Compassionate leave lasted for a week, which didn’t seem very generous to Betsy until she realized that, in those circumstances, a week lasts a year. Paul Moses came out to help with the details of transferring the body and dealing with the funeral directors. It did not occur to Betsy to wonder why an NSA cryptographer should pull that particular duty. Or, rather, it occurred to her and she decided not to think about it.
She didn’t begin thinking about those things until her compassionate leave was all used up, Paul had gone back to Washington, and she had chewed through a few weeks of her vacation leave. She knew that Cassie would have some pungent observations to make about this: a woman who would use her vacation days only when an immediate family member had died, so that she could spend those days in abject misery.
She spent many days sitting at the kitchen table in the farmhouse in Nampa. Long breakfasts with Mom stretched into long lunches. They read every word of the local newspaper, watched a fair amount of daytime TV. It wasn’t very productive, but that was okay.
She knew she’d gone a long way in her own recovery when she began to think about everything that had happened. And then she realized that she had figured out a lot of things subconsciously in the last few weeks.
For example, the mugging in Adams-Morgan hadn’t been a mugging, it had been an attempt on Kevin’s life concealed as a mugging. Margaret Park-O’Neil wasn’t just a neighbor who happened to become Kevin’s love interest; she had been planted in his path by someone who knew Kevin well enough to know that he had a weakness for Asian women. She was working for someone, for one of the “good” guys, and her job was, among other things, to act as Kevin’s bodyguard. She had died in the line of duty.
What followed was a little more difficult to swallow.
If Margaret—Kevin’s perfect love interest—had been planted in his path, what did that tell Betsy about her own perfect love interest, Paul Moses? What on earth was Paul doing in Nampa handling the funeral arrangements if he really worked for NSA?
How about Marcus Berry—Cassie’s supposed love interest, who spent all his time in the Midwest? The President himself had told Betsy that Edward Seamus Hennessey had a man on the ground in Wapsipinicon, Iowa, looking after the Iraqis there.
Which meant that Cassie herself was part of the game. Betsy ran over the chronology in her mind: she had given the fateful briefing to the Ag attaché early in March. Two days later her previous roommate had suddenly been sent off to another post. Two days after that Cassie had shown up, the ideal roommate, and moved into the apartment.
She and Kevin were pawns, that was obvious. Like many pawns, Kevin had already been sacrificed. Cassie, Paul Moses, Marcus Berry, and Margaret were rooks and bishops and knights. Who was the king? Almost certainly Hennessey. But this wasn’t a chess game with only two armies and two kings. The board stretched off in all directions, its boundaries lost in darkness and distance, and she sensed that other parts of it were crowded, and furiously active.
On Halloween evening Betsy was driving her mother back home from a trip to the Nampa shopping center, and as they passed through the streets of the town, they saw the trick-or-treaters making their way down the sidewalks in their flimsy store-bought disguises, carrying their bags of loot.
“Look at all the children in their costumes,” Mrs. Vandeventer exclaimed. “Isn’t that adorable?”
For the first time in about a month Betsy smiled. “We have the same thing in Washington, D.C., Mother.”
Mom got a vaguely distressed look on her face. “Isn’t it dangerous out there?”
“Yeah,” Betsy said, “but some people like it that way.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine