Shoot Him If He Runs

48

Senator Calvin Ferguson, R-UT, sat across the East Room with his wife, Evelyn, who was twenty-seven years his junior, and gazed at Katharine Lee.

“Who are you staring at, honey?” Evelyn asked him, leaning in close, so that he could look down her cleavage. That always got his attention.

“Kate Lee,” he said. “I planted a tiny bomb this afternoon, and I want to see if it explodes tonight.”

Evelyn, Ferguson’s former deputy press secretary, had replaced his late wife an alarmingly short time after her death; rumor had it that he had proposed to Evelyn in his wife’s hospice room. She was a smart woman, knowledgeable about the political flora and fauna inside the beltway, and she was jealous of Kate Lee, because she had a real job, while Evelyn no longer did, except to the extent that Cal Ferguson was a job. “You want to go over there and look down her dress?” she asked.

“Certainly not,” Ferguson replied testily. He was a bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and he did not like that kind of talk-not when someone might overhear it, anyway. The Marine Band began to play some Glenn Miller. “Tell you what I do want to do,” he said, as the president and his wife led everyone to the dance floor. “I want to dance with her for a minute. How would you like to dance with the president?” He took her hand, hoisted her from her chair and shuffled a beeline across the floor toward the First Couple.

“Evening, Cal,” Will said as they came close.

“Good evening, Mr. President,” Ferguson said. “I wonder if we might change partners for a moment?”

“Of course,” the president said, gracefully steering Kate into Cal’s arms while bringing Evelyn into his own.

“Good evening, Cal,” Kate said, flashing a brilliant smile.

“Hey, Kate. Tell me, what’s happening in the Caribbean these days?”

“The Caribbean? Well, let’s see: I can’t think of a thing. Were you thinking of invading some place down there?”

“I was thinking about a certain former Haitian who got his head blown off in St. Marks.”

“St. Marks? Isn’t that in the Mediterranean somewhere?”

Ferguson managed a chuckle. “My friend, Hugh English, tells me it’s not.”

Kate formed her features for tragedy. “Oh, isn’t it sad about Hugh?”

Ferguson frowned. “What?”

“Of course, I replaced him with Lance Cabot the minute we began to suspect. Just today, in fact.”

“Kate, you’re not telling me Hugh English is a mole, are you?”

“Of course not,” Kate said, shocked. “The man is a patriot!”

“Then what’s sad about him?”

“I’m sorry, Cal, I shouldn’t have mentioned it; I thought you already knew.”

“Knew? Knew what?”

Kate looked around, as if to see if she might be overheard. “Cal, you have to promise me faithfully that you’ll keep this to yourself. We don’t want this to get around; we just want a happy retirement for Hugh.”

“Of course.”

Kate sighed. “Well, this isn’t exactly a diagnosis, but some of Hugh’s actions over the past few days have caused a number of people to feel that he is suffering the early stages of…” She shrugged and made a face.

“Nonsense,” Ferguson said. “Why the man is as sane as I am.”

“That’s what I told everybody,” Kate said, “until…”

“Until what?”

“Well, there was an incident a couple of days ago during a staff meeting about…well, about a classified matter, and Hugh suddenly piped up and said, ‘We’ve got to get the man out, and quickly.’ That pretty much brought the proceedings to a halt, and somebody said, ‘Who, Hugh? And out of where?’”

“And what did Hugh say?”

“He said, ‘Nelson, of course; out of East Berlin.’”

“But East Berlin as a political entity doesn’t exist anymore,” Ferguson said.

“Exactly,” Kate replied, “and neither does Nelson, but at that moment, they both existed for Hugh. Someone had the presence of mind to say, ‘Right, I’ll get on it, Hugh,’ and the meeting continued, but Hugh got up and left. When I inquired about it, I was told that he had been exhibiting…memory issues and flashbacks. Someone thought it came on after his wife died.”

Ferguson looked perplexed. “We were going to call him in to testify next week.” Ferguson was the ranking Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“Well,” Kate said, looking sympathetic, “if there’s anything the committee wants to know about East Berlin…” She ducked under his arm, put her own around her husband’s waist and, effectively, left Evelyn Ferguson to rejoin her husband.

“What was that all about?” Will asked.

“It was about neutralizing Hugh English,” she said. “By tomorrow morning, no one, not even the press, is going to pay attention to anything he has to say.”

“And how did you accomplish that?”

“My darling, you don’t want to know.”