Sussex Drive: A Novel (29 page)

“Fair enough,” Becky said.

“The hit was targeted,” Taylor said.

“Of course it was targeted. That’s what the Taliban do, sweetie.”

Taylor was flustered. “I need to talk to you in person. I need to give you something.”

“That’s just so not on.”

He persisted. “You need to know that my relationship with Martha was, how to say it, engineered.”

“Excuse me.”

“It was set up.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“I was being shut up.”

“You have lost it.”

“Kept close and kept focused.”

Becky did remember that after Corporal Shymanski’s rehabilitation, he was posted directly to the Prime Minister’s entourage and treated by Greg in particular as a welcomed member of one big happy family. Martha was suddenly invited by her father to tag along for pancake breakfasts, fishing trips and strolls at summer fairs, where security pushed her right up against the limping Corporal. It was around that time that Greg had started composing the
Temptations
tunes.

Oh my God, she thought.

“I was silenced,” he said.

Becky said, “Okay, let’s meet.”

A few days after she and Greg had jetted back to Ottawa, Becky waited for Nina Pearce (née Madrigal) to unlock the door of her cream 2004 BMW M5. They were in the outdoor parking lot of the Casino du Lac-Leamy, in plain sight in a congested area by Lac de la Carrière. Gatineau. Becky had stashed her Harrington Lake Jeep a few rows away. The lock snapped and she slid into the vehicle and positioned herself beside her legendary predecessor.

“You weren’t followed?” Nina said.

“No.” As far as the PMO knew, Becky had checked into a day spa for treatments.

“Security?”

“No.” The Beamer interior smelled of smoke and
cinnamon, and in the back seat there was a Maltese with a plastic cone around its head and workout gear, a towel.

“May I check your purse?”

Becky was insulted. “Be my guest.” She passed over her Roots hobo bag.

Becky stole a few looks while Nina rummaged around. She was a more vivid iteration of Becky, for sure, the non-maternal version, now a salon redhead, with the eyebrows receiving as much attention as her pet. But she had laugh lines too, which Becky had never factored into her Nina projections.

Nina handed it back. “I’m an executive secretary at a publicly traded firm,” she said, explaining the anti-spy shakedown.

“I know.”

“So I know what I’m doing.”

“Are you going to check me for a wire?”

“No. You don’t have one of those.”

“Is your dog sick?” Becky asked.

“No. She just feels more secure wearing the cone.” Nina didn’t reveal the dog’s name. “I won full custody of her in the divorce.”

Becky removed her sunglasses. “Do you know why I needed to meet with you?”

“Do you know why I agreed?”

“I’ll level with you,” Becky said.

“Don’t. Please—”

“But—”

Nina gazed out at the lake but didn’t seem to be taking it in. “Since Gregory became the PM, I can’t tell you the number of journalists who have stalked me. My family’s been bothered, my marriage was plagued, my phone bugged, and I’ve been fortunate that my corporate security at work has given me the tools to keep my private life private.”

Becky knew she was the gatekeeper for a Kanata bigwig. A solid Tory supporter.

“Why did we break up? Whose idea was it? It was decades ago, but everyone wants the true story.”

“Including me,” Becky said.

“Clearly,” Nina said. “Do you mind if I smoke?” Her hand reached for the Dunhills in her coffee holder.

“I do mind,” Becky said. “Sorry.”

Nina laughed. “I respect that.”

“You see,” said Becky, “there are competing versions.”

“Yes,” Nina said. She was enjoying her power just a little.

“Serious depression versus restraining orders,” Becky prompted.

“I know,” she said. She looked out the window and absently reached back to pat the snout of the no-name pooch. “Look, I have to have a smoke.” She grabbed a cigarette from the pack, a lighter, and got out. She headed to the sidewalk by the lake and lit up.

Becky waited a minute and then got out of the car and came up beside her.

Nina punched her key fob and the Beamer beeped.

“This is what I want to tell you,” Nina said. “Here’s your
take-away. I’ve watched you and Gregory over the years. You have a beautiful family—”

“Thank you for affirming that.”

“—two of your own and that sweet little boy from South America. You’ve stuck by Gregory through thick and thin.” She took another drag. “He’s a politician. As are you. It’s always about spinning a story. Even if the story is saying, hey, by the way, blue is red.”

Becky nodded and moved out of the exhalation of smoke.

Far behind them, the motorcoaches roared up to the casino to deliver loads of day gamblers, dreamers and seniors.

“So,” Nina said. “He was a man who made up a story. It happened to be about me. It was a story he needed to tell because he was so hurt.”

To Becky she sounded protective. Revisionist.

“Hurt that you ended it,” Becky said.

Nina ignored her. “The story allowed him to survive to carry on. To meet you, keep you and have a beautiful family.” She flicked the ash. “To live happily ever after.”

Becky stared out at Gatineau. So he’d lied. Not only had there been a restraining order, he’d disparaged his lover.

“They took care of me,” Nina said.

“Excuse me?” Becky said.

“Covered my airfare, six months’ rent and change. Pastor Grant still sends me a Christmas card.”

She felt ill. “I really have to go,” Becky said.

Nina crushed her cigarette under her Cole Haan pump. Becky had the very same pair. “Well, that was fast.”

Becky had already turned around and was walking back toward her Jeep. As she passed Nina’s car, the Maltese started to yap; it was just a cute face in a cone. She kept walking. “Your dog needs to pee.”

Taylor was late. She waited in yet another parking lot, the deserted one at the Mackenzie King estate near Kingsmere Lake. Nobody was here except for Mackenzie King’s ghosts and herself.

Out in the bush, she could see the green creeping out onto the trees.

Which would be worse—the history that Nina Pearce had been carrying for two decades or the information Shymanski wanted to unload?

The tongues of Ottawa were wagging. The Parliamentary Committee was scheduled for tomorrow and there was internal wrangling about parameters and redactions. She’d also heard on the news that the Afghan ambassador, Jabar Khan, had been recalled to Kabul and President Karzai wasn’t disclosing any details. Colvin’s detainee case was also on the boil.

Where was Taylor? She phoned him.

“Becky.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m on the Champlain—”

“You’re late.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Just get here.”

“I’m sorry, the Governor General, I had to—”

Trust Lise to have her fingers in this. “Hurry,” Becky cried.

He wasn’t far. There wasn’t even time for her to walk up the hill to the house, closed now, and wander through the ruins. What had that prime minister been thinking with his seances? And how well Ottawa had kept its secrets over the years. Imagine if any relatively current PM was dabbling in the dark arts!

She heard the car. And then it was visible on the stretch of Chemin Mackenzie King. A green compact, an eco-rental, an Honour-Car: she could see the familiar logo on the driver’s door. It was Shymanski, and she wondered what she could possibly have been thinking. Meeting this wild card, this publicly accused ANP murderer, trafficker and daughter deflowerer, in the middle of the wilderness.

She stayed in the Jeep while Shymanski pulled into the parking lot. She watched him fiddle with something in the car and then her phone rang.

“Becky—Mrs. Leggatt, do you want to walk?”

“Yes,” she said. “In the ruins. Up the hill and to the left. Join me in five minutes.”

“D’accord.”

She threw on Greg’s Tilley hat and her black scarf. She wondered if by appearing here she gave credence to Taylor’s notion that he’d been set up with Martha. There was too much to think about.

It was a gentle climb. She was up by the cottage. Not far away, she saw the colonnaded ruins, suitable for a performance of the Scottish play. A soft mist choked the lawn.

She heard the blast. It shot right through her, a battle, and then she found herself and she was running back to him as fast as she could.

The Honour-Car had been tossed. It rested upside down in flames. Acrid black smoke was already towering high. She screamed his name and ran past a leg, real or prosthetic. He’d been expelled in the driver’s seat, with the door attached, and it seemed absurd to be trying to open a door to reach him when he wasn’t actually inside. She hunted by feel. She didn’t dare breathe. There was no logic to it. She had to unfasten his seatbelt, but it seemed to have melted into his hoodie, which became his torso, and then her hand seemed to be inside his cooking lung. He had to be dead. Then her hands reached up to the seatbelt clasp and fused.

By the time the operatives stepped out from behind the trees, the hands were ice. What were they doing there? Who were they? In seconds she was dragged from the explosion and rolled, under their heavy guy weight, to extinguish her jean jacket, her flaming hair under the smoking Tilley.

Then she heard the ambulance.

At the Gatineau Emergency, where she was attended by the very same Pakistani physician who’d treated Greg the previous fall, Becky thought she’d been granted a do-over.

She saw his familiar face, and that’s where she went in her brain.

They prepared her for an airlift, working to minimize the impact of smoke inhalation and to reduce her heart rate and
vascular resistance, assessing her TBSA, her fluids. Her hands, with second-degree partial-thickness burns and some third-degree coverage, were raw under the cling film. She tried to find the right words.

“You turned back time.” She was deliriously grateful. “He’s alive.”

“She’s in shock,” he said.

May 2009
 

19
 

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, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Becky was registered under her maiden name, Holt. The administration knew how to protect Canadian privacy. For morale and more, though, she’d adopted a brunette wig, shoulder length, the Julia Roberts.

Greg visited once, briefly, not wanting to run up costs for suffering taxpayers. She discussed her treatment: the skin graft, the infection she’d incurred, the cosmetic prognosis for her hands as a whole, and certain digits and her right thumb specifically. Greg nodded appropriately.

Her parents had been taking care of the children, staying at Sussex Drive and flying down to spend time with her on weekends, but had recently left for a long-awaited trip to China. Glenn had told her he was sending Greg daily texts: “Wish you were here.”

“And how are the kids?” Becky asked.

“Don’t ask,” Greg said. Pablo wasn’t causing any trouble,
but Greg had had to punish Peter for insolence and various transgressions. And then Greg was infuriated at Martha’s hysterical reaction to his disciplining of Peter.