Each Precious Hour

by Gayle Wilson

  They probably wouldn’t know that for a few days. After all, McCord hadn’t even announced yet. It was still a few minutes before the new Waterford crystal ball out in Times Square would begin its descent and usher in the new millennium.

  Watching the hours of this long day slip away, despite everything that had happened in the course of them, had been wrenching, Jared admitted. The last day he and Robin would spend together. And the last night. Because none of the arguments had changed anything. Not McCord’s warnings about living with regret. Not what Robin had said about being able to stand anything but burying him. Not even the arguments Jared had made to himself.

  The bottom line was that he knew how important his job was. It saved lives, like all those little kids lined up on the sidewalk that morning. That, and not bits and pieces spread out on a lab table, was who he was. And who he wanted to be.

  “He thought I’d fail,” Robin said softly.

  They had been circling the dance floor without speaking for a long time, just holding one another.

  “He?”

  “Whitt,” Robin said. “That’s why he made me talk to the media. I never did understand why he was so insistent. But he didn’t want his face in front of the cameras, despite how much he’d changed. And he thought that when it all came out about what Uncle Jim had done in Vietnam, I wouldn’t be able to handle it. He thought I’d screw it up and make things worse.”

  “You can’t know that’s what he was thinking,” Jared said.

  “You really think Whitt wanted me to be effective in explaining to the press what had happened in Nam?”

  Edwards hadn’t, of course. Maybe Robin was right. Maybe that had been what he was hoping for. That she’d fall on her face or say something stupid and make the situation even worse.

  “Funny, I always thought Whitt liked me,” she said bitterly.

  “Maybe he did,” Jared said. Not about Robin. After all, those had been Whitt’s last words.

  “Enough to try to blow me up.”

  “He said—” Jared began.

  Suddenly, he realized this was what had been nagging at him all night. This was what was unfinished. Incomplete. And until every piece of the puzzle had been put together, the picture complete, Jared wasn’t the kind who could leave it alone.

  “He said what?” Robin asked.

  Not about Robin. Jared knew the bomb hadn’t been meant for McCord. Why leave the print in that case? And Edwards had never wanted to kill McCord. He’d wanted to discredit him. To force him to give up his dream on the very verge of its fulfillment. That bomb certainly hadn’t been meant for Gus. Which left...

  “What did he say, Jared?” Robin asked, her voice puzzled.

  Which left...only me, Jared realized. “Did he know I was there?” he asked. He put his hands on Robin’s shoulders and pushed her away from him so that he could see her face. “Did Edwards know I was in the limo that night?”

  “I don’t know,” Robin said. “What does it matter?”

  Jared didn’t respond at once, still trying to think if this made sense. “McCord talked to someone back at the hotel. He used his cell phone from the limo to tell them we were arriving.”

  “It must have been Whitt. He’s the one who told me...” She hesitated, her eyes widening before she said, “He’s the one who told me that Uncle Jim had an errand for me to run.”

  “And he sent you downstairs to get in the limo?”

  Robin nodded, eyes still fastened on his. “He meant to kill me all along. You were wrong about—”

  “Come on,” Jared said. He grabbed her arm and pulled her with him through the crowd, heading toward the stage, from which McCord would make his speech in a few minutes. He was hoping the senator would be hovering somewhere nearby.

  He was. McCord was talking to a small, attentive group, his gestures expansive, his face beaming. He was on the verge of fulfilling every fantasy he’d ever had. At the peak of his entire life.

  And that was, of course, the other thing Edwards had said as he lay dying. That McCord would never be president. It all fit. All the bits and pieces Edwards had scattered over their lives were coming together to make a picture. To show him the pattern.

  Jared grabbed McCord’s elbow. The senator turned, putting his arm around Jared’s shoulders. He looked glad to see him.

  “Y’all finally decided you want me to add your announcement to mine?” he said, speaking above the noise. He was still smiling.

  “Who’d you talk to that night on your cell phone?” Jared shouted back. “The night when we were coming back to the hotel. The night you set Robin up by putting us together in the limo.”

  At what was in his voice or in his face, McCord’s smile faded. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Was it Edwards?” Jared demanded. “Is he the one you .told we’d be there in a few minutes?”

  McCord nodded.

  “So he could send Robin down?”

  Again McCord nodded, his eyes wary.

  “Edwards knew I was in the limo?”

  “Sure. We planned it. I wanted the two of you to talk. Before I left to meet you, I told Whitt that when I called, he should send Robin down. I told him I was gonna play matchmaker.”

  “Damn it,” Jared said. The words were bitter.

  He turned away, looking around the ballroom. The department had run a routine check on the room before the first guests arrived, using dogs and vapor detectors. And they hadn’t found a thing. But Edwards hadn’t come up here. He’d made one last play to get McCord to drop out of the race, and it hadn’t worked. Then he had said he was coming up here, but he hadn’t. He had left the hotel, but before he did...

  “I need Emory’s room number,” Jared said. Both Robin and McCord were looking at him as if he had lost his mind. He prayed they were right. “I need you to get hotel security to meet me down there and open it for me, Senator. And I need that done right now.”

  “Room 1426,” Robin said. “You think...”

  “I think I was the one he was trying to kill that night,” Jared said. “And I can’t think of but one reason why.”

  “THERE YOU GO,” the security guard said, pushing open the door to 1426. “I opened this room up for the cops earlier. Don’t know what you guys are looking for. They already looked through everything up here—the drawers, the closet.”

  “Thanks,” Jared said, his gaze circling the room. He hadn’t been aware that the police had already done that, but he should have known. This was a murder investigation, and procedures wouldn’t have changed simply because it was New Year’s Eve.

  “I gotta stay,” the guard said. “It’s policy. No offense.”

  Jared shook his head, still studying the room. If the cops had already opened all the drawers and doors...

  He walked over and stretched out flat on the floor beside the bed. He lifted the edge of the spread. There was nothing there. He carefully examined the underside of the springs, but he didn’t see anything that looked suspicious.

  “You don’t mind if I turn on the TV while you look, do you?” the guard asked. “Don’t want to miss the ball dropping.”

  Jared looked at his watch as he got up, but he didn’t bother to answer. He moved over the huge windows and, leaning the side of his head against the wall, looked behind the draperies, being careful not to touch the fabric. Nothing.

  Apparently, the guard had taken his nonresponse as permission, because the television came to life. Jared glanced at the screen, his eyes drawn by the sound of the familiar voice. McCord’s speech. The senator was certainly getting coverage. You had to admit, Jared supposed, that tying McCord’s candidacy to the dawning of the new millennium had been a stroke of genius. Even if a madman had devised it.

  “You think he did it?” the guard asked. He was sitting on the bed, eyes on the screen. “Killed those guys, I mean.”

  “No,” Jared said succinctly, moving into the bathroom. The shower curtain was open, and there was nothing but a wrapped
bar of the hotel’s soap in the enclosure. Jared slid his hand carefully between each of the clean towels in the stack.

  He glanced again at his watch. Five minutes until midnight. Not time enough to get the dogs up here. Maybe he was just making a fool of himself thinking there was a bomb somewhere in the hotel. He had nothing to indicate that was Edwards’ plan. Nothing but circumstantial stuff like the two things he’d said in the alley and that photocopied note McCord had shown him.

  What does doomsday mean to you? Maybe blowing a hole in this hotel and raining debris on the people in the square below.

  Making a fool of myself, Jared thought again. He was putting himself in the middle of something that had nothing to do with him. That Hal Edwards had been trying to kill him that night was insane. Just about as crazy as Edwards would have been to put a bomb here and then practically tell him about it.

  Not about Robin. That had to mean something else. Jared walked back out into the room, looking for anything he might have missed. The security guy was still sitting on the end of the bed, listening to McCord. The senator couldn’t go on much longer, Jared thought, or they’d cut away. They’d cut back to Times Square. And to the crowd. A million strong tonight. He couldn’t remember who had—

  His eyes hesitated, fastening on the connecting door. He didn’t know who had had the room next door. Farley maybe? That would have been convenient. They could work up here. Of course, they had done most of the work in McCord’s suite, but still...

  “Can you open that?” he asked.

  The guard looked up, reluctantly. “Sure,” he said. “I may have to do it from the hall if they’ve thrown the latch on that side.” He walked over and inserted his passkey, pushing the door open. “He must have rented both,” he said, returning to the bed.

  “Thanks,” Jared said, moving past him into the other room. He didn’t get far. Despite what he’d been thinking when he’d come up here, he found that he hadn’t really been prepared.

  There was a long black duffel bag on the bed. A big one. His eyes moved quickly around the rest of the room, but nothing was out of place. It had been cleaned, and then apparently this had been laid out on the bed. Laid out for him to find?

  He walked over to the bag, the adrenaline rushing into his blood like a drug. He took a couple of deep breaths, willing himself to calmness. Somebody’s dirty laundry. But he knew. He always knew, because that cold finger was on his spine.

  He walked around the bed, examining the bag from all sides. There was a zipper on the top that ran down the entire length of it. There was nothing else around it.

  He was aware on some level that the guard was talking to someone in the adjoining room. Maybe McCord had sent someone else up. Too much to hope for that it might be someone from the squad. He glanced again at his watch. Two minutes until midnight. Him or nobody. And it was far too late to be careful.

  He touched the tab of the zipper and took another breath before he pulled. It slid smoothly downward as if it had been oiled. As it moved, the bag fell open a little, revealing the contents. And he knew then, the bile rising in a wave into his throat, that he hadn’t been wrong. Not entirely wrong. Just a little off in underestimating the scope of Edwards’ thirst for revenge. And his thirst to destroy forever McCord’s good name. Using, ironically, McCord’s campaign money to do it.

  Jared pushed the canvas down, away from the bomb, revealing most of it. He knew now that he didn’t have to worry about trip wires or collapsing circuits. All he had to worry about were the numbers on the dim green timer, which were silently, relentlessly, clicking off the seconds.

  It was Soviet made. He remembered enough from his army EOD days to be sure of that. It was small and it was very old, but there was no doubt it was nuclear. And no doubt it was powerful enough to vaporize a few square miles of Manhattan.

  “It’s almost midnight,” Robin said.

  He looked up, across the bed and straight into her eyes, shocked out of his paralyzed horror by the sound of her voice. He hadn’t told her to stay downstairs. He had just assumed she understood. Doomsday. He was looking at exactly that.

  His first inclination was to tell Robin to get out of here, but that was pointless. There was nowhere to run. And nowhere to hide. There was just doomsday, lying obscenely between them.

  “What is that?” Robin asked breathlessly.

  He could tell by her voice, however, that she knew. She knew, but she couldn’t believe it. Just as he couldn’t.

  “Do something,” she whispered.

  He thought about all the movies he’d seen where they opened one of these things up with screwdrivers and spoons and probed around inside, cutting wires or turning things off. Only there wasn’t anything here to cut or to turn. He couldn’t disarm this, and he had known that from the first. He didn’t have the tools, even if he had had the knowledge.

  “Jared,” Robin said, an edge of hysteria in her voice.

  He shook his head and watched her eyes widen.

  “Do something,” she said again. An entreaty.

  So he touched the timer, his eyes drawn back to the racing numbers. Less than thirty seconds. It wouldn’t matter what he did. Or didn’t do. But because she had asked, he fumbled in his pocket and his shaking fingers closed over a dime. He slipped it into a slot on the top of one of the screws and began turning it.

  He could hear the television from the other room, and he realized that the security guard didn’t even know what was going on in here. He was too busy waiting for the ball to drop outside in Times Square. Jared wondered exactly what the people watching all over the world would see in a few seconds.

  He started on another screw, working mechanically now. At least his hands had stopped shaking. Robin had moved closer to the bed, so close he could smell her perfume, subtle and evocative. He had smelled it last night as he held her. It had been caught in the drifting tendrils of her hair and on the heated skin of her throat. Between her breasts.

  All those memories moved through his head as his fingers unthreaded screws. Each image clear. Vivid. Precious.

  So infinitely precious, he thought in wonder, his fingers starting on the next-to-the-last screw. Why was it that you never realized how precious each moment of life is until it’s threatened? Until it’s slipping through your fingers as rapidly as the remaining seconds were ticking off the timer?

  Suddenly, from the television in the next room, he could hear the crowd starting to count, a million voices strong.

  “Ten.”

  He had already slipped the dime into the crosspiece on the top of the last screw and begun to turn.

  “Nine.”

  His fingers moved, as he allowed his mind to think about the baby. Boy or girl? he wondered. All those years they might have had together were gone, lost to a madman’s quest. Robin had talked about ball games. Graduations. All those were slipping away, as the silent seconds ticked by. Out of his control.

  “Eight.”

  He worked the screw out and slipped his fingers under each side of the plate that covered the top of the timer.

  “Seven.”

  And Robin. They should have had years to know each other. To grow old together. He remembered what he had thought about the nursing home, holding hands, side by side in their wheelchairs. “Till death do us part” stuff. The good stuff.

  “Six.”

  Not this death. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. They had had nothing yet. No baby. No life. Each precious hour. Each minute, each second to be cherished. Guarded.

  “Five.”

  He lifted the plate. There was nothing under it that meant anything to him. There were no wires to cut. No buttons to punch. Nothing. Nothing he could do to stop this.

  “Four.”

  He closed his eyes, fighting the sharp, hot bite of his own tears. But he didn’t want his vision to be blurred. He wanted it to be clear. The last thing he would see on God’s dear earth.

  “Three.”

  He lifted his hea
d, looking straight into Robin’s eyes. Hers had filled with tears, and seeing them, his did the same.

  “Two.”

  Each precious hour. Minute. Second. They should have spent them all loving each other. Nothing else was important, and he didn’t know why it had taken him so long to know that.

  “One.”

  “I love you,” he said, and had time to see the impact in her eyes.

  And then a cheer went up from the crowd in the street, projected into the room from the speakers of the television next door. It took him a couple of heartbeats to realize what it was, because it wasn’t the sound he had been expecting.

  He looked down at the timer. The green numbers were gone. There was nothing there. In the background, the familiar music began, a cheesy old song he’d sung a hundred times. “Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind...” He remembered to breathe. A conscious effort, trembling and uneven.

  “Why didn’t it go off?” Robin asked. “Wasn’t it set?”

  He nodded, trying to figure it out. The timer had just cut off. They would have to get somebody up here to get this obscenity out of here, of course, but it hadn’t gone off. It had been armed and the timer had been set, but for some reason...

  And then, suddenly, he knew exactly what had happened. Back when everyone had been worried about all those Russian missiles going off accidentally because of the Y2K thing, some arms expert had predicted exactly this. Exactly what had happened here. He had said those missiles were far more likely not to go off. Far more likely just to stop. To shut down. The bug in the microchip would kill everything when the clock ticked over to 2000.

  The damn millennium bug. “Wouldn’t it be a joke,” Edwards had said, “if Avamore and the rest of them were right.” And the joke, macabre and inhumanly bizarre, had instead been on Hal Edwards.

  “The millennium bug,” Jared said.

  Her eyes widened in understanding. There were tears on her cheeks, and her face was white, but she was alive. That was just beginning to sink in for him. They were both still alive.