Ashes (6 page)

She thought hard. For some reason it seemed important to repeat exactly what he’d said. “He asked if I was OK. He said he was going to see if he could find anyone else from our department. He said ... he said, ‘You go on. Get out of the building as fast as you can.’ And then I went for the elevators, I wasn’t thinking, and he said, ‘No, take the stairs, keep going.’”

“A dozen words, thirty? Just some words, but those words probably saved your life, didn’t they?”

Jennifer nodded.

“A few words can make all the difference sometimes. We’re so fixed on the grand gesture that we forget it’s the small things that matter most. And sometimes you don’t even know how much they matter until later. Your old life may be over, but your new one is starting.” Dr. Levinson closed his eyes, said softly, “‘What falls away is always. And is near. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.’”

What falls away is always. And is near.
“That’s lovely.”

“It’s from a poem by Theodore Roethke. A colleague of mine says that poetry is the only antidepressant that works for everyone, and no side effects to worry about.” He fell silent for a moment. “Would you do something for me, Jennifer?”

“Yes.” She was too confused to know what was going to happen next, exactly, but knew that Dr. Levinson had given her the key.

“Call me if you ever need me. Promise me that.”

“I will.”

He smiled. “Would you at least let me see you eat?”

“What?” Jennifer looked down at the table. She hadn’t seen the waitress arrive with the food. Nor could she remember what she’d ordered. Apparently it had been pancakes, with bacon and eggs sunny-side up. She began eating — the food was a bit cold but quite tasty — and waited for her body to reject the food. It did not.

“One last thing,” Dr. Levinson said as he signaled the waitress to bring the check. “Do this for me. Learn by going where you have to go. And tell me what you find when you get there. Please?”

“Yes. I’ll do that.”

* * *

I
t was late, past midnight when Jennifer arrived back at her apartment. There was a message on her answering machine. She pushed
Play
and recognized the throaty voice of Amber LaSalle. The reporters had given up, but Amber LaSalle of Ellis and Associates Representation was still persistent. Not a hint of impatience in her voice as she asked Jennifer to call at her earliest convenience.

Jennifer did not go to sleep or retreat to the bathtub, but instead pulled the duvet off the bed, wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl, and stepped out onto her apartment’s tiny balcony. She gazed out over the quiet suburbs, thinking.

What falls away is always. And is near.

No, she wasn’t Jennifer any more. Not that Jennifer. That life was over, done with. She had to find another life.

I learn by going where I have to go.
“I can’t stay here anymore.”

The city was no longer hers. The lights that had so entranced her with their magic when she was a child were now just bits of electricity, nothing more. This apartment, the furniture, the books and movies, the stuffed animals, everything. Not hers, any more. Someone else’s. Some other Jennifer. That girl in the picture, the crying girl, that was not her. Once, in a high school science class, she had seen a snake shed its skin, and what had been so lovely and glossy black on the snake’s flesh was a crumpled bit of nothing, fragile as candy floss. An old life sloughed away. Nothing there that she wanted. Or needed.

She watched the sun come up, and thought about what she needed. To leave. To go where she had to go. Where that might be, she wasn’t sure, yet. And how to get there? The break had to be clean. All at once, like a snake shedding its skin. She needed help. As the sun began to warm the boxy apartment buildings and people began to stir, she knew who could help her.

She went inside, tossed the duvet on the bed, and made coffee. As it brewed she unearthed the list of messages Cindy had written down. Jennifer found Amber LaSalle’s number with no trouble at all.

She waited until 9 a.m., and then picked up the phone, dialed. After three rings a receptionist’s voice welcomed her to Ellis and Associates Representation.

I
t had been easy for Sean to be flippant to Halsey, to act as if it was no great matter to leave it all behind. Easy, because he neither liked nor respected Halsey. But Sean could not pretend to himself that it had not been a heavy blow. For more than half his life he had been in their service. He had forsworn the life of an ordinary working man and all its attendant miseries and joys, and the contempt he often professed for those who led such simple lives could not hide the sense of loss he sometimes felt for having missed the commonplace pleasures of wife and children and home. He had given them the full benefit of his mind and skills, and they had thrown him aside like a broken tool.

No. The tool was still useful, but they no longer wanted it.

The euphoria he’d felt when he walked out on Halsey faded by the time he reached his hotel. He packed quickly, meaning to be on his way almost immediately. But as he closed the duffel bag he stood for a moment, fingertips running idly over the worn canvas, and the full weight of it fell on him. He was out. Finished. It was over. He had spied and betrayed trust and killed and served his country well, and it was all for nothing.

The weight of it pressed down on his shoulders. If he let it, the weight would crush him and he would crawl back to Florida. Emptiness would eat at him until he drowned himself in a bottle or in the Gulf of Mexico. Then it truly would have been for nothing.

Sean slammed his fist into the wall. Once, twice, three times, so fast an observer would have been hard pressed to see it. The walls were cheap, his hands hard and his strength considerable; he stood gazing calmly at a dent in the wall and a dust of white powder on his hand. He flexed the fingers; they were not broken. Beyond that the pain was irrelevant. Indeed, he hardly felt it. Both pain and despair had been replaced by a calm — almost cold — feeling of purpose.

He was never one to linger on the past. Not on its triumphs and not on its mistakes. He had closed the door, and there was no opening it again, not even if he had wanted to. What mattered now was bringing those who had hurt Jennifer Thomson to justice. What Sean needed was counsel, and he knew where he could find it.

A quick consultation with a phone book, a taxi ride. He signed forms, paid cash, and minutes later was driving in a rented car. Heading north. As he left Washington behind, it began to rain.

* * *

R
obert lived in a medium-size town on Maine’s rocky coast. Somewhere around New Hampshire, the rain had turned to snow, not much more than a flurry, and Sean thought of Christmas. That was when he'd last heard from Robert, who had sent him a card. Unusual, that, and even more so was the message inscribed below the card’s generic happy holidays message, in Robert’s elegant yet very readable writing.
I’ve been thinking about the old days a great deal recently. If you have the time, why not tear yourself free from the sunshine state and visit? We’ll eat lobster and talk.

Guilt was not an emotion he felt often — they broke you of that one early on — but he felt it now for not coming up here, for just sending Robert a note that said yes, they’d do that, some time. Because Robert had taken Sean under his wing when Sean was still young and green, had taught Sean a thousand things. Robert knew so much, yet he never passed on his knowledge in a patronizing manner. He knew about far more than weapons and intelligence and how to extract information from uncooperative sources. There had been countless times when they played the waiting game that was so much of their work, and Robert talked. His voice had lost its Czech accent save for a certain cadence to his sentences. His talk: a running discourse on everything from a rain of frogs he’d seen in the Australian outback to a bar he’d once visited where a caged parrot spoke in Ernest Hemingway’s voice. There was money in Robert’s background and education as well, but none of those things had made Robert soft. On the contrary, Robert was the best shot he knew, and had once, down in Central America when their transport broke down and they had to slog through the jungles on foot to escape guerrillas, executed three prisoners, one of them a woman, so the prisoners would not slow them down.

And though Robert had been retired longer than Sean, Robert had more connections to agents active and retired, and might have an idea of where Sean could start.

He arrived late in the morning, the day after his meeting with Halsey. Robert’s house, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence, was on a secluded street near the coast. Ivy, winter-brown and skeletal, lightly dusted with snow, covered the fence and the entry gate, blocking Sean’s view of the house. He stepped out of the car, feeling the cold breeze cut through his clothes; if he was going to stay, he would need a warmer jacket. The ocean’s tang carried on the breeze, a deeper, colder smell than the Gulf of Mexico. To the right of the gate was a small intercom box. He pressed the button. No answer. He pressed again. No reply but the distant sound of the sea, the snow ticking softly against the brown ivy.

He could stay and wait, but he did not want this to feel like a stakeout. So he drove into town and stopped at a bookstore to while away a few hours.

The store was one of the chains, large and bright with a coffee bar over by the periodicals. He sat down with a cappuccino and watched the shoppers with deceptive idleness. His instincts hummed into life a second before his eyes registered what they saw. There. Heading over to the reference books. He could always spot someone who had been in his line of work; they had an air of alertness that they never lost.

He finished his cappuccino, then got up and walked casually to the reference section. Robert stood with his back turned to Sean, holding a book and turning the pages slowly; it was a dictionary of Shakespeare quotations. So strange to see Robert here in this suburban stronghold. He was several yards away, about to speak, when Robert, without looking round, chuckled. “I thought I’d be hearing from you.”

* * *

“T
ell me, what did you do on your summer vacation?”

“Watched a lot of movies. You?”

“Caught up on my reading.”

They were at Robert’s house, sitting by the living room hearth where a fire blazed cheerfully. The wood burning in the hearth was cedar and its sweet smell perfumed the room. Sean glanced around the room; it was everything he would have expected. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with handsome leather-bound editions and battered, read-to-death paperbacks. The hardwood floor shone. Odd knickknacks that Robert had picked up in his many travels were scattered about the room. He thought that he was looking at Robert’s fortress, his kingdom of one.

Only one thing would have appeared strange to a casual observer. There were no photographs of friends or family. That did not surprise Sean. He did not have any in his house either.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked.

“You have a slight limp that becomes worse in cold weather,” Robert replied. “The right knee. It was the unpleasantness in Afghanistan, yes?”

“Right on the money. As always.”

Robert smiled, settled into his chair. “I also heard about your little
tête-à-tête
with Halsey.”

“News travels fast.”

“I keep my ear to the ground. You didn’t think what you said to him would stay quiet, did you? Not what I would have advised.”

Sean felt his ears burn. He hadn’t expected Robert to take him to task for that. “You know as well as I do that Halsey’s nothing but a numbers man. All he knows are dollars and cents, not what it’s like out in the field.”

“Did I say I disagreed? On the contrary, you nailed him precisely.
Zatraceny´ blbec.
Him, not you. All I said was that it wasn’t what I would have suggested. They’re very jumpy right now and not taking kindly to criticism from any quarter. Still,” Robert shrugged, sipped his coffee. “what’s done is done. And I have to say that burning your bridges must agree with you. You haven’t aged a day.”

“You’re looking well yourself.” But he didn’t mean it, because while he might not have aged, Robert certainly had. His hair and beard were almost entirely gray and his broad shoulders slumped a bit. There was an extra caution when he walked, as if he were favoring some part of his body, but what was wrong was not immediately clear.

“Thank you.” Sean could tell that Robert knew he was lying. He waited for Robert to say more, but nothing on that subject was forthcoming.

They talked the afternoon away, about the old days mostly. They kept the conversation on lighthearted things, for pleasant times were few in their line of work, and those moments were all the more cherished. The time in Minnesota, Sean and Hamilton going after a neo-Nazi group. The group’s sniper missed he and Hamilton, hit a six-point buck instead. They’d taken out the sniper and had a fine venison dinner that night. Or the time he and Robert and Beatty were taking some R&R in Bangkok. Beatty had decided to celebrate the end of the mission by going on a bender and had disappeared for two days; Sean and Robert had finally found Beatty in a dive, passed out cold. They dragged him out while on the tables stark naked women did innovative things with ping-pong balls and bananas, and had only an hour to sober him up before a debriefing with the top brass. Or when Robert had “persuaded” the security guard at the Louvre to let him stay after closing, and had wandered the galleries until morning.

Robert made dinner, the long-promised lobster, and they ate and talked some more, but even so he could not help noticing that Robert ate sparingly. Sean did justice to his share; it was no obligation. Robert was an excellent cook, and his own cooking was adequate at best.

After dinner, with fresh wood on the fire and a glass of brandy for each of them, Robert finally said, “The reason you came here wasn’t simply my Christmas invitation.”

Because it was a statement and not a question, he could answer freely. “No. I need your help.” He paused, trying to think of how to say it right when he had not fully articulated his feelings even to himself. “The reason I wanted back in is because of what happened in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. To be honest, not what happened, but...” He took out his wallet. The picture was tucked away, folded to the size of a credit card. He unfolded the picture, cut from an issue of
Time
magazine. He smoothed it out, sat looking at the image for a moment. He knew it by heart now. The not-blonde not-brown hair covered with dust and matted with drying blood. The unnatural bend in the left arm. What looked like a high school class ring on the third finger of her right hand. And most of all the look on her face; fear and disbelief that she was alive and anger and sorrow all mingled. Pain, inside and out. He thought, as he always did when he looked at the picture:
I’ll help you. I’ll make the pain stop.