The first man interrupted. “Your job was to kill that executive, and then the Ayatollah. To take them out with explosives. And to make sure you came back with photographs. Because we wanted it to look as if the same nasty folks had done both hits. The photographs would be sent to the major newspapers, along with a bragging note from the Iran People’s Movement.”
“I’ve never heard of it,” Drew said.
“Of course not. It doesn’t exist. We made it up. What difference does that make? The note would have said that the Ayatollah—and the American oil executive—had been executed because they’d made a bargain to replace the Shah with the same old repressive government. And when Iran’s indignation reached its peak, the next popular choice to rule the country, a man just behind the Ayatollah, would have taken over. But he’d have done what the Ayatollah should have. He’d have cooperated with the Western oil companies.”
(Father Stanislaw nodded. “And because an American and his family had been killed, no one would have suspected that American interests were to blame. It might have worked.”
“Except…”
“Indeed, except for you.”
“And because of me, the Iranian hostage crisis occurred, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Reagan defeated Carter…”)
“It could have worked!” the first man shouted at Drew, his face distorted with anger. “But, boyo, just one problem. It all depended on a timetable. Forty-eight hours from one hit to the next, but you didn’t stay on schedule! On those two days, we knew for sure you could get at both the oil executive and the Ayatollah, We’d learned their itinerary. We’d found the spots where they’d be most exposed!”
Drew tried to shift the blame. “You should have allowed for contingencies. If the timing was so important, why wasn’t another operative given the second assignment?”
“Because, you stupid bastard, the same man had to do both hits! Because of the camera! Both hits had to be recorded on the same roll of film. When we sent the photographs and the negatives to the press, we wanted the pictures to be in the same numbered sequence—to prove to Iran that whoever had killed the oil executive had also killed the Ayatollah. The Iranians had to be convinced that one of their own groups was responsible.”
“Why blame me? You’ve got the camera. Reschedule the second assignment.”
The first man sighed and looked at his companions. “You hear what he’s saying? How simple he thinks it is to make things right again? Boyo, we can’t reschedule! It’s too fucking late! The Ayatollah’s tightened security around him. We can’t get near him anymore. Not close enough to use that camera. That first hit’s worthless now! You did it for nothing!”
Drew heard the young boy’s screams of grief.
“But the second hit—or rather, the one you didn’t do,” the aristocratic man said, “your failure earned you something, didn’t it? How much did the Ayatollah pay for you to get conveniently lost in the mountains? You went to him, right?”
“That isn’t true.”
“I said quit it!” The first man stepped behind the sofa, yanking Drew’s head back, pressing the knife against his throat again.
The third man continued. “Be reasonable. We want an excuse that makes sense. Later, after I give you the amytal, if your story’s the same, we’ll know you’re not lying. And if we can sympathize with your reasons, we’ll call it an honest mistake. We’ll set you free. Of course, you wouldn’t ever be hired again. But I don’t think you’ll object.”
Drew’s throat was stretched so taut that he couldn’t speak. The man behind him seemed to understand; he removed the knife.
Drew coughed and swallowed. He had no more to invent. “All right.” He massaged his throat. “I lied.”
“Now there, that’s better. At last, we’re making progress,” the third man said.
“But I didn’t sell out. It’s not what you think. Something—I don’t know how else to say it—happened to me in the mountains.”
“What?” The first man came from behind the sofa.
Drew told them. He’d anticipated their reaction correctly; they looked at him as if he’d gone mad.
“Boyo, not hire you again is right. Something happened to you for sure. You lost your nerve.”
“There’s one way to know,” the third man said and gestured with the full hypodermic. “As I asked you earlier, please take off your coat. Roll up your sleeve.”
Drew stared at the hypodermic, his spine feeling cold. They’d brought too much. His interrogators had enough amytal to kill him, as soon as they’d verified his story. He was being invited to participate in his own execution.
“Under amytal, I’ll say the same thing,” he insisted. “Because it’s the truth.” Standing, he took off his coat.
He threw it to his left, toward the man with the knife, obscuring his face. He had to reach the pistol. Lunging, he twisted the second man’s wrist, tilting the silencer on the barrel toward the gunman’s face. He pulled the trigger. The gun made a noise like the muffled impact of a fist against a pillow. The bullet went through the man’s right eye, spewing blood and brain.
The man with the knife yanked the coat from his face. Drew shoved the sagging corpse at him. As they toppled, he pivoted toward the third man, jerked the hypodermic out of his delicate hand, and rammed the needle into the side of his neck. Blood flew, crimson spurting from a high-pressure hose, as he shoved the plunger all the way in. The genteel man collapsed.
Drew swung toward the upright lamp, clutched it like a staff, and parried the knife that the first man, freed from the coat and the body, lunged at him. The cord on the lamp broke, extinguishing the bulb. Flickering light from the fireplace silhouetted their movements. Drew whipped the base of the lamp toward his enemy’s shoulder, reversed his attack, and thrust the bulb-end of the lamp against the knife hand. He jumped back, using the skills he’d been taught in Colorado, struck his assailant in the crotch with the base of the lamp, and slammed the knife from his hand with the other end.
He grabbed the knife off the floor, ramming it up beneath his enemy’s chin, through the tongue, through the roof of the mouth, into the brain.
Drew continued to hold the knife, feeling warm blood cascade down its blade and over his fingers on the handle. He kept the man standing up for a moment, feeling him tremble, scowling at his dying eyes.
Then he released his grip. The man fell backward, his head cracking sharply on the bricks in front of the fireplace.
Drew grabbed his boots and dragged him back from the flames, unable to bear the stench of burning hair. He shuddered, staring at the blood, the bodies around him. The odor of urine, of excrement, filled the room.
Though hardly innocent of the smell, he wanted to vomit. Not from fear but from revulsion. Death. Too much. For too many years.
3
“And then?” Arlene asked. She had taken his hand as he talked, giving him at least some comfort.
“I left the pistol in the house. All I wanted to do was run, though I made time to grab the camera. I’m sure a psychiatrist would find the choice interesting. But I did have a handgun in my emergency cache in Paris, along with money and a passport under another name. I rented a car and drove to Spain. I got rid of the gun, of course, in case I was searched when I crossed the border.”
“Why Spain?” Father Stanislaw asked.
“Why not? I figured they’d be looking for me everywhere. At least—” Drew shrugged “—Spain was warmer. I left the car with the rental company and hired a private plane to fly me to Portugal. There, in Lisbon, I had another alias on a passport. And after that? Ireland. America. Three times, they almost got me. Once, at a service station, I had to set a car on fire. But at least I didn’t need to kill anymore. And finally I was home. In America. I knew exactly where I was going. I didn’t care about shahs and ayatollahs and oil and terrorists. None of it was important. I’d killed the equivalent of my parents. I’d caused a boy to suffer for the rest of his life as I had. The world was a madhouse. B
y comparison, those Carthusian monks lived in paradise. They had their priorities straight. They set their sights toward the long view. Toward eternity. Since I was ten, I’ve been a wanderer. But after I fled from that house on the Seine, faced with the prospect of wandering still more, I finally had a direction. I saw a goal. I wanted peace.
“A priest named Father Hafer was my sponsor. He arranged for me to go into the monastery. But before I entered the Carthusians, I had to get rid of all my possessions. Except these photographs, of course. But when I thought I’d finished, when I wondered if I’d canceled myself, I realized that there was one last thing I had to do. A sentimental weakness. A final breaking of the ties.”
4
In darkness, Drew crouched behind bushes and jumped up with all his strength, his fingers clutching the concrete rim of the wall he’d been hiding against. It was March. His bare hands swelled from the aching cold as he scraped the soles of his shoes against the wall, struggling to climb.
He reached the top, sprawled flat upon it, breathed hard, then squirmed down the other side, supporting himself by his numbed fingertips.
He landed on frozen earth, his knees buckling, and surged up defensively, his only weapons his hands. He could have brought a pistol, of course, but he’d vowed that he wouldn’t kill again. Subdue an enemy with his hands, that he could justify. But kill again? His soul recoiled from the possibility. If he in turn were killed tonight, it would be God’s will. But no one challenged him.
He scanned the dark. After the glare of streetlights on the far side of the wall, his eyes would normally have needed a second or two to adjust to the deeper gloom. But he’d shut his eyes as he dropped from the wall. And now that he’d opened them, his irises were already wide.
He saw murky trees and bushes, a few waist-high upright pipes with taps, watering cans beside them. And tombstones. Rows and rows of them, their shadows stretching off until the night concealed them.
Pleasant View Cemetery, Boston.
He crept through shadows, passing trees and bushes, crouching by gravestones, sprinting stooped across gravel lanes, exhaling with relief as he reached silent grass again. Pressing his back for cover against the wall of a cold mausoleum, he studied the gloom. The darkness was eerily silent. The only disturbance was the lonely far-off drone of a car.
And at last, as he crept farther, he saw them, never confused for a moment as to where they would be.
The headstones, the graves, of his parents.
But he came at them indirectly, circling, checking every likely hiding place, remembering the vandals he’d protected his parents against so many years ago.
Finally he stood before them, staring down at the headstones where the names would be if he could see them.
But even at night, he knew that this place was theirs. He traced his fingers lovingly across their names, the dates of their births, their deaths; then stepped back, brooding down at them for an instant that became a minute, two, then three, and said at last, “If only you hadn’t died.”
A voice made him stiffen.
“Drew.”
He swung.
The voice was male. It was far away, hushed.
“Why did you do it?” The voice was ghostly.
Drew strained his eyes but couldn’t penetrate the blackness … over there, to his right.
He didn’t feel threatened. Not yet, at least. Because he knew that the man could easily have shot him while he stood in front of his parents’ graves.
Which meant that the man felt the need to talk.
He recognized the voice.
Jake’s.
“Do you realize the shit you’ve caused?” Jake asked from the dark.
Drew almost smiled. A rush of friendship overcame him.
“Or how many men they’ve got hunting you?” Jake’s voice was low.
“And what about you?” Drew asked. “Were you told to hunt me, too? You’re a long way from New York. You’re not here because you like cemeteries at three a.m. Are you going to kill me?”
“That’s what I’m supposed to do,” Jake’s voice was resonant, mournful.
“Then go ahead.” Exhausted, empty, Drew suddenly didn’t care any longer. “I’m dead already. I might as well fall down and be still.”
“But why?”
“Because you’ve got your orders,” Drew said.
“No, that isn’t what I mean. I want to know why you sold the network out.”
“I didn’t.”
“They say you did.”
“And I can say I’m the Pope. That doesn’t make it true. Besides, you didn’t believe them. Otherwise, you’d never have given me the chance to talk. You’d have shot me while I stood here. How did you find me?”
“Desperation.”
“That’s what I always liked about you. Your knack for long explanations.”
“They sent a team to watch where you lived, just in case, but I knew you wouldn’t go back there. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realized you wouldn’t go back to any place that the network associates with you. My best guess was you’d holed up somewhere in the mountains. You know enough to survive there for months, years, even in winter. So that was that, I figured. The race was over. You’d won.”
“That doesn’t explain…”
“I’m coming to it. See, something kept nagging at me. A speck of a memory. There had to be some place that irresistibly tugged you. Even people like us are human. Where, though? What made you what you are? And then I remembered what you’d told me once—when a snowstorm forced us to camp for the night on a peak, the windchill so bad we had to keep talking to each other to make sure we didn’t fall asleep and die. Remember?”
Drew did. With fondness. “In the Andes.”
“Right.” Jake’s voice came out of the dark. “And when you couldn’t think of anything else, you told me what had happened to your parents and how you lived with your uncle and aunt in Boston.”
“My uncle’s dead now.”
“Yes, but your aunt’s still alive, though the way you’d described her I knew you’d never get in touch with her for help. But Boston reminded me of your story about how you protected your parents’ graves. How you used to sneak into the cemetery every night. How, even as an adult, you still went to visit them whenever you could. It wasn’t hard for me to learn which cemetery your parents were buried in or to find their graves. But I kept asking myself, before you went to ground, before you shut yourself off from the world, would you say your final goodbyes, would you still obey the old impulse? Or had you done so already and I’d missed you?”
“A long shot.”
“Sure. But the only shot I had.”
Drew squinted toward the dark. “I’ve been on the run since January. You’ve been watching these graves every night since then?”
“I told you. Desperation. But I gave myself till the end of this month.” Jake laughed. “Imagine my surprise when you suddenly came out of the shadows. For a second, I thought I was seeing things.”
“It’s a good place for ghosts. And reunions. And executions. The undertaker might just as well skip the funeral and plant me where I fall. But you still haven’t shot me. Why?”
In the darkness, Jake sighed. “Because I want to know what really happened.”
Drew told him.
For a moment, Jake didn’t react. “It makes a good story.”
“It’s more than a story!”
“But don’t you see? It doesn’t matter. What they believe is what matters. They came to me. ‘You’re his friend,’ they said. ‘You know his habits. You know what he’ll do. He’s dangerous. There’s no telling who he might sell us out to next.’”
“I told you already. I didn’t sell them out!”
“And they also said, ‘We’ll give you a hundred thousand dollars if you find him … and you kill him.’”
Drew lost his patience. He stepped ahead, stretching out his arms. “Then do it! What are you waiting for? Earn the bo
unty!”
“Don’t rely on our friendship,” Jake warned from the darkness. “Don’t come any closer, and don’t try to run.”
“Run? I’m sick of running. Kill me, or let me go.”
“If I let you go, you’d still be running.”
“No. Tomorrow I’m supposed to enter a monastery.”
“What?”
“That’s right. I’m becoming a Carthusian.”
“You mean you really did get religion? A Carthusian? Wait a minute. Aren’t they the ones who live alone in a cell and pray all day? That’s fucking weird. It’s like crawling into a grave.”
“The opposite. Like being resurrected. I’m in a grave already. And not because of the gun you’re aiming at me. Think what you want. From your point of view, by joining the Carthusians I’d be dead already, wouldn’t I? You wouldn’t have to kill me.”
“You were always good with words,” Jake said from the darkness.
“I won’t insult our friendship by thinking that you’re tempted by the hundred thousand dollars they offered you to kill me. I won’t insult you either by trying to tempt you with a larger amount if you let me go. The fact is, I don’t have that kind of money anymore. I gave everything away.”
“Weirder and weirder.”
“What I am doing is counting on our friendship. I saved your life once. On that same climb in the Andes. Remember?”
“Oh, I remember all right.”
“Nobody knows you found me. Return the favor. Save my life. Let me walk away.”
“If only things could be that simple. See, there’s something else I haven’t told you. And more at stake here than just the hundred thousand. That’s just the carrot on the end of the stick. But that stick has another end, a sharp end, and it’s being jabbed right into my back. You really made them angry, Drew. A failed assignment. A major one. And those three operatives you killed. The network’s sure you’ve become a free-lance, a rogue.”
“They’re wrong!”
“But that’s what they think. They’re sure you sold out. The things you know, you could do a lot of damage to the network. So they’re falling on you hard. They won’t ever stop looking. And the angrier they get, the more they start falling hard on other people, too. Like me. It’s like because I know you, because we’re friends, they figure I should be able to find you. And if I don’t, then I must be a rogue. Next month, I expect them to put the boots to me. So you see my point? I can’t let you go.”