The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk

by David Ambrose

  Back home she checked her machine. No calls. That meant Frank had no further news. She thought about calling him or going to the office, but there was no point.

  All the same, she felt the need to talk to somebody. But who could she draw with her into this limbo of horrible uncertainty? It was an unfair thing to do to anybody. It couldn’t achieve anything but make them feel bad.

  There was only her father.

  Amery Hyde had never been a demonstrative man. Even in words he was careful what he said and how he said it. It was a temperament that had served him well through a glittering career in the diplomatic service. Retired now, he divided his time between sitting on commissions and advisory bodies and a couple of visiting professorships. He was a good-hearted man, and as a little girl and an only child, she had loved him with something bordering on folly. There had been a special closeness between them since her mother’s death from a stroke ten years ago.

  She let his phone in Washington, D.C., ring for a long time. She was about to hang up when, finally, he answered. As always he was happy to hear her voice, but he immediately realized that something was wrong. He listened in silence, and said he would get the first plane.

  Susan heard herself assuring him it wasn’t necessary, saying automatically the things she felt she ought to say, not wanting to put others, even him, to any inconvenience or change of plan. He didn’t argue, just repeated that he’d be there as soon as he could. He told her to stay at home and keep in touch with Frank at the office. He would get a cab from the airport. She thanked him in a whisper.

  Half an hour later Frank called to say that the wreckage of the light plane had been found, scattered over a wide area. The cause of the crash was so far unknown.

  There had been no survivors.

  Chapter 4

  CHARLIE’S OPPONENT circled him with a wide-blade knife that glinted almost hypnotically as it moved. Charlie was unarmed, facing a man who was clearly adept at hand-to-hand fighting. He could tell that from the way the man moved, the way he kept you guessing where that razor-edge would be a second from now.

  The best thing, Charlie knew, was to force him to make the first move. Or carry on with this dance till he left an opening wide enough for Charlie to get through. And he would, in time. It was just a question of out-waiting him. Charlie turned slowly, following the other man’s movements.

  When the lunge came, it was from an unexpected angle. It was clever. All the same, Charlie got there. His speed, as always, gave him all the edge he needed. Then he was past the blade long enough to grab the man who was holding it. Disarming him was easy, accomplished with no unnecessary force. Charlie never went beyond what was necessary in these things. That was part of his training.

  The instructor blew his whistle. Charlie fell back into line and the next man stepped forward. He and the man with the knife went through the same circling routine while the rest looked on. They all knew they weren’t playing games. The man before Charlie had been taken out to have his badly slashed hands attended to, and another man earlier had been knocked senseless by a blow to the side of his head. They were facing a formidable and highly trained killer. They were all trained killers themselves, but this man was the one to beat. And Charlie was the only one who’d done it.

  But then, all through his training, Charlie had always been the best. He remembered somebody once saying that he was wired differently. He knew what that meant: It meant they thought he was a psychopath. It didn’t offend him. He didn’t pick a fight about it. On the contrary, he thought it was probably true, and the best thing he could do was take advantage of the fact. Think positive.

  A cry of pain and the latest “volunteer” fell awkwardly on the mat and had to be helped up. He was a German, but it was an Englishman who took his place. They routinely had international participants in their various counterterrorist exercises—chiefly British, French, or German, sometimes others. They called it cross-training. The SAS, GSG-9, GIGN, and GIS had things to learn from as well as things to offer Delta Force (the U.S. Army’s counterterrorist group) and Devgroup (formerly the Navy SEALs). The world’s counterterrorist forces were coordinated in a way that the West’s intelligence services had never achieved in the old cold war days.

  Charlie himself was a member of neither Delta Force nor Devgroup, though he had trained and served with both. The group he was in now had no name, no visible structure, and no known commander. All he knew about it was the orders he received. He didn’t even know anyone else who belonged to it, except for the man he called Control. And Control came to Charlie, never Charlie to Control. Whatever his outfit’s name was, and wherever its headquarters, if any, they were unknown to Charlie.

  The instructor’s whistle blew twice to announce that the session was over. In the locker room the men from different groups and nations didn’t mix. Members of one group arrived together and left together. Fraternization was discouraged.

  Charlie pulled on his tracksuit and left, exchanging only a flicker of acknowledgment with the other men around him. Outside he walked to where his Porsche was parked beneath an overhang, protected from the baking California sun. He showed his pass and was saluted through the heavily guarded compound gates. He headed north and an hour later was back in Los Angeles.

  He parked his car in its numbered space beneath the building and took the elevator to his apartment. As he entered, he was hit by the golden glow of sunset over the ocean. He looked at his watch. Carol would arrive in an hour. His face cracked into a grin of anticipation. He crossed to his wet bar in the corner, took a beer from the fridge, and flipped the top.

  Carol. Was that Carole, with an e, or without? And what the hell was her last name? Wagradsky? Waginsky? No. Wazinsky? Goddamnit, that could be embarrassing, forgetting a girl’s name like that. Not that she would mind. Carol was an easygoing, down-to-earth girl. Direct. They’d met in a bar ten days ago, and after a couple of drinks it was she who’d proposed they go somewhere and fuck. She had a body to dream about. Just the thought of it made him start to get hard. If he didn’t start thinking about something else, he was going to have to jerk off before she arrived, and he didn’t want to do that.

  Not that it would inhibit his performance if he did. They’d still be all over each other the moment she came through the door, the way they had been every time so far. Later they’d get dressed, go out and eat, probably that little Italian place downstairs, then return to the apartment.

  He decided to take his beer out on the balcony and watch the sun disappear. He sat with his feet up on the wall and watched the sea turn molten, like a great vat of burning gold. Charlie was sensitive to color. He used it boldly in his painting. Yet, strangely enough, he couldn’t recall a single color from his childhood. It was as though all his earliest memories existed only in monochrome. It was only after they’d sent him to “the Farm” when he was about sixteen that color had entered his life. It was like a film he’d seen on television once. The first part had been all in black and white, then suddenly it burst into color. That was how he felt.

  All the best things that had ever happened to him had started at the Farm. They’d taught him how to make something of himself, get the most out of life that he could, which had turned out to be more than he could ever have imagined. Now here he was, with a place of his own, all the essentials provided and enough money for all the fun he could handle. Not bad for a guy of… what age was he now? Thirty? Thirty-one? Two? He’d never known for sure when he was born. Not that it made any difference. Birth, like childhood, was in the past, and best left there. The more of the past he could forget, he told himself, the better off he’d be.

  The sun had gone down. Suddenly it was dusk. Glancing at his watch, he pushed himself to his feet and went back inside to take a shower before Carol arrived.

  In the morning his phone rang early. He reached out a soapy hand from his bath and answered. He recognized the voice at once. It was Control.

  “Hi, Charlie. You got time for a chat?”<
br />
  “Sure.”

  “Let’s say around three.”

  It was a code that had nothing to do with the time of day. The number three referred to a prearranged dead-drop location—this one a baggage locker in the downtown Greyhound station.

  Charlie respected the speed limit on the freeways. For one thing, the cops loved to bust any good-looking young guy in an expensive car like his Porsche, and the hassle was something he could do without. Of course, if it was an emergency and he was on a job, he’d take his chances. He could out-drive them if he had to. It was something he’d been trained for. But so far it hadn’t been necessary.

  A little over half an hour after getting out of his bath, he was opening the baggage locker in the Greyhound station and taking out the standard white envelope he found there. Sometimes it contained instructions, which could be detailed or just a few words. Sometimes, as on this occasion, it contained only a plane ticket: round-trip, to Boston’s Logan Airport. Charlie reflected that his evening’s entertainment would be taken care of.

  Moments before takeoff, someone eased himself into the empty first-class seat alongside Charlie. He turned to his right and saw the familiar patrician profile of Control—steel-gray hair, impeccable suit, pale blue questioning eyes, and a thin, ironic mouth.

  “How are you, Charlie?”

  “Never better, sir.”

  They made small talk for a while. Then, over mineral water and a salad, Control outlined the job ahead.

  Chapter 5

  THEY BROKE THE news to Christopher together. She didn’t know whether her father had had to break much bad news in his life; she supposed he had. At any rate, she couldn’t have got through the ordeal without him. Somehow they managed to tell the child the truth—that Daddy wasn’t coming back. At all. Ever.

  Throughout those dreadful few days she never had to ask her father for a thing. He anticipated every need of hers and almost all of Christopher’s. He took care of practical matters—lawyers, insurance, and most important, the funeral arrangements. John’s body was flown back with the other victims’ and delivered to a local funeral parlor. They removed him from the sealed plastic bag in which he’d been transported and prepared him to be viewed by relatives and friends. Susan went with her father, leaning heavily on his arm. She had already been told that John had not been facially disfigured in any way. There was a terrible injury to the back of his head and considerable bodily damage, but lying there in his coffin he could have been asleep. Hesitantly, as though her hand were being willed by some agency that was not part of her, she reached out to touch his face. Its coldness, even though she had been prepared for it, shocked her. Only much later, when Christopher was safely tucked up in bed, did she allow herself to break down in her father’s arms.

  It was ten days before Susan insisted that her father should go home now and resume his life. She would manage because she had to. Christopher was back in school, in no way forgetting his father, but already adapting to a universe in which death had become a presence far sooner than it should.

  She drove him to the airport. As they hugged each other at the barrier, she told him that she’d never quite known how much she loved him until now.

  Amery Hyde blinked back a tear and his distinguished features twisted into a smile—as though somehow apologizing for making her say what she’d just said, but touched beyond words by it all the same. He kissed her on the forehead, before starting down the tunnel to the plane. He paused once to wave, then disappeared.

  The packed lecture hall fell silent as Susan stepped up to the podium. Everybody knew about her recent tragedy. Many had sent notes of sympathy and attended the funeral. As she entered there was a ripple of applause, and one or two started getting uncertainly to their feet, unsure what the proper etiquette might be in such a situation.

  Susan held up her hands for silence, thanked them for their concern and the warmth of the many messages she’d received, then said that if they didn’t mind she would like to get right into her lecture. She asked for the lights to be dimmed.

  “First,” she began, “we’re going to look at a video of Brian Kay greeting his wife shortly after he was admitted into full-time care almost twenty years ago.”

  The large screen behind her flickered into life. It showed an anonymous white-painted room in which a young-looking Brian Kay sat staring vacantly into space. A door opened and Dorothy entered. She was young and pretty, with dark hair cut short to frame her face attractively. The moment he saw her, Brian came to life, springing to his feet and throwing open his arms to embrace her as though they’d been separated for months.

  “Darling,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion, “I was so worried. I didn’t know where you were. I thought something had happened to you. I thought you were dead.”

  Dorothy calmed him, reassured him that everything was all right. She said he didn’t remember, but he’d seen her yesterday.

  “Yesterday?” he echoed in disbelief. “When yesterday? Where did I see you yesterday?”

  “Here, yesterday morning, the same time.”

  “What is this place? What am I doing here? What’s happening?”

  Patiently she explained that he’d been sick, but he was recovering now and would return home soon.

  “Sick? I haven’t been sick. What’s supposed to be wrong with me?”

  “You caught a virus. It affected your memory.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my memory.”

  Susan pressed the clicker in her hand and the tape stopped.

  “Of course we know that Brian never did get well enough to return home. In fact his condition has remained essentially unchanged from that day until now. I think you’re all familiar with the details of the virus and the nature of the physical damage caused by it. It attacked that part of Brian Kay’s brain that processed sense perceptions into short- and long-term memory. Consequently he became trapped in an eternal present, with no way of translating his moment-by-moment perceptions into any kind of meaningful narrative that he could then store in the way that normal memory is stored. The only things he remembered were the things he’d learned before the disease attacked him. His whole past remained intact—childhood, college, marriage, followed by a career teaching English in high school. But with the onset of his illness, an unbridgeable gulf had opened up between that past and the present moment—and each successive present moment. At the same time, his intelligence has remained undiminished in terms of his capacity to understand things. For example, he never has any problem grasping the nature of his condition when it’s explained to him. The problem is that the moment the explanation is over, he forgets it. He cannot learn, because he cannot transfer anything from perception into memory.”

  She paused a moment. Despite all her experience in teaching and lecturing, speaking in public was not something that came naturally to her. She felt somehow depersonalized before an audience, as though she somehow ceased to be herself before all those attentive faces and became instead simply a conduit for the ideas she was attempting to communicate. At least, she told herself, this implied a loss of self-consciousness that helped her over a certain inherent shyness. She took a sip from the glass of water on the table before her and continued.

  “When I first became involved in this case a little over seven years ago, Brian’s condition had remained unchanged since the onset of his illness. I’m going to show you now a video of Brian greeting his wife about that time—that is, some thirteen years into his illness.”

  The image on the screen was of Brian once again sitting vacantly in an anonymous though different room. A different nurse opened the door and his wife entered. Dorothy had changed—not greatly, but enough for the change to be startling if you were told that it had taken place from one day to the next. That, as Susan pointed out to her audience, was the impression Brian was getting when he looked at her. His only memory of her was the way she had looked thirteen years earlier. Now he was seeing a woman with hair already turn
ing gray and with lines around her eyes and mouth. He froze as he saw her and stepped back in alarm.

  “My God, darling! What’s happened to you? Are you ill?”

  The audience watched in silence as Dorothy explained his condition to him yet again, in the same words she had used countless times already. He nodded, taking it all in, then reacted with anger and frustration that nothing had been done to help him, and demanded to know why he had not been told all this before.

  Susan pressed her clicker to stop the tape. “Now let me show you how Brian greets his wife now when she visits him.”

  The tape she played showed Brian and Dorothy as they were now, but his behavior when she entered was exactly as it had been twenty years ago: delighted, confused, and full of angry questions about himself and his situation, but without any of his previous alarm at Dorothy’s “overnight” change in appearance.

  “The procedure we developed,” Susan continued as the lights came up, “was noninvasive but allowed us to send a visual image directly into the brain, bypassing the eye in the way that sound can bypass the ear in certain kinds of hearing aids. It allowed us also to bypass that part of the brain which would normally process visual stimuli into memory. Sadly, it remains a long way from a full cure, but it is a start. Next time we’ll take a look down some of the avenues that may yet lead to such a cure.”

  The gathering broke up, most of the audience filing quietly out while a handful of friends gathered around Susan.

  One man stood alone near the door, unremarked by anyone. He was short, thin-faced, and nervous-looking, with straggly gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wore jeans and an old corduroy jacket, and looked as though he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. When Susan stepped out of the room and started down the corridor, still accompanied by two or three people, he followed her. Only when she had passed through the main doors and was crossing the quadrangle alone did he fall in step alongside her.