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Authors: R.J. Ellory

BOOK: A Simple Act of Violence
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‘And the real truth of why we’re going out there?’
She looked towards the window - pensive, intense.
‘The fact that people have to die . . . ?’ I prompted.
‘Everyone has to die, John.’
‘Sure they do, but they die of cancer and car accidents and strokes and shit like that. It isn’t your average citizen who walks down the street and gets shot in the head by a sniper.’
‘The greater good,’ she said.
‘The greater good,’ I echoed.
‘It’s not something that has to be questioned by people like us. We do what we do for the greater good.’
‘Hitler in a bar in 1929.’
‘Precisely.’
‘So I agree with you.’
Catherine frowned. ‘What?’
‘I agree with everything you say. I came over here to tell you exactly what you’ve just told me—’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘I like to hear you preach,’ I said. ‘I like to hear you get all wound up and indignant.’
‘Oh fuck off will you.’
‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘It’s actually refreshing to listen to someone take a position on something. Out there . . .’ I waved my hand toward the window, the street, the world beyond. ‘Out there people are so fucking half-minded. They don’t know what they want or need. I see what’s happening, and in all honesty I couldn’t give a damn, at least not specifically.’
‘What? I thought you just said—’
‘Sit down,’ I told her.
‘I don’t want to sit down.’
‘Sit down. You’re going to need to sit down.’
‘I don’t need—’
‘Catherine, for once in your life will you shut the fuck up and sit down?’
Her eyes wide, her mouth open, she stepped to the left and sat down on the sofa.
‘I didn’t come here at the same time as you,’ I said. ‘You thought you were here before me. You were here and then I arrived, right?’
‘Yes, you came after me.’
‘I’d been here for three months before you even arrived. I went through the entire routine with Don Carvalho. Dennis Powers came later. He’d been away somewhere. He was told that I knew nothing, that I should be indoctrinated like everyone else, and he was to tell you how I reacted, what I thought, everything I said.’
‘You set me up?’ Catherine said. ’For God’s sake—’
‘No-one set you up, Catherine. I needed to know how certain you were about what was going on. I decided a long time back that I was going. We needed someone to go with me, preferably a girl. They figured you were the best, but they needed to know that you would go regardless of what you thought of me.’
‘And Dennis Powers didn’t know that you were already working?’
‘Only person who knew was Don Carvalho. He’s my coach, if you like. He figured you were the right one, but he had to be sure.’
‘So you had already made arrangements?’
‘Arrangements were made weeks ago.’
‘But you just said that you didn’t care what was happening out there.’
‘Specifically,’ I replied. ‘I said I didn’t give a damn about what was happening specifically.’
Catherine looked so intense, and yet so confused. I remembered the first time I’d seen her in the damned turquoise beret, how I’d wished that she could be the one.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked. I could see her assumptions falling apart. She had believed me indecisive and uncertain. Believed it had been her job to convince me of something, and now she saw that it had merely been her own proving ground.
‘I mean that there are too many places we could go,’ I said. ‘Ethiopia, Uganda, Palestine, Israel. There’s the attempted Portuguese coup, the Lebanese civil war, the Cuban invasion of Angola. All of this shit and more happening in the last handful of years. This is the tip of the iceberg. This is just the stuff we read about in the newspapers, but it’s out there, it’s happening and it never fucking stops. So no, I don’t care for this any more than I care for any other place, but this is where they want me to go, and they want someone to go with me, and it looks like you’re it.’
‘And you’re an assassin? Is that what you are?’
‘Jesus no, I’m not a fucking assassin. Who told you I was an assassin?’
‘The conversation we had before . . .’
‘The conversations weren’t for me, Catherine, they were for you. Everything we discussed, everything you concluded, what you said to Dennis . . . all of it was part of finding out how much you wanted to do this thing, how far you were prepared to go.’
‘And you know how far I’m prepared to go?’
‘We know enough.’
‘So this was all prearranged? Everything that’s happened between us was part of my indoctrination into this . . . this . . .’
‘Company of wolves?’ I suggested.
‘So what now? I have to fuck you or what?’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
She shrugged. ‘No, I’m not kidding. Jesus, is this what you thought of me? That I could just be led along day after day, that you could just—’
‘Just what?’ I said. ‘Test you? Test your resolve on these things? What the fuck kind of game do you think this is, Catherine? What the hell kind of thing do you think is going on here? There’s a war out there . . . Jesus Christ, even that is one almighty understatement. The movies you saw, they weren’t even the rated versions. We’re gathering intelligence, that’s what we’re doing. We’re going out into the middle of fucking nowhere to find out what the middle of nowhere actually looks like. There’s millions of dollars being spent on trying to defend that scratched-up piece of shit from a complete communist takeover, and the CIA . . . Jesus, I don’t even know if this is the CIA. It could be NSA, it could be naval intelligence, it could be some splinter group that answers only to the president himself, but whatever the fuck it is I want to do something about it, and yes I am the same as you. I don’t have any parents or anyone else who might be concerned if I don’t come home on time. This is not the kind of life . . . hell, I don’t even know what kind of life I was planning . . . I only know that this appears to serve a great deal more purpose than anything else I’ve thought of.’
‘And what about me?’
‘What about you?’
‘You want me to go with you?’
‘Yes I do,’ I said.
‘And I’ve passed your tests?’
‘They were never my tests, Catherine—’
‘I’m not talking about Dennis. I’m not talking about late night discussions with Don Carvalho. I’m talking about whatever tests you figured out for me. The things I’ve said, how I’ve dealt with everything here . . . you must have had a viewpoint about what you wanted.’
‘I’ve always known what I’ve wanted.’
‘So you want me to come with you?’
‘Yes I do . . . I want you to come with me.’
‘And you think you can trust me?’
‘Yes, I think I can trust you.’
‘And to work together you think that maybe the trust should be mutual?’
‘Of course it should.’
‘So tell me something about yourself.’
‘What?’
‘This whole time you’ve been pretending to be someone else, pretending to be the new kid on the block, the guy with all the uncertainties and questions. Well, now you tell me that you were here first, that you’d already made up your mind, and you just needed to get me straight enough to go with you—’
‘I never said that—’
‘But that’s what was going on, John. I can see that much.’
I didn’t speak.
‘So the trust should be reciprocated, and you can only trust someone if you know something about them, and with that something you open the door to something else, and soon you know everything there is to know about them and they have nothing to hide. That’s trust - the idea that there isn’t anything they can hide from you.’
‘I haven’t hidden anything from you.’
‘You’ve told me nothing about yourself.’
‘Telling you nothing and hiding things from you are not the same thing.’
‘That’s pedantic.’
‘It’s not pedantic, it’s true.’
‘But nevertheless you agree that we should be on the same terms for a relationship to work?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it can’t hurt to tell me something.’
‘I don’t have anything to tell you, Catherine.’
‘Your parents.’
My thoughts stopped dead. ‘My parents?’
‘Sure . . . tell me what happened to your parents. Tell me why
you’re all alone in the big, bad world with no-one to call the police if you don’t show up for work.’
‘I’m not going to tell you about my parents.’
‘Then you can go fuck yourself.’
I laughed. ‘You’re such a tough cookie,’ I said. ‘You’re so full of shit. There’s no way after all of this that you would turn this down.’
‘Try me.’
There it was again, the intensity in her eyes - the hardness. The thing that had convinced Don Carvalho that Catherine Sheridan
was the one. ‘You’re serious.’
‘As can be. You want me to trust you, then you have to trust me.
You want me to go two thousand miles into the middle of fucking nowhere with you, then there has to be some kind of give and take—’
‘I’ll tell you something else,’ I said.
‘The
fuck you
will. I want to know the truth about your parents,
not the bullshit you told me before.’
‘Why? Why on earth do you want to know about my parents?’
‘Because it’s the one thing you’ve never mentioned, and when I’ve mentioned it you close up so fucking tight. Mention your parents and you become someone else entirely. So fucking impregnable. Be different if you were my trainer, if you were my coach, my reader. Be different then. Wouldn’t be such a big deal. But you’re not those things, John. You’re the guy I’m s’posed to trust with my life. You’re younger than me, for God’s sake. You’ve probably never had a steady girl. Sometimes you act like you never fucked someone. I wanna know whether this big man on fucking campus is really the CIA hotshot, the golden boy, the whiz-kid prodigy that you probably are, or whether you’re just some dumbass wet-behind-the-ears farmhand out of Bohunk, East Jesus, that the CIA thinks they can send over there as cannon fodder.’
‘Are you done already?’
She laughed unsympathetically. ‘No, as a matter of fact I am not done. What I’m saying means something.’
‘I know . . . we know how easy it is for you to get all fired up and—’
‘Will you just shut up and stop interrupting me?’
I shut up. It was some performance.
‘That’s the deal. Right where it stands, that’s the fucking deal. Take it or leave it. You tell me what I wanna hear and I’m with you all the way. You clam up and I’m gonna go drink some beers and find some guy who’ll fuck me just to take my mind off what a dickhead you are.’
‘You want to know about my parents. That’s the deal.’
‘Yes.’
‘I could tell you anything. I don’t have to tell you the truth.’
‘You could.’
‘You wouldn’t know if I was telling you the truth or not.’
‘But you’d know.’
‘So?’
‘So you’d know, and you’d feel like an asshole. You’d start to wonder whether I’d figured you out. You’d read stuff into innocuous comments I might make. You’d have to remember the lines you told me for next time I asked about your folks. All that bullshit, right? We don’t have the time, and we sure as hell don’t have the attention for that kind of game, my friend . . .’
‘So I’ll tell you.’
‘The truth?’
‘Yes, the truth.’
Catherine looked back at me with an expression of such anticipation it was difficult not to start right on in. I cleared my throat. I looked away towards the window. I glanced at my watch.
‘Speak, John Robey, or you’re gonna find me in some bar in Richmond trawling for rough trade.’
‘My father,’ I said. I looked down at the floor. Already I felt that subtle twist of tension writhing in my chest. Vagus nerve in my lower gut was fighting back. Tears in my eyes? I closed them and willed myself to think of nothing but what I was saying. I wanted to feel nothing. I wanted to feel nothing at all.
I looked up at Catherine Sheridan.
‘My father killed my mother,’ I said quietly. ‘And I . . . I helped him do it.’
TWENTY-FOUR
Roth drove while Miller thought about Marilyn Hemmings, a woman he’d known for three, perhaps four years. He’d seen her come in as a forensic assistant, and now she had her own lab, dealt with the workload, the administration, the coroner himself, all the lines and legalities that went with such a territory. Yet she held her own, carried a sharp sense of humor like a campaign medal, looked good an awful lot more than she didn’t. Several times he’d considered asking her out, but each time he’d backed down and walked away.
‘I’m thinking out loud here,’ Roth said unexpectedly. ‘Just a thought, an idea. This thing about two killers. The guy that killed the first three, the guy that killed Sheridan. That’s something we’ve been considering since the Sheridan autopsy. Maybe McCullough is one of them, and then the guy in the picture . . .’
‘The guy in the picture could be no-one.’

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