John Nance - Headwind

“Not a problem, honey. Alastair and I’ve looked at it very carefully, and what we’ll do, as I just told him, is we’ll go to the halfway point and look at the winds, and if there’s any question that we’re getting too close on projected reserve fuel at Presque Isle, we’ll turn around and come back.”

“I wish I could release my two girls.”

He shook his head slightly. “Can’t do it and be legal unless we removed a lot of seats. If we have that many seats, we have to have three of you.”

“I know, I know.”

“You want to go home?”

“I want you to stay employed, and I’m very afraid. You’re about to go pressing the rules again.”

“I actually think I’ve got them buffaloed in Frankfurt, Jill.”

“There’ll be no fuel slips from Iceland or Canada. They’ll know you went direct.”

“They’ll think the U.S. government told me to do so. Anyway, John Harris is still free because of what we’ve done, and I’m not abandoning him now.”

“Rats,” she said. “So what time?”

“Wheels up at seven A.M., babe. That means we should be out of here no later than four-thirty.”

His hand began running lightly along her thigh and she turned in his arms and held his face. “We have to sleep fast, Craig.”

“Aw…” he whined.

“No more tonight!” she replied.

“What if I beg real nice?”

“No. You already did that,” Jillian said. “Begging only works once… every few hours.”

She kissed him. “Call Alastair. Set the alarm. Sleep. In that order!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Twenty-five minutes after the call to Craig Dayton, Jay Reinhart stood in silence beside a seated John Harris and turned off the videocassette player after showing the same sequence.

“My God in heaven,” the President managed.

“I think those were roughly my words, John. What’s going on here?”

Sherry was sitting in stony silence in the corner, watching John Harris as he slowly shook his head. “Jay…” He turned toward her. “Sherry… I want you to listen to me very closely. I have either suffered a major mental breakdown and lost a substantial portion of my memory and my grip on reality, or… what you’ve just shown me is a flat-out fake.”

“John, that’s your voice!” Jay said more sharply than he’d intended.

“And that’s the Oval, sir,” Sherry added.

John Harris licked his lips, his eyes on the dark screen. “I know what we’ve just seen looks like the real thing, but I… did… NOT… speak those words. I did not hear those words from Reynolds. I’m not even sure I ever saw my face on there.”

“It’s there, John, in one shot,” Jay said quietly.

The President looked up at him, his face betraying pain. “You don’t believe me, do you, Jay?”

“I honestly don’t know what to believe, John. I want to believe you, and I want to believe this is a fake, but… and maybe I do, personally, but I’m dead in the morning in court with this. Campbell will play this and even a U.S. judge would have to find a prima facie case against you.”

“There will be time to fight this, Jay,” Harris said. “We’ll need to get expert analysis and show how it was fabricated. I don’t know precisely where I was in the office… I mean, the visual image is probably real, but somehow they’ve faked the voices. After all, there are people out there who do very good imitations of presidents.”

“We don’t have time to do any sort of research or scientific analysis by tomorrow!” Jay answered. “I mean, we could do a digital voice analysis later and prove it isn’t you, but that takes time, and first I have to convince the judge that he can’t rely on this tape in any way. You can be sure Stuart Campbell’s got a carefully manicured pedigree for this thing: chain of possession, affidavits, everything needed to convince. That means an arrest for certain and the beginning of a long, bloody process, and I can’t be sure – with Garrity’s being spooked over the judge – that we won’t be facing a faster extradition track than normal.”

John Harris exhaled a long and ragged breath, shaking his head. “This is one of those never-ending nightmares, isn’t it, Jay?”

“Apparently.”

They all fell quiet for more than a minute.

“Sir?” Sherry said from the corner, emotion constricting her voice.

“Yes, Sherry?”

“I want you to tell me the absolute truth.”

“I always have, Sherry,” he said with palpable sadness.

“I know… as far as I know… and I’ve always believed that. Tell me the words on that tape were never spoken by you, if that’s the truth.”

The President got to his feet and moved to her, placing a hand on her shoulder and the other under her chin, raising her eyes to him.

“Sherry, I swear to you, what you heard was not my voice, nor my words. The conversation you heard was faked somehow.”

She nodded as she blinked back tears and stood to hug him silently, leaving the President off balance until she sat down and he returned to sit on the end of the bed.

“All right, Jay. What do we do?”

“We fly. You fly. Seven A.M. departure. Captain Dayton has agreed to fly to the halfway point and if the winds and his fuel are okay, take you on to Presque Isle, Maine, and the airfield there. It’s literally the closest suitable U.S. airport.”

“And you?”

“I’ll… stand and fight as best I can. I have to anyway, because you may be back.”

“Understood.” The President got to his feet and patted Jay’s shoulder. “If it helps, try to think how you could fake something like this, Jay.”

“I am, sir. What scares me is that someone may have perfectly matched your voice digitally so that even if you didn’t say the words in that sequence, they could still be your words and your voice rearranged.”

“Don’t lose faith in me, Jay. Things are seldom what they appear.”

Jay looked up at him for several very long moments before replying. “That’s precisely what worries me,” he said.

John Harris returned to his room and Sherry bade Jay good-bye with confirmation that she would leave with the President on the 737. They hesitated at his door, holding hands briefly as she promised to call the second they landed in the United States.

Jay returned to the empty room in turmoil, desperate for sleep, feeling the effect of the two pints of stout, and determined to figure out a way around the inevitable. He turned on the TV and VCR and reran the tape, looking for something that had bothered him earlier, a fleeting glimpse of something he now couldn’t place. Whatever it was now eluded him.

He sat on the edge of the bed in deep thought, regretting the time spent at the pub, though Michael and his friends were delightful company.

His friends.

Jay yanked a sheaf of business cards from his pocket and lunged for the phone to get Michael Garrity on the line.

“What is it, lad?” Michael asked.

Jay related the details of what he’d seen on the tape Stuart Campbell had provided.

“Oh, me. That will make things very difficult indeed.”

“Can we block admission of the tape?”

“Yes and no. Remember, we’re dealing with Justice O’Connell, and he’ll do whatever he’ll do without benefit of counsel. Under our Criminal Procedure Acts, it’s really up to the trial judge. There’s no automatic exclusion just because the evidence – the video – might have been obtained contrary to U.S. law,” Michael said, pausing. “All I can do is fight a good fight to keep it out by persuading him that it’s terribly prejudicial to President Harris.”

“Michael,” Jay said, “I’ve got an idea how we can convince him – if you’re willing to lose a night of sleep, and if you can get one of your friends to help us tonight.”