with a bob of her head to one of the women among her security guard. The woman looked more like a college undergrad than a Secret Service agent. Where she could have been carrying a gun under the summery little dress she had on was an intriguing mystery to me.
“Jennie,” Laura asked, “can you move the team to the outside of the doors? Mr. Albano and I want to speak privately.”
She nodded, just as tight-lipped and hard-eyed as the men. Inside of thirty seconds, the room was empty, but we both knew that nobody could get in with anything less than an armored squad of commandos.
Laura still had a look of casual amusement about her. “What was it you wanted to talk about, Meric?”
She had moved from the dais to one of the folding chairs in the first row of the audience. I was still on my feet, standing before her.
“I know about the cloning.” I said.
“So I’ve heard.”
“I was wondering how much you know. What ideas you have about which of them might be the murderer.”
She arched an eyebrow, but said nothing.
“You agree that one of the brothers is… killing the rest of them?”
“I suppose that’s what it is,” she said. Then, looking up at me, “But it might be someone else… someone who wants to see just one of the brothers in power, and all the others out of the way.”
“You mean Wyatt?”
She made a small shrug. “Or Lazar.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“Or Mandella, the Secretary of Defense… Or anybody.”
She was teasing, toying with me, not taking it seriously.
“Or you,” I said suddenly.
Her smile got wider, but her eyes went cold. “Yes,” she said slowly, “it might even be me. Maybe I want to be President.”
“Or in total control of the President.”
“It’s a thought,” Laura said.
It was like trying to interview a piece of sculptured crystal. Laura sat there, beautiful, smiling,
“I’m calling a press conference tomorrow,” I said. “If there’s no answer by then, I’ll throw it open to the public.”
“Yes. He told me.”
“Who told you? Which one?”
An annoyed shake of her head. “I don’t know. I make it a policy not to ask.”
“You just deal with them…”
“As if there were only one,” Laura finished for me. “It’s easier that way. They’re careful not to let anybody see more than one at a time. They do the same for me… most of the time.”
I could feel my knees getting fluttery. “But… but you
Her eyes never faltered. She kept looking straight at me, kept her smile going, although now it was starting to look mocking. “I told you, Meric, I never ask. Was it Franklin who said, ‘In the dark, all cats are gray’?”
I felt myself sit with a thump on the edge of the dais.
“Oh, don’t look so shocked,” Laura said, her voice getting sharp. “You’d do exactly the same thing… men have been doing it for ages. It’s called a harem.”
“No… it’s not…” I was shaking my head.
“Poor Meric. Still a Yankee frontiersman in your head, aren’t you? All the old morality. All the lovely old chauvinist attitudes.”
There wasn’t much I could say.
“Come here, Meric. Sit beside me.” Laura patted the seat next to her.
I went over and sat, like an obedient puppy.
“You realize that if you make this story public it will ruin the President. He’ll be forced to resign.”
“At least.”
Laura put a finger on my lips. “Do you realize that you’re doing this to hurt me? To punish me for choosing him over you?”
“You mean choosing
“Don’t be mean.”
“I’m not trying to hurt you, Laura. God knows that’s the last thing in the world I’d want to do.”
“Then drop this press announcement. Cancel the conference.”
“And let one of those brothers finish murdering the rest of them?”
“Let them settle their family matters by themselves. It doesn’t concern you.”
“I can’t!” It sounded more like pleading than a mighty affirmation of morality, justice, and the rule of law.
“Not even for me?”
“Not even for you,” I said. Miserably.
Her hand came back to my face. I could smell a fragrance that she used, a scent I hadn’t known since we were in college together. She brushed at the hair over my ear.
“You don’t understand what I just said, Meric,” she said, very softly. “You can have me… if you still feel the way we used to.”
“The way we used to?” My voice was a strangled squeak.
“Yes. When you loved me and I loved you. We can have that again. The two of us. Just like before.”
I pulled myself away from her. “How in the hell… you must be out of your mind, Laura!”
Very patiently she said, “Listen to me. Jim has a little more than three years to his term. He won’t try for reelection… too much has happened for him to expect that. After he’s out of office, there will be a quiet, amicable divorce. Then you and I… together… anywhere in the world, Meric.”
There must be an instant in a heart transplant operation when the surgeons have removed your original heart but haven’t yet put in the donor organ. That’s how I felt right then. There was a hole in my chest, an aching cavity, livid with flame-hot pain.
“Three years…” I heard myself mumble.
Laura said “I never loved him, Meric. I realize that now. It was all ambition… the power trip. And we could get together from time to time even before the three years is up. I travel a lot, and so does…”
A sudden vision of me waiting at the end of a line, with everybody ahead of me looking like the President snapped me back to reality.
“Sure, we could get together,” I said. “With three of the brothers dead, your dance card must have a lot of holes in it.”
“Don’t be vicious.”
“Then don’t treat me like some high school kid with a hard-on. Jesus Christ, Laura, you’re nothing but a high-classed whore.”
“And what are you?” she snapped back, taunting. “A sniveling little boy who works at the White House and still believes everything they taught him in grammar school about patriotism and loyalty.”
“Damned right I do!”
“Grow up, Meric! Be a man! It’s
“Yeah… he pumps it into you, doesn’t he? How the hell do you arrange it? Do they each have a certain night, or do you take them all on the same night? Do you have gang bangs in the Queens Bedroom?”
Her smile returned, but now it was etched with acid. “Sometimes.”
“Ahh, shit!” I bolted out of the chair, turned and kicked it, sending it clattering into the row of chairs behind it.
