is a healthy young girl with a vivid imagination. She… fantasizes and sometimes she… caresses and
… gratifies herself in that bedroom when she changes clothes. The pictures we have are very clear… and explicit.”
Bern was paralyzed. Mondragon went on.
“Over the years, Jude had occasional disciplinary problems. A couple of years ago, he had a mistress. As insurance for us, she was able to collect a quantity of semen for our safekeeping. That semen, of course, shares your identical DNA.
“You will remember that a few weeks ago, Alice misplaced a swimsuit. Her mother was frustrated, but she has lost them before. They bought another. Never gave it another thought.”
Bern’s ears were ringing, his mind frozen.
“These are the components that comprise the story of the end of your life, Paul,” Mondragon said, and then he fell silent, letting it soak in.
Bern reeled, his mind flickered, and his thoughts lurched into the past, into the imagined future, into a nightmare.
“Something like this,” Mondragon went on, “has no satisfactory resolution. It isn’t possible. Statutory rape, and the death of a disturbed girl’s innocence. Devastated parents. The betrayal and destruction of a long and close friendship. The end of your anonymity and reputation. Our people are very good, and the evidence would be incontrovertible.
“But even if, somehow by some miracle, you were able to escape the facts,” Mondragon elaborated, “the media coverage and the imagination of the public would condemn you. Maybe his lawyers got him off, they would say, but we know that he did something terrible to that poor girl.” Mondragon sat perfectly still. “The birth of suspicion, Paul, leaves an indelible stain. Nothing cleans it.”
Silence.
Mondragon held out the folder. “Would you like to see the pictures of Alice?”
The young woman took the folder from Mondragon and handed it to Bern, then disappeared.
Bern had to look. At least he had to identify Alice. He would be an idiot if he simply took Mondragon’s word for something like this.
With unsteady hands, he slid the photos out of the envelope and looked. They were of Alice, of course.
They were stills from a video recording. Video. The sons of bitches.
He couldn’t look at more than a couple of them, and then he dropped the envelope and the pictures on the floor beside his chair.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands. Mondragon cruelly remained silent, and Bern felt as if he had fallen into hell.
Finally, Mondragon spoke.
“But, as they say, it doesn’t have to end like this. Those photographs never have to be seen by anyone. What I’m asking you to do, after all, is not an impossibility. Think about it. If these pictures were ever to get out, what wouldn’t you give to have the chance to make this choice all over again? Pretending to be your brother would seem like a godsend, and a small price to pay to make it all go away.”
Chapter 17
Bern sat on the edge of his bed in his underwear and stared out the window of his darkened hotel room. It was 2:40 in the morning, and the traffic on West Loop South was sparse. The night sky was hazy with moisture, and the lights that stretched eastward toward downtown receded into the misty distance. He was nowhere near sleep.
His thoughts cycled over and over and over variations of the same three concerns: his fear of the exposure of the photographs (the storm of emotions that this would unleash for the Laus was almost unbearable to consider), his anger and frustration at being extorted without any recourse, and his inability to imagine or prepare for what he was going to have to do to for Mondragon.
He wasn’t a total innocent. He had heard and read about the contractors that U.S. intelligence used all over the world with increasing regularity. He knew nothing of their legal standing, but he knew enough to understand that they were proxies for a reason. Somehow they managed to squeeze between the threads of the legal fabric to do things for the CIA that the CIA didn’t want to get caught doing themselves.
He had no doubt that an end-run effort around Mondragon’s extortion would trigger the anonymous release of the photographs, and then he could kiss his old life good-bye. Essentially, he had no choice.
And he grieved for Alice. Just knowing that those pictures were out there somewhere and that someone could look at them as much as they wanted made him ache for her. She would be so ashamed. And Dana and Phil. Goddamn Mondragon.
It was a spooky feeling, too, that someone had been in his house and installed digital video-surveillance cameras in the lower bedroom, and he hadn’t even had a clue. This was scary stuff.
Midmorning the next day, Bern picked up a printout of his own DNA string at the private laboratory off North Loop West. From there, he went to the GTS labs in the Texas Medical Center, where the skull’s DNA was being sorted out. After last night, the result of the DNA reading had even more importance for him than it had before.
He sat in a small sterile room with a humming fluorescent light while a molecular geneticist with a pallid complexion and round eyeglasses of pinkish plastic examined and compared the two strings. Bern noticed that the pocket of the doctor’s crisp white lab coat was still starched closed.
“Monozygotic twins. Yeah.” The doctor looked up. “Identical. Yeah.”
The flight back to Austin occupied a time zone all its own, and the fifteen-mile drive from the airport to his house on the lake was completely lost to him.
As soon as he got back to the house, he parked the TR3 in the garage and went up and checked his messages in the kitchen. He took a flashlight out of the drawer under the telephone and went down the steps to the guest bedroom that opened out onto the terrace. He stood in the middle of the room and looked at the wall opposite the French doors. The garage was on the other side of the wall. That was the likeliest spot. Near the ceiling.
He dragged a chair over to the wall and stood on it. Starting at the left corner of the room, near the ceiling, he shined the flashlight flat against the wall and carefully followed every inch. And then there it was. A little smooth spot about the size of his thumbnail. Color was the same, but the texture was too smooth. Drywall texturing was hard to duplicate in a patch.
With his arms, he measured the distance from the intersecting wall to his left, and then he went upstairs and then down again to the garage. He climbed up on the workbench that was built against the bedroom wall and measured from the front of the garage. And there it was. The bastards hadn’t even bothered to patch the hole in the garage. A hole the size of the diameter of his thumb, and next to it a shelf with cans of paint pushed to one side, where they had set something.
He looked out the garage door to the rock wall and the lake beyond. It wouldn’t have been that hard at all. Easy, in fact. Shit.
Back in the kitchen, he opened a bottle of Shiner beer and made a ham sandwich. He went outside to the ter- race and sat at the table under the arbor while he ate. He gazed at the lake sparkling in the summer light and thought about what he was going to have to do.
After he finished, he put the dishes into the dishwasher and walked over to the studio. As he stepped inside and breathed in the familiar odors, his eyes fell on the partially dismantled skull of his brother.
His brother.
Would this ever seem real to him? Monozygotic. Who in the hell had their mother been? What in God’s name had happened to her that scattered them in those critical days of their infancy?
He walked over to the workbench. The weird suspicion that had gripped him last time he saw this skull-that he had some mysterious connection to it-had now been replaced with a scientific certainty. Now there a total reorientation regarding himself and this incredible relic, and he could hardly bring himself to touch it.
