Without remorse - Tom Clancy [322]
And now this ... Things had become very confused today. Not even twenty-four hours earlier he'd seen his ultimate target, but now he wondered if it would ever be finished.
Maybe it would have been better if he had never begun, just accepted Pam's death and gone on, waiting patiently for the police to break the case. But no, they would never have broken it, would never have devoted the time and manpower to the death of a whore. Kelly's hands squeezed the wheel. And her murder would never have been truly avenged.
Could I have lived the rest of my life with that?
He remembered high school English classes, as he drove south, now on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Aristotle's rules of tragedy. The hero had to have a tragic flaw, had to drive himself to his fate. Kelly's flaw ... he loved too much, cared too much, invested too much in the things and the people who touched his life. He could not turn away. Though it might save his life, to turn away would inevitably poison it. And so he had to take his chances and see things through.
He hoped Ritter understood it, understood why he was doing what he had been asked to do. He simply could not turn away. Not from Pam. Not from the men of boxwood green. He shook his head. But he wished they'd asked someone else.
The parkway became a city street. New York Avenue. The sun was long since down. Fall was approaching, the change of seasons from the moist heat of mid-Atlantic summer. Football season would soon begin, and baseball end, and the turning of the years went on.
Peter was right, Hicks thought. He had to stay in. His father was taking his own step into the system, after a fashion, becoming the most important of political creatures, a fund-raiser and campaign coordinator. The President would be reelected and Hicks would accumulate his own power. Then he could really influence events. Blowing the whistle on that raid was the best thing he had ever done. Yeah, yeah, it was all coming together, he thought, lighting up his third joint of the night. He heard the phone ring.
'How's it going?' It was Peter.
'Okay, man. How's with you?'
'Got a few minutes? I want to go over something with you.' Henderson nearly swore to himself - he could tell Wally was stoned again.
'Half an hour?'
'See you then.'
Not a minute later, there was a knock on the door. Hicks stubbed out his smoke and went to answer it. Too soon for Peter. Could it be a cop? Fortunately, it wasn't.
'You're Walter Hicks?'
'Yeah, who are you?' The man was about his age, if somewhat less polished-looking.
'John Clark.' He looked nervously up and down the corridor. 'I need to talk to you for a few minutes, if that's okay.'
'What about?'
'boxwood green.'
'What do you mean?'
'There's some things you need to know,' Clark told him. He was working for the Agency now, so Clark was his name. It made it easier, somehow.
'Come on in. I only have a few minutes, though.'
'That's all I need. I don't want to stay too long.'
Clark accepted the waved invitation to enter and immediately smelled the acrid odor of burning rope. Hicks waved him to a chair opposite his.
'Can I get you anything?'
'No, thanks, I'm fine,' he answered, careful where he put his hands. 'I was there.'
'What do you mean?'
'I was at sender green, just last week.'
'You were on the team?' Hicks asked, intensely curious and not seeing the danger that had walked into his apartment.
'That's right. I'm the guy who brought the Russian out,' his visitor said calmly.
'You kidnapped a Soviet citizen? Why the fuck did you do that?'
'Why I did it is not important now, Mr Hicks. One of the documents I took off his body is. It was an order to make preparations to kill all of our POWs.'
'That's too bad,' Hicks said with a perfunctory