Bunting said, “Six bodies in the barn. Interesting number.”
Quantrell and Foster stared back at him impassively.
“Six bodies. The E-Six Program? If I didn’t know better I’d think someone was playing a sick joke on me.”
As Bunting turned to go, Foster said, “Peter, if by some miracle you are innocent I hope you make it through this in one piece.”
He turned to face her. “I wish the same for you, Madame Secretary,” he said.
CHAPTER
54
BUNTING SPENT THE SHORT PLANE RIDE on his G550 staring out at a large bank of lazy clouds. He barely noticed the plane had landed until the flight attendant handed him his coat and told him his car was waiting. The drive to the city took longer than the flight had. The maid greeted Bunting at the door of his Fifth Avenue brownstone.
“Is my wife in?” he asked the woman, who was petite and Latina.
“She is in her office, Mr. Bunting.”
He found her going over details for another social benefit. He didn’t even know what it was for, she was involved in so many. All good causes, he knew, that also allowed her and her friends to dress up, go to chic places, eat good food, and feel wonderful about themselves and what they did for the people who did not live in twenty-million-dollar brownstones on Fifth Avenue. But that was unfair. His wife had gone to hospitals with no photographers in tow and held AIDS and crack babies for hours because she wanted to help, because she felt compassion for them. She volunteered at soup kitchens and as a reading tutor at a homeless shelter, and she often brought their kids with her so they could see that life was not so wonderful for everyone. They had set up a foundation that funneled money and assistance to the poor and undereducated in the city.
And I do nothing when it comes to that.
But I keep the country safe. That was usually his easy answer to why he didn’t share in his wife’s philanthropic endeavors. But right now it didn’t seem very convincing.
He kissed his wife, who looked up at him in surprise. He hadn’t been home this early in years.
“Is everything okay at work?” she asked in a worried tone.
He smiled and sat down across from her in the exquisitely decorated office that alone had probably cost a quarter of a million dollars.
He wanted to talk to her about his problems, but she would have required the highest security clearances for that to happen. And she had none. Not a one, while he possessed the very highest of all. It was like living with someone from a different planet. He could never talk about work with the woman he loved. Never. So he simply smiled, even though he wanted to scream, and said, “Everything’s fine. Just thought I’d come home, spend some time with you and the kids.”
“Oh, well, I have to go out to a benefit at Lincoln Center. It’s so beautiful what they’ve done with the restoration. You need to go with me sometime.”
“Right, I will,” he said vaguely. “Sometime. And the kids?”
“They’re at my sister’s house. Remember? We talked about this. They’ll be back tomorrow morning. We did talk about it,” she added gently.
Bunting’s smile faded. I’m an idiot. I basically run the nation’s intelligence grid to keep all Americans safe and I don’t even know where my own kids are.
He tried to laugh it off. “Right. I know. I’ve got some things to do in my study.”
He went to his bedroom, dropped his two-thousand-dollar jacket on the floor, undid his three-hundred-dollar tie, poured himself a drink from the minibar in the adjacent sitting area, and gazed out the window at the darkening skies. Fall had settled in with cooler temperatures and fouler weather. It only added to his depression.
He looked around the confines of his bedroom, which had been personally designed by someone who went by only one name and was written up all the time in the sorts of magazines Bunting never read. Everything was elegant and in its place and spic-and-span clean. His entire home could be in a magazine. But it never would be because of what he did for a living. The country’s spy heads expected their hired lackeys to tiptoe through life, not run screaming down the halls with money clutched in their fat fists.
He also had a library of handsomely bound leather books, many of them first editions of wonderful fiction penned by storied writers from the past. Or so he’d heard. The one-name designer and his wife had purchased them all in a single lot. He’d never actually read any of them. Didn’t have the time. He wasn’t much into fiction. Cold, hard facts ruled his entire existence.
He took one flight down to his study and spent about an hour working there. Then, when his concentration continued to wander, he clicked off his computer, rubbed his eyes, and went back upstairs, where his wife was finishing dressing for her night out.
“You can come with me,” she said. “I’m on the board. I can certainly get you a seat.”
“Thanks, maybe another time. I’m really beat.”
She turned around, lifted up her hair, and pointed down to her zipper. “Can you help me, sweetie?”
Before he zipped her up he let his gaze wander down the inside of her