* * *
Afterward, Kerry and Lara returned to the porch. The Mall surrounding the monument was silent now, the festivities ended. The air was moist but cooler.
Head bent, Lara touched her eyes. "I don't know," she murmured.
"About what?"
"Anything. Even me."
Watching her, Kerry waited until she spoke again. "I'm so damned scared for her. But it's all a tangle." She faced him. "This was supposed to be our night. Instead you've taken on my sister.
"I'm angry with her, God help me—why did she marry this man, why did she stay so long, why did she have to call tonight? And angry at myself. I can't even get her to talk about this, except through you." She gave a brief shake of her head. "I didn't say it was pretty."
But at least that was honest, Kerry thought. Wearily, he perceived that he had become part of a complex triangle in which Lara, despite her guilt over this, might resent both him and Joan.
"She's in danger," Kerry said.
"I know that. I can feel it from here." Her voice softened. "If anything happened to her or Marie it would kill me."
"I know that, too." Kerry reached for her hand. "So listen to me, okay?
"You've done so much for me. But you don't have to do everything anymore. Because there are also things I can do for you.
"It'll take some getting used to, for both of us. But some morning we may wake up feeling sheer relief at being able to lean on someone else." Pausing, Kerry saw that he was asking, at least in one sense, for a favor. "Protecting them means a lot to me. Please, let me help her. Who better, after all?"
Studying him, Lara took this in. Then, at length, she said, "Whatever you do, Kerry, I want to know before you do it. She's still my sister, and I can't let go."
SE VEN
"The Army thinks they've trapped Al Anwar," Clayton Slade told the President.
The two men sat in the Oval Office. Kerry had slept little, worrying about Joan. But the Presidency did not stop. It was his iron routine that at seven a.m., he and his Chief of Staff met to sort out their priorities, the endless list of choices a President must make.
So, as always, the first sight of Kerry's workday was an AfricanAmerican with a round face, short, greying hair, clipped mustache, gold wire-rim glasses, shrewd black eyes and a laconic wit which cut to the core of whatever came their way. Since meeting as young prosecutors, Clayton had been Kerry's closest friend and, in politics, they complemented each other—Kerry was intuitive, at once "ruthless" and a romantic; Clayton was earthbound, pragmatic, deeply attuned to consequence and, at times, a brake on Kerry's impulses. Kerry relied on Clayton's judgment—between the two of them, he once had quipped, they might just add up to one reasonably decent President. But Clayton had learned—and this was the most delicate part of their relationship—that he could not act in Kerry's name.
Now their daily meeting was as integral to Kerry's comfort as the decor which made the Oval Office his—bookshelves filled with biography and poetry; busts of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; the world globe on his desk, a reminder of his power and its limits; a table with photographs of Lara, his mother, his godfather Liam Dunn, his brother James. All of them had helped define who Kerry was; only Lara knew him as well as Clayton did.
They had much to consider: the budget battle, in which Kerry was fighting for more social spending; a conference in Brussels to discuss expanding NATO; a goodwill visit to Lara's ancestral village in Mexico; this morning's event with gun manufacturers. But Clayton's reference to the terrorist Al Anwar erased all else. For Americans, Mahmoud Al Anwar was the newest face of terror: he had moved from kidnapping and executing Americans abroad to financing the two fanatics who, shortly after Kerry's election, had flown a private airplane filled with explosives into a football stadium, killing or maiming several thousand onlookers and scarring the national psyche. And so Kerry had inherited the hunt for a captive Al Anwar and his inner circle, now directed by the Special Forces through one of two warring factions in the Sudan.
"They've 'thought' that before," Kerry said. "How long until they know, I wonder."
Clayton shrugged. "It's bad terrain, and tunneled. It could be days, weeks, months. But suppose you get a phone call in an hour, and find Al Anwar on your hands?"
It was choices like this, Kerry reflected, that nothing could prepare you for—a fateful decision, made in a moral quagmire, with untold consequences. "If that happens," Kerry answered, "it's too late."
Looking past him, Clayton stared out the window at the Rose Garden, then sipped from his mug of coffee. "You'd have to put Al Anwar on trial, I expect. Except that he'd make a rotten prisoner."
Slowly, Kerry nodded. "Bad for hostages, you mean. His people could kidnap more Americans, demanding his return. And when I didn't cave, Al Qaeda would start mailing me their prisoners' severed limbs."
"You'd have to assume that."
"And the World Court?"
"Legalities aside, same problem—except that our allies would hate it. Imagine NATO once Al Anwar starts bombing Italian lovers in cafes, or blowing up Big Ben. We'd lose support for rolling up his network." Pausing, Clayton stared into his coffee cup. "And so . . ."
Kerry was silent. As often as he had imagined being President, the weight of lives in the balance felt heavy beyond his reckoning. At length, he answered, "We hope for the ideal outcome. Where there's nothing to decide."
There was nothing more to say. Clayton understood him welclass="underline" tomorrow morning, perhaps, Kerry would learn that Al Anwar was dead.
"Guns," Kerry said.
The verbal shorthand was typical of them. "They'll be here at ten," Clayton answered. "Martin Bresler and five gun company CEOs."
"Voluntary safety locks." Kerry's tone combined wonder and disgust. "Thirty thousand deaths from guns a year, and this is the best we can do."
Clayton shrugged again. "If these folks don't get kneecapped by the SSA for doing this, maybe next time they'll help you keep guns away from criminals. That might actually save some lives."
"Amazing," Kerry said. "We pass a law requiring licensed gun dealers to run background checks so felons, wife-beaters and drug abusers can't buy weapons. But all you have to do is say you're a collector, not a dealer, and you can take your arsenal to a gun show and sell semiautomatic weapons to Charles Manson. A loophole big enough to drive Mahmoud Al Anwar through, courtesy of the SSA." Shaking his head, Kerry finished, "The 'right to bear arms.' The SSA thinks that means the right to arm bears, or anything old enough to pull a trigger."
Clayton's smile was thin. "How many pickup trucks did you see last election with stickers like 'Ban Kilcannon, not guns'? For a lot of folks, guns are a symbol—the system's stacked against them, and now a city boy with no kids and a celebrity girlfriend wants to take their guns away. Or so the SSA keeps telling them in every fund-raising letter . . ."