Читать книгу Aftermath - Lynda J. King - Страница 6

At 5:15 Holder had retrieved Major Margaret Fremont from Tempelhof, and they were on their way to the hospital. They didn’t talk much. Maggie Fremont was not one for small talk, and she especially didn’t want to make small talk with this man. A slight, dark-haired woman with sparkling blue eyes and a no-nonsense personality, Fremont had spent more than thirty of her fifty years affiliated with the US Army. For many of those years she had been one of the few female doctors in the Army.

She’d met Holder in Vietnam, fifteen years ago, when she’d operated on him after a failed mission. Since then their paths had crossed more often than she’d wished, but they did have an acceptable working relationship. She knew he was a spook and a handler, and she reckoned he was good at it because of what she considered his character flaws. Today she thought again that she glad he wasn’t HER handler.

After having heard Austin’s report on the phone a few hours earlier, she had questions for her old “friend.”

“Okay, Holder. Give me the story. Austin told me what terrible shape she’s in. How’d she get that way?”

“Need to know, Maggie. And you don’t.”

Snorting, she rejoined: “Cut the crap. It’s me you’re talking to. And I’m doing you a favor. Tell me.”

“What difference does it make?”

“I want to know, that’s what difference it makes. Stop playing games and get to the point.”

Holder shot her an unreadable look, then shrugged slightly.“All right. She was working undercover in East Germany. Someone betrayed her; we don’t know who. The Stasi arrested her and put her in Bautzen, their prison outside Berlin. We exchanged her for a Czech spy earlier today. That’s the whole story.”

Pursing her lips in cynicism, she said: “The whole story. That’s a laugh. All right, just tell me this: How long did they have her?”

“Six months.”

She gasped. “For the love of Pete! Why did it take so long? Was she that far down the list, or was it something else?”

“You mean did we leave her there on purpose? For God’s sake! Would I do that? She’s one of my best operatives.”

Fremont glared at him. “Leave God out of it, Holder. Of course you would do it. Remember, it’s me you’re talking to. But okay. I’ll accept what you’re saying for the moment. If you weren’t giving her up, why DID it take so long?”

“For the first month we didn’t even know she’d been arrested. Breakdown in communication. When she didn’t report in as scheduled, I set the wheels in motion, but things like that take time.”

Fremont harrumphed in disdain. “Right.”

“Maggie, it does take time. Then I got, well, distracted by other problems. It’s a fact of life that every operative has to accept. They are not always priority number one.”

“So while you were dithering, they were torturing her.”

“Believe me; I had no idea what they were doing to her.”

Another harrumph from Fremont.

“Look. This world of ours has its own rules. One of them is that you don’t mess with our people when they get caught, and we don’t mess with your people when they get caught. While you’re working out an exchange you don’t hurt them, at least not too badly.” He stopped when Fremont raised an eyebrow at him. “Oh, yes, of course this rule is superseded by another. If the operative is suspected of certain transgressions, they are at the mercy of the other side. But Kate was not arrested for anything major. There was no reason for them to treat her like that.” He paused. “I’m going to get to the bottom of it, you can count on that. Someone’s going to pay.”

“Who’s going to pay? Some other poor soul like Taylor, right?”

“Pour soul? Kate Taylor is no innocent,” he shot back.“She is a highly trained operative who has carried out many missions that have ended…hum…badly for the other side. It just so happened that the one they got her for was relatively innocuous.”

“Are you saying she deserved it?” Her eyes flashed at his implication.

“Shit no! But don’t confuse her with Mother Theresa. She is a dangerous, calculating soldier. As a soldier she has to accept what the battle brings her.”

“Soldiers know someone’s got their back. Did you have her back? Or is she an army of one? Remember, I’ve been a soldier for a long time. Soldiers look out for each other.”

She had found the weakness in his position, and he was annoyed. He turned to gaze out the window, pursed his lips. “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it now, is there? Except fix what they did to her.”

Fremont inhaled sharply. “Do you really think she can be ‘fixed’ as easily as that? For God’s sake, to say she’ll be scarred for life is not just a figure of speech. And she’s pregnant! Do you think the baby will just miraculously go away?”

“A bad choice of words, I admit. Maybe ‘heal’ would have been better.”

“Still wrong, Holder. Still wrong.” How long would it take this Kate Taylor to heal from what had happened to her, Fremont wondered? Would she ever heal completely? Holder was clueless, but Fremont decided it wasn’t worth arguing with him. Some of her younger female colleagues would have called him a male chauvinist pig. In this case she thought the term was too mild.