She got up, putting on her careful smile, wondering what he was thinking. She had taken pains to dress like a woman who deserved to be taken seriously. She’d gone to the hairdresser at the hotel first thing this morning, her suit was well made, and so were her shoes. The cube was in a shopping bag, so she could look like any ordinary shopper, except for the bruise greening one cheek, just under her dark glasses. She saw Representative Alvarez’s eyes settle on it, just for a moment, and his lips tightened.
“Mrs. Alvarez?” He smiled very nicely and kept his voice gentle. Well, he’d sponsored a lot of anti abuse legislation, and the public knew all about how his mother had died. “I’m intrigued by your message.”
“Are you, really?” She was pleased. “I tried to make it intriguing. I know you must be pestered to death, and the last person you want to talk to is somemujer loca from back home.” She looked around his office, a little flustered, summoning up her daytime, working-woman self, the one who dealt with people all the time.
She went to the chair he gestured toward and seated herself when he did, just across from him, with no desk between.
“Tell me about yourself,” he asked, smiling. “You’re from New Mexico? Married? With children?”
“Two. They’re both in college in California.” He started to say something then caught himself. She guessed he was going to say she didn’t look old enough. People often said that. The truth was, she wasn’t old enough. There were still too many Hispanic girls like her, having babies at fifteen or sixteen, more among Hispanics than any other group. Among her people,familia had always been more important than anything, and babies born too soon, though grieved over, were accepted.
“Now, what brings you to Washington?” he asked.
She took a deep breath and said firmly, “I was hired. They paid me to bring this thing to someone in authority.”
She bent toward the shopping bag, unwrapped the tissue and came up with the shiny cube, reached over and handed it to him. He took it as though it might be a bomb and almost dropped it when it immediately turned firecracker red. He was old enough to remember when kids played with firecrackers, and he held it, feeling it.
Benita knew it felt like leather. Not soft, precisely, but yielding. Not like plastic or wood. He turned it over, and it screamed at him. He almost dropped it.
She reached for it and turned it over, at which point it stopped yelping. “It has a right side up,” she told him. “And it yells if you upset it or leave it alone. So long as you’ve got it near you, it stays quiet. When it turns blue, it’s okay. You can feel it kind of buzzing? On your fingers?”
He stared at the thing. She knew he could feel the vibration, and the color had faded somewhat toward the purple. “What does it do?” he asked.
“They didn’t say. They just said it would do all the convincing and explaining that was necessary. I kind of expected it to do it when I gave it to you. Maybe not, though. Maybe it won’t turn on until it gets to the president or somebody like that?”
He snorted. “I can picture that. The Secret Service would just love it. A sealed container with who knows what in it!”
“I thought it might be a bomb,” she agreed, nodding. “Except it went through all the machines at the airport. There was even a sniffer dog, and he didn’t twitch.”
“Probably looking for cocaine,” he muttered. “Who gave this to you?”
“They were strangers to me,” she said, using the phrase she had decided upon during the plane trip. Strangers were acceptable. Aliens might not be. “They came up to me in the mountains, where I was hunting mushrooms, and they gave me that cube and some money, and they asked me to take it to someone in authority over our country.”
He started to ask the sensible questions, like where, and when, and how many of them had there been, when a loud voice in the outer office made him turn in that direction.