Blood Trust

ONE

Washington, D.C.

“SHE’S DEAD.”

These words, spoken by his daughter, jerk Jack McClure out of sleep.

Covered in sweat, he turns in the darkness of his bedroom. “Emma?”

The faintest cool breeze stirs the hair on his head.

“She passed by me a minute ago, Dad. Or is it an hour?”

Hard to tell, Jack thought, when you’re dead.

“Emma?”

But the ghostly voice was gone, and he felt the sudden lack of her. Again. A great abyss on whose edge he teetered like a drunk reeling out of a bar. He drew a breath, gave a great shudder, and lunged for his cell phone. Punched in the number of Walter Reed Medical Center and heard the familiar voice of the night nurse.

“Mr. McClure, how odd you should call at this moment. I was just about to dial your number.” She cleared her throat and when she began again her voice had taken on a formal, almost martial tenor. “At two fifty-three this morning, the former First Lady, Lyn Carson, expired.”

“She’s dead.” The echo of Emma’s voice caused another shiver to run down his spine.

“I’m very sorry for your loss,” the night nurse said.

“Have you notified Alli?”

“I haven’t yet, but as instructed I’ve called Mrs. Carson’s sister and her brother-in-law.” She meant Henry Holt Carson, Alli’s uncle. “As well as Secretary Paull, of course.”

“Okay.” Jack thumbed the sleep from his eyes as he swung his legs off the bed. “I’ll take care of informing Alli.” He padded toward the bathroom.

“Sir, is there anything—?”

“At the end … did she regain consciousness?”

“No, sir, she never did.”

“Stay with Mrs. Carson.” He squinted as he turned on the light. “I’ll be right over.”

“IT’S THE end of an era,” Dennis Paull said as he and Jack stood by Lyn Carson’s bedside.

No one knew that better than Jack. Ten months ago, he had been in the vehicle following the president’s limousine in Moscow when the limo had skidded on a patch of ice. Almost everyone in that car, including President Edward Harrison Carson, had died. All except Lyn Carson, who had slipped into a coma. Despite two surgeries, the first on board Air Force One, the second here at Walter Reed, she had failed to regain consciousness. Both procedures had succeeded only in prolonging her twilight life.

“Did you call Alli?”

Jack nodded. “Several times, and they said they’d get the message to her.”

“What about her cell?”

“Fearington has a strict policy about cell-phone use.” Fearington was the FBI Special Ops school in Virginia.

“Even for this?” Paull shook his head. He was now Jack’s boss. He had hired Jack after President Carson’s fatal accident. Jack, who had worked for ATF, had been tapped by Carson as a strategic advisor immediately following his old friend’s inauguration. That all ended as abruptly as it had begun, and Paull, seeing his opportunity, had scooped Jack up. Now Jack tackled the antiterrorism assignments that daunted Paull’s other agents, using his dyslexic mind to unravel puzzles no one else could handle.

“Rules are rules.”

Paull took out his phone. “We’ll see about that.” While he was waiting, he said, “You must’ve moved heaven and earth to get her in there.” Then he held up a finger. “No answer.” He closed the connection.

“Fearington periodically goes into lockdown as a drill.”

Paull nodded and put his phone into his pocket.

“But the truth is Alli did her own heavy lifting,” Jack went on. “She passed the entrance exams with the highest marks they’d seen in more than a decade.”

“Smart little thing.”

Jack snorted. “It takes more than smarts to get into Fearington. After her father was killed, she wouldn’t talk to anyone, even me. She curled up into an emotional ball. But there was so much anger inside her that when I took her to my gym, she slid on a pair of boxing gloves and started pounding the heavy bag.”

Paull laughed. “I’d like to have been a fly on the wall.”

“Yeah, she almost broke her right hand. Then I began to teach her how to box and, damn, if she didn’t pick up all the fundamentals right away. At first, she didn’t have a lot of power, as you can imagine, but then, I don’t know, something clicked inside her. She was like a ghost—it seemed as if she could anticipate my punches. She has this ability. By reading a person’s face she knows whether they’re lying or telling the truth. Now she’s extended this ability to knowing what they’re about to do.”

“So she put the boys down?”

“Did she ever!” Jack said. “But admiration wasn’t what she got from a lot of her classmates.”

Paull nodded. “I can only imagine. Fearington’s a men’s club. Didn’t you warn her?”

“Well, I reminded her.” Jack sighed. “Not that it did any good. She was determined. No one and nothing was going to get in her way.”

ALLI CARSON was pulled from sleep, roughly and without warning.

“Get up, Ms. Carson. Please be good enough to rouse yourself.”

Alli turned over, opened her eyes, and was almost blinded by the fierce glare from the overhead light. Who had turned it on, who was barking orders at her? Her mind, still fuzzed with the dream of Emma’s face glowing in the light of—what?—a streetlamp, a full moon, an unearthly luminescence?

“What is this? I don’t under—”

“Please do as I say, Ms. Carson, quickly, quickly!”

“Commander Fellows?”

“Yes,” Brice Fellows said. “Come, come, there’s no time to lose!”

She sat up. The oversized T-shirt she slept in was black, covered in white silk-screened skulls. Though twenty-three, she looked more like sixteen or seventeen. Graves’ disease had interfered with her growing, so that she was slight, almost pixieish, just over five feet in height, her tomboy figure more suited to an adolescent than an adult.

“Can you please tell me—?”

“Hurry, Ms. Carson. The police are outside.”

Fellows glanced around the dorm room, pointed to a chair on which she had casually tossed the clothes she had been wearing during dinner. Beyond was an empty bed with the covers pushed back.

“Where—where is Vera?” Alli asked.

“You don’t know what happened to her?”

“No, I don’t.” Beneath her anger at this treatment, she felt a wave of fear rising inside her. “She fell asleep before I did. She was there when I turned off the light.”

A catch in the commander’s voice. “Well, that, at least, is a relief.

“Now, please, Ms. Carson, get dressed.”

“Where is Vera?”

“She’s in the infirmary.”

A clutch in the pit of Alli’s stomach. “Is she okay?”

“At the moment I can’t say.”

“Commander, you’re scaring me.”

“Please, Ms. Carson, just do as I ask.”

Crossing to the chair, she drew on a pair of black jeans and a thick turtleneck sweater of the same color. She always dressed in black. Sitting on Vera’s bed, she placed her palms against the bottom sheet as if to make certain that Vera wasn’t there. Then, drawing her shoes over, she stepped into them.

“Here, you’ll need this.”

He passed her her leather jacket. She swung it around and zipped up.

“Come with me.”

She stood up, silently, with a fiercely beating heart.

Beyond her door, the hallway was only dimly lit, so as not to awaken the other recruits on the floor, she assumed. She saw two police detectives, a three-man forensics team, and a pair of Secret Service agents, one of whom, Naomi Wilde, had been the head of her mother’s detail. Cops and the Secret Service? What in the world had happened?

All at once, her heart skipped a beat. “Naomi, is Vera all right?”

“Keep your voice down.”

She turned to see three forensics techs snapping on latex gloves before they stepped into her room. Turning on the lights, they began to methodically go through it.

“What are they looking for?” Then Alli turned back to Naomi. “Please,” she begged. “Just tell me if Vera is okay.” But Naomi’s face was as blank as a field of snow.

“Ms. Bard is in the infirmary,” Naomi said.

“I already know that,” Alli said. Something in her voice had spoken of a forced detachment, which caused Alli’s stomach to clench in anxiety. If Naomi wasn’t in control of the situation …

“She’s been drugged. She was disoriented, sick to her stomach. She went out into the hallway without, apparently, knowing where she was, and collapsed. A security guard found her.”

“What?” A chill ran through Alli. “My God, how … who would do such a thing? I want to see her—!”

“Ms. Carson—”

“Hey, Vera’s the only one here who gives a damn about me.”

A member of the forensics team emerged from Alli’s room holding a plastic evidence bag with something in it. Approaching one of the Metro detectives, he handed over the bag and whispered in the detective’s ear, before disappearing back inside the room.

The Metro detective cocked his head. “Interesting you should say that now.”

Alli turned on him, her cheeks aflame. “What the hell does that mean?”

He held up the bag. “This bottle contains traces of Rohypnol. Roofies in common street parlance, the date-rape drug. It was found under your bed.”

“What?”

“You deny it’s yours?”

“Of course I deny it.”

“So it’s your claim that you didn’t drug your roommate?”

“What the what? Why on earth would I?”

“Please keep your voices down,” Commander Fellows interrupted.

“Ms. Carson,” the detective said in a steely voice, “I must insist you come with us now.”

She looked around. “Just let me find my cell phone.”

“The academy is in lockdown. You know the rules.” The commander gestured to the doorway. “This way, Ms. Carson.”

She knew better than to argue further with Fellows. He ran Fearington like an Army boot camp, and talking back would only get her into deeper trouble. Fearington was one of only a couple of elite academies that fed the government secret services. Like its brethren in other regions of the country, Fearington was a closely guarded secret. Its cadets were the cream of the crop, exhaustively vetted and tested before being chosen to fill its ranks. The courses were rigorous, both physically and intellectually. It had taken all of Jack’s skills to get Alli accepted into the examination phase; following Jack’s intensive tutelage, she had done the rest. But from the very first day, she had been acutely aware of the fact that she didn’t fit the traditional Fearington mold.

As she was marched down the hallway and out onto the grounds, she wondered dazedly why she was in trouble. Her legs were shaking and the core of her felt cold. Nevertheless, she had no choice but to take her first step into the nightmare.

“GENTLEMEN, WHAT a surprise finding you here.”

This was how Henry Holt Carson, oldest brother of the late president, announced himself as he walked through the door into his sister-in-law’s room. Immensely wealthy and influential, he wore a silk-and-cashmere made-to-measure suit that Jack estimated must have cost at least five thousand dollars. On his feet were John Lobb shoes, mirror-shined, but not, Jack was certain, by Carson himself. His cold blue eyes, huge as an owl’s, studied them both, but failed, Jack noted, to even glance at Lyn’s corpse. But then, she was dead, Jack thought, and of no use to him.

“Interlopers to the end, I see.” His lopsided smile failed to blunt the barb of his remark.

He was in every way his brother’s polar opposite. A hard-nosed businessman, he distrusted and detested politicians, especially the ones he couldn’t buy off. He owned mining interests in the Midwest, for which he was forever buying pollution credits so he could continue pulling ore out of the ground and refining it. More recently, he had bought up a number of regional banks at bargain basement prices, merging them into one, InterPublic Bancorp. He had been married and divorced four times that Jack knew of. He had children, but, according to Edward, could neither remember their names nor what they looked like. He was an empire builder through and through. But, somehow, possibly because of his affection for all things familial, Edward had forgiven his brother his peccadillos and loved him as one ought to love a brother. It was anyone’s guess how the elder Carson felt about Edward. A rock might reveal more of its personal nature.

He moved into the apex of the triangle with them; he was the kind of man who was continually conscious of his power vis-à-vis those around him, perhaps out of a deep-seated sense of inferiority. After being expelled from high school for defecating on the principal’s chair, retaliation for some slight, imagined or real, he had toiled fifteen-hour days in an iron smelter’s, working his way up to foreman, then day manager, from which position he had obtained a bank loan in order to buy the company. From that moment on, the path of his life was set.

“We all had a deep and abiding fondness for Lyn,” Jack said.

“My brother’s wife has passed to her final reward, McClure.” Henry Holt Carson’s head, as round as a medicine ball and almost as large, swiveled in his direction. “She doesn’t give a good goddamn whether you’re here or not. If she ever did.” This unnatural head, with its great eyes and turnip nose, sat atop sloping shoulders seemingly without the benefit of a neck. He had the overlarge, rough, slabbed hands of a hod carrier, and his face was deeply scored by wind, sun, and backbreaking work. Though he was now an owner, he made it an ironclad rule never to sit behind a desk. He was vocal in his contempt for those who, as he put it, were that disgusting modern mythological beast, half man, half chair. As a consequence, he never sat when he could stand, never walked when he could run. And he never spoke when he could order or accuse.

Now he looked around. “Why isn’t my niece here?” Dark clouds gathered along his brow. “Has she been informed?”

“We tried.” Paull’s voice was mild and even. “It seems that Fearington is in lockdown.”

The clouds were fulminating. “At this ungodly hour?”

“Rehearsal lockdowns are designed to come at inconvenient times,” Jack said. “As in real life.”

“Indeed.” Which was what Henry Holt Carson said when he didn’t know how to respond and didn’t want to lose momentum. He abhorred silence the way nature abhors a vacuum. “This is unacceptable. The girl needs to know the altered state of her mother.”

“Is that what you call it?” Jack said.

“Listen, you”—Carson’s stubby forefinger stabbed the air like a dagger—“you’ve already done enough to that girl. As far as this family is concerned, you’re a fucking menace.”

“Oh, I see. This isn’t about Alli at all, is it?”

Carson took a step toward him. “The fuck it isn’t.”

Paull put his hands up. “Rancor isn’t appropriate, especially at this moment.”

The two men ignored him, glaring fixedly at each other.

“The. Fuck. It. Isn’t,” Carson repeated, emphasizing each word with a degree of menace. “And then you go and let my brother get killed.”

“Now it comes out. No one could have—”

“You should have.” Carson squared his shoulders like a linebacker ready to make an open field tackle. “I mean, that’s what Eddie was always saying about you—Jack can do this, Jack can do that. According to him you were a fucking wizard.”

“He had a squad of Secret Service agents whose job it was—”

“They weren’t you, McClure.” He was up on the balls of his feet now, his hands curled into fists. “They. Weren’t. You.”

At that moment, Paull’s phone burred. Something about the moment, the phone ringing in the dead of night, or the portentousness of the sound, stopped the escalating argument in its tracks.

The two men stared at Paull as he drew out the phone, checked the number on the readout, then took the call. For what seemed the longest time he said not a word. But his gray eyes slid across the room and met Jack’s. His expression was not encouraging.

“All right,” he said at length. “Make certain nothing gets out of control.” He sighed. “Yes, I know it’s already out of control. I meant—for God’s sake use your head, man!—don’t let it go any further. I’ll be right there.”

He closed the phone and stood staring into space for some time.

“Well,” Jack prompted, “what is it?”

Paull, seeking to pull himself together, turned to Jack. He rubbed a hand across his forehead and said, “That was Naomi Wilde.”

Jack’s adrenaline started to flow. “The Secret Service agent?”

Paull nodded. “She’s at Fearington. The lockdown isn’t a drill, Jack.”

FEARINGTON’S GROUNDS were as dark as an abandoned coal mine. Not a light shone, not a figure could be seen in the blackness where trees, training courses, and firing ranges loomed. It was as if she and her detail were the only ones on the academy campus as they crunched through a thin layer of frost. Her breath appeared before her like an apparition. Then, from behind her, lights popped on in the dorm rooms, first one, then others, like eyes opening. Heads in silhouette told her that some of her fellow classmates had been roused, despite the stealth of her detail.

She was led across the campus. Not a word was spoken. She could hear the soft crunch of their shoes in the icy grass, the brief slither of material against material. Just last week there were patches of snow, like the last tufts on a balding man’s scalp. Still, the cops’ shoulders were hunched against the chill. Out past the obstacle course, they turned left into a dense copse of towering beech trees, and she felt even more surrounded, hemmed in, and helpless.

All at once, the lead detective murmured into his wireless mike and three huge generator-driven floodlights snapped on, one after the other. They were trained on a space between the trunks of two trees. Alli gasped and, staggering, almost fell. Only the hand of Naomi Wilde, cupped around her elbow, kept her from pitching headlong onto the bed of fallen leaves.

There, in the midst of the Fearington campus, was the naked body of a young male. He was upside down, his ankles and wrists bound and tied to the tree trunks. His skin was a sickening blue-white.

Alli, staring at Billy’s body, felt the familiar steel wall spontaneously spring up, shielding her from trauma. Her unconscious had manufactured this mental wall during her weeklong captivity; it was a defense mechanism over which she had no control. She felt the disassociation, the sense of watching a movie instead of living life. This was happening to another girl, the protagonist of the film. She remained perfectly impassive, watching the film as, frame by frame, it unspooled toward its unknown climax and denouement.

After some time, she became aware that the others had come to a halt and now stood in a semicircle with her roughly in its center. They were all staring at her with the stern demeanor of tribunal judges. Her mind was filled with the ominous rat-tat-tat of military drums, and with a determined effort she put this, too, beyond the barrier of her inner wall.

One of the detectives, a beefy man with the splayed stance of a flatfoot, was directly behind her, and she heard his voice now.

“Well?”

Alli, spellbound in horror, felt her tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth. She could not utter a word.

“What, no shock, no hysteria, not a tear shed?” Flatfoot said with a voice like an ice floe. “Christ, you’re a cold bitch.” He pressed his fingertips against her shoulder blades, propelling her forward. “Here is William Warren.” He came after her, like a hunter with the fox in his sights. “You knew him, oh, yeah, you did.” His laugh was like the braying of a mule. “You and he did what together behind that big old tree?”