Т Паркер - The Room of White Fire

“How well do you know Spencer?”

It took her a while to answer, and she commenced at the end of a long sigh. “After hiring me he professed a... romantic interest. I professed none back. He was separating from his wife. We talked, often and sometimes long. I noted that he did not seem to have genuine emotions for things and people outside himself. He presented as a sociopath — what we call antisocial personality disorder. Subtly at first, then not. As many of them do. He patched his marriage back together. He totally shut me out. I was thankful for that. The only reason I stayed at my job was my partners.”

Another long silence. When she spoke again it was no more than a whisper. “I’m very, very tired.”

“Then sleep.”

“Do you think of your wife before you fall asleep?”

Again I listened to the slow in and out of her breath. I wanted this woman to know my wife’s name, but had been ready to shoot Briggs Spencer for even saying it. “Her name was Justine.”

“How beautiful. Do you work hard and constantly to avoid thinking about her?”

“I think of her anyway.”

I heard the ice hit her glass again. “That is a healthy thing. Roland? There’s something I’d like you to know about me. I was married once. His name was Daniel, though he preferred Dan. A beautiful man. I loved him. Cancer, age thirty-four. Five years ago.”

That rocked me. “I’m sorry. Why did you lie to me about him?”

She had to think about her answer, which seemed odd. “He is hard for me to talk about. I know. A shrink who doesn’t want to talk can’t be a real shrink. But his death was a long and sometimes brutal thing. It colored the way I consider the world, and love. I wanted not to be colored for you. For reasons I don’t yet fully understand.”

I heard the glass and ice again, but no words. We let the time pass in our connected distance. “I enjoyed our dance,” she said.

“Let’s add music next time. A waltz or two.”

Briggs Spencer answered on the first ring. “What were you doing on my property?”

“Trying to get there ahead of Clay,” I said. “Vazquez was shot dead in your kitchen. What do you know about it?”

“Why would I know anything about it?”

“Because I’m not the only one you’ve recruited to find Clay Hickman, am I? You also sent idiots who played it heavy. DeMaris and his sidekick? Whoever it was, it blew up when Laura Vazquez and her son came home.”

“That’s not the narrative.”

In the ring, I was never much of a believer in feeling out an opponent. Just wanted to get right into it. “How’s this narrative? You were Clay’s superior in Romania. You know from his emails that Clay was talking to Vazquez about bringing you a dose of something you don’t want — white fire. What you do want is Clay back in his psychotropic haze at Arcadia, where he can’t bring anything to anyone. I know about Donald and the formulary. Clay wasn’t taking Paige Hulet’s prescriptions, he was taking yours.”

“Stirring!” he yelped. “Except Paige Hulet is the medical director at Arcadia and prescribes for Clay. I’m a mere psychologist. I can’t prescribe drugs in the state of California. It’s against the law.”

“You’ve been letting Hulet prescribe medications for Clay for two years,” I said. “But behind her back, Tice has been giving him other drugs the whole time.”

“Utter fabrication. Do your job and find him.”

I considered resigning my commission. Letting Clay bring white fire to Deimos. Whatever white fire was, Briggs Spencer deserved it. But I couldn’t let Clay go back to Arcadia. I needed to know if he was a menace or a victim. And, menace or victim, I wasn’t going to abandon Sequoia to him — in love with Clay or not. Briggs Spencer heard my thoughts.

“Thinking of quitting? Maybe doing a tell-all with that reporter who gave you a copy of Hard Truth ?”

“If you didn’t send those men to Redwood Valley, who did?”

“Find out.”

He clicked off.

I thought a moment, declined another drink from the bartender who follows me everywhere, then pulled Clay’s printed address book from my briefcase. I wrote Timothy Tritt a brief text explaining my position and requesting an interview as soon as possible.

Timothy Tritt lived in a yellow barn in Bishop, California, on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The barn sat in a meadow with a creek winding through it and thirsty black cottonwoods following the curves of the water. The main ranch house was a hundred yards upstream. The Sierras stood jagged and black against the western sky, with the White Mountains to the east, the two ranges facing off like enormous chess pieces. I’d landed at Bishop Airport and taken a taxi to this, the north end of town.

We sat on tree-branch chairs in the shade of the barn, a blue cooler with a white top between us, and six dogs alternatingly panting or sleeping close by. The morning was warm. Tritt was skinny and bearded, hair long and yellow as the faded barn. Cargo shorts, a cheap plastic watch, and a black bandana rolled into a headband. Skin dark and wrinkled by the sun. He wouldn’t look at me. He popped the caps off two more beers and swung one over.

“Terrible about John Vazquez,” he said. “We weren’t close but I loved the man just the same.”

“They shot him up like a paper target. Who would do that?”

Tritt shook his head, drank. “He could have been mixed up with bad people. Drugs. Weapons. I don’t know.”

I had considered those things, too, but Clay having been at Spencer’s ranch at the same time was too big a coincidence. And nothing I had seen of John, Laura, and Michael Vazquez looked like a drugs or weapons kind of life.

Tritt sighed and continued. “Spence was always an easy guy to like. We were SERE instructors at Fairchild, both married. He was always picking up the tab for the beers and burgers. He played ball in college and tried out for the pros but didn’t make it. So he coached Spokane Little League. He adored his wife, Dawn. Respected her. They couldn’t have children. Then one morning the world changed.”

I nodded.

“Spencer and I were past fighting age when they bombed the Trade Center, but we wanted to fight terror and protect American lives. Wanted to get into the smoke. Terrorists can’t do that to Americans. We saw a chance to make our own war on terror. We left SERE and started Spencer-Tritt Consulting. We would train military and diplomats for danger zones. Private contractors, too. We’d give everyone the best tools we knew for avoiding capture and surviving interrogation. We’d been teaching those things for years at SERE. And Americans were being dished up for torturers and executioners, right?”

I said nothing, not wanting to derail him. He scratched a dog’s belly with his toe. “Then one night Briggs and I came up with a great idea — why not play some offense, too? Why not reverse engineer our resistance techniques into methods for extracting good intel from detainees? Spencer-Tritt would be the cutting edge in getting high-value, actionable intelligence. Naturally, we would have to charge very good money for this expertise. Well, when the CIA heard our pitch, they lit up like a million-dollar slot machine. They had even less of an idea than we did on how you actually interrogate a human being. They didn’t want to know. So out came the checkbooks and we were on our way.”

A long silence. A hawk wheeled and keened, one of the dogs snored. I tried to put myself into the mind-set of a psychologist going into the interrogation business while his country declared its war on terror. I’d enlisted in December of 2001, three months after the attacks, recently graduated with a bachelor of arts in history. I was twenty-two and had no real prospects. Like Tritt, I was angry and wanted to do something. Military service was a tradition in my family. So I understood Tritt, so far.