Each Precious Hour

by Gayle Wilson

  Despite the fact that Jared thought the bomb had been meant for her, Robin was just as glad she wasn’t being officially protected—not by anyone but him. And as long as she was with Jared, she wasn’t worried. He was being obsessively careful. And after all, he knew all the tricks of the trade, things the agents would probably never think to look for or consider.

  “So where do we go from here?” Katie asked into the glum silence that had fallen over the meeting.

  The edge of excitement from working for the front runner had certainly dissipated. The spirits of James Marshall McCord’s small staff seemed as flat as morning-after champagne.

  Robin knew that no matter the outcome of the election, a lot of the joy would be missing for James Marshall McCord, as well. His dream of being president, even if it were realized, would have cost far more than he had ever thought it might.

  First had been the terrible price he had paid when his reputation had been stained by his acknowledgment of what he had done in Vietnam. There had been enough editorials doubting the honor of the choice he had made that day to call into question history’s final judgment of James McCord. An incident he had once hoped would never have to be revealed would now always be a footnote to his biography.

  His drive to achieve the presidency had also cost his family. Olivia had been threatened, and Jared was convinced Robin had been targeted, and he was afraid she might be again.

  And most tragic of all, Gus was dead. Robin had seen the price of those things darken the optimistic visions of the future that had once shone from the farseeing eyes of the man she loved like a father. A man who had been like a father to her. Uncle Jim looked old and tired now, defeated. Her heart ached for him.

  “We do what we’ve always planned to do after New York. We go on to Iowa,” Whitt said. “And to New Hampshire.”

  “Then you think...” Katie hesitated.

  Emory finished the question. “Do I think he’s going to quit? Not now. Not if I understand McCord. He won’t run away.”

  “Someone’s trying to kill him,” Paul reminded them. “I wouldn’t exactly call that running away. I’d call it being smart.”

  “Actually...” Robin began, and then she, too, hesitated. She wasn’t sure sharing Jared’s theory was what he would want her to do at this point, but these people deserved to know everything she did, she supposed. They were all in this together. “Actually, I’m not certain they want to kill Uncle Jim.”

  “Is that the opinion of your boyfriend on the bomb squad?” Katie asked. “That they’re planting bombs in the senator’s car, but are not trying to kill him?”

  “They sure weren’t after Gus,” Paul said.

  “Maybe they weren’t after Uncle Jim, either.”

  “Meaning?” Whitt asked.

  “Jared thinks I was the target,” she said. Even as she said it, she realized how ridiculous that sounded if you didn’t know about the threat to Levi, which she believed none of them did.

  “I don’t understand,” Whitt said.

  “Threatening Uncle Jim doesn’t work. Maybe they think threatening his family will.”

  “That seems...a little far-fetched,” Katie said, her tone managing to avoid open derision by a hairbreadth.

  “They want him to back out. For some reason, they want him to do it publicly,” Robin said. “And to do it on New Year’s Eve. They want him to do that instead of declaring.”

  “They don’t want him to run,” Whitt said.

  “But they don’t necessarily want him dead,” Robin reiterated. Again, she could sense their disbelief.

  “They don’t want to make him a martyr?” Paul suggested.

  She hadn’t thought about that, but she supposed it was a possibility. Maybe whoever this was had forced the revelation of what had happened in Nam. To humiliate James Marshall McCord? To discredit him? To ruin his name?

  If McCord died now, still at the height of his popularity, would he be discredited? Or would he become what Paul had just said—a political martyr, his name forever associated with the promise of a new beginning? A man cut down before he could achieve the potential everything about his persona promised?

  “Another JFK,” Katie said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t profess to understand their reasoning, but I think we have to take what they’ve said seriously. Exactly what they’ve said. They want him to announce that he won’t run. They want him to say that he doesn’t feel he’s qualified to lead this country into the next century. That’s what they’re asking him to do.”

  “Or else?” Katie asked.

  Or else...doomsday, Robin thought. Whatever that meant.

  That’s all they had threatened. A vague and patently ridiculous wording. One McCord apparently hadn’t shared with the rest of his staff. Doomsday, she thought again. And whatever that meant, it was now only two days away.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Why are we just now finding out about this? And from the damn tabloids?” McCord demanded the following morning, throwing a newspaper down on the conference table in his suite.

  “Maybe because they’ve put forth more effort than the cops have,” Paul Farley said.

  “Or maybe more money,” Whitt suggested. “You dangle enough cash out there and all sorts of ‘facts’ begin to emerge.”

  “What about the bureau? Wouldn’t you think they’d have discovered this during the last week? How the hell do we even know if there’s any truth to it?” McCord asked.

  “I think you can depend on the facts being accurate,” Whitt said. “The implications they’re drawing are the problem.”

  “Even if those men are dead, that shouldn’t be all that startling, given our ages,” McCord said. “And it sure as hell shouldn’t be cause for those kind of innuendos.”

  “Well, they are making them very carefully,” Katie said.

  Paul had seen the headline while he was having breakfast in the restaurant downstairs and had brought the paper up to the morning staff meeting. According to the newspaper, three of the four men who had, along with McCord, survived that mission in Vietnam were now dead. And despite what her uncle had just said about age, actuary tables would dispute the odds of that.

  William Robert Larson, a deputy sheriff, had been shot to death in Montana less than a month ago. Frank Reamer, who hadn’t been the world’s most upstanding citizen, had been killed six weeks ago in a mugging. He had bled to death in a dark Detroit alley a couple of blocks from his destination.

  And then, less than three weeks ago, John Stover, a machinery parts salesman in Indiana, had been the victim of a one-car accident involving his pickup and a bridge abutment. According to blood tests, Stover hadn’t been drinking and there had been no adverse weather conditions. At the time, there had even been talk of suicide, speculation that he had aimed his truck straight for that concrete pillar. The problem with the theory was that no one, especially not his family, could figure out a motive for Stover to take his own life.

  And now, thanks to those deaths—all of them within the last few weeks—there were whispers of something more sinister. The tabloid was hinting, albeit subtly and carefully, that one man’s ambition might have led to murder.

  “How the hell...” McCord said again, shaking his head.

  “The good news is that we seem to have gotten a bump in the polls,” Paul said. “Not much, but still...”

  “From that?” Robin asked, incredulous.

  “From the bomb,” Paul explained. “People don’t like their choice for president threatened.”

  “Their choice didn’t much like it, either,” McCord said.

  “Look,” Whitt said, “if this were the Times—”

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” McCord interrupted.

  “Probably nothing. Not as far as your base support goes.”

  “And if I decide not to run?” McCord asked. “If I get up there tomorrow night and tell them I’m not going through with it? You know what kind of interpretation rags like
that are going to put on that decision?”

  No one wanted to answer his question. Because, of course, he was right. The press would connect his decision not to run with the revelation that three of the four men who had walked out of the jungle with Jim McCord were now dead. Three men whose lives the senator claimed he had saved were now dead and unable to confirm—or deny—anything he said about that mission.

  “Son of a bitch,” McCord said, his voice very low.

  “Senator—” Whitt began, only to be cut off again.

  “I back out now, and I’m forever tied to those deaths. It won’t matter what comes out later. Nobody will remember any retraction that’s made. They won’t even remember they were made. Nobody will give a damn. If I don’t announce tomorrow night and refute that garbage, tell them I’m gonna prove there’s nothing to those allegations, then there are gonna be a whole hell of a lot of people in this country who’ll always believe I had something to do with what happened to those men.”

  He was probably right about that as well, Robin thought. If McCord backed out, the sterling reputation for honor and integrity he had built during the last thirty years of public service would forever be tainted. If he stayed in the race and fought, fought the tabloid press’s innuendos with his own powerful brand of oratory and charisma, he might have a chance.

  Maybe not a chance at the presidency. It was too early to tell how all this would affect those hopes. But at least he’d have a chance at salvaging the public’s memory of what he had accomplished during his years of service to this country, and at salvaging his reputation. But if he didn’t announce that he was giving up his candidacy, as the threat demanded, then...

  No one could know how far McCord’s enemy would take this. Or who that enemy might be. Or why McCord was his target, other than the fact that someone didn’t want him to be President.

  “Do you think that,” Robin asked, gesturing toward the newspaper, “has anything to do with the threat you received?”

  McCord looked up, his eyes reflecting surprise. “You believe this might have been released to force me to back out?”

  “At the very least, the timing’s suspect,” she suggested. “I’d like to know their source.”

  “So would I,” Whitt said. “That should be something we can find out. I have a couple of contacts.”

  “Even if we find out where the story came from,” Robin said, holding her uncle’s eyes, “it’s probably too late to do much about it. It’s in print. And I agree with Whitt. The facts as they’ve given them are probably pretty close to the truth. Probably too close to disprove, even if we had time.”

  “So you agree I can’t back out,” McCord asked.

  She supposed she should be flattered he was seeking her opinion. She was the novice here, but McCord trusted her to have his best interests at heart, as she trusted him to have hers.

  “I don’t think you can back out without some... damage,” she said. “But that’s a decision only you can make, Uncle Jim.”

  He nodded, his eyes still on hers, almost as if they were the only two people in the room.

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG DAY, Robin thought as she waited for Jared. A long ugly day during which the story, only a tabloid item this morning, had filtered through the legitimate media outlets. She had spent most of the day answering the phone, saying the same thing over and over again: the senator had been unaware of the deaths until the story broke. He had been shocked and dismayed, but he believed those deaths had nothing to do with the Vietnam incident he had revealed last week and certainly nothing to do with the presidential race.

  It had sounded pretty good. She wished she believed it.

  She put her head in her hands a moment, and only then did she notice the silence. She had been working up here by herself for the last couple of hours. The phone calls had been incessant, but even they seemed to have slowed down.

  Finally, she picked up her purse, turning off the desk lamp. Then she walked across the sitting room to switch off the one on the credenza. The faint light coming from the senator’s bedroom threw long shadows across the floor, making everything seem alien in the twilight. So much so that she jumped at the knock on the door, although she had been expecting it. As she let Jared in, she could tell by his face that he knew what was going on.

  “You’ve read the papers,” she said.

  “Afternoon editions. How’s McCord taking it?”

  “He’s furious. But he thinks he can’t back out now. That he can’t afford to. Not with that story out there.”

  “He’s going to announce?” Jared asked.

  “He didn’t say that. Not in so many words, but I could see it in his eyes. He feels as if he’s in a trap, his reputation forever ruined if he tucks tail and runs.”

  Jared said nothing for a few seconds, and then he asked, “You think there could be something to what they’re saying?”

  If Jared could ask that question, what chance did they have that everyone else wouldn’t be asking it as well?

  “How can you even think that?” she said.

  “Because I’ve been trying to figure out all afternoon who else would have a reason to want those three men dead.”

  “You, and everybody else, are making the assumption that there’s something suspect about those deaths,” Robin said angrily. “We know what Larson was doing when he died—trying to kidnap Levi. What makes you think the other two incidents weren’t just what they were originally reported—an accident and a mugging?”

  “More than fifteen years as a cop,” Jared said softly.

  He might be a cop, and this might be the way he was trained to think, but he was accusing her uncle of murder. “And that’s exactly why he won’t quit,” Robin said angrily. “He’s afraid everyone will see it as an admission of guilt.”

  “I didn’t mean to get you upset,” Jared said, realizing he had overstepped the bounds. “We can talk when we get home.”

  Home. His apartment. Robin had spent every night there since the bombing. She had slept in his arms and felt safe. But if Jared could believe this...

  “I think I’ll stay here tonight,” she said stiffly.

  “Just what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Maybe I need some time alone.” She wasn’t sure what she wanted Jared to say. Unsure if there were anything he could say that would fix what he had done with that question.

  “Look, I’m sorry for what I said, but you aren’t staying here tonight,” Jared said. “You’re not staying anywhere alone until this is over.”

  “Nothing’s happened in the last three days. They’re just waiting for him to decide. Maybe what hit the papers today is supposed to put more pressure on him, but whatever is going on, it isn’t about me. You said yourself they would have warned him if they intended to hurt me. They didn’t. They haven’t now.”

  The more she talked, the more she knew she was right. And besides, despite the last few days, despite their renewed physical relationship, despite the baby, she and Jared were still the same two people they had been when that car bomb had gone off, right in the middle of another argument. Somehow she seemed to have forgotten that.

  For the last few days, she had been watching a dream die. And since this morning she had been watching the death of a man’s reputation. A man she loved. A man she owed more to than she could ever repay.

  “Just...indulge me,” Jared said, his voice soft, its tone one she had always had trouble resisting. “It won’t be long now, and then, whatever happens, this will be over. Maybe you’re right. Maybe you don’t have anything to do with what’s going on, but what will it hurt to be careful for one more night? For the baby, Robin, if for no other reason.”

  That was an argument, of course, against which she had no defense. He was right. It was only for one more night. Maybe the last night she would ever spend with Jared.

  And she wanted to. It was so tempting. After a day like today, she wanted nothing more than to curl up in Jared’s arms and let him take
care of her. She could be strong again when this was all over, she told herself. But right now...

  And so she nodded, and watched relief wash the tension from his face. She put her purse on the floor while Jared took her coat out of the closet and held it for her to slip her arms into.

  “Where is everybody?” he asked, looking down the dark hallway toward the silent sitting room.

  “Uncle Jim’s having dinner with an old friend, a former New York senator. The rest of the staff are probably packing.”

  “Packing?”

  “They’re going on to Iowa tomorrow. All except Whitt.”

  “They’re not going to be here for the announcement?”

  “That was never in the plans. There isn’t time. If he declares, we’ll have to hit the ground running. They’ll have to,” she corrected after a moment, still not facing him, her fingers working slowly over the buttons on her coat.

  “You going to miss it?” he asked.

  “Probably,” she admitted. “But after all of this, I know that being involved in a campaign at this level isn’t really what I want to do with my life. It’s too...”

  “Dangerous,” he supplied when she hesitated.

  “I was going to say acrimonious. Hate filled. But maybe that’s just this campaign. I have to wonder what might have happened if we hadn’t chosen the millennium theme. Or if the incident in Vietnam hadn’t come to light,” Robin said, bending to retrieve her bag and settling its strap over her shoulder.

  “I don’t really think McCord killed those men to keep them from talking,” Jared said. He put his hands on her shoulders, strong fingers massaging away some of the tightness. “And I’m sorry I suggested it. I was just—”

  “That would be insane,” Robin interrupted.

  “Sometimes when people really want something, they get so caught up in it.... It may seem like anything is justified.”

  She pulled away and turned to face him.

  “I didn’t mean McCord,” he said quickly.

  “Who else would want them dead?” she asked.