Splinter Cell

I really thought that would do the trick, but instead she says, “Bullshit! You think I’m gorgeous. I can tell. Come on, what is it with you?”

I laugh and say, “Look, Katia, you’re my instructor. I don’t… I can’t get involved, all right? Let’s just be friends.”

She shakes her head but keeps smiling. “Boy, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that one. Fine. Look, we all have pasts we want to hide. Don’t worry about it. We’ll be friends if that’s what you want.”

By now we’re done with our coffees. I look at the time and say, “Well, I guess I’d better be going. I have some, uhm, sales reports to do this afternoon.”

She sighs and says, “Okay, Sam. Will you be at the next class?”

“I should be. You never know, though, in my job.”

We walk out of the diner together and she holds out her hand. I take it and give it a light squeeze.

“Okay, friend,” she says. “I’ll see you next time.”

“Okay,” I reply. And then we separate. She goes back to the studio and I begin the walk home, cursing at myself for being such a shit.

* * *

When I get back to the house, I hear the phone ringing. I keep a regular unlisted home phone line. There’s an extension in the kitchen, on the middle level, right when you walk into the house.

I pick up the receiver and I hear Sarah’s sweet voice.

“Hi, Dad, it’s me!”

“Sarah honey! I’m happy to hear from you,” I say. I honestly get a warm, fuzzy feeling when I talk to her.

“Just wanted to let you know that Rivka and I are about to leave for the airport. We’re so excited.”

I tense up and say, “Whoa, hold on. The airport? Where are you going?”

“Jerusalem, Dad. Remember? We’ve been planning this for—”

“Sarah, we discussed this at length! I told you that you couldn’t go.”

“Dad! Come on, you didn’t come right out and say I couldn’t go. You didn’t want me to go, but you didn’t say I couldn’t go.”

“Well, you can’t go. Israel’s just too volatile right now. With the state of things in the world with respect to Americans, I’m just not comfortable with it.”

Naturally, she sounds upset. “Oh, come on, Dad! I’m twenty years old! You can’t stop me now! We’re on our way to the airport as we speak! I have my tickets and everything!”

Aw, hell. What am I supposed to do about this?

“Sarah, I wish we’d talked more about this.” I try to control my anger.

“Look, I’ll call you when we get to Jerusalem. I’ll try to figure out what the time difference is and not call you in the middle of the night. I gotta go.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “Be careful. I love you.” But she had already hung up. Damn it.

I guess I had forgotten all about her plans. Sarah wanted to go with her friend Rivka to Israel over spring break. I had told her I wasn’t too crazy about her going to such a dangerous location but I guess I wasn’t forceful enough. What can I do? Technically, she’s an adult.

Sarah’s a student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago. She’s a junior. I think. Sometimes I forget how long she’s been in college. Rivka is her best friend and she happens to be from Israel. They’re supposedly going to stay with Rivka’s family in Jerusalem for a little less than a week.

I glance at the photo of Sarah that’s stuck on the refrigerator with a magnet. She’s the spitting image of her mother. Beautiful and smart. A class act all the way. The only thing she inherited from me was my stubbornness.

The memory of Regan giving birth flashes through my mind. It was a difficult labor and being on a U.S. military base in Germany didn’t help. I was in the CIA at the time, working in Eastern Europe. Regan had a job as a cryptanalyst for the NSA. We met in Georgia, of all places. Not Georgia, USA, but the former Soviet state. We had a stormy affair and Regan got pregnant. The wedding was a small, quiet one on the base in Germany, and that’s where Sarah was born.

I don’t like to reflect on the three years Regan and I were together. It wasn’t a happy time. I loved Regan and she loved me, but our professions interfered. It was a distant, difficult marriage. Regan eventually went back to the States and took Sarah with her. She reclaimed her maiden name, Burns, and had Sarah’s legally changed. As for me, I dedicated myself entirely to the work, operating extensively in Germany, Afghanistan, and the Soviet satellites in the years leading up to the collapse of the USSR. Needless to say, I became estranged from Regan and Sarah.

I think Sarah was fifteen when Regan died. That was so goddamned hard. I hadn’t spoken to Regan in years, and I tried my best to have a reconciliation with her when I learned that she had less than a year to live. Fucking ovarian cancer. It doesn’t take a trained psychologist to figure out why I’m afraid of commitment now. Living with the guilt of not being there while Sarah was growing up and then facing the fact that the woman you love is dying will turn anyone off from relationships.

I became Sarah’s legal guardian, and that’s when I took the bureaucratic job with the CIA in the States, hoping I could settle into a suburban life and focus more on her upbringing. Unfortunately, I have enough trouble being comfortable around human beings in general, much less a teenage girl. It was an awkward, difficult time. I suppose, though, that it’s turned out okay. After she graduated from high school, Sarah seemed to come around and appreciate me more. I’ve read that all teenagers go through the same thing. Once they leave the nest, they become your friend. Thank goodness that’s what happened with us.

I wish I could see her more often.

I hear myself sigh as I force these thoughts out of my head. I walk downstairs to the office so I can check my other answering machine. My line to the NSA isn’t a phone at all. It’s really more of a pager embedded in a paperweight on my desk. If the pin light is on, that means I need to contact Lambert from a secure line outside the house. I don’t ever call on my home line.

The pin light is on.

4

Police Constable Robert Perkins disliked his beat with a passion. Every night it was the same thing, except on Sundays when the theater was dark. Even days were bad because of matinees.

As the officer in charge of the area surrounding the National Theatre in London, PC Perkins felt that supervising traffic was below his station. Nevertheless, he did it without complaint. He didn’t actually have to direct traffic — thank God for that — except in the case of an emergency, a royal event, or if some idiot did something to cause an accident. Perkins had walked this beat for the last twenty-two years and would probably be doing it for at least the next ten. Perkins could always put in for a transfer, but his superiors always frowned upon such requests. At age forty-three, he felt, he was becoming a bit long in the tooth for this type of work.

On weekday evenings traffic was even worse because of the business day rush hour. Waterloo Bridge loomed overhead, running from northwest to southeast across the Thames to the South Bank. The mass of vehicles traversing that particular road never let up. At rush hour, before the theater’s evening performance, it was at its worst. The “congestion charge” of ?5 over and above the parking fee didn’t dissuade drivers from attempting to use the theater’s small car park. Perkins wondered why more people didn’t just take the tube and walk. Certainly it was simpler and less annoying.

Perkins usually stood at the intersection of Theatre Avenue and Upper Ground because the only place coaches could let off passengers was on Upper Ground at the back of the theater. Thus, he was practically directly beneath Waterloo Bridge and had to deal with the noise of the traffic above him. It gave him a daily headache.

It was now 6:30 and the bulk of the evening traffic was at its peak. Perkins stood at the crossroad and