“And what about the money that Jeffrey stole? Where’s that?”
“Goodness. Hard to find now, I’m afraid. Not clear even who it belongs to.”
Sophie laughed. She didn’t mean to, but she couldn’t help herself. He might as well have stuffed it in the pockets of that lime-green suit.
“I like a good yarn as well as anyone, Mr. Hoffman, but please tell me the truth. What did you know about Omar al-Wazir? Gertz told me you were the one who set this all in motion. Is that true?”
“Don’t be silly, my dear. Of course it’s not true. If I had been running this, it never would have gotten so messy. Be very careful not to spread that sort of malicious gossip. It will do no one any good.”
Hoffman excused himself to go upstairs and pack. Otherwise he would miss his flight. He invited Marx to come visit him at Langley as soon as she returned to Washington. There was an opening for a senior job on the seventh floor, he said, and Marx would be an ideal candidate.
It was nearly six when the warden’s door finally opened and out walked Thomas Perkins, a free man. He was dressed in the pin-striped suit he had been wearing when he was first taken into custody and sporting a pair of handmade shoes from John Lobb. The pencil-nosed warden was shaking his hand and apologizing strenuously for the inconvenience of the last few days.
When Perkins saw Sophie in the waiting room, a smile rolled across his face like a gentle wave breaking on the ocean. She leapt from her chair and, without thinking about it, embraced him and kissed him on the cheek. The warden handed over a manila envelope that contained Perkins’s wallet, gold cuff links and other valuables that had been collected when he was first taken prisoner.
“That’s it?” Perkins asked. “I’m really free to go?”
The warden nodded in a proprietary way and walked him out the gate onto Caledonian Road. He offered to send Perkins home in one of the vehicles of the National Offender Management Service, but Perkins said he would rather walk with his friend and savor his new status as a free man.
They ducked into the first pub they saw. It was early evening, and the summer sun was low in the sky. They brought two pints of beer out into the courtyard. Perkins had purchased a pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t smoked one in more than twenty years, he said, but he had promised himself that if he was released from prison, the first thing he would do would be to have a cigarette. He lit it up, breathed the smoke in deep, coughed, took another puff and threw it away. He looked like a man who had awakened from a nightmare and realized that none of the horrors he had been experiencing were real.
Sophie demanded an explanation. Why had he been freed, after so much thunder and rage? Had he bribed the prime minister, or just the home secretary?
“I frightened your friends at the CIA,” Perkins answered. “They thought I was going to tell the truth, and they panicked. They contacted the British government last night, and they negotiated all morning. Hush-hush, the warden told me. By the time the meetings were over, they had decided they wouldn’t bring any charges. Terrible misunderstanding, they told my lawyer, frightfully sorry.”
“What are you going to do now? Go back to being a billionaire?”
“I’m not a billionaire anymore, sweet girl. Not even a tiny fraction of one. The run on my firm was like a fire sale. I’ll be lucky to avoid bankruptcy.”
Sophie took his hand. She wanted to be supportive, but she wasn’t sure how. She had never been very good at relationships.
“You can build it all back up, if you want.”
“That sounds boring. I’ve done that. I want to try something new. I want to see what’s on the other side of all those things that we’re supposed to want.”
Sophie thought of the dreams she’d had as a young intelligence officer, the places she had been and the risks she had taken. What had all of this produced?
A string of lies, near as she could telclass="underline" colleagues who lied and cheated and only got upset if it seemed that someone was about to blow the whistle. They had been dropping bombs on people for so long, it had begun to seem natural. That was the corrosive part: If you killed someone at close range with a knife, at least you knew what it felt like to have blood on your hands. But if you did it from ten thousand feet, looking at a picture on a television screen, you forgot that there were real people down below. It wasn’t that the cause was wrong, but that it wasn’t an honest fight.
“I want to see what’s on the other side, too,” said Sophie. “I’ve had enough dishonesty to last a lifetime. I want to see what it’s like to tell the truth.”
“Want some company?” asked Perkins.
She nodded and took his hand. They finished their beers, and had another round, and eventually they caught a taxi on Caledonian Road and went off to find a restaurant in Camden Town where, Perkins assured Sophie, there would be nobody that either of them knew.