The Kill Shot

by Nichole Christoff

  After medics loaded him into the chopper, the State Department officials began to shake hands all over again. And Ikaat knew that was our cue to leave. Roger tucked her into the back of a Town Car with a door so thick, I was certain it had been reinforced with enough steel to withstand rocket-propelled grenades.

  He held the door for Katie and me as well. The three of us would ride together to Washington. At the State Department complex near the National Mall, we would go our separate ways. Ikaat would meet more officials from State, the Department of Energy, and Homeland Security than she’d ever imagined existed—and she’d answer their tough questions again and again over the coming days. Katie, having served as Ikaat’s friend and companion through this ordeal, would stay with her—and be the sugar that made the medicine go down.

  I, on the other hand, would be free to go my merry way once we crossed the boundary marking the District of Columbia. Because bringing Katie safely back to Washington had been the deal I’d struck with my father. Nothing more, nothing less.

  My father could continue to pretend he knew nothing about my travels to London. And I promised myself I wouldn’t care. Because my obligation to him would be complete.

  But then Roger said, “Jamie, the Senator will be meeting Doctor Oujdad this evening. The Senator wants to see you immediately afterward. At eight.”

  I nodded.

  And flicked a look at Barrett.

  For all intents and purposes, he was supposed to be deep in conversation with the doctor and the Speedwell’s skipper. But when I turned his way, the naval officer had to repeat whatever he’d said to Barrett. Because, with his eyes on me, Barrett paid the men no mind.

  “Boy,” Katie said, “if Mr. Spencer-Dean could see Lieutenant Colonel Barrett look at you like that, he’d jump on the next flight over here.”

  “It’s really not like that.”

  But that was a lie guilt made me tell. And it tasted sour on my tongue. After all, Philip had socked Barrett for less than looking at me, and Barrett didn’t think much of Philip, either. Funnily enough, in spite of that, if I’d followed Philip’s advice, if I’d delayed our return to America, if I’d taken him up on his offer to stash us all in a safe house, none of us—including Barrett—would’ve been on that plane when it crashed. At any rate, my fib didn’t convince Katie.

  She said, “You won’t tell Lieutenant Colonel Barrett what I said in the raft, will you? I mean, about my sister?”

  Katie had said she’d do anything to help her sibling. But to my mind, there was nothing wrong with that. In fact, I didn’t think anyone could take exception to the sentiment, least of all Barrett, who had a sister of his own.

  But Katie had also tried to take the blame for our plane going down. It hadn’t made sense at the time, and it didn’t make sense now. Of course, some people’s notions about cause and effect get tangled up in a crisis. That’s why survivors sometimes suffer guilt of their own. So, in the clear light of the new day, it was no wonder she didn’t want me to mention her odd confession now.

  I promised her I wouldn’t.

  Katie’s relief was palpable. She thanked me and slipped into the Town Car. When she did, Barrett crossed the dock to me.

  I peeled away from Roger, met Barrett midway.

  He said, “I’m going to Washington, too. I’m riding in a chase car.”

  “I figured as much.”

  “I’ll have to report in and face a long day of debriefings. After that, though, I’m done. I plan to take some leave.”

  “You should. You deserve some time off.”

  “I do.” He tucked a fingertip beneath my chin. “I know who I’d like to spend that time with.”

  In my opinion, Barrett still had a lot of explaining to do. But I was more than willing to hear him do it. So I smiled. I couldn’t help it. And Barrett smiled back.

  Like a chaperone with the worst timing in the world, though, Roger broke into our conversation. He emphatically invited me to get in the car. I did, and our long line of vehicles hit the road.

  We reached Washington in the early afternoon. And once we did, parting with Ikaat and Katie wasn’t easy. In the inner courtyard of the State Department complex, beneath the finely wrought globe of verdigris and gold that was too big for even Atlas to hold, we said farewell.

  Katie hugged me like she’d never let go. And with tears in her eyes, Ikaat kissed me on each cheek. She tried to speak, but her happiness wouldn’t let her.

  Considering the life she’d left behind—and the promise of the one that lay before her—I was more than okay with that.

  Then they were on their way, escorted by all kinds of diplomats, across the flagstones and through the glass doors on the far side. They were headed to the seventh floor. Or, in other words, to meet the Secretary of State.

  I, on the other hand, headed home.

  And, boy, was that a good feeling.

  In my living room, the empty champagne glasses Barrett and I had drunk from were on hand to greet me. So were the chocolates nestled in their crystal box. I popped one in my mouth, then emptied my pockets on the coffee table. My cell phone, in the fancy case Philip had bought me, clattered on the marquetry. My phone’s battery was dead, but I was alive—and I was grateful.

  By then, news of the plane crash had probably reached Philip in London. And he’d probably burned up a communications satellite trying to reach me. He deserved to know I was fine. But I didn’t want to think about Philip just then. Instead, I plugged my phone into its charger and made a beeline for the shower.

  I could’ve spent an eternity under its hot spray.

  When I toweled off, the texture of the terry cloth felt so good. And it felt marvelous rubbing against the spot where Katie’s pen had poked me. The place had been itchy ever since she’d stabbed me, but now it was hot and prickly. And I knew that couldn’t be good. So I backed up to a mirror to take a look at it.

  And discovered a welt, red and angry.

  “Great. Katie’s pen was dipped in bubonic plague.”

  All joking aside, though, I slathered it with antibacterial cream and got ready to visit my father.

  At ten minutes to eight, I found myself parked on a hard-backed chair, in the outer office of his suite in the Capitol Building, with the hem of my skirt smoothed primly over my knees and my hands knotted in my lap, just like a nervous college graduate on her first big job interview.

  I could hear the natter of polite conversation going on behind the cherrywood double doors to my father’s inner sanctum. Ikaat was in there, I figured, along with a bevy of State Department types. My father would be chatty and charming—and working out for himself whether the bargain he’d made to bring her here was worth it.

  At five to eight, the doors swung open. Roger emerged. Ikaat, Katie, and a bunch of bureaucrats were right behind him. When she saw me, Ikaat smiled. And then Katie and her cronies whisked her away for a private tour of the building.

  Roger said, “The Senator will see you now.”

  The chief of staff looked worn out with work, and something more. Worry? His brows knitted at the sight of the cast on my arm.

  “I sat in on a special debrief this afternoon.” He cleared his throat. “Sounds like we almost lost you. Several times. I wish…I wish I could’ve been more helpful to you.”

  Barrett, I thought. My father hadn’t wasted any time calling him into his office. And knowing Adam, he hadn’t fed my father some sugarcoated report.

  I forced a false smile, tried to set Roger at his ease. After all, shutting me out in the cold probably hadn’t been his idea. “You were just following orders. Besides, my father sent me in style to twenty-first-century England, not a bordello behind the Iron Curtain. How bad could it’ve been?”

  “Bad enough,” Roger said.

  He hugged me then. It seemed an odd gesture for him. And the genuine affection in it blasted me in the breastbone.

  “What,” my father growled, darkening his own doorway, “is going on out here
? Jamie, I sent Roger for you three minutes ago.”

  “It’s my fault, sir.” Roger let me go. “I was just telling Jamie it’s good to have her back in Washington.”

  “Yes,” my father agreed. “It surely is.”

  And if that were a welcome home, I made up my mind to take it.

  The three of us spent the next hour in my father’s office going over my version of the trip to Britain. Though he appeared to relax behind his desk in his red, Moroccan leather swivel chair, my father listened carefully when I described the men who tried to snatch the snitch visas from Katie and me at Heathrow. He also made me recount everything I’d seen and heard in that Fen Country manor house as if there were some secret meaning in my words. He wanted to know about the Anonymous Men, Philip’s conducting us to our plane, and his offering a safe house, too. I told him all he wanted to know and more.

  But when it came time to talk about the plane’s multiple engine failure and about its crash into the sea, my father sprang from his seat as if the thing had an ejector spring under it.

  “Roger,” he said, “would you give me a moment with my daughter, please?”

  Roger heard the command in the question and, without a word, withdrew.

  When the cherry doors were firmly shut between him and us, my father said, “I set a difficult task before you.”

  He had. And he’d cut me loose while I was in the middle of doing it. If Ikaat’s defection had gone sour, I suppose he would’ve claimed Katie had hired me.

  He slipped a hand into the breast pocket of his suit coat and said, “You did well, Jamie.”

  These were words I’d rarely heard from my father. I felt the pleasure of his approval tremble through me like starlight. Which was ridiculous. I wasn’t a little girl learning to ride her first bicycle. I was a grown woman with her own career, her own home, and her own life.

  I didn’t need my father’s praise—especially after he’d withheld his help.

  Still, my cheeks heated pink at the sound of it.

  My father withdrew a small, slim box from his pocket. “This is a little token of my appreciation.”

  He crossed to the tufted sofa where I sat as stiff and straight as a society hostess.

  And he placed the box in my hands.

  It was a cool blue box, sporting a skinny line of silver embossing on its top. It looked just like a box that would come from that lovely location where Holly Golightly had had breakfast. It looked like it had come from Tiffany’s.

  I lifted the box’s lid and there, nestled in white velvet and caught in a platinum pendant, glowed a sapphire as blue as the cold waters of the North Atlantic.

  It was beautiful.

  And it blew my breath away.

  “What do you think of it, Jamie?”

  My father’s gifts were few and far between. Except for a string of exceptional pearls he gave me the day I graduated from Princeton and a delicate diamond bracelet he gave me at my wedding, my father wasn’t into presenting gifts to anyone, much less to me. And if he needed to buy a gift, he had staff members like Roger to select one for him.

  I cleared my throat. “I think Roger has exquisite taste.”

  My father chuckled. It was a warm sound, rich and round. I didn’t hear it very often.

  “Roger,” my father said, “doesn’t do everything around here.”

  His nimble fingers lifted the necklace from the box. He fastened the chain around my neck. I moved to the beveled mirror hanging over the barware on his credenza.

  In the hollow of my throat, the sapphire shone like the Evening Star.

  And there were stars in my eyes as well.

  They felt a lot like tears.

  My father appeared in the mirror behind me. “Thank you, Jamie.”

  His hands closed over my shoulders. He pressed a kiss to the top of my head. His gesture seemed so strange, and yet so normal. For a second, I felt as if I’d stepped through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass. But unlike Alice, I didn’t want to come back to the real world.

  Chapter 25

  Night had fallen by the time I left my father’s offices. I didn’t see Roger on my way out. I didn’t see the police officer at the blockade of a desk in the reception area under the Capitol, either. Outside, I didn’t see other officers patrolling the manicured grounds. But that was okay by me.

  I’d seen who I needed to see.

  My father still had a long night ahead of him. He’d called a special session of the Armed Services Committee. And I suspected they’d be discussing the information about her homeland’s secret nuclear program that Ikaat had brought with her. No doubt they’d jaw over the observations Barrett and I had brought from Britain, too. I had no idea what they’d do with all that knowledge.

  Cold light poured off the Capitol dome above me and the Supreme Court buildings across the street as I slipped from the back of the complex, nipped across the Capitol’s grounds. Massive concrete planters, chock full of evergreens and frost-resistant pansies, barricaded the street and made this particular stretch of pavement a pedestrian walkway. Lots of folks were taking advantage of it.

  Young staffers and a plethora of interns made their way like sleepwalkers toward the bistros to be found past the Library of Congress. Most would stumble onto Blue and Green Line Metro trains at stops like Archives and Judiciary Square to go home, get some sleep, and do this all over again tomorrow. Because of the long hours they’d needed to put in—and the few parking places to be found—few would’ve driven to the Hill.

  I had, however.

  And I had wormed my way into a precious parking space not far from the Library of Congress’s Jefferson Building.

  Leaving the pedestrian walkway, I headed that way, sticking to the sidewalk and hooking a right onto one of the Hill’s cramped side streets. There, under a streetlight, stood a slender woman with lustrous curls, free of their customary hijab. Her face was turned to drink in the sight of the Capitol’s rotunda.

  “Ikaat?”

  She jerked, startled that a stranger had called her by name. But I wasn’t a stranger. She smiled when she recognized me.

  “Jamie. I did not expect to see you.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Or more to the point, what was she doing out here—alone?

  Katie and a cadre of federal agencies would want to keep Ikaat under lock and key for a while. For her own safety, sure. But also for everyone else’s—just in case she decided to take anything she’d managed to learn about our own nuclear programs or our security secrets and head back home to share her information there.

  Yet here she was. On her own. Mooning over our national architecture.

  Ikaat’s smile turned sheepish. “I am a guest in a lovely apartment, but in the hall, in the lobby, and on the street are guards. They are friendly men and they wear suits, not uniforms. Still, they are guards. Now that I am to be an American, on my first night in America, I wanted a few moments to be free, like other Americans.”

  Well, I could hardly argue with that.

  “How did you get away without being seen?”

  “Katie helped me.” Ikaat dipped her fingers into the neck of her sweater, withdrew a pass card on a lariat. “She gave me this key before she went to her own home for the evening. It opens all the locks in the building.”

  Katie shouldn’t have done that.

  But I kept that sentiment to myself.

  Instead, thinking of the goons who’d tried to kill us in London, I suggested Ikaat call it a night. I offered to take her back to her apartment. But when her face fell, I added, “We’ll take the scenic route.”

  So Ikaat was all smiles again as we made our way toward the intersection together. I could see my XJ8 by then, gleaming green and shoehorned between a late-model Mercedes and an ancient Ford across the way. Ikaat and I stepped to the granite curb, looked both ways before crossing the bumpy cobblestone street.

  Halfway between the sidewalk and my Jag, my fully charged cell phone began
to dance in my coat pocket. I withdrew it, glanced at the screen. Philip’s name and number lit up the display.

  I paused in mid-stride, Ikaat at my side, and weighed the pros and cons of answering. He loved me—or so he said. And I cherished him. But there was Barrett to consider. So my thumb hesitated over the touchscreen.

  Just as a car roared out of the darkness.

  And drove straight at us.

  I gripped Ikaat’s wrist, yanked her toward the safety of the sidewalk. The car’s high beams hit us full in the face. I couldn’t see who was behind the wheel, but I was sure he could see us.

  And he intended to plow us into the pavement.

  I took off, running full out and towing Ikaat behind me. It wasn’t an easy task in high heels. Ikaat stumbled, too, but we kept going. Until the heel of my Michael Kors pump got caught between two cobblestones.

  “Jamie!” Ikaat shrieked. She tugged on my broken arm. Pain ricocheted through me.

  The engine of the oncoming car sang as it shifted gears.

  I wrenched my foot from my shoe, shoved Ikaat ahead of me, and kicked off the other heel. Barefoot, I sprinted for the gap between a Corolla and a Lexus. We almost made it.

  The Lexus and the Corolla were parked nose to tail. Not even an emaciated supermodel could’ve squeezed between them. Ikaat dove onto the Corolla’s trunk. I planted my good hand on the Lexus’s paint, used its bumper like a step stool. The enemy car clipped the fender beneath my foot. The impact knocked me off balance. And flung me backward.

  I fell hard, slamming onto the speeding car’s hood. Momentum thrust me up and over the windshield. I tumbled across the roof, out of control and sick with the sensation.

  The driver hit the brakes. I bounced off the back end of the car. And landed facedown in the street—with my broken wrist pinned under me.