Chapter Seventy-Six

…the photograph.

Henry

Sunday, 16th December, 2018

10:30 AM

Rain pounded the windows. Henry raised the mug to his lips and took a short slurp of the too-warm coffee whilst he fumbled at the bottom right-hand corner of the broadsheet spread out across the end of the kitchen island. When he finally managed to secure a grip, he turned the page and the swish of paper curled up into the room. With the heating on full blast and the rain pelting down, the glass behind the slats of the venetian blinds had fogged and the air had grown thick; it gave the downstairs a stuffy yet cosy feel.

Alison and Jason loitered at the opposite end of the kitchen island, near the pantry. Both stooped over the countertop, their elbows propped to the marble as they clutched their cell phones and stared at the white glow that emanated from the screens. The phones whooshed and clicked and chirped over the beat of the rain.

At the thud of footsteps charging down the stairs, their thumbs stilled and their heads pricked up. Henry's grip on the mug tightened and he swivelled around on the stool, just in time to catch a flash of Stevie storming past.

Half a second later, there came a crash against the kitchen table.

The cardboard box Stevie had been carrying had spilled atop the wooden surface, and a thousand matt and glossy images had flooded out.

Henry clunked the mug down on the counter. His brow furrowed. "Honey, what are you—"

"First she gets poisoned, then she gets shot, not once but three times—three times! Did you know bullets can penetrate a bulletproof vest, by the way?" Stevie kept her back to him whilst her whole body jittered with bound-up energy. "If something happens to her, I don't want to be learning about her from some tabloid journalist's idea of a biography or from a Wikipedia page."

"God… Looks like Stevie's finally lost it." Jason drawled from the opposite end of the kitchen. "Good thing Mom knows a place—Ow!"

"Don't say that about Mom." With the whine in Alison's voice, Henry didn't need to look at her to see the pinch that nicked the middle of her brow.

"What? I'm just saying…"

Henry shot Jason a look as he pushed himself up from the stool. "Respect your mother."

"Whatever." Jason shrugged it off, and he stuffed his cell phone into the back pocket of his jeans. "I'm going over to Jake's." He grabbed his bomber jacket from the peg, slung it over his forearm, and then motioned to Stevie. "Have fun with that."

Stevie scowled at Jason. "Doesn't it bother you at all that Mom could have died?"

"Why do you think I'm going to go numb myself with video games?"

Henry padded over to where Stevie stood in front the deluge of photographs that swarmed across the kitchen table. The lights above reflected off their surfaces in dapples of golden-white. He squeezed her shoulder. "I know that hearing what happened to Mom's scary, but she's okay."

"But what if she hadn't been? How am I meant to make the most of her if she's dead?"

Henry's mouth hinged open and then hung there. He searched the sea of photographs as though they might hold the answer—one that didn't point out that his daughter's current panic was entirely of his own doing. When he'd spoken to Stevie the other night, he hadn't intended for her to get so agitated. Then again, he hadn't intended to tell the kids about the shooting either. After all, what good could possibly come of upsetting them like that when Elizabeth was no more than bruised? (At least according to her staff.)

Then his gaze landed on the image that lay on top of the box lid, and he frowned.

He let go of Stevie's shoulder and stepped past her. He picked up the photograph by its corners, so as not to smear it with his fingerprints. "I remember this."

Stevie looked to him. She curled her fingers over the top rail of the chair. "You do?"

"Sure I do. I was the one who took it."

The photograph was of Elizabeth sat on the couch at Conrad's house with baby Stevie, maybe eight weeks old, lying lengthways in her lap, her tiny fists flailing at either side. Next to Elizabeth sat Lydia Dalton, with a seven-month-old Harrison perched in a precarious tripod between them. The two women had been chatting away, and Elizabeth had looked so at ease and so content—perhaps the most relaxed he'd seen her in weeks—that he knew he had to capture it. So he'd borrowed Conrad's camera and was about to take the candid shot, when Elizabeth looked up, and as she caught sight of him, the most brilliant smile flashed across her face.

He smiled down at the photograph now—of that moment of unadulterated joy preserved forever—and then turned to Stevie. "Where did you get it?"

"President Dalton gave it to me after that incident with the VP."

"Dalton gave you what?" Alison nudged up next to Henry on the opposite side to Stevie, her arm bumping against his, and then she stole the photograph from him. "Wow. Is that Mom?"

Jason sailed past the three of them on his way to the back door, tugging his bomber jacket on as he went. "You know, nostalgia's just a symptom of your current dissatisfaction—"

But then he caught sight of the photograph too, did a double take, and stopped. His face lit up, and he snatched the photo from Alison and held it up next to Stevie. He dragged one finger from the image of Elizabeth to Stevie's face and back again. "Look, it's Mini-Me."

Stevie pursed her lips and tugged them to one side. "Aren't you meant to be liquifying your brain with video games?"

But Jason had ditched the photograph on top of the billowing tide of images and grabbed up another one: Stevie, once again, but this time maybe five or six years old and swamped in a frilly white tutu and a pair of tights a size too big that she was holding up with one hand to stop them from slipping down as she prepared for her ballet class's first performance—a take on 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy'. "Oh, this one needs to go up on Facebook."

Stevie's scowl deepened. "I wanted to find out stuff about Mom, not have you compile a load of embarrassing photos of me."

"I don't see why the two should be mutually exclusive." He sank down onto the chair at the head of the table and scooted it forward. The feet screeched against the floorboards. He reached across the table, rocked the chair onto its front legs, and plucked up another photograph, this time of a toddler—whom he must have presumed also to be Stevie—clinging to a fluffy white toy owl almost as big as she was in a koala-hug-cum-chokehold. He held it up for his sisters to see. "How about this one for your profile pic?"

Henry laughed, and squeezed his shoulder. "I'm afraid that one's you, buddy."

Jason frowned down at it. "What? No, it's not."

"That's when you were going through your 'owl phase'."

The girls each took a seat. They pored over the photographs, chatting to one another and pointing at the images as they picked out the ones of Elizabeth, and cringing each time an embarrassing shot of themselves popped up before they promptly tossed it into the cardboard box in the middle of the table.

Henry stood behind Jason's chair, one hand rested against the top rail. He chuckled to himself as he stared down at the photo of Jason and the toy owl.

"What on earth happened?" Henry stared open-mouthed at the scene in front of him.

He had only stepped out of the dining room for two, maybe three, minutes to fetch the bottle of Merlot that he'd left to breathe on the kitchen side. But now both Stevie and Alison were hunched over the table and crying into their hands, whilst Jason was red-faced from bawling and he continued to scream, 'No owl! No owl! No owl!' And food was…well, everywhere. Splodges of gravy smeared the once-white tablecloth, clumps of mashed potato clung to the wall behind Stevie, and that might have been a floret of broccoli that dangled from the light fitting.

Elizabeth leant over the table and snatched the bottle of wine from his hand. She glugged the wine out into her glass. The red swirled up past the halfway mark and she showed no sign of stopping.

"Babe?" He stared at her.

"Well… Stevie told Jason that the turkey was an owl. Turns out, Jason didn't like the thought of that so much—hardly surprising seeing as his 'owl phase' looks like it's set to stay—so he decided to lob a fistful of mashed potato at Stevie, but it landed in Alison's hair instead." Elizabeth paused, and her gaze drifted to the wall behind Stevie before it returned to her glass, the wine still pouring. She shrugged. "Or at least the first batch did anyway. Alison didn't like that so much, so she threw a carrot back at Jason, but it landed in Stevie's gravy instead and splashed her favourite top…and everything else. And Stevie didn't like that so much, so now they're all crying."

"I see." Henry studied her as she clunked the bottle of wine down, the glass now teeming to the brim. "And you're just…?"

She leant back in her chair and cradled the glass of wine in front of her chest. She stared into the distance. "Waiting for it to turn into Lord of the Flies, or for them to tire themselves out eventually."

Then she looked up at Henry, her gaze so sharp it whistled straight through him. "The next time you so much as think about impregnating me, I want you to remember this scene." She raised her glass to him, just as a floret of broccoli hurtled past his ear. "Happy Thanksgiving, Henry."

With her chin propped to the heel of her palm, Alison looked up at Henry, her eyes bright beneath the lights. A photograph of him and Elizabeth taken during their days at UVA was half-hidden beneath her other hand. "How did you know that Mom was the one?"

Henry grinned. "Have you met your mother?"

Alison rolled her eyes. "Seriously, Dad." Then her expression softened. "How did you know she was your forever forever?"

Henry let go of the back of Jason's chair and paced over to the kitchen island. "Well, it wasn't the moment I thought I couldn't live without her, that's for sure. Or the moment I realised that this was it, this was forever. That's about the time I freaked out." He picked up his mug of coffee from the countertop. When he turned to face the table, he found all three kids looking up at him. Stevie and Alison had twisted around in their seats, and even Jason had stopped scavenging through the photographs that his sisters had discarded in the cardboard box and was staring up at him expectantly.

Henry perched against the stool and cradled the mug to his chest, close enough that the warmth pressed through his shirt. He stared past the kids, towards the shelves against the far wall. A slight frown dawned across his brow. "I think the moment that I truly knew she was the one—my forever forever—was when I realised that I could live without her, but that there was nothing at all in the world that would make me want to."

Stevie propped her elbow against the top rail of her chair and rested her chin to the back of her hand. "Was Mom mad with you after you left her?"

"I didn't leave her. And she married me, didn't she?"

"How did you propose?" Alison asked.

"Skywriter." Henry took a sip of coffee. "And no matter what she says, it was romantic."

Jason gave him an incredulous look, one that said—You've got to be kidding. "A skywriter?"

"What? I was going to be a fighter pilot. It was my way of showing her that whenever I was up there in the sky, I'd be thinking about her and about coming back to her."

"I think it's romantic," Alison said.

Jason turned his look on her now. "That's because you've internalised the ideals of romance perpetuated by Hollywood movies."

Henry nearly choked on a swallow of coffee. "Uh, excuse me. Need I bring up Luther Vandross and chocolate-covered strawberries?"

Jason's cheeks flushed a violent crimson. He sank back in his chair, and folded his arms across his chest.

Stevie adjusted the frames of her glasses whilst she continued to stare up at Henry. "How did you and Mom first meet?"

A soft smile sprang to Henry's lips, and his gaze dipped to the floorboards. He drew in a deep breath, his eyebrows raised. "Well—"

The front door slammed.

Henry stopped. He twisted around. Rain thundered against the windowpanes like shards of steel being driven through the glass, and the sound of footsteps stomped and echoed through the hallway. His heart hammered just as loud, and he stumbled down from the stool. A surge of adrenaline had severed the connection between his brain and his legs, but somehow he managed to find his footing. He clunked the mug down against the countertop before he could lose his grip, and then backed up towards the kids and motioned for them to stay in their seats.

"What's happening?" Jason said. A spark of fear lit his tone.

"It's okay. Just stay there." Henry motioned again. Where the hell were security?

The footsteps grew louder.

DS and Secret Service agents guarded every inch of the house; they patrolled up and down the street. There were always at least two on each entrance. They were armed. They wouldn't hesitate to shoot if there was a threat. No one could get past them, surely.

"Henry?"

At the voice, a wash of relief swept through Henry—Thank God. He pinched the bridge of his nose and drew in a sharp breath. It quivered in his chest. When he opened his eyes, he glowered at the shadow that strode through the gloom of the dining room, a taller figure chasing just a pace behind. "This is our home, Russell. You can't just barge in here unannounced."

Russell held up one hand to stop that thought as he marched through to the kitchen. "Let's save the nuances of social etiquette for another time, shall we?" He came to a stop in line with the sink, and Agent Hayes halted behind him. Both men wore black overcoats. The wool of their coats and the lenses of their glasses were beaded with pellets of rain. "I need your car keys."

Henry's frown stretched into bemusement.

Russell flapped his fingers towards his palm. "Now."

"Why?"

Russell held his hands out wide and rocked back on his heels. "Because I fancy taking it out for a spin, and Agent Hayes here thought he'd join me." The sarcasm came heavy.

Henry's jaw tightened. "You know, you'd get what you wanted a lot faster if you'd just explain what's going on rather than barging in here and making demands."

"I'd get what I wanted a lot faster if people would just do as I asked when I asked rather than wasting time questioning everything."

"Dr McCord." Agent Hayes pulled a wad of folded up pages free from his inside jacket pocket. The edges were dampened and semi-translucent from the rain. "After the raid yesterday, we did a routine check for any credit cards linked to the address. That turned up nothing. But then someone in my team thought to contact the takeaway shop that Andrei Kostov had been ordering from to see if they had any record of payment details for orders delivered to that address. It turns out that he paid over the phone using a credit card not associated with that address—possibly provided by someone working with him, it's not yet clear. We pulled all the records for the card going back to August, when he first arrived in the country—" He smoothed the stapled-together pieces of paper down atop the newspaper spread across the kitchen island, and pointed to a line highlighted in fluorescent yellow. Henry eased a step closer and frowned down at the entry, whilst Agent Hayes twisted around to look up at him. "—and we found a payment to a company who primarily deal in GPS tracking systems. The payment went through on November thirteenth, after it was announced the secretary was taking personal leave—"

Henry turned to Russell. "You think he put a tracker on my car?"

"It's a possibility we'd like to rule out." Russell held his hand out again. He flapped his fingers to his palm. "Car keys. Now, please."

Henry's mind raced. He had driven to the clinic on Monday. He had wanted to see her, to get Russell to leave her alone, to make sure she was okay. But if there was a tracker on his car, that would mean…

He shook his head. Adamant. "He can't have. The car park at the War College is secure, and DS would've noticed if someone was trying to get into the garage."

Russell balked. "What? Like they noticed someone taking pictures of your house?"

Henry clenched his jaw, and shook his head again. "You told me he's on the run, that he's trying to get out of the country."

"And he might well be." Russell's voice strained. He stooped forward and counted off the place names on his fingers. "So far, we've got simultaneous sightings of him in Wichita, Palm Springs, and Paradox—ironically." He tossed his hand up. Then his gaze steeled on Henry. "But if he knows where she is, we need to do something. Sooner rather than later. So grab your car keys."

Thanks for reading!