Girl of Vengeance

by Charles Sheehan-Miles

  “So what happened?” she whispered.

  “She ran. Out the door, and out into the street. I confess, I thought she was just angry, and going for a walk to cool down. Sometimes she did that … Adelina is a passionate woman, but not one who deals with personal confrontation very well.”

  No kidding.

  “When she didn’t come back after an hour, I called Melissa Brewer and sent you girls over there, and I drove, looking for her. We didn’t have cell phones then, of course, so all I could do was search, then check back at home every once in a while to see if she’d come home. I was frantic.”

  As he told the story, Julia found herself nodding. Unfortunately, so far it was completely believable.

  “So … by ten that night, I was panicking. I called the police, but they told me they couldn’t do anything until she was gone for twenty-four hours.”

  “So what happened?” Julia asked.

  “At one am the phone rang. It was Adelina. She was calling from … from a pay phone in the Tenderloin.”

  Julia sucked in a breath. Her father looked ashen as he continued his story.

  “I immediately went to her. I don’t know if you know what it was like back then—San Francisco now isn’t what it was twenty-five years ago. Back then the whole district was … massage parlors and cabarets. Whores and pimps and drug dealers. Homeless men sleeping in doorways. Junkies and transvestites and derelicts. I found your mother at a bus stop on this filthy street corner. Her clothes were torn and she was glassy eyed—drunk or drugged or I don’t know what. She was battered and bruised and…”

  He stopped speaking and stared off into space. Julia didn’t react.

  He swallowed and looked back at her. “I don’t tell you this to bullshit you, Julia. It’s what it was. She was in bad shape. I took her to the hospital, and we were hours waiting in the emergency room. Finally they saw her, and that took hours more. It was about three in the morning when the police questioned me. It was routine—they always question the husband when a woman is assaulted.”

  He sighed and shrugged. “It was awful. Just … awful. Julia … I love your mother. And I second-guessed myself for years. Should I have just let it go and not confronted her? I felt responsible. It’s not as if I didn’t know that she was unstable. And it just got worse. We went to Belgium and … well … you remember her hospitalization.”

  Julia stared at the table. Of course she remembered. She remembered every slap, every bitter word.

  “Julia, I swear to you, I never laid a hand on your mother. And I’d do anything for her to be healthy again. We once loved each other … surely you know that. She was … so beautiful when we met. Young and happy and full of life. I know things were awful when you were a teenager, but don’t you remember when you were little? She used to take you to church, and sometimes we’d have lunch afterward?”

  “I remember,” Julia said. Her eyes watered.

  Richard. May 6.

  When Julia’s eyes watered, he knew he had her. Julia had always been his closest daughter, the most loyal. From the time she was a toddler, he’d done everything he could to ensure her loyalty and love. And done just as much to ensure that she felt nothing but fear of her mother.

  “Of course I remember.” She stared at the table, as if she were reviewing memories in her mind. And he knew that many of those memories were of hugs from him. Throwing her up in the air as they laughed. Embracing her as she came off the stage at her first piano recital.

  “Do you think that’s why she went so crazy and distant when we were in Belgium and China? Because of the assault?”

  He shrugged, but inside, he was filled with glee. He needed Julia as his ally, and it was clear he’d won her over, or at least begun to. “I don’t know. Her psychiatrists suggested that it might be some post-traumatic stress. But some of the instability was there even before.”

  Julia sighed. “What about Andrea?”

  “What about her?”

  Julia winced. “Why was she … why did she spend so much time in Spain growing up?”

  Careful. Julia and her sisters had almost fanatical loyalty to each other. If she detected any hint of hostility toward Andrea, he would lose her. So, he drove another nail into Adelina’s coffin. “I should never have given in to her on that. Adelina wanted it. She said that at least one of her daughters should grow up Spanish. It was irrational.”

  “But you told Carrie that it was … you hadn’t … bonded with Andrea.”

  He leaned forward and looked at her with a serious expression. “It’s true, I guess, though I’m ashamed to admit it. Would I have allowed Adelina to send her away if she were mine? I guess … I wouldn’t have. But it’s what your mother wanted. And, I guess the truth is, sometimes I found it was easier to give in to her rather than have to deal with months of hysteria.”

  He ran a hand through his hair, knowing the gesture of insecurity would help persuade her, and that his self-deprecation would come across as honesty. Disarm her suspicion.

  She shook her head, then said, “Is that why you never protected us from her? Because it was … easier?”

  He closed his eyes. Better to take the hit on this one and win her over. He spoke in a low tone. “I suppose it was. And I’ll regret that to the end of my days.”

  “I know you did the best you could,” she said. Excellent. She continued. “But I’ve still got questions. Why the kidnapping? The IRS investigation? What the hell is happening? And why did you have that file in your office? The one with the pictures of the … dead bodies from Afghanistan?”

  He cursed at himself for the instinct that had led him to keep those photos, to keep that file. Nothing in it had been classified. Nothing in it that hadn’t made the papers. But those photos—they showed a power that had awed him. A single bottle, tightly secured inside a steel container. That was all it had taken to kill the entire village. And that power had been in his hands. But that, he could never admit to. He might feel his own thrill—much as he’d felt when the truck he’d driven had smacked into the body of Manuel Ramos, smashing the pompous old man’s body and cracking his skull open like a rotted watermelon.

  “You should never have seen that. It wasn’t classified anymore, but it ought to be. Back in 1983 Afghan militia attacked a village with chemical weapons and killed everyone.”

  “I know about the incident, I’ve read a fair amount about it.”

  Of course she had. She was his daughter far more than Adelina’s, and he knew she wouldn’t walk into a meeting like this without being prepared. But he was ten laps ahead of her—no matter how fast she was, she wouldn’t be able to gain control of the situation.

  He said, “Then you probably know that at the time, the United States blamed the Soviet Union for it. But what no one knew was that Leslie Collins was responsible for it.”

  “Leslie Collins? As in the Leslie Collins you used to have over for dinner all the time?”

  “Yes. I didn’t find that out until much later, of course, and reported it as soon as I knew. But the higher ups in the Agency at the time decided to cover it up instead. Because it was in the interest of national security.”

  “And you went along with that?”

  “I had no choice, Julia.”

  “So why all the stuff that’s happening now?”

  He looked at his daughter. Time to plant a seed that would drive a wedge between his daughters and George-Phillip. The thought of that man made him seethe. How the hell had Adelina managed to keep a secret like that all those years? He remembered how many times over three decades he’d had meetings with George-Phillip. Talked over drinks at Embassy functions in different countries. How many times he’d touched his hands. Richard wanted to vomit at the thought of it. He wanted to kill. Instead, he spoke in a calm and rational manner.

  “Actually I think there are two things happening here. And you gave me the last puzzle piece.”

  “What piece?” she asked, arching both eyebrows.

  “Well,
first, I think Collins knew that if I took over as Secretary of Defense, I’d move to have the cover up of Wakhan declassified finally. That would end his career and likely see him in prison. I believe he engineered the secret accounts to discredit me. And you, unfortunately, are an innocent bystander. I assumed he was behind the kidnapping as well. It certainly made the drug money angle more convincing. But now I wonder if something else entirely happened with Andrea.”

  “What?” She tilted her head. She was hooked.

  “Prince George-Phillip, of course. Can you imagine what a scandal it would be if it became public that he’d had a long-standing affair with Adelina? With two children? The easiest way to handle that would be to ensure that those children no longer existed, wouldn’t it?”

  Julia winced, a slight furrow appearing between her eyebrows. She reached into her purse and took out a tattered, tightly bound book.

  “One more thing. What about this, Dad? It’s Mother’s journal. And it says you raped her.”

  Christ, that crazy bitch kept a journal? He cursed at himself. How had he missed that? He knew for sure she hadn’t kept one in the eighties—he’d thoroughly searched her room, more than once, when she was at church. Carefully, he tilted his head. Then he said, “It’s not true, obviously. Let me see it.”

  She stared at him, her face obviously reluctant.

  “Come on, Julia. It’s me. You know me,” he said.

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “I don’t think you should read it,” she said. “It’s private.”

  “Julia, you know I have her best interests in mind. I’m deeply concerned about her.”

  Her hands shook as she passed the book to him. He studied it. Black leather cover. It was old, the paper slightly browning, the entire book slightly curved, as if it had been bound up inside a vase and bent permanently. Where had she kept it?

  He looked at Julia and raised an eyebrow. Her expression was skeptical. But it was also hungry. Julia needed an answer that made sense. Her desperation for order in her life, her desperation for approval—it was plainly obvious. Just as plainly obvious that he was the only one who could provide her with that. Her nothing of a husband couldn’t. She’d married him because she could control him. Crank wasn’t her equal in determination or in intelligence, and his education was worse than third-rate. Only his freak talent with the guitar, and the business management she’d learned from her father, gave Crank the massive success he so richly did not deserve.

  Richard flipped open the journal. He grimaced. The journal was a densely packed block of letters starting on the first page, the handwriting deeply slanted and barely legible. Good God.

  “It’s worse than I thought,” he muttered.

  “What?” Julia asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious? There’s no paragraph marks here. No margins. This is the journal of a crazy person.” He flipped through the first few pages. Richard was fluent in Spanish—after all, he’d been stationed there and helped assist the organizers of the February 23rd coup.

  He stopped on the sixth or seventh page, and the words leapt out at him. Richard murdered my father. He kept flipping through. Pages and pages of rambling about God and the devil. He turned the journal to Julia, who he knew full well couldn’t read Spanish fluently.

  “Look here,” he said. “She rambles on for pages and pages about the devil. It makes me wonder if she was hallucinating.”

  Julia shook her head sadly. Richard took the book back and continued flipping through. An account of her hospitalization. On another page, she wrote, I hate myself for breaking George-Phillip’s heart. But what else could I do? He grunted in disgust and passed the journal back to Julia.

  She should have done what she was told. Richard wanted nothing more than to punish her. Instead, he looked up at Julia and said, “Julia. I know you’ve—you’ve had a difficult relationship with your mother in the past. But I need your help.”

  He leaned close and looked at her with the most sincere eyes he could. “Julia, I don’t know if you can forgive her. But you have to recognize that she was sick. We need to help your mother, Julia. We need to get her back to the United States. I … I hesitate to say this … but I’m starting to think that it’s time we considered some inpatient options for her.”

  Julia flinched. “Like … a mental hospital?”

  Like a six-foot-deep hole in the ground. “Yes. She needs competent medical care, and I’ve never believed that quack she goes to knows what he’s doing.” He looked down at the table and ran his hands through his hair again. He didn’t want to overplay his cards. But he also knew that this conversation was essential. He looked back up at Julia and said, “Julia. Can you forgive your mother? Will you help me?”

  She met his eyes. He could see the vulnerability in her eyes. The desperate need for approval which had driven her career and her life. She would do as he asked. She would.

  Then she nodded. “Of course I’ll help.”

  Bear. May 6.

  The nurse at the desk looked irritated when Bear asked for Adelina Thompson. She waved down the hallway and said, “You’ll find her at the end of the hall with the security guards. Room 201.”

  Bear smiled and said, “Thank you, ma’am.” He walked on, Anthony at his left side. Immediately, the correct room became apparent. Two men in black quasi-military uniforms flanked the door in an uneasy triangle with an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  One of the men saw them coming and approached. His sidearm was visible in a shoulder holster. That was unusual for Canada.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked.

  Anthony said, “We’re here to see Adelina Thompson.”

  “And you are?”

  “You can tell her it’s an old friend,” Bear interjected. “Bear Wyden. She’ll remember me from Belgium. And let her know we come with news from Carrie and Julia.”

  The guard looked at him suspiciously and consulted a sheet of paper. Then he said, “Your name isn’t on the list of permitted visitors. Wait here.” Then he waved at the other guard, who took a blocking position in the hall as the first one went back to the door.

  The badges on the uniform looked almost official, unless you looked closely. The center showed an eye, like the CBS logo, with a triangular shape spreading out from the center. Like an all-seeing eye. Creepy. The words on the badge said Pinkerton Security Services.

  Bear waited impatiently. It had been one long as hell day, starting with a crack of dawn flight west. Once they’d finished here, they were headed back east on a red-eye from Vancouver to Washington, DC. Thank God The Washington Post was paying for the flight. Finally, the guard came back.

  “All right, you’re cleared. You carrying?”

  Bear shook his head. He wasn’t officially on duty. The last thing he needed to be doing was carrying his service weapon across international borders.

  The guard patted them both down—not a perfunctory search, but really looking. Finally he waved them in.

  Inside the room, an emaciated teenager lay on the hospital bed, the back of the bed configured to allow her to sit up comfortably. Her eyes were hollow, but Bear could see that she had the potential for real beauty if she gained a little weight. As it was, she clearly wasn’t healthy. He recognized her from the portrait in Richard Thompson’s office at the Pentagon, as well as many photos displayed in Carrie’s condominium. Jessica, who had been born after Bear last saw Adelina Thompson.

  His eyes shifted from the daughter to the mother. Adelina was still an attractive woman. He’d guess she was fifty years old now. Over the years she’d put on some weight, and giving birth to six children had changed her body significantly. But her eyes were still wide, her hair black and twisted carelessly into a knot over her shoulder. She stood as Bear and Anthony entered the room.

  “Bear,” she said, walking forward with a half smile.

  He smiled at her. “You remember me,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “A long time, but how cou
ld I forget the man who protected my family and my daughters?”

  “You’re still as lovely as always,” he responded.

  Adelina said, “Jessica, this is Bear Wyden. He headed our security detail in Belgium in the nineties. It must have been nearly twenty years ago.”

  “Almost exactly,” he responded. “This is Anthony Walker. He’s a friend of Julia’s, and a reporter for The Washington Post.”

  Adelina’s eyes widened. “A reporter? Friends with Julia? I find that … surprising.”

  “Friends may be an overstatement,” Anthony said. “But we’ve been working together. Julia’s come around to the idea that it’s time to shed some public light on what’s been happening to your family.”

  Adelina’s eyes darted back and forth between the two men. Then she said, “You have my undivided attention. I never expected you to pop up out of the woodwork. What brings you to Canada, exactly?”

  Bear said, “I know you were away, so you may not know the extent of the details. But when your daughter Andrea arrived in the United States last Monday, I was assigned to investigate her kidnapping. I’m still with Diplomatic Security, of course. I assigned a protective detail to guard your daughters, but they were attacked again on Friday night. I’ve been doing everything I can to track down those responsible for the attacks. Our best lead was Nick Larsden, the man who shot at you and your daughter as you were trying to cross the border.”

  “Was?” she asked nervously. “He’s not free, is he?”

  “No, ma’am. He’s dead.”

  Adelina blanched.

  He went on, “Someone in the jail knifed him. We don’t know who, or whether it was for hire or just a bizarre coincidence. Anthony and I interviewed him early this morning, but we didn’t get a chance to finish.”

  “Why not?”

  Bear looked at Anthony, as if to ask Anthony’s opinion. Should he tell her the truth? Anthony raised an eyebrow. That was the opposite of helpful. He turned back to Adelina and laid his cards on the table.