26
THE SAME RECEPTIONIST WAS AT HER DESK AT THE WBRS radio station, thumbing through what could very well have been the same magazine. When she saw me coming, she opened a desk drawer and reached down into it with both hands. She came out with a goldenrod envelope. She hefted it up and offered it across the desk to me.
“What’s this?”
“It’s from Lyle. He said you’d be back.”
She gave me a look of complete disdain, as though letting Lyle down meant letting her down, too.
“Thanks.” I took it from her. It was heavy. “Is he back there?”
“He’s gone.”
The finality in her tone suggested that she didn’t mean he had gone out for lunch. “Is he coming back?”
“No.”
“Why not? What happened?”
With both hands flat on the desk, she leaned forward and looked up at me. “He left the day you came here and never came back to work.”
The envelope in my hand suddenly seemed to have more heft to it. “Is he all right? Has anyone spoken to him?”
“He called in. He said everything was fine and thanks and all that, but he wouldn’t be back and not to look for him. He told us to donate his last check to the Jimmy Fund. He said he was leaving for good.” She went back to her magazine.
I thought back to what he’d said in the control room about being fucked, about having some decisions to make. Apparently, he had made them, but I still had to wonder what would prompt a man to quit his job and uproot his family that way.
“He didn’t leave any-”
“Forwarding information? No. He left that.” She nodded to the envelope. I had the sense from her reaction that she had somehow been bruised by Lyle’s departure.
“Were you friends?”
She had never taken her eyes from her magazine. “Good enough friends that I would never have expected him to leave town without so much as a goodbye.” She turned the page but must have decided that more needed to be said.
“I hope you’re happy with yourself. I hope it doesn’t bother you that just when he was getting settled and things were getting back to normal, you came along and stirred it all up again.”
I could tell she was one of those people who liked delivering bad news. It was right there on her face, and it made me uneasy. “Stirred up what?”
“His oldest son was run over by a truck and killed while his little brother watched.
I took a step back from the desk.
“That’s why Lyle left the paper to come here. He wanted to spend more time with Jeff. I guess now he’ll be out looking for another job, thanks to you.”
“Did they…was it an accident?”
“Hit and run. Never caught them.”
I took another step back. It felt as if she’d just splashed acid in my face.
“He said to be careful with that.”
“What?”
She nodded at the envelope that I was now hugging to my chest.
“And good luck.” She turned the page to a new article. “He said be careful and good luck.”
I sat in the car with the overstuffed envelope in my lap and both hands on the wheel, thinking about what she’d said and what it meant. I felt like one of those patients who wakes up in the middle of surgery-in pain and completely helpless. I tried breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, but I couldn’t catch my breath.
It was one thing to threaten an adult. Adults chose paths that sometimes went to scary places. But kids don’t make those choices. A kid never had anything to do with anything. The thought that Lyle’s son, trusting and vulnerable and feeling safe in his world, could have been run down and killed just for being his father’s son hurt beyond words and made me want to kill someone.
Good luck, and be careful. That was Lyle’s message. That was part of Lyle’s message. The rest of it was in the envelope. I had to dig in to know the rest, but I had the strongest feeling that if I did, something bad would happen to me, too. I was certain of it. I brushed my fingers across the outside. It was soft and worn and well used. He had traded his job and his family’s life in Boston for me to have it. Perhaps not by choice, but that’s how it had turned out. I had to look inside.
I slipped my fingers in and pulled out a couple of pages. They looked to be the middle pages in the draft of a story. I pulled out a few more and found the beginning of the article. It was called “The Private War of Cyrus Thorne.” With fewer pages stuffed inside, the envelope had a little more give. I looked down and spotted a tiny cassette tape. I pulled it out, and a second came tumbling behind it. There was nothing on the labels except “ 1” and “ 2.” I had no way to play microcassettes in the car and a suddenly burning desire to hear them right away, so I started up the engine and drove to a nearby Staples. I bought the cheapest microcassette player I could. I bought batteries. I went back to the car, assembled everything, and popped in tape number one. I didn’t even bother to rewind.
“-believe it was Pan Am 103?” That was Lyle’s voice, and I was immediately drawn in. Why was he talking about Lockerbie?
“Without question, it was Pan Am 103.” That was a voice I didn’t recognize. “There was a CIA team on that flight. Five agents, including McKee. One of the best I ever knew got blown out of the sky that day, and that was the beginning of the end of it for Cyrus. He hung in with the agency a few more years, but he never got over what happened with Pan Am.”
Best I ever knew. Was he CIA? The voice was not deep yet had plenty of gravity. There was a bulldog quality about the way he powered forward, but strategic pauses insinuated a wry sense of humor, even if he didn’t give it voice. I started glancing over the article as I listened.
“What happened?” Lyle asked.
“Cy was part of a team that investigated the incident. He came to believe 103 was targeted because McKee and his people were onboard.”
“Why?”
“They had found out about a Syrian drug trafficker. He was swapping information for protection with the DEA and another CIA team in Germany. They were allowing him to bring drugs into the States. McKee found out. He thought it was bullshit. The Syrian heard, probably from other agents, that McKee was about to blow the whistle on his sweet deal. He blew up McKee instead.”
“You’re saying that, indirectly, the CIA and the DEA were responsible for Pan Am 103?”
“That’s what Cyrus thought. To him, those agents were heroes, betrayed by their country, swept aside in some high-level cover-up. It drove him nuts. Then he got into counterterrorism, and that was the last straw.”
“Any particular incident?”
“Everything taken together. He was one of the first to see the threat of the radical Muslims. He understood the socioeconomic drivers in third world countries, and he thought you could apply the domino theory to Muslim nations.”
“Domino theory? Like LBJ’s excuse for escalating Vietnam?”
“Exactly. But in Cy’s nightmare, the first thing that happens is Pakistan falls to extremists. Then the princes in Saudi Arabia lose control, and the House of Saud falls. Osama comes out of the caves to lead his people. He has Saudi oil, and he has the bomb, and now the dominoes start to fall. Indonesia, the largest Muslim population in the world, the Philippines, Turkey, Syria, Somalia, and other African Muslim nations. Afghanistan goes back to the Taliban. The Palestinians get the muscle they need to plow Israel under. The ayatollahs in Iran are already developing their own bomb, and who the hell knows what Saddam really has in his backyard?”