The Threat (22 page)

The president hung up a phone as they approached. He shifted in a high-backed chair, eyes flicking to Dan, then back to the poised little woman whose heels tapped across the parquet before falling silent on a beautiful oval carpet.

The man, Dan thought, who was probably sleeping with Blair. For a second hate flared. Then it guttered away, like a candle flame cupped by an inverted glass.

“Mr. President,” the national security adviser said. “Something you ought to hear.”

“Make yourselves comfortable.” De Bari waved to a couch, started to get up, to move over there to sit with them.

“We'll stand,” Clayton said, and Dan caught an edge to her voice.

She summarized Dan's cable, updated with what he'd told Sebold half an hour before. It was a crystal-clear recapitulation of everything he'd tried to put across, but more concise; what he'd spent hours trying to write and say, given in ten sentences not one word of which he could have improved on. She finished by nodding his way. “I've brought Lenson in. So you can hear this for yourself. He hasn't even been home to change.”

“All right, Doris … That pretty accurate, Dan? Gosh, I'm glad we got you back. That must've been hell.”

“No, Mr. President,” Dan said. His mouth felt as if he hadn't used it for years. He took a breath, trying to be where he was, not somewhere far away. “I was only there a few days. For the people who have to live there—that's hell.”

The president spread his hands. “Tell me what you saw. In your own words.”

Dan told him in unadorned sentences. He came to the events in the warehouse, and stopped, looking past the man who waited. Out the windows behind him. At the bare trees of the South Lawn. At a gardener pulling burlap over the pampas grass for the winter. Then he took another breath, and told about his escape and the dead he'd seen in the fields, lying in windrows like the old pictures from the Somme.

The man with the blow-dried hair swiveled back and forth, thrusting out his lower lip. “What are the numbers?”

“Numbers,
Mr. President?” Clayton said.

“For deaths in that conflict. The trend line.”

“The trend line. In Bosnia—they're down.”

“Well, that's good. It's not spreading. Like we thought it might. Though, the collapse of the safe areas—that's bad news.”

Dan thought he'd better try again. “Mr. President, those figures don't reflect what I witnessed on the ground. There had to be four hundred bodies in that warehouse. More, many more, in the fields and in the woods. The UN doesn't have a handle on this. I don't think NATO does either. And just containing it isn't going to stop the slaughter.”

Clayton said, “We've spent months on this. So did the previous administration. This is not an American problem. We support the UN. But basically, it's a European responsibility.”

Dan told her, “No, ma'am. With respect. Genocide is not somebody else's problem. And these are Muslims we're talking about. The whole Middle East is going to judge us by how we respond.”

“Dan, I hear what you're saying,” De Bari said. “But we've sent Mokey Revell over. Worked with Mitterrand and Kohl. Believe me, I'd like to stop this horror. But committing troops is a big step, in a direction I'm not sure we're ready to go in.”

“What about air power?” asked Clayton. “Air strikes, or Tomahawks? We've got to do something to get out in front of this issue. Can we turn the situation around without ground forces?”

“Not with that command setup,” Dan said. “They've got some kind of UN-NATO-national triple-key approach that just doesn't work. And the terrain, the forest cover … you need boots on the ground. To really make a difference.”

“We've just finished troop reductions in Europe,” De Bari said, shaking his head. “And we took a hell of a lot of heat for it, too. I have to tell you, Doris, I don't feel much like going back now and saying, ‘Hey, boy, were we wrong on that one, let's ship them all back.”

Dan saw Clayton's brow furrow. The same expression she'd had putting down the phone in the Situation Room. When the man before her wouldn't commit to Eritrea, either.

“Then give them arms,” Dan said. “If we can't defend them. Lift the embargo.”

“Arm the
Muslims
?” De Bari said. “The French will never agree. Neither will the Germans.”

“Then we just leave them to be murdered?” Dan felt his mask slipping. He knew what he said wasn't fair, maybe wasn't even true. But he was losing it. The room was too elegant. These people, too detached. “This is the worst thing since Hitler. In Europe, anyway.”

Clayton told him, “Well, the president may be right. We could put troops in, tamp it down. But for how many years? What's our body count? And what's our exit strategy once we're in?”

Dan couldn't believe how quickly she'd put her tiller over, trimmed to match the president's wind. Was this the vaunted loyalty the political staff valued above all else? He muttered, feeling each word like a piece of glass working its way out, “So the Holocaust didn't teach us anything.”

Clayton said, “No one likes to say this. But some things can't be stopped.”

“If you run, you hit the bullet,” Dan started to say, but stopped after “run.” The room was silent.

“I assure you, no one's ‘running,'” Clayton said, angrily now. “All right, that's enough. This is over—”

“No, no, Doris, dial it back a notch. This guy's been through a lot,” De Bari told her. “You sent him to get a firsthand look, didn't you? And he did. He really came home with what we needed to know.” His tone was so compassionate, Dan almost bought it. Then he thought: This turd fucks my wife, and pretends he cares about me?

“We'll get you a written debrief, Mr. President. I'll prepare a list of options, and my recommendation.”

“Do that,” the president said. He too gave Dan a harder look. “And include the option—I know how you must feel about this, Dan, but this is what I want—include the option of continuing with just what we're doing now.”

Clayton took his arm. She pointed to the door as De Bari picked up his phone again.

When Dan looked back he was already talking, grinning up at the ceiling, his voice booming, hearty, jovial.

*   *   *

He was ready to go home. But he couldn't find his car. He had to call the Metro police, then take a cab to the impound lot. Someone had scratched the paint, all the way down to raw steel. The tow company insisted they'd found it that way. Even though he left the White House before lunch, he didn't get to Arlington until it was dark.

Her car was in the drive. He sat in the street for some minutes, the engine ticking over quietly, before pressing the accelerator and surging up to park beside it. Looking at the flaking eave he'd intended to scrape and paint, and not gotten to before it got cold. Remembering when he'd cared about things like that.

“Dan? Is that you?”

She was in the bathroom. He stood in the living room, not wanting to go in. On the TV Larry King was interviewing the vice president. They were talking about the designated-hitter rule.

“Yeah,” he muttered.

When she came out and clicked the TV off with the remote and hugged him he thought for a moment how nice this might have been, if it had been a normal homecoming. She'd changed out of her work clothes. Out of suits and heels, into what she wore around the house: loose cotton pants and sweatshirt, striped socks and backless clogs. Her hair was pulled back, careless, even untidy, but he'd always liked that. That was what hurt, that he still loved her.

He just didn't trust her anymore.

It must have been his look that made her step back. She searched his face. “Bad, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Meilhamer said they sent you to Bosnia. Then I didn't hear from you—”

He said that was right, and detached her fingers and went into the kitchen. Mainly because he couldn't meet her eyes. He opened the fridge. There were the expensive dark ales that she liked to have maybe once a week, with dinner. He could have one. The trouble was, he couldn't have just one. But he wouldn't have to feel so betrayed, so furious, so empty.

He got a diet Coke instead and let the door suck closed on a cold breath.

Her arms came around him again, from behind. He closed his eyes against her warmth. Her scent. “Well, now you're home. I'll make dinner. We can just stay here.”

For a moment, even knowing what he knew, he wanted to hug her back. Pretend nothing had changed. But he couldn't. Even if the truth hurt, he wanted it. He sucked air. It would have torn him apart a week ago.

Now, though, all he had to do was remember a room full of gray light and corpses. And his personal problems seemed to lose their importance.

“Okay, I give up,” she said. “I don't have time for games, Dan. Is it something you saw over there?”

“You're right. I don't have time for games either.”

“Then why don't you tell me what's on your mind.”

“So,” he said, not looking at her but out the window at the house next door. Then, harshly, “So, how was it with De Bari?”

“How was what?”

“When you got it on with him? In Russia. And wherever else it's happened.”

When he took a look she was staring at him, as if he were something broken, or malfunctioning, that she was trying to figure out.

“Are you serious? You come back from Sarajevo—Srebrenica—and that's what you want to know?”

“Am I serious? What do you think?”

“You seem to be. It's the question I'm having trouble taking seriously.”

“That you banged him? He's not that fat.”

“He's—wait a minute. That I
banged
him? Is that what I just heard?”

“I guess not.” He went past her into the dining room and looked at the table. The glassware. The dishes they'd picked out, with the hand-painted birds. Something shifted in his heart. He wanted to break everything, destroy everything, wreck the room. Then he didn't care again. “No, that couldn't be it. Could it?”

His voice sounded weak. He knew that was what sarcasm was, weakness, but Christ it hurt. He just wished this was over.

She pushed past him. Dropped into a chair, kicked off her clogs, curled her legs under her. Getting ready for a discussion. Which he for one did not intend to have. “You must have seen some ugly shit over there.”

“I saw a lot of dead people. A country coming apart. A policy that's not a policy.”

“You let them know? At the NSC?”

“In the Oval Office. This morning.”

“You briefed him?” Just the way she said “him” hurt.

“Yeah.”

“And he said?” She cocked her head in her let's-think-about-this gesture.

“It doesn't seem to be a priority. Like a lot of other things this administration should be putting effort into.” He cleared his throat, feeling anger pushing up. It was there. It just took time. “I don't want to talk about that now. How about we talk about you and him.”

“Me and Bobby-O.”

“That's right.”

“Wait. Before this goes any further. Go over to the china cabinet. Look in the mirror.”

“What?”

“Please. Look in the mirror.”

When he looked in the reflective glass he recoiled. The white of his left eye was sheened with blood. As he pulled down the lid to examine it she said, “Let me put this as clearly as I can. Are you listening? I have never been sexually involved with Robert De Bari.”

It looked
Night of the Living Dead
horrible, but it didn't hurt; it seemed to be limited to the sclera, the white of the eyeball; just a broken blood vessel. “You never had sex with him.”

“That's what you meant, right? No, I don't think ‘banged' leaves much room for misinterpretation.” She said precisely, in her appearance-before-Congress tone, “I have not banged the president; I have not screwed the president. I have not fucked him, or blown him, or even given him a hand job. Now, does that take care of whatever's eating you? I hope so, because you're scaring me, Dan. Maybe you should see that doctor again.”

“Never mind her. You were never alone with him?”

She glanced away, and that was when he knew he was right. The knowledge tore apart parts of himself he'd thought were healed. She scraped her nails along the arm of the chair. The zipping noise raised the hairs on the back of his neck.

“Well?” he said, in a voice he barely recognized.

“Have I ever been alone with him. Well—actually I was. Once.”

He waited.

“I told you I was on his transition team. After the speech to the Guard Association. Well, one day he wanted a briefing. I forget what. Personnel issues, probably. I was in there with Holt, and Gino Varghese, and Charlie Wrinkles. The Christmas help he brought in from Wyoming. We had a suite at the Sheraton. We were there about an hour. Then Tony and the rest left.”

She looked at the carpet. “I should have told you. But I figured it would upset you. Anyway, he was on me before I had time to think about it. I pushed him away. Said I was in a relationship. He did his little-boy-caught-in-the-cookie-jar act. Said it wouldn't happen again. Asked me to forgive him. There hasn't been anything since.”

He had to admit, it was a good act. But now he knew how things worked inside the Beltway.

She was ambitious. Political. She worshiped De Bari.

“You were never with him after that?” he asked her again. Giving her one last chance.

“Never.”

He hadn't wanted to give her the details, tell her how he knew. She'd argue, obfuscate, make him sound stupid and petty. That was the way they worked, and they all screwed you in the end; there was as much chance of finding one who was honest and faithful as picking a buttercup in hell.