“How did that go?”
“For the first half hour, very proper and sedate. Anyone at the next table would have seen a social lunch between two old friends. You have to understand Tricia as well as I do before you can have any idea how much she longs to be First Lady. She missed it once, because of some wrong information she was given. I told her that if she plays along with us, she’ll get what she wants this time. Guaranteed? she asked. Guaranteed, I said. You should have seen her face. I thought she was having an orgasm on the spot. She said that the dinner with Saul ’couldn’t have gone better.’ Reading between the lines, she had him drooling and panting and climbing up the curtains. He’s as hot for her as ever.”
“Excellent.” Lopez paused in his pacing. “Then they had sex?”
“No. He was ready, she could see it and feel it. But she thought she ought to hold out until he made her some sort of commitment. Keep him on the boil. She told him that she was a married woman, even though Joseph Goldsmith has apparently gone off to La-la-land.” She saw Lopez’s face. “You don’t like that, do you?”
“I do not.” Lopez towered over her, a frown on his broad brown face. “Now you have me worried. In my experience it doesn’t work like that. Tricia should have snagged him when she had the chance. She ought to be having sex with him as often as he can manage it. Keeping him drained, it’s the only safe way. Believe me, Sarah, I know.”
He went to the window and stared toward a White House hidden by federal buildings. The upper level of the Capitol vibrated to a harder gust of wind.
“I don’t like this.” With no one but Sarah to see him, he made no effort to hide his intelligence. “How do we know who else is chasing Steinmetz? How do we know that Yasmin Silvers isn’t in his office right this minute, offering him a piece of her hot young ass?”
Nick Lopez was half right. As he was speaking, Yasmin was indeed in the President’s office. But Saul was not present. And although Yasmin was breathing fast, it was from nervousness, not sexual arousal.
She told herself that what she was doing was legitimate, that she had permission directly from Saul himself. Back at Indian Head he had agreed that she could try to find out why Tricia Goldsmith had walked out on him before the election. He had also agreed — reluctantly — that she could tell people that the investigation was being done for the White House.
Did it matter that she would be using a telcom line from within Saul’s private office? He would be out until about eleven, and so would Auden Travis. The response times here were so much faster.
She had entered Saul’s office only ten minutes earlier, but she had been up and working for many hours. Awakened at two in the morning by the sounds of the storm, she had gone to her office rather than lying grieving for Raymond. With the vastly diminished telcom service, she had waited endlessly — often futilely — for data base connections to go through. Many denied her access. Even so, she had exhausted the obvious possible connections between Saul Steinmetz and Tricia Goldsmith. It was time for the more subtle connections.
The President’s office, she knew, could key into every national data base. Why settle for anything less?
She examined her scattered notes. It was like a version of an old game. Pick a person, A. Pick another person, B. Now can you name another person, C, who provides a direct link between A and B? In the case of Yasmin and Saul Steinmetz, for example, there had been a connection before she came to the White House: her lying, rapist relative, Senator Lopez. The thought of him, and of poor Raymond, made her feel sick.
She went back to gnaw on the problem. In the case of Tricia Goldsmith and Saul Steinmetz, a particular time and place were involved. The connection had to exist two and a half years ago, and logically it was on the West Coast. Saul said he had been in Oregon, meeting with his advisers. Tricia had been in California, meeting with — whom?
There was no information. Just what Saul had told her, that Tricia had been staying with people who were old friends from the time of her first marriage, when she had been Patsy Leighton.
Yasmin dug into the data bases using the limited query systems and cursed the inadequacies of both. A month ago this exercise would have been easy, everything in the world cross-referenced. Today she was poking and hopping and hoping.
Tricia Goldsmith = Patsy Leighton, wife of software czar Rumford Leighton. Here it came, a spreading family tree of the Leightons by birth and marriage. The display was inadequate to show the full array. The results had to be printed, agonizingly slowly. Yasmin collected a dozen output sheets and scanned them for familiar names.
Nothing.
Try the other end. Saul Steinmetz’s political supporters. They were, judging from their printed descriptions, a rich and powerful group. A careful inspection revealed no overlap with the Leighton clan. Leightons were Dexter supporters, not Centrists. Try again. Here were the guests at political rallies and dinners that Saul had attended during the relevant time period. The records were spotty. Again they told Yasmin nothing.
The handlers, then, those specialists who commissioned Saul’s opinion polls and interpreted the results. What about them? Another half-dozen sheets, more confusing than ever. Yasmin was tired, and even the names of the polling research companies began to sound unreal. There were scores of them. Almost every one of them seemed to have done something connected with the Steinmetz presidential campaign. She scanned them, intrigued by the company names. Brybottle and Marchpane, Gluff and Aspinall, Quip Research — jokes a specialty? Crossley and Himmelfarb, Lamb and Love.
Thomas, Jacko, and Nelly, the retired vaudeville team. Male and Middle.
Yasmin paused. Something was nagging at the edge of her attention, but she couldn’t bring it into focus. She went on, printing lists of campaign contributors for the relevant time period, but her mind was no longer on what she was doing. What was it, what had she missed?
The buzzer by her right hand sounded, so loudly that she jumped and knocked half her papers to the ground. She thought that no one knew she was here.
She pressed the access pad.
“Yes?”
“I need to speak with the President. It’s urgent.”
“He’s not here at the moment.”
She waited for the question: “So what are you doing in his private office?” But the woman at the other end said only, “This is Moira Suomita, the State Department Acting Director of International Space Activities. To whom am I speaking?”
“This is Yasmin Silvers. I am an aide to President Steinmetz.” It still gave her a thrill to say those final words.
“I see.” The woman sounded more starchy than impressed. “I was told that this line gave direct access to the President’s office. I will call back.”
She was gone, and Yasmin was not sorry. There were more important things to do. Instead of retrieving the papers from the floor, she took the rest of them from the desk and sank to her hands and knees. She laid the convoluted Leighton family tree on the floor, with the campaign pollsters next to it. It took a while, but eventually she saw it. George Crossley, married at one time to Rumford Leighton’s sister Anita Leighton, now divorced. Crossley and Himmelfarb, pollsters. Location, Palo Alto. When Saul was up in Oregon, Tricia was in San Francisco. Palo Alto was no more than twenty or thirty miles away.
Coincidence? No way to tell. Crossley and Himmelfarb listed no first names.
She queried the corporate and association listings.
Crossley and Himmelfarb, the name was there, but the footnote showed that it had ceased operations more than a year ago.
Tax records? George Jarvis Crossley and Michaela Scarlatti Himmelfarb, principals. No outstanding tax obligations. No current address, but IDs for both people. Presumably George Crossley = George Jarvis Crossley.