Headwind (2001) Page 6

  “I’m going to accept an offer to teach at a small college in Kansas.”

  She looked stunned. “You applied without telling me?”

  “I wanted to tell you, Linda, but . . .”

  “Is it a law school? Would you be a law professor?” she asked evenly, struggling to keep control.

  He shook his head no. “Liberal arts. Business law.”

  She pulled away from him and backed up, her eyes flaring. “That’s what you’re teaching here! If you were . . . were going to get your law career back . . .”

  “I’m still a lawyer in Texas. My suspension’s up.”

  “But . . . why Kansas if it’s not the law? I mean, I don’t want to move, Jay, I love it here . . .” she gasped as her hand went to her mouth in disbelief. “Oh my God, you’re . . . you’re dumping me, aren’t you!” she said, staring hard at him.

  “No, I’m . . . that’s a terrible term, Linda. It’s just that . . . we’re getting too close.”

  “Oh?” she replied, her voice hardening. “Too close? And precisely how close would that be? Like a while ago? Physiologically, I’m not sure we can improve on that performance!”

  He hung his head. “Linda, I care about you very deeply.”

  “Then . . . why?”

  For a short eternity, he stared at the floor, his right hand gesturing silently, before looking up at her.

  “Because when I’m holding you, I can’t get her out of my mind. I doubt I’ll ever be free of her, and you don’t need that.”

  She ripped the robe off and threw it at him, marching naked into the bedroom to find her clothes, her voice angry and hurt as it raged back through the open door.

  “Damn you, Jay! You don’t have a clue what I need!” She disappeared around the corner, then burst out again carrying a bra and a small framed picture of a woman on a mountainside, her blonde hair blowing free in the wind, her eyes haunted by things unseen as she stared an unfathomable distance off camera.

  “Here!” Linda snarled, pushing the picture frame into his chest. “I’m sorry as hell she’s dead, Jay! I really am!” Tears were streaming down her face now and her teeth were gritted in anger. “But you know something? Believe it or not, you’re still alive, and you’ve got a helluva lot to offer! DAMN!”

  She turned and rushed back to the bedroom, her voice echoing around the corner. “You are not responsible for her death, Jay. You gave her everything you could. But you ARE responsible for your own life, and if you won’t live it, no one can help you!”

  He moved slowly to the bedroom door. “Linda, please . . .”

  She turned. “Don’t Linda me! Dammit, Jay!” She finished pulling on her panties and jeans and buttoning her blouse, sticking the bra in an overnight bag as she struggled with her shoes. “Look, if you ever decide you’ve something better to do with your life than camp on her grave and cry, give me a call. Maybe I’ll still be around. Then again, maybe I won’t.”

  “I just need some more time,” he said.

  “No! You need to make a commitment. To life. To one particular town and college. Maybe to some poor girl who’s been throwing herself at you for months, warming your bed, and . . . and . . . loving you!” She tried to fight back a flurry of sobs, but it was useless.

  “I’m so sorry, Linda.”

  “I am, too,” she said at last, dabbing at her glistening face with a Kleenex.

  He followed her to the door and held it after she yanked it open and turned back to him.

  “I just might have been in love with you, Jay, but I can’t live with a ghost, too. I should have fallen for a simple cowboy with an old pickup and an IQ of six. At least then I could expect to be dumped for the next rodeo.”

  She pulled the door from his hand and slammed it hard. He could hear the door of her Firebird open and close. The sound of squealing tires melded with the ring of a telephone as she burned out of the driveway and careered down the street.

  Jay walked slowly back to the kitchen trying to ignore the phone and wishing he knew how to lose himself in a bottle when life got so painful. But he’d always hated getting drunk. It solved nothing. The pain was always still there in the morning, with the added agony of a headache.

  He yanked the receiver up at last just to silence the bell.

  “Yes!”

  “Jay? Jay Reinhart?”

  The voice sounded vaguely familiar. “Yes. Who’s calling?”

  “Your old senior partner and employer, Jay. John Harris.”

  A shuddering cascade of memories flooded Jay’s mind. “Mister President? What . . . ? I mean . . .”

  “I’ve been out of office a long time, Jay. Please call me John.”

  “Yes, sir . . . John. How are you?”

  “That was going to be my question to you, Jay. Is Karen okay?”

  Adrenaline squirted into Jay’s bloodstream at the mention of his dead wife’s name.

  “Ah, no, John . . . she’s not.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  He swallowed hard before answering. He should spare John Harris the shock of the answer, but there was a perverse satisfaction in telling the truth, like some form of miniature retaliation against the injustice of her loss, knowing the embarrassment it always caused on the other end of a phone.

  “Karen’s dead. She died last year.”

  “Oh, Jay, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. A sudden illness?”

  He couldn’t hold it back. He could feel the words gather like a shotgun blast at fate. “Actually, John, she killed herself.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “She was in constant therapy, but in the end . . .”

  “The years of abuse from the first husband,” Harris offered.

  “Yeah.”

  “Jay, I apologize for reopening the wound.”

  “You didn’t know. It’s just kind of a bad morning.” He took a deep breath and forced his eyes to open. “Now, Mr. President, where are you?”

  “In a bit of trouble,” John Harris said, explaining the situation in brief and raising the immediate question of what to do about the warrant undoubtedly waiting in Rome. “So, I want to hire you as my lawyer, Jay, if you can take a few days off.”

  “You want to hire me?”

  “That’s right.”

  “The last time we talked, you were in the Oval Office and I’d just been suspended from the Texas bar after they threw me off the bench.”

  “Doesn’t matter now, does it? You’re not licensed in Italy anyway. We can hire local talent to follow your orders, but I need your international legal expertise. You are familiar with the Pinochet situation?”

  “Of course. I keep very current. I don’t know why, since it’s obvious I’ll never get to . . .”

  “You were going to say, ‘practice again’?”

  “Yeah,” Jay replied.

  “Well, here’s your chance.”

  “This is really curious timing.”

  “How so?”

  “I just received notice last month that my suspension is over and my law license is current again.”

  “Good.”

  “And if I never said it . . . John, I’m so very sorry I let you down when you were just starting your administration.”

  “You’re forgiven, provided you help me out now.”

  Jay rubbed his forehead, feeling his mind still swimming with a cascade of emotions and thoughts and alarms. He had a class to teach, but he was quitting. He should chase Linda down, but he had to let her go. And the chance to practice again was illusory. No one in the legal profession respected a defrocked judge.

  “Okay,” he heard himself saying. “What can I do?”

  “No, Jay, the question is, what can I do? This is a dynamic, unfolding situation, and the Justice Department has already informed me they will not provide my lead attorney.”

  “All right. Ah, first, I need to sit here and think and then jump on the computer and confirm something I remember about Italian criminal procedure.”

  “H
ow long? Should I hold?”

  “Yes. Five minutes. Maybe four. Don’t go away!”

  “I’m not about to, Jay. Keep in mind, though, we’re less than fifteen minutes from arrival in the Rome area, although the pilot has promised to delay his landing for at least forty-five minutes.”

  “Hang on, John. Be right back.”

  Jay carefully placed the receiver on the tile counter as if he might break the connection by putting it down too hard. He stepped back, staring at the instrument, letting his mind organize itself around the problem. The essence of it! What was he always trying to teach the dullards in his class who wanted to conquer Wall Street but had no idea how the legal system worked? First, reduce the problem to its bare essence: We have a Pinochet warrant waiting for an ex-President. He quickly ran through the facts Harris had given him, coming to the same conclusion Sherry Lincoln had reached some five thousand miles distant: if the warrant was in Rome, it would be all over Europe. Only real estate under full U.S. control could forestall an arrest and give him time to start defensive maneuvers.

  U.S. soil. U.S. control. U.S. bases.

  Jay began to lunge for the phone, stopped himself, and raced instead to the bedroom to fire up his laptop. He struggled to plug the cable into the jack connecting him to the University’s computer network and toggle on his Internet connection, loosing a flurry of keystrokes to enter the words “United States Military Bases and Detachments” into a search engine.

  A list of possibilities came back and he paged through them, amazed at the fact that American military bases all seemed to have their own web sites. Ramstein Air Base in Germany, two in the U.K., none in France, a Navy base in Spain, and . . .

  “Yes!” he said to himself, clicking the name he’d found.

  A screen popped up and he ordered the computer to print the image, then switched to a map of the globe and zoomed in on the location, triggering a printed copy of that as well.

  The printer disgorged both pages and he took them and fairly skid-ded back into the kitchen to scoop up the phone.

  “John? Are you there?”

  The line was dead. He replaced the receiver, realizing his hand was shaking, and yanked it up again the second it rang.

  “Mr. Reinhart?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Brian with MCI Worldcom, sir. How are you today?”

  “Too busy for you!” Jay snarled, slamming the receiver back in its cradle.

  He had no phone number for the President. How did one go about calling a foreign airliner in flight halfway around the world, especially one presumed hijacked?

  This is intolerable! he muttered to himself. What on earth do I do now?

  The phone remained silent. He checked his watch. If John Harris had been right, they were on descent into the Rome area right now. What if the pilot decided not to hold, but to land instead? That would be the wrong thing to do.

  Maybe I could call through their air traffic control system, Jay thought. No, I can’t tie up the phone!

  He rushed back to the bedroom and leaned over the computer keyboard again to enter a search command for the main airport in Rome.

  Information on Rome, Ohio, came back.

  He tried again with “Italy” attached as the phone rang again.

  He leapt from the chair, turning it over in the process of dashing toward the kitchen, before remembering the bedroom extension. He reversed course and answered the phone by the bed.

  “Hello?”

  “Jay? John Harris. Sorry. It dropped out on us.”

  “Thank heavens! Do not land in Rome!”

  “Say again?”

  “Do not land in Rome. Instead, I think we’d better get you to an air-base in Sicily called Sigonella. It’s a U.S. Navy contract base not far from the city of Catania. There’s another American base near Milan called Aviano, but it’s too well known. I think Sigonella’s a better choice.”

  “American soil, in other words?” John Harris asked.

  “Not . . . entirely. Only embassies truly fit that description, but this will more than likely buy us time. Can the pilot do it?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to ask him. This is a commercial flight and he’s already gotten himself in trouble for helping me.”

  “If I lose you, John, how do I phone you back?” Jay asked.

  “I doubt you can. I think I’d better call you, if you can keep that line open. Do you happen to have a second line into your home?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  Jay scratched his head frantically, trying to think how to make the calls he was going to need and keep the line open at the same time.

  “You have a cellular phone?” John Harris asked.

  Jay shook his head in disgust. “Of course! We can keep this one open, and I’ll use the cell phone. Have you talked to anyone in Washington I need to talk to? I mean, do you have any telephone numbers into the White House or Justice?”

  “Yes. Hold on. I’ll put you on with my assistant, Sherry Lincoln, and she can brief you on the contacts at the State Department and Justice Department, as well as the direct White House numbers you’ll need while I talk to the captain.”

  “All right. I’ll need to book the fastest flight available to get over there.”

  “Whatever you need to do, Jay. I’m reasonably wealthy. I’ll cover any expense necessary and you can name your fee.”

  Jay started to protest, but Sherry Lincoln was already saying hello. He took down the names and numbers she gave him and asked her to monitor the line while he pulled out the cellular phone, hoping the battery was fully charged. There would be at least a day of work to do in the next fifteen minutes.

  EIGHT

  EuroAir Flight 42, Airborne, 25 Miles Southeast of Rome—

  Monday—2:40 P.M.

  “What do you want to do, Craig? It’s decision time,” Alastair asked, his finger poised over the transmit button.

  “Hold. We hold. Tell them we need some time to sort out a problem. Don’t tell them what.”

  Alastair punched the button and made the requisite call as Craig lifted the PA microphone and blamed the arrival delay on Italian air traffic control.

  The mixed nationalities of the 118 passengers aboard Flight 42 were typical of the melting pot that Europe was becoming in the first years of the twenty-first century. Scattered through the cabin were Turks, Italians, Greeks, British, Germans, Swiss, Dutch, Spaniards, French, and a single Dane, all in the company of forty-four Americans on a guided tour.

  With the exception of two British passengers, only the Americans were aware that a former U.S. President was on board, a fact that had spread excitement through the group on the ground in Istanbul when John Harris was ushered into the otherwise empty first-class cabin by the EuroAir station manager.

  Several members of the tour had come forward in flight to invade the first-class section and say hello, each of them graciously received by the President, who each time had waved down Jillian’s attempts to chase them back to coach.

  As the President finished talking to Jay Reinhart and handed the phone to Sherry Lincoln, the tour director herself came forward and knelt by his seat.

  “Mr. President?”

  “Yes?” he replied, forcing a warm smile to his face and offering his hand to the well-dressed woman, who appeared to be in her sixties.

  “It’s an honor to be aboard your plane, sir!” she gushed. “It feels like Air Force One.”

  He laughed easily. “Well, hardly that. Air Force One has a lot more room. I didn’t get your name?”

  “Annie Jane Ford, sir, from Denver. I’m the tour director for the group back there. All Americans.”

  He held her hand and squeezed slightly. “Annie, please don’t tell anyone, but I’m working on a bit of a scheduling problem at the moment, and I need you to excuse me so I can go talk to the captain.”

  “Oh! Sure! I’m sorry!” She got to her feet and stood aside as he thanked her and moved forward. Jillian had seen him comi
ng and opened the cockpit door.

  John Harris moved inside the small alcove and put his left hand on the captain’s shoulder as he nodded to Alastair Chadwick.

  “Captain?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Where are we?”

  “Descending through twelve thousand, Mr. President, and approaching a holding fix south of Rome. You can see the city up there about thirty miles.” Craig Dayton pointed in the right direction and Harris followed his finger as Craig let a few seconds of silence elapse. “Do you have any word from Washington?”