THE PRESIDENT 2 Page 14

  They affirmed to live the rest of their lives as a twosome, no matter what missiles the world tossed at them. They affirmed to never again let there be any daylight between them no matter how many reasons there was to go their separate ways. And, most importantly of all, if it was the two of them against the world, then the world be damned. It was going to be the two of them.

  It was an affirmation fraught with the pain of trauma, of Dutch almost losing the most important person in his life, and they understood that. But they affirmed it anyway.

  And after that climax, after their affirmation, they lay on their backs in silence. It would be another long, drawn out period of time, minutes that felt like hours, before they would speak.

  Gina turned to face him, her eyes narrowing in that sincere but disconcerting look of hers that always got his attention. And when she said, “good morning,” and smiled that beautiful, bright white smile of hers, he relaxed too.

  “Good morning.”

  “You realize it’s after eight o clock?”

  “I realize that.”

  “I’m surprised one of your aides hasn’t come for you. You aren’t usually anywhere near a bed by eight am.”

  You aren’t usually under attack the day before, he wanted to say, but it was still too raw for him to make light of it. “How about that?” he said, instead.

  “What’s on tap today?” she asked, and he realized right away that she was trying to reclaim some normalcy. “Meetings and more meetings?”

  “You know it. But we do have good news on the hostage front.”

  This piqued her interest. “What’s happened?”

  “Eyes only,” he said, which she knew meant that the information he was giving her required clearance of the highest order. What the world didn’t realize was that it was Gina, not his cabinet, not Max or Allison, who was his closest advisor. He told her everything that happened in his administration. Above all the king’s men, he trusted her. “We know where the hostages are being held.”

  This was surprising indeed. “That’s great news, Dutch,” she said. “That’s wonderful news.”

  “And,” he added, “we’re finalizing plans to secure their release.”

  Gina’s heart pounded. “An inside source I take it?”

  “You take it correctly.”

  “That’s great, Dutch. Is an Al-Qaeda affiliate?”

  “An even looser affiliate than we had initially thought, but yes.”

  Gina wanted to ask if that same organization was responsible for the attack on her convoy, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask it. Dutch, however, who was staring at her, whose hand was rubbing her braids, answered her unasked question anyway.

  “No,” he said, “it wasn’t the same group that attacked your convoy, darling. They wanted us to believe it was, to maximize their publicity no doubt, but no. My Intel people believe it was a copycat pure and simple, a homegrown terror group masquerading as an Al-Qaeda affiliate. They believe they know whom, also, but we’ll see.”

  Gina closed her eyes, rested her forehead against his.

  Max and the rest of his staff were already insisting, even as he journeyed over to Andrews to meet Gina’s plane, that he parade her before the cameras, to reassure America that the First Lady was okay, but Dutch had nixed the idea in its infancy. Nobody was parading his wife anywhere, he had told them, and least of which in front of that man-eating press. He would brief the press himself and make clear that she was just fine. If that wasn’t enough for them, then tough, he decided. He didn’t give a shit.

  “Was it as magnificently terrible as I believe it was?” Dutch carefully asked Gina after a few minutes of deafening silence, his fingers now tracing along her bare back and backside. He knew this was still a horrific memory for her, and always would be, but the only way he could help her, he believed, was to know exactly what she had gone through to begin with.

  She nodded her head. “It was bad,” she admitted. “I don’t think terrible is a strong enough word for how bad it was. It was unbelievable. And when I found out that those men had died, that those good men. . .” She shook her head. “I can’t, Dutch,” she said, and looked into his eyes, tears forming in hers. He understood. And pulled her into his arms.

  After another long period of silence, he slightly changed the subject.

  “How did it go with Mr. Rance?” he asked her.

  She smiled, which he took to be a good sign. “It was nothing like I expected it to be,” she said. “He says he’s innocent.”

  Dutch smiled. “Like every convicted killer.”

  “I know. But still.”

  Dutch looked down at her. “But still what?”

  Gina hesitated. Had to remind herself that this wasn’t about her, but about justice. “But I think it should be looked into, that’s all.”

  Dutch stared at her. She was an advocate to her heart. And he wasn’t about to trounce on that. He, in fact, loved that about her. “I don’t want you looking into it,” he did, however, make clear.

  “No, not me. An old friend of mine.” Gina hesitated before saying his name. “Roman Wilkes,” she ultimately said.

  Dutch knew Wilkes to be a famous criminal defense attorney, a smooth, good looking man of the bar. He also remembered the press attempting to romantically link Wilkes to Gina during the campaign. Gina admitted they used to be romantically linked, but years ago. And Dutch didn’t comment on it now. He, instead, filed it away in the Rolodex of his mind to be retrieved, if needed, some other time.

  “What exactly will Wilkes be looking into?” he asked Gina.

  “Marcus is claiming that he was working at the time of that drive-by shooting, and that he has plenty of corroboration, including a co-worker and his boss. And as for DNA, according to him, I haven’t confirmed any of this, but he says there was no DNA presented at trial. Just the fact that the assailant was driving his stolen vehicle.”

  Dutch frowned. “That’s ridiculous, Regina. Why would the police arrest him if he could prove that he was at work at the time, especially if they had no scientific evidence?”

  “It happens, Dutch. Believe me,” she said, her passion released. “Witnesses come forward, but the jury just doesn’t believe them because they aren’t necessarily upstanding citizens themselves. In Marcus’s case, all of the people who worked at that furniture delivery company had rough backgrounds, including, apparently, the owner. That’s why the owner hired them. He had turned his life around, and was trying to help turn theirs around.”

  “But the idea that people would say that he didn’t do it and there was no DNA that categorically said that he did, yet they still sentenced him to death? That’s hard to believe, Gina.”

  “I know it is. That’s why it happens more times than people think, because it just can’t be true. But sometimes it is true. When I was running BBR, and looked into those cases, I was astounded too. I saw it more times than you would believe, Dutch. It happens.”

  Dutch still seemed doubtful.

  “Remember the Geter case?”

  “Not really, no,” Dutch said.

  “Well, this black engineer, Lenell Geter, was accused of armed robbery, in Texas too, and sentenced to life in prison. Forget that he was at work at the time. Forget that he had co-workers willing to testify on his behalf, they sentenced him anyway. If it wasn’t for that Morley Safer report on 60 Minutes back in the eighties, which exposed this kind of craziness, that man would have probably still been in jail to this day for something he didn’t do. And don’t forget all of these inmates that the Innocence Project has freed; men who’ve served fifteen, twenty years for murders they didn’t commit. It happens, Dutch.”

  Dutch studied her. This was her passion. This was what she did. The fact that it was her half-brother probably heightened her interest and was probably the reason why she asked Wilkes to help, despite the rumors. He was undoubtedly the best at this sort of case and Dutch knew her to be the kind of woman who would put herself out there, in the grind
of the rumor mill again, to help somebody else. Especially, as she put it, her father’s son.

  “Just don’t get too caught up in this, Regina,” he ordered her. “I don’t want you out there railing against something that may not be what Rance is making it out to be. Wait for the facts, and consult me before you go public with any of it. Understand?” he said this and looked at her.

  She smiled. “Understood,” she said. Then she continued to look at him, the terror of last night still planted in her brain. Also planted was the fact that Dempsey had phoned LaLa just after they left the prison and mentioned that Dutch’s mother and some very beautiful woman had come back from Nantucket with him. Gina didn’t call Dutch to find out what that was about, but had opted to wait until she got back home to see for herself.

  Now the suspense was killing her.

  “How did it go for you? At Nantucket, I mean?”

  Dutch’s heart hammered against his chest for some reason. “It went okay,” he said. “My mother decided to come back to Washington with me.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  Dutch looked at her. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  Gina considered his question. “A problem? No. I don’t like her, and she can’t stand me, but she’s your mother. Your mother will always be welcomed wherever we live.”

  Dutch loved her so much. “Thank-you,” he said. Then he wrinkled his brow. “She didn’t come alone,” he said. “There’s been a new development.”

  It was Gina’s heart that hammered this time. Was this that other shoe? Was this beautiful, mystery woman some old girlfriend of the president’s? Was he going to tell her that he was in love with this woman and wanted a divorce? It was highly unlikely to Gina, the way he held her last night, and their affirmation this morning seemed to seal the unlikeliness, but given the way her life often went she wasn’t about to put anything past anyone.

  She stared at him.

  “Her name is Caroline Parker.”

  Gina was puzzled. “Caroline Parker? But isn’t that the woman. . .” It made no sense. But she remembered that name. Had even Googled that name and stared at the beautiful photos of her on the Internet, all proclaiming her to be the president’s great lost love. She swallowed hard. “Isn’t that the name of the woman, of your fiancée who had died in that plane crash?”

  Dutch nodded, a painful look crossing his handsome face. “Yes,” he said.

  “But. . . What are you telling me, Dutch? Are you telling me that she didn’t die? That she’s alive?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you, yes.”

  “So she wasn’t on the plane at all?”

  “She was on the plane when it landed in France. But she didn’t come back. She stayed in France. The flight manifest wasn’t changed, and so when the plane crashed, there was no survivor to tell us that she stayed back.”

  Gina still couldn’t understand this. “But she survived. If she stayed back, she survived. Why didn’t she tell y’all?”

  Dutch exhaled. He felt the same way. “She said the reason she stayed back was because she couldn’t face it anymore.”

  “Face what?”

  “The pressure of the wedding. In our circles it didn’t get any bigger than our wedding. And she said it was becoming too much for her. Her plan, if she had one, was to stay away for a while, travel around France under assumed names so that I wouldn’t know where she was or come looking for her. At least not until she could gather the strength to face me. But then the plane crashed, she was presumed dead too, so she decided, with no aforethought, she claims, to keep it that way.”

  “To stay dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what brought her back alive?” Gina wanted to know.

  Dutch would have smiled if he hadn’t asked the exact same question. “Her French husband was convicted of some major securities fraud; they lost everything, including the very roof over her head. And so she reached out to my mother.”

  “Who, I’m sure, given how she feels about me, welcomed her back with loving arms.”

  Dutch didn’t respond to that, and Gina immediately regretted the fact that she just exposed her anger. Instead of celebrating the fact that the woman was alive, she was actually upset by this revelation.

  “Why did your mother,” Gina said, careful to keep her irritation in check, “decide to bring this Caroline Parker to Washington with her?”

  “To break up our marriage so that Caroline and I could be together again.”

  Gina looked at Dutch, amazed by his clarity. He even smiled, which caused her to smile, albeit nervously.

  “And those two schemers,” he said with a laugh, “thought I was just that clueless. They actually believe they’re getting one over on me.”

  Gina laughed this time. “So why did you let them come here, if you knew what they were up to?”

  “Because I want you and me in a room with Caroline and my mother so that I can make it clear, with no misunderstandings, no second hand information, that they had better get any notions of undermining my marriage out of their pretty little heads. We have enough demons to battle. We aren’t battling them, too.”

  Gina’s eyes narrowed as she stared at her husband. And here she was, thinking she was unlucky when, because of Dutch’s love, she might just be the luckiest woman of them all.

  But tears were in her eyes after he pulled her into his arms. Because she just couldn’t see it. Because she just knew that even a come-to-Jesus meeting with those two wouldn’t end it. Not if that mother of his was involved. Gina knew that witch, and unlike Jennifer Caswell who went away quietly, she was more than a force of nature. She was evil. And the forces of evil could be the most potent foe.

  They were not out of the woods yet.

  THIRTEEN

  When Gina arrived at the breakfast table later that morning, she wasn’t at all surprised to see the two women staring daggers at her. But what she was surprised to find was that Caroline Parker, even more than a decade after those photos she had seen of her were taken, was still a remarkably beautiful sight to behold. Her heart that had soared when Dutch confessed his knowledge of their scheme and how it wasn’t going to work, came back down to earth a bit when she saw Caroline.

  Caroline’s heart had the opposite effect. Last night, after Dutch arrived at the White House with the First Lady and didn’t so much as acknowledge her when they walked by, she began to wonder if she stood any chance with that man. But this morning, seeing Regina Lansing, not just after some ordeal, but freshly scrubbed and dressed in another one of those ridiculous African outfits she favored, her heart actually soared. Because she believed that the odds of her taking Dutch away from this woman were excellent. She believed she more than stood a chance.

  “Good morning,” Victoria said when Gina finally joined them for breakfast. Not that she could eat a thing. She couldn’t. But she, like them, wanted to get a firsthand look at her enemies.

  “Good morning,” she said as the chef brought her the cup of coffee and toast she had ordered before she even arrived in the room.

  “That’s all you’re eating?” Victoria asked as she patted her mouth with her napkin. She and Caroline both were very petite women, and both appeared to have moved around more than ate the little food they did have on their plates. “It seems painfully obvious that you generally eat more.”