Another body blow, worse than before. O’Farrell breathed in deeply, as if he had been winded. Had to fight back, he thought, stop appearing so helpless! He said, “You seem to have carried out a pretty deep profile.”
“Normal precautions, like every assignment,’’ Lambert said. He smiled. “A rule of engagement.”
Which was true, O’Farrell knew. He’d spotted the watchers himself. As forcefully as he could, he said, “What’s this all about?” and thought it was a demand he should have made before now.
“Didn’t you expect there to be an inquiry?”
“By Petty and Erickson certainly. Maybe others, from my section or Plans. Not being held a virtual prisoner in any army camp and interrogated by a psychologist!”
“That’s interesting!” Lambert said, as if he’d located an odd-shaped fossil on a stony beach. “Is that what you consider this to be, an interrogation?”
It had been an exaggeration, O’Farrell conceded. This wasn’t really an interrogation, not the sort he’d been trained to resist. Why then was he so unsettled by it? He said, “Perhaps not quite that,” and hated the weak response, just as he disliked most of his other replies. Trying to recover, he said, “You didn’t answer my question: what’s it all about, this interview?”
“Your state of mind,” Lambert announced disquietingly. “And you didn’t answer mine. What about the booze?”
“I had a few drinks,” O’Farrell said, stiffly formal. “I never endangered the operation. It had no bearing whatsoever upon the accident.”
“Well done!” Lambert said, congratulatory.
“I don’t …” O’Farrell started, and then paused. “I won’t—I can’t—consider it an accident. I never will be able to.”
“You just called it that.”
O’Farrell shook his head wearily. “I didn’t think sufficiently. It’s the wrong word; will always be the wrong word. It was murder. We both know that.”
“Innocent people get killed in wars.”
“What the fuck sort of rationale is that!” O’Farrell erupted. “We’re not talking about a war! Stop it! The professional-soldier pitch won’t get to me. I’ve thought it through; it doesn’t fit.”
“So you’re quitting?”
“We’ve gone down this road as well,” O’Farrell protested. “I’m unacceptable.”
“Your judgment,” Lambert reminded him. “What if other people … Petty and Erickson and people in Plans, all of them, think like I do? What about if they all consider it an accident and don’t contemplate terminating your active role?”
“What about it?” O’Farrell knew the question was coming, but delayed it with his own query to think of an answer better than those he’d so far offered.
“You going to resign?” the man asked bluntly.
“I don’t know”. What the fuck was he saying! He’d thought of nothing else, waking or sleeping, for months; had thought about it this very day in this very room, working out the logistics of selling the house! He wanted to quit—needed to quit—more than he’d wanted to do anything else in his entire life. So why didn’t he just say so! Easiest word in the language: yes. Yes, I want to quit. Get away from all this mumbo-jumbo psychology and these ridiculous briefings in ridiculous places, immerse myself in my boring figures in my boring office and truly become the boring clerk everyone thinks I am, catching the adventurers manipulating their expenses and being despised by my wife for not intervening in squalid public arguments.
“Not even thought about it?” Lambert persisted.
“Of course I’ve thought about it; haven’t you thought of chucking what you do?”
Lambert genuinely appeared to consider the question. “No,” he said. “I never have. I like what I do very much.”
“What is it? I mean, I know your job, but why—and what—here, in the middle of a CIA training facility?”
“Talk to people with motivational doubts, like you,” Lambert said.
“Is that the diagnosis? Lacking motivation?”
Lambert’s expression was more a grin than a smile. “Nothing so simple.” he said. “You know what professional medics are like—three pages of bullshit, complete with reference notes and source material, to express a single idea.”
“Which is that I am lacking motivation?”
“Aren’t you?” Question for question.
“I don’t think—”
“You do,” Lambert said, blocking another escape.
O’Farrell refused to answer, caught by a sudden, disturbing thought. “How did the Agency find out about my family archive?”
“Didn’t you have some work done on it?” Lambert asked casually.
The copying, O’Farrell remembered. So it hadn’t been some Agency break-in squad poking through the house, prying into everything, maybe sniggering and joking over what they found, while Jill was at work or in Chicago. O’Farrell was relieved. Lambert was lounging back comfortably in his chair, apparently waiting for him to say something. “Well?” O’Farrell said.
“We were talking about motivation.”
“You were,” O’Farrell corrected, deciding how to continue. “And you seemed to think I’d lost it.”
“Haven’t you?”
“Yes,” O’Farrell said bluntly. He’d said it! And he had the acceptable explanation ready. If this sneaky bastard took it, this debriefing could end and he could go home to Jill.
“A breakthrough!” Lambert said.
“Is that surprising, after murdering someone?”
Another of the long, silent stares, broken this time by a slow headshake of refusal. Then the psychologist said, “Is that how you intend to use the accident?”
“I’m not using it for anything!” said O’Farrell, knowing he had lost, too exasperated to deny Lambert’s choice of word.
“You began assembling all that stuff on your great-grandfather, making the lawman comparison, long before the Rivera assignment,” said the man. “Drinking too.”
O’Farrell shook his head, genuinely weary. “Think what you like. I don’t give a damn.”
“You just want to go home, go to bed, and pull the covers over your head.”
O’Farrell went physically hot because that was exactly what he had been thinking. “Maybe just that.”
Lambert rose from his seat, but halfway toward the coffeepot he hesitated. “Would you like a drink? Something stronger than coffee, I mean.”
O’Farrell ached for a drink. He shook his head. “Not even coffee.”
“You do that, do you?” Lambert asked conversationally. “Set yourself limits and feel proud, as if you’ve achieved something, when you stay within them?”
Like everything else during the meeting, it was a small but complete performance to make another point, O’Farrell realized. He was still hot but now with anger against the man it seemed impossible to outtalk. “No,” he said.
Lambert smiled, with more disbelief, and continued on to the coffee machine. Standing there, he said. “I don’t blame you. I’m surprised the doubts haven’t come long before now.”
O’Farrell frowned, further bewilderment. “Whose side are you on!” he said.
Lambert, smiling, walked back to his chair. More to himself than to O’Farrell, he said. “There have to be sides, good or bad, right or wrong.…” He looked up, open-faced. “I’m on your side, if that’s the way you want to think about it. That’s why I want to get the truth, everything, out into the open, so we can talk it all through, lay all the ghosts.”
“Why?” O’Farrell asked suspiciously.
“Why!” Lambert echoed, surprised. “You were flaky before England. With all the guilt after the accident you’re going to become a pretty fucked-up guy, aren’t you? And the Agency worries about fucked-up guys, particularly in your section.”