O'Farrell's Law

by Brian Freemantle

  “You’re right,” agreed the other man, discomfortingly. “My problem; always my problem.”

  Symmons smiled, waiting, and O’Farrell smiled back, waiting. The silence built up, growing pressure behind a weakened dam about to burst. Mustn’t break, O’Farrell told himself. Mustn’t break; couldn’t break. It had to be Symmons who spoke first: who had to give in.

  He did. The psychologist said, “How do you feel about colors?”

  O’Farrell smiled again, enjoying his victory, and said, “Why don’t you find out?”

  O’Farrell considered the color test—matching colors, identifying colors, blending colors into the right sections of a spectrum divided into primary hues—easier than the verbal inquisition and finished it feeling quite satisfied that he had made no errors; done well, in fact.

  The physical examination was as complete as the mental probe. O’Farrell, well aware of the procedure, stripped to a tied-at-the-back operation gown and subjected himself to two hours of intense and concentrated scrutiny. Symmons put him in a soundproof room for audio tests and plunged it into absolute blackness for the eyesight check. Before putting O’Farrell on a treadmill, the man took blood samples, as well as checking blood pressure and lung capacity. The man gradually increased the treadmill speed, pushing O’Farrell to an unannounced but obviously predetermined level. O’Farrell was panting and weak-legged when it finished.

  O’Farrell was weighed and measured—thighs and chest and waist as well as biceps—and touched his toes for Symmons to make an anal investigation and spread his legs and coughed when Symmons told him to cough.

  O’Farrell dressed unhurriedly, wanting some small redress for the indignities. He fixed and then refixed his tie and arranged the tuck of his shirt around a hard waist to spread the creases and carefully parted and combed his hair. The reflected image was of a neat, unobtrusive, unnoticed man, fading fair hair cropped close against the encroaching gray; smooth-faced; open, untroubled eyes; no shake or twitching mannerisms visible at all. All right, thought O’Farrell, actually moving his lips in voiceless conversation with himself; you’re all right, so don’t worry.

  “Will I live?” he demanded as he emerged from the dressing area, caught by the cynicism of a further attempt at glibness. That was all right, too: Symmons didn’t know. Only a very few people knew.

  Symmons stayed hunched over the formidable bundle of files and documents and folders that constituted O’Farrell’s medical record. Symmons said, “A shade over one hundred and forty-eight pounds?”

  “I saw it register on the machine.”

  “The same as you were twenty years ago.” Symmons smiled up at him. “That’s remarkable at forty-six: there’s usually a weight increase whether you like it or not.”

  “I suppose I’m lucky.”

  “Still not smoking?”

  “Hardly likely I’ll start now, is it?”

  “And still only one martini at night?”

  “No more.” That was near truth enough.

  “What about worries?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Everyone has something to worry about,” challenged the man.

  But what precisely was the something—the doubt—making him feel as he did? O’Farrell said, “Lucky again, I guess.”

  “That makes you a very unusual guy indeed,” Symmons insisted.

  “I don’t think of myself being unusual in any way,” O’Farrell said. Didn’t he?

  “What about money difficulties?”

  Damn that reaction to the financial question. O’Farrell said, with attempted forcefulness, “None.”

  “None at all?” pressed Symmons.

  “No.”

  “What about sex? Everything okay between you and Jill?”

  They did not make love with the regularity or with the need they’d once had, but when they did, it was always good. O’Farrell said, “Everything’s fine.”

  “What about elsewhere?”

  “Elsewhere?” O’Farrell asked, choosing to misunderstand.

  “Any sudden affairs?”

  It was a fairly regular question, acknowledged O’Farrell. Getting satisfaction from the reply, he said, “None.”

  “You’ve said that before,” the doctor reminded him unnecessarily.

  “It’s been true before, like it is now.”

  “Not a lot of guys who say that are telling the truth.”

  “I am,” said O’Farrell, who was. He’d never ever considered another woman, knew he never would.

  “Jill must be a very special lady.”

  “She is,” said O’Farrell, bridling.

  The psychologist discerned the reaction at once. “It worry you to talk about her?”

  “It worries me to talk about her in the context of screwing somebody else.” Where was he being led? “Jill hasn’t got any part of this,” he said.

  “Any part of what?”

  “What I do.” Fucked you, you self-satisfied bastard, he thought, knowing that Symmons couldn’t ask the obvious follow-up question.

  “That worry you, what you do?”

  O’Farrell swallowed at the ease of the other man’s escape. “No,” he said, pleased with the evenness of his own voice. “What I do doesn’t worry me.”

  “What does worry you?”

  “I told you already: nothing.”

  “Been to the graves lately?”

  It had been a long time coming. “Not for quite a while.”

  “Why not?”

  “No particular reason.”

  “That used to worry you,” the psychologist said.

  O’Farrell felt the slight dampness of discomfort again. “Wrong emotion,” he insisted. “It was sadness that something that happened to her so young made her later do what she did.”

  “Lose her mind, you mean?” Symmons was goading him.

  “That. And the rest.”

  “Never feel any guilt? That you could have done more but didn’t?”

  “No,” O’Farrell insisted again. “No one knew. Guessed.”

  “Looks like that’s it, then,” Symmons said abruptly.

  O’Farrell had not expected the sudden conclusion. He said, “See you in three months then?” The squirrels were still swarming over the trees. O’Farrell had an irrational urge to ask the man if they damaged his garden but decided against it: he couldn’t give a damn whether they chewed up everything.

  “Maybe,” Symmons said, noncommittal.

  He would be expected to respond to the doubt, O’Farrell realized. So he didn’t. He let Symmons lead him back across the coldly patterned hallway and at the entrance gave the perfunctory farewell handshake. Because he guessed the man might be watching from some vantage point, he did not hesitate when he got into the car, as if he needed to recover, but started the engine at once. He carefully controlled his exit, not overaccelerating to make the wheels spin but going out as fast as he could, an unconcerned man wanting to get back to work as quickly as possible after an intrusive disruption. Which he actually didn’t want to do. He was only about thirty minutes—forty-five at the outside—from Lafayette Square, and Petty would expect him to come in, but O’Farrell decided on unaccustomed impulse not to bother. A call would do. Start the weekend early, instead: that was what half the people in Washington did anyway.

  O’Farrell drove without any positive goal, the road dropping constantly toward the capital. He had done all right, he decided, repeating the dressing-room assurance. But he’d been stupid to try to find significance in Symmons’s questions: he’d have to avoid that next time. There’d been one or two moments when he’d come near to making mistakes by wrongly concentrating upon what the psychologist meant rather than upon what he was saying, but nothing disastrous.

  Jill wouldn’t be home yet. And she might think it odd if he were in the house ahead of her, because it hardly ever happened. Maybe he should go to Lafayette Square after all. No, he rejected once more. What then? O’Farrell started to concentrate on his s
urroundings and realized he was near Georgetown and made another impulsive decision. If he were going to goof off, why not really goof off?

  O’Farrell got a parking place on Jefferson and walked back up to M Street, choosing the bar at random. Inside, he sat at the bar itself, selecting with professionally instilled instinct a stool at its very end, where there was a wall closing off one side. He hesitated only momentarily when the barman inquired: the martini was adequate but not as good as those he made at home.

  Why was he doing this? It was out of pattern, a definite break in routine, and he wasn’t supposed—wasn’t allowed—to do anything contrary to pattern or routine. But where was the harm! He was just goofing off a couple of hours early, that’s all. It wasn’t as if he were on assignment: never took risks on assignment. No harm then. Have to call Petty, though. But not yet: plenty of time to do that. From along the counter the barman looked at him questioningly, and briefly O’Farrell considered another drink but then shook his head. Only one, he’d assured the psychologist. What about when he got home? So maybe it would be one of those nights when he’d have another. No reason why he shouldn’t have more than one, like he did occasionally. Just a small pattern break, still no harm.

  O’Farrell lingered for another fifteen minutes before going to the pay phone further into the bar, glad that temporarily there was no music. He dialed the number of Petty’s private telephone, the one on his desk. The man answered without any identification, and O’Farrell didn’t name himself either.

  “Where are you?” his controller asked.

  “Thought I’d go home early,” O’Farrell said. Now he’d told Petty, he wasn’t even goofing off anymore.

  There was a momentary pause. “Sure,” the man agreed. “How did it go?”

  “Like it always does.”

  “Was he happy?”

  You get the official reports, I don’t, O’Farrell thought. He said, “Seemed to be.”

  “Have a good weekend then.”

  “You too.”

  O’Farrell used the Key Bridge and chose the Washington Memorial Parkway instead of the inner highway, wanting to drive along the Potomac. He did so gazing across the river, picking out the needle of the Washington Monument and the Capitol dome. The word stuck in his mind, from that day’s assessment. And then others. Country. And patriot. Which really was how he felt: he was a free man in a free and beautiful country and it was right that he should feel—that he should be—patriotic toward it. And he was; O’Farrell reckoned it would be difficult to find many other men prepared to take their patriotic duty as seriously as he did.

  Jill was already home. He kissed her and asked about her day and she complained it had been busy and asked about his, and he said his had been, too. She believed him to be a financial analyst at the State Department with particular responsibility for the budgets of overseas embassies, which provided a satisfactory explanation for those sudden foreign trips; when he was not employed in his true function O’Farrell actually did work on accounts, those of the CIA’s Plans Directorate. Of everything, O’Farrell found the pretense with his wife the most difficult to maintain: she trusted him absolutely and every day of their married life since joining the Agency he’d lied to her.

  The martini he made for himself was a proper one, with a bite that caught in the throat; he slightly overfilled the shaker, so he had to take a sip to make room for the remainder. Two and a half, he thought as he did so. No harm at all.

  O’Farrell took the glass to the den, placing it carefully on the side table away from his desk, where there was no danger of anything accidentally spilling on the clippings. He kept them in a thick book, covered in genuine Moroccan leather. He opened it familiarly but at random, eyes not immediately focusing on the words. It was the obituary. It was practically a eulogy, running almost to two columns: THE MAN WHO BROUGHT LAW TO THE TERRITORY was the headline. O’Farrell became conscious of the words shifting and realized his hands were shaking, very slightly. Just the weight of the book, he told himself, trying to concentrate upon the account again but finding it difficult because of another intrusive thought.

  O’Farrell forced himself to confront it. Had his great-grandfather ever questioned what he had to do, been unsure whether he could go on doing it? The way O’Farrell was starting to question what he was called upon to do?

  There was one part of the diplomatic bag, a specially sealed and marked satchel, which no one but the ambassador was allowed to open, and the ambassador, upon strict orders from Havana itself, always had to be available instantly to receive it.

  José Gaviria Rivera recognized the necessity for such precautions but was frequently inconvenienced by them. As he was tonight. He’d allowed a two-hour fail-safe between its expected arrival and the time he had to be in the reserved Covent Garden box alongside a mistress about whom, almost disconcertingly, he felt differently than he’d felt about any other. But because of fog the damned aircraft had been diverted to Manchester. So he couldn’t make the curtain. She’d said she understood when he’d telephoned, coquettishly insisting she would punish him for it later, but Rivera actually enjoyed La Bohème; this was an acclaimed production and he had wanted to see all of it, not merely a segment. So it was at the moment difficult to convince himself that the system really had the highest priority. Not that Rivera would ever have neglected business for pleasure, even for someone as pleasurable as Henrietta. Internal as well as external spying was an important function for those members of the Direcctión Generale de Inteligencia posing under diplomatic cover within the embassy. Because of the special demands being made upon him, Rivera had succeeded in putting himself above any sort of prying whatsoever. He was fully aware how much those specific orders from Havana were resented by the local station chief, Carlos Mendez. And how very anxious the man was to send an adverse report back to Cuba.

  Rivera sighed, striding back and forth in front of the window of his office. Perhaps he should be philosophical in another way: perhaps the sexual punishment for one act would make up for missing the first of another. Had he allowed himself to consider the emotion, which of course was unthinkable, Rivera might have imagined himself in love with Henrietta.

  It was almost an hour before the diplomatic bag arrived and his personal “Eyes Only” satchel was hurried to him. Rivera let the breath go heavily from himself, forming a whistle, as he read the demand. It was far greater than ever before, far beyond the usual small arms and handguns and low-caliber ammunition, although they were included. This time he had to supply ground-to-air missiles and sophisticated communication equipment; there was even a request for tanks, if they could be supplied.

  Rivera sat back, gazing sightlessly at the door, momentarily curious. Where was it all destined to go? Nicaragua was an obvious recipient, despite the supposed peace accord with the Contras. Maybe Honduras. Or Panama, perhaps; the government there might, after thumbing its nose at Washington, consider an arms buildup a sensible insurance. What about the guerrillas in Colombia, the country upon which it all depended anyway?

  Rivera shrugged. It did not really matter, wherever it was. His part began and ended with European arms dealers. And even before making the most preliminary of inquiries, Rivera knew the cost would be incredible. He smiled. And not all of that incredible expenditure was actually going to be spent upon the weaponry he was being ordered to buy.

  Rivera knew precisely his importance in Havana’s drugs-for-arms-arms-for-drugs chain: without him there wouldn’t even be a chain. So it was right that such expertise be properly rewarded. Ten percent was the usual fee he awarded himself, but this was a much bigger consignment than any he’d handled before. It was going to take a lot of organizing. He considered that his unofficial commission should go up commensurately. He didn’t doubt that those at the other end of the chain, those Cuban diplomats entrusted through embassies and legations and missions with the drug distribution, were making far greater personal profits than he was. Not that Rivera was jealous. He knew he would
not have enjoyed being a money raiser, actually dealing in cocaine. That would have been much too dangerous.

  THREE

  O’FARRELL’S OBSERVANCE of order and routine extended into his private life. It was a Saturday, and on Saturdays his first job was to clean the cars. He always did it early because it meant backing the vehicles out of the narrow garage onto Fairfax, with a view of the Old Presbyterian Meeting House. By midmorning, particularly in the spring and summer, Alexandria became thronged with tourists, and he liked to finish before they arrived. Not that he wasn’t proud to live in such a historic township. The reverse. O’Farrell got real pleasure from residing in a township where George Washington and Robert E. Lee had once lived; he knew all its history and its landmarks and talked knowledgeably on the few occasions when he had been trapped by early visitors. But those occasions had been very few; O’Farrell shunned casual contact, even with anonymous tourists: certainly with anonymous tourists carrying cameras that might record him.

  Today there was an additional reason for wanting to be outside. After the two and a half martinis of the previous night he’d awoken with an ache banded like a cord around his head, and he needed to get out into the air.

  It was warm, despite being early, and apart from the headache O’Farrell was comfortable in jeans and shirt sleeves. There was, of course, a pattern to the cleaning. He hosed the car down first, to soften the dirt and dust, washed it off with soapy water, and then hosed it down again before toweling away the excess water. He completed the drying with a chamois cloth and finished off by polishing with more toweling.

  O’Farrell enjoyed engines. They performed to predetermined orderliness, dozens of independent parts making up a complete whole. He supposed that tinkering with the workings of his car and Jill’s had been his only hobby until he’d started upon the ancestral archive. He greased them and balanced them and tuned them, and as he finished off the cleaning O’Farrell decided that the care and attention paid off. The paintwork of both had practically the same showroom sheen, which they wouldn’t have had if he’d stop-started them through some plastic-brushed car wash. There wasn’t any rust, not so much as a warning stain behind any of the decorative metalwork. O’Farrell reckoned he would easily get another four years out of each vehicle before trading them in.