Preparing for the Final Battle

Friday, 9:40 PM. The farmhouse kitchen.

"No," said Dr. Raman.

"I haven't asked yet," said Julian.

"You were about to ask whether you could leave this house on Sunday. The answer is no."

"I wasn't going to ask. I was going to inform."

"Then the answer is still no, in a louder voice." The tall surgeon planted both hands on the pine table and leaned over it, scrubs rumpled, iron-gray hair standing up in tufts. "Mr. Kastellan. Eight days ago you had a hole in your subclavian artery. Five days ago you had a lung that didn't work. This morning I took out a drain. You are not a man who is going to walk into a ballroom in Washington."

"I have to."

"You have to rest."

"I have," said Julian, "sixty-one hours."

He sat at the head of the table in a borrowed flannel shirt, one arm in a sling, a mug of black coffee untouched in front of him. He was pale. There were gray hollows beneath his eyes. But the eyes themselves were clear, and fixed, and there was something in the set of his mouth that made the surgeon straighten slowly, like a woman realizing she has been arguing with a tide.

"If I don't go," he said, more quietly, "it doesn't happen. I can't send other people to do what I started. Cole, Marcus, Dara. Camille." His gaze moved around the kitchen. "She is going to walk into a room with that man. Alone. Wearing a stud earring. And I'm going to sit here, in a flannel shirt, eating soup."

"It's very good soup," said the doctor's sister.

"It's excellent soup." His mouth quirked. "I'll eat it afterward."

Dr. Raman looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at Camille, who sat at the other end of the table with her bandaged hands around a mug, saying nothing.

"Do you want him to go?" the doctor asked her.

"No."

"Will you stop him?"

"No." Camille met her eyes. "I tried that once. It doesn't work."

Raman let out a short, exasperated breath. She went to a cupboard, took down a plastic bottle, and set it on the table with a click.

"Two every six hours. They'll keep the pain down without clouding your head. No more than that. And a chest binder, which I will tighten myself, and a pressure bandage, which you will not remove." She pointed a finger. "If you cough blood, you sit down. If you feel dizzy, you sit down. If anyone puts so much as a finger on your left side, you shoot him."

"I don't have a gun."

"Cole has several." She turned for the door. "I will say this once. I have patched up soldiers, spies and a Nobel laureate who fell off a ladder. I have never had a patient so determined to die for someone else's sake."

"I'm not planning to die."

"No one is, Mr. Kastellan," said Dr. Raman. "That's the trouble."

…

They worked through Friday night and all of Saturday.

The farmhouse became a war room. The kitchen table disappeared under paper. Maps, floor plans, phone logs, a seating chart of the Willard Hotel's Grand Ballroom, with six hundred names. Okonkwo built a nest of laptops and cables on the sofa and did not seem to eat or sleep. Teague drove to Fairfax and back four times. Ruiz sat on the porch, cleaning a rifle he kept insisting was a collector's item.

And Marcus, who had not seemed old until this week, rose from his chair at 3 a.m. on Saturday and said, "I think I have it."

He laid it out at the table at dawn.

"The event is the National Press Club's Founders' Dinner. Sunday night, eight o'clock, the Willard. Six hundred guests, one hundred and forty accredited journalists, every network and wire service, three cable anchors, the White House pool. Wallace is the keynote. It is the last major press event before the address."

"He's using it," Camille said.

"As a stage. He'll preview the emergency in front of the donors, test the language on the cameras. By Monday, he'll have rehearsed it in public." Marcus tapped the plan. "That is why it's perfect. For the first and only time in three years, Grant Wallace will be standing in a room with a hundred and forty reporters and no way to leave before the speech is over."

"And the evidence?" said Julian.

"Is in three parts. Dara?"

Okonkwo did not look up from her screen. "One. The tape. Forty-four minutes of the President of the United States saying, in his own words, that the paper is his. Two, the Annex C ledger, matched line by line to forty-one transfers, with the Halloran deed and Gray's electrical bill. Three, the packet. A single PDF, signed and timestamped, ready to go to forty-two newsrooms and the House and Senate Judiciary Committees at the push of a button."

"When?"

"When we choose." She finally lifted her head. Behind the half-moon glasses her eyes were bright and merciless. "The Willard's ballroom has an old audio system. A reliable one. I can run it from a phone."

Camille caught her meaning first.

"You're going to play it in the room."

"Through the ceiling speakers. Every one." A thin smile. "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. The paper is mine."

A silence.

"Six hundred witnesses," said Marcus softly. "A hundred and forty cameras. By the time his people reach the sound booth, the networks will have it live. By the time they cut the feed, it will be on the wire. By morning, it will be in every house in America."

"He'll say it's fake," said Teague.

"He'll say. But a voice on a recording is one thing. A voice on a recording, with the man standing in front of the microphone, with his face in the shot, with his own flag pin in the frame, is another." Marcus's mouth twisted. "He can lie to a newspaper. He can't lie to a camera pointed at his own mouth while his own voice plays."

"And the arrests?"

"The Deputy Attorney General, Ruth Abrams, is a career prosecutor who has been waiting three years for a reason. She has a federal judge, Naomi Brandt, who will sign warrants on Gray, Halloran, and a dozen others, the moment the tape goes public. Marshals will be in the lobby by 9:15."

"And Wallace?"

"The Vice President," said Marcus, "has been very quiet for three years."

He let the sentence hang.

"Lillian Cho was a prosecutor too. A good one. Wallace picked her for her résumé and then locked her in a drawer. She has a dozen enemies in the cabinet and one friend in the Capitol who knows how to count." He drew a breath. "I met her in a parking garage on Thursday. I told her what we had. She said, and I quote, 'Mr. Doyle, if the tape is what you say, I will take the oath in a ballgown if necessary.'"

A pause.

"She'll be at the Willard," Marcus finished. "Table nineteen."

…

"And me?" said Camille.

They all turned.

She had not spoken for twenty minutes. She sat at the corner of the table with a legal pad in front of her, on which she had been drawing, as she often did when thinking, a small repeating pattern of dots, the base-twelve cipher in her sleep.

"What's my part?" she said.

No one answered. Marcus looked at Julian. Julian looked at the table.

"I'll say it," Camille said. "I'm the bait."

"You're the distraction," said Okonkwo gently. "It's different."

"It isn't. It's me, in a dress, in the front row, with the man who killed eleven women's reputations and two of their lives." She said it levelly. "He wants me there. He asked me twice. He said, 'I'm not asking you to leave him tonight. I'm asking you to think.' So I'm going to tell him I've thought."

"Camille—" Julian began.

"Let me finish."

He stopped.

"I call his office tomorrow. I speak to Gray. I tell him I've changed my mind." She laid her hands flat on the legal pad. "I tell him I've seen what happens to men who stand near Julian Kastellan. That I watched you almost die. That I'm tired. That I want to be on the side that wins."

"He'll never believe it."

"He'll believe it because he wants to." Her eyes were steady. "That's what I learned at supper. He wants to be believed. He wants to be loved, in his own way. He's a man who's had everything he's ever grabbed. A woman who chooses him, after rejecting him, isn't just a prize. It's a verdict."

Silence.

"He'll invite me to his table. He'll sit me beside him. And when he's on the stage, when the lights go up and the cameras swing around, he'll want to look at me." She drew a breath. "I'll be wearing the earring. I'll be the last face he sees before Dara's voice comes through the ceiling."

"And then?" said Julian, very low.

"And then I let him see my face."

The kitchen was quiet. Outside, a wind had risen, and the bare branches of the maple scraped against the roof.

"I want him to look at me," Camille said, "when he understands. I want him to see I wasn't a prize. I want him to see I was a pawn that turned around."

Nobody spoke.

Then Marcus Doyle said, in a rusty, curiously gentle voice: "Ms. Duarte. I have worked with two thousand agents. I never met one I would rather have at my back."

…

Saturday, 11:50 PM.

The attic room under the eaves was dark except for a single lamp. Rain had begun again, soft and cold, tapping on the slates. The rocking horse stood in its corner. A faded quilt lay across the bed.

Camille was sitting on the edge of the mattress in one of Cole's T-shirts, brushing out her hair. Julian lay on his back with his good arm folded behind his head and his eyes on the ceiling.

Neither had said much since dinner.

"Tomorrow," he said.

"Yes."

"If anything—"

"No."

"I haven't—"

"You were going to say 'if anything goes wrong.'" She put down the brush. "I won't hear it. Not tonight."

"All right."

"We have all the plans we'll ever have. We have the cipher, and the tape, and Okonkwo, and a woman in a ballgown. Tonight we don't plan." She turned and lay down beside him, carefully, on his right side, and laid her head on his shoulder. "Tonight we're two people in a bed. One of whom has a hole in him. The other of whom is very tired."

"Very tired," he agreed.

For a long while they lay in the soft rain, listening to it. She had her hand over his heart. She could feel it through the T-shirt, steady, quick, alive. Each beat was a small bright coin she counted and kept.

"I'm not afraid," Julian said at last.

"I know."

"I thought I would be. I've never been so afraid of anything in my life as I was on Thursday. And now there's... nothing. A kind of..." He searched for the word. "Quiet."

"That's what it feels like," Camille said, "when you've made up your mind."

"Is that it?"

"I think so."

"I made up my mind in the alley," he murmured. "I just didn't know."

She smiled against his shoulder.

"Julian."

"Mm."

"Whatever happens tomorrow. Whether it works or it doesn't. Whether he's in handcuffs or in the Oval Office, whether we're in a courtroom or on a boat to somewhere with no extradition treaty." She lifted her head, and in the lamplight her eyes were dark and shining and certain. "I don't regret one day of it."

His breath caught.

"Not the alley?"

"Not the alley."

"Not the café, or the leash, or the hospital?"

"I regret what it cost," she said. "I don't regret what it made. I'm someone I didn't know how to be. I wouldn't give her back. Not for a thousand quiet Sundays in Queens."

He turned his head. He looked at her for a very long time, the way he had once looked at a chessboard: seeing every square, every line, every possible future. Then something in his face unclenched, and he raised his good hand and laid it on her cheek.

"Neither would I," Julian whispered.

She kissed him.

It was not like the other kisses. It was slow, and unhurried, and without any heat except the one that comes from certainty. It tasted of salt, and rain, and the coming morning. She felt his hand slide into her hair. She felt the quiet in him, the great calm country he had been looking for all his life, and she thought: Here. Here it is. We found it.

When she lay back down, her head on his shoulder, the lamp had burned low. She watched its small gold flame waver on the wick.

"Tell me a story," she said.

"What kind?"

"A true one. About you. Before."

He thought. His fingers moved idly in her hair.

"When I was seven," Julian said, "my father took me to see the Hudson from the roof of Kastellan Tower. It was a Sunday. Nobody was there. He stood me on a chair so I could look over the parapet, and he held on to my belt. And he said, 'See that, Julian? All of it. Every light.' And I said, 'Whose is it?' And he said..."

He paused.

"He said, 'Nobody's. That's the secret. It only looks like it belongs to somebody.'"

Camille was very still.

"I didn't understand," Julian said. "I thought he was joking. I thought it was just something a father says. But I think about it now. I think about Wallace, with his paper and his ink and his six million people, and all of it his, all of it owned. And I think my father knew."

"Knew what?"

"That the only thing you can actually keep," said Julian, softly, "is the person you're holding on to."

The rain fell. The lamp guttered and steadied.

She did not say anything. She only pressed closer, and he held her, and neither of them slept. Toward four in the morning the rain stopped, and a pale light began to creep into the window, and somewhere downstairs, in the kitchen, a kettle began to sing.