Slim To None

Hannah glanced at her watch. It was late afternoon back in L.A. Gabe had been attending a summer day camp in the Santa Monica mountains, but it had finished a week earlier. Now he was supposed to be enjoying a few lazy days before heading off to third grade at Dahlby Hall, the exclusive private school he attended, where classes were due to resume the Tuesday after Labor Day. As always, Hannah’s presence at his first day of school was neither required nor encouraged.

She closed her eyes as a wave of guilt and anger passed over her. It wasn’t right that another woman got to see her child over these milestones. For two years now, Cal’s wife had been taking Gabe to his dentist appointments, his soccer games, his play dates and his friends’ birthday parties. Christie had been the one to read him the Harry Potter stories before tucking him into bed. It was Christie his teachers had called when Gabe had broken his arm in a fall from a schoolyard jungle gym.

When she was back in L.A., Hannah had her son on weekends, for two weeks in the summer and for alternate holidays, but how much longer would even that unsatisfying schedule last? Already she felt pressured to relinquish her visitation days on those occasions when Gabe was pulled between her and a chance at doing something special with his friends. It was no use making him feel guilty about it. That way lay only resentment. What was going to happen when he hit his teens and had a girlfriend or played team sports? How eager then would he be to pack up his bag and move for the weekend to his mother’s little condo across the city?

On the other side of the world, she heard the phone ring in Cal and Christie’s Mulholland Drive mansion. It picked up on the third ring and a Spanish-accented voice said, “Hello, Nicks residence.”

The satellite connection was as clear as if Hannah were calling from next door. She pictured Cal and Christie’s housekeeper standing by the phone in their massive granite and travertine kitchen. It overlooked a sprawling hillside garden with an infinity swimming pool that seemed to drop off the edge of the earth.

“Hello, Maria. This is Hannah, Gabe’s mother. Is he there?”

“Oh, hello, Miss Hannah. No, he’s not, I’m sorry,” the housekeeper said. “He just left with Mrs. Nicks to get some new shoes and his school uniforms.”

Even now, three years after Cal’s remarriage, it still grated to hear someone else besides his mother called “Mrs. Nicks.” It wasn’t that Hannah had an emotional attachment to her ex-husband’s name. She’d seriously considered going back to Demetrious after the divorce, but in the end, had decided against it. It wasn’t just the paperwork hassle. Sharing a name with her son seemed more important than severing that link to the man who’d cheated on her and then dumped her. God knew, she shared little enough with Gabe, the way things had worked out.

“They should be back in a couple of hours,” the housekeeper said. “Would you like Gabriel to call you when he gets in?”

Damn, damn, damn.

“No, I’m out of town on business and I’m going to be out of touch for a while. I’ll have to call back. Could you tell him I called and said I love him?”

“Yes, of course. I am sorry you missed him,” the housekeeper said.

“How’s he doing?”

“Oh, very good. He had some friends here for a sleepover last night. They put up the tent in the backyard and slept out there.” Maria laughed. “Mookie wanted to sleep with them, but the boys put her out. She had gone into the pool with them earlier and she was getting their sleeping bags all wet. And she smelled, Gabriel said.”

“Ah, yes, the ripe odor of wet border collie,” Hannah said, smiling. The puppy had been Cal and Christie’s gift on Gabe’s sixth birthday two years ago—a bribe, maybe, or a consolation prize. Lose your mom, gain a dog. A fair trade, right?

Whatever it was—the dog, the fabulous house, the new school and many friends—the strategy had obviously worked. Although Gabe had originally been unhappy with the changed custody arrangements, crying to move back with his mother, he clearly considered the Mulholland Drive mansion his home now and no longer even mentioned going back to living full-time with Hannah. Though he assured her he understood why the change had been necessary, she couldn’t help feeling she’d let him down—and that once more Cal, damn him, had ended up looking like the hero.

Hannah had met Calvin Nicks during her freshman year at UCLA. Barely eighteen years old when she arrived in Los Angeles from her parents’ home outside Chicago, she’d been swept off her feet by the handsome pre-law senior who lived down the hall from her dorm room. Being young and on her own for the first time was no excuse for her incredible stupidity about practical matters like birth control when she’d fallen in love with Cal. She might have come from a sheltered background in an immigrant family, but she’d grown up in the freewheeling 1980s, for crying out loud, not ancient Greece. What a dope.

When she’d discovered she was pregnant, Cal had been no more eager than she to consider the possibility of a termination. Whatever happened later, he had loved her then, she was pretty sure. To marry her and provide for their child, he’d been ready to give up his dream of law school and becoming a criminal prosecutor, but Hannah couldn’t let him do that. Instead, she’d dropped out and taken a job as a dispatcher with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, working right up to her delivery date, then going back to night shifts three months later while Cal stayed home to study and take care of Gabriel.

Maybe the drift had started then, with the two of them coming and going from their little apartment on completely opposite schedules. Or maybe it was when she decided to take up an offer to enter the police academy. Thanks to her cosmopolitan family, she spoke three languages in addition to English—Greek, Arabic and passable high-school Spanish. That made her too valuable an asset to waste on the dispatch desk, the sheriff’s department personnel management decided.

Had she loved police work too much and Cal not enough? Did he resent the excitement of a career that put her on the street and then into undercover work in record time? Despite the claims he made later during the custody hearing, she’d been conscientious about being there for Gabe and juggling her schedule as much as possible to meet his needs. At the end of the day, though, maybe too many of her husband’s needs had gone unmet. Maybe she had to take some of the blame when he drifted into a series of affairs, first with a fellow student, then some miscellaneous women he met in his first job at the district attorney’s office, and finally with Christie Day, the local television news anchor who became his second wife. But even if Hannah accepted some of the blame for the end of the marriage, that didn’t mean that Cal had had the right to jump at the first opportunity to steal her son.

If only the courts had agreed.

It was an undercover job, a major drug, arms and money laundering sting carried out in cooperation with the FBI, DEA and ATF, that had done her in, putting the final nail in the coffin. She and Cal had been divorced for nearly two years by then, and he’d left his job at the district attorney’s office and gone over to the dark side, working for a high-end defense firm with a stable of bad-boy clients. She’d been working long and irregular hours. With no family around to provide backup care and less than flexible babysitting arrangements, she hadn’t been in a position to turn down Cal and Christie’s offer to keep Gabe full-time for the few summer weeks the sting operation was expected to last. Christie had even rearranged her schedule at the TV station, taking the crack-of-dawn news shift in order to be home by 9:00 a.m. to care for Gabe while Cal was at work. In retrospect, Hannah realized, it had all been part of Cal’s master plan, but at the time, she’d been absurdly grateful.

It didn’t help that a few weeks had turned into four months as the sting operation dragged on and on. By the time it ended and the case went to trial, Gabe had already been enrolled at Dahlby Hall, made friends and begun to settle into a new routine with no need for the kind of outside caretakers that Hannah had to rely on. Yet even then, Hannah thought, with Cal determined to petition the court to reverse their original custody arrangements and having the money and the legal connections to press the matter until he got his way, she might have kept her son.

The bomb had ended her hopes. Planted by one of the defendants in the sting, who’d somehow discovered the identity of the undercover cop set to testify against him, the explosive had blown up more than her little house in Los Feliz. It had also destroyed any chance of convincing the courts she was the better parent to provide a secure and stable environment for a child. Even Hannah, shaken to the core by the assassin’s near-miss of her and Gabe, had conceded that, barring a lottery win, there was no way she could afford the kind of advantages Cal and Christie could offer her son.

Most people thought it was the events of September 11, 2001 that had pushed Hannah out of the sheriff’s department and into the freelance security game, but the truth was, it was sheer financial need. She made nearly five times her police salary doing the kind of work she was doing now. She was on track with a plan that would allow her, if she were very careful, to take several years off and devote herself full-time to her son’s needs without having to worry about where the grocery money would come from. She had a real shot at petitioning for a review of her case, she thought—if only she could survive long enough to see her game plan to fruition….

CHAPTER

4

Washington, D.C.

Evan Myers felt his cell phone vibrate inside the breast pocket of his subtly pinstriped, two-thousand-dollar navy-blue suit. He silently cursed both the interruption and the twitch of anxiety it set off in his gut.

He was perched on one of Richard Stern’s low, armless visitors’ chairs, forced—by design, he was certain—to gaze up at the older man who occupied the massive leather chair on the business side of a broad oak desk. As Myers pulled out his phone and flipped it open, he couldn’t fail to notice the irritation that flickered across Stern’s lined face. Myers hoped his own expression didn’t reveal how that made him feel—like a misbehaving schoolboy caught passing notes.

Not even his Armani suit could quite overcome the youthful impression cast by Myers’s slight, five-foot-eight stature, his thick mop of red hair and his rosy, puckish face. He’d just passed his thirty-sixth birthday, had graduated summa cum laude from Yale Law School, and had fast-tracked with the prestigious Boston firm of Fitzgerald-Revere. Now, as White House deputy chief of staff, his carrot-topped head could often be spotted in close proximity to the president during press scrums and state visits. Yet in spite of all that, Myers still found himself being carded by clueless bouncers at trendy Washington watering holes. It was unbelievably irritating.

As for Richard Stern, the man on the other side of the desk, his demeanor was as humorless as his name. With a shock of steel-gray hair and flint-colored eyes behind rimless glasses, the assistant national security advisor had a reputation for ruthlessness and a background as sketchy as his current mandate seemed to be. Stern was portly in girth and close to sixty years of age, yet there was nothing avuncular about him. Having spent most of his adult life swimming in the murky back channels of covert operations, he had a sharklike slipperiness and a corresponding cold disdain for any poor sap whose blood he scented.

Stern and his small gang of handpicked associates occupied a suite of first-floor offices at the northeast corner of the Old Executive Office Building at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, adjacent to the White House. A five-story, white, Empire-style monstrosity that Mark Twain had deemed the ugliest building in America, the OEOB had been the site of numerous watershed events in U.S. history, as well as some notable scandals—cursed, perhaps, by the ghost of its architect, who committed suicide over his much-maligned creation. Built in the late 1800s and originally called the State, War and Navy Building, the OEOB’s ornate rooms had been at the center of all of the country’s early international dealings. Here, in 1898, America declared war on Spain and then, two months later, signed a treaty of peace. More than a thousand other international treaties had been signed on behalf of America in its ornate halls, including the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I, and the 1942 United Nations Declaration.

In recent decades, with White House office space at a premium and much in demand by politicos hovering at the hub of power like flies at a sugar bowl, the neighboring building had been housing administration overflow as well as a few power brokers who deliberately sought to maintain a lower profile. In the late 1980s, Colonel Oliver North had secretly orchestrated the Iran-Contra affair out of Room 392 of the OEOB. In a failed bid to keep her boss from going to jail over his criminal dealings, Colonel North’s secretary had shredded incriminating documents in a basement cubbyhole of the same building—documents detailing illegal sales of U.S. arms to Iran and the equally illegal diversion of those proceeds to President Ronald Reagan’s favorite “freedom fighters,” the anti-government Contras of Nicaragua.

With so much tradition, both grandiose and disreputable, behind it, it was little wonder that a figure such as Richard Stern would have chosen to establish his lair in the OEOB.

The entire White House office complex was surrounded by blastproof concrete barriers, high wrought-iron fences, armed guard posts and countless security scanners and cameras. In spite of that already elevated level of vigilance, entering Dick Stern’s personal domain took things one step further, requiring even an official as highly placed as Evan Myers to pass through yet another security barrage and—the ultimate insult—to be accompanied at all times by an authorized escort. Myers had never fully grasped the precise nature of Stern’s mandate, nor understood the reason for these obsessive security arrangements. Although he chafed at having been summoned like some junior flunky to this meeting on Stern’s turf, however, he was damned if he was going to let the man intimidate him as he did most everyone else.

When his phone vibrated again, Myers flipped it open and glanced at the text message on the screen.

“Again, Evan?” Stern asked peevishly.

“Nature of the beast, Dick,” Myers said, reading the third communication his assistant had sent in the past forty minutes. “We’re at the president’s beck and call over there.”

This latest message, however, did not concern demands of the Oval Office. Apparently Patrick Fitzgerald had called yet again. Myers had never seen his former boss and mentor so rattled, but considering the kidnapping of Fitzgerald’s daughter, it wasn’t surprising.

“Anyway,” Myers added, tucking the phone away, “that’s why I wanted to meet in my office.”

Stern grunted. “Not possible.” He almost never entered the White House. Myers wondered whether the president even knew the man, much less what he was up to over here.

Hundreds of characters circled around any administration, drawing power and authority from it. Much as they needed and wanted that presidential imprimatur, however, some of those people made a point of flying beneath the radar of Congress, the media and the public, their activities largely invisible even within the administration’s inner circle. Dick Stern was a case in point. The man seemed to answer to no one, yet when problems of a certain sensitive nature arose, he was inevitably tagged as the go-to guy.

“Patrick Fitzgerald has called again,” Myers said. “We can’t keep putting him off. God knows, the State Department isn’t giving him any joy. If I don’t get back to him with an update on his daughter, the next call he’ll make will be to the Oval Office. And you know he’ll get through, too, Dick. Fitzgerald is too big a fish to ignore if the party has any hope of making inroads in New England next year. And when he does make that call, the president’s going to be calling us both in for a sit rep.”

“You can’t let that happen.”

“Explain to me why not. A young American woman’s been kidnapped from under the noses of our own forces in Iraq. The press is saying she’s being held by some fundamentalist warlord. The State Department, like I said, is clueless. Meantime, both the CIA and the Pentagon claim to have no idea where she is or what this Salahuddin character wants. For the life of me, I can’t figure why we haven’t already launched a rescue mission. Are we in control or not over there?”

“It’s not that simple. That part of the county is still influx.”

“Are we at least talking to this Sheikh Salahuddin who’s supposed to have taken her? I mean, is somebody who speaks for us talking to him, since Langley’s spooks and the military don’t seem to be in the loop?”

“I can’t say.”

“Can’t or won’t?”