“Good to see you,” Lambert said, as if their last meeting had been a long time ago. “Don’t these programs blow your mind! Can you imagine making yourself look stupid in front of millions of people!”
“I’ve never seen it before,” O’Farrell said. “But no, I can’t imagine it.”
Lambert held the remote control in his hand for several moments before reluctantly switching the television off and turning his full attention upon O’Farrell. They fascinate me,” he said. “Just fascinate me.”
Definitely a psychologist, O’Farrell thought. He supposed it had been obvious but he’d hoped Lambert wasn’t. He looked around for shapes to fit into holes but couldn’t see any. There were couches and chairs around a dead fire-place and two extension telephones on side tables. There were a lot of large plants in pots. O’Farrell recognized a rubber tree; its leaves were very dirty and dry. All the plants sagged from lack of water.
Lambert gestured vaguely toward the easy chairs and couches and said, “Make yourself at home. You like some coffee? I’ve just made some fresh coffee.”
“Thank you,” O’Farrell said. He was indifferent to the coffee but it pleased him to have Lambert fetch and carry for him. Why? he asked himself at once. Careful; he wasn’t the psychologist.
Lambert served the coffee with powdered cream and sugar in little pots on the side. With his head still bent, the man said, “So you killed her? The wrong target?”
O’Farrell blinked at the abruptness. “Yes,” he said. His headache wasn’t too bad, considering the previous day’s intake, but he felt tired, although he’d slept.
“It was an accident.”
“How the hell can you say that!”
“You intend to kill her?”
“You know I didn’t!”
“So what else can it be but an accident?”
“I wired the car, for Christ’s sake, turned it into one fucking great bomb! How can planting a load of explosives in a vehicle, which blows up and kills a person, be minimized as an accident!”
Lambert had been standing. Now he took his own coffee to an opposite chair. “What about Rivera? What if he’d turned the key and he’d been the person killed?”
O’Farrell frowned. “What about it? I’ve gone through all the evidence against him. He’s guilty; involved in criminal activity against the interests and security of this country.”
“So it’s okay to blow him away! No conscience problem there!”
This was like getting into the ring with a far superior boxer constantly able to jab past your defenses. O’Farrell said, “That is the function I am employed to carry out on behalf of the United States of America.”
“Well recited!” Lambert mocked. “You comfortable with that?”
“Of course I am.”
“Why of course? Where’s the natural consequence come in?”
O’Farrell was sweating and put his cup down before he spilled it. This man was bewildering him. Hopefully he said, “There are some people, a few, who are beyond normal parameters; beyond the law, if you like. People capable of great harm, great hurt. The judgment against them is not reached by a court of law, but it is as fair and impartial as if it were.”
“Hitler … Stalin … Amin. Killing saves lives,” Lambert completed. “I’m familiar with the list; it’s a cliché. You know what? I don’t think you believe that. Maybe once, but not anymore.”
O’Farrell was glad he was sitting down because his head was swirling. The ache was worse, too. He thought he saw an escape and went for it. “It’s an academic debate anyway, isn’t it?”
“Why?” asked Lambert.
“I’m hardly likely to be used again, after this debacle, am I?”
“Whose choice not to be used again? Yours? Or the Agency’s?”
Jab, jab. jab, O’Farrell thought. “The Agency’s, I would have thought.”
“Why?”
“This record seems to be stuck.” O’Farrell chanced the sarcasm but was unsure if he should take the risk. Speaking overly slowly, he said: “In London, England. I made a bomb that killed someone who should not have died. As of yesterday, I became an operative too unreliable to trust anymore.”
“Who said that?”
“Nobody said it. It’s obvious.” It was the first time since the disaster that O’Farrell had thought fully about it. And its personal implications. So he’d lose the hidden salary. So what? The value of the house in Alexandria had to have increased twofold at least over what he’d paid for it. If the allowances to the kids became too much of a burden, he could always sell it and buy something cheaper, cheaper but still a damned nice house.
“How would you feel about that, being taken off the active roster?” Lambert persisted.
O’Farrell came close to smiling at the absurdity of the expression; was that a cosmetic name for Petty’s department, the active roster? Slowly again, but for a different sort of reason this time, he said, “It would be wrong—morally and mentally—for me to enjoy what I do. I’d be some sort of psychopath. I have sincerely considered every mission I have undertaken to be justified, like Rivera’s removal. I have never thought of being taken”—he stopped at the phrase, then pushed on—“off the active roster in the middle of an operation. If that’s the way it ends …” He shrugged, struggling for words. “Then it ends,” he finished badly. Toward the conclusion he’d been floundering, O’Farrell admitted to himself. Worse, it appeared as if he’d been trying to convince Lambert about his function, about the whole existence of his department within the CIA.
“A soldier, obeying orders?”
“I find that a good analogy.”
“And you were a professional but special soldier before you joined the Agency, weren’t you? And professional soldiers are taught to kill. Especially your unit.”
“Under proper rules of engagement,” O’Farrell qualified.
“Was that how you saw your missions? Obeying orders like a professional soldier, following unusual but properly established rules of engagement?”
“I said I felt comfortable with the analogy. Perhaps that’s how I felt sometimes.” Nothing was coming out as he wanted; he felt hopelessly inferior to this man, who had to be at least ten years his junior and seemed to know everything that had ever gone on in his mind. Lambert was far more formidable than Symmons. O’Farrell realized for the first time that Lambert was wearing the same suit and shirt as the previous evening; perhaps there really had been a party where he’d gotten lucky and not gone home.
For a long time Lambert stared at him, blank-faced and unspeaking. Finally the man said, “Charles O’Farrell, that marshal ancestor of yours, never did that, did he? Never quit or got taken off anything before it was properly ended. Before justice was done.”
That wasn’t a jab; that was practically a knockout blow. “I don’t think so; not that I have been able to find out.” The words strained out, dry-throated.
“What about him?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“Didn’t you see some comparison there, between yourself and your great-grandfather?”
O’Farrell gulped some coffee to ease his throat. “Not really,” he lied knowingly. “Maybe there’s a similarity. I never thought about it.”
Again there was a long, silent stare and O’Farrell read disbelief into it. Lambert said, “What do you think of the booze in London making you careless? A factor in the accident?”