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“All right,” Clete conceded. “I want Vanessa to be well again. She’s had it rough ever since the baby died.”
“So President Merritt informed me. He regrets not getting her into therapy following the baby’s death. If she’d had counseling then, this crisis might have been avoided. But don’t worry. We’ll return her to you fully restored.”
“You will if you know what’s good for you,” Clete said just before hanging up.
“Satisfied?” David asked.
“Not by a long shot.” Clete strode to the door of the Oval Office. “Be very careful, David. I don’t care how many people you’ve lined up to lie for you and do your dirty work, I’ll have my daughter back, or else. A few weeks ago I reminded you that I put you here, and I can take you out.” He snapped his fingers an inch from the President’s nose. “Like that.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Well before daylight, Clete headed downstairs to pour himself a cup of coffee. Before going to bed each night, he set the timer on the coffeemaker.
That first steaming cup always brought back cherished memories of his boyhood, before he knew how to spell politics or even what the word meant, before he learned that some men placed ambition and greed above honor, before he had become one of those men.
His father had been a tall, strong, quiet man to whom committing one crime to cover another would have been unthinkable. He’d had only a third-grade education, but he knew all the constellations and could calculate in record time the number of dots on the dominoes just played. He was slow to anger, but quick to defend an underdog in a fight.
He had served under General Patton in Germany. That’s where he’d been killed and buried. But before the war he’d lived and worked as a wrangler on a cattle ranch in south Texas. During spring roundups, he would sometimes let young Clete ride along with him and the other cowboys.
The most dangerous animals on the range weren’t other men from whom you had to protect your back, but rattlers, spooked horses, and cranky longhorns. The days in the saddle were long, hard, and dusty. The nights were star-studded. At dawn every morning, before the workday began, the cowboys gathered around the campfire and drank cups of scalding, stout coffee.
After the war, his widowed mother moved them to Mississippi to live with her family. Clete had spent the remainder of his youth far from the cattle ranch, and the majority of his adult life in Washington, but sixty years later, he could still recapture the mingled smells of frying pork, and manure, and leather, and his father’s cigarettes, hand-rolled as he hunkered down over breakfast under the sky. No coffee in the world had tasted as rotten as that camp coffee. None since had tasted as good.
Clete had loved those mornings. He’d loved his father too. He remembered how glad he’d been to ride along beside him, and how the other men, no matter how tough, had treated his father with earned respect. How proud Clete-the-boy had been to be his father’s son.
On this m
orning, as on all others, Clete avoided thinking about whether his father would be proud of Clete-the-man.
He switched on the kitchen light.
Gray Bondurant was sitting at the table. He had helped himself to a cup of coffee. “Morning, Clete.”
His voice was level. His slouch was hardly a confrontational posture. But Clete knew that to Gray Bondurant, betrayal was the ultimate offense. And Bondurant was a dangerous man.
Clete wondered if his reminiscences of his father and campfires and roundups had been harbingers of his imminent death at the hands of a man he had sorely wronged. He was ashamed of the fear that fissured through him.
Of course, he let none of his apprehension show as he poured himself some coffee and joined his uninvited guest at the kitchen table. It would have been a waste of breath to ask Bondurant how he’d gotten inside the house. The sophisticated alarm system had been armed, but it wouldn’t have deterred the recon who’d penetrated the walls of a Middle Eastern prison.
Holding Bondurant’s chilly, implacable stare, Clete took a fortifying sip of caffeine. “I guess saying I’m sorry won’t cut it.”
“Not hardly, Clete. Call off the dogs.”
“I can’t. It’s gone too far. It’s out of my hands.”
“Bullshit. You started the ball rolling. You can stop it. Or are all your boasts about the power you wield just so much hot air?”
Bondurant was a worthy adversary. He wasn’t going to be put off with verbiage. Clete decided to cut to the chase. “What do you want?”
“I want to find Vanessa and return her to you. But I can’t have the FBI breathing down my neck while I go about it.”
“Vanessa’s no longer in danger.”
“You believe that?”
“She’s at Tabor House.”
“I know where she is.”
