I said another whispered profanity-a rhetorical question-then returned to the computer and read portions of the letter again. Tinman
… We were once friends, and I still think of you fondly. I know that neither of us has wanted to acknowledge the possibility that you are Laken’s father. I have always wondered.
Who in the hell was Tinman? And why hadn’t this woman-a person whose ethics I’d admired for years-had the decency to tell me that such a thing was a possibility?
I didn’t feel betrayed. There has to be a covenant before there can be a betrayal. Pilar and I had none. What I felt was a terrible sense of potential loss. I was already fighting to save my son. Now these new, outrageous circumstances were threatening to take him in a way that was beyond any hope of change or my control. There’s something you don’t know. Slightly more than a year ago, I received information about MF that made me hope that it’s true. Now, I really do have reason to believe you are the one.
Slightly more than a year ago, someone had shown her files concerning my work in Central America. She’d learned the truth about Marion Ford-or believed she had. That had changed everything, as far as she was concerned.
In my mind, I replayed the first minutes that we’d been alone together; could hear Pilar saying, “Do you know what concerns me the most since I found out? That Laken calls you ‘father.’ If he believes your blood runs in his veins, will he try to emulate you? Already, he’s becoming more and more like you. At night, I go to sleep worrying about it. Will that part of you be in him? That gene, that kind of.. . of evil? Is there a killer inside of my child, waiting?”
Her odd wording now made sense.
I could also hear her say, “You’re not the good man I fell in love with. You couldn’t be. How could you have done those things?”
Did she really believe this guy could be Lake’s father? Or was it simply because she now preferred to believe that it was true?
I knew I’d want to read the letter later, study the nuances, so I saved the e-mail to my computer’s personal files. I then moved the cursor so that I could read the second e-mail she’d written Tinman. It was sent on Sunday, the night before she left for Miami.
It was as shocking as the first: My dear Campanero, I write a final time begging you to answer. Do you remember the good days when we called each other by that name? It honors peasants, not politics. I ask you to reflect on those days, and so agree to help. I know you must still have loyal connections in Central America. We all admired your heart and brain so much. I ask you to call on those connections now and ask them to look for a monster named Praxcedes Lourdes, the one who abducted my son, and to pass the information on to me. I wonder if you are getting my letters? Or maybe you don’t respond because you still feel guilt because you encouraged MF’s friendship with the hope of gathering information about his country’s illegal activities. In this way, we are the same, my dear Tinman. I also felt much guilt. Unlike you, though, I no longer feel any remorse. One day, when we are together and alone, I will tell you why. Perhaps, then, you will finally answer me. What happened that night? I remember laughing and laughing, and being very dizzy. I think you know the truth. Are you Laken’s father? His face reminds me of yours. P
I’D recently taken delivery of the finest microscope I’ve ever owned. It’s a Leica Selectra Trinocular, with extraordinary resolution, variable zoom, and a vertical photo tube. I turned away from the computer and seemed to float across the room, where I reached out to the microscope as if it were a lifebuoy.
I removed the scope’s cover and found a glass slide on which I’d already mounted a cross section from a piece of loggerhead sponge. I’d found the sponge while collecting on the flats a few days earlier. I fixed the slide on the scope’s stage plate, touched the light toggle, and removed my glasses. Then I leaned toward the viewing head’s eyepieces, eager to escape into that bright world of exacting focus.
I had to have a break. My brain was so fogged by what I’d just read, I felt dizzy, even nauseous. It couldn’t be true, but it was true. Pilar had become friendly with me, and then ingratiated herself, in order to gather information about my covert work. So she had known. Or, as she’d told me, at least suspected-but not the extent of the things I’d been ordered to do during the revolution that was going on in her country.
Tinman had done the same thing-whoever the hell Tinman was. He, supposedly, was also a friend. At least, that’s the way her letter read.
I’d gone over the sentences only a couple of times, but they’d already been seared into my memory: I also felt much guilt. In this way, we are the same, my dear Tinman. Unlike you, though, I no longer feel any remorse.
Yeah, there was no room for doubt.
But which of my male friends? I’d had several good ones during my time there. At least, I’d thought of them as good friends.
Are you Laken’s father? His face reminds me of yours.
That certainly narrowed it down.
If Lake and Tinman actually did resemble one another, then Tinman also had to be distinctly non-Latin-looking. In his photos and in person, Lake could pass for a Midwestern farmboy.
The possibilities made me feel wobbly. I needed an emotional retreat. The microscope awaited. I touched my eyes to the twin eyepieces and was instantly transported. I took one… two… and then a third full breath.
Magnified by the fine optics, the protein fibers of the sponge’s osculum-its excurrent water opening-seemed large enough so that a model city could be erected within its perfect convexity. There were vast corridors and safe hideaways that, to me, were alluring. I longed to climb inside.
I touched the glass plate, and the view changed. There was a curling flagellum, a hairlike paddle that pulls in water… and the crosshatched symmetry of the animal’s silicate skeleton. The skeleton was an intricate pattern of fluted ramps on a curving honeycombed infrastructure. I increased magnification until the sponge fibers became an extraordinarily modernistic sculpture. A single filament might have been a stairway designed by Dali.
I was looking into a world that was no less chemically complex and biologically diverse than my own. Sponges consist of cooperating communities of different cells. We have counted as many as sixteen thousand animals, and many species, living in the canal systems of a single sponge.
Complex, yes. But not nearly so complicated.
My mind cycled away from this articulate microuniverse, back into the murkier world that was my own. I stood suddenly, and lowered my glasses.
I’d scanned my memory synapses over and over, and the results were always the same. During that general time period prior to Lake’s birth, there were only two men whom I considered friends, who’d also known Pilar in Masagua, and who were unmistakably Anglo-Saxon.
One was my old partner, Thackery, the crazed Australian surfer and SAS operative. I remembered that he had a Ph. D. in oceanography, was a passionate environmentalist. Part of his cover was that he’d infiltrated an ultra-left-wing environmental group that was helping to fund the guerrilla fighters. Or supposedly infiltrated them. Could Thackery actually have been working for the enemy? Could he, in fact, have been a double agent, fighting for the other side?
I hadn’t seen the man in years. Wondered how I could track him down. And if he was Tinman, I would have to find him… or at least make certain that people in the American intelligence community knew about him. Even though several years had passed, it was still a serious security breach, and it would have to be dealt with.
Yet, the truth was, I hoped that Tinman was Thackery.
There was only one other possibility. That was Tomlinson.
At a little after four in the morning, I opened the screen door and stepped into my little house to see Ransom curled in the chair, still holding Crunch amp; Des. But instead of sleeping, her eyes were open wide, staring at me. She looked alarmed.