Even in her bulky coat, his stare made Gurt a little uncomfortable. “No, thank you. Just over to the park. The child is restless.”
She started to add that her name was Fuchs, not Reilly, decided the rebuke was not worth the effort and guided Manfred onto the driveway.
Randy turned to take a long look at the Iris Garden. “I don’t feel comfortable with that, ma’am. Even with the foliage off the trees and bushes, too many places somebody could hide.”
Not without leaving tracks in the sheet of ice a blind man could spot, Gurt thought. But she said, “Thank you for your thoughtfulness, but we will be quite all right.”
Taking Manfred by the hand, although there was no sign of traffic, she stepped into the street. Grumps, lesson unlearned, dashed ahead, again unable to put on the brakes. This time he hit the far curb.
Randy shut the SUV’s door with a little more force than Gurt thought necessary. “Then I’ll have to go with you ma’am.”
The thought of the man’s stares made Gurt inexplicably uncomfortable. She’d been… what would Lang say? Ogled, that was it, ogled. She’d been ogled by men all her adult life and most of her adolescence.
Her tone had a little more snap in it than she might have wished. “I said, we will be quite all right, thank you. I would prefer to be alone with my child.”
Randy shrugged. “Orders are orders, ma’am. I’m to stay with you while you’re outside.”
She saw no one else was in sight on this rare day when fireplaces would be more than decorative and at least half her neighbors would be home. On the unlikely chance anyone showed up to walk the Iris Garden, he would be as obvious as a wart on the nose. But she understood the necessity of obedience to orders as only those of Teutonic origin can. She herself had complied with enough of them in her time with the Agency.
She sighed, admitting defeat. “Very well, but try to keep a distance.”
Randy gave her a wary smile. “I don’t mean to give offense, ma’am.”
“It is not you who is offensive,” Gurt lied smoothly, all too conscious of the gun in her own pocket. “It is I dislike to have my child exposed to men, er, carrying firearms. There is too much violence on television and in the papers already.”
“I understand. The kid won’t see my gun, ma’am.”
“Gun?” Manfred piped up. “The man has a gun?” he turned to Randy. “Can I see?”
Gurt sighed deeply, taking Manfred by the arm. “Come, Manfred. Grumps wants to play.”
“Aw, Mom…”
“I said, come! ”
Today Grumps was more interested in the various smells of the Iris Garden than he was in fetching the tennis ball. Perhaps the small park’s resident squirrels had left a different scent or the neighborhood dogs had deposited more “pee mail” than normal, each requiring a prompt reply.
Whatever the reason, the first toss of the Day-Glo chartreuse ball only got a glance from the sniffing dog. At the second attempt, Grumps stopped his exploration long enough to watch the ball roll down one of the two slopes that formed the valley that was the park. The dog favored Manfred with a look that clearly asked, “Just what, pray tell, do you expect me to do with that?”
The little boy’s enthusiasm undiminished, he followed the dog, followed by Gurt, followed by Randy.
Gurt was breathing hard, the air cold enough to slice her lungs like a surgeon’s scalpel. Cresting a small rise, she saw other human figures, those of her next-door neighbors Paige Charles and her son Wynn Three, Manfred’s friend.
“I am surprised you are out in this cold,” Gurt said when she was within earshot, motioning Randy to keep his distance.
Paige shook her head, a movement hardly perceptible under the fur-lined hood of her heavy parka. “It was either brave the weather or a restless child. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be cooped up with a kid as active as Wynn Three.”
Gurt watched Manfred and Wynn Three, now playing with a compliant Grumps. “Believe me, I do not have to imagine. I-”
A sharp crack shattered the morning’s cathedral-like silence. Gurt’s hand went to her coat pocket as she frantically motioned Manfred to come to her.
Paige must have seen the consternation on her face. “What? That was just another limb breaking off from the tree because of the weight of the ice.”
Gurt barely heard her. She had a protective arm around Manfred, her eyes searching what she thought was the direction of the sound, but she was certain only of two things: Randy was no longer in sight and she surely knew the difference between a shattering oak limb and a gunshot.
The White House
Washington, D.C.
The previous afternoon
The secretary of defense stood, hands clasped behind his back as he stared out of the Oval Office’s French doors into a rose garden desolated by winter. He checked his watch. The president was twenty minutes late for the meeting. That wasn’t even close to the record. The young chief executive had no qualms about keeping staff waiting an hour or so if the opportunity arose for an impromptu press conference, something he invariably mishandled. The man was a golden-tongued orator as long as he could stick to prepared notes and the teleprompter. Off the cuff, he tended to sound self-contradictory or confused. Fortunately, a sympathetic press usually edited out his most nonsensical responses, leaving only Fox News and conservative bloggers to broadcast the miscues.
Still, the man liked press exposure. Many said someone should tell him he no longer had to campaign and should get down to the business at hand.
The business at hand. The SecDef glanced around the room. An odd crew: a fiftyish female lieutenant colonel who had something to do with intelligence; the U.S. delegate to the Organization of American States; and the new head of the CIA, a former college radical, community organizer and a man who, as far as the SecDef knew, had had no experience in running anything the size of a taco stand, let alone one of the world’s largest intel agencies.
But then, neither had the president.
The last chief spook had resigned in protest of the criminal prosecution of a number of CIA agents who, following the previous administration’s guidelines, had inflicted what the new bunch considered torture on some very brutal individuals, extracting information that had prevented at least one and possibly more terrorist attacks on the U.S. both here and abroad.
Such was politics. The new CIA chief, along with his boss, believed sincerely, the SecDef feared, that total candor and self-abasement were the tools of successful relationships with other nations, a policy uniformly embraced in word if not in deed by America’s enemies. The country’s traditional allies had all but ceased to share information for fear the same would appear on the front pages of the New York Times or Washington Post.
It was enough to make the SecDef wish he had not been chosen as the sole holdover from the previous administration.
The absence today of any of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was significant as was the fact that this meeting was taking place here rather than the much larger adjacent conference room, equipped with the latest real-time technology. The president’s dislike of large meetings was well-known and offered as an excuse to exclude most of the intelligence community and military, both of which he equally and openly distrusted.
His thoughts scattered as the president entered wearing his customary golf shirt and slacks, the first person the SecDef had ever seen enter this historic room in less-than-respectful business or military attire. He was followed by Jack Roberts, chief of staff, a man the SecDef thought of as the “presidential dog robber.” Whatever the White House needed, be it leaking a rumor devastating to a member of the opposition, strong-arming a recalcitrant member of his own party or making it convenient for a congressional fence-sitter to come down on the White House’s side of a vote, Roberts was the go-to guy.
The president motioned for everyone to take a seat as he slid behind the desk and nodded to the director of the CIA. “You wanted to see me, Jerry?”
The director nodded, turning to the woman in the army uniform of a lieutenant colonel. “Let me introduce you to Colonel Faith Romer and Jack Hanson. Colonel Romer is the military liaison with the CIA regarding the Caribbean Basin. Jack is the U.S. representative to the Organization of American States.”
