Free Escape the Night by Richard North Patterson

felt pain becoming anger.
    His deep absorption in the Careys had not yet filled the emptiness inside him: he wished to be the unseen hand, felt but not discerned, that would make Phillip Carey’s future different from his past.
    Remembering the notes of Phillip’s fantasies, stolen from his analyst, his flesh tingled with their closeness.
    The Careys were his secret life. For four years, he had done the flagging work of HUAC, returning at night to the reports and photographs and soft, taped voices of his borrowed family, to love and hate and take pride and pity, safe behind a screen. He did not find this odd: he knew that most men were at heart voyeurs, who felt seeing women’s bodies in a magazine the same quick, guilty thrill of peering through a window. He simply had what his solitude made him need: a place inside the window, where voices could be heard.
    The voice he heard was Phillip Carey’s.
    With Phillip, he had delighted in Charles’s departure: the public lessening of HUAC’s interest in the firm had been his private signal to John Carey that this son was better gone. Now he let his presence show only in the men who still watched Charles, to mark him a pariah. But his secret bugs and wiretaps remained: he watched John Carey’s love for Peter grow, heard the murmured telephone calls that signaled Charles’s adulteries, felt the doubt and loneliness that haunted Phillip’s days and nights, increased by the women he could never love.
    Like Phillip, he did not know the contents of John Carey’s will.
    John Carey spoke of it to no one.
    Now, as the old man had predicted, HUAC’s strength was fading fast: two months prior to this night, the Committee’s Chief Counsel had suggested closing “some of our more tired inquiries …”
    Atop the list was Charles Carey.
    Englehardt stalled for time; his response was tortured and cerebral: he knew that he could not reach Charles Carey through his politics. Only in his personal life, as the father of a son he loved too much to abandon his brittle wife, did Charles show true weakness.
    Englehardt felt his own weakness growing with each night.
    The Chief Counsel had given him five more months to complete the Carey file.
    Part of him knew, even as he felt the pain of separation, that this was a necessity. The Careys were too seductive and yet too distant from his true career; it was time to find a patron much more permanent and powerful than this farce of a Committee. He would close accounts with Charles, leaving Phillip to his prize of power, to seek his own.
    But he recognized, on the tape which had just ended, that Charles Carey was moving closer to his father, just as this sweet, secret time of listening was drawing to a close.
    Without much hope, he picked up the reports that had accompanied the tapes.
    As always, they were neatly typed, a written schedule of Charles’s life. But once more their gloss was fool’s gold, reflecting nothing but a father’s love for a small blond boy with a name too weighty for him to shoulder: John Peter Carey, the second …
    Angrily, he flipped its pages.
    The last page stopped him with a jolt.
    As if rising from the printed word, Charles Carey turned in the doorway of the apartment building belonging to the slim, dark woman, Ruth, and kissed her.
    Suddenly, Englehardt knew from months of listening to their conversations, knew before Charles Carey did, that Ruth Levy would be different. And, as he did, he saw at once that he might use this latest woman against Charles, in the way he would feel most deeply: to ensure that his father’s favor, and thus his will, would settle on the younger son.
    His means would be Peter Carey—the price of an adultery too humiliating for his mother to ignore.
    All he needed were a few final months: enough time for Charles Carey to fall in love.
    After that first night together, Charles began returning often, to be with Ruth.
    She had a