She reached behind her back in that way women can that makes you think their elbows are going to snap, and unhooked and tossed her bra in the direction of my jeans.
“Come here,” I said. She leaned over, allowing her nipples to brush lightly across my chest.
“Ray!”
Julie sat bolt upright. “Jesus!” she said under her breath.
My heart went off like a trip-hammer. “Fuck,” I whispered.
I could hear Thomas’s door open. “Ray! Come here! Ray?” I’d never heard him call for me this way before.
I went to call out, then stopped myself. I didn’t want to bring him in here. Julie half-naked. Me entirely so.
“Where are you?” he called. I heard the guest bedroom door open. “Ray? Are you in Dad’s room?”
Julie looked at me, wide-eyed. She whispered, “You have to do something.”
“Thomas! Give me a sec-”
The door flung open. Thomas walked straight in. Didn’t even look at Julie as she hopped off me and grabbed the bedspread to cover herself. As she did so, she exposed me, and my current state, completely.
“Ray!” he shouted. “It’s gone!”
“Thomas, for Christ’s sake, can you see-”
“It’s gone! The head’s gone.”
“What?” I said, swinging my legs off the bed and reaching down for my boxers. “What are you talking about?”
“You have to see this!” he said. He exited the room and ran back down the hall to his own.
I followed him, wearing nothing but my underwear. Julie had struggled back into her top, not bothering with her bra, and came along after me.
As I went into Thomas’s room I saw that he had all his monitors focused on the window on Orchard Street. It sure looked like the same window, except this time there was nothing in the frame. It was black. No more bag- wrapped head.
“What the hell?” I said.
Thomas stood there, pointing. “Where did it go? What happened to it?”
I stammered, “They must, they, I guess, they must have updated it. Taken pictures of the street again.”
“No!” he said. “Everything else is exactly the same! The same people on the street. The same cars! Everything’s the same except the head is gone!”
I dropped myself into Thomas’s chair and looked at the screen. “Son of a bitch,” I said.
Thomas grabbed a sheet of paper off the table and handed it to me. A printout of the original image, like the one he’d sent with me to New York. “It’s exactly the same, right?”
I studied the printout. “It’s the same, Thomas, it’s the same.”
Julie sidled up next to Thomas, then took the printout from me and studied it, not saying anything.
“Why, Ray?” Thomas asked. “Why is it gone? Why is it gone, right after you went into the city to check it out?”
I was shaking my head. I couldn’t make any sense of it. In the last twenty-four hours, someone had gone into this site and wiped out the image. Since I had been down there. Since I’d knocked on the door and had a few words with the neighbor.
I felt a chill. And not just because I was sitting there with almost no clothes on.
Julie touched my brother gently on the arm. “Okay, you know what, Thomas? Start from the beginning. Tell me all about what you’ve seen, and what you think it means.”
THIRTY-NINE
Lewis Blocker called Howard Talliman Monday morning.
“It’s done.”
Howard said, “Hold on.” He put the cell phone on the granite counter in the kitchen of his Upper East Side brownstone and supported himself on the countertop with both hands. He hadn’t slept in days and he felt like his body was shaking all the time, like he was walking around in a world with nonstop low-level earth tremors.
This was the call he was waiting for, and now that he’d received it, he had to steady himself, take a few breaths. He picked up the cell again and said, “I’m here.”
“Go to your computer.”
Howard hauled himself up onto one of the barstools and opened the laptop on the raised stretch of counter. He entered the Whirl360 address into the Web browser and found his way to that Orchard Street window.
The head was gone.
“Lewis,” he said.
“I’m here.”
“I looked. It’s gone.”
“Yeah. She got it done.”
Howard was pleased, but he wasn’t about to shower any accolades on the woman who’d screwed this thing up from the get-go. “Any complications?”
“Some.”
“Any that could blow back and hurt us?”
“No.”
“Okay. Where are we on the other matters?”
“She’s gone back to Dayton to babysit the mother. Still waiting. And I’m still looking for our visitor.”
“It’s nice to have a little bit of good news for once,” Howard said. “But we’re still deep in the woods.”
“Yes.” Lewis paused. “I’ll keep you posted.”
Howard ended the call, slid the phone across the counter, and put his head into his hands. God, he needed a drink and it was only eight. He needed his strength. He had an appointment with Morris Sawchuck this morning.
THE man was becoming increasingly restless. He wanted to reactivate his campaign plans. Announce formally, after delaying for nine months, that he would be seeking the office of the governor of the State of New York.
It had made sense, back in August, for Morris to put his ambitions on hold. One very personal reason that had become very public, and another-his complicity in the CIA director’s deal with terrorists-that he’d prayed would never become public at all.
And a third reason he knew nothing about.
Oblivious, Morris believed there was no longer a reason to put his career on the back burner. Enough time had passed. Had he known a woman named Allison Fitch was still out there-and that she could destroy him-he might well have felt differently.
Every day, Howard Talliman lived with the fear the woman would surface. He checked Web sites on his phone before he was even out of bed. He grabbed the TV remote, turned on CNN in his bedroom, flipped back and forth between it and the Today show. Imagined Wolf Blitzer saying, “And now, in a CNN exclusive, we talk to a woman who’s come out of hiding to accuse Morris Sawchuck and the people around him of trying to have her killed. Not only is she accusing the New York attorney general of attempted murder, but of being complicit in the disgraced former CIA director’s plan not to pursue charges against-”
That was when Howard imagined turning off the TV, getting his hands on a gun, and blowing his brains out.
Not unlike what Barton Goldsmith ultimately decided to do.
While Howard and Morris fretted that the attorney general’s involvement in the CIA director’s deal with terrorists would become known, Goldsmith was feeling the pressure as well. He was going to be called to testify before a congressional committee. Everything was going to come out.
So Barton Goldsmith rose early one morning, walked into the backyard of his Georgetown home, stood among
