Power Play

  She was silent for a moment, handed him a covered basket. “Have a croissant. I made them.” They were big, hot and flaky, and his mouth watered, they smelled so good. “Try one with the turkey bacon,” and she pointed to another covered dish.

  She was dithering, which meant she wasn’t sure yet about him and she wanted to feel him out. Well, okay, not a problem, since he was starving, and so he gave all his attention to making a bacon croissant sandwich and stayed silent, waiting to see where she’d head.

  “I understand you met my daughter yesterday evening.”

  He took a big bite of his croissant and fell in love. Both with the croissant and the cook. “Yep, got home and there she was on her Harley, very nearly on my nicely kept front yard.”

  “Do you know who she is?”

  “After I Googled her, sure. Since I’ve been a Redskins fan from the womb on, I realized I’d read some of her bylines and some of her blogs. Actually, I remember thinking Perry Black was a guy until they started running her photo next to her byline in the Post. I was amazed, I mean, a woman who’s a real expert on pro football? Then yesterday, of course, I found out she’s related to you.

  “I thought your name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t put it together until one of the agents told me yesterday when I got to the Hoover Building. And then, of course, I found out all about you and your current difficulties.” She looked so normal, he thought, and nice and pleasant, and yet—“Here you are, the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, one of the plummiest Foreign Service assignments in the universe, right?”

  “Well, except for the Vulcan ambassadorship, I’m told, which isn’t in the cards, since I can’t pronounce the Vulcan capital.” She grinned at him, chewed on her croissant. He saw blackberry jam ooze over her lip.

  He said, “I read your family in Boston is very well connected, big politicos for decades now, with their fingers in lots of local and national elections. Did their big contributions help secure that ambassadorship for you?”

  She didn’t throw her fork at him. No, she laughed. “Not a bad assumption, but off the mark in my case. There’s quite a bit more.”

  “You slept with the president.”

  She laughed again. “Can’t say I did. Nope. He’s happily married, though it took him a while to take the plunge. Imagine his daughter is only twelve years old and Perry’s twenty-eight. You’re forgetting who my husband was, Agent Sullivan.”

  A smile bloomed, Davis couldn’t help it. “Dr. Brundage Black, the longtime orthopedic surgeon for the Washington Redskins, and one of the first physicians to be directly on a pro football team’s payroll. He died of a heart attack when he was only fifty. I was very sorry to hear it.” He found he leaned toward her, at the loss and pain in her eyes.

  After a moment, he said, “So tell me, Mrs. Black—”

  “Call me Natalie, please.”

  He nodded. “Natalie, what did your husband have to do with your appointment as the ambassador to the United Kingdom?”

  “You want to go back into the mists of time?”

  “Sure. I’ll eat another croissant.”

  She handed him the covered bread basket. “Four of us—President Gilbert; Arliss Abbott—he appointed her as his secretary of state; my husband; and I all met at Yale in our sophomore year. Thornton Gilbert—Thorn—and I were both in Berkeley College. My husband, Brundage, and Arliss Abbott in Calhoun and Branford. At any rate, the four of us were tight friends from our sophomore year on, all of us full-charge types, but we laughed about it, and somehow it worked. Brundage and I married soon after we graduated, and so did Arliss, a whirlwind romance with a mining engineer, and had her son not long after that. The president went on to law school at Harvard. He met and married his wife, Joy, some fifteen years ago. We all stayed in touch over the years, even though our paths diverged.”

  “So your appointment as ambassador to the United Kingdom was for auld lang syne?”

  “Perhaps, in part, but I’ve made my career in the diplomatic corps for five years now. I had two other postings before this one.”

  “But you have a law degree; you had a successful practice here in Washington. Why did you decide to join the Foreign Service?”

  She smiled. “Thorn, President Gilbert, told me I was the natural-born diplomat in the group, that I could talk a sheik into giving up his harem and that I was wasted hammering out endless business contracts. He said it was invaluable to him to have people around him he could trust implicitly, and he trusted me. Arliss Abbott, his newly appointed secretary of state, another one of the four of us, agreed, and so I did.

  “It was Brundage who first suggested I should think about becoming a diplomat. He said to forget the harems, I could talk him out of his last bite of butter-pecan ice cream. Unfortunately, he never saw it happen. He died at the beginning of President Gilbert’s first term. I remember he loved dancing at the inauguration ball. He was very pleased for Thornton and for the country.”

  She fell silent and Davis didn’t say anything, let her gather herself. He finished off his second croissant, drank more of his coffee, sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He said finally, “Okay, I’d like to get back to today, if you don’t mind. Are you ready to tell me why you wanted to see me?”

  She sipped her coffee, frowned.

  “Okay, perhaps you’ll let me get us started. According to what I’ve read, you’re back in the States officially on health leave, but really because of a scandal the British press created and is hounding you with. I saw they’ve labeled you a black widow ‘before the fact,’ a clever little aside they found amusing; in short, they were making your life a misery. And now there’s talk here as well, since you came home. Is that fair?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I assume you expect the press here will be going after you and that’s why you have a bodyguard, to keep them away? You don’t have any DSS agents with you?”

  “No. The Diplomatic Security Service is not normally assigned to protect me when I’m home, and I haven’t made a request for them.” She said nothing more.

  Davis eyed her, continued. “I read the scandal in England involved the suicide of an Englishman you were engaged to marry.”

  She nodded.

  “The English press claimed you drove him to suicide because you broke it off with him abruptly, and that’s why they came up with the black widow moniker. His family was less than supportive, and some of the public seems to think you should be exiled to the Hebrides to live in a Viking hut. Not exactly a comfortable position for an ambassador to an important ally, I gathered. Did I hit the high points, Madame Ambassador?”

  She studied him silently for a moment, then said, “I don’t believe George McCallum, my fiancé, did commit suicide, Agent Sullivan.”

  Now that we’re officially sharing secrets, Madame Ambassador, call me Davis.”

  “Very well. Davis.”

  “Is that why you asked me over today, to tell me you don’t think George McCallum’s death was a suicide?”

  “In part. Let me add that George was the eighth Viscount Lockenby, the head of the very large McCallum family. His family seat is near Canterbury, in Kent. Lockenby Manor.” She paused for a moment, and he saw grief in her eyes. She cleared her throat. “George was the polar opposite of Brundage. He didn’t know or care a thing about sports. To him, Wayne Gretzky could have been a Polish astronaut. It didn’t matter, he was a wonderful man. He loved life, loved his family, loved me. He paid attention to everyone, most especially me. He had this gift, I suppose you could call it. He knew, for example, when I needed to change my back tires or where I’d dropped a missing bracelet. Someone in his family was always phoning him, even about little things like a pet that couldn’t be found or a horse running in the fourth race at Doncaster. He was involved in all their lives deeply, and he took his role as head of his family seriously. He protected them.”

  Again she paused, then met Davis’s eyes. “He did not, however
, foresee his own death.

  “They found him in his car at the bottom of a cliff near Dover. The car was smashed, of course, but there was no evidence the car had been tampered with, and there were no skid marks to suggest he was losing control and trying to regain it. The car went straight over the cliff.

  “It’s true it couldn’t have been an accident, since the cliffs are a goodly distance beyond the road, thus anyone would have plenty of time to stop a car—if one wanted to. At first everyone believed he’d lost consciousness, maybe suffered a heart attack. There was an autopsy, but I was told it was difficult to determine what had happened, since his body had been so traumatized. Still, it was ruled an accidental death.

  “Then the whispers started right after the funeral, whispers and tabloid stories that it was really a suicide, that George had fallen into a profound depression because I’d broken off our engagement, that I was to blame, that I drove him to kill himself. It seems I hadn’t even told him to his face, no, I’d sent him an email telling him, and it broke him.”

  “Had you broken it off with him?”

  She shook her head. “Hardly. We’d been happy, making plans. He liked the U.S. He didn’t mind living here six months out of the year; he even liked the idea of being posted elsewhere in the world.

  “George was in fact under a good deal of stress in the final two weeks of his life. It had to do with his eldest son and heir, William Charles—Billy. George had told me he was a troubled child throughout his school years and that despite his complete support, Billy was asked to leave Oxford in his first year. He soon cut off most contact with the family and moved to Germany. He lived in a mostly Muslim neighborhood in Hamburg and eventually courted a Lebanese girl and ended up converting to her religion. George thought that structured life seemed to help William at first, and perhaps it did, but there was more, a lot more. I realized George didn’t like to talk about Billy—it was a painful subject for him, and I didn’t push it.

  “Two weeks before George’s death, there were huge headlines in the British tabloids, such as ‘Viscount’s Heir a Terrorist’ and ‘House of Lords Member Breeds Traitor.’” She gave him a twisted smile. “That’s doubtless one of the first things you read about me, isn’t it?”

  Davis nodded, saying nothing.

  “They published a photograph of Billy taken somewhere in Syria, bearded and in local garb, armed with a Kalashnikov. We had no idea where they’d found that picture, but it was clearly Billy, no denying it, George said.

  “It was a major embarrassment, needless to say, both for George and his family and for me, the United States ambassador who was engaged to him. The story was irresistible, and we came under intense scrutiny by the press. But there was no talk between us of ending our engagement. And then George died, and that faked email surfaced in the press—again, I don’t know how—and it all led to the speculation that George had killed himself, that I was responsible because I sent him that email, favoring my own career in his time of need, that sort of thing.

  “As you know, Davis, the English tabloid press is probably the most virulent in the world. I remember one of the headlines—that I’d gone to Paris to get away from George and meet up with my lover. The fact is I was in Paris when George died, but I was there to meet with Jean-Marc Ayrault, the French PM.

  “Of course what the tabloids wrote was far sexier. I spoke to George’s family—those who would speak to me, that is—but they didn’t believe me when I told them I hadn’t broken it off, or they were too busy fending off the media wanting to know everything about George’s son—how he became a terrorist, why he became a terrorist, and what they felt about it. You get the idea.

  “The tabloids even suggested that my husband, Brundage, had killed himself as well and I’d managed to get it covered up with a heart attack story, backed by the president.” He saw her hands were clenched into fists, flames nearly shooting out of her red hair. “Can you imagine? Accusing me of murdering Brundage?

  “The press don’t have any of the famous British sense of fair play, no brakes. In England there’s simply no way to set things straight. If they decide you’re guilty of something, they single you out as their latest star.

  “Needless to say, the whole affair embarrassed our government, the embassy staff, and many of my British friends. I offered to resign, but the president refused to accept it, told me to soldier on, that I had done nothing wrong. As for Perry, she wants to go tear out someone’s throat. Soldiering on is only part of the reason I’m sitting in my lovely house with a bodyguard to protect me—” She stopped cold.

  Davis said, “What would the bodyguard protect you from? The press? No, not the press. You’d chew the press up and have Hooley toss them over the fence. All right, Natalie, why do you have a bodyguard? Why did you want to see me?”

  She said, “I told you I didn’t believe George McCallum’s death was a suicide. Actually, my strongest reason for that is because I’m sure as I can be someone is trying to kill me.”

  Natalie told him about the attempt on her life on the narrow country road on the way to George’s country home, vivid in her mind since she’d awakened early that morning sweating, her heart hammering in her chest, breathing hard and fast, nearly choking on the remembered fear.

  “My Jag, Nancy, has lots of oomph, thank heaven, but I knew he could catch me; the Mercedes was more powerful and the driver was really good. Then two cars came over the hill in front of us, which meant witnesses, and the driver did a fast screeching K-turn and sped back toward the M2. I pulled over and sat there, my head against the steering wheel. It didn’t occur to me then to flag down those two cars, ask them what they’d seen.”

  “What did you do?”

  “When I got myself together, I drove to the police station in Whitstable. The constable accompanied me back to the scene. There were tire marks—both cars—but there was nothing more to show them but a dent in my back fender.

  “By nightfall I saw a headline: ‘Swallow This: Black Widow Blames Auto Accident on Mysterious Assassin!’”

  “Did you see the driver of the black sedan?”

  “No, like I said, the windows were dark-tinted and the license plate was muddied, probably on purpose.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Arliss called me back home after consulting with the British government. From their perspective, you see, I was either unstable or, worse, the focus of a plot they could not unravel. Either way, all parties sought to avoid a major international scandal. Arliss said she and the president believed me, of course, but it obviously wasn’t safe for me in England. I can’t tell you how glad I was to come home. I believed I would be safe here, since all the violence had happened in England, and it seemed to be tied to George.”

  Davis nodded. “The son’s photo, the e-mail, then his death. Okay, tell me what happened back here in the States?”

  “I’ve been home six days, conducting business by phone, or in meetings at the State Department, meanwhile dodging the press, following the papers here and in London, waiting for Arliss and the president to decide when it will be a political necessity for me to resign.” She sighed, told him about her run in Buckner Park at sunset, a beautiful time of day to run, her thinking time.

  “So another attempted murder using a car as the weapon?”

  “It was like England. For an instant, I thought it was all over for me, but then I managed to roll behind bushes against a tree in the nick of time. It was close. I could even smell the car exhaust.”

  “What did the car look like?”

  “Another big black sedan, and again, I couldn’t make out the license plate and the windows were tinted so I couldn’t see the driver or how many people were in the car. I know it can’t be the same car as in England, but it was probably the same person behind the wheel—to try to kill me with a car twice? Why the same play?”

  “You called the cops?”

  She shook her head. “Believe me, I thought about calling them, but I knew I
couldn’t risk a police report getting into the press. I had no proof, and without that, another press leak might give the secretary of state and the president no choice. And what was there to find, anyway? Maybe evidence that a drunk might have lost control, got scared, and drove off as fast as he could?”

  “So you hired Hooley.”

  “Yes. Hooley is ex–Special Forces, and came well recommended. He wanted me to speak to the police, to the FBI, to the State Department, but as I said, I haven’t even told Arliss or Thorn—President Gilbert—no one except Hooley and Connie Mendez, a former Secret Service agent Hooley recommended. And now you.”

  “Do you know our FBI director?”

  “Yes, I’ve met him, but I don’t know him or his loyalties. Whereas you, Special Agent Sullivan, I saw what you’re made of, how you deal with surprise and danger. Don’t you see I had to decide who to turn to. I don’t know any other agents in the FBI, though I’ve heard of that exceptional boss of yours, Agent Savich. There’s no reason for any of them to believe me, not given what’s happened and what’s been reported. After yesterday, I thought perhaps you would.”

  Davis didn’t hesitate. “I do believe you. But I want to bring my boss, Dillon Savich, to see you. I want you to tell him what you’ve told me. Believe me, Natalie, we’ll do everything to find out what’s going on. And there will be no press leak. Something else—Savich has a gift, like George McCallum. He seems to know things, sense things. Sometimes you don’t want to think about it because it’s scary, but you’re glad he’s on your side.”

  She was quiet until she’d poured him another cup of the sinful coffee from a silver carafe. “Can you guarantee me that you’ll be directly involved?”

  “You know I can’t, but I’ll try.”