“Aren’t you?” Question for question.
“I don’t think—”
“You do,” Lambert said, blocking another escape.
O’Farrell refused to answer, caught by a sudden, disturbing thought. “How did the Agency find out about my family archive?”
“Didn’t you have some work done on it?” Lambert asked casually.
The copying, O’Farrell remembered. So it hadn’t been some Agency break-in squad poking through the house, prying into everything, maybe sniggering and joking over what they found, while Jill was at work or in Chicago. O’Farrell was relieved. Lambert was lounging back comfortably in his chair, apparently waiting for him to say something. “Well?” O’Farrell said.
“We were talking about motivation.”
“You were,” O’Farrell corrected, deciding how to continue. “And you seemed to think I’d lost it.”
“Haven’t you?”
“Yes,” O’Farrell said bluntly. He’d said it! And he had the acceptable explanation ready. If this sneaky bastard took it, this debriefing could end and he could go home to Jill.
“A breakthrough!” Lambert said.
“Is that surprising, after murdering someone?”
Another of the long, silent stares, broken this time by a slow headshake of refusal. Then the psychologist said, “Is that how you intend to use the accident?”
“I’m not using it for
“You began assembling all that stuff on your great-grandfather, making the lawman comparison, long before the Rivera assignment,” said the man. “Drinking too.”
O’Farrell shook his head, genuinely weary. “Think what you like. I don’t give a damn.”
“You just want to go home, go to bed, and pull the covers over your head.”
O’Farrell went physically hot because that was exactly what he had been thinking. “Maybe just that.”
Lambert rose from his seat, but halfway toward the coffeepot he hesitated. “Would you like a drink? Something stronger than coffee, I mean.”
O’Farrell ached for a drink. He shook his head. “Not even coffee.”
“You do that, do you?” Lambert asked conversationally. “Set yourself limits and feel proud, as if you’ve achieved something, when you stay within them?”
Like everything else during the meeting, it was a small but complete performance to make another point, O’Farrell realized. He was still hot but now with anger against the man it seemed impossible to outtalk. “No,” he said.
Lambert smiled, with more disbelief, and continued on to the coffee machine. Standing there, he said. “I don’t blame you. I’m surprised the doubts haven’t come long before now.”
O’Farrell frowned, further bewilderment. “Whose side are you on!” he said.
Lambert, smiling, walked back to his chair. More to himself than to O’Farrell, he said. “There have to be sides, good or bad, right or wrong.…” He looked up, open-faced. “I’m on your side, if that’s the way you want to think about it. That’s why I want to get the truth, everything, out into the open, so we can talk it all through, lay all the ghosts.”
“Why?” O’Farrell asked suspiciously.
“Why!” Lambert echoed, surprised. “You were flaky before England. With all the guilt after the accident you’re going to become a pretty fucked-up guy, aren’t you? And the Agency worries about fucked-up guys, particularly in your section.”
“Okay,” O’Farrell said, not really knowing to what he was agreeing.
“You’re out of balance,” Lambert said. “For months, maybe longer, it’s been difficult morally for you to go along with what you’ve been doing, right?”
O’Farrell nodded. There was a vague feeling, too vague for relief but something like it, at the admission, at talking at last to someone who understood.
“Why not?” Lambert said, not wanting an answer. “Within the strict lines of morality, how can you justify taking another life? It’s difficult to fit, whichever way you twist it.”
“More than difficult.”
“Is it, though?” Lambert demanded at once. “I said earlier they were cliches, but wouldn’t millions of lives have been saved and the suffering of millions more been avoided if Hitler and Stalin and Amin had been removed?
“Decided upon by whom!” O’Farrell came back. “Who are these unknown wise men with clairvoyant powers that can’t be appealed! What gives them the right to sit in judgment!”
Lambert sat nodding, as if he were agreeing, but said, “That’s a weak argument. Won’t stand examination. Have you, personally, ever been asked to move against anybody in
O’Farrell did not reply for several moments. “No,” he admitted begrudgingly.
“Have you, personally, ever had the slightest doubt of the guilt of the person in any mission you have been asked to undertake?”
“No,” O’Farrell conceded.
“If any of them had appeared in a court of law and the evidence against them had been presented, what would the judgment have been?”
“Guilty,” O’Farrell said. Hopefully he added, “Although it’s debatable whether the verdict would have been death.”
Lambert was ready for him. “Let’s debate it then. According to the judgment of their own country, was it more than likely that the sentence would have been death?”
“I suppose so,” O’Farrell said.
“Judged according to their own standards?”
“Yes,” O’Farrell capitulated.
“You were in Special Forces?”
“Yes.”
“Ever had any difficulty carrying out a morally objectionable order in the army?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I … it was …” O’Farrell stumbled.
“Because you had the right,” Lambert supplied. “You had a service number and a rank and usually a uniform and that gave you the right. More than that, even. If anything went wrong, as it went wrong yesterday in London, the ultimate responsibility wasn’t yours—”
“But it was yesterday,” O’Farrell broke in. “I didn’t have any right to kill Estelle Rivera.”
“So yon didn’t try to kill her!” Lambert said, equally insistent. “It was an accident.”
O’Farrell sighed, but with less exasperation than before. He definitely did feel better talking to this man, convoluted though at times he found the reasoning. He supposed that by a stretch of the imagination—a stretch he was still unprepared to make—the London incident could be considered an accident. He wasn’t prepared to dispute it anymore. “And I don’t have a rank or a serial number, either.”
“Part of the same problem,” Lambert said. “No official backing or support. Minimal, at best. Guess your great-grandfather operated that way a lot of the time, though.”
O’Farrell thought it was the first time the psychologist had strained too hard to win a point. He said, “A dogtag or a badge. I can think of them as the same.”
“So where are we?” Lambert appeared to feel the same as O’Farrell about his earlier remark.
“You tell me,” O’Farrell said, enjoying the temporary supremacy.
“Talked through for today, I guess.”
“I want to go home,” O’Farrell announced. “There’s nothing left for us to talk about.”
“Give me another day, to sort a couple of things out in my mind,” Lambert said. “Just a day or two.”
“One day just became two,” O’Farrell said.
