Exile Hunter (54 page)

“Mother is not
feeling well,” she offered before he had a chance to speak. “She
apologizes for not seeing you and asked if you could come back in the
morning.”

Caroline’s answer
seemed so pat that Linder wondered how often the girl delivered it.

“Certainly,” he
responded. “The rooms are available but you’ll have to come meet
my landlady before she’ll agree to rent to you. Do you think I
might take you and your mother to see her tomorrow after breakfast?
It’s only a few blocks away.”

“Yes, Mother usually
feels better in the morning. I’ll talk to her. Could you come back
around ten?”

* * *

Linder returned at
the appointed hour the next day and knocked on the apartment door. A
few moments later, Patricia Kendall opened it, looking fresh in
pressed jeans and a plaid cowgirl shirt, her mahogany hair, as sleek
as he remembered it but now streaked with gray, tied behind her head
with a blue ribbon. But in the nine months since her arrest, she had
aged markedly. While her figure had always been slim as a dancer’s,
in Beirut it had seemed the more alluring for having filled out
somewhat. Now she was thin to the point of angularity, and her olive
complexion, which before had seemed ageless, showed fine lines and
wrinkles around the eyes, forehead, and lips, and a blotchy
sallowness that her suntan could not hide.

Yet for all that,
Patricia Kendall still held an appeal for him independent of time and
physical appearance. Though it was born of a pre-romantic bond that
some might dismiss as puppy love, Linder wondered whether puppy love
didn’t sometimes produce a permanent imprinting like that between
mother hens and their hatchlings. For that reason, Linder was deeply
disappointed when Patricia Kendall’s dark eyes met his and he saw
not the faintest glimmer of recognition. If imprinting had occurred
back when they were teens, it was entirely on his side.

“Hi, I’m Tom
Horvath,” he introduced himself, doing his best to conceal his
chagrin. “I hope I haven’t come too early.”

“No, not at all,”
she said in a husky voice. “Caroline said you’d be coming at ten.
I’m Patricia Kendall.”

He noted that, despite
her polite smile, she offered no explanation for her odd behavior on
the previous day. And rather than invite him inside, she stepped out
and called for Caroline to join them.

“I gather you two are
new in town, like me,” he continued. “I arrived from Montana last
month. You know, I was very lucky finding rooms with Mrs. Unger when
I came here. It seems to me that you two might do a lot worse than
rent from her, considering the kind of landlord you’ve got now.
Would you like to meet her and see what she might have?”

Caroline came out the
door and locked the deadbolt behind her as he spoke.

“Good morning, Mr.
Horvath,” she greeted him with a cheerful smile. Like her mother,
she was dressed in jeans and a plaid cowgirl blouse.

“My, you two are
going to fit in here just fine,” he remarked on seeing them
side-by-side. “Shall we go? It’s not far.”

They covered the short
distance to Mrs. Unger’s bungalow in a few minutes and spent the
time in innocuous small talk about Coalville and the erratic spring
weather. Linder detected the smell of mint on Patricia’s breath and
a faint odor of alcohol from her body as she perspired from walking
in the sun. Linder grew concerned as he recalled Mrs. Unger’s house
rules but was unsure how to raise the subject without calling undue
attention to it.

The interview with Mrs.
Unger started off well, with Patricia and Caroline graciously
accepting their hostess’s offer of tea and answering each of her
questions in a way that built confidence. But when Mrs. Unger asked
how they came to be in Kamas, Patricia surprised him.

“Last Fall, our
family was abducted by Unionist security forces overseas and brought
back to stand trial on false sedition charges. After a security court
wrongly convicted us, the judge sentenced Caroline and me to five
years in a corrective labor camp. Why they let us out of Kamas on
probation after only six months remains a mystery to me. But, unless
something totally foreseeable happens, I expect Caroline and I will
be in Coalville for quite a while to come.”

“I see. And are you
employed in the area now?” Mrs. Unger asked without missing a beat.

“I work part-time in
the accounting department at the Wanship truck depot,” Patricia
replied, meeting her gaze head-on. “And Caroline attends North
Summit Middle School. Your house would be quite convenient for both
of us.”

“Well, let me make it
perfectly clear that I don’t approve at all of what they do to
prisoners at places like Kamas,” Mrs. Unger told her. “Believe
me, I’ve seen enough at my age to know that not everybody who lands
there is guilty of a crime. And this town is home to plenty of former
camp prisoners, most of them fine upstanding people.”

“Thank you, Mrs.
Unger,” Patricia responded quietly. “That means a great deal to
us.”

“Fine, then. Let me
show you the rooms. There’s no lease here, but rent is payable in
advance, either by the week or by the month, and I ask that you abide
by the house rules.”

Linder followed them to
the vacant rear bedroom, which would likely be Caroline’s, and to
Linder’s room, which Patricia would take over.

“But this is your
room,” Patricia exclaimed in surprise, pointing to Linder’s
packed duffel and some of his papers stacked on the writing desk.

“Oh, I’ve been
planning to move, anyway,” Linder lied. “I’ll be rooming with a
buddy from work who has more space than he knows what to do with.”

Patricia cast a
questioning look at the landlady, who said nothing. But on seeing
Caroline’s look of delighted expectation, the mother withheld
further objections except for the most important one: money.

“I would so like to
say yes, Mrs. Unger, but I’m afraid I won’t have the full rent
until I’m paid on Friday. Could I pay you fifty dollars now and the
rest next Friday?”

“I’m sure we can
work something out,” Linder broke in. “My rent is paid up through
next week and my buddy’s place is rent-free. Why doesn’t Mrs.
Unger hold my deposit on your account till you can pay her? I don’t
mind waiting a while to see my money back.”

“That would be fine
with me,” Mrs. Unger replied.

“Really? You would do
that for us, Mrs. Unger?” Patricia asked, clearly touched by the
offer.

“Don’t thank me.
It’s Tom’s deposit,” the landlady replied as she led them back
to the kitchen.

A few minutes later,
Patricia and Caroline returned to their old apartment to pack their
belongings, while Linder carried his bags to the front porch and
returned to the kitchen alone to make a phone call.

“Hi, Jay, did I wake
you up?” he asked when the connection went though. “Remember your
offer to let me spend a night or two on your living room sofa? Does
the offer still stand? If it does, I have a bottle of good Canadian
whiskey that I’ve been saving for a special occasion. Tonight could
be it.”

He smiled at Jay’s
response.

”No, don’t bother
picking me up,” Linder added. “I’ll be right over.”

Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment.
Napoleon
Bonaparte

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE, THREE YEARS EARLIER

Warren Linder sat at
his desk in the U.S. Embassy chancery building in Nine Elms and
looked out the window across the Thames River toward central London.
The diplomatic staff’s relocation to America’s new London embassy
complex had been completed during the darkest days of the Events,
when the Unionist regime was withdrawing from military bases, closing
consulates and cultural centers around the globe, and downsizing its
diplomatic staff in every major and minor overseas capital.

The gleaming
steel-and-glass cube in London remained half-empty, with entire
floors left unfurnished and unoccupied. The DSS’s London Base
occupied a choice location on a high floor facing the Thames, where
Linder idled away many an hour gazing out his window at the Queen
City of the Free World. As a senior operations officer in the base’s
Emigré Branch, Linder qualified for a private office rather than an
open cubicle, and savored his second coffee of the morning with The
Times spread across his desktop.

He put aside the front
section, which he had read in the Tube en route to work, and opened
the paper to the Life section, where births, deaths, weddings,
engagements, and celebrations were announced. A photograph of a
handsome young couple, the man in his mid to late forties and the
woman perhaps a decade younger, caught his eye immediately. The brief
single-column article announced the marriage of Roger Kendall, an
American banker, to Patricia Eaton, daughter of the exiled American
industrialist, Philip Eaton. Both were recently widowed.

The headline jolted
Linder out of his lethargy and cleared his brain of the haze that
lingered from his overindulgence in single malt whisky the night
before. While he knew that Patricia’s first husband had been killed
during the Battle of Cleveland and that she had fled America, fearing
arrest because of her father’s suspected role in the rebel attacks
there, Linder had not known of her arrival in London. Her father had
left the city for Switzerland some months earlier, after a
notoriously botched DSS rendition attempt by Linder’s predecessor
while Eaton drove his car on a country lane near Cambridge.

News of Patricia’s
engagement to her first husband more than a decade earlier had left
Linder depressed for days. Word of her husband’s death years later,
while Linder worked under cover for the DSS in Cleveland, had left
him irrationally hopeful about his prospects to win Patricia’s
heart. Locating her, however, had posed a thorny problem. In the
months following the Battle of Cleveland, her trail had gone cold and
Linder had feared that she and her daughter might have been captured
or killed.

Blanket government
surveillance of the Internet made it impossible for him to track
Patricia online without being discovered by his superiors. Yet to
request her DSS file or an official name trace on her also risked
raising suspicion of a prior relationship. Fortunately, Linder had no
difficulty gaining access to her father’s DSS file, since Philip
Eaton remained an active target of the Emigré Division and resided
within Linder’s operational territory in Europe and the Arab Middle
East.

According to documents
in the father’s file, Patricia and her daughter had fled to Canada
with retreating rebel forces after the Battle of Cleveland and from
there by sea to England, where she and Caroline lived briefly with
her father until he bolted to Basel. While Linder knew that Roger
Kendall had been active in London’s circle of anti-Unionist exiles
and was an acquaintance of Philip Eaton, he had not known of a direct
connection between Roger and Patricia until today. To Linder’s
dismay, nearly all the while he had been in London, Patricia had been
there, too, yet Kendall had beaten him to her.

Linder brooded on his
loss as he looked across the Thames toward the glittering skyscrapers
of London’s financial district, where Roger Kendall would return to
a successful career in banking after his honeymoon. For all Linder’s
disappointment, he could understand why Patricia might have wanted to
marry Roger after two years as a young widow. She was an exile with a
young daughter in a horrendously expensive city with no means of
support other than handouts from her father and no social support
network.

Viewing her situation
objectively, Linder could hardly deny that Roger was a good match for
her, since the latter was an attractive man not so much older than
she, of the same social background, possessing some money of his own,
and occupying an excellent position with a leading global bank.
Having been widowed himself when the Saigon flu claimed his wife and
young son during the Events, Roger had something in common with his
new wife that might even be expected to nourish their relationship.

But, in Linder’s
eyes, for Patricia to leave her father’s roof to live under Roger’s
seemed rather like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. This
was because Philip Eaton appeared to be retiring from the
anti-Unionist movement just as Kendall was becoming more active in
it. Now, both Philip and his new son-in-law would rank high on the
DSS’s list of exile targets to be compromised, captured, or killed.

Linder heard a knock on
the door and turned just in time to see the Deputy Base Chief enter
his office. There was no time to fold the newspaper and, in an
instant, Neil Denniston was peering over his shoulder at the
photograph. For an instant, Linder weighed the idea of drawing
Denniston’s attention to the photograph and proposing a closer
operational focus on Kendall. This would likely win him a point or
two with his bosses, but it would also pose a serious threat to
Patricia’s new family.

Despite his momentary
pique at having been bested by Kendall, he could not bring himself to
target the man in this way. Experience and intuition told him that
Kendall’s remarriage to Patricia and his new role as stepfather
would likely put a major damper on his political activities without
the DSS lifting a finger. And if the Department did move against
Kendall, how could Linder ever reenter Patricia’s life after having
destroyed whatever happiness she might have found with her new
husband?

“Ah, if it isn’t
our friend, Roger Kendall,” Denniston smirked upon recognizing the
banker’s image. “What’s he been up to? Any new angles on him?”

“His interest in
exile politics appears to be waning at the moment,” Linder answered
blandly. “His bank has just promoted him, and now he’s remarried
and become a stepfather. I’d say he has his hands full.”