For the next hour the professor gave me a primer of the spiritual weapons that were available to me.
“Be constant in prayer,” he said.
“Prayer? What good will praying do if I’m praying to a God who has made it clear He is not my Savior?”
“Pray to the Father. The Creator. You may be unique, but you are still part of His creation.”
“What do I pray for?”
“The ability to stand.”
“Bloodied, but unbowed?”
It was well after midnight when the professor showed me to the front door. “Read the Gospels,” he said. “You know what the Gospels are, don’t you?”
“The first five books of the New Testament.”
“Four.”
“I thought it was five. Aren’t they called the Pentateuch?”
“That’s the first five books of the Old Testament.”
I sighed. It was late. “I guess I’ll stop showing my ignorance and go home.”
He handed me his Bible to use.
“Thanks, but I can check one out of the library,” I said.
“I want you to have it.”
The offer touched me. I took it, not knowing what to say. I opened the front cover and saw an inscription.
PhD!!!
Congratulations, sweetheart! I’m so proud of you. I couldn’t have chosen a more gentle man to be the father of my children—yes, you read that correctly, Daddy.
Yours forever,
Nora
I handed the Bible back to him. “Professor, I can’t . . . really . . .”
“You’re right,” he said, taking the Bible back.
Angling it so that light fell on the pages, he located a specific page and marked it with the ribbon bookmark. He handed the Bible back to me. “Now, you can,” he said. “Start there. Read that passage several times a day, plus the Gospels. Study Jesus, how he recognized and moved in the spiritual world while on earth. Study his tactics. Practice them.”
“But Professor, your wife gave you this Bible.”
He smiled. “Nora would have liked you. She was a lot of fun.”
Back in my hotel room I opened the Bible to the page the professor had marked.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore, put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.
I placed the book on the nightstand. For me, the day of evil was fast approaching, and while I may have had a classroom session on spiritual weapons, I had no actual experience.
CHAPTER 25
Groggily I raised my head off the pillow. The knocking wasn’t in my dream. Someone was at my hotel door.
The room was dark, though it was morning. A sliver of sunlight sliced across the floor through a crack in the blackout curtains. Disoriented still, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and felt the carpet with my toes.
The knocking continued.
I’d been awakened out of a dream in which my father came to me, in demon form, and apologized for possessing me the way he had. We sat on a park bench and chatted.
“It’s not so bad, son,” he assured me, “being a demon. Sure, it has its downside, but we get to travel . . . meet interesting people. Last year, for example. We went to Cannes . . .” He winked at me. “You’ll like possessing French women.”
The knocking at the hotel door persisted. Caught in the noman’s-land between the dream and being awake, without thinking, I opened the hotel door in my boxer shorts.
“Grant!”
It was a duet. Jana and Sue Ling reacted identically and in harmony, staring at my shorts, covering their surprised mouths.
Still in a fog, I misinterpreted their reaction for fear. “Look, I know you’re frightened of me,” I said, “but I’m scared of me too.”
“At least last time he wore a robe,” Sue said to Jana.
“Grant, honey, it’s hard to be scared of a man standing in nothing but his boxer shorts,” Jana said, amused.
Of course, it was at that moment I woke up, or came to my senses, or however you want to describe the feeling you get when you realize you’re not dressed for the occasion, or hardly at all.
“How about if we . . . ,” Sue said.
“Yeah. Get dressed, Grant. We’ll wait for you downstairs.”
To say I felt exposed is an understatement. My chest and legs were chilled while my face burned. And just when I thought it was almost over, it got worse.
“Grant!”
“Christina?”
She came up the hallway behind Jana and Sue. Her expression clearly registered her emotions—shock, followed by anger which bordered on nuclear meltdown.
“Christina?”
“Christina?”
The duet again. Jana and Sue in harmony.
Before Christina had a chance to storm away, Jana had her by the arm. “Girlfriend,” she said, “we have got to talk.” She led Christina down the hallway.
“We’ll be downstairs,” Sue said, following them and grinning at me over her shoulder.
For a long moment I stood there, wallowing in my humiliation.
The door to the room across from mine opened. A middle-aged woman in a pink jogging suit holding a poodle with a pink bow scrunched up her face in disgust. “Put some clothes on!” she snapped.
I sat on the edge of the bed mechanically pulling on my socks. Twin thoughts occupied my mind. The first thought was to climb back under the bedclothes, pull them over my head, and never answer the door again. Its twin suggested I get dressed and sneak down the back stairway, fly to Morocco, change my name, and become a used-camel salesman.
As I pulled on pants and shirt and shoes all I could think of was how Christina and Jana and Sue were sitting together downstairs with one common denominator among them—me.
I dragged a razor across my chin, brushed my hair and teeth, and stepped into the hallway. Decision time. Turn right to the elevator, which led to two former girlfriends and a woman who mystified me, or left to Morocco and the camels.
I found the three of them in a restaurant off the lobby. They hadn’t spotted me yet. All three of them were laughing like they’d been best friends all their lives.
Taking a deep breath, I entered the lion’s cage.
When they saw me coming, boiling laughter simmered down to grins and snickering.
“Good morning, Grant.”
“Good morning, Grant.”
“Good morning, Grant.”
Was it too late for Morocco?
They were seated in a booth, the half-circle kind set against a wall, with Christina sandwiched in the middle. I started to squeeze next to Jana.
“No, no, no, no, no . . . ,” she cried. “You sit there.”
She pointed to the front of the table, where the waiter usually stands to take orders.
The two others nodded their agreement. Apparently they’d discussed the seating before I’d arrived. On cue, a waiter arrived with a chair. I sat in front of the three women feeling very much like a convict at a parole hearing.
Each woman had a silver teapot with a wedge of lemon perched on the saucer. The table was littered with empty packets of sugar and sugar substitute.
It quickly became evident that the challenge before me was to look at them without looking at them. It had been my experience that women don’t appreciate a man who looks at another woman when he’s out with her. And while you might think this law would be null and void given the fact that I wasn’t technically out with any of them, when it comes to former girlfriends, there are no rules. Whatever you do is wrong. And I knew that if I looked at any one of them for any length of time, the two others would take offense.
So I tried not to look at any of them.
But I wanted to look at them—Jana with her dark, full hair cas
cading to her shoulders, her charismatic smile and radiating sensuality; Christina with her East Coast professionalism and sparkling, energetic blue eyes; and Sue Ling, quiet, sweet, and brilliant.
I was a dead man.
“Isn’t this great, Grant?” Christina exclaimed. “We’ve all heard each other in the background of your phone conversations, and now we have a chance to get to know each other.”
“Um . . . yeah . . . great,” I said. “Listen, Christina, about what you saw upstairs in the hallway. I had a late night and Jana and Sue had just stopped by when you—”
Christina waved off my explanation. “Oh, we’ve already been through all that,” she said cheerily. “However, they did inform me that the previous time they were with you in your hotel room, you at least had the decency to wear a robe.”
A gray-haired woman in the booth next to us glared at me with disgust.
Jana, Christina, and Sue laughed.
“We are all in agreement on one thing, though,” Sue added. “You have nice legs.”
They fell against each other laughing.
I tried to be a good sport, to laugh with them, but all I could manage was half of a smile. I craned my neck to see if I could find a waiter. I could really use a cup of coffee.
“There it is,” Jana said, leveling an index finger at me.
“You’re right,” Christina agreed.
“What?” I asked.
“A few moments ago I was asking Christina if she noticed how quick you are to find the humor in someone else’s discomfort, but when it’s you who are uncomfortable, for some reason it’s not funny.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, fidgeting in my seat.
“For me,” Jana said. “It was a run in my stocking at the Senior Prom. I tried to get Grant to take me home so I could put on a new pair. He refused.”
“You monster!” Sue Ling cried.
“Instead, he took it upon himself to do an informal survey of every guy who walked by our table. He even had me stand up and show them the run. His conclusion? Nine out of ten guys didn’t think the run made me any less attractive. He honestly thought that would make me feel better.”
“Well, I did . . . at the time,” I said weakly.
My only hope now was to get a last-minute reprieve from the governor.
“He did a similar thing to me,” Christina said. “We were sitting in a restaurant just a few blocks from the Capitol, for an important lunch meeting with the senator from Massachusetts. The waiter spilled coffee on the sleeve of my two-piece suit.”
Jana and Sue gasped.
“It was too late to do anything about it. I had no choice but to remove the jacket and proceed with the meeting. Do you know what Grant did during the entire lunch? He kept commenting about how cold it was in the restaurant and asked me if I wanted help putting my jacket on.”
“Grant!” Jana and Sue chimed in.
I felt like a worm. Like the underbelly of a worm. Like a parasite crawling on the underbelly of a worm.
“And have you noticed how Grant gets moody when he doesn’t get his way?” Sue Ling said.
“He does!” Christina said, surprised. “How long have you known Grant?”
“Just a few days.”
“You’re absolutely right, though. He does,” Christina said.
“I do not,” I objected moodily.
“Yes, you do,” Jana said, making it unanimous.
With cup in hand, I turned to look for the waiter, needing that coffee desperately now.
“All right, ladies,” Jana said. “Let’s get down to business.”
“Business?” I said.
“Grant, we’re here to help you,” Sue Ling assured me.
“Help me?”
“You are one lucky guy, Grant Austin,” Jana said. “Three gorgeous and talented women show up on your doorstep with a single thought. To help you.”
“Lucky me.”
“Christina, you’ve come the farthest,” Jana said, “you go first.” To me, she added, “Christina flew all the way across the United States to bring you some news, and she took personal time off from work to do it. I hope you appreciate what a good girlfriend she is.”
“Ex-girlfriend,” Christina and I said in unison.
“But I do have good news,” Christina continued, smiling at me. “I discovered who doctored the manuscript.”
“You’re kidding!” I cried. “Who?”
“Sylvia Jakes.”
The name clunked onto the table meaninglessly. Who was Sylvia Jakes? “It might have been her handwriting,” I said, “but someone else orchestrated the changes, right?”
Christina nodded, still smiling.
“Ingraham?”
She shook her head. “Margaret.”
“Margaret!”
“Who’s Margaret?” Sue Ling asked.
“Chief of Staff Ingraham’s personal secretary,” I explained. “Are you sure this Sylvia person wasn’t working under Ingraham’s orders?”
“Positive,” Christina said. “And if needed, Sylvia has agreed to testify that you had nothing to do with it. You’re off the hook.”
“Thank you, Christina,” I said with emotion, because indeed a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. “What does Margaret have to say about it?”
Christina hooked her hair behind an ear. It was an endearing gesture, the equivalent of a man rolling up his sleeves to work. “We don’t know,” she replied.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“Margaret has disappeared. I mean, literally, Grant. I followed her into the supply closet, and when I got there, she was gone. I couldn’t have been more than a second behind her. It’s the supply closet at the end of the hall where you had your desk.”
I was familiar with it. There’s only one way in or out of that supply closet.
“The mystery deepened when we went that night hoping to find her at her town house. The place was so proper and neat, it looked like a model house or a showroom of some kind. But no Margaret.”
“I wanted to tell you the other night when I called.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Even as I asked the question, I knew why. She hung up when she heard Jana’s and Sue’s voices in my hotel room.
“You flew out here to check up on me!” I cried.
“I did not!” Christina objected. “I had a message to deliver and needed to get away for a while. What better place than San Diego?”
“I believe her,” Jana said.
“So do I,” Sue said.
I pondered the realization that Christina still cared for me. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
Jana reassumed control. “Sue, you’re up next.”
“Mine’s not a big thing like Christina’s and Jana’s,” Sue began, “but I’ve been thinking about the coded phrase in your book. Even though you can prove you didn’t write it, its placement and the phrase itself was meant to implicate you, which means it’s still a clue as to what’s in store for the president. Do you still want to talk to him?”
“I do,” I said. “I may be off the hook, but I still have questions for the president. If there will be an assassination attempt—and I’m confident there will be—I want to stop it.”
“If you ask me, it’ll take place in San Diego,” Christina said. “You wouldn’t believe how crazy it’s been around the White House. Something big is happening. Besides, the president warned Grant away from San Diego to protect him. The attempt will be made here, you can count on it.”
“And Myles Shepherd told me the president himself was in on the plot,” I added.
“What?” Jana cried. “When did he tell you that?”
“The day of my speech.”
“And you’ve been sitting on that information all this time?”
“I didn’t want to believe it,” I said, which was true. I only hoped Jana wouldn’t press any further.
“You didn’t tell me because I’m a reporte
r, isn’t that right?” Jana said. “You didn’t trust me.”
Three angry faces glared at me.
I was without defense.
Mercifully, Sue Ling continued with her contribution. “To remind everyone of the sentence, it read: ‘When he is suspended between earth and heaven I will kill the president.’ The timing of the assassination is dictated by the place, ‘suspended between earth and heaven.’ ”
“We considered places like the Skytower at Sea World—it’s two hundred and sixty feet high,” Jana said, “but the president’s itinerary doesn’t place him anywhere near Sea World.”
“What about a high-rise?” I suggested. “He’s staying at the U.S. Grant Hotel, it has a rooftop terrace.”
“We considered that as a possibility,” Sue said.
“But not likely,” Christina added. “The president doesn’t usually wander outside of his hotel when he travels unless it’s to go someplace specific.”
“He did some wandering the night you found him with the manuscript copy,” I said, “and if he really is planning it himself, he would have to take the Secret Service by surprise.”
“Remembering that the plan was to implicate you, Grant,” Sue said, “it would mean you would have to be on a rooftop or in a helicopter to get some kind of shot at him on the terrace. Do you have any plans to be on a rooftop?”
“No.”
I didn’t tell her that I had recently been on the roof of the Emerald Plaza towers.
“Given the president’s itinerary,” Sue said, “we think the phrase between earth and heaven most likely refers to Air Force One.”
“That certainly fits the description,” I said, “but how would I—”
“Before we go there,” Jana interrupted, “let me show you the itinerary.” She shoved a piece of paper in front of me and proceeded to go down the list. “There are two scheduled fund-raisers,” she said. “The first, a private reception at the home of Gerald Keneally in La Costa.”
A Hideous Beauty Page 22
