At Any Cost (19 page)

He rocked back, recoiling from her. “No, you're right. Let's get dressed and go.”

She had moved stiffly, wordlessly, her small body made smaller still by her cramped movements. She retrieved her coat, and without looking at him, walked out.

After the door closed, Tom felt incredibly alone. He had never felt so alone, except that first night when he knew without a doubt that Bethany had not made it out of the building. This kind of solitude felt like punishment.

He returned to the living room and blew out the candles. He lit a single lamp so that he could pour the rest of the wine down the sink and cover the antipasto platter to place it in Gwen's fridge. He assumed she would have more use of it than he.

After he had cleaned up, he sat on the edge of the sofa, trying to figure out what to think. The slap had shocked him and concerned him. But what had surprised him more was the reserve of anger that Fallon had accessed so quickly.

If anything, this nasty little scene just proved what he had known since Bethany's death. He was meant to be alone. It was better this way, in a nice cocoon of not expecting anything from any other person. It was certainly easier to be objective about life when you didn't have to consider anyone else. He glanced at the green LED clock on Gwen's microwave. It was late. He had no place to go but home.

Tom had finally sunk into an uneasy sleep when the phone jittered loudly on the bedside table. He grabbed the device, blinking at it, until the words dissolved into an impossible text:

FOUND SOMETHING.

It was almost three o'clock in the morning. Tom pushed himself up, got dressed, and drove back into D.C.

This time Frank was not frowning. In fact, he looked jubilant. “It was so easy! We were totally overthinking it!” he exclaimed as they walked down the hall to his office. He handed Tom some papers from the printer.

“He took pictures of his notes and uploaded them to his Flickr page. He kept them private, obviously, but there they are.”

Tom's mind was racing, trying to connect the dots that didn't seem to belong in the same stratosphere. He glanced over the pictures, some of the words hard to read, but the word Mullinax was visible.

The electric pulse of revelation zipped through him. He had been avoiding this angle because Richard Mullinax was a very powerful man. In order to accuse him of anything, Tom had to have his facts straight. He could not ask for a warrant based on Fallon's recollection of the dead man's call, and he knew even now, holding this in his hands, it was not enough probable cause for a warrant. But he felt like he had a new direction to pursue—the correct direction.

Fallon was exhausted but could not sleep. Her mind was racing; she was alternately freezing and burning up, like she had some virus eating at her inside. The fact that Tom was married (might still be married, in fact) had receded somewhat in immediacy. Far worse was the fact that she had slapped him. Remorse kept her on edge, replying the scene over and over again. How stunned he looked. His pale cheek with that nasty red mark on it—a mark she caused! She cringed with guilt.

Just like my parents
, she thought miserably and wiped the tears from her eyes. The screaming. The slap. Horrible. And more to the point
: just like my mother
. Elizabeth Hughes's drunken rants and irrational behavior had caused her family an incalculable amount of pain. Her father had too, with his discreet infidelities. She had seen her mother go insane when confronting Preston about his mistresses, claw at his face, scream, and throw things. Fallon had hated those fights. Yet she had allowed herself to do the same thing. Fallon wondered if it was possible her mother had gotten pregnant with Evan for spite. Had she done it just to prove she could? Could she be that destructive?

Reflecting on those fights, the answer seemed obvious.

Fallon had never been drunk before in her life, but now she wondered if some alcoholic gene was expressing itself in her behavior. No, she admonished herself firmly. That was far too easy an excuse. Tonight could be explained by one thing: she was simply out of control with rage. She had wanted some excuse to yell at him for leaving her on Paxos, and no matter his reasons, she was going to have an explosive outburst to punish him.

She felt absolutely wretched.

She threw the covers off and, after a moment's indecisiveness, padded downstairs. The big loft was inhabited by darkness. Normally the mementos from her travels made her happy; they gave her access to the freedom she craved. But tonight, in the shadowy, skittering light, the gaping African masks she'd bought in Botswana seemed like horrified witnesses to a terrible crime. Fallon shivered and turned on a set of recessed lighting over her work area.

She thought of sending Tom a text or calling him but knew he didn't want to hear from her. A little roil of panic rocked her as she acknowledged he might never speak to her again and would, of course, be completely justified.

Curiosity and jealousy—why not admit it, she had no pride after tonight's actions—gnawed at her. She wanted to know about the wife. The anticipated pain would help blunt the guilt and perhaps fade the grotesque memory of her hand striking Tom. Fallon typed “Thomas Bishop” into Google.

To her surprise, several listings came up. It took a moment to understand what she was seeing. She recognized Tom by the green eyes blazing off the page, but nothing else about him seemed familiar. The caption read:
A Secret Service agent carries an injured woman from the World Trade Center
. He wore a dark suit though it was barely recognizable from all the white dust that covered him. His face was streaked with white dust and dirt, a nasty jagged cut bleeding on his cheek, but his eyes were pure and angry—deep, vivid green, smoldering with anger at a world suddenly covered with nuclear ash. The woman in his arms was limp and pulped purple and red with blood, but she gazed up at him with what could only be described as devout gratitude.

Fallon had absorbed all of the assembled iconography of the attacks, but she had never seen this picture. An overwhelming sense of loss seared through her, leaving her grasping. Through her own stupid, impulsive, criminal actions, she had lost this brave, serious man. She was having difficulty reading the blurred words through her tears. She swiped the annoying wetness from her eyes and cheeks.

The answer she was looking for was found on the next page. It was just one throwaway line, captioning the same photograph as the famous picture of Tom, but it suddenly gave her more context to the man than anything else would have:
Agent Bishop personally rescued at least fifteen people. Bishop's wife, Bethany Bishop, perished in the attacks.

The horror came back to her with a cataclysmic shudder as she acknowledged her own awfulness.
Fallon, listen to me.
She had not only refused to listen, she had assumed the very worst about him. She felt so very small.

She had to apologize, even if her words were flimsy and too minute to matter. Even if he never wanted to see her again, she had to apologize and at least convey that she knew she was wrong. So, so, so wrong.

Fallon dug deep for information about Bethany Bishop. She was a senior executive at a financial company officed on the 104th floor the North Tower. Personal memories of Bethany Bishop described a generous, accomplished woman who was loved by hundreds of people who knew her. She raised money for pediatric AIDS; she loved to sail; she collected antique blue glass.

These details hurt like bee stings. Fallon couldn't take any more, not just yet. She glumly stood up and looked around at her empty life.

At the wall of windows, Fallon pressed her forehead against the cold glass, looking through the lace of snow to the wide crescent of blackness: the Potomac was indistinguishable from sky. The world seemed full of violence, random losses, and cruelty. It refused to be ordered.

She felt incredibly guilty. Lonely, too, but she deserved to feel lonely. She tried to imagine Tom's loss but couldn't. She had been fortunate in that regard. The only person she had ever known who died was Antoine Campbell, and she didn't even know him really. He was just a voice on the telephone, begging for help.

Fallon shut her eyes. What a goddamned fool she was. To have been so eager to condemn him in order to justify her own rage. She had tried so hard to be the opposite of her mother and, in doing so, had become her.

The next morning, Fallon awoke completely calm. All her tears had been shed, and her mind was clear and clean. She operated with the hateful clarity of shock: it was ice-cold, precise, and implacable. The calm did not vanish as she got ready in the morning. It did not even leave when she opened the door and saw Tom standing there as he was most mornings. Seeing him, she felt the loss with her whole body, but her cold, protected machine mind knew it was unwise to burden Tom with her agony caused by her own character flaws. She did not want him to glimpse the pain and so the calm eclipsed her face, and she said nothing as they strolled to the elevator. She dared to glance up once and saw that he had been studying her. Shame filled her. Fallon urgently wanted to say something, but the right words refused to come, and so she left the silence intact.

For the first time she could ever remember, she was thankful for her work, which would consume her utterly. She attacked it with a certain cold ruthlessness she'd never experienced before. The calmness allowed her to think clearly. She dispatched inefficiency and ineptitude with remorseless action.

Her mother called her once to ask if she had her gowns altered. Fallon had become so accustomed to lying to her mother about even the most trivial matters in order to keep peace, but on this day, with a sense of strength, she said, honestly, “No, I haven't.”

“I cannot believe you'd disappoint me this way,” Elizabeth sighed and began to launch into a monologue about the responsibility of the First Family.

Fallon cut her off. “Mother, is your life so constricted and small that you care more about a ball gown than the fact that I was accused of murder or Evan is languishing because you don't care enough to find him a proper nanny and preschool program?”

After a stunned little pause, Elizabeth shot back, “You are just like your father.”

“No, Mother,” Fallon replied. “I am just like you.”

She waited for a sense of regret, but it did not come. There was nothing. Just coldness. And under that, a sense of relief. She was finished enabling her parents' bad behavior. She'd spent her whole life attempting to please and appease them, to conform to their idea of what she should be. But those days were over. She knew she had just thrown down the gauntlet. Either they would all recover and be a normal family, or they wouldn't. Either way, Fallon was finished lying about what she wanted and who she was.

Tom Bishop was in the control room writing an email to Leah when Kevin White came inside. “The taps and traps caught two hang-up calls last night on Fallon's phone but the calls were unknown. The pen register came back unknown.”

Tom mulled that for a moment. Circumventing the pen register and the taps and traps showed a very high level of technical sophistication on the part of the caller. Not that he was surprised. He remembered the meeting at Midnight Research and wondered if they had cracked the entire US government yet.

A sonar ping rippled through his mind. Something …

“Tom, there's something I'd like to ask you.”

“Shoot.”

“This is difficult to ask, but are you seeing Ms. Hughes socially?”

Oh shit.

Tom made a concerted effort to not flinch. Struggling to keep his expression completely neutral, he answered, “No.” He hoped he was successful because there was a ferocious roar in his head, and he could not hear anything over it.

Kevin's eyes were probing, watching, waiting for some indication that he was lying. “No?”

“No. I am not seeing Ms. Hughes socially,” Tom answered with more certainty. “Absolutely not.”

“Okay then.” Kevin stood up. “Well, I wanted to let you know about the pen register.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

Kevin hesitated. Tom sensed Kevin's questions. Kevin was questioning his own instincts, which were fighting ferociously with his desire to believe that all Secret Service agents, particularly the agent most responsible for his protectee, would tell the complete truth when asked a direct question.

After Kevin departed, Tom looked back to the email he had been drafting and deleted it. It did not seem important now. Needing some air, he told the others he would be back soon and drove to the old Post Office building. He took the elevator down to the basement, to the shooting range. The monthly weapons requalification was one administrative task that every agent from the deputy director down to the guy hired just four weeks ago was obligated to complete.

Tom scanned the lanes and saw a female agent with whom he had spent a lonesome Thanksgiving in Norfolk, Virginia babysitting the president's brother. A freak snowstorm had blown through and there had been nothing to do but sit in the truck at the end of the street and talk for eight solid hours.

He remembered her name suddenly—Kayla Barnes. He'd have to say hello later.

Meanwhile, he claimed a lane, fastened his eye and ear protection, and began shooting. Normally he scored a perfect 300, but it quickly became apparent that today would not be like other days. His shots were all over the place.

As he reloaded, Kayla waved. She pulled off her ear protection and walked over.

The “No Talking” signs posted over the benches was mostly ignored but respected enough that the agents discreetly kept their voices down during the after-shooting banter.

“Hey, Bishop,” she said. “You've been on the grapevine lately.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She pulled back the slide of her weapon, checking to make sure it was clear. “Just rumors.”

“What kind of rumors?” Tom asked.

“Just that you might be taking the service in ‘Secret Service' a little too far with Avalon.”

A fine flush washed over him. The Secret Service, like any organization, paid attention to rumors, and this one was tantalizing enough to be investigated seriously if it caught fire. Not to mention it had the distinct disadvantage of being true. Or it had been, for a while.

Tom realized Kayla was watching for his reaction, which meant the rumor had gained some traction. He smirked. “She's hot. Keep those rumors going.”

Kayla laughed. Tom was relieved—she seemed to dismiss the idea of by-the-book Tom Bishop fooling around with his protectee. She moved on to other gossip.

After ten minutes of catching up, Tom washed his hands and returned to his government vehicle, a white Chrysler Sebring. Once on Pennsylvania Avenue, he swerved into the parking lot of a convenience store and turned off the ignition.

Fuck. Everybody knows.

Tom Bishop was not a man who panicked often, but a distinctly trapped sensation was descending upon him. Tom had been a Boy Scout growing up; he'd been a United States Marine officer. And now a Secret Service agent. He had built his life on a foundation of honesty and trustworthiness—just like the Secret Service motto,
worthy of trust and confidence
. He wasn't worthy of those—or of honor, that most sacred part of himself. Sneaking around with a protectee did not exactly comport with the image he had of himself. The fact that it was definitely over did not help matters.

He decided quite suddenly that he would go back home to New Jersey for the weekend. It had been a while since he'd been back, and since the inauguration was coming up, travel would become increasingly difficult. He had so much time saved up he could spend six months away from the office—with pay—but decided a weekend would suffice. He would come back feeling clearer, knowing what to do about the problem of Fallon Hughes.