O'Farrell's Law

O’Farrell’s Law

Brian Freemantle

ONE

EVEN IN the guaranteed security of his Alexandria home, it was instinctive, far beyond any training, for Charles O’Farrell to awaken as he did: eyes closed, breathing deeply as if he were still asleep, listening first. Always essential to listen first, to be sure. Around him the house remained early-morning quiet, the only sound the soft, bubbled breathing of Jill, still genuinely slumbering beside him. Safe then. O’Farrell opened his eyes but did not move his head. It wasn’t necessary for the initial ritual.

The bedroom cabinet with the photograph was directly in his line of sight. Except when he was on sudden overseas assignments, when it would have been unthinkable to risk such a prized possession, the photograph was invariably O’Farrell’s first sight in this unmoving, safety-checking moment of awakening. Just as at night, usually while Jill was making dinner, he went to the den to look over the cracked and yellowing newspaper cuttings of the archive he was creating. With just one martini, of course, the one a day he allowed himself. Well, normally just one. Sometimes two. Rarely more.

The way the newsprint was deteriorating worried him, like the fading of the photograph from brown sepia into pale pink worried him. It would be easy enough to get the cuttings copied, although a lot of the special feeling—the impression, somehow, of being there—would go if they were transferred onto sterile, hard, modern paper. Essential that he do it, though, if he were to preserve what he had so far managed to assemble. He’d need advice on how to save the picture. Copied again, he supposed. O’Farrell was even more reluctant to do that: there would definitely be a loss of atmosphere if the treasured image were transferred to some glossy, up-to-the-minute print.

There was no detail in that stiffly posed souvenir of frontier America that O’Farrell did not know intimately, could not have traced, if he’d wanted to, with his eyes shut. Sometimes, on those foreign assignments, that was precisely how O’Farrell did conjure into his mind the picture of his great-grandfather, allowing his imagination to soften the sharp outlines, even fantasizing the squeak of ungreased wagon wheels and the snorts of impatient horses and—only very occasionally—the snap of a shot.

O’Farrell knew there would have been such snapping echoes (why did a pistol shot never sound the way it was supposed to sound, always an inconsequential pop instead of a life-taking blast?) because the cuttings from the Scott City journal that at the moment formed the basis of his archive recorded six shoot-outs from which the man had emerged the victor. There would have been much more shooting, of course; the six had been reported because people had died, but O’Farrell knew there would have been other confrontations. Had to have been. Law was rare and resented in Kansas then, and anyone attempting to enforce it was more likely to be challenged than to be obeyed.

Objectively, the aged photograph hardly showed a man to be obeyed. There was nothing in the background of the photographic studio to provide a proper comparison, but the man appeared to be quite short—maybe just a little shorter than O’Farrell himself—and slightly built, like O’Farrell again. The stature was accentuated in the picture by the long-barreled Colt. It was holstered high and tight against his great-grandfather’s waist, a necessary tool of his trade, not low-slung and thonged from the bottom around his leg, like those in preposterous Hollywood portrayals. Properly carried, as it was in the photograph, it appeared altogether too. large and heavily out of proportion. But for the gun, it would have been impossible to guess what job the man held. He’d obviously dressed for the portrait: the trousers of his waistcoated, high-buttoned suit worn over his boots, tie tightly knotted into a hard-starched collar, hat squarely, almost comically perched on his head. Why, wondered O’Farrell, hadn’t his great-grandfather worn his marshal’s badge? It was a recurring question that O’Farrell had never resolved. He doubted his late father’s suggestion that it had been a retirement photograph. Currently the last of the fragile cuttings, an obituary of his great-grandfather’s peaceful death—in bed—at the age of seventy-six, also reported his quitting as a lawman when he was sixty. And he certainly didn’t look sixty in the photograph; somewhere between forty-five and fifty. Maybe forty-six. My age, thought O’Farrell; he liked to think so. Personal comparisons were very important.

O’Farrell moved at last, turning away from the bedside cabinet to look at Jill. She shifted slightly with his movement but didn’t awake. A skein of hair, hairdresser-blonded now because of the hint of grayness, strayed across her forehead. Very gently O’Farrell reached out to push it back, but paused with his hand in front of himself. No shake, he saw, gratefully. Well, hardly; no more than the minimal twitch to be expected from his lying in such an awkward position; wouldn’t be there at all when he got up. Continuing the gesture, O’Farrell succeeded in rearranging his wife’s hair without disturbing her. Worrying over nothing, he told himself. Which was the problem. Why was this feeling of uncertainly constantly with him? And growing?

He eased cautiously from the bed, wanting Jill to sleep on, but hesitated before the cabinet. It was definitely impossible without the gun to imagine his ancestor as a law man. Even more difficult to believe him to have been someone to be obeyed. Or capable of shooting another man. But then it was never possible to judge from appearances whether one man could kill another.

Charles O’Farrell knew that better than most.

Until the official opening by President Kennedy in 1961 of its headquarters at Langley, just off the Washington Memorial Parkway, America’s Central Intelligence Agency was housed piecemeal at 2430 E Street NW, in barracks alongside the Reflecting Pool and in wooden buildings behind the Heurich Brewery. Not everything was brought conveniently to one location by that 1961 presidential ceremony, however.

The security needs of the Agency’s most secret divisions actually dictated that they should remain outside its identifiable headquarters, and its most secret division of all was kept in Washington, on two floors of an office building just off Lafayette Park, to maintain a physical distance between the CIA, a recognized agency of the U.S. government, and a part of that agency determinedly unrecognized. Its existence was known only to a very few men. Required under oath to admit that the Agency possessed such a facility—at congressional inquiries, like those, for instance, that shattered the morale of the CIA in the mid-1970s—those men would have lied, careless of perjury, because their questioners were insufficiently cleared at the required level to receive such intelligence. The division, created after those mid-seventies congressional embarrassments, fit the phrase that became public during those hearings. It was “plausible deniability.”

The division came under the hidden authority of the CIA’s Plans Directorate. It was run by two men who worked on completely equal terms, although George Petty was accorded the title of director, with Donald Erickson defined as deputy. Each was a third-generation American who believed implicitly in the correctness and the morality of what they did, an essential mental attitude for every constantly monitored employee.

“It’s O’Farrell’s medical today,” Erickson said. He was a tall, spare man with hair so thin and fair that he appeared practically bald. By standing at the window of their fifth-floor office suite, he was just able to look across the park to the White House he considered himself to be protecting. It was a favorite stance and an unshakable conviction.

“I know,” George Petty said.

“Have you spoken to the doctor?”

Petty was a heavy, towering man who appeared slightly hunchbacked from his tendency to bring his head forward, like a turtle emerging from its shell. He did not reply at once, making much of filling the ornate bowl of his pipe with a sweet-smelling tobacco and tamping it into a firm base once he got it lighted. He said, “I didn’t consider it wise.”

“Why not?” asked Erickson, turning back into the room.

“It has to be his opinion, without any influence from us,” Petty said.