PrivateSector

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He began tracking Julia Cuthburt as she pulled out of the parking garage underneath her Connecticut Avenue office building at 5:30. She drove a silver 2001 Toyota 4Runner with a six-cylinder engine and four-wheel drive that had probably never once, not since the day she’d bought it, ever been engaged. Her choice of automobile was in character with her general profile: practical, reliable, and best on the market for holding its value. The car conveyed an outdoorsy, rugged, and adventurous image, three qualities Julia Cuthburt roundly admired and sorely lacked. Poor Julia was a glorified clerk who wanted to be a princess in a Disney movie. Following her was too easy.

It was rush hour in Washington, and the traffic was dense and sluggish. She was a cautious, meticulous driver who rarely changed lanes and signaled far in advance of every maneuver. She drove like a snail.

At 6:15 she took a left off M Street in Georgetown, drove downhill half a block, and turned right into an underground garage. He waited fifteen seconds before he followed her in, just in time to see her taillights turning to the right. She went down three levels. He went down three levels. She pulled into an open space and he parked twelve spaces away.

He was quietly congratulating himself, when, suddenly, things went haywire. She locked her car and walked directly to the handicap elevator instead of the stairs. He was just stepping out of his car as the elevator doors closed and her guilty grin disappeared. The lazy bitch should’ve taken the stairs, instead of abusing the public trust.

He rushed for the stairwell, sprinted up three levels to the ground floor, and barged through a pair of heavy double doors just in time to knock a mother and her little children flat into a wall.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, looking frantically around, as the mother glared nastily and one of the children wailed, bouncing up and down on a hurt foot. He found himself on the ground floor of a two-level indoor mall, filled with expensive and exclusive shops. Julia Cuthburt wore a dark blue business suit. The crowds were light, and spotting her should be easy. If she was there. For five minutes he searched with increasing despair.

He gritted his teeth and cursed as he rushed toward the M Street exit from the mall. He stormed out onto a street thick with pedestrians, mostly young people and college kids wandering in noisy swarms and barhopping. He looked both ways and Julia Cuthburt in her blue business suit was nowhere in sight.

He had not considered this. Not from her. His computer had rated her a three. Tiny children with their naive trust of strangers and frivolous ways were twos. Julia Cuthburt was barely two steps above a drooling paraplegic in a wheelchair, he thought, as he shrugged with bewilderment and pondered his options. The simplest solution would be to go back into the parking garage, linger beside her car till she returned, and try something different. That option was canned nearly the moment it popped into his head. Bad enough that Lisa Morrow had required a script revision. One, okay, but Julia’s role was sacrosanct.

He racked his brain and tried to calculate what had brought her here.

Shopping, possibly, but as he looked up and down the street and studied the environment, it struck him as more and more unlikely. The array of expensive, upscale Georgetown shops was out of character for a tight-fisted bargain hunter who liked to brag to her friends about all the great deals she bagged at Wal-Mart and Kmart and Dollar stores. Her pretensions aside, Julia had an accountant’s soul. Life for her was a never-ending tug-of-war over who got to keep the highest percentage of the margin.

She would be hungry at this hour. But he doubted she had driven forty minutes through rush-hour traffic to find an overpriced restaurant in the most crowded district of the city. Possibly she was meeting a date, and that eventuality unsettled him greatly. It would mess up everything. This was Julia’s night to rise and shine.

He thought of all the other details and notations in her file and a hunch began to take shape. He looked both ways again, then swiftly crossed the street and walked into Clyde’s. The bar was packed with young men and women, mostly wearing suits and business attire, hefting drinks, chattering and chuckling, ogling one another, and posturing in ways they hoped would attract the opposite sex. He wandered through the bar pretending to search for someone he was supposed to meet. But no Julia in her blue serge suit. Possibly she was in the ladies’room, so he loitered nearby, gave that five minutes, and then departed in a huff.

A block down was Nathans and he made a beeline for the entrance. An almost identical scene, another upscale meat market filled with horny young people willing to pay seven dollars per beer on the off chance they might get lucky. He searched the tables first on the possibility that she was having dinner with a date. No Julia in a blue suit at the tables. He progressed to the bar, where women aspiring to be picked up mostly congregated. After two minutes of fruitless searching, he caught a flash of dark blue at the far end of the bar, right below a pair of ancient rowing oars hung on the wall to give the utterly false sense of a sporting clubhouse. He moved across the floor and improved his angle. Bingo-it was indeed Julia in her blue serge suit, perched on a tall barstool, a mixed drink of some sort held daintily between two fingers of her left hand. A man stood beside her, gripping a longneck, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet and chortling at something.

The man was in his late thirties, balding, chubby, with a long, pointed nose, and his posture and gestures suggested he was trying hard. Her posture and flat expression suggested he was trying much too hard.

He maneuvered through the thick crowd until he was directly behind the man chatting with his Julia. Was this a date going sour or merely a stranger attempting a pickup? That distinction mattered. It mattered greatly.

The man was waving his longneck through the air and saying to her, “… and the senator was all over me to get it fixed. I have lots of friends in the White House, and you know what?… If he hadn’t pissed me off, I might’ve picked up the phone and handled everything.”

Julia nodded and said, “Uh… okay.”

“Know what I did?”

“No.”

“What I did was tell the senator I didn’t like the way he approached me. I told him I wouldn’t lift a finger. You should’ve seen him. Guy’s got hair transplants, you know. I swear to God, his face went red from here to here.”

He rocked back on his heels and chortled loudly. Julia took a long and serious sip from her drink.

“So, anyway,” the guy asked, “what did you say your name was?”

“Julia.”

“Uh-huh. Ever been up on the Hill, Julia? I could get you in, show you the corridors of power, introduce you to a few senators.”

“What a thrill,” Julia replied. Funny, she didn’t sound the least bit thrilled.

The important question was answered. He leaned across the bar and used his elbow to push back the man hitting on Julia as he yelled, “Julia? My God, it’s been what? Ten years?”

Her eyes shifted to him and she blinked a few times. He winked at her and said, “You don’t remember me? The prom? Senior year in high school?”

Julia’s expression became even more confused, so he widened his smile and added, “Gosh… Tom Melborne? Maybe you don’t recognize me without my tuxedo.”

Julia seemed to catch on. “Tom? Oh God. Please, I’m sorry.”

He edged closer to her, using his body to force the Senate staffer to back away a few more steps. He said to Julia, “What are you doing in Washington? Last I heard, you were going to… oh, gosh… I’m embarrassed-”

“University of Delaware,” she answered, smiling.

“Of course.” He looked at the staffer. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude. Are you Julia’s boyfriend? Husband? Date?”

“Uh, no. We just met.”

He put a hand on the staffer’s shoulder. “We went to high school together, until my mom and dad died in a car accident… right after the prom.” He glanced at Julia and said, “That’s why I dropped out. I’m sure you wondered, and… I guess I should’ve told you, but I… Hey, look, I didn’t want your sympathy. You had your life, your great future, and I had to raise and care for my four younger sisters. You didn’t need that. They’re all doing great, by the way. Jessie, the youngest, remember her? The one in the wheelchair? She just started college.”

Julia had her face stuffed inside her drink. She bit her lip, glanced up, and said, “I always wondered what happened to poor, sweet little Jessie.”

Uncomfortably shuffling his feet, the staffer was looking like the deflated third wheel he had tacitly become. He studied the intruder, his competition, and realized without a doubt that he was dealing with a number one draft pick. He saw a tall, broad-shouldered, blond-haired man, slightly older than Julia, with a square jaw, blue eyes, and the kind of sculpted looks that could get him any woman in this bar, or any other.

The staffer backed away, saying, “Well, uh, it was nice to meet you, Julia. That offer to show you the Hill is still open.”

She looked down at the floor and mumbled, “Thanks… honest.”

The staffer melted back into the crowd and they erupted in chuckles.

“The name really is Tom,” he said. “Tom Melborne.”

“And I’m really Julia… Julia Cuthburt.”

They giggled some more.

He said, “You owe me. Another three minutes and he would’ve been pelting you with stories about how he and the Speaker of the House play golf together every Sunday. That’s where he advises the Speaker on how to run the country.”

She chuckled. “Did you really have four little sisters?”

“Of course. And do you really plan to go visit him on the Hill?”

She stole another sip from her drink and he could see her eyes studying him, liking what she saw, and wondering if this was all there was. A white knight saves her from a horny dragon and then drifts off into the night, leaving her to the next hungry Hill staffer, or lawyer, or civil servant. The city was filled to its bowels with all three and she was long past the point where she found them entertaining.

He smiled at her and asked, “Would you care for another drink? Perhaps you’d like to hear how poor Jessie is really doing.”

She gave him a smile that was half yes, and half bald relief. “Rum and Coke would be great.”

He waved at the bartender, ordered hers, and a scotch on the rocks for himself. As the harried bartender rushed off, he asked her, “So, what do you do?”

“I’m an accountant at a firm here in Washington. Johnson and Smathers. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”

“Never. But I’m not in business.”

“Are you in government?”

“Sort of.”

When he failed to elaborate, she said, “I’m baffled. Where do you work?”

He took the drinks from the bartender, handed her one, and shrugged. “Across the river.”

“Where across the river?”

“That big outfit located in a big building down the GW Park-way. I don’t actually work in that building, but I keep a town-house nearby for when I’m in town.”

“Oh, you’re with the CIA?”

“Yes. But we’re not really supposed to admit more than that.”

“What do we talk about then?”

“At the moment, I’m posing as a college professor on sabbatical who travels overseas and does research on public health systems. If you happen to have a keen interest in matters of public health, ask away.”

A look of dread crossed her face. “Public health?”

“I know.” He chuckled. “I hate my cover.”

“It’s a bad choice anyway. You don’t look like a college professor.”

“No?”

“Nor do you dress like a college professor.”

“I have a closet filled with worn tweed jackets. Also a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. You’d be surprised how a few minor touches can alter an appearance.” And truly she would, he thought.

She licked her lips. “That’s exciting.”

“Sometimes. But like I said, we’re not supposed to talk about our jobs.”

“Are you supposed to lie?”

“If need be, yes.”

She coyly stirred her drink with her forefinger. “You mean like you went to the prom with somebody, dropped out of school, and raised four orphaned sisters?”

“Touche.”

She chuckled and twisted her ankles together. Julia Cuthburt was everything his file and research projected her to be-a bored woman in a tedious job she could barely stand, past the age when she had hoped to be married and raising three kids, a living parody of Looking for Mr. Goodbar, prowling through singles bars in search of a jolt of excitement.

A tall, muscular, absurdly handsome CIA agent just in from the trenches was exactly what the doctor ordered.

She licked her lips again and asked, “You’re not joking, are you? You’re really a spy?”

“It’s what I do.”

“Are you working now?”

“I’m back for a debriefing.”

She felt a flip-flop in her stomach. No more Hill clerks, two-bit lawyers, and civil servant jerks for her. A real-life James Bond type had his feet perched on her barstool, his briefcase parked at her feet, and was buying her drinks.

What was in that big briefcase anyway? Plans for the defense of Pyongyang, maybe. A termination order for the greedy, evil prime minister of Botswana who’d been dealing under the table with terrorists.

“I’ve never met anyone who works at the-” She caught the frown forming on his face, and swiftly said, “Well, that place.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh… of course.” She nodded, as though this made sense.

After a moment, he said, “But enough about me, I’d rather talk about you. For instance, where are you from?”

“A small town in Kansas. But I left a long time ago.”

He knew this, of course. And that she hadn’t merely left Kansas, but fled at the first chance. He knew she was a math genius, had two little sisters, left Kansas at seventeen, and after majoring in mathematics at the University of Delaware, had picked up a master’s in accounting at Boston College. She’d done well. Offers had poured in from the top firms. Her specialty was corporate taxation, and setting up tricky offshore accounts was her particular talent. She billed out at $350 per hour, high for an associate, but her firm described her to interested customers as a wizard at loopholes. The bookshelves in her apartment were crammed with thick accounting texts, intermixed with romance paperbacks with those corny covers depicting forlorn women being crushed in the arms of bronzed, muscular men. He assumed she had taken the job in Washington because it was filled with powerful men with interesting lives she wanted to marry into.

Over the next hour he walked her back through her history, posing a succession of perfectly timed questions that allowed her to portray herself in the most favorable light, no easy task with an accountant. She liked talking about herself and was thrilled to the core that such a man would be so fascinated with her.

She was merrily chattering away when at 8:30 he absently glanced down at his watch. “Oh… my God… Julia, look what you’ve done.”

“What?”

“I never lose track of time. Never.”

“It’s only eight-thirty,” she protested.

He looked embarrassed. “I have a 6:00 A.M. debriefing scheduled. My mind has to be sharp. I should walk you to your car. Where are you parked?”

The invitation was a test, she was sure. Say no, thanks, and he would conclude she was still on the prowl. There would be an awkward moment, then sayonara, and she’d never see her CIA man again.

A toothy grin and she grabbed her handbag. “In the underground garage across the street.”

“Me too.” He dropped a fifty on the bar to cover their drinks with a hefty tip, hefted up his briefcase, took her elbow and helped her up.

They chatted amiably until they reached her car in the garage. He opened her door, then shuffled his feet and said, somewhat awkwardly, “Julia, I… I’ve really enjoyed this evening. I mean, really.”

“Me too.”

The ball was back in his court, and he appeared suddenly tentative and nervous about what to do or say next. How beguiling. This fearless man who could face the most daunting dangers had melted into a shy puppy. He said, “I’d invite you back to my apartment for a nightcap, but… not tonight.”

“Why’s that?”

“Two other agents are crashing there. Most guys don’t keep apartments here. When they return for a debrief, I let them use my place.” He gave her a sad smile, and added, “In the field, we all live in a state of constant fear and anxiety. Sometimes… well, it’s nice to cook your own meals, be with friends, people you trust.”

Her stomach did another flip-flop. She’d been so obsessed talking about herself, and so selfishly concerned with her own romantic needs, she’d nearly forgotten how hazardous his life was. The man could be killed at the drop of a hat.

She clutched his arm and stared deeply into the contacts that gave his eyes that wonderful sea blue glaze. She said, “My apartment’s not far. I know it’s late for you… but a nightcap?”

She felt exuberantly guilty. So selfish of her.

He smiled. “A quick one. I’ll follow you.”

“Maybe you’d feel more comfortable talking about yourself in my apartment. You’re so mysterious. I’m dying to know the real you.”

He grinned. “It’s a promise.”