“Can’t sleep?” she asked with a smile.
Spalding shook his head. “You must have energized me.”
“Turn on the lights.”
Spalding flipped a dashboard switch and the cockpit lights flickered on. Slowly, Victoria opened the robe. She was naked except for the black seamed nylon stockings and the garter belt he’d given her as a present.
“Isn’t it lovely?” she asked.
“You’re a bad girl to wear such naughty things,” Spalding said sternly.
“I know.” She let the robe drop to her feet. “I shan’t do it again.”
“Turn around.”
She handed him an unwrapped condom. “Are you going to punish me?”
“Mind your elders and turn around.”
Shivering slightly in the cool air, Victoria turned and bent over to be spanked.
Ten minutes before Sara was due to meet Fitzmaurice outside the hotel, a knock came at her door. She opened up to find two men, one of whom flashed a Department of State special agent shield.
“Colonel Brannon,” the man said, “I’m Daniel Withers, with the Bureau of Diplomatic Security assigned to the American embassy, and this is Major Stedman, assistant military attache. You are to come with us.”
“What’s this about?” Sara asked, eyeing the two men. Withers, a man nearing thirty with a receding hairline and a dimpled chin, nodded at the major, who wore civvies.
Stedman stepped forward and handed Sara a paper. “The deputy secretary of defense has ordered your immediate return to the Pentagon, Colonel. You are to cease all current activity and accompany us to the airport for a flight to Washington.”
Sara read the order. It was original and authentic, most likely delivered overnight by courier. She looked at the major. No older than Withers, he had an intelligent face and close-set, baby-blue eyes that gave nothing away.
“Let me see some identification, Major,” Sara said.
Stedman fished out his military ID and gave it to Sara. He was a Marine officer, but what else? She guessed he was with the Defense Intelligence Agency, which routinely assigned personnel to embassy duty.
“May we come in, Colonel?” Stedman asked, smiling affably.
Sara handed him back the DEPSEC order and his ID. “I see nothing in the order that authorizes you to take me into custody, Major.”
“No, ma’am,” Stedman replied. “Our orders are to see you safely on your way home.”
“Very good, Major,” Sara said, “then you can wait in the hall while I pack.”
“We have orders to stay with you until your departure, ma’am,” Stedman said, pushing his way into the room. Withers followed, closed the door, and stood in front of it with his arms crossed.
So much for not being in custody, Sara thought grimly. She kept her composure in front of the two men and started packing. She passed by the window, hoping to spy Fitzmaurice on the quay waiting for her, but he wasn’t there. She wondered if some senior foreign service officer from the U.S. embassy was sitting in the Garda commissioner’s office at that very moment, arranging to have the Spalding investigation disappear completely.
While Stedman and Withers watched, she pulled clothes off hangers and stuffed them into her bag, emptied her toiletries from the bathroom into her kit, and dumped papers into her briefcase, her mind racing. The orders from DEPSEC had apparently left General Clarke out of the loop. She was to report directly upon her return to Thatcher’s boss, the provost marshal general, who also commanded army CID. That meant Clarke hadn’t shut down the operation and quite possibly didn’t even know it had been canceled.
How had the mission been compromised? Had she made a mistake by telling Fitzmaurice about Carrier? Outside of General Clarke he alone knew that Thomas Loring Carrier was a target.
Sara took another quick look out the window. There was still no sign of Fitzmaurice. She decided to trust her instincts; there was absolutely nothing duplicitous about the man. That left General Thatcher, her petty, childish tyrant of a boss, who was Carrier’s good friend and second cousin of a powerful senator.
She stood at the desk, blocking Stedman’s line of sight as she packed up her laptop. She knew that as soon as she walked out the door, the room would be searched and cleaned by experts, who would leave nothing behind. When Withers glanced away, she slipped the disk containing Spalding’s file under the waistband of her slacks. Somehow she had to get it to Fitzmaurice and hope that the Garda bosses would let him do his job in spite of any pressure from Washington.
“It’s time to go, Colonel,” Stedman said.
“I’m ready,” Sara said as she put the laptop in her soft leather briefcase and picked up her room key.
“You can leave the key here,” Withers said as he opened the door. “We’ve already checked you out of the hotel.”
“How very thoughtful,” Sara said. No doubt Stedman’s cleaners would return the key to reception after removing any trace of her from the room.
As she stepped outside the hotel with Stedman in the lead and Withers following behind, Sara spotted Fitzmaurice rolling to a stop at the curb. Perhaps he hadn’t been ordered to stand down by his superiors after all. She caught his eye and nodded slightly at a black, right-hand-drive Jeep Grand Cherokee with Diplomatic Corps plates. He glanced at the vehicle and gave Sara a quick nod in return.
Stedman and Withers hustled Sara into the car and drove her away. To avoid telegraphing the tail she didn’t dare look back to see if Fitzmaurice was following. Instead she spent the time during the short drive to the airport trying to figure out a way to pass Fitzmaurice the Spalding disk without arousing attention.
At the airport Stedman parked in a restricted zone next to the terminal, and the two men walked her to a check-in area on the upper level, where Withers gave her a ticket. Their diplomatic passports allowed them to bypass security, and they entered a long, wide corridor filled with shops, eateries, and stores that led to the departure gates.
Sara stopped in her tracks and looked at the flight information on the ticket. She had an hour before boarding time. Stedman touched her elbow as she glanced around, hoping to spot Fitzmaurice.
“We’ll take you through U.S. Customs now,” he said.
“What’s the hurry, Major?” Sara replied. U.S. Customs ran a pre-clearance operation at the airport, and once she stepped across the line, she would technically be on American soil, which meant Fitzmaurice would be unable to easily follow.
“No hurry, ma’am,” Stedman replied.
“Would you mind if I bought a book to read on the flight?” Stedman glanced at Withers, who shrugged in reply. “Go right ahead, Colonel.”
In a nearby bookstore crowded with travelers buying newspapers, magazines, and paperbacks, Sara browsed while her watchers stood at the entrance and kept her in view. At the new release section she picked up a copy of Brendan Coughlan’s latest novel, The Dory Shed, which he’d read from at O’Reilly Hall, and placed the Spalding disk inside it. With the book under her arm she paged through other fiction titles, including a recently reissued edition of The Year of the French, by Thomas Flanagan, the writer Fitzmaurice’s son, Sean, had so highly praised. Mentally, she counted off the minutes, and was about to lose hope that Fitzmaurice would show, when a man jostled past her in the narrow aisle.
“Excuse me,” Fitzmaurice said, in a normal speaking voice.
“No harm done,” Sara replied with a smile, as she very deliberately put the Coughlan novel back on the shelf face out.
Fitzmaurice reached for it. “Is it not a good book then?”
“Not my cup of tea,” Sara replied. “It’s about some Irishmen living in some dreary place in Nova Scotia.”
She turned away, went to the counter, and paid for the Flanagan book. Fitzmaurice stepped up behind her with The Dory Shed in his hand.
“Have a safe flight,” he said with a smile as she was about to leave.
“Smooth sailing to you,” Sara replied.
Just west of Dublin, within the confines of an eleven-kilometer wall, is the largest enclosed city park in Europe. Fitzmaurice had played in it as a child and, as an adolescent, had courted comely lasses under its trees and on the greens.