"It is?" Gene Newman wasn't entirely sure Paula Zarte understood how angry the First Lady could get.
In the end, a pretty Italian-looking girl came to collect their plates, brushed away the President's grissini crumbs with a tiny metal scoop and brought them dessert menus bound in red leather.
"Don't tell me..."
"Five languages and she can strip and reassemble a handgun faster than most of the men in this room," Paula Zarte said. "She'll be a section chief in five years."
"Who's here from the FBI or the NSA?"
"No one," Paula said, "they're not involved."
"You know what you're doing?" Gene Newman sounded genuinely concerned. There were laws governing inter-agency relationships. The President knew, he'd introduced some of them.
"You have a problem."
President Newman looked at her. "You're not the first person to tell me this in the last few days."
"I know," Paula Zarte said. "I had a call from Petra Mayer."
That was the moment the President knew his world had finally gone pear-shaped, to use one of his daughter's expressions. There were no circumstances under which Petra Mayer and Paula Zarte should talk to each other through anything other than attorneys. It was Professor Mayer who'd made case law by extracting her files from the archives at Langley and Paula Zarte's predecessor who spent a large amount of the Agency's money appealing the case.
"Do I want to know about this?" he asked.
To his surprise the woman opposite took the question seriously, disappearing behind her eyes while she considered the possible answers. In the end, she just reached down beside her chair and opened her briefcase. It contained police records, files from drug clinics, banking details from a family trust and even an old copy of NME.
Paula Zarte left all of these in the case. What she produced belonged to her daughter and came from Santa Claus. It was a child's Etch A Sketch. Twisting the plastic knobs, Paula wrote a simple sentence, showed it to the President and then shook the toy so that its screen went grey again.
"Let me know what you want to do."
Gene Newman didn't even need to think about it. "I want to know how this happened."
The woman on the other side of the table sighed. "I was afraid you'd say that." Signalling for the bill, she paid cash and pushed back her chair. "My car's outside," she said, "and I've booked a double room at a tiny family hotel overlooking the Sound. You'll be surprised to know that it's opening early."
The receptionist's hair had faded from red to grey and her pale blue eyes watched the single car draw up with little interest. If the old woman behind the desk recognized Gene Newman she gave no hint of that fact.
"Sign here."
"I'll do that," Paula Zarte said. She signed the form with a name so anonymous it had to have been chosen by computer for lack of recognition factor. The address was similarly anodyne. "They're real," she said, when the old Irish woman was off fetching a key.
"Don't tell me..."
Their room was small with a shower rather than a bath and one window that looked out over grey waves lapping a shingle beach.
"What do your people think is happening?" Gene Newman turned back from the window and its view of three muscular fishermen casting weighted lines into an unpromising looking surf.
"You mean, do they think we're really having an affair?" Paula Zarte smiled sadly. "It's possible. But they know that's not why I'm here. We've got budgets coming up and it's known you're not happy with Homeland Security. In fact, you're rumoured to be looking at breaking HS up and giving everyone back some level of autonomy, subject only to an overview from your new National Security Advisor."
"That's your price?"
"There is no price," Paula Zarte said. "As far as everyone out there is concerned we're discussing budgets and the limits to this Agency's responsibility. The reason we're meeting like this is you can't be seen to talk to us before talking to anyone else... You haven't talked to anyone else, have you?"
Gene Newman shook his head. "You know," he said, "I'm beginning to see why we couldn't have this meeting in the Oval Office."
Later, Paula brought up the issue of pardoning Prisoner Zero. "It's going to play better at home if he's American," she said.
"I still need him to appeal to me directly."
"You can do it without."
"Of course I can. But some kind of public remorse and an appeal for clemency would make things a lot simpler."
"In which case I wouldn't hold your breath."
President Newman looked at her.
"I've been reading Dr. Petrov's file. Half the time I'm not even sure the man is aware he's even human. Of course, Ed's got his own ideas on how to handle this."
Gene Newman's Security Advisor had a theory on everything.
"Don't tell me," said the President. "We take Prisoner Zero down to a cellar and sweat the equations out of him."
"Even better," Paula said. "We kidnap Prisoner Zero and replace him with a decoy, then we execute the decoy as a matter of principle, ride out the public storm and give the original back to our North African allies to extract the information we need."
"Yeah, right," said Gene Newman. "Like we hadn't thought of that."
The sex was slow and gentle and rather a surprise to both of them. In his private study the next morning, preparing to telephone Petra Mayer, the President was unable to remember who began it but completely aware that, once started, neither Paula nor he had been in any hurry to stop.
It lacked the fire of their Paris days and when Gene reached up to wrap one arm around her naked back, supporting Paula while he rolled both of them over to put himself on top, he realized she was heavier than before and he was less strong. Fumbling the turn, Gene lost his rhythm.
"We're getting old," he said.
"No," said Paula Zarte. "You are. I'm just not as young as I was."
Afterwards Gene Newman pillowed his head on one breast and listened to the slowing of her heart. And then when he could put it off no longer, he showered, dressed and came back to sit on the chair next to their bed. The problem seemed like something he should discuss while wearing his clothes.
"You want to tell me how this happened?"
"What's to tell?" Paula shrugged. "We got it wrong. Prisoner Zero's real name is Marzaq al-Turq, he's part German and wholly a genius. It looks like Jake Razor really died in that fire in Amsterdam."
"So," said President Newman, "Prisoner Zero stole his identity."
"What would you do?" Paula said. "You're penniless, drug-addicted, surviving on small sums paid into an account by a family who refuses even to see your only friend and suddenly that friend dies. Prisoner Zero didn't steal Jake's identity. He just kept cashing the cheques."
"Who knows this?"
"Me," said Paula, "you, Petra Mayer and Prisoner Zero." She managed to say the Professor's name without making it sound like a swear word. "That's all, so far."
"What about Jake's family?"
"So far as they know it was Marzaq al-Turq who died in the fire. The flat in Paris was their way of getting Jake away from Amsterdam. Off the record, they even accept that Prisoner Zero is Jake, no matter what they've been saying to the press."
"What are the chances we can keep them believing that?"
Paula Zarte thought about it. "You want my suggestion?"
The President nodded.
"Leave it to me," she said. It would take a certain amount of juggling of records and a couple of fingerprint swaps, but nothing that hadn't been done before.