by John Farris
"Mrs. Harvester," Beau Chanson interrupted with a nervous twitching of his shoulders, "the President certainly is looking fit—he was when I saw him toward the end of last week—but I'm wondering if we're not perhaps being overly optimistic in assuming that he is ready for the, the level of exposure that you're contemplating while he, in all fairness, seems less than a hundred percent mentally."
"I'm never overly optimistic about anything except my next lay, Beau. But I'm quite confident that the rapport my husband and I have enjoyed for twenty-two years, the extraordinary like-mindedness we share, will be more than enough to overcome any small difficulties Clint may encounter while resuming his duties. I will be there for him, every moment. At his side. Getting back to the American People, and what they want—" She turned her smile on Cody Vollers. "It has been made abundantly clear that they want to feel good about their country again. The shock of Portland hasn't begun to wear off. The American People want the man they elected by a fifty-six percent popular vote three years ago here, at his desk, leading them in difficult times."
"Mrs. Harvester—"
"Yes, Pep?"
"I know—we all know—where your heart, and your loyalty is, and it's—inspirational to all of us—"
"You break into a sweat when you're shoveling heavy shit, Pep."
"Then may I speak as frankly as I feel I must, given the circumstances?"
"You know me and I know you, Pep. Wouldn't have it any other way."
"Thank you. Our President, Clint, probably my dearest friend—" His lips trembled. "A man whom I admired without reservation is ... he's hopelessly—the stroke has left him with the mind of a very young child. God knows I would give my own life to change that. But it is a medical fact."
"While that is factually correct, it is also a gross misrepresentation. Just how damaged is his mind? We don't know. All I know is what was in his head before the stroke, and what I believe is in his heart even now. Together, Clint and I can do this. His appointed task. Together we will reassure the American People that there is hope in a world turned against us. Belief is better than dread. Hope is the balm for grieving hearts. We are giving back to the country our beloved leader."
Again Rona endured their silence, while she drank from a wineglass filled with Orange Crush and watched them coolly, wondering who would challenge her. Beau Chanson was her odds-on favorite, and he didn't let her down.
"Well, if this isn't a masterpiece of badly used inspiration," Beau Chanson said in his famous going-to-battle growl. She'd been waiting for this. Beau was old Birmingham money, a wing shooter and a horse-and-hounds fancier. They'd ridden together in the Virgina hunt country. She'd once walked in on Beau in his hunt club suite when he was wearing nothing but an unbuttoned shirt and had given him a friendly feel, saying, "Now I know why they call you 'Mr. Beau-dangles.'" While he looked down at her with smiling disdain. Should have let it go at that, but then he said, "You can get it hard if you want to, Rona. But I'd sooner stick it in a beehive than give you a hump."
"Qualms, Beau?"
"Qualms? For the love of God! How do you have the effrontery to believe you can pull off this charade—no, I'll name it what it is, an outright farce—and not destroy the very soul of our republic? You do Clint Harvester neither credit nor honor with your scheme! We must accept that his time is done. You have always been astute in your depredations, but you must reconsider this course of action and not diminish what was pure gold in Clint Harvester to pennyweight."
"I'll bet you swiped that one from the old Confederate spellbinder, your great-grandfather. Glory be, they sure could spiel in those days."
"You would be well advised to accept my advice," Beau Chanson said with a hard glower.
"I was wondering if you still have that old beehive I mailed you, once upon a time."
Slingbury and Vollers looked puzzled and wary. Chanson set his glass down.
"I believe I have overstayed our little get-together. I intend to fax my resignation to Allen Dunbar before rejoining my wife and children in Nantucket for what is left of our Memorial Day weekend."
Rona was smiling. Within her smile a serpent lay coiled.
"Nonsense, Beau. You're not resigning. And if the thought crossed your mind, Slingbury, dump it. No one is stepping down from Clint's staff or his cabinet. No excuses will be permitted. We will have a unified show of strength and support for his return. So now you all look as if you've lost your zeal for public service! Pity. As us kids used to say, way back in the peaceful and prosperous Eisenhower era, 'like it or lump it."
"If you think you can intimidate me." Beau Chanson was furious to the point of an arterial blowout.
"I'm giving you a chance to leave gracefully after our inspirational heads-up. Otherwise it's time for hard knocks, and you won't be neglected."
Chanson said through gritted teeth, "Just where do you think you can go with that threat?"
"Where should we go? How far?" Rona stood musing, an eye to the sky as if cloud nine had appeared. "All the way back to Auburn University in '63? The preemie in the toilet in the Chi O house? A black man's baby, delivered in the middle of the night by one of the sisters of an all-white sorority? Very effectively hushed up. But do you think that the mother who was also a murderess wonders, even now in comfortable estate in her late middle age, does she still have images of that expelled six-month fetus, red and dripping until she flushed, and flushed again, and drowned it? Does she see, on those nights when the wind dies and frost first appears and she is sleepless and looking back into a past she can never repair, see her firstborn clinging to a windowpane like an unfinished ghost?"
"Monstrous," Beau Chanson said, staring at Rona with a frayed desperation, the expression of a man undergoing a debacle of the senses. The other men looked elsewhere, shamefaced and with a touch of terror in their own eyes.
"The old sins endure," Rona said, and she sighed as if she genuinely regretted it was so.
"The files. All the files were expunged," Chanson said in the tone of a man uttering last words to a hanging judge.
"But not all the voices were stilled. That's always how it is, I suppose. Anyone else tired of his job? Peppy? No? Wonderful! I'll look forward to seeing all of you in the Oval Office Tuesday morning, eight sharp. Sorry about Nantucket, Beau. Give my best to Mimsy and her five surviving children when you speak to her again."
Rona had kept her own staff waiting in the solarium with the bulletproof glass, part of the First Family's residence on the third floor. She apologized and then took up her first order of business.
"Where is the girl?"
Peach Boondecker, the holder of the slings-and-arrows durability award among long-time Rona staffers, broke the news that they didn't know.
"She's probably lying low until the spotlight is off. Who could blame the poor kid?"
"I can't put too much emphasis on this. I want her. I want Eden what's-her-name here, in Washington, and it had better not be later than teatime tomorrow."
"We know she has a steady boyfriend. Not live-in. He's a cop. Sunday is his day off, so we haven't been able to locate—"
"I can't believe how badly you're handling this, Peach. Never mind. Melissa, get me Katharine Bellaver. Holiday weekend, she'll probably be at the farm in Westchester." Rona turned to her appointments secretary. "Ingrid, adjust my schedule with Countess Von Alstine and Women Against Female Circumcision, at the Watergate. Dinner's out, but I'll still do the keynoter at nine-thirty."
Another staff member came into the solarium and handed Rona a note. There was a call for her on the secure line in her bedroom.
"Rona?" Victor Wilding said. "Thought we should share this. Robert Hyde is on his way to Innisfall by Air Force jet. ETA in twenty minutes."
"Why?"
"Bureau's after the girl, obviously. Just as obvious, they have a good lead on her whereabouts. And Hyde is taking a personal interest. Hyde doesn't want us to have her. She must be hot. More impressive than we imagined."
&nbs
p; "Do you know what their lead is?"
"We had a report from our sources at Cal HP. The FBI accessed the frequency of a LoJack belonging to a young Innisfall cop named Geoff McTyer. We also know they've put an Air Force Special Weapons unit on alert at Travis. Helicopters. Frisco FBI's SWAT team left the Bay Area a few minutes ago, headed north."
"She's with her boyfriend, and they're on the road somewhere."
"More about him. We have his file. McTyer was his mother's maiden name. He's Robert Hyde's son, undercover for the Bureau."
"So they've known about Eden Waring for a long time! But if Hyde's kid has been cozy with her, what's all the urgency? Hyde flying Mach two to the Coast, and Bureau's ordered up the SWATsters—oh, yeah, wait a goddamn minute."
"Right."
"This kid, McTyer, he turned on them? On his old man? He fell hard for Eden Waring. Now he's protecting her. Which means she's on the Impact list. Just as her mother was. That's why they're running."
"You got it."
"Victor, we must find them first! Who do you have there in Innisfall?"
"A big crew. We're monitoring the Bureau, of course, but that doesn't give us much of a jump. Right now we can only hope we get a break."
"The Bureau. Those sons of bitches. Nothing but trouble for us."
"We go head-to-head on this one, if we have to. MORG and the Bureau. I don't care about the consequences."
"Just find Eden Waring," Rona pleaded. "Congress is recessed and Justice is a shell. We can handle the fallout. Victor, I'm going to have a meet with Katharine Bellaver. Today. Eden may be in touch with her already."
"Be careful. She has important allies. Don't give them cause to unite against you."
"We're taking over, Victor. The sooner Katharine Bellaver has that message, the better we'll get along."
CHAPTER 37
INNISFALL • MAY 29 • 1:50 P.M. PDT
The National Transportation Safety Board and FAA investigators had secured most of the south campus of Cal Shasta University with the help of a platoon of National Guardsmen. Bertie Nkambe and other Sunday joggers couldn't come within two hundred yards of the crash site. There were some picnickers on a hill overlooking the stadium, a few curiosity seekers watching through binoculars the activity around the wreckage of the DC-10. The air was fresher on the wooded hill than it had been close to the site, but Bertie thought she probably couldn't enjoy a picnic lunch while any trace of burnt bodies lingered.
She paused to have a drink from the water bottle she was toting and reported back to Tom Sherard, who was waiting for her on the other side of the airport in the Ford Expedition. She used the limited-range walkies they had picked up at Wal-Mart.
"I can't get close enough to do any good."
"Let's be on our way, then. According to the map I have, Moby Bay is a good two hours from here. There's no direct route. Secondary roads across the mountain range."
"I'll just catch my breath and do my tai chi workout. Be there in twenty minutes."
Bertie put the walkie in a fanny pack and began her exercises.
Three girls, eight to ten years old, came out of the trees on the jogging path and crossed the sunny open space where Bertie was concentrating on her tai chi forms. The girls were having an earnest discussion about something, interrupting each other but not quarreling.
"Well, I can't take it home with me."
"We can't just let it die."
"Maybe it isn't dying."
"Sure looked that way. Poor kitty."
"Maybe I could ask my mom."
"You've got three cats already, Jana."
"It belongs to somebody. It's wearing a collar."
Bertie relaxed, breathed deeply, and said, "What's up, guys?"
The girls stopped and looked her over. Decided she was okay. One of them pointed back along the jogging path.
"There's this cat in a tree. A white cat. Looks like a dog got after it or something. One ear's torn and bloody. And its fur is dirty."
Another girl said, "I smelled smoke."
"I'm Bertie. What's your name?"
She was the smallest and youngest. "Jana."
The others introduced themselves.
"Grace."
"Danielle."
"Sisters?"
"Cousins," Danielle said. "We're all cousins."
"Where's this cat you're talking about?"
"We could show you."
"I've gotta go," Jana said.
"No, you don't," Grace, the oldest, said. "Mom said two-thirty and it's only twenty after."
"I mean peepee!"
"Oh. Why didn't you do it in the woods? Okay, tell Mom we'll be right there." She looked up at Bertie. "You wanta see?"
"Sure. I like cats. We had a couple on the farm when I was growing up."
"What kind were they? Siamese?"
"African lions," Bertie said. Grace and Danielle looked at each other, confirming that they were too sharp to put up with this. Bertie shrugged.
"I grew up in Africa."
She answered a dozen questions about her childhood and the coffee plantation in Kenya on the short walk to where the girls had discovered the injured cat.
It wasn't easy to see, crouched a dozen feet off the ground where two leafy limbs of the oak joined the trunk. A young Persian with a crusty cut on one ear. Only a small part of its fur, on and around the face and breast where it had been able to clean itself, was white or grayish. The rest of the fur was blackly streaked or singed. The cat had lost most of its whiskers, apparently to the fire it had barely escaped. The cat's eyes were closed, as if it was too exhausted to pay attention to them.
"Do you think kitty was in the plane that crashed?" Danielle asked.
The older girl said, "Everything on board burned up. Except the one they have in the hospital. She was thrown out but she's not going to live. That's what Rich's mother told him, and she's a surgical nurse."
"Let's have a look," Bertie said, moving closer to the tree. The cat's eyes opened partway at her approach. Bertie stood very still, gazing up, a hand raised high above her head. She remained that way, relaxed and motionless, long enough for the girls to become restless.
"What are you going to do?" Grace asked.
"Figure out a way to get him down. Take him to a vet for shots and stitches. He was on the plane, for sure. Traumatized, but I'm sure he'll be okay."
Grace said, "What's traumatized?"
"He's scared. In shock."
"How do you know it's a boy cat?" Danielle asked.
"Oh—just something about him. I can't explain."
"Danielle. Gracie!"
"That's Jana. We better go. Thanks for taking care of him, Bertie. You gonna adopt him?"
Bertie smiled but didn't look around at them. Nearly all of her attention was focused on the cat. Her right hand remained in the air, fingers spread, moving slightly, as if she were reading something written there in spectral braille. The Persian cat had lifted its head and was staring at her.
"I'll just leave that up to Warhol," she said. "When he's feeling better, and we've had a chance to talk."
CHAPTER 38
WESTBOUND/CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY 299 • MAY 29 • 2:25 P.M. PDT
They were waiting for Geoff and Eden Waring's doppelganger at the bridge over the Burnt Oak River in the mountain town of Valleyheart, sixty miles east of Moby Bay. Two SUVs from the sheriff's department and a unit of the California Highway Patrol. Geoff spotted them from half a mile away as he was driving down the narrow switchback road into town.
He came to a skidding stop. The convertible top was down. He looked at the bridge in the valley; saw the glint of sunlight on binocular lenses. They were expecting him.
"Oh, my God."
"You must've been right about the helicopter," the dpg said. "Can you go back?"
Geoff appraised his chances. Cliff wall on the right side of the road, steep forested slope on his left, with a steel guardrail nearly flush with the road.
"By the time I
get turned around, they'll be up here. If they've done this right, there'll be another car comin' up behind us, any minute."
"Back up. Just out of sight of those deputies at the bridge."
"Why?"
"You're getting out."
"What for?"
"Who do they really want, you or me? Eden, I mean."
"Eden."
"Back up, get out, climb over the guardrail. Find something to hang on to for a few minutes. Just don't let them see you."
"What are you gonna do?"
She grinned at him.
"You'll find out. When it's all over, if you don't see me around, retrieve your car and go to Moby Bay. The family's name is McLain. Eden's staying with them."
"Every law enforcement agency in northern California has my vehicle description and plate number by now. If they're usin' helicoptahs—"
"That's a good point. Maybe you ought to borrow one of their cars, tune in on the radio traffic. Come on, let's get moving."
Geoff put the Taurus in reverse and screeched uphill around a sharp curve in the road, stopped. They heard a siren on the road behind them. "Leave the engine running," she said.
Geoff vaulted out of the car, cleared the guardrail, slid on his heels a dozen feet down the slope that ended at a precipice, and grabbed a flowering purple rhododendron well rooted in the feldspar. Looking up, he couldn't see the road. Then Eden's face appeared above the guardrail.
"Give me about twenty minutes," she said. "That should be long enough for them to call in that pesky helicopter. Lay low, then head for the bridge. I've got your car. Don't worry, I'll take good care of it."
Eden's dpg was halfway to the Burnt Oak River in the Taurus when the other CHP car came flying up behind her, blue lights flashing.
She continued downhill at twenty-five miles per hour, swerving to keep the highway patrol from passing and cutting in front of her.
Fifty feet from the police-model Ford Explorers blocking the bridge, she stopped, pushed the cheap sunglasses Geoff had bought her above her hairline, and sat with hands high on the wheel of the Taurus as law dogs of various jurisdictions converged on the car. Guns drawn. One of them was even pointing a shotgun at her, as if she butchered small children and drank their blood.