Sliver of Truth

19

About fifteen hours later, I watched my father, Ben (not Max), on a closed-circuit television screen. He was being questioned by two CIA agents: a man, tall with dark buzz-cut hair, and a woman, Latino and small, with burning coals for eyes, both wearing conservative blue suits. I noticed that he didn’t look scared at all, that he leaned back in his chair and had his arms folded across his chest. That his face was stern, his eyes disdainful. He’d admitted to communicating with Max. But he didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with that.

“It’s not a crime to disappear from your life, is it?” he asked.

“That’s not his crime, Mr. Jones,” said the female agent. She leaned against the wall.

“You have no proof, no evidence, that your other allegations against him are true,” my father said with his signature huff. “If you had, you would have brought him in long ago.”

I had to admit that I’d had the same thought. I’d brought it up with Jake, who’d told me that they’d never had enough solid evidence to scare him into giving up the men with whom he’d done business. They could have had him on hiding assets, possibly tax evasion, but they wanted him on charges that, if proven, might lead to the death penalty, which was the only way they figured they’d get him to bargain. Otherwise, a few years in a federal prison would be a cakewalk compared to what some of his associates might have done to him—or to the people he loved. They’d never get him to turn. So they watched and waited. But the longer it went on, the more ethereal he became, the less they saw of him, the more careful he was about his dealings. He turned to vapor before their eyes. And then he “died.” That’s why they started calling him the Ghost.

They’d been at my father for hours. But all they’d managed to get from him was an admission that he’d received a communication from Max about a year and a half after his death with instructions on how to decode messages in the red website. My father told them that he checked the website nearly daily and received communications maybe once every few months. The communications were vague—questions about me, about the rest of the family. Max never once said where he was, and Ben knew better than to ask.

“I didn’t understand why he’d do such a thing, cause us all so much grief,” my father said, “but I figured he had his reasons and I respected that.”

The male agent shook his head, sat down across from my father, and leaned in. His face was a mask of disdain.

“You respected that? Do you mean to tell us that in all your years of knowing Max Smiley, you never suspected what he might be capable of, that he might be a murderer, that his business dealings contributed to the destruction of human lives? That he disappeared because it was all starting to catch up with him? He left you and Esme Gray to take the rap for Project Rescue. He nearly destroyed your adopted daughter’s life—almost got her killed, in fact. And still you protected him.”

My father turned away from the agent’s hard gaze.

“I try to see the best in the people I love,” he said. “I try to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

He sounded defensive, nearly delusional. I was embarrassed for him. I felt ashamed and angry. My cheeks were hot and I sat down in the chair. Jake, who’d been standing behind me, put a hand on my shoulder. I shook him off.

“I told you not to touch me again,” I snapped. I felt him shift back from me. I hated him. I hated my father. I hated everyone.

“What does he have on you, Mr. Jones?” the female agent asked with a shake of her head.

My father flinched. “I have nothing left to say. I want an attorney.”

She gave a little laugh and looked at him with mock sympathy. “We’re with the CIA, Mr. Jones. The usual rules don’t apply.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” he asked. He started to look afraid for the first time. I saw a sheen of sweat on his brow; he gripped the edge of the table and sat forward.

“It means that you don’t have the right to an attorney. It means that we can hold you indefinitely if we believe you are a risk to national security. Max Smiley was a known associate of terrorist organizations. You have had contact with him. That makes you at best a witness, at worst an accomplice.”

My father was silent. He rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Was it loyalty or fear that kept him protecting Max? I didn’t know.

I turned to Jake. I couldn’t look at my father anymore. “What happens to me now?”

“Nothing,” he said. “We let you go. You live your life, go about your business.”

I looked at him. “In the meantime, you watch every move I make, every phone call, every e-mail. I live in a fishbowl.”

He gave me a grave nod. “Then,” he said, “after a few weeks, using the log-in you obtained from Angel, you try to reach Max. We’ll go from there.”

“And Dylan?”

Jake nodded again. “All charges and reprimands against him have been dropped,” he said, handing me a document. “As per the terms of your agreement.”

“He goes back to work?” I asked, scanning the page. I’d read it and signed it a few hours earlier.

Jake shook his head. “No. We weren’t able to arrange that. He’s been terminated from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The guy is a loaded gun.”

I couldn’t help but stare at Jake. He didn’t seem that different to me. Weird, after everything. He still seemed like Jake. Though he wore a suit and had a cool professionalism to him, I could still see the man I’d known for the last year. I felt as if something in my chest was splitting in half.

“And you?”

“You never have to see me again.”

The thought gave me a little jolt. I saw that he could do just that. He could walk away from me as if he’d never made love to me, never held my hand, never listened to all my secrets. Maybe he didn’t want to, maybe somewhere within him it would cause him pain, but he could do it. He would do it.

“But you’ll be there, listening and watching,” I said, thinking about how strange and sad that would be.

“Until we find Smiley. Then I disappear.” He was frowning, looked stiff around the shoulders. I hoped it meant that he was in pain.

“Fine,” I said, standing.

“Do you want to hear the rest of Ben’s interview?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve heard enough. From everyone. I want to go home.”

We’d been back in the States since late the night before. After I agreed to help them, Jake and I got on a commercial flight with a couple of other agents and returned to New York. I’d been with the CIA ever since. I wasn’t sure where in the city we were. I’d come to this location in the back of an unmarked white van with no windows. I hadn’t seen Dylan since the Internet café in London.

I’d spent a few hours in a clinic where a doctor cleaned and dressed my wound and gave me some kind of antibiotic shot. He also gave me a course of antibiotics for the road. And some painkillers, which I hadn’t taken yet. I wanted to be clearheaded.

Jake walked me down long white corridors lined with gray doors. We exited from the building into an underground garage and climbed into another van. Or the same van, who knows. There was a driver at the wheel, and as soon as Jake slammed the door, the van started moving. Sitting in the back beside me, he handed me a cell phone equipped with instant messaging and e-mail access. It was pretty cool looking, slick and flat. He told me how everything was preprogrammed for me to reach them.

“Keep this on you at all times. You’ll have five minutes to return calls, e-mails, or instant messages from us. If you exceed that time, someone will come for you.”

“To protect me or take me into custody?”

“Well, that depends upon the reason for your delay in responding.”

I nodded my understanding.

“Remember, Ridley,” he said after he’d finished with his various instructions—don’t play my music too loud, don’t expose the phone to moisture, don’t loiter in cell phone dead zones, use stairs instead of elevators whenever possible (I didn’t ask why)—“we may not be the only people watching you. You won’t see us, you won’t hear us, you won’t know we’re there. If you do suspect that someone might be following you, if you hear strange clicks or static on your phone, even if the screen on your computer monitor starts to act up, you need to let us know.”

“Okay,” I said. I was struck again with how bizarre this whole thing was. I thought that Grant would have gotten a kick out of it all. I personally had never been so depressed in all my life. I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d listen to me going to the bathroom. This was a weird thing to wonder, I know.

I must have dozed off a little because the next thing I knew, we were coming to a stop. I sat there for a second, then looked at Jake. The look on his face communicated the gravity of my situation. He was worried—whether it was because he thought I couldn’t handle it, or he was afraid, even with all their surveillance, that he might not be able to keep any harm from coming to me, or he just grieved for all that was lost between us, I didn’t know.

“Ridley,” he said as he swung the door open for me. “Be careful.”

I waited until I climbed over him and out of the van and came to stand on the sidewalk before I responded.

“This is never going to work, you know.”

“We’ll see,” he said. We locked eyes for a second. I’m not sure what he saw there, but it caused him to shift closer to me.

“Ridley,” he said, his voice a warning, “just follow the program, okay?”

“What choice do I have?” I said, and walked toward my building. He closed the door without another word and the van sped off. I moved quickly inside and was glad not to see anyone in the lobby or in the elevator. I’d barely made it into my apartment before I started sobbing. I knew they could hear me and I didn’t care; I just let it all out, all the pain and fear and anxiety, into the cushions on my couch. When I felt better I ordered enough Chinese food for four people from Young Chow on Fourth Avenue and took the hottest shower I could take without scalding myself.

When the food came, I ate it in front of the television set, flipping mindlessly through the channels. I didn’t see a thing on the screen in front of me as I wolfed down egg rolls and wonton soup and sesame chicken. I was starving, absolutely ravenous. When I was totally stuffed, I took my antibiotics and three of the pain pills the doctor had given me. I ignored the message machine blinking beside the phone. I got into bed and slept for nearly twelve hours.

When I woke in the bright light of late morning, I expected to feel better. But I didn’t. I felt utterly lost. Those black fingers of depression that had been pulling and tugging closed around me like a shroud. I spent the better part of the morning staring at a water stain on the ceiling over my couch.

THEY SAY THAT it’s the first three years of a child’s life that are the most critical, that if in those years a child is not cared for and loved, then the damage cannot be undone. If in those years, a child does not have the opportunity to see and learn, to develop empathy, compassion, and trust, he will never have the opportunity to learn those things again.

I don’t know what happened to Max in the early years of his life, but I can imagine now. Max was a damaged person. I know I’ve said this before, but I’m asking you now to really understand, to have true compassion. Imagine if you can an infant, fragile and pure, who instead of being the object of adoration was the object of anger, who instead of being stroked and cuddled was slapped and shaken. Imagine that instead of learning love, that child learned only fear. Imagine that all he knew was that fear and pain, and that somehow he would use these things to survive. What would such a person be capable of later in his life? I’m not making excuses. I’m just asking you to think about it.

BEN HAD ASKED to meet me at the fountain in Washington Square. I didn’t answer his call when I saw his number blinking on my caller ID. I had halfway decided that I might never speak with him and Grace again. He left a message.

“You probably don’t want to see me,” he said. His voice was tired. He sounded old and afraid. “I don’t blame you.” A long pause followed where I could hear only his breathing. “But I am asking for you to meet me. I’ll buy you a cappuccino and we can watch some chess—like we used to. A lifetime ago, I know. I’ll be there around four. I’ll wait.”

I think he was trying to be sly by not naming the meeting place outright. He may have surmised that I was being watched or that he was. But it wouldn’t have taken a genius to figure out where he was talking about. And I’d be followed there, anyway. I knew they had equipment in those vans that could make it so they could park blocks away and still pick up most of our conversation. I didn’t plan on going, but then around three-thirty, I found myself bundling up and heading out.

The sky was that strange gray-blue tempered with black. The fountain in the center of the park was dry, and people hustled through the open space that sat at the bottom of Fifth Avenue, instead of lingering as they would in spring or summer. In those months, Washington Square would be full of people sitting on benches or along the edge of the fountains or on the grass, watching entertainers playing guitars or performing magic tricks for small crowds. The playground would be packed with kids playing on the swings and jungle gyms while parents and nannies looked on. In the warmer months, Washington Square was one of the most alive places in the city. Today the trees were black with spindly branches reaching dark fingers into the sky.

I saw him sitting on the bench in a long black wool coat and cap. He had his hands in his pockets and he leaned back, looking up at the sky. I don’t know what he was thinking about, but when I drew closer I could see that his eyes were rimmed red. I sat down beside him. He looked at me, then looked away. He looked back again and sat up.

“Ridley,” he said, reaching for my hair. “I didn’t even recognize you for a second.”

I let him touch me, even though I wanted to slap his hand away. He touched my spiky hair, the side of my face.

I smiled without mirth. “It’s my fugitive do,” I said. “What do you think?”

He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

“I don’t like it, either,” I snapped. “But it’s just one of many things about my life I don’t like. I can live it with, though, which is more than I can say for the rest of it.”

The fog of my words hung in the cold air between us. I tried to hold his eyes but he looked away.

“I knew he couldn’t be trusted,” he said finally. “I never liked him.”

“Who?”

“That Jake Jacobsen. He lied to you all this time.”

The nerve and the audacity of that statement, his absolute ignorance of its irony, stunned me. I looked at him and felt the most profound loss of faith, the deepest disappointment I think I’ve ever felt in anyone. Including Max. Anger was a stone in my chest, preventing me from answering. I tried to take a long breath, to compose myself. It took a while before I could speak again.

“Have you always known what he is?” I asked finally, surprised at how even and steady my voice sounded.

I wondered if he’d be coy, ask me who I was talking about, pretend I might be talking about Jake. Instead he surprised me.

“Of course,” he said, turning his eyes on me. There was mettle in his expression. “Of course I knew. Why do you think we took you that night, no questions asked? Do you really think that we were that ignorant, that foolish to break the laws we broke, to risk Project Rescue? We took you out of fear, Ridley. We took you out of the terror of what a man like Max might do to a child.”

I stared at him. He said it as if he thought I should understand, as if maybe I should have even surmised as much by now. I envied him his sense of righteousness. I wondered what it was like to be so sure of the virtue of your actions and deeds, in spite of staggering evidence to the contrary.

“So you knew what Project Rescue was, too?”

He shook his head. “I’ve told you before that I only knew we were flying under the radar of the law. I didn’t know about the dark side of the organization. I won’t keep trying to convince you of that. Anyway, it’s not important now what I knew then.”

He had donned an air of huffiness that I found repulsive. I still loved him but I felt a growing chasm opening between us. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to cross it again. I grieved inside—because my dad had always been the love of my life.

“So tell me, Dad. What do you consider important now?”

“What have they asked you to do?”

“Who?”

He gave me a look. I shook my head.

“It’s none of your business,” I said.

He sat up quickly and grabbed my shoulders. “Don’t ever say that to me. Everything about you is my business. You’re my daughter. Not my blood, no, but my daughter in every way that counts. If anything ever happens to you…” He let the words trail off and I didn’t rush to fill the silence. I didn’t squirm from his grasp, but I didn’t sink into him like I wanted to, either. I looked at his face, his snow-white hair, the deep lines around his eyes, his full pink cheeks. No one could call my father handsome, I’ve told you before. But his face was strong, his gaze powerful.

“You can’t understand,” he said. “Not until you’re a parent yourself. You’ll never know the all-consuming love, the desire to protect that just eats you alive. You’d do anything to keep your child safe.”

I wasn’t sure if he was talking about himself or about Max. Then: “Stay away from him, Ridley.”

“Why?”

“Just stay away.”

“Why did you love him, Dad?”

He sighed. “I knew another side to him. The side that you loved. That was true, you know. That was Max, too. Understand, I didn’t know anything about his business dealings. I didn’t know about the—” He swallowed hard here, shied away from saying the word murders. “I didn’t know about the other things of which he’s accused. I didn’t know.”

Maybe he thought if he could just repeat the words I didn’t know enough, he’d make them true. Or maybe he knew our conversation was likely being listened to and he was being careful to assert his ignorance of Max’s dealings.

“But you knew he killed his mother,” I said. “Or suspected it. Didn’t you?”

He seemed startled, then hung his head. I was glad he didn’t deny it.

“He loves you, Ridley. Truly, deeply, as any father loves his daughter. But I promise you, if he thinks you’ve turned on him, God help you.”

His words ran like liquid nitrogen in my veins. I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know what kind of deal they offered you. But stay away from Max. Let him die. They’ll never find him. Never.”

“How long have you known that he was alive?”

He shook his head. I knew he wouldn’t say anything out loud. When he was being questioned, I’d heard him say that he’d received a communication from Max a year and a half after his alleged death, but I wondered if my father had helped Max to stage his death. I didn’t ask, mainly because I didn’t want to know.

“Where is he, Dad?”

He looked straight ahead, as if he was searching for a face in the crowd. “I’m begging you, lullaby, stay away from him.”

He stood up and I stood with him. He took me into his arms then and held me with a terrible desperation. I put my arms around him and finally let myself sink into him. I clung to him, grieving for all that was lost between us, wondering what the future held.

“You will always be my daughter,” he whispered fiercely. I wondered if it was true. I didn’t know. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know any longer who we were to each other.

“You do what you have to do, little girl,” he said into my ear. “But protect yourself. Anything that happens to you happens to me. Remember that if you can. In spite of everything, it’s as true today as it always has been.”

He released me then, started to move away, but stopped to say, “There’s something else you should know. About Ace.”

I braced myself. On some level, I already knew. Since I’d heard him smoking on the phone that night, since he’d abandoned me when we were supposed to go to the Cloisters. Since I hadn’t heard a word from him through everything.

“He’s using again. I think we’ve lost him for good this time.”

I nodded and looked up at the sky, shook my head in grief and disappointment.

When I looked back down toward my father, he was walking away. I stood watching him for a long time as he grew smaller and smaller and then turned a corner. I sat back down on the bench and just sat there for a while, watched some kids playing hackey-sack badly. It wasn’t until he was long gone that I realized he’d dropped something in my pocket. It was a smallish silver key with a flat round head. A key to what, I had no idea.

I DECIDED TO walk back to my apartment, wanting the space, the cold air on my face. By the time I got home, my hands were red and painful from the cold, my feet and thighs raw beneath my jeans and boots. All during the walk, my mind worked on what that silver key might unlock—a locker, a safety deposit box…I couldn’t call my father and ask; I’d have to figure it out.

Jake had been serious when he’d said I’d never know they were there. In my imagination, I had anticipated seeing strange men in dark clothing lingering around, reading newspapers on benches, or whistling casually, leaning against lampposts as I passed. I imagined white vans trailing slowly behind me as I moved about my life. I thought they’d be calling all the time with instructions, but the phone I kept with me hadn’t rung or beeped even once. I could almost convince myself that I’d imagined the whole thing. As I entered my building, I pretended for a second that I was just Ridley Jones, freelance writer, returning from a walk, that there was nothing more serious on my mind than what I’d have for dinner.

He was standing in the lobby by the mailboxes. It’s not an exaggeration to say I ran to him, let him enfold me. I wrapped my arms around him and put my mouth to his. His body felt strong and wonderful through the thick suede of his jacket. He held on to me tight. I heard him sigh as I pulled my mouth from his and put my head to his chest.

“Are you okay?” he whispered into my ear, rubbing my back. It felt so good, the tension of the muscles there draining beneath his hands.

I nodded into him. I was afraid to speak.

“They can’t hear us out here,” he said.

“How do you know?” I said. I’d been wrong before when I said his face wasn’t beautiful—the rock of his jaw, the warmth and depth of his eyes, the strength of his nose. I’d been afraid of all the ugly truths that had made a home in his features. That’s what kept me looking away from him.

“Because when I was watching you, we always lost you between your building’s front door and your apartment door. Must be lead in the walls.”

We took the elevator up to my floor, making out the whole time. I couldn’t get enough of him, the comfort of him. I felt a little of the blackness I’d been carrying lighten and lift. He waited in the hallway while I entered my apartment and made some noise, turned on the television. I ordered some Chinese food (yes, again) and went quietly back into the hallway, hoping whoever was listening would think I was just watching TV, waiting for my delivery. They told me there’d be only audio surveillance in my apartment so that I could have some privacy. I hoped they weren’t lying. Either way, I wasn’t sure it mattered. No one ever told me I couldn’t see or talk to Dylan Grace.

We sat on the staircase, huddled together as if for warmth.

“They told me you made a deal so that the charges and reprimands against me would be dropped.”

I nodded.

“Thank you, Ridley,” he said, putting a hand to my face. “I wouldn’t have asked you to do that.”

“I know. I’m sorry you lost your job.”

He shrugged and gave me a weak smile. “It was probably killing me, anyway.”

I just looked at the tiles beneath our feet.

“What do they want you to do?” he asked after some silence.

I told him everything about Jake and everything I’d learned from him. I told him what they wanted me to do.

He shook his head. “It’s not going to work.”

“I told them.”

“I’m sorry about Jacobsen. I can imagine how that must hurt you. I didn’t know. His cover was deep—I never realized he was CIA.”

I shrugged, turned away from him so that he wouldn’t see the pain on my face. It was a private pain; I didn’t want to share.

He tightened his arm around me. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

I told him about Esme Gray, about Ben, about meeting Ben in the park.

“Man,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “They really played us.”

“Yeah.”

We sat there, thinking about it all. Then: “What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

He nodded. “Whatever it is, count me in.”

I took his hand and squeezed it hard.

The buzzer in my apartment rang and I went inside quietly, asked who it was and let the delivery guy in. Dylan waited on the next level until it was clear, then came back downstairs. I took him by the hand and led him into the apartment and into the bedroom. There we made love in a silent intensity where I lost and found myself all at once.

RIDLEY, GO HOME, Max’s ghost had warned me from a computer screen. The image of him, thin and limping on a cane, was on a loop inside my brain. It came unbidden in my dreams and in idle moments. Ridley, go home. His face had been so pale, so devoid of the energy I’d always expected to see there. His message was grave and dark: an omen. He didn’t look anything like the man I’d known, my dearest uncle, my failed father. But then, he wasn’t either of those things. And yet he was both of them. And he was so much more.

In London, Dylan had asked me, What if knowing Max Smiley doesn’t bring you any closer to yourself? What if the closer you get to him, the further you get from who you really are?

I didn’t really understand what he meant by that. I was from Max, of him, and it was clear to me then that only in knowing him could I discover that part of my own mystery. I wasn’t Ben’s daughter, the good girl. I was Max’s little girl, alone on the street after dark, no one to look after me. But as I lay in the dark beside Dylan, my naked body enfolded by his, I wondered something: Maybe it wasn’t the sudden knowledge that I came from Max that had caused me to become unrecognizable to myself. Maybe it was my refusal to let him go. After all, it was only in the chase for him that my life started to come undone.

I had stepped out of my identity to follow Max. I had led people to their deaths; I had fled from federal custody (or so I thought); I’d cut off my long auburn hair and bleached it blond; I’d gone to the Cloisters in the middle of the night at the bidding of a mysterious text message, been abducted and tortured as a result; I’d fled from custody again in London with Dylan, a man I had no reason to trust, and looked on as he later tortured information from a prostitute in the blue room of an after-hours club in the West End, then been arrested in a gaudy show of international law enforcement agencies at an Internet café. With each outrageous action and awful consequence, I further convinced myself that I was less of Ben and more of Max. But really, the doing of it was all mine. It was neither Ben nor Max calling the plays of my life. It wasn’t my adopted mother, Grace, or my biological mother, Teresa Stone. It was me.

The thought of it, as I listened to Dylan’s steady breathing, hollowed me out inside. I think that’s the moment when we all grow up, when we stop blaming our parents for the messes we’ve made out of our lives and start owning the consequences of our actions.

I lay beside Dylan, felt his breath in my hair, his arm curled over my hip and across my abdomen. My head rested on his other arm, his hand dangled off the bed. I watched the thick muscles of his forearm, the square of his hand as he shifted in his sleep. It was the kind of position that felt wonderful now but would wind up causing his muscles to stiffen and his arm to fall asleep. I shifted the weight of my head onto the pillow to spare him that.

I felt stronger suddenly. The thought that I might be more Ridley than Ben or Max was new and liberating. I felt some of my energy returning.

Ridley, go home.

I started to ponder a question that had been bothering me in the periphery of my consciousness: How could Max possibly have known that I’d log into that website using the log-in Dylan had forced out of Angel? And then it occurred to me what I should have realized all along. It was so obvious, I almost laughed. It wasn’t me who’d been chasing Max. He’d been chasing me. When he said, “Ridley, go home,” he didn’t mean my home. He meant his.