The Parnell Affair (33 page)

“What are those?” he whispered before returning his eyes to the long tree-filled acres which led down to the driveway's end.

“It didn't look as if Mrs. Thoblon had taken the time to set an alarm system,” Sally whispered.  “But on the off chance Jon had some remotely activated system installed, which he could activate from his keychain, I'm going to bypass this window's sensor.”

“Shit,” Tobias said.  “Didn't consider that possibility either.  What if there are motion sensors?”

“Could be,” Sally said cheerfully.  She then slid two of the paint scrapers into the front of the window and peeped between them.  “But given the rural environment, and that they're never here, motion detectors would be going off all the time because of animals.  Probably don't have them.”

“And if they do?” he asked, breaking away from his watching the driveway for a moment.

“We'll,” she said and paused.  “Have to be,” she said through gritted teeth as she slipped the plates connected by wires into position.  “Quick!  That ought to do it.  Now for the latch.”

“Encouraging, really,” Tobias said, returning to the road.

Sally strained the windows apart as far as she could and slipped an oddly shaped piece of metal into the house, rotated it about and used it to hook open the window's latch.  Then she slipped the two windows as far apart as the magnetized metal plates' wires would allow, about eighteen inches.  The sensor, because of the wires, remained in circuit and fooled the system into believing the window was closed.

“Let's go,” she whispered and swung a leg through the opening.

Tobias passed in the knapsack and then crawled in after her.  They were in an obviously renovated mudroom, just off the back door.  Two huge washers and driers glowed metallically in the starlight through the window.  Sally eased open the door to an equally renovated modern kitchen and peered slowly about.  Satisfied, she opened the door, took a moment to wipe her shoes off and indicated to Tobias to do the same, and then they weaved through the dark kitchen to the hallway forward.  The lights in the living room held a certain menace for Tobias, a symbol of the life here upon which he was invading.

Sally bound up the stairs two at a time but silently.  As if she'd visited the house often, she guided them to the upstairs room that had been lit as they watched the house earlier.  The knob turned and the door gave.

Pale blue starlight made a luminous atmosphere in the room but no detail emerged from the objects within.  Sally pulled Tobias inside and shut the door before finding a desk lamp and lighting it.  Tobias questioned her with a look, disjointed as it was by the stocking over his face.

“If they come home suddenly,” she said, “they'll think he left it on.”

The room was paneled in knotty pine; the carpet had been luxurious twenty years ago; the desk was far too large for the room, dwarfing the pictures and an expensive gold writing set atop it; curtains of a vague green color obscured the well-carved moldings; and pictures of men who looked and dressed like Jon Thoblon lined the walls.  A picture of the President shared the desk with Thoblon's wife and sons—and a briefcase.

Tobias forgot his trepidation at sight of the one place they knew the Niger docs had once resided.  He dodged around the desk and tried the briefcase's latches: locked.  He looked up to find Sally, with her knapsack open beside her, kneeling in an open closet in front of what looked like a large metal ice chest.

“A document safe,” she said when she saw him looking at it, as she retrieved a couple lock picks from her bag.  “Not as secure against explosives—or crowbars—as a real safe but it's only meant to survive a fire.  The locks can be good, though,” she added slowly as she probed the lock, looking absently at the back of the closet.  “Can you watch the road?”

“Yeah,” he said and stood with his back to the desk lamp and cupped his hands against the window pane.  He could see the darker driveway amid the canopy of trees as it wound through a hundred or so acres to the road below.  The light above the front porch reduced the quality of what he saw, however: he suddenly remembered a piece about burglaries he'd read, about how some alarms are silent and ring at the local police station.  If they drove up the driveway without headlights, he thought, I might not see them until they're on the porch.

“Before we left yesterday,” Sally said as she worked the lock, “you said you'd been kidnapped by the FARC.”

“Yeah,” he said.

She looked over her shoulder, her hands still in motion.  “You never told me that before,” she said.

“No,” he said and then laughed through his nose.  “No, I didn't.  If I talk about it, I dream about it; so I don't talk about it.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, pausing in her work.

“Don't worry about it,” Tobias said, smiling at her briefly before turning back to the window.  “It wasn't that horrible.  They only had me for about ten hours.  Then they tried to move me, by car, out of Bogotá.  They tried to zigzag through the city's back streets and wound up ziging right into a traffic jam.  Some sort of car accident ahead.  Cops all over the place.  So, they pushed their guns between their seats and I figured this was the only chance I'd get and reached across the guy to my right and opened the car door.  He tried to stop me but wasn't strong enough to hold the door with one hand and so, with me half out of the car—he pushed me!  I went ass over head into the street and when I got up, they were gone.”

“Wow,” she breathed.  “That's as close as it gets.”

“Tell me—shit!” Tobias hissed.  He pressed himself against the window, trying to see.  “Headlights!”

Sally tried to work faster.

“Headlights!” Tobias repeated.

“I heard you,” she said calmly.  “Tell me when they're here.”

“Christ,” Tobias swore.  “No, never mind.  They're not coming up, they’re passing by.  This damn porch light: I can't see the edge of the property clearly.”  He looked back to see Sally smiling at him over her shoulder.  “Must have been a car passing on the road,” he tried to explain, lamely.

“Probably looking for
their
Christmas Eve party,” she said.

With a slight scratching noise, the lock turned.

“Bingo,” she said.  “Let's have a look.”  Sally rifled the rows of folders in the document safe.  “I don't think they're here.  Deeds, investments, and more investments; his will.”

She closed the safe and stood up, stretching her back.

Tobias shook a couple drawers of the desk.  “You want to start with the desk or the briefcase?”

“Briefcase,” she said.  “It's the easier of the two.”

“Don't suppose Thoblon would have some kind of James Bond incendiary in there to burn up everything if someone opened it the wrong way,” he said and smiled.  Sally's hands froze an inch from the latches; she glared at him.  “You can, you could tell, right?”

“With an X-ray machine,” she said.  “Hell.”

Within seconds she had both latches open but only very slowly did she raise the lid.  Once an inch separated the two halves, Sally flung open the briefcase.  She swallowed loud enough to hear it in the dead-quiet room.

“They're here,” she said.

“The Niger documents,” Tobias said, stepping beside her and looking into the briefcase.  “That's the title of the official who oversees the country's mines,” he said, pointing.

“Not just a pretty face,” she said, running a finger down his jaw.

“Particularly now,” he said, tugging at his stocking.  “I compiled a list of the officials' names that should be on the documents—as well as their predecessors and replacements—while at the UN, in October.  Need them to write the story.”

“I better get to work then,” she said.

Tobias returned to the window and Sally put the briefcase on the desk's chair.  Setting the pile of Niger documents in the center of the desk, she took a picture off the desk of Thoblon's wife and laid it next to the documents to prove their authenticity in each photo she'd take, one at a time.  Using a small but powerful digital camera (capable of 1200 dpi resolution), Sally began photographing each page of the Niger documents.

Footsteps thumped on the porch below them.  Tobias shot out an arm and took hold of Sally's shoulder.  She listened and the footsteps sounded again; two pairs, she thought.

“Lock the door,” she whispered and returned to her work.

Tobias sprang across the room on toe tips and turned the latch.

“He'll have a key,” he hissed.

“It'll buy us time,” she whispered, flipping pages and photographing them as quickly as she could.  “If they come upstairs, we'll go out the window.”

Tobias returned to the window as the footsteps sounded again.

“What the hell are they doing?” he whispered.  “Maybe it's cops.  Maybe there was a silent alarm and they're peering through the windows.  I don't see their car,” he said, trying to hide behind the drapes and see through cupped hands beyond the circle of light the porch light cast.

“Halfway,” Sally mumbled.

The camera continued to click as they strained their ears for the sound of someone coming up the stairs.  Knocking down Jon Thoblon was one thing; Tobias was not prepared, he thought, to knock down a cop.  By the mist on the window, he barely breathed at all.

“Good fucking Christ,” he said and laughed loudly.

Sally ducked and turned surprised and almost angry eyes on him.

“It's a deer,” he said.  “There's a deer in the lawn.  He just walked off the front porch.”  Sally joined him at the window and cupped her hands to the glass, as well.  “I guess you were right about the animals,” he said.  “They're not used to humans being here.”

“Maybe he escaped from Santa's sleigh,” she said and returned to the desk.  “I'm almost done.”

“That'd be appropriate,” he mumbled at the glass.  “What with us looking like the evilest elves to ever get kicked out of the North Pole, with these stockings over our heads,” he said, flipping the leg of it that ran down his back.

Sally laughed in spite of herself.  “Shut up,” she said.  “I have to keep still.”  Another minute passed.  “There, done,” she said.

Tobias turned and stepped beside her, putting a hand on the small of her back; they both looked at the camera.             

“We have them,” he said.

“We have them,” she said.

Sally slipped the camera into a zippered pocket in her running suit before replacing the Niger docs in Thoblon's briefcase, returning Mrs. Thoblon's picture to its place on the desk, and the briefcase to its former position.

“Let's get out of here,” she said.

They turned off the light and crept back downstairs, through the hallway, into the mudroom, and out the window.  Sally reset the window frame and latch before carefully withdrawing the wires that had occupied the security system.  Immediately, they ran for the woods.  Once among the trees, they were forced to slow their progress; the scant light of stars filtering through the canopy above left the ground all but totally obscured.  A twisted ankle now could prove disastrous.  After a mile, Sally realized she still had the wires in her hand and stuffed them into the knapsack that Tobias wore.  They removed their stockings then, too, though not pausing in their exfiltration.  The cool night air was bracing, almost delicious after the strangling closeness inside the improvised masks.  Once again Led Zeppelin occurred to Tobias's mind: he mumbled snatches of
No Quarter
's second stanza as they hurried along, but they did not talk.

A mile from their car, Sally halted to change out of her running suit, making sure to transfer the camera to her jeans.  Tobias felt the light sweat on his skin hit by the night air after he removed and stowed his jacket.

“We must be safe enough for this,” he said and pulled her to him and kissed her, quickly but without restraint.

“Best to keep our eye on the ball, mister,” she said, giving him a shove and then taking his cheeks in her hands and pulling him down for a second kiss.  “Oh crap,” she said suddenly.  “Which way were we going?”

“That's not in the least funny,” he said.

She laughed and looked at the sky.  “Ah, this way.”

“Are you navigating by the stars?” he asked.

“More or less,” she said.  “Although over an hour has passed so we should head a little more to the right.”

Indeed they should have.  They hit the road down from the strip mall rather than coming to its parking lot.  They backtracked quickly, exerting a supreme self control in order not to run once out in the open and in sight of their car.  At the car, Sally put her stockings, rolled up, in her suitcase—among her other things of that sort—and her burgling tools in a tool box containing the usual automotive necessities.  She took out Tobias's laptop and then joined him in the car, which he had running.  They sped away from there about as fast as the law allowed: this was no time to receive a speeding ticket, which would place them in the vicinity at the time and near the place of the theft of the Niger documents.

They drove through the rest of the night.  Sally transferred the Niger doc photos to Tobias's laptop and then compared the names on them with the list of officials, past and present, Tobias had compiled earlier.  The forger had lacked the most basic attention to detail: the names listed in the documents of people in crucial positions in the Niger government and at the mine were of current holders of those positions, not those who held them years ago when the documents were supposed to have been written.  Offices were misnamed or misspelled; the grammar was poor enough for a government work, but the French was written by someone using English grammatical structure.  Sally made notes of everything she found, verbally exploding with each new revelation.  Even if Tobias hadn't been too wired for sleep, he should have had no trouble remaining awake with every other minute punctuated by a shouted exclamation from Sally.

Once through the documents, the electronics off and stowed, they laughed at their own excitement.  The release of the night's tension, the first positive step now behind them, Sally laughed herself to tears and then back out of them.  All that was left was to drive to a hotel in Florida, checking in late enough in the morning to give the impression—to anyone who might be monitoring their credit cards—that they'd stopped during the night, somewhere in the Carolinas perhaps, and then had an early start to arrive in Florida by Christmas morning.

After talking through the evidence and the story to come, anticipation of the hotel and the end of their long wait for one another began to build.  Sally held it at bay as best she could, knowing she had to call her daughters.  At 7:00 am, still on the road, Sally called them in Paris.  Their father had tried to sweeten the upheaval in their lives with the most luxurious Christmas they'd ever had.  It helped, they kidded, but they missed their mother.  It surprised Sally almost into speechlessness: Anna was solicitous, kind, grateful, and even admiring.  No veiled reference to Sally's absence was offered as an explanation for her eldest daughter's sudden affection.  Whatever had changed for her daughter, or seemed to have changed in herself that now she was accepted, Sally thrust aside questioning and enjoyed the first loving conversation she had with Anna in nearly three years.  She hadn't realized how oppressive their tense relationship had felt until the weight was lifted.  But now the weight was gone, her duties discharged, her worries alleviated—for the moment, at least—and only the immediacy of the present remained to her.  And Tobias.  She shut off her phone, put it away, and put a hand on his thigh.

“How far to the hotel?” she asked.

No one drives the speed limit in Florida and only the most callus cop would give them a ticket on Christmas Day—and it wouldn't matter now: they were within the geographical limits of their story to surveillance.  The rented Chevy had wings by the time they reached Jacksonville.

They checked into a hotel by a famous golf course, had the concierge buy them tickets on the next morning's earliest train to DC, and said they needed no bellhop to show them the room or take their luggage.  The hotel was all but entirely silent at 9:00 am, but the closing elevator doors felt to Tobias and Sally as if they shut out the world.  They dropped their bags and there was nothing slow in the way they reached for one another.  Whether released from the tension of the previous night on her honesty with Joe or finally hitting back at those who'd wronged her, or whether too much time had passed in the life of a physically passionate woman, Sally threw herself into their kiss without reserve.  She pulled herself up by his neck, wrapped her legs around his waist, and kissed his mouth as if it were the source of something more urgently needful than air.  In the midst of her enjoyment, however, her mind probed ahead to the end of her long and unhappy banishment, her now foolishly considered exile from sex.  All the body's possibilities and her months of fantasizing about being with Tobias recalled a certain unpleasant reality to mind.

“I stink,” she said suddenly, pulling her face back an inch from his.

“I think this kiss is going pretty well, really,” he said, grinning at her, stroking the underside of her thigh, more or less.

“I mean—” she began.

“I know what you mean,” he said.  “I'm sweaty, too, from all that running.”  He raised an eyebrow significantly.

Sally started and asked: “Uh, are you kinda into something a little—”

“No!” he said.  “I thought we might have a nice little shower together.”

“Oh!” she breathed and then kissed him again.  Speaking all but into his mouth, she said, “I forgot someone else can be in the shower, too.”

The elevator doors opened and Sally hopped down and they practically danced down the hall, embracing and kissing at intervals, banging into walls.  They took their time once within their room—and Tobias did not forget to hang the do-not-disturb sign on the doorknob.

With murmured and playful commentary, they unwrapped each other.  While the novelty of nudity before another, equally nude, had been lost in both their youths, no less intense was the pleasure of exploring that figure so beautiful it had tempted lesser men to treason and had once inspired a greater man to valor.  She felt no less thrill at uncovering him, reveling in the act of knowing him by touch.

If the soap was an excuse to run their hands slowly over each other's entirety, cleanliness had nothing to do with where their hands lingered.  Yet, too many times had she imagined him while under falling water and she wanted something else; with effort—and not without regret—she flung herself out of the shower.  Still soapy in spots, she ran a towel quickly over herself, though she could not be described as anything less than thoroughly wet.  Tobias didn't care if
the sheets got soaked: they would anyway.

The end of her long seclusion came as she had envisioned time and again: staring into his eyes as the waves mounted until the intensity of her orgasm squeezed shut her eyes and arched her back away from him, so that only her breasts against his chest and hands gripping his shoulders penetrated the gale of her pleasure to assure her he remained close to her as well as deeply within her.

The “outsider-vision,” which served Tobias so well in his professional life, intruded somewhat upon his sexual life, and always had.  Despite the pleasure, he never fully immersed in the moment, always a part of him seemed to observe from above, looking over his shoulder.  So even though his making love to Sally far surpassed any of the trifling encounters of his life, he remained totally aware.  Particularly, he remained cognizant that this morning meant more to Sally—after her unwilling abstinence—than to him, no matter the thoughts, which occurred to him like a mantra, of never wanting to be with a different woman again.  With difficulty, it must be admitted, he suppressed his own climax: when her eyes opened and her mouth found his, he rolled onto his back.

“I want to see you,” he breathed
.

To which she replied, “I want to been seen!”

Enveloped by the moment as Sally felt, her mind never lost focus on her lover.  Though she dove into the enjoyment of his hands as she reached orgasm time and again, she wanted to know she imparted as much pleasure as she partook.  So when faintness began to seize her shaking muscles, she pulled Tobias back to where they'd started and stared up into his eyes, smiling and desirous of that last compliment.  Though she felt luxuriously spent and for the moment sated, as she watched pleasure overwhelm him and his body leave his control, her body rallied and rose to meet him in one final mingled climax.

For a time they lie together entwined, talking and laughing lightly, but even though they'd remained awake through the last evening, they did not sleep.  The first vigorous rites of passion paid, they made love again but with the easy care of lovers who wish to spend all their hours within or about one another.  They talked as they made love, they laughed.

Midday found him stretched upon the floor and Sally lying awkwardly, yet smilingly, across a large overstuffed chair.

“You're not tired, are you?” she asked mischievously, still breathing heavily.

“No, no,” he said in the voice of someone who's just woken up.  “Why do you ask?”  She laughed soundlessly.  “Actually,” he said, struggling onto his elbows, “and I know it's not romantic—sorry—but I'm getting a little hungry!”

“Yes!” she said and slid into a more usual position in her chair, though folding her legs up onto the cushion with her.  “I'm starving.  Ow, we probably should pace ourselves; I'm going to walk funny tomorrow as it is.”

“I've given up entirely on walking,” he grunted as he came to his feet.  “When I order lunch, I'm going to tell them to send a wheelchair for me come checkout time.”

He rummaged around the hotel desk and then shuffled to the table with the phone, rubbing his back.

“I love your little butt!” she cried and laughed into her had.  He feigned alarm as he looked over his shoulder.  “The way it is,” she reassured him, “intact.”

“Thank you for that caveat,” he said, leafing through all the various folders by the phone.

“It's always kind of funny having sex with someone for the first time,” she said, watching him.  “Particularly someone interesting: you never know beforehand if they're into something a little odd.”

He looked up, smirking.  “There's a story behind that smile, I can tell,” he said.  He shuffled back with two menus.

She nodded, laughing a little.  “I'll save it until after lunch,” she said.

He sat on the arm of the couch, next to her chair, opened his mouth to say something but looked back at his bag by the door suddenly.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“You know,” he said, dragging his eyes back to her and kissing her shoulder, “I'd like nothing better than to make love to you until they'd need to call in the paramedics—but I need to write that story.”

“Yes you do!” she said, sitting up quickly.  “Do you need to be alone—” she began, about to come to her feet.

“No,” he said, staying her with a hand and rising himself.  He hurried over to his bag and retrieved his laptop.  “I should really say, 'type that story.'  I've written it in my head a dozen times over the past few months.  It may need a little hammering, though.”

He up-righted an overturned chair before the desk and sat down—practically perched on the front two inches of the armless seat—and opened his laptop on the desk.

“It's okay if I'm here, though?” she asked.

“Yeah, it's fine,” he said.  “Oh, the food!  I will need something to eat.”

“I'll order it,” she said, going to the phone.  “What do you want?”

“Well, there ought to be a sufficient Jewish presence in Florida to get some decent corn beef,” he said: “I'll have a reuben!”

“A Christmas morning reuben,” she laughed.  “You're so traditional.  I think I'll have the short ribs and fries.  And a blooming onion.  Ooo, and a chocolate milkshake!  And a case of bottled water.”

“Yes, definitely water,” he agreed, staring impatiently at his computer's boot-up screen.  “And a bottle of champagne?”

“Why not?” she said, dancing a step as she picked up the phone.  “Better finish that story first, though.”

“I would if this damn thing would start up already,” he said through clenched teeth.  “Come on, Windows!”

A knock came at the door and Sally’s eyes sprang open.  She found herself lying on the bed, a pillow beneath her head and one of the hotel's complimentary bathrobes draped over her.  Tobias wore one as well, still seated and typing rapidly at the desk a few feet away.  He paused and seemed on the point of rising when Sally said she'd get it.  Slipping into her robe, she opened the door.  She tried to remember falling asleep as the waiter set their covered plates on the round table by the window.  She got as far as remembering lying on the bed and watching Tobias begin to type, still naked, at the desk.

She found some money to tip the waiter and then moved the food to the desk next to Tobias's laptop.

“Thanks,” he mumbled. “Oh, almost done.  Last read through and then I ought to take a break from it.  See it with fresh eyes tomorrow morning.”

“Can I have a look?” she asked.

“Please do,” he said.  “And feel free to add any 'Intelligence sources say' tidbits you can think of.”

Sally let her robe fall, still feeling warm from their exertions.  Straddling the portion of the seat behind Tobias—who remained perched on the front two inches, hunched over the computer like a teenager with a new video game—Sally rest her chin on his shoulder and began to read.

'The documents alleged by the Howland Administration to prove Iraq attempted to purchase uranium from Niger are the product of a crude forgery, concluded the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),' the lede read.  '
The Washington Observer
has obtained a copy of the so-called Niger documents and has confirmed the IAEA's claim of forgery.'  The story then enumerated the names of officials in the Niger documents that were current for 2002 and not of people who had held those positions when the documents were said to have been created in 1998.  An explanation followed of the IAEA's withholding the obvious forgery’s existence from the public, their discretion used as a bargaining chip at the UN to obtain inspectors rather than a resolution authorizing force.  A short history of the Howland Administration's march toward war came next, with all the familiar unsubstantiated claims of WMD.  Next, Tobias carefully walked through the furtive actions of Jon Thoblon and made clear where the documents had been photographed, though leaving the impression a third party had performed the raid on Thoblon's house in order to sell the photos to
The Washington Observer
.  The final paragraph reiterated the facts and asked how Congress and the American people would now view the Administration's push for war, knowing its key evidence was the product of premeditated deception.  Last of all, the piece asked again who in the Administration had outed Sally Parnell, claiming she'd missed what the Niger documents contained, knowing all the while they were forged.