Timothy Culver - Power Play

“I think it would be better if you’d talk to Mr. Lockridge first, Ma’am, before doing anything.”

Looking down at him where he was standing beside Jester, holding the reins clasped in one large hand, she believed that he would stop her from going any farther, no matter who she was, no matter what the situation, no matter how extreme his actions had to become. “I’ll talk to him,” she said threateningly. “You can believe I’ll talk to him. Let go of my horse.”

He released the reins at once, and stepped back. “I’m sorry, Ma’am, but I have to do what I’m told.”

A hundred angry answers rose to her mind, but she knew none of them would penetrate that closed cold face of his, so she harshly spun Jester around and rode back to the house.

She didn’t know whether it was all right to use the phones in the house now or not, and at the moment she didn’t care. She was furious, and she wanted to get to Wellington before her fury cooled.

He had given her a phone number where he could usually be reached in Washington, and had told her to expect to have to let it ring for a while. She did, and at last a woman came on, identifying herself only by announcing the last four digits of the number Evelyn had dialed. Evelyn asked for Wellington, was asked to hold on, and waited over three minutes by her watch before Wellington’s voice suddenly said in her ear, “I understand someone was rude to you.”

How did he know about it so soon? But this time his ubiquitousness was itself a source of annoyance and only fired the flames. “He certainly was! And what’s going on up there anyway, what are you doing that you can’t—”

“Are you calling from home?”

“Yes! And I don’t care! To be treated like that on my own property—”

“Evelyn, I understand, and I apologize. My man should have handled it differently. The fact is, we need a more secure base of operations than the one we took over from those other people. You know the ones I mean?”

His circumspection reminded her that she too should be circumspect, which cut at once into her anger. She shouldn’t have used this phone, and that awareness removed the purity of self-righteousness from her rage; she answered only, “Yes, I know who you mean.”

“All right. We’re building something more stable, in a better location. But the people working on it, naturally, aren’t completely in our confidence. That’s why it would be better if you didn’t talk to them. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, I follow you. But if you wanted to avoid that sort of thing, why not tell me about it? Why let me stumble on it, and cause a big scene?”

“Yes, that was a mistake on my part. You have to understand how remote this all is from my usual type of activity. A family situation is naturally more open and — I don’t know how to say it — less professional than what I’m used to. But I tell you what. That man will apologize to you, and as soon as—”

“I don’t want him to apologize to me,” she said, beginning to feel slightly foolish. And honesty made her add, “He already did.”

“Then,” Wellington said, not picking that up and adding to her discomfort, for which she was grateful, “as soon as the site is finished, I’ll take you on a sort of tour of it myself. All right?”

“I don’t want that either,” she said. “I just want to know what’s going on, I want you to start telling us things.”

“But not on the phone,” he said.

“I don’t care how you tell me, just stop acting as though you were the only one involved!”

“Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry, it just never occurred to me you would go riding up in that area at this time of year. And I didn’t think you would be interested in a simple change of site.”

Everything he said was so reasonable; she felt the solid ground slipping out from under her, and she struggled to retain it. “I saw a light last night,” she said. “In the woods. So I went investigating this morning.”

“Without saying anything to me?”

Baffled, she said nothing for a few seconds, then: “What?”

“You knew I had people in that general area. If you’d asked me about the light, if you’d told me about your plan to investigate, I would naturally have told you about the construction right away.”

She didn’t believe that, but she let it go, saying instead, “Why build anything anyway? We’re going to Paris.”

“Not permanently,” he said. “Besides, it was started before that decision was made. It was begun last Friday, actually, while you and Bradford were away at Elizabeth’s funeral. That was when the demolition was done.”

“Demolition?”

“The easiest way to dig a hole,” he said, “is with explosive. We took advantage of Bradford’s absence to do it the easy way.”

The thought entered her mind that Wellington was making a profit somewhere. It suddenly seemed to her that he was doing a lot of unnecessary fancy-work around the fringes of this thing, and why would he do it unless there was some way he was fudging money out of the government? Took advantage of Bradford’s absence, did he? And maybe he was taking advantage of the whole situation. Disliking Wellington as much as she did, it was easy to attribute that kind of motivation to him. Building a complicated underground base of operations at the same time the man they’re supposed to be watching is going to leave in five days.

“Thank you, Wellington,” she said coldly. “Thank you for the explanation.” And hung up.

The only times she felt real these days were when she was naked in Robert’s apartment. It was strange, that difference in her, strange and delightful. Though she’d never been exactly a prude with Fred, it was true that the intervals she’d spent wearing absolutely nothing during their marriage had been almost nil. She’d worn nightgowns to bed, and though she might sometimes have been nude during sex, she had always put on either the nightgown again or a robe immediately afterward.

But now it was different, astonishingly so. She loved going without clothes in Robert’s apartment, padding around the room or standing at the kitchen-closet to make coffee or just lying on the bed. Sex was a large part of it, of course, her avidity for his body was still getting stronger all the time, was enough now to make her smile suddenly and at odd moments when they were miles apart, was enough to make her much less inhibited and more inventive in bed than she’d ever been before — they had done together so far two things she had previously never done with anyone — but that wasn’t all the reason. There was also a feeling of freedom that came with stripping away her clothing, as though the garments were symbols of the morass of responsibility in which she was mired; without them, she could pretend for a while to be nothing but a female body, desirable and desiring, and that she was someone for whom it was all right to think only of pleasure.

That moment, late at night, when it was necessary for her to get ready for the ten-minute drive back to Eustace, back to the place that was no longer home, was always a bad one, and it seemed at times she was just as bothered by the necessity to get dressed, to blanket herself in weighted layers of cloth, as she was by the prospect of leaving Robert, though of course the two regrets were so entwined it was impossible to tell them apart.

As for Robert, as the week went by leading to the Paris trip, he grew more and more silent, more and more withdrawn. And yet it wasn’t as though he didn’t care about her; he was, if anything, more tender and passionate than before, but he seemed to have to struggle to push those emotions to the surface, as though he was suffering an emotional weariness against which he had to fight at all times. But she could understand that; she would be able to understand any reaction to their situation by now, five weeks since Bradford had first told her his plan to go to Red China. She took what warmth she could from Robert, and didn’t blame him that it wasn’t more.