The Parnell Affair (32 page)

“Shit,” Tobias said, drawing out the word.  He leaned back smiling.  “All the way to Alabama.  He has a house there.  Goes down every year at this time for some kind of Christmas Eve Masons' meeting.”

Sally shook her head as she swallowed her coffee.  “No,” she said.  “I know what that is.  Not the Masons.”

“Not the—” Tobias began.

“No, not the Klan,” she laughed.  “Much older.  Never mind.”  She smiled with so much sultry pleasure in her eyes, Tobias wondered if she were about to change the subject: she didn't.  “So he took the Niger docs home,” she said, “and he'll be out of the house all night tomorrow?”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” he said, sitting forward and lowering his voice.

“What did you think I'd do with this information?” she asked, still smiling.

“What
we'll
do,” he corrected.  She rolled her eyes.  “Hey, I survived enough gun battles—and being kidnapped by the FARC once—in South America not to be thought of as some wilting flower.”

“I don't think that,” she said.

“Anyway, I could just throw a big chunk of money at his cleaning staff—” he began.

“That's not a sure thing, either,” she interrupted.  “And we don't want them stolen.  Better to do it my way: in, out, and use a digital camera.  That way the docs become evidence of an ongoing crime that the Administration is concealing. 
If
they remain in his possession”

“If you think you can do it,” he said.  “But I'm coming, too.”

There was no mistaking her small smile now.  “Good,” she said.  “Actually, I need you.  In more than one way.”  She reached for his hand across the table with her left hand, while her right withdrew her cell phone.  “We need a cover for leaving town and this phone call to Joe is long, long overdue.”  Tobias indicated his willingness to give her some privacy, imagining what she was about to do for the benefit of the NSA eavesdroppers as well as her husband and herself: she tightened her grip on Tobias's hand.

“Hi, Joe,” she said a moment later.  “I have to tell you something, partly to explain why certain people thought I was snooping around and partly because I just have to tell you.”

Joe recognized the professional tone to her voice, despite being roused from sleep by her call, but he noticed something behind it as well.  “I don't ask for any explanations,” he said.  “Tell me what you will.”

“When you recognized that strong feelings were growing between you and Ms Fromsett,” Sally said, taking a breath before driving on with words she'd practiced many times, but never felt real before now, “you told me, even asked my permission, before anything—god, I don't know what to call it—extramarital happened between you.  It's taken me a lot longer to get to that place but I have.  You remember that journalist who came to the house, Tobias Hallström?”

“Yes,” Joe said, his voice concealed nothing of what he felt: hope that the long, sad and lonely episode in his wife's marriage might finally end but also his own sadness at truly and with finality losing his wife.

“Well, I'm falling in love with him, Joe,” she said.  They shared a silence, as at the passing of a friend, each breathing deeply and audibly over the phone, keeping tears at bay with a bulwark of other happiness.  “I wanted to tell you before anything too extramarital happened,” she said with a smile in her voice and only a little crack.  Then she sighed and a different voice said, “I think my sneaking around with him is what misled some officious person in the Administration into thinking I was snooping: Tobias knows how preoccupied I've been with the Niger documents.  He's done a little asking around about them.  I told him to stop, that we should just step aside and let others take the lead.  Hopefully things will calm down now.  Anyway, I wanted to tell you.”

“I'm glad that you did,” Joe said all but inaudibly.  “I'm glad.  I really am, though I can't help feeling a little sadness as well.  There's a little sadness in your voice, too.  That's only natural.  I wish you all the happiness in the world; you certainly deserve it after all this time sacrificing for others.”

“You've been a wonderful husband, as I've always felt,” she said softly, “even as our marriage ended.  I'm sorry I can't be in Paris for Christmas: tell the girls I'll call them Christmas morning.  Tobias and I are going to drive down to Florida tonight; well, start tonight.  We wanted to spend the holiday somewhere warm.”

“I see,” Joe said; only Sally would notice the question and perhaps reproach in his voice: he knew she had any eavesdroppers in mind and he did not for a moment believe she was not still running her operation, despite the danger it posed.  He knew, however, that he could do nothing but assist her in this small way, by playing along.  “I'll tell them to expect your call.  Goodbye, Sally,” he said lingeringly.

With funeral quiet, she said, “Goodbye, Joe.”

She closed her phone and met Tobias's eyes.  Upon her face was something he'd never seen in her: fear.  Not fear of some impending action, but the delayed unbridling of an emotion long suppressed.  He guessed at how many times—particularly those last few months—she must have rehearsed that conversation, loaded as it was with years of emotional toil.  The fear melted away, however, the longer they sat silently together; her hand warmed and the color returned to her cheeks.  It's quite a thing to be chosen by a woman like you, he thought: but there's no time for reflection now.

“So, we're going to take a little trip,” he said.

“Yes,” she breathed, only half listening to his words, though seemingly preoccupied with the lips that said them.

“We'll need to pack and I'd like to stop by the office,” he said.

“Hmm?” she murmured and then returned to the present.  “Yes, of course.  We should pack and get moving.  I'll need a few things from home.  Why don't we take separate cabs to go pack and then I'll meet you—where?”

“At the paper,” he said.  “There's someone there—who always works late because he can't be bothered to show up before eleven—who can probably pluck Thoblon's address out of his memory.  Plus—and I blame you for this—I don't want to get a map off the internet from my apartment in case my connection is tapped.  See what you've done to me?”

“I'm so proud,” she said.

They spent several warm minutes in the cold outside the diner before walking to the hospital to find taxis.

Armed with directions, Thoblon's address, as much cash as they could take from the ATMs, and a few tools of Sally's—to say nothing of the will to perform the necessary—they went to National Airport and rented a car.  Sally's car may have had a tracer on it somewhere and so, while they knew Tobias's rental of a car would be known via his credit card, their exact movements would be more obscure in a rented car.  He had no worries about claiming the rental on his expense sheet this time.

They drove through the night, driving in shifts while one slept or tried to sleep or feigned sleep.  During Sally's driving shifts, she went through the routine of shaking surveillance, though she spotted none.  It was time for professionalism, for exacting and single-minded prosecution of their mission.  Tobias had never before taken part in the theft of anything for a story, though he naturally knew that things had been stolen by others and sold to his paper.  The effect was more bracing than troubling, though he sensed he was crossing a line journalists should never cross: if he were to label himself afterward, what label could he use now?  And yet the specter of a corrupt government deceitfully manipulating a country into war with forged documents so forcefully intruded upon his thoughts that he could not declare even burglary a crime if performed in pursuit of the truth.

Twenty-four hours later, after a brief—and uncomfortably distracting—pause at a roadside motel (sleeping in shifts, while one watched the parking lot), they reached Alabama.  Dropping their rented car in a strip mall’s parking lot, they took to the woods behind it.  Sally had used the online maps to determine a covered and concealed route to Jon Thoblon's house that would take them through some wooded and hilly terrain.  She brought a knapsack with them and once deep within the woods, they paused to don the dark clothing it contained.  Tobias added a black woolen jacket he rarely wore to the dark trousers he had on: Sally changed into a dark blue running suit.  She had also brought a pair of nylon stockings, to be used over their heads.  It was thought that this precaution—along with a nearly OCD use of a large lint brush over their outer garments—would keep them from leaving any hairs behind, which could be used for DNA identification.  They left the masks rolled above their brows as they hurried through the woods.

Night had fallen and with it the peculiar stillness, like expectancy, always found in a dark wood.  The silence made an unbearable din out of the crunching leaves beneath their feet and a gale of each breath.  Tobias had joked about their appearance and mission as they'd changed, likening both to the French Resistance: in the speechless infiltration to Thoblon's house, the similarities lost all humor.  He had no doubt that if caught in the act, the Administration would not hesitate to try them for treason, convict from the bench, and execute them without mercy.  The question of why he was there echoed through his mind again and again as they ran on, like the tolling of a bell.  And then the thought occurred to him, could he turn back?  Could I ask her to?  Pushing aside for a moment what she wanted and what he expected of her, he wondered if he wanted to turn back or, if not, why he pressed on.  Another mile ended, another mile began and Tobias answered himself as his subconscious usually did, with music.  Perhaps it was the December chill in the air, though hardly cold in Alabama.  Led Zeppelin's
No Quarter
overwhelmed the crunching leaves and labored breath.  “They carry news that must get through / they choose the path where no one goes / they hold no quarter / they ask no quarter.”

Ahead through the trees, light danced in the motion of their running.  Sally slowed their pace, brought them to a walk and then to stillness as their breathing quieted.  Tobias wondered how she had guided them; he hadn't seen her use a compass.  Sally selected an observation point and, crouching, they made their way to the edge of the wood.  Over the wide green lawn, past several old and majestic trees, stood Jon Thoblon's plantation-style house.

Probably built in the 1920s to resemble an actual plantation mansion, though with all the modern conveniences, Thoblon's house had wide porches running the length of the house, a colonnade of supports,  neoclassical touches alongside the practical necessity of laying out a house—in the age before air conditioning—to capture every ounce of breeze and channel it through each room.  Stables and a kitchen building stood away from the house, both converted to guest or servant's quarters, seemingly, and both dark.  Indeed, in the main house, only the front room and one upstairs room were lit.  It made sense: Thoblon and his wife had only been home a day and unexpectedly.

“How do we know they're still here?” Tobias asked.

“I saw some movement behind the curtains upstairs,” Sally whispered back from behind a pair of small binoculars.  “I just hope it’s not the help or this will get complicated.”

“Shit,” Tobias cursed.  “I hadn't thought of servants.  What if some are here?”

“We set the house on fire,” she said simply.

“What!” he gasped.

“The servants would rush out and stand in front of the house, waiting for the fire department,” she said, turning her head but not her eyes toward Tobias.  “We could then slip upstairs and find the Niger documents.”

“This is getting very real,” he mumbled.

“Shh,” she said, returning to her binoculars at a sound.

The light upstairs had gone out and a door had closed behind the house.  A few minutes passed before a large SUV came around the far side of the house and braked in front.  Mrs. Thoblon came out the front door and walked down the steps; Jon shouted something and waved an arm from the driver's side window; Mrs. Thoblon swiped at the air in front of her and stamped back to the house and there locked the front door's dead bolt before returning to the SUV.  In an impatient screech of rubber, the vehicle sped off down the half-mile driveway that wound amongst stately trees to the upscale community’s circling road.

“Bad good news,” Sally whispered.  “The door is locked but she wouldn't have done that if servants were here.”

“Whew,” Tobias said.  “Alright, let's go.”

“Easy,” Sally said, keeping him crouched with a hand on his shoulder.  “Let's give them a half hour.  People sometimes forget things when they leave for parties and then rush back for them.”

Thirty minutes dragged themselves by in the cold darkness of the wood.  Some small animal foraging suddenly amid the leaves to their right scared the hell out of them halfway through their vigil.  Checking a watch every three minutes can be a painstaking way to go mad but eventually time did pass and Sally and Tobias left.

Following the edge of the woods, they kept out of sight of the house while they moved behind it.  After rolling their stocking masks into place—and a deep breath—they dashed across the open lawn to the low window of some room adjacent to the backdoor.  Tobias, with some difficulty, suppressed the desire to editorialize this very large departure from his usual life.

He wore the knapsack now.  At the back of the house, Sally motioned for him to kneel and keep watch around the corner in case the Thoblons returned.  The stable-turned-garage and kitchen-building-turned-guest-house both seemed to star
e with open mouths and shocked expressions at what they saw.  Sally slipped a few implements out of the knapsack that, to Tobias, looked like paint scrapers and miniature jumper cables without clamps but thin plates.