The Ambler Warning

  “He can read people, then.”

  “Like a book. You wouldn’t want to get near this guy when you’ve got something to hide.”

  “A walking lie detector. I’d like to get me some of that.”

  “The people I spoke to doubt Tarquin himself knows how he does it. But, no surprise, they’ve done research in the area.”

  “And?” Norris plopped himself down on the sofa.

  “There are a lot of variables at play. But the research indicates that people like Tarquin are particularly attuned to things like ‘microexpressions’—facial expressions that last no more than thirty milliseconds. The kind of subtleties most of us would never notice. Specialists talk about ‘leakage’ and ‘emblems.’ Seems there are all kinds of ways that hidden emotion spills out. In terms of the human face, there’s lots of information that we simply tune out. Probably we couldn’t get through the day otherwise.”

  “You’ve lost me, Clay.” Norris put his legs up on a battered coffee table. Caston guessed that it was not battered when the Department of Office Supplies & Services delivered it. Everything in Norris’s office looked a little more shopworn and scuffed than mere age would account for.

  “Again, this is all stuff I’ve just found out. Apparently, though, various psychologists have been making a study of this. You videotape someone speaking, then you slow it down, go through it frame by frame, and sometimes you see another expression that’s at odds with what’s being said. The subject’s looking mournful—then, for a fleeting instant, they look triumphant. But it’s so fast that we mostly aren’t aware of it. There’s nothing mystical about what he does. It’s just that he’s responding to things that are so fleeting that on most of us, they don’t register.”

  “So he sees more. But what does he see?”

  “It’s an interesting question. People who study faces have worked out certain combinations of muscles that are involved in squelched emotions. Someone starts to smile, and immediately forces down the corners of their mouth. But when you’re doing that consciously, you’re going to move your chin muscle, too. When the corners of your mouth are pulled down involuntarily—because of sincere feeling—the chin muscle doesn’t change. Or if you’re putting on a fake smile, there are certain muscles in the forehead that don’t change the way they should. Then there are involuntary muscles in the eyebrow and eyelid that convey anger or surprise. Unless you’re a Method actor—unless you’re genuinely experiencing these emotions—there are going to be subtle muscular discrepancies when you’re simulating. In most cases, we don’t see them. They’re too subtle for us. There are hundreds of ways in which the facial muscles can interact, and it’s like we’re looking at a rich canvas, but we’re color-blind—we see in shades of gray. Whereas a guy like Tarquin sees all the colors.”

  “Makes him a damned formidable weapon.” Norris’s heavy eyebrows became a pair of circumflexes. He wasn’t pleased with what he was learning.

  “No question,” Caston said. He did not voice a suspicion that was still inchoate in his mind: that there was a connection between Tarquin’s uncanny gifts and his hospitalization—indeed, the erasure of his civilian existence. Caston hadn’t worked out the logic yet. But the day was young.

  “For twenty years, he was working for us.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And now, we’ve got to assume, he’s working against us.” Norris shook his head hard, as if erasing some internal Etch A Sketch. “This isn’t a man you want to have on the other side.”

  “Whatever side that is,” Caston said grimly.

  FOURTEEN

  The gloom of the Montreal afternoon brightened momentarily when Laurel called him on his cell phone.

  “Are you all right?” Ambler asked urgently.

  “I’m fine, Hal, I’m fine, ” she said, forcing herself to sound casual for his sake. “Everything’s fine. Aunt Jill’s fine. I’m fine. Her sixty Mason jars filled with peach preserves are fine, too, not that you asked, and not that anybody will actually be eating them.” She muffled the phone with her hand for a moment, having an exchange with someone nearby, and then said, “Aunt Jill wants to know whether you like peach preserves.”

  Ambler tensed. “What did you tell her about—”

  “You? Not a thing.” She lowered her voice. “She assumes I’m talking to a boyfriend. A ‘beau,’ as she would say. Imagine.”

  “And you’re sure you haven’t noticed anything off. Anything at all.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing,” she repeated, too quickly.

  “Tell me about this ‘nothing,’ ” Ambler said.

  “Just—oh, it really is nothing. Some guy from the oil company called a little while ago. They were updating their customer records, asked me all sorts of silly little questions, then when they got into stuff about oil usage and the type of oil burner equipment we use, and I went and checked and saw Aunt Jill uses natural gas, not oil, and I came back to the phone, they’d hung up. Must have been some sort of mix-up.”

  “What was the name of the company?”

  “The name?” She paused. “You know, they actually didn’t say.”

  Ambler felt encased in ice. He recognized the hallmarks of the approach: the innocent-seeming confusion, the pleasant professional phone call, probably one of dozens they had been placing—with a voice-print analyzer on the other end.

  It was a probe.

  He was silent for a few moments, not wanting to speak until he could speak calmly. “Laurel,” he said. “When was this?”

  “Maybe . . . twenty minutes ago?” The sangfroid had left her voice.

  Twelve layers of lacquer. Twelve layers of dread. “Listen to me very carefully. You need to leave now.”

  “But—”

  “You need to leave right now.” He went on to give her precise instructions. She was to drive her car to a car repair shop, tell them that the steering alignment needed to be fine-tuned, and drive off with whatever “loaner” car they’d have for her. It was a cheap, easy way of getting a vehicle that could not readily be traced to her.

  Then she was to drive off somewhere—anywhere she had no connections to.

  She listened, repeated the odd detail: he could tell she was taking it all in, calming herself by translating the threat into a set of procedures to be implemented.

  “I’ll do this,” she said, taking a deep breath. “But I need to see you.”

  “That won’t be possible,” he said, as gently as he could.

  “I can’t do this otherwise,” she said: stating a fact, not making an entreaty. “I just . . .” she faltered. “I just can’t.”

  “I’m leaving the country tomorrow,” he explained.

  “I’ll see you tonight, then.”

  “Laurel, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I need to see you tonight,” Laurel repeated with grim finality.

  Late that night, at a motel near Kennedy Airport, Ambler stood in his twentieth-floor room—he had insisted on a high, north-facing floor—studying the traffic on 140th Street in Jamaica, Queens, through a scrim of bad weather. The rain was coming down in sheets, had been for an hour, flooding culverts and forming layers of slick on all the roads. Though not as cold as Montreal, it was decidedly chilly, in the lower forties, and it felt cooler because of the damp. Laurel said she would be driving, and it was no weather to drive in. Yet his spirits leaped at the prospect of seeing her. To be truly cold was to doubt whether you would ever feel warm. Right now, he felt that she was the only thing that could warm him up again.

  At 11:00 P.M., squinting through binoculars, he saw the sedan drive up, a Chevrolet Cavalier, pummeled by the downpour. Somehow he knew it was Laurel even before he caught a glimpse of her tousled auburn hair through the windshield. Now she did as he had instructed: waiting for a minute in front of the hotel, then rejoining traffic, driving until the next exit appeared, and reversing direction. From his high floor he was able to peer at the patterns of traffic surrounding h
er. If she was being tailed, he should be able to tell.

  Ten minutes later, she had returned to the hotel’s concrete porte cochere. Once he called her cell phone to reassure her that she had no visible tail, she emerged from the car, holding a bundle wrapped in plastic, holding it as if it were a precious thing. She knocked on his door just a few minutes after that. As soon as the door was closed, she dropped her blue nylon parka to the floor—as sodden as only supposedly waterproof garments can get—and laid her bundle on the carpet nearby. Wordlessly she stepped toward him, in to him, and they held each other close, feeling each other’s beating hearts. He was clutching her the way a drowning man clutches a lifesaver. For a long moment, the two stood together, nearly stationary, holding each other tightly. Then she pressed her lips to his.

  He pulled back after a few moments. “Laurel, all that’s happened—you need to step back. You need to be careful. This isn’t—what you want.” The words came out in a rush.

  She looked at him, her eyes imploring.

  “Laurel,” he said thickly. “I’m not sure that we . . .”

  He knew that trauma could produce forms of dependency—could distort perceptions, emotions. She still saw him as the man who had rescued her; could not accept that it was he who had imperiled her in the first place. He also knew that she needed desperately to be comforted: to be possessed, even. He could not push her away without wounding her, and the truth was that he did not want to.

  Guilt mixed with aching desire washed over him, and soon the two tumbled onto the bed, two naked bodies, flexing and shuddering and flushing and, together, creating the warmth each desperately craved. When their bodies finally parted—spent, out of breath, glazed with perspiration—their hands sought out each other, and they interlaced fingers, as if neither could bear to be wholly separated. Not just now. Not just yet.

  After several minutes of being quiet together, Laurel turned to him. “I made a stop on the way,” she whispered. She rolled from the bed, got to her feet, and retrieved the package she had arrived with. His heart quickened as he watched her naked form, silhouetted against the drawn curtains. God, she was beautiful.

  She removed something from a plastic bag and handed it to him. A large, heavy volume.

  “What is it?” Ambler asked.

  She was trying not to smile. “Take a look.”

  He switched on the bedside lamp. It was a cloth-bound yearbook, the Carlyle College logo embossed on a tan cover and still in its original shrink-wrap, now looking slightly brittle. His eyes widened.

  “Pristine,” she said. “Untouched, unaltered, untampered with.” She handed it to him. “This is your past. This is what they could never get to.”

  Carlyle College was where she had stopped. “Laurel,” he whispered. He felt a surge of gratitude and of something else, as well, something even stronger. “You did this for me.”

  She looked at him hard, and there was pain in her eyes and something like love, too. “I did it for us.”

  He took the book into his hands. It was substantial, a bound volume meant to last for decades. Laurel’s faith in him was evident in the fact that she had not even felt the need to open the yearbook herself.

  His mouth felt dry. She had found a way to punch through the lies—to expose a cunning charade for what it was. Laurel Holland. My Ariadne.

  “Dear God,” he said. There was wonder in his voice.

  “You told me where you went to school, you told me what class you were in, and so I got to thinking. The way they’d tried to erase your past—I figured they’d done enough to put off a casual investigator. But they couldn’t do more than that.”

  The vaporous plume of the third-person plural: they. A verbal placard over a chasm of uncertainty. Ambler nodded encouragingly.

  “There’s just too much stuff, right? I was thinking about that. It’s like when you rush through the house with a vacuum because company’s coming. Maybe everything looks really tidy. But there’s always stuff—dust under the rug, a take-out carton under the sofa. You just have to look. So maybe they could have altered the computer records at the provost’s. But I went to the alumni office, you see, and I bought a copy of your yearbook. The real, physical object. Paid sixty dollars for it.”

  “Dear God,” Ambler repeated, his heart in his throat. Now he slit open the age-stiffened shrink-wrap with a fingernail and sat back, leaning against the headboard of the bed. The yearbook emitted the plastic smell of expensive printing—of ink and heavy coated stock. He paged through, smiling as he saw images of old hijinks: the infamous pumpkin prank; the full-grown Guernsey cow that had been led into the library, her tail flicking the card catalogs. What struck him most was how skinny most of the kids looked. As he must have.

  “Brings back memories, huh?” Laurel snuggled beside him.

  Ambler’s heart began to pound as he continued to flip slowly through the book. There was something comforting about its very weight and solidity. He thought back to his open-faced twenty-one-year-old visage and the quote he had run beneath his photograph, a quote from Margaret Mead that had somehow impressed him deeply at the time. He still knew the words by heart: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

  Ambler reached the A’s of the regular face pages, and he ran a finger down the column of small rectangular black-and-white images, an array of bushy hair and braces. ALLEN, ALGREN, AMATO, ANDERSON, ANDERSON, AZARIA. His smile faded.

  The photographs were displayed in five rows per page, four faces across. There was no question where the HARRISON AMBLER photograph should have appeared.

  Nothing. Not a blank space. Not a PHOTOGRAPH UNAVAILABLE notice. Just the face of another student, one he vaguely remembered.

  Ambler felt light-headed and a little sick.

  “What’s wrong?” Laurel asked. When she looked where his finger rested, she, too, seemed stricken.

  “I got the wrong yearbook,” she said. “I got the year wrong, didn’t I? I’m so stupid.”

  “No,” Ambler husked. “The year isn’t wrong—I’m wrong.” He exhaled heavily, shut his eyes, and opened them again, willing himself to see something he had not seen before. Something that was not there to be seen.

  It couldn’t be.

  Hurriedly, desperately, he flipped to the index. ALLEN. ALGREN. AMATO. ANDERSON.

  No AMBLER.

  He riffled through the book until he found a group photograph of the Carlyle crew team. He remembered the uniforms, remembered the goddamn boat—the slightly beaten-up Donoratico eight—that was visible in the background. Yet when he searched the group shot, he was nowhere to be found. Young men in yellow Carlyle Ts and shorts. His teammates were all assembled, young men with confident looks, shoulders thrown back and chests puffed up for the photographer. A team of—he counted them—twenty-three undergraduates. Familiar faces all. Hal Ambler was not one of them.

  On autopilot, he continued to page through the book, finding other group shots—teams, moments, activities—where he expected himself to appear. He was nowhere.

  Osiris’s words returned to him. It’s Occam’s razor: What’s the simplest explanation? It’s easier to alter the contents of your head than it is to change the whole world.

  Harrison Ambler was . . . a lie. A brilliant interpolation. It was a life concocted from a lacuna, assembled from a thousand real-world fragments, and funneled into the mind of someone else. Rich feed. An artificial life supplanting an authentic one. A stream of vivid episodes, presented in jumbled, constantly changing order. A slate erased and then rewritten.

  Ambler cradled his head in his arms, seized by terror and bewilderment, by a sense that something had been taken from him that he would never recover: his very identity.

  When he looked up, he saw Laurel staring at him, her own face tearstained.

  “Don’t give in to them,” she said in a hushed voice.

  “Laurel,” he started.

 
“Don’t do this to yourself,” she said, steel in her voice.

  He felt himself collapsing in on himself, like some astral body crushed by its own gravity.

  Laurel put her arms around him, spoke in a low voice. “How’s that poem go? ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you Nobody, too?’ We can be nobodies together.”

  “Laurel,” he began. “I can’t do this to you.”

  “You can’t do this to yourself,” she replied. “Because then they win.” She slipped her hands around his shoulders, grabbing hold of them, as if to bring him back from whatever distant place he had drifted to. “I don’t know how to put this. It’s a matter of instincts, right? Sometimes we know what’s true even if we can’t prove it. Well, let me tell you what I know is true. I look at you, and I don’t feel alone anymore—and I can’t tell you how rare a feeling that is for me. I feel safe when I’m with you. I know you’re a good man. I know it because, trust me, I know the other kind all too well. I have an ex-husband who turned my life into a living hell—I had to get a restraining order against him, which didn’t do shit. Those men last night—I saw how they looked at me, like a piece of meat. Didn’t care if I lived or died. One of them said something about ‘having a slice of that ass’ as soon as I was put under. The other said he’d ‘have a helping,’ too. Nobody would ever know, they agreed. That’s the first thing that was going to happen to me. Only, they didn’t count on you.”

  “But if it wasn’t for me—”

  “Stop it! Saying that is like saying they’re not to blame. But they are, and they’re going to pay, too. Listen to your instincts, and you’ll get to what’s true.”

  “What’s true,” he echoed. The words sounded hollow in his mouth.

  “You’re true,” she said. “Let’s start with that.” She pulled him close. “I believe. You need to believe, too. You need to do that for me.”

  The warmth of her body strengthened him, like armor. She was strong—God, she was strong. He had to recover his strength as well.