Free The Second Saladin by Stephen Hunter Page A

hurried introductions—Speight had said something about a computer whiz—and remembered a short, dark, splotchy man, a boy really, not quite or just barely thirty, with unruly oily black hair. He had the look to him of a priest’s boy, the one in every parish who’d seek a special relationship from the father or the mother superior and draw power off it for years. He’d seen it at Resurrection too, and maybe elsewhere; maybe it wasn’t Catholic at all.
    “Once in ’seventy-seven, wrists,” Lanahan amplified, “once in ’seventy-nine, pills, and a real bad one last year, pills again. She almost went the distance.”
    Chardy nodded, keeping his eyes sealed on the woman’s image before him.
    Johanna,
why?
    But he knew why.
    “The university has had her in and out of various shrink programs,” Lanahan continued. “We got the records. It wasn’t easy.”
    But Chardy was not listening. He looked at his own wrists. He’d cut them open in April of 1975 after his lengthy interrogation by the KGB. He knew the feeling of comfort: the blood draining away and with it all the problems of the world. An immense light-headedness fills you, seductive, gratifying. You think you’re going to beat them.He remembered screaming at the officer who had supervised his interrogation, “Speshnev, Speshnev, I’m going to
win.”
But they’d saved him.
    “Is that it?” Trewitt asked.
    “Yes,” said Ver Steeg, and the image vanished. Trewitt pulled the curtains open and light flooded the room.
    Chardy stared at the wall from which her image had disappeared. Then he turned back to the others.
    “So—Paul. May I call you Paul?” Yost asked. Chardy could not see his eyes behind the pink-framed semi-academic glasses he wore, a style beloved of high-level government administrators.
    “Please,” Chardy said.
    “Ulu Beg knows only two people in the United States. You and Johanna Hull. And it seems unlikely he’d come to you—for help.”
    Chardy nodded. Yes, it seemed unlikely Ulu Beg would come to him—for help.
    “That leaves this woman.”
    “You think he’ll go to her?”
    “I don’t think anything. I see only probabilities. It seems probable that he’s aware how difficult it would be to operate in this country without some kind of base. It seems probable, then, that he’d try and obtain one. It seems probable that he’d be drawn to somebody he felt he could trust, somebody who shared his sentiments about the Kurds. It seems probable, finally, that he’d go to her. That’s all.”
    “You could try and anticipate his target,” said Chardy.
    “You could. And if you anticipated wrong you might put yourself into a posture you’d never get out of. We have no data to operate on at this point as to his target; there are no probabilities. That may change; until it does I’ve decided to concentrate on the probabilities.”
    Chardy nodded.
    “So we have to wonder, Paul,” Yost continued It was a freak of optics that kept his eyes hidden behind the twin pools of light reflected in his lenses. “You’re our authority. You know them both. Is it feasible he’d approach her? To you, I mean. Does that
feel
right? And if so, how would she react? And finally, would she cooperate with
us?
Or, more to the point, with
you?”
    Miles spoke before Chardy could form an answer.
    “She’s not an activist type, we know. She’s not affiliated with any zany political group, she’s not a demonstrator, a kook. She doesn’t sleep with fruity revolutionaries. She’s quiet, she’s solid—except for her head troubles. She doesn’t have a history of doing screwy things.”
    He fingered through some pages before him—Johanna’s dossier, probably. God, they knew so much about her, Chardy thought. The idea of this Miles’s small fingers riffling through Johanna’s life offended him. His damp hands on her picture, her documents.
    Miles smiled, showing dirty teeth.
    Who’ll save you, Johanna, from these guys?
    I will, he