"Thank you, sir. Eight a.m. on Monday the 10th. I'll e-mail you to confirm."
"This isn't going to be another of those week-long deals, is it, Ron?"
"No, sir. The senator is going on a junket — uh, a fact-finding mission — to Ethiopia on the 12th, so we'll wrap by Tuesday."
So, at worst, he'd be on the hot seat for a day or two, assuming nobody else was slotted. And it was unlikely that he'd be the only sacrificial lamb — White's committees always had plenty of victims they wanted to skewer. What an idiot.
After he hung up, Michaels leaned forward in his chair, feeling tired. He'd like nothing better than to take the day off, go for a nice long ride on his bike, to enjoy the cold, crisp morning while working up a little sweat. Or, as long as he was wishing, why not a week in Tahiti? Lie on the beach, soak up whatever rays the sunblock would let past, drink coconut and tropical fruit and rum. Listen to the waves break. Boy, did that sound good.
He grinned at himself. There was a pile of work on his desk that he couldn't get done if he worked twenty-four-hour days for a month. The deeper that pile got, the more he felt like dragging his heels. Did everybody feel that way? Or was it a contrary streak in him, just like wanting to spend money the most when you were dead broke?
Well. You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, right?
Right.
John Howard sat on Doc Kyle's couch in the base clinic, watching the older man flip through the hardcopy print out.
Kyle shook his head. "I don't know what to tell you, John. X-rays, EEG, EKG, sonograms, MRI, MEG, everything is normal. You have the blood pressure of a man half your age, your reflexes are great, there's nothing growing in any dark corners that shouldn't be there. Your don't have AIDS, hepatitis, prostate cancer, or herpes. Your cholesterol is low, your liver enzymes are good, hormones are normal — all your bloodwork is all dead-center normal, except for what might be a little bit of a white cell shift to the left, a few segs, that might be indication of a virus. Might also be lab error, it's that close. You're as healthy a specimen as I've seen all month."
"So why am I so tired all the time?"
Kyle, a full bird colonel, was sixty, and a career military man. Howard had been his patient for years. Kyle grinned. "Well, now, none of us is getting any younger. A man your age needs to realize he's not going to be able to run basic with the recruits forever."
"A man my age? Jesus, I'm not a man my age!"
Kyle laughed. "Come on, once you hit forty you have to expect to slow down a little. Sure, you can hold the Reaper at bay with diet and exercise, cheat him pretty good, but the time when you could wine, women, and song it up all night long, then grab a full pack and hump it all the next day are behind you. What you did for a light workout as a shavetail is overtraining for a colonel old enough to be that boy's father."
"You're saying I should slow down."
"Not ‘should.' You will slow down, that's the nature of the beast. You're in better shape than most twenty-year-olds I see in here, no question. But the fact is, a twenty-year-old in peak condition is going have better legs, faster recovery, and more energy than a forty-year-old in peak condition. I'm not saying you should park your butt in the rocking chair, smack your gums, and wait for senility, but you need to recognize the reality. If you hit the gym four times a week, better cut that to two. If you jog ten miles a day, drop it to five. Warm up more, stretch before and after you sweat hard, give yourself more recovery time. You don't have the reserves you once had, simple as that. You can maintain a vintage aircraft pretty good, but sooner or later the metal fatigues, no matter how many times you rebuild the engine and the hydraulics."
Howard stared at him. It wasn't as if the doc was giving him a death sentence—
Well, yes, it was. That was exactly what he was doing. He was reminding him that the grave was still out there — and it was closer than it used to be.
Just what I needed to hear. Howard blew out a sigh. "All right. Thanks, Doc."
"Don't take it so hard, kid. You might have a couple more good years left. You want me to write you a prescription for some prunes and Geritol?"
Outside, the January sky was clear and cold. Howard walked toward his office, thinking about what Kyle had said. So, okay, he'd ease up a little on his workouts, see if that helped. If Doc was right, then he'd feel better.
Of course, he'd also feel worse, knowing that there wasn't something simple that could be fixed. Nobody had come up with a cure for getting older yet. And this was the first time he'd realized that it was going to happen to him too. Somehow, he'd always felt as if he'd live to be ninety, and except for a few wrinkles he'd look and feel the same then as he had at twenty or thirty.
Maybe there was something to be said for dying in battle while your brain was still sharp and your eyes unclouded by time. At least it was quick. Maybe it was better to be burned-out ashes than cold, ancient dust.
Tyrone's life was over.
He stood inside CardioSports, between the wrist-heart-monitor display and a display case of stopwatches, staring through the front window into the mall. From where he stood, with the rack of ski jackets behind him, he'd be hard to see from the tables at the food court, just across the mall's main walkway, but he could easily see Bella where she sat at one of the tables.
Where she sat, with somebody.
Where Belladonna Wright sat with Jefferson Benson, facing him across the little round white table, holding his hands with her hands, smiling at him.
Smiling at him.
Oh, God!
He felt sick, as if he was gonna throw up, as if somebody had punched him in the solar plexus hard enough so he couldn't breathe. And he felt a cold and hot blend of sad, aching misery entwined with mindless, killing rage. He wanted to scream, to run to where Bella sat, to smash Jefferson Benson's face in with his fists, to kick him enough times to break every bone in his body. He wanted to do that, and then spit on him.
But what Tyrone did not want to do was look Belladonna Wright straight in her lying face. Not at that moment.
He was on afternoon shift at school, like she was, and so he'd asked her if she was going to the mall. They could meet, grab lunch, head for classes?
No, she'd said. Not today. She had to run some errands, she'd said, so she wasn't going to the mall. She'd see him later at school.
Fine. That was nopraw.
And yet, there she was. Sitting there with Benson, holding his fucking hands, smiling at him.
Tyrone stood there, pretending to examine the heart monitors, unable to look away. It was like when you saw somebody do something really stupid on a vid, something so stupid it embarrassed you just to be watching it, and you wanted to look away, but you couldn't, you watched it anyhow. He didn't want to be here. He didn't want to know that Bella had lied to him. He didn't want to see her holding hands with Benson. But he couldn't move, couldn't turn his head away. He had to watch. Even though it felt as if there was something alive in his stomach, something with teeth and claws trying to dig its way out of him.
He never would have known if he hadn't come to the sport store looking for a birthday present for his father. It had never occurred to him that Bella would be at the mall. She'd said she wasn't going, and it had never crossed his mind to believe otherwise. Truly had never occurred to him.
She'd lied to him.