practicing her craft. Something was scaring her and she was trying to control it. Kelly knew firsthand that very few things scared Debrah Drexler. “I’ve got a problem.”
“We should start a club,” Kelly said. He had leaned forward in his seat, but now that he knew it was Debbie, he eased back again and put his feet up.
“I tried calling your cell phone, but I couldn’t get through.”
“It’s off. New protocol they’re trying out. No cell use permitted inside CTU. You know this call will be logged, too?”
“That’s not a problem from this number. But I didn’t want your secretary hearing the name. I need help. Real help, and you’re the only person I could think of.”
Kelly felt his face flush like a schoolboy. All he could think was
the thought of being her knight in shining armor set his heart to beating.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
She told him. When she reported her conversations with the Attorney General, and her encounter with the mystery man, her voice reacquired the crisp, direct tones of the Senator everyone knew from television. But as she concluded, the quaver returned. “I…I don’t know how anyone could have known that, Kel. It was so long ago. No one knew me back then. You were…you were the only one I ever told.”
Her words were part plea, part accusation. He could tell she couldn’t — or wouldn’t — believe he had betrayed her, but she was bewildered and desperate. She had to know, but couldn’t bring herself to ask. He would have done the same thing in her place.
“It wasn’t me, Deb. You know that. Besides, why would I tell the AG? You know how I feel about the NAP Act.”
She stifled a sob. “Yes, I know.”
Politics was all they could ever talk about anymore. This was ironic, of course, because it was politics that had driven a wedge between them a dozen years ago. She’d been the Mayor of San Francisco and he’d been head of the special response unit there. That made him the head of security and, ostensibly, her chief bodyguard. They’d danced around each other for several months. There was reason to hesitate — she was several years older than he was, for one thing; for another, a relationship, while technically permissible, was wonderful grist for the rumor mill. They’d finally taken the leap after a security briefing for a visit by the president-elect. She’d insisted on sitting in — even though the mayor had very little to say, and less to do, about the visits by the Federal government — and he’d enjoyed her biting style of questioning. In the general hubbub that inevitably follows one of those briefings, he’d managed to slide her a quick invitation to dinner. They’d each expected to be disappointed. How interesting could a law enforcement man be? How pleasant could a feminist politician be? And yet they’d each found a diamond in the rough and become fascinated. He had done undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, just across the bay, before chucking it all for a military career “just to see if he could hack it.” She wasn’t so much a feminist as an individualist, whose hackles rose whenever she perceived a person — any person— squashed by the system. The two years they spent together in the city by the bay were good years for both of them.
Good things end, though. No moss gathered on Debrah Drexler’s career, and she used her Bay Area popularity to jump into the national game, winning a seat in the Senate on her first try. That had been the end. If a local mayor was allergic to gossip, for a U.S. senator it was deadly poison. Though Kelly grasped her reasons in an intellectual exercise, his heart remained baffled, and confusion led inevitably to pain. She threw sporadic communications his way, trying to maintain contact, but it was too hard, especially when the conversations turned to personal matters. So when they did speak, which was not often, it was only about politics.
That was how she knew that Kelly Sharpton opposed the NAP Act. He was one of the few in his agency who did — most agents in CTU, and most officers in other intelligence units, were grateful for every tool that helped them do their job. But the aggressiveness of this “New American Privacy” awakened in Kelly some of his old Berkeley sensibilities. He wasn’t sure he wanted to live in a country so willing to sacrifice what it loved to save itself. It was his job to invade people’s privacy, disrupt their lives, sift through their secrets, because sometimes those people were evil. But he had always appreciated the watchmen who watched him. But now the watchers had joined the party themselves praising and encouraging the very government operations that the Founding Fathers had sought to check.
“I don’t really know the Attorney General,” Kelly said. “Would he go through with it?”
Deb half-laughed, half-sobbed. “Oh, he’d do it just to hurt me. We aren’t the best of friends.”
“The confirmation hearings. I remember.”
“This is just icing. It would ruin me. ‘Champion of Women’s Rights A Former Prostitute,’ ” she read the imaginary headline. “That’s going to be fun.”
“What do you need from me?” Kelly asked.
“He’s got something, Kel. Some kind of proof, or he wouldn’t talk about making it public. Twenty year old rumors would be useless. He’s got something. I need you to find out what he’s got and destroy it.”
Kelly felt his chest tighten. A fist clutched his heart. “That’s…you say it pretty easy. Do you have any idea what that means?”
“I’m desperate,” she said.
Words like
“There’s got to be something. I don’t know anyone else—”
“You’re on the Senate Intelligence Committee!” Kelly shot back. “You know everyone! You know the bosses of my bosses’ bosses!”
“But I can’t trust anyone. Not anyone in Washington. Trust me, anyone I ask will either expose me right away or they’ll use the information themselves and I’ll do this all over again in a year or two. No one there is stupid enough to—”
“But I am. ”
“You’re brave enough,” she said. She paused, as though the enormity of her request was finally dawning on her. “Kelly, I barely know what I’m asking. I don’t even know what you can do. I don’t even know what he has, exactly. All I do know is that I’ve got an hour to make a decision. And I can’t let that get out.”
He sat up, almost getting to his feet. “You don’t mean you’d change your. ” he trailed off, not able to finish the sentence. “That’s not you. You don’t buckle under.”
He could feel her stress through the telephone line. This was killing her, to have someone force her hand. Every politician makes compromises, of course, but Debrah Drexler had slogged through twenty years of politics without sacrificing her principles. He’d known her for years, and even when they weren’t talking, he’d watch her career and the way she voted. She was Liberal with a capital L, an ACLU supporter, and an outspoken civil rights champion. She bucked trends in either direction when her bullshit meter sounded. Despite her liberal tendencies, she had championed welfare reform for years… only to vote against the bill at the last minute because it did not provide adequate child care provisions for mothers who found jobs. That had nearly destroyed her reputation among the moderates who chose her over the conservative alternatives. By the same token, she had nearly destroyed her image on the far left by voting to revise affirmative action because she believed it had become a quota system that looked at color alone, without considering economic status. She weathered every storm by declaring her intention to vote for what she felt was right, even if it meant losing her job.
“There’s a lot of work to be done in the Senate,” she replied. “I don’t know who would speak up for women. The abortion debate is still going on—”
“You can’t vote for that bill,” he stated firmly.
“Then help me destroy his evidence. I need you to do it.” She checked her watch. “And I need you to do it in less than an hour.”
4. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 6 A.M. AND 7 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD
