A Clear and Present Danger (9 page)

She told him less about herself. But enough. She was a serious student of music, a substitute flautist with the National Symphony
in Washington, a College of William and Mary fine arts major, and the grateful beneficiary of a rich father.

The two of them were inseparable from that first meeting. Within sixty days, they were married. Again, it seemed to Slayton
that there was no time to lose.

Jean Marie’s father presented the pair with the gift of fifty acres of rolling woods and field near Mount Vernon—ancestral
land. He had enjoyed hearing Ben’s talk of building a self-sufficient home on acreage somewhere outside Washington, where
he was seeking federal law enforcement work with the help of a Michigan Congressman who had been a friend of his late father.

There could have been no happier couple.

Slayton built on the land his father-in-law had given them. The house was first to go up, a large, rambling affair built of
logs and stone and surrounded by verandas and decks. The south side was entirely glass, a system of solar heating panels over
the greenhouse.

He built a windmill and managed to generate nearly one-third of his own electricity. Then he added a hangar, to house a single-engine
Cessna he had managed to win in a poker game in Thailand. Adjacent to the hangar, he built a sixteen-stall garage for his
cars.

Jean Marie worked on arranging a gourmet kitchen for the house, saw to the growing of herbs and spices, vegetables, and even
a few citrus plants in the greenhouse, and set off a generous part of the house for Ben’s library, to which her father added
a considerable number of rare leather-bound editions, oak floor-to-ceiling bookshelves to line the room, a pair of Persian
rugs, and a ceiling of embossed goat skin.

Slayton won appointment to the Treasury Department as a provisional agent, subject to his successfully completing the academy
training. On the eve of his graduation day, Slayton received word from Michigan that his mother had died.

… Time is all we have
.

The thought reverberated in his head as he attended the funeral, his wife at his side. She became overwhelmingly precious
to him.

When they returned to Virginia, Jean Marie’s father had one further lavish gift for the couple, a gift requiring a great deal
of Ben’s increasingly valuable time. Between the work on the “farm,” as he and Jean called their place, and his work in Washington
for Treasury, Slayton was a very active man. But Jean’s father insisted. The two were to sit for an oil portrait. And sit
they did.

Ten days after the portrait was hung above the library fireplace, Jean Marie died in her sleep.

“I wanted to tell you all along,” her father told Ben as the two men drank together through the first shattering night of
grief, “but Jean made me keep it to myself.

“She’s been sick a long time, Ben, since when she was a girl. It meant there were a lot of things she couldn’t have, a lot
of times she couldn’t share with other girls her age. She met you and she fell in love and she wanted the time together, however
brief it would be. I wouldn’t deny her that wish, or endanger it, by telling you.”

The older man finished his brandy and then looked at his son-in-law with a nearly helpless plea in his eyes.

“You understand, Ben?”

He did. “I wanted the time, too. I could have known.”

Now, alone in the surroundings that he and Jean Marie had created, he would be reminded of her always. It had been a good
time in his life, providing him strong memories with which to go forward.

He found progress in his life, in his work. Slayton had compiled an impressive record of achievement at Treasury, a record
that could not be denied him in spite of his occasional contentiousness. He had been good at whatever he had done, in whatever
division he served. He would be noticed by someone, at some time.

Slayton believed himself not simply slated for career promotion; he believed himself at a strange and exciting starting point
of a new life. He knew he was uniquely fit, by qualification and circumstance. He had been strengthened by love and support
in his past, so much so that he understood the power of his complete personal freedom for the future. He was ready and capable
of making a blind leap into the dark.

He was neither humbled nor mystified by his fateful conclusion. Slayton merely deduced. He had been waiting for the time,
ever since first meeting Hamilton Winship. That early impression, the impression of a man biding his time in a role, had reminded
Slayton of a piece of dialogue from R. Wright Campbell’s finely textured novel of political intrigue,
The Spy Who Sat and Waited:

“… ‘I will survive. You see, I am a patient man and easily overlooked.’”

Slayton’s own discreet investigation of Winship had only strengthened initial impressions. And tonight, by the ritual of the
Washington party, the two men would perform for one another; they would test one another; they would seal some desperate destiny.

WASHINGTON, D.C., 9 p.m. St. Valentine’s Day, 1981

Slayton eased the Nash-Healey around the tight corner leading off the avenue to the Winship residence in Washington’s exclusive
Georgetown district.

He had been chilly the entire twelve-mile trip in from Mount Vernon, despite the wheezing of the tiny gasoline-powered heater
below the dashboard. It was, Slayton reasoned, quaking with the cold in the tiny canvas-topped passenger compartment, a small
price to pay, this discomfort. The car was an absolute classic, as underappreciated as it was even in its day.

The Nash-Healey was one of the few true sports cars made in the United States, the happy attempt by the late Nash Corporation
to spruce up its line. Even the most biased Nash executive had to know that the Nash selection resembled a display of bathtubs
more than an array of fine cars.

So in 1952, the Italian designer Pinan Farina was brought to Detroit to rescue the Nash. And what a job he did of it.

Slayton’s was one of the very first Nash-Healeys off the factory assembly line. It had a sleek ivory body, sloped downward
at the front of its long hood, was notched with tiny tailfins in back. An oval chrome grille with hooded headlights, the sparest
of chrome bumpers fore and aft, and balloon tires set around gleaming convex hub caps gave the ship its European dash.

Under the protracted hood was a powerful, mostly aluminum-cast six-cylinder V-block engine, quite a forward-looking plant
in its day. It still ran like a dream. In the dry months of October and November, Slayton would run the Nash-Healey full-out,
and the machine would respond as if it were a greyhound dog aching for the relief of a race track.

The engine purred as Slayton wheeled the car to the curb front outside the Winship home. A liveried black man opened the door
for him and announced that he was to park the guests’ cars. Slayton tried to give him a pair of dollar bills for his trouble.

“No way,” the porter said. “This is a privilege. Can this be a Nash-Healey?”

“The very one,” Slayton answered. There was a bond between the men. Few could identify the car properly. Only the most discriminating.

“A rare beauty,” the porter said.

“And a rare night.”

Slayton turned and walked to the front stoop of Winship’s house, an ivy-covered red brick townhouse at mid-block with a fine
green-and-gold Georgian door.

A butler took his coat and gloves, and before he was spotted by his hosts, Slayton had a chance to take in the scene.

It was a typical Georgetown gathering, minus only the posturing of Presidential Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointees, as it
was too early in the new regime for that sort of thing. Slayton missed most especially the antics of Hamilton Jordan from
the Carter administration. He had been in a home much like the one he now stood in when Jordan, it had been rumored and fiercely
denied by Hamilton the next day, ogled the decolletage of the Egyptian ambassador’s wife and remarked. “I do believe I see
the great pyramids.”

The Congressional representation was mostly Democratic, reflecting the Winships’ personal political affiliations, though a
few Republican curiosities were milling about. Slayton couldn’t take his eyes off Alfonse D’Amato, the new Senator from New
York. He was trying to decide the merits of a description of D’Amato he had heard somewhere, that the Senator closely resembled
a ferret.

Diplomats were in great abundance, of course. The biggest delegation were elegant Third Worlders whose capitals couldn’t provide
food and drink that matched the quality and quantity of that offered at the simplest American diner. Often this bunch was
purely hungry, Slayton had learned.

The women were uniformly horselike. The doughy matrons who had by some mysterious means laid claim to their husbands decades
earlier and were now resting on their plump laurels, content to allow the menfolk their cheap distractions while they quietly
kept the books.

The exception, Slayton quickly saw, was the wife of the French ambassador, a Monsieur LaRoque. LaRoque had recently married
a twenty-seven-year-old star of the French cinema, known in Paris simply as Adrienne. LaRoque himself was an aging debauchee.
The flesh sagged off his face like a cake that had been left out in the rain. The only icing was a little Hitleresque mustache.
His eyes were tired, as if he’d been up all night before sweating it out with a pair of fourteen-year-old boys.

LaRoque’s wife, on the other hand, was a wondrously beautiful creature. It was as if this couple were the gender opposites
of Senator John Warner and his new wife, the corpulent Elizabeth Taylor, both of whom were standing nearby the LaRoques.

Adrienne LaRoque was a tall and graceful woman, perhaps four inches taller than her squat husband; she had dark brown hair
and almond-colored eyes; and a voice that Slayton cocked his ear to hear, a familiar husky-feminine voice. He had seen one
of her films and had been reminded, though she looked nothing like her, of Lauren Bacall in her early days.

Slayton began moving toward the LaRoques. Senator Warner and Elizabeth Taylor waved to him, signaling him to join their circle,
thinking he had seen their gesture.

He was stopped by Edith Winship.

“So, you must be Benjamin Justin Slayton,” she said.

“The same.” He took her hand and kissed it in the continental manner. She blushed—slightly, girlishly. He liked her immediately.

“Hamilton pointed you out to me when you entered,” she explained. She pointed now across the room, to her husband, who tipped
his glass toward them. He was busy speaking to Jim Brady, the President’s press secretary.

“Come and I’ll introduce you to whoever you may not know,” she said, draping her arm in his.

“The French ambassador,” Slayton said. “I’ve never had the pleasure.”

Edith Winship arched her brows at this and whispered to Slayton, “Pity that old goat has the pleasure. My guess is that you’d
know how better to use it.”

They reached the LaRoques. Slayton extended his hand in greeting to LaRoque, but didn’t look at him. He and Adrienne locked
gazes.

“I’ll leave you all now,” Edirh Winship said, fluttering off toward the Warners. Elizabeth Taylor looked miffed.

LaRoque muttered something, and continued a conversation with a man to his right, an Austrian who looked every bit as debauched
and as wearied by it as LaRoque.

“Shall we have a moment’s time together?” Slayton asked Adrienne.

“Of course,” she said.

All eyes in the room followed the handsome couple as they glided toward a bar and helped themselves to champagne.

They talked for ten minutes. Adrienne favored him with a few bits of Parisian film gossip, indicated her boredom for Washington
and most things American, and said she wished she were home in France, basking in the warm sun of Nice. Slayton imagined himself
in bed with her, with her long legs wrapped around his back.

She noticed that he wasn’t listening to her words. She smiled and covered his hand with hers.

“I can read your thoughts,” she said, her voice heavy with its French accent. “Can you read mine?”

“I believe I can. You just thought, ‘Yes, I’d love to have a private drink with this man.’”

“Then let’s go,” she said, “but not far.”

Slayton looked around the room. The only escape was a stairway. She watched him look at it.

“I’ll go up, to the powder room. You follow in a few minutes. We’ll meet somewhere up there.”

It was just as she said. When Slayton made his way up the stairs, he heard her whisper, from a doorway off the corridor.

He entered a large bedroom, tastefully furnished and equipped, as most of Georgetown’s elegant homes were, with a small fireplace.

“Now, we’re alone,” she said, smiling, somewhat shyly.

Slayton took her shoulders in his hands and pulled her toward him. She did not resist.

They moved together quickly, hungrily, embracing with parted lips. Slayton slipped his fingers beneath the wispy strands of
her gown and pulled the top slowly over her breasts, baring them.

He held her breasts in his hands, then leaned down to kiss them. Adrienne locked her fingers behind his head, urging him on,
then urging him downward.

Slayton dropped his hands to her hips and grasped the lower portion of her gown, raised it up over her knees, then her smooth
thighs, to her waist. She was naked beneath the gown.

He caressed her gently, wetting her, causing her to tremble and growl something wicked in French. Then he rose to face her.
He could see the helplessness in her face. She was his.

She bent to undo his trousers, pleasuring him with her touch and her taste. Slayton steadied himself as she worked on him,
playfully, expertly.

When she had tired, Slayton guided her to the edge of a canopied bed. Standing at the side, Slayton lifted her right leg at
the knee, propping it up on the bed. He stood behind her, raised her gown and moved in close.

Behind them, at the door, they heard the sound of a throat clearing itself.