He nodded. “Great, me too. I know a fantastic little place in Georgetown. I’ll book for a quarter to eight.”
They stood there for a long moment. Amy was openly watching them, gaze shifting from her, to him, then back to her. Clearly, she felt something more was required.
Claire stepped back, because the temptation to step forward, right into Dan’s arms, was so strong.
“See you at seven, then,” she said and turned down the corridor of rooms. At number seven she stopped and looked back. Dan hadn’t moved. He’d watched her, every step of the way.
Her room was very comfortable, with a little parlor area outfitted with a sofa, a desk and a chair. Claire unpacked her bag, taking her time, eyeing the bed. It was a big four-poster with a huge down comforter, and it beckoned to her.
She sat on one of the two chairs and stared out the window at the sleety storm outside and thought of nothing at all, savoring the unusual feeling of relaxation.
Just as she was contemplating lying down, there was a soft knock on the door. She checked the peephole. Amy, the girl from the front desk, stood holding a tray and grinning.
Claire opened the door.
“This just came, Ms. Day.” Amy placed the tray carefully on the desk and stepped back.
Claire lifted silver covers and discovered a fragrant, steaming bowl of cream of mushroom soup, a small salad, hot focaccia bread and a slice of dense chocolate cake. There was a half bottle of chardonnay and a large bottle of Evian. A small white envelope leaned against the wine bottle with her name in bold black ink.
She opened it.
Enjoy the lunch
, she read.
See you at seven. D.
She did enjoy the lunch, to her utter surprise. This past year food—the smell of it, at times even the sight of it—made her stomach clamp shut. Just knot right up until she thought she’d never eat again in this lifetime.
But not now. Now she felt . . . open. Almost hungry.
She ate about half of everything. The soup settled, warm and comforting, in her stomach. The hot focaccia made a pleasing contrast with the crisp salad greens and the chocolate cake was simply divine, the platonic ideal of a chocolate cake. It was what chocolate cake would taste like in heaven.
How could she have forgotten how much she loved chocolate?
And the wine. She loved wine. Why had she stopped drinking it? Because it was too much trouble to go to the wine shop and buy it? Because in her knotted-up mode it turned sour in her stomach? Because she’d forgotten about the very concept of pleasure?
This wine went down like a dream, tasting of summer and sunshine, and relaxed her. The bed beckoned even more loudly than before. She changed into her pajamas and slipped under the covers, expecting to lie there for a couple of hours, bleary-eyed and tense as she usually did. Instead, she went out like a light.
It was dark when she woke up again. For an instant’s panic, she thought she’d slept through until seven, but the clock showed five thirty. She’d slept a solid four hours. Another first. In the past year, she hadn’t managed to sleep for four hours straight through the night, let alone during a nap.
Though packing for a possible date hadn’t even occurred to her, she did have a change of clothes. Black pants, black cashmere turtleneck sweater, black boots. And some Body Shop creams. The bath’s hot water finished relaxing her and she had fun grooming, lavishly overdoing the White Musk body cream, head to toe, and drying her hair carefully with the hotel dryer and a round brush instead of just letting it air dry.
And makeup! She’d almost forgotten makeup existed and found pleasure in applying the Dark Female Arts. Leaning forward over the sink, she almost didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror, with color in her face and on her lips. One natural, the other artificial, but still. She looked . . . normal. Not white-faced and pinched, some alien being from a cold, airless planet.
Welcome back,
she told her image in the mirror.
You’ve been gone for a long time.
Even drawing out the womanly preparations for a night out—her first in over a year—she still had forty-five minutes left before Dan was stopping by to pick her up.
The novel she’d packed held no appeal. Clearly, it was the brother-in-law who had offed the banker. Money, power, revenge. Important things in the world, but now faraway concerns.
Out of sheer habit, she’d packed her netbook, simply because she’d packed a computer in every suitcase since she was sixteen. She hauled it out and powered it up.
This whole Bowen in Algiers thing was so strange, though she couldn’t put her finger on why. At times, everything was strange to her. But still . . .
Bowen was a master of misdirection. He was CIA after all. Suppose he’d spun a story and had actually been in Laka that day?
If he had been, if her memory—or what she thought was a memory, or a memory of a memory—was correct, maybe it might mean she was getting her mind back. Her life back. If not, if he’d been away as Dan insisted, she’d be no worse off than before. Still crazy and out of it.
Hmmm. Why not do a little digging?
Claire logged on to the DIA website, clicking through until she came to the section containing reports, password-protected. She was no longer an active member of the DIA, and her badge and pass had been canceled, but experience told her that they’d probably forgotten to cancel her password.
She knew people who had
123456
, their date of birth, their mother’s maiden name, their pet’s name as passwords. It was little short of lunacy. Claire had always had complex, randomized passwords she committed to memory.
39*Zan103hzy.
Her pretty pink netbook whirred discreetly.
Bingo. She was in.
A minute later, she was scrolling through reports back to last November. It took a while. DIA had been busy this past year. The world was a huge, dangerous place and DIA kept track of it all. She flipped through the world’s hotspots and crises patiently and . . . there it was.
The embassy bombing in Laka, in a pdf file. The report was sixty pages long. No time to read the whole thing. The easiest thing would be to do a search and find. She typed
Bowen McKenzie
into the search field, pressed enter, and discovered that he was only mentioned once in the report. As absent on the twenty-fifth of November, due to a two-day meeting with the deputy prime minister of Algeria in Algiers. He’d arrived in Algiers on the evening of the twenty-fourth and made it back to the Laka Embassy only after the siege and the bombing.
Claire froze, trembling fingers curved over the keyboard. Oh, God. The memory had been wrong. The clouds hadn’t parted at all. What she’d seen so clearly for a tempting moment hadn’t been a memory—it had been the artifact of a still-sick mind.
She wasn’t getting better. If anything, her hallucinations had picked up enough real-world grit to seem true. Maybe this was going to be her reality for the rest of her life—flashes and visions from a sick mind. This was so
scary
.
Over the past year, Claire had gritted her teeth as she lost her father, learned to walk again and slowly brought her body back from near death. There had been endless sleepless nights, days and nights of heart-wrenching panic, nightmares where she woke in a nest of sweaty sheets, heart pounding, curled up against the headboard in defense against the monsters of the night.
That were in her head.
She bore all of that with, if not grace, then stoicism. And she realized now that all this time, in the back of her mind was the conviction that it was all temporary. That sooner or later she’d get her health and then her mind and then her life back.
It had been a given. She was too young for life to be over, she’d barely begun it. Wasn’t that what always happened on those made-for-TV movies where the heroine overcomes extreme odds and prevails by sheer dint of willpower?
But . . . what if that wasn’t the scenario? What if the scenario for the rest of her life was this bleak and empty reality? What if she was going to be like
this
the rest of her life? Weak and hurting and alone, because who would want a woman on the borderline?
Another forty, fifty years of this. Of waking up from a restless sleep with tears drying on her face. Of having flashes of violence suddenly flood her mind. Of finding herself crouching, terrified, in the post office or the frozen foods section of the supermarket. Of seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, but still felt terribly real.
A lifetime of being afraid, nauseous with anxiety.
She powered the netbook down, closed the lid and sat there with her hands on the shiny pink surface, seeing her slightly distorted reflection. Pale, mouth a thin line. She sat for a long time, trying not to think of anything at all.
Finally the hotel phone rang. She glanced at her watch. Seven sharp.
Dan, waiting to take her out to dinner.
She put the laptop in its case and vowed to do her best to enjoy the evening out, her first in a year and maybe her last for a long time to come.
So he kept his ear close to the ground, had trip wires everywhere, letting him know if anyone came prodding at his perimeter. Any unhealthy interest in him and his affairs, well . . . one of the advantages to his time in the CIA was a small army on call. Good men who’d served their country and now served him. And he sure as hell paid a lot better than Uncle Sam.
He’d placed beacons in the pixels of the logos of all the reports on the Laka bombing. CIA, DIA, State, Marine Security Detachment records. Expunging his name had been easy for someone who knew what he was doing. The beacons sent a signal to his computer if anyone searched for his name in the reports. His computer was programmed to buzz him if it received a signal.
A whole year had gone by without any warning signals. He’d started to relax. Even started to think of removing the beacons, which represented a tiny risk, but a risk nonetheless. Maybe some Homeland Security nerd, bored, looking for something to do, would come up with an algorithm to find beacons. So he’d been weighing the pros and cons of removing them.
He hadn’t come this far by courting risks.
The buzz had come in the middle of a dinner in his honor in the grand ballroom of the Willard. Throw a rock and you’d hit an ambassador, a minister or a billionaire. All there for him, to honor him for trying to turn a continent around. Good works, writ large, the kind that went into the history books, and you could buy a piece of it. Be counted as among the great and the good.
Black tie, twenty-five thousand dollars a plate. Cheap at the price.
And they vied for tickets, fought over the privilege of being there, because it was the event of the month. People lining up to give him money, to praise him.
At the discreet buzz in his two-thousand-dollar tuxedo pants, he excused himself and found a quiet corner to consult his PDA. Immensely powerful, as small as a cell phone. It gave him access to his home computer.
Fuck!
He actually stepped back in surprise, then caught himself gracefully. Someone had done a search on his name! Someone with a DIA password. What the hell was that about?
He emailed an NSA agent who moonlighted by the hacker name of Wizard. Wizard was kept on retainer, a cool two hundred thousand a year, to be useful in exactly this kind of situation. Wizard would find out who was sniffing around his perimeter.
Five minutes later, a message popped up on his BlackBerry. The request had been traced back to the IP address, then triangulated for the street address.
He frowned. The request had come from a hotel, a small one, basically a bed-and-breakfast, in downtown Washington. He scrolled down . . . and froze. The request had come from room seven of the hotel. The guest who was checked into room seven was Claire Day.
Shit!
When he’d first heard that Claire Day had been wounded in the blast, he’d worried that she might have seen something. The embassy was supposed to have been empty except for one lone Marine Guard. And yet Claire Day had been found outside in the compound, very badly injured, and had been immediately whisked away by her father.
He’d kept a close eye on her, ready to give the order to have her taken out at any time. But she’d spent three months in a coma and by all accounts was barely back on her feet. She was down in Florida and no threat to him.
What the fuck was she doing in Washington DC, checking up on him? She was supposed to be down south, still loony from the blast. Barely able to walk and suffering from amnesia. Whatever she was doing, she was a danger to him. She had to go. He should have taken care of this from the start, when he first heard she’d been at the embassy during the bombing and had survived.
It never pays to let loose ends free. They need to be snipped, fast.
The voice of the secretary of state boomed from the ballroom. “And now, let’s give a special hand to our guest of honor, a great American and a great philanthropist, a man who single-handedly . . .”
The secretary was going to call him to the podium very soon. He pulled out a throwaway cell phone from an inside pocket, using a handkerchief. He always carried a throwaway cell in case he had to call his team together. The cell phone would go into the drains several miles from here when he was done. The cells were never used twice.
Heston, the head of his team, picked up on the first ring.
“Yes?” No names, ever.
“Clean-up action,” he said. “Room seven, Kensington House, Warren Street, off Massachusetts. Booked in the name of Claire Day. Get the computer in the room, then trash the room. Make it scary, like some lunatic broke in. She’s messing with me. We want to make sure she stops.”
“Yessir. What about the woman herself?”
He thought about Claire Day. What did she know? Had she seen something? Had she been biding her time, waiting to strike him down? Was she planning on fucking with him?
She’d been a looker in her day, though she probably wasn’t one now. And a real uppity bitch, too. Turned him down flat, secretly laughing at him while she did it. Well, it was payback time. Whatever she thought she was doing, she had just made a big, big mistake. No one crossed him. No one.
And he wanted no loose ends, not now. Especially not now.
“Terminate. Make it look like she interrupted the burglary,” he said, flipping the cell closed. He strode down the carpeted hallway under the enormous chandeliers and entered the ballroom to thunderous applause, the man of the hour, a true American hero.