Scarecrow and the Army of Thieves (28 page)

‘Your research on me?’

‘When you set out to assassinate someone, it is wise to know as much as you can about them. Pressure points, loved ones, weaknesses that can be exploited.’

‘Why don’t you tell me about myself then,’ Schofield said. ‘Let’s see what you know and I’ll tell you how accurate it is.’

‘Okay,’ Champion began.

As they glided through the network of narrow leads, Champion spoke slowly:

‘Shane Michael Schofield is the son of John Schofield, a successful businessman, and the grandson of Michael Schofield, a highly decorated Marine, call-sign Mustang.

‘Michael Schofield’s actions during World War II are legendary in the Marine Corps. Indeed, several of them are
still
classified more than sixty years later, including one fabled mission known only as
BLACK WOLF HUNT
. Your grandfather is revered in the Corps, a most admired man. You and he are close, and you dine together at least once a month.’

Schofield nodded. ‘So far, all correct.’

‘But your father—John Schofield—was
not
a Marine, and you and he were not close, all the way to his death . . .’

Champion surveyed Schofield’s face as she said this. His distant look gave her the answer she was after. It was true.

‘Your father was a businessman and a very good one,’ she said. ‘He could never match your grandfather’s military accomplishments so he chose to outdo him in the acquisition of money and he became a very wealthy man.’

Schofield said nothing.

It went further than that.

His father had
hated
his grandfather, despised him, despised the respect he received everywhere he went. And even though Michael Schofield had never put any pressure on John Schofield to do anything other than what his heart desired, John had been haunted by the long shadow cast by his legendary father. It was, sadly, a torment that found expression in other ways.

Champion said, ‘Your father regularly beat both you and your mother: I found hospital records from your youth detailing several broken noses and cigarette burns on your forearms.’

Schofield said nothing. It was either the bastard beat his mother or beat him, and that was a no-brainer. His beatings had started at the age of twelve. He still bore small circular scars on his forearms from the cigarette burns.

Champion went on. ‘So when you turned eighteen, you joined the Marines and there you thrived. You became a pilot in the Air Wing, where you served with distinction until you were shot down over Bosnia, where a local warlord mutilated your eyes, leaving the distinctive scars that are the origin of your call-sign.

‘After your rescue, you became a regular Marine rifleman, rising quickly to Force Recon level. You commanded Force Reconnaissance Unit 16 on that mission to Antarctica which brought you into contact with my cousin. You survived that—a delicate affair involving allies at war and even American forces fighting American forces—but it displeased some in high places and you were subsequently assigned to the President’s helicopter, Marine One. It was an ornamental position and thus an insult for one so skilled and experienced, but you did it anyway.

‘That assignment brought you into another incident that the US has successfully hidden from the world: Colonel Caesar Russell’s coup attempt. The hunting of a President within the confines of his most secret base. Your acts there won you a classified Medal of Honor.’

Champion paused.

‘Shortly after that, your father died, by his own hand.’

Schofield nodded silently. The bastard had got the death he’d deserved: bitter and alone, sitting in his wood-panelled office, he’d shot himself through the mouth.

Champion said, ‘Your mother had already passed away several years earlier. Yet, despite your father’s awful treatment of you as a child, he left you everything in his will. Twelve million dollars. Making you, a humble United States Marine,
a very rich young man
.’

Schofield said nothing.

This was all true, but few knew it. Champion’s sources were excellent. Mother knew about the money and Gant had, too. And they had both approved of what he had done next.

Champion said, ‘You donated it all to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Every penny. An act of principle?’

‘You could call it that.’ Schofield shrugged.

‘It was
twelve million dollars
. You wouldn’t have had to work again. Do you ever regret it?’

‘Not for a second. It was a cruel man’s money and I didn’t want it. I sent it somewhere worthwhile.’

He looked away, kept paddling. Champion gazed at him for a long moment before going on.

‘And then came the Majestic-12 bounty hunt during which the missile-builder, Jonathan Killian, had your girlfriend, Elizabeth Gant, call-sign Fox, cruelly beheaded in a guillotine. This was a pivotal event in your life. You retreated from military activity for four months. Your superiors thought it had broken you. You can’t imagine how surprised they were when you turned up one day and said that you were ready to get back to work. Yet what did they do with you? They made you a teacher, and then they hid you away up here in a lowly equipment-testing unit. Another insulting assignment.’

Champion waited for him to respond.

‘Fox’s death
did
break me,’ Schofield said. ‘But ultimately I . . . I figured out a way to cope.’

‘How?’ Champion said. ‘I am genuinely curious. How did you cope? Like I did, by becoming immune to emotion?’

Schofield thought for a moment.

‘No. No, I didn’t do that. In those first few months after the Majestic-12 thing, the Corps sent me to a bunch of psychiatrists, top-of-the-range shrinks, all with Top Secret clearance, the best money can buy. Hell, one of them charged a thousand bucks an hour.

‘But none of them worked. I kept thinking about Fox, picturing her death. I kept thinking about what I could have done. I felt powerless. I retreated into myself.’

‘So what changed?’ Champion asked.

‘I found a new shrink, not a psychiatrist, but a psychologist, a simple therapist. And not through the Corps. Mother found her, saw her flyer tacked to the noticeboard at her husband’s office and gave it to me—Ralph’s a trucker and the company he drives for was offering free therapy to its long-haul drivers because of rising divorce rates.

‘Anyway, that psychologist’s name was Dr Brooke Ulacco and she wasn’t some old white male Ivy Leaguer. She was a mother of two boys and she worked part-time out of the basement of her townhouse in Baltimore. I started doing therapy with her.’

In his mind’s eye, Schofield could see it as if it were yesterday.

Arriving at the old townhouse, with its formstone walls, being met at the door by Brooke Ulacco, a tawny-haired woman in her forties with wide hips, a gentle smile and a razor-sharp mind.

He recalled sitting in her basement office—valiantly decorated with pot plants and some framed photos, but nothing could hide the pipes and water heaters—hearing the kids playing upstairs. He even remembered once when Dr Ulacco called out: ‘Kids! I’ve got a client down here! Keep it down, will ya!’

Schofield liked that atmosphere.

Others might have found it distracting, but to him it was normal and that made it wonderful. It was the real world. Real kids playing in a real way and a real mom telling them to play quietly. That was who he fought for and that was why he did what he did, why he fought terrible missions against terrible people in terrible places.

Ulacco also didn’t beat around the bush. She spoke plainly and honestly, sometimes brutally so. If she felt Schofield was skirting around an issue or an emotion, she called him on it, often cutting in with, ‘Now, come on, Marine, that’s not true . . .’

But she could also be extraordinarily kind. For instance, when he spoke of Gant, of her thousand-watt smile, of the wonderful person she had been, Ulacco would just sit back and let him talk. On those occasions, she never interrupted.

A problem arose early on: Ulacco didn’t have the same high-level clearance that the other shrinks did, so at first Schofield couldn’t tell her the details of what had happened on that fateful mission, just his feelings about them. After a time, though, when he felt he could trust her, he asked his superiors in the Marine Corps if Ulacco could be background-checked for the appropriate level of clearance, so he could tell her more. It took a few months, many checks (including two sweeps of her office for bugs) and three polygraph tests, all of which Ulacco endured without so much as a blink—she had a brother named Bryce fighting in Afghanistan, so she understood. But eventually clearance was given: ‘TS/SCI’ or ‘Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information’, which allowed her to be told the details of those missions relevant to Schofield’s treatment, and that made things much easier.

But while Ulacco’s straight-talking manner and humble basement office made Schofield comfortable, it was her unusual brand of therapy that had made him well again.

‘So what could this part-time suburban psychologist teach you that the best minds in mental health could not?’ Champion asked.

Schofield shook his head. ‘It’ll sound weird, but she taught me about memory techniques, including one particular technique called the
method of loci
. Some people call it a memory palace or memory cathedral. You order your memories into a visual location of some sort—a cathedral, a town, a house, whatever, so long as it’s a structure that you know very well and can thus picture easily. Then when you want to remember something, you travel through that memory location and find the memory you’re after. What Dr Ulacco taught me was more than that: she taught me how to use a memory location to
forget
.’

Champion said, ‘Go on.’

‘I needed to function, to be able to keep going,’ Schofield said. ‘I didn’t want to forget Fox, but I needed to be able to . . .
compartmentalise
. . . the memory of her so I could move on and function and continue to be the person I am.’

‘And what is your memory location?’ Champion asked.

‘It’s stupid. You’ll think it’s silly.’

‘I’ll probably be dead within the hour, so what can it hurt to tell me?’

Schofield took a deep breath. He’d never actually told anyone about this, not even Mother.

‘It’s a submarine,’ he said.

Despite herself, Champion snuffed a brief laugh. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I told you it was stup—’

‘No, it’s clever. It’s very clever. Submarines have strong walls, and compartments that you can close off with airtight steel doors. It strikes me as an excellent location to store memories, especially painful ones.’

‘It was Ulacco’s idea,’ Schofield said. ‘She suggested a spaceship or an aircraft carrier but I liked a sub the best. I’ve been on many, so I know the layout well and can conjure it up easily. I seal off the most painful memories in the farthest reaches of my imaginary submarine, behind many watertight doors. They’re still with me, but I only access them when I really want to, when I’m ready to. Getting to them requires substantial mental effort. There’s also another reason why a submarine is good.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because you can
purge
a submarine,’ Schofield said flatly. ‘Eject the trash, so to speak.’

‘You mean jettison memories for good?’ Champion frowned. ‘Forget things
forever
?’

‘If you’re disciplined enough, yes.’

At that, Champion made a strange face, a sorrowful one.

She said, ‘This Fox, this Gant, she sounds like an impressive woman. So impressive that she captured your heart—a heart, I imagine, that is not often or easily caught. I can understand how damaged you were by her death. But to try to forget someone
entirely
’—Champion shook her head—‘this is a very sad thing. Not even I did that. Is that what you did to keep going? Did you jettison her entirely from your memory?’

Schofield looked away again, kept paddling.

‘I don’t—’

At that moment, his wristguard vibrated.

Schofield looked down at it.

A message had come in, from David Fairfax.

‘This conversation is to be continued,’ he said, looking down at the message.

The message read:

Schofield frowned.
The CIA?

Attached to the message was a document in PDF form, titled
OPERATION
‘
DRAGONSLAYER
’. He opened it and, sitting down beside Champion so she could look on, started reading:

Schofield glanced at Champion. ‘Use Russia to kill China? This is about
China
?’

They kept reading: