David Baldacci - First Family

"Damn it!"

She cursed again, stood and walked to the bathroom. She started shivering again and hesitated. She swallowed hard, opened the door, and passed through. She was still trembling, sobs bumping up and down her throat.

Sean saw her through the shower door. "Michelle?" He looked at her questioningly, keeping his gaze on her eyes that looked ready to dissolve into tears. "What are you doing?"

"I don't know. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, Sean!"

He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around himself before stepping out of the shower. He led her out of the bathroom and over to the bed. They sat on the edge, her head cradled against his chest.

"I really think I'm losing it," she said.

"You've been through a lot. It's only natural to feel overwhelmed."

"My parents have been together forever. Had five kids. Four brothers and me the mutt. The bring-up-the-rear mutt."

"I don't think anyone feels that way about you. I certainly don't."

She turned to face him. "How exactly do you feel about me?"

"Michelle, I-"

She picked up the cracked photo. "Nearly fifty years of marriage and five kids and this is what you get? This?"

"Michelle, we don't know what's really going on here yet."

"I feel like I've wasted so much of my life."

"An Olympian, Secret Service agent, and now my partner?" He attempted a smile. "I think a lot of people would like to switch places with you. Especially about being my partner."

She didn't smile. She didn't cry. She leaned over and kissed him gently on the lips.

She breathed into his ear. "I don't want to waste any more time, Sean. Not another second."

She kissed him again and he kissed her back. She leaned into him.

And then Sean pulled back.

Their gazes locked. "You don't want me?" she said.

"Not like this. Not this way, no. And neither do-"

She slapped him and turned away.

"Michelle-"

"Leave me alone!"

She started to run, but then it was like a hard wall of something both hot and cold slammed into her, inflaming her organs, icing her skin. Her knees buckled and she was on the floor, sobbing, curled into a ball so tight that she seemed to have shrunken down to a child. Her fingers clawed the floor, found the fractured picture where it had fallen. She held it against her chest.

A moment later Michelle was lifted off the floor and her head fell against Sean's chest. He spoke to her, urgently, but she didn't answer.

Sean laid Michelle on the bed, took the photo from her, and covered her with the sheet and sat next to her. He put his hand out and she instinctively gripped it. As the minutes went by and the sun came up, her sobs started to subside. Finally, her grip around his hand loosened and fell away as she slept. He tucked her hand up under the sheet.

Sean lay next to her, a finger sliding against her wet hair. He watched her until, exhausted, his own eyes closed and he fell asleep.

QUARRY MARCHED across the dirt in front of his little house, Carlos behind him. The big man stopped and pointed to the berm.

Quarry said, "The camera feed goes right to where you'll be. The TV monitor is all set up. I checked it out, works fine. It's an exterior shot only, though. No way to hide it inside the house."

"Understood."

They had been over this several times already, but Carlos had learned that the one thing that Sam Quarry lived by was repetition. Like the pilot he was, the man's firm belief was that going over it and over it was the only way to extract out as much potential error as was possible.

"The camera sight line is dead-on," Quarry added. "But I'll check it right up to the last minute."

"Chances of it being discovered and taken out of operation?"

"Slim at best given the time parameters, but if it does you've got to resort to the backup." Quarry slipped a pair of heavy binoculars from his knapsack and handed them to Carlos. "An old-fashioned decent pair of optics and two good eyes. I've got a sightline for you that won't reveal your position. You just slide the lever I showed you in the bunker open, like a gun turret."

Carlos nodded in understanding. "And the other thing?" he said, eying the house, the treeline, and the critical ground in between.

Quarry smiled. "That's the beauty of the whole damn thing, Carlos. It's all activated when you hit the one button." He grinned like a schoolboy who'd just won the science fair. "Took me a while to build, little tricky, works off a split feed, but I got there. And once you push it, Carlos, there ain't no going back, my friend."

"And how do I contact you at the mine?"

"First, you'll contact me whether things go right or go to hell. And you'll do it with this." Quarry handed him a boxy device. "Like a SAT phone," he explained. "The call will get to me, even up at the mine. I've already tested it. But the slit in the hole you'll be in has to be open so it can communicate with the satellite. But it'll only take you a few seconds to make the call. No long-winded messages, just yea or nay."

Carlos held the phone. "Where did you get this?"

"Built it out of spare parts."

"But the signal from the satellite?"

"Piggybacked on an existing platform. Went to the library and got some info off the computer that showed me how to do it. Easier than you might think if your mind works that way. Hell, Carlos, all this stuff I did here is easy compared to what we had to jury-rig in 'Nam. So this way saved me a lot of money. Money I ain't got."

Carlos looked at him in unconcealed awe. "Is there nothing you can't do?"

"There's lots of things I can't do. Most of them important. I'm just a working man. Don't know squat about shit."

"So when is all this going to go down?"

"I'll let you know, but it'll be soon."

Carlos once more looked over at the knoll. Quarry watched him closely.

"You'll be hidden, but exposed at the same time," Quarry said. "Close quarters."

"I know this," answered Carlos, whose gaze shifted to a buzzard making lazy ovals in the sky.

"It's only an issue if they make it one. Otherwise you walk away."

Carlos nodded, but kept his gaze on the bird.

"You want me to switch with you I got no problem with that, Carlos. But I'll ask this one time only."

The wiry man shook his head. "I told you I would do this and I will do this."

Carlos left and Quarry unlocked the door to the little house and walked in. Everything was ready, except for one missing piece. But that would come.

An hour later Quarry lifted into the sky in his Cessna. The low-level winds were rough and his little plane crab-walked across the sky, but it didn't bother him. He'd flown through a lot worse. A little turbulence would never kill him. A lot of other things could, though. And probably would.

He had a lot to think about, and he did his best thinking while flying along. At a few thousand feet up, his mind seemed to clear even as the air thinned. In the back of the plane was a box filled with cables and wires. In that box, and in a second box up at the mine, he would draw out his doomsday scenario. He would only use it if he had to, and he hoped he didn't.

As he flew, Quarry's thoughts went back to the last time Tippi had ever spoken. He and his wife had rushed to Atlanta when they'd been told how desperately ill their daughter was. Quarry had never wanted his little girl to move to the big city, but children grow up and you have to let them.

When the doctor at the hospital told them what had happened, neither of them could believe it. Not their Tippi. There must have been some mistake. But there had been no mistake. She had already sunk into a coma because of the blood loss. However, the physical evidence was conclusive, they'd been told.

Cameron had left the room to get some coffee and Quarry had been leaning up against the wall, his jeans dirty, his shirt stained with sweat from the long ride over from Alabama in summer heat with no air conditioning. He'd come right from the fields after his wife had raced across the tilled dirt screaming about the phone call she'd gotten. The compressed, artificial air in the big hospital had been foul, suffocating for a man used to wide-open spaces.