“You dropped him off somewhere. After you rescued him. Where was it?”
“Somewhere on the outskirts. We were met by—he used the word friends.”
“Wouldn’t happen to be Russian or Chinese, these friends?”
“They didn’t seem Russian or Chinese.”
Carlisle lets out a long sigh, slumps his head into his hand, and massages his temples. “It shouldn’t have come to this, you know. Those times when we approached you, we were doing it for your own safety.”
The words burst out of my mouth angrily, involuntarily: “When the hell did you ever approach me? While you were sitting on your ass in New York, I was here, doing your job, trying to find my father.”
Carlisle picks up a leftover French fry from my plate as if he’s considering eating it. “We tried to rescue you in Berlin, Gwendolyn,” he says tiredly. “From that gangster, Christian, remember? Two men approached you on the street. But you pulled a gun and fucked everything up. We tried again on the train to Prague. That time you went through with it—stabbed a man right in the heart.”
“He had a pistol,” I say.
“After what happened in Berlin, can you blame him?” He shakes his head. “If you had just left it to the professionals, we could have avoided all this.”
“Avoided killing your go-to guy for rocket launchers and teenage girls?”
Carlisle’s eyebrows arch with mild surprise. Then he rises and walks to the window with hands deep in pockets. “I’m not going to lie, Gwendolyn. This is a filthy, filthy business in a filthy, filthy world. Yes, Bohdan Kladivo was ours. Was.” He turns and wags a finger in the air to emphasize the point. “But we put an end to all that once we found out about the human trafficking. Your father, bless him, saw to that.”
“Who was it that set my dad up? Who arranged it?”
He runs his fingers over an elegant leather chess board on a table beside the window, then picks up the black queen. “Do you play?”
“Not really.”
“It’s funny. People are always saying politics is like chess. But it’s not. In politics, all the pieces are pawns, and the players aren’t even at the table.” He tips over the black king and looks at me. “We arrested him in Switzerland, by the way. Getting off a flight in Zurich.”
“Arrested who?”
“Joseph Diaz. Diaz and Kladivo were going to split Viktor Zoric’s money. Your father was the only one who knew where to find the passcodes.” He lets out an exhausted sigh. “As to the accounts those passcodes open, they’re the Loch Ness monster of Swiss banking. We still have no idea if they even exist.”
I look down, concentrating on the tablecloth, the empty bottle of Coke, anything other than Carlisle. Joey Diaz was always the closest thing I had to family when we lived abroad. We had holidays together, I played with his kids. It was Joey Diaz who told me my dad wasn’t a paper-pushing State Department drone but an intelligence operative with the CIA. “Why should I believe you?”
“About?”
“Joey Diaz, any of it. How do I know you’re not the one who betrayed my dad?”
A resigned laugh, a sad shake of the head. “I don’t know, Gwendolyn. Look around you. Are you in some dungeon? Are there chains on your wrists?”
I see his point and say nothing.
He turns around, hands back in his pockets, just another rumpled, dopey public servant caught up in shit well beyond his pay grade. “Would it help if I showed you the arrest warrant for Joseph Diaz? Or the ten thousand memos that have been back and forth across my desk since your dad disappeared and you decided to go after him?”
“Sure,” I say. “Show them to me.”
Carlisle arches his eyebrows. “Then you’ll have them, I don’t know, tonight. Tomorrow morning, latest.”
“So what’s next? Do I go back to a Czech prison?”
He walks over to me, places a hand on my shoulder. I’m surprised I don’t flinch. “No. We take you home. Wait for your father to get in touch. As for the Czechs, we made a deal. It wasn’t hard. Half the government wanted to give you a medal for killing Kladivo. We can leave tomorrow, as soon as the debrief is done.”
“The debrief?”
Carlisle shrugs. “We ask you what happened, you tell us. A formality. Something to put in the filing cabinet.”
*
She is, I guess, about forty or so, with straight black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She’s wearing a navy blue pantsuit and carries a leather case in her hand. Entering the suite, she gives a pleasant, very American inquiry of “Hello?” as if she were just a kindly neighbor looking to borrow the lawn mower. Carlisle introduces her as Dr. Simon, a psychiatrist who will, he says, be helping me through the debrief.
“Just government-speak for a chat,” she says, head tilted to the side. “You’ve been through quite a bit in the last few days, haven’t you?”
It’s all very chirpy and passive the way she says it. The whole been through a lot makes it sound as though it had been a car accident instead of a war of my own making. But maybe that’s her point.
“I’m doing fine,” I say.
“Gwendolyn, when was the last time you had a tuberculosis shot?”
“No idea.”
Dr. Simon holds up the leather case. “Unfortunately, TB is very common in Czech jails, so we strongly recommend a booster shot to anyone in your situation. Do you mind? It’ll only hurt for a second.”
I’m about to object, but if it moves things along, I’ll comply. I sit down on the couch and pull up the sleeve of my robe.
Dr. Simon sits beside me, puts on a pair of translucent rubber gloves, and prepares the injection. Her fingers are cold and sticky on my skin as she squeezes and prods the flesh on my upper arm.
I always had to look away from needles, but for some reason, it doesn’t bother me this time. I watch the slender line approach my arm and don’t even blink at the pain as it forms a crater in the skin, then slides through it. As she presses the plunger on the syringe, the sensation of being injected with pleasantly cool water spreads from my arm to my chest and into my limbs and head. The doctor places a folded piece of gauze over the hole as she withdraws the needle and tapes it into place.
“Good job,” Dr. Simon says as if she were a pediatrician and I were four.
She moves to the armchair, while Carlisle settles into the far end of the couch opposite mine. I can barely see him from where I’m sitting.
“Comfortable?” Dr. Simon asks.
“Sure,” I say.
“Then let’s talk awhile.” She crosses her legs and leans forward, the posture of every shrink I’ve ever seen in my life. “Let’s start with how you rescued your father, your dad. From what I heard, it was quite an adventure.”