“He certainly developed a strong dependence,” Lambert agreed modestly. “It was too strong for him to continue on his own anymore. The doubt was too deep.”
“So often the way it happens.” McCarthy sighed.
“He was doing every thing he should have done in Ma drid,” Erickson insisted, coming out in support of his division chief.
“What was the point in taking the risk!” McCarthy said, with strained patience. “This way everything is boxed and tied with ribbon. Rivera’s dead, as we intended. The speculation about the who’s and why’s of that killing will go on for weeks, and every day it’ll act as the warning we always planned it to be to Havana. And in Spanish custody is a man provably a Soviet assassin; it doesn’t matter a damn that the guy won’t talk or admit anything. They got him in the room with the gun still in his hand, for Christ’s sake! It fits perfectly with the history of O’Farrell’s mother; Moscow pursuing relentlessly the son of a nationalist dissident. We can even seed the doubt that the murder-suicide verdict on the parents was wrong. That their deaths were Soviet orchestrated, too …” McCarthy looked at Petty, as the doubter. “You see anything hanging loose from that?”
Petty wished he could. He still believed absolutely in the correctness of what he and his department had to do, but this was the first time they’d turned on one of their own people. It frightened him. He said, “I agree it wraps everything up.”
“Maneuvering the Soviet involvement and then alerting the Spanish authorities was brilliant,” Sneider said syco-phantically, stroking McCarthy’s favorite hobbyhorse.
“Didn’t I say that’s what the Russians would do when we leaked O’Farrell as the killer of Leonid Makarevich?” McCarthy said.
The arrested Soviet assassin was named Vladimir Kopalin, Petty knew. He knew, too, that the Agency had monitored the man’s arrival in Madrid and watched him stalk O’Farrell and let it happen: wanted it to happen. He said, “We’re going to keep O’Farrell’s State Department appointment, right? It wasn’t just a way to guarantee the media hype by getting the Secretary of State here today?”
“Sure, why not?” The Plans director shrugged. “That way Mrs. O’Farrell collects a nice fat pension as well as the insurance.”
“What about the new man, who really took Rivera out?” Lambert queried.
“What about him?” Erickson demanded. He was as unsettled as Petty.
“He okay?”
“He said it was easy; called it a piece of cake,” Petty reported. “Actually it was the way suggested by O’Farrell.…” He paused and added defiantly, ‘The way he was going to do it.”
Lambert appeared to miss the jab. He said, “We’d better tell Symmons to keep an eye on him. Let’s not recruit someone who enjoys it. That’s dangerous.”
“I thought everything we did was dangerous,” Petty said. He felt oppressed within the limousine and desperately wanted a pipe. Below them, through the protectively black windows, he saw that the interment was almost over. The mourners were shifting, about to leave, and the limousine drivers were standing ready to open the doors. Abruptly Petty announced, “I’m going down to speak to her.”
“That’s not wise,” Sneider said.
“A lot of things aren’t,” Petty said. “I’ll make my own way back.”
He left the car before there could be any more objection, shivering at once as the wind cut through his topcoat. It was too strong to attempt lighting a pipe, he realized miserably. He shrugged his collar up further and took a pathway to bring him out by the other official cars, as if he had emerged from one of them.
The family group were still some way away when he got there and he hung back from the media rush as the Secretary of State spoke briefly to them. Mrs. O’Farrell was shiny-faced and very red around the eyes, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She didn’t appear to speak a lot, hardly at all, but nodded and even smiled faintly at what was being said to her.
Petty waited until the woman had almost reached her car before stepping forward. “Mrs. O’Farrell?”
Jill hesitated, looking toward him, waiting.
“I knew your husband; worked with him,” Petty said, awkwardly. “I wanted you to know how sorry I am.”
“Thank you,” said the woman. Her voice was quite resolute.
“You’ll have all the State Department materiaclass="underline" telephone numbers and references. If you need any help, please use them.” State would automatically channel any communication through to him.
“I’ll remember that,” Jill promised. “I’m thinking of selling out here and moving to Chicago. I’ve a daughter there, you know.”
“No,” Petty lied. “I didn’t know. It would probably be a good idea.”
“There’s a church in Evanston that’s been very kind to me since it happened,” Jill said, the dam unblocked, wanting to talk now. “We attended church regularly, Charles and I. We both found it a comfort.”
Petty’s throat moved and he was glad his coat collar was high. “Yes,” he said inadequately. Beside her the child he knew to be Billy had stopped crying, too, but the breath was going into him in sobs that made his tiny shoulders shudder. “Please don’t forget,” Petty urged. “Any problem at all, just get in touch.”
“Yes,” Jill said.
Petty doubted that she would. He pulled away and watched until her car led the cortege out of the cemetery, eventually following toward the exit. He was quite close before he realized the figure there was Erickson, hunched for protection by the gate pillar.
“I thought we could get a cab back together,” the man said.
“I didn’t like that,” Petty declared. “I didn’t like that one little bit.”
Erickson began waving for a cab. “McCarthy says he wants to talk. Another assignment, I guess. He said it was important.”
“Aren’t they all?” Petty queried wearily. It wasn’t until he was inside the cab and it was moving away that he realized it was festooned with No Smoking stickers.
Everything was completely alien to Jorge; he could remember none of it. It was very hot and his clothes stuck to him and the streets stank of sewage and gas fumes, making his chest tighten. He’d been escorted from England by a woman as well as a man from the Foreign Ministry. She kept trying to hold him and he wished she wouldn’t.
“Your father is a hero,” the man said in the car taking them from the airport. “He is to be honored. There is already a place for you in a state academy.”
Jorge was taken straight there and he hated it, as he hated everything else. The curriculum was completely different from what he had studied at the lycée, he was bullied, and an older boy sexually molested him the first week. Jorge complained to the housemaster, who dismissed it as a fact of academy life. The master let the other boys know of Jorge’s complaint and he was beaten very badly and kept for several days in the academy’s sanatorium, with a suspected rib fracture.
The same couple who had brought him from London collected him for the ceremony they had promised. Jorge was allowed to stand on a podium with a lot of important-looking men, one of whom had a beard and appeared to be obeyed by everyone else. The man ruffled his hair once. He smelled of cigars.
Jorge understood little of it. There were a lot of speeches and a lot of cheering and a small curtain was pulled away from a plaque set into a wall. His father’s name was written upon it. So were the words FIGHTER FOR FREEDOM.
This time Jorge let the woman hold him and on the way back to the academy told both her and the man how he was beaten and how the older boys kept getting into his bed at night. The man promised to speak to the principal. Jorge begged him not to, because of the beating he had gotten on the previous occasion. The man said it would be different this time.