Liar's Market - Taylor Smith

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for Drum. His mother has been rattling around in it by herself ever since his father died. She has a daughter, as well—Drum’s sister, Eleanor—but she lives in New York and hardly ever returns to D.C. Anyway, I think I said that Drum inherited the house when his father died. When he was posted back to Langley, neither he nor his mother would hear of us living anywhere else.

      How did you feel about that?

      It wasn’t the first time. We’d lived there before the posting to London, too—after Africa, when Jonah, our son, was a baby.

      I know, but I asked how you felt about it. Not many young wives would want to live with their mothers-in-law.

      Well, no, neither did I particularly, to be honest. But we left London so suddenly, I didn’t have time to convince Drum we should be looking for our own place.

      So you just went along with what he wanted?

      To begin with, yes. You have to understand, I had a lot on my plate. There’s a ton of personal admin that has to be taken care when these transfers come through. With Drum as busy as he was at work, that all fell on me—the shipment of our personal effects, getting what we’d left behind out of storage. Drum’s Jag was in storage, but I had to find a car for myself. I also had Jonah to get settled. Had to try to find a summer day camp that was still accepting registration. There was no way a six-year-old could be expected to hang around the house all summer. He would have been bored silly, and Althea—that’s Drum’s mother—she wasn’t used to having noisy children underfoot, either.

      Anyway, bottom line—living there wasn’t ideal, as far as I was concerned, but with our rushed departure from London, it’s what I was handed. I tried to make the best of it.

      And your husband? How did he seem when you got back to D.C.?

      He was even busier than he’d been in London, just as I suspected he’d be—which was another reason he had no interest in house hunting.

      How did he settle in?

      It’s been tough for him, the past two or three months.

      How so?

      Well, being back at headquarters is not like being out in the field. You’re a lot more independent out there. Back here—well, you must know this yourself. The FBI can’t be that different from the rest of the government. There’s a lot of bureaucracy to deal with. Political gamesmanship, that sort of thing. Drum hates all that.

      So he wasn’t happy?

      He was showing signs of stress, I’d say. It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle the deputy’s job, mind you. He was really pleased to have been promoted. It was more like, he was champing at the bit to get to it. He wanted to put his mark on things, he said. Travel out to the posts, get to know all the station chiefs.

      And what was stopping him?

      As I say, bureaucracy. It seems there was some big organizational review underway—still the fallout from September 11, I gather. You know—trying to decide what the Agency did wrong, coming up with recommendations on what they might do differently in future. When Drum got back from London, the Director asked him to take on the running of that task force for a few weeks. Said it needed a little fire put under it. Drum felt he couldn’t say no, especially when the Director stressed how high profile it was, and how important to the Agency’s future. But Drum was more and more frustrated with every passing week. Said he was spending his days pushing paper around, chairing endless meetings—except not the ones he wanted to be in on.

      And which were those?

      The ones dealing with day-to-day operations, I suppose.

      And so?

      So, nothing. What could he do? He had to get the damn job finished, he said. That’s what he was trying to do. All I know is, we hardly ever saw him. Most days, he left home before Jonah was up and came back long after he was in bed. After I’d gone to bed, too, for the most part.

      He left at what time in the morning, generally?

      About seven. He liked to beat the traffic and be at his desk before seven-thirty.

      Always?

      Whenever he was in town, yes. As I say, he was almost always gone by the time Jonah came downstairs for breakfast.

      So, he had a routine that never varied.

      Not really.

      And then two days ago, something changed. Right, Carrie?

      You know it did. That was the day everything changed.

      CHAPTER SIX

      Washington, D.C.

      August 12, 2002

      The buzzing of the cicadas was relentless, maddening, like an electric drill to the brain. Sweltering air hung thick and hazy, even at this early hour, a reminder that the nation’s capital was a Southern city, albeit one over-laid with a more northern ethic of naked ambition. Summer heat and the drone of the insects in the treetops only amplified the sense of urgency that coursed through Washington like a permanent adrenaline feed.

      Every cop on the beat knew that in D.C.’s rougher eastern neighborhoods, there would be blood on the pavement before the day was out. It was the same every summer. People couldn’t live day after day, week after week in such close quarters and suffocating humidity without snapping.

      But it wasn’t just a problem of the concrete inner city. Even in green, leafy suburbs of neighboring Virginia, tension was rising.

      McLean, Virginia

      7:32 a.m.

      Knowing Drum’s impatience with anything or anyone in his way in the morning, Carrie had gotten in the habit of either waiting to get up until after he’d left for work, or showering and dressing in the front guest room so he could have the master bedroom and bath to himself. On that morning in particular, she was anxious to avoid him. She’d been awake since a little after five and had slipped out of bed as soon as she’d felt him stirring for fear her brittle nerves would betray her.

      The previous night, as happened more often than not, she’d been in bed when he got in. But going to bed wasn’t the same as going to sleep, not with her body thrumming in anticipation of what the dawn would bring. Her head, too, had spun with doubts, wondering whether she was doing the right thing. And even if she was, she wondered if she shouldn’t just screw up her courage and tell him about her appointment the next morning—assuming he didn’t already know.

      Despite the fact that he was so rarely around, Drum had an unnerving ability to pick up information by osmosis—or maybe it was his mother who served as his inside source here on the home front. Althea’s formidable determination to stay on top of everything that went on under her roof was only one of the drawbacks of living in that house, as far as Carrie was concerned. As far as Drum was concerned, though, the notion of a place of their own had been a non-starter.

      “I haven’t got time to look for a house we don’t need, Carrie. MacNeils have been living on Elcott Road for generations, and the house really belongs to me now, anyway. My God, do you have any idea what it’s worth these days? Over an acre of land in an area of million-dollar-plus homes? Surrounded by parkland, and fronting on the Potomac, no less?”

      “But I always feel like we’re crowding your mother.”

      “That’s ridiculous. The place is way too big for her alone. Anyway, she’d be the first to insist it’s where Jonah belongs. Not to mention how close it is to Langley. Christ! Haven’t I got enough on my plate without adding a long commute every day?”

      End of discussion. But if Carrie had been wavering for months about whether or not to take back her life, this one-sided debate had pretty much tipped the scales. When the dust had settled on the move and Jonah was safely enrolled in summer camp, she’d quietly made—then canceled—several appointments with the partner of her former college roommate, who now had a legal

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