'I knew Peter. He was so harmless. I only met Trig once .. . twice, actually.'
'Hmmmm. Can you think of a specific circumstance that united the four of you? Marine, peace demonstrators, 1971?'
'We were all involved in one of the last big demonstrations, May Day of that year. The three of us as demonstrators, Donny as a Marine.'
'Julie,' said Bonson, 'we're thinking less of an ideological unification here and more of a specific, geographic one. A time, a place, not an idea. And a private place, too.'
'The farm,' she finally said.
There was no sound.
Finally, Bonson prompted her.
'The farm,' he said.
'Donny was distraught over an assignment he'd been asked to do.'
Bob looked at Bonson and saw nothing, just the face of a smooth, professional actor in the role of concerned intelligence executive. No flicker of emotion, grief, doubt, regrets: nothing. Bonson didn't even blink, and Julie, remembering nothing of him and his role in what had happened, went on.
'He believed this Trig, of whom he thought so highly, might have some idea what he should do with his ethical dilemma. We went to Trig's house in DC but he wasn't there. Donny remembered that he was going out to a farm near Germantown. I think Peter may have followed us.
Peter thought he was in love with me.'
'What did you see on that farm?' asked the young analyst.
She laughed.
'Nothing. Nothing at all. What can have been so important about it?'
'We'd like to know.'
'There was a man. An Irishman named Fitzpatrick.
He and Trig were loading fertilizer into a van. It was very late at night.'
'How clearly did you see him?'
'Very. I was just out of the light, maybe fifteen, twenty-five feet away. I don't think he ever saw me.
Donny, for some reason, wanted me to stay back. So he and Trig and this Fitzpatrick talked for a few minutes.
Then Fitzpatrick left. Then Donny and Trig talked some more and finally hugged. Then we left. There was some kind of agent in the hills. He got our picture--Donny's and mine--as we drove away. Donny's mostly. I was ducking.
And that's it.'
'That's it.'
'Do you remember Fitzpatrick?'
'I suppose.'
'Do you think you'd be able to describe--' 'No,' said Bonson.
'Go straight to the pictures.'
'Mrs. Swagger, we'd like to have you look at some pictures. They're pictures of a variety of politicians, espionage agents, lawyers, scientists, military, mostly in the old Eastern Bloc, but some are genuinely Irish, some English, some French. They're all in their forties or fifties, so you'll have to imagine them as they'd have been in 1971.'
'Yes,' she said.
'Just take your time.'
One of the kids walked across the room and handed her a sheaf of photographs. She flipped through them slowly, stopping now and then to sip on her Coke can.
'Could I have another Coke?' she asked at one time.
Somebody raced out.
Bob watched as the gray, firm faces slid by, men possibly his own age or older, most of them dynamic in appearance, with square, ruddy faces, lots of hair, the unmistakable imprint of success.
They were hunting for a mole, he realized. They thought that somehow--was this Bonson's madness?-this Fitzpatrick had implanted someone in the fabric of the West, prosperous and powerful, but that his heart still belonged to the East, or what remained of it. If they could solve the mystery of Fitzpatrick, they could solve the mystery of the mole.
Bob felt an odd twist of bitterness. That war, the cold one, it really had nothing to do with the little hot dirty one that had consumed so many men he had known and so wantonly destroyed his generation. Who'll stop the rain?
It wasn't even about the rain.
'No,' she said.
