Ken Follett - Lie down with lions

Jane thought for a moment. "I don't know. The only thing that's certain is that Masud's regime will be an Afghan tyranny instead of a Russian tyranny. And it's not worth killing people to exchange a local dictator for a foreigner."

"The Afghans seem to think it is."

"Most of them have never been asked."

"I think it's obvious. However, I don't normally do this sort of work anyway. Usually I'm more of a detective

type."

This was something about which Jane had been curious for a year. "What exactly was your mission in Paris?"

"When I spied on all our friends?" He smiled thinly. "Didn't Jean-Pierre tell you?"

"He said he didn't really know."

"Perhaps he didn't. I was hunting terrorists."

"Among our friends?"

"That's where they are usually to be found—among dissidents, dropouts and criminals."

"Was Rahmi Coskun a terrorist?" Jean-Pierre had said that Rahmi got arrested because of Ellis.

"Yes. He was responsible for the Turkish Airlines fire-bombing in the Avenue Felix Faure."

"Rahmi? How do you know?"

"He told me. And when I had him arrested he was planning another bombing."

"He told you that, too?"

"He asked me to help him with the bomb."

"My God." Handsome Rahmi, with the smoldering eyes and passionate hatred of his wretched country's government . . .

Ellis had not finished. "Remember Pepe Gozzi?"

Jane frowned. "Do you mean the funny little Corsican who had a Rolls-Royce?"

"Yes. He supplied guns and explosives to every nutcase in Paris. He'd sell to anyone who could afford his prices, but he specialized in 'political' customers."

Jane was flabbergasted. She had assumed that Pepe was somewhat disreputable, purely on the grounds that he was both rich and Corsican; but she had supposed that at worst he was involved in some everyday crime such as smuggling or dope dealing. To think that he sold guns to murderers! Jane was beginning to feel as if she had been living in a dream, while intrigue and violence went on in the real world all around her. Am I so naive? she thought.

Ellis plowed on. "I also pulled in a Russian who had financed a lot of assassinations and kidnappings. Then Pepe was interrogated and spilled the beans on half the terrorists in Europe."

"That's what you were doing, all the time we were lovers," Jane said dreamily. She recalled the parties, the rock conceits, the demonstrations, the political arguments in cafes, the endless bottles of vin rouge ordinaire in attic studios. . . . Since their breakup she had assumed vaguely that he had been writing little reports on all the radicals, saying who was influential, who was extreme, who had money, who had the largest following among students, who had Communist Party connections, and so on. It was hard now to accept the idea that he had been after real criminals, and that he had actually found some among their friends. "I can't believe it," she said in amazement.

"It was a great triumph, if you want to know the truth."

"You probably shouldn't be telling me."

"I shouldn't. But when I've lied to you in the past, I have regretted doing so—to put it mildly."

Jane felt awkward and did not know what to say. She shifted Chantal to her left breast, then, catching Ellis's eye, covered her light breast with her shirt. The conversation was becoming uncomfortably personal, but she was intensely curious to know more. She could see now how he justified himself—although she did not agree with his reasoning—but still she wondered about his motivation. If I don't find out now, she thought, I may never get another chance. She said: "I don't understand what makes a man decide to spend his life doing this sort of thing."

He glanced away. "I'm good at it and it's worth doing and the pay's terrific."

"And I expect you liked the pension plan and the canteen menu. It's all right—you don't have to explain yourself to me if you don't want to."

He gave her a hard look, as if he were trying to read her thoughts. "I do want to tell you," he said. "Are you sure you want to hear it?"

"Yes. Please."

"It's to do with the war," he began, and suddenly Jane knew he was about to say something he had never told to anyone else. "One of the terrible things about flying in Vietnam was that it was so hard to differentiate between Vietcong and civilians. Whenever we gave air support to ground troops, say, or mined a jungle trail, or declared a free-fire zone, we knew that we would kill more women and children and old men than guerrillas. We used to say they had been sheltering the enemy, but who knows? And who cares? We killed them. We were the terrorists then. And I'm not talking about isolated cases—although I saw atrocities too—I'm talking about our regular everyday tactics. And there was no justification, you see; that was the kicker. We did all those terrible things in a cause that turned out to be all lies and corruption and self-deceit. We were on the wrong side." His face was drawn, as if he were in pain from some persistent internal injury. In the restless lamplight his skin was shadowed and sallow. "There's no excuse, you see; no forgiveness."

Gently, Jane encouraged him to say more. "So why did you stay?" she asked him. "Why volunteer for a second tour?"

"Because I didn't see all of that so clearly then; because I was fighting for my country and you can't walk away from a war; because I was a good officer, and if I had gone home my job might have been taken over by some jerk and my men would have got killed: and none of these reasons is good enough, of course, so at some point I asked myself 'What are you going to do about it?' I wanted ... I didn't realize it at the time, but I wanted to do something to redeem myself. In the sixties we would have called it a guilt trip."

"Yes, but ..." He looked so uncertain and vulnerable that she found it hard to ask him direct questions, but he needed to talk and she wanted to hear it, so she plowed on. "But why this!"

"I was in Intelligence, toward the end, and they offered me the chance to continue in the same line of work in the civilian world. They said I would be able to work undercover because I was familiar with that milieu. They knew about my radical past, you see. It seemed to me that by catching terrorists I might be able to undo some of the things I had done. So I became a counterterrorist expert. It sounds simplistic when I put it into words—but I've been successful, you know. The Agency doesn't like me because I sometimes refuse a mission, such as the time they killed the President of Chile, and agents aren't supposed to refuse missions; but I've been responsible for incarcerating some very nasty people, and I'm proud of myself."

Chantal was asleep. Jane laid her in the box that was her cradle. She said to Ellis: "I suppose I ought to say that . . . that I seem to have misjudged you."

He smiled. "Thank God for that."

For a moment she was seized by nostalgia as she thought of the time—was it only a year and a half ago?—when she and Ellis had been happy and none of this had happened: no CIA, no Jean-Pierre, no Afghanistan. "You can't wipe it out, though, can you?" she said. "Everything that has happened—your lies, my anger."

"No." He was sitting on the stool, looking up at her as she stood in front of him, studying her intently. He held out his arms, hesitated, then rested his hands on her hips in a gesture which might have been brotherly affection or something more. Then Chantal said: "Mumumumummmm ..." Jane turned around and looked at her, and Ellis let his hands fall. Chantal was wide awake, waving her arms and legs in the air. Jane picked her up, and she burped immediately.

Jane turned back to face Ellis. He had folded his arms across his chest and was watching her, smiling. Suddenly she did not want him to leave. On impulse, she said: "Why don't you have supper with me? It's only bread and curds, though."