Exile Hunter (9 page)

Linder gave a bitter
laugh.

“So I’m to blame
for everyone else’s screw-ups, too?”

“No, but we need your
confession to sort things out with the Lebanese government,”
Bednarski replied. “You see, they’ve accused the Embassy of
violating Lebanese sovereignty and using violence to intimidate
Americans holding legal residence here.”

“Don’t look at me,
Bob,” Linder retorted, folding his arms across his chest. “I
didn’t give the order to storm the place.”

“That’s irrelevant
now,” Bednarski answered with a dismissive flick of the wrist. “The
point is, the Ambassador has already approved a plan to placate the
Lebanese by showing that our team stepped in to rescue Eaton from an
assassination attempt by a rival exile faction. This gives the
Embassy grounds for keeping the Kendalls in protective custody until
they can be safely repatriated to the United States. Since the
Lebanese have identified you as Eaton’s would-be assassin, it would
be very helpful if you would sign the confession that we’ve
prepared for you.”

“And if I do?”
Linder inquired.

“We slip you out of
the country on a rendition flight and you get off with maybe a letter
of reprimand and a year’s delay in your next promotion. If, on the
other hand, you refuse to play ball, we fly you straight to a
stateside interrogation center and put you on trial for whatever
charges our lawyers care to throw at you. Do I make myself clear?”

“Clear enough,”
Linder replied. “But say I decide to go along. How do I know that
the Department will follow through with its end of the deal?”

Bednarski looked down
his nose at Linder and scoffed.

“You’re in no
position to be demanding assurances, pal. Denniston has told me how
you’ve concealed your prior relationships with Eaton and his
daughter. If it were up to me, I’d order an investigation going all
the way back to your first contact with those people. For all I know,
you may have been in cahoots with Eaton’s insurgent gang all the
way back to the Cleveland bank job. And how convenient that you
arrived in London around the same time they did. I think that’s
worth exploring, too.”

At the mention of
London, Linder bristled.

“That’s utter
hogwash. I never laid eyes on Eaton or the Kendalls in London. Neil
can back me up on that. And as for all your finger pointing, it looks
to me like you’re desperate to divert attention from your crude
moneymaking dodges. I suggest you watch your step, Bob. If somebody
like me sees enough to blow the whistle on you from a casual walk-by,
others could do worse. So go ahead and fly me home in shackles if you
want. I’ll see you in court. We’ll find out soon enough whose
version of events the judge believes. You’d better hope Neil backs
you up...”

At the mention of
Denniston’s name, Bednarski let out a loud guffaw.

"Denniston back me
up? Can you really be that stupid? Who do you suppose came up with
the whole operation? You’re out of your cotton-pickin’ mind if
you expect any help from him."

“You’re a liar,”
Linder answered heatedly. “And this is far from over. You won’t
get away with what you’re doing.”

“Yes, we will,”
Bednarski assured him with contempt oozing from his bloodshot eyes.
He moved his face close to Linder’s and lowered his voice. “The
fix is in, buddy. People up the line are already counting their
share. We take care of them; they take care of us. But you, Linder,
if you keep taking the wrong attitude, you’ll lose everything. Do
you hear me? Everything.”

Linder shook with
impotent rage for minutes after Bednarski left the cell. Then the
loudspeaker over the cell door crackled to life. For hours afterward,
Linder heard muffled screams, moans, and anguished cries for mercy
that he was certain were recordings played to intimidate him. Except
that, over time, the voices came to sound increasingly like those of
Philip Eaton and Roger Kendall.

* * *

Linder fell asleep at
last when the loudspeaker went silent. Having dreaded sleep so often
for fear of nightmares, it struck him as ironic that his waking life
now inspired more fear and apprehension than the accusing faces of
his former targets. His worry about ever again enjoying a sound
night’s rest without the aid of alcohol or drugs now seemed moot.

At the same time,
Linder was unable to sweep aside the curtain of fear that had fallen
between him and his future. While he knew enough about psychology to
understand the perils of negative feedback loops and self-fulfilling
prophecy, a verse from the Book of Job stuck in his mind: “For the
thing which I greatly feared is come upon me…” And the kinds of
things that he feared most—failure, disgrace, betrayal, hardship
and pain—were standard-issue weapons in his employer’s arsenal.

Even after Bednarski’s
disclosures, Linder still found it difficult to comprehend how he had
misread the situation so badly. Ignoring his inner voice and
intuitive cues had been bad enough. Not detecting any of the usual
warning signs he usually associated with operations about to go sour
was worse. He had arrived in Beirut a long-time friend of Neil
Denniston and on passable terms with Bob Bednarski. Despite
Denniston’s recent performance, Linder still found it hard to
believe that his friend could betray him as ruthlessly as Bednarski
had claimed.

In retrospect, it
seemed to Linder that his fundamental error, his original sin, so to
speak, had been to join the Department of State Security in the first
place. He had joined at a time when he saw ample reason to believe he
would lose his job in the CIA’s clandestine service, as so many of
his fellow veterans of the war on terror had when the President
withdrew all but a token level of American forces from overseas.

He had been so fearful
of losing his income, perks, and the prestige of belonging to a
tightly knit elite unit, that he had been willing to trade his equity
in the CIA for a slot in the newly formed DSS. But in exchange for
the job security and generous pay and benefits in the powerful new
organization, it was clear that, eventually, he would be expected to
direct the special counter-terrorism skills that he had used on
foreign enemy combatants against domestic enemies of the Unionist
regime.

Now, in retrospect,
Linder could see clearly that, by making that trade, he had signed
over his future to the Department and put everything he valued in his
life at risk. After swearing an oath of loyalty to the DSS, he could
no longer raise scruples against being assigned to questionable
grab-and-go operations, repatriation teams, or other émigré hunting
parties. To the Department, such operations did no more than extend
the reach of extraordinary rendition from foreign enemy combatants to
domestic insurgents residing abroad. As a DSS officer, he was now in
for a penny, in for a pound, and sauce for the goose was being
applied liberally to the gander.

In his early years with
the Department, pursuing the rebels had seemed like a game of wits
played for high stakes against well-matched opponents. By nature,
Linder was an aggressive competitor who had whetted his natural
predatory instincts to a sharp edge and relished the game of luring
overconfident insurgents to their doom.

But by the time Linder
arrived in Beirut, nearly five years after the end of CWII, his
sporting instincts had dulled and he had wearied of the game. Of the
millions of American expats who had escaped the country before the
borders closed, most had turned their backs on America and conceded
it to the Unionists until such time as that misbegotten regime
toppled of its own weight like the Soviets’ eighty-year reign in
Russia. Most American émigrés had scattered across the globe,
settled in new homes, begun new jobs and businesses, and taken
permanent residence or citizenship wherever they had landed. In cases
like these, Linder sometimes asked himself, what was the point of
further pursuit? To prosecute former enemies in absentia for
long-forgotten offenses seemed a waste of state resources.

From time to time, when
alone with his thoughts, he wondered whether an amnesty program,
administered perhaps by a truth commission like the ones pioneered in
South Africa and Argentina, might be a way to reconcile regime and
rebels and end the fruitless pursuit of former enemies. But this was
a dangerous idea to voice openly, as amnesty and reconciliation had
long been anathema to the President-for-Life and his inner circle.
Like King Herod, Caligula, Stalin and Snow White’s mother, to
compensate for his deep sense of inferiority, the PFL hungered to
destroy all rivals who might someday surpass him and to settle scores
with all those who had ever denied him their full support.

Only over the past few
months had Linder begun to realize the extent to which he had fallen
under the spell of Unionist double-think and had come to accept the
premise that the Department was always right and that the rebels were
always wrong. Now the spell was lifting. With 20-20 hindsight, Linder
recognized in Neil Denniston and Bob Bednarski the superior, mocking
smile of the President-for-Life.

But of what conceivable
good was his change in attitude now? What could he possibly do in
captivity that would undo the damage he had already done to people
like Philip Eaton, Patricia, and their families?

A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always
ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good.
Varlam
Shalamov

MAY, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER, GATES MILLS, OHIO

The first time Warren
Linder laid eyes on Patricia Eaton was during seventh-grade ballroom
dance lessons at the Hawken School. His dress for dance class was
typically an ill-fitting blue blazer, gray flannel trousers, and a
polka-dotted bow tie, along with the dweeby black-framed glasses and
spiky gel hairdo that were his trademark in those days.

Not being physically
mature for his age, he was clueless about the female gender, a
situation made worse by his father’s aversion to raising the topic
of sex with his son for fear of encouraging him. Accordingly, Warren
had to pick it up for himself and didn’t make much headway. To his
credit, however, he knew a little about ballroom dancing because his
father was dance instructor at Hawken and at several other schools in
Cleveland’s affluent eastern suburbs and had tutored Warren from an
early age. In fact, Warren’s dancing prowess was the only reason
for including him in the class. He was not a Hawken student, but a
public-school ringer added to the roster at the last minute because
the class was short of boys and his father liked to use his son to
demonstrate new steps.

To Warren’s delight,
the class at Hawken included many pretty girls from Cleveland’s
leading families, who had benefited from natural selection to bring
together the inherited traits of wealth, social standing,
intelligence, and good looks across multiple generations. None of the
girls had attracted Warren’s special notice, however, until the
third session in the yearlong course, by which time he had danced
with all of them. Such variety was guaranteed by his father’s
rotational system for selecting dance partners, which served the
multiple goals of breaking the ice, disrupting cliquishness, and
extending a safety net to wallflowers.

Once or twice each
week, Warren’s father decreed a ladies’ choice dance, and on this
much-anticipated occasion, Warren was bowled over when a slender
dark-eyed girl wearing a beige chiffon tea dress, black Mary Jane
shoes, and a bouncing ponytail of mahogany hair approached him with a
playful smile and the magic words: “May I have this dance?” He so
appreciated this stroke of good fortune that he flashed her a broad
grin, took her outstretched hand in his and replied with the
all-purpose adolescent response when words failed: “Why not?”

The dance was a fox
trot to Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love,” one of his father’s
favorites from a bygone era, and Warren led his young partner
skillfully through all the steps he knew, traversing the crowded room
repeatedly at varying angles and speeds to show that his dance moves
were not limited to slavish repetition of the box step. The first few
times they collided with other couples, her eyes met his and they
laughed in unison, confident in the other’s support. By the time
the song ended, Warren was happily short of breath and had come to
feel that this girl was somehow different from the others.

Having been too shy to
introduce himself on their first dance, the next time the rotation
brought them together he wasted no time in asking her name.

“Patricia,” she
answered. “Patricia Eaton.”

“Great! I’m Warren
Linder.”

“I know. Your father
introduced you to us the first day of class. You are a very polished
dancer, by the way,” she added with an approving smile.

“If you practiced as
much as I’ve had to, I’m sure it would come just as easily,” he
replied.

“I haven’t seen you
in any other classes here. Are you a transfer student?” Patricia
asked.

“No, actually, I
don’t go to Hawken,” he responded without the self-consciousness
he might have felt if he had known more about the exclusive school.
“I’m in seventh grade at Patrick Henry Middle School in
Lyndhurst. I just come here for dance class.”

“Oh, I see. I’ve
never met anyone from Lyndhurst before. Do you like it there?”

“It’s nice enough.
But it’s the pits compared to this place. Hawken is awesome!”

“You really think
so?” she challenged. “I think it’s boring. But then, I’ve
been here ever since pre-K.”

The music stopped and
Warren felt certain the disc had skipped a verse because the song
ended far too soon.

For the rest of the
semester, Warren and Patricia were frequent dance partners, choosing
each other whenever they had the opportunity. Sometimes when their
preference for each other became too obvious, Warren’s father would
urge him to “play the field” or “spread the wealth.” Being
conscious of his status as a guest student and not wanting to disobey
his father, Warren would comply when he couldn’t avoid it, but week
upon week, he felt drawn to Patricia in a way that was completely new
to him.