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She was floating in that half-awake half-asleep state when the phone rang once more. She snatched the phone off the cradle, assuming it was J.C. again, and snarled, “What now?”
“And good morning to you, too.” Shane’s voice, warm and amused, sounded in her ear.
* * *
Marsh disconnected his disposable cell phone—cutting off his conversation with his contact on the inside—before he cursed. Disposable or not, he was discretion personified on the phone. He never let his clients—or their hirelings—know what he was thinking. And he especially never let on when he’d made a mistake.
But he was angry with himself for his carelessness. He’d worn gloves, of course—he wasn’t stupid enough to leave fingerprints. He wasn’t stupid enough to leave DNA, either, if he could possibly prevent it. But in this case the gloves had been his mistake. Who could have foreseen the gloves would smudge the dried dirt splatters on the panel below the driver’s side door of the senator’s car when Marsh had slid beneath it to set the bomb? Or that the senator would notice that tiny patch where the dirt splatters should have been but weren’t?
“Should have thought of that,” Marsh muttered to himself. “Planning? Perfect. Execution? Flawed.” Respect for his target made him add, “He’s smarter and more observant than anyone you’ve gone up against before. Which means you need to be on top of your game. No more screwups.”
* * *
“I’m sorry,” Carly told Shane. “I thought it was J.C. calling again. My producer.”
“Yeah, I met him yesterday, remember?” His voice turned dry. “I have epilepsy, not amnesia.”
Carly winced at first, until she realized something. “Hey, if you can joke about it, then—”
“It’s getting a little easier to talk about...with you. I haven’t received any feedback from my constituency on the interview that aired last night, but my mom called while we were at the reception and left a message on my answering machine—I heard it when I got in this morning. She thinks it went okay, but we’ll have to see what the polls say.”
She was suddenly reminded that since Shane hadn’t seen the broadcast, he still didn’t know... “I have to tell you something,” she began, but he interrupted her.
“Can it wait? The Senate will convene at nine and I just arrived at the office—I slept late this morning. I have several things I need to do before going down to the Senate floor, but I had to call and see how you’re doing this morning after last night.”
“Sleepy, but otherwise I’m fine,” she assured him. “But I have to tell you—”
“Will you have dinner with me tonight? Lunch is impossible, I’m afraid, but—hang on a second, please,” he said, and Carly could hear voices in the background. When he came back on the line he said, “I have to go. Dinner?” His voice dropped a notch. “Please, Carly.”
“Okay, dinner.”
“I’ll pick you up. What time?”
Surprised, she asked, “You have your Mustang back?”
“Not yet, but my executive assistant arranged a rental car. So what time should I pick you up?”
She thought quickly, and said, “Seven.” It was always possible he’d call and cancel...if he found out what she hadn’t told him about last night’s broadcast. If he didn’t cancel, then...
“Seven it is. See you then.”
* * *
Carly was jumpy and nervous all day. Every time her office phone or her cell phone rang, she was sure it would be Shane, calling to say she’d betrayed him by not telling him about the computer-generated reenactment and the interview with the woman he’d saved that had been included in last night’s broadcast. But every time it wasn’t him. She was so worried about Shane’s reaction that when the overnights came in—the ratings on her interview with Shane—they barely registered, even though her colleagues praised her for the journalistic coup that had also been a ratings success. She was so distracted that when J.C. laid out three potential stories he wanted her to pursue, she just said fine without picking one to focus on first.
