impending conference. That was a comfort, she supposed.
Another, more subliminal, reason she had chosen Key West, Conch thought, was the notion of coming home. She cherished any time at all here, however brief.
Her family had been one of the oldest sugar families in Cuba. De los Reyes plantations had dotted that beautiful island for centuries. But her father had been a very wise man. He had seen Castro coming, even when he was considered a mosquito, fighting his sporadic guerilla actions up in the mountains. Gustavo de los Reyes had moved everyone to Florida the day before Fidel rolled into Havana. So Conch had been born and raised right here on the tiny Island Republic of Key West, in a yellow Victorian house just across the way from Truman’s Little White House.
She’d grown up fishing the flats with her brothers. In her teens, she’d become an accomplished bone-fishing guide in these waters. By the time she left for Harvard and a doctorate in political science, she could spot the wily Mr. Bone sliding across the shallows at sixty yards. At twenty, Conch was legendary among the grizzled old charter skippers down at the docks. She still was, she thought, smiling, it was just a different kind of legend.
She was never happier than when she managed to escape down to the Keys, especially when she had a few days to disappear at Conch Shell. This was her small bungalow hidden away on a small bay north of here at Islamorada. Beer, Buffett, and the slippery Mr. Bone. Of course, it was always more fun when he was there. But that was not in the cards right now and so she’d best not think of it.
She sighed and sat back in her chair. She was grateful for these few hours to herself before two days of nonstop sessions got under way.
Save the two Marine guards stationed outside her door, she was alone in her makeshift office. Her temporary quarters occupied a corner suite of offices on the top floor of the old Marine Hospital. Built in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a sturdy brick building, recently whitewashed, with a tin roof and freshly painted plantation shutters. It was also surrounded on all sides by tall palms whose fronds whipped and clawed her windowpanes in the stiff wet wind.
She looked up from the blurry words she’d written on a sheet of notepaper, her eyes refusing to focus. Her view, beyond the rain-streaked windows, was of stormy skies to the west. She overlooked the choppy Sub Basin and the remains of Fort Zachary Taylor guarding the entrance to Key West. To her right, she could just see her old Victorian homestead, Harry Truman’s Little White House, the Truman Annex, and the myriad red rooftops nestled under the swaying palms and lowering purple skies above the old town.
If she raised herself up an inch or two off her chair, and looked straight out her windows, however, as she did now, all she could see in the foreground was that damned black yacht.
ALEX HAWKE WAS ABOARD that sky-blotting boat. Some time, surely within the next half hour, the man was going to disembark. Then he would walk ever so briskly across the Yard. He would make his way to the former Marine Hospital and present his credentials to the Marine sentries and DSS guards stationed at the main entrance security post. He would pass through the X-ray and metal detectors, making breezy chat with the guards.
Would he find a phone downstairs and call up to her office? Or would he go straight to the auditorium to practice his remarks? The meeting would begin in one hour’s time. Knowing Hawke, he’d get right down to business. He was dead serious about his topic and when he focused on something, it was all consuming. She knew that firsthand.
She also knew that, were she to get up right now and post herself at the window, she might catch him striding across the coquina walkway. He’d be oblivious to the foul weather. She’d never seen him wearing a raincoat, or any kind of topcoat. What was the line he’d used the day they got caught in a downpour at Mt. Vernon? Rain’s only bad if you’re made of sugar. That was Hawke, all right. All man, all the time, rain or shine.
She looked at her watch and collapsed back into her chair. The truth was, at any minute, Alex Hawke could blow through that door like a force of nature. She wouldn’t put it past him. Much bowing and scraping, of course. He knew she was royally pissed off and with good reason. The facts of the matter were not obscure. The man had been an absolute shit, and they both knew it.
But.
But, but, but.
Every damned button on his Royal Navy uniform would be gleaming. His curly black hair would be damp with rain. He would be thinner than usual, she guessed, after what had happened to him in the jungle. Tall and thin and deeply tanned. And, then he would say something beguiling or charming or both.
Bastard.
Oh, he would stand there, smiling, and then he would aim those blue eyes at her, looking down at her upturned face as though he were about to snatch her up and…
He was going to walk right through that door and she had no idea how to handle it. Hell, he’d be here any minute now, she was sure of it. What in God’s name was she to do? She could smile, offer her hand, and ask about his voyage down from Miami. Pathetic. No. She would say how delighted she was that he could find time to be here. That she and her senior advisors had all read the insightful report of his time in the Amazon and were sure he’d find a receptive and enthusiastic audience when he spoke and—
Damn it!
She sat back and closed her eyes. She willed her breathing to slow, tried to stop an oncoming tide of images that came rolling in anyway. They broke upon her mind one after another, like waves upon a windswept beach.
TWO YEARS AGO, she and Alex Hawke had spent a blissful week down in these islands, fishing and bathing in the warm sea at Conch Shell. The spinning hands of days unwound quickly, whirling into golden afternoons that dissolved into blood-red sunsets and finished with a sparkle of stars over their sleepy heads. They went about naked and found themselves making love whenever and wherever the notion struck them. She had given her heart to Alex Hawke then, thinking that, finally, she was not misplacing it.
But time and Alex Hawke had a way of breaking that heart, no matter how fiercely she tried to protect it.
Shut the damn blinds, Conch.
Suddenly, she rose from her chair and marched across the scrubbed wooden floor to the west-facing windows. There were four of them, tall casement windows, each with its own set of Venetian blinds. She grabbed each set of cords, yanked each of them to one side or the other until she finally got all four of the damn things to bang down on the windowsills. The office was plunged into deeper gloom.
She turned her back on the windows and stared for a moment with her arms crossed under her breasts, staring at the bad painting of a leaping sailfish that hung on the wall behind her desk. A grinning man with a bent rod stood on the heaving decks of the sport-fishing boat reeling in his trophy.
Hooked, goddamnit.
Ah, well, that’s better, she thought, looking at the shuttered windows and feeling her pulse slacken. No more distractions. Now, she could go back to her desk and get some work done. Who was he, anyway, to ’cause such a hellish fuss around here? There was vitally important work at hand. The next few days would be critical to State’s rapidly evolving foreign policy in Mexico and the southern hemisphere.
She sat down at the desk and considered her opening.
As she’d reminded President McAtee just before leaving Washington, the battlegrounds of the war on terror were constantly shifting. In her view, they were rapidly shifting to the south. Just look at the Mexican border. Cuba. Why, Chavez and the Venezuelan government had only recently—
“Conch?”
She took a breath. Here we go.
She looked up. Commander Alexander Hawke was standing in her doorway, leaning inside the frame and smiling at her.
He raised his hand in mock salute and said, “Reporting for duty, sir!”
She pushed back from her desk and stood, smoothing the pleats of her navy skirt. Finally she met his eyes.
“Oh, Alex. Come on in, please. No one told me you were here.”
