Department so he could imagine how she might feel. Either way, she just didn’t seem to him to be Marc’s type.
When the housekeeper knocked lightly on the door nearly an hour later and showed both of them into his study, the ambassador was startled to realize he was still musing about Marc and Cally’s sex life.
“Morning, sir,” Marc Reagan said.
“Good morning, Mr. Ambassador,” Cally Parks said.
The ambassador nodded and waved them toward the two straight chairs in front of his desk.
“How was the trip, sir?” Marc asked.
“Okay.”
“Did you get some sleep last night?”
“No.”
Dutifully Marc and Cally both nodded, then fell into silence.
The ambassador took a deep breath and let it out again.
“Okay, ladies and gentlemen, now that the small talk portion of our program is over, let me get straight to why you’re here.”
He folded his arms over his chest and told them what he had just heard from DeSouza, more or less. He watched their faces as he talked. Shock was written all over Marc’s, but Cally’s was blank. Even her eyes were empty. In his experience, it was the eyes that gave people away when they were trying to look cool and they weren’t. Cally just sat there and listened to him, nothing in her eyes, saying nothing at all.
He pushed the graphic details of Liz’s death a little more than he normally might have, certainly more than the occasion called for, just to see what kind of reaction he would get out of Cally. He got none at all. Maybe this little girl really was as tough as she acted, the ambassador thought to himself. Maybe she really was.
When he finished, there was a long silence.
Marc was the first to break it. “Good God, sir, I just don’t know what to say. Mrs. Munson was-”
“Save it, Marc,” the ambassador interrupted. “What I need to understand now is who else in the embassy knows about this.”
“No one, as far as I know, sir. I’m flabbergasted. I’ve heard nothing like this from anyone. Not the slightest rumor.”
The ambassador shifted his eyes to Cally.
“I’ve heard nothing either, sir,” she said.
The ambassador grunted.
“What about the boys in the basement?” he asked. “They know about it yet?”
Marc glanced involuntarily toward Cally, but she was watching the ambassador intently and didn’t appear to notice.
The ‘boys in the basement’ was the in-house euphemism for the CIA, a reference to the location of the Agency’s offices within the embassy building. The Agency wasn’t actually in the basement — buildings in Singapore didn’t have basements — but they were on the ground floor at the lowest working level of the building, hidden behind the grassy embankment that was supposed to protect the structure from explosions and other forms of modern unpleasantness.
“I doubt it, sir,” Cally said. “Not unless they’ve developed the information on their own.”
The ambassador considered that, looking out through the big windows in the study into the residence’s gardens. Off in the east, out beyond the treetops, the newly risen sun looked like a flare, washing all the color out of the sky. It was going to be a clear and hot day. Of course, there were really only two possibilities in Singapore. Either clear and hot, or raining and hot. There wasn’t much in between.
“Marc,” the ambassador said without looking at him, “do you know if Dewey is in town?”
Dewey Garland was the CIA chief of station in Singapore, an old hand who had circulated through his share of hot spots. The embassy gossip mill had it that Dewey was hiding out there from some kind of bureaucratic indiscretion. Singapore didn’t have much going for it as a post for an intelligence officer, other than obscurity, but when you were on the run from trouble, particularly career-breaking trouble, a post not many people back at Langley ever thought about was exactly the one you wanted.
“I don’t know, sir. I haven’t seen him in the last few days.”
“When we’re done here, find out. If he’s in town, I want to see him immediately. If he’s not, set up a secure telephone call to wherever he is as soon as you can.”
“Right, sir.”
Another silence settled over the room after that and the ambassador seemed in no hurry to break it. Still facing the windows, focusing somewhere in the distance and seeing things only he knew, he yawned hugely. Then, after a minute or two, he swiveled his chair back toward Marc and Cally.
“There are two things I have to tell you about all this,” he said, “and both those things are for your ears only. Are we clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Marc said.
Cally only nodded.
“Okay.” The ambassador paused and weighed his words. “First, you need to understand why I don’t appear to be particularly griefstricken. Liz and I haven’t…”
The ambassador stopped talking and cocked his head as if listening for an echo.
“I guess that’s the wrong tense, isn’t it? What I mean to say is that Elizabeth and I hadn’t gotten along in a very long time. The truth of it is that we had pretty much come to hate each other for a lot of reasons. You’ve probably heard the gossip already. If it hadn’t been for…well, never mind. Just understand there were several reasons neither Liz nor I could file for divorce without doing more harm to ourselves than to each other. A death in the family was just what we needed to straighten things out. She would have been happy as hell to see me cash in my chips and the truth is I’m not sorry to find out she’s dead either. Under most circumstances, I have no doubt the cops here would be taking a pretty close look at me.”
The ambassador glanced at Marc with something on his face that was almost but not quite a smile.
“On the other hand, since I was halfway around the world in Washington when she was killed and have the Secretary of State to vouch for me, I think my alibi will hold up pretty well, don’t you, Marc?”
Marc looked uncomfortable, but he kept his face blank and his mouth shut. Better not to laugh at a lame joke and be thought stuffy, he figured, than to laugh at something that wasn’t a lame joke and look like a moron.
“Second,” the ambassador continued, “no matter how nasty you think this is now, it’s worse than that. Everybody thought Elizabeth was just an airhead with big titties who fucked around behind her older husband’s back. If that were true, finding her dead in a hotel room with something shoved up her pussy would be about par for the course.”
Marc Reagan blanched and looked away in embarrassment. He was used to the blunt, frequently profane way the ambassador expressed himself, but Cally wasn’t and Marc was just old-fashioned enough to be embarrassed when the ambassador talked like that in front of women.
The ambassador caught Marc’s discomfort and misinterpreted its meaning.
“Oh, come on, Marc. You’ve heard all the stories about Elizabeth. Half the embassy staff has heard them. Don’t feel like you have to pretend just to be considerate to me. We’re way past that now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Marc glanced back at the ambassador, but still couldn’t quite bring himself to look at Cally.
“Anyway, that’s not what’s important here,” the ambassador continued.
He shifted forward in his chair. Knitting his fingers together, he rested his chin on his clasped hands.
“Here’s the real problem,” he said. “Elizabeth was a NOC.”
NOC was a State Department acronym for an almost mythological group of deep-cover intelligence officers deployed around the world by the Central Intelligence Agency. Marc shot a quick glance at Cally to see if he might have misunderstood the ambassador. Elizabeth Munson was a deep-cover agent for the CIA? Surely not.
“Was Mrs. Munson working out of the station here, sir?” Cally asked the ambassador while Marc struggled to contain his shock. Her voice was almost unnaturally calm and professional.
“No. I think I was the only person in the embassy who knew.”
“I know this is a sensitive question, Ambassador,” Cally went straight on without hesitating, “but can you
