Liberation Day

Chapter 5

I sat on the T, the smart aluminum commuter train that had brought me from Logan Airport into Boston and, after a quick change, north toward Wonderland.

Wonderland always sounded to me like some kind of glitzy shopping mall; in fact, it was only the drop-off point for people from the northern suburbs heading into Boston. Today, though, no destination could have been better named. Carrie had been lecturing at MIT this morning, so was picking me up here instead of at the airport, then taking me to her mother’s place in Marblehead, a small town about twenty miles north along the coast. Her mother had lent us the guest annex, while she carried on with her bed-and-breakfast business in the main house. Carrie and I lived there alone now that Luz had started high school in Cambridge. To me it was home, and it was a long time since I’d felt that way about anywhere.

The other passengers looked at me as if I’d just escaped from the local nuthouse. After two days of traveling back from Egypt, my skin was greasy, my eyes stung, and my socks, armpits, and breath stank. As some kind of damage limitation before I saw Carrie, I was brushing my teeth and swallowing the foaming paste as I looked out of the window. It wasn’t going to transform me into Brad Pitt on Oscar night, but it was the best I could do.

I picked up the nylon duffel bag near my feet and put it on the empty seat beside me. I needed to check just one more time that the bag was sterile of anything that could link me to the job before she picked me up. My hand passed over the smooth, rounded shape of the Pyramids snowstorm shaker I’d bought her at the Cairo airport, and the hard edge of the small photo album she’d lent me for my weeks away. “If you don’t look at it and think nice things about me every day, Nick Stone,” she’d said, “don’t even think about coming back.”

I opened it and felt a grin spreading across my face, as it did every time I saw her. She was standing outside Abbot Hall in Washington Square, Marblehead, on the start of what she’d called my U.S. Heritage Induction Tour. Abbot Hall was the home of The Spirit of ’76, the famous portrait of a fife and drum at the head of an infantry column during the Revolutionary War. She wanted me to see it because she said it embodied the spirit of America — and if I were going to become a U.S. citizen one day, it was my solemn duty to damned well admire and be moved by it. I said I thought it looked more like a cartoon than a masterpiece, and she pushed me outside.

Her short brown hair was being buffeted by the wind blasting off the Atlantic as I pressed the shutter. She looked like GI Jane in green fatigue cargos and a baggy gray sweater. She certainly didn’t look in her late thirties, even though a certain sadness in her smile, and a few small creases at the corners of her mouth and eyes, told anybody who was paying attention that the last couple of years had not been easy on her. “Nothing Photoshop can’t handle,” she said, “once I’ve scanned them into the PC.”

It was rare to see her expression so relaxed, even when she was sleeping. Normally it was much more animated, most often frowning, questioning, or registering disgust at Corporate America’s latest outrage. She had good reason to look weighed down. It had been hard for her and Luz since the two of them had come back from Panama, one without a husband, the other without the man who’d become her father. Since Aaron’s death there hadn’t been a day when he didn’t come into her conversation. I still tended to cut away from stuff like this, but the way she saw it, he’d been her husband for fifteen years and dead for only a little over one.

In the whole of my life as a Special Forces soldier, and later, as a “K” working on deniable operations for the Intelligence Service, I’d always tried to turn my back on the guilt, remorse, and self-doubt that always followed a job; what was done was done. But watching her trying to deal with it moved me more than I’d thought possible.

I’d been sent to Panama in September 2000 to coerce a local drugs racketeer into helping the West. Carrie and Aaron had been my local contacts; they’d been environmental scientists running a research station near the Colombian border, and on the CIA payroll as low-level intelligence gatherers. I was staying at their house when the racketeer’s boys came looking for me, and Aaron had paid the price.

There hadn’t been many days since when I didn’t wonder if there’d been something more I could have done to save him.

There was another photograph of Carrie taken in her mother’s kitchen at Marblehead. She was cooking clam chowder. Just to one side of her was a framed black-and-white portrait of her with her father, George, a handsome, square-jawed all-American in a uniform, probably taken in the early sixties.

I gazed at the one of her standing outside her college. Carrie had been encouraging me to give the place a try; I’d always loved medieval history, and had been reading quite a lot about the Crusades lately. I’d told her I wasn’t sure the whole mature-student thing was me, working in Starbucks, being bossed by an eighteen-year-old manager. I hadn’t quite gotten around to telling her that my formal education had ended when I was fifteen, so the college was unlikely to take me on as a janitor, let alone enroll me in one of its courses.

I guessed there was quite a lot of stuff, one way or another, that I hadn’t told Carrie. There was my trip to Algeria, for a start. It wasn’t the job itself; I wouldn’t have said a word about that anyway. It was the fact that I’d promised her I’d never get involved in dirty work again. The carrot George had dangled in front of me was irresistible; with American citizenship papers in my pocket, I’d be free to work at whatever I wanted. But I wasn’t sure Carrie would appreciate the method behind the madness.

The story I’d told her was that I’d been offered three weeks’ work escorting thrill-seekers into Egypt. After the 9/11 attacks, tourism to the Middle East had all but dried up, and the few travelers still brave enough to go wanted guides. Carrie agreed it was a good idea for me to make some money before I started the long process of applying for citizenship. Until that happened, all I could do were menial jobs, so money would be tight. I hadn’t a clue how I was going to explain to her why my citizenship had come through so fast, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. I sat and looked out at the dull gray day as ice-covered trees zoomed past along the side of the track and vehicles in the distance with cold engines tailed exhaust fumes behind them. It wasn’t a good start to us being together, but it was done now. I should just look to the future.

After two days of moseying around, ninety feet below the Mediterranean, following the North African coastline, we’d finally made it back into Alexandria. The weather had closed in as predicted about ten hours after we got on board, not that we knew, so far below water. A Chrysler MPV was waiting at the dockside; somebody took my bergen, and that was the last I saw of it. For the next week I just had to wait in a hotel room in Cairo while the head I’d brought back was confirmed as Zeralda’s. If not, we might have been sent back to get the correct one.

I still didn’t know why I’d been asked to bring back Zeralda’s head and I still didn’t care. All that mattered was that George was coming to Boston in a few days’ time, and I’d be getting Nick Stone’s shiny new U.S. passport, social security number, and Massachusetts driver’s licence. I was about to become a real person.

I looked around the train. Most of my fellow travelers had now gotten bored looking at the jerk brushing his teeth and wiping the foam that ran down his chin, and were buried in their papers. The front pages were plastered with the war in Afghanistan, reporting that everything was going well and there were no casualties. Northern Alliance fighters were silhouetted against the sunset as they stood watching U.S. Special Forces soldiers carrying enough gear on their backs to collapse a donkey.

I looked out and chewed on my brush. To my right, and running parallel with the track, was the coast road, also cutting through the icy marshland. We were overtaking a taxi, his side windows festooned with patriotic imagery; there was even a little Stars and Stripes fluttering from his aerial. I couldn’t see the driver, but knew he just had to be an Indian or a Pakistani. Those guys didn’t want to leave anything to chance in these troubled times.

The marshland petered out, and whitewashed clapboard houses sprang up on either side of the train, then the blur of supermarkets and used-car lots also draped in the Stars and Stripes. I felt my pulse quicken with anticipation. I didn’t have to work for the Firm (British Intelligence) any more, didn’t have to do anymore jobs for George. I really felt I’d been given a new start, that life was coming together. I was free.