Coup D'Etat by Ben Coes Read Free Book Online Page A

Did he, well, did he love someone, someone else, that is?
    Jessica stared for a moment longer, then shut her eyes. She fought to keep the emotion from taking over her thoughts. Sometimes she wished she had never met Dewey, because at times like this, for no reason, he would enter her thoughts and just not leave them, sometimes for days. How many times had she been set up on dates, the beautiful, single national security advisor; dates with diplomats and corporate heavyweights, congressmen, and even a recently divorced senator. Each date, every chauffeured limousine, every starlit evening as she sat miserably across from one of them at a restaurant, or next to them at the Kennedy Center, every time, all she could think about was him. Why? she asked herself. But she knew the answer.
    Jessica felt her eyes becoming moist. She bit down on her lip. She wiped her eyes with her hands. She returned the frame to her desk drawer. Shutting her eyes, she steeled herself away from her feelings. She leaned forward and pressed the green button on her phone console.
    “Yes, Jessica,” the voice of her assistant said over the speakerphone.
    “Get me Indra Singh, India’s minister of defense. He’s at his beach house in Goa. Tell him it’s urgent.”

6
    CHASVUR STATION
    COOKTOWN
    By midnight, the rains had thoroughly drenched Dewey, Deravelle, and the runaway mare. Dewey had lost all sense of where he was, with the stars hidden behind lightning-crossed clouds.
    The rain had begun more than four hours before and, except for one brief ten-minute stretch, had not let up. He’d put on his long wax raincoat, but was, nevertheless, soaked from head to toe. The water poured down off the brim of his cowboy hat in an unremitting deluge. The one saving grace was the warm temperature, which remained in the eighties. A little cooler and he would have had to pull up somewhere beneath a rock outcrop and build a fire.
    He had led Deravelle and the mare straight north to the long granite butte during the last light of dusk. As the first torrential rains began to pour down from the sky, Dewey moved around the butte to a wide-open valley to the north. There he’d searched in the square mile west of the canyon for any signs of life by moving in parallel lines, east to west, then back again, using the lightning strikes to illuminate the area in front of him. The rain had erased any vestiges of the mare’s tracks into the canyon and the ground was a wet, shapeless mess of wild grass and mud, rivulets of dirt forming into small streams.
    The one fact Dewey recalled about Chasvur was that it was north of Sembler. It was a well-known station, an estate really, a gentleman’s ranch, beautiful stone with white pillars and a stunning green lawn that swept down to the ocean a few dozen miles above Cooktown. Dewey had seen photographs of it in Cooktown—framed and hanging at different restaurants and bars, showing off it and the other landmarks of Queensland. In the early hours, Dewey had focused his search toward the north. But after a time, he came up against the ineluctable fact that Mother Nature had outgunned him. Without the stars, he didn’t know which direction was actually north.
    By midnight, he found himself capable of focusing on three things and three things only: calming Deravelle and the mare every time the lightning crossed the sky and sent panic through the horses; searching the two-foot arc visible in front of him; and, in the moments just after a lightning strike, doing a quick scan of the terrain, searching for something, for someone, for anything that might be out there.
    In retrospect, perhaps he should have gone back to Sembler Station, called over to Chasvur and let them handle the whole affair. By the time the people at Chasvur realized their horse and rider had gone missing, it would have been too late to do anything. Maybe an earlier call from Dewey would have let them get a decent-sized search party out before all visibility was