“How was she different?”
“I’d finally screamed at her”—he remembered the night, a livid memory, like a scar, still tender to the touch—“that maybe she hated what I was doing, but I was doing something. Something. That I believed. That she sat around making wisecracks and playing at despair but never doing anything, never believing in anything. That she was too precious to do anything. For some reason that really cut into her. After that she was different. And then I began getting these reports that she was seeing this guy for lunches in various obscure spots around town. That was all.”
“And that was it?”
“In January, I think. I smelled his aftershave on the pillow. She hadn’t even bothered to change the pillowcases. She had to let me know. She had to hurt me.”
He thought about it: the last provocation. After all the years, the final, the ultimate provocation. It was as if she’d finally launched, and now he had to counterstrike on warning or lose his hardware in the silos.
“Cheap aftershave,” he said. “English Leather, can you believe that?”
“What happened?”
Peter couldn’t reach it, couldn’t touch it.
The pause lengthened.
“And?”
“Look, it was a very intense relationship. I was capable of…”
“Capable of what, Dr. Thiokol?”
“I guess finally I hit her.” He remembered the evening, June it was, leafy June, the air full of light, the trees green, the breeze sweet and lovely. He’d never hit anything before. He remembered the way her head jolted on the impact and the way her eyes went blank and then her face broke up with fear. She fell back, leaking blood, her nose mashed. Spasm war: the end. She cried. He felt so shitty, he tried to help her, but he was afraid he’d think about Ari Gottlieb again and hit her some more. He told her he was feeling pretty fucked up in the head, she ought to get out of there. He might kill her. And he told her he was going to get a gun and kill Ari Gottlieb. That was June.
“It was something else too.”
Peter turned so that he didn’t have to look at the two of them. After all the denying, it was time to reach in and go where he was most terrified to go. He finally faced it.
“I’d also — well, I did a lot of work at home, and I found stuff — rearranged. Out of order. Slightly scrambled. It really scared the hell out of me. I guess I couldn’t deal with it.”
“It was her?”
“It had to be.”
“Why didn’t you say something?”
“I just put it into the deep part of my head and covered it up with everything I had. Have you ever heard of denial? You refuse to deal with reality. That’s when I flipped, I really flipped. I crashed in July.”
There was another long silence.
“It sounds like a classic,” said one of the agents. “They probably had the two of you under surveillance for a long time, knew exactly how vulnerable she was. They built her a dream man, tailored exactly to your weaknesses. He seduced her. And recruited her. That’s how they did it.”
“Who? Gottlieb was an Israeli, for Christ’s sake. They’re on our side, for God’s sake.”
“Well, in some things. In others, maybe not. Maybe — well, who knows? She’ll have to tell us.”
This struck through Peter’s defenses. Ashamed, he still reacted instinctively. “Go easy on her. The truth is, no matter what, I still love her. I never loved anyone before and I’ll never love anyone else. It was my fault. It wasn’t hers—”
Finally, he’d run out of words.
He sat for a while after they rushed off with their little treasure, feeling awfully rocky inside. Had he just betrayed her? He wasn’t sure anymore where the higher loyalties lay. He hated the idea of disappointing her again, after everything else. He also felt close to her. He realized it had pleased him to talk of her. He wanted to reach out for her. It was dark in the room. He thought of Megan, Megan’s laugh, which he had not heard for ages.
He remembered the last time he’d seen her. Two weeks ago, after such a long time. They’d talked for a while, and for a while everything seemed fine and there seemed to be some chance for them. He was out of the bin and teaching at the Hopkins and everything was fine. The key vault thing was finally going through, they’d just sent him the final design configuration and the Northrop design team had really done a good—
But in the morning she’d been angry with him. She said he was happy only because the project was going well. He was still a part of it, wasn’t he? He still drew power and pleasure from its evil.
He’d gotten angry. Shouts, screams, accusations, the same old business, the air hot with neurotic fury. He’d watched her go off.
Still, she’d looked so damn beauti—
Certain things clicked in the machine of a brain he had and Peter recognized from the pattern that a wondrous possibility had just been opened.
But he also had a moment of real loneliness. Jesus, Megan, what the fuck have you done now? What the fuck have I done?
And then he thought, Where is Puller? Where is Puller?
They reached the lateral tunnel without much trouble, and Rat Team Alpha headed one way, toward the shaft called Alice. That left Team Baker to veer toward Elizabeth.
“We goin’ to fuck this Elizabeth,” said Walls. “We goin’ crawl up this white bitch’s pussy, and fuck her to death. Give her some lovin’ like she never thought of. Once they go black, they never go back.”
“Shut up,” said Witherspoon, an edge on his voice.
“Man, you talk like you married to a white bitch.”
“I am. Shut up.”
“Man, no wonder you so mellow. Man, I was cashing in on white pussy every night, I tell you—”
“Shut up. Nobody talks about my wife like that. She’s a terrific gal who just happens to be white, goddammit.”
Walls snickered, a deep contemptuous sound. So rich. This jive-ass white boy nigger is full of himself, Mr. Delta Mean Motherfucker, see how he do if Charlie’s up ahead. He shit up his pants real good.
He liked the darkness, the cool air of the tomb. The tunnel was narrowing, too, closing down. The initial shaft had been cleanly cut into the mountain, almost like a stairwell, its walls flat and more or less smooth. A little railroad track had run through it where the miners pushed their little trains. It had a comfy feel to it.
But now, after the separation of the teams, the walls were closing in. It was coolish and clammy in there; he could smell the coal dust in the air, and something else, too, a tang or something. Witherspoon’s powerful beam cut like a sword all around, jiggering nervously this way and that, its white circle roaming all over the place like a man’s hands on a woman’s body. Meanwhile, Walls kept his beam straight ahead.
“Man, you must be nervous or something.”
Witherspoon didn’t say a thing. The night vision goggles pressed against his head tightly, pinching it, and it was less than pleasant. And he was a little jumpy, it was true. In Grenada he had been amazed by how un-nervous he was, but it had happened so fast, there wasn’t time to be nervous. The stick had landed, they shucked their ‘chutes and were hauling ass up this little ravine toward the airfield HQ, when literally, all hell had broken loose. Some lucky Cubie had been gazing skyward when the black-painted Charlie-130 Herc had flown in for the insertion, and had seen the black-clad commandos floating to earth.