Free Blown by Francine Mathews Page B

delight, almost telling them what they wanted to know. Klaus raised his fist again: Ernst held him back.
    “We followed you there.”
    “Then you also know she’s a luscious little piece. Too lonely for words. Very correct German husband, very tedious for a girl like Monika. I was staying with her while her man was on the road. Her sister—who I gather is somehow connected to this Sharif fellow you’re hunting—claimed I was staying with her . Since you asked. Family feeling, and all that. Thinking fast on her feet. Protecting Monika’s honor. Not a bit of truth in the whole bloody yarn. You’ve been right well snookered, I’ll tell you that.”
    The door to the adjoining room opened and a young woman—blond, coiffed, as neat as a flight attendant for Lufthansa—appeared. She tossed Nigel Benning’s alias passport on the table without a word; Ernst picked it up and flipped through the pages. Eric knew what he would find: an entry stamp for Poland. An exit stamp for Hungary.
    “What are you doing in Germany, Nigel?”
    “Just passing through, really.” He closed his eyes, a tide of weakness tugging him into the shallows. “A hiking tour all on my own. Tony Bloody Blair did for my job six months back, so I put London behind me and set off for the Continent. A good pair of shoes, a good backpack, and the world’s your oyster. Budapest last month, Poland before that. I’m working my way home to the white cliffs of Dover now, if you must know, and after this unfortunate experience I’m liable to hasten my trip.”
    “Come on.” Ernst was speaking German now and he seized Klaus’s elbow. “We’re wasting our time. We should have nabbed the wife.”
    “Want him dead?”
    A fractional pause, as the brains of the operation considered his alternatives.
    Then Eric was lifted, wobbly as an old mattress, and dragged out of the room.

Chapter 13
    THE WHITE HOUSE, 2:07 A.M.
    Adele Bigelow raised her head from the pillow. A light shone from the master bedroom’s walk-in closet, and the glare hurt her eyes. She felt blindly for the wristwatch resting on her discarded book and saw that it was the middle of the night. Jack had never bothered to come to bed. Like a bell sounding in deep water, memory returned sharply. Chemical attack. Hundreds dying. A riot in the streets of Spring Valley.
    “Jack?” she called as she threw back the covers. “Honey?”
    The closet door swung slowly open and there he was, backlit against the vivid light: an aging man with a powerful frame, stooped over the golf magazine cupped in his hands. He was sitting on the bench he used to pull on cowboy boots. His body was curved like a question mark, something in its lines too defeated and weary, and Adele thought, Oh, Sophie. Why did you have to die?
    She had liked the vice president. Liked the easy humor and intelligence the woman mustered through five months of grueling campaigning after the nomination was secured, liked the raw emotion that surged beneath the carefully controlled surface. They were different people, of course—Adele hated the White House limelight, loathed politics, and survived by effacing herself completely in public—but at least Sophie had been a woman she could trust. She had no agenda beyond the work meted out to her in the Old Executive Office Building; no rivalry with the First Lady she nurtured in back halls. They were both mothers of sons—had that, at least, in common—and both tried to shield Jack Bigelow from the savagery of the press or his own Cabinet. Now Sophie was gone.
    Jack might stand before the microphones and declare that the United States would never be held hostage by terrorist thugs; he could celebrate the courage of Sophie Payne or Caroline Carmichael and pose while he handed out medals—but there was still the annoying American tendency to need somebody to blame. It was all too possible, Adele knew, that Sophie’s murder would scuttle Jack’s second term—and as much as she longed to