Alone in his quarters, Adam stared out at the starkly beautiful mountain ranges, waiting for the call from his case officer.
He had been blunt about his own misgivings. “This Afghan could be a plant,” he had told Brett Hollis, “and his POW tip completely bogus. They may be thinking we’ll respond like Pavlov’s dogs, salivating at the chance to retrieve one of our own—the kind of showy operation that got bin Laden. That would confirm me as CIA. Way more important, they could lure us into Pakistan and expose our assault teams operating against al-Qaeda and the Taliban inside the border. All on the word of an agent we don’t know and have never tested.”
“All true,” Hollis said tersely. “But I need to report this now. If the information is solid, they may be moving Bergdahl soon.”
“That’s another thing that bothers me,” Adam replied. “Maybe everything he says is true—or, at least, he believes that it is. But why hide our guy in a populated village instead of in some cave? This story is perfectly designed to make us rush into a trap, get a bunch of guys killed or captured because we just couldn’t stand to wait. Instead of one POW, they could have a whole fucking platoon.”
“I’ll pass on your reservations,” his superior responded glumly. “But this one’s not our call.”
So Adam waited.
Restless, he read Carla’s e-mail for the second time that morning. He was thinking about her too much. For the last decade, he had lived without a past or future, functioning in the moment. Now, against all of his instincts, he had begun to imagine a life beyond Afghanistan. Another reason, perhaps, why he was so wary of the Afghan’s story—he wanted to leave here alive, and sensed some new danger at hand. In the curious logic of his job, the fear of death could make him more hesitant and edgy, dulling the reflexes he needed to survive. He should never have risked himself with her.
And yet, in her own way, Carla was also taking chances. Her e-mail made light of this, mocking its supposed self-absorption. But she was giving him a part of herself, so that he might understand her better, and perhaps respond in kind. It was no accident, he suspected, that she had chosen to reveal truths about her family—as Carla surely knew, what haunted Adam resided there, unresolved.
Still, she had written, and he should answer.
Sitting at the computer, he began by describing things he could talk about—the terrain, the people, the semifortress in which he lived. “In a way,” he told her, “the walls around us symbolize the pointlessness of our mission. We don’t want Afghanistan to be the base for another 9/11. But we won’t leave a positive imprint here, any more than foreigners did before us. This isn’t a country at all, as we understand that—it’s a bunch of tribes. Outside of Kabul, Karzai is a joke—he’s the mayor of a city, not the president of anything. Each tribe runs their self-allotted territory, and mountain ranges divide them from each other. So the locals depend on Mullahs and religious leaders, a lot of whom hate the government for taxing them, or for helping us cut down opium production and kill their friends with drones. When we go, we’ll leave nothing behind but corpses. Including our own.”
This was what he would tell anyone in a moment of honesty, Adam knew. But all it would mean to Carla was that his death, should it happen, would be as meaningless as the rest—a pointless sacrifice to his own personal code. He owed her better, if he could find the words, and Charlie Glazer would say that he owed this to himself.
Like Carla, he had memories of a father—first poisoned by betrayal, then by the searing discovery that Benjamin Blaine was not his father at all. For years, Adam had sealed them in a psychic box he never opened. Now he allowed himself to recall Ben teaching him how to sail the Herreshoff on Menemsha Pond—how patient he was, how different than on land. As if recalling someone else, Adam felt a distant, odd affection for the boy he had been, so trusting of his father, so innocent of all that lay ahead. He could not reach back and protect himself—he had learned to be a fatalist, dealing only with whatever he had to face. But he wished better for Carla’s son.
That was the festering core of things—the man who had been the foundation of Adam’s life, then changed it irrevocably, had been Carla’s lover and the father of this boy. Yet there were good memories, as painful as they were to resurrect, and perhaps it would help her to know this much. After gazing at the screen, lost in time, he wrote, “I know you wonder what happened between Ben and me. That’s for another day, if ever, and certainly not for an e-mail. But the way in which your father planted the seeds of acting, without meaning to, reminded me of the things Ben did as a father that were for the better.
“One memory stands out. Baseball was the spectator sport he most loved, and he grew up worshipping Ted Williams, the left fielder for the Red Sox who he insisted was the greatest hitter who ever lived. He told me everything about Williams—how he sacrificed five years of baseball to be a fighter pilot in two wars; how he played to his own exacting standards, and not for the adoration of the fans; above all, the molten, uncompromising integrity with which he drove himself to get the most out of his talent.
“This statistic may not mean anything to you, but seventy years ago Williams became the last man to hit .400—an average of four hits in every ten at bat. That’s a stunning athletic feat. I still recall Ben telling me ‘to accomplish that by swinging a wooden bat at fastballs coming at ninety miles an hour from sixty feet away, or curveballs that dip just when you’re swinging, is incalculably difficult. But on the last day of the season, that’s exactly where Williams stood.’
“His manager offered to take him out of the lineup for the final two games, a doubleheader, so that Williams could preserve this record. At this point in the story, Ben would begin speaking in a gruff Ted Williams voice. ‘If I don’t earn this record on the field,’ he’d say, ‘it isn’t worth a damn, and neither am I.’ Then Ben would smile, and deliver the punch line, ‘That day Ted Williams got five hits and raised his batting average to .406. No man has done it since.’
“It was a message about integrity and risk, the idea that a man should have of himself. It was how Ben strove to live, and drove me to live.”
Adam paused, caught in images he once had cherished. Then he decided to give them to her.
“My own training started early,” he went on. “When I was six, Ben began taking me to a baseball diamond in West Tisbury. At first, the bat felt almost too heavy to lift. But Ben pitched slowly, underhand, until I learned to time the contact of bat with ball. Every session got harder; each time, I got better, a little more confident. Finally, he deemed me fit for the ultimate challenge—facing his alter ego, Ace Blaine, the fearsome pitcher for the hated New York Yankees, the Red Sox’s bitter rival, the pinstriped scourge of Boston’s hope of winning a pennant after forty years of heartache.
“In these imaginary—but to a seven-year-old, very real—contests, it was always the last game of the season, and the Red Sox and Yankees were playing for the pennant Boston fans had craved for decades. Their hopes were all on me. I was the Red Sox’s entire lineup, all nine batters, faced with batting against the fearsome Ace, whose swagger and towering ego were a parody of Ben’s own. The game was always played at Fenway Park, in front of a rabid crowd; it was always the last of the ninth inning, with the Sox one run down, and the gloating Ace smelling another humiliation for the entire city. And the Sox—meaning me—had to get three hits to load the bases, then drive in two runs to win.
“The fans were going crazy, the broadcaster—also Ben—building tension with each pitch. As for me, I was carrying the burdens of an entire team, and my heart was in my throat.”
He could feel it still, Adam realized—heart beating, muscles taut, nerves jangling with apprehension and yet this strange adrenalized exhilaration, the nascent belief that he lived to face down challenges. In high school and college, his apparent nervelessness had awed his teammates. Now it kept him alive.
“Remarkably, I later realized, at times both the broadcaster and the ferocious Ace lost track of the count, allowing four strikes before I hit the ball. For a great athlete, Ace was also an erratic fielder, who sometimes made inexplicable errors when I slapped a pitch right back at him. Every so often, with two outs, Ace would blow a third strike right by me—teaching me that I couldn’t always win, would sometimes have to bear up under defeat until the next time. But more often than not, I triumphed, and I learned to thrive on challenge and adversity. And I could see through the veneer of Ace’s disappointment and frustration how much that pleased the man I loved more than anyone in the world.
“Later on, I understood that he was training me to be nerveless under pressure, the one who never folded. I still carry that, his gift to me.”
Gazing at these words on the screen, Adam felt a tightness in his throat. Before his breach with Ben, he had always cherished this memory; later, he had refused remember it at all. Now it hurt.
Sitting back, he steepled his fingers. Ben, who was not his father, had nearly destroyed Adam’s life. His true father, Jack, had killed him. Now Adam concealed this from the world. From Carla.
Still, for her sake, he forced himself to go on.
“There were other people in my family, of course. I knew my mother loved me, and she had a sense of fun then, the desire to do new things. She was at her best when Ben wasn’t around, and she could have life the way she wanted it. And Jack—my uncle, then—was a calming presence, much gentler than his brother. As for my own brother, I loved him—Teddy was always good to me, no matter what a nuisance I was, and I admired his talent even then. When it became apparent that he was gay, I was the one who confronted Ben on Ted’s behalf.
“But that was later. It was Ben who taught me to love the outdoors, and gave me a model of success—determined, unsparing of himself, unwilling to accept anything less than the best. He showed me how to compete—when I was older, he gave no quarter, and expected none.” Here Adam paused, caught by a brief, wrenching image of Jenny Leigh. “I’ve never forgotten what he told me about how to face the world. ‘Don’t make excuses for what you’ve already done, and don’t complain if people dislike you for it. Don’t whine, fell sorry for yourself, or hide from your mistakes. The past is dead; all you can change is the future. So learn, and move on.’”
Easier to say, Adam thought, when you are the protagonist—although, in the end, it seemed that Ben himself had not quite outrun the damage he had done to Jenny. But Ben had also passed on his test for friendship, developed when, as a young man with no money and no prospects, he had observed the underside of the Chilmark social scene, which he had scathingly labeled, “high school for the rich and vapid.”
“‘If you want a friend,’ he admonished me, ‘don’t choose the insecure, the envious, or the needy. They’re the ones who will sell you out. Those you can trust are confident and secure, men and women who like their lives, and don’t have to meet their needs at your expense. So no gossips, back stabbers, or celebrity fuckers. No one who has to tell you who they know, what they own, how important they are, or whose self-concept depends on the acceptance of others. The only people who can truly care about you are those who are sufficient unto themselves.’”
Here, Adam paused again. In his own experience, this last was largely true. But he wondered now whether Ben was also saying that he, himself, was too flawed to be trusted—or, perhaps, that his own resentments of Adam for existing were too great. Growing up, Adam had seen many of Ben’s flaws: too much drinking; Ben’s derisiveness and harshness; the whispers about women he never bothered to deny; his growing compulsion to compete with Adam—his own son, or so Adam had thought. But he had never expected Ben’s last brutal violation of his trust, because Adam had not known that he was at the heart of his family’s bitter secrets. Knowing this was no help now, except to explain what could not be helped. The past, as Ben had told him, was dead
Except that it lived on in the woman he was reaching out for, if only through a letter.
The cell phone on his desk rang, the one he used for secure calls.
“They agree with you,” Hollis said without preface. “So far your Afghan’s background checks out—what he told you about himself is true, at least as far as it goes. But they want you to test him, ask for more information. Who’s in charge of the village, a detailed description of the house he claims our boy is being held in—walls; windows; whether the doors swing in or out. Tell him you want pictures, if possible.”
Adam tensed—the information they wanted was necessary to an assault plan. “All that’s fine,” he answered. “But if this is a trap, they’ll be more than glad to give it to us.”
“We know that. At the next meeting, you’ll give him a surveillance device disguised as a rock, which contains a box that picks up telephone calls or voices and relays them to NSA in the States. You’ll have it by this afternoon. Make sure this guy knows the equipment is valuable, then ask him to plant it near where he says they’re keeping Bergdahl. If he sells it, then we know he’s slippery or a double. If he plants it, then we’ll see whether there are any voices we can match to known al-Qaeda people. We may even pick up clues as to whether they’re actually hiding someone.”
Adam gazed out the window in the direction of Pakistan, the no man’s land where any assault force would have to go. “But if he’s working for al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and not just a scammer, he might do that just to set us up.” He hesitated, thinking as he spoke. “Of course, that would expose the colonel to a lot of danger. If he’s selling us to the Taliban, he’d have to think his own neck was on the chopping block. So either this Afghan is legitimate, or he’s doubling the colonel and us.”
Hollis laughed softly. “Yeah, that’s where we wound up. So get your new friend going, quickly. When he’s done, we’ll figure out what to do.”
Adam hung up, his own misgivings a knot in the pit of his stomach. He wondered how much of this was due to Carla Pacelli, and whether his effectiveness was already compromised. Wanting to live could kill.
Typing a last cursory paragraph, he hit the send button.