Girl of Rage Read online

  “Oh, how I wish I’d seen it,” she said.

  He sobered a little and said, “Maybe we can arrange for a showing at the Embassy—”

  She reached out and touched his hand. “George-Phillip. No.”

  “But, it doesn’t have to—”

  She sighed. “Stop. We really can’t see each other after today. This was sweet. And in a different life, things would be different.”

  His mouth quirked to the side. “Of course. And I’d never ask you to do anything dishonorable, Adelina.”

  “Gotta go potty,” Julia said.

  Adelina closed her eyes. She was closer to tears than she’d realized. She didn’t need that. “Excuse me,” she said, her voice at a near whisper. She lifted Julia out of her seat as Julia said the words, “Why Mommy sad?”

  With Julia in her arms, she rushed out of the room. In her haste, she didn’t see the young columnist from the Washington Post until she literally bumped her out of the way.

  Maria Clawson gasped as Adelina stumbled back.

  “I’m so sorry,” Adelina said.

  She kept moving, trying to bite back the tears. Inside the women’s room, she sighed in frustration. She was too late—Julia had already soiled herself. Nearly crying in frustration, Adelina searched her purse for a diaper. She had one, tangled at the bottom with sundry other supplies.

  “Mrs. Thompson.” The voice was sickly sweet.

  Twenty-three-year-old Maria Clawson was slightly taller than Adelina. Pale skin and blonde hair framed a classic Irish face with her upturned nose and apple red cheeks. Adelina wanted to pinch them until she cried.

  “Maria. How pleasant to see you.” There was no hiding the venom in her voice.

  “Having a lunch out with friends?” Maria asked.

  “I am. And you?” Adelina wanted to say, Are you here stalking George-Phillip? but she knew she couldn’t.

  “Yes, I’m here with Janna Farrington,” Maria said.

  Adelina raised an eyebrow, not recognizing the name.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t recognize her name,” Maria said. “She’s old Washington society.”

  Adelina snorted, unintentionally. She did not need to make an enemy of a Washington Post gossip columnist after all. But she couldn’t help herself. “I suppose old Washington society means her money goes back more than ten years? Of course I wouldn’t know her. Society in Europe goes back a bit further.”

  Maria froze. She sniffed and turned up her nose, then said, “I’m sure you’re familiar with all sorts of society in Europe, aren’t you Adelina? And really, you should be proud of yourself. Most homeless nobility wouldn’t be caught dead marrying rich Americans. But you’ve done all right for yourself. And I bet Richard Thompson wasn’t even as old as your father.”

  Julia began to cry, and Adelina realized she was holding her daughter’s arm far too hard.

  “Excuse me,” she said, forcefully.

  A few minutes later she had Julia sorted and cleaned up. George-Phillip was sitting in the dining room, waiting for her.

  “Adelina,” he said.

  “I really must go,” she replied.

  “Of course,” he said, sadly.

  For just a second, she let herself see him. He was her age, or close to it. Tall. He was a man, caring and considerate but strong. He was everything Richard wasn’t.

  He wasn’t hers.

  She sighed and set Julia on the floor beside her, then began getting her daughter into her coat. Two minutes later, she left the room, walking into the main dining room of the restaurant. Neither she nor George-Phillip had spoken another word.

  As she walked out of the dining room, she spotted Maria Clawson, sitting with an older blonde woman near the window. Maria had her claws out as she spoke forcefully to her companion. Then she looked up, her eyes darting from Adelina to the door of the private dining room.

  Adelina paused, then saw George-Phillip, standing in that doorway.

  She looked at the floor and walked out without meeting Clawson’s eyes.

  The entire ride home in the cab, Adelina thought about what Maria would say. If Maria, the gossip columnist, chose to write about seeing Adelina lunching with George-Phillip. It would make for an interesting piece, wouldn’t it? Just enough innuendo to smear her and enrage Richard. She thought she might preempt the questions by telling Richard she’d had lunch with George-Phillip. After all, nothing inappropriate had happened. The two of them talked. Two-year-old Julia had been in the room with them the entire time.

  But Richard wasn’t home that afternoon, or that evening. When seven pm finally rolled around and she had Julia asleep, Adelina found herself staring at her closet.

  Staring.

  Finally she got up. She paced outside the closet door. Back and forth.

  Then she opened it.

  On top, on the shelf, in the back, was the dusty case of her violin. She pulled it down and reverently set it on the bed.

  She’d loved that violin. It wasn’t special. It wasn’t an antique. There was nothing to make it stand out from a million other similar instruments. After all, her father might have claimed the title of Marquis, but in practice he was an impoverished shopkeeper, and no mere posturing could bring him into land or titles. He’d saved money for several months in order to buy this instrument.

  She opened the case for the first time since her father had died. It was dusty, and she felt the dust against her fingertips with the cloying grip of grief. Slowly, she eased the instrument out. It would be badly out of tune, of course, but she’d forgotten nothing. She quickly tuned the instrument.

  Then she began to play. A solitary, lonely note. Then another. And another. And before she knew it, she was playing. One note after another, the rapid-fire introduction to Antonio Vivaldi’s Winter. Tears ran down her face as she played through the rhythm, a powerful, mournful movement.

  The tears came faster and faster, just as the notes did, and she found herself swaying, playing louder and louder, quicker and quicker. The rising notes took over, and for just a second she felt herself close her eyes. She swayed with the music, and she wasn’t standing in the prison of her life just outside Washington, DC. Instead, she was on the floor of the orchestra pit of the National Youth Orchestra, with two thousand people in the audience, her father in the seat of honor as tears ran down his face.

  And then she cried out, because for just a second, her father’s presence was so real. It was so real it hurt. So real she could smell his awful cologne, she could feel the roughness of his hands as he held hers, she could feel his beard as he kissed her cheek. His presence was so real it ripped her insides out. It turned her love into grief, her joy into hopelessness, her faith into dust.

  In a sudden, jerking motion, she lowered the instrument from her shoulder, raised it by the neck, and swung it hard against the wall. The drywall cracked, and she swung it again, harder. This time the instrument itself cracked at the neck, and she cried out in pain.

  She swung her violin a third time, as if it really were her past she was destroying. The wood of the instrument shattered, fragments and splinters flying everywhere.

  Adelina let the remainder of the wood fall to the floor. Julia was stirring in her room next door, on the verge of crying. The noise. Adelina sank to her knees, gripping her head in her hands. Not meaning to, she found herself holding the sides of her head where Richard had the other day. Like him, she squeezed, as if causing herself pain could shut out the cries of her daughter, as if squeezing her own head could shut out her own cries of pain at the loss of everything.

  She lay down on her side and wept.

  Jessica. May 2. 11:00 am Pacific

  A tear ran down Jessica’s face as she listened to her mother’s story.

  “You smashed your violin?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” Adelina said. A tear ran down her face.

  “Why did you tell George-Phillip you couldn’t see him again?”

  Adelina stared at the floor, and she whisper
ed, “Because it’s a sin, isn’t it? I’m married. I was married then. I wanted to see him, so badly. But I knew, if I did, then … well…”

  “You were afraid you would love him?”

  Adelina closed her eyes. Jessica leaned forward and touched her mother on the shoulder. And then she whispered, “I wish I’d known. Somehow.”

  “You weren’t born yet. Not for a long time.”

  Jessica turned on the wall, looking out at the ocean. She felt numb inside. Confused. But also relieved. For the first time in her life, her mother made sense.

  Her mother made sense. And the sense she made was so heartbreaking and full of grief and sadness and tragedy that Jessica wanted to throw herself off the wall. Instead, she leaned on her mother, and slipped her hand around her waist.

  Her mother sighed.

  “Did you get to see him again?” she whispered. “Is George-Phillip Carrie’s father?”

  Adelina took a deep breath and began to speak again.

  George-Phillip. May 2.

  “Sir?” Oswald O’Leary, George-Phillip’s special assistant, had opened the door and leaned inside.

  “Oh,” said George-Phillip. “It’s three o’clock, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. The car is waiting.”

  George-Phillip stood and straightened his tie, then pulled on his jacket. He felt as if he were moving in slow motion. It was the afternoon of the second day since the assassination attempt, and he’d barely slept since. For one thing, security personnel had been in and out of his house since that night, installing bulletproof glass, armored doors and a safe room between his and Jane’s bedrooms.

  Moments like that made him question his choice of avocation. George-Phillip would have done just as well financially by following in his father’s footsteps—serving on the board of several charities, concerning himself with hunting and drinking, and leaving the public service to men of lesser station. But something of his aunt Alexandra’s example had settled in on him at a young age. Princess Alexandra had continued participating in hundreds of royal obligations every year right up until recently, when aging and arthritis had begun to slow her down. So instead of living a quiet life, he’d attended the military academy at Sandhurst. He’d served his time in the Royal Marines and the remainder of his career in the Special Intelligence Service.

  The result? Some lunatic firing a rifle through his office window in the middle of the night from the woods in Belgrave Square.

  Except, George-Phillip reflected, he knew full well that it wasn’t some random lunatic. Whoever wanted to kill him had also placed a bomb in Adelina Thompson’s home in San Francisco and attacked Andrea Thompson and her brother-in-law in the Thompson condominium in Bethesda, Maryland. Whoever it was had a long reach, a lot of resources, and a vendetta that appeared increasingly personal.

  O’Leary walked silently beside George-Phillip as they made their way to the elevator. O’Leary was, in some ways, the perfect assistant. The two men had worked together for thirty years, and O’Leary was the only person who knew everything he’d worked on—including the Wakhan file, and of course, the links between George-Phillip and Adelina Thompson.

  They stepped into the elevator. George-Phillip looked at O’Leary and said, “Any word on the whereabouts of Adelina? Or Andrea Thompson?”

  O’Leary shrugged. “We’ve got people looking for both, but there’s a lot of ground to cover. The best bet for Adelina will be when she uses her phone or credit cards, which is bound to happen at some point.”

  “Unless she threw them away. She must know there are people after her.”

  “I don’t think she’s that smart, sir.”

  George-Phillip grimaced. “She’s a lot smarter than you’d think, O’Leary. You never gave her enough credit.”

  “We have trained agents looking for them, sir. They’ll turn up.”

  “Safely,” George-Phillip said. “I don’t have to tell you that this is important to me on a personal level.”

  “That you don’t, sir.”

  Two minutes later they were in a car, slogging through traffic to the bridge. It was only a mile and a half to 10 Downing Street, perhaps a twenty-five minute walk. On some days he might have walked it, but that was less of an option with people trying to kill him.

  Who was he kidding? This wasn’t new. At one time it would have been the Irish he was worried about killing him. Or the Arabs. Now it was … who?

  He didn’t know. Likely someone inside the CIA. Rogues, perhaps, working for Leslie Collins. Nothing else made sense. Whoever it was, they would have answers soon enough. In the meantime, George-Phillip had other problems.

  Once they cleared the guards, the car pulled to a stop in front of Number 10 Downing Street. George-Phillip took a deep breath, then stepped out of the car as the door was opened. A moment later the front door to the house opened.

  “Your Grace,” said the man who stood in the door, an aide to Prime Minister Duncan Howard. “Come in, please.”

  George-Phillip felt like a mouse walking into the house of a hungry cat. He smiled and approached the aide, who led him into the entrance hall.

  “This way, sir,” the aide said.

  “Thank you,” George-Phillip said. He’d first visited this house when Margaret Thatcher was still new in office. He remembered sitting across from the woman who would become known as the Iron Lady, the first—and still only—female Prime Minister.

  I hope you’ll be more of a credit to your nation that your father was, Miss Thatcher had said.

  I plan to, George-Phillip had replied. I’m seeking an enlisted position in the Royal Marines, then appointment at Sandhurst.

  Good, she’d said. I’ll speak with General Moore.

  She’d been as good as her word—General Moore had found him a job, and not a desk job. George-Phillip had been trained and went ashore alongside the other Marines.

  Duncan Howard, the current occupant of 10 Downing Street, was a mere shadow of Miss Thatcher. An arrogant buffoon who understood nothing of the needs of national security or of the economy, his only overriding goal was his own political preservation.

  That said, George-Phillip had to respect the position, though he had none for the man. A moment later, the aide stopped at the door, letting him in.

  Duncan Howard stood as they entered the room. He gave George-Phillip a smarmy smile and held out a hand.

  George-Phillip took the hand.

  “Georgie,” Howard said and waved vaguely to a scarlet brocade seat. “I’m so pleased to see you alive and well. That must have been quite a fright.”

  “Indeed,” George-Phillip said. He took the proffered seat and waited for Howard to get to the point, doing his best to suppress his irritation at the nickname. Georgie indeed.

  Howard sat down across from him and said, “Tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Howard frowned then said, “Georgie, I called you over here because of a matter which has been brought to my attention. A matter which I’m not really—equipped—to deal with.”

  “Indeed?”

  “How familiar are you with the Wakhan region of Afghanistan? And specifically—what happened during the Soviet occupation of that country?”

  George-Phillip grimaced. “I’m intimately familiar with it. You may be aware MI6 conducted an investigation in the late 1980s. It was my first major assignment.”

  “I am aware. That’s why I asked you.”

  George-Phillip nodded.

  “I’ve received a disturbing report. Disturbing because it was brought to me directly. Disturbing because it involves you. I’d like to ask you to explain yourself?”

  “I’ve no idea what you mean.”

  “Did you, in fact, find out who was responsible for the massacre at Wakhan?”

  “The Afghan Mujahideen was responsible for the massacre, Mr. Howard. Specifically Ahmad Shah Massoud and his confidante Vasily Karatygin.”

  “The Soviet defector?”

  “Yes. He’s main
ly a smuggler now.”

  “Where did they get the chemical weapons?”

  George-Phillip didn’t answer.

  “Come now. This is what the report is about. I’m told that you found out who sold them the weapons.”

  “We did, sir. Richard Thompson, the new American Secretary of Defense, was the leader of the group that got the weapons into the country.”

  “Dear Lord. Why did we not take action then?”

  George-Phillip rolled his eyes. “Ironically, I sat in this very office with your predecessor Mrs. Thatcher discussing this subject, Duncan. We didn’t do anything about it for the same reason the American government didn’t. Because at the highest levels, no one cared about the civilians who were murdered. I was ordered by Miss Thatcher to suppress my findings. We sealed the report in the interest of national security.”

  Howard looked at him and said, “That decision might still cost you.”

  “It’s already cost me decades of sleep. Why are you raising this now?”

  George-Phillip knew the answer. Of course he did. It must be one of the conspirators who had originally covered up the massacre. Perhaps because of Thompson’s elevation to Secretary of Defense, perhaps because of the increasing likelihood that Carrie and Andrea Thompson would learn who their birth father was. Something had set this thing in motion and now who knew where it would end up?

  Howard leaned forward. “We’ve been asked by the Guardian to comment on a story they are about to run.”

  “About Wakhan?”

  “About what they are referring to as the cover-up at Wakhan.”

  “Do you wish me to comment?”

  “We’re considering pursuing them under section 2 of the Official Secrets Act.”

  George-Phillip grimaced and shook his head. “I don’t recommend it. First, it will make the government look like clowns. We don’t need another ABC affair. Second, it isn’t even our secret.”

  Howard frowned at the mention of the ABC trials of 1978, when the government had aggressively prosecuted journalists Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell for receiving official secrets. The trials were a credibility disaster for the government.