First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [49]
"No, no! Please!"
She wanted to shrink into the chair, to disappear like him, but she remained in the cone of light. She hung her head, the blood pounding in her temples.
"What is it?" Kray said, his voice suddenly soft. "I'm a reasonable man. Tell me."
She shook her head. Her fear clouded her eyes.
Kray stepped into the light. "Alli, please speak to me." His features took on a rueful cast. "It's not my fault. You forced me to frighten you. I didn't want to, believe me."
For a moment, utter stillness held her in its grip; then she began to weep, her breath fluttering like a spent leaf. "I need . . . I need to go to the bathroom."
Kray expelled a tender laugh. "Why didn't you say so?"
He unstrapped her from the chair, and she whimpered.
"There," he said.
She stared at him, wide-eyed, so stunned, her brain refused to function.
He brought over a bedpan.
"This can't be happening," she said more to herself than to him. "I won't." She was sobbing and begging all at once. "I can't."
He stood in front of her, arms crossed like a corrections officer, detached, observant, his smoke-colored eyes on hers.
"Please!" she begged. "Don't look. Please, please, please turn away. I'll be good, I promise."
Slowly, he turned his back on her.
Stillness overcame her then, as her mind tried to accommodate. But it was so hard. Each time she thought she had a handle on her new reality, it turned upside down: good was evil, kindness was pain, black was white. She felt dizzy, alone, isolated. Terror crept into her bones, freezing the marrow. But, oh, her bladder would burst unless she peed, peed right now! But she couldn't.
"Emma didn't tell you a thing." She was trembling, the muscles in her thighs jumping wildly. "How do you know about me and Bark?"
"I'll tell you, Alli, because I like you. I want you to trust me. I know because there was a microphone in your dorm room. When you confessed to Emma, you were also confessing to me."
Alli closed her eyes. At last, head bowed, shivering, she let go, the sound like rain spattering a tin roof.
FOURTEEN
THE POTUS and Secretary Paull sat together in the backseat of the president's heavily armored limo on the way from the White House to where Air Force One was waiting to take the president and his small party to Moscow to meet with the Russian president, Yukin. In the briefcase that straddled the president's knees was the Black File Paull had provided, proof that Yukin's handpicked head of the state-owned RussOil was his still-active ex-KGB assassin.
The president could have taken Marine One, his helicopter, to the airfield but with its privacy shield between the passenger compartment and the driver, the limo provided absolute privacy, something with which the president, in the waning weeks of his Administration, had become obsessed.
"This abduction business," the president said, "how is it progressing?"
"We're following every lead," Paull said noncommittally.
"Ach, Dennis, let's call a spade a spade, shall we?" The president stared out the bulletproof smoked-glass window. "We've been blessed with a bit of great good luck. This business, unfortunate as it may be for the Carsons—and God knows every day I pray for that young woman's safe release—has provided us with the excuse we need to excise the missionary secularists—all of them." He turned back, his eyes burning with the fire of the devout. "What I want to know is why hasn't that already happened?"
"The president-elect's agent—Jack McClure—has been following a very promising lead."
"Well, you see, Dennis, now you've just put your finger on the nub of the problem."
Paull shook his head. "I don't understand, sir," he said, though he was quite certain he was reading the president all too well.
"It appears to me that Jack McClure is gumming up the works."
"Sir, I believe he's on to a lead that could bring us Alli Carson's abductor. I was under the impression that our first priority was her safe return."
"Have you forgotten our previous discussion, Dennis? Give the order to Hugh Garner, and let's get on with it. By the