“I tell you what you need to do.” Lowell dumped ketchup on his eggs. Mark had to look away. His stomach was bothering him again, knotted so tight he knew he wouldn’t be able to choke down so much as a bite of the triangle of buttered toast he’d picked up. He put it back down on the plate without even making the attempt. “You need to get her to sign a secrecy agreement—offer her whatever money you have to—and get her the hell out of town until this blows over. I’ve checked into her background—she doesn’t have a pot to piss in, and never has. Comes from nothing. She’ll be glad to get the money. And to keep her mouth shut for it.”
“The problem with a secrecy agreement,” Mark pointed out in measured tones, “is that it exists. If she doesn’t know anything, it clues her in that there just might be something to know. And if it somehow goes public, it makes it look like there’s a conspiracy. Like somebody has something to hide.”
“Hell, we do have something to hide. There’s no reason in the world for anybody to know that Mrs. Cooper had a problem, or that she was out there trying to score drugs when she died.”
“You sure that’s what she was doing?”
“It’s looking like it. Why else would she sneak off like that? With that amount of money in her purse?” Lowell shoveled down his doctored eggs with enthusiasm. Watching was making even the coffee turn sour in Mark’s stomach.
“I don’t know.”
There was a lot he didn’t know, Mark reflected—like what state Mrs. Cooper had been in when she left the residence that night, or if anybody besides Prescott had been with her when she’d headed out to the Rose Garden. One reason he was having so much trouble figuring out those things was that he’d been put on official leave: Just as he had suspected, his had been the first head on the chopping block. He was still on the payroll, still in the loop; he was still working, as was evidenced by his careful coordination of the babysitting of Jess Ford. But all that was on the QT, at the behest of Lowell and the rest of the President’s inner circle. Because they knew he was loyal, knew he’d keep his mouth shut, knew he’d get the job done for them. For the record, though, he was in deep shit, complete with all the media finger-pointing that came with it. The worst thing about it was being denied access to the very things he needed to use to get answers. Answers to the questions about that night that were eating him up. The White House surveillance tapes, for example, were not available to him; they’d been turned over to the investigative arm of the Secret Service. Between them and the FBI, the crash probe was being conducted at the highest levels, as his boss had assured him when he’d pressed for access. Lowell had refused to intervene.
Your job is to handle the survivor,
Lowell had said.
Let the trained investigators handle the investigation.
The trained investigators who didn’t know anything about Mrs. Cooper, and thus had no clue what to be on the lookout for. Which, maybe, was the point.
Or maybe he was just growing increasingly suspicious with age. And experience.
“So what do you suggest?” Lowell stabbed a sausage link with his fork and took a huge bite.
“We pay her off, but we channel the money through someone else. If it comes from us, she’s immediately suspicious about why, right? What we don’t want is for her to start asking herself that. We just want her to take the money, keep her mouth shut, and fade out of the picture.”
“Amen to that. You sure you can fix it?”
“I’m sure.”
“So we’re good?” Lowell polished off the last of his meal and took a quick last swallow of coffee as he stood up.
Mark looked up at him. “As long as nothing else happens to Miss Ford.”
“Nothing
did
happen to her.”
The waitress had seen Lowell stand up and was heading their way with the check. Mark stood up, too, his stomach as tight as a clenched fist, his breakfast uneaten. What he needed, and he hated to admit it, was a cigarette. He’d quit four years ago, gone cold turkey since, and now he was craving nicotine in the worst way.
The truth was, as he’d discovered about himself before, he really didn’t handle stress all that well.
“Was there something the matter with the food?” the waitress asked as she handed him the bill. Lowell was already on his way out the door. Mark understood: Mark had requested the meeting, so breakfast was on him.
“Turns out I wasn’t hungry after all.” Mark put a couple of twenties down on the table, more than enough to cover the food and a tip, and followed Lowell.
Who was already gone.
Funny, he reflected as he pushed through the door into the gray bleakness of a cold April dawn and felt the chill of the rushing wind bite into him, he didn’t feel any better about things now than he had before the meeting.
The day was just getting started, and it was already on its way downhill. And he still had Prescott’s funeral to attend.
13
I
n the end, avoiding the media had been surprisingly easy, Jess reflected as she looked out the concave glass window of the helicopter that was at that moment carrying her toward D.C. Avoiding Mark Ryan, who’d been hovering around her and her family like a hungry bat with a cluster of mosquitoes in its sights, had been equally simple: She’d simply waited to go until he wasn’t around. Leaving the hospital by helicopter had worked like a charm; apparently, no one had expected it. Of course, it also helped that her exodus had been carefully timed to coincide with Annette Cooper’s funeral service.
The thought made her queasy. Or maybe it was the motion of the helicopter, swooping up and down like a hawk riding the gusting air currents as they followed the twisty path of the Potomac past Reagan National Airport and into D.C. As Davenport ’s assistant, Jess was no stranger to helicopters, but seeing the Capitol laid out before her like a sparkling miniature village was something that never failed to awe her.
Even today.
“Mr. Davenport wants you to feel free to use the condo for as long as you need to. He anticipates that it will be for at least several weeks,” Marian said.
“That’s nice of him.”
Davenport’s longtime personal secretary was buckled into the cushy leather seat next to Jess. She was sixty-one, unmarried, and totally devoted to Davenport and, to a lesser extent, the firm. Tall, lean, and elegant, with coarse iron-gray hair that she wore in an elaborate chignon, she was dressed in a pale gray skirt suit and a lavender blouse. Her features were strong rather than attractive, her makeup was minimal but well done, and she was very good at blending into the woodwork until Davenport needed her.
Which he constantly did. As far as everything that wasn’t connected to legal research (Jess’s department) was concerned, Marian was Davenport’s right hand. She knew him better than his young third wife, sent the gifts, made the reservations, fielded his phone calls, set up his meetings, and then sat in on them taking notes. If Davenport had a secret that Marian didn’t know, Jess would be surprised. No, she would be shocked. But Marian kept Davenport’s secrets, too.
Besides the pilot, who was sitting up front and was separated from the passenger compartment by a partition, she and Jess were alone in the helicopter. According to Marian, Davenport had decided that the fewer people who knew where they were going today, the better.
The safer.
But Jess filled that in for herself.
The million-dollar question was, did Marian know what was going on? That Davenport was afraid of something concerning Annette Cooper’s death, concerning the crash? Or was this one secret Davenport had kept from her?
Jess didn’t know, and she couldn’t ask. She wasn’t going to say a word on the subject to anyone until after she had talked to her boss.
Davenport would know what to do, where to go with her suspicions, to whom it was safe to tell them. Because right now, she didn’t feel like she could trust anybody else.
Not the cops, not the FBI, and certainly not the Secret Service, all of which had sent representatives to question her about the crash once they learned she was conscious and coherent. She had said the same thing to each of them:
I don’t remember.
They had gone away.
She had been on pins and needles, fearing they would come back. Which was why she’d been so glad to leave today, twenty-four hours ahead of schedule.
The Secret Service agents outside her room, all of whom had become accustomed to her comings and goings inside the hospital over the last few days as she’d suffered through more tests and X-rays and treatments and had worked with physical therapists to regain her mobility, had followed her at a discreet distance as she’d headed for the elevator some thirty minutes earlier. Their faces were vaguely familiar because they’d been around, but she didn’t know either of them and they didn’t know her in any kind of personal way, which made telling them that she needed a few minutes alone with her companion—Marian—and then closing the elevator doors in their faces all the easier. After that, it was a piece of cake: a trip up to the hospital’s helipad, bundling into the chopper, and taking off. She was free.
Just like that. After tossing and turning through a sleepless night and then suffering butterfly-inducing anticipation all morning, the ease of her escape—because that was how she thought of it—was almost anti-climactic.
Maybe Ryan wasn’t at the hospital because he was attending Mrs. Cooper’s funeral. If he’d been there, she had a feeling that getting away wouldn’t have been quite so simple.
She hadn’t even told her mother and sisters where she was going. Just that her boss was sending someone for her, and she would be staying in one of his houses for a while until media interest died down. Grace had packed her a suitcase and brought it to the hospital that morning. Jess had parted from her and Judy and Sarah and Maddie with a round of weepy hugs. Judy had wanted her to come home with them, but Jess, with Marian backing her up, had been adamant: Davenport was a pro at handling crises of all sorts, and she would do what he wanted her to do. Reluctantly, Judy saw the sense of that: Like the hospital, her house and Jess’s apartment were still under siege, and some reporters had even started waving fat checks around in hope of procuring an interview.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll call you,” she promised her mother. The truth was, she was desperate to get away from them, terrified that somehow what she knew, or suspected, would be conveyed to them and then they would be in danger, too. Or maybe they didn’t even have to really know or suspect anything. Maybe just being in her vicinity was enough to make them targets.
And maybe she was just totally paranoid, too.
But she didn’t think so.
“Mr. Davenport wanted me to assure you that you’re still drawing your salary, by the way,” Marian said. “I made the arrangements for it to be direct-deposited into your account yesterday. It will continue until you’re able to come back to work. And he said to tell you that you’ll be getting a large settlement soon.”
Jess couldn’t help it. Even under the circumstances, the prospect of obtaining a substantial amount of money made her heartbeat quicken. It was a result, she was sure, of having spent almost her whole life never being sure that she and her family would have enough groceries to last out the week, or a roof over their heads from month to month.
Lifting her eyebrows with what she hoped looked like only polite interest, she said, “A large settlement?”
Marian looked impatient. “You were badly injured in a car wreck. The limousine company and its driver are liable, among others. Ordinarily it would take months, possibly years, to negotiate just compensation. Given the circumstances, though, Mr. Davenport was able to do very nicely for you. All you have to do is sign the papers.”
Clearly, working around lawyers for so many years had an effect on people, because Marian was sounding like one herself.
“What papers?” If Jess’s tone was faintly wary, well, she guessed she had reason. One thing she had learned for sure over the years was that if it sounded too good to be true, it usually was. “And how large a settlement are we talking about?”
“Mr. Davenport will explain. He’ll go over everything with you when you talk to him later.”
Fair enough. “What time is he coming?”
The look Marian gave her was withering. “When it’s convenient for him.”
“I’ll be sure and be ready, then.” If there was a smidgen of dryness to her tone, Marian didn’t appear to notice.
The two of them were publicly cordial, but they were not friends. Jess sometimes wondered if Marian, jealous of her own position in Davenport’s life, didn’t resent Davenport’s increasing reliance on Jess.
Jess said nothing else, and the conversation ended. Her gaze drifted down to the scene below. For the first time in her memory, nothing was moving on the Beltway or 295 or any of the other arteries into and around the city. Cars had pulled over to the side of the roads; the expressways were clear. Seeing the flashing blue and red strobe lights at the entrance ramps, Jess realized that police had them blocked off. Instead of cars, D.C.’s center was filled with people. Hordes of them, tens of thousands of them, stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to Capitol Hill in a near-solid carpet, massing in Constitution Gardens, surrounding the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the White House and the Washington Monument, crowding around the Tidal Basin and the Reflecting Pool and filling the Mall, filling the downtown, filling the whole of D.C. for as far as she could see, packing the streets and the public spaces so that everywhere you looked they were all you saw, eclipsing the buildings and monuments, the variegated colors of their clothing putting to shame even the intense pinks of the cherry blossoms for which D.C. was famous.
She remembered that Congress had declared today a national day of mourning.
A motorcade, composed of vehicles that from this height appeared no bigger than the Hot Wheels cars her nephews loved, caught her eye. It moved slowly down Constitution Avenue. From the tiny flags flying on the lead cars and the number of long black vehicles involved, Jess knew what it had to be: Mrs. Cooper’s funeral cortege transporting her body from the Capitol Rotunda, where it had been lying in state, to the National Cathedral for her funeral service.