by Gayle Wilson
“Paul thinks it’s better if I don’t. Maybe the information’s too sensitive for my clearance.” His slight laugh was ironic. “I’ll be outside if you need me.” He pulled a hall chair next to the unopened door to reaffirm his intent. “Just call. I’ll come. Are you going to be all right?” he asked, his long years of caring for those in distress telling him how much she dreaded what she would do, must do.
Rationally, Rae wanted the information as much as Paul. Through the eight years she’d worked in law enforcement she, too, had seen the trail of suffering left by the ghouls they were finally, with the help of the man inside this room, going to put an end to. She would be willing to die to bring about the final collapse of their empire, but it was going to be much more difficult to watch someone else make that sacrifice. This would take a different kind of courage, a cold-blooded courage that considered the end and ignored the means. She thought briefly of her father, and that gave her strength. She would do what she could to ease the way for this man to die, and before he did, she would help him repeat the names and numbers that would justify his death.
At her nod the doctor opened the door. She stood for a moment, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the blackness within. Gradually the light from the hall enabled her to see the small table close to the bed, whose occupant was simply a shape, a slight mound in the deep shadow. She closed her mind to the reality that this was a fellow human being, suffering agonies she could not afford to think about.
She walked to the table and, without looking at the bed, sat down and spent the few necessary minutes preparing her equipment. The routine tasks calmed her mind as she locked everything else away.
A voice, she thought. A voice in the darkness. That’s all he is.
“I’m ready,” she said in Spanish, speaking into the silent glow of the computer. She didn’t turn her head to send her words in his direction.
The voice that answered out of the blackness was low, above a whisper only by the sheerest determination. His accent was classic, like a language tape, and she was surprised. The grammar and syntax of the short instructions he gave her marked him immediately as educated. She remembered Hardesty’s remark that he had used the highest levels of diplomatic circles to transmit the original offer. She wondered briefly how he had gotten involved in the struggle against the men who had made their country’s name an obscenity to law-enforcement agencies all over the world.
She blocked further speculation as the soft voice began to reel off names and companies, accounts and codes. The lists seemed endless. As she struggled to keep up with the flow of information through the long minutes, she wondered how he knew to dictate at the exact speed she was capable of handling.
Because he’s used to dealing with good secretaries, she thought suddenly. That momentary flash of insight about this man she had been determined to consider only a voice gave her instead the image of a dark-haired executive seated behind a desk, quickly dictating some business communiqué. The picture was so clear that she strained to see the face in her vision and realized that she had lost whatever he was saying.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and knew that he hadn’t heard her when the low voice continued. She repeated the apology, speaking more loudly over his words. His voice faded, and she heard a soft movement. She knew somehow that his eyes were now on her face. She forced herself to stay focused on the screen that would clearly illuminate her own features for the man in the bed.
“I lost you. Let me read back the last I have and start from there.”
“Wait,” he said, the voice truly only a whisper now. “May I have some water. Since we’ve stopped…”
“Of course.” She rose and then thought better of it. “I’ll have to check with the doctor. I don’t want to do anything that might…” Her voice faded at the very definite, if pained, laugh that interrupted her words.
“Of course,” he said softly, and she could still hear the amusement threaded in that racked voice.
The doctor agreed with his patient’s assessment. “What the hell difference do you think that could make?” he asked irritably, moving to minister to the dying courier and leaving Rae feeling foolish for her question. Since her self-esteem wasn’t fragile, she mentally shrugged away his annoyance with her concern for the man she had listened to for the last half hour.
The worst consequence of the entire episode was that his amusement had now made him real to her—someone who could laugh in spite of all he had been through. He was no longer only a voice from the darkness, and she knew that she would never again be able to fit him back into the mental box she had tried to create.
“He can have water whenever he wants. Call me if he asks again,” the doctor instructed before he returned to his vigil in the hallway where she’d been waiting. He added the afterthought, “He was distressed that you’re worried about him. He says you’re too beautiful for this filth.”
“Is he—?”
“He’ll last,” the doctor interrupted almost abruptly. “He’ll do what he has to do, if only from sheer hatred. Go in and help him.”
When they began again the careful dictation of information, she knew that he now watched her face as he talked. She could not have told why she was so sure of that fact. Perhaps a difference in the timbre of the softly spoken words. Perhaps a slight improvement in clarity since he had turned toward her. Whatever had given it away, she had no doubt that he was as focused on her face as she was on the screen.
She fought an almost-irresistible urge to turn her head to catch a glimpse of him in the darkness, but she knew he was already too real to her. No longer a phantom, but a man. A man who had walked and talked and laughed. Who had loved and made love. A man who did not deserve to die like this. Away from his country, his family, among strangers.
She coldly blocked those thoughts and typed. How much longer? she wondered, but she knew that the more information she put down, the wider would be the devastation they wrought.
His voice faded, and she heard the shuddering breath he took before he spoke again. “A moment,” he asked. “A moment and then we will go on.”
She swallowed against the sudden tightness in her throat at his linking of her into this effort. They would go on together. She was making it possible for him to do what she now had no doubt he wanted. She lifted her fingers from the keys, becoming aware of the stiffness, the dull pain across her shoulders from the too-long day. She flexed them, lowering and then raising her chin to ease the soreness in her neck. She rotated her head and finally interlaced her fingers and pushed them to stretch the cold joints. The noise was too loud in the quiet room, a desecration of what was happening here.
“You’re tired,” he said in his beautiful Spanish. “We can rest. Ask them to bring you coffee.” The hoarseness of the whisper attested to his own exhaustion, and she felt emotion again tighten her throat and prickle behind her eyelids. He was concerned for her. It broke her resolve so that finally she turned toward him in the darkness. Perhaps her eyes had stared at the screen too long, but in the dimness she could see nothing of the man on the bed.
“No.” The denial was harsh, and then, more softly, pleading with her, he whispered, “Please.”
She turned back to the screen, feeling tears threaten again. Rae Phillips never cried. She lived in a world of men who expected the same level of control from her that they themselves exercised and, right or wrong, it was what she expected of herself. She swallowed the lump that had been building and lowered her head. If she could not control the burning tears, she would not let him see them fall. She would not weaken him by exposing her pain for him.
“Don’t,” he said, revealing that he knew the struggle she was undergoing. “It’s all right.”
She swallowed again and lifted her head, putting her fingers back on the keys. She had unconsciously straightened her back, raising her chin at his command. The broken lips of the man in the bed lifted slightly.
“Whenever you’re ready,” she said, unaware how cl
early her every emotion was revealed in the light from the terminal.
“Will you tell me your name?” he asked softly.
It was against every instinct, every tenet of training she had been given, but like the water, she thought, What can it possibly hurt? What can it matter?
“Rae.” She breathed the single syllable into the light from the screen.
“I thought…” he began, and she could hear the puzzlement.
Her slight smile was a reaction not to his confusion but to the number of times she had answered the question through the years.
“Not the man’s name. R-a-e,“ she spelled. “I was named for my grandmother,” she explained, the smile growing with the memory. “A good Biblical name. Rachel. But my father had wanted a boy, and Rae was what I ended up. You can’t imagine the confusion it’s caused through the years.”
He said nothing else, although she waited, and finally when he spoke, it was not a response to that personal revelation. “Read back to me the last.”
“Of course,” she whispered. Together they picked up the thread of the detailed lists he had memorized. A freak memory, Hardesty had said. She had heard of such things, but she had never imagined that anyone could be capable of committing all this to memory and then spitting it out as if reading from the source. The sheer volume of what he was giving them was incredible.
After a long time the information came in shuddering gasps and broken inhalations. She wanted to get the doctor—perhaps there was something he could do. But then she thought—they had come so far together. She wanted him to finish, to complete this self-imposed task that was his revenge upon those who had done whatever had been done to him. She was torn between her concern for his agony and her desire to help him succeed.
It was not until the voice faded completely that she moved. She opened the hall door, and the doctor rose immediately, hurrying to the bed. She raised her left arm, propping it against the hard wood of the door frame and resting her forehead against it. Her tiredness was emotional, she knew, caused by her tension. She wondered if she were capable of returning to the room, to the screen, to that broken voice. She wondered if she would have to. Was he dying, even now, as she stood, trying to block the thought of that possibility from her mind?
“He’d fainted. I gave him what I could. Hardesty said not to give him anything that might interfere with his mental
abilities, so I’m limited…God, I hate this.” The doctor
brushed past her to resume his seat. When he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, she could see his tension as clearly as she had felt her own.
She steeled herself to approach the computer that glowed in the darkness like a candle in some isolated window.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and in reaction to that soft apology, she felt the tears burn again. “We’re almost through. Only a little more,” he said to reassure her, to comfort her.
She couldn’t answer, but she knew he expected none. She seated herself, putting her fingers on the keys as that implacable, indomitable whisper penetrated the darkness between them. She didn’t know how long it went on. Time had become meaningless in the blackness of the room, in the night of what they were doing together. She typed until he stopped again. The resultant silence became painful, as painful as the hoarse, suffering voice had been only minutes before.
“Thank you,” he said finally. There was nothing she could say, even if she could have spoken past the hard knot that blocked her throat. She competently began to complete her job and to pack up the equipment. She never looked at the bed, and with the loss of the glow from the screen, she knew that he could no longer see her face. Using the thread of light under the door as a guide, she moved across the room.
She wondered what she could say to him. She wanted to give him some message, but there seemed no words appropriate for a dying man who had just spent his last hours in agony rather than in the peaceful oblivion of drugs. He had chosen to spend them that way, and finally he could rest. He could loosen his determined hold on life and slip into the release that even she sought for him now.
She stopped by the closed door, turning to speak into the darkness. The phrase had come unbidden to her mind, but it was right, and so she whispered it to the man she felt joined to by some invisible linkage, by the hold he had taken on her emotions, as if his fingers were tangled into her heartstrings.
“Rest in peace,” she said softly and then opened the door, stepping back into the light.
The doctor pushed by her as she moved out into the hall. She never looked back, but continued down the dim staircase. Her grotesquely exaggerated shadow, created by the light from the upper landing and perhaps now from the lights in the upstairs room as well, mocked her from the wall. Frank waited at the bottom of the staircase, and at the look on her face, he put his arm around her shoulders, squeezing gently. He released her to hurry—for a man of his age and bulk—up the stairs she had just descended.
Paul Hardesty was waiting in the library, his half-filled glass on the marquetry table beside him. He rose at her entrance, and after a brief glance at her pinched features, he poured a stiff two fingers into one of the old-fashioned glasses that rested on the tarnished silver tray beside the decanters.
She sipped it gratefully, welcoming the burn that at least represented life. She was suddenly so cold she shivered, although the house’s heating system was operating efficiently, in view of the conditions outside. Shock, she supposed, as she drank another healthy swallow of the brandy.
“Did you get it all?”
Hardesty’s harsh question broke through her self-absorption. Of course, his concern would be for the information now residing safely in the hard drive. Somehow she wished his first question had been about the condition of the man upstairs, but he would know the answer to that. He had told her that before she’d left this room.
“It’s all here.”
“What do you think? Is it as valuable as we hoped?”
She realized that she had never once thought about the value of the information, had never analyzed its possible use, in spite of the fact that she was certainly in a position to make that evaluation. Her whole concern, almost from the first, had been the medium and not the message, to paraphrase Holcomb’s caustic remark.
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “It’s extensive enough. If it’s accurate, it’s invaluable. Well worth what it cost.”
“Worth more than that,” Paul affirmed, “and you know it. I’m sorry to have put you through this, Rae. I know it was difficult. Women are much more sensitive to the suffering of others. The maternal instinct, I suppose. I know what this has done to you.”
Rae’s smile was bitter, mocking his easy assurance that he understood what she was feeling. “Maybe you do,” she answered too sharply, “but I would defy anyone not to have been affected by what he accomplished.”
Frank came into the library, saving his boss the necessity of a reply to what was, they both had recognized, a criticism and a rejection of his words of comfort. Holcomb held a small recorder in his hand, and he set it down on the table by Hardesty’s chair, pushing buttons until the thready whisper Rae had listened to upstairs filled the room.
The pain belonged in the darkness, hidden, shielded from the ears of these listeners. It was almost a sacrilege to play it here in the light; to have recorded it at all struck her as the worst sort of depravity, an obscenity like a snuff film. She turned away as the two men listened. Perhaps they had heard all they needed or they had finally noticed her reaction, but the electronically triggered stop cut off the voice as effectively as his pain had sometimes done in the dark room. Even the cessation of the sound was an agonizing reminder.
“Why did you need me if you were going to tape it?” she asked bitterly into the silence.
“This is backup. In case you made a mistake. Yours is in a form we can send immediately to the computers. We’ll have a translation to work with by morning. In spite of the exce
llence of the equipment, the sound quality of the tape is very bad.”
“That poor bastard,” Holcomb said softly. “I suppose the hoarseness is caused by his screaming when they—”
“My God, Frank,” Hardesty’s voice overrode Rae’s gasp. She closed her eyes to stop the light-headedness that made her senses swim, then felt Paul’s hand on the back of her neck, forcing her to sit, to lower her head down between her knees. Eventually he put her glass into her hand, and she was able to drink the remainder of the brandy and finally to look up into his concerned blue eyes.
“I’m all right,” she said. “I can’t get him out of my mind.”
“I know. Let’s get out of here. There’s nothing else we can do. Let’s go get this information home and plan the best way to use what he’s given us. It’s the most fitting tribute we can make. Do you understand, Rae?”
“I know. But Paul, I don’t ever want to hear that tape again. Don’t ever let anyone play it in my presence. No one should hear it. It diminishes what he was. I can’t explain it any better, but that shouldn’t be the only thing that remains of who that man was.”
He nodded, but she doubted that he really understood. It was enough that he had agreed. Paul Hardesty would keep his word. That was one thing she was certain of.
They heard the chopper, and Rae began putting on her coat. Paul took the computer, leading the way down the hall to the French doors that would open onto the patio. She turned back to look into the interior. The stairs she had climbed were hidden by the intervening rooms. Finally she shook her head and followed the men out into the cold night.
Frank helped her into the Huey, leaning close to speak against her ear, “I’m sorry, Rae. I didn’t think how that would come out. He was a brave man. He wanted this. Don’t grieve that he succeeded.”
She nodded once as she settled into the cold vinyl seat. She pressed Frank’s fingers to let him know she had accepted his apology. She looked out on the Virginia countryside, watching the passing lights below. She knew that most of the people in the houses still slept, but here and there the early risers were beginning to stir and make ready for the day—the farmers, the delivery people, those who worked the early shifts at hospitals and factories.