Читать книгу This Child Of Mine - Darlene Graham - Страница 10

THE OFFICES OF the Coalition for Responsible Media consisted of four cramped rooms at the top of three flights of stairs in an ancient, crumbling nineteenth-century building on the fringes of Old Town.

Enthusiastic volunteers teemed in and out of cubicles crammed with file cabinets, beat-up desks, computers and a perpetually zipping photocopier.

“Where do all these people come from?” was Mark Masters’s first question as he observed the beehive of activity, already at a fever pitch at eight in the morning.

Before Kitt could answer, a young man hailed her. “Ms. Stevens, Senator Goins on line one.”

She pushed her back-to-normal bangs aside, and said, “Take a seat,” to Masters without introducing him to anybody. She had no intention of making this guy too comfortable.

Then she got so busy bending congressional ears that she didn’t see him for the next hour. Which was just as well. Their beginning this morning had been rocky.

The first thing out of his mouth when he picked her up in the disgusting foreign Lexus was, “What a relief! I was afraid you’d still have your hair up in that snaky braidy thing.”

Little snot.

Kitt had blushed at her own folly. The expense. The discomfort. For nothing. “Oh, you didn’t like my wig?” she cracked as she settled herself into the leather seat.

He grinned as the precision engine purred to life. “You borrowed it from the Star Trek props room, right?”

Kitt pursed her mouth sourly. Normally, she loved this kind of repartee. With four brothers, she’d grown up on a steady diet of it. But from this man, it rankled. Because he’d known who she was the whole time, stupid hairdo or no stupid hairdo. Had he even known at the ice-cream social? Had he been mocking her instead of flirting with her? Pride prevented her from asking.

She looked over at him. Again, he was immaculately groomed in a navy-blue worsted-wool suit—the same tailored suit he’d worn before, she was certain—and a starched white shirt. Only his tie was a contradiction to his classic apparel. Today it was panda bears tumbling over themselves, munching bamboo. The black-and-white pandas and kelly-green bamboo looked absolutely ghastly with the navy suit. But rich boys, she supposed, could wear any ugly tie they pleased.

She stared out the windshield at the hazy morning scene of Alexandria-near-the-Potomac and wondered why she had agreed to let this spoiled brat pick her up this morning.

“So,” she said as she adjusted her seat belt, “you’re Marcus Masters the Third. Marcus Masters’s kid.”

“No. I am Mark Masters. The adult son of a man whose name is Marcus Masters, whose father also happens to be named Marcus Masters.”

He was still smiling, but not quite so brightly now, and Kitt thought, Touchy, touchy. She wanted to say, No, you are the spoiled son of a man who doesn’t care how he pollutes the culture as long as it makes a profit. But she steered clear of that honey pot. This was the congressman’s new intern, and she couldn’t do anything to jeopardize the CRM’s position with Congressman Wilkens.

“Well, Mr. Masters—” she couldn’t help the sarcasm “—exactly how did you happen to obtain this plum of an internship with Congressman Wilkens?”

“Don’t call me Mr. Masters.” The smile was gone and his face looked suddenly older, hardened. “That’s my father. I’m Mark.”

So this is some kind of sore point, his father. “Not Marcus?”

“That’s my father as well. And Mac is my grandfather. I’m Mark.”

“Does everybody call you that?”

“Only since I’ve been born.” Now he smiled.

“Okay. Mark. How?”

“My father didn’t pull strings for me if that’s what you’re asking. I applied for the internship like everybody else, and I got it.”

“Yes,” Kitt said, eyeing the supple leather upholstery, the walnut trim, his handsome profile as he steered the car smoothly through the tangle of rush-hour traffic, “I imagine it was just that simple.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her, a dark slash of disapproval. “Rich does not equal spoiled.”

She blushed at his perceptiveness, and he smiled, but not warmly. “I get this all the time, Ms. Stevens.”

Kitt turned her face to the window. All this Mr. and Ms. doo-doo was purely antagonistic posturing, but even so, she did not invite him to call her Kitt. A tense silence ensued as they waited at one of the interminable stoplights that control the infamous five-way intersections in northern Virginia.

“So you study at the Carl Albert Center?” she said after a moment, trying to be civil.

“Yes, ma’am.”

She ignored the ma’am. “Is that your major? Political Science?”

“I study writing.”

“Writing?” Kitt’s own undergraduate major had been journalism, in its own way as tough a nut to crack as law school. “I’d think writing would be somewhat quaint and antiquated for the LinkServe genius.”

“Do you actually know anything about my LinkServe experiment?”

“I know it’s a comprehensive communications technology that you’ve been working on ever since you graduated from creating video games in high school. I know it’s the technology that threatens to make other technologies obsolete. I know you—and your father—don’t want LinkServe—and others like it—regulated by the new bill designed to control the glut of filth and violence in the media.”

“I see I’m not the only one who does my homework.”

“Is that what you call it? Homework?”

“Yeah. What do you call it?” He watched the stoplights above them.

“Espionage. Skulduggery.”

He had glanced over then, blue eyes sparkling with challenge, and had given her a crooked little smile, which she had wanted to slap off his pretty-boy face. “You don’t like me much,” he said. “I can tell.”

“I wouldn’t say that I don’t like you personally, Mark,” she answered.

“Oh, what don’t you like impersonally, then?”

Your father, the way he’s polluting the mindscape of this country’s kids for the bottom line, she thought. The way he’s planning to use LinkServe to keep on doing it, no matter what kinds of legislation my people get passed. But, again, she avoided all that by squinting at his chest and saying, “It’s your tie I think.”

He laughed—a surprised, delighted laugh—and flapped the tie. “Hey. Don’t knock it. This tie is a gift from a girl with impeccable taste.”

“Oh, yeah?” Kitt imagined he probably had girls with impeccable taste buying him gifts every day of the week. And then, for some reason she couldn’t fathom, she’d turned ten shades of red, and, trapped right there in his Lexus, all she could do was turn her face to the passenger window again.

Thank you, dear Congressman Wilkens, she’d seethed, for arranging this delightful week with this delightful young man.

WHEN KITT FINISHED her phone calls, she found him with his butt propped on a corner of one of the volunteer’s desks, his handsome head cocked to one side, listening intently while two women and one man blasted their faces off with flushing zeal about the future plans of the Coalition for Responsible Media.

And in his palm he held a microrecorder.

“What’s that for?” Kitt charged forward, pointing at the thing.

He stood. “I asked Mary and Shirley and Howard—” he smiled at the three “—if I could tape their comments. My memory is sort of feeble,” he explained, then smiled again at the trio, who beamed back.

“But you didn’t ask me,” Kitt said. “Turn it off.”

Mary’s and Shirley’s and Howard’s smiles shriveled and they looked stunned, offended. At Kitt.

She ignored them. “If you want information, we’ll get you some literature. Follow me.” She whirled away.

Behind her, she heard him making his apologies to the group, saying maybe they could visit more later.

When she got him alone in her tiny office, she closed the door. “Don’t do that again.”

“Do what?” His face was guileless.

“Record the staff’s comments. This is a coalition, and a very loose, diverse one at that. Made up of child advocacy groups, church groups, parents, cops, educators. Most of these folks are not political players. They’re volunteers. They believe in what they are doing, but they are very naive. Did you even tell them you are an intern from Wilkens’s office? That you’re gathering data to report to the congressman?”

“Nobody asked.”

Just as she’d thought. “Listen, Mr. Masters—”

“Mark,” he corrected.

But at that she only squinted and repeated: “Mr. Masters, those folks wouldn’t, of course, ask. They wouldn’t know to ask. And while I appreciate your efforts to be accurate—”

“That’s right. I’m only striving to be accurate.” He raised his palms in a helpless gesture. “I have a very poor memory. In fact—” he pumped his eyebrows Groucho style “—I have absolutely no memory of the first three years of my life.” He dropped his hands and grinned.

But his silly joke and his goofy grin did not amuse Kitt. “While I do want your report to the congressman to be as accurate as possible, you surely realize there are people who are anxious to undermine what we’re doing here, to make us look like zealots, like twenty-first century thought police.”

“How can I undermine you if I simply give the congressman the facts? You don’t have anything to hide here, do you?” He smiled that smile. That smile that, Kitt was convinced by now, he surely must know was completely disarming and endearing. Completely sexy.

“From now on just stick with me,” she said.

“Like ugly wallpaper.” He pumped those eyebrows again, smiled that smile.

Kitt looked pointedly at his tie. He should know from ugly.

And the remainder of the day went like that: Kitt feeling threatened, edgy, thinking mean little thoughts; Masters being sunny, straightforward, thinking only heaven-knew-what. Smiling, smiling, smiling that damn winning smile. All the while Kitt felt certain he was gathering data that would somehow be used against her cause, given who he really was. Intern, schmintern.

He had to be doing everything he could to protect his LinkServe—how had he phrased it to Wilkens?—his interests? Interests indeed.

She felt despair when she realized that by some grotesque twist of fate, Marcus Masters’s own son had become their unsympathetic pipeline to Congressman Wilkens. And The Pipeline seemed to be everywhere, getting into everything, persisting in being so nice that the staff was blinded to the dangers of opening up to him. Their underfunded little organization would be laid before the Masters Multimedia giant like a deer caught in the headlights of a semitruck.

By late afternoon Kitt was exhausted from the mental gymnastics, and the very sight of Mark Masters was giving her a torpid headache. She couldn’t wait to get him out of their offices, to get away from the man.

But Jeff Smith neatly destroyed all hope of that when he arrived shortly after five to offer Kitt a ride home.

She went to gather her paraphernalia: jacket, clutch, pager, cell phone. While she crammed it all into her tote, Jeff reviewed their plans to go to Murphy’s, her favorite Irish pub in Old Town. A little too loudly, Kitt realized, when she saw Mark Masters’s head pop up from a stack of deadly-dull media-content analysis statistics.

“Hey! I’ve heard of that place!” Masters said from across the room.

Jeff turned. “Oh?”

“Yeah. One of the other interns mentioned it. Authentic Irish music, live.” Masters smiled that choir-boy smile. “Sounds neat.”

Kitt wished to heaven the man would stop saying neat.

Mark’s reminder that he was the congressman’s intern was not lost on Jeff. “Would you care to join us?” said Jeff, the charming congressional aide, being hospitable to the lonesome little intern. “Whatdaya say, Kitt? Don’t you think Mark should get a taste of authentic Alexandria nightlife?”

“Well…” Kitt knew she looked caught, trapped again, and she tried to compose her expression into one of nonchalance as Mark stood and crossed the room.

She shrugged. “Well, Murphy’s isn’t really a good example of Old Town nightlife. It’s pretty dull, actually. The place would bore Mark, I’m afraid.”

Mark gave her a small frown, cocked his head, regarded her with glittering eyes that seemed to see right through her. “I’m not nearly so prone to boredom as you seem to imagine,” he said. “And how could anything be dull—” he paused, narrowing those already-narrow eyes at her “—as long as you’re there.”

Kitt’s face flamed, and she opened her mouth to speak, but Jeff wedged his lanky frame between Kitt and Mark. “Does that mean you’ll be joining us?” he asked.

Mark quirked a dark eyebrow at Jeff. “Absolutely. How do I get there?”