The President's Daughter - Mariah Stewart [7]
Who gets an opportunity like that? Who in his right mind would turn it down?
So why then, Simon asked himself yet again, had he not jumped at Norton’s offer right then and there?
“I don’t know,” Simon said aloud as cars once again began to move over the bridge from Annapolis to Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “I do not know. . . .”
But a glance at his mail once he arrived home—too many bills, too low a balance on his bank statement— was enough to convince Simon that Norton’s was, in fact, a classic case of an offer too good to refuse.
Besides, hadn’t he known Philip Norton for close to fifteen years? He’d never known the man to be less than forthright. And the book he’d asked Simon to write would, once it was completed, permit him to take his time while he finished Lethal Deceptions. . . .
Simon dropped the mail onto the counter in his cramped kitchen and sat down at the small table. The apartment had been the least expensive living quarters he could find at the time he’d first left the paper, a definite comedown from his apartment in D.C. that had overlooked the Potomac. He glanced out the kitchen window, which overlooked a narrow yard and a derelict garage that the landlord always kept locked.
Simon took off his jacket, then roamed into the living room, where he tossed it onto one end of the sofa while he sat upon the other. On the coffee table sat the latest draft of Lethal Deceptions, Simon’s work on a money-laundering operation that reached far into the government and involved diplomats from seven other countries. While the individuals had hotly and sternly denied the allegations, Simon had spent too many nights in covert conversation with several members of the organization to doubt that the story was true. Unfortunately, his editor wouldn’t print the story without clearance from the legal department, and the legal department wouldn’t clear it without independent verification of the sources.
By the time Simon and legal had finished arguing, the bodies of three of Simon’s sources had been found on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico, their throats slashed.
Simon felt he owed it to those men to finish the book and to get it published. And the best way to do that—the fastest way to do that—was to put it aside for a few months and write Norton’s book for him. It was a no-brainer.
So what was it, then, about Norton’s offer that continued to prick unmercifully at the edge of his conscience?
CHAPTER THREE
The late-afternoon sun slanted in through the windows of the greenhouse at sharp angles, casting thin splinters of light across the worn wooden tables that stood, end to end, down the center of the narrow room to form one long, continuous work space. In perfect precision at the end of the table closest to the door, peat pots awaited their allotment of specially mixed growing compound and carefully selected seeds. At the opposite end, clay pots had been readied for the small seedlings that would be transplanted, one of these late-winter days, and eventually hardened out-of-doors as preparation for sale in the retail shop out front.
Dina McDermott opened the wooden door and pushed it aside with her foot just far enough to permit her entry into the moist, warm confines of the greenhouse that sheltered much of her nursery stock. She back-kicked the door closed, dumped the large bag of perlite onto the floor, and snapped on the light, then glanced at the indoor thermometer that she’d nailed to the back of the door on the day the structure had been delivered. Satisfied that the temperature remained at an even sixty-eight degrees, she pulled off her old suede gloves and stuffed them absently into the pockets of her down jacket, which she shed and tossed onto a hook near the door. She snapped on the radio and jumped nearly