The Parnell Affair (22 page)

“Well, where they were, anyway,” he said, considering.  “No, no, where they are now, too.  They're probably at the OSP.”

“Oh, well that stands to reason, I guess,” she said.  “All sorts of intel has gone there, although they haven't said why.”

“I found that out, too,” he said.  “The OSP is writing a brief of the Administration's case for war, which the Secretary of State will deliver to the UN next month.”

“Interesting,” she said, stressing each syllable.  “I'm no analyst—despite having been officially moved from the Directorate of Operations to Intelligence—but we could read a couple of things into that.  One: the people at the OSP don't know the Niger docs are fake or, two, they know but want them around to ensure the other intel they select for this brief supports them.  You said you know where they were?”

“Yeah and it looks like we were a little slow on the uptake,” he said.  “Jon Thoblon had them.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Pretty sure,” he said.  “You remember you said he was at Joe's meeting, they came out of his briefcase, he's the one who handled them?”

“That's provocative, I'll admit,” she said.  “But it doesn't follow that he'd go on carrying them around with him.”

“Not by itself,” he said.  “But about a week ago, at a State Department meeting to transfer intel from the Bureau of Arms Control and International Security to the OSP, Thoblon physically prevented a fella from INR from attending.”

“That's even more provocative,” she said.

“Tell me about it,” he said.  “It was the simplest answer to where they were, and I missed it.  If we'd thought of it a week ago, we could have asked Joe to slip in there and do things I wouldn't want full knowledge of afterward.”

“Ha, I guess,” she said.  “Certainly would have been easier than stealing them from the Pentagon.  I could give it a try, I suppose.  Only my
Le Femme Nikita
costume is at the dry cleaners until Thursday.”

Tobias made a low noise in his chest.  “You would look
incredibly
sexy in that,” he said huskily.  “God, you really do look beautiful tonight.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly, enjoying that subtle loss of expression a man's face assumes when his interest is entirely captivated.  “How did you find out all of this?” she asked, and then broke the spell with a sidelong glance at a couple passing on the sidewalk.

“A guy from State,” Tobias said.  “The one Jon Thoblon chucked out of his office.  You're right, though: getting them from the Pentagon could be tough.  It has happened: the Pentagon Papers.  Still.”

“If I could get a list of its members,” she said, “the OSP's, we could try to find one among them who'd leak.”

“How would you get that?” he asked.

She shrugged.  “I'm being made the manager of a team of analysts,” she said.  “I'll have access to plenty.”

“That's one way,” he said.  “You know what?  It could be that they'll send the Niger docs along to the UN for the Security Council meeting.  Only someone in-the-know—like you—could tell they're fakes, I'm guessing, so they may think they'll fool the diplomats at the UN.”

“They could,” she agreed, nodding her head as she thought more about it.  “And the UN leaks like a sieve.”

“I got to get up there for it,” he said.

“I'm really grateful,” she said with surprising earnestness, placing a hand on his forearm, looking him in the eyes.

“My pleasure,” he said.

“You're not—” she began to ask about his job security and then changed tack.  “What does your editor think of all this?  He doesn't mind you neglecting your beat at
Congress?”

“No, don't worry about that,” he said with a smile.  He motioned to the car and they walked down the steps.  “I'll tell them about Secretary McLean addressing the UN—which hasn't been officially released—and it'll allow them to scoop the competition.  That'll make them happy.  More to the point, though, it'll unquestionably indicate a prelude to war.  Wartime on a newspaper, as on a battleship, means all hands on deck.”

They spoke little at first, as they drove out of the city and into Maryland: the questions answered—or half answered—vied with new questions for the attention of their inner thoughts.  The context of an evening out together asserted itself, however, and they laughed away the momentary embarrassment of their silence.  With self-deprecating nonchalance, which only age seems capable of imparting, they admitted the nervousness and vanity in which they'd both indulged earlier.  That simple step toward memory lane led them back to similar though far more nervous nights from their youths, the anxiety anesthetized into sentiment by time.  They were laughing before they reached the river.

The restaurant was to a crab shack what a Turner is to a jailhouse tattoo.  Elegant without ostentation, possessed of a luxury of space as all restaurants appear to those who live within the confines of a city; the view of the bay through the south-facing wall of windows was breathtaking.  Or would have been, if either Sally or Tobias had noticed.  The restaurant was a part of a small but charming hotel; the reception desk had to be passed to reach the maître d'.  Sally wondered just how active her subconscious had been when she'd selected this restaurant.  She tried to steal a glance at Tobias, to see if he was reading anything into the proximity of so many available, private bedrooms.  The next second, however, they stood before the dining room and Sally surveyed the dozen or so couples enjoying their own nights out. 
Some of the men noticed her and risked a lingering glance; some of the women hated her with their eyes while others seemed to ignore her and stole shamelessly appraising looks at Tobias; most were involved in their own conversations; some intimate, some heated though suppressed, a few even bored; young couples on dates and a twenty-third anniversary.  The dining room was filled with people living their lives and Sally was finally there, among such people again, a life of her own to live.  Tobias could see the excitement dancing in her eyes and that she heard neither his compliment of the place or the waiter's beckon.  He guided her forward with a hand gently at the small of her back and she returned to the present immediately as they found their table.

Sally had pressed against the few fingers that had touched her until she felt the whole of his hand on her.  She felt also the reluctance, the regret as he let his hand drop.  And though entirely irrational, she expected his lips would find the back of her neck.  She knew, consciously, that they wouldn't but her skin tingled with expectation nevertheless.  Rejoining the living was not merely a return to the simple pleasures of the board.  As they talked quietly about the restaurant, what they'd drink, the menu, Tobias touched her fingers with his; not holding hands but a light, tactile attention.  Sally found herself as fascinated by the sight of his touch as by its sensation.  The waiter's appearance avoided another silence but he wasn't appreciated for it.  The interruptions dinner service would impose seemed intrusive to Sally until she remembered they had the entire night ahead of them.  She tried to shift her seat to keep the hotel's reception desk—with its clerk handing out keys—out of her peripheral vision.  She tried not to speak in innuendos.  She tried not to hear them.  She tried.  But after the food arrived and Tobias noticed her watching his mouth, he made a joke and laughed away a little of the not unpleasant tension.  But she continued watching his mouth, thinking about what he could do with his mouth, his lips; what she could do with hers.  Her desire was not merely physical, though: she wanted to return to the human race entirely; to be a disappointed woman no longer; to strip away trepidation as she longed to strip off her clothes and be again a whole woman, a lover.  But Tobias and Sally were not there yet.  Until now, they were less trusting each other as damning consequence and hoping.

The dinner over, they stepped out into the cool fall evening.  Sally had her coat around her shoulders and her hand through Tobias's arm.  As they walked slowly, reluctantly toward her car, he asked if she would like to look at the water.  It was a moonless night, and the little cove upon which the hotel restaurant was situated had few houses to define its shores; he was asking something else.  She breathed her agreement and they passed through a trestle set amongst a tall hedge.  A narrow path of slate wound down to a few tables and benches at the water's edge.

Away from the hotel's lights, the night closed in around them.  The evening sounds of crickets hummed indistinctly beneath the tide lapping against the low seawall, which lined the waterfront.  With each slow step, Sally's thoughts increased in speed and urgency but groped among the myriad conflicted concerns her circumstances imposed.  She'd said many things a married woman should not, that night and before, but she'd not taken those steps out of marriage that Joe had taken with Ms Fromsett.  What had seemed an exciting, sensual first step back to the land of the living—this inevitable first kiss; not the tame greeting of friends
’ kiss or tired goodnight of an ancient couple but the apex of an enveloping embrace, more passionately akin to a sexual act—now smothered under unintended implication: what if all she felt was a betrayal of Joe?  Not the dizzy ecstasy she'd vividly imagined at times during the preceding weeks, the lustful reaction to a man she wanted mind and body, but a startling realization that no matter how disappointed her marriage had become she could not disentangle herself from it.  What then?

“Can't see a thing down here,” she said.

“We don't have to go down,” he said.  “Would you rather go back?”

“No, no,” she said.  To herself she added: alright, subconscious, if you screw this up for me, I'm throwing us both in the water.  “I just mean, I think it'll take a minute for our eyes to adjust to the darkness.”

They halted when their feet crunched on gravel.  Suddenly feeling violently warm, Sally pulled off her coat and dropped it over the back of a nearby bench.

“It's nice down here,” he murmured, as she turned back from the bench.

“Yes,” she sighed.  His hand was on her hip but she wasn't sure if he'd put it there or she had.

“It occurred to me,” he said slowly, as their features grew more distinct in the faint light, “that as often as we've talked, I've never been alone with you.”

“Alone with you,” she breathed and stepped closer.

Whatever anxious patter remained in her mind was cast aside, lost in the rush of every other thought that flew toward him.  The look on his face as his arms encircled her was of amazement, boyish joy, and lover's need.  He'd changed for her; in the taking of a breath he'd changed from a man whom she found interesting, intelligent, handsome and sexy to something else: all those things but now also something needful for no other reason than that he was he.  And that was enough; a feeling that takes a paragraph to describe takes only a moment to feel; her desire to act upon it, to join with him, however briefly, animated her body as if it were an entity apart.  Far from feeling carried away, she urged it on, surging upward in Tobias's embrace to find his mouth.

Throughout the drive home, whenever she shifted gears, her hand found his or his arm or thigh, if only for a moment.  He would then kiss her hand or bare shoulder or neck or cheek.  They laughed at themselves, at the unspoken restrictions they'd breached and those they still obeyed.  They pulled over once, pretending to look at a map, and were secretly thankful another car's headlights raked across them—thankful they hadn't gone further than more kissing, in a car at least.

They spent a few more minutes together in front of his building before he reluctantly withdrew.  She felt a childish curiosity at what he'd be thinking and doing after she left, when she saw the state in which she was leaving him.  Perhaps it would have disappointed her to learn all he did was collapse into his favorite chair upon reaching his apartment; perhaps, but his thoughts of her may have been gratifying.

“Well, to hell with it,” he told the room.  “If it's a mistake then it's a mistake.”

His smile and inward stare were not those of a man who thinks he's making a mistake.

His ME was more reluctant than Tobias had intimated to Sally to letting Tobias attend the Security Council meeting in which Secretary of State McLean would present the United States case for war with Iraq.  The paper was pleased Tobias obtained unofficial confirmation of Secretary McLean's attendance but plenty of wrangling in
Congress needed covering as well.  Only Tobias's threat to use some of his vacation days—he never used all of his yearly allotment in any event—swayed the editors.  He'd go one way or another and they felt it best not to alienate him.  The long train ride to New York was much more peaceful than his last, but Tobias's mind was, if anything, more disquieted: how to find someone who knew of the Niger docs, to solicit a leak; what if war were approved; and what of Sally?  All such thoughts contended for preeminence.

Though the Security Council was not due to convene until the next day, the UN nevertheless had much to accomplish first.  While delegates made speeches to mostly empty seats in General Assembly Hall, Tobias stalked the halls to which he was allowed access, looking for someone who could set him on the right path.  By in large, he met only other reporters.  With no other resource, he listened to those around him and learned that McLean would arrive at three to meet with the British Foreign Secretary Jack Hay for a last consultation.  It was generally agreed by observers that this meeting—as well as the use of the public lobby entrance by the Secretary of State—was a secret deliberately kept poorly so that video of their meeting would give the impression of greater unity.