O'Farrell's Law

That night, in bed, they lay side by side but untouching, insulated from each other by their separate thoughts. It was Jill who broke the silence. She said, “I’m sorry, about tonight.”

“What about tonight?”

“You were right not getting involved in that scene in the bar. An awful lot of people do depend upon you. It would be ridiculous to put anything at risk.”

“I won’t, ever,” O’Farrell said. It did not actually constitute a lie, he told himself, but it was still a promise he could never be sure of keeping.

Petty was engulfed in so much tobacco smoke from his pipe that his voice came disembodied through it; Erickson thought it looked like some poor special effect from one of the late-night television horror movies to which he was addicted.

“Well?” Petty asked, wanting the other man to volunteer an opinion first.

“Certainly appears to go some way toward confirming the impressions Symmons formed three months ago,” Erickson said.

Petty picked up the psychologist’s report, concentrating only upon the uppermost precis. “But this time Symmons considered it a challenging encounter, that O’Farrell was fighting him.”

“Why would O’Farrell want to challenge the man?” the deputy asked. The psychologist hadn’t reached a conclusion about the attitude.

“I wish I knew,” the controller said, refusing to give one. “I really wish I knew.”

“Then there’s the preoccupation with violence,” Erikson pointed out, going deeper into the report where Symmons had flagged a series of word associations.

“And he talked to himself when he was dressing,” Petty added. They knew because a camera was installed behind the mirror into which O’Farrell had gazed, arranging and rearranging his tie and mouthing to himself the assurance that he’d come through the interrogation successfully.

“It happens,” Erickson said, with a resigned sigh. Today across Lafayette Park some protesters were marching up and down outside the White House; the angle of the window made it impossible for him to see what the protest was about.

“I don’t think we should be too hasty,” Petty cautioned.

Erickson turned curiously back into the room. “Use him again, you mean?”

“He is good,” the huge man insisted.

“Was, according to this.” Erickson gestured with his copy of the psychologist’s report.

“It would be wrong to make a definite decision just on the basis of two doubtful assessments,” Petty argued. “There’s never been the slightest problem with any operation we’ve given O’Farrell.”

“Isn’t that the basis upon which the decision should be made?” Erickson queried. “That there never can be the slightest problem.”

“We’ll wait,” Petty said. “Just wait and see.”

For a long time after it happened, Jill used to accompany him to the cemetery, but today O’Farrell hadn’t told her he was coming; there hadn’t seemed to be any reason for doing so. He guessed he would not have come himself but for the session with Symmons. O’Farrell gazed down at the inscription on his parents’ grave, easily able to recall every horrific moment of that discovery, his father blasted beyond recognition, his mother too. And of finding the note, the stumbled attempt of a tortured mind to explain why she was killing the man she loved—and who loved her—and then herself. Oddly, she had not mentioned Latvia and what had happened there: the real explanation for it all. Carefully O’Farrell brushed away the leaves fallen from an overhanging tree and placed the flowers he’d brought, caught by a sudden awareness. He had not realized it until now, but his mother’s running amok with a shotgun coincided almost to the month with his decision to find out as much as possible about the origins of his settler great-grandfather, the man who’d become a lawman. The psychologist would probably be able to find some significance in that if he told the man. But he wouldn’t, O’Farrell decided. He didn’t believe there was any relevance.

FOUR

EARLY IN his assignment Jose Rivera had regretted that the Cuban embassy was in London’s High Holborn and not one of the impressive mansion legations in Kensington. Estelle, he knew, remained upset, but then his wife was a snob and easily upset; she considered it reduced them to second-grade diplomats.

Rivera didn’t regret the location of the embassy anymore. Carlos Mendez, the resentful local head of the Direccion Generale de Inteligencia, maintained close contact with the KGB rezidentura attached to the Soviet embassy in Kensington, and from Mendez, despite their limited contact, Rivera knew of the intensive surveillance imposed there by British counterintelligence. And intensive surveillance was the very last thing to which Rivera wanted to be subjected. For that reason, once he’d been given the arms-buying role in Europe, Rivera had persuaded Havana to free him from Mendez’s prying. The given excuse was that arms dealers wouldn’t trade if they thought their comings and goings were being recorded. The real reason was Rivera’s determination to restore a family fortune lost when Fidel Castro came to power.

There was nearly two million dollars so far on deposit in a numbered account at the Swiss Bank Corporation on Zurich’s Paradeplatz, all unofficial commissions creamed off previous deals. He was impatient for today’s meeting to gauge by how much that amount was likely to increase from the latest huge order from Havana. It would be huge, he calculated; it was a comforting, satisfying feeling. Rivera liked being rich, and wanted to be richer.

Rivera was confident he had established the way. It was always to obtain everything demanded, in less time than was allowed, from men whose names were known only to himself, but no one else. Which made him absolutely indispensable. More than indispensable: unmovable, which was very important.

Rivera liked London. He liked the house in Hampstead and the polo at Windsor. Hardly any part of Europe was more than three hours’ flying time away—Zurich even less—and by his upbringing Rivera always considered himself more European than Latin American. Until, like the survivors they were, his family realized Batista’s Cuban regime was doomed, they had been among the most fervent supporters of his dictatorship; certainly the family had been among the largest beneficiaries of Batista’s corruption. That wealth had ensured Rivera’s Sorbonne education and the introduction to a cosmopolitan and sophisticated existence. They’d had to lose it, of course, when Castro came to power. And the teenage Rivera had loathed every minute of the supposed socialist posturing, actually wearing ridiculous combat suits, as if they were all macho guerrillas, and reciting nonsense about equality and freedom.

The life he led now was Rivera’s idea of equality and freedom. Realistically he accepted that it would, ultimately, have to end. And with it, he had already decided, would end his diplomatic career. By that time the Zurich account would be larger than it was now—many times larger. At the moment, although he was not irrevocably committed, he favored his boyhood Paris as the city in which he would settle.

It would mean a fairly dramatic upheaval, but he was preparing himself for it. Rivera cared nothing for Estelle, as she cared nothing for him. They’d stayed together for Jorge, whom they both adored. But Paris would have to be the breaking point. It had taken Rivera a long time to admit the fact but now he had, if only to himself. He loved Henrietta and wanted her in Paris, with him. There wouldn’t be any difficulty getting the divorce from Estelle, any more than for Henrietta to divorce her aging husband. The only uncertainty was how Jorge would react. The boy would come to accept it, in time: learn to love Henrietta. There was no question, of course, of Jorge living anywhere but in Paris, with him.

All possible from the biggest arms order he’d ever been called upon to complete.

The ambassador strode across his office to greet the chosen dealer as the man entered, retaining his hand to guide him to a conference area where comfortable oxblood leather chairs and couches were arranged with practised casualness around a series of low tables.

The size of the order had decreed that Pierre Belac had to be the supplier, because he was the biggest Rivera knew. Belac was a neat, gray-suited, gray-haired, clerklike man, in whose blank-eyed, cold company Rivera always felt vaguely uncomfortable. Sometimes he wondered how much profit Belac made from his dealings and would have