“Would you mind if I phoned him to confirm?” he asked.
“Not at all.” Claire rattled off his work number at the CIA. “If there’s any problem at all, I’d be happy to stay with you until he comes. To tell you the truth, I’m not quite up to such a radiant affair. Glen insisted. Perhaps I can sit down while you call.”
“Certainly, ma’am.” Fitzgerald had to catch himself. He’d almost addressed her as “madame.” He led her up two stairs to a bank of Louis XV chairs set against the main stairwell. “If you please… oh, and watch your step. The carpet’s come up a bit-”
It was too late. As soon as he uttered the warning, she caught her heel on a bulge in the carpet. Fitzgerald reached for her arm a second late and could only bear witness as her ankle turned beneath her and she collapsed to one knee. The woman let out a pathetic cry.
“Miss Charisse, please allow me to…” Then he saw it, and he knew he had to get her out of the entry hall PDQ. The wig. “Excuse me, ma’am.”
She was holding her ankle and her cheeks had grown taut and pale. “I’m so sorry,” she said, dazed. “I’m so clumsy these days.”
Christ, thought Fitzgerald, how do you tell a sick dame her wig’s coming off? “Ma’am, please excuse me for saying it, but your hair… it’s uh…”
The woman’s hands flew to her head. Appalled, he could see her eyes dashing from one guest to the next, anticipating their impolite stares. She tried to stand, but fell back again. He heard an angry sniff, and he thought, No, not on my watch. He wasn’t going to have another Mrs. Hersh start bawling in the main entrance of the White House with fifty of the country’s most important movers and shakers on their way to what was supposed to be the dinner of their lives.
Gently, he lifted her by the arm and guided her past the brace of agents blocking access to the stairs, around the maroon velvet rope behind them, and directly upstairs to a private bathroom off the Blue Room restricted for “Buckskin” himself. When she emerged a few minutes later, Fitzgerald had forgotten all about phoning Admiral Owen Glendenning. He was thinking that it had been a stupid idea even to question the woman. She worked at the World Health Organization. A do-gooder. And Glendenning? The man was a medal winner. The goddamned medal. As close a thing to a hero as they minted these days.
“Enjoy yourself, ma’am,” said Fitzgerald, all but doffing an invisible cap as he escorted her into the throng of guests enjoying predinner cocktails and the music of the Marine Band in the Blue Room. “If you need anything, just ask for me. Michael Fitzgerald. The boys all know me.”
“You’re most kind, Mr. Fitzgerald.”
Fitzgerald watched her until she’d disappeared into the crowd. Quick recovery, he thought. She barely had a limp.
Chapter 61
The White House shone like an ornament against the burnt orange dusk. Lights blazed beneath the massive portico and beamed from the lawn. The mansion was as magisterial as a democracy would allow.
“How long?” asked Chapel as he and Sarah walked past St. John’s Church. Across the street, a steady stream of elegantly attired men and women passed through the wrought iron gates along Pennsylvania Avenue and strolled purposefully up the wide, curving driveway toward the modest door that offered entry to the presidential mansion.
“Does it matter?” asked Sarah, and when she saw his jaw set firmly, his eye blazing with hurt, she added, “Since the beginning. I didn’t change horses midstream.”
“But they’re our allies.”
“Allies are for wartime. In peacetime, it’s every man for himself. National interest comes first. Has to, really. It’s a country’s job to protect itself. America’s the number-one practitioner of that policy. Why is it that you’re always so convinced that what’s good for you is good for the rest of us? France is the only country trying to go it alone these days. For God’s sake, look at Britain. A hundred years ago we ruled the seas. Now we can’t even commit a soldier anywhere outside our borders without America’s consent. All in the name of the special relationship. Nelson must be turning over in his grave.
“You can’t believe that?”
“Can’t I? I’d say I voted with my feet.”
“What did it?”
Sarah stopped walking and confronted him with a disdainful smirk. “Something had to do it?”
Chapel refused to be cowed. He’d had it with her sidestepping the truth, her polite silences and clever delays. “Yes,” he answered emphatically. “The daughter of a British general doesn’t just go trotting across the lines because the cuisine is better.”
Sarah shrugged, but the defiant tone remained. “You already know. It was Daddy.”
“What about him?”
“They abandoned him. Left him to die like a soldier, I suppose they might say. I sat by his side watching the cancer consume him, holding his hand as he grew weaker every day. What did the army do? Put him in a ward with ten others and refused to try every experimental drug I brought to their attention-including Gleevec, which turned out to have an eighty percent survival rate over five years-because the drugs were too expensive or not proven.” Sarah put her hands on her hips, her cheeks taut with anger. “They did nothing to help a man who’d given his country forty-four years of his life. Put me in a bad mood at the right time.”
“When you were a student at the Sorbonne?”
“So you were listening.”
Of course he’d been listening. He hadn’t forgotten a word she’d said to him.
“Gadbois found me. Asked if I might lend a hand. I asked how. He said he thought MI6 would like to have a look at me. Told me to join up. Keep an eye open, an ear to the ground. I signed on.” She added lightly, “I’ve always been a sucker for French culture.”
But Chapel was in no mood for her whimsy. “You’re a spy.” He meant it in the old-fashioned sense. A traitor. Against us. Against the good guys. Someone they take out and shoot at dawn.
“I am a double, Adam,” she said coldly. “A double agent. I don’t hurt Mother England. I just do what I can to help France. And if one day I find someone else who I think could use a hand, I hope I have the courage to help them, too.”
Chapel had nothing to say.
“You think I could go to my controller at MI6 with this?” Sarah demanded, and it hurt him more that she was trying to explain. “He’d have had Glendenning on the phone lickety-split. ‘What’s this about you tipping off the French police? I told Sarah it was nonsense, you know the girl, she’s got a mind of her own. And, oh, yes, she mentioned you’d arrested one of your own men before hearing him out, seen to it the French gave him a good beating, too.’ It would have been us back there on the floor instead of Glendenning and poor Mr. Spencer. Right now, you should be counting your blessings the French don’t trust us implicitly.”
She pursed her lips, and a great shudder passed over her body. As she closed her eyes, he could sense her shame, though if it was for her actions, or her need to confess them, Chapel couldn’t tell. When she opened them, he could see she was done with her confession. A smile stretched her lips, and she spent a few seconds arranging his bow tie, brushing a few specks of lint off the lapels of his tuxedo. “By the way, you look smashing for a man who’s slept five hours in the last four days and had a rather unpleasant course in ‘torture lite.’ ” She leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. “I’m sorry for that. General Gadbois had to know for himself that I was telling the truth.”