Exile Hunter (32 page)

“I’m too young to
look like this!” he protested to the mirror, overwhelmed at seeing
the indelible effects of scarcely two months in the Yukon following
three months in solitary confinement. He turned his back to the
mirror in disgust and put the pajamas back on.

On returning to the
ward, he scanned each bed for familiar faces. Two beds away from his
own, he found a face he recognized, but he could not manage to recall
the man’s name or where they might have met. Stepping forward to
read the clipboard at the foot of the bed, he flinched upon seeing
the name Roger K. atop the page. Then he remembered Bednarski telling
him that Kendall was also at the camp, in failing health after his
own stay in the disciplinary unit.

Linder took a closer
look at the pinched, stubble-covered face and recognized the Roger
Kendall he had met only five months earlier in Beirut. But this was a
grotesquely emaciated version of the tanned, confident and impeccably
groomed Roger Kendall with whom he had shared lunch on the day of
their arrest. Kendall had been forty-seven then, yet this grizzled
scarecrow looked not a day under sixty.

As the patient remained
asleep and Linder could not decipher his medical charts, he dared not
wake him. But when the orderly approached the next bed, Linder
brought Kendall’s clipboard to him and asked why Kendall had been
admitted.

“He collapsed at the
recycling plant with some kind of heart problem. This time the doc
says he’s a goner, but the Deputy ordered him kept alive. So here
he is.”

“Does he ever wake
up?” Linder asked.

“Too early to say.
They brought him in around the same time as you.”

Linder brought a chair
to Roger Kendall’s bedside and kept vigil for the rest of the day.
At sunset, the patient moved an arm, and then rolled onto his side as
noise levels on the ward rose shortly before dinner. When the
squeaking wheels of the food cart rolled into the room, Kendall
opened his eyes at last.

“Would you like some
dinner?” Linder asked.

Kendall nodded and
looked around with vacant eyes.

Linder called over the
orderly to help him tilt the bed so that Kendall could eat. When the
dinner tray was placed before him with a plate of warm casserole and
mixed vegetables more appetizing than anything Linder had seen in
months, Kendall stared at the food blankly for several minutes before
slowly picking up a fork. Then, to Linder’s surprise, the prisoner
began eating slowly and methodically until every morsel was gone.

Though Linder had taken
a dislike to Kendall when they met, sizing him up at that time as a
self-satisfied hypocrite unworthy of being Patricia Eaton’s
husband, he felt a flood of sympathy for the man who now lay near
death from exposure, overwork, and malnutrition. And because he had
played a role in bringing Kendall here, Linder resolved to do
whatever he could to ease the man’s suffering. He waited for
Kendall to finish his food before he spoke again.

“Good job there,”
Linder commented when Kendall had cleared his plate. “How are we
feeling tonight?”

Kendall cast a puzzled
glance at him, as if noticing him for the first time.

“Terrible,” came
the reply.

“You’ve slept quite
a long time,” Linder went on. “Would you like to use the toilet?”

Kendall’s gaze seemed
unsteady and out of focus, as if his vision or his thinking were
impaired.

“Are you the new
orderly?” he asked.

“Not exactly,”
Linder replied. “But I’ll help if you want me to.”

“If you’re an
orderly, why are you wearing patient pajamas?” Kendall answered. As
he pointed to Linder’s hospital gown, his bony finger trembled.

Linder knew that, if he
wanted to keep the conversation going, he would eventually have to
offer his name. The problem was that Kendall had known him in Beirut
as Mormon Joe Tanner. If Linder introduced himself as Tanner, or if
Kendall recognized him as Tanner without his disguise, it could
deliver a nasty shock to a man as ill as Kendall. On the other hand,
for Linder to use his true name risked exposing both his DSS
affiliation and his prior connection with Patricia, depending on what
Kendall’s wife and his interrogators may have told him.

“I’m just another
prisoner, like you,” Linder replied after a moment’s pause. “My
name is Warren.”

“Very pleased to meet
you, Warren,” came the reply. A moment later, Kendall closed his
eyes and drifted back to sleep.

Though Bednarski had
already revealed that Roger Kendall was at Camp N-320 and near death,
it disturbed Linder to see a man once as proud and capable as Kendall
reduced to a hollow vestige of himself. The sight moved Linder deeply
and made him feel intensely ashamed for having set him up for
rendition. All at once he recognized his initial antipathy toward
Kendall for what it was: envy, not only for the man’s good looks,
wealth, and social standing, but for the unforgivable offense of
having made Patricia Eaton his wife.

As soon as he could be
sure that he would not disturb Kendall by removing his dinner tray,
Linder returned it to the orderly.

“Hey, I’m not very
experienced at this,” he offered while the orderly emptied the tray
and stacked it on his cart. “But is there something I could do
around here to help the old guy without getting either of us in
trouble?”

The orderly gave a
raucous laugh.

“What you can do is
stay in bed and save your strength. You may be listed as able-bodied,
but you’re only here for three days and you’ll need all the rest
you can get. Never mind the old fart. He’s a goner and isn’t
going to make it, anyway. Why bother? Is he an old war buddy of yours
or something?”

“I knew him and his
family on the outside,” Linder answered. “I feel I owe it to
them.”

The orderly shrugged
and retrieved another empty tray from the next bed.

“Then knock yourself
out,” he replied without slowing his pace. “There aren’t nearly
enough of us staff to look after you people, anyway. And goners like
him are more trouble than they’re worth.”

The orderly turned to
leave but stopped unexpectedly and gave Linder a searching look.

“Look, buddy, if it’s
that important to you, what he’ll likely need most is help getting
to the toilet and cleaning himself up. The washbasins are over there.
If you want a sponge and some soap, I’ll get them from the
storeroom. One more thing. Make sure he wakes up in time for meals.
If he misses one, there’s no second chance. The vultures will
snatch what’s his the moment the cart goes by.”

The orderly cast a
sidelong glance at a wizened old prisoner across the aisle, who eyed
them intently. The man’s facial features had an Asiatic cast and
Linder guessed he might belong to one of Canada’s indigenous
peoples, like the Kaska or the Tutchone.

“Got nothing for you,
Scotty,” the orderly called out to the watchful prisoner, and moved
on.

* * *

The following
morning, Linder rose early and waited for Kendall to stir while most
of the other prisoners slept. The room was still dark except for the
dim glow of emergency exit lights and a night-light next to each bed.
The room was eerily quiet, as if death had seeped into the room and
was slowly smothering any patient too tired to stir.

At last, the overhead
lights flickered on and a pair of male nurses began their rounds,
moving from bed to bed, taking temperatures and pulses and writing
cryptic notes on each patient’s medical chart, Across the room, a
nurse pulled the blanket over the face of a prisoner who died during
the night and pressed a button that rang a bell in the hall. A few
moments later, an orderly arrived to wheel the bed away with all the
care of a sanitation worker emptying an overflowing garbage bin.

When at last the
breakfast cart made its noisy approach and Kendall failed to wake,
Linder shook the patient gently by the foot. A few of the patients
awakened by the noise moaned and called for help but none of the
nurses or orderlies paid them the least attention.

“Time to eat,”
Linder announced softly. “Don’t let the vultures take it. You’ll
need to eat everything you’re given if you want to grow up big and
strong.”

Roger Kendall opened
his eyes and stared blankly at Linder, then all at once sat up
without a word and, as if by habit, dug his spoon into the oatmeal.
But the slow, lifeless way in which he went about it and the
persistent tremor in his hand left Linder wondering how much of the
old Roger Kendall remained inside the shell.

Suddenly, as if Kendall
could read his thoughts, he looked across the bed at Linder and
spoke.

“Don’t I know you
from somewhere?” he asked in an odd monotone.

Linder responded with
an amused smile.

“Yes, in another
world a long time ago,” he answered, looking to either side to make
sure no one could overhear him.

“Tell me your name,”
Kendall asked next.

“Warren Linder. I
introduced myself last night.” Linder pulled his chair closer to
the bed and sat where Kendall could get a better look at his face.

“No, you’re not
Warren Linder. I remember that name and I remember your face, but you
can’t be him.”

“And why not?”
Linder asked, doing his best to appear unruffled.

“Because after they
kidnapped me, my interrogator kept asking me about a Warren Linder,”
Kendall replied, raising his voice a notch. “If I had known someone
by that name, I would have remembered. But I do know your face. So
that means we’ve met, only not as Linder.”

Kendall turned his
attention back to his oatmeal in that moment and Linder could not
help but laugh uneasily at the lucidity of Kendall’s response.

“Well, I can assure
you that I am indeed Warren Linder. If you doubt it, ask the staff or
take a look at my clipboard,” Linder replied with studied
smoothness. “Names of prisoners are not something the CLA gets
wrong often.” Now Linder held Kendall’s gaze steadily in his, as
if to influence the man’s response by sheer force of will.

“Perhaps so,”
Kendall replied, as if the lights suddenly turned on inside his head.
“But if I had met you as Warren Linder, I’m certain I would have
remembered. You see, my interrogator claimed that Linder was a
childhood friend of my wife. He also insinuated that something
improper was going on between the two of them. Now, you wouldn’t
claim to be
that
Warren Linder, would you?”

Now it was Kendall’s
turn to fix Linder in the eye and at once Linder realized that Roger
Kendall, the former litigator, had come back to life. And rather than
feel threatened, it made Linder feel happier than he had felt in a
long time. He flashed Kendall a grin.

“Well, I wouldn’t
subscribe to the last part and I’m sure Patricia wouldn’t,
either. In case she hadn’t already told you, she and I met in
middle school and talked to each other only once or twice since then,
while we were in boarding school. Really, Roger, you ought to know
better than to believe everything an interrogator tells you. Now, let
me ask you a question: can you describe the interrogator for me? And
did he give you a name?”

“He called himself
Dennis,” Kendall replied, dipping a finger in his coffee mug to
judge if it had cooled. “I saw him only during the first days after
my arrest. He was about your age, tall and lanky, with fair hair and
a narrow face, but he had cold blue eyes and a wide, thin mouth that
gave the impression of a snake about to strike. Quite a pitiless
sort.”

“I think I know him,”
Linder responded, lowering his voice as a nurse passed by. “His
true name is Neil Denniston. He and I worked together during the
Battle of Cleveland, chasing the militias who looted the downtown
banks. Neil’s been trying to get his hands on the missing loot ever
since. And your father-in-law, the man accused of planning the
operation, has become Neil’s very own white whale.”

Linder stopped and
watched for Kendall’s reaction but had to wait while the orderly
cleared Kendall’s empty breakfast tray.

“So you served in
State Security,” Kendall observed when the orderly was out of
earshot. “How fascinating. And you remained a DSS officer
until...?”

“Until my conviction
for sedition,” Linder replied.

“Then you are a
regular prisoner and not a guard or an orderly?”

“Just look at me,”
he told Kendall, opening his arms wide. “Do I look well-fed enough
to be anything else?”

Kendall gave a weak
smile.

“I suppose not,” he
answered quietly, and for a moment his mind appeared to drift off
again. “But, in that case, where could we possibly have met?” he
continued, gazing at Linder with such fierce concentration that
Linder felt goose bumps on his scalp and neck and wondered whether
Kendall might still recognize his face, bearded, sans disguise, and
considerably leaner than that of the ruddy-faced Joe Tanner from
Utah.

As if on cue, a glimmer
of recollection appeared in Kendall’s eyes.

“Could we have
crossed paths in London?” he ventured.

“Not likely.” The
half-truth came easily to Linder, as his instincts told him to draw
Kendall’s focus away from London, lest it lead him to ask about
Beirut before Linder was ready for it. “But, listen, I’d rather
not dwell on my time in the government just now. Besides, it’s
ancient history. So why don’t we both get some rest and talk again
in the morning?”

Kendall gave Linder
another searching look and fell silent, his concentration apparently
fading once again. The conversation had probably required more mental
effort than Kendall had exerted in weeks of mindless work at the
recycling plant. Though he longed to confess that he had met Kendall
in Beirut as Mormon Joe Tanner and seek his forgiveness, it was hard
to know whether Kendall was strong enough to confront the man who had
lured him into captivity. If Linder moved too quickly and Kendall
spurned his advance, any chance of reconciling with Kendall, or with
Patricia, might be irretrievably lost. Unsure of success and
unwilling to risk a setback, Linder decided to wait.