Exile Hunter (18 page)

“You’re absolutely
right, Sheila darling. Besides, how could I refuse when I know the
bubbly is your favorite drink?” Denniston replied.

Linder waved a summons
to José, who happened to be standing close by, and asked him to
bring the wine list. Rather than entrust the choice to Denniston, who
was already showing signs of brain fog, Linder ordered a modestly
priced bottle of domestic sparkling wine from the bottom of the list.
The waiter returned with four flute glasses and a chilled bottle in a
silver-plate ice bucket.

At Linder’s signal,
the waiter opened the bottle to shrieks of delight from Sheila and
Nora and a chorus of approval from the girls at neighboring tables.

“To our lovely
companions,” Denniston announced.

Before anyone could
respond, the band struck up its first tune, one with a compelling
syncopated Latin beat that Linder identified at once as meringue.
Sheila listened and nodded, swaying to the music, and proposed that
they all get up and dance.

Linder took the cue to
reach for Nora’s hand and lead her onto the dance floor. Sheila
rose, as well, but to Linder’s puzzlement, Denniston appeared to
resist her urgings and remained glued mulishly to his seat. Wrong
move, Linder muttered to himself, and turned his full attention to
Nora.

“How’s your
meringue?” he asked playfully.

“I think it was one
of the dances I learned in high school, but I don’t exactly
remember. If you know the steps, I’m sure I can follow once I catch
the beat,” she answered bravely.

“Terrific,” Linder
answered. “I think I know enough to get us started. Let’s give it
a shot.”

The moment Linder took
Nora’s right hand in his and placed his right hand on her hip, he
sensed that she would be a clever dance partner. Her hips began to
sway in rhythm with the beat and she became totally focused on
following Linder’s moves. He began with the basic meringue step,
bending knees left and right to force the hips to follow. Then, he
led Nora in an underarm turn to the side, a left circle, a reverse
with twin turn, and a rocking step.

From there, intuition
and deep muscle memory took him through a series of other meringue
steps that he had practiced so many times in his father’s dance
classes. By the end of the song, he felt suffused with a warm glow
but his heart rate had barely risen. Nora, by contrast, was nearly
out of breath. But the look in her eyes said that she would gladly
follow Linder again, anytime and anywhere.

When they returned to
the table, Linder saw that Sheila was putting on a brave face while
Denniston was sulking. Though the bottle of champagne was
three-fourths empty, he poured himself yet another glass. Then Linder
remembered: Neil Denniston hated to dance.

This had been a point
of contention between them more than once in the past. Though at
times it seemed to Linder that his friend’s only ambition in life
was to pick up women for one-night stands, Denniston generally
avoided nightspots with a dance floor. To Linder, it seemed that
Denniston’s pickup technique was limited to chatting up
ordinary-looking, chirpy, impressionable bar hoppers, whom he
considered easy prey, and then investing inordinate amounts of time
and money in plying them with alcohol.

Though Denniston seemed
to favor bringing Linder along on his nighttime forays, because
Linder tended to attract a better class of women, by night’s end
Denniston always seemed to begrudge the ease with which his friend
found hookups when he often hadn’t made it to first base.

Linder understood full
well that his brooding dark looks didn’t appeal to every kind of
girl, but enough seemed to favor the strong, silent, and dangerous
type of man that he rarely found himself out of luck. Yet what truly
set him apart on the nightlife circuit was his skill at dancing. It
was more than an equalizer; it was a secret weapon. It allowed him to
bypass the kind of perky, bubbly, chatty girls that Denniston so
often chased, and zero in on the sultry temptresses who harbored dark
secrets of their own.

Now, seeing the same
scenario play out once again, the thought occurred to Linder that
Denniston’s animosity toward him might go deeper than mere pickup
envy and might amount to a broader and deeper resentment based on
hidden feelings of inadequacy. For while both men had attended the
same college, worked in the same government agency, and enjoyed
identical rank and income, Denniston had lost the status he once
enjoyed growing up in an old-money family while Linder had risen from
the working class. And now, if what Jack Moran said was true,
Denniston risked disgrace and an end to his Agency career even
without regard to the President’s global pullout.

Linder had long been
aware of a simmering tension between them that dated back to their
college days. He had noticed that Denniston seemed to resent that
Linder had attended an elite New England boarding school, albeit as a
scholarship boy. Even after visiting the Linder family’s modest
bungalow in Lyndhurst, Denniston somehow could not give up the
preposterous notion that his friend Warren had been born with a
silver spoon in his mouth. Denniston also seemed annoyed by Linder’s
academic success, which he ought to have known was based as much on
hard work and determination as on talent. Had Denniston applied
himself similarly, rather than play cards and drink several nights a
week, he might easily have matched Linder’s grades.

Linder recalled his
friend once aiming a dig at him for having been accepted at Columbia
Business School, where Denniston had been rejected, and another dig
at Linder’s landing a pharmaceutical sales job, which seemed to
aggrieve Denniston because he had been unemployed for over a year.
What Denniston did not appreciate was Linder’s own disappointment
at failing to land a job on Wall Street after graduating in the top
third of his class at Columbia. In Linder’s view, there had been
plenty of disappointment to go around.

In the end, Linder
thought that Denniston harbored his most toxic resentment toward him
for the unpardonable sin of having surpassed Denniston in social
status. For though Denniston had been born into a venerable and
wealthy Kentucky family while Linder was a third-generation
immigrant, Denniston felt certain he had lost his social standing
through his father’s financial losses and felony convictions. What
set Denniston’s teeth on edge most, it appeared, was to see his
lowborn friend acquire some of the polish and confidence of the
wealthy during years of close mingling with them at Exeter, Kenyon,
and Columbia. Yet, here, too, the irony was that Linder had never
felt accepted in the circles that his friend presumed he had joined.

The difference between
them, Linder realized, was that he never considered himself to be in
competition with Denniston. In his view, he and Denniston were
separate spirits, each following his own path. While their journeys
might coincide from time to time, and while Linder valued Denniston’s
high-spirited companionship, the two men were fellow travelers bound
together by common experience, not intimates, and he trusted
Denniston only within the limits of his nature. True friendship was
something else, and in his heart of hearts, Linder wasn’t sure that
either of them had an abundance of that quality to offer.

Linder sometimes
wondered what would become of his relationship with Denniston if the
latter failed to conquer his sense of inferiority. At a time when
American political life had been turned on its head, with old elites
toppled and former outcasts risen to power, he had watched the
country’s Unionist leaders transmute their feelings of envy and
victimhood in an unquenchable thirst for dominion. If Denniston were
to follow the same road after joining the DSS, might not an old
college chum become a convenient target for his misplaced rage?

But before Linder could
take the thought any further, he stopped to help Nora into her seat
and pour what was left of the champagne into the women’s flutes. No
sooner had he motioned to José for another bottle than Sheila
grasped his hand.

“Come with me,” the
blonde said, rising to her feet. “The next dance is mine.”

Linder gave Sheila a
polite smile before turning to asking Nora if she minded sitting out
the next tune.

“I could use a
breather,” Nora replied with an easy laugh while reaching for her
glass. “Knock yourselves out.

But as he walked Sheila
onto the dance floor for a rumba, Linder glanced back at Denniston
and was alarmed to see a depth of malice in the man’s eyes that he
had never noticed before. Though he had not yet decided whether to
join Denniston at the DSS, he did know this much: if he did, he would
keep him at arm’s length from now on.

Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.
Jean Jacques
Rousseau

MID-DECEMBER, UNIDENTIFIED AIR FORCE BASE IN MARYLAND OR NORTHERN
VIRGINA

Warren Linder awoke
suddenly and felt the cold bite of handcuffs and leg irons at his
wrists and ankles.

In his dream, he had
been reading a newspaper while seated in a leather easy chair inside
a walnut-paneled study, which was handsomely furnished with oriental
rugs, brass ornamental trays, inlaid Egyptian woodwork, and other
Arab artifacts. To his left, French doors opened onto a balcony,
where palms and dwarf lemon and frangipani trees baked in giant
terracotta pots under a late afternoon sun. A sultry breeze riffled
the pages of the newspaper, causing him to raise his eyes and notice
a white-haired man of about seventy in a beige linen suit seated
opposite him with an open book on his lap.

Though the old man’s
face was cast in shadow, Linder recognized him instantly as the late
Philip Eaton, now tanned, well rested, and in the peak of health. But
having felt the reproach of so many former targets in his nightmares,
Linder panicked at the sight of Eaton and froze from fear that the
man’s fingers would be at his throat in a flash. He awoke in a
sweat and, for a moment, could not remember where he was.

When he did remember,
it was as if he had awakened from one nightmare into another. An hour
or so earlier, he had boarded an aging Boeing 757 airliner
reconfigured for prisoner transport. By his estimate, the aircraft
held more than 250 prisoners packed tightly in rows of web frame
seats to which each man was shackled at the waist, with wrists and
ankles bound to the waist chain.

Sometime before dawn,
his guards at the Virginia interrogation prison had summoned him from
his cell and thrown him into a blacked-out school bus with some
thirty other prisoners. They drove for about ninety minutes to a
military airfield, perhaps Andrews Air Force Base or the Patuxent
Naval Air Station, where a queue of identical buses waited to
disgorge their passengers onto the tarmac.

Announcements aboard
the bus were terse. There would be no toilet breaks in flight. No
food or water would be served. Prisoners who disobeyed orders or
acted out would be tazered, restrained, and sedated and would remain
in their seats no matter what.

On boarding the
airplane, Linder felt overwhelmed by the sudden transition from
solitude to close confinement with 250 other prisoners. The reek of
foul breath and sweat, the jabs of elbows, the outpouring of curses
and complaints in the most creative and colorful language,
momentarily overwhelmed him. Mercifully, the ambient light was low
and the windows were blacked out, making it difficult to see the
faces of all but his nearest companions. Like him, they looked pale
and drawn, with shaven heads and orange coveralls hanging loosely
across their scrawny shoulders. Nonetheless, these were not the faces
of common criminals. Years ago one would have called them political
prisoners, but now the official term for them was national security
cases.

Linder closed his eyes
and listened to the low murmurings and occasional shouts and ravings
of his fellow passengers. Once the initial outpouring of complaints
receded, few of the prisoners had much else to say. Having likely
spent weeks or months in solitary confinement, most appeared to need
time to adjust to the change. For the moment, Linder’s own thoughts
were too confused to articulate. Ideas intersected like tangled
vines, surfacing as long-repressed memories of random times and
places. Amid such confusion, conversational ability did not return
quickly or all at once, but in slowly and gradually.

Linder listened to his
neighbors call out blunt questions to their nearest neighbors and
receive equally blunt answers. They asked if anyone was from their
home city, or attended the same college or high school, or served in
the same military unit. To Linder’s relief, his immediate neighbors
ignored him. He had little interest in them, either, and contented
himself with lying back and merging into the anonymous crowd. He felt
no need just yet to reach out and find himself a friend.

“Where are we going?”
someone called from the row behind him.

“North. All the way
north,” came a muffled voice further back.

“What do you mean?
The North Pole? Santaland?”

“Don’t be stupid,”
muffled voice replied. “Alaska. Maybe the Yukon.”

“Don’t they have
any labor camps in the Sunbelt?” a voice with a New York accent
complained.

“Not for the likes of
us, brother,” a deep-voiced Southerner answered.

“Alaska, nonstop from
D.C.? Can this plane do that?” the New Yorker protested. “I don’t
think my bladder can handle it.”

“The 757 doesn’t
have the range,” replied a prisoner to Linder’s left. “We’ll
probably stop to refuel in the Dakotas, either at Grand Forks or
Ellsworth. From there, they’ll probably take us to Elmendorf Air
Force Base, in Anchorage. That’s the main hub for connecting
flights to the northern camps.”