O'Farrell's Law (28 page)

“That's interesting!” Lambert said, as if he'd located an odd-shaped fossil on a stony beach. “Is that what you consider this to be, an interrogation?”

It had been an exaggeration, O'Farrell conceded. This wasn't really an interrogation, not the sort he'd been trained to resist. Why then was he so unsettled by it? He said, “Perhaps not quite that,” and hated the weak response, just as he disliked most of his other replies. Trying to recover, he said, “You didn't answer my question: what's it all about, this interview?”

“Your state of mind,” Lambert announced disquietingly. “And you didn't answer mine. What about the booze?”

“I had a few drinks,” O'Farrell said, stiffly formal. “I never endangered the operation. It had no bearing whatsoever upon the accident.”

“Well done!” Lambert said, congratulatory.

“I don't …” O'Farrell started, and then paused. “I won't—I can't—consider it an accident. I never will be able to.”

“You just called it that.”

O'Farrell shook his head wearily. “I didn't think sufficiently. It's the wrong word; will always be the wrong word. It was murder. We both know that.”

“Innocent people get killed in wars.”

“What the fuck sort of rationale is that!” O'Farrell erupted. “We're not talking about a war! Stop it! The professional-soldier pitch won't get to me. I've thought it through; it doesn't fit.”

“So you're quitting?”

“We've gone down this road as well,” O'Farrell protested. “I'm unacceptable.”

“Your judgment,” Lambert reminded him. “What if other people … Petty and Erickson and people in Plans, all of them, think like I do? What about if they all consider it an accident and don't contemplate terminating your active role?”

“What about it?” O'Farrell knew the question was coming, but delayed it with his own query to think of an answer better than those he'd so far offered.

“You going to resign?” the man asked bluntly.

“I don't know”. What the fuck was he saying! He'd thought of nothing else, waking or sleeping, for months; had thought about it this very day in this very room, working out the logistics of selling the house! He wanted to quit—needed to quit—more than he'd wanted to do anything else in his entire life. So why didn't he just say so! Easiest word in the language: yes. Yes, I want to quit. Get away from all this mumbo-jumbo psychology and these ridiculous briefings in ridiculous places, immerse myself in my boring figures in my boring office and truly become the boring clerk everyone thinks I am, catching the adventurers manipulating their expenses and being despised by my wife for not intervening in squalid public arguments.

“Not even thought about it?” Lambert persisted.

“Of course I've thought about it; haven't you thought of chucking what you do?”

Lambert genuinely appeared to consider the question. “No,” he said. “I never have. I like what I do very much.”

“What
is
it? I mean, I know your job, but why—and what—here, in the middle of a CIA training facility?”

“Talk to people with motivational doubts, like you,” Lambert said.

“Is that the diagnosis? Lacking motivation?”

Lambert's expression was more a grin than a smile. “Nothing so simple.” he said. “You know what professional medics are like—three pages of bullshit, complete with reference notes and source material, to express a single idea.”

“Which is that I am lacking motivation?”

“Aren't you?” Question for question.

“I don't think—”

“You do,” Lambert said, blocking another escape.

O'Farrell refused to answer, caught by a sudden, disturbing thought. “How did the Agency find out about my family archive?”

“Didn't you have some work done on it?” Lambert asked casually.

The copying, O'Farrell remembered. So it hadn't been some Agency break-in squad poking through the house, prying into everything, maybe sniggering and joking over what they found, while Jill was at work or in Chicago. O'Farrell was relieved. Lambert was lounging back comfortably in his chair, apparently waiting for him to say something. “Well?” O'Farrell said.

“We were talking about motivation.”

“You were,” O'Farrell corrected, deciding how to continue. “And you seemed to think I'd lost it.”

“Haven't you?”

“Yes,” O'Farrell said bluntly. He'd said it! And he had the acceptable explanation ready. If this sneaky bastard took it, this debriefing could end and he could go home to Jill.

“A breakthrough!” Lambert said.

“Is that surprising, after murdering someone?”

Another of the long, silent stares, broken this time by a slow headshake of refusal. Then the psychologist said, “Is that how you intend to use the accident?”

“I'm not using it for
anything!
” said O'Farrell, knowing he had lost, too exasperated to deny Lambert's choice of word.

“You began assembling all that stuff on your great-grandfather, making the lawman comparison, long before the Rivera assignment,” said the man. “Drinking too.”

O'Farrell shook his head, genuinely weary. “Think what you like. I don't give a damn.”

“You just want to go home, go to bed, and pull the covers over your head.”

O'Farrell went physically hot because that was exactly what he had been thinking. “Maybe just that.”

Lambert rose from his seat, but halfway toward the coffeepot he hesitated. “Would you like a drink? Something stronger than coffee, I mean.”

O'Farrell ached for a drink. He shook his head. “Not even coffee.”

“You do that, do you?” Lambert asked conversationally. “Set yourself limits and feel proud, as if you've achieved something, when you stay within them?”

Like everything else during the meeting, it was a small but complete performance to make another point, O'Farrell realized. He was still hot but now with anger against the man it seemed impossible to outtalk. “No,” he said.

Lambert smiled, with more disbelief, and continued on to the coffee machine. Standing there, he said. “I don't blame you. I'm surprised the doubts haven't come long before now.”

O'Farrell frowned, further bewilderment. “Whose side are you on!” he said.

Lambert, smiling, walked back to his chair. More to himself than to O'Farrell, he said. “There have to be sides, good or bad, right or wrong.…” He looked up, open-faced. “I'm on your side, if that's the way you want to think about it. That's why I want to get the truth, everything, out into the open, so we can talk it all through, lay all the ghosts.”

“Why?” O'Farrell asked suspiciously.

“Why!” Lambert echoed, surprised. “You were flaky before England. With all the guilt after the accident you're going to become a pretty fucked-up guy, aren't you? And the Agency worries about fucked-up guys, particularly in your section.”

“Okay,” O'Farrell said, not really knowing to what he was agreeing.

“You're out of balance,” Lambert said. “For months, maybe longer, it's been difficult morally for you to go along with what you've been doing, right?”

O'Farrell nodded. There was a vague feeling, too vague for relief but something like it, at the admission, at talking at last to someone who understood.

“Why not?” Lambert said, not wanting an answer. “Within the strict lines of morality, how can you justify taking another life? It's difficult to fit, whichever way you twist it.”

“More than difficult.”

“Is it, though?” Lambert demanded at once. “I said earlier they were clichés, but wouldn't millions of lives have been saved and the suffering of millions more been avoided if Hitler and Stalin and Amin had been removed?
Isn't
there the need for that sort of justice?”

“Decided upon by whom!” O'Farrell came back. “Who are these unknown wise men with clairvoyant powers that can't be appealed! What gives them the right to sit in judgment!”

Lambert sat nodding, as if he were agreeing, but said, “That's a weak argument. Won't stand examination. Have you, personally, ever been asked to move against anybody in
anticipation
of their evil?”

O'Farrell did not reply for several moments. “No,” he admitted begrudgingly.

“Have you, personally, ever had the slightest doubt of the guilt of the person in any mission you have been asked to undertake?”

“No,” O'Farrell conceded.

“If any of them had appeared in a court of law and the evidence against them had been presented, what would the judgment have been?”

“Guilty,” O'Farrell said. Hopefully he added, “Although it's debatable whether the verdict would have been death.”

Lambert was ready for him. “Let's debate it then. According to the judgment of their own country, was it more than likely that the sentence would have been death?”

“I suppose so,” O'Farrell said.

“Judged according to their own standards?”

“Yes,” O'Farrell capitulated.

“You were in Special Forces?”

“Yes.”

“Ever had any difficulty carrying out a morally objectionable order in the army?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I … it was …” O'Farrell stumbled.

“Because you had the right,” Lambert supplied. “You had a service number and a rank and usually a uniform and that gave you the right. More than that, even. If anything went wrong, as it went wrong yesterday in London, the ultimate responsibility wasn't yours—”

“But it was yesterday,” O'Farrell broke in. “I didn't have any right to kill Estelle Rivera.”

“So yon didn't try to kill her!” Lambert said, equally insistent. “It was an accident.”

O'Farrell sighed, but with less exasperation than before. He definitely did feel better talking to this man, convoluted though at times he found the reasoning. He supposed that by a stretch of the imagination—a stretch he was still unprepared to make—the London incident could be considered an accident. He wasn't prepared to dispute it anymore. “And I don't have a rank or a serial number, either.”

“Part of the same problem,” Lambert said. “No official backing or support. Minimal, at best. Guess your great-grandfather operated that way a lot of the time, though.”

O'Farrell thought it was the first time the psychologist had strained too hard to win a point. He said, “A dogtag or a badge. I can think of them as the same.”

“So where are we?” Lambert appeared to feel the same as O'Farrell about his earlier remark.

“You tell me,” O'Farrell said, enjoying the temporary supremacy.

“Talked through for today, I guess.”

“I want to go home,” O'Farrell announced. “There's nothing left for us to talk about.”

“Give me another day, to sort a couple of things out in my mind,” Lambert said. “Just a day or two.”

“One day just became two,” O'Farrell said.

“Evening of the second day. My word.”

“If it's not, I'm going to test the quickness of the guys on guard,” O'Farrell said.

“Sure you are,” Lambert said, and O'Farrell regretted the bravado; he had sounded like a child protesting that he was unafraid of the dark when really he was terrified.

In addition to the genuine mourners, there was a large contingent from the Cuban security service and more from the Diplomatic Protection Squad. Rivera didn't object, although he disliked having so many guardians constantly around him. “Highly professional and skilled” was the forensic description of the assassination; so Belac had gone to a lot of trouble, employing the best. But then, it was logical that the arms dealer would know the best. It was his business to know things like that. Beside him Rivera felt a slight movement, as Jorge clutched his leg. Rivera put his arm around the boy's shoulders and pulled him closer. Jorge had cried a little in the church but had recovered now, in the churchyard, and Rivera was proud of him. At the touch Jorge looked up through filmy eyes and smiled slightly, and Rivera hugged him again.

Rivera kept his head bowed because it was expected but managed to look quite a way beyond the priest saying whatever he was saying over the coffin, which was resting on the lip of the grave. Rivera hadn't expected there to be so many people. They were crowded together, solemn-faced, and the immediate grave area was a blaze of flowers; some of the wreaths were quite elaborate. He was glad he'd deputed a secretary to make a note of the names so he could write later.

The coffin was lowered. Rivera felt a nudge of encouragement from someone and took the offered trowel, casting earth into the grave, giving it in turn to Jorge. When the boy moved, there was a chatter of camera shutters. Rivera wondered if the photographs would appear in the papers belonging to Henrietta's husband. After the bombing they had described him as a playboy diplomat, and he'd made a mock complaint to Henrietta.

Rivera thanked the priest, whose name he could not remember, and hesitated on the pathway back to the cars for people to murmur their regrets as they filed by. He murmured his thanks in return. Some of the women patted Jorge's head as they passed. Rivera wished they hadn't and knew Jorge would feel the same way, too.

The cortege had left from the embassy and not the Hampstead house because it still bore the burns and damage of the explosion, so it had been easy for Rivera to give the instructions to his First Secretary.

The man was beside him now Rivera said, “Well?”

“No, Excellency.”

“You sure?”

“Quite sure.”

Rivera was disappointed. He had quite expected the man to attend.

The line was almost over before the First Secretary leaned toward Rivera and said, “Here, Excellency,” and Rivera stretched out a limp hand to accept that of Albert Lopelle, Estelle's French lover.