Desperate Measures (46 page)

The grand counselors were evil. Of that, Pittman had no doubt. But they would have died soon anyway, he told himself, and
maybe that would have been better than exposing their obscene secret and causing so many other deaths along the way. Would
any of this have happened, Pittman wondered, if he hadn’t believed that the public truly had a right to know about the abuses
of power? If he’d been less determined, he would never have gone after Jonathan Millgate seven years previously. Burt would
never have chosen him to go after Millgate again two weeks ago. Do
I
bear some responsibility for what happened?

Pittman couldn’t believe that. No, I was right to go after them, he told himself with force. Those bastards did think they
were above everyone. They didn’t care who suffered and died as long as their careers prospered. They deserved to be punished—not
killed, too easy for them, but exposed, condemned, ridiculed. In the old days, they would have been put in a cage in the town
square and people would have spat upon them. And maybe other diplomats would have been discouraged from abusing power.

This “what if” type of thinking, this “if only” second-guessing had been typical of Pittman’s mind-set after Jeremy’s death.
He had kept imagining an alternate reality in which if only this or that had happened, everything would have turned out for
the best. But the “if only” hadn’t happened. “If only” wasn’t the case. Reality was the case. And reality was painful.

As a consequence, he had not been prepared for the love that he had found in Jill. He held her close to him. He treasured
her. Yes, love was doomed to end in pain, he thought, but in the meantime it was an anodyne against other kinds of pain, the
tragic imperfections of life. He still could not adjust to the realization of how close he had come to killing himself two
weeks earlier. He had been in such black despair because of grief, the pain had been intolerable. Now grief still weighed
upon him, unrelieved by the tears that streamed down his cheeks as he blinked through them at Jeremy’s sunbathed grave, but
he had been shocked into dealing with the present rather than dwelling on the past, and with Jill beside him to share the
weight of his grief, he knew that he could now persist, just as he would gladly share the weight of whatever despair would
eventually seize her.

And to be sure, a few good things had happened. The day after the massacre at Gable’s mansion, the newspaper for which Pittman
had worked and which had been scheduled to go out of business had found a financial white knight willing to keep it in business.
The dying paper had been reborn, and the publicity that Pittman’s story had received had prompted the paper’s new owner to
rehire Pittman as a lead reporter—in exchange for an exclusive series about what had happened to him and what he had discovered
about the grand counselors, although his prestigious new position didn’t matter to him as much as the chance to continue telling
the truth about the abuses of power.

If only Jeremy was alive to cheer me on, Pittman thought.

If only.

But “if only” was to look backward, and at the moment, watching Jeremy’s grave, tightening his arm around Jill, he knew that
he had an obligation to himself and Jill to look to the future.

An act of faith, Pittman thought.

He turned to Jill, who wiped his eyes and kissed him.

“I’m sorry you’re hurting,” she told him.

“Hey, I’m alive. You’re here with me.” His voice broke. “Tears don’t always mean a person’s sad.”

^*
Limited edition with illustrations. Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.