flicked on and the man in the front seat twisted his head around, his mouth opening to shout. Suvorov shot him twice, the silver-tip hollow-point bullets tearing through the rib cage under the armpit.
Almost before the blood began to spurt, Suvorov jerked the driver’s body out of the car and rolled it away from the wheels. Then he roughly crowded Larimer and Moran into the back seat. Both men had lost their blankets, but they were too deeply gripped by shock to even notice or care. No longer the power brokers of Capitol Hill, they were as helpless as children lost in the forest.
Suvorov dropped the shift lever into drive and jammed the accelerator to the floor mat so fiercely, the rear tires spun and sprayed gravel for fifty yards before finally gaining traction. Only then did Suvorov’s fumbling hand find the headlight switch and pull it on. He sagged in relief at discovering the big car was hurtling down the precise middle of a rutted country road.
As he threw the heavy, softly sprung limousine over three miles of choppy washboard, he began to take stock of his surroundings. Cypress trees bordering the road had great tentacles of moss hanging from their limbs. This and the heavy atmosphere suggested they were somewhere in the Southern United States. He spotted a narrow paved crossroad ahead and slid to a stop in a swirling cloud of dust. On the corner stood a deserted building, more of a shack actually, with a decrepit sign illuminated by the headlights: GLOVER CULPEPPER, GAS & GROCERIES. Apparently Glover had packed up and moved on many years before.
The intersection had no marker, so he mentally flipped a coin and turned left. The cypress gave way to groves of pine and soon he began passing an occasional farmhouse. Traffic was scarce at this hour of morning. Only one car and a pickup truck passed him, both going in the opposite direction. He came to a wider road and spotted a bent sign on a leaning post designating it as State Highway 700. The number meant nothing to him, so he made another left turn and continued on.
Throughout the drive, Suvorov’s mind remained cold and rigidly alert. Larimer and Moran sat silently watchful, blindly putting their faith in the man at the wheel.
Suvorov relaxed and eased his foot from the gas pedal. No following headlights showed in the rearview mirror, and as long as he maintained the posted speed limit his chances of being stopped by a local sheriff were remote. He wondered what state he was in. Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana? It could be any one of a dozen. He watched for some clue as the roadside became more heavily populated; darkened buildings and houses squatted under increasing numbers of overhead floodlights.
After another half-hour he came to a bridge spanning a waterway called the Stono River. He’d never heard of it. From the high point of the bridge, the lights of a large city blinked in the distance. Off to his right the lights suddenly halted and the entire horizon went pure black. A seaport, he swiftly calculated. Then the headlights fell on a large black-and-white directional sign. The top line read CHARLESTON 5 MILES.
“Charleston!” Suvorov said aloud in a sudden burst of jubilation, sifting through his knowledge of American geography. “I’m in Charleston, South Carolina.”
Two miles farther he found an all-night drugstore with a public telephone. Keeping a wary eye on Larimer and Moran, he dialed the long-distance operator and made a collect call.
40
A lone cloud was drifting overhead, scattering a few drops of moisture when Pitt slipped the Talbot beside the passenger departure doors of Washington’s Dulles International Airport. The morning sun roasted the capital city, and the rain steamed and evaporated almost as soon as it struck the ground. He lifted Loren’s suitcase out of the car and passed it to a waiting porter.
Loren unwound her long legs from the cramped sports car, demurely keeping her knees together, and climbed out.
The porter stapled the luggage claim check to the flight ticket and Pitt handed it to her.
“I’ll park the car and baby-sit you until boarding time.”
“No need,” she said, standing close. “I’ve some pending legislation to scan. You head back to the office.”
He nodded at the briefcase clamped in her left hand. “Your crutch. You’d be lost without it.”
“I’ve noticed you never carry one.”
“Not the type.”
“Afraid you might be taken for a business executive?”
“This is Washington; you mean bureaucrat.”
“You are one, you know. The government pays your salary, same as me.”
Pitt laughed. “We all carry a curse.”
She set the briefcase on the ground and pressed her hands against his chest. “I’ll miss you.”
He circled his arms around her waist and gave a gentle squeeze. “Beware of dashing Russian officers, bugged staterooms and vodka hangovers.”
“I will,” she said, smiling. “You’ll be here when I return?”
“Your flight and arrival time are duly memorized.”
She tilted her head up and kissed him. He seemed to want to say something more, but finally he released her and stood back. She slowly entered the terminal through the automatic sliding glass doors. A few steps into the lobby she turned to wave, but the blue Talbot was pulling away.
On the President’s farm, thirty miles south of Raton, New Mexico, members of the White House press corps were spaced along a barbed-wire fence, their cameras trained on an adjoining field of alfalfa. It was seven in the morning, Mountain Daylight-Saving Time, and they were drinking black coffee and complaining about the early hour, the high-plains heat, the watery scrambled eggs and burned bacon catered by a highway truck stop, and any other discontents, real or imagined.
Presidential Press Secretary Jacob (Sonny) Thompson walked brightly through the dusty press camp prepping the bleary-eyed correspondents like a high school cheerleader and assuring them of great unrehearsed homespun pictures of the President working the soil.
The press secretary’s charm was artfully contrived — bright white teeth capped with precision, long sleek black hair, tinted gray at the temples, dark eyes with the tightened look of cosmetic surgery. No second chin. No visible sign of a potbelly. He moved and gestured with a bouncy enthusiasm that didn’t sit well with journalists, whose major physical activities consisted of pounding typewriters, punching word processors and lifting cigarettes.
The clothes didn’t hurt the image either. The tailored seersucker suit with the blue silk shirt and matching tie. Black Gucci moccasins coated lightly with New Mexico dust. A classy, breezy guy who was no dummy. He never showed anger, never let the correspondents’ needles slip under his fingernails. Bob Finkel of the Baltimore
He stopped at the CNN television motor home. Curtis Mayo, the White House correspondent network newscaster, sagged in a director’s chair looking generally miserable.
“Got your crew set up, Curt?” Thompson asked jovially.
Mayo leaned back, pushed a baseball cap to the rear of a head forested with billowy silver hair and gazed up through orange-tinted glasses. “I don’t see anything worth capturing for posterity.”
Sarcasm ran off Thompson like rainwater down a spout. “In five minutes the President is going to step from his house, walk to the barn and start up a tractor.”
“Bravo,” Mayo grunted. “What does he do for an encore?”
Mayo’s voice had a resonance to it that made a symphonic kettledrum sound like a bongo: deep, booming, with every word enunciated with the sharpness of a bayonet.
“He is going to drive back and forth across the field with a mower and cut the grass.”
“That’s alfalfa, city slicker.”
“Whatever,” Thompson acknowledged with a good-natured shrug. “Anyway, I thought it would be a good chance to roll tape on him in the rural environment he loves best.”
