He shook his head. “But you can’t, not really.”
He rolled his head, stretched, was the picture of a man whose body was slowly being taken over by cramps, muscle strain, or… guilt.
“You’ve met Herb.”
“Sure.” Valerie spoke quietly, afraid to break the mood.
Xenos shook his head. “Helluva guy. Really. I owe him a lot that I
am
going to pay back to him one day.” He breathed deeply several times. “He found me in college, I was on a music scholarship.”
“Really?”
He tilted his head to the side as if to see a cockeyed world around him. “I was young, desperate to change the world, without a clue as to how.”
“Herb showed me.”
Settling on the edge of the table, Xenos seemed lost in himself, looking not at Valerie, but at some moment in a distant past.
“I don’t know how he found me, how he picked me.” A bitter laugh. “Just came looking, I guess.”
“Oh, he understood me so well.” His voice grew, well, absent. “Knew I was different, knew that I knew it. Knew how to reach me like nobody else in my life.” He shook his head. “He promised me that, together, we could change the world.”
He stood up, shoulders bent inward, head down, his voice barely audible. “We changed it.” The big man seemed to be shrinking in front of her; seemed one giant lump of pain.
Then, suddenly, a strange thing happened.
He straightened, as if forced away from the memories by some inner drive to hold himself up and face the woman a foot or less away.
“I never intended to do any of this,” he said in a stronger voice. “It’s just that recently, I’ve needed to, I’ve been, well… He took a deep breath.” “When Gabi died in my arms, when I looked around at all the children lying there like broken toys… He shook his head sadly, mystified by himself, then turned and walked out of the room.”
“Please!” Valerie called after him. “Please.”
He stopped, then came back to her.
“When I saved you,” even before—as soon as I became involved in looking for Paolo—everything that followed became my responsibility. Herb wouldn’t agree. I doubt that Colin would even agree, although he’d understand. He shook his head with finality. “Now I have to live with that, somehow make it right again.”
Valerie shook her head. “But what you did saved lives. Mine, others, maybe—please God—my children. How can that be a bad thing?”
Xenos never moved, never blinked or breathed. “I should’ve let them kill us,” he said flatly. “You, me, your children.”
“How could you?”
“Easily,” was the atonal reply. “But because I didn’t, the Chinese takeover of the government which would’ve happened peacefully—without fuss or bother or notice—has become the prelude to war. Because of what I did, a hundred thousand people could die.” Maybe more. I can see it! Lay it out in detail to you with numbers, throw weights, troop movements, and strike contours! Christ! He picked up a newspaper from a nearby table. “It’s all there if you want to see it!”
He threw the paper across the room.
“And I
always
see it,” he muttered sadly.
His shoulders dropped, his head bowed, he began to shuffle away. “And it’s my responsibility. I started it. I’m the only one who can stop it.”
Torn between thinking of Xenos as a madman or as a prophet—or as both—Valerie looked down at the paper, then back at the man who seemed covered in blood and guilt.
“Can you stop it?” she asked weakly.
He sighed. “Don’t be late,” was his only comment as he sat down at a computer terminal and began to work.
She watched him for a moment, shivered uncontrollably, then hurried out to Fabrè in the waiting car.
In the subbasement of his headquarters, in a room protected against nuclear attack and twenty-first-century eavesdropping, Herb turned to the attorney general designate, eyeing him suspiciously.
“It’s your dime, Senator.”
“Where you been, Herb?” Buckley’s answer was an expressionless stare. “Let me put it another way. How close are you to figuring out the shit that’s been going on?”
“I’m sure you’re more on top of that than I am,” Herb said easily. “It
was
your commission.”
Buckley smiled, an oddly unsettling expression. “I also sat on a committee with access to the Pei interrogations.” A brief pause. “Interesting reading in light of recent developments.”
“Whatever are you suggesting?” Herb was going to make the man commit himself before reacting.
A fact the senator seemed to understand. “My commission,” he began easily, “dealt with evidence, not conjecture. The FBI, the CIA, the president, and the American people all believe the Taiwanese are responsible for this crisis. Who am I to argue?”
“Yes,” the old intelligence chief agreed, “which makes you a wonderful candidate to be Pei’s traitor—this Apple Blossom.”
Buckley smiled, charmingly, happily, completely at ease. “But I’m not, and I think we both know that.”
“I only know what I read in the papers.”
“Then read these papers—originals with no copies—from my commission’s, uh,
parallel
investigation.”
Herb began flipping through the files. “And why would you investigate Messieurs Kingston and DeWitt?”
The senator stood to leave. “Call it a hunch. Call it jealousy. Call it anything you want.”
Herb looked up at the man. “These are exactly the kinds of things I’d expect the real traitor to come up with.”
Buckley chuckled. “Yeah. I thought of that. The door closed behind him.”
Hours later Herb turned to the two other men who had been with him since Buckley left.
He knew them each intimately, had recruited them individually out of the service or college, had personally investigated them each time he’d advanced their careers.
Had done so again in the days since his return to Washington.
“Simply put, boys, I’m asking you all to commit treason on the most serious levels possible.”
Nobody moved, spoke, or even raised an eyebrow. They just sat, waiting. Each man had a copy of Buckley’s files, and there were nine cartons of other files stacked against the far wall.
Cartons labeled: Buckley, Kingston, and DeWitt.
“I want ideas,” the old man said with pride as he looked at their professionally receptive faces, “propositions, thoughts. Three areas.”
“One: how do we slow down the Kingston nomination?”
“Two: how do we slow down the DeWitt confirmation?”
“Three: which one of them is Apple Blossom?”
One of the men looked up from the papers. “How do you know you can trust Buckley? He fits the profile as tightly as the other two.”
“Four,” Herb answered quickly, “can we trust the good senator?”
“How long do we have?” the taller one asked.
“Almost no time.”
“Assets available?” the other asked calmly.
Herb shrugged. “The three of us. Whatever resources we can steal or subvert.”
“Why don’t we just kill all three, take no chances on guessing wrong?” one of the men who were pale knock-offs of the man in the warehouse asked.
“I’d like to avoid that. At least for now.”
The men thought about it for a few minutes. Then the talking began.
Within an hour, a favorite emerged. Within another twenty minutes, they all began to believe in their choice. Two hours after that, a general plan had been agreed on.
It was raw, without sophistication or contingencies—but Xenos would add those, Herb knew. And it was risky beyond measure.
But, with a little luck, it would
work.
Avidol found Xenos sitting on the warehouse roof. Looking up at the stars, fiddling with a pad, distracted in the way he’d become ever since he was a child when he was deep in thought.
“Jerry? How are you?”
Xenos jumped up and helped his father to one of the several lawn chairs that had been set up there. “Papa, you shouldn’t be up here. You should rest.”
Avidol shook his head firmly. “My place is where I am needed.” He kissed his son on the hand. “And you need me, no?”
“I, I’ve hurt you. Got you shot, made you violate your strongest principles and values. I’m surprised you’re even talking to me.”
Avidol patted the hand he wouldn’t release. “We are all free wills in this world. God’s only promise to individual
men. We make our choices. You chose to save your family when running away again would’ve been easier. I chose to kill a man rather than be killed.”
He sighed. “It is a thing I will remember until I die.” An irretrievable act that violated my most basic beliefs. The slightest hesitation. “But I am prepared to take responsibility for that act.”
He moaned as he adjusted himself in the seat. “Maybe we both compromised, but our choice was life, and there can be no sin in that.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“You must be, Chuni.”
The old man reached over, turning his son’s face to him. “Evil has many faces, many guises. Few can recognize it beneath its beauty. But you can. You have.”
Xenos nodded. “And I’ve started something worse because of it.”
“You think so? I wonder.”
“What is there to wonder about?” the morose man asked as he leaned back and stared up at the starry night.
“Let me ask you, not as a father—but as a teacher—do you still believe in God?”
“Yes,” came the delayed response. “I just don’t think he believes in me anymore.”
“Really,” Avidol said in a professorial tone. “Then why has he made you responsible for so much?”
“He didn’t. I did.”
“No!” It was an unequivocal statement of fact. “Einstein said it better than all the Talmudic scholars in all the centuries of our history.” He paused. “God does not play dice with the universe.”
“We are, to God, strange creatures. Capable of gaining Heaven or creating our own Hell. But it is always our choice. He set us in motion in Eden, and the rest has been of us, alone. He will not interfere in our lives, other than to place the tools of Heaven or Hell within our grasp. And always in equal balance.”
He frowned. “God does not want a suicide any more
than a murderer. If I do not kill, then I allow myself to be killed. God’s paradox.”
“Papa, it’s cold. We should go inside.”
But the old man refused to move.
“You see, Chuni, God offered these same tools to the Chinese and this Canvas fellow. They chose the path to Hell. But he also gave
you
the tools, the responsibility. You have chosen Heaven and accepted the responsibility.”
“For a situation I created.” The younger man sounded beyond bleak.
Avidol shook his head as if trying to explain the alphabet to a child who refused to believe
F
followed
E.
“Jerry, whether lives would be lost now or in the future, the same lives would be lost. This is the inevitability of evil. The rest is only timing. This Canvas was born to be the right arm of the Chinese at this time in this place. His entire life—for good or ill—is what has placed him here. Not the money or bad breaks or political beliefs.
“But,” and the old man smiled warmly, “God has also given you your life. A thing of twists and turns, blackness and pain and isolation. But a thing that has given you what you need to stand up to this evil. As God’s strong right arm!”
Xenos stared into his father’s intense eyes, inhaling the strength and purpose he saw there.
“And from the moment of your birth,” Avidol said flatly as if God had told him himself, “the responsibility has been yours.” He shrugged. “Everything that’s happened in the last weeks has been mere details.”
A young Corsican appeared on the roof. “Dureté, the jar is opening.”
Xenos nodded and started for the door. “Are you going to be all right?”
“Sure, go.”
A moment later, when he was alone on the roof looking up at the magnificent pageantry of the constellations and planets, Avidol sighed deeply and closed his eyes.
“Dear God, give my boy the strength he needs.” He
paused, almost unwilling to give voice to the thought that was almost a betrayal. “And let me be right.”
O’Neill watched the young woman until she turned the corner. Smiling and waving to her as she disappeared from sight. Then he picked up a cell phone from under his seat.
The phone was answered on the first ring. “Yeah?”
“The jar is empty,” O’Neill whispered.
“We’re ready, was followed by the click of the line disconnecting.”
Barbara had gotten out of the Bible salesman’s car a block away from the house. After the night’s battles and terrors, she was taking no chances now. She didn’t
see
any surveillance on the street, everything looked calm and normal. But…
Twice she’d thought about calling the emergency number again. Each time deciding against it. Because the more she thought about it, the more she began to realize that it was a damned short list of who would want her dead and who had the resources to put together a professional hit team like the men in the vans.
And the Apple Blossom chain was at the top of that list.
It could be that she had outlived her usefulness to them. Or maybe they were just tidying up before anything could go wrong at the sonofabitch’s hearings.
It also occurred to the young woman as she fished in her purse for the keys to the co-op she secretly owned with Valerie (her house was out of the question for now) that it could be other, even more sinister forces that were trying to kill her. A vengeful CIA or NSC that had discovered the plot and were cleaning house to avoid a public scandal.
But—in either event—she would clean up, get something to eat,
definitely
something to drink, then think about her next move.
She let herself in the side door, waiting to turn on the lights in the entry hall until she’d locked the door behind her.
“Hello, Barbara,” a familiar voice called out softly from the dark behind her.
“What…”
She never finished the thought as her ribs seemed to explode with pain as Valerie’s baseball bat crashed into them.
The furious congresswoman watched as Fabrè picked up the screaming woman with the broken ribs and tossed her on the couch. A quick search of her, a nod to Valerie, and the assassin stepped out from between the women.