the ability to stop time, or, in a less fanciful description, to make the past manifest itself in the present. With that look she and Jack were hurtled back in time to the moment when he’d rescued her, when danger was as palpable a presence as a hand on the throat or the plucking of a sleeve from out of a nighttime crowd. There was an understanding between them that at that moment nothing was safe, nothing was certain, that all around them lay peril and the gaping unknown. There is no more powerful situation in which to forge true intimacy, a bond that cannot, or perhaps more accurately will not, be broken.
Which was why Jack now turned to the waiting aide and said, “Close the door and let’s get under way.”
Alli didn’t look at Annika, she didn’t gloat as she might well have done. Instead, she kissed Jack chastely on the cheek and murmured, “Thank you,” in his ear, before returning to her seat and strapping herself in.
“Don’t make me regret what I’ve done,” he said in return, but in truth part of him was already regretting it. He was ready to ignore his promise to the First Lady. Even as they began to taxi out onto the runway he felt the urge to call the aide over, tell him to stop the plane. As he took a seat, he told himself that Wilde must have already departed in the limo, but whether this thought was a form of consolation in order to lessen the burden of guilt that was already beginning to weigh on him or an actual fact he never found out because he quite deliberately kept himself from looking out the window to see if, in fact, the limo had left and, with it, his other option. He’d made his choice, now he’d have to live with it.
SIX
“WHAT’S UP with you?” Jack said.
“What’s up with the psycho-bitch?”
“Please don’t call her that.”
“I’ll stop calling her a psycho-bitch when she stops acting like one,” Alli said. “Which will be never.”
Jack had taken Alli to the rear of the aircraft as soon as it had taken off and reached cruising altitude.
“Jack, what is she doing here? I mean, who is she, anyway?”
Jack glanced over her head, checking to see that Annika was still in her seat. “She and I got into some trouble, which is why she’s here. She can’t go back to Moscow, to her old life.”
“You mean she fucked up her life, now she’s going to fuck up yours.”
“It’s not that simple, Alli.”
“Okay, then explain it to me.”
“The less you know about this, the better, believe me.”
“Now you sound like my father.”
“Low blow,” Jack said, and they both laughed at the same time. “Still,” he said, sobering quickly, “two men were killed tonight, two criminals.”
“So what’s the problem? The police—”
“This is Russia, Alli. The police aren’t to be trusted. They’re in the pocket of either the Russian mafia or elements of the federal government, both of which are as corrupt as they come.” He looked at her. “In any case, one of the criminals was so highly connected that Annika’s bosses have turned their backs on her. They may even send people after her.”
“To bring her back?”
“To kill her.”
“You’re kidding, right? Tell me this is a joke—I don’t care how sick it is, maybe I deserve it, but just tell me —”
“It’s no joke, Alli.” He sighed heavily. “Now you know why I didn’t want you coming with me.”
She was silent for some time. The plane hit an air pocket and dipped unexpectedly, obliging them to hold on for a moment. Jack reached for one of the overhead bins, Alli grabbed on to him, pressing closer.
She bit her lip. “The only reason I fought to come on this boring trip was so I could be near you.”
“Alli—”
“Listen to me. I feel safe only when I’m with you. It doesn’t matter where you go, Jack. I can’t be on my own now—I can’t be with my parents or their handlers or the doctors. When I am, I’m filled with a nameless dread, or maybe it isn’t so nameless, right? We know him—you and me and Emma.”
“Morgan Herr is dead, Alli. You know that.”
“And yet I
Jack put his arms around her. “What kind of things?”
“Things from my past—people and places, things that only Emma and I knew, and sometimes not even Emma; things I’m deeply ashamed of, things I’d rather not remember, but he won’t let me forget. It’s like he crawled inside my head and somehow, I don’t know how, he’s still there, living and breathing, whispering to me, whispering . . .”
Her last words dissolved into racking sobs. She pushed her face into his chest and he rubbed her neck in order to soothe her and, in another sense, soothe himself because he felt her pain almost as if it was his own, a twin, two melancholy trains running along the same track, which led to Emma, perhaps only a memory of her, perhaps not; best friend to one, daughter to the other. But part of him wasn’t sympathetic at all. He sensed that a good deal of her persistent anxiety stemmed from pushing down those very incidents in her past, because the more she turned away from them the more they tore at her, exacerbating her anxiety, stoking her fear. For the moment, at least, it was easier for her to believe that Morgan Herr was instigating those thoughts, rather than admit to herself that it was her own mind struggling to work through the most emotionally devastating days and nights of her past.
“I wish Emma were here,” she said in her soft little girl’s voice.
Jack stroked her hair absently. “Me, too.”
“Sometimes I can’t believe how much I miss her.”
Alli said it, but it might just as well have been Jack. “She’s in our memory, Alli, which is what makes memory so precious.” He detached himself from her so that he could look her in the eye, to confirm to her, if she didn’t already know, that they were traveling along the same track. “It’s this same memory that holds your dark days— Emma’s, too, for that matter, as well as mine—and I think you can figure out for yourself that it’s all one, the dark days and the bright, shining ones. Of course we both want to remember Emma, and we do, but for you the cost of holding your dark days at bay has become too great. If you push them away then you risk losing Emma as well.”
“It can’t work that way—”
“But it does, Alli. Whatever’s happened to you is a part of you; you can wish it hadn’t happened, but you can’t deny that it did.”
“But every time I think about the dark days I break out into a cold sweat, I start to shake, and I hear a screaming inside myself I can’t silence, and then I’m sure I’m losing my mind, and the fear starts to build until I can’t stand it anymore, and I think . . .”
True to her word, she had started shaking, tiny beads of sweat appearing at her hairline. Jack held her close again. “I know what you think, honey, but you’re never going to act on that thought. You understand that, don’t you? You’re not going to kill yourself, there’s far too much life inside you.”
He waited until he felt her nod wordlessly against him before going on. “Whatever happened to you, you’re still who you always were. Morgan Herr didn’t have the power to take that away from you. In fact, it was in those dark days that you found your own courage, you found out who you are.”
“But he programmed me. I did what he wanted me to do.”
She looked up at him, a little girl again, stripped of her tough young woman’s armor, her smart mouth, her arrow-swift rejoinders learned in a culture that grew its children into adults before their time, a culture that moved far too swiftly, becoming fixated on the glossy surface of things. He saw her as her father never would, an unspeakable tragedy that Jack, a man who had lost his only child, was struck by more deeply than most.
“No one knows the future,” he said, “we all accept that, but we don’t really know the past very well, either. We know only what happened to us, not what happened to those around us. We have no idea, for instance, how what they did or didn’t do aff ected us. Once you accept that we’re aware of only a sliver of what happened, you
