At Any Cost (2 page)

The possibility of being trapped in the car with Tom Bishop and her own tangle of confused emotions made her throat close and oxygen seem like a suddenly rare resource. She had to physically move, clear her head and give herself an opportunity to get a grip.

“We are going to walk, if that's okay.” Not that she needed his permission.

“Yes, ma'am,” he replied. He lifted his wrist and spoke into his sleeve to notify the motorcade that Avalon would be walking.

“We're going to the corner of 15th and K, if you want to let the drivers know.”

Tom Bishop radioed the information to the vehicles. As they walked in the direction of McPherson Square, she was acutely aware of Tom beside her. Normally her Secret Service detail was part of her background, but not today. He was pretty much the only thing she could think of, though she tried not to look terribly interested in him. She was still scrambling for the resources to pretend this was perfectly normal. She wasn't a particularly good actor though, and the best she could muster was a neutral expression.

Pedestrian traffic was heavy, despite the blustery cold, and Tom stayed close. As he walked abreast of her, others were forced to move aside. When Fallon tried to step out of the way of a harried businessman, Tom smoothly grabbed her arm, keeping her next to him and forcing the businessman to step into the grass with an annoyed grunt. Tom's quick contact felt jarring, even impolite. The pressure where his fingers clasped her bicep was solid and thrilling, and she hated that she liked it so much.

Fallon chanced a glimpse of his stoic profile. Even with his game face on, the man was startling attractive.

His dark hair was maybe just a tiny bit longer than the Secret Service officially approved of, carelessly swept off his smooth forehead and emphasizing the cold distrust in his eyes. He was the kind of agent who makes you feel good about paying taxes, all polished angles and cold, hard competence.

She wasn't usually attracted to the buttoned up type, considering she was one herself. She liked the artists and the brilliant academics—the ones who made her see more of the world than what was right in front of her. But Tom defied all her conventions and rules.

She had never seen him working before and despite the questions and miasma of shock, she decided she liked it. He might be an incompetent jerk when it came to relationships, but she had no doubt that if a bullet came whizzing in her direction, he'd jump in front of it. Professional obligation and all that.

“I got a strange phone call,” Fallon said.

“Strange how?”

“Somebody called needing a lawyer but wouldn't meet at the office. We're going to see this mysterious caller at the coffee shop. He sounded distraught.”

“Did he say why he was distraught, or why he wouldn't meet at your office?”

Fallon paused before answering, judging how much to say. She didn't want him to think she was naïve for agreeing to meet someone who might very well be a recently released St. Elizabeth's patient, or worse. “He said he was being followed and wanted to meet in a public place. Plus, he mentioned a rather obscure government official. I want to find out what is up with this guy.”

Tom reached the door before she could and held it open for her. She slid past him, noticing the slightest whiff of his cologne as she passed. The Daily Grind was warm and overstuffed, infused with the aroma of roasted coffee. Fallon took quick account of the customers, seeking out anyone who might be Antoine Campbell.

“I guess he isn't here yet,” Fallon murmured, as much to herself as Tom.

At the counter, the barista recognized her and asked if she was having her usual, a soothing raspberry tea. “No, not the usual. How about a jumbo pumpkin spice latte with double whipped cream, caramel sauce, and can you dump some of those chocolate covered espresso beans on top?”

“Bad day or good day?”

“Honestly, I just don't know,” Fallon replied, still trying to get the mental feng shui right. She spontaneously added a plain cup of coffee to her order. Black coffee, neat scotch: Tom Bishop was a man with simple tastes, luxurious tastes, things distilled to their purest essence. She wished she didn't remember that.

After paying for the drinks, she handed the cup of black coffee to Tom. His eyebrows lifted in surprise at Fallon's casual act of thoughtfulness.

“I thought you might like something warm.” When he still hesitated, she added: “It's not poisoned. Too much.”

Tom smiled then. The smile transformed him. It softened his whole face, giving him an aspect of sudden sweetness that she found disarming. White, straight teeth signaled that he had perfect genetics, but the lines around his smile, like little parentheses, reminded her that he loved to laugh. Under that Secret Service poker face was a man who loved life.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the cup.

“Let's sit down.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She bristled at the formality. “Why are you calling me ‘ma'am'?”

“Protocol.”

Of course. Protocol. The system people relied on when they could not be themselves.

She sat down to wait. Tom sat across from her. He periodically glanced beyond her forehead to the door, or the large side windows, but otherwise he seemed perfectly content in the silence.

His calmness had to be a facade. There was no way he wasn't acutely aware of the shared past that lay between them, the questions that were circling around her head like a cartoon corona.

Well, she wasn't going to be the one to mention Paxos. She had moved on. She'd finished law school, found a real job, made a life for herself. She barely recognized the bohemian yoga hippie she'd been, wandering through Europe with no thought to the future. It was embarrassing, really, recalling how utterly stupid she'd been back then.

She was smarter now. Certainly sharp enough to play this cool.

Fallon took a sip of the pumpkin spice latte and used the opportunity to study Tom again. He seemed like an abstract concept, a miracle and a curse at the same time, sitting in front of her. Within nose-punching distance.

That was probably not an idea she wanted to pursue.

“Antoine Campbell sounded really upset. I hope he's okay,” Fallon said.

“Maybe he's stuck in traffic,” Tom suggested.

True, traffic on the Beltway might be heavy; it often was, even in the middle of the afternoon.

She wanted to ask how he was doing, or what he was doing, but those questions would be ridiculous. They would only emphasize how strange this whole arrangement was—how utterly artificial they were being with each other, as if they'd never met before.

She realized with dismay that she hoped he might give her some kind of small, private signal that he remembered their shared past in Greece and he respected their time together. But when her gaze once again met his, she saw only cool, vast, imperturbable nothingness. Pristine Siberian wilderness.

He was blocking her out intentionally. She recognized the blankness as a defense. Once, she'd been able to vault past it, to the impossibly sweet, generous, gentle man inside. There was no sign of that guy today and never would be again.

The logical lawyer side of her personality insisted she should despise him after the way he left her. But she hadn't loved him logically. She'd loved him passionately, with searing, aching intuition—all heart, no brains. Gwen Atwell, her best friend, would tell her she was an absolute fool, which was probably true.

Jangling bells signaled the opening door and Fallon looked up, expecting Antoine Campbell. A curious old man with a sporty felt cap and a red muffler entered the shop with a stack of newspapers, bringing a gust of cold air in with him.

“How is your family?” Tom asked, surprising her with the personal question. “I hear your brother is keeping his agents pretty busy.”

Fallon spontaneously smiled, touched that Tom mentioned Evan, her six-year-old autistic brother; he was the one person she could honestly say she loved unconditionally. “He's amazing,” she said with more passion than she had intended. She was never much good at keeping her feelings a mystery. “Why, what have you heard?”

“Not much. I've heard he goes to the Air and Space Museum every day.”

Evan was fascinated with airplanes and math. The Air and Space Museum was one of the only places he would talk. It was like he could relate to people only through airplanes. Fallon tried to juggle her weekend schedule so she was at the office in the evening through the night so she her days were free to take him to the museum. She knew her parents wouldn't do it, and it was important for the boy to actually spend some time with family instead of Secret Service agents, babysitters, special needs teachers, personal assistants, minders, and the various pols who orbited around her parents like buzzards.

At the thought of the little sandy-haired boy and all his haunting complexity, her heart squeezed. She loved him very much, painfully and protectively. She hoped she loved him with enough breadth and intensity to make up for the fact that her parents were less than loving toward him.

Her mother felt overwhelmed by his needs, and her own, so she drank to make all of it irrelevant. Since she'd abdicated her parental responsibility, Fallon stepped in. Nobody else was going to. Certainly not her father.

“I heard he toured Andrews Air Force Base. Ran away and slipped into the pilot's seat of a C-130. The agents were panicked, thinking they'd lost their protectee.”

Fallon giggled, remembering the incident that had scandalized her parents, though they were more angry than amused. They thought of him as a problem child, someone who refused to yield to discipline, instead of a boy who could no more alter his love of aircraft than he could change the color of his eyes.

“He's very self directed. If there's an airplane within Frisbee distance, he's going to find it, and he's not going to wait for you to catch up.”

“How about your parents? How are they?”

“Good,” Fallon said automatically. She didn't think Tom would gossip if she told him the truth, but she felt protective of her family, however crazy they were. In fact, the less uttered about them, the better.

She'd had a rocky relationship with her parents for most of her life. It had something to do with feeling like she wasn't living up to their expectations. Her airy-fairy love and peace and butterflies existence seemed trivial to them. Over the years, they'd all settled into a mutually disappointing relationship.

It had reached a breaking point during the campaign; even now, things between them were more strained than usual. She was emotionally estranged from both of them now. Like most presidential campaigns, her father's had become ugly.

From his earliest days as an oil executive, Preston Taylor Hughes had flouted his marriage vows, and though his team was prepared to handle a whisper campaign that questioned his morality, they had been stunned by how hard President Ballard's people had hit on the theme that Hughes was a ladies' man and serial adulterer, and therefore could not be trusted with the presidency. Ballard's reelection team was headed by his longtime political guru, Gil Parry, who had masterminded Ballard's political climb from his earliest days. To a man like Parry, Hughes's personal life was a gift on a golden platter. His surrogates had leaked reports by “knowledgeable sources within the Hughes campaign” that Hughes and his wife were close to splitting. These same “knowledgeable sources” reported late-night screaming matches that featured thrown objects, vile language, and threats of divorce. No matter how many times Hughes denied marital problems, or his wife Elizabeth tried to laugh off the rumors off on daytime TV shows, the story had legs.

Accusations and tabloid tell-alls by women from Hughes's past added momentum and energy to the gathering storm.

Hughes fought back with an “above it all” strategy crafted by Jerry Chambliss, an inside-the-Beltway veteran of many political wars and Hughes's closest friend and advisor. It had been Chambliss who made sure the loudest of the Montana ladies with stories to tell quietly went away with large sums of cash.

Despite his full-force smear campaign, Ballard's henchmen missed the larger scandal, the real scandal that would have likely torpedoed Hughes's aims for the presidency. Six-year-old Evan Hughes was not Preston Taylor Hughes's child. For all his political muckraking and caterwauling about ladies on the side—which was true—and all his millions spent on opposition research, Gil Parry missed seeing Elizabeth Hughes's vulnerability.

Fallon was thankful for her mother's ability to hide in plain sight, and prayed that Evan's parentage remained a closely held family secret, not for the sake of her father's career, but for Evan. As a special needs child, he needed to be protected and cherished for the person he was, not used as a token in a bitter political battle.

It had been Fallon who noticed something odd about him when he was still a toddler. She pointed out to her mother that instead of playing with his small toy cars, he would line them up by size. Instantly defensive, Elizabeth Hughes dismissed Fallon's concerns; she'd taken Fallon's prompt as a baseless attack on her parenting.

Evan had been slow to walk and to talk, but when he began to exhibit poor motor skills, Fallon grew alarmed. She consulted Evan's pediatrician, but he said that Evan was too young for these symptoms to mean anything. Finally, two years ago, he'd been diagnosed with autism.

When Evan and her parents moved to D.C. after the election, Fallon felt relieved. She'd be able to see him more often, and she'd be able to see to his health care.

Meanwhile, she devoured every book she could find about autism, and it was she who played with him and loved him and took joy in his accomplishments. Her life might be a little constrained and dim right now, but Evan was definitely one for the plus column.

Fallon glanced at her watch. “It's been almost an hour. If he's coming at all, he's very late.” She looked around the little coffeehouse in case she had been so confounded by Tom Bishop that she missed her mark. Disappointed, she sank against her chair back. “I guess I've been stood up.”