head,” I said, handing Thomas one.
I pulled over a chair so I could put an arm around his shoulder.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I said.
“No,” Thomas said.
“I kind of lost it.”
“Have you been taking your medication?” he asked,
I hadn’t had a single M amp;M since returning from Dr. Grigorin’s. “No, I guess I forgot to take them.”
“You run into problems when you don’t take your medication,” he said.
I kept my arm around him. “There’s no excuse for what I did. I know…I know you’re the way you are, and screaming at you, that’s not going to make things any different.”
“What are the rules?” he asked.
“I just…I just want you to check with me first before you send any e-mails, or make any phone calls. But you can still wander all the cities you want for as long as you want. Is that a deal?”
He thought about it, still holding the freezer bag to his head. “I don’t know.”
“Thomas, not everyone in the government understands that you’re trying to help them. They don’t understand that you’re a good guy. I want to make sure there aren’t any misunderstandings. It’s not just you who could get in trouble. It’s me, too.”
“I guess,” he said. He took the bag from his head. “It’s really cold.”
“Try to keep it there. It’ll keep the swelling down.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I’ve never seen you get that angry,” I said. “I mean, I had it coming, but I didn’t know you had it in you.”
As Thomas held the cold bag to his head, his eyes were shielded.
“I’m going to go back to work now,” he said, slipping out from under my arm and heading for the stairs, leaving the bag on the table.
His back to me, he said, “Am I still making dinner tonight?”
I had forgotten. “No,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
EIGHTEEN
Bridget is coming out of the building on Thirty-fifth Street where the PR firm she works for is headquartered when she sees him waiting there for her.
He grabs her firmly by the elbow and starts leading her down the sidewalk.
“Howard!” she says, glancing down at his hand. “Let go of my arm. You’re hurting me.”
Howard Talliman says nothing. He swiftly moves her along, Bridget struggling to maintain her balance on her heels. He steers her into the lobby of a building, the first place he’s spotted where he can talk to her without anyone else listening in.
“What does she know?” Howard asks once they are inside. He has moved Bridget up against a marble wall and still not released his grip on her.
“Howard, what the hell-”
“She says she heard things.” He is hissing, almost snakelike.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“I met with her. When she was leaving, she said she heard things.”
“Heard what? What did she say she heard?”
“She didn’t say. But she intimated that it was something damaging. Things you’d said, things that made sense once she knew who you are.”
“Howard, I swear-”
“Did you talk to Morris while you were in Barbados?”
“Of course. We talk all the time.”
“You talked to him when you were with Allison Fitch?”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure I did. Howard, I can’t feel my hand. You’re cutting off the circulation.”
He releases his grip but is still only inches from her, his face pressed up to hers. “Was she present when you had those conversations?”
“No, I mean, she might have been in the other room. I talked to him when I was in the bathroom, or maybe when Allison was. I talked to him by the pool one day, when she went off to get us drinks.”
“So she might have heard any of them. She could have been behind you, or on the other side of a door,” Howard says.
“Okay, I suppose it’s possible, but even if she did, we didn’t-I’m sure I never said anything that-”
“You know about Morris’s situation,” Howard says grimly.
“He doesn’t tell me everything.”
“But you know.”
“I know what they’re looking into, okay. How could I not know? Morris is going out of his mind about it, thinking sooner or later it’s going to come out, that Goldsmith will implicate him.”
So she did know.
Howard had never been able to persuade Morris not to discuss political liabilities with his wife. He’d clearly told her how Barton Goldsmith, the CIA director, had involved Sawchuck in his plan to cut deals with a handful of terrorism suspects. Goldsmith argued he was doing it to protect the people of the United States, but it turned out the people of the United States didn’t quite see it that way after the New York Times did an expose on how Goldsmith had leaned on various prosecutors and law enforcement agencies across the country to allow certain terror suspects to walk in return for information.
Like those two nut jobs who were about to set off a bomb in a Florida theme park when they were nabbed. The moment he was notified of the arrests, Goldsmith was leaning on Florida’s highest-ranking law enforcement officials to hold the two men until his people arrived. Goldsmith’s intelligence experts said something much bigger was coming, and those clowns in Florida agreed to tell everything they knew in return for a couple of air tickets back to Yemen. (The U.S. government even paid their airfare home, the Times noted, a fact that rankled almost as much as the prospect of the devastation they nearly caused.)
Goldsmith credited the deal with thwarting another underwear/shoe-type bomber before he boarded a Washington-bound plane in Paris. But the Times story could find no definitive link between the two events. It suggested Goldsmith was inflating the value of the intel he’d received from the two theme park terrorists to justify sending them home.
Goldsmith was pilloried. He resigned. Florida’s attorney general followed.
What the Times didn’t know was that Florida was not the first such incident.
A Saudi illegal with al Qaeda sympathies had tried to set off a Ford F-150 filled with explosives around the corner from the Guggenheim. He’d parked it in the middle of the night and set it to go off at nine in the morning. But a woman looking out her brownstone window wondered why he kept checking something in the truck’s cargo bed, and called the police. A tactical team arrived and disabled the device before the bagel carts had set up for business. The truck was traced to its owner, the man arrested. Goldsmith was in the loop from the beginning, scooped the suspect, found out he had a bunch of similar-minded friends he was willing to roll on, all in return for a trip home.
Goldsmith called Morris.
Morris balked at first. He’d prosecute the son of a bitch. Told Goldsmith he wasn’t interested in making deals with terrorists. Goldsmith said, “You know, terror suspects aren’t the only people we have a lot of background intel on, if you get my meaning.”
There wasn’t an ambitious politician alive who didn’t have secrets he hoped were buried forever. Morris Sawchuck could only have guessed what Goldsmith might have had on him. Knowledge, perhaps, of one or more dirty tricks Howard had performed on his behalf. Campaign donations that hadn’t gone through channels. Maybe even something about Bridget’s sexual history. Or even his own.
