First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [151]
"You have my personal thanks." Secretary Paull stared at Jack for a long time. At length, he cleared his throat. "On another note, you'll be pleased to know that there's no sign of the organization known as E-Two. Frankly, I suspect it never existed. The former Administration required a domestic bogeyman to go after its main objective—the missionary secularists. Maybe E-Two was fabricated by the former National Security Advisor."
"Or maybe Brady came up with the idea," Jack said. "After all, misdirection was his forte, and those FASR defectors had to go somewhere."
"A bogus revolutionary cell? Could be." The secretary shrugged. "Either way, I've ordered the members of the First American Secular Revivalists released and reinstated. And, by the way, I protected them while they were in custody. No one interrogated them or harmed them in any way."
"I know you did what you could."
Paull rose, walked to the door.
"What was his name?" Jack said. "His real name?"
Paull hesitated only a moment. "Morgan Herr," he said. "Truth be told, I know precious little about him. I'd like to know more, but for that I'd require you and your particular expertise. If you're interested, come see me."
February 1
UNDER THE buttermilk sky of an early dusk, Jack stood at the front window of his living room, staring fixedly at the bleak view of his driveway. All the crispy leaves were gone. Overnight, a bitter front out of the Midwest had nailed shut the coffin of the January thaw. All day long, the District, home to mild winters, had been shivering.
Earlier in the day, he'd driven the white Lincoln Continental down Kansas Avenue NE. Parking outside the Black Abyssinian Cultural Center, he hurried across the pavement and through the door. There, he collected the month's rent, minus an amount for the time Chris Armitage and Peter Link occupied the back room. The leaders wanted to pay the full month's rent, but Jack said no. He drank a cup of dark, rich African hot chocolate with them, thanked them, and left.
Trashy wind, full of cinders and yesterday's newspapers, followed him down the block to the FASR office. Inside, everything looked more or less back to normal, except that Calla Myers's desk was unoccupied, wreathed in black ribbon. A number of lit candles clustered on the desktop in front of a framed photo of her with some of her coworkers. They were all smiling. Calla was waving at the camera.
Peter Link was out on assignment, but Jack spent a few minutes chatting with Armitage. He knew he'd made a friend there.
JACK ABANDONED the window and its bleak view to put a Rolling Stones record on the stereo. "Gimme Shelter" began, simmered to a slow boil. "War, children," he sang in a melancholy voice along with Mick and Merry Clayton, "it's just a shot away."
He returned to the window, waiting. Tonight, he had a date with Sharon. He had no idea how that was going to go, but at last she had agreed to come to the house, Gus's house, the house of Jack's adolescence. If he and Sharon didn't kill each other, then next Saturday the two of them would spend the afternoon with Alli. It was Alli's idea; maybe she wanted to play matchmaker—or peacemaker, anyway.
He thought about Alli and her effect on him. There was a time when he didn't know himself or the world. Worse, he couldn't accept that he didn't know himself, so he kept pushing everyone away. Without intimate mirrors, you have no hope of knowing yourself. So he kept Sharon and Emma—the two people best equipped to be his intimate mirrors—at arm's length, while he deluded himself into thinking his job came first, that saving strangers was more important than allowing anyone to know him.
He recalled his first encounter with Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf. He hadn't liked the book, because he was too young to fully appreciate it. But with living comes wisdom. Now a line from the book surfaced in his mind. There's a moment when Steppenwolf is struck by a revelation. In order to understand himself, and therefore the world, he needs to "traverse, not once more but often, the