Pursuit

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  “Because I live close by. Because I could get there quickly. Because Mr. Davenport trusts me.”

  “Ah.” Mark still didn’t get it, but why Davenport had sent a subordinate in his place really wasn’t the most important point he needed clarity on at the moment, so he let it go. “So you met Mrs. Cooper in a hotel bar. Then what happened?”

  “We left.”

  Mark stifled a glimmer of annoyance. The antagonistic vibes she was sending his way were starting to get old.

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “We walked out together to the car I had come in—Mr. Davenport had arranged for it—and drove away.”

  She stopped, closing her eyes. He waited. Her dark hair fanned out against the pillow as she turned her head away from him, showing glints of red amid the deep brown. Under the unforgiving glow of the harsh overhead lighting, her face looked almost as white as the pillowcase. Taking in just the damage to her that was visible, he felt bad for even questioning her. But time was of the essence here. He might—thank Jesus—be the first, but he wouldn’t be the only one to ask all this and more. He had to know what she was going to say.

  “So,” he finally said when it became clear she wasn’t going to resume talking anytime soon, “you and Mrs. Cooper are in the car, it drives away, and . . . ?”

  Her head turned back toward him, and her eyes opened again with a slow sweep of thick lashes. It seemed to cost her some effort to focus on his face. “That’s the last thing I remember. Getting into the car and pulling away from the hotel.”

  Mark made his voice even gentler. “What about the crash?”

  “I don’t remember it. I don’t remember anything from the time the car left the hotel until you found me. Nothing. At all.”

  She said the last “at all” as if for emphasis.

  There was a pause as Mark processed that. She’d been through a terrible trauma just hours before. Trauma often erased the events immediately preceding it from the mind, as he knew from experience. Therefore, it made sense that she wouldn’t remember, he decided. And it also made things easier.

  For him. And for her.

  “You said Mrs. Cooper was alone in the bar. You mean really alone? There wasn’t a Secret Service agent with her?” He was thinking of Prescott, who had clearly hooked up with the First Lady at some point before the crash.

  Jessica shook her head.

  “One of our agents, Will Prescott, was killed in the crash along with Mrs. Cooper and the driver. If he wasn’t with Mrs. Cooper at the bar, how was it that he was in the car with you all?”

  She seemed to think about that.

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember,” she said at last. “Wait—he may have been outside in front of the hotel, on the street. When we came out.”

  “So he joined you in the car.”

  “I don’t know. I remember being in the car with Mrs. Cooper and the driver, and no one else, as we pulled away from the curb. After that—it’s a total blank.”

  Mark decided to let the logistics of Prescott’s presence in the car go for the moment, too. She seemed increasingly exhausted, a nurse or anyone else could come in at any moment and interrupt, and he had other, more urgent, fish to fry while the frying was good. Finding out what she knew without letting her in on anything she didn’t already know about the First Lady required a delicate balance. Unfortunately, he wasn’t sure he was up to it. Even under the best of circumstances, delicacy had never been his strong suit.

  “So what did Mrs. Cooper do in the bar? What was she doing? When you got there.”

  “Finishing her drink. She was alone at a table in the corner. I told her Mr. Davenport had sent me and a car to pick her up. So she left with me.”

  “Where were you going?”

  She hesitated. There was a new tension around her eyes and mouth that made him wonder if she was in pain. He hadn’t had that impression before, but he supposed that if she had been on painkillers, they would have been delivered via the IV, which obviously was no longer happening. It wasn’t too big a stretch to assume the painkillers she’d already received might be starting to wear off.

  “I . . . don’t know. I was supposed to call Mr. Davenport for instructions once I had the First Lady safely in the car. But . . . I can’t remember if I did.”

  “Safely?” The word tugged at him.

  She wet her lips. Her eyes opened wide again to focus on him. It seemed to cost her considerable effort just to lift her lids.

  “You know, I was only with the First Lady for about ten minutes, tops. At least, that I remember. I walked into the bar, told her Mr. Davenport had sent me to get her, and walked out with her. We got in the car. And that’s it. That’s everything. That’s all I know. I don’t remember anything else. So could you please just go away and leave me alone? I’m really not up to this.”

  He looked at her consideringly. If possible, she was even paler than before, so colorless her skin appeared almost translucent, and the bruises on her face and neck stood out like zebra stripes. She was shivering now, where she hadn’t been before, her hands curled into the blanket. He felt a quick stab of compassion. She was injured, perhaps terribly, and she’d survived a gruesome car crash that had left the three others involved dead. He’d gotten the answers he needed from her, or at least most of them. The important one, which was that she knew nothing and remembered little. So probably it was time for him to back off and turn her back over to the medical personnel who were caring for her.

  “The President would appreciate it if you didn’t talk about his wife or the crash or anything related to any of that to the press.” He evoked the power of the office almost reluctantly. He hadn’t said anything about the President earlier, in case one of the others in the room at the time later blabbed to the media the details of his visit to Jessica, which, the principles of medical privacy be damned, he figured they were highly likely to do. He didn’t want anyone saying that he was at the crash survivor’s bedside at the direction of the President until the way the spin on this was going to be handled had been worked out. Maybe they would decide he had rushed to Jessica’s bedside at the President’s behest, and maybe they would decide he hadn’t. Hell, for all he knew he might not even have officially seen her at all. “I recommend . . .”

  That was as far as he got. A plump blond woman—Jessica’s mother; he recognized her from the lobby and assumed she had finally finished with the hospital admission paperwork—pushed through the door, high heels tapping, be-ringed hands fluttering in agitation as she spoke over her shoulder to the younger, slimmer blond woman following her. They looked enough alike that it was obvious that they were mother and daughter, although one was about fifty and the other was maybe in her mid-twenties. Both were round rather than angular, and tall, with the kind of bleached-out platinum hair that was clearly the result of multiple home dye jobs. The mother wore hers in short curls; the daughter’s was shoulder-length with bangs. Both had round, apple-cheeked faces, snub noses, and dark brown eyes that gave the lie to their hair color. Both wore tight jeans and V-neck pullover sweaters. The mother’s was baby blue. The daughter’s was pink. Neither looked anything at all like Jessica.

  “Honey, you’re awake.” The mother barely glanced at Mark as she rushed, heels clacking, toward her daughter’s bedside. “Oh, my goodness, Jess, you just about scared us to death.”

  “Mom.” Jessica’s chin wobbled, and Mark realized to his horror that she was going to cry. She looked past her mother at her presumed sister. “Sarah. Guys, I can’t move my legs.”

  “Oh, Jess.” The younger woman rushed the bedside, too, and they both leaned over their relative. Mark didn’t know if they all engaged in a group hug or what because he was busy backpedaling away from the lovefest just as fast and unobtrusively as he could. “What matters is that you’re alive.”

  “The doctor down in the emergency room said it was probably temporary,” her mother soothed. “He said the X-rays didn’t show anything, so it’s probably ju
st . . .”

  The door flew open again as if propelled by great force. Two little towheaded boys, maybe four and six years old, wearing Batman and Incredible Hulk pajamas respectively, tumbled into the room, the older one shoving the younger one so that he nearly fell flat on his face.

  “He pushed me!” Recovering his balance, Batman ran toward the sister—Sarah—who had turned upon their entrance. His arms wrapped tight around her legs. “Mom! He pushed me!”

  “Is Aunt Jess dead?” Hulk skidded to a halt near the foot of the bed and peered up at Jessica, whose face Mark could no longer see because of the screen provided by her family. “Nah, she’s just crying. Why are you crying, Aunt Jess?”

  “ ’Cause she’s hurt her face, stupid. See all the places?”

  “Boys,” their mother—at least, Mark presumed Sarah was their mother—warned sharply. “Behave.”

  “. . . have anybody to leave them with,” another female voice said apologetically, and Mark’s gaze swung toward the door. It was opening again. The speaker was talking over her shoulder to someone—the older nurse, Mark saw as they entered one after the other and headed toward the bed. This blonde was a bombshell, slim yet curvy and tall like the other two, with long, straight hair that swung as she walked. Maybe twenty-one or -two, dressed in a killer black miniskirt and heels that made her tanned bare legs look a mile long. She was wearing a jacket, too, a black leather bomber, but Mark barely noticed that. It was all he could do to look away from the legs.

  “I’m sorry, but children aren’t allowed on this floor.” The nurse sounded like she’d said this more than once and was fast running out of patience.

  “Their dad’s coming for them,” Sarah told the nurse. “It’ll just be a little while. They’ll be real quiet.”

  “You said you were going to watch TV and go to bed,” the bombshell said accusingly to Jessica. “What happened?”

  “A lot.” Jessica’s voice sounded thick. Mark, who still couldn’t see her, took this to mean she was still weepy. “I’m so glad to see you guys.”

  “Believe me, not as glad as we are to see you.”

  Group hug again, during which the boys, clearly revolted, crawled under Jessica’s bed. Nobody except the nurse—who gave them an evil look—paid the slightest attention.

  “One of you could wait with the children in the lobby,” the nurse suggested, in the kind of stern tone that made it more of an order than a suggestion.

  “It’s full of reporters,” the bombshell said, glancing around at her relatives. “They were taking the kids’ pictures. I don’t know how the subject came up, but apparently Hunter told them Jess was their aunt. After that, we had to go.”

  “They were talking ’bout some lady being killed in a car wreck,” Hulk said from beneath the bed. “I told ’em my aunt was in a wreck too. Then they just started asking all kinds of questions and taking pictures.”

  “And Aunt Grace made us leave,” Batman chimed in. “I got to push the elevator button, though.”

  “Oh, no.” Their mother voiced the dismay apparent in the faces of everyone Mark could see.

  “What could they have said?” Jessica’s mother made an excusing face. “They’re just little kids.”

  “Nobody should say anything to anybody.” Jessica’s tone was urgent. “Mom, Mrs. Cooper was killed in the wreck.”

  “Honey, I know. It’s a terrible, terrible thing. She seemed like such a nice lady, too.”

  “I’m just glad it wasn’t you,” the bombshell said fiercely. “What would we do without you?”

  “Well, we’ll just get your IV hooked up again.” Giving up on banishing the kids, the nurse went for the pole, obviously noticed the missing bag, stopped dead, and frowned. Mark could feel the thing practically burning a hole through his pocket.

  “No! No IV!” Jessica protested in agitation. Not that Mark minded, because her reaction distracted the nurse’s attention from the missing bag. “Look, I’m a lawyer, and I know I have the right to refuse to have one. And I refuse! Do you hear? I refuse!”

  The nurse shook her head at her. “You have to have an IV. Your medications are administered through it and . . .”

  “No. What part of ‘someone just attacked me’ did you miss?”

  “Wait a minute.” Jessica’s mother frowned. “Someone attacked you?”

  “We’re sure it was a hallucination brought on by the medication,” the nurse said wearily.

  “It was not . . .”

  While the standoff continued, Mark judged his principal perfectly safe for the time being and slipped from the room.

  It had to be a hallucination. That was the only thing that made sense. Yes, there were others, known variously as cleaners, plumbers, repair-men, whatever, covert operatives that routinely dealt with problems to the powerful like the one Jessica potentially presented. But to employ them on a woman who might very well know nothing of the First Lady’s secrets, who might very well present no problem at all, would be the ultimate in overkill. He’d known the Coopers long, and he knew the Coopers well. They would never be party to such a thing.

  But under the circumstances, and just in case, he meant to keep tabs on Jessica until he could be absolutely, positively certain he was right.

  Because one thing he’d learned over the years was that you could be absolutely, positively certain you were right about something—and still be dead wrong.

  Nodding at the security guards, who still hovered in the hall, he walked over to one of the three pay phones on the wall behind the nurses’ station—a phone that he was pretty damned sure wasn’t tapped and wouldn’t be monitored, because nobody would ever figure on anything sensitive going out over it—and placed a call to Harvey Brooks, a lab guy he knew, all while keeping an eye on the door to room 337.

  When that was completed to his satisfaction, he pulled his encrypted phone—which he hadn’t used to call Brooks because, cynical bastard that he was, he figured that somewhere in the coils of the government he worked for there was somebody who could break through the encryption at will—out of his pocket and called Lowell.

  8

  I’m scared.

  That was the thought that popped into Jess’s brain as her eyes opened, slowly and reluctantly, on what proved to be the shadowy, whisper-quiet world of her hospital room. Like the desperate hand of a drowning person going down for the last time, it shot out of the black void of the already almost forgotten dream she’d been caught up in, breaking the surface of her consciousness and grabbing hold. She blinked, trying to be rid of it, but still it held on.

  Oh, God, we’ve got to get out of here. . . .

  That voice, shrill with terror, swirling up out of the darkness, was more residue from the dream. It was a woman’s, but it wasn’t hers; she didn’t recognize it.

  Or maybe she did.

  As she contemplated that, a cold little frisson of dread made her shiver. Her heart pumped like she had been running for miles.

  In self-defense, she dismissed the other swirling images trying to take shape in her mind before they could solidify, and instead focused determinedly on the immediate, on the here and now.

  Instinctively, she knew it was safer that way.

  The walls were white, the curtains green. They were closed, with slivers of dull light glowing around their edges and, mysteriously, what looked like a stripe of duct tape running down the center line holding them together. The monitoring machines stood silent beside her bed; she hadn’t allowed them to be hooked up again because the idea of machines being attached to her body freaked her out now. Her mother stood between her bed and the machines, looking tired and frazzled in the soft, gray shadows of the heavily curtained room as she reached for something on the stand beside the bed. There were bags under her eyes that were not normally there, the creases running from her nose to her mouth and in between her eyebrows seemed deeper than usual, her lipstick had worn off, and her short cap of blond hair was straight and flat, as though it had not seen a curling
iron in some time. Judy Ford Turner Whalen always had immaculate makeup and always curled her hair, world without end; for her to have neglected either showed just how extremely stressed out she was.

  The phone was ringing. Her mother was reaching for the ringing phone. Probably, Jess decided, the sound was what had awakened her.

  Just looking at her mother made her thudding heart start to slow. Judy was many things, not all of them totally positive, but one thing she definitely was was a tigress in defense of her young. No harm could come to her with her mother in the room—no harm that Judy could prevent, anyhow.

  The certainty calmed her. Jess took a steadying breath. Whatever had come before or would come after, for now, for this moment in time, in this gloomy cocoon of a room, she was safe.

  “Hello,” her mother said cautiously into the receiver. It wasn’t like her mother to be cautious, so Jess immediately knew something was up. She felt herself tensing again. Their eyes met. It was hard to read the nuances of her mother’s expression through the gloom, but Judy’s widened eyes and slight smile acknowledged the fact that Jess was awake.

  It also made her think that whatever was going down on the phone couldn’t be so terribly bad. Judy wouldn’t be smiling at her like that if it was anything bad.

  “You think I don’t know my own sister’s voice? This sure as hell is not Jessica’s Aunt Tammy.” Her mother slammed the receiver back down with enough force to make the phone jump. Jess would have jumped, too, if she’d had the strength. She winced instead, which hurt. “Damned reporters.”

  “Mom?” Jess frowned at her in surprise.

  “They’ve been trying every which-a-way to get information about you,” Judy informed her. “Ron”—Sarah’s possibly soon-to-be-ex-husband; their separation had led to Sarah, boys in tow, moving back in with Judy three weeks ago, which in turn had led Grace, who had been living with their mother, to flee to Jess’s apartment for sanctuary—“couldn’t even take the kids to school this morning. There was a TV truck out in front of his house! He had to call the police to run them off.”