The Gamma Option (42 page)
Authors: Jon Land
“Difference is you’re at least free to make a choice while I—Well, the Israelis you saw outside my door aren’t doctors.”
“You’ll be freed as soon as you’re well enough.”
“What?”
“Governments have this thing about embarrassment—Americans, Israelis, even the Soviets. They fear it more than anything. They may have killed Rasin, but they missed their chance at me, which means I’m the only one who can expose the truth of how close the Israeli government came to bringing about the world’s untimely end. Only I have no plans to as long as my terms are met.”
“My … freedom?”
“Among other things. Did promise them that your underground and commando days were over, though.”
“Because you knew I’d seen enough… .”
“Not really. I just knew you didn’t have the stomach for it. I could tell by the questions you asked me when we first met, the way you reacted to my responses. I wasn’t what you expected, and it was easier emulating a fantasy.”
Evira grimaced. “I learned that in Tehran.”
“For sure. You’ll make a great politician. You care too much about causes to keep operating out of flea markets.”
“And you don’t?”
“Nope. My thing is people. To me every single individual life is as precious as a homeland for your people or peace for the Middle East in general.”
Evira looked at him like an old, trusted friend. “You’ve made my decision easy. I suppose I owe you an even greater debt now than I did before. ‘Evira’ is finished. No more shadows, no more crevices, no more … flea markets. I’m taking my fight public, into a different arena.”
“Beware, my lady. The rules are different, too. Less bullets. More lies.”
“Not more. Just increasingly difficult to separate from the truth.” She hesitated. “And what about you?”
“That depends on Paris.”
Johnny Wareagle made no move to leave the car after Blaine had pulled into the no-parking zone in front of the Paris hotel Evira had sent him to.
“Worried about us getting towed, Indian?”
“You won’t need me in there, Blainey.”
“Why is it everyone knows more about what I’m going to find upstairs than I do?”
“The patterns are there for all of us to see; they have been from the beginning.”
“What am I going to find in that room, Indian?”
“Truth.”
“A popular word lately …”
“A journey must come to its own end. We can choose our path, and with luck find another after it has ended. Without luck we become immobile, afraid to go back because we know what’s there. Unable to go forward because our way is blocked.”
“Like me these past few months?”
“Perhaps. The key is to seek out that next road, Blainey, and accept the transition it offers from the last.”
McCracken left the car wordlessly and entered the hotel. In the elevator out of habit he touched his gun, despite sensing he would not need it. His heart was pounding when he reached the door in question and found it already partway open. His guard up again, he lunged through it into a combat stance that was already half-hearted before his eyes found the single figure seated by the window.
“
Bonjour, mon ami,”
said Henri Dejourner.
Blaine didn’t lower the pistol, not right away.
“Do I need this or not, Henri?”
“That will be up to you to decide.”
“You bastard! You set me up!”
The Frenchman shrugged. “Regrettable, but necessary.”
McCracken looked at him with a strange calm. “Then the boy …”
“Not your son. Lauren’s yes, but not yours. I created the fiction out of reasonable fact.”
“To make me work for the Arabs, because you already
were
working for them.”
“Not for—with. The difference is crucial,
mon ami.
Their concerns, Evira’s specifically, mirrored my own. You were the only one who could help us.”
“It was your idea, goddamn it!” Blaine exclaimed.
“Both of ours. We needed you, had to have you.”
“And when I refused to listen to the messenger boys you sent, you cooked this up.” He shook his head. “You violated principles, Henri, and that makes you a rat.”
The Frenchman shook his head deliberately. “No,
mon ami,
principles were only a part of it; practicality was a far greater part. We needed the McCracken of a decade ago, a year ago. Not the McCracken I found on that island off Portland, Maine. The fabrication of a son was meant to assure your services,
oui,
but it was also meant to insure we were getting a man who would stop at nothing, who would accept nothing, until the affair was satisfactorily brought to a conclusion.”
“Is that how you would explain it to John Neville, or doesn’t his life matter either? No, don’t bother answering. I can’t stand any more of your bullshit. You broke every unwritten rule in the book and I ought to kill you just for that.”
Much to Blaine’s surprise, the Frenchman reared back his head and laughed. “I see my plot has accomplished exactly what it was supposed to. Tell me you don’t feel better standing there now. Tell me that gun in your hand does not feel different than it did when I came to you on the island. Tell me a flame you may have throught extinguished forever has not been rekindled.”
Blaine lowered the pistol. “Fuck you, Henri.”
“He’s not your son,
mon ami.
He is nothing to you. It is over.”
“You know it’s not like that. You know, damn it!”
The Frenchman rose with a knowing gleam in his eye. “You’re involved,
mon ami,
with the boy and his life. You told him simply you were a friend, mentioned nothing of what you perceived to be the truth, and on that basis your relationship with him was founded.”
“Get to the point.”
“He is my niece Lauren’s son, and she is dead, making him an orphan. That much is true. So what has changed? Plenty in your eyes, yes, but nothing in the boy’s. Everything is perspective. I wanted to meet you like this to be sure at least this one point was presented to you.”
Blaine found himself wanting to be angry but not succeeding. “You’re still a rat, Henri.”
“But it was your needs that led you to take the cheese,
mon ami.
”
“You knew,” Blaine said to Johnny from behind the wheel of the car.
“The spirits provided indications I could not ignore, Blainey.”
“You know the worst thing, Indian? I knew too. From the first time I saw the boy, I felt he wasn’t my son. But I wouldn’t face up to it because I wanted him to be. Make sense?”
“As much as anything. More than much.”
“I wanted him to be my son because that would have been my escape, my convenient out. An excuse, a rationale to let myself change, to
make
myself change.”
“But doing all you have done to save the boy made you realize you did not want to change, that you were only happy within the hellfire that is both place and feeling.”
“Not happy, so much as able to succeed. I tried to turn my back, to walk away, to withdraw—I really did. God, how much I’d love to be able to live alone in the woods like you.”
“And has that helped my withdrawal from the hellfire, Blainey?”
“No, because I keep drawing you back in.”
“You come because you must. I go with you because I must. Where is the distinction? We both do what we have to. Only the origins we emerge from are different, and in themselves those origins are meaningless. It is the destinations that matter, and ours are the same.”
Blaine looked at him reflectively. “We’ve been fighting the same war for twenty years, Indian. What kind of destination is that? The names and places keep changing, but I’ll be damned if they don’t seem interchangeable after awhile.”
“Because the journey is what matters. Moving is living. Motion is life. One cannot exist without the other.”
“I wanted that boy to be my son, Indian.”
“A passenger on the journey, Blainey, regardless of label.”
“Yeah, I get the point.”
Blaine arrived at the Reading School in the twilight between afternoon and night. The teacher who had replaced John Neville as housemaster directed him to a small pitch in the school’s rear where a number of boarders were kicking a soccer ball leisurely about before dinner. He approached without hesitation, his step purposeful and sure, but his thudding heart betraying the fear within.
Fear of acceptance.
Fear of truth.
The boy had been involved in this because of him. One way or another that made it his responsibility to do … something. So much to be said, so many explanations called for. Where to start?
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“Got to save some stuff for later.”
“And what about what you did in the Phoenix Project?”
“Also later.”
Their first meeting weighing heavily on his mind, he’d composed a dozen speeches en route there, and dismissed them all. None came even close to expressing what he felt, what he really wanted to say. His thoughts swam wildly as he approached the boys clad in sweat suits kicking the muddied ball about in the falling shadow of dusk. He couldn’t see Matthew and wondered if the housemaster might have been mistaken.
The boy turned and seemed to rush for him in the same motion. Blaine saw the smile beaming, thought perhaps it might have been the greatest sight ever, knew then that he didn’t need the words ready because they would come on their own.
The boy lunged the last of the way with long hair flapping in the breeze and threw his arms around Blaine, head buried against his chest. McCracken returned the grasp as tight as it came to him, and the embrace lingered for a time before he eased the boy away gently at the shoulders.
“It’s later.” Blaine smiled.
Since his first book was published in 1983, Jon Land has written twenty-eight novels, seventeen of which have appeared on national bestseller lists. He wrote techno thrillers before Tom Clancy put them in vogue, and his strong prose, easy characterization, and commitment to technical accuracy have made him a pillar of the genre.
Land spent his college years at Brown University, where he convinced the faculty to let him attempt writing a thriller as his senior honors thesis. Four years later, his first novel,
The Doomsday Spiral
, appeared in print. In the last years of the Cold War, he found a place writing chilling portrayals of threats to the United States, and of the men and women who operated undercover and outside the law to maintain our security. His most successful of those novels were the nine starring Blaine McCracken, a rogue CIA agent and former Green Beret with the skills of James Bond but none of the Englishman’s tact.
In 1998 Land published the first novel in his Ben and Danielle series, comprised of fast-paced thrillers whose heroes, a Detroit cop and an Israeli detective, work together to protect the Holy Land, falling in love in the process. He has written seven of these so far. The most recent,
The Last Prophecy
, was released in 2004.
Recently,
RT Book Reviews
gave Land a special prize for pioneering genre fiction, and his short story “Killing Time” was shortlisted for the 2010 Dagger Award for best short fiction. Land is currently writing his fourth novel to feature Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong—a female hero in a genre which, Land has said, has too few of them. The first three books in the series—
Strong Enough to Die
(2009),
Strong Justice
(2010), and
Strong at the Break
(2011)—have all garnered critical praise with
Strong Justice
being named a Top Thriller of the Year by Library Journal and runner-up for Best Novel of the Year by the New England Book Festival. His first nonfiction book,
Betrayal
, tells the story of a deputy FBI chief attempting to bring down Boston crime lord Whitey Bulger, and will be released in 2011.
Land currently lives in Providence, not far from his alma mater.
Land (left) interviewing then–teen idol Leif Garrett (center) in April of 1978 at the dawn of Land’s writing career.
Land (second from left) at Maine’s Ogunquit Beach during the summer of 1984, while he was a counselor at Camp Samoset II. He spent a total of twenty-six summers at the camp.