'I know that, Ron. You can take anything. But maybe sometimes a person doesn't need to say everything. You've just got to get through stuff.'
He sipped his drink. 'Sometimes you think you would want to go see him, or talk to him, if it wasn't for us. Is that it? Because if it is, I won't stand in your way. I really won't, T.' He came forward. 'But let me ask you this: Were you thinking a lot about him before you ran into his mother and found out he'd been hurt?'
'Not a lot, no. Sometimes.'
'So maybe-just a thought here-maybe it's guilt. Maybe on some level you feel like you need his permission.'
'To do what?'
'Move on. Have a life of your own.'
She sat on the edge of her big chair, biting her lip, holding her forgotten wineglass in both hands between her knees. Eventually, slowly, she began to shake her head. 'No,' she said. 'I don't think that's it.'
'Okay,' Nolan said. 'I've been wrong before. Twice, I think.' A quick smile, trying to break the tension. It didn't work. 'What's your theory?'
'It's not a theory so much as it's a change in the facts I was living with. I thought he stopped writing to me because he'd stopped…loving me.'
'Maybe he stopped writing to you because you didn't write back.'
'Okay, maybe some of that too. But that wasn't really him, I don't think. He's a stubborn guy. I mean, he wrote me ten letters and I didn't answer any of them, so why would he stop at number ten? I think he would have kept on until I told him to stop. Except he got shot and he couldn't.'
'So he's still carrying a torch for you?'
'He might be.'
'And that would make a difference?'
She blew out the breath she was holding. 'I'd gotten comfortable thinking it was over, that's all. Mutually over. Thinking he was okay with it. It made it easier for me.'
'With me, you mean?'
She nodded. 'Which is really why I didn't write back to him. You know that.'
'Yes, I do.' He sat back, let out his own long breath, and took a drink. 'Do you regret that? Us?'
Tara 's head kept moving slowly from side to side. 'I don't know, Ron. I just don't know. You're a good guy and we've had a lot of good times…'
'But?'
She raised her eyes and looked at him, her lovely face drawn with indecision and regret. 'But I think I might need some time to sort this out a little.' Her eyes widened. 'God, I don't even know where those words came from. I'm not saying I want to stop seeing you. I don't know what I'm saying.'
Nolan pushed the ice around in his glass with his index finger. Sitting back now, an ankle on its opposite knee, he let the silence hang for a few beats. 'Here's the deal,' he said at last. 'You take all the time you need, do everything you think you need to do. The downside is I might not be around anymore if the deciding goes on too long. That's just reality. I don't want to lose you, but I don't want half of you either. Just so it's clear where I stand.'
'It's always clear where you stand. That's one of the great things about you.'
He leveled his gaze at her. 'You're going to call him?'
'I don't know. I shouldn't, at least not right now. His mother made it sound like he still wasn't all the way back to normal. I don't want to hear him or see him and start to feel sorry for him. That wouldn't be good.'
'No, it wouldn't. It's easy to confuse pity and love, but it's bad luck.'
'But I've still got to figure out where to put him. For my own peace of mind. And to be fair to us.'
'I get it,' Nolan said. 'Truly.' He drained his drink and got to his feet. 'But as I say, T, don't be too long. I want for you what makes you happy, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't hope that that was me.'
'It might be, Ron, but I'm just all confused by this right now. Please don't hate me.'
'I couldn't hate you, T. You get this settled, maybe we can start over.'
'That'd be good.'
'I hope it would.' He offered her a cold smile. 'Well, listen. You've got all my numbers. I'll wait for you to call.' Nodding, he placed his empty glass carefully on the coffee table, crossed over to the front door, opened it, and stepped out into the night.
10
Evan Scholler was the enemy. Sometimes it was a split-second evaluation, and sometimes a long-considered one, but once you made the decision that an enemy had to be eliminated, it came down to tactics-how to do it. And in this case, there was no more time to be lost. Tara remained undecided about getting in touch with Evan, but that could change in the blink of an eye. For all of Tara 's apparent reluctance, at some point she'd need to see or talk to him. And any contact between the two of them would be a disaster.
Nolan had lied to Evan about what Tara had done with his letter; he'd lied to her about the incident in Masbah and many other things. Those lies and all the other ones would come out and he'd lose her.
He couldn't let that happen.
So Evan was the enemy.
Nolan left Tara's, went home and packed a bag with a heavy jacket in it, and made it to the Oakland Airport by ten o'clock. In the mobbed waiting room at the JetBlue terminal, he found a likely looking college kid, chatted him up, and ended up giving him three thousand dollars in cash to cancel his own ticket so that Nolan could get his own last-minute ticket on the otherwise sold-out red-eye flight to Washington. He caught four hours of solid sleep on the five-hour flight.
The sky was deeply overcast, a light snow was falling, and the temperature hovered at twenty-six degrees at ten twenty-five when he arrived by cab from National Airport at the main entrance to the enormous complex that was the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The place brought him up a little short. Though he had some general understanding of the numbers of injured service personnel being treated at the center, he had more or less assumed that the place was in essence just a big hospital-a building with a bunch of patients and doctors.
It was more like its own city. The main reception area throbbed with humanity. It reminded him in some ways of the main hall of Baghdad's Republican Palace. By the information board, he checked out a rendering of the facility and saw that there were nearly six thousand rooms-he figured probably fifteen to twenty thousand beds- spread out on twenty-eight acres of floor space.
Turning back to the mob, he scanned the cavernous lobby, hoping to get his bearings somehow. A large information booth commanded a good portion of the reception area's counter space, but Nolan was here to neutralize one of the hospital's patients. It wouldn't be a good idea to call any attention to himself. Returning to the rendering, he found a building labeled Neurology and decided to start there. Grabbing the map from its slot, he started out across the huge campus.
The snow had begun to dump more heavily by the time he reached his destination, and he stopped inside the door to shake out his jacket and stamp his feet. The lobby here wasn't nearly as crowded as the main reception lobby, but it still was far from deserted.
He was surprised to see four gurneys lined up against one of the walls, each of them featuring hanging drips and holding a draped body. The line for surgery? For a room? He didn't know and wasn't going to ask, but it struck him as out of place and terribly wrong. These guys had no doubt been wounded in the line of duty-the least the Army could do, he thought, was get them some rooms.
But he wasn't here to critique conditions at Walter Reed. The Army he knew was so fucked up in so many ways that he'd given up thinking about it. Besides that, he had been running on a mixture of adrenaline and low- level rage ever since he'd left Tara 's apartment last night, and now, suddenly, the logistics of carrying out this particular mission demanded his complete attention.
As the tide of humanity continued to flow past him in both directions, Nolan experienced a rare moment of indecision: Why did he assume that Evan Scholler would be here anyway? The front door of the building identified it
