The Paris Betrayal by James Hannibal (the dot read aloud .txt) 📗

Ben’s eyes snapped open. The empty room broke his heart. Night had fallen.

Passing in and out of consciousness wouldn’t do. He considered the kick.

“This will wake you up,” Tess had told him when she explained how it worked. “You’ll feel like a new man—aware and capable. But the crash will come soon and come hard. It’s one of the drawbacks. The kick is the ultimate gateway drug. Instant addiction, and nothing will ever satisfy the need. You’ll want it the rest of your life. For you, that won’t be long. If you take this in the latter stage of your disease, the crash alone might kill you.”

Maybe he should start with some coffee.

He made a pot, drank two cups, and poured a third before checking the clock by the bed.

Ten o’clock. Time to go.

He’d set the meeting for eleven p.m., long after closing time at Arlington National Cemetery. Ben took the Metro from Vienna/Fairfax Station, and the smattering of passengers traveling at that late hour parted wherever he walked. At the first stop, Dunn Loring, a young woman boarded with a sleeping baby. She hugged the child to her chest and hurried past Ben to the back of the car. He didn’t blame her.

At West Falls Church, a small crowd of students got on, groups and pairs returning to Marymount University from Fairfax’s restaurants and bars. Most had the same reaction as the woman with the baby. But one girl lingered despite the urgings of a friend. Small. Korean, if Ben could guess by the urgent whispers of the girl tugging at her elbow.

The one who’d lingered responded to her friend in an even tone and gently pulled her arm free. She carried a cane but never let it touch the car floor as she crossed the aisle and took the seat next to Ben—on his right, not his good side. No hood could hide the blotches there.

He turned his face away lest he frighten her and make her regret her choice, masking the move by pretending to sip from his paper coffee cup.

The doors closed. The car moved on in silence, and another stop went by. More students boarded, murmuring to each other and avoiding Ben to join the growing crowd at the car’s rear. After a while, curiosity got the better of him. “You’re not scared?” he asked his seatmate in a rasp. He hardly recognized his own voice.

“My friend says I should be. But she worries too much. Most people do.” The girl didn’t turn her head when she spoke. Her gaze remained level, unfixed.

Ben risked a closer look.

“Yes. It’s true. You’re sitting next to a blind woman. So now, are you scared?”

He laughed, descending into a coughing fit, and buried his head in his arm. “I’m sorry.”

“No problem. I’ve already had the virus.”

“Different disease.”

“Drug addiction? This is what my friend Seo-yun assumed.”

“No.” Ben shook his head, as if she could see him in their reflections in the car window. “I didn’t do this to myself.”

“Thus, the opposite must be true, or so your tone implies. This was done to you. An injustice.”

He faced her directly. She couldn’t see his Day of the Dead mask anyway. “You sound like a philosophy major. At Rice, I used to hate talking to the philosophy majors.”

“Psychology.”

“Even better. Are you charging me for this talk?”

“Not tonight. The first hour is free.”

Ben managed a smile. He liked this young woman. In a different time, he might have tried to recruit her for the Company.

She didn’t let up. The girl planted her cane on the floor and rested her small arms on the head. “Back to you . . .”

“Ben.”

“Thank you. And I’m Ha-eun. Please, Ben, tell me more about this injustice you suffered.”

He opened his mouth, then shut it again. Ben’s woes, substantial as they were, faded in the serene face of a blind girl. “How did you lose your sight?”

“A birth defect. I’ve never known a sunset except for the coolness in the air when the light is gone. I’ve never seen the leaves change in fall. Those things are abstract to me.”

“And isn’t that an . . . an injustice, as you say? Don’t you deserve better?”

“What, truly, do any of us deserve?” She laid three fingers on his knee.

A simple touch, a gesture to emphasize her words, but Ben had not imagined anyone ever touching him again. Not even Tess had been willing to touch him.

“I battled anger for many years,” Ha-eun said. “I raged against the injustice of my life, until finally my mother begged me to stop. I will tell you what she told me. Stop asking what you deserve, Ben. Try asking, ‘What is my purpose?’”

Ben waited, but she didn’t continue. And despite the danger, death, and nation-ending threat that should have dominated his thoughts, he found himself pushing her to go on for fear they might reach her stop before she gave him the answer. “So, what is your purpose, Ha-eun?”

“I don’t know yet. But I keep busy by seeking that purpose each day. For instance, tonight I think my purpose is to sit beside a wronged man on a train.”

A robotic voice announced their arrival at Ballston-MU Station, and the car slowed to a stop. Ha-eun pushed herself up with the cane and felt for Ben’s hood. Tentatively, he guided her hand, and she peeled the hood back to rest her delicate fingers in his hair.

“Be well, Ben,” she said, then joined her friends and left.

67

No thief or spy ever broke into Arlington National Cemetery. There’d never been a need. The walls were too low. Ben tossed his paper cup at a street receptacle and stepped over an eighteen-inch stone barrier, then wandered southwest into the graves. He knew the place well. He’d buried two friends there, men whose military service was a matter of public record. Their Company service—not so much.

He passed the fourteen-foot Greek obelisk memorializing Howard Taft and passed JFK’s giant circle. Neither of his friends’ graves was