The Threat

“Well?” he said, in a voice he barely recognized.

“Have I ever been alone with him. Well — actually I was. Once.”

He waited.

“I told you I was on his transition team. After the speech to the Guard Association. Well, one day he wanted a briefing. I forget what. Personnel issues, probably. I was in there with Holt, and Gino Varghese, and Charlie Wrinkles. The Christmas help he brought in from Wyoming. We had a suite at the Sheraton. We were there about an hour. Then Tony and the rest left.”

She looked at the carpet. “I should have told you. But I figured it would upset you. Anyway, he was on me before I had time to think about it. I pushed him away. Said I was in a relationship. He did his little-boy-caught-in-the-cookie-jar act. Said it wouldn’t happen again. Asked me to forgive him. There hasn’t been anything since.”

He had to admit, it was a good act. But now he knew how things worked inside the Beltway.

She was ambitious. Political. She worshiped De Bari.

“You were never with him after that?” he asked her again. Giving her one last chance.

“Never.”

He hadn’t wanted to give her the details, tell her how he knew. She’d argue, obfuscate, make him sound stupid and petty. That was the way they worked, and they all screwed you in the end; there was as much chance of finding one who was honest and faithful as picking a buttercup in hell.

“I can see I’m not getting through. There’s something in your head. The torture thing. Losing your ship. And now whatever you saw in Bosnia. But snap out of this. Believe me, you’re making up something that’s not there.”

It felt like someone else picked up the serving dish. The sound of it crashing into the mirror, of everything shattering, was the most satisfying thing he’d ever heard.

“Dan. Dan!”

He said in a thick voice, “Then how about in St. Petersburg. At the Pribaltskaya. That night, in his suite. How about that?”

She’d jumped to her feet when the mirror exploded. Now she turned for the bedroom. But paused, looking back. “It was business. But I see I can’t convince you of that. You can’t even control your actions. So I don’t see any point in continuing this conversation.”

He heard the snap as the lock went home. Leaving him clenching his fists. Looking at his bloodshot, crazy, shattered reflection in the shards that littered the sideboard.

Maybe it didn’t matter in the great scheme of things, the way a massacre in a distant land mattered. Or maybe that didn’t make any difference either.

The guilt, the rage, the shame, hammered through him. He wanted to smash more things, smash everything.

He was mad enough to kill.

13

She was already up when he lurched into the kitchen the next morning. The couch had been stylish but uncomfortable. She was dressed, made up, and was eating a toasted sesame bagel. They didn’t have much to say. Just the “Did you want coffee?” and “There’s more of those in the freezer” nonconversation of a couple who didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to be near each other.

At the door she said, “This house is half yours. So I can’t exactly ask you to leave.”

“You want me out? I’ll get out.”

“Let’s talk about it later. I’ve just got too much going on to deal with this right now,” she said, and was gone. Leaving only her scent, and the lingering smell of toast.

Meilhamer was in when he got to the office. “Jeez,” his assistant said, looking at his eye. “You have that looked at?”

“It’ll go away,” Dan told him. “Let’s get to it.”

“Okay.” Meilhamer fitted himself like a puzzle piece into the window chair and unloaded a sheaf of correspondence folders onto Dan’s desk. The first alone was an inch thick. “We got catch-up to play. First off, this GAO report on automated information-systems management. The counterdrug systems inventory. Here’s their draft report and recommendations, our draft response.”

Dan sat with chin on his fist, looking at page after page as the assistant ground through why NSC–CD could not agree to this obscure recommendation for this or that arcane reason, but on the other hand, how the working-group reports could not be considered in the final IRM draft documents. He was into pointer index systems and the National Counter-Narcotics Information Protection Architecture when Dan broke in. “Can we move ahead on this, Bry? Kind of give me the one-pager. Or we’re never going to get through it.”

“Sure, boss. Bottom line’s that the draft National Drug Control Information Resource Management plan, as currently configured, should not receive support from within the NSC–CD staff. Without a major redrafting, it’ll end up in the “too hard” box. This eventuality is underscored by the problems we’re having getting letters of promulgation signed for the TMP and the DETIP. Even if it comes back in a more benign form, it’s too expensive. Half a billion my little birds tell me isn’t going to be in the budget.”