Permanent Interests (20 page)

"Are you sure, Bob? Maybe we ought just to cool it for now. You need rest. Let's go."

Innes wouldn't be budged. Colleen perceived a moonie-like quality about him.

"Three elements emerge in the pattern: there's a criminal angle; there's a Russian connection in there somewhere; and the same perpetrator is killing these people."

"And somebody in our government knows what's going on but doesn't want anyone else to know," Colleen added.

"Russians. Hmmn. An espionage angle perhaps?"

"Who? The Russian SVR guy, okay. But not the Teamsters. And certainly not Ambassador Mortimer."

"Why not Mortimer? As for the Teamsters, I can't figure the connection yet."

"No. Not Mortimer. He may have been a jerk. But he was also a patriotic American. I knew him. Worked for him, remember? I would've noticed something fishy. I think." Colleen was confused and distraught. The thought that her first boss in her budding diplomatic career might have been a traitor deeply disturbed her. Her mind raced through the past year. The possibility that she may have been an unwitting accomplice to a spy panicked her.

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"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Innes counseled, suddenly a fount of reason and caution.

They paid the bill and left.

Colleen wasn't sleeping well. Nor was she eating steadily. This and her deepening anxiety caused her to lose ten pounds. She was falling behind in her Thai language lessons. Innes had become obsessed with his conspiracy theory and this added to her worries. He showed signs of manic-depression. His rantings and intensity called to her mind weird people who made a vocation out of trying to prove the CIA killed Kennedy or the government was covering up what it knew about UFOs.

Could Mortimer have been anything other than a lecherous, bumbling fool? Had she missed something?

After a year of working as his personal aide, surely she would have picked up on any truly suspicious activity on his part. Then again, she was a 24-year old, first tour junior officer, not a hard-bitten counterespionage specialist. If he was a spy, what would the inevitable investigation reveal about her role? At best, an unwitting naïf. At worst, a dimwitted nerd totally oblivious to clear signs of malfeasance. These apprehensions ate at her.

Her friends were becoming concerned over her. When they asked what was bothering her, she would simply mumble, "Nothing," and clam up.

Amy Chen entered the service with Colleen. They became fast friends and kept in touch from their respective postings. Amy, now working in Protocol, was afraid for her friend. She insisted that they have dinner at her place.

Just the two of them. Amy would make Colleen's favorite -

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- Cantonese coconut soup and spicy tofu with mixed vegetables.

Colleen picked at her food, occasionally forcing a wan smile in order to appear amiable.

"Amy, I know why you invited me here tonight. And I really appreciate your making my favorite dishes.

But…I'm all right, okay? Don't worry about me. I've got a few things on my mind right now, but I can manage."

"Nonsense, Colleen. We're almost like sisters. We even menstruated at the same time when we were in junior officer training." She laughed.

Colleen couldn't help also laughing.

"So, what is it kiddo? Love?"

Colleen put down her chopsticks and rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands.

"Oh, Amy. You don't miss anything, do you? You know everything."

"Hey. There's a Chinese saying that goes, 'He who is half Teaches and half Hakka is like the moon and the sun --

cold and hot, a contradiction of mystery and power.'"

"Huh?"

Amy giggled. "Never mind. Who is he?"

"Amy. It's…He's…Where do I begin?"

"Let me guess. He's married."

"Separated," Colleen added quickly.

"Oh good. Not a totally hopeless cause then."

Colleen went on to describe her falling in love with Bob Innes, their having worked together on the Mortimer case, his travails and increasingly strange behavior. Then she stopped.

"So, you get to the bottom of what's eating at him and help him work it through. You're strong enough for it."

Colleen nodded feebly, but kept her eyes averted.

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"There's more. Colleen, tell me what it is. Get it off your chest. Let me help you. You can't go on like this.

You're wasting away. You and your man will end up in a loony bin together. Or worse."

"God, Amy. I don't know what I'm into. If I'm in trouble and getting sucked in deeper. Or, if I'm just imagining things. I'm afraid of telling anybody lest I drag them in or they conclude that I'm becoming crazy. But I'm afraid to tell anybody. If Bob is right, people could get hurt."

"If you don't unburden yourself, you'll just continue on your present course. And that spells disaster for you. And your lover."

Colleen knew that her friend was right. She then went on to recount everything she knew about Mortimer, her helping Innes to investigate the case independently, his illfated memo and tribulations and her present self-doubts.

"Amy, I'm so confused. And I'm so afraid." She broke into uncontrollable weeping. Amy comforted her in her arms.

"One day at a time, baby. One day at a time."

Growing a year older every twelve months was a bummer. But birthday parties were another thing. Ever since he could remember, Toby Wheeler loved birthday parties. He liked the gathering of friends, poking fun at the birthday boy or girl, the sharing and caring. But the thing he especially loved about birthday parties, and he kept it secret, was birthday cakes. Wheeler got positively giddy over vanilla cake with lots of sugary frosting. He would pig out on cake. If his wife didn't watch him closely, he would get sick to his stomach after getting second, third 174 JAMES

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and fourth helpings. It was just one of those things. A simple human fallibility. Marion rapped her husband on the knuckles with a spatula as he was surreptitiously fingering frosting from their daughter's coconut and cream birthday cake sitting on the kitchen table.

"Hey! What's that for, you crazy woman?"

With one fist on her hip and the other brandishing the spatula rapier-like at her husband, she answered, "I don't want my man to be a fat slob. Nor do I want him having a heart attack just because he can't discipline himself around food, and particularly junk food!"

Wheeler shook his head, but couldn't suppress a smile.

"Man-o-man. Other men got loving wives who feed them well. Me. I had to marry Attila the Hen."

"Well, Mr. Frosting Fat Ass. If you can't stand the heat, you can get out of this here kitchen!"

Without warning, he sprang at her. With his hands now firmly around her waist, Wheeler planted a fat, wet kiss on his wife's lips. Caught completely by surprise, she succumbed, getting cake icing in his hair as she embraced his neck.

"There now. Am I still Mr. Fat Ass?
Darling?
"

Her face reflecting both love and exasperated humor, Marion let out a short laugh.

"I don't know what you are. You're just a silly man. My silly man.
Dear!
"

The doorbell rang. She broke from his embrace.

"Courtney's little friends are here! We've got to get moving." Marion rushed to answer the door, to usher in the first of a dozen little kids coming to celebrate their daughter's sixth birthday. With her hand on the knob, Marion admonished her husband one more time with a shout, "Now you stay clear of that cake, you here me?!"

"Yeah, yeah." He licked the spatula.

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The kids o.d'ed on sugar, having devoured the cake, inhaled the jelly beans and guzzled Sprite. They were now venting the resultant burst of energy on games, notably

"Twister" and pin the tail on the donkey. A dozen cacophonous little voices squealed "Old McDonald," "Big Bird, Where Are You?" and, of course, "The Birthday Song."

Wheeler genuinely enjoyed playing with the kids, allowing them to ride on his back and gamely acting as a stationary target for Courtney's new Power Ranger Zapper gun.

The effect of two hours of six year-old mayhem, however, left Wheeler with a throbbing headache and a need for some fresh air. With Marion's ready permission, he took leave for a stroll. Marion was grateful that he had blocked out time to spend with his family and even to take a stroll in the neighborhood. It wasn't only his birthday cake cholesterol intake that worried her. She was concerned that he'd been putting in too many hours on his story about organized crime's inroads into government.

The phone rang constantly. Wheeler had to meet sources at weird hours in the outer suburbs. His editor was constantly at him to develop further leads. The consequent stress made him irritable and listless around the house. But Courtney's birthday snapped him out of it. For Wheeler, family came first.

Wheeler quickened his pace through the maple-lined streets of his neighborhood, a bucolic enclave nestled against Rock Creek Park containing ranch houses occupied by affluent black professionals.

God, he loved this place. It was the perfect antidote to a scruffy little pig farm in Texarkana, where he was raised.

As he sprinted along the street pavement, determined to burn off some of the megacalories he had ingested that 176 JAMES

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afternoon, his mind turned to his recent discussions with Marion about having another baby. A son this time.

Hmmn. And more occasions to eat birthday cake!

The blow came much too fast for Wheeler to realize what had happened. It was only when a neighbor almost ran over his sprawled body in the middle of the road that his situation was known. Marion and Courtney held his hand in the ambulance ride to the hospital. He had a faint awareness of this. After an initial going-over in the emergency room, Wheeler was examined carefully by doctors. He had incurred a severe blow to his fourth cervical vertebra, Marion was told. It was too early to know whether there was damage to the spinal cord. They injected him with something to arrest such damage. He would need to stay perfectly still for days. Then they would be able to tell whether he suffered permanent paralysis.

"Another mugger attack, I suppose," offered the attending physician sympathetically.

"I don't know. I don't know," was all a shaken Marion could offer in response.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It was 11:00 am and Horvath, seated behind his hundred-year old oak desk in the National Security Adviser's office in the West Wing, clasped his hands before his face in a meditative fashion. He was contemplating how to direct that afternoon's briefing of the President on military options concerning "Major Regional Conflicts" --

"MRCs" in Pentagonese. The Joint Chiefs would be doing the briefing. He had little tolerance for the military. There was something about their clear-eyed, can-do, gung-ho attitude that he found disquieting. He had seen that attitude in the eyes of the Iron Guard when he was a kid in Hungary during the war. He could recall hearing the screams of Jews from his neighborhood being hauled off by the Hungarian Fascists. He saw the same autonomic behavior among the communists who followed the Fascists, and in the eyes of the hated Soviet occupying troops. When he hurled those Molotov cocktails as a teenager, he aimed directly at Russian eyes, if he could get close enough.

Despite control by a democratic government and the trappings of a citizen-force, the American military too were a culture unto themselves and therefore were capable of anything in the right circumstances. They understood only 178 JAMES

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control and discipline. He must control the military.

Nicholas Horvath, witness to history.

His secretary brought in that morning's mail. She opened and screened all official correspondence, tacking on a self-stick note here and there reminding him of an upcoming meeting with a correspondent, informing him that she had passed on a copy to another office requesting a draft reply, and so on. Anita was as efficient as they came.

And discreet. She would forward on to her boss unopened anything explicitly marked "Personal." Thus, the large brown envelope in that morning's take, marked "Strictly Personal," arrived on his desk intact, unopened.

The STU-III secure phone rang. It was CIA Director Levin.

"Nick, you've seen today's
Post
article on Zimbabwe, I take it. All this shit that Mugabe's dishing out about how we had plans to overthrow him. This is a heads up. The President may get saddled with questions from the media or Congress. I know that Senator Presser is on his high horse…"

"Uh huh, uh huh," Horvath kept murmuring half-listening and half-daydreaming. He reflexively reached for a letter opener and lazily tore the top of the big business envelope.

"…we've prepared some press guidance. Basically, it throws cold water over all this nonsense about trying to overthrow…"

Horvath slowly reached in and pulled out the contents of the envelope, though his gaze was fixed absently on a large map of the world on the opposite wall.

"…I'll fax it to you. Please let me know your reaction…"

"Yeah, sure, be glad…" Horvath's heart stopped. Ten thousand bells and sirens shrieked in his brain. His eyes PERMANENT INTERESTS

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bulged from their sockets. He felt that he would pee his pants that very moment.

Staring back at him were photos of abused female faces.

Mug shot-like. Russian women. Whom he had beaten.

Beneath their swollen faces were typed their names:

"Marissa Vassileva." "Nina Turcheva." "Olga Galinska."

"Lydia Puchinskaya." There were other photos. Of him strolling hand-in-hand with one of the women. Kissing another in a doorway. Making love on a couch. Receiving oral sex in a bathroom. There was a cd as well.

The sweat poured from his face and armpits. He felt dizzy. He stifled the sudden urge to vomit.

"Uh. Uh. Dave. Yeah. Sure. Uh. Can I call you back?" Horvath, shell-shocked, slowly replaced the receiver on the blinking, compact secure phone unit. He sat there frozen. The jolt was such that he was incapable of even panicking. He sat paralyzed. It seemed that a darkness was closing in all around him.
Oh, let it not be!