powerful stuff at DEA. At the time of the ambush he had been a heroic figure in the agency, a leader who went into the field and faced danger with his men. The files bulged with citations and press clippings on his career.
“I’m sorry… God, I’m sorry. I was doing my job. If I had known-” Paul hung his head.
“Fletcher wants us to blame you. But we don’t. Do we?” Thorne looked at Joe. Joe nodded slowly and slammed the flat of his hand against a beam. “Martin Fletcher’s crazy as a shithouse rat.”
“Crazy as a shithouse fox,” Joe said.
“Couldn’t it be anyone else? We made some people mighty unhappy. Maybe it’s someone wanting us to think it’s Martin. Hiding behind his mystique.”
“The players we chased around after are mostly washed up-kids who were in diapers then are leaders now. Ochoa, Lopez, Perez,” Joe said. “The ones that are still alive are in hiding in Spain, in jail, dead, or so deep in the jungle they’re making monkeys.”
“He butchered our families. He has to be stopped. You have to come out and help us,” Thorne said.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said. He looked out the window and took a deep breath and exhaled it. “I can’t… can’t think about going out there again.”
“What the hell do you mean?” Joe snapped. “Haven’t you been listening? Our families have been fucking wiped out! What makes you think he’s finished?”
“Finished?”
“There’s only one family left, Paul. Yours.” Thorne frowned.
Joe started. “You think because you left them and took up with the fucking trout they aren’t targets? He may have disliked us, but, Paul, he hates your fucking guts. He said he was finished in the letter he left for you, but you believe for one second he’ll let your family live?”
“Dear God,” Paul said. “It didn’t occur to me.” Laura, Erin and Adam-Reb.
Thorne washed out the coffee cup. He watched as Paul tried to use the weakened left hand to get a cigarette from the pack, failed and used the right.
“It’s better,” Paul said defensively when he realized they were watching the hand. “I’m still doing my therapy. I’m supposed to squeeze a tennis ball. I forget.”
“We’ve got people in New Orleans watching Laura and your children, but we can’t keep them there long without T.C. getting wind of the expenditures. We’ve got a twenty-four seven in place, but we need cops and all sorts of help down there.”
T.C. Robertson’s face crossed Paul’s mind. He was the acting director of DEA, and he and Paul had never been friends. They had been rivals for the position T.C. now held. He was acting director because the presidents couldn’t find an excuse to push him out, but they didn’t want to make him director either. The new president was no different. But T.C. Robertson was popular with the average man on the street because he was always showing up on the evening news making tough statements about drug cartels.
“Okay,” Paul said after a long silence. “I’ll think it over. In the meantime let’s talk about what you’ll need.”
Thorne and Joe watched in surprise as Paul slowly began to pull himself together and take control again. In the few minutes they’d been in the cabin, Thorne had actually forgotten that Paul’s face was so fiercely fucked up. Now he could see that under the ill-fitting flannel shirt and beneath the beard and scraggly hair, well, Paul Masterson was still in there after all. This was the man that he and the other men would have followed through the gates of hell. Now Thorne and Joe both had actually begun to believe they could take on Martin Fletcher. Believed that they would do it. And they could see in Paul’s face that he knew it as well. After three cigarettes and a few cups of coffee he had written down an outline for capturing Martin Fletcher. Then he stood, stretched his arms, opened the refrigerator door, and stuck his head inside. “You guys up for elk steaks and bourbon?”
“I could eat a horse,” Joe said.
“You choose, I got both,” Paul said.
Paul was in Miami. He didn’t know that because of anything he could see-the world was a seamless wall of white, thick fog-but from a feeling he had. But his face was healed and he was seeing out of both eyes. There were two men standing a few feet away in the fog, and as Paul approached them, they turned toward him, their movements jerky, machinelike. But he knew them. Paul turned at the sudden sounding of a freighter’s horn, and when he looked back, the men had disappeared. He was alone. “Joe Barnett? Jeff Hill?” he called.
He walked after them, and the ground grew soft, spongelike. Then suddenly there was pressure on his ankle, and he looked down to see that skeletal hands were gripping his legs. He shrieked and awakened to the familiar dark of his bedroom. He listened and realized that the two men in the cabin were not awake. So he must not have called out in his sleep. He was thankful for that.
Paul was not often seized by the horror anymore, had few dreams at all, thanks to the pills he took before he went to sleep. But the combination of Irish whiskey and the thought of leaving the mountains and of his family’s danger at the hands of Martin Fletcher, fell over him like a net. His mind froze in fear, his chest constricted, and the room seemed to enlarge. His life was an obvious mess held together by twisted, frayed threads, and he felt small and powerless. He wanted to roll under the table or the bed and make these men leave him alone. But he knew he couldn’t. He had to be able to face his image in the mirror. He had to realize that leaving wasn’t death, that he wasn’t inadequate in the eyes of others. They didn’t know how terrified he was, how his soul cried out in pain, and how fear had become something that he could taste and almost feel with his fingers. He would be vulnerable out there. He was afraid, so afraid. He began to breathe deep breaths. He didn’t want the anxiety attack to continue, but it was beyond his control.
The grandfather clock chimed three times. Paul could hear either Thorne or Joe snoring. It was a bizarre feeling having people in his cabin, but he didn’t dislike it. Aaron visited on rare occasions, usually on his way to fish Paul’s stream, but had never spent the night. The men had stayed because Joe was too drunk to navigate the trail back to Aaron’s.
Paul got out of bed and made his way quietly to the bathroom. He looked into the mirror above the sink, studying the hair and the beard. The familiar mountain man stared back at him. The hair didn’t really hide the damage but certainly cut down on the number of people who engaged him in idle conversation when he was in town. He readied the scissors but hesitated before attacking the beard. It was like losing an old friend. A warm friend.
He had to go out there and help them. He hoped there hadn’t ever been any real question of its being otherwise. Even if his own family had not been endangered, he hoped that he would have gone to help his friends find their tormentor. Martin would be all but impossible to find and even more impossible to take alive. That was just as well. Martin was the mad dog people spoke of when they used the term. Martin Fletcher had been taken alive once… and it hadn’t panned out.
The fact that his family was threatened required his attention. How could he live knowing that he had turned his back on them and allowed harm to befall them? Maybe they were safe, maybe not. He couldn’t gamble on it. He could protect them here, but they would not come to Clark’s Reward. This way he could do what needed to be done from a distance and get back up on the mountain, and they wouldn’t even have to know he had been down. He would insist that they not be told he had been out in their world. He loved them with everything he was, but he couldn’t face them again. The very idea caused his chest to tighten.
He looked at the man in the mirror and tried to remember what that face had looked like before it had been altered. He had looked at this other face so long that it was Paul Masterson’s smooth, unmarked face that was all wrong. His old face reminded him of another time, another life, and of Martin Fletcher. He realized that Fletcher had never been completely out of his mind.
He had met Fletcher because the expert on terrorism was training the DEA’s elite force when Paul came into the organization from Justice. Fletcher was a corn-fed, military-trained CIA asset who enjoyed inflicting pain. He had remarked once to Paul that interrogation was rarely about gaining information. He had explained that it isn’t what you learn that matters but what the person you’re working on lives to tell others. Torture one, and let his contemporaries see what you’re capable of.
Paul had never liked Martin Fletcher. Not that he wasn’t charming when he chose to be. But there had been something missing from the man’s personality that had bothered Paul from the get go. He lacked compassion, for one thing. He also lacked the ability to shoulder responsibility. But the main thing he lacked was real emotion. It was as if he mimicked emotions-acted them instead of felt them. And then there were the man’s eyes. His eyes were flat, lifeless.
