She’d noticed. Of course, he reflected ruefully, the way he’d been nursing that phone for the past twenty-four hours, she’d have to have been blind not to notice.
He poured himself coffee and set the phone on the table. Bilmer had mentioned laconically that its number was one of her own, an account taken a month ago with somebody else’s name, not an NSA secured line; this needed to be outside the loop.
“Not yet. Jan, listen.” He pulled up a chair, and Jimmy, the First Dog as the papers liked to call the big shepherd, moved ten inches from lying next to Jan’s chair to lying next to his. Jan pushed a plate of English muffins at McKay.
“You remember Agent Bilmer.” He touched the phone lightly with the backs of his fingers.
“Jerri?” Jan smiled. “Of course. I talked to her again at the fund-raiser last month, which of course was a little awkward, since I know I’m not supposed to ask her what she’s been doing since the campaign. Teaching, I think she said, though goodness knows what the actual story is.”
McKay remembered a dozen nights or a hundred, on the campaign trail, when Jan would come out with some astonishing piece of information about load-vs.-weight ratios of semiautomatic weapons or what Richard Nixon’s Secret Service detail had called him in the duty room, courtesy of Jerri Bilmer. One night Bilmer had showed Jan how to conceal a weapon in a bikini. That had been some demo.
McKay drew a deep breath. “She’s going to call sometime this morning-I hope she’s going to call,” he revised. “I don’t have time to explain to you what’s going on, partly because I don’t know. Who’s in on it, who can be trusted. .”
Jan, who’d started to hand him the letter from Ricky, set it down again, and he saw the shift in her eyes as she processed what he’d said. “The CIA? Or people like Steve and Nina?” She named two of the White House aides who’d been with them longest. “Who’s in on what?”
McKay thought about the small fragments of facts, the odd discrepancies in reports from the supposedly routine project that had caused him to meet with Bilmer in the Rose Garden.
At length he said, “I don’t know. Bilmer is trying to find out for me. She was supposed to call a week ago.”
“I see.” Jan nudged her coffee cup out of the way of her elbow. “Sort of.”
“And if her call comes in, I can’t take it during the meeting with Sugiyama.”
A small, amused crease tucked into the corner of Jan McKay’s mouth. “But you figure I can say, ‘Oh, excuse me, girls.’ ” She went into her Gracie Allen voice and fluttered her hands. And then, sobering, “What do I say?”
“Tell her I said that she can trust you. Do whatever she says, make whatever arrangements she asks for, to get her and her information here as fast as possible without being seen. And notify me the second I’m out of that damn meeting.”
Jan was silent for a time, toying with the edge of the Polaroid. Dense tall pines, blue sky, a joyous nine-year-old boy and two small girls at the lake’s rim with Secret Service Agent Minsky hovering behind. Early sunlight sparkled on the coffee things; it was so quiet McKay could hear the roar of the mowers out on the lawn. Among the gilt porcelain cups and bright orange day-lilies the small gray telephone stood up like a stubby tower.
“It’s that bad?”
He sighed. “It could be. And it could be nothing. I’m pretty sure now that every report I’ve received about the Source Project has been a carefully fabricated lie, but I don’t know who’s doing the fabrication. Or at what level. Or why. I hope I’ll find out when she gets here.”
“And after that?”
McKay shook his head. Dismissals, maybe. A shakeup in the Pentagon. Maybe a scandal, at best. At worst. .
He shivered despite the summer warmth and forced a smile. “That’s another thing I don’t know.” He picked up his son’s letter and headed for the dressing room to make himself ready for whatever the day would bring.
Chapter Three
WEST VIRGINIA-7:52 A.M. EDT
At the velvety, experimental touch on her cheek, Wilma Hanson opened her eyes. Paws tucked up neatly under him, Sebastian was sitting on her chest.
She sighed. “Good morning, Sebastian.”
She had long suspected the big cinder-gray tom of watching for the first movement of her eyelids. Most mornings, her first awareness-even before the whistle went off at the mine on the other side of town-was of Sebastian’s hefty weight walking up the length of her body and settling himself on her chest, and then, if she didn’t respond, putting out a paw and tapping her nose. Breakfast?
The purring in her ear informed her that Dinah had returned to being a hat, sleeping on the pillow just above Wilma’s head. And that soft little rumble at her right hip would be Imp. “I suppose it could be worse,” she said aloud and made a move to turn over. Sebastian climbed down, offended, and leaped gracefully off the bed, followed immediately by Rhubarb, Anastasia, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Mortimer and Spartacus. “I could have St. Bernards.” She put on her bathrobe and padded to the kitchen, trailed by the rest of the gang: O’Malley, Isabella, Theodora, Clinton, Fish and Tara of Helium. Dinah remained where she was, for she was old and arthritic, but she mewed to remind Wilma that she wanted breakfast, too.
The house on Applby Lane was old, the kitchen large. Back when there’d been any money in the family-or in Boone’s Gap-there hadn’t been such a thing as air-conditioning. Wilma had left the door onto the sun porch open last night, and the room was drenched with early sun and the scent of morning, the fresh tingle of the air still bearing the scent of mountains and the woods. When she was a girl growing up in this house-back when dinosaurs walked the earth-the woods had been right out the backyard, and she and her tribe of sisters sat on the steps and watched the fireflies on hot summer nights. During the coal boom of the seventies the Applby Mining Corporation had put a trailer park there for its workers, and about three-quarters of the spaces were still occupied, mostly by retirees. There was a little shopping center just beyond.
Even so, you could still smell the woods on a summer morning.
Wilma smiled, a tall, rangy, gray-haired woman in a pink chenille robe, and knelt to portion out can after can of Friskies onto fourteen plates. The eight o’clock whistle blew at the mine, a groaned carpe diem-summer half over, and what had she done of all she’d planned to do before kids came back to her classroom in the fall? Four sisters yet to write those long letters to-though of course Hazel was of the opinion that all of them should get computers and communicate by e-mail. Weeds luxuriated between the long rows of berry canes across the back of the enormous yard. Many, many books yet unread. She’d kept up her work at the Senior Center, that was something. But mostly she’d just walked the green Allegheny trails to this or that hidden hollow, to spend a magic afternoon listening to folks sing old songs, tell old tales. She’d worked some on her weaving, relaxing into the rhythmic thump of the huge loom Hazel had built her in the living room, the cats all watching in fascination and reaching hesitant paws out to catch the shuttle.
Time and summer, like shining gold cupped in her hands.
Her smile faded a little as she thought of her pupils. Not so happy a time for most of them, with not enough work even for their parents. The town council of Boone’s Gap had been trying, since Applby had mechanized the mine ten years ago, to get a garment factory in town; there were a couple of small shops where wives could augment their husbands’ welfare checks, but that was all. Despite government efforts to widen and improve roads, there still wasn’t much tourism, and the one motel in town didn’t boast the amenities apparently indispensable to folks from Philadelphia or Baltimore or Washington.