Shame burned in Cal. His sister drew her pride and conviction, he knew, not just from the purity, the perfection for which she herself strove, but from her certainty that he held himself to the same standard.
He followed her gaze as it shifted to Schenk. Like a camera twisting into focus, he suddenly saw the anguish on the old man’s face, the need and fear and fatalism. Images of the dream flooded back: the sword and those who had cried their need to no avail.
Schenk was staring at him, waiting. Trying to regain balance. Cal ventured. “In these big suits, that’s not unusual. Only-”
“My nephew wasn’t gonna freeze me out! But my friends, then your boss, they all said, ‘Idiot! Big money! More.’ ” He sighed, wretched. “Would I really win. .?”
There it was, the straight line, just waiting for him. Cal looked to his sister, but she would not meet his eyes. Rage flared in him. Schenk’s gaze was locked on him, pleading.
Slowly, with deliberation, Cal shook his head.
“I knew it,” Schenk said. “The will’s sound, right?”
Cal shook his head again.
“Then who-?”
Cal was silent, and his night-shrouded reflection reared up. Only the image now was not his father but Ely Stern, senior partner, gazing back with cool certainty. Cal’s belly grew cold.
“We do. Your lawyers. This kind of law suit, we get the candy store.”
“How do I get outta this?” Before Cal could respond, Schenk rose, closing on him. “I can’t face that table full of suits, that boss of yours, with his eyes like stones. I’ll fold; I know myself. What do I do?”
With his eyes like stones. “Don’t go. I’ll draft a letter, you fax it, that ends it.”
“But I signed stuff. Your boss said penalties, something. . ” Schenk was in panic now. “I signed.”
Cal fetched his briefcase, propped on the rocker-long minus its runners-his mother had bought the day he was born. He opened the case, found the contracts. He paused and felt, without turning to see, his sister’s eyes upon him. He tore the sheaf of papers in two. The sound reminded him of a guillotine.
Schenk drew a vast handkerchief from a pocket, mopped his face. Pumping Cal’s hand, he gushed words of gratitude and departed.
Cal stepped to the window and opened it. A wind from the west, like a hot breath, stirred his hair.
If he hadn’t come here, Cal thought, if he hadn’t come and forced his way in, I’d have sat at that big conference table and let the machine shred him, and I wouldn’t have said a word.
An arm slipped around his waist, and he looked down to see his sister there, gazing with nervous admiration.
“How much trouble are you in?”
He smiled reassuringly and felt only dread.
He had no armor now, no sword.
And Stern would be waiting.
WASHINGTON D.C.-6:54 A.M. EDT
One more mile. The hill was steep, but he’d done it before. Sweat crawled out from under the terry cloth band around Stuart McKay’s head and down unshaven cheeks. He could feel the faint persistent tug of the old shrapnel wounds in leg and thigh as he drove hard against the pedals. Not much pain today, more like a reminder of an unforgettable afternoon at Dak Kon, like initials carved into a tree: Charlie was here.
The steepening hill, breath coming harder: I really have to do this more often.
And on the page in front of him, propped on the handle-bars:
“. . a 2 percent increase on import tariffs of electronics will offset cost increases of General Motors and Microsoft, enabling a balance to be maintained. Mr. Sugiyama has approved this conditionally, with the stipulation that a cap be put on increases over the next five years. . ”
A drop of sweat fell on the page. The green line on the readout before him, half obscured by the typed precis, dipped as his pedaling slowed, and a small, tinny female voice admonished, “Your heart rate has fallen below optimum level, Mr. McKay.”
With an inner sigh McKay cranked harder. I’m the President of the United States, he thought. In two hours I’m going to sign an agreement with Japan that will affect the economy of the entire electronics and automotive industries, and I’m being told to get my fat ass in gear by a microchip.
Would Sugiyama go for it if I suggested a rider adding a 25 percent import tariff on all electronics devices with snippy little voices?
The stationary bike achieved the crest of its imaginary hill and the pressure against the pedals slacked. McKay straightened his body-a little paunchy, he thought, but not bad for a fifty-seven-year-old who had a close encounter with a fragmentation grenade in his youth-and dropped his hand to touch the phone clipped to the waistband of his shorts. Throughout his workout he’d been listening for its ring, but he automatically glanced at the light that would have signaled that a call had come in, in case he’d been too preoccupied (With THAT report?) to hear it.
It was dark. Damn.
Damn, damn, damn.
Bilmer should have called by this time.
Something clutched, tight and cold, behind his sternum. Checked in. Said everything was all right. Said there’s going to be a delay. Said SOMETHING.
She was a week overdue already.
And now he was going to have to shower and shave and get ready to meet the Japanese, and if Bilmer’s call hadn’t come in by then, it might make for an extremely awkward conversation when it did. He had no idea what she’d tell him-nor any notion of what or how desperate her circumstances would be. He grinned a little at the mental picture of himself and Sugiyama, an elderly gentleman of enormous dignity, in the Oval Office, surrounded by secretaries and ministers. The President or, worse, the Japanese Trade Liaison picks up his pen to sign. . oh, ’scuse me a minute, I have to take this call.
He glanced across the white-tiled basement gym, where his aide Ron Guthrie puffed stoically on a recumbent set to one notch above “coast,” and Secret Service Agent Larry Shango-one of the few who could keep up with McKay on an actual road ride-peddled in his usual ebony silence, a refrigerator in a sweat suit.
Guthrie? wondered McKay, touching the phone again. But who was to say Guthrie wasn’t in on it?
Someone close to him was.
Someone was lying. Someone was covering up. His mind ticked off the men who’d been with him in his Senate years, and down the campaign trail; he felt as he’d felt in the jungles, surrounded by a wall of greenery that could conceal anything.
And responsible for everyone. Responsible for their lives.
His glance again caught Shango. It amused McKay a little, that the man would be that invisible.
Yet that very invisibility, that very quality of being utterly withdrawn from even service politics, added to McKay’s sense that this was a man who could be trusted. If he’d known him longer. .
But he hadn’t. McKay wondered if he’d known anyone long enough.
Impatient, McKay stepped from the cycle prematurely. He took the private elevator back to the third floor. Officer Shango loomed discreetly behind, then positioned himself outside the residence as McKay went in. Jan, whom McKay had left curled in a sleepy little lump in bed, was now in the Yellow Sitting Room, wrapped in her bathrobe at the cherry-wood breakfast table by the curved windows that overlooked the south lawn. Early morning light made soft chaos of her short, graying blond curls, and she had on her glasses, something she never allowed the Press to see on the grounds that they made her look like an owl, which they did. Coffee perfumed the air. She, too, was perusing the printout of her itinerary for the day, though a carefully printed letter from their son-plus Polaroids of him and his cousins at Jan’s brother’s place in Maine-lay nearby. A treat, McKay guessed, if she was good and read the itinerary first. She looked up at once as he closed the door and asked, “Did you get your call?”