Betrayal (13 page)

He started to laugh. At first it was just a small chuckle emanating from his throat, but it soon swelled to something completely out of his control, paroxysms that violently shook him until he could no longer catch his breath. His shoulders heaved and heaved some more as he tried to grab air into his lungs and now suddenly he was crying again, crying for real. Exhausted, his body shaking with the release of so much that he’d kept pent up, he collapsed back into his pillows, tears flowing unabated in a steady stream down his face.

S
TEPHAN WAS WIPING
his face with a warm towel. “What happened here?”

“Nothing. What do you mean?”

“I mean, your face is wet. Are you all right?”

“I got frustrated. Then the reindeer.”

“Right.” Stephan, perhaps more attuned to absurdist dialogue than most people, nodded as if he understood the meaning of what Evan had just said. “But you’re all right now?”

“Fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Sure.”

“Because I’ve got a staff meeting in ten minutes, but I’ll bail on it if you need me here. Even just to talk.”

“No. I’m good. Really, Stephan. Everything’s okay.”

N
OLAN WAS THINKING
that this was why you didn’t waste too much thought on what could go wrong. You just kept moving forward, you kept your goal in your sights, you pushed the niggling doubts out of your mind.

Walter Reed wasn’t wallowing in chaos by any means, but clearly it was an understaffed and overburdened institution. In theory, maybe somebody was supposed to inquire whom he had come to visit, somebody should have checked his ID—he had almost hoped for that, since he had a Canadian passport in his pocket that identified him as Trevor Lennon—but no one had. Beyond those oversights, the crowding had become so serious that in many areas, and specifically on the upper floors of the Pediatric ICU building that had been pressed into service for recovering brain trauma patients, there was no video surveillance.

He was invisible.

There was no need to be impatient. The building had six stories and he’d covered floors two and three already, walking the hallways with a purposeful stride, as though he knew exactly where he was going. He stepped into each room on both floors, checking for Evan. As he walked the halls between rooms, he nodded to patients lying on their gurneys, or shuffling with their walkers; gave a brisk hello to anyone who looked like a doctor or nurse or staffer. He even had a name, Jarrod Smith, if anyone asked him who he was coming to visit, but he didn’t think that was going to prove necessary.

Turning into the third door down on the fourth floor, he saw Evan in the bed across the room, over by the window. The three other beds in the room were all unoccupied. He walked into the room and closed the door behind him, checking the terrain, thinking on his feet that the best way to do it would be out the window.

Depressed brain-injured guy, left alone by a high window. An obvious suicide.

“D
UDE.”

For some reason, Evan found himself tempted to laugh. Inappropriate laughter, Stephan called it, a normal symptom of his kind of brain injury—this time he was able to resist the impulse. “I know you,” he said after a moment.

“Of course you know me. I’m Ron Nolan.”

Evan nodded. “That’s it. Ron. How you doin’, Ron?”

“I’m good. The question is, how are you doing?”

“They tell me I’m a miracle in progress, but I don’t much feel like it. What are you doing here?”

“I was in town and found out you were too. I thought I’d come by and say hi.”

“What town?” Evan asked.

“Washington, D.C., or close enough. They don’t tell you where you are?”

“No, they probably do.” He smiled. “I don’t remember everything the way I should yet.”

“Well,” Nolan said, “wait a second.” He walked around the bed and over to the window. Looking left outside, then right, he suddenly threw up the bottom half of the double-hung window and stuck his head out. Bringing his body back in, he asked. “Can you get up out of bed?”

“Slow but steady.”

“Well, check it out. Come on over here. Next time you forget where you are, look out here—you can read the Walter Reed logo out there on the—”

“What’s a logo?” Evan had thrown off his covers and was sitting on the edge of the bed. “I told you,” he explained, “some words—”

Nolan reached out a hand, ostensibly to stop his talking. “Hey, a picture’s worth a thousand of ’em. Come here.” Taking him by the wrist, he pulled him gently off the bed to a standing position, then backed away from the window to let Evan look out.

Three steps and then…

Nolan put a hand on the center of Evan’s back. A slight pressure, moving him forward.

Two steps.

“W
HAT’S THAT WINDOW DOING
open?” Stephan Ray yelled from the doorway. “You’re going to freeze yourself and the rest of the room to death.” Then, pointing at Nolan, “And who the hell is this?”

Nolan recovered without missing a beat. Pasted the smile back on as he turned. “Ron Nolan,” he said. “I was with Evan over in Iraq.”

“He was with me in Iraq,” Evan repeated.

“Glad to hear it, but let’s close that window, what do you say? And, Evan, you shouldn’t be walking around too much without the walker, right?” He softened his tone, spoke to both of them. “Falling would not be a good thing right now.”

“No. I hear you. My fault,” Nolan said. “Sorry.”

The door was still open to the hallway, and now another man came in with his therapist and the two started to get the patient arranged on his bed.

The moment had passed.

P
LAN
B
WASN’T GOING
to be nearly as satisfying, final, or effective. In fact, it might not do any kind of a job at all, but at least it would give Nolan time. And keep Evan and Tara apart. But he had to work his way into it—besides, it was about the only possibility left, with the other witnesses remaining doing their therapy on the other side of the room. And with Nolan identified for who he really was. “Your nurse seemed a little upset,” he said when Stephan had left them.

“He’s not a nurse. He’s a…” The word
therapist
suddenly wasn’t there. Evan searched the corners of the ceiling for an instant and couldn’t find it up there either. So he regrouped, came out with, “He’s a…helper. He’s here to help me. And sometimes I get upset. TBI will do that to you.”

“TBI?”

“Traumatic brain injury. That’s what I’ve got. Or had. They tell me I’m getting better. I’m not sure I believe them.” Evan picked up the sheet that covered him, he wiped some sweat off his brow. It was, if anything, still cold on his bed, but something about this man Nolan’s presence stoked him up, made him sweat with nerves. “What are you really doing here, Ron?”

“I told you. I had some business in D.C. and thought I’d drop by and see how they’re treating you.”

“They’re treating me fine.” The snow out the window held his attention for a beat, then he came back to Nolan. “And you’re not here from Baghdad?”

“No. I left about a week after you did.”

“What for? Were you hurt?”

Nolan’s cheek ticked. “No. Me and Onofrio, we picked you up, then made a run for it and got out clean. It was a lucky thing.”

“You got me out?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t remember any of that.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would. I didn’t expect you to live. Nobody did.”

“I should thank you.”

Nolan shrugged. “Line of duty, dude. We couldn’t have left you behind.”

“What about the other guys? What happened to them?”

Nolan took a breath. “They were all killed, Evan.”

“No, I know that. But what happened to them, their bodies? If we didn’t get them out? Nobody will tell me anything about that.”

“You don’t want to know, dude. Really.” He paused. “And that ought to tell you everything you need.”

His jaw set, Evan looked over again at the snow, then came back to Nolan. “So why’d you leave? If you weren’t hurt…?”

“Politics. They were going to offer me up, maybe to the CPA, maybe to the locals. Either way, I lose. So I’m out of there, for a while, at least. Until it blows over or all the other shit that happens every day over there covers it up.”

“What do you mean, exactly? What are they accusing you of?”

“Some lying witnesses over in Masbah said I fired too soon. That the car we hit had already stopped. Which is bullshit, since it kept coming and slammed into us way after I blew out the whole front windshield. But they were going to lay it all off on me. I didn’t see any point in sticking around.”

The nebulous memory in Evan’s gut began to coalesce around Nolan’s words, the all-but-forgotten moments just preceding the attack coming back to him with a sickening urgency. It wasn’t some lying witnesses in Iraq—it was people who had seen what had happened and were coming forth with the truth. And the truth was that this trigger-happy son of a bitch was responsible for everything that had happened in Masbah, for all of Evan’s men’s deaths, for all of his own suffering.

Nolan, oblivious to Evan’s growing awareness, continued. “Anyhow, this way, I’m home for Christmas, doing business development over here for Jack Allstrong. You wouldn’t believe how many soldiers like me want back in on the private side. The contractors’ market is going through the roof over there and we get the pick of the litter.”

Evan’s blood pounded in his brain. Pinpricks of bright light danced in the periphery of his vision. The pain forced him to close his eyes, to bring his hands up to cover them.

“But you know,” Nolan went on, his voice suddenly taking on a confiding familiarity, “what I’m really here for is to talk about Tara.”

Evan opened his eyes. The throbbing inside his head squeezed itself down to a tiny pulsing silent ball of focus. Bringing his hands down slowly to avoid drawing attention to the internal violence of his reaction, he forced a curious expression to gather in his facial muscles. “Tara? What about her? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. She’s terrific, in fact.” Nolan cleared his throat. “The thing is, though, the main reason I wanted to see you in person, I thought I owed it to you…”

“What?”

“To tell you to your face that Tara and me, we’re kind of an item. We’re going out together. I thought the right thing would be to let you know.”

Evan felt his hands tighten into fists again under the sheets, but he couldn’t find a response in words right away. Until at last he said, “All right. Now I know.”

“I don’t blame you for being pissed off,” Nolan said.

Evan’s nostrils flared and his breath seemed to be coming in ragged chunks. But he said, “I’m not pissed off. It’s none of my business. We were broken up.”

“Yeah, sure, but I met her doing an errand for you. That’s got an odor on it. You being hurt makes it worse.”

“So? You want some kind of forgiveness? You’re barking up the wrong tree,
dude
.”

“I don’t think so. And I don’t have a guilty conscience. I just wanted you to know how it happened, so you’d know it wasn’t me. I didn’t start it.”

“I don’t care how it happened.”

“No. You’d want to know. It was when I came to tell her you’d been hit.”

“You did that? What for?”

“I thought I owed it to both of you.” Nolan raised his right hand. “I swear to God, I went over to her place as your comrade-in-arms. I told her the whole story, that you’d been talking about her the night before the attack, that you knew she’d ripped up your last letter and were still going to try to work things out with her.”

Beyond the bare truth of Tara and Ron’s involvement with each other, a far more important fact leapt out at Evan, and he wanted to make sure of it. “You’re saying she knew I was hit from before I even got here to Walter Reed?”

Nolan nodded. “Within a week of it anyway. All she said was that this is what she assumed was going to happen when you went over in the first place. When you actually left, she was done. That’s why she never wrote. It’s why she never contacted you here. It was over, dude. When she knew I was coming out here this trip, I told her I was going to come see you and at least try to explain my side of it…”

“There’s nothing to explain. Who wouldn’t want her? You think I blame you for that? I barely knew you for a few weeks in Iraq. You didn’t owe me squat, Ron. And, okay, you got her. Good luck. I mean it. Now get out of here, would you? Get out of here.”

“I’m going,” Nolan said. “But there’s one last thing. I asked if there was anything she wanted me to say to you. You need to hear this. You know what she said?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Here’s the quote: ‘I’m sad he got hurt, and I hope he’s okay. But I’ve really got nothing to say to him. He made his bed, he can lie in it.’”

I
T TOOK
T
ARA
three days to work up the nerve to call Evan. Still uncertain exactly about what she was going to say, even once she’d made up her mind to call, she actually wrote some ideas down so she’d hit all the notes—she didn’t know he’d been injured, she missed him. Mostly—she wrote it five separate times—she was going to say she was sorry. She was going to tell him that when she’d found out what had happened to him, she was resolved to reach out and try to connect with him again. In spite of how badly she’d treated him by not answering his letters, she hoped he could forgive her. She had been wrong, and she was sorry, sorry, sorry. Now she had to know where she stood with him before she could go on with her life anymore. In spite of their philosophical differences, they’d had something rare and special. He knew that. She was sure they’d both changed since he’d left, and possibly it could never work between them, but maybe they could at least start talking again and see where that led.

Sitting in the big chair in her living room, she listened to the ring at the other end of the line, three thousand miles away. Her mouth was dry, her heart pumping wildly. She realized that she was holding her breath and let that go with an audible sigh, reminding herself to breathe again.