“No,” I say, finally opening my eyes.
“You mean,” she says, placing her own lawyerly spin on my answer, “that you omitted a proper investigation of a suspect for some other reason?”
“I mean that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, one of us doesn’t.”
Her crack elicits a snort of assent from somewhere along the table. I feel, at this moment, about two inches tall.
I am saved by a rap at the door. Alfonso Hernandez, the Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs, the SG’s new best friend since Patrick’s fall from grace, puts his head in and informs the perm five that the SG has invited them up to thirty-eight for drinks and an informal postmortem on the vote. The SG, he says, can receive them whenever they’re ready. When Lady Nicola thanks him, Alfonso glances at me: Patrick’s number two in strife with the Council. The prick shoots me a smile, then withdraws.
“You’re excused, Mr. Windrush,” Lady Nicola tells me, rising. “But I trust we’ve been able to impress upon you the seriousness with which your investigation continues to be followed by the Council. Should we feel the need to call you in again, be assured we will.”
She does not wait for a reply. There is a shuffling of chairs, everyone rising to their feet. Notepads are gathered up. Jackets buttoned as the ambassadors turn to consult their colleagues. I am painfully aware that I have been dismissed like some recalcitrant child. Jennifer studies an empty page in her pad; she doesn’t even raise her eyes as I slip quietly from my chair and out the door.
Blank. My mind is blank as I stride from the side chamber, propelled solely by the urge to get as far away as possible from the place. Then the blankness is pierced by a single point of red light that explodes, and I see a thousand points of red light dancing before my eyes. How could she do that to me? And why? Just to keep Bruckner happy? Or was she trying to prove her mettle to me, to demonstrate that any personal connection between us will never stand in the way of her job? Before I know it I have blundered out into the glare of TV lights. A solid press of journalists sways forward, a jostling wall of microphones, voices calling for the perm five’s first public response to the vote. Questions shouted at me before they realize that I am, in fact, nobody. Turning on my heel, I head back the way I came. And rounding the next corner, I walk straight into Jennifer. She is waiting for Bruckner, who is farther back along the hall, having a quiet word with Lady Nicola, getting the spin worked out before they meet the press. I step past Jennifer, then turn and step back.
“Thanks,” I tell her through clenched teeth.
She makes a face. “You’re not the only one with a job to do, Sam.”
“You humiliated me. What was that for, your job?”
“Oh, come on.”
“And you know what? You enjoyed it.”
“Jesus Christ,” she murmurs, glancing back over her shoulder to Bruckner and Lady Nicola.
“All that ‘you surprise me’ bullshit, don’t tell me Bruckner primed you with that. That was you, Jennifer. Up there tap-dancing on my reputation. On me, for chrissake.”
She faces me squarely. “You’ve been chasing your tail around New York for two days, Sam. Chasing your tail, wasting time, while the support for Japan has just crumbled. You saw the vote. Am I meant to be pleased?”
“You can’t blame me for that.”
“I can,” she says. “And I do.”
I look down at the seaweed-green carpet. I chew my lip. “So. None of this is personal.”
“You set the ground rules,” she reminds me, a reference to my little speech two nights back at the Waldorf. “It’s a bit late to be changing your mind.”
“You used me, Jennifer. First to try to get a privileged peek at my investigation. And now”—I gesture toward the side chamber—“now to score some big points with your boss. And you’re telling me it’s not personal?”
“Sam,” she says, reaching to lay a hand on my arm. “Listen.”
But I am way past the listening stage. Shaking her hand off, I step up beside her. Bruckner and Lady Nicola are coming our way now, both eyeing us curiously. After the encounter in the side chamber, they are understandably surprised to see us together at all. Now I lean toward Jennifer, our shoulders almost touching. My whisper, when it comes, is low and surprisingly mean.
“Next time you’re feeling lonely, you’ve got a big empty bed available, do everyone a favor.”
When she looks up, I catch the glint of alarm in her eye. Then I say it. And I say it like I mean it, which at this moment I really do.
“Go screw yourself.”
She flinches. From a distance we are just two lawyers calmly debating our professional differences. Now I rest a hand on her shoulder and I nod.
“Jennifer,” I say evenly. “Fuck you.”
30
B
ACK IN THE SECRETARIAT BUILDING I MAKE DIRECTLY
for Room Seven and Rachel. In the hall a radio is droning, the sportscaster giving the results for some game in Baltimore. Weyland isn’t here, just that same kid, the young guard from the other day who was playing cards with Rachel. Right now he is alone in the hall, the droning radio at his feet.
He looks up warily.
“Rache?” I call, nudging open the door to Room Seven.
“Gone,” says the kid.
My gaze flickers over the room. The bunk is gone. On the table where Rachel’s toiletries—soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant—were neatly stacked, there is nothing. Everything has disappeared. My heart flutters. Patrick has freed her.
“Gone where?” I ask, going back out into the hall. “Did she say she was going up to my office? Or home?”
“She wasn’t going home, I think.”
Reaching down, he turns off the radio. And when I inquire if Mike Jardine is anywhere nearby, the kid shakes his head and tells me he hasn’t seen Mr. Jardine all day.
I take a moment with myself. Relief is too weak a word. And it’s not just Rachel either, because with Rachel free, I am suddenly released. If I wanted, I could now go public with Internal Oversight’s evidence against Asahaki. But after the discovery of Lemtov and Patrick’s joint attendance at that money laundering conference in Basel, I am loath to act too hastily. We seem to be missing something here, either not seeing it or not reading the facts we have correctly. More and more I am coming around to Mike’s view that the three Special Committee members are an extremely unlikely criminal troika. A double act between two of them? Maybe. But most plausible in my own mind is the notion that Lemtov, the politically adroit mover and shaker with the unsavory connections down at Brighton Beach, has manipulated Po Lin or Asahaki in some way that we have yet to fathom. Through Patrick? I wonder.
Then I lift my head. What was it this kid said? “You haven’t seen Mike all day?”
“No.” Registering my look, the kid adds tentatively, “That a problem?”
“So who told Weyland that Rachel could go?” The kid doesn’t seem to get it, so I explain. “Weyland’s orders were to not let Rachel out of his sight. Not till he got the all clear from Mike.”
“He hasn’t,” says the kid.
Bemused, I glance into Room Seven, then back.
“Weyland went with her,” he tells me, pointing down the hall. “Five minutes ago. I got no idea where they’re holding her now.”
Where they’re holding her now.
I sway unsteadily. His expression changes as he realizes at the same instant I do that we have had our wires badly crossed. “Oh,” he says, “you thought—”
“Who came here?” I ask sharply, my stomach suddenly churning, relief splintering into alarm. “Who told Weyland to move her? O’Conner?”
“No, Eckhardt.” Eckhardt, Mike’s boss, the head of UN Security. Weyland really had no choice. Then the kid adds, “Just Eckhardt and some old guy. No one said where they were going.”
“What old guy?”
He shakes his head, he didn’t catch the name. “I think I heard Eckhardt call him Mr. Ambassador. I wouldn’t swear to that, you know.”
Mr. Ambassador. I grip the back of a chair to steady myself. Mr. fucking Ambassador.
“You didn’t recognize him?”
“Unh-unh.”
“At all?”
The kid tells me he has been working here only six weeks. “Like the big guys, Bruckner and those, I know them. But, God, there’s hundreds. One little old Asian guy, I mean, does anyone know who all these guys are?”
A worm of fear suddenly moves in my throat. Chou En, the Chinese ambassador? Or Asahaki? Trying to stay calm, I ask the kid to describe this guy, the Asian ambassador.
“Small,” he says, then thinks a second. “Gray hair. And his face.” He scrunches up his own face to show me. “You know, like a prune?”
That is not Chou En. Or Asahaki. That is the guy I saw less than twenty minutes ago in whispered conference with Lemtov. A face like a prune. Or a walnut. The guy who came to move my captive daughter to new holding quarters was that poisonous little bastard the Tunku.
The kid offers weakly, “I can try to find Mr. Jardine.”
But Mike, I know, cannot help me here. Shoving off the wall, I go jogging down the hall to find Patrick.
His door is open. In shirtsleeves, Patrick is facing the window, fiddling with his tie and shouting for his secretary as I go in.
“Leila!” he calls. Glancing over his shoulder, he sees me and looks away swiftly. “Bloody woman. Give her my jacket to brush, she disappears.” His tie finally knotted, he faces me. “You’ll have to wait for your kick in the pants, I’m wanted upstairs.”
“Where’s Rachel?”
He strides across to the side door and leans through. “Leila, for chrissake!”
“The vote’s over. There’s no reason for her to be detained here.”
Patrick returns to his desk and does some unnecessary rearranging of papers and pens. He keeps his eyes down. Contrition. Regret. These are outside this man’s range of genuine feelings, but if I am not mistaken, there is a real hint of embarrassment now in Patrick’s demeanor.
I step up to his desk. “The Tunku and Eckhardt showed up at Room Seven just now. After the vote. They moved Rachel.”
“Mmm?”
“I’d like to know where.” I lean on his desk, just my fingertips touching. “And I’d like to know why.”
He holds my look a moment, then turns to the side door. If he calls for Leila, I will lose it. I will step around the desk and tear this man apart. But he turns back, smiling humorlessly.
“You know what’s funny, Sam, what I can’t get over?” He thumbs his chest. “I put you on this thing. Me. Christ almighty, it would have been easier if I’d just slashed my own wrists, got it over with. The fucking mess you’ve made.”
The mess I’ve made. For Rachel’s sake, I hold my tongue.
Then Leila, Patrick’s willowy Indian secretary, comes in and hands Patrick his jacket. He pulls it on, instructing Leila to type up the memos from his Dictaphone. Picking up the vibe in the room, Leila raises one eyebrow at me in sympathy as she takes the Dictaphone and wordlessly departs.
“What the hell have you been playing at, Patrick?”
He brushes some invisible lint from his sleeve.
“You tried to call Toshio’s murder a suicide when you knew it wasn’t. You kept me in the dark on Oversight’s investigation of Asahaki. Then you make my daughter a goddamn hostage, and now that the vote’s over, you’re still trying to hold her?”
“It wasn’t me who screwed up the vote,” he remarks evasively and totally beside the point. He heads out the door; I catch up with him by the stairs.
“Where’s Rachel?”
“No idea.”
“Bullshit.”
He looks left to the elevator, then right to the stairs. He goes right, shouldering open the stairwell door. He is not pleased when I follow him.
“You got an invitation?” An invitation, he means, from the SG. Patrick has evidently been summoned to the same informal gathering up on thirty-eight as the perm five ambassadors. When I arrive at thirty-eight, a guard will politely but firmly direct me back down.
“I’ve got a good story,” I tell Patrick as we climb. “And if you don’t tell me where Rachel is, I’ll be telling that story to whoever wants to hear it.”
“Me covering up for Asahaki? That’s your big story?”
“Where’s Rachel?”
“Well, you’ve got that one wrong too. Christ, what haven’t you got wrong?”
“You detained her for no good reason. Just to yank on my chain. When the vote was over, she was meant to be released.”
“I never said that.”
I grab his arm, and he stops one step above me and looks back.
“She had the opportunity and the motive,” he says, tugging his arm free. “And no one except you thinks her detention’s unreasonable.”
“So what’s the Tunku, the goddamn deputy sheriff? Jesus Christ, Patrick. This is my kid. I’m not going to walk away from this. And why the hell did you bring the Tunku into this anyway?”
“The short answer is, I didn’t.”
We look at each other. Finally he leans back on the banister and blows out a breath. “What a fucking day,” he mutters, putting a hand to his forehead. Then, seeming to reach some decision, he drops his hand. “Listen, she’s not under my authority anymore, all right? You’ll have to make your inquiries to the Headquarters Committee. It’s out of my hands.”
The Headquarters Committee. Of which the Tunku is chairman. For a second I am too shocked to speak. “You’ve given Rachel to the Headquarters Committee?”
“If you’d done as I’d told you—”
“Whether Rachel’s released or not, that’s up to the goddamn Tunku?”
“Okay,” says Patrick, “here’s what I can do.”
When he actually begins to tell me, I just stare at him. Studying for my doctorate, I was obliged to read the memoirs of several secretaries of state, reading that cured me forever of the misconception that someone somewhere knows what makes the world of international affairs go around. Academic models of reality always supplanted the fluid and intractable world. Schemes for peace in the Middle East featured frequently. At the close of these books I was often left with the disturbing thought that the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth was, at times, being conducted with a willful blindness that bordered on the insane.
This disturbing thought, that there is a touch of willful blindness in the higher reaches of the political game, this thought comes to me powerfully now as I stand here in the stairwell, listening to Patrick O’Conner. He assured the SG that the Japanese were a shoo-in for the Council seat: He was wrong. He detained Rachel in order to put a leash on me, calculating that Asahaki would then see the Japanese safely through to a permanent seat on the Council: wrong again. Yet another woeful miscalculation has forced him to hand Rachel to the Headquarters Committee, and now I can hardly believe I am hearing him explain the intricacies of his next plot. It seems he has no sense that he is standing next to a man who would cheerfully sling him from the top of the building.
“Patrick,” I finally break in. “I don’t want your help, okay? If you hadn’t detained her, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“There were reasonable grounds,” he declares flatly. He even seems surprised by my rebuff. Then, apparently deciding that my mind will not be changed, he continues up the stairs. “If you don’t like it, take it up with the Headquarters Committee.”
“I might just take it up with Lemtov.”
Patrick stops. Slowly faces me again.
“Lemtov’s behind it, isn’t he?” I say. No reaction from Patrick. “He’s pulling the Tunku’s strings. He’s getting the Headquarters Committee to do his dirty work. That’s why Rachel’s still detained, because that’s how Lemtov wants it.”
Patrick frowns. “Why?”
“The same reason you wanted her detained. To put a leash on me.”
At that, Patrick turns his head and swears.
“Where is she?” I ask again.
He repeats his improbable assertion that he does not know, his glance drifting up the stairwell. “But if you’ve got some real reason for accusing Lemtov, I’ll come down to your office when I’ve finished upstairs and hear it.”
In other words, he wants to discover what I know about Lemtov.
I climb a few steps and stand beside him. “You tell me where Rachel is. Because if you don’t, I’ll be calling Oversight. And I’ll tell Dieter and Pascal that they might find something interesting if they make some inquiries about a certain conference in Basel three years back.”
This hits the mark. He makes a sound.
“That’s right,” I say. “You and Lemtov.”
Patrick studies me. Trying to assess what? How much I know? Whether or not my threat is real? At last he turns, lifts his gaze upward and climbs. My stomach sinks. The possibility that I am totally mistaken becomes real. Patrick does not care if I tell Dieter. The connection I am making between Patrick and Lemtov is illusory; Patrick is quite content for me to publicize his joint attendance with Lemtov at that money laundering conference in Basel. Above me Patrick climbs one flight of stairs. Then two. Then his footsteps pause on a concrete landing somewhere overhead. He knows that I have not moved. We both wait, listening to the silence.
“Try the basement,” he says finally, then he climbs again, his footsteps slow now and heavy. “Basement Room B Twenty-nine.”
The basement room is bleak. White walls, two fluorescents, and cream linoleum on the floor. Rachel is lying on her bunk, facing the wall.
“Rache?”
No answer, not even a flicker of movement. I exchange a glance with Weyland, who stands beside me. His look is a mixture of apology and concern.
“They wanted Rachel moved,” he says, and I nod quickly, telling Weyland that I don’t blame him for this, that I’m grateful he’s here. He seems reassured. He lifts his chin toward the bunk, then withdraws into the hall, leaving me alone with Rachel.
When I go and sit on the edge of her bunk, she does not stir. I lay a hand on her shoulder and there is still no response. I bow my head and I think, Not again, please God, not this. Not more.
It wasn’t until months after Sarah died that I became aware of Rachel’s illness. In retrospect, the signs were all there: her habitual absence at mealtimes, a certain listlessness, a growing touchiness about any remark directed at her personal appearance. But she was a kid who had just lost her mother. Her mood swings and all the rest of it did not seem that remarkable to me; for months I was really not much better myself. But as the months passed and I slowly resurfaced from the wave of grief that had engulfed us, I began to see that Rachel had not resurfaced with me. I gave it time. A few months. But by then the drop in her weight was too obvious to miss or ignore; food, what she ate, these were suddenly issues between us. Even as I got out of bed and went to set the table for breakfast, I found myself becoming tense, mentally preparing myself for the inevitable argument that would follow.
Then a morning came when she did not emerge from her room. I lingered around the kitchen awhile, shouted down the hall a few times, then finally went and knocked on her door and implored her to come out and eat. She did not answer. When I went in, she was lying on her bed, facing the wall. There was a muffled noise; it took me a moment to realize that she was crying into her pillow. My heart knotted painfully in my chest. I went and sat on her bed, put my hand on her shoulder, and felt for the first time what I had only seen until then, how fragile and wasted she had become. After a minute she lifted her legs and hunched over into the fetal position. When I squeezed her shoulder she curled up tight like a ball and I knew at that moment that if I did not get help for my daughter, I might lose her.