Brian Freemantle - Betrayals

“Yes,” agreed the man. “Wait.”

Janet did just that, wandering aimlessly around the apartment and then, irritated at herself, remembered the continuous news broadcasts on CNN. Hurriedly she turned on the television. Sheridan’s kidnap retained its place as lead item and Janet sat through two top-of-the-hour repeats, each time grimacing as the fatuous CIA refusal to deny or confirm Sheridan’s connection with the Agency was parroted, as it had been parroted to her that morning. The library footage was similar to that of the previous night, and once more there were comparison still photographs of Sheridan and William Buckley. On one segment the Beirut situation was augmented by a live studio interview with a supposed intelligence expert whose name Janet had never heard before. Hands clenched, she sat as the man recounted brief details of the obscene torture the earlier CIA station chief had undergone. Before the expert finished Janet found herself saying: “No, please don’t let it happen. Don’t let him be hurt,” like she had the previous night.

Janet snapped off the television, impatient at no fresh news development. She looked at her watch and then at the telephone-three hours since her contact with Langley. What was it that took so long! she thought, exasperated.

Realizing it was lunchtime and that she had taken nothing other than coffee that morning, Janet went into the kitchen and stood looking at the refrigerator and the cupboards, wondering why she bothered. She wasn’t hungry and did not want to eat anything anyway. There were the remains of a bottle of wine she and Harriet had failed to finish last night, and Janet considered it and then decided against that, too. She’d never found solace from disaster in booze.

Although she was expecting it, she started when the telephone sounded, snatching it off the kitchen extension to hear Harriet’s voice.

“What is it?” demanded Harriet, discerning the disappointment.

“I thought it would be someone else.”

“From the Agency?”

“Yes.”

“What have they said?”

“Nothing yet: that’s why I’m waiting.”

“It’s all over the newspapers.”

“Yes, of course,” said Janet, trying to curb her anxiety. “Darling, I really am waiting on this call. Can I get back to you?”

“I’ll come by, direct from work,” announced her friend.

“Do that,” Janet said at once, eager to clear the line, even though her telephone was equipped with call waiting, which had not registered during Harriet’s interruption. Still, Janet rang the switchboard operator downstairs who confirmed there had been no other incoming call in the preceding ten minutes.

She tried CNN once more and saw a replay of the previous newscast and the intelligence expert’s account of what had happened to the last CIA officer snatched in Beirut, with no additional information, and turned it off. She walked from the main room to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the bedroom and then back into the main room. There were some magazines disordered on a small table and so she tidied them. All over the newspapers, she remembered, as she did so. How could she have been so stupid?

Janet called the switchboard operator in the lobby and explained she was expecting an extremely important call: she was turning her telephone to answer and if the call came the operator was to ask whoever it was to hold as she was only going into the basement shopping area for a moment.

She moved impatiently from foot to foot waiting for the elevator to arrive and darted immediately inside when it did, emerging before the doors were fully open into the basement. She snatched up all the newspapers available in the 7-11 store and was able to catch the elevator she had left before it was summoned to another floor. On the way back to her apartment Janet tried to read the account in one of the smaller-sized newspapers, Newsday, but the bundle was too clumsy and she abandoned the attempt.

Inside she dumped the newspapers onto a pile, crossing directly to the telephone. The message light was not on but she spoke to the operator anyway. There hadn’t been a call.

Janet had bought the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsday , the New York Daily News, and the New York Post. She spread them all out over the floor, at first only scanning each. Harriet had been right: every paper had led with Sheridan’s kidnapping. The Times and the Washington Post reports carried the byline of staff correspondents, rather than AP or UPI. Because their accounts appeared longer she read them first. Both reported that Sheridan had been waylaid in West Beirut as he drove, just after 9 A.M. the previous morning, from his apartment block to the fortified U.S. embassy, less than two miles away in the Yarzy district. Eyewitnesses talked of his vehicle being blocked front and back by two other cars and of Sheridan being bundled out at gunpoint. No responsibility had so far been claimed, but informed opinion was that the kidnap had been carried out by members of the Islamic Jihad. The Times pointed out that the warring factions in the Lebanon were so fragmented that it could have been the work of a splinter group of what they referred to as the Iran-backed Hezbollah, the Party of God, or simply a ransom-inspired snatch by any one of a dozen gangs running crime syndicates in the lawless city. The Washington Post speculated similarly but their correspondent doubted it was a gangland seizure because all U.S. embassy personnel followed a strict security pattern, alternating routes and arrival and departure times at the American compound, indicating that the kidnap was carefully planned.

The Washington Post story continued inside the paper and when she got to the continuation page Janet saw a biography of John Sheridan running alongside the news story. At once she abandoned the Beirut account.

There were three photographs of Sheridan, none of which Janet considered very good. Inevitably there was comparison again with William Buckley, and part of Sheridan’s supposed background was intermingled with information about Buckley, so Janet had to read carefully to differentiate between the two.

She learned for the first time that Sheridan had been born in Billings, Montana, had attended university there, and majored in law. His dead parents had been farmers and there was another photograph of a stiffly upright couple, both Sunday-best-dressed at what appeared to be an agricultural show. He’d run middle distance in his university athletics team and according to university contemporaries whom the newspaper had interviewed Sheridan had moved east almost directly after graduation. Those same unnamed sources described him as a serious, studious person who at school had not appeared to attract many friends.

The biography repeated the absurd, noncommittal statement from the CIA at Langley and then recounted Sheridan’s postings in Mexico and Peru and Egypt. He was variously described as a political officer or a cultural attache. There was a personal anecdote from a Washington Post staff writer who had worked in Saigon during Sheridan’s period there, and who claimed to know the man. Sheridan had not been a mixer or a party-goer, the journalist remembered. He had played chess and enjoyed studying the culture of the country: during his two-year posting he had acquired a reasonable fluency in Vietnamese.

The biography concluded by saying that Sheridan was unmarried and had few friends in the Washington area, where he had been based for the previous three years, after his reassignment from Mexico.

What about me? thought Janet at once. Wasn’t she a friend? More than a friend?

She went carefully through the biography a second time, feeling cheated and betrayed, as she had the previous night, stunned before the television set, hearing of the kidnap. It wasn’t right-wasn’t fair-that she should learn about the man she was going to marry from some dry newspaper account. Why hadn’t he told her about Montana and his family? Of being an athlete? Of liking chess and being able to speak Vietnamese? They weren’t things that needed to be hidden: things likely to impinge upon whatever ridiculous oath of secrecy or silence or whatever it was she imagined they swore to uphold, like members of some cloaked and closed society. Janet felt she was sharing him now with however many thousands or millions of readers read that morning’s newspapers: that he wasn’t hers any more.