The Devil's Light Read Free

crossed a rivulet still swollen with late-spring rains. Leaning on the railing, they watched the ridgelines as they softened in the light of early evening, two men at peace. At length, Grey asked, “So how is the Outfit now? For you, I mean.”
    â€œYou know how it is,” Brooke said flatly. “Maybe getting burned in Beirut wasn’t a career killer. But being chained to a desk job makes me feel like the living dead. I still perceive everything around me, but can no longer speak or move.”
    His mentor glanced at him sideways. “They’re keeping you safe. Though perhaps in the minds of some, you’re serving a stretch in purgatory for the sin of being right.”
    Brooke shrugged. “Better than getting killed, I’m sure. What a joke of a death that would have been, taken out by a couple of amateurs from al Qaeda because my idiot station chief couldn’t tell a double agent from his own unfaithful wife.”
    Grey laughed softly. “You don’t get out of life alive. You were hoping to die for a reason?”
    â€œEveryone dies for a reason. I was hoping for a better one.”
    â€œAt least you helped the Lebanese break up an al Qaeda cell.”
    â€œI could have done more,” Brooke objected. “When Lorber butted in, there was still work to do.”
    Grey gazed out at the ridges and valleys. “Dangerous work. Thanks to Lorber’s blunder, you’re more likely to die in bed at the age of ninety-five. The question becomes how you kill the time between now and then.”
    â€œNot this way. Serving as a bureaucrat erodes my sense of purpose. I’ve taken to reading analysts’ reports on al Qaeda just to sate my curiosity.”
    â€œWhich is a good thing,” Grey opined. “You need curiosity, and you need to care about the work. Have you thought about becoming an analyst?”
    Brooke shook his head. “I’m a field officer by nature. As long as I’m with the agency I want to serve where it matters. I’ve been stuck here too long.”
    â€œGranted.” Grey eyed him more closely. “But I heard another element just now—‘as long as I’m with the agency.’”
    Brooke fell quiet for a time. “I’ve started questioning my life,” heacknowledged. “I’ve always accepted that foreign postings made relationships harder. So does deception. Not that I minded lying to foreigners—that’s what we’re supposed to do. But now I’m telling Mickey Mouse lies to neighbors, the women I meet, and friends who’ve spent years believing they still know me. Even my parents think I’ve got some desk job at the State Department.”
    â€œYou’re allowed to tell your parents, Brooke.”
    â€œAnd horrify my mother? She’d probably leak my identity to the New York Times
. ” Brooke paused, then added with resignation, “Feeling distant from my parents is nothing new. But sometimes I visit my friends from graduate school—with sharp wives, and little kids they like—and I want a family of my own.”
    â€œAnne told me you were seeing someone. A lawyer, wasn’t it?”
    â€œWe’ve broken up. Erin was no fool—she’d started calling me ‘elusive.’ I had to decide whether we were worth breaking cover for, and concluded we weren’t.” Brooke smiled a little. “Besides, it takes a special woman to help you live a lie. Which is why, in my expert opinion, Bernie Madoff never told his wife he was a crook.”
    â€œMaybe Madoff just liked lying,” Grey parried. “I grant you I was lucky in Anne. The life imposes a certain solitude. Further complicated, in field officers, by the rules against romantic entanglements with foreign nationals.”
    Brooke raised his eyebrows. “I got entangled once or twice in Lebanon—it deepened my cover. But that’s all it was.”
    â€œYou’re