The Truth Itself

by James Rayburn

  Danvers took the stairs down to the U-Bahn station, reaching the platform just as the yellow train hissed to a halt. He validated his Berlin City Tour Card at the ticket stamping machine and boarded the crowded train, strap-hanging near the door.

  As the train took off he felt a presence at his side and the blonde woman and her child squeezed in beside him.

  So, his aged pee-pee had been right.

  “Do you know where he is?” Kate asked, staring out at the dark tunnel.

  “And hello to you too, Kate.”

  “Do you?”

  “Who?”

  “Philip, please.”

  He looked at her and saw the strain on her face and had to quell an impulse to embrace her.

  The child gazed up him, silent. A girl, he saw, wearing the haircut and clothes of a boy.

  So this was the spawn of Kate and the Palestinian. There was something of the father’s languid Levantine beauty (Danvers had harbored a secret and quite ridiculous lust for the sleepy-eyed Yusuf) in the face that peered up at him.

  “Not exactly.”

  “But you can find out?”

  “Yes, I can find out.”

  The train halted at Paradestrasse and even though his stop was farther along at Stadtmitte, near the Regent Hotel where he was staying, he stepped out, saying, “Meet me at the Holocaust Memorial in two hours.”

  Danvers, left alone on the platform, buffeted by the hot wind of the departing train, wished he were home listening to Chopin and sipping the single Cutty Sark that he allowed himself each evening. As he hauled his dying body up the stairs, using the handrail, he felt very, very old and very, very tired.

  NINE

  Benway flew home on Emirates, a two-hour hop from Amman to Dubai and then direct to Washington. First class, with the private cubicles he preferred, had been fully booked but at least Emirates had lie-flat seats in business class. Anyway, legroom was no problem.

  Morse had gone ahead, hitching a ride on an unmarked 747 with Special Forces cronies of his who were returning to Fort Bragg after some black flag operation in Yemen. Even with his connecting flight to Washington he’d be there ahead of Benway, who was in no hurry.

  The enforced inertia of fourteen hours in the air was what he needed to process the emotions that the reappearance of Kate Swift had stirred up, for she had been the instrument of his downfall, the reason that he’d been disowned by the CIA and the administration (narrowly avoiding criminal charges)and now had to live in the shadow of an ongoing Justice Department investigation into his international contract work for contraventions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

  The heat of that investigation had seen the majority of his clients, shy as roloway monkeys, withdraw from him, and his stunted list now comprised only the outlaw governments of pariah states who continued to prize the insights of an American of his stripe and cared not a fig for international condemnation.

  A humiliation for a man who’d had the ears of four successive American presidents.

  He sighed and signaled the stewardess for another Cutty Sark, and she brought him a little green and gold miniature that he uncapped and poured into a glass over ice.

  As he sipped the drink he thought of Philip Danvers and realized, to his shame, that he wished his relationship with the old man was still intact, that when he landed he could turn to him for succor.

  An absurd notion, for Benway had engineered the palace coup that had seen Danvers forced into early retirement.

  When Danvers had quashed Benway’s initiative to go private, to take their shadowy, unnamed unit off-the-books and leave them far beyond the reach of intelligence oversight committees on The Hill, he’d gone over his mentor’s head, lobbying his allies in the executive, the DOD and the intelligence community who were tired of having their wings clipped, and he’d won the day, ousting the old man and, in effect, creating his own little fiefdom, reporting directly to the White House.

  The unofficial nature of this relationship (his standing bon mot when being briefed by station chiefs and generals and presidential aides had been “and for whom am I not working today?”) had made for great freedom, but his hubris had led to his downfall.

  He’d inherited Kate Swift, who’d remained too much Mrs. Danvers’s little pet for his liking and he’d been distrustful of her marriage to Yusuf Hourani, an American, yes, born in Chicago, but the son of Palestinians who’d once supported Arafat, his mother reputedly—though when Benway had searched for proof he’d found only rumor and innuendo—one of the Black September band, along with Leila Khaled, who on August 29, 1969 hijacked TWA Flight 840 on its way from Rome to Athens, diverted the Boeing 707 to Damascus and blew up the aircraft after the hostages had disembarked.

  The elder Houranis had put that behind them and become academics, and their son, it seemed, was a patriotic American, albeit a practicing Muslim, until 9/11. After the invasion of Iraq he’d flirted with radical Islam and it was Kate Swift who’d seduced him and made him her agent, infiltrating him into Al-Qaeda.

  His intelligence had enabled Swift to assassinate an Al-Qaeda leader high on the administrations kill list, and this had purified Hourani’s heathen soul and she’d married him and borne him a child.

  This hadn’t mollified Benway, who’d remained convinced that Hourani remained loyal to Al-Qaeda, that the death of the leader was merely a matter of housekeeping, and opined pithily, “That boy has a missile in his future.”

  How else, Benway had maintained, could Hourani, after a spell as a stay-at-home dad to their mixed blood daughter, suddenly reactivate himself and travel, with Swift, to Pakistan to reconnect with an Al-Qaida cell hidden deep in the mountains on the Afghanistan border? He’d dismissed Kate Swift’s contention that after she’d left Hourani in Lahore and returned home, he had, at great personal risk, gone to South Waziristan to help transport two of his erstwhile assets and their families to safety.

  Benway had made a convincing case to the White House that Hourani was caucusing with Al-Qaeda heavy hitters and advocated kinetic action. A drone strike had been authorized and Benway, in a moment of gloating grandiosity, had sent the link to the Predator’s camera feed to Kate Swift so she could see her husband being erased half the world away.

  Benway and Morse had watched the strike in their Washington office, Benway smoking Samsuns and drinking Cutty, Morse standing easy. When the screen had flared pleasingly, Benway had exhaled a plume of smoke at the acoustic-tiled ceiling, raised his glass and said, “Allahu Akbar!”

  Kate Swift had responded by going public and exposing the chain of command in the attack on her husband (the leftist media anointing him as an American hero) that led straight to the White House, resulting in the resignation of the president's chief counterterrorism advisor and the sacrifice of Benway, who’d been squeezed like a suppurating boil from the corpus of U.S. intelligence.

  Swift, meanwhile, had taken her daughter and gone dark. Benway, fighting for his life, had leaked fabricated reports that she’d done a Snowden and gone to Russia, the only country that would have her, and that she’d been sighted in the company of one-time Russian mole, Anna Chapman, aka Anna Vasil’yevna Kushchyenko, having her nails done in a Moscow beauty parlor.

  The Cold War was dead, but memories were long and tying Swift to the Russians had tarnished her “patriot” ticket and the administration had made it clear that if she ever set foot in the U.S. she’d be tried for treason.

  Benway had suspected that she’d never left America and had used his increasingly meager resources to find her, without success.

  But she had been there all the time.

  Hiding in plain sight.

  The irony that Swift had been flushed not by the machinery of the state, nor by her own ineptitude, but by the mindless actions of a pair of the mutants who incubated with such monotonous regularity in America’s psychic buttcrack, was not lost on Benway.

  No matter. She was on the run and this was his chance to find her. And find her he would.<
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  Benway wagged a finger at the stewardess for another Cutty Sark and as he sipped his drink, the rumble of the jet beneath his feet, the little plane on the display taking him ever closer to home, he felt sufficiently anesthetized to think about the other woman who awaited his vengeance: his treacherous wife.

  TEN

  Nadja Benway’d had, as Lucien was wont to announce over cognac and cigars at the fag end of their increasingly infrequent dinner parties, more cocks in her than the First Street Tunnel’d had trains, but this time it was different.

  She really was going to leave her husband for another man.

  This certainty came to her as she sat smoking her breakfast cigarette at the kitchen table of the Q Street townhouse, oblivious to CNN chattering away on the small TV on the counter, and this understanding gave her pause, her elbow propped up on the table top, the ash growing like a centipede on the tip of the Marlboro Menthol held in the fork of her fingers.

  Nadja was chic in the European way. She would wander through Union Market dressed in a slightly grubby cashmere sweater, jeans and sneakers without socks, her strikingly beautiful face free of make-up, her long black hair still tousled from a recent encounter with one of her roster of paramours and render the over-dressed, nipped and tucked Georgetown matrons invisible, drawing the eye of every man there and leaving him with a faint hint of musk and Guerlain Samsara in his nostrils and the gnawing certainty that his life would be incomplete for never having known her.

  So cocks had been abundant and there had been more than a few offers for her to ditch the gnomish Benway, offers she had always scoffed at.

  But during these last weeks some strange and hitherto unknown emotion had sprouted inside Nadja, as if it had been fertilized by the commingled fluids of her and her latest lover.

  At first she’d believed that she was ill and had moderated her consumption of cigarettes and vodka and the Belgian chocolates she consumed in such massive quantity with no effect at all upon her figure.

  Then she’d understood that she was sick.

  Love sick.

  Good god, how adolescent.

  No matter.

  There it was.

  She was in love and through the roseate lens of love she saw her marriage for the tawdry business that it was.

  When she’d sent her lover off to his latest little war wearing the leather bomber jacket she’d bought him at Dr. K's Vintage Shop on U Street, a shit-eating grin and a mantle of boyish bravado—the last had left her unimpressed, for one thing Nadja knew about was war—she’d promised him an answer on his return.

  She’d expected her ardor to cool in his absence but if anything it had grown stronger, and, as she stared out at the snowbanks on the sidewalk, she knew she was going to elope with him.

  He’d been offered a job in Paris—a city she’d always found agreeable—with some desperately soigné on-line current affairs, culture and politics magazine, and she had decided, right now, to go with him.

  And Lucien be damned.

  As she laughed and finished her cigarette and stared out the window at the flurries of falling snow, not really listening to the shrill American voices of the news anchors—the usual Barbie and Ken duo, all porcelain veneers and spray tans—she realized that, for the first time in many years, she was happy.

  And when she turned and saw Michael Emerson’s face on the TV screen she thought she was allowing the stuff of her daydreams to bleed through into the real world. But it was Michael, smiling that smile in a photograph taken the night he’d won a Pulitzer for his reports on the rise of ISIS, and she heard Barbie telling of the discovery of his beheaded body in Al-Raqqah, Syria, another American journalist fallen victim to the lunatic jihadists.

  Nadja reached for the TV remote and, with hands that betrayed not the slightest tremor, killed the newscast.

  Her eyes traveled from the dead gray tube to the small drawing that hung beside the refrigerator. The charcoal was of a Balkan peasant girl from the middle of the last century wearing a little hat, a waistcoat and an embroidered blouse, smiling shyly. It was the only thing Nadja had retrieved from the casino villa that, during the siege of Sarajevo, had been the headquarters of a brigade of Bosnian Serb forces, where, as a pubescent, she’d been held captive for more than a year by a Serb colonel.

  The drawing—only later, in America, had she discovered it was the work of the portraitist Ismet Mujezinović and was quite valuable—had hung over the colonel's bed and she had stared at it during the many hours he had raped her before handing her around to his men while mortar rounds whistled overhead.

  In the last days of the war the casino was surrounded by a ragged band of Bosnian Muslims who killed most of the Serbs in a protracted firefight. The colonel, wounded in the shoulder, walked out waving a craps stick with a white shirt tied to it.

  The Bosniaks shot him where he stood and were inclined to consider Nadja a collaborator when a troll of a man, barely five feet tall with a huge head stepped forward, his American accent and mysterious authority clearing a path through the ragged militia, and next thing she was in an old Mercedes being driven to a UN hospital and then it was onto America, Lucien Benway using his contacts to secure her refugee status.

  She was fifteen. Lucien was thirty-one. He never laid a finger on her. When she turned sixteen he proposed and she accepted and they had been married for twenty years. A marrige that had never been consumated.

  Lucien Benway had rescued her, or that’s how he would tell the tale. Truth was, he’d enslaved her, digging at the scabs on her psychological and spiritual wounds to keep them suppurating, goading her into a roundelay of meaningless sexual encounters with strangers that left her loathing herself, the idea of living without him unthinkable.

  Until she’d met Michael Emerson, the love of her life, who had been left lying headless in the sand, like some joke fucking Ozymandius.

  Nadja crossed to the refrigerator and opened the freezer, reaching in for the bottle of Stolichnaya that lay on its side, glass milky with ice.

  She took a tumbler from the cabinet above the sink and sat down at the table, hearing the crack of the cap as she unscrewed it, and poured the treacly liquor into the glass.

  Nadja drank herself insensible.

  ELEVEN

  Kate Swift, holding tightly onto Suzie’s gloved hand, walked along Ebertstrasse not far from the Brandenburg Gate, heading toward Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial.

  The Wall had tumbled when she was a child, but she knew that it had run along most of the length of this street, bisecting the city that she’d always considered Philip Danvers’s spiritual home.

  It had been, in its schizoid state, the perfect metaphor for all of them—for all the spies, everywhere.

  No sooner had she thought of him than she saw Mrs. Danvers—Lucien Benway’s bitchy handle had been adopted by even those who loved Philip, or had loved him—crossing the street, a second’s uncertainty just as he gained the sidewalk hinting at his age.

  He paused a moment beneath a denuded linden tree, taking in the two thousand seven hundred and eleven gray coffin-like concrete slabs arranged in a precise rectilinear array, before he walked into one of the narrow alleys between them, his silly little green Tyrolean hat with its jaunty feather disappearing as the ground plunged.

  Kate followed, towing Suzie with her, scanning the street for pursuers. She saw nothing suspicious. Which meant nothing.

  “Is that the old man from the subway, Mommy?” Suzie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Just a man I used to know.”

  “Is he your friend?”

  “Yes, he’s my friend,” Kate said with more conviction than she felt as she led the child deeper into the narrow alley, the uneven cobbles slick with melting snow.

  As they were dwarfed by higher and higher slabs, the city views reduced to slices from a gun turret, claustrophobia oppressing her.

  This stone maze was the perfect venue for an ambush
.

  Kate was about to turn on her heel and flee with the child when Danvers appeared from behind a slab, his breath a plume as he spoke.

  “Kate.”

  “Philip.”

  “I won’t say that you look good.”

  “And neither will I.”

  Danvers coughed a laugh. “Why did you risk exposure, Kate? By coming to me?”

  “Are you going to expose me?”

  “God knows I should.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “Call it the caprice of a sentimental old man.”

  He looked at her with eyes faded to the color of dust and she could see the veins beneath the thin skin stretched across the bones of his face. He’d missed a spot shaving that morning, a trio of white hairs rising like antennae from a dewlap in his wizened neck.

  “Why did you stay in America after you did what you did?” he asked.

  “It’s my country. It’s her country.” She nodded at Suzie, who was playing a solitary game of hide and seek.

  “The country you betrayed?

  “Philip, that’s hopelessly one dimensional and you know it. We no longer live in simple times.”

  He raised his fine patrician nose and looked down its full length at her. “Oh, don’t you dare to presume, Kate. I’m ancient enough to have seen it all, remember? In the Sixties you would have been Jane Fonda. In the Seventies, Patty Hearst. You’re just another cliché.”

  “I was widowed, Philip. My child was left without a father. That’s not a cliché.”

  “It’s what you signed on for, Kate. And so did Yusuf.”

  “So I was meant to keep my mouth shut and grieve in private?”

  “It’s what we do.”

  “Maybe it’s what you do. The noble warrior.”