Each Precious Hour

by Gayle Wilson

  Of course, she reminded herself, as she had reminded Jared so often through this long day, just because one of the survivors of that ill-fated mission knew something about explosives, it didn’t mean he had anything to do with. the bomb that had been planted in the senator’s car. They didn’t even know if Carl Bolton was alive. Nobody, including the FBI, apparently, had been able to track down those three men. Not yet, anyway.

  “It just all seems to fit,” Jared said. “And when something ties together this well...”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you think ties together. He isn’t anywhere around the car. And we don’t have any proof that he had anything to do with any of this. Not with the team. Not with the voice that night. And not with the bomb.”

  “It’s the pattern,” Jared said.

  “The pattern?” she repeated carefully.

  “They threaten McCord’s family to get him to do what they want. They know that threatening him personally will just make him more resistant to the pressure to quit. But threaten his daughter...” Jared said. “Or threaten you,” he added softly.

  “Nobody threatened me.”

  “What happened that morning was a damn good indication somebody didn’t care if you got hurt—not if that’s what it took for them to make their point. Or maybe they intended for you to get hurt. Maybe that’s why the bearded guy pulled you back into that mob. What would McCord have done about his campaign if you’d been injured in that riot?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Robin said, but she was remembering the hands that had shoved her and the stick descending toward her head. At the time, she hadn’t felt that any of those actions were designed to hurt her. She’d thought she had simply gotten caught up in a situation that had spiraled suddenly out of control—the real danger of mobs and riots.

  “What would McCord have done if that had happened, Robin?” Jared asked again. “What would he have done if you’d been hurt? If you’d lost the baby?”

  “Nobody even knew about the baby,” she said, putting her hand on her stomach, fingers spread across its slight convexity.

  “Maybe not. But they sure as hell knew about your connection to McCord. Maybe they thought that might be the only way to make him back out of the race—by hurting you or Levi.”

  “And when that didn’t work, they just decided to kill him instead?” she asked, her voice expressing disbelief.

  “That’s the pattern. Just what they did in Texas.”

  It was still hard for her to believe that someone—anyone—wanted McCord out of the presidential race badly enough to kill him. No matter what her uncle had said about the height at which political passions ran these days.

  “If they were going to do that,” she said, thinking out loud, “then why would they bother to demand he make a withdrawal speech on New Year’s Eve? Did they intend to kill him without giving him a chance to do what they want? Without even waiting to see if he would drop out—”

  She stopped, the unfinished sentence cut off by Jared’s reaction. Suddenly, his head came up. His eyes, which had been on the remote control device he was turning over and over in his hands, lifted to meet hers. “Good God,” he said softly.

  “What?” she said, frightened by the look on his face.

  “They never intended to kill McCord.”

  It took a second or two for her to understand. And a second more for physical reaction to stir sickly in the pit of her stomach. “Me?” she whispered. “They meant to kill me?”

  As a warning to her uncle. Two lives sacrificed to keep one man from announcing for the presidency. When her mind was able to move past the initial shock, she realized that of course there would have been more lives lost than hers and her baby’s.

  Jared had been in that car. No one could have known he was there, but there was also Gus. Gus, who had paid the price they meant for her to pay—convincing James Marshall McCord that he didn’t really want to be president quite as much as he thought he did. And if he were stubborn enough to decide he did still want to run, to remind him of just how much it was going to cost him.

  “They couldn’t get to Levi,” she said, “so they figured I was the next best person for putting pressure on Uncle Jim. And if we hadn’t had that stupid argument—”

  “Don’t,” Jared ordered. He reached for her, pulling her into his arms. It wasn’t until her face was resting against the warmth of his sweatshirt that she realized she was crying.

  “How sick are these people?” she whispered. Rhetorical question. As sick as they had to be to blow up a car without caring who might be in it. And maybe—just maybe—as sick as they had to be to carry out the rest of what they had threatened.

  SHE RUBBED HER FACE against Jared’s bare chest, the slight, hair-roughened abrasiveness under her cheek comforting. She was lying almost on top of him, held close against his side, listening to his heartbeat, its rhythm steady and reassuring.

  “I thought you were asleep,” he said. His voice rumbled a little, the sound of it distorted by the fact that her ear was against his chest.

  “I may have been,” she said. “I don’t know.” If she had not been sleeping, at least she had been drifting. Trying not to remember. Not to think.

  They had made love again. Slowly and deliberately. That first night’s desperation had had no part in what had happened tonight. She supposed they had both recognized they were using physical sensation to destroy the nightmare images of the last two days. To hold at bay the sense of time passing, bringing them closer to the edge of some dark abyss, an ominous clock ticking softly in the background of their lives.

  One tick had been lost in the heated moisture of his lips and tongue, moving against the most intimate part of her body. Another had been buried in the teasing caress of her hands against the most intimate part of his. A third had been brushed aside as his palm drifted over their baby, who was growing safe and protected beneath the softened roundness of her belly.

  Time saved. Precious minutes rescued from the cold, stinking breath of death. To be cherished. Never forgotten.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Jared said.

  “Don’t,” she whispered, closing her eyes, although the darkness in the room was almost complete, velvet in its depth.

  “Why didn’t he warn McCord?” Jared said.

  She opened her eyes then, regretfully, knowing he wouldn’t let it go. He probably couldn’t. This was what Jared did. Part of it, anyway. The cop part. The part of him that worried at a problem until he had found a solution. And this problem...

  “He did,” she said, pulling her mind out of the pleasure-drugged depths of exhaustion she had worked so hard to achieve.

  Neither of them could afford to close their eyes to this, hoping it would just go away, as much as she might want to. If her uncle’s enemy, whoever he was, succeeded in using a threat against her to scare Senator McCord away from the race, he would also be using—and endangering—the baby she carried.

  “They warned him about doomsday,” Jared said derisively. “Not about something happening to you. They never even mentioned you. A threat can only be effective if you make it.”

  She thought about that. Tried to frame arguments against it, but her mind wouldn’t seem to work anymore. Maybe it was in overload. Too much to think about. Too much to worry about.

  “They never even mentioned you,” Jared said again.

  “And what do you think that means?” she asked.

  “Damned if I know. But...it has to mean something.”

  She lay there, staring into the darkness, the pulse of his heart under her ear the only sound. Trying to think if it did.

  “You’re attempting to apply logic to insanity,” she said finally. “Someone who would do what he did just to prove a political point is crazy. Crazy doesn’t have reasons.”

  “They do,” Jared said. “They always have reasons.”

  Bombers, she realized. That was a subject Jared certainly knew far more about than she did. And she wasn�
��t going to argue with that hard-earned knowledge. She couldn’t. But she knew what she knew. Someone who could do what had been done to Gus—what had almost been done to her and Jared as well—was insane.

  Maybe someone like Avamore, so caught up in his own rhetoric that he thought what he was saying made sense. Or someone like the bearded man. Or like Billy Bob Larson. Someone whose pain had made him lose touch with reality. Someone living in a nightmare world she couldn’t even begin to imagine, a world where blowing people up for political reasons made sense.

  Not her world. Or their child’s. Please, dear God, don’t let the madmen win. Don’t let all those predictions they’re making for the terrors of the millennium come to pass.

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll look at the tape again. Check back with the FBI. We’ll do something.”

  Anything, she thought. Anything to be doing something besides giving in to the madness and the darkness.

  Whatever was in her tone had apparently been enough to tell Jared she couldn’t bear any more. Couldn’t bear to talk about possibilities. Couldn’t bear to think about what might happen.

  Jared’s hand found hers, his strong fingers intertwining with hers. He brought their joined hands to his lips and, turning them, placed a weightless kiss on each of her knuckles. Then he trailed his open mouth along the inside of her wrist, pressing the last kiss into the sensitive skin inside her elbow.

  Finally his lips moved higher, finding the softness of her shoulder. His breath was warm against her night-cooled skin, the roughness of his beard another pleasure.

  “Wanna ride, lady?” he asked softly, the seductive teasing somehow out of place with the horrors they had been discussing. Out of place, perhaps, but still welcome. Normality.

  “Remember those bumper stickers?” she asked, not sure where the thought had come from, but wanting to share it with him. She wanted now to share every thought about her pregnancy with him. “The ones that said Baby on Board?”

  He laughed, and the sound destroyed another tick of that clock. “I always thought they were pretty stupid,” he said.

  She had, too. But she wouldn’t now. Maybe you had to have a baby on board to appreciate the sentiment.

  “So how about getting that baby on board,” Jared suggested.

  “No bombs in this car?” she asked softly.

  Gallows humor, perhaps. Jared had said once that cops made jokes about things other people would consider off-limits. Their sense of humor was apt to be both morbid and inappropriate. A form of stress relief, a way of dealing with the strain of having to face death on a daily basis. Maybe that’s what this was.

  Suddenly she became aware that his body had stilled, his fingers gripping hers too tightly.

  “Maybe a couple of explosions,” he said, his voice totally changed, the amusement gone. “In fact, I can guarantee them,” he said huskily. Still seductive, but in a different way.

  “That would be very good,” she said.

  She moved over his body, one leg on either side of his narrow hips. And for a long time, lost in the velvet darkness and each other, neither of them was aware of the slow, relentless ticking of that unseen clock.

  THEY WERE STILL ASLEEP when the phone rang. It was later than the morning when McCord had called. Jared was less dazed now by the loss of sleep, less reluctant to be pulled from the safe web of dreams that didn’t include any remembrance of Gus or the smells from that night, which had haunted him ever since. Except when he was asleep, he thought, his arms wrapped protectively around Robin and their baby.

  He pushed up on his elbow and reached unerringly across Robin’s body to grab the phone. It was already daylight, and the room was full of a thin, winter sunlight, which might have helped with the waking process. Jared had time to wonder if it was McCord again before he got the receiver to his ear.

  “Donovan,” he said, less impatiently than the last time.

  “You aren’t going to believe this,” a voice said. A voice he knew, but couldn’t seem to place. He tried to force the identification out of his brain, but the words themselves didn’t provide much of a clue. After all, a lot of things had happened lately that he’d had a hard time believing. The pause while he tried to think was apparently too long, telling the caller that Jared needed some help figuring out what he wasn’t going to believe and who wanted to tell it to him.

  “Jared?”

  “Who is this?” he said finally, giving up his attempt at recognition as fruitless.

  “Brad Simpkins. Are you sitting down?”

  Jared’s gaze skimmed over his thigh, which was lying across both of Robin’s. When he looked up, he found her eyes were open. She could probably hear Simpkins’ voice almost as well as he could, he realized, given their position and the forensic tech’s excitement.

  “I’m sitting down,” Jared lied. Robin’s lips tilted.

  “You remember how the Unabomber used to sign his stuff? How he used to punch letters into the metal? Somewhere protected, where he knew they’d find it?”

  “I remember,” Jared said. He did, vaguely. But the quality of his memory about those details wasn’t important. This call wasn’t about the Unabomber. His mouth had gone dry, his heart rate accelerating, half in anticipation and half in fear.

  “Well...” Brad said, drawing out the syllable, obviously enjoying the drama of the moment.

  If what he had found would help them discover who had put that bomb in the limousine, Simpkins certainly deserved his moment of triumph, Jared thought, holding on to his patience. Brad could have as many of those as he wanted.

  “This one’s got something like that?” Jared prodded.

  “Even better,” Simpkins said. “A whole lot better.”

  There was another pause, and Jared waited through this one, his eyes on Robin’s. Hers didn’t reflect the same gut-deep urge to overreaction he was fighting, but she didn’t know Simpkins was one of the most careful technicians he’d ever known. Whatever this was, it would live up to the buildup Brad was giving it.

  “We’ve got us a fingerprint, my friend,” Brad said softly. “As clear as a baby’s footprint on a hospital birth certificate.”

  “RIGHT THERE,” Simpkins said, moving away from the microscope to let Jared take a look at what he had found.

  Brad had been right. The print was unforgivably clear, as if it had been deliberately placed here for them to find. Which was, of course, the conclusion Simpkins had already come to. It was a signature. Just like those initials the Unabomber had punched into some part of each of the package bombs he’d made.

  “Have you run it?” Jared asked.

  “I wanted you to see it first. Just showing off, maybe, but you said this was personal.”

  “It is,” Jared agreed. “Do me another favor?”

  “Then you’ll owe me again,” Simpkins said, grinning.

  “Send it on to the bureau. Ask them to get the service records of the men from McCord’s A-team and make a comparison.”

  “McCord as well?” Simpkins said.

  “Run them all,” he said softly.

  Simpkins’ eyebrows lifted, but after he’d held Jared’s eyes a moment, he nodded. “I’ll let you know,” he promised.

  “How long?”

  “It depends on where we are on their list of priorities. Or where McCord is. I’ll tell them we needed it yesterday.”

  “Does that usually help?” Jared asked.

  “Not in my experience,” Simpkins said, looking down again into the microscope Jared had deserted. “In my experience,” he said, peering into the eyepiece, “it doesn’t help one damn bit.”

  “A FINGERPRINT?” Whitt Emory repeated.

  “Seems awfully careless to me,” Paul said. “You’d think someone smart enough to build a bomb would know enough to wear gloves. Hell, even I know that much,” he added with a laugh.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” Robin said. “The forensics people think the print was put there so it would be fou
nd.”

  “Wait a minute,” Katie said. “Are you saying that someone made a bomb and deliberately left his fingerprints all over it?”

  “One print,” Robin said. “In a place he felt sure would, because of the way the bomb was constructed, survive the blast.”

  “Can you really do that?” Whitt asked.

  “Apparently. If you know what you’re doing,” Robin said.

  This was secondhand information from Jared, of course. And Robin had expressed these same reservations. This was something Jared knew a lot about, however. Far more than the rest of them.

  “Because deep down he wants to be caught?” Whitt asked.

  “Maybe,” Robin said. “But...the police think it’s a form of taunting. A way to say ‘Catch me if you can.’”

  “So his prints aren’t likely to be on record anywhere.”

  “I don’t know. When he gets through at the lab, Jared’s coming over here. He may be able to tell us more. That’s all I know right now. I just thought you should have all the facts.”

  Jared had ridden over in the same cab with her to the hotel. The protesters had been dispersed and the relatively empty sidewalks out front had been a little eerie after the days and nights of shouting, milling protesters. Jared had had the cabbie wait while he walked Robin to the elevator. He would have come up to the suite with her if she hadn’t put her foot down.

  Nothing was going to happen to her inside the hotel, she had insisted. James McCord, heavily guarded by FBI agents, was away, speaking to a veterans organization. This was the speech she had made the arrangements for and one of the few New York engagements Uncle Jim had been adamant about not breaking. Many of the other commitments had been cleared from his calendar, and he would be escorted by federal agents to the rest.

  In addition to those precautions, McCord had also warned the members of his family back in Texas about the renewed threats. He had asked for FBI protection for them, as well.