Exile Hunter

by Preston Fleming

  At the mention of London, Linder bristled.

  “That’s utter hogwash. I never laid eyes on Eaton or the Kendalls in London. Neil can back me up on that. And as for all your finger pointing, it looks to me like you’re desperate to divert attention from your crude moneymaking dodges. I suggest you watch your step, Bob. If somebody like me sees enough to blow the whistle on you from a casual walk-by, others could do worse. So go ahead and fly me home in shackles if you want. I’ll see you in court. We’ll find out soon enough whose version of events the judge believes. You’d better hope Neil backs you up...”

  At the mention of Denniston’s name, Bednarski let out a loud guffaw.

  "Denniston back me up? Can you really be that stupid? Who do you suppose came up with the whole operation? You’re out of your cotton-pickin’ mind if you expect any help from him."

  “You’re a liar,” Linder answered heatedly. “And this is far from over. You won’t get away with what you’re doing.”

  “Yes, we will,” Bednarski assured him with contempt oozing from his bloodshot eyes. He moved his face close to Linder’s and lowered his voice. “The fix is in, buddy. People up the line are already counting their share. We take care of them; they take care of us. But you, Linder, if you keep taking the wrong attitude, you’ll lose everything. Do you hear me? Everything.”

  Linder shook with impotent rage for minutes after Bednarski left the cell. Then the loudspeaker over the cell door crackled to life. For hours afterward, Linder heard muffled screams, moans, and anguished cries for mercy that he was certain were recordings played to intimidate him. Except that, over time, the voices came to sound increasingly like those of Philip Eaton and Roger Kendall.

  * * *

  Linder fell asleep at last when the loudspeaker went silent. Having dreaded sleep so often for fear of nightmares, it struck him as ironic that his waking life now inspired more fear and apprehension than the accusing faces of his former targets. His worry about ever again enjoying a sound night’s rest without the aid of alcohol or drugs now seemed moot.

  At the same time, Linder was unable to sweep aside the curtain of fear that had fallen between him and his future. While he knew enough about psychology to understand the perils of negative feedback loops and self-fulfilling prophecy, a verse from the Book of Job stuck in his mind: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me…” And the kinds of things that he feared most—failure, disgrace, betrayal, hardship and pain—were standard-issue weapons in his employer’s arsenal.

  Even after Bednarski’s disclosures, Linder still found it difficult to comprehend how he had misread the situation so badly. Ignoring his inner voice and intuitive cues had been bad enough. Not detecting any of the usual warning signs he usually associated with operations about to go sour was worse. He had arrived in Beirut a long-time friend of Neil Denniston and on passable terms with Bob Bednarski. Despite Denniston’s recent performance, Linder still found it hard to believe that his friend could betray him as ruthlessly as Bednarski had claimed.

  In retrospect, it seemed to Linder that his fundamental error, his original sin, so to speak, had been to join the Department of State Security in the first place. He had joined at a time when he saw ample reason to believe he would lose his job in the CIA’s clandestine service, as so many of his fellow veterans of the war on terror had when the President withdrew all but a token level of American forces from overseas.

  He had been so fearful of losing his income, perks, and the prestige of belonging to a tightly knit elite unit, that he had been willing to trade his equity in the CIA for a slot in the newly formed DSS. But in exchange for the job security and generous pay and benefits in the powerful new organization, it was clear that, eventually, he would be expected to direct the special counter-terrorism skills that he had used on foreign enemy combatants against domestic enemies of the Unionist regime.

  Now, in retrospect, Linder could see clearly that, by making that trade, he had signed over his future to the Department and put everything he valued in his life at risk. After swearing an oath of loyalty to the DSS, he could no longer raise scruples against being assigned to questionable grab-and-go operations, repatriation teams, or other émigré hunting parties. To the Department, such operations did no more than extend the reach of extraordinary rendition from foreign enemy combatants to domestic insurgents residing abroad. As a DSS officer, he was now in for a penny, in for a pound, and sauce for the goose was being applied liberally to the gander.

  In his early years with the Department, pursuing the rebels had seemed like a game of wits played for high stakes against well-matched opponents. By nature, Linder was an aggressive competitor who had whetted his natural predatory instincts to a sharp edge and relished the game of luring overconfident insurgents to their doom.

  But by the time Linder arrived in Beirut, nearly five years after the end of CWII, his sporting instincts had dulled and he had wearied of the game. Of the millions of American expats who had escaped the country before the borders closed, most had turned their backs on America and conceded it to the Unionists until such time as that misbegotten regime toppled of its own weight like the Soviets’ eighty-year reign in Russia. Most American émigrés had scattered across the globe, settled in new homes, begun new jobs and businesses, and taken permanent residence or citizenship wherever they had landed. In cases like these, Linder sometimes asked himself, what was the point of further pursuit? To prosecute former enemies in absentia for long-forgotten offenses seemed a waste of state resources.

  From time to time, when alone with his thoughts, he wondered whether an amnesty program, administered perhaps by a truth commission like the ones pioneered in South Africa and Argentina, might be a way to reconcile regime and rebels and end the fruitless pursuit of former enemies. But this was a dangerous idea to voice openly, as amnesty and reconciliation had long been anathema to the President-for-Life and his inner circle. Like King Herod, Caligula, Stalin and Snow White’s mother, to compensate for his deep sense of inferiority, the PFL hungered to destroy all rivals who might someday surpass him and to settle scores with all those who had ever denied him their full support.

  Only over the past few months had Linder begun to realize the extent to which he had fallen under the spell of Unionist double-think and had come to accept the premise that the Department was always right and that the rebels were always wrong. Now the spell was lifting. With 20-20 hindsight, Linder recognized in Neil Denniston and Bob Bednarski the superior, mocking smile of the President-for-Life.

  But of what conceivable good was his change in attitude now? What could he possibly do in captivity that would undo the damage he had already done to people like Philip Eaton, Patricia, and their families?

  S4

  A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good. Varlam Shalamov

  MAY, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER, GATES MILLS, OHIO

  The first time Warren Linder laid eyes on Patricia Eaton was during seventh-grade ballroom dance lessons at the Hawken School. His dress for dance class was typically an ill-fitting blue blazer, gray flannel trousers, and a polka-dotted bow tie, along with the dweeby black-framed glasses and spiky gel hairdo that were his trademark in those days.

  Not being physically mature for his age, he was clueless about the female gender, a situation made worse by his father’s aversion to raising the topic of sex with his son for fear of encouraging him. Accordingly, Warren had to pick it up for himself and didn’t make much headway. To his credit, however, he knew a little about ballroom dancing because his father was dance instructor at Hawken and at several other schools in Cleveland’s affluent eastern suburbs and had tutored Warren from an early age. In fact, Warren’s dancing prowess was the only reason for including him in the class. He was not a Hawken student, but a public-school ringer added to the roster at the last minute because the class was short of boys and his father liked to use his son to demonstrate new step
s.

  To Warren’s delight, the class at Hawken included many pretty girls from Cleveland’s leading families, who had benefited from natural selection to bring together the inherited traits of wealth, social standing, intelligence, and good looks across multiple generations. None of the girls had attracted Warren’s special notice, however, until the third session in the yearlong course, by which time he had danced with all of them. Such variety was guaranteed by his father’s rotational system for selecting dance partners, which served the multiple goals of breaking the ice, disrupting cliquishness, and extending a safety net to wallflowers.

  Once or twice each week, Warren’s father decreed a ladies’ choice dance, and on this much-anticipated occasion, Warren was bowled over when a slender dark-eyed girl wearing a beige chiffon tea dress, black Mary Jane shoes, and a bouncing ponytail of mahogany hair approached him with a playful smile and the magic words: “May I have this dance?” He so appreciated this stroke of good fortune that he flashed her a broad grin, took her outstretched hand in his and replied with the all-purpose adolescent response when words failed: “Why not?”

  The dance was a fox trot to Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love,” one of his father’s favorites from a bygone era, and Warren led his young partner skillfully through all the steps he knew, traversing the crowded room repeatedly at varying angles and speeds to show that his dance moves were not limited to slavish repetition of the box step. The first few times they collided with other couples, her eyes met his and they laughed in unison, confident in the other’s support. By the time the song ended, Warren was happily short of breath and had come to feel that this girl was somehow different from the others.

  Having been too shy to introduce himself on their first dance, the next time the rotation brought them together he wasted no time in asking her name.

  “Patricia,” she answered. “Patricia Eaton.”

  “Great! I’m Warren Linder.”

  “I know. Your father introduced you to us the first day of class. You are a very polished dancer, by the way,” she added with an approving smile.

  “If you practiced as much as I’ve had to, I’m sure it would come just as easily,” he replied.

  “I haven’t seen you in any other classes here. Are you a transfer student?” Patricia asked.

  “No, actually, I don’t go to Hawken,” he responded without the self-consciousness he might have felt if he had known more about the exclusive school. “I’m in seventh grade at Patrick Henry Middle School in Lyndhurst. I just come here for dance class.”

  “Oh, I see. I’ve never met anyone from Lyndhurst before. Do you like it there?”

  “It’s nice enough. But it’s the pits compared to this place. Hawken is awesome!”

  “You really think so?” she challenged. “I think it’s boring. But then, I’ve been here ever since pre-K.”

  The music stopped and Warren felt certain the disc had skipped a verse because the song ended far too soon.

  For the rest of the semester, Warren and Patricia were frequent dance partners, choosing each other whenever they had the opportunity. Sometimes when their preference for each other became too obvious, Warren’s father would urge him to “play the field” or “spread the wealth.” Being conscious of his status as a guest student and not wanting to disobey his father, Warren would comply when he couldn’t avoid it, but week upon week, he felt drawn to Patricia in a way that was completely new to him.

  Patricia, for her part, chose Warren repeatedly over the smartly dressed, well-mannered, fine-featured Hawken boys, and this endeared Patricia to him even more. Unlike so many of the giggling, fidgeting, flighty girls of her age who moved about in packs, here was someone strong enough to break from the herd, make her own choice and stand by it. Even more, she seemed to accept him exactly as he was and never seemed to tire of him, even when he ran out of things to say. Though Warren had long enjoyed the love of parents, grandparents, and a younger sister, no one else’s attention meant as much to him as Patricia’s.

  At that time, Warren knew nothing about Patricia Eaton’s family, wealth, or social status. Having grown up in a middle-class neighborhood where most families shared similar levels of education, income, and standard of living, it had never occurred to him to ask. And, in a similar way, having spent her entire young life within a prosperous enclave where lot sizes started at two acres, children and teenagers attended private schools and lived much as she did, Patricia had assumed that Warren’s home life was much like hers.

  The second semester of dance class passed in a blur. Though Warren would remember little of it years later, one occasion stood out. The class had just completed the segment on swing dancing and the students were practicing swing moves to Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover,” laughing and blushing as they executed tuck turns, swingouts, and slingshots with gleeful abandon. The next song was Paul Anka’s dreamy, “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” which was one of Warren’s top ten dance tunes and always sent a chill up his spine, not least because his father’s rules governing proper dance form banned the move described in the song’s title.

  A few moments after they had caught their breath from the swing dancing and joined for the slow number, a tall, broad-shouldered boy with shaggy blond hair hanging over his ears tapped Warren on the shoulder to cut in. Despite his annoyance at the intrusion, Warren allowed it, having no other choice in the matter, since his father insisted that he set a good example of correct dance etiquette. As he walked off to the edge of the dance floor, however, Warren looked back over his shoulder in time to see Patricia send him a consoling look that warmed his heart with a devotion beyond anything he felt a right to expect. Though his parents called it puppy love and told him it would pass, Warren had never forgotten that look and had drawn upon it for solace countless times when down on his luck or feeling sorry for himself. To him, that memory was a goose that laid golden eggs, an inexhaustible source of comfort known only to him.

  Sadly, his dance class relationship with Patricia ended even before the school year did. Three weeks before the final session, Patricia’s mother died of cancer and Patricia stopped attending. Not long afterward, she left for summer camp and on her return had only one week to shop and pack before travelling to Boston for boarding school. Though Warren left messages for her and she returned his calls twice to leave messages, both messages were brief, regretting that she had no time to see him. When Warren described the situation to his father and asked his advice, the response was to forget her and move on. There was nothing to be done, his father told him. The two of you live in different worlds. Don’t go where you don’t belong. Hanging on will just make you unhappy.

  Warren didn’t see Patricia again for nearly four years, and their reunion was far from the joyous occasion that he had hoped it to be. The encounter happened without warning, on a bitterly cold March night during Warren’s junior year as a scholarship student at Exeter. A classmate from Concord, Massachusetts, whose sister was a day student at Concord Academy, had invited him home for the weekend. A dance was being held that night at the Academy, and the sister invited both boys to attend.

  At seventeen, Warren had recently entered his young fogey stage, determined to assimilate among his upwardly mobile classmates bound for Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, and Penn. His preppy dress code, horn-rim glasses and rigid, condescending demeanor identified him as an aspiring elitist bent on seeking fame and fortune through the relentless pursuit of excellence and contacts.

  An hour or so after the dance was scheduled to begin, Warren and his classmate entered the school cafeteria, which was cleared of tables and chairs for the occasion. Before long, the classmate peeled off to greet a long-legged blonde in a delectably clinging dress, leaving Warren on his own. After scanning the room, he approached the refreshment table, where a couple, clad completely in black, cast a reproving look his way as if to put him on notice that his preppy attire did not conform to Concord’s more artistic norms of dress.

  The disc jockey cu
ed up a new tune and dancing resumed. But no sooner had Warren taken a bite from his chocolate chip cookie than he spotted a tall dark-haired girl with a dancer’s figure and a bouncing ponytail among the crowd. He tossed the cookie in the trash bin and moved toward her for a closer look. Having tracked Patricia for the past two years via mutual acquaintances and the Internet, Warren knew that she had transferred to Concord Academy in her sophomore year. But until now, he had lacked a suitable occasion or method to approach her.

  His heart raced as he realized that the long-awaited occasion had arrived. Without a moment’s hesitation, he stepped up to Patricia from her blind side and tapped her gently on the arm. She turned away from the darkly mature boy beside her and turned around to face the intruder.

  “Excuse me, but you look a lot like someone I used to know in middle school. You wouldn’t be Patricia…”

  “That would be me. And you are…?” she inquired blandly, with her arm still around her dance partner’s neck.

  “Warren Linder. Remember Hawken dance class?” he asked eagerly.

  She wrinkled her brow and said nothing.

  “Seventh grade,” he persisted. “Don’t you remember all those retro rock-and-roll steps we learned then?”

  With each phrase, he waited for her to recognize him.

  A sneer formed on her partner’s upper lip as Warren struggled to break the thickening ice.

  At last, he saw a glimmer in her eyes.

  “Oh, yes! Of course! You were the one who wasn’t a Hawken student…”

  “That’s right. I went to school in Lyndhurst. My father taught the dance class and you and I were dance partners. Sometimes.”

  Patricia blushed.