“You are a vamp, my little Masha,” Peter said, laughing. “Your flirting frightened the gentleman.”
The girl opened her eyes very wide. “But no, Peter, I was not flirting with him! I was merely being polite!”
He hugged her and kissed her, and then kissed her again. “I adore you, my Masha! Shall we go home?”
Masha, who had been standing on a marble floor in four-inch heels for over an hour, agreed, even if it did mean another interminable evening with Apollo and Starbuck. At least in Peter’s apartment the vodka was Stoli, the caviar was beluga, and the bed, when Peter eventually let one sleep, was a Verio Heritage Limited, specially imported.
LANGLEY, VIRGINIA
HUGH’S TEMPER WAS HOT improved by the sight of his overflowing mailbox or by the stack of message slips held down on his desk by the soapstone bear paperweight. The bear had been a gift from Sara the last Christmas they were in high school together. He wanted to pick it up and heave it through the window.
He didn’t, of course, but sitting on the impulse just pissed him off more.
There had, in fact, been no moment during which he had not been thoroughly pissed off since he woke up alone in his Anchorage hotel room yesterday morning. His admin assistant had taken one look at his face as he came in the door this morning and speech had withered on her tongue. He took a deep breath and let it out, uncapped his vente quadruple shot americano, took a big swallow to get his heart started, and began wading through the mess.
There was the usual assortment of pleas for help from agents and in formers in the field, from Tokyo to Taiwan to Ho Chi Minh City to Shanghai to Bangkok to Singapore to Calcutta. They wanted to pay off a source, they needed to verify intelligence, they had had to bribe a local official for a satellite uplink. The official had discovered who he was really dealing with and had doubled the already astronomical price. Hugh was in no mood to be generous with the hard-earned tax dollars of the American citizen this morning, and he rejected all but one request out of hand. A high-ranking Pakistani military officer had made an oblique approach to a junior officer of the American embassy at a cocktail party in Karachi, and the consul had handed the contact off to the case officer in Delhi, who had confirmed the identity of the officer in question and was recommending the agency make the officer an offer for his services. A walk-in snitch, Hugh’s favorite kind, and he e-mailed the case officer to proceed. There was too damn little in the way of human source intelligence available to the Directorate of Intelligence these days and he was willing to investigate every possible source no matter how unlikely, as these social first contacts too often proved to be. There were a dozen open cases that needed monitoring, some that needed orders issued for further action, and one that needed closing because the source had disappeared, which meant he had probably been discovered, which meant that he was either dead or in the wind. The intel the source had produced had bordered on hearsay and speculation, but he’d been on the payroll for six years, during which time he’d come up with maybe three really useful pieces of information, one concerning the sale of CBRN weapons components to North Korea, and the case officer in Shanghai had thought they ought to do something for the family. Hugh almost rejected this request, too, until he realized he was in no frame of mind to be making this kind of decision. He e-mailed the man in Shanghai and told him to do what he thought appropriate within budgetary constraints.
The phone rang. He snatched it up. “What?”
The voice on the other end said, “Sadly, that does not sound like the voice of someone who just got laid.”
Hugh’s grip tightened on the receiver. “I’m busy, Kyle. What do you want?”
There was a brief silence. “Okay, let’s start over. This is Kyle Chase, your oldest, bestest friend from when you were in diapers. Lilah and the kids are fine, thanks.”
No way was Hugh going to let Kyle lay any guilt on him. “I know that, I played horse with Eli and crazy eights with Gloria this weekend, not to mention ate large of Lilah’s pot roast.”
“It was my pot roast, actually. Lilah can’t cook worth a damn. Only bad thing I can say about her.”
Hugh didn’t say anything.
Kyle sighed. “So, did you miss her? I didn’t think her trial had finished up when I sent you over there.”
“It hadn’t. She was finishing up her testimony when I walked in.”
Kyle’s voice brightened. “So you did see her?”
Hugh hesitated.
“I knew it, I knew all you had to do was see each other and you’d both be toast. So tell me all about it and, please, don’t omit one shocking or salacious detail. I’m here for you, buddy. Go ahead. Share.”
Some of the tension went out of Hugh’s shoulders at Kyle’s determinedly sophomoric banter, and he swiveled to put his feet up on the desk and stare out the window at the aspens crowding the edge of the perfectly manicured lawn. “She had a room. We went back there. I spent the night. Next morning when I woke up, she was deja vu.” The sheets hadn’t even been warm next to him.
A long silence, and then a respectful whistle. “Man. I gotta hand it to her, that’s really cold.”
Hugh half smiled. “You don’t have to sound so admiring.”
“Yeah, but it’s got style, you know? Can’t fault our Sara for not making an impact.”
“Tell me about it.” Hugh paused. “She was happy to see me. She was at first, anyway. I don’t know what she was feeling when she woke up.”
It sounded like Kyle was rubbing his hand over his face. “How long you been married now, buddy?”
“Ten years. Like you weren’t there.”
“And how many of those years have you and Sara spent in the same town?”
“Cumulatively? About a year, total.”
“How many times you actually answered the same phone when you were home?”
This was cutting to the heart of things with a vengeance. “Twice.”
“And that probably includes that sleezy little motel down the road from the academy. Or do I mean that skanky town house in Alexandria when you were going for your doctorate and she was at Georgetown going for her master’s? The one where the roaches were bigger than the rats?”
Hugh was counting on his fingers. “No, wait, there was that apartment in D.C. Three times.”
A pause, then a sigh. “What I’m saying. You want things to change, start there.”
“What about my job?” Hugh said.
“What about hers?” Kyle said. “She always wanted the Coast Guard, ever since we were kids. Hell, she bucked both parents to get into the academy, and you followed right along, even got into Harvard so you’d be in driving distance while you were both in school. Time was you admired her guts and her determination.”