"A different man," said Thomas.
"As complex and simple as that."
There was no smile on his face, not even a hint of one. Only tension and fatigue. It was five A.M. They stood, the three of them, on the edge of a small windswept landing field at the Marine Air Terminall" a small sub port of New York's La Guardia Airport. Leslie shivered slightly and pulled her coat tighter. Hammond dropped a half-smoked cigarette, muttered something about having to quit sometime soon, and extinguished the butt with a toe. They watched a small plane belonging to the United States Treasury Department, taxiing slowly toward their end of the runway. It had been fueled, a pilot had been hauled out of bed. The craft was ready.
Hammond motioned with his head toward the small plane, the door to which had opened.
"We're ready," he said.
They walked toward the airplane. Leslie boarded first. Hammond and Daniels stood before the steps to the plane. Hammond reached into his coat and pulled from it a small thirty-eight caliber pistol.
"Know how to' use one of these?" he asked.
"Unfortunately, yes' "Take it."
"Will I need it?"
"I doubt it" "Then I don't want it" Hammond slid it into Thomas's coat pocket.
"Keep it as a good luck charm. I'll catch hell in Washington if you go along and I don't equip you with something' "What about you? It's your profession' "I'm protected," Hammond said simply. He was. He wore an identical small handgun on his belt. And within the plane, should it be needed, a specially equipped long-range rifle, disassembled and in its case.
Minutes later, the plane was airborne.
Gradually, his entire life made sense. Thomas understood the man his father had wanted him to become.
As the coastline of the northeast unraveled with infrequent yellow lights below the window of the airplane, Thomas was lost in thought. He had the disquieting sense of having never known his father at all. It was as if he'd spent his life standing too close to a mural, never having stepped back to gain the proper perspective.
The image of the saint in the iron coffin, the one in the church at North Fenwick in Devonshire, appeared before him. The iron image of the man on the outside, the shell presented for the world to see. But within? The soul of an entirely different inner man. And what eyes could see that, obscured as it was by a lead mask and illusory image?
Illusion, never reality, he thought. Distance, never scrutiny. An interior of betrayal and treason, disguised by an iron mask of patriotism.
Thomas understood that his father had never done anything without a reason, other than perhaps being born and dying. subject to (Thomas examined those events, too; everything was question now.) Equally he understood what sort of a man his father had tried to create in his only son. Tried and failed.
The private schools, the mingling with the very rich, the exposure to the criminal dregs of capitalistic American society, the blood sports, the guise of an extreme right-wing father, the easing into the legal profession, the engendered reaction to white-collar criminals, and the inheriting of a law office with no further criminal clients to represent. It was as if every image of greed, every exposure to opulence, every suggestion of inequality and unlawfulness, had all been carefully Lyeared to create a reaction in Thomas Daniels. A reaction left war sympathy (overt? covert? Thomas could choose) to the destruction of the American system. Sympathy to the beliefs of the father, whether or not those true beliefs were ever known to the son.
Thomas saw the sky brightening in the east. The sky had an illuminated glow, though not yet light, the grayish-blue brightness before dawn.
He looked around the airplane. The pilot was steady at the controls, smoking a cigarette and appearing in charge. Every once in a while the airplane would buffet slightly.
Hammond was wide awake, on edge, an exhausted man with worn nerves and a winding-down body. Too tired to sleep, too sleepy to converse. He was probably thinking of his wife, of his retirement, of the so-called sunset years that would follow. Would he approach them with enthusiasm or fear? Thomas wondered. He studied Hammond in the darkness. He was a tired man, the sort of man who makes mistakes -unthinking and expensive mistakes.
Could Hammond pull a trigger if he had to? Could he pull one fast enough? Or did he carry a weapon simply to inflate his fading courage?
Thomas's eyes moved a quarter inch. He saw Leslie.
She was reclining in her seat, as motionless as the death that had long been intended for her. Leslie McAdam, he thought, turning over the sound of her name in his mind. Trapped in a world of terror and duplicity, locked into an identity which was hers but wasn't hers. Gifted with the paternal talents of the artist, damned to the vengeance of the bogus father. Unwilling to use her real name of Sandler, unable to advertise the name of McAdam. A life on the run, jumping from shadows, until protection could be purchased from a bunch of sleazy white-collar headhunters in Washington.
Sell us your soul, theyd told her. Help us kill. We'll give you your own life in return. Thomas weighed the exchange. He probably would have made the same decision himself. What are ethics when your life is at stake? Crucify your ethics on a cross of expediency.
Why not?
He thought of his father, the man living a lifetime of illusion and deception. In retrospect, it seemed so clear. So obvious. Why had no one ever seen it? ' A committed Marxist, probably from boyhood.
Growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, racism and ethnicism and @ inequity all around him. The sweatshops. The Depression.
Educating himself in the Public Library as a teenager. Scrounging admittance to City College, where the brilliant radical thinking would hone his scalpel of a mind. Somewhere there he'd been recruited.
Somewhere then he'd turned into a spy. Was it a Calling he had sought for himself or was he, like a priest, Chosen?
It must have happened early, thought Thomas. Sometime in his father's nineteenth year. As a freshman. Thereafter the guise started. The guise of the self-made right-wing zealot, the criminal lawyer. seeking to bilk the legal structure for all it was worth, at the same time undermining it; sending despicable wealthy capitalists off to combat Nazism in Germany, then cashing them in, arranging for their slaughter, and introducing a master spy as a replacement.
The master spy who inhabited the identity of Arthur Sandler, then leaped, like a possessing demon, into the identity of Adolph Zenger.
"The ruthless bastard," Thomas caught himself thinking, conjuring up the image of his father, tousle-haired, center stage in the courtroom, cunning, arrogant, shrewd, brilliant as ever. An image that lived in Thomas's mind, an image of the father whose blood flowed in Thomas's veins. Yet could Thomas indict him for his principles, for believing so fervently in a system other than what Thomas believed in? The real failure of the father, Thomas realized, was within a force that no man could control.
The force of nature and human character. The father was an extremist, the son a man of moderation. No lifelong ruses, no connivances, no deceptions or calculations could in the end swerve Thomas Daniels. He was a man of the sane center, or at least liked to think he was. So now he was in an airplane with dawn breaking over Rhode Island, on his way to undo-or end-what his father had spent a lifetime helping to construct.
The pilot threw a switch in the cabin. Soft lights flickered on above the heads of Hammond, Leslie, and Thomas.
The pilot spoke to them.
"Better be waking up" he said; 'we'll be setting down in another twenty minutes' Leslie came quickly to consciousness. Hammond had already been awake and jittery. Daniels yawned. Good advice from the pilot, he reasoned. An airplane should always have as many safe landings as takeoffs.
They touched down a few minutes before dawn on the southern coast of Nantucket Island. By prearrangement an empty, unmarked Massachusetts State Police car had been left for them at the airfield.
The keys were in the backseat ashtray.
Hammond tossed the rifle and its carrying case into the rear seat.
Leslie joined it. Thomas, after a moment's hesitation, sat in the front with Hammond.
"Know the way, huh?" asked Hammond.
"Let's hear it.
Thomas began to direct them. Halfway through the ride, he became again aware of the loaded pistol, safety catch in place, which Hammond had given him.
Two images flashed before him.
He thought of Leslie whirling, pistol in hand, in the basement of the Sandler mansion, a finger squeeze away from killing an innocent man by accident. And then that image was replaced by a separate vision, one resurrected from longer ago. In a forest in Pennsylvania, Thomas stood, rifle in hand, watching a struggling deer coughing blood and trying to flee though a shoulder had been shattered by Thomas's bullet.
He remembered the terror in the animal's eyes, the blood it had coughed, and his father's hand on the rifle, prohibiting Thomas from firing a merciful second bullet.
"Let the blood flow," Daniels, Senior, had said.
"That's the way of nature " His father had owned a deer rifle with an American flag carved on its stock.
Leslie leaned forward to Thomas and spoke.
"I was meaning to ask you.. " she said.
"How did you have the nerve to bring Whiteside face to face with me' – "There was no nerve at all," he admitted, She was perplexed.
"But he was insisting I was an impostor. Suppose he continued to claim-" He was already shaking his head.
"I went on the assumption that he and Hunter were who they said they were" Thomas explained.
"And by that time I knew you probably were, too."
"How?"
"You appeared for all the world to be an elaborate hoax," he said.
"There's no way I couldn't have drawn that conclusion."
"And so?"
He motioned to Hammond, bleary-eyed and steering the car.
"Then you didn't have me shot, despite the fact that you'd already shot someone that same day."
"What did that prove?"
"Maybe nothing. But I figured an impostor would have had me killed. I knew too much" She leaned back in her seat, thinking.
"Clever," she said.
"Call it a lucky guess' he conceded.
"I was still pretty nervous" Dawn was breaking. @'re almost there," he said to Hammond.