He sipped his beer, cautiously watching her blue, almond-shaped eyes, her lips slightly wet with wine. He found himself wondering what was going on inside her head right now.
She laughed then, nicely. “I'm completely losing it! I
“Having a drink of white wine? At midday? Not that unusual in New York.”
“I think I have to go. I really should go. I have to call and tell them you didn't keep your appointment.”
“That's a problem. If you did that, they wouldn't let me see you again. I'd get a bad reputation as somebody completely unreliable. And we wouldn't want that, would we?”
“No, I guess we wouldn't. But I really have to go.”
“Well, that's not acceptable to me. No. Just hold on a minute.”
Hudson reached inside his weather-beaten, drab brown overcoat. He placed three fifty-dollar bills on the bar.
“Billie what? Tell me your last name, at least.”
“You can't afford this. Please, David. It really isn't a good idea.”
“Billie what? I thought you liked me.”
She looked as if she'd been slapped, as if someone in her lower-middle-class English family had caught her at this escort work in New York. She hesitated, then finally spoke up again.
“It's Billie Bogan. Like the poet Louise Bogan… ‘Now that I have your face by heart, I look…’”
“You look extremely beautiful to me. Let's get out of here, now.”
David Hudson hadn't felt this way in fifteen years. It was inconvenient, and the timing was terrible-but there it was.
Feeling-where there had been none for so many years. Intense feeling. And the warning signals were going off all at once.
15
Washington, D. C.
The morning of December 9 was a gloomy day in Washington, where even the stark, bare trees seemed to be gasping for light and life. A second emergency meeting was being held at the White House for members of the National Security Council and other officials associated with the Green Band inquiries.
As he waited patiently for the president to arrive, Arch Carroll was thinking about pain.
It was hard for him not to. His right arm, which was cradled in bandages and a temporary sling, would flare up every now and again. He'd flinch and curse before he had time to remind himself he was lucky just to be alive. Despite the Tylenol 4 he'd swallowed, his nerve endings felt as if they were being gnawed on.
Lucky to be alive, Carroll thought again. There were four fewer orphans in the world.
A morbid little syllogism clicked in his head.
A cat has nine lives.
I am not a cat.
Therefore I don't have nine lives.
So how many lives do I have? How many more chances if I keep playing the game this hard?
President Kearney finally entered the room, and everyone stood up.
The president of the United States was dressed casually. He had chosen a navy Lacoste shirt and slightly wrinkled, knockabout khakis. He looked like a kind of regular guy, Arch Carroll thought to himself. You could imagine him, in better times and another season, puttering around the backyard, poking the center of a sirloin on the barbecue. Carroll remembered that Kearney had two young boys. Maybe he played ball with them. But there wouldn't be much leisure for that these days. President Kearney had taken the brunt of press criticism over Wall Street, a case of the press creating a convenient scapegoat for the public. Suddenly, in just a few days, his political moon had lost almost all its former brightness.
The participants inside the White House conference room avoided formal handshakes this time. They'd all brought bulging leather briefcases and portfolios for the early morning meeting; the physical proof of the relentless investigations were there to be reviewed and acted upon.
Judging from the impressive look of the paperwork, someone had to have discovered something about Green Band, Carroll thought as the meeting began. He looked across the room at Caitlin Dillon, who smiled back at him. She, too, had an overstuffed briefcase. Today she looked businesslike and efficient in a tailored navy blue suit and an unadorned white shirt. She wore a navy necktie in the form of a large bow. For some reason Carroll found all this severity of style attractive.
“Good morning to all of you-although I don't know what might be especially good about it. To be perfectly blunt, I'm even more concerned than I was on Friday night.”
President Kearney certainly did nothing to relieve the strain as he delivered his opening remarks. He remained standing stiffly at the head of the long wooden table.
“Every reliable projection we have says that a stock market panic, a full-scale crash, may soon be on us… Some of the more manipulative bastards around the world have actually figured out how to make this tragedy work to their advantage…
“I will tell all of you this in strict confidence-the Western economy cannot survive a major crash at this time. Even a minor market crash would be catastrophic.”
The president had raised his voice, and there was the palest flash of his old campaign style, the inspirational voice, the characteristic firmness of the jaw-but then, as suddenly as the echo had come, it vanished. Justin Kearney looked like a man whose spirit had sagged entirely.
The president once again solicited information, and new data from around the table. Each adviser gave a succinct report on any findings relating to Green Band.
When his turn arrived, Carroll inched his chair closer to the conference table. He tried to make everything very quiet inside his head. He was still hazy. His body was numb and cold at times since the shooting in Paris. And his arm was throbbing again, a palpable pain.
“My news isn't good, either,” he began. “We have some concrete facts, some statistics, but not a lot that's worthwhile. The raw information about the bombing is complete, anyway. Five packages of plastique would be required per building. They could have leveled lower Manhattan if they'd wanted to. They didn't want to… They wanted to do exactly what they did. New York was a controlled, a tightly disciplined, demonstration. My team has spent forty-eight hours going through every terrorist contact that exists. There are no connections to this group.
“There
“Unfortunately, so many Wall Street computers and brokerage house records were destroyed, We have no way to determine the true stock market picture. We don't know if securities were taken, or if there's been a computer scam.”
The vice president, Thomas More Elliot, interrupted Carroll. Of all the men seated in the room, the stern New Englander seemed the sharpest, the most in control of himself. That morning, at least, Vice President Elliot looked more like the group's leader than the president.
“You're saying we still have
Carroll frowned and shook his head. “There haven't been any further demands. No bargaining. No contact whatsoever. They seem to have invented a completely new and terrifying game. It's a game where we don't even get to know what game we're playing! They move-then we have to try to react.”
“Comments?” Vice President Elliot asked, his tone clearly acerbic. “On Mr. Carroll's contributions.”
The blank faces staring at Carroll certainly weren't encouraging or supportive. The heads of the enforcement agencies were especially cool and distant. The cabinet members were mostly business-management types who didn't understand the problems of police work in the field. They were indifferent to the trials and demands of a start-from-scratch street investigation.
The Senate majority leader finally spoke. Marshall Turner's familiar voice was southern and boomed like an echo. “Mr. President, I'm afraid this simply will not do. All of what I'm hearing is unsatisfactory. Late last week we came
“That's what we're told, Marshall.”
“Now you tell us we're still in serious danger, maybe even worse danger. A second Black Friday is being discussed. I feel it's our responsibility to make certain we have our best investigative apparatus in place. Now, as I understand it, the Federal Bureau and the CIA are both being underutilized in the current manhunt for terrorists.”
The tone in the senator's voice was offensive to Carroll. He stared at the political leader, who had the kind of swollen pink face you might encounter in the sawdust-filled back room of a country store.
Phil Berger, the director of the CIA, stepped into the uncomfortable silence. He was a small, lean man whose head, starkly bald and shining under the lights in the room, came to a domed point. He reminded Carroll of a hard-boiled egg sitting in an eggcup.
Berger said, “The FBI and the CIA are working twenty-four-hour shifts. There's no question of underutilization.” He turned his eyes toward Carroll. “And I'm sure Mr. Carroll is giving it his very best, even if he hasn't managed to come up with anything.”
“All right. Let's not fight among ourselves.” President Kearney abruptly rose from the conference table.
Justin Kearney looked at Carroll and said, “I made a hard decision late yesterday. I would have called you, but you weren't in New York, Archer.”
“Right. I was in Paris, getting shot at.”
The president ignored Carroll's remark. “Effective immediately, I'm ordering the following changes. I want you to continue to run the part of the operation that deals directly with known terrorist groups. But I want Phil Berger to supervise the overall investigation of Green Band, including the investigation of terrorists inside the United States. You're to report directly to Phil Berger. You're also to give the CIA a complete record of your personal contacts, all of your files.”
Carroll stared incredulously at President Kearney. He was almost certain it wasn't legal for him to give his record files to the CIA. He also had the feeling he'd just been floated down the Potomac on a leaky raft. Thanks for all of your past help, but your team's working methods leave something to be desired.
