“I have to go over there.”
The world stopping turning. My worst fear came true. I put a hand to my throat. Breathe. Stay calm. “You’re retired. Why you?”
“I’m the only westerner Mostafa trusts. I saved his life about ten years ago, when he was still fighting on our side. He considers me a . . . kind of friend.” Jakobek’s mouth curved in a grim smile on the last word. The smile faded as he looked up at me. I was deciding whether to cry or scream or tie him to the bed long enough for me to call Al and tell him that my future husband, his nephew, the man I loved dearly and would marry in less than a week in the grand East Room of the White House, was not going over to some godforsaken desert hellhole to risk his life negotiating with some crazy Osama bin Wanna-be.
Of course, Jakobek shouldn’t have to listen to whiny crap like that. So I just said, “I’m not gettin’ married without you.”
“Good. I won’t let you.”
“Promise me you’ll stay safe, Jakobek.”
“I swear to you. With any luck, I’ll be back in time for the rehearsal dinner.”
With any luck.
He got up and pulled on his khakis. I wrapped myself in an apple-print silk robe and sat miserably beside him on the king-sized bed we’d bought a few months before—our first furniture purchase as a couple. Outside the windows of my big farmhouse, the apple orchards of Sweet Hush Farms were beginning to ripen for autumn. We had only a few weeks to get married, go on a Hawaiian honeymoon, and come back to Chocinaw County before fall apple season started. Now, we had only a few hours to spend what might be the rest of our lives together. “When are you leaving?” I asked, my throat on fire.
“As soon as a military helicopter gets here.”
I sagged. He put an arm around me, and I put my head on his shoulder. I cried. I couldn’t help it.
“I’ll meet you at the altar,” he whispered.
“If you don’t,” I managed to say, “I’ll hunt Mostafa down like an egg-sucking dog and bury what’s left of him under my apple trees as fertilizer.”
“THOSE THINGS DO not resemble silk magnolia blossoms,” Edwina Jacobs yelled up at a scared-looking decorator arranging huge flower sprays above the windows of the State Dining Room. “They look like wilted white carnations from the flower department at some tacky Walter-Mart!”
“That’s Wal-Mart, ma’am” an assistant whispered loudly.
“Walter Mart. Wal-Mart. Whatever. Take them down. Take them all down and call the floral designer and have her replace those horrible carnation-like monstrosities with real magnolias. The theme of my nephew’s wedding to Hush Thackery is Welcoming The Southern Sophisticate, not Howdy Do, It’s The Hillbilly Hoedown.”
“You know, Edwina,” I said behind her, standing in the doorway among piles of luggage and an escort of Secret Service agents, “sometimes you sound just like Mrs. Howell on Gilligan’s Island.”
She pivoted on one perfect mauve pump with military precision, a blonde dynamo but with eyes as red-rimmed as mine. She and Al were just as worried about Jakobek as I was. And she would put on just as tough a front. “Well, well. Glad you could make it the White House for your wedding-week festivities, Hush. I was afraid you’d be on a plane to the Middle East this morning, armed with a deer rifle and a rotten apple to throw at Mostafa bin Ottma.”
I strode to her, leaned down close, and whispered tightly. “If I thought I could find him before he got his hands on Jakobek, I’d be headed his way with an apple-shaped grenade.”
Her stern look softened. She thrust an arm through mine and whispered so her staff couldn’t hear. “I’d be right behind you. I’m worried sick.” For just a second we stood there with our heads bowed together in silent prayer, her short and blonde and dressed like a lavender-suited Avon lady, me tall and redheaded and rumpled in jeans and red linen blazer.
Then both I and Edwina drew back, sniffing and wiping our eyes and pretending we disliked each other. She grimaced. “If we cry we’ll only wilt these so-called magnolias even more.”
“Agreed,” I said hoarsely. I forced myself to look at the flower arrangements. “But these look great to me.”
“That’s because you have no taste.” She tugged me by the arm, and we walked out of the ornate formal dining room. We headed down one of the White House’s typically grand halls with a small army of people behind us, most of them toting my luggage and Edwina’s rejected flowers. “We’ll have your debut dinner in the State Dining Room tonight, to introduce you to Washington society and to our major campaign fundraisers,” Edwina said crisply. “The next evening you’ll attend a small reception hosted by the Vice President and his wife, where they’ll introduce you to our top allies in Congress. The evening after that you’ll be presented to a select group of friendly media. Did I mention the luncheon we’ve scheduled with Barbara Walters? And the tea with the editor of Vanity Fair? Barbara wants to interview you on 20/20 and the VF editor is planning a feature on you and Jakobek.”
I picked my jaw up off the floor. I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours since watching Jakobek climb onto a military helicopter and disappear into the summer sky, and all I wanted to do was sit on a balcony all week, facing east, the Middle East, and waiting for him to come back. “I’m supposed to make all those appearances alone? How exactly do you plan to explain Jakobek not being here? That he’s turned into The Invisible Man?”
“The White House Press Secretary has informed everyone that Nicholas is observing a quaint wedding-week custom hailing from his and Al’s Polish heritage. He’s secluding himself from his bride until the wedding day.” Edwina paused. “He’s on a fishing trip. Somewhere very remote. The South Pacific. Or the Australian outback.”
I gaped at her. The woman had more gall than a gallbladder. “Then tell everybody that I’m also observing a custom from my heritage—a mountaineer custom of sitting on the front porch with a shotgun on my lap, ready to shoot anybody who tries to talk to me.”
“Sorry. No deal.”
“You can’t parade me around Washington like a prize poodle, as if nothing’s wrong.”
Edwina stopped like a train hitting a wall, jerking me to a stop beside her. “Now listen to me,” she said in a low voice. “Al and I would like nothing better than to spend this week in a dark room at the Pentagon watching satellite images and hearing constant updates on Nicholas’s whereabouts and safety. But we have a country to run. Next year is an election year, Hush. Every public move we make is crucial to building Al’s poll numbers. You have become a very popular attraction in our political carnival, Hush. I hate to admit it, but you’re an asset. You are part of our image now, like it or not, and just as we have to do our duty—and just as Nicholas is doing his duty—you must do your duty, too. Nicholas would want you to carry on.”
She got me with that one. I stared at her for a long second. “Just tell this prize poodle when to bark,” I said grimly.
THAT NIGHT SMOOCH and I huddled in pajamas on the Lincoln bed in the Lincoln bedroom, looking up at a portrait of President Lincoln. At least, I was looking. Smooch held a palm-sized video camera to one eye, filming everything. “I’m makin’ a video diary of our week in the White House,” she had announced. “To put on the Sweet Hush Farms website.” Always the marketing whiz.
I hugged my knees and forced myself to nibble salted Sweet Hush apple slices. My head buzzed with fear, my eyes burned with tears, and my mind was thousands of miles away, with Jakobek. Somewhere, in an unfriendly desert, it was a broiling hot day.
And he might already be hurt. Or worse.
“GLORY TO ALLAH! Death to infidels! Do you have any cigars on you, Colonel?”
Mostafa’s chief lieutenant, Orda, pulled his French sunglasses down, waved an automatic rifle in my face, and peered at me as if he might shoot me just for not carrying any stogies. Around us, thirty of Mostafa’s armed soldi
ers fiddled with the triggers of their guns and squinted in the swirling sand. The sand stuck to the sweat on my face. I felt like human sandpaper.
“I know what Mostafa likes. I brought him the best.” I pulled a packet of hand-rolled Cuban cigars from the vest of my desert camos. “Sorry for the blood,” I deadpanned. “I dripped.” A gash throbbed above my left ear, my lip seeped blood, the knuckles on both fists felt like raw meat, and one cheekbone ached. Before Orda had decided I was who I said I was, I and a few of his men had gone a few rounds. I was proud to note that they looked worse than I did.
Orda grabbed the packet of cigars, sniffed them, said “Ahhhhh,” in appreciation, then poked me with his rifle. “Let’s go.”
Our sweaty, sandy little gang headed through craggy rock formations and sand dunes, toward a cave entrance. About the time we reached it Mostafa burst out. He wore desert camos, a pristine white headdress, and a diamond-encrusted Rolex. Look up ‘crazy, freakin’ rich’ in a dictionary and you’d see his picture. His hobbies included managing his multi-million-dollar investment portfolio, smoking cigars, playing Dungeons and Dragons on his computers, watching Jeopardy on satellite TV, planting bombs, kidnapping VIP’s, and collecting his enemies’ sawed-off ears in large crystal jars of formaldehyde.
“Jakobek!” he yelled, smiling, then grabbed my hand and pumped it. “So they sent you to talk me out of auctioning off pieces of my prize Saudi? Or are you here to assassinate me? Or to lead your army friends to me so I can be captured and shown on American TV? Maybe I could get interviewed in my prison cell by Dan Rather? Huh?”
“I think Tom Brokaw was hoping for a chance at you. But his ratings suck.”
He laughed and slapped me on the back. “Where are my cigars?” Orda handed them over. “Hmmm. Wonderful. Colonel, you remembered. How sweet.”
“What are old friends for?”
Mostafa laughed harder but his eyes were like a shark’s. “Maybe,” he said, touching a finger to my ear, “I won’t add you to my collection. But then again, maybe I will.”
He grinned and waved me inside. With Orda’s gun in my back I followed him into the cave. I put one hand over my vest pocket, where only one possession mattered to me. My photo of Hush, the one I’d started carrying long before I had any hope she could love a tough-ass like me.
She would always be with me, even if I never made it back home.
“THEY CALL THIS the ‘Red Room?’” I said under my breath, as one of Edwina’s social secretaries led Smooch and me toward yet another of the White House’s formal public rooms. “From the pictures I saw in the guide book, they ought to call it the ‘Old New Orleans Bordello Room.’”
Even with the video cam still plugged to her right eye, Smooch gasped at my irreverence. “There’s red twill satin on the walls! And the chandelier is French! And all the furniture is early 1800’s French and it’s covered in red silk upholstery!”
“What furniture?”
We halted in amazement as the secretary finished opening the room’s mile-high doors. The room had been cleared of its antiques. Instead, huge tables covered in red silk were piled with mountains of strange and wonderful and just plain weird items.
“Your wedding gifts from around the world,” the secretary intoned solemnly. “We’ve recorded them all for the thank-you notes. The original cards are attached to each.”
Smooch picked up an elaborately carved tribal mask. “Colonel Jakobek,” she read aloud, “I will always owe you for the lives of my children. May the rain gods bless your fruit.” Smooch stared at me. “This is from Chief Something-or-other. In a jungle country I never heard of.” She hoisted a solid-gold turtle the size of her head, turned it over, and, puffing from the weight, read the card taped to its bottom. “This one’s in Spanish. ‘For the lives of my people, even gold is not enough to thank you.’ Wow. He really has been all over the world doing heroic things no one can talk about.”
“I never doubted that.” Oh, Jakobek, I added, my heart breaking. You’ve saved the world enough times. Now save yourself and come back home to me and our Hollow. I turned my back to Smooch and dabbed my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket. I had dutifully turned myself into an Edwina clone, dressing in a pale silk dress-suit with a pearl choker. I had gone to the parties, the luncheons, the interviews. But I wanted to put on my jeans and one of Jakobek’s soft flannel shirts, sit in the middle of all these presents, and bawl.
“Assessing your loot, I see.” Edwina swept into the room.
I would have poked her with a jewel-covered samurai sword sent by the Japanese emperor, but Al strode in right behind her, looking somber and Presidential in a dark suit. He grabbed me in a hug. “We just got word that the plan is working and Nick’s been picked up by Mostafa’s men—he’s alive but we don’t know where they’ve taken him.”
I latched my hands in Al’s jacket and looked up at him urgently. “He’s alive. Just keep tellin’ me he’s alive.”
“I will. I promise you.”
“Sis!” My brother’s voice boomed across the room. Logan, Lucille, and Puppy rushed in. They’d just arrived from Georgia. We shared hugs all around. When I knelt down to let Puppy fling her arms around me, the bubblegum scent of her little-girl perfume reeled inside my head and headed for my stomach like liquid dynamite. “Back away, honey, Auntie Hush is going to spew.” I turned aside and gagged.
“Not on the heirloom rugs!” Edwina ordered.
Too late.
A few minutes later, as everyone fussed over me, I sat dizzily on an antique chair with an ice pack clamped to my forehead. Smooch knelt in front of me, dabbing my face with a wet cloth. “Hush, you’ve been urping a lot, lately. Yesterday, today—and last week your stomach was upset, too—maybe you should see a doctor.”
“I already have. I planned to tell Jakobek before we came here for the wedding. But then he got the call about Mostafa—”
“Oh . . . my . . . god,” Edwina said. “The forty-year-old apple tree and the forty-four-year-old bee have pulled off a miracle of pollination.”
I looked up into the stunned faces around me, and nodded. “Jakobek and I are pregnant.”
“MOTHER,” DAVIS SAID in a lecturing tone, but smiled. “How will we explain to Eddie Hush that your baby is her aunt or uncle?”
“Just use Southern tradition. We’ll tell her to call it ‘Cousin.’”
Sitting on my lap, my beautiful red-headed granddaughter, little Eddie Hush Jacobs, cooed and smiled a two-teethed smile. Her mother, Eddie, put an arm around me. “I think it’s wonderful news,” Eddie said, her voice breaking. “Nickie will be so happy. He’ll be a great father. And he will come back safely, Hush. I’m sure of it.”
“Of course.” I spoke firmly, confidently. A mother didn’t show fear and misery in front of her children. I slid a protective hand over my abdomen. Not even the ones still waiting to be born.
“COLONEL, I’M SORRY you came here on my behalf. I fear our ears are going to share a place of honor in one of Mostafa’s crystal jars.”
“As long as we have all our body parts, your highness, there’s still hope.” The Saudi prince and I shared a hard corner of the cave floor, where we were handcuffed to a mutual post. The battery-powered ceiling lights didn’t do much for our dark corner. I could dimly hear Mostafa’s big-screen television somewhere down one of the cave’s tunnels. “I can tell you this much,” I said, “he won’t kill us until after he finishes watching Jeopardy.”
The prince sighed. “I never thought I’d pin my future on Alex Trebek.”
Suddenly, silence. Then the sounds of running feet, headed our way. The prince drew a sharp breath.
I straightened, ready. I love you, I said silently, to Hush. My whole life was worth living for the past year, with you.
Mostafa lunged into our room, his face furious. He hunched over me, shaking both fists
in my face. “How could you? How could you? Ten years! You don’t call, you don’t write, and now, you don’t even tell me you’re getting married! I have to hear about it on CNN!”
I managed to keep a neutral expression. “You never even asked me out on a date. How was I supposed to know you cared?”
He stared at me, open-mouthed. Then, to my relief, he laughed. Guffawed. Split a seam in his camos, practically. He grabbed me by the shoulders, shook me, then planted a cigar-stinking kiss on the top of my head. “Get out of here! Go home! My wedding gift to you!” He bellowed over one shoulder, “Orda! Get Jakobek and the prince on the next jet to Kabul!”
“You’re releasing me, too?” the prince said incredulously.
Mostafa grinned at him with deadly humor, then made a slicing motion along the side of his head. “This time. But don’t invest in any earrings.”
I just sat there thinking, I’ve been here three days. If I can get home in three more, I’ll make the ceremony on time. Hush, I promised I’d meet you at the altar. Don’t give up on me. I’m coming home.
OUR WEDDING DAY. Still no word from, by or about Jakobek. All contact had been lost. A U.S. special operations team located Mostafa’s latest camp in the mountains, but Mostafa and his men were long gone. The team used corpse-sniffing dogs to search for shallow graves that might contain the bodies of Jakobek and the prince. No graves were found, thank God.
“He’s taken them with him,” Al told me. “That’s a good sign. They’re still alive.”
“He’s vanished in the desert, and so has Jakobek,” I countered. “Put me on a military plane right now. I’m going to hunt for Jakobek. From now on, you can call me ‘Hush of Arabia.’”
Of course, Al just smiled. Edwina was more blunt. “Put on your wedding dress and shut up,” she ordered. “No one outside this immediate family has any clue that Nicholas is missing or even why he went overseas in the first place. That information can not become public, Hush. We’re talking about an international incident. The entire Middle East could fall into deeper chaos if the world learns about that kidnapped prince. So we’re going to hide the truth until our forces find Mostafa et al. Even if we have to carry on with your wedding ceremony right up until the moment you point your gargantuan size-nine pumps up the aisle and Nicholas isn’t there waiting for you.”
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