Allender sat down and finished his Scotch, while Melanie looked at him with an amused expression on her face. “You have really interesting friends,” she said finally.
He just shook his head. “I guess if you’re going to be a chess piece it’s good to have Hank Wallace as your player. Damn!”
“Is the Agency ever going to reveal any of this?”
“Are you kidding?”
“What about Greer? How will they keep her quiet?”
“They’ll tell her that Hingham was removed for sanctioning a political smear on a sitting congressman and that the top brass at the Agency had to lie to her in order to get enough evidence to remove him. And, by the way—would she like to hold a public hearing on the matter, a year before the election? No? We thought not. We’re so sorry for any inconvenience. Even sorrier about your friend.”
“I’m not sure she’s gonna let it go that easily,” she said.
“Her question to us when we told her that nothing she’d heard so far was true was very telling, in my opinion—‘how does this affect me’? Her own reelection was a whole lot more important than any national-security issues.”
“She should be prosecuted for allowing MSS to get close to her,” Melanie pointed out.
“Probably won’t be,” he said. “The Agency has some pretty good leverage on her right now, just as she has some on the Agency. That might lead to a much better relationship.”
“You’re getting pretty cynical in your old age,” she said.
“‘Old age’ being the operative term, secret agent,” he said. “Now I need a hot shower and then some sleep.”
“Me, too,” she said, and then gave him an extremely direct look. Tired as he was, that look did not escape his notice. “Melanie,” he began, but she interrupted.
“It’s ‘Melanie’ now and forever, especially since you called me ‘Melanie’ in front of Chiang version two. And why not? You know I like you.”
“I’m too old and I’m too weird,” he said. “Ask anybody.”
She gave him an arch look that said this discussion wasn’t over. He fled upstairs. Standing in the hot shower, he resisted the urge to kick himself. Why not, indeed. He’d hidden behind his amber eyes for almost his entire lifetime, and now here was a woman who didn’t really care about that or the fact that he was much older than she was.
He came out of the bathroom dressed in a bathrobe and rubbing a towel through his hair. Then he stopped. All the lights were off. The only light in the room came from the bathroom door. Melanie was in his bed, her own head wrapped in a towel. She was grinning at him. He stared at her for a moment and then walked over to the bed. He was astounded to find that he didn’t quite know what to do next. She solved it for him.
“Disrobe,” she growled in a positively awful rendition of his own voice.