Free The Mark of the Assassin by Daniel Silva Page A

do you, Michael?”
    “I love you, Elizabeth, and only you.”
    She rolled over in the darkness and pulled his face to hers. He kissed her forehead and brushed tears from her eyes. He held her for a long time, listening to the wind in the trees outside their bedroom window, until her breathing assumed the rhythm of sleep.

7
     
    THE WHITE HOUSE
     
    Anne Beckwith had one rule about dinner: Talking about politics was strictly forbidden. Politics had ruled their lives in the twenty-five years since her husband had been sucked into the GOP machine in California, and she was determined that for one hour each evening politics would not intrude. They dined in the family quarters of the Executive Mansion: the President, the First Lady, and Mitchell Elliott. Anne revered Italian cooking and secretly believed the country would be a better place if “we were a little more like the Italians and less like Americans.” Beckwith, for the sake of his political career, had asked Anne to keep such views to herself. He resisted Anne’s desire to vacation in Europe each summer, choosing “more American” settings instead. That summer they vacationed in Jackson Hole, which Anne, on the fourth day, renamed “Shit Hole.”
    He indulged her when it came to food. That night, beneath soft candlelight, she had chosen fettuccini tossed with pesto, cream, and peas, followed by medallions of beef tenderloin, a salad, and cheese, all washed down by a costly fifteen-year-old bottle of Tuscan red wine.
    Throughout the meal, as White House stewards drifted silently in and out of the room with each new course, Anne Beckwith carefully guided the conversation from one safe topic to the next: new films she wanted to see, new books she had read, old friends, the children, the little villa in the Piedmont district of northern Italy where she planned to spend the first summer “after our sentence is over and we’re both free again.”
    The President looked exhausted. His eyes, normally a clear pale blue, were red and tired. He had endured a long tension-filled day. He had spent the morning with the heads of the agencies investigating the attack on the jetliner: the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board. In the afternoon he had flown to New York and met with grieving relatives of the victims. He toured the crash site off Fire Island aboard a Coast Guard cutter and flew by helicopter to the town of Bay Shore to attend a prayer service for a group of local high school students killed in the tragedy. He had a tearful meeting with John North, a chemistry teacher whose wife, Mary, was the faculty sponsor of the trip to London.
    Vandenberg had scripted the events perfectly. On television the President looked like a leader, calmly in control of the situation. He returned to Washington and met with his national security staff: the secretaries of defense and state, the national security adviser, the director of Central Intelligence. At precisely 6:20 p.m., Vandenberg briefed White House reporters on background. The President was considering military retaliation against the terrorists believed to be responsible for the attack. U.S. Navy warships were moving into place in the eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. At 6:30 the White House correspondents from ABC, CBS, and NBC stood side by side on the North Lawn and told the American people that the President might take decisive action to avenge the attack.
    Mitchell Elliott knew the overnight poll numbers would be good. But now, sitting across the table from James Beckwith, Elliott was struck by the fatigue written on his face. He wondered whether his old friend had the will to fight any longer. Elliott said, “If I didn’t know better, Anne, I’d say you were ready to leave now instead of four years from now.”
    The remark bordered on discussion of politics. Instead of changing the subject, the way she usually did, Anne Beckwith met Elliott’s gaze and narrowed her blue eyes in a rare display of