“Good that you enjoy your work.”

Again she said nothing.

“There’s no other way for you, is there? You can’t do something only for yourself. Even when you try, it’s really for the people who are pulling your strings.”

“You can think what you want.”

“Exactly. That’s the difference between you and me.”

“You’ll come around. Everybody does.”

“You’re confusing me with you,” he said, shaking his head. “Look it up. It’s called projection.”

He walked away, past the traffic, the blank-eyed buildings, the commuter zombies.

He imagined a frog in a pot, the water getting gradually warmer, the frog never noticing any of it. He imagined people telling themselves they would never be part of something corrupt, then telling themselves they would only be part of it to make it better, then telling themselves, hey, the thing wasn’t corrupt in the first place, it was just the way of the world, they’d been naïve before and now they were savvy.

He thought of Paula. He didn’t hate her. He almost felt sorry for her. He wondered if she’d realized what was happening to her, or if she only saw it in retrospect, after it was too late to do anything about it. Or maybe Ulrich had something on her, the way the Agency now did on him, the way all of them did on one another. It didn’t matter. At some point, she’d made a choice. Now she was part of it.

He wondered if he was different.

Maybe he had a way to find out.

43. The Polite Thing

The next morning, Ben waited in another rental car outside Marcy Wheeler’s house in Kissimmee. He was nervous in a way that was weirdly different from the familiar pre-combat jitters.

He didn’t need to be here. He knew she wasn’t really expecting to hear from him, or, if she was, that she didn’t expect the truth. But he’d said he would tell her if he could. And he sensed that somehow, if he avoided that, rationalized it away, arrogated to himself the power to shape and distort and withhold, it would make him like what he now recognized in Paula. And in Hort. Maybe he was making too much of it, but even that consideration felt like the worm of a rationalization. He thought he’d have to be vigilant about things like that, disciplined. Alert to threats to his integrity the way he was to threats to his person.

At just past eight o’clock, Wheeler’s front door opened, as it had a few days before. She kissed her son and watched him while he waited for the bus, then went back in the house, again with that wistful, sad look he’d noticed last time. He got out, walked over, and knocked on her door.

When she answered, she took a step back. “Agent Froomkin,” she said. “I… I didn’t think you’d come back.”

Ben felt a weird tightness in his chest. He could tell her anything, he realized. She’d have no choice but to believe it. Why make it hard on her? Why burden her, when she already had so much on her hands and on her mind? A little piece of fiction, a white lie, would free her from her doubts. Wouldn’t anything else just be cruel? And selfish, too, to unload on her just to prove something to himself.

“It’s not Froomkin,” he said. “And I’m not FBI.”

Her jaw tightened. “What are you?”

He shook his head. “I can’t tell you that.”

A little fear crept into her eyes. “What can you tell me?”

“What you wanted to know. If you still want to know it.”

She looked at him for a long time. He thought maybe she was going to tell him no, don’t tell me, it’s too much. Free him from the responsibility. Free him from the choice.

“I want to know,” she said.

He cleared his throat. “Your husband was having an affair.”

She didn’t blink. She didn’t flinch. She looked at him, and he could tell without knowing how that she hated him.

“Who was she?” she said, her tone so flat it could have been produced by a synthesizer.

He hesitated.

Just fucking say it. “It wasn’t a she.”

Her pupils dilated. He could feel her sudden revulsion for him. He felt it for himself.

She said, “God.”

He didn’t respond.

A long moment passed. She said, “Well, I asked you to tell me, didn’t I?”

She shook her head as though in wonder at her own stupidity.

“Still. I really can’t believe you did. I can’t believe it. I guess the polite thing would be to thank you.”

Tell her the rest. Tell her he’s not dead. Tell her.

But wasn’t she indicating now that she didn’t want to know? Didn’t that change-

“Goodbye, Agent whatever your name is and whoever you are.”

She closed the door in his face.

He stood there for a long moment, telling himself to ring the bell, get it out, finish what he’d come here for.

He didn’t. Instead, he walked back to the car, feeling slightly ill. He wondered whether he’d proven something. If so, he wished he knew what it was.

He drove back to the airport in Orlando.

He had some tough decisions to make. Decide wrong one way, and he could take the fall for Ulrich. Decide wrong the other way, and he could spend the rest of his life anesthetizing himself like Paula. Or looking for some crazy Hail Mary way out, like Larison.

It seemed like the safest alternative was to do what Hort had asked. Track down the men he wanted. It would buy him time. After all, Hort couldn’t monitor everything that happened in the field. He might learn something, the way he had from Larison. Speaking of whom, he could track him down, too. He’d done it before. He could do it again. There was no telling who else Hort had screwed along the way. Put together a few disgruntled former soldiers, and Hort could wind up on the wrong end of a fragging. With Clements and the CIA and the rest of the damn oligarchs or whatever they called themselves alongside him.

He hoped he was making the right decision. Hort said he knew people. Would he have seen this coming? Would he have known this was the way Ben would perceive the situation, the way he would persuade himself he still had free will even as he was doing Hort’s bidding?

He didn’t know. He’d have to be careful.

You come a certain distance, you can’t just turn around.

Yeah, he could see that now. He couldn’t just walk away. He was too deep inside. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t find a way out.

But should he? There was a lot of damage you could do from the inside, if that’s what you wanted.

He smiled grimly. Yeah, if damage was the objective, inside could be awfully goddamned good.

Author’s Note

Location photos of some of the places in this book can be found on my website at http://www.barryeisler.com/photo.php.

During the year in which I wrote this book, various people privy to its plot were concerned the CIA interrogation tapes would surface and overtake the story. I told them not to worry: those tapes would never see the light of day. They haven’t. And they never will.