Free The Great Divide by T. Davis Bunn

times to visit Carol’s parents.
    Like Marcus, his former wife was an only child. He had once joked that this was the single part of their background they held in common. Carol’s family was old Delaware money. Very old. One of her direct ancestors had received a land grant from King George III. The deed, with its watered ribbons and royal seals, still hung upon the living-room wall of their Wilmington estate. They also had a summer home outside Annapolis, which had been in the family since Carol’s great-grandfather served two terms as a United States senator. The kids had loved this sprawling clapboard manor, the only reason Marcus had ever endured weekends with Carol’s parents. They also owned a penthouse on Central Park West and an apartment in a Louis XIV manor on the rue Faubourg St-Honoré—neither of which he had ever been invited to visit. He had never been to Europe at all. It was one of those things he had always promised Carol and never managed to deliver. One of many.
    Marcus sat in the window of a Starbucks in Foggy Bottom, pretending to read the
Washington Post
. Behind him, the six employees called a constant cadence and beat rapid tattoos on the coffee machine. Beyond his window streamed a hectic Friday crowd, most of them young and intelligent-looking and focused on the day ahead. Marcus sipped his coffee and found hints of his own past reflected in those intent young faces.
    In the early days of their marriage, he had refused the offer of a job from Carol’s father for a thousand reasons. The biggest had been that he was too hungry. He had wanted a place where he could scramble and push and fight and make it on his own terms. He had considered the firm of Knowles, Barbour and Bradshaw to be a perfect fit, and for several years it truly was. The firm had been cobbled together from numerous local groups, all merged under the umbrella of what had once been a San Francisco–based firm. Now it was everywhere—offices in thirty-two states and eleven foreign countries. Marcus hadthrived on the sixteen-hour days, the ninety-hour weeks, the competition, the breakneck pace, the constant demand to bill more hours. Carol came from a long line of workaholics, and had learned early on not to complain.
    He wasn’t exactly sure when the marriage had started to unravel. It would be too easy to say, his final year of law school, on the day they had met. But there was some truth in that statement. Enough to propel him from his seat and out the door and down Constitution Avenue.
    At precisely nine o’clock he signed in at the State Department’s main entrance on C Street. Five minutes later he was approached by a balding man in his late forties with a bureaucrat’s poker face. “Mr. Glenwood?”
    “Yes.”
    “James Caldwell. As you were told yesterday on the phone, there’s nothing anyone can do for you here.”
    Marcus accepted that the man was not even going to invite him to sit down. “It seems to me that an American citizen gone missing—”
    “We don’t have the resources.” The man wore an ill-fitting checked suit of bluish gray and a goatee with more hair than was on the top of his head. “We deal strictly with policy matters.”
    “—who’s gone missing in China would be a vital enough issue to concern our government.”
    “Right. Mr. Glenwood, in eleven weeks the Vice President and the secretary of commerce are leading a trade mission to China. We’ve got seventeen places to fill and more than four hundred heads of industry who want to come along. Not to mention half of Congress. We also have to prepare position papers on two dozen different topics.”
    And this, Marcus realized, was a carefully rehearsed little speech. “Preparatory meetings for this mission would be the ideal chance to bring up the issue of a missing American citizen.”
    “Not a chance.” The words echoed loudly through the voluminous lobby. “Look, maybe you could ask your local congressman or senator to raise the