Free The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America by Michael Kurland, S. W. Barton Page B

asked.
    “No.”
    “You must be honest with me if you expect me to help you,” the woman said. “And I do want to help you, you must believe that.”
    The walkie-talkie made a churping sound, as of suppressed laughter. Then came St. Yves’ voice: “Phone check okay.”
    “I have to hang up now,” Peterson said into the phone.
    “Let me help you!” the woman said. “You mustn’t give up!”
    “Good-bye,” Peterson said in his flat voice. “Thank you for trying.” And he hung up the phone.
    Schuster walked through the Embassy mansion and out into the greenhouse. She was sitting there waiting for him. Her hands, folded demurely in her lap, were covered by long white gloves that made her arms look too slender to be real, too slender for the remembered strength of passion. The blue dress with its almost conservative neckline in this day of daring wives made her prim and proper and gave little hint of the exciting body it sheathed. She was in earnest conversation with the undersecretary of something or other when he came out, but her eyes caught his and did not let them go.
    He walked past the two of them, and stood with his back to her, admiring flowers he wasn’t sure were there, waiting for her to come.
    Then her hand was on his arm. “Ralph.”
    “Hello.”
    “Just ‘hello’? That’s not very friendly.”
    He turned to look down at her. “Hello, my love,” he said. “If I get more friendly I’ll screw you here in the greenhouse, and your husband will challenge me to a duel.”
    “Can’t you take me away and screw me somewhere else?” she said, her gray eyes staring intently up into his brown eyes, just the hint of a smile on her face.
    “Say the word,” he said.
    “My husband couldn’t come,” she said. “He’ll be here at one to have a drink with the French Ambassador and let me drive him home. Can we be back at one?”
    “That,” Schuster said, taking her arm, “is the word.”
    “We mustn’t leave together,” she said. “Go out the side door and walk toward the Circle. My car’s in back. I’ll pick you up.”
    “I hate this!” Schuster said. “Couldn’t we—”
    ”Later,” she told him. “Right now, this. Later, your more direct approach, perhaps.”
    “All right,” he said. “We can’t talk about it here. Besides, that’s just one of the things we can’t do here. Pick me up. I’ll be the man with the chattering teeth and the blue thumb.”
    Curtis glanced up as a man came out of the side entrance to the Embassy, but he headed off in the wrong direction, and he wasn’t wearing a camel’s-hair overcoat. A minute later an old MG, driven by a woman with a light-blue scarf around her head, came from around the building and headed after the man, who was already out of sight. Curtis sank further down into his seat and turned on the engine again to blow some warm air into the car.
    “That man is crazy,” St. Yves said, taking off his earphones. “But the phone tap works fine.” He rewound the tape on the voice-activated recorder.
    Kit had his chair up against the window and was leaning forward, resting his forehead against the frame and peering out at the building across the street. “How’s that?” he asked.
    “He called up the Suicide Prevention Center for the phone check.”
    “Maybe he knows something we don’t,” Kit commented.
    “Damn, the batteries on this tape recorder are low. I don’t know if I have replacements.”
    “Plug it in.”
    “It doesn’t plug in. Yes, here. No, damn, they’re the wrong size.”
    Kit watched the empty street while St. Yves struggled with the equipment. In the Company, he reflected, they checked out equipment before they used it, but he decided it would be more politic not to mention it. “Say,” Kit said, “there’s a sports car pulling up in front of the building. Parking by the red line at the curb.”
    “Diplomat,” St. Yves said, uninterested. “Those bastards park on the sidewalk when they want to. Why