Each Precious Hour

by Gayle Wilson

  “WE DON’T THINK HE USED a timer,” Bradley Simpkins said. “We haven’t found any evidence of one. I think it was set off remotely, probably by radio signal.”

  They were looking at the fragments of the bomb that had been recovered from the scene by the technicians last night and brought into the lab. The bomb forensics expert had evidently been working on them throughout the course of the day. What he was telling Jared was very preliminary. Which was exactly what Jared had asked for when he’d come into the lab this afternoon. For Simpkins’ gut reactions, based on what he had seen so far.

  Remote control, Jared thought in surprise. He had already made up his mind that the timing had been predicated on McCord’s tendency to run late. That was what came of not waiting to see what the bomb itself revealed.

  They had been only a few blocks from the hotel when Robin directed Gus to pull over to the sidewalk. Traffic had been heavy, and since they hadn’t given him a destination, the driver hadn’t been hurrying. So it was possible...

  “From the hotel?” Jared pressed.

  “I can’t narrow it down for you,” Simpkins said, shrugging. “Oh, and by the way, the tapes don’t show anything suspicious.”

  Jared had requested this morning that the department ask for copies of tape the media had shot during the senator’s arrival. He was hoping the cameras had caught something that would give them a clue as to who had stuck that bomb under the car. If, and that was a big if, of course, it had been done by someone in the throng of protesters who had been crowding the limo last night.

  “Damn,” Jared said under his breath.

  Simpkins laughed. “You know better than to expect this to come easy,” he said. “You didn’t think you were going to get lucky enough to get film of the guy planting the thing, did you?”

  “I can always hope,” Jared said.

  “You a McCord supporter?”

  Jared looked up from the bits and pieces of the bomb, spread out on the table in front of him like a jigsaw puzzle.

  “I haven’t thought too much about it one way or another.”

  “I thought maybe since you were riding around in his limo when this went off...”

  “Somebody I know works for McCord,” Jared explained.

  “The woman in the car last night? The senator’s niece?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I was leaning toward McCord,” Simpkins said. “Up until the Vietnam deal. No matter what he says, I don’t think we’ll ever know what really happened. It’s thirty years before he tells that story, and by now there’s nobody left to contradict him. At least nobody’s come forward to do that. Not yet. Maybe he waited until he knew nobody would before he said anything.”

  Since the story had broken, the media had been searching for survivors of that ill-fated mission. It had been only a few days, of course, but so far, nobody had come up with one.

  “From everything I know about him, he seems to be an honorable man,” Jared said, remembering the powerful charisma the Texas senator exuded. And remembering also how much Robin loved her uncle. It felt disloyal to her not to defend McCord.

  “There ain’t no such animal,” Simpkins said, “as an honorable politician. It’s a contra-damn-diction in terms.”

  Disinclined for some reason, maybe because he needed to know whatever Simpkins would eventually be able to tell him about the bomb and its maker, Jared didn’t bother to disagree.

  “Call me when you get through with that,” he said instead, lifting his chin toward the jumble of fragments.

  To anyone else, they would be just that. To Brad Simpkins, however, those heat-scarred bits of metal would provide a wealth of information. Which Jared would need if he were going to keep Robin safe for the next three days. Until New Year’s Eve. The beginning of the new millennium. Maybe he and Robin would have cause to celebrate. If they could just make it to the New Year.

  Unwanted, her words last night, that ridiculous premonition, brushed through his consciousness. “I had this sense of... I don’t know. Just this feeling that something very bad was going to happen. Something...terrible.”

  “Seems like everybody’s interested in this one,” Simpkins said. “Celebrity factor, I guess. Joe Anonymous gets blown up, and nobody comes calling on me.”

  “I do,” Jared reminded him with a grin.

  “Yeah, I guess you do at that,” the forensics expert agreed. “I’ll give you a call as soon as I know something.”

  “Even if you think it doesn’t amount to much,” Jared urged.

  Simpkins’ eyes focused on his face. “Personal?” he asked.

  After a few seconds’ hesitation, Jared nodded.

  “That’s not a real good idea.”

  “I don’t have a choice on this one,” Jared said. “So give me a call, if you think of anything. I’ll owe you.” He had already opened the door, his mind working with the idea that the car bomb had been set off remotely, when Simpkins stopped him.

  “You said anything.”

  Jared turned back. “You thought of something?”

  Simpkins shrugged again. “I don’t see what difference it makes, and it’s probably because of McCord being who is he, but the bureau’s asking for what we’ve got on this.”

  “FBI,” Jared said in surprise.

  “McCord is running for president.”

  “Not yet he isn’t,” Jared said, trying to think about jurisdictions in a case like this. “Not officially. But he is a U.S. senator. I guess that’s why.”

  “The thing is,” Simpkins continued, “from something this guy said, I got the impression they had an ongoing investigation before this little sweetheart here went boom.”

  “Investigating McCord? Or somebody on his staff?”

  Simpkins shook his head. “Nothing like that. At least as far as I know, it isn’t. Something the guy said made me think this isn’t the first time somebody tried to take the senator out of the race. Permanently.”

  “Another bomb?” Jared asked as a matter of course, but he thought he knew what this was about. The guy Robin had told him about. The brother of the CO McCord had offed in Nam.

  Simpkins shook his head again. “He didn’t give me any details. And I may be wrong about how I interpreted what he said, but...you said anything at all.”

  “Thanks. I owe you,” Jared said.

  “So bring me something interesting next time,” Simpkins said. “Some nasty, devious little device that I can get my teeth into. A real intellectual challenge.”

  “You just described my worst nightmare,” Jared said.

  But if he did what he’d been thinking about, and took one of those options, Jared realized that however interesting that next bomb was, he wouldn’t be involved. Except maybe to do what Simpkins was doing today. Picking through the scraps to get a feel for the maniac who had constructed the thing.

  “To each his own,” Simpkins said. He was grinning.

  “I guess you’re right about that,” Jared said before he closed the door to the lab.

  “THIS ISN’T THE FIRST time somebody’s tried to kill you. You might have mentioned that when you showed me that note.”

  McCord’s eyes moved to Robin’s face before they came back to Jared’s. “I thought it was over. We thought everybody who’d been involved in it had been...taken care of.”

  “It?” Jared questioned.

  He knew the senator didn’t want to worry Robin, but it seemed to Jared that in order to protect her, he needed to know everything. Even if the senator thought none of what had gone on before had anything to do with what was going on right now.

  “What happened back in Texas,” McCord said evasively.

  “Exactly what did happen, Senator? If you don’t mind me asking,” Jared said, his sarcasm barely controlled.

  They were in McCord’s hotel suite, and they were finally alone, just the three of them. Jared was still annoyed that the senator hadn’t come clean with him. If McCord hadn’t intended to tell him the truth, t
hen why had he shown him the threatening note?

  To be fair, maybe he had done that so Jared could protect Robin. However, Jared had been forced into playing a hand in the game with a few cards missing. And he didn’t like being put at a disadvantage like that. Especially when it affected how well he could take care of Robin.

  “A couple of people didn’t want me to announce,” McCord said. “Didn’t want me to run.”

  “And they physically tried to stop you?” Jared said.

  “I guess you could say that,” McCord said. There was a hint of amusement in his eyes, at least until he glanced at Robin. “Don’t look that way, baby,” he said coaxingly. “I told you this morning that everything’s under control. Whitt told you, too.”

  “You also told me that there was nothing much to the Jake Edwards’ business. That was obviously not the truth. Now I’m finding out you received another threat before that bomb went off last night. Exactly how long has this been going on?” she asked.

  McCord’s mouth tightened. “One’s got nothing to do with the other. The first came before Thanksgiving. When we were all down at the Altamira. Hell, I would have ignored the whole thing, except—” He broke off, looking slightly guilty, as if he’d already said more than he’d intended.

  “Except what?” Robin demanded.

  “Except it had to do with Olivia.”

  “They threatened Levi?” Robin said disbelievingly.

  “They thought that would make me tuck tail and run for sure. It scared me, all right. But it also made me mad.”

  “And?” Jared prodded.

  “I sent somebody to take care of her.”

  “So no attempt was made—”

  “I didn’t say that.” McCord interrupted Jared’s question. “I just said the solution I figured out to protect Levi worked.”

  “And you know who was behind that?” Robin asked.

  “Same guy was behind both that and what happened later on.”

  “Later on?” Jared asked.

  “They tried again. Me instead of Levi. This time I was determined I was going to get whoever it was. And we did.”

  “We?” Robin repeated.

  The senator looked at her again. “Me and Clint Richards.” He turned to Jared. “Clint’s the local sheriff. And... my son,” he said softly.

  “Your son?” Robin repeated, her voice full of shock.

  “Another old secret. One I’m not particularly proud of. I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell you about it since I got up here. Clint’s one reason I was so determined the two of you figure out how you’re going to be together to raise this baby. It just ain’t right, honey, for a child to grow up without his father around. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m proud of Clint. Proud of the man he’s turned out to be, but...he’s my son, and I can’t take any credit for him or his upbringing ’cause I wasn’t there. I missed it all. And as a result, he’s got some real bitterness toward me. Bitterness I sure can understand.”

  “Uncle Jim,” Robin said softly, still obviously stunned.

  “Clint and I have talked. We know our relationship is bound to come out Eventually the tabloids will get hold of the story. If things were different...” McCord hesitated, lips tightening. “I had been planning on having both Levi and Clint up here with me when I made the announcement, but with all this going on...”

  “But you trust Richards.”

  “I trust him with my life. I did. Him and Darlene.”

  “Darlene?” Jared questioned.

  “An old friend. And an FBI agent. I had asked her to come down to the ranch to help me with the threats and then all hell broke loose. They attacked me and her.”

  “You said ‘they’ earlier. Obviously more than one person. So how many people were involved in what happened?” Jared asked.

  “The head of security at my ranch turned out to be the brother of the man I had to kill in Vietnam.”

  McCord was answering Jared’s question, but his eyes had never left Robin’s face.

  “He and the guy who was supposed to grab Levi must have been working together. His name was Billy Bob Larson. He’d been a member of the team in Nam. One of those who came back from the war with some problems. A lot of problems,” the senator added.

  “Because of what happened on that mission?” Robin asked.

  McCord searched her features, perhaps trying to decide what she was thinking, what she was feeling about what he was telling her. Perhaps even what she was feeling about him.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. I won’t deny that enough went on that...I guess it’s possible.”

  “Larson blamed you,” she said.

  “Hell, Billy Bob blamed everybody. He went over there, just a kid, a know-nothing, snot-nosed kid, totally unprepared for what was going on. Unprepared for the reality of it. Vietnam changed his life. It changed him. In some kind of deep, fundamental way. Nothing was ever the same after he got home.

  “And somehow through the years I must have become the focus of his resentment. Maybe just because my life turned out differently,” he said. “So when Hal Edwards’ brother approached him, I don’t think it took much persuading to get him involved. But Larson and Edwards are both dead, so...”

  “It’s possible there is someone else Edwards ‘got involved.’ Someone who’s followed you up here,” Jared suggested. “Somebody who shouted at you that night.”

  “I don’t know why any of those men—”

  “There were twelve people on that A-team,” Jared interrupted. “Am I right about that, Senator?”

  McCord nodded.

  “Tell me about them,” Jared said, almost a demand.

  After a moment’s hesitation, McCord complied. “The CO—that was Edwards. Everybody called him Whacko. Not to his face, but he had to know how we felt. I was the XQ. The others were sergeants, each with a certain area of expertise, a specialty.”

  “You operated behind enemy lines,” Jared said.

  “Most of the time. Support for indigenous units. Training. Recon. Some other things that were...more sensitive.”

  “And on that last mission something went wrong.”

  “Not something,” McCord corrected softly. “Edwards went wrong. He went off the deep end. He went nuts.”

  “And he got people killed.”

  “Good men. Men who didn’t deserve to die simply because their commanding officer had lost his mind. When I saw him about to execute one of his own men who didn’t want to die on some crazy-ass mission Whacko had thought up, I just decided...that he wasn’t going to kill any more of them.”

  “How many of those twelve came back from that mission?”

  Again the senator’s lips pursed and his eyes became shuttered as he thought about those survivors. Or about what had happened. “There were five of us who walked out.”

  “You. Larson. Who else?”

  “Carl Bolton, Frank Reamer and John Stover,” McCord said.

  Suddenly, like the icy finger that caressed the back of his neck when he knew there was a bomb in place, something trailed up Jared’s spine, raising the hair on his neck.

  “And what were their specialties, Senator? The specialties of those three men?” Jared asked, knowing, even before McCord said it, what the answer would be.

  “Stover was communications, Reamer meds and Bolton was our explosives guy,” McCord said.

  “Bingo,” Jared said softly, and watched the senator’s gaze lift from his hands to meet his. And then he watched McCord’s eyes hold there, the pupils widening slowly until the narrow rim of blue surrounding them was almost lost in the expanding black.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I’m telling you he’s not there.”

  “One more time,” Jared suggested.

  “You can play it fifty more times,” Robin said tiredly, “and it won’t change anything. The man who grabbed me isn’t there.”

  “You’re sure you’d recognize him?”

  She thought about that, the rest of the
images on the video tape playing out unnoticed across the screen of the TV in Jared’s apartment—the part that showed the limousine pulling away from the curb. She would probably dream about the other, the section that showed the crowd gathered around the car as the senator climbed out and she got in. That was imprinted on her brain like an afterimage because she and Jared had examined it so often, freeze-framing each view that showed any portion of the mob.

  “Unless he shaved his beard,” she said. “And cut his hair. Changed his clothes. If you’re asking me if the guy in the Armani pinstripe standing by the curb is him, then I guess it’s possible. If you’re asking me if the man I saw—as I saw him that morning—is on this tape, then the answer is no, he’s not.”

  Her tone was sharper than she had intended, a product of her frustration. They both were frustrated because everything they had tried during the last twenty-four hours had come to a dead end. And now they were another day closer to the deadline. Another day closer to the scheduled New Year’s Eve speech.

  “It was worth a shot,” Jared said.

  She could hear the disappointment in his voice, but she couldn’t tell him she had seen something that wasn’t there. She was almost sorry now she had told Jared about the man in fatigues who had tried to pull her back into the crowd that morning.

  Jared was convinced the bearded man, who seemed the right age to have served in Nam, had something to do with the voice McCord had heard from the darkness—the “Hey, Jimmy-boy” voice. And that he might therefore have had something to do with the bomb.

  “We’ve given it a shot,” Robin said. “More than a shot.”

  Jared had had the cops stake out the area around the hotel, looking for the bearded guy, asking questions. That was after Uncle Jim told them that the team’s explosives specialist had been one of the survivors.

  She still didn’t understand why McCord hadn’t made the instantaneous connection between Bolton and the car bomb that Jared had. Maybe because he couldn’t believe someone else on the team felt the same way about him that Billy Bob Larson had. Maybe because he didn’t want to accept that someone else whose life he had saved thirty years ago might be trying to kill him.