He put on the coat, still talking, still explaining. “Since then they had two other tries to find the right guy. An air force guy and a marine. Both superb officers, both unacceptable. I don’t know why. Probably stomped on a bug during basic training and offended the Buddhist lobby. We have a world so full of people ready to take offence it’s tough to find a fighting man, any man, who never offended anybody.”
Polly was trying not to listen, but she could not ignore the significance of what Jack was saying.
“I presume what you’re getting at is that they’re going to ask you to stand,” she said, impressed despite herself. “That you are going to be chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Is that what you came here to tell me? Am I supposed to congratulate you?”
Jack stood staring at Polly. He was gathering his thoughts. Then he stepped across the room to where Polly’s answerphone was still blinking out news of the various messages of the evening. Jack pressed the erase button. The machine clunked and whirred in response, wiping clean the tape upon which Jack had announced his rearrival in Polly’s life.
“What are you doing, Jack?” Polly felt a chill of fear shiver across her body, enveloping her like an icy cloak.
“Surely you know now why I’m here, Polly,” he said.
“No, Jack, I don’t,” Polly replied although suddenly she was not so sure.
“People die every day.”
Polly was cold to the bone now. “What do you mean?”
“What I say. People die every day. Famine, war, accident, design. Death is commonplace. A modern fiction has developed that life is precious, but we know it isn’t so. Governments sacrifice thousands of lives every day. At least in the old times they were honest about it. There was no hypocrisy. To be a king or a conqueror you had to kill; no one ever got to the top any other way. Sometimes you even had to kill the things you loved, wives, children… many kings and rulers did that. They still do.”
Polly could not credit the suspicions that were beginning to flood into her mind. Surely this would turn out to be just another monologue, going nowhere.
“Jack-”
“You were an anarchist, Polly,” Jack continued. “A sworn enemy of the state. When I met you your life was dedicated to the confusion of the military policies of your own country and also those of the United States. You were, to put it as I fear the press will put it, as my detractors in Congress and the Senate will put it, a foreign red. An enemy of the US.”
Jack could not be implying what it sounded like he was implying.
“I was seventeen, Jack! A teenager! It was so long ago.”
“Exactly. Seventeen, that’s four years underage in my home state. An anarchist and a child to boot! Twenty years ago people would have laughed and said I was a lucky guy. These days you get burned at the stake for that stuff. If our affair ever came to light it would finish me for good and ten times over. You know it would. A soldier on active duty consorts with juvenile pacifist anarchist? I wouldn’t last ten seconds in a Senate hearing.”
Polly struggled to come to terms with what Jack was saying.
“But only you and I know, Jack!”
Jack had taken his gun from his pocket and was attaching some kind of metal attachment to the end.
“That’s right, Polly. Nobody else knows about us and nobody knows I came here tonight. I’m a NATO general, in Britain for a few hours, asleep in his hotel room. There is a spook called Gottfried, the guy who traced you for me, but he got promoted to our station in Kabul. Nice job for him, convenient for me – the Taliban don’t tend to take the London
Jack levelled his gun at Polly’s head.
“I love you, Polly, but I’m leaving you again. This time for good.”
“Peter!” Polly shouted.
“Who?”
“The stalker! He knows, he knows an American was here. He saw you! He could describe you!”
“That’s right. He could, Polly, which is a pity for him because you told me where he lives.”
Jack’s finger was taut on the trigger.
“Jack, no,” Polly whispered.
“I’m sorry, Polly, but you do see I have no choice, don’t you?”
Jack meant it too. As he saw it he had no choice. In fact it was his duty. He saw himself as the best remaining candidate to lead the army he loved, and it was his responsibility to ensure that nothing compromised his ability to command. Jack had already sacrificed Polly once to the oaths he had made when he had joined the service. Now he had to find the courage to do so again. And this time he would have to do it while looking Polly in the eye.
Polly was still sitting on the bed. Jack stood before her, his arm outstretched, the gun levelled between them, his target pale but somehow calm, calmer than Jack had expected.
“We have a child,” she said.
55
Jack had been about to shoot. At the very moment that she said it he had been about to shoot.
“What?”
“When you left me I was pregnant, Jack.”
Every well-honed instinct of self-preservation within Jack’s icy soul told him to shoot and shoot immediately, but somehow he could not, not yet, not for a moment.
“I don’t think so, Polly.”
“Well, what the fuck would you know, you bastard!” Polly snarled. “You left me pregnant! That was why I always waited for you… That was why I couldn’t forget you. How could I?”
If she was acting, and Jack was almost sure she was, then she was very good at it; the sudden and bitter venom of her statement was uncomfortably convincing.
It was convincing because it was true. Jack had left Polly pregnant. She realized about three weeks after he had walked out on her. It was not his fault. He could not have known; those had been in the days before AIDS, and Jack had never used condoms because Polly had been on the pill. Unfortunately, like many a young girl before her, Polly had been made careless by love and the result was that she suddenly found herself alone and carrying the child of a man who had had his way with her and then gone.
Polly stared at Jack over the vicious snout of his pointing gun, her eyes teary with angry memories.
“How could I have got over you, Jack?” she said. “You were still there with me, growing inside me every day.”
Jack knew that this was nonsense. He tried to shoot, but still he could not. Because if it were true, although it could not be, but if it were true, it would be so… Jack shut the thought from his mind. He had come to kill this woman.
“It was a boy, Jack,” Polly whispered. “We have a son.”
All Jack’s life he had wanted a child, and being a soldier, of course, he had particularly wanted a son. He and Courtney had not had children; she’d been young and ambitious for her career and they’d grown apart so quickly. But to have a son with Polly! Jack had often daydreamed of exactly that, imagining what a wonderful spirited boy such a union might create. Jack struggled to regain control. He had no business to be indulging in fantasies of this sort at such a time. Imagining Polly as the mother of his child reminded him of how much he was still in love with her, but he could not afford to be in love with her. He had a higher love to answer to – his love of power, of ambition, his love of self.
Yet still he could not pull the trigger.
“What’s his name?” Jack asked, allowing himself to relish the dream.
“Misty Dawn,” Polly replied instantly.
“Misty fucking Dawn? You called a boy Misty Dawn?”
“He changed it to Colin when he was at school.”
“What was wrong with Jack?”
