Games of State - Tom Clancy [8]
If Melissa doesn't approve of SweetTarts, these sure aren't going to go down real easy.
Rodgers dropped the stack of comic books on the floor, beside his slippers. He wouldn't give these to a kid.
Maybe I should wait and buy him a Hardy Boys book, he thought, though he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to see what had become of Frank and Joe. The brothers probably had lip rings, choppers, and attitude. Like Rodgers, their father Fenton was probably prematurely gray and dating a succession of marriage-minded women.
Hell, Rodgers decided. I'll just stop at a toy store and pick up an action figure. That, and maybe a chess set or some kind of educational videotape. Something for the hands and something for the mind.
Rodgers absently rubbed his high-ridged nose, then reached for the remote. He sat up on his pillows, punched on the TV, and surfed through vividly colored vacuous new movies and washed-out vacuous old sitcoms. He finally settled on an old-movie channel that was showing something with Lon Chaney, Jr., as the Wolfman. Chaney was pleading with a young man in a lab coat to cure him, to relieve his suffering.
"I know how you feel," Rodgers muttered.
Chaney was lucky, though. His pain was usually ended by a silver bullet. In Rodgers's case, as with most survivors of war, crime, or genocide, the suffering diminished but never died. It was especially painful now, in the small hours of the night, when the only distractions were the drone of the TV and the intrusion of headlights from passing cars. As Sir Fulke Greville once noted in an elegy, "Silence augmenteth grief."
Rodgers shut off the TV and switched off the light. He bunched his pillows under him and lay on his belly.
He knew he couldn't change the way he felt. But he also knew he couldn't afford to surrender to sorrow. There was a widow and her son to think about, plus the sad task of finding a new commander for Striker, and he had to run Op-Center for the rest of the week that Paul Hood would be in Europe. And today was going to be a low point on the job, what Op-Center's attorney Lowell Coffey II accurately described as "the welcoming of the Fox to the warren."
In the night, in that silence, it always seemed like too much to deal with. But then Rodgers thought about the people who didn't live long enough to become oppressed by life's burdens, and those burdens seemed less crushing.
Thinking that he could understand why a middle-aged Batman or anyone else might go a little nuts at times, Rodgers finally floated into a dreamless sleep
CHAPTER FIVE
Thursday, 10:04 A.M.,
Garbsen, Germany
Jody's mouth twisted as she entered the trailer and took a look at the prop list.
"Great," she said under her breath. "Just great."
The good-natured exasperation which had marked her conversation with Mr. Buba was tinged with genuine concern now. The item she needed was hanging in the tiny bathroom of the prop trailer. Getting to it around the clutter of tables and trunks would require delicate maneuvering. The way her luck was running today, Lankford would print the scene he was shooting after one take and move on to the next before she returned.
Placing the heavy clipboard on a table, Jody started out. Though it would have been faster to crawl under the tables, she was sure that if she did someone would see her. At graduation, when Professor Ruiz had informed her that she'd gotten this internship, he'd said that Hollywood might try to discourage her ideas, her creativity, and her enthusiasm. But he'd promised that they would heal and return. He'd warned her, however, never