No answer.
“Simon. It’s murder. The boy could hang.”
A hard silence at the other end of the line. The kind that takes a piece out of your fuselage in the night. Finally Jack adds, “That’s the worst-case scenario.”
“I’ll tell you what the worst-case scenario is, Jack,” and Simon’s tone is still reasonable. “A number of our people — brave people, agents-in-place — begin dying in the Soviet Union, far from your precious conscience. Fried’s information about Soviet intentions and capabilities vis-à-vis their strategic missile program — test results, blueprints, organizational structure — becomes worthless; the press has a field day with the story of Nazis at NASA and government funding is cut, crippling our bid for the moon, to say nothing of the implications for Western intelligence, and the fight for supremacy in certain technologies that keep you safely at your fucking barbecue.”
“Yeah, well Simon, I’m here and you’re not, and so is Fried. I just have to make one call and he’ll be picked up so fast—”
“Fried is long gone, mate.”
Of course. Jack takes the humiliation. “When?” he asks, adding, “I know you won’t tell me that, just tell me, was he already gone the other day when I offered to look in on him?”
“Afraid so.” Simon’s tone is almost apologetic.
Jack reaches up and leans his hand against the cold glass.
After a moment, Simon says quietly, “Jack, the reason I came to you with this mission is that I’ve learned to trust very few people,” and it’s the voice of a friend again. “I don’t care what their security clearance is or where they’re from. Some of the worst offenders are among my own countrymen. I wouldn’t ask you to cross the street for Oskar fucking Fried. We’re not doing this for him.” He sighs. “This war — the one we’re engaged in now — makes me pine for the last one. Any fool can die for his country, Jack.”
“I don’t happen to think forty thousand Canadians were fools.”
“I’m not belittling the sacrifice made by my friends and yours — by my younger brother, for Christ sake. I’m pointing out that you and I don’t have the privilege of fighting and dying. We have to live, and we have to make decisions — we had to make decisions in the last war too but they weren’t all secret. The guilt and the bullshit and the triumph were shared and we called it duty….” Jack can’t talk about the last war. He was and was not there. I don’t have the right to talk about it. And those who do have the right almost never talk about it at all. “Then one day the shooting stopped and we called it victory. We demobbed and went back to work, got married, had children and we called it peace. But it isn’t quite. And you’re right in the middle of it.”
“Simon, I manage an organization that teaches people how to manage organizations. I drive a station wagon, I love my wife, I’m not in the middle of a damn thing.”
“You’re in it, lad. You’re on ops now, whether you like it or not.” Simon’s tone brightens. “You know we bombed the shit out of the German war industry. The Ruhr night after night — you should’ve been there, mate, you were robbed.” Is he being sarcastic now? “You know I went to Peenemünde.” I went to Peenemünde. Jack knows enough to translate: I beat the odds and survived a bombing mission. Target: Peenemünde. “We bombed the hell out of Hitler’s V-2 rockets—”
“That’s for sure.”
“So they moved underground, got a lot of slaves, worked them to death at Dora, starved them, hanged them, bloody good show.”
“That wasn’t our fault.”
Simon continues, his voice calm — Jack realizes he is furious. “When we bombed Hamburg, thousands of people died. I was in on that one, we dropped incendiaries, fluorescent bombs along with the old blockbusters, and what was down there? Civilians. We killed them just as surely as if we’d lined them up and shot them into a pit, and we won the war either because of it or in spite of it, I suspect in spite because I know who rebuilt their cities, the bloody women did, brick by brick, and how are you going to defeat that? But we got rid of Hitler, didn’t we, and what’s bothering me, Jack, is that Stalin killed more civilians than Hitler did, but Germany is a different place now and Russia is not. And I’m asking you — your country, your goddamn civilization, is asking you to maybe, perhaps, sacrifice the life of one boy — and very probably not his life, merely his freedom — in the interests of peace, in the interests of a number of scientific advances that could make the difference between survival and annihilation, in the interests of your daughter. You bloody fool.” Simon falls silent. When he speaks again, he no longer sounds angry. Merely sad. “I killed hundreds and hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. But I didn’t do it secretly and I never saw a single victim. You don’t at that height, it’s called the morality of altitude. And I got a medal for it. You are being asked to jeopardize one person. The difference is, you know him. I didn’t know the women rushing to the shelters when the sirens went, I didn’t know their children, who died under buildings or stuck to the roads when the tar melted, I didn’t know the people in the hospitals and churches, or the ones who ended up in the canal, I don’t delude myself that they deserved what they got and I don’t indulge in a lot of pointless guilt and virtuous hindsight. I did my fucking duty, Jack. It’s time you did yours.”
The fog has obliterated time and place. Jack could be anywhere — ten thousand feet above the earth, trust your instruments….
Simon says, “There’s an old Chinese proverb: once you’ve saved a man’s life, you’re responsible for him.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Simon.”
“My colleagues know there is a senior Canadian officer involved, they know he is stationed at Centralia, and although I haven’t mentioned your name, they could track you quite easily, I should think. But here’s the crux of it, Jack. So far, they’ve no inkling you intend to break silence.”
If Simon thinks Jack is worried about his career right now, he’s sorely mistaken.
“Are you threatening me, Simon?”
“No.” He sounds genuinely surprised. When he speaks again, his tone is intimate, almost aggrieved. “I’m giving you my word that they’ll not hear it from me.”
Jack swallows and says, “Simon. I won’t let that boy hang. He’s innocent.”
“Then he has nothing to worry about.”
I don’t know what to do. Jack has not said it aloud. But Simon has heard him. Simon is just across the table, a Scotch away. He leans toward Jack now and says, “Do the right thing.”
The phrase stirs something in Jack’s memory, just behind his left eye…. What Simon said when Jack awoke in the MRI to learn his war was over: You did the right thing, mate.
“Goodbye, Jack.”
Jack takes his hand from the opaque glass and his print remains, black and transparent. He looks up and through it. Outside, the night is clear. The moon glistens through his palm. The fog was inside the booth all along, made of nothing but his own breath. He opens the door and feels the chill through the wool of his uniform. It has started snowing. Flakes graze his eyelashes, melt against his lower lip. He puts on his hat. His legs carry him over the silent white. Halfway across the parade square, he becomes aware of a set of muffled footsteps behind him. He quickens his pace but so does the follower — he can hear the catch of the stranger’s breath, almost feel the clap on his shoulder: You got rid of the car, Jack. Even if you did come forward, the police wouldn’t believe you any more than they believed Henry Froelich. There never was an Oskar Fried. He stops. Who would believe him? His wife. The Soviets. And the CIA.