now for him.
The weight of what he owed her, as opposed to the confusion and pain from her earlier lies, settled onto his heart. ‘What are you thinking of?’ he asked.
‘Your father,’ she said. ‘You look like him. In your smile. In those photos, your father had a very innocent smile. I was wondering if he is scared. For himself, for you.’
‘Jargo’s told him a thousand lies, I’m sure.’
‘He only has to tell one really good one.’
‘One wasn’t good enough to fool you,’ Evan said.
‘I wonder if our parents were ever afraid we would find out the truth and turn away from them.’
‘I’m sure they must have been. Even when they knew we loved them.’
‘But my father recruited me, he pulled me into this world, the same way Jargo did to Dezz. I still don’t understand why he did it.’ But she sounded tired, not angry.
‘We don’t know he had a choice, Carrie. Or maybe he hoped if you were involved in the business, you wouldn’t reject him.’
‘I would have loved him, no matter what. I thought he knew that.’
‘I’m sure he did.’
She shook her head. ‘I just feel now, he had this whole life I never knew. A whole set of thoughts and worries and fears that he had to keep secret. It’s as if I didn’t know him at all. Probably that’s how you feel about your dad.’ Or me, he waited for her to say, but she didn’t.
He cleared his throat. ‘I only know I love the dad that I know, and I have to believe that’s the truest part of my father, no matter what else he has done.’
‘I know. I feel the same. You would have liked my father, Evan.’
‘You must miss him.’
‘My God, seeing him in those pictures, so young… it’s still getting to me.’ She wiped at her eyes. He moved into the seat next to hers. Put his arm around her. Brushed the tears from her cheek.
‘They didn’t trust us with the truth,’ she said after a moment.
‘They were trying to protect us.’
‘That was all I wanted to do with you. Protect you. I’m sorry I failed.’
‘Carrie. You didn’t fail me. Not once. I know you were in a terrible, terrible position. I know.’
‘But you hate me a little. For lying.’
‘I don’t.’
‘If you hate me,’ she said, ‘I’d understand.’
‘I don’t hate you.’ He needed her. It was a subtle shock. The knit of tragedy forever linked them, the same way his parents and her father were linked. He did not want to be alone.
He kissed her. It was as tentative and shy as a first kiss, a first real kiss, often is. He leaned back to study her, and she closed her eyes and found his mouth with her own, gently, once, twice, then he kissed her with passion. A need for tenderness mixed with a need to show her that he loved her.
She broke the kiss, rested her forehead against his. ‘Our families lived false lives. I did it for a year, I don’t want to live a lie anymore. You cannot imagine how lonely it is. I don’t want you to do it. We can just be us. I love you, Evan.’
He wanted to believe. He needed to love; he needed to believe the best in her. He needed to regain what he had lost, in some small measure. The awareness was sudden and bright, a firecracker in his head. He wanted to be alone with her – away from CIA bugs, away from their parents caught as strangers in old photos, away from death and fear.
‘I love you, too,’ he said quietly.
She settled into his arms and he held her until she slept.
We can just be us.
Yes, he thought. When Jargo is dead. When I’ve killed him.
As the jet screamed toward Virginia, Evan didn’t wonder if she was the same woman he loved. He wondered if he was still the same man she loved.
30
J argo lay half-awake, half-asleep, waiting for the phone call that would end this nightmare. He was a boy again, sitting in a darkened room, listening to the voice of God ringing in his ears. God was dead, he knew, but the idea of God was not, of a being so powerful he held absolute sway over you, whether you breathed, whether you died. The boy he was had not slept in three days.
‘The challenge,’ the voice said, soft, British, quiet, ‘is that you must make a failure into an opportunity.’
Jargo-the-boy – his name had been John then, the name he liked best – said, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘If you create a situation, and you lose control of it, you must be able to reimagine that situation. Turn it to your advantage.’
‘So if I fall off a ten-story building… I can hardly reimagine that into victory.’ He was thirteen and he was starting to question the whole world he had always known.
‘I speak of salvageable situations,’ the voice said with no trace of impatience. ‘You live and breathe, you can manipulate people. You must construct every trap so that if the prey escape, they do not believe they were in a trap of your making.’
‘Why do I care,’ Jargo asked, ‘what an escaped victim thinks?’
‘Stupid, stupid boy,’ the voice said. ‘You don’t see it. The trap still has to be set. You have to remain unknown, no suspicion of you brought to light. I don’t really think that you’ll ever be ready to lead.’
The phone rang.
Jargo sat up, blinking, the frightened boy sitting in the dark lingering for just a moment, then gone. He groped for the phone, clicked it on.
‘I have the cellular records from your special chunk of Ohio.’
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘They’re uploaded to your system,’ Galadriel said.
‘I’ll tell you what I’m looking for. Calls to the D.C. metro area.’
‘Seven,’ she said after a moment.
‘Get me addresses for all those numbers.’
A pause. ‘Two residences. Five government offices, mostly congressional offices and Social Security.’
‘None to confirmed CIA addresses?’
‘None,’ she said after another moment. ‘But we don’t have a complete list of CIA numbers. You know that’s impossible.’
‘Get me calls from or to all of Virginia and Maryland.’
Another pause. ‘Yes. Sixty-seven in the course of the day.’
‘Any to Houston?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘Get me all those addresses, for every call.’ His other line rang. ‘Hold on a minute.’ He answered the other phone. ‘Yes?’
‘I think they’re flying to Britain,’ the voice said.
Jargo closed his eyes. Down the hall he could hear the barest zoom-zoom of Dezz’s Game Boy, the quiet of Mitchell’s voice. They’d had a long day and accomplished little in trying to devise a way to draw Evan back to them. But now everything had just changed.
‘From where?’
‘I suspect from an Agency medical clinic in southwest Virginia. It’s called North Hill Clinic. There’s a private airstrip close by and the requisition is for that airstrip.’
‘They flew there from New Orleans?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve only seen the requisition for a plane to go from D.C. airspace to the U.K. Not even sure it’s
