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“I’ll do whatever’s necessary,” he softly replied. “You know that. I don’t put limitations on what I’m willing to do to get a job done.”
“Yes, I heard that about you,” she said just as softly, rage boiling through her veins with a suddenness that took her off guard. “They say you even killed your own wife, so why would you worry about upsetting a little girl?”
Leaden silence fell between them. John’s face was absolutely expressionless, his eyes so cold and empty they looked dead. “Her name was Venetia,” he finally said, the words a mere rustle of sound. “Why don’t you ask me if I did it? How do you think it happened? Did I shoot her, or break her neck, or cut her throat? Maybe I just tossed her out a thirty-story window. I’ve heard all those scenarios. Which do you think is most likely?”
She couldn’t breathe. She had wanted to hit him, say something that would make an impression on him, and she had evidently succeeded beyond anything she could have expected. She hadn’t believed those wild stories, hadn’t really believed he had ever even been married. To know that he had, to know that his wife’s name was Venetia and she had existed, was to suddenly think that those stories could be true.
“Did you?” she managed to say, barely able to force the words out through her constricted throat. “Did you kill her?”
“Yes,” he said and leaned back as the waiter approached with their meal.
She strolled with him across the lush, manicured lawn. She hadn’t had a chance to recover, to ask him any more questions, after he dropped that bombshell at lunch. First the waiter had been there, setting out their lunch, refilling their water glasses, asking if they needed anything else, and by the time he left, Ronsard “happened” to walk by and stayed to chat.
Niema had scarcely been able to talk; she had managed a few short answers to Ronsard’s questions, but her lips were numb and she kept seeking refuge in her water glass. She remembered eating a few bites of lunch, but she had no idea how it had tasted.
After lunch, John put his trousers on over his dry swim trunks, then took her hand and led her out here. The hot sun beat down on her, bringing welcome warmth to her cold skin. She felt as if her heart were breaking. Innocence was an invisible fortress, keeping one safe, and oblivious to some things that were too horrible to contemplate. But now she no longer had that innocence, that obliviousness; she was aware of the pain, the horror, the cost. What must it be like for him, to have lived through it?
“John, I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
She saw his surprise. Evidently he had expected her to be repelled by who he was, what he had done, maybe even frightened of him. She searched for the right words. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I hadn’t believed the stories, or I never would have brought it up.”
“Hurt me?” He sounded almost disinterested. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses, and she wanted to snatch them off his face. “The truth is the truth.”
His hand was so warm and so strong, wrapped around hers, but the strength in his fingers was controlled so he wouldn’t hurt her. He had never hurt her, she realized. Even when faced with her distrust and hostility in Iran, he had taken care of her, saved her life, held her in his arms while she grieved.
“Sometimes the truth is the truth, but sometimes it’s something else. What really happened? Was she a double agent, the way I’ve heard?”
He made a noncommital sound. Growing exasperated, she squeezed his hand. “Tell me.”
He stopped and turned to face her. “Or what?”
“Or nothing. Just tell me.”
For a minute, she didn’t think he would. Then he shrugged. “Yes, she was a double agent. She did it for the money. There weren’t any extenuating circumstances; she didn’t have family in the Soviet Union, or in East Germany, that was being threatened. All her family was American, and they weren’t involved at all. She simply wanted the money.”
So there was no excuse he could give his wife; he’d had to face the truth that she was, simply, a traitor.
That would have been devastating for almost anyone; what had it been like for him, after he had dedicated his entire life to the service of his country?
“How did you find out?”
He began walking again. “There wasn’t any one big moment of truth, just a lot of little things that began adding up and made me suspicious. I set a trap for her, and she walked right into it.”
“She didn’t know you suspected?”
“Of course she did. She was good. But I baited the trap with something she couldn’t resist: the names of our two highest-placed moles in the Kremlin. Aldrich Ames never came close to this information, it was so restricted.” His lips were a thin line. “I was almost too late springing the trap. This was during the height of the Cold War, and this information was so crucial, so valuable, that she decided not to route it by the usual method. She pic
ked up the phone and called the Soviet embassy. She asked to be brought in, because she knew I’d be after her, and she started to give them the names right there over the phone.”
He took a long, controlled breath. “I shot her,” he finally said, staring off at the massive wall that surrounded the estate. “I could have wounded her, but I didn’t. What she knew was too important for me to take the chance, the moles too important to be brought in. They had to be left in place. She had already told her handler that she had the names; they would have moved heaven and earth to get to her, no matter what prison we put her in, no matter what security we put around her. So I killed her.”
They walked in silence for a while, going from flower bed to flower bed like bees, ostensibly admiring the landscaping. Niema still clung to his hand while she tried to come to grips with the internal strength of this man. He had been forced to do something almost unthinkable, and he didn’t make excuses for himself, didn’t try to whitewash it or blur the facts. He lived with the burden of that day, and still he went on doing what he had to do.
Some people would think he was a monster. They wouldn’t be able to get beyond the surface fact that he had deliberately killed his wife, or they would say that no information, no matter how crucial, was that important. Those who lived on the front lines knew better. Dallas had given his own life for his country, in a different battle of the same war.
John had saved untold lives by his actions, not just of the two moles but of the ensuing events to which they had been critical. The Soviet Union had broken up, the Berlin Wall had come down, and for a while the world had been safer. He was still on the front lines, putting himself in the cannon’s mouth, perhaps trying to balance his own internal scales of justice.
“Why didn’t she sell you out?” Niema asked. “You’re worth a pretty penny, you know.”
