoke to her.

Breathe
, she instructed her body. And she did.
Smile. Look happy
.

She made her entrance, beaming. But instinct told her that something was horribly wrong. Where the hell was her mother? And what, if anything, did that awful man know about Talia?

3

Peter was still hanging out with the Mexican contingent. By now it had grown—wives, dates, and kids having joined the men. Mercy cut a beeline across the room, toward her husband, her pulse hammering, ears ringing with anxiety.

She needed to find out if this Lucius Clay was legitimate. Maybe he was someone’s idea of a prank. A heartless, ill-conceived joke at that. Clay hadn’t given her one detail, not one piece of information to prove he knew anything. He could have lied about having information concerning her mother. But why? So maybe this wasn’t a joke. He’d intimated he was with the CIA, but was he?

She was halfway across the room now. The orchestra bursting into
The Girl from Ipanema
, of all things. The room around her had faded into a miasma of jittery fog—all faces melting away before her eyes as she nearly ran between people, tables, and servers. She focused on her husband. Peter would know what to do.

She thought about other clandestine organizations—NSA for one. However, that was less likely to be where Clay worked. Despite Hollywood’s fanciful portrayals of employees of the National Security Agency, she knew the organization didn’t employ armed agents who ran around threatening civilians or carrying out secret missions like James Bond. Most of their work was done through electronic or satellite surveillance, sitting in cubicles at Ft. Meade, Maryland. And although the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives
, known as the ATF, did have agents, what would they have to do with her mother or tracking her overseas? The Secret Service, on the other hand, was concerned with protecting the nation’s financial infrastructure as well as guarding President of the United States, other national leaders, and visiting heads of state. Her mother wasn’t one of those. And anyway, if there had been an accident—Talia’s plane went down or she was in a car crash—either the airline or the State Department would have let her know. Right?

Maybe, as she’d first thought, this really was part of a slick confidence game. If so, what would Clay have to gain?

Screw it!
She should have demanded identification! Her stomach knotted.
Please, God, don’t! Just don’t let anything have happened to my mother

She would see what Peter thought of all this.

Mercy arrived at his side, out of breath and jittery, but waited for the Mexican ambassador to finish what he was saying before whispering in her husband’s ear, “I need to speak with you.”

“Now?” He grimaced at her.

“Now,” she said, prepared to drag him bodily from the room if he didn’t start moving.

Peter glanced at her, then back the ambassador and his group. “Please excuse us, gentlemen, ladies. My wife has been trying all evening to coax me outside to view the lovely garden.” He patted her hand, clamped on his arm. “I have ignored her for too long.”

“
De acuerdo
.” Ambassador Rodriguez bowed. “
Bonita señora
, enjoy the roses.”

Mercy quietly thanked the ambassador in her limited Spanish, even as Peter offered his arm and moved with stiff reluctance toward the French doors on the far side of the room. It seemed to take them forever to cross the ocean of floor. She tried to think of other things. Like Peter’s smile—as brilliant now, for the benefit of their guests, as when they’d first met. Her father had said, “That smile could charm a nun out of her habit.” And, of course, Mercy had fallen for it and him on their very first meeting.

She had been just fifteen—an impossible age for falling in love, her mother had told her. She was too young to know, too young to date. Mercy only a junior in high school, and Peter already a grad student at Yale. But their parents had been friends, neighbors, bridge club buddies. By the time Mercy entered college, she and Peter had become a couple. Their parents adjusted. They acted as though their children falling in love heralded a royal alliance. Unfortunately, it wasn't long after the happy couple announced their engagement that Mercy's mother and Peter began having bitter arguments. Mercy chalked up their differences to strong, mismatched personalities and resigned herself to keeping them at a distance from each other.

Peter had so utterly entranced her during the first year of their marriage she hadn't really minded their bickering. He was her heart, her first lover ever, and she never wished for another.
If he bothered to turn on that same charm tonight
, she thought,
the man still could have me, right here on this damn floor
. In spite of a few hundred guests as onlookers. In spite of her worry about Talia. But things had changed.

She glanced outside as they passed through the tall etched-glass doors at the end of the room. She was immediately glad to see they would be alone on the raised patio, at least for the moment. Steps led down into the garden, allowing anyone below to join them. She hoped no one would.

To steady her nerves and prepare to calmly explain what had transpired moments earlier in the gallery, she took in her surroundings. An ornate wrought-iron rail curved around the second-floor landing. Below, elegant couples promenaded arm-in-arm in the steamy August night through a lush display of full-blown roses—sunset orange, pale pink, and blood red. For two months out of every year, Washington, D.C. turned into a sauna. Locals rarely ventured outside of air-conditioned rooms. Tonight was no different. The temperature had reached 103 that day and hadn’t dropped much as yet. She could hardly breathe, the air felt so thick.

One couple in particular, strolling on the paths below, held her eye. The same dark-haired Latino gentleman she’d just left in the lower gallery. He was not as tall as her lanky husband, but he held himself in a way that implied both physical strength and confidence. Holding onto his arm a strikingly beautiful young woman walked, who appeared half his age. A black lace mantilla draped her dark head and delicate bare shoulders. She giggled sweetly and beamed adoringly up at him.

Cradle robber
, she thought, and dismissed them from her thoughts. Only one person in the world mattered at this moment.

Peter startled Mercy out of her thoughts by pulling her around to face him. She knew, from the vein pulsing at his temple and his annoyed scowl, his composure was shot to hell. “We’ve just told the ambassador of our host country to take a hike,” he snarled. “This had damn well better be important.”

“It is. And I’m sorry for taking you away. But something may have happened to my mother.”

“
This
is why you dragged me away from the ambassador?” He looked away then snapped his head around to glare at her again. “The most important night of my life, Mercy, and you’re worried about your
mother
? Christ! The same woman who has covered war zones on four continents, hiked through jungles, climbed Everest, and risked her life more times than either of us can count—because she
likes
it. And you’re worried about her?”

Mercy locked arms at her sides and forced her clenched fists open. She felt like decking the man. How could he be such a jerk? Or maybe it was just that he was the third male tonight to annoy her.
No,
she decided,
it’s Peter being Peter.
Her husband had never understood Talia's restlessness, or the risks she’d been willing to take for her profession. Her art.

Mercy spoke with deliberate slowness. “She hasn’t been in touch with Mark for two days. That’s not like her, Peter.”

“So, she’s busy or out of range of a cell tower.”

“I think it’s more than that. Just now a man approached me who claims to have information about her. He says she’s in trouble.”

Peter’s expression suddenly altered from impatience to curiosity. “What man? What kind of trouble?”

“He wouldn’t say. He wanted me to go with him somewhere more private to talk. Out of the building. I refused.”

He snorted. “Good thing! God knows what he was after.”

For some reason, she didn’t tell him Clay’s name. It might not even have been his real name anyway, she reasoned. And anyway—did that matter at the moment?

Peter seemed to give this some thought then waved a hand in dismissal. “He sounds like a crazy. How do people like that get into private parties?”

“But, Peter, I’m worried that—”

“Look,” he said, settling his hands on her shoulders, looking down on her as if she needed “a good talking to,” as her father used to say when a staff member annoyed him. “It’s not like this is the first time Talia lit out for parts unknown on a whim.” He nodded his head, as if agreeing with himself, then rushed on before she could protest. “She’ll show up when she’s good and ready. In the meantime, I’d really appreciate it if you got your ass back in there and did your job. Be the diplomat’s charming wife.”

Mercy stared at him in disbelief. “Do you realize how insensitive you sound?”

He must have sensed just how angry she was. Peter wasn’t stupid. He knew how far he could push. His next words were markedly conciliatory.

“Listen, I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s just . . . this night is so very important to me. You know that. Posted to Mexico City! I still can’t believe our luck.” Grinning, he took her hands in his and rubbed his thumbs over their backs consolingly. “We’ve both worked hard for this moment. Please don’t spoil it. Besides, there’s really nothing we can do. Talia is Talia. You know how unpredictable she can be.”

She refused to be appeased. “We have to at least look into the reason for her sudden silence.”

He dropped her hands, giving the glass doors a wistful glance. Beyond them the band had segued from lively
ranchera
music into a romantic Marco Antonio Solis ballad. 

“I’m going back to the party. If you can’t be an asset to this evening,” he growled, “I suggest you go home, make your phone calls, or do whatever you feel compelled to do there.”

“Peter!”

He had started to turn away, but now stopped and glanced back at her with a weary expression. “You might ask yourself why your mother, after wandering the world for two years in Mark’s company, insisted on traveling alone this time.”

“What?” She felt her body temperature rising to match the torpid air around her.

“Maybe,” he suggested, “Talia decided it was time for a change of
scenery
?”

She knew without explanation what he meant. Since meeting Mark, Talia had stayed close to home—close for her, that is. Mark was confined to a wheelchair and, though he traveled willingly to be with her, the reality of his situation slowed her mother down and became a challenge when she planned her more adventuresome trips.

But it wasn’t Talia and Mark that Mercy thought about when Peter hinted at the possibility of her mother’s infidelity. It was her own marriage, her own pain and bitter disappointment. “Is that what Betty Mayo was to
you
—a change of scenery?”

She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She really hadn’t.

More than a year had passed since she’d discovered Peter’s indiscretion, just three months into their marriage. Betty was a vivacious redhead who worked at the British Embassy. The pain of his deception still gnawed at Mercy. Now her question hung in the air between them, an awkward word-fart. She didn’t know what to say, or do.

Peter obviously didn’t either. He stared down at his hands. “Is that what this is really about, Merce? Old mistakes?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Not at all. I just want you to use your connections in the goddamn State Department to locate my mother and make sure she’s all right. That isn’t too much to ask, is it?”

He hesitated then let out a small sound that wasn’t quite a groan. “This is really bad timing. I’ve just been given an amazing promotion. You’re asking me to use my new position to demand special treatment.” She started to open her mouth to object but he cut her off. “All right. I promise I’ll look into it tomorrow. First thing. I will.”