Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers) (20 page)

“Good evening, President Matthews.”

Lola listened to the voice on the speakerphone.

Cultured, smooth, careful. She looked at the biography now showing on the main screen of the Situation Room. A slender man with a short, graying beard. A pleasant smile graced his face in several of the photos. Educated at Oxford, and still the Iranians had elected him president. A surprise there. A Western-educated leader.

Or was he chosen by the latest Ayatollah? Lola couldn’t remember quite how their government worked.

“Good evening, President Madani. How can we help you this evening?”

“I am hoping that just you and I could discuss a small problem we are having.”

President Matthews glanced around, signaling that they should all remain silent before he spoke.

“A small problem, Mr. President, perhaps in the desert outside Ravar requiring the attention of three of your Phantom F-4E jets and a third of your Unit 400 forc—”

“They were the ones I killed there.” Madani cut him off harshly.

President Matthews didn’t change the tone of his voice in the slightest, calm and steady. Having forced Madani, by his very reaction, to confirm the existence and involvement of the secret-ops unit, Lola hoped he wasn’t going to push harder.

“Yes, I am aware that you’ve had some difficulties. How may we be of help?”

There was a long pause and Lola wondered if the man was going to continue, but the President didn’t look worried.

The sound of a sigh over the phone proved him right. It finally sank in where she was sitting and a cold shiver ran up her spine. She’d much rather be sitting in the windblown seat of her Black Hawk than the comfortable armchairs of this room. To lead here, to be the Commander-in-Chief, President Matthews would have to be a truly exceptional judge of character. Far more specialized than herself or the Majors. In this room, there was only one person on the planet of sufficient caliber every four to eight years. Or at least one hoped so, and this president did have a reputation for being the right person in the right place at the right time.

And at least from the seat of her helicopter, a poor decision couldn’t affect the fate of millions.

She took a calming breath, and then another. It didn’t help in the slightest.

“You are a very wise man, Mr. President.”

“Thank you, President Madani. And might I point out that you have also managed to rise to the presidency of one of the few space-faring nations on the planet. But your difficulties are earthbound.”

Again the long pause.

“You are very… American.”

Lola had to bite her lower lip hard to suppress her laughter. It was true. Peter Matthews had all of the direct, forthright, self-assured American attitude that flustered so many foreigners. Something she and the President had in common. His easy attitude made the room feel a little less weird, but not much.

President Matthews waited out another silence.

“There is little liking between our countries…” The Iranian leader hesitated. “Do you not think so, Mr. President?”

“Far too little.” He looked around the table to see mostly shrugs about what was going on.

Lola wondered if… Something was familiar in the way the Iranian president was dodging around the meat of the matter, but he wasn’t going away either. As if he was… afraid?

“Perhaps, President Madani, there is a problem that we may solve together?” Clearly the President was a step ahead of her again.

“Yes. Yes, that would be good.” Mandani almost stumbled over himself being pleased. “You and I, we can perhaps solve this thing together.”

President Matthews glanced at General Rogers, then at Emily. At a thoughtful look from the former and a nod of encouragement from the latter he continued.

“Mr. Pres… May I call you Javad? You may call me Peter if that would be easier.”

“Yes, that would be better.”

“So, this problem in the desert, this laboratory, it is—”

“A terrible thing, Peter. A terrible thing. I had it destroyed as soon as I heard about it.”

General Rogers turned to glare at the phone in surprise, opened his mouth to speak, then remembered and shut it again. He scribbled furiously on a pad and shoved it to the President even as he was finishing it.

Lola leaned forward.

He’s in trouble. The religious right made it, he destroyed it. They’ll come for him.

The President nodded with surety. He’d clearly come to the same conclusion.

Lola wanted to tell him that this was no time to be playing poker.
Lay
down
your
hand
and
maybe
he’ll lay down his.
She could barely suppress her exclamation of surprise when he did exactly that.

“Javad, there weren’t any chemical or biologic weapons at the site when you bombed it.”

There was a gasp, then silence. Such a long silence that the President leaned forward to inspect the phone to check the connection.

“So it is true.” The voice was small, as if coming from much farther away than half a world. “The weapon is in transport. I was too late.”

“Do you know where?”

Everyone in the room strained forward in their seats to listen though the sound was clear in the room.

“Only a few clues, nothing concrete yet.”

“But we may assume that it is coming to America.” President Matthews didn’t make it a question.

“With our countries’ relations, that is a reasonable assumption, but I can only confirm it is upon a ship. I do not know its type, name, or destination.”

“Is there a cure?”

Lola could barely swallow after the worried intensity of President Matthews’s question.

“If there is, Peter, I destroyed it along with everything else at the site.”

Not everything. Would the President play that card? Major Henderson had said that the President played poker with more enthusiasm than success. He clearly made up for that playing in the international arena. Lola couldn’t even guess which way would play better.

“Javad.” Matthews’s voice had the perfect balance of calm and surety. “I have your computers and the research references here.”

This was clearly the table where President Matthews played a masterful game. One way over Lola’s head.

“How? No, I don’t care. Praise be to Allah. Then you know what it can do. Can you stop it?”

“I don’t know, Javad. We are working on the how, but we need to know where and when.”

“I will try, Peter. I swear that I will try.”

Help
him
, Emily mouthed at him. And Lola could see why she didn’t play poker. Childhood friend or not, Major Beale couldn’t see that the President was five or six moves ahead of her. It was the same way she flew, straight ahead without any games.

The Iranian president had just reached out in secrecy to help the most hated foreign power. The personal and professional risk of doing so was immense. If he were caught, it wouldn’t be execution. It would be torture of him, his families, his friends, and every member of his political party. It might unleash an extremist jihad of unprecedented proportions.

“What can I do to help you, Javad?”

President Matthews was clearly searching for an idea, any idea. And just as clearly he didn’t have one.

She scribbled a note, thought better of it, crossed it out, wrote another, and shoved it across the table so that it slid into his range of vision.

The President read it, and read it again, clearly thinking very hard and fast. Then he nodded sharply without looking up. Decision made.

“Javad.”

“Yes, Peter.”

“I regret that I don’t know who is murdering your top nuclear scientists one after another.”

Iran had lost five and nearly lost a half-dozen more as someone used weapons, poisons, and car bombs to kill the country’s top physicists. Lola had crossed it out because clearly Israel was doing the assassinations and they had to have at least tacit U.S. approval to proceed. So, stopping that just wasn’t going to happen. The United States needed at least one friendly nation in the Middle East too badly to mess with that.

“However, perhaps I can ease the international banking sanctions associated with your space program. Space only. I still cannot condone any nuclear research or related efforts.”

Again the silence was long enough for the President to check that the connection remained active.

“Yes, Peter. That would be enough. If I could show them that I had negotiated the release of foreign-held funds that rightly belong to Iran, that might be more important than the destruction of Ravar.”

“We’ll be in touch, Javad.”

President Matthews finished the pleasantries and cut the connection. He looked slowly about the room, offered the general a nod of thanks, then glanced at the two notes in front of him. Comparing them.

“Whose writing is this? Sure isn’t yours, Brett. Way too nice. Thanks, Em. It was the perfect carrot. Even the crossed-out teaser of what he’d ask first but I’m certainly not going to do.”

Emily pointed across the table at Lola.

President Matthews slowly turned to face her.

“Perfect timing, Chief Warrant. Exactly what I was looking for.”

Again she could only nod.

Then he quirked that nationally televised smile that he wore so easily.

“You tell Mr. Maloney to keep you close, Chief Warrant LaRue. If he doesn’t, I might be trying to steal you away.”

For the second time tonight and perhaps in her life, Lola felt the heat rise to her face as she looked down at the table.

She and Tim had been much less circumspect than they’d thought. And the heat she felt thinking of Tim was echoed by a warmth much closer to her heart.

Lola told Tim all she could remember of the phone call and the meetings that followed, going over it again and again until she had every detail clear. She’d done it while curled up in his arms, just letting him hold her close and safe in the apartment’s bed. Her head on his shoulder as she spoke, a leg hooked over his hips, and her fingers tracing out her memories on that perfect chest of his.

A Secret Service agent had returned her to the restaurant’s back door and there he’d been. Sitting outside the kitchen door, still wide awake though it was two in the morning. Tim sitting in a pool of brightness cast by a single light over the door was the best welcome she’d ever had. He must have been worried because he hadn’t even taken the opportunity to razz the agent.

Now the telling was done. Lola hadn’t left out a single thing. Not how out of place she’d felt. Not how her flight had looked in the drone’s camera. Not about the fears of living in a world where such hatred didn’t just exist but created horridly lethal weapons of mass destruction and where people could be so twisted that they’d want to wield them.

She lay in silence now as Tim stroked his hand up and down her bare back. She’d never lain naked with a man when it wasn’t about sex; either the sex that had just happened or the sex that was about to. But for this instant, for this precious moment, they simply lay together in companionship. In comfort.

He twisted his head enough to lay his lips on her hair. Tim was the perfect gentle lover, the considerate man, the good son.

“How, Tim? How is it that you ever left your family?”

She could feel the lips against her hair shift into a smile. She’d bet if she could see, it would be a sad one. The sigh that rippled across his chest beneath her spread hand and draped arm confirmed her guess.

“It’ll sound stupid.”

“Good, that way I won’t be the only one.”

She could feel him trying to look at her. “You’re not stupid.”

“You have no idea. Now give. Henderson’s dad was a SEAL. Beale’s such a goddamn overachiever that she couldn’t help herself. Connie was born to it. Kee will fight anything she meets to the death. What is someone like you doing as a lifer in the Army?”

Tim relaxed back against his pillow, probably contemplating the dark ceiling barely lit by the alley’s light shining up through a narrow opening in the window curtain.

“I had this great childhood. I was a cutup, the class clown, and I was good at it. Got jazzed up on the attention, I guess. I occasionally feel bad that Mrs. Wilson retired unexpectedly at the end of my fifth-grade year. I think it might have been because I automated her desk. Silent remote-control motors. I could open or close the drawers when her back was turned. Make her chair wander away. Once I got it out the open door and a dozen yards down the hall before she noticed.”

Lola giggled against his chest, feeling a bit guilty about laughing at a woman she didn’t know.

“Once I got a taste of it, I couldn’t stop. I reprogrammed the school’s master clock to play AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’ each time it was supposed to ring the bell for class change. I rebuilt my uncle’s transmission linkage, installing a reverser gear in the drive train so that he had three reverse gears and one forward one. That car could go really fast, backwards.”

That got her to laugh.

“Then I started getting stupid.”

His suddenly serious voice sobered her instantly. She might have tried to raise herself to look at him, but his hand no longer stroked her back. Instead it clamped tight across her shoulders as if holding on.

“Worked my way up into a chop shop for a while. I’m a damn good mechanic, and I learned a lot taking cars apart and putting them back together so that they didn’t look stolen. I made good money, too good for a teenager, but thankfully, other than a few drunken escapades, I didn’t get too stupid with all that cash. It was the cars I liked. The mechanicking. I did a lot of stupid shit. Even stole and striped a cop car once, as if that wasn’t about the dumbest thing you could do.”

His body was rigid with memory.

“I’d go home, come here to the kitchen, and Ma would know. Maybe not exactly what, but I could feel her shame of me. Which only pushed me further. To this day I don’t know what I was rebelling against. As far as I can recall, I didn’t know then, either.”

He took a deep breath, raising her head as his chest filled with air that he then released in an exasperated puff.

“I still don’t know. I was just stupid. Right until the day I saw that jet airliner fly into the side of the Pentagon carrying a bellyful of helpless passengers. That was the moment I woke up. That’s the day I understood that the world was way bigger than what shit I could spread around on it. My parents love me the way they do because they know what I crawled out of.”

Tim wasn’t just a good man, he was a good man by conscious choice. That in some ways made him an even better man than she’d already thought he was. And made her feel even less that she deserved to be with him.

“They loved you anyway. You just gave them a reason to be proud.”

“Maybe. I guess.”

Lola could feel the tension remaining in him like hot steel.

“Never told anyone any of that. Not Ma. Not John.”

Trust. He treated her with such absolute trust. She didn’t deserve such a thing, such a gift.

“So you really are ‘Crazy Tim.’ Dumb enough to trust a Creole bitch.” Her mind latched on to a joke and spit it out before her thoughts could go any deeper. Before they could lead somewhere she didn’t want to go.

“Yep.” The soft chuckle rippled across his pecs. “I guess I earned that one fair and square. Earned it long before I was tagged with it, if they only knew.”

But Lola’s thoughts continued despite her best attempt to sidetrack them.

“Your parents love the man you’ve become.”

He shrugged. “I guess. Maybe for the man they think I can be. I haven’t been tossed in lockup for a couple years, not since before I made SOAR. But they saw plenty of the bad years. I don’t think they trust those are really gone.”

“Are they?”

He released his tight grip on her shoulder and started toying with her hair. It seemed to hold endless fascination for him. He was always combing his hand through it, twirling a bit around his finger. A dozen, a hundred little tugs on her scalp like a gentle massage.

“I don’t know. The Majors sure put up with enough crap from me. Now I just do the practical jokes on Rangers, which nobody seems to really mind except the Rangers.” His tone clearly indicating that their opinion didn’t matter in the slightest.

“I usually manage to make it look as if another Ranger did it. Like the guy I sewed into his bunk while he was sleeping. I used the suture line from a half-dozen med kits that I lifted from his squadmates and just happened to leave lying about where he could see them. They had to cut him out of the bed. It was especially funny because he kicked and screamed every time one of them came near him with a knife because he was sure they were the ones who’d sewed him in.”

He tugged at another little clump of her hair.

“My parents always wanted me to be a better man, didn’t help much. The Majors definitely did. I think it’s you that I really want to be the best for. I feel different around you. As if I’m the one that’s important, not who I’m supposed to be. Not who my parents think I’m supposed to be. Just me, as I am.”

They lay together with Tim’s absolute honesty between them. Lola couldn’t turn away from that. She wanted to use sex, wash away the moment, but that wasn’t honest either.

“That’s my dad.”

“What is?”

Lola hadn’t meant to say anything, but Tim had given her such a gift that she had to return it in kind.

“The way I use sex. Used sex. Or don’t use it. I don’t seem to do it with you, though I’ll be damned if I know why.” Or maybe she did, but it was not something she’d ever admit out loud.

“Sex is power. Dad taught me that.”

“He didn’t?” Tim jerked half upright.

“No.” Lola patted his chest to ease him back into place. “He was an abuser, just not a physical one. He absolutely controlled me by proving just how thoroughly he could ignore me. I was never good enough, always a disappointment, didn’t meet standards. When he had a woman, he made sure they were loud, usually right in the living room so I couldn’t even escape my room. Sex is power.”

She pushed herself up on one elbow to look down at him. Just the least hint of light brushing Tim’s beautiful face.

“You may be the first man I’ve ever been with where sex wasn’t some weapon to wield, some way to distract myself so that I can fly under the radar and avoid how screwed up my past is. To dodge what a mess I am. How screwed up my family is.”

“Is? You have family? I thought your parents were dead.”

“No.” Her voice was the barest whisper. “No, I just wish he was.”

***

Tim pulled her back down to his chest. He could feel her blinking hard, fighting against the tears he could hear in her voice but she was too stubborn to release.

“He? Your dad? The one you said was run over by the beer truck while lying drunk in a tavern parking lot?”

“Yes. That one.” Her voice was a small, distant thing as if she weren’t just flying under the radar but was falling off its most distant edge.

He stared up at the ceiling, considering if he should be offended by the lie, but he wasn’t. He knew the self-protection of a lie. But he was learning from Lola that it wasn’t necessarily the best protection. Telling her the truth, he’d surprised himself. He really was his best self around her. Something about her made him want to be the strong, solid, reliable person that he’d only pretended to be before.

“Tell me about him.” He felt the shiver run up her spine, but no tears splashed onto his chest and her head didn’t turn into his shoulder to avoid the question. She simply lay in silence and Tim let her.

“Ricky LaRue.” Her voice little more than a whisper. “Deputy Sheriff of New Orleans Richard LaRue. Used to say he always wanted to be a cop so that he could lock others up for the shit he did. Never wanted to be sheriff, ‘because those idiots get elected, then thrown back out.’ He just wanted the power, didn’t care about the title. He ran a bunch of brothels, a couple drug rings, had three or four street gangs that reported to him. Who knows. Some corrupt judges, which the Big Easy is known for, he has his hands into several of those as well.”

“How did you get away from that?” Lola might project wild, but she was forthright and had apparently become best friends with Emily Beale almost overnight, which was high praise indeed. Lola was a woman of such integrity that it was impossible to reconcile that with such a past.

“Mama Raci.” Her voice sounded solid for the first time. “Old crone who ran a brothel not under my father’s sway. She’d started in the front of the house as a child prostitute. Ended up working in the place and, sixty years or more later, ran the house from the kitchen with an iron fist. Found me bruised, battered, and bloody in the back alley at twelve. Couple of my dad’s criminal buddies went after me and he did nothing to stop them. Said he owed them or some such crap. I beat them off, cut one up pretty good, and got away.”

Tim held her tighter, could feel the rage building inside him. No child deserved that kind of past. Lola lay against him totally passive, as if she were talking about the day’s news of some far-off place.

“Mama Raci took me in but never let me into the front of the house. I worked in the kitchen with her. Ran errands. I guess I’m the one she decided to save. Got me to go back to school, let me sleep in the kitchen as long as I did my homework. Always made sure I was safe and fed.”

She let out a long, slow breath. “Already told you the rest.”

Yes, the same thing that had happened to him. She wasn’t kidding when she said she’d been born on September 11th, 2001. They both had.

The woman she’d become was a magnificent statement of her strength of will. Made him feel humble and stupid. He’d struggled against a great family and barely found the fortitude to crawl out of it. Lola strode out of Hell with the power of a goddess of old.

Now she did turn her face into his shoulder, and sniffled.

Tim held her tight and rocked her back and forth. Lola’s voice, so carefully flat, clearly hid a tidal wave of pain and anger and old scar tissue.

He knew about old scar tissue. Could feel himself shedding the last of it as they lay there.

He hoped there was some way he could return the favor.