First Family kam-4 Page 13

  "Why?"

  "Let's just say he's rubbed me the wrong way."

  "Care to give an example?"

  "Would you believe me if I told you?"

  "I've got a very open mind."

  Hilal looked off for a few moments before glancing back at Sean. "This is sort of embarrassing, actually."

  "I'm very much into maintaining confidences."

  Hilal popped a piece of gum in his mouth and started chewing and talking fast as though beating up on the gum and grinding his teeth were giving him the juice to confess everything. "Last year's Christmas party? We'd won a nice little contract. Nothing to write home about, but we splurged anyway to keep up morale. Booze, band, fancy buffet, and a private room at the Ritz-Carlton. We spent too much but that was all right."

  "Okay. So what?"

  "So Tuck gets shitfaced and makes a pass at my wife."

  "A pass? How?"

  "According to her, by grabbing her ass and trying to stick his tongue down her throat."

  "Did you see it?"

  "No, but I believe my wife."

  Sean shifted his weight to his right foot and drilled Hilal with a skeptical look. "If you believed your wife, why the hell are you still partners with Tuck?"

  Hilal looked down, obviously embarrassed. "I wanted to kick his ass and walk out the door. That's what I really wanted to do. But my wife wouldn't let me."

  "She wouldn't let you?"

  "We have four kids. My wife stays home. Like I said, everything we have is tied up in this business. I'm a minority partner. If I tried to pull out, Tuck could screw me, leave me without a penny. We couldn't survive that. We'd have lost everything. So we swallowed our pride. But I have never let my wife be in the same room with Tuck since then. And I never will. You can talk to her if you want. Call her right now. She'll tell you exactly what I just did."

  "Was Pam at the Christmas party?"

  Hilal looked surprised for a moment and then nodded. "Right, I see where you're going. Yeah, she was there. Dressed as Mrs. Claus if you can believe it. Bright red hair and skinny. I think some people were laughing at her not with her."

  "You think she saw Tuck messing with your wife?"

  "The room wasn't that big. I think a lot of people saw it, actually."

  "But no visible reaction from Pam?"

  "They didn't leave together, I can tell you that." Hilal paused. "Look, anything else? Because I've really got to get home."

  Sean walked back to his car. The principal reasons he believed Hilal were twofold. First was "Cassandra" being the password on Tuck's computer. And second was Tuck's claim that he was having financial troubles and Hilal was trying to take advantage of that. After his meeting with Jane and Tuck, Sean had taken a much harder look at Tuck's financial records he'd found on the hard drive. The man had a stock and bond portfolio worth in excess of eight figures, and outstanding debts at less than a quarter of that amount, so his cry of poverty was total bullshit. Yet if they knew he had cracked Tuck's hard drive, they also had to know he would find that lie out. But sister and brother had still tried to snooker him. Sean put that aside and turned to the next obvious questions.

  So why did you come back early, Tuck? And what were you doing for almost an hour between the airport and your house?

  On the drive back to his office, he called Michelle. She didn't answer. He left a message. He was worried about his partner. Yet he had spent much of his time worrying about her. On the surface she was the most rock-solid person he'd ever met. But he'd learned that rock had a few cracks if one poked at it deeply enough.

  He drove home, packed an overnight bag, zipped to the airport, and paid an exorbitant walk-up fare to snag a flight to Jacksonville that was leaving in an hour.

  He needed to talk to Cassandra Mallory. In person.

  He got a phone call on his way to Washington Dulles Airport. It was his linguistic friend, Phil, from Georgetown University. "I've got someone who is familiar with the Yi language. If you want to send me a sample of what you're talking about I can let her look at it."

  "I'll e-mail it to you," said Sean. When he got to Dulles he sent the sample. He walked to the security gate praying the letters on the arms would lead to something. But the more he thought about it he didn't see how that was possible. As Michelle had rightly pointed out, the sample wasn't even in Chinese.

  He stared down at the picture of Cassandra Mallory that David Hilal had e-mailed him. She clearly had all the tools with which to tempt a man.

  As the fifty-seat jet swept into a clear night sky, Sean hoped this trip was not taking him in the opposite direction of where he needed to go to find Willa.

  Every day that went by without the little girl being found meant it was far more likely they would discover her body instead of her.

  CHAPTER 26

  JANE COX LOOKED OUT the window of the First Family's living room. Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania was in the middle of the capital city. And yet for those who called it home it might as well have been in a different solar system. There was no one on earth who could fully understand Jane's life other than the families who had inhabited this house, tying their fate to the office of the presidency. And even for some of these folks, times had indeed changed. Even as recent a president as Harry Truman could walk around town with only a single guard accompanying him. That was unthinkable now. And there had never been as much scrutiny over the smallest act, the fewest words, or the slightest gesture as there was now.

  She could understand why some First Ladies had become addicted to drugs and alcohol or been clinically depressed. She stayed away from anything except the occasional glass of wine or a beer on the campaign trail when the photo op required it. Her only constant drug had been pot when she was in college and a snort of cocaine during a post-college jaunt to the Caribbean. This had thankfully gone largely unnoticed at the time and was never reported later when she had undertaken the long journey from liberated student to First Spouse.

  She called Pam Dutton's sister and talked to John and Colleen, doing her best to reassure the children. She could sense their fear and wished she had more to tell them than that she was hoping and praying that Willa would soon be home. She next called her brother, who was still in the hospital for observation, though it was hoped he would be released soon. The two kids had visited him.

  Jane had her dinner brought up to her by the White House staff and ate it alone. She had several invitations to dine out this evening and had declined them all. Most were from folks interested merely in pumping up their own status by breaking bread with the First Lady and snagging a cherished photo with which they could later bore their grandchildren. She would rather be by herself. Well, as alone as a home with over ninety full-time staff and too many security agents to count would allow.

  She decided to take a stroll outside, accompanied, of course, by aides and the Secret Service. She sat for a while in the Children's Garden, a shady spot that was the brainchild of Lady Bird Johnson. Jane loved to look at the bronzed hand- and footprint pavers of presidential grandchildren lining the walkway. She hoped her own kids would get on the ball and start delivering some grandkids for her and Dan.

  Later, she passed by the tulip beds in the Rose Garden where thousand of bulbs would bloom in the spring, giving dazzling color to the grounds. Next, she headed up to the solarium, which had been constructed from an attic room at the request of Grace Coolidge. It was the least formal room in the mansion and also, in Jane's opinion, had the best views. First Ladies had often led the charge on both enhancing the White House for future presidents and their families and also making it their own. Jane had done some of that in the last three years, though never approaching the level of work spearheaded by Jackie Kennedy.

  She returned to her quarters and recalled the first day they had arrived here over three years ago. The former First Family had checked out at 10 a.m. and the Coxes had come in at 4 p.m. It was like a rental flipping. And yet when they had walked in the door, the clothes were i
n the closets, the pictures on the walls, the favorite snacks in the fridge, and her personal toiletries lined up on her sink. She still didn't know how they had managed it all in six hours.

  Later, Jane sipped her coffee and thought about her discussion with Sean King. She could count on him. He had been a good friend, had saved her husband's political career, in fact. She knew King was peeved at her right now, but that would pass. She was more upset about her brother. For most of her life she had been taking care of him, largely because their mother had died when Jane turned eleven; Tuck was five years younger. Coddling, some might term it. She now had to face the fact that this protective instinct had done more harm than good. Yet she could hardly turn her back on him now.

  Jane walked back over to the window, watching the pedestrians standing in front of the White House. Her house. At least for the next four years if the polls were to be believed. Yet the final decision would be rendered by over a hundred and thirty million Americans who would vote yea or nay on her husband's second term.

  As she rested her cheek against the bulletproof glass, her thoughts came to rest, like an anchor at the bottom of the sea, on Willa. She was out there somewhere with people who had murdered her mother. They wanted something, only Jane didn't know what.

  Jane Cox was girding herself for the possibility that Willa might not come back to their lives. To her life. That she was perhaps already dead. Jane had trained herself not to show emotion, certainly not publicly unless the political conditions on the ground required it. It wasn't that she lacked passion. But many political careers had been shipwrecked on the shoals of erratic displays of anger or frivolity or else false sincerity that to voters demonstrated an innate dishonesty. No one wanted immoral, erratic fingers holding the nuclear codes, and the public also frowned on the spouse of the holder of the nuclear codes being a whack job too.

  So for at least the last twenty years of her life, Jane Cox had watched every word she said, calculated every movement she made, diagrammed every physical, spiritual, and emotional action she ever contemplated. And the only price she had to pay for that was to give up all hopes of actually remaining human.

  The schedule she had been given tonight allowed for a ten-minute window to call her husband, who was at a rally and fund-raiser in Pennsylvania. She made the call and talked the talk, congratulating him on the latest poll numbers and his recent TV appearances where he had looked fittingly presidential.

  "Everything okay with you, hon?" he said.

  "Everything except Willa," she said back, in a tone a little stronger than she probably intended.

  Her husband's political skills had been deemed first-rate, even by his opponents. Yet Dan Cox's perception of his wife's issues and nuances had never seemed to reach this sanctified level.

  "Of course, of course," he said, as snatches of conversations in the background filtered through to her. "We're doing all we can. We just have to keep our thoughts positive and our hopes high, Jane."

  "I know."

  "I love you," he said.

  "I know," she said again. "Good luck tonight." She put the phone back down, her allotted minutes exhausted.

  A half hour passed and Jane turned on CNN. She had a rule about not watching the political and news shows during an election year, but the exception to that rule was when her husband was appearing somewhere. The second banana's time onstage was over and the crowd of seventy-five thousand was just about to see the person they'd really come to hear.

  President Daniel Cox strode onto the stage accompanied by an earsplitting song. Jane could remember when political appearances did not resemble rock concerts with warm-up acts, deafening music, and the crowd chanting some ridiculous slogan. It had once been more dignified and perhaps more real. No, there was no perhaps about it; it had used to be more genuine. Now it was all staged. Right on cue the fireworks went off as her husband stepped to the lectern and faced the twin and nearly invisible teleprompter screens. There used to be a time too, she knew, when politicians would actually wing it onstage, or simply glance down from time to time at their notes. She had read where politicians of the Revolutionary and Civil War eras could actually memorize speeches of their own making running several hundred pages long and deliver them flawlessly.

  Jane knew there was not a political leader living today-including her husband-who could duplicate such a feat. However, a flub during Lincoln's time wasn't spread around the world in an instant either, like it was today. And yet as she watched her husband reading from his screens, thumping his fist against the lectern, while signs hidden from the cameras recording the event were raised and lowered instructing the crowd when to applaud, cheer, stamp their feet, and chant, a part of Jane longed for the old days. That was when she and Dan would arrive at an event alone, haul bumper stickers and lapel pins out of the trunk, give them out to the sparse crowd, and then watch as Dan simply stood in the center of the people and talked from his heart and his head, shook some hands, kissed some babies, and asked folks for their vote come election day.

  Now, as president, it was like moving a small country whenever Wolfman went anywhere. It required nearly a thousand people, cargo planes, and enough communications equipment to start your own phone company and that would allow her husband to pick up his phone in any hotel room on earth and get direct U.S. phone service. Leaders of the free world could not be spontaneous. And unfortunately neither could their spouses.

  She continued to watch him. Her husband was a handsome man and that never hurt in many careers, including politics. He knew how to work a crowd. He had that way, always did. He could connect with the people and find common ground with millionaires and mill workers, black or white, the serious and the silly. That's why he'd come this far. The people did love him. And they believed that he really cared about them. Which he did, Jane really believed that too. And no man ever became president without a commitment from "the other half."

  She listened as he delivered his canned twenty-seven-minute stump speech. It was the economy tonight laced with support for union jobs and a plug for the steel and coal industries since he was in the Keystone state. She found herself saying the words of the speech along with him. Pausing as he did for one, two, three seconds before delivering the punch line to a joke crafted by some Ivy League speechwriter making far more than he should.

  She undressed and slipped into bed. Even before she turned out the light, Jane felt the darkness closing in around her.

  In the morning a White House maid would find the First Lady's pillows slightly wet from the tears shed.

  CHAPTER 27

  WILLA PUT DOWN Sense and Sensibility. Not long after being brought here she'd tapped on each of the walls and detected something solid behind them. She had listened for footsteps and calculated by checking her watch that someone patrolled by every other hour. She made her own meals consisting of canned stews, eaten cold, or packaged MREs that she knew had to do with the military. They were not what she was used to but her stomach didn't care. She drank the bottled water, munched on crackers, tried to keep warm, and used the battery-powered lantern sparingly, turning it off while she rested and trying her best not to think of things coming for her in the dark.

  She would listen for the man, the tall older man. She had learned to recognize his walk. She liked him better than the others who would come by with water, cans of food and clean clothes, and new batteries for her lantern. They never spoke, never made eye contact, and yet she was afraid of them. Afraid their silence would be replaced with sudden anger.

  She had tried to speak to them at first, but now she didn't. Instead, she tried to become invisible when they arrived. And she would let out a relieved breath when they locked the door behind them.

  She looked at her watch. The footsteps had just come by. She had time now. Two hours free. She gripped the lantern and walked over to the door. She tapped on it lightly. Waited. Tapped. Waited.

  "Hello?" she said. "Um, I think there's like a really big fire in here."


  No answer.

  She set the lantern down and from her pocket pulled out the pen that Quarry had given her. Or rather she pulled out the pen's clasp. It had the required ninety-degree-angled hook on the end. Next she took out a long piece of metal with a triangular-shaped bump on the end. She'd fashioned it from one of the canned stew tops she'd opened. She'd taken the circle of metal and painstakingly cut it in half using the heavy lantern to hold it against the table while employing the sharp edge of another can top to cut away at the metal. Then, like a rug, she'd rolled the remains of the top into a long cylinder and then hammered the end of it into the required shape.

  She studied the lock, trying to mentally coax back her lock-picking skills. Two years ago they had visited the First Family at a hundred-year-old coastal home in South Carolina that wealthy friends of the president had lent them for a two-week summer holiday. Colleen Dutton, who was then only five, had locked herself in the bathroom. The terrified girl had screamed and pounded on the old door and pulled on its antiquated lock, but to no avail. Then a Secret Service agent had come to the rescue, using a paper clip to pick the lock and setting Colleen free in under ten seconds.

  Willa had held her inconsolable sister for hours after the episode. Later, she'd been worried that Colleen would accidentally lock herself in the bathroom when they got back home, so she'd asked the agent to teach her how to pick a lock. He had and had also shown her the difference between an ordinary lock and a dead bolt. Dead bolts were harder, requiring greater skill and two different tools, and that's what she was faced with here.

  Hanging the lantern handle over the doorknob so her work area would be lit, Willa inserted the pen clasp, which served as her tension tool, into the bottom of the lock's opening. She turned it as if she were manipulating a key in a lock, applying enough pressure to keep the interior lock pins from falling back into place. She slid the pick tool into the upper part of the lock using her other hand. She was applying so much force that a bead of sweat appeared on her forehead despite the chill of the room. She pushed up with the pick, trying to rake the pins into their sheer alignment. Once her hand slipped and the tension tool came loose.