Nuts to that. Op-Center occupied him an average of twelve hours most days, and sometimes-during a hostage situation or stakeout-exactly double that. It wasn’t fair that it should also hold him prisoner in the small hours of the night.
As though you’ve got a choice. From his earliest days as an investment banker through his stint as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury to running one of the world’s most bizarre and intoxicating cities, he had always been a prisoner of his mind. Of wondering if there was a better way to do something, or a detail he might have overlooked, or someone he forgot to thank or rebuke… or even kiss.
Paul absently rubbed his jaw, with its strong lines and deep creases. Then he looked over at his wife, lying on her side. God bless Sharon. She always managed to sleep the sleep of the just. But then, she was married to him and that would exhaust anyone. Or drive them to see an attorney. Or both.
He resisted the urge to touch her strawberry-blonde hair. At the very least her hair. The full June moon cast her slender body in a sharp white light, making her look like a Greek statue. She was forty-one, NordicTrack slim, and looked ten years younger-and she still had the energy of a girl ten years younger than that.
Sharon was amazing, really. When he was the Mayor of Los Angeles, he would come home and have a late dinner, usually talking on the phone between salad and Sanka, while she got the kids ready for bed. Then she would sit down with him or snuggle on the couch and lie convincingly-tell him nothing important had happened, that her volunteer work at the pediatrics ward of Cedars went smoothly. She held back so that he could open up and dump his day’s troubles on her.
No, he remembered. Nothing important happened. Only Alexander’s terrible bouts with asthma or Harleigh’s problems with the kids at school or hate calls and mail and packages from the radical right, the extreme left, and, even once, Express Mail from a bipartisan union of the two.
Nothing happened.
One of the reasons he opted not to run for reelection was because he felt his kids were growing up without him. Or he was growing old without them… he wasn’t sure which disturbed him more. And even Sharon, his rock, was starting to push him, for the sake of all of them, to find something a little less absorbing.
Six months before, when the President offered him the directorship of Op-Center, a largely autonomous new agency that the press hadn’t quite discovered, Hood had been preparing to go back into banking. But when he mentioned the offer to his family, his ten-year-old son and twelve-year-old daughter seemed thrilled by the idea of moving to Washington. Sharon had family in Virginia-and as Sharon and he both knew, cloak and dagger work had to be more interesting than check and dollar work.
Paul turned onto his side, stretched a hand to just an inch above Sharon’s bare, alabaster shoulder. None of the editorial writers in Los Angeles ever got it. They saw Sharon’s charm and wit, and watched her charm people away from bacon and doughnuts on the half-hour weekly McDonnell Healthy Food Report on cable, but they never realized how much her strength and stability enabled him to succeed.
He moved his hand through the air, along her white arm. They needed to do this on a beach somewhere. Someplace where she wouldn’t worry about the kids hearing or the phone ringing or the UPS truck pulling up. It had been a while since they’d gone anywhere. Not since coming to D. C., in fact.
If only he could relax, not worry about how things were going at Op-Center. Mike Rodgers was capable as hell, but with his luck the agency would score its first big crisis while he was on Pitcairn Island, and it would take him weeks to get back. It would kill him if Rodgers ever handed him a win like that, neatly wrapped.
There you go again.
Paul shook his head. Here he was, lying next to one of the sexiest, most loving ladies in D. C., and his mind had wandered to work. It wasn’t time for a trip, he told himself. It was time for a lobotomy.
He was filled with a mixture of love and need as he watched Sharon’s slow breathing, her breasts rising-beckoning, he fancied. Extending his hand past her arm, he allowed his fingers to hover over the sheer fabric of her teddy. Let the children wake. What would they hear? That he loved their mother, and she loved him?
His fingers had just brushed her silken teddy when he heard the cry from the other room.
FOUR
Tuesday, 5:55 P.M., Seoul
“You really ought to spend more time with him, Gregory. You’re glowing, do you know that?”
Donald tapped out his pipe against the seat of the grandstand. He watched the ashes fall from the top row to the street below, then put the pipe back in its case.
“Why don’t you visit for a week or two at a time? I can run the Society alone.”
Donald looked into her eyes. “Because I need you now.”
“You can have both. What was that Tom Jones song my mother was always playing? ‘My heart has love enough for two …’ ”
Donald laughed. “Soonji, Kim did more for me than he’ll ever know. Taking him home from the orphanage each day helped keep me sane. There was a kind of karmic balance to his innocence and the mayhem we were planning at KCIA and when I worked at the Embassy.”
Soonji’s brow knit. “What does that have to do with seeing more of him?”
“When we’re together-I guess it’s part cultural, and part Kim, but I was never able to instill in him that trait American kids embrace so easily: forget your folks and have a good time.”
“How can you expect him to forget you?”
“I don’t, but he feels as though he can’t do enough for me, and he takes that very, very personally. The KCIA doesn’t have a tab at that bar. He does. He knew he wouldn’t win our fight, but he was willing to accept a public drubbing for me. When we’re together, he carries his sense of obligation with him like a millstone. I don’t want that eating at him.”
Soonji hooked an arm through his and pushed back her hair with her free hand. “You’re wrong. You should let him love you as he needs-” She froze for a moment and then shot erect.
“Soon? What is it?”
Soonji fired a look toward the bar. ‘ The earrings you gave me for our anniversary. One of them is missing.”
“Maybe you left it home.”
“No. I had it in the bar.”
“Right. I felt it when I brushed your cheek-”
Soonji shot him a look. “That had to be when I lost it.” She stood and hurried to the end of the grandstand. “I’ll be right back!”
“Why don’t I call them?” Donald shouted. “Someone here must have a cellular-”
But she was already gone, making her way down the steps and, a moment later, hurrying down the street toward the bar.
Donald slumped forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
The poor girl would be devastated if it was lost. He’d just had the earrings custom-made for their second anniversary, with two small emeralds, her favorite stones.
He could have it made over, but it wouldn’t be the same. And Soonji would carry her guilt around.
He shook his head slowly. How was it with him that every time he showed someone love, it came back as pain? Kim, Soonji-
Maybe it was him. Bad karma or sins in a previous life or maybe he was a black cat with a resume.
Leaning back, Gregory turned his eyes toward the podium as the President of the National Assembly stepped to the microphone.
FIVE
Tuesday, 6:01 P.M., Seoul
Park Duk had the face of a cat, round and unworried, with eyes that were wise and alert.
As he rose from his seat and moved to the podium, the people in the grandstand and the crowd standing below erupted into applause. He raised his hands in acknowledgment, framed majestically by the stately palace, with its walled grounds and collection of old pagodas from other parts of the country.
Gregory Donald clenched his teeth, caught himself, then returned his expression to neutral. As President of the U.S./Korean Friendship Society in Washington, he had to be nonpolitical as pertained to matters in South Korea. If the people wanted reunification with the North, he had to go along with that in public. If they didn’t, he had to go along with that in public.
Privately, he yearned for it. North and South both had a great deal to offer each other and the world, culturally, religiously, and economically, and the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts.