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LIZ WAS PACKING for her trip when the intercom buzzed. Wally Reed called earlier, saying he wanted to drop by.
She rang him up. He gave her a brisk kiss at the door. Then he stood back and slid his warm hands down her limp arms, staring into her eyes, concerned. He knew something was up. “What’s going on?”
“Death in the family.”
“Sorry to hear.” He angled his head. “Who?”
“An uncle.”
She had given her colleagues the same lame excuse. They didn’t believe her either, probably figuring she just needed some time off. Never explain and never complain, this her mom’s motto, the one she lived by while keeping her many disappointments bottled up inside. Like mother, like daughter.
“What’s really going on?”
She shrugged as if it were trivial. To a man like him, a man who literally had the weight of the country on his shoulders, her troubles were trivial. The stress was getting to her. Between HID’s demands, Brandon’s expectations, Jack’s disappearance, and Wally’s attentions, it was all too much. She couldn’t cope. She was on an emotional roller coaster. If she didn’t get away, sort things out, and put some distance between her and work, she would break. “I have to catch the redeye to Atlanta, so if you wouldn’t mind ....”
He checked his watch and tilted his head, suggesting the obvious. “Still time.”
They made love. Or more exactly, he made love to her while she mulled over recent events. One good thing, Brandon had been protecting his chief asset. It wasn’t lost on Camilla that he was lavishing all sorts of praise on Liz. This while making Camilla look lousy, such as calling her on sending Aneila down to the Caymans in search of Jack. Were she to find out Liz was the snitch, there would be a price to pay. But she couldn’t worry about that now. She had other things to consider.
It began to rain. A steady rain. A gentle rain. The kind of rain you’d want to stand underneath, arms extended, twirling around, face lifted to the clouds, and laughing. She wished she could be that carefree and that gay. Instead she felt helpless. Paralyzed. There was nothing she could do to get out from under the mess she had walked into. No good way to disentangle herself from Brandon. No good way to spurn the man lying next to her since both their futures were linked to Brandon’s goodwill. Once she was an ordinary woman. A boring woman. These days she was having violent thoughts. Crazy thoughts. Thoughts that rarely went through the minds of ordinary women. Ergo, she was not an ordinary woman, maybe never had been. She was a conniving, calculating, self-serving bitch who brought this on herself.
Wally rolled onto this back and stared at the ceiling. Post-coital affections were not part of his romantic repertoire. During the act, he was well equipped to handle the logistics, which erogenous zones to stroke, the correct duration of foreplay to perform, the timed crescendo toward climax and deliverance to execute, how to give that extra effort that made a woman feel immensely flattered, lightly used, and only slightly abused. Reed harbored egotistical tendencies that balanced on a shaky fulcrum between intimacy and brutishness. He knew how to please a woman. He also knew how to tease her and then to take advantage of her, but always managed to do it with grace. One day, he wouldn’t. Liz dreaded the arrival of that day.
Ironically, she had come to learn that Brandon was a man of integrity. His own kind of integrity. He could break almost every rule of decency known to man, but there were always forbidden lines that should never be crossed. He respected those lines. Nothing could compel him to go over those lines. In her increasing awe of him and his growing trust of her, he had come to respect her. Even admire her. Not just for her beauty but also for her brains. After using her like a doll in his bed of pleasure—sometimes sweetly and other times accompanied by anger—which he profusely and abjectly apologized for afterwards—Brandon taught her about the ugly world in which they worked. He described men of importance in the minutest details, outlining their strengths but stressing their weaknesses, since it was their weaknesses that lay them open to manipulation. But delicately. Cautiously. Like a surgeon applying a scalpel while the patient lay helpless on the operating table.
“Was it true with you? Or was it not?” he had asked her.
“Until it was too late,” she admitted.
“Exactly so.”
He was also one of the most intelligent men she had ever known. He had a keen memory. A vast mental encyclopedia of information. An instinct for saying the right things at the right times. And an intuitive knowledge of human behavior. He was also one of those charismatic men both sexes admire from a distance, not quite able to pinpoint which qualities made him so charming but instinctively knowing he had it, whatever ‘it’ was.
After their last romantic interlude, he blabbed, describing to her the government landscape from the top down, and revealing secrets he should have kept to himself. She already knew too much as it was. She had to retain her own counsel so as not to let anything slip. She was on a tightrope. The height was dizzying. And she had mistakenly shown her hand to Angie Browne, who wasn’t a dither head, and recognized Liz as cunning, a colleague to watch. Angie would report everything back to Salazar. Brandon had already counseled Liz on this, and he had no reason to lie. He revealed this profound truth to get something from Liz in return. To turn her into his personal mole. To be his back channel of everything that was said and done at HID, especially by Angie and Camilla, these women whom Liz once looked up to, but no more. And she had performed as requested, down to Angie’s menstrual cycle and the masseur Camilla went to basis, and not just for massages. He taught her well, Brandon had. He taught her how to get what she wanted. And she was about to use it to good effect.
“What about your wife?” she asked Senator Reed, as she referred to him in her mind, not Wally, which was too intimate.
He turned to look at her. “What about her?”
“What if she finds out? About us?”
“She’s the daughter of a former senator. She knows how Washington works. She’ll stand by me through thick and thin, and from the back of the room like all good political wives do. She knows where her bread is buttered. She would never leave me. Did you think we married for love?”
“But every time you come here―”
“I’m here on unofficial business.” He gathered her into his arms. “Shall we get down to some more unofficial business? For instance. Where is Coyote? Do you know?”
“Somewhere in Indonesia.” She shrugged. “Well, that’s what we learned this afternoon.”
“But you don’t believe it.” He was one of the coolest and most calibrating men she had ever known, which was saying something, since she was acquainted with many.
“He’s too smart to be cornered. And he’s learning. We almost caught up with him in the Caymans. But he squirmed out of that trap like he squirms out of everything.”
He planted the side of his face on a propped fist. “Something you’re not telling me.” He wasn’t accusing her. He was stating a fact.
She stroked his chest with tentative fingers, feeling his muscles rippling beneath, and shrugged as if the details were unimportant. “We’re using several sources to get a bead on him. There’s really no way for him to get away. Eventually we’ll bring him in, either in chains or in a coffin.”
“You have it in for him.”
She turned away from him, bringing the sheet with her so he couldn’t read her face. She was committed now. Nothing would stop her. It was a matter of survival, her survival, though not necessarily Jack’s.
“I don’t think I’d want to get on the wrong side of you,” he said.
“You wouldn’t even want to get on the right side of me.” She tossed the covers aside. “I have a plane to catch.”
