Jericho's Fall Read Free Page B

Where there were no windows, bookshelves covered the walls, crammed with thousands of volumes, most of them hardcover and dog-eared. Jericho used to point his young lover to a shelf and command her to pull a book at random, and give him a report by the end of the week. He had loved these little games. But tonight the room pulsed with animosity. Pamela had been twenty-two and about to graduate college when her father announced that he was leaving her mother for a nineteen-year-old.
    “Audrey said he was asking for me,” Rebecca said.
    “He’s been asking for you for years,” said Pamela from behind her. “That never got you up here before.”
    Beck said nothing. She looked up at the balustrade. She heard a door slam. She assumed that Jericho was in his old suite, commanding the magnificent views suitable to a man of his station. In the Rockies, if you angled your windows just right, the mountains went on forever, and his windows were angled right. Her own, smaller suite had been next door, but she spent most nights in his.
    “Rebecca?” said Pamela. “Hello?”
    Still Beck did not speak. She stood very still. She did not want to go up there. She wanted to be back home in Alexandria with Nina and their cat, Tom Terrific. She wanted to be back at the office, listening to Pfister’s rants while pretending not to be as smart as he. At this moment, she would even rather be down in Florida, sitting across the living room from her poisonous mother, soaking up the gospel according to Nancy Grace. Anything to avoid seeing Jericho again. Not because he had wrecked her life: after all, she had wrecked his, too.
    No.
    Beck was beset by the same emotion that had flattened her yesterday, when she got the call. Jericho was supposed to be immortal. His distant presence, not just in her memory but here in his mountain fastness,had formed the background of her adult life. They might never again be lovers, but a world where he did not exist seemed unimaginable.
    Now, standing beside the cold fireplace, Rebecca began to tremble. She remembered stepping into this house for the first time, squealing delightedly as she ran across the floor— You bought this for us? — Not for us, my dear. For you —pressing her face against the sparkling windows like the child she had so recently been, then turning into his bearish hug. She remembered the times she had danced for him in front of the lovely fire, slowly removing her clothes and his own, and the way the flames playing over their bodies had heightened their intimacy. She remembered, too, the night their fun was interrupted by a trio of hard-faced men from the CIA’s Office of Security, who had led them to separate rooms and interrogated her for an hour and a half, growing particularly angry when she had trouble remembering the name of her fifth-grade Spanish teacher. Afterward, Beck complained to Jericho that the men had refused to let her dress and made her spend the whole session wrapped in a blanket. He confessed that he had co-authored the manual that suggested precisely that form of humiliation for getting answers out of reluctant women.
    But what do they want? she had asked. Why did they come?
    Until last year, I was Director of Central Intelligence , he had answered calmly. Before that, I was Secretary of Defense. Before that, White House National Security Adviser. You’re in my life now, my dear. You’ll be in their files forever . Making this sound like an honor. To most people, sex is just sex. In my profession, unless we see proof to the contrary, we have to assume that an affair is a cover for something else .
    He had wanted to resume their conjugality, but Rebecca marched upstairs to her suite, locked the door, and showered for what felt like a week, then put on about three layers of pajamas. That night they slept apart.
    And Jericho had been right about their files. Five or six times over the years, always without warning, another couple of visitors from Security had