The Names of the Dead Read online

  In the light of that, meeting Patrice for drinks in two years was little more than a dream. And Leclerc really had no need to worry about how Wes might adapt to life outside. The radio silence said it all—Wes’s time was already up.

  “I had a session with Leclerc yesterday.”

  “And?”

  “He seems more interested in getting information out of me than offering any kind of help.”

  “Yes!” Wes had apparently expressed something that had been niggling at Patrice. “In the group this morning, he asked me to talk about my crimes, again and again.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him the Lord knows what I’ve done, and I reminded him that there will be rejoicing among the angels in heaven for this one sinner who repents.”

  Wes could imagine Leclerc’s response to that.

  “He asked me if I thought I’d been set up, betrayed by one of my own people.”

  Patrice said, “Did you tell him about the Garvey man?”

  Wes smiled. Patrice pronounced “the Garvey man” as if he were a frightening character from a children’s story, a far cry from the dull and dependable face Sam had actually presented to the world.

  “I think Dr. Leclerc’s a Freudian—I’m not sure how well he’d respond to me saying I believe the best man at my wedding set out to ruin my life.”

  “You chose your friend badly, that’s all. But the CIA, they chose badly too, and they still think you are bad and he is good.”

  “I guess so.”

  Patrice looked deep in thought for a moment, his brush suspended in midair, before saying, “It’s very wrong, that your government and your CIA treats you like this. You’re an honorable man, Wes, and your people should treat you with honor. They should trust and respect you.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment, Patrice. Although, I have routinely discussed Agency operations with an African war criminal.”

  Patrice laughed. He laughed easily, with the air of a man who’d already been liberated. He turned back to his canvas then and added some extra strokes of vivid yellow to the shrubbery.

  Satisfied, he said, “Look what the Lord has given us! Paradise.” But when he turned to Wes, his face had grown contemplative. “You know Pavić died?”

  “Who’s Pavić?”

  Patrice frowned. “You know him! The old man. The demon girl visits him.”

  Wes laughed now, knowing who he was talking about. He was a Croatian war criminal but Wes had only ever known him as “the General” because that was how the guards always addressed him. The girl was presumably General Pavić’s daughter and Wes understood why Patrice thought of her as a demon, because she was painfully thin, with pale skin and unsettlingly dark eyes and white-blond hair.

  “I didn’t really know him.”

  “He was a good man.”

  Relatively speaking, thought Wes. Pavić, Patrice, and a few of the others, they were all good men in their own way, in each other’s eyes at least, but they were all in here for doing horrific things—in the case of Pavić, that had included ethnic cleansing and the execution of prisoners, many of them civilians, many of them boys. Wes had done some pretty bad things too, but at least they’d been done for the right reasons, or what had seemed right at the time, anyway.

  A door opened on the far side of the garden and Enzo, one of the guards, came out and started toward them, looking grim-faced. They both watched his approach, and then without being sure why, Wes started to clean his brush, sensing that his painting was over for the day.

  Sure enough, as he got closer, Enzo looked at Wes and offered a sad regretful little smile.

  “I’m sorry to disturb your painting, but, Wes, the Director needs to speak with you.”

  “Sure. He say what it’s about?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  He was lying, and Wes guessed that meant it was bad news from home that Enzo didn’t want to break to him. Someone close had died, maybe one of his parents. Someone close. Someone close who, like his government, hadn’t talked to him or contacted him in three years.

  Four

  Enzo couldn’t wait to make his escape once they reached Monsieur Dupont’s modernist office with its wall of glass looking out over the neighboring forest. For his part, Dupont welcomed Wes like a priest greeting a parishioner in crisis.

  “Wes, thank you for coming. Please, sit down. Can I get you a drink?”

  “I’m good, thanks, Monsieur Dupont.”

  He remained standing, too, but as Dupont took his own place behind his sleek wooden desk he gestured again to the chair, an entreaty rather than a command, as if it mattered to him that Wes be seated for what he was about to say.

  Wes sat and Dupont nodded sadly and said, “I have some terrible news. You heard about the terrorist attack in Spain yesterday.”

  Wes nodded through his confusion. He’d prepared himself for news from home, that one of his parents had died, or even one of his sisters, but the mention of Spain had thrown him off balance. Unless one of them had been on vacation . . .

  “I saw it on the news, but what does it have to do with me?”

  “It’s best for me to tell you outright. Your wife—rather, your ex-wife—she was among the dead.” Dupont looked down at a piece of paper in front of him. “Rachel. Rachel Richards. I imagine she changed her name again.”

  Rachel Richards. His ex-wife. Dead. These words made no sense; they seemed to refer to something unreal, something imagined or only vaguely remembered.

  They’d married just nine months after she’d walked into his office in Mardin. Wes and Rachel had viewed it as whirlwind, others as hasty, and the low-key wedding had managed to alienate both families to some degree. They’d been married only a year before Wes’s arrest. She’d initiated divorce proceedings immediately following his conviction and he hadn’t contested it.

  It was no time at all really, no lifelong romance, no world of common experience. They had liked each other for a long time, loved each other passionately for what now seemed a few sun-scorched weeks, and then it had ended. It already felt a lifetime ago, prison years being like dog years.

  He had disciplined himself to put any love for her aside, to accept that he would never see her again, that she had stopped loving him. But he knew that he’d also carried something else within—a time capsule of other feelings and fanciful hopes, something that should have stayed buried for at least another two years.

  The dislocation of having that time capsule cracked open now was too much. He no longer felt attached to his own body, as if his physical remains were dissolving into the plush chair. And he could hear Dupont’s soothing voice, but as if through water, the words muffled and unformed.

  And then, in a jarring moment of clarity, he heard Dupont say, “Wes? Are you sure you wouldn’t like that drink?”

  “She kept her name.”

  “What?”

  “She didn’t change it back, she never changed it in the first place.”

  Dupont nodded, but then stood and crossed the room with a look of concern, and Wes wondered how long the Director had kept talking before Wes’s response, how much of the crucial detail he’d missed. Was it even crucial? Rachel was dead—there was no more to it than that. He’d always thought he would die first.

  Dupont placed a glass in front of him. Brandy. Dupont had one himself and drank most of it in one gulp as soon as he sat down. Wes leaned forward and picked up the glass, following suit. It burned his throat and made him feel instantly heady, the first alcohol he’d touched in three years.

  “It’s terrible, of course. She was on vacation. And the boy—”

  “What boy?”

  “I just told you. I thought you seemed confused—I should’ve waited.” He looked angry with himself. “It’s not just your wife, Wes. Your son is missing too. They can’t say for certain yet, but naturally, they fear . . .”

  Instantly, Wes was fully present again, his senses sharpened, his thoughts cutting throug
h what he’d been told.

  “How certain are they that it’s Rachel?”

  “Er, I . . .” Dupont moved the piece of paper on his desk as if that might help him. “I’m giving you only the information I was given by the US authorities. They’re certain, I think. And your son . . .” He let the words fall away, apparently still nervous about how Wes was taking this piece of news, or fearful it wasn’t sinking in at all.

  “I don’t have a son, Monsieur Dupont. Surely it’s in my file. I don’t have any children. Rachel and I, we were trying for a while, but . . . we didn’t have a child.”

  “But . . .” Dupont looked down at the piece of paper again, then picked up the glass and drained the rest of his brandy. He pointed at the facts printed in front of him. “She was traveling with her son. They stayed in Madrid with a former colleague who works in the US embassy there, then they went off to tour southern Spain, your wife and your . . . It names you here as the father.”

  “No. She would have told me. If Rachel had a son, she must have met someone else after I came here. That’s the only explanation.” Wes felt stung by the prospect, and angry with himself for feeling stung—she’d desperately wanted a child and five years would have been too long, even if there had been any hope of them getting back together. Dupont nodded without any certainty, and Wes said, “How old was he?”

  Dupont looked at the paper again, though Wes got the impression he knew the answer already.

  “Two and a half years.”

  “Oh.”

  It was the worst answer when it should have been the best. They’d gone away for a week, once he’d known the arrest was coming—a week on the Turkish coast in which they’d been precipitously, impatiently happy. Could this child have been the result of that week, a child who was now dead, who he’d never known?

  He reached forward and finished his brandy.

  Dupont got up and fetched the bottle, pouring them each another hefty measure. Wes didn’t know how he was meant to respond except with numbness. Even Rachel had come to feel unreal to him, so how was he meant to grieve for a child so intangible?

  “He could be mine then. But he’s dead.”

  “Missing.”

  “Unidentified isn’t the same as missing, Monsieur Dupont. People don’t go missing in suicide bombings.”

  Dupont appeared to acknowledge the point but looked preoccupied and sounded hesitant as he said, “I didn’t hear this from the American authorities. I heard it from my brother-in-law who . . . well, who would know more than you or me. The scene is still very confusing—it’s only twenty-four hours. At first they believed they had found the body of your son, near to your wife, but it wasn’t him. And it seems so far that there are no more small children among the dead.”

  Wes felt a sickly nervous energy pulse through his body.

  “So maybe he wasn’t with her.”

  “I don’t want to build your hope. It is, still, a very confusing picture. And it seems too unlikely—no?—that your wife would be on vacation with her son but not have him there with her when . . . Well, you understand.”

  He’d just found out Rachel was dead, that maybe he’d had a son, that maybe his son was also dead or, if not, missing in some mysterious way. So the simple answer was no, he didn’t understand. He didn’t want to hope, either.

  Why had Rachel never told him? And why couldn’t his own government do the bare minimum and send someone from the State Department to tell him face to face? Even without answers, those two questions seemed to sum up the totality of his abandonment.

  When Wes said no more, Dupont shrugged and said, “Er, it may take a few days, a week, but there are plans to bring forward your release, on humanitarian grounds. Technically you’re no longer next of kin, so officially you have no part to play in proceedings, but naturally—”

  “No longer her next of kin. But if the boy’s mine, I’d say I have a pretty good case for being his.”

  “Of course. I don’t know the legal situation, but under law, the father must retain some rights.”

  “Do you have the name of the friend she was visiting in Madrid?”

  Dupont shook his head regretfully. “You know how your government is. They keep such a tight lid on everything.”

  That was true enough, and a stark reminder of what an early release would really mean for Wes, that he would simply be bringing forward the day of his own reckoning. He’d long accepted that Sam Garvey would try to kill him as soon as he got out, but it was unnerving to see that moment suddenly accelerating toward him.

  It didn’t help that the world had shifted beneath him. He’d always been relaxed about what might happen to him, and one of his few reasons for wanting to stay alive had been erased in the last few minutes. But it wasn’t just about Rachel anymore, or even about Wes himself.

  He could feel that sickly tingling still in his blood, of nervous anticipation and fear and emotions he couldn’t even put a name to. There was a boy, dead or missing. Rachel’s son, maybe his. There was a boy, and it was still too much of a revelation for Wes to understand exactly what that meant.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My son, what’s my son’s name?”

  Dupont glanced at the paper again. “Ethan. Ethan Richards.”

  “That was her father’s name.”

  And Wes stood, urgently, even though he had nowhere to go—as he’d said to Patrice, the fence was everything, and he felt that more than ever now.

  “I need to find out, Monsieur Dupont. I need . . .”

  “I understand. I’ll do everything I can to get answers for you.”

  Wes nodded.

  “Can I leave now?”

  “Of course, Wes.”

  Dupont waved his hand toward the office door, and in his eyes was an acknowledgment that, in some way or another, Wes had already gone.

  Five

  Wes went back to his own room first, his mind working through next moves, even as a stubborn background voice kept reminding him that there probably wouldn’t be any next moves, that staying alive long enough to find the truth would be tough.

  But that didn’t mean he couldn’t try. He’d had a shock, and this was the only way he knew how to deal with it, by turning it into a problem that needed to be solved. He had to stay alive and he had to find out where his son was. If he thought about it like that, it was no different to any field operation.

  If he could get the name of the friend in Madrid, he could pay a visit and ask him or her. Except visiting an embassy official in Madrid wouldn’t be easy either, and with a flash of resentment, he thought of this unknown friend of Rachel’s, who knew more about his own son than he did. Rachel had been so desperate for a child, but Wes had wanted it too, and she’d known that.

  He counted off three twenty-euro notes, then considered what might be the best approach and added another two. He went to Raphael’s room and found him playing some crazy computer game.

  Raphael paused it and only then looked to see who was standing in his doorway.

  “Oh—hi, Wes.” He was in his mid-twenties but looked about sixteen—his skin was so smooth that Wes wasn’t convinced he even shaved yet, and in most prisons he would have had a hard time, but here everyone seemed to leave him alone, not least because he was the go-to person for fixing tech. “Problem?”

  “Kind of. I wondered if you could get me a list of everyone who works at the American embassy in Madrid. I know that’s a lot of people, but I need it.”

  Raphael became immediately animated, a response so deeply ingrained in his character that his eyes continued to dance even as he frowned and bit his lip.

  “I don’t know, man, I . . . You know, they’re trying to extradite me already. If I got caught doing this, I mean . . .”

  The kid was right. He was here for hacking into the websites of the CIA, FBI, NSA, and IRS, the latter being the one that had probably upset them most. Europe’s human rights laws were protecting him for
now, but if he did get extradited to the US he’d spend the rest of his life in the kind of prison that would show this one up for the summer camp it was.

  Wes held out the money.

  “So don’t get caught.” Raphael looked at the money in Wes’s hand. “It’s a hundred euros. I need this, Raphael, I wouldn’t ask you otherwise.”

  “Okay. How soon do you need it?”

  “They’re letting me out early, maybe within a week, so I’d want it by then.”

  Raphael was calculating now, maybe seeing a way of doing this for Wes without worsening his own position.

  “So, I think I can help. Before you leave, I’ll give you a Gmail address and a password. I’ll send the information to that address. But it’s better . . . it’s better for me if you don’t access it until you leave.”

  Wes thought of asking him to search for the whereabouts of Sam Garvey, too, but he realized he’d be confusing two issues if he did that. All he really had to do was stay out of Sam’s way long enough to find out what had happened to his son.

  His son. The strangeness of it kept washing over him in shallow waves.

  Wes put the money down on the desk and shook Raphael’s hand, then walked out into the garden where Patrice was just packing up. He stopped and looked as Wes approached.

  “That explosion in Spain yesterday . . . My ex-wife was one of the people killed.”

  Patrice made a sign of the cross and said, “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “Thanks. But there’s an added complication.”

  “Then let’s walk and talk.”

  Wes nodded and they left their easels behind, sauntering around the grounds as he recounted the conversation with Dupont. Despite the crimes Patrice had witnessed and perpetrated in his life, he seemed particularly disturbed by the possibility of Wes’s son being missing, and angered on his behalf that he was only finding out about the boy now, when maybe it was already too late.