Free The Emissary by Patricia Cori Page A

hadn’t even begun.
    Already, the temperature had fallen to ten below. Weather forecasts predicted that the light snowfall that had dusted the trees and the lawns of the city earlier that afternoon was just a teaser for what was moving in from the coast. News of the imminent storm had grown more and more alarming throughout the day, with travel warnings issued for Sunday morning, just when Mat would be flying back. It was all the more incentive for him to spend as little time as necessary playing politics, and to leave Washington as early in the morning as possible, ahead of the storm. He would do dinner, take care of business, and then get out of town fast, before his plane got grounded or he simply froze to death, stuck to a sidewalk somewhere on Icicle Hill.
    As he stepped out of the car, Mat told the driver to be back for him at 11:00 p.m. sharp. Four hours would cover what needed to be said and done, and still get him to bed early enough to give him a head start on his way back to Houston—back to his comfort zone. Here, he was out of his element completely … and he knew it.
    He hated the fat cats in Washington. They all placed themselves above the law they supposedly upheld, while meanwhile their palms were out, under the table, waiting to be greased—or up in the air, pointing fingers at everybody else. He always referred to them as “highfalutin politicians and bottom-feeding lobbyists,” and they all came with an agenda … and an extremely high price tag.
    Bracing for an evening of backhanded deals and political maneuvering, Mat tipped the coat check clerk, straightened his tie, and made his entrance. He glanced around the room, gazing at faces he already knew all too well, thinking, “At least hookers are honest about what they do for a living: ‘This is my price; this is what you get; show me the money.’ ”
    Whenever he reflected on who was really running the show on the Hill, he would inevitably make that analogy, reminding himself that he actually respected and trusted prostitutes far and beyond the whores in Washington. Worse yet, he was well aware that that night, there would be guns pointed at his boots and he was going to have to dance for them all, buying time for the corporation and votes in Congress.
    The club’s private dining room was stiflingly overheated, so much so that walking from the freezing night air into the room was like going from a freezer straight into the oven. In the company of people who seemed to suck whatever oxygen there was from the very air itself, Mat could feel his heart pumping overtime … his blood pressure rising. The passage of time was excruciating: the minutes seemed like hours—slow and tedious. Longing for the moment when he could escape into the crisp evening air—to breathe again—he became fixated on the time, like a nervous football coach trying to run down the clock and get off the field, victorious.
    He spent the evening dodging bullets and putting on a show for the power players—divulging nothing and promising everything. He so resented having to be “politically correct” and play their game, a game over which he had little or no control. It was high-stakes poker: you had to know when to bluff, when to call, and when to throw in a good hand, because even if you were holding all the aces, the guy across the table still
had
to win.
    After hours of laborious conversation, when Mat was all played out, he said his goodnights, grabbed his coat, and burst out into the freezing night air, where the limo, parked and waiting across the road, immediately pulled into the drive to pick him up.
    “Back to the hotel,” he told the chauffeur, gruffly, and then he loosened his tie, poured himself a drink, and finally relaxed into the seat, grateful to have another command performance behind him.
    Circumventing the primary roads on the Hill, where the SecretService had set up roadblocks, the driver had to divert at Pennsylvania Avenue, no longer open to