Blood Trust

McKinsey made a face. “But, see, this is what I mean. You can be such a fucking snob.” He swigged down some of the wine. His eyes had a semiglazed look and his hair seemed unkempt. “Honestly, I don’t know why I put up with you.”

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

He began to scan the menu. “Well, I could request a new partner, but no one else would have you.”

Naomi buried her face in the menu and decided not to show how deeply he had stung her.

He set aside the menu. “Besides, no one else would come up to your standards.”

She raised her eyes to see his tight grin. Everything about Pete was tight. He was one of those people who worked out at the gym three nights a week. If he wasn’t in the Secret Service he’d have been a professional gym rat without any socially redeeming value whatsoever.

They gave their orders to the waiter, who gathered up their menus and departed. That left the two of them staring at each other. The bustle all around them seemed not to exist, or to be muted out of all proportion. Though it was far too late for a normal dinner crowd, this crew was anything but normal. They all worked for the federal government; three-quarters of them—maybe more—were spooks of one sort or another. They were a clannish lot: the field agents over there, the intel parsers over here, the code breakers huddled in back like a bunch of old ladies. A table of four bosses—who knew their real ranks?—was in the center of the crowd, anxiously being observed by everyone out of the corner of their eyes.

“The Bishops are in the process of rearranging the board,” McKinsey said. Bishop was the internal name for the bosses, from departmental chairs to ministry honchos to the secretaries in their lofty nests high above the fray at the president’s side.

“They’re always rearranging something,” Naomi said. “It gives them something to do.”

McKinsey nodded. “Stratagems within stratagems.”

Speaking of which, Naomi thought, what stratagem are you involved with? She put a smile on her face. “Pete, we’ve been partners for a couple of years. What do we know about each other?”

He shrugged. “We always have each other’s back. What else do we need to know?”

The food came and she sat back until the waiter had left. She glanced down at her food and knew that she’d made a mistake. The red sauce looked too much like blood and the meatballs—well, she’d rather not even go there.

McKinsey was already forking up his veal parm. “What’s the matter?”

Naomi sighed and put her fork down. “I just lost my appetite.”

He paused with his fork halfway to his mouth. “This isn’t like you, Naomi. What’s gotten under your skin?”

“Just about everything,” she said, “from what was done to Billy Warren, to four dead bodies in the space of twelve hours, to Alli being the prime suspect in Billy’s torture-death.”

He looked at her steadily. “You have a soft spot for that girl, don’t you?”

She returned his gaze, part of her looking inside herself. “I was with her when she lost her father, when they brought her mother aboard Air Force One. Losing both parents in the space of a year. I feel for that girl. Her world’s been turned inside out. And now this mess.”

“We’ve all been through shitty times, Naomi.” He popped a wedge of veal into his mouth. “She’s no different than the rest of us poor fools.”

Naomi clamped down on the urge to say, There’s nothing the same between us and Alli, but, instead, sticking to her agenda, she said, “You’ve been through tough times, Pete?”

“Sure.” He rolled his shoulders, the way all gym rats did. “One time, when I was eight, or maybe nine, I got lost. I mean really lost. My parents had rented a cabin in the Smoky Mountains. This was before the blood and guts of the divorce started flying, but already they weren’t getting along. I guess they thought the vacation would do their relationship good. Instead, the isolation just brought home to them how unhappy they were. They fought—every night they fought, worse and worse. I couldn’t stand it, so I left.”

He speared another chunk of veal and cheese. “It’s not like I was running away from home or anything, but I had to get out of there. I was so upset, I didn’t think, didn’t take a flashlight or even a jacket. I ran into the forest the way you run in a nightmare, without sound, with your heart pounding so heavily you’re sure it’s going to explode and rip you wide open.

“I remember the moon, that cold light breaking through the pine branches, making little pools of light that winked out too fast. Otherwise, Jesus, it was as dark as a pit. After a while, I ran out of breath, so I stopped, bent over, hands on my knees, panting like a sonuvabitch.

“Sometime later, I stood up and looked around. I had no idea where I was. Worse, I had no idea from which direction I had come. I had no one, nothing to guide me home. Hell, right then, I didn’t have a home.”

He held the forkful of food but it hung in the air, suspended, not going anywhere. McKinsey was lost again.

“What to do? Naomi, I tell you, I’ve never been so scared in my life. I was flooded with adrenaline. I heard all these strange sounds, amplified to an almost unbearable level, I saw leaves tremble as unseen animals moved through.”

He put down his fork and looked at her. “Have you ever seen a bear in the wild?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“It’s a pretty fucking amazing thing. That’s what came out of the underbrush, Naomi, a bear. A black bear. A man-eater.”

“What happened?”

McKinsey put his elbows on the table, clasped his hands together. “Here’s the thing: you never know what a bear is going to do next. There are no signals you can read. Its behavior is totally unpredictable. And that pretty much sums up life in general: It’s so fucking unpredictable you’ve got to do everything in your power to protect yourself from being eaten alive.”

Naomi stared at him, and it was some time before she realized that he had given her his motivation for having some kind of arrangement with Fortress Securities. You’ve got to do everything in your power to protect yourself from being eaten alive. This told her why, but not what. What was Pete doing with Fortress, and was it a coincidence that this was the company whose head was in bed with Henry Holt Carson? Naomi didn’t believe in coincidences. In her world, a belief in coincidence got you killed.

“How did it end?”

McKinsey finished off the bottle. “It didn’t end, but I see what you mean.” He laughed, showing her his teeth, ivory-colored and even. “The moment it saw me the bear reared up on its hind legs. He and I, perfectly still, stood looking at each other. I was aware of something breathing just below me. Later, I realized it was my body. Abject terror had taken my mind away from the danger. How long we stayed like that I can’t even guess. Eventually, though, the bear went down on all fours, turned, and crashed back through the thick undergrowth.”

McKinsey licked his lips. Naomi was pleased to see that he’d had more than enough.

“Go on, Pete.”

“That fucking bear.” He shook his head. “I never saw the bear again.” His voice had lowered, causing Naomi to lean across the table. “But, late at night or early in the morning or just as the sun is going down, I can hear it breathing close beside me, I can smell its foul breath, feel its huge presence, like an eclipse, like death.” He looked at her bleakly, his eyes red-rimmed. “There’s no way to escape it, you know. None at all.”

* * *

JACK AND Alli sat together talking softly. All around them was the stillness of movement found only in an airplane.

“Tell me about Billy Warren,” Jack said.

Alli shrugged.

“What attracted you to him?”

“He was nice—honest. He wasn’t grabby, like the other guys around me. And there was something old- fashioned about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for instance, he liked ice-cream sodas, not Jell-O shots. And, despite what he did for a living, he was a kind of neo-Luddite. He hated computers, hated how easily data could be hijacked, substituted, even faked. Give me