by Ramsay, Lex
His little upturned nose looked like he’d borrowed it from his mother’s face, and his lips were full and well shaped. But it was his eyes that made you love him. Winston’s’ eyes, even his beloved Nana had to admit, were too large for his thin face. They seemed to be tinged with a kind of sadness that seemed well beyond his years, unless, that is, he was smiling as was usually the case.
One thing Eugenia constantly marveled at was Winston’s nearly uniformly sunny disposition. He laughed and smiled his way through his days, and seemed to have come to grips with having dunces for parents. Even as a baby he rarely cried, and he had never been fussy about food or anything else.
Eugenia liked to think that Winston’s little personality was being shaped by her attentiveness and devotion, even though she knew she had little to do with it. He was just a sweet little boy who was engaging but not sassy, composed but not aloof, and basically, a whole lot of fun.
“Nana, look what I got.” Winston proclaimed as he thrust a picture book at her.
“It’s got all your favorite colors, so I know you can’t wait to read it to me … right Nana?”
Eugenia laughed and opened the book. “Well, I don’t know Winston, how about you try to read it to me instead?”
Winston’s eyes opened even larger than usual and he looked to be in serious distress. “But I can’t read Nana!”
“All right child, in that case I guess we’ll have to read it together. Come on up on Nana’s lap and let’s take a stab at it, shall we?”
Winston climbed up on her lap and Eugenia snuggled her grandson and rested her chin on his soft curly hair. Yes, as long as she had Winston and her orchids, maybe she’d be able to endure her life. For that matter, Eugenia smiled to herself, maybe she’d just get the last laugh and outlive all her tormentors and live out her life with her cherished Winston and her lovely orchids. Wouldn’t that be rich.
CHAPTER 21
Patrick had pretty much decided to put the whole sordid mess out of his mind. Why had he dared to hope that it was somehow going to be different with Amani Jordan?
He could have written the script to their encounter without ever having to actually live the ordeal. The only thing Patrick hadn’t counted on was how utterly taken he would be with Amani.
As he’d walked downstairs, he’d seen the back of a tall, full-bodied woman facing his sister while they talked. She slowly turned, wineglass in hand, and Patrick nearly stumbled and fell into her calm and even gaze.
Amani Jordan had the most arresting face Patrick had ever seen. Dressed in a flowing batik wrap of jewel colors that almost—but not quite—hid her lush body, Amani had a square, even brow, and piercing eyes. With prominent, beautifully shaped cheekbones and skin that looked like chocolate velvet, she wore her hair in a tightly curled helmet that covered her scalp without concealing her shapely head and graceful neck.
She almost seemed to float up to meet him, their eyes locked so completely. He found himself chatting with her easily and without thought.
Clarissa seemed to immediately sense that her job was done, and melted into the background and out of the room unnoticed.
Patrick had felt his body reacting to Amani’s from the start, and even though he knew he should rein himself in, seemed helpless to prevent the growing magnetism. He drifted in with a smile in his spirit and his soul open and vulnerable.
And had his solar plexus kicked in. Which was all the more bitter for being predictable. Then came the guilt for failing to expect it.
Once Patrick caught himself at the brink of letting himself go, he snatched himself back like a snail recoiling from salt, and shut Amani Jordan out of his life. The cold fear that blanketed his mind had performed its heartless feat with ever more ruthless efficiency than usual, and closed the door that he had unwittingly flung open with the precise click of a turning lock.
Amani sensed before she heard the abrupt change in the conversation. She turned her face up to his, her brow wrinkling in her search for the answer to her unspoken question. For a moment, mere seconds really, Patrick hung in the chasm between his two competing desires.
Then he succumbed to the safety of the familiar. The icy veil descended over his eyes, and he heard himself telling Amani in his most formal tone, how nice it had been to meet her, and he’d walked out of the room.
Now he sat in an office overlooking Connecticut Avenue in downtown D.C., mindlessly working through lines of code in his client’s troublesome program. He’d been back in the city for almost two days, and still couldn’t stop thinking about that chocolate velvet skin and the heat the closeness of her body caused.
• • •
Olivia had been to D.C. a few times before. She knew it well enough to know that the only way to travel in the city proper was by taxi. She figured that if she didn’t have a limo like Em, neither would she bother herself with the color-coded subway system whose map never failed to make her dizzy.
Her first stop after arriving at the train station was at the Quincy House Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, where she checked in and had her bags taken to her room. Next on her list was Allenby’s on Connecticut Avenue to do some quick research on the horses being offered the next day at the auction. After confirming that the two she’d had her eye on were still being offered, Olivia decided to do some shopping in the designer boutiques tucked in between the restaurants and office buildings along the length of the avenue.
• • •
Patrick put down his e-tablet, finally yielding to the knowledge that he was just too distracted to concentrate, and looked out the window of the skywalk office he was working out of this week.
The construction of the skywalk office allows him to view the people on the street from all sides. Like most structures of its kind, this skywalk spans the width of the buildings to which it is attached at both ends, and a wide corridor passes through the length of the skywalk on each level. Since all D.C. buildings are limited to eight stories—so as not to outshine the Capitol Building—the skywalks tended to start around the third floor and rise up to the fifth or sixth. Office clusters are arrayed along each level’s main corridor on both sides of the aisle.
Double escalators shaped like a triangle are set in the center of the skywalk, with one side devoted to upward, and the other to downward travel. Surrounding the floors is glass—or what appears to be glass but is actually a durable petrochemical blend—above, below and at the sides of the skywalk. Even the floors, aside from the corridor and crosshatched walkway paths in the offices, are thick glass block.
The arrangement affords little privacy, but creates the illusion from within the skywalk of being suspended in open air; and without of workers liberated from the strictures of gravity. It also permits its occupants to engage in some spectacular people watching, even as they themselves are being watched.
He was mindlessly people watching when a woman in a camel hair coat caught his eye. She was crossing Connecticut coming toward his side of the street with her face tilted up to the sun. Something about her was startlingly familiar. Her glossy, chestnut hair, her compact frame, and most of all the look of sprightly determination on her face told Patrick she was someone he knew.
It took him a moment to realize it, because of her unexpected surroundings and because for once his thoughts weren’t preoccupied with the R.A. He was staring into the face of Olivia Askew.
CHAPTER 22
Emmaline chuckled as her limo pulled away from the train station, having dropped Olivia off and watched her board her train to Washington, D.C. Seeing her old friend had brought back their crazy days in Switzerland years earlier. Olivia could always be counted on for a laugh when she needed it, and had remained a loyal friend. But Lord did drama follow that girl!
Em sat back in the well-padded leather seat and focused on Olivia’s latest drama. Well, truth be told, this was not quite the run of the mill Olivia-type drama. This was huge. Em had put out feelers to a few trusted contacts and had received some rather startli
ng confirmations of what she’d already pieced together.
The Assembly had its dirty little hands all over this one. Not that they hadn’t done a superb job of covering their tracks. But it took a devious mind to uncover deviousness, and Em was as deliciously devious as they came.
Olivia finally told her why she just had to visit the Domestic Products Committee office at the Confederacy—to flush out any hint that she was being shadowed, or manipulated by unseen forces behind the scene. Their afternoon spent at the office was uneventful, and Olivia even snooped around a bit under the guise of chatting up some of the legislative aides. No one seemed to pay much attention to her, and certainly no one tried to steer her away from interacting with the office staff. Of course, she had to remind Olivia that the Assembly was far too stealthy to do anything so obvious as bar her from what was in actuality a public office. But still, Olivia seemed relieved that her visit seemed to have caused nary a stir in any quarter that mattered.
The tinny sound of a cell phone interrupted her thoughts. Em fished through her purse, picking up one phone and then another until she found the ringing culprit.
“This is Em,” she spoke quickly into the phone. She listened for a moment, then ended the call without saying anything more.
Em pulled her e-tablet out of the attaché case on the seat next to her, used the stylus on the touch screen to pull up Olivia’s email address and swiftly tapped out her message. Hitting the “encrypt” key, Em hoped the basic encryption program that came loaded onto the e-tablet would suffice for her purposes.
“Damn,” Em whispered half aloud as she considered the import of the information her contact had just given her. She had to get back to her office to find out what other abominations the Assembly had concocted.
Em looked up to check how close they were to her office now, and was surprised to see that they were in the warehouse district, miles away from their destination. Just as she pushed the button to the intercom, she heard the driver’s door open and watched him sprint away from the idling car.
Before Em’s agile mind could connect the dots, a blinding white flash enveloped the car. The last thing that Emmaline Moultry thought, as her body blew apart into fragments indistinguishable from the bits of wreckage that was once her limo, was “Awwww Shit!”
• • •
Patrick eased in behind Olivia as she swung through the revolving door into the lobby of Montalvo’s on Connecticut. After spotting Olivia on the street, he had decided to approach her. You could do some wonderful things with tech, he knew better than most. But what he needed now, what he needed to know if he was going to place the fate of his people in Olivia’s hands, was what kind of person she was—and whether she could be trusted with such an enormous responsibility. That kind of question could never be answered with tech, for that, Patrick knew, he had to get up in her face and see what lie behind her eyes.
Patrick wasn’t the least concerned that she would know who he was. As he always did when conducting R.A. business over voice tech, he had used a voice modifier. That particular technology had come a long way in the last few years. Where before all that could really be done to mask the voice and elude voiceprints was to use a mechanized voice synthesizer, now you could defeat voiceprints while still sounding human to the receiver. By separating out the major harmonics resonating within the human voice, and realigning them slightly, altering the timbre, pitch or key for one or two harmonics, the sound was changed dramatically enough to fool voiceprint tech, while still sounding like a real person.
Patrick had made sure that when he made the call to Olivia he was wearing the simple quarter-sized disc on a strap around his throat that effected the necessary change to his natural voice. Now he had no need to disguise anything, not his face, which she’d never seen, and not his voice, which in truth she’d never heard.
Walking through the revolving door, Patrick positioned himself next to the counter featuring an almost endless array of leather gloves—directly in her line of sight—and proceeded to studiously ignore her. One thing Patrick had learned about spoiled, impetuous, beautiful women was that they expected an audience, and the easiest way to grab their attention was to completely ignore their existence. Being ignored was apparently so foreign to their pampered egos that it drove them to demand the attention they believed was their due.
She sauntered down the isle toward him, fingering silk scarves and progressing to sleek leather handbags along the way.
Patrick noted through his peripheral vision the stir Olivia was causing among the other patrons—male and female alike—who watched in her wake.
As predictable as the sunrise, she honed in on Patrick like a beacon in a storm.
• • •
Olivia was growing predictably bored with her shopping spree. As tedious as protectorate life was, and as arduously as she had often wished to live in a real city, for the shopping, for the culture, for the people for cripes sake—she now found that she was almost as bored here in D.C.
She was tired of the stares she seemed to attract wherever she went. When she was younger, she was uniformly flattered by the attention she received from everyone around her. She’d been told that she had that certain “je ne c’est croix” that set her apart from the masses—that it was not just her beauty, but her presence that caused people to stare. Now, she didn’t care. She’d heard every line that existed, endured every approach that pea-brained men could muster and now, well, she was just plain old bored.
At this point Olivia, ever on the prowl for new adventures, needed more than a flattering line or even a beautiful body (although that never hurt). No, at this point she required much more to attract her interest.
Just as Olivia finished her thought, her eyes were drawn to a man standing by the leather gloves. It wasn’t that he was particularly handsome, although he was pleasant looking enough. In fact, there was nothing she could pin point that had attracted her attention in the first place. It was more of a feeling, an aura, a presence that she sensed.
Olivia slowly walked toward the man, eyeing him brazenly … and why not, she thought, he hadn’t even registered her existence … yet.
• • •
Patrick timed his actions to perfection. He picked up a pair of calfskin driving gloves, and slowly moved his gaze from the gloves to the woman standing before him.
He wiped all expression from his eyes, looked up at Olivia and, keeping all inflection from his voice, said “May I help you?”
“Well, now, that all depends,” Olivia said, “Do I look like I need help?”
“Not particularly, but you do look like a woman who can help herself.” Patrick said as he turned to walk away.
“Course if you leave now, you’ll never find out what kind of help I need, now will you?” Olivia replied, flirting outrageously.
“Listen, miss, I’m not in the mood to be toyed with by some spoiled Southern Belle. I neither have the need nor the patience, now if you’ll excuse me.” Patrick wondered if he’d overplayed his hand, and as a result, hesitated slightly before turning away again.
“Now don’t that just beat all,” Olivia said as she blocked his path, hands planted firmly on her hips, “I try to be nice and look where it gets me!”
Patrick couldn’t suppress a smile, both at the audacity of this woman, and at the humor of her statement, but most of all, at the fact that he still had her firmly planted on the hook.
“Look lady,” Patrick began.
“My name is Olivia Askew and I’d thank you to use it … in fact, I’d love hearing it roll off your Yankee tongue.”
“Look …Olivia Askew, I’m not much for witty repartee. I think you’re lovely, but then so does every other man with a temperature of 98.6 degrees in this city. So now that you’ve gotten your kicks for the day, I’ll just say adieu.”
“Please don’t,” Olivia quickly responded. “No more games, O.K., I just want a little conversation to break up the monotony … fair enough?”
“
Fair enough,” Patrick said, “My name is Daniel Ingram,” he said as he extended his hand, but what he thought was “Gotcha!”
CHAPTER 23
Senator Woolridge clipped the end of his cigar absentmindedly as he perched on the edge of his desk.
“Lewis,” he said, rolling the “L” and extending the two syllables of the name with a flourish, “tell me that bothersome Moultry woman is history.”
“The assignment was carried out as you instructed, Senator. I’ve taken the liberty of having the anarchy group du jour claim responsibility for the bombing. We may have to hold hearings investigating the matter simply because of who she was and who her father is, but there’s enough evidence linking them to the deed to support our findings.”
“Yes, yes, that’s fine Lewis, but the question is, how much did she learn?” Senator Woolridge asked as he leaned toward his aide.
“We know she received a cell phone call just before the explosion, but the trace showed that the signal was bounced around to prevent detection.” Lewis answered.
“Goddammit Lewis! Can’t I depend on you to do anything right?” The Senator bellowed.
“It doesn’t matter, Senator, considering the fact that immediately after receiving whatever information Ms. Moultry got, she was blown to smithereens.” Lewis responded calmly.
The senator turned his head to look out the window as a sadistic grin spread slowly across his face. “Well … there is that,” conceded Senator Woolridge.
• • •
Olivia felt deliciously scandalous. She couldn’t remember when she’d had such an interesting afternoon. All the way back to the Quincy House Hotel riding in the taxi she recalled moments from the day and savored them like precious last morsels of a favorite dish.
She and Daniel, despite their rocky start, had found each other’s company delightful. He was an unusual combination of brilliance and sensitivity, yet he treated her with a gentle ease that bordered on nonchalance. Olivia had to admit that Daniel’s reticence was a weird kind of turn-on.