“So what do we do?”
“Open the box.” The A.D. paused. “Put him up for adoption. Wait for this thing to cool down. And then reexamine the problem.” The A.D. said this in a flat, dull voice without any edge of menace.
“Ship him back to Florida?”
“Tonight, if possible. Then back off. Just a discreet distance. I want you to handle it yourself.”
“You know,” Rice said, trying once more. “He does have some real problems besides the ones we could give him. He’s suffering from exhaustion, malnutrition, some jet-lag fever, a cold, there’s a kidney problem of some sort. And he has a skin infection on his feet; he could deteriorate on his own.”
“No one dies of athlete’s foot,” the A.D. said.
“He’s weak.”
“Make certain he lasts until we have him signed and sealed in Florida. What was the name of the man in charge down there?”
“McGillicuddy. He hasn’t made a fuss, he understands our problem. He did some work for us in Morocco twelve years ago.”
“Fine. McGillicuddy could be our link to monitor the patient. Have him take Tunney off our hands and with some discretion. The farther we take him from Washington the better I’ll like it. There are too many reporters in this city.”
“But what if he starts talking down there. To reporters, to the priests…”
“He has shown no inclination to say anything thus far, Rice,” the A.D. said dryly.
“Perhaps he doesn’t like us,” Rice said.
The A.D. frowned. Rice had no sense of conversational savoir faire; the A.D.’s comment had not called for a joke.
“Damage, Rice. Damage has been done. It can’t be undone but it can be mitigated. Getting him away from here is the first step. In the next few days we simply watch and determine how much more damage he has in him.”
Rice stared at the A.D. while he spoke and then nodded in agreement and looked out the window. It was too dirty, too complicated, too many things had already gone wrong. He wished again he was away from here, home again in McLean, sitting on the patio in the soft autumn light, watching the Redskins game on the tube. “There’s more damage, isn’t there? That can be done?”
“Yes,” the A.D. admitted. “Much more.”
“Can I get into the picture?”
“No,” the A.D. said. “Not now.” After all, secrets compelled other secrets and a shared confidence now, even with Rice, would be a betrayal.
8
He only remembered parts of it, as though the landscape of his memory had been covered with a thick fog that made shapes indistinct but which lifted from time to time to show places and people in different frames of time.
They had come for him at nearly five in the afternoon. He was sure of that, he had seen the watch one of them wore. He had opened his eyes and they were around the bed — the one with the gray suit, called Maurice, and the one called Rice, and the one called George — they had lifted him from the bed effortlessly, onto the gurney cart. Then orderlies had covered him with sheets and the two agents had strapped him down on the cart. He saw a clock again in the corridor as they wheeled him away. Yes, it had been just five o’clock.
Then fog. Just a vague memory of the ride in the ambulance. Darkness, lights, sirens. The straps cutting into his thin arms. He was thirsty.
Next was the plane itself. It was very loud inside, he could hear the engines whining, it might have been a cargo plane. There had been bumpy weather just after takeoff and then the plane settled into smooth flight. He slept; the fog descended on his dreams.
He awoke as the plane landed. He was thirsty still and said so but they ignored him. Tunney was certain he had spoken aloud to them; he was sure he had heard his own voice. But perhaps that, too, had been a dream.
Sleep, fog, dreams: He was in the jungle just outside of Pnon again, with the woman and the child. The dream always came back to him this way.
In the morning, the company of Marines had come through the village, burning the huts. Some of them had used cigarette lighters to start fires at the corners of the thatched roofs.
Voices that were so familiar. He nearly called out to them; almost, nearly, but hesitation overwhelmed him as it always did.
He had taken the woman and the child into the jungle instead, as the flames from the burning huts raced through the village.
A child was in the road, sprawled in death, his belly already exposed to flies.
They hid, they did not speak; they huddled together. Shots, single shots and then bursts of bullets. The whoomp of a flamethrower coming to life. And screams.
The dead child in the road. A merciful death in light of what followed.
He saw Van Lo run from the village, the flesh of his arm turning white and then black, the skin melting as the flames made him a torch. Beyond screams. What did it feel like to be so hurt?
Tunney, huddling, holding them to him. She was so close to him, she was weeping, he knew, keeping the tears from falling, a dry weeping that wrenched his heart. He had told her they would not harm her. Everything was a lie in the end, of course.
Van Lo danced in the flames. One of the Marines thought to shoot him then. His body burned to a tight, black core.
Fog, sleep, dreams again. He awoke and he was in another car, it was deep night and the streets were wet with a recent rain. Palm trees like broken umbrellas stood sentry along the streets.
“I’m thirsty,” he told them again. Yes, he was sure of it this time, he had definitely heard his own voice; this wasn’t a trick of memory. But they didn’t answer him. And Maurice, the man in the gray suit. He was gone.
He closed his eyes and thought he was going to sleep.
Another time and place: Now they were in a hut, away from the village, or perhaps before the horror came. The woman slept next to him; he touched her face. She was only a child though her own baby slept in another part of the hut, on the grass matting. Child, child, he had thought, giving the word two chances to describe both of them.
In the darkness, next to him, in the festering heat of night, he could smell her next to him, he felt her flesh next to his flesh, felt the small, yielding softness of her body.
He was unstrapped from the gurney and lifted onto a bed.… Screams. He had been screaming all day and night in the tiger cage, screaming into madness. They knew he was mad then and it amused them. His hair had turned white. When they let him go, he was bent over, crippled by the weeks in the tiger cage.
Cool sheets. He opened his eyes. Water. One of them gave him a glass of water and he reached for it, felt the cool glass in his hands. Rice was there. And others. But this was not a hospital, he thought. Outside the windows, he could see rows of palm trees illuminated by street lamps; a city with wet streets. It was raining again. He thought he heard the distant growl of automobiles. Was he awake? But no, refreshed by the water, he could not fight off the sleep.
Later he realized that it was only a trick of his mind, that the fog of memory was merely lifting and he was watching the tableau played out again. Bombs from airplanes coming in low over the village.
This was a different place, in the mountains. It was very cold. The woman was sick, the child they had saved was dead. A fever only, not the war.