She stared into her coffee cup, swirling the last dregs around its bottom. Her reflected face looked back at her without expression.
That, she knew all too well, was just a façade, a shell. She couldn’t allow herself to feel anything. Because if she did, she knew what emotion would consume her.
Despair.
She had thought her anguish would fade over time. She had been wrong. Instead it had mutated, a cancerous tumour in her psyche, poisoning every moment. It took all her willpower not to give in to it . . . but in moments of loneliness, she couldn’t stop the awful darkness from rising.
She gulped down the final mouthful of coffee, then summoned the strength to return to the apartment. The empty apartment. Sometimes she kept walking the streets of Manhattan for hours to avoid having to go back to it, but in the end she always had . . . because she had nowhere else to go.
Nina was walking to the door when something made her pause. Dalton’s name.
It was hardly the first time she had heard it since returning, loss and loathing flooding back at each occurrence. But there was something different about it now, a buzz as it spread through the customers. She turned. People were talking on phones, scanning news pages on laptops, spreading the word. She tried to pick out details through the growing hubbub.
‘- the President -’
‘- he slept with -’
‘- terrorist -’
‘- might have to resign -’
‘- a video -’
‘- all over the Internet -’
‘- I found it, I got it here!’
People clustered round one man, who tilted his laptop’s screen so they could watch. Nina hesitated, then joined them. She could barely see the screen through the throng, but a glimpse was enough.
She turned away, heading for the exit as the grainy video of Sophia Blackwood and Victor Dalton, faces and naked bodies clearly visible, played.
‘Where did it come from?’
‘I dunno, but it’s all over the place. YouTube already pulled the original, but there’s hundreds of copies up, it’s on the torrents, everywhere!’
‘Is that - that’s her, isn’t it? The bitch who tried to nuke us?’
‘Is that really the President? It can’t be. Can it?’
‘It’s him, it’s really him!’
The voices faded behind Nina as she left the shop and stood on the street. The word was here too, a verbal virus leaping from person to person. Shock, laugher, disbelief, intrigue - everyone had a different reaction.
But everyone had a reaction. Everyone knew.
Nina hurried towards her apartment, the tiniest seed of an emotion she hadn’t felt for some time taking root inside her.
Hope.
By the time she reached home, every shop window TV, every radio blaring from a passing cab, every overheard cell phone conversation was about the same thing.
The President of the United States had been filmed in flagrante. That he hadn’t been president at the time was immaterial; that the woman with him not only was not his wife, but had almost succeeded in detonating a nuclear bomb in New York, most certainly was. The video had spread across the Internet in a matter of hours, a digital hydra spawning new heads exponentially. A news story so big that whatever a network’s political biases, it could not be ignored.
Nina rushed to the TV. She had avoided the news channels since her return, but now sought them out. There was only one story.
A caption told her she was watching a live broadcast from the White House press room, the familiar blue curtains behind a flustered man in a suit: the White House press secretary. Questions were being shouted at him, voices overlapping. ‘One at a time, one at a time!’ he cried, almost pleading. ‘You, Pete. One at a time.’
‘Is the President going to resign?’ someone yelled.
‘The Pres - the President will make a statement concerning this - this fabrication later today,’ the press secretary stammered. ‘That’s all I can say right now.’
‘That’s the official line, that it’s a fabrication?’
‘It is, yes.’
‘It’s a fabrication, or it’s the official line?’
Another voice chipped in with a loud aside of, ‘If it’s a fake, it’ll win the Oscar for special effects.’ Laughter erupted around the room.
‘Will the President resign?’ someone else boomed. The question was repeated with minor variations from what seemed like the entire press corps. The man visibly quailed.
Nina stepped back from the TV. ‘Gotcha,’ she whispered as she switched it off. If Dalton had Sophia’s recording, then the only way a copy could have been made was . . .
A reflection in the blank screen told her she was not alone.
‘Ay up,’ said a familiar voice. ‘Don’t I get a kiss hello?’
‘Eddie!’ Nina screamed in delight as she spun to see Chase sitting casually on a chair in the corner, looking as if he’d just come back from the 7-11 rather than the dead. She ran to him. ‘Oh my God, oh my God! Is it really you?’
‘Course it’s bloody me! What, you think I’m a zombie? Ow, don’t hug me there, ow!’ He grimaced and pushed her off his chest. ‘I’ve got a bust rib and a fucked-up lung, so don’t go poking at ’em!’
‘What happened?’ Nina asked, emotions whirling. ‘I thought you were dead!’ Tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘Oh, God, I thought you were dead . . .’
‘Yeah, I did too, for a bit. When Sophia shot me she hit a rib, but I still got a fragment in the lung. I don’t remember too much, just trying to keep my head above the water, but I think I ended up a couple of miles downstream where someone found me. Got taken to hospital, and they patched me up.’
‘What happened to Sophia?’
‘Now that I do remember. I, ah, used her as an airbag. She hit a couple of rocks on the way down.’
‘Is she dead?’ Nina asked hopefully.
‘Dunno. After we hit the water, I lost her. But if she isn’t, I doubt she’ll be running any marathons for a while. I definitely heard a couple of bits of her go snap. See, I told you there weren’t any feelings left between us.’
‘Throwing your ex off a cliff’s kind of an extreme way of proving it. So when did you get back to New York?’
‘Couple of days ago.’
‘And you didn’t tell me?’ she shrilled.
‘First thing I did was check you were okay!’ he said, holding her arms so she couldn’t hit him. ‘But I had something to sort out first.’ He glanced at the TV. ‘Looks like it worked.’
Her outrage faded. ‘But how did you get the recording? Dalton took the only copy.’
He grinned. ‘He took Sophia’s only copy. You know when I went into that bank in Zürich to check if she’d already been there?’
She nodded. ‘Yeah?’
‘Well, it occurred to me that seeing as she was legally dead and she’d named me as her next of kin or whatever, that’d mean I had the right to open her deposit box. Took a bit of wheedling, but they eventually let me look inside. And there it was. So . . .’
‘You made a copy.’
‘Yup. Had to buy a memory stick off some clerk, but I made a copy. And it even survived falling off a cliff into freezing water.’ He held up a small orange flash drive. ‘Might have it framed, actually.’
‘So you put a copy of the recording on the Internet.’
‘I put lots and lots of copies of the recording on the Internet. Got in touch with some old mates. Then this morning, all at the same time, they sent it out to every news agency, all the TV stations, papers, YouTube, all of those places. Spammed the world so everybody’d see it. And it looks like they did.’ Another smile. ‘Ain’t technology grand?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d made a copy?’
‘I didn’t have time. Sophia and Ribbsley turned up at the bank right after I left, remember? If I’d been another couple of minutes farting about, she’d have caught me.’
Nina raised an eyebrow. ‘And they didn
’t tell her that you’d just been rifling through her safety deposit box?’
‘Well, you know those Swiss banks. Very discreet.’
She laughed, for the first time in three weeks, then kissed him, long and hard. ‘So now what?’ she asked.
‘Well, we can sit back and watch Dalton get fucked in slow motion.’
‘Eddie, that’s gross.’
‘I don’t mean with Sophia!’ he hastily qualified. ‘I mean on the news. There’s no way he’ll be able to slime his way out of this one. He’ll have to resign, otherwise he’ll get impeached. That’s something I always found funny about you Yanks. Your politicians can lie, cheat, steal, kill, and they’ll still probably stay in office. But one whiff of dodgy sex, and bam, they’re up shit creek! You’re such bloody puritans.’
She huffed in mock offence. ‘Oh, you think I’m a puritan, do you?’
‘Well, not so much since I bought you that book . . .’
They both laughed, Nina taking his hands in hers and lifting them - then looking at her engagement ring. ‘You know what?’
‘What?’
‘I think a ring’d suit you too.’
He considered, then a broad smile spread across his square face. ‘I think it might. What, right now?’
Nina could hardly contain her rising excitement. ‘Yeah, right now. Come on!’ She jumped up, helping Chase stand. He winced at the pain in his chest - but it didn’t take the smile off his face.
They hurried down to the street. ‘Taxi!’ Nina yelled, waving down a yellow cab.
‘Where are we going?’ Chase asked.
‘Oh, crap, good point. New York’s got a twenty-four-hour waiting period on marriages. Oh, I know!’ The cab stopped and they climbed in. ‘Take us to Connecticut!’
The driver, a Central Asian man with a stubbly beard, gave her a dubious look. ‘Where in Connecticut?’
‘The nearest place with a Justice of the Peace!’
‘It’s your dollar,’ said the driver with a shrug, starting the meter. ‘Hey, you heard about the President?’
Nina and Chase smiled at each other. ‘Yeah, we have,’ Nina said, laughing.
Andy McDermott, The Covenant of Genesis
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