A Clear and Present Danger (8 page)

Winship did not reply to the brash young agent. But he quietly admired him.

Now he was in receipt of another Slayton memorandum, which he read for the fourth time. For the fourth time, he was struck
by the last line:

“… I don’t mind losing it all for Georgie, or even Ronnie, for that matter; but I would greatly appreciate in the future knowing
when I am to be a decoy.”

Winship permitted himself a small laugh.

Earlier in the memo, Slayton had suggested a confidential meeting. It was this request that had occupied Winship’s thoughts
today, this request that had prompted his historical remembrances, this request that had revived his terrible, unshakeable
belief that certain ugly events had a grim connection.

Benjamin Justin Slayton, whose life was spread before Winship on paper, had stepped into the shadows of a nightmare. Did Slayton
know where he was treading?

Winship knew only that there was no time to waste in finding out about this Slayton fellow. He telephoned his wife.

“Edith,” he said to her, “I want you to arrange a party. Purely a social thing. Mix it up. You know, some serious types and
some frivolous. Maybe a bit of the press as well.

“I should like to watch a certain young man.”

MOUNT VERNON, Virginia, St. Valentine’s Day, 1981

“I don’t suppose you’re able to break it?”

The woman’s words came in short gasps, plaintively. She rolled out of Ben Slayton’s arms to the edge of her side of the bed
and pouted. Slayton moved to her.

“Ben? Oh why?”

“Sorry, love. Command appearance.”

He put an arm around her, found her soft and yielding, turned her toward him. He kissed her, gently and properly, and she
responded with an involuntary shudder that began in her shoulders and worked itself down to her loins.

Slayton drew her tightly to his body. Her breasts pressed hard against his chest. Their hips swayed together, in a slow, undulating
rhythm as they continued their embrace.

Her face was flushed and warm, expectant. He kissed her eyes and her chin. She brushed her long fingers over his taut skin.
A fire was building.

“Let me ride you,” she said, leaning over his face now, kissing him languorously on the chest and forehead, on his shoulders.
“Let me try to keep you to myself.”

She straddled his hips as he lay fiat on his back, lowering herself to meet his manhood. He moaned, with a touch of helplessness
in his voice that pleased her. She bent her head and kissed his lips.

He dug his fingers into the soft flesh of her round hips, guiding her downward, rocking her. Her breasts bobbled not far from
his face. She used one hand to pull his head to her bosom.

He tasted the sweetness of her skin, the different textures of soft breast and rigid nipples; and he listened as she cried
out each time she thrust herself down on him, again and again, going on long after he had spent himself inside her.

Now dizzy and pleasantly exhausted, they lay on the bed’s cool linens, their naked bodies covered only by a sheet and a thin
blanket.

Slayton watched the sun rising over the treeline in the east. Bare wooden limbs were tinged with a cold orange. The day would
dawn bright and chill.

She clung to him, like a small child. He could smell her crisp scent, gentle and feminine, and the feral odors of their love-making.
Women, he thought; such gentle creatures, capable of such frequent and unbridled passion, truly deadlier than the male.

When his breathing returned to normal, he leaned across her lush body for the nightstand, brushing the sheet and blanket away
from her breasts. He kissed her breasts and they grew instantly rigid at the tips.

But he ignored this second chance, reaching instead for the nightstand. He slid open a small drawer, felt for the box he knew
to be there.

“A token of our time together,” he said, holding out the box to her.

Slayton had met her several months ago at the Kennedy Center, during a performance of
Evita
. She was with another man and Slayton was with another woman. But accessories didn’t matter. Slayton smiled at her during
intermission while the two waited for their respective partners to return from the
pissoirs
.

He had said, “We’ll have lunch tomorrow.”

And she had sputtered something about a trial beginning tomorrow, how she was a lawyer and how this was a major case—

“Break the date,” he told her.

She did, and they dined that next afternoon. And evening. And at breakfast the next morning, in her apartment.

She looked so much like Jean Marie… he thought it then and he thought it now, as she examined the contents of the box, holding
it up to the morning light shafting in through the windows.

“A sapphire,” she said. “A perfect star sapphire. It’s beautiful, Ben. Gorgeous.”

Then she pouted, jutting out her lower lip, which was about twice the fullness of her upper number. The Julie Christie look.

“I’d rather have you, especially today,” she said.

“So you shall, my flower. But not today. The sapphire will have to do until I return. Take care of things.”

But he made no effort then to leave the bed. Instead, he lay back, as if to enjoy a cigarette, had he been a smoking man.
She hugged him, nodding her acceptance, silently understanding.

Slayton was momentarily saddened. Then he snapped out of it. He understood the meaning of Winship’s invitation and knew he
had to attend. It was the Washington way.

He closed his eyes, pretending to sleep, listening until his woman drifted off for another hour or two of sleep before rising
for the day. Only then did Slayton slip out of the bed.

Quietly, he showered and dressed in jeans, boots, and an oiled wool sweater. He made coffee, and downed two cups while he
watered vegetables and flower plants in the greenhouse at the far end of the kitchen.

The greenhouse was an adjunct of the solar heating unit Slayton had constructed on the south side of his house. He had first
seen this combination in Vietnam, in the rural cities and villages outside Saigon—or Ho Chi Minh City. Slayton had immediately
admired the self-sufficiency of the Vietnamese people and determined to build a home of his own modeled after the typical
Vietnamese plan. Even the poorest home was rigged with a solar heat and power generator; even the poorest home contained its
own greenhouse.

Jean Marie had loved this greenhouse.

Slayton had met her in his stock car racing days, an improbable but thoroughly enjoyable time of his life, a necessary bridge
between his discharge from the Air Force, the resumption of his scholastic life at the University of Michigan, his days of
political activism as a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and his life today as a T-man.

Jean Marie Parrish had come to the races that day in a tank town outside Washington, a town on the circuit Ben Slayton rode
in. He remembered everything they talked about, but only a few things about their actual meeting.

He was driving a ’72 Pontiac LeMans turbo-charger in those days, and he was winning a good percentage of the events he entered.
The day he met Jean Marie was his biggest payday yet.

It was a perfect Indian Summer Saturday. A high school band played the national anthem as all the drivers, in toggle suits
with helmets held respectfully over the heart, stared at the flag flapping in the breeze. The dull roar of racing engines
and the pervasive smell of motor oil accompanied the ritual music.

Slayton, as usual, was doing stomach exercises while he stood waiting to race, a practice which he found calmed him. He forced
his stomach out, then sucked it in, out, then in… .

He heard a woman’s laughter and turned around. He could have reached out and touched her. She sat in a private box behind
him. Or rather stood, her hand across her heart as the band played on. She wasn’t singing the words to the national anthem;
she watched Ben Slayton’s stomach making its peculiar motions and she found it funny.

Embarrassed and angry at the same time, Slayton quickly turned away from her, but not quickly enough to erase the image of
her face from his mind.

She was dark-skinned from the sun. Her hair was titian, her eyes a very dark blue, large and wide-set on her face. Her mouth
was generous, her nose delicate. She had an intelligent and joyous look. In her face, he saw his future. Never had a woman
had such an affect on him, such an all-encompassing, powerful effect.

The band’s contribution to the day of racing and gambling was blessedly over. Slayton had never quite understood why the national
anthem always had to be played for races and side bets.

He took the wheel of his LeMans, and his seconds strapped him in. His gloved hands gave a final check to the roll bar, he
revved the engine some to check for the bounce of the tachometer needle, and, without thinking, glanced back at the stands,
to the box where the laughing woman had been. He saw her watching him. When their eyes made contact, she waved to him.

A final check of the mirrors while he heard the starter’s count-down. He kept his eyes peeled on the track, depending on his
ears to hear the gun fire above the cacophony of engine noise and on his peripheral vision for the downsweep of black-and-white
checkered flag.

He nudged the accelerator with his right foot, and made the LeMans jump from the line. He had enough play left to jump his
car out in front of his competitors once he had left the line.

Slayton was an excellent racer. With his fourteen- or fifteen-inch starting advantage, he nosed the car inward, toward the
close track. He had the edge over cars whose drivers drew the favored positions. He forced one and then another driver to
take his dust as he steered relentlessly for the inside track.

Slayton had reached better than one hundred miles an hour in twelve seconds, a credit to his father’s excellent teaching,
he thought, as he eyed the instrument panel. More power was needed as he went into the turn, he noticed, or else he would
hit the wall.

He gritted his teeth, and the muscles in his arms tensed as he held the wheel in a perfect straight line, making sure the
wheels were in a square. Then he punched down hard on the accelerator, delivering a sudden burst of torque to the power train.
The LeMans held the track as if it were glued to the pavement. Slowly, Slayton inched the wheel into the turn, minimizing
the dangerous friction that could flip the fast-moving vehicle.

Fully half a length in front of the only car threatening his victory, Slayton took the chance of torquing into a bank turn.
For a suspended second, he thought he might lose control. The vibration was terribly strong, sweat streamed off his face,
his arms, and his hands. But he held on, turning, turning… and he imagined that he heard the laughing woman, the beautiful
laughing woman.

He felt the tremendous rush of free air as he zoomed past his competitor, to the clear command of the track. Gently, Slayton
worked the LeMans up into the safety of the oval bank. No one would catch him now. He punched the accelerator… one hundred
and twenty, one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty-eight miles per hour. Then he topped one-fifty, leaving more than
a dozen lengths of space between his LeMans and what would be the second-place driver.

At the end, he climbed out of his car more wobble-legged than he had ever remembered. It had been a grueling race, one in
which he had had to battle for all the concentration he could muster, for he had wanted to think only of the face of the laughing
woman.

He had set a record that day, he learned as fellow drivers and racing association officials pummeled him on his back and shouted
their congratulations. Slayton was floating somewhere above the praise, his perspiration-blinded eyes searching the stands
for the vision of that titian-haired woman who had laughed at his stomach exercises.

He took a few unconscious steps in a remembered direction, and suddenly saw her. She waved to him with unrestrained enthusiasm.
He ran toward her. She leaned out of her box and nearly fell to the tarmac. A man caught her just in time—her father, as it
happened.

Slayton could say nothing. She shouted something like congratulations to him. Dazed and smiling, he moved as close to her
as the confines of her spectator’s box would allow. She pecked his damp cheek. And then he found his voice.

“Wait here,” he said. “I’d like to meet you after.”

“Well, the boy speaks!” the older man with her remarked.

“I’ll be here,” she promised.

And she was.

It was an awkward first hour. Slayton found it difficult to lurch into conversation with Jean Marie, though with her father
the talk was a breeze. He was a race fan, and Slayton found himself discoursing on the finer points of racing cams and splinter
carbs, all of which the woman he loved found less than enthralling.

But finally her father left, a private sort of laughter trailing behind him as he walked away, and Ben and Jean were alone.
He began compulsively telling her about himself, as if there was not a moment to lose.

…
Did he know even then, that first time he spoke with her?

He told her of his wartime experiences, how he had grown sick and ashamed of the profiteering he saw all about him, by the
immorality of the war itself, by the tragedy he could see that the war would bring to the lives of its veterans; he told her
about his father, a police captain in Ann Arbor who had died of a heart attack while he was somewhere over Vietnam dropping
a payload of destruction in the name of democracy, how he had loved the man, how they had built an impressive collection of
Hudson automobiles and vintage Packards and Cadillacs. He told her how his prize possession was an ivory 1952 Nash-Healey
two-seater designed by Pinin Farina; how he had joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he returned home to Michigan,
then dropped out when he realized that his radical friends seemed to have no vision beyond their next television appearance;
how he had amassed a huge collection of literate mystery novels during the time he studied langauge, diplomacy, and politics
at the University of Michigan.