O'Farrell's Law

O’Farrell.…” He paused and added defiantly, ‘The way he was going to do it.”

Lambert appeared to miss the jab. He said, “We’d better tell Symmons to keep an eye on him. Let’s not recruit someone who enjoys it. That’s dangerous.”

“I thought everything we did was dangerous,” Petty said. He felt oppressed within the limousine and desperately wanted a pipe. Below them, through the protectively black windows, he saw that the interment was almost over. The mourners were shifting, about to leave, and the limousine drivers were standing ready to open the doors. Abruptly Petty announced, “I’m going down to speak to her.”

“That’s not wise,” Sneider said.

“A lot of things aren’t,” Petty said. “I’ll make my own way back.”

He left the car before there could be any more objection, shivering at once as the wind cut through his topcoat. It was too strong to attempt lighting a pipe, he realized miserably. He shrugged his collar up further and took a pathway to bring him out by the other official cars, as if he had emerged from one of them.

The family group were still some way away when he got there and he hung back from the media rush as the Secretary of State spoke briefly to them. Mrs. O’Farrell was shiny-faced and very red around the eyes, but she wasn’t crying anymore. She didn’t appear to speak a lot, hardly at all, but nodded and even smiled faintly at what was being said to her.

Petty waited until the woman had almost reached her car before stepping forward. “Mrs. O’Farrell?”

Jill hesitated, looking toward him, waiting.

“I knew your husband; worked with him,” Petty said, awkwardly. “I wanted you to know how sorry I am.”

“Thank you,” said the woman. Her voice was quite resolute.

“You’ll have all the State Department material: telephone numbers and references. If you need any help, please use them.” State would automatically channel any communication through to him.

“I’ll remember that,” Jill promised. “I’m thinking of selling out here and moving to Chicago. I’ve a daughter there, you know.”

“No,” Petty lied. “I didn’t know. It would probably be a good idea.”

“There’s a church in Evanston that’s been very kind to me since it happened,” Jill said, the dam unblocked, wanting to talk now. “We attended church regularly, Charles and I. We both found it a comfort.”

Petty’s throat moved and he was glad his coat collar was high. “Yes,” he said inadequately. Beside her the child he knew to be Billy had stopped crying, too, but the breath was going into him in sobs that made his tiny shoulders shudder. “Please don’t forget,” Petty urged. “Any problem at all, just get in touch.”

“Yes,” Jill said.

Petty doubted that she would. He pulled away and watched until her car led the cortege out of the cemetery, eventually following toward the exit. He was quite close before he realized the figure there was Erickson, hunched for protection by the gate pillar.

“I thought we could get a cab back together,” the man said.

“I didn’t like that,” Petty declared. “I didn’t like that one little bit.”

Erickson began waving for a cab. “McCarthy says he wants to talk. Another assignment, I guess. He said it was important.”

“Aren’t they all?” Petty queried wearily. It wasn’t until he was inside the cab and it was moving away that he realized it was festooned with No Smoking stickers.

Everything was completely alien to Jorge; he could remember none of it. It was very hot and his clothes stuck to him and the streets stank of sewage and gas fumes, making his chest tighten. He’d been escorted from England by a woman as well as a man from the Foreign Ministry. She kept trying to hold him and he wished she wouldn’t.

“Your father is a hero,” the man said in the car taking them from the airport. “He is to be honored. There is already a place for you in a state academy.”

Jorge was taken straight there and he hated it, as he hated everything else. The curriculum was completely different from what he had studied at the lycee, he was bullied, and an older boy sexually molested him the first week. Jorge complained to the housemaster, who dismissed it as a fact of academy life. The master let the other boys know of Jorge’s complaint and he was beaten very badly and kept for several days in the academy’s sanatorium, with a suspected rib fracture.

The same couple who had brought him from London collected him for the ceremony they had promised. Jorge was allowed to stand on a podium with a lot of important-looking men, one of whom had a beard and appeared to be obeyed by everyone else. The man ruffled his hair once. He smelled of cigars.

Jorge understood little of it. There were a lot of speeches and a lot of cheering and a small curtain was pulled away from a plaque set into a wall. His father’s name was written upon it. So were the words FIGHTER FOR FREEDOM.

This time Jorge let the woman hold him and on the way back to the academy told both her and the man how he was beaten and how the older boys kept getting into his bed at night. The man promised to speak to the principal. Jorge begged him not to, because of the beating he had gotten on the previous occasion. The man said it would be different this time.

“Please sir,” said Jorge, guessing the importance of politeness. “I would like to go home.”

“What?” said the ministry official.

“Home,” Jorge repeated. “I don’t like it here. I want to go home.”

The embracing woman withdrew her arm. The man said, tightly Jorge thought, as if he were offended. “This is your home. This is where you are going to live now.”

It took three days for the complaints to percolate down from the principal’s office. This time the beating was worse than before and Jorge had to stay longer in the sanatorium because an X ray disclosed that one of his ribs was definitely cracked.

The woman from the ministry visited him at the end of the month. She said, “You’ve got to start trying harder. It is a great privilege for you to be taught in the academy. There have been complaints about you from the authorities. They say that you are a troublemaker, upsetting the other boys. You want to be liked, don’t you? Behave yourself!”

A Biography of Brian Freemantle

Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain’s most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.

Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the Daily Mail, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city’s orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred lives—and sold a bundle of newspapers.

Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with Charlie M. That book introduced the world to Charlie Muffin—a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carre, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series, The Blind Run, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen titles in the Charlie Muffin series, the most recent of which is Red Star Rising (2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.

In addition to the stories of Charlie Muffin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle’s other series include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives—an FBI operative