From then on Connor and Maggie spent every moment of their spare time together. She learned about touchdowns, end zones and lateral passes, he about Bellini, Bernini and Luini. Every Thursday evening for the next three years he fell on one knee and proposed to her. Whenever his team-mates asked him why he hadn’t scratched her name on the inside of his locker, he replied simply, ‘Because I’m going to marry her.’
At the end of Connor’s final year, Maggie finally agreed to be his wife - but not until she had completed her exams.
‘It’s taken me 141 proposals to make you see the light,’ he said triumphantly.
‘Oh, don’t be stupid, Connor Fitzgerald,’ she told him. ‘I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with you the moment I joined you on that bench.’
They were married two weeks after Maggie had graduated summa cum laude. Tara was born ten months later.
5
‘DO YOU EXPECT ME to believe that the CIA didn’t even know that an assassination attempt was being considered?’
‘That is correct, sir,’ said the Director of the CIA calmly. ‘The moment we became aware of the assassination, which was within seconds of it taking place, I contacted the National Security Advisor, who, I understand, reported directly to you at Camp David.’
The President began to pace around the Oval Office, which he found not only gave him more time to think, but usually made his guests feel uneasy. Most people who entered the Oval Office were nervous already. His secretary had once told him that four out of five visitors went to the rest room only moments before they were due to meet the President. But he doubted if the woman sitting in front of him even knew where the nearest rest room was. If a bomb had gone off in the Rose Garden, Helen Dexter would probably have done no more than raise a well-groomed eyebrow. Her career had outlasted three Presidents so far, all of whom were rumoured at some point to have demanded her resignation.
‘And when Mr Lloyd phoned to tell me that you required more details,’ said Dexter, ‘I instructed my deputy, Nick Gutenburg, to contact our people on the ground in Bogota and to make extensive enquiries as to exactly what happened on Saturday afternoon. Gutenburg completed his report yesterday.’ She tapped the file on her lap.
Lawrence stopped pacing and came to a halt under a portrait of Abraham Lincoln that hung above the fireplace. He looked down at the nape of Helen Dexter’s neck. She continued to face straight ahead.
The Director was dressed in an elegant, well-cut dark suit with a simple cream shirt. She rarely wore jewellery, even on state occasions. Her appointment by President Ford as Deputy Director at the age of thirty-two was meant to have been a stopgap to placate the feminist lobby a few weeks before the 1976 election. As it was, Ford turned out to be the stopgap. After a series of short-term directors who either resigned or retired, Ms Dexter finally ended up with the coveted position. Many rumours circulated in the hothouse atmosphere of Washington about her extreme right-wing views and the methods she had used to gain promotion, but no member of the Senate dared to question her appointment. She had graduated summa cum laude from Bryn Mawr, followed by the University of Pennsylvania Law School, before joining one of New York’s leading law firms. After a series of rows with the board over the length of time it took women to become partners, ending in litigation that was settled out of court, she had accepted an offer to join the CIA.
She began her life with the Agency in the office of the Directorate of Operations, eventually rising to become its Deputy. By the time of her appointment, she had made more enemies than friends, but as the years passed they seemed to disappear, or were fired, or took early retirement. When she was appointed Director she had just turned forty. The Washington Post described her as having blasted a hole through the glass ceiling, but that didn’t stop the bookies offering odds on how many days she would survive. Soon they altered that to weeks, and then months. Now they were taking bets on whether she would last longer as the head of the CIA than J. Edgar Hoover had at the FBI.
Within days of Tom Lawrence taking up residence in the White House, he had discovered the lengths to which Dexter would go to block him if he tried to encroach on her world. If he asked for reports on sensitive subjects, it was often weeks before they appeared on his desk, and when they eventually did, they inevitably turned out to be long, discursive, boring and already out of date. If he called her into the Oval Office to explain unanswered questions, she could make a deaf mute appear positively forthcoming. If he pushed her, she would play for time, obviously assuming she would still be in her job long after the voters had turned him out of his.
But it was not until he proposed his nomination for a vacancy on the Supreme Court that he saw Helen Dexter at her most lethal. Within days, she had placed files on his desk that went to great lengths to point out why the nominee was unacceptable.
Lawrence had pressed on with the claims of his candidate - one of his oldest friends, who was found hanging in his garage the day before he was due to take up office. He later discovered that the confidential file had been sent to every member of the Senate Selection Committee, but he was never able to prove who had been responsible.
Andy Lloyd had warned him on several occasions that if he ever tried to remove Dexter from her post, he had better have the sort of proof that would convince the public that Mother Teresa had held a secret bank account in Switzerland regularly topped up by organised crime syndicates.
Lawrence had accepted his Chief of Staff’s judgement. But he now felt that if he could prove the CIA had been involved in the assassination of Ricardo Guzman without even bothering to inform him, he could have Dexter clearing her desk within days.
He returned to his chair and touched the button under the rim of his desk which would allow Andy to listen in on the conversation, or pick it up off the tape later that evening. Lawrence realised that Dexter would know exactly what he was up to, and he suspected that the legendary handbag which never left her side lacked the lipstick, perfume and compact usually associated with her sex, and had already recorded every syllable that had passed between them. Nevertheless, he still needed his version of events for the record.
‘As you seem to be so well informed,’ the President said as he sat down, ‘perhaps you could brief me in more detail on what actually happened in Bogota.’
Helen Dexter ignored his sarcastic tone, and picked up a file from her lap. The white cover bearing a CIA logo had printed across it the words ‘FOR THE PRESIDENT’S EYES ONLY‘. Lawrence wondered just how many files she had stashed away across the river marked ‘FOR THE DIRECTOR’S EYES ONLY‘.
She flicked the file open. ‘It has been confirmed by several sources that the assassination was carried out by a lone gunman,’ she read.
‘Name one of these sources,’ snapped the President.
‘Our Cultural Attache in Bogota,’ replied the Director.
Lawrence raised an eyebrow. Half the Cultural Attaches in American embassies around the world had been placed there by the CIA simply to report back directly to Helen Dexter at Langley without any consultation with the local Ambassador, let alone the State Department. Most of them would have thought the Nutcracker Suite was a dish to be found on the menu of an exclusive restaurant.
The President sighed. ‘And who does he think was responsible for the assassination?’
Dexter flicked over a few pages of the file, extracted a photograph and pushed it across the Oval Office desk. The President looked down at a picture of a well-dressed, prosperous-looking middle-aged man.
‘And who’s this?’
‘Carlos Velez. He runs the second-largest drug cartel in Colombia. Guzman, of course, controlled the biggest.’
‘And has Velez been charged?’
‘Unfortunately he was killed only a few hours after the police had obtained a warrant to arrest him.’
‘How convenient.’
The Director didn’t blush. Not possible in her case, thought Lawrence: after all, blushing requires blood.
‘And did this lone assassin have a name? Or did he also die only moments after a court order was …’
‘No, sir, he’s still very much alive,’ the Director replied firmly. ‘His name is Dirk van Rensberg.’
‘What’s known about him?’ asked Lawrence.
‘He’s South African. Until recently he lived in Durban.’
‘Until recently?’
‘Yes. He went underground immediately after the assassination.’
‘That would be quite easy to do, if you were never above ground in the first place,’ said the President. He waited for the Director to react, but she remained impassive. Eventually he said, ‘Do the Colombian authorities go along with your account of what happened, or is our Cultural Attache your only source of information?’
‘No, Mr President. We picked up the bulk of our intelligence from Bogota’s Chief of Police. In fact, he already has in custody one of van Rensberg’s accomplices, who was employed as a waiter at the El Belvedere hotel, the building from which the shot was fired. He was arrested in the corridor only moments after he had helped the assassin to escape in the freight elevator.’
‘And do we know anything of van Rensberg’s movements following the assassination?’
‘He seems to have taken a flight to Lima in the name of Alistair Douglas, and then continued on to Buenos Aires, using the same passport. We lost track of him after that.’
‘And I doubt if you’ll ever find him again.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t be that pessimistic, Mr President,’ said Dexter, ignoring Lawrence’s tone. ‘Hired assassins tend to be loners who often disappear for several months following a job of this importance. Then they reappear once they feel the heat is off.’
‘Well,’ said the President, ‘let me assure you that in this case I intend to keep the heat on. When we next meet, I may well have a report of my own for you to consider.’
‘I shall look forward to reading it,’ said Dexter, sounding like the school bully who had no fear of the headmaster.
The President pressed a button under his desk. A moment later there was a tap on the door and Andy Lloyd entered the room.
‘Mr President, you have a meeting with Senator Bedell in a few minutes,’ he said, ignoring Dexter’s presence.
‘Then I’ll leave you, Mr President,’ said Dexter, rising from her place. She put the file on the President’s desk, picked up her handbag and left the room without another word.
The President didn’t speak until the Director of the CIA had closed the door behind her. Then he turned to his Chief of Staff. ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ he muttered as he dropped the file into the out tray. Lloyd made a mental note to retrieve it as soon as his boss had left the room. ‘I guess the best we can hope for is that we’ve put the fear of God in her, and that she won’t consider carrying out another operation like that while I’m in the White House.’
‘Remembering the way she treated you when you were a Senator, Mr President, I wouldn’t put a lot of money on that.’
As I can hardly employ an assassin to remove her, what do you suggest I do?’
‘In my opinion she has left you with two choices, Mr President. You can either sack her and face the inevitable Senate inquiry, or accept defeat, go along with her version of what took place in Bogota, and hope you can get the better of her next time.’
‘There could be a third choice,’ the President said quietly.
Lloyd listened intently, making no attempt to interrupt his boss. It quickly became clear that the President had given considerable thought to how he might remove Helen Dexter from her post as Director of the CIA.
Connor collected his thoughts as he glanced up at the baggage arrivals screen. The console was beginning to spew out the luggage from his flight, and some passengers were already stepping forward to pick up the first bags.
It still saddened him that he had not been present at his daughter’s birth. While he had doubts about the wisdom of the United States’s policy in Vietnam, Connor shared his family’s patriotism. He volunteered for military service, and completed officers’ candidate school while he waited for Maggie to graduate. They ended up only having time for a wedding and a four-day honeymoon before Second Lieutenant Fitzgerald left for Vietnam in July 1972.
Those two years in Vietnam were now a distant memory. Being promoted to first lieutenant, captured by the Vietcong, escaping while saving another man’s life - it all seemed so long ago that he was almost able to convince himself that it had never actually happened. Five months after he returned home, the President awarded him the nation’s highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, but after eighteen months as a prisoner of war in Vietnam he was just happy to be alive and reunited with the woman he loved. And the moment he saw Tara, he fell in love for a second time.
Within a week of returning to the States, Connor began to look for a job. He had already been interviewed for a position at the CIA’s Chicago field office when Captain Jackson, his old company commander, turned up unannounced and invited him to be part of a special unit that was being set up in Washington. Connor was warned that should he agree to join Jackson’s elite team, there would be aspects of the job he could never discuss with anyone, including his wife. When he learned what was expected of him, he told Jackson that he would need a little time to think about it before he came to a decision. He discussed the problem with Father Graham, the family priest, who simply advised him: ‘Never do anything you consider dishonourable, even if it’s in the name of your country.’
When Maggie was offered a job at the Admissions Office at Georgetown University, Connor realised just how determined Jackson was to recruit him. He wrote to his old company commander the following day and said he would be delighted to join ‘Maryland Insurance’ as an executive trainee.
That was when the deception had begun.
A few weeks later Connor, Maggie and Tara moved to Georgetown. They found a small house on Avon Place, the deposit being covered by the Army paycheques Maggie had deposited in Connor’s account, refusing to believe he was dead.
Their only sadness during those early days in Washington was that Maggie suffered two miscarriages, and her gynaecologist advised her to accept that she could have only one child. It took a third miscarriage before Maggie finally accepted his advice.
Although they had now been married for thirty years, Maggie was still able to arouse Connor simply by smiling and running her hand down his back. He knew that when he walked out of customs and saw her waiting for him in the arrivals hall, it would be as if it was for the first time. He smiled at the thought that she would have been at the airport for at least an hour before the plane was scheduled to land.
His case appeared in front of him. He grabbed it from the conveyor and headed towards the exit.
Connor passed through the green channel, confident that even if his luggage was searched, the customs officer wouldn’t be that interested in a wooden springbok marked clearly on the foot ‘Made in South Africa’.
When he stepped out into the arrivals hall, he immediately spotted his wife and daughter standing among the crowd. He quickened his pace and smiled at the woman he adored. Why had she even given him a second look, let alone agreed to be his wife? His smile broadened as he took her in his arms.
‘How are you, my darling?’ he asked.
‘I only come alive again when I know you’re safely back from an assignment,’ she whispered. He tried to ignore the word ‘safely’ as he released her and turned to the other woman in his life. A slightly taller version of the original, with the same long red hair and flashing green eyes, but a calmer temperament. Connor’s only child gave him a huge kiss on the cheek that made him feel ten years younger.
At Tara’s christening, Father Graham had asked the Almighty that the child might be blessed with the looks of Maggie and the brains of - Maggie. As Tara had grown up, her grades in high school, and the turned heads of young men, had proved Father Graham not only to be a priest, bu
t a prophet. Connor had soon given up fighting off the stream of admirers who had knocked on the front door of their little house in Georgetown, or even bothering to answer the phone: it was almost invariably another tongue-tied youth who hoped his daughter might agree to a date.
‘How was South Africa?’ Maggie asked as she linked arms with her husband.
‘It’s become even more precarious since Mandela’s death,’ Connor replied - he’d had a full briefing from Carl Koeter on the problems facing South Africa over their long lunch in Cape Town, supplemented by a week of local papers that he read during the flight to Sydney. ‘The crime rate’s so high in most of the major cities that it’s no longer against the law to drive through a red light after dark. Mbeki is doing his best, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to recommend that the company cut back its investment in that part of the world - at least until we’re confident that the civil war is under control.’
‘”Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world“,’ Maggie said.
‘I don’t think Yeats ever visited South Africa,’ said Connor.
How often he had wanted to tell Maggie the whole truth, and explain why he had lived a lie for so many years. But it was not that easy. She may have been his mistress, but they were his masters, and he had always accepted the code of total silence. Over the years, he had tried to convince himself that it was in her best interests not to know the whole truth. But when she unthinkingly used words like ‘assignment’ and ‘safely’, he was aware that she knew far more than she ever admitted. Did he talk in his sleep? Soon, though, it would no longer be necessary to continue deceiving her. Maggie didn’t know it yet, but Bogota had been his last mission. During the holiday he would drop a hint about an expected promotion that would mean far less travelling.
‘And the deal?’ Maggie asked. ‘Were you able to settle it?’
‘The deal? Oh, yes, it all went pretty much to plan,’ said Connor. That was the nearest he would get to telling her the truth.