The Ambler Warning

  Adrian tilted his head, looking startled. “I—I think I can, yeah.” He swallowed: his country was calling on him! With greater conviction, he added, “Definitely.”

  “And then get my Req. 1133A processed faster than any Req. 1133A has ever been processed in agency history.” He smiled. “Consider it a challenge.”

  “Super,” said Adrian.

  Then Caston reached for the telephone; he needed to have a word with the ADDI. He had not moved from his seat in hours. But he was closing in.

  TEN

  GAITHERSBURG, MARYLAND

  It was a one-story ranch-style house, generic looking, distinguished from its neighbors only by the well-pruned holly bushes that grew around its foundations, a moat of spiny-leafed greenery, even in winter. It seemed an unlikely place of safety, and maybe it was not one. But Ambler had to find out.

  He rang the doorbell and waited. Would she even be home?

  He heard footsteps, and another question formed in his mind: Would she be alone? There was just one car in the garage, an old Corolla, and none in the driveway. He had heard no noises of cohabitation. But that was not proof.

  The front door was opened a few inches, a chain stretched across the opening.

  A pair of eyes met his and widened.

  “Please don’t hurt me,” Laurel Holland said in a quiet, frightened voice. “Please, just go away.”

  And the nurse who had helped free Ambler from Parrish Island shut the door on him.

  He was prepared to hear her footsteps rush away, a phone being dialed. The door was cheap brown-painted fiberboard with glued-on detailing. The chain was a joke. One shove and it would have broken off the latch. Yet that was not an option. Ambler had only one chance; he had to play it right.

  She had stepped away from the door but, he could tell, was still standing near it, as if frozen by uncertainty, indecision.

  He rang the bell again. “Laurel,” he said.

  There was quiet in the house; she was listening. The words he spoke next would be critical.

  “Laurel, I will go if you want me to. I’ll go, and you’ll never see me again. I promise you that. You saved my life, Laurel. You saw something nobody else saw. You had the courage to listen to me, to risk your career—to do what no one else did. And I’ll never forget it.” He paused briefly. “But I need you, Laurel. I need your help again.” He waited several long moments. “Please forgive me, Laurel. I won’t bother you anymore.”

  He turned away from the door, his heart sinking, and walked down the two-step porch, scanning the street. It seemed impossible that he could have been followed—and surely there was no reason for people to think he would be paying a call on anyone from the Parrish Island rotation—but he would reassure himself yet again. He had made the trip down from New York using a cab and two rented cars, and, throughout his journey, he had monitored the traffic for any sign of a tail. He had carefully scouted out the entire subdivision where she lived before making his approach. And there was nothing awry. At midafternoon, the street was nearly deserted. A few cars of people who, like Laurel Holland, worked an early shift and were home, awaiting the return of their children from school. Game shows spilled from the windows of some of the ranches; elsewhere soft-rock radio stations played, as housewives—a hardy species, despite bulletins warning of their endangered status—did ironing or sprayed polish on department-store furniture.

  He heard the door opening behind him before he reached the drive, and he turned around.

  Laurel Holland was shaking her head in self-reproach. “Come inside quickly,” she said. “Before I come to my senses.”

  Wordlessly, Ambler entered the modest house and looked around. Lace curtains. A cheap imported rug on the mass-produced oak flooring. A generic sofa, but covered with an interesting Oriental-looking piece of embroidered fabric. The kitchen had not been changed since the house was built. The counters were linoleum, the appliances harvest gold; the floor was the kind of harlequin-patterned vinyl that was cut from a roll.

  Laurel Holland looked scared, angry at him but angrier at herself. She also looked beautiful. In Parrish Island, she had been the brusque, pretty nurse; at home, with her hair down, dressed in a sweater top and jeans, she was more than just pretty, he could see. She was lovely, even elegant, her strong features softened by her wavy auburn hair; she moved with natural grace. Under her loose-fitting sweater top, she was hard and soft, supple and yielding. Her waist was narrow, and yet there was something almost maternal to the swell of her breasts. Ambler realized he was staring, and he averted his eyes.

  With a pang, he saw the small revolver—a Smith & Wesson .22—mounted on a bracket near the spice rack. Its presence was significant. More significant was the fact that Laurel Holland had made no move toward it.

  “Why are you here?” she demanded, looking at him with wounded eyes. “Do you realize what can happen to me?”

  “Laurel—”

  “If you’re grateful, get out! Leave me alone.”

  Ambler flinched, as if he had been slapped, and bowed his head. “I’ll go,” he said in a voice like a whisper.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want—I don’t know what I want.” There was anguish in her voice—embarrassment, too, that he was witness to it.

  “I brought you trouble, didn’t I? Because of what you did. I want to say thank you, and I want to say I’m sorry.”

  Absently she ran an anxious hand through her lustrous hair. “The key card? It wasn’t actually mine. The night-shift nurse always leaves hers in the dispensary drawer.”

  “So they figured I’d palmed it from her somehow.”

  “You got it. The video made it pretty obvious what happened, or so they thought. Everyone got a reprimand, and that was the end of it, aside from the two guys on medical. So. You left. And now you’re back.”

  “Not back back,” Ambler corrected.

  “They told us you were a dangerous man. Psychotic.”

  Ambler’s eyes flickered toward the wall-mounted revolver. Why hadn’t she grabbed it, armed herself? Somehow he doubted that she was the one who put it there. Someone must have mounted the gun for her. A husband, a boyfriend. It wasn’t a man’s gun. But it was the gun a man would have obtained for a girl. A certain kind of man, anyway.

  “They told you those things, and you didn’t believe them,” Ambler said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have let the dangerous psycho in your house. Especially since you live alone.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” she said.

  “You didn’t used to,” Ambler said. “Tell me about your ex.”

  “You seem to know so much, why don’t you?”

  “He is, or was, a double-ex. Ex-you. Ex-military.”

  She nodded, looking slightly startled.

  “A veteran, in fact.”

  She nodded again, the color beginning to drain from her face.

  “Maybe a little paranoid,” Ambler said, tilting his head toward the gun bracket. “So let’s think this through. You’re a psychiatric nurse, in a secure facility belonging to the Walter Reed complex. Now why would that be? Maybe because your man came back home from a tour of duty—from Somalia, Desert Storm?—a little messed up in the head.”

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder,” she said quietly.

  “And so you tried to heal him, make him whole.”

  “Tried,” she said. There was a tremor in her voice.

  “And failed,” Ambler said. “But not for lack of effort. So you go to school, maybe at one of the military professional schools, and they encourage you to specialize, and you throw yourself into the subject, and you’re smart, so you do well. A psychiatric nurse, military background. Walter Reed. Parrish Island.”

  “You’re good,” she snapped, resentful of being reduced to a case study.

  “You’re good—that’s what got you in trouble. Like they say, no good deed goes unpunished.”

  “Is that why you’re here?” she said, stiffening. “To see that punishment is served
?”

  “Christ, no.”

  “Then why the hell—”

  “Because . . .” Thoughts swirled in Ambler’s head. “Maybe because I’m worried that I am mad. And because you’re the one person I know who looks at me as if I’m not.”

  Laurel shook her head slowly, but he could tell that the fear was ebbing from her. “You want me to say you’re not psychotic? I don’t think you’re psychotic. But what I think doesn’t mean diddly.”

  “To me it does.”

  “Want some coffee?”

  “If you’re making it,” said Ambler.

  “Instant OK?”

  “You don’t have anything faster?”

  She gave him a long, level look. Once again, it was as if she were looking through him, to some core self-hood, some essential sanity.

  They sat together, drinking coffee, and suddenly he knew exactly why he had come. There was a warmth and a humanity to her that he desperately craved right now, the way he craved oxygen. Osiris’s discussion of mnemonic overlay—of the armamentarium of mind-control techniques—had been profoundly harrowing: it was as ifthe ground beneath his feet had vanished. The spectacle of the man’s violent death, harrowing, too, only added to the authority of his voice.

  Where others, it seemed, sought him as an operative for hire, Laurel Holland was the one person in the world he could find who, for whatever reason, believed in him, as he wanted to believe in himself. The irony was painful: a psychiatric nurse, who had seen him at his very nadir, was the sole witness to his sanity.

  “I see you,” she said slowly, “and it’s like I see myself. I know we’re as different as can be.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “But there’s something we’ve got in common. I don’t know what.”

  “You’re my port in a storm.”

  “Sometimes I think ports welcome storms,” said the nurse.

  “A virtue of necessity?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “Speaking of which, it was Desert Storm.”

  “Your ex.”

  “Ex-husband. Ex-Marine. It’s kind of an identity in itself, being ex-Marine. It never really leaves you. Any more than what happened to him in Desert Storm ever really left him. So what does it all mean? Am I just attracted to trouble?”

  “He wasn’t post-traumatic when you met, was he?”

  “No, not then. That was a long time ago. But he got shipped out, did two back-to-back tours, and came back different.”

  “And not in a good way.”

  “Started to drink, a lot. Started to hit me, a little.”

  “A little is too much.”

  “I kept trying to reach him, like there was a broken little boy inside him and I could somehow make him all better if only I could love him enough. I did love him. And he loved me, too. He wanted to protect me was the thing. He got paranoid, started to imagine enemies everywhere. But he was afraid for me, not just for him. Only thing that never occurred to him was that, for me, he was what there was to be afraid of. That gun on the wall—he put it there for me, insisted I learn how to use it. Most of the time, I forget it’s there. But sometimes I thought about using it to protect myself—”

  “—against him.”

  She closed her eyes, nodded, embarrassed. She was silent for a while. “I should be terrified of you. I don’t know why I’m not. It almost scares me that I’m not scared of you.”

  “You’re like me. You go by your instincts.”

  She gestured around her. “And see where it’s got me.”

  “You’re a good person.” Ambler spoke simply. Without thinking about it, he reached over and placed a hand on hers.

  “That what your instincts say?”

  “Yeah.”

  The woman with the green-flecked hazel eyes just shook her head. “So tell me, is there a shell-shocked vet in your background?”

  “My lifestyle wasn’t conducive to deep relationships. Or shallow relationships, for that matter. Hard to keep a lover if you’re going to be disappearing for seven months in Sri Lanka, or Madagascar, or Chechnya, or Bosnia. Hard to have civilian friends when you know you’re dooming them to an intensive period of surveillance. Just protocol, but when you’re in a special-access program, a civilian contact is either somebody you’re using or—the fear is—somebody who’s using you. It’s a good life for a loner. A good life if you don’t mind relationships that come stamped with an expiration date, like a quart of milk. It was a sacrifice. A big one. But it was supposed to make you less vulnerable.”

  “And did it?”

  “I’ve come to think it had the opposite effect.”

  “I don’t know,” Laurel said, the recessed overhead lights burnishing her wavy hair. “With my luck, I would have been better off if I’d always been alone.”

  Ambler shrugged. “I know what it’s like to have people change on you. I had a dad who drank. He was really good at holding it, and then he wasn’t.”

  “An angry drunk?”

  “At the end of the day, most of them are.”

  “He beat you?”

  “Not much,” Ambler said.

  “Not much is too much.”

  Ambler looked off. “I got good at reading his mood. With drunks, it’s tricky, because they can turn on a dime. Giddy, laughing, then suddenly it’s smack, with an open hand or a closed fist, depending, and the expression on his face blackens into a kid-you-got-a-smart-mouth-on-you scowl.”

  “Christ.”

  “He was always sorry afterward. Really, really sorry. You know what it’s like—the guy says he’s going to change this time, and you believe him because you want to.”

  She nodded. “You have to believe him. Like you believe that someday the rain’s got to stop. So much for instincts.”

  “I’d call it self-deception. Ignoring your instincts. See, if you’re that little boy, you get real good at watching your old man’s face. You learn to recognize when he seems to be in a bad mood, but it’s only because he’s down on himself. You ask him then if you can have your allowance, if he can buy you a new action figure, and he looks at you like you did him a favor. Hands you a fiver, maybe a ten, and says, ‘Make yourself happy.’ Says you’re a good kid. Other times he seems giddy, happy, and you look at him cross-eyed and suddenly it’s a cloudburst and he’s going to belt you for sure.”

  “So you never knew how it was going to play out. He was totally unpredictable.”

  “No, that’s the thing,” Ambler said. “I learned. I learned to tell the difference, learned the subtleties. Learned to tell apart the weather systems. By the time I turned six, I knew his moods like I knew the alphabet. Knew when to get the hell out of his sight. Knew when he was in a generous mood. Knew when he was angry and aggressive, knew when he was passive and self-pitying. Knew when he was lying to me or to my mom.”

  “A heavy thing for a kid.”

  “He left by my seventh birthday.”

  “Were you and your mom relieved?”

  “It was more complicated than that.” He stopped.

  Laurel was quiet for a while, as they sipped bad coffee. “You ever had another job? Other than being a spook, I mean.”

  “A couple of summer jobs. Serving up barbecue at a fairground place outside of town. You hoped people would eat their spare ribs after they went on the roller coaster. I used to be pretty good at drawing. I did a junior-year-abroad in Paris, tried to make money as a street artist. You know, you’d sketch portraits of passersby, try to get a few francs from them.”

  “Your road to riches, huh?”

  “I had to take the first exit. People got incredibly upset when they saw what I drew.”

  “Bad at resemblances?”

  “It wasn’t that.” He broke off. “God, I haven’t thought about this for years. It took me a while to realize what the problem was. Basically, the way I saw these people wasn’t necessarily the way they wanted to be seen. Somehow on my sketch pad people ended up looking scared, or eaten by self-doubt, or despairing—and ma
ybe it was the truth. But it wasn’t a truth they wanted to see. A lot of the time, it freaked them out, or pissed them off. I’d hand them the sketch, and they’d go crazy—crumple it up, then rip it into pieces before putting it in the trash. It was almost a superstitious thing. Like they didn’t want anyone else to see it, to glimpse their soul. At the time, as I say, I didn’t fully understand what was happening.”

  “Do you understand what’s happening now?”

  He stared at her. “You ever get the sense you don’t really know who you are?”

  “Try all the time,” she replied, her lynx eyes drawing him in. “What did they do to you?”

  He responded with a miserable half smile. “You don’t want to know.”

  “What did they do to you?” she repeated. Now she put a hand on his, and the warmth from the contact seemed to travel up his arm.

  Slowly, he began to tell her about his disappearance from the databases and electronic archives, and then, in broad strokes, the essentials of what Osiris had told him. She listened contemplatively, and her calm was contagious.

  Finally, she said, “You want to know what I think?”

  He nodded.

  “I think they tried to mess with your mind when you were on the inside. In fact, I’m sure of it. With drugs and electroshock and Lord only knows what else. But I don’t believe you can ever really change who a person is.”

  Quietly he said, “When I was . . . inside . . . I heard a recording. Of myself.” He described it bloodlessly.

  “How do you know it was really you?”

  “I just . . . know,” he said, flailing.

  Laurel’s focus was razor-sharp. “That can all be explained.”

  “Explained? How?”

  “I did a unit on pharmacology in nursing school,” Laurel said. “Let me get my textbook, and I’ll show you.”

  When she returned a few minutes later, she was carrying a thick textbook with a maroon and gold-embossed cover. “The sort of psychosis you were talking about? It could be drug induced.” She turned the pages to a chapter on anticholinergic drugs. “Look here, in the discussion of overdose symptoms. It says anticholinergics can result in psychosis.”