Most of the time it’s ugly and messy, and you never forget. The faces fade, so do the places and circumstances, but the act—the deed itself—sticks with you. If you’re not ready to deal with that, it can eat you up.”
Jack took a deep breath, eyes on the floor. Was he ready? He could sense the truth of what Clark was saying, but at this point it was an abstract. He knew none of it was like the movies, or in novels, but knowing what something was not like was useless, kind of like describing the color red by saying it didn’t look like blue. No point of reference—or almost no point of reference, he reminded himself. There’d been MoHa.
As if reading his mind, Clark said, “And make no mistake: MoHa was an aberration, Jack. You fell into that, didn’t have a chance to think about it, and you were sure the guy was bad. It’s not always that cut-and-dried. In fact, it’s rarely that way. You have to get comfortable with uncertainty. Can you do that?”
“To tell you the truth, John, I don’t know. I can’t give you an answer. I know that’s not the right answer, but—”
“Actually, that’s exactly the right answer.”
“Huh?”
“When I was going through the entry process into BUD/s—Basic Underwater Demolition School—everybody had to meet with a psychologist. I was in the lobby waiting, and a buddy of mine came out. I asked him what it was like. He said the doctor had asked him if he thought he could kill a man. My buddy, anxious to kick ass, said, ‘Hell, yes.’ When my turn came and the doctor asked me the same question, I told him I thought so but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure. One of us made it in; the other didn’t.”
I’ll be damned, Jack thought. Thinking of John Clark as some fresh-faced raw recruit rather than a godlike special operator was a hard concept to wrap your head around. Everyone started somewhere.
Clark continued, “You show me a guy who answers ‘Hell, yes’ to those kinds of questions and I’ll show you a nutcase, a liar, or someone who hasn’t given it enough thought.
“Tell you what: Ask Ding sometime. First time he had to put someone down, it’d been a near thing right up until the moment he’d pulled the trigger. He knew he could do it, and he was ninety-nine percent sure he was going to do it, but until he dropped the hammer there was still a little voice in his head.”
“And what about you?”
“The same.”
“That’s hard to believe,” Jack replied.
“Believe it.”
“So what’re you saying? I should stick to my keyboard and computer monitor?”
“That’s your choice. I just want to make sure you’re straight in your head about it. If not, you’re a danger to yourself and to everyone else.”
“Okay.”
“One more thing: I want you to think about telling your dad.”
“Jesus, are you kidding—”
“No, I’m not. I’ll keep the secret, Jack, because you’re an adult and the choice is yours, but it might be time to step out on your own, and you can’t do that while you’re still afraid to stand in front of him. Until then, you’re not your own man.”
“You don’t pull any punches, do you?”
Clark smiled at this. “I’ve been hearing that a lot lately.” He checked his watch. “Almost time to get back. Give it another day’s thought—both things. If you still want to go out, I’ll teach you what I can.”
Mary Pat’s contact at Legoland—Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service headquarters at Vauxhall Cross on the River Thames was colloquially known as either Legoland or Babylon because of its chunky, ziggurat-like architecture—had offered only one name in response to her query. Nigel Embling, she was told, was a retired old hand in the Stans and had forgotten more than most people knew about the region. Mary Pat assumed the Brits had active assets there, but whether or not Embling was one of these, she couldn’t be sure. Probably not. Her back-channel inquiry had likely made clear to her contact that she was slightly off the reservation, in which case the Brahmins at SIS wouldn’t look kindly at him handing over a genuine agent.
Of course, being armed with a contact was only half the battle. Embling was an older man and well past his fieldwork days, which meant they’d need to put someone else on the ground to do the legwork. Mary Pat didn’t have to think very hard about that one. Two names immediately came to