Painkiller

37

When the phone chortled its usual two rings and the machine picked up, Laramie came awake with the sense that something was out of place. Asleep in the same position in which she’d passed out, she wasn’t sure what it was that bothered her while Eddie Rothgeb’s voice blasted from the answering machine and banged around her aching head.

“Laramie, where the hell are you? Pick up! Are you seeing this?”

She knocked the phone off the hook, fumbled for it, picked it up, said, “Enough,” and heard a click. Then nothing.

“Eddie?”

There was no answer. No noise at all-just dead air.

Maybe she had disconnected the call with her butterfingers maneuver, but Laramie doubted it. She hung up, clicked back on, and got no dial tone. She tried this a few times with the same result before her headache began to reassault her. Groaning, she leaned her forehead against a palm, and in so doing, caught an angle on the open pizza box. Sprawled on the floor, it contained only the lone remaining slice. She noticed that she had even consumed the crusts of the missing pieces.

Last night, there hadn’t been a single message on the answering machine. Not even any she had previously saved. She usually had four or five waiting for her at the end of each day and knew for a fact she’d had at least fifteen saved on the chip, so she was confident they hadn’t been letting any calls through.

Meaning this morning, they would have kept the intercept going. The call from Rothgeb, cut short though it had been, didn’t make sense.

She crossed to the front window and peered outside; it was still dark. She checked her watch, which they’d let her wear for the length of the interrogation, probably just to annoy her further. It was 5:15 A.M.

Two of the sedans appeared to have abandoned the assignment. There remained only one black sedan and the van. She thought of Eddie’s words.

Are you seeing this?

Laramie found the remote. The BREAKING NEWS headline registered before the full screen image came up on the tube:

NUKE BLAST AT CHINA SUMMIT

She kicked up the volume. It appeared she’d clicked on to the Fox News Channel. Brit Hume had the desk.

“…acted immediately. In an emergency vote of the surviving leaders, former vice premier and military general Deng Jiang has been appointed premier.

“The high-intensity detonation had initially been confirmed by a U.S. intelligence source, and has now been officially characterized by China’s ambassador to the U.S., as a nuclear explosion. Our American intelligence source is also referring to the size of the detonation as, quote, ‘significant.’ The Chinese Ambassador in Washington states that China’s own intelligence wing has ruled out accidental detonation, and suspects terrorism as the cause. Tens of thousands are suspected dead, including eight of the State Council members, the ruling body of the People’s Republic of China. Among the confirmed dead at this hour is China’s president and premier. We’ll go again to a statement made by the PRC moments after news of this tragedy was confirmed.”

Laramie now had a pretty good idea why her personal surveillance detachment had been depleted by fifty percent: half-assed treason investigation notwithstanding, she figured she’d be safe in placing herself a little lower on the global-crisis pecking order than the world’s first act of nuclear terror.

Crap.

She knew China with the same familiarity she had with the tiny birth-mark on the side of her neck. The territory, the tendencies of every key leader, the way they reacted in a time of crisis. All of it. She could have predicted to the second-in her sleep-the process and result of the immediate-succession vote installing General Deng Jiang as premier. She would have been able to predict who it was who called the vote, who voted, who voted for whom, what actions would be taken, what the State Council and the CPC’s public statements would be, and who would issue the statements in the wake of the bombing.

And here I am in my living room. The morning of the worst terrorist act ever to hit the PRC-the worst terrorist act ever-and I’m stuck here under house arrest.

Hung over, no less.

Hume was back on her television screen.

“Interim Premier Deng Jiang issued a written statement to the global news media minutes after the ambassador’s press conference.” Hume read from a prepared statement while its text appeared over a map of China.

“ ‘The most horrible of tragedies has been wrought upon the People’s Republic of China. The destruction was not accidental-this atrocity is almost positively an act of international terror. And while the terrorists did not use a Chinese weapon, I assure you that China possesses suitable weapons to combat this act of war. I can tell you that we are in possession of strong intelligence indicating the presence of a well-funded international terrorist organization hostile to the interests of the People’s Republic of China, which was fully capable of perpetrating this murderous act. If and when we determine this organization’s responsibility, China will strike defiantly and supremely. The People’s Republic of China is now at war, and we will vanquish our mortal enemy with furor, vengeance, and haste.’ ”

Hume came back onscreen, looked up from the page he’d been reading, and held the gaze of the camera for a long moment of reflection.

“Eerily reminiscent,” he said, “of a day in September, not long ago.”

Laramie returned to her couch. She sat cross-legged on its cushions and stared blankly at the images on the television for a long time. The phone rang once. The answering machine did not pick up. It rang again, this time as a clipped half-ring.

After a while she went into the bedroom, changed into a sweater, jeans, and running shoes, packed her preferred travel bag with a couple days of things, found the vial of Advil and downed a trio of tablets. She turned on the lights in the bathroom, kitchen, and bedroom, and turned up the volume on the television. Then she grabbed her purse and bag, returned to the garage, and, working in the dark, used a key to open the door normally reserved for the egress of her garbage bin.

Outside, she found herself face-to-face with the purple plastic monstrosity the city required its residents to use for refuse. Behind it lay the condo village’s service road and the fairly ugly rear view of a dozen town-homes backed up against the road.

Crouching, she slid sideways into a bed of bark chips and periwinkle. From this unobstructed, crappy hiding place she listened and watched. Somebody’s alarm clock wailed; a local morning news show blared; a phone rang. The tendrils of dawn had not yet reached into the predawn sky. As her eyes adjusted, she tried to see into the cavities at the rear of each townhome-see whether one of her house-arrest squad was out here keeping an eye on the back of her unit. The light from her bathroom window was bright up above her; maybe, she thought, if one of them is watching and is too incompetent to have spotted me already, his eyes would be drawn to that window.

Since she didn’t see any figure in the shadows, didn’t see any smoke rising from a cigarette, or hear the muffled static of a security radio, Laramie crept around the corner of the unit next to hers. Then, hearing no shouts demanding she stop in her tracks, she started out on the service road, slinking along the garage walls of her neighbors.

After keeping close to the buildings of six or seven units and still finding no objection, she stepped out onto the road, clasped her bag and purse against her side, and set off at a jog.

Security was beefed up to post-9/11 levels everywhere in town, let alone at the entrance to the building where fifty-one of the nation’s most senior elected representatives happened to work. Nonetheless, when asked by the security man whether she had an appointment with the senator she’d come to see, Laramie gave it her best shot.

“I don’t have an appointment,” she said, “but Senator Kircher is expecting me.”

The guard offered her an amused look as he examined her driver’s license, and suddenly Laramie wondered whether Gates’s goons had managed to get a warrant issued, or an APB, and that the mild-mannered security officer was playing games with her, buying time while he contemplated how best to leap around his desk and cuff her.

But the man merely returned her license, and when she took it, Laramie saw that he’d stacked atop it a visitor’s pass.

So much for security on Capitol Hill.

The metal detectors offered no further resistance; when she asked a page for directions, he too offered a bemused expression and directed her down the building’s main hallway.

“Fourth office on the left, Miss,” he said with a smile.

She came into the waiting room outside Senator Kircher’s wing of offices and approached the fiftysomething woman behind the reception desk. Laramie identified herself, told the woman she was here to see the senator, and said, “He may not know me by name, but he’ll be familiar with my e-mail address. It’s EastWest7. I believe he’ll be interested in hearing from me.”

Laramie almost blew a gasket when the woman gave her the same sort of inside-joke look offered by the security guard and page.

“Sure,” the receptionist said. “‘EastWest7,’ is it?”

“Correct. I’d like to see him immediately.”

“Do you have any information?” the receptionist said. When Laramie stared uncomprehendingly at her, the woman said, “A résumé?” and pushed an eight-by-ten head shot of a very attractive woman across the countertop, not all the way over to Laramie but far enough for her to see.

Laramie examined the photograph from her upside-down perspective. The receptionist looked Laramie over and smiled a motherly smile. “Tell you what,” she said. “The senator isn’t meeting with constituents today, but one of his aides is here. Why don’t you go ahead and wait over there and I’ll put a good word in for you.” When the woman tilted her chin toward the chairs behind her, Laramie turned to see that there was another woman seated in the waiting room. The woman was stunning. Tall. And thin. Laramie also noticed, connecting the dots now, that the woman did not exactly possess the demeanor of, say, a lobbyist, or a fellow representative.

It was the same woman she’d just seen in the head shot.

A door opened behind the reception desk and a man who reminded Laramie of Rob Lowe leaned out. The receptionist turned and handed him the other woman’s head shot and an accompanying sheet of paper. Rob examined the photograph, nodded, and looked across Laramie until his eyes landed on the other woman in the room. He smiled.

“Sherrie? Come on in,” he said.

When the stunningly beautiful woman had strolled through the doorway and Rob Lowe closed the door, Laramie, feeling somewhat short and plain, looked at the receptionist.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she said.

The woman smiled.

Laramie said, “The reason I’m asking to see-”

She abandoned the explanation midstream. She dug into her purse for a pen, and in as polite a tone as she could muster, said, “Would you happen to have a pad of paper back there?”

“Of course.”

Laramie chose a seat as far from where the other woman had been sitting as she could find. Fighting a gag reflex at the prospect of another “constituent” coming in and mistaking her for a fellow aspirant to the Rob Lowe preinterview, she composed with her pen and the receptionist’s pad a six-page letter that would bring Kircher up to speed on her findings since the last whistle-blower e-mail. She included her theories on the topic of collusion between General and now-Premier Deng Jiang, North Korea, and the remainder of the declared or aspiring Marxist-Leninist dictatorships Cooper had photographed on the remote island resort. She also included her hypothesis on Peter M. Gates’s apparent systematic model of withholding important intelligence from his superiors until the moment of greatest political expediency-expediency for his own career.

When she was through, she checked the document for mistakes-an impulse she rarely possessed the strength to buck-and folded the pages in half. She wrote the following words across one of the blank sides:

TO: SENATOR KIRCHER

FR: EASTWEST7 (AKA JULIE LARAMIE, CIA)

RE: CHINA AND OTHER MATTERS

She had started to write her cell number below the subject line when, deciding the disconnected number would do her, and Senator Kircher for that matter, no particular good, she crossed out the prefix and composed, instead, a three-word note:

HAPPY CASTING, SENATOR!

Thinking that once her ordeal ended, if it ever did, she might consider paying a visit on Mrs. Alan Kircher, or perhaps the assignment editor at 60 Minutes, Laramie stood and handed the folded pages of her makeshift essay to the receptionist.

“Please give that to somebody on the senator’s staff,” she said, and jerked her thumb toward the door Rob Lowe had used. “Preferably somebody besides him.”

Then Laramie walked out of Kircher’s waiting room and exited the building.