The Lie Read Free

dark-haired little boy. More
     pictures followed of the same boy grown older. And older still. Until he evolved into a tall, lean, striking young man with
     dark, deep-set eyes and a haunting stare. He still had the same determined solemnity, as if not even the camera could coax
     him into the faintest of smiles.
    On a wall beside the photographs hung a strongly brushed oil painting of the same young man. It evidently was a self-portrait
     since he was shown holding a palette and brushes. Scrawled in English across the bottom of the canvas was an inscription:
For Mom and Dad—with love—Paulie
.
    I’ve orphaned him
, Kate realized.
    So he was an artist, as his father apparently had been.
    A large, skylighted studio offered plenty of evidence. Canvases were scattered everywhere. Inasmuch as it was Peter Walters’s
     studio, almost all the paintings were his. But a few were signed by his son, Paulie. Once Kate noticed the first of these,
     the others stabbed at her.
    How many of this Paulie’s paintings were there? Three? Five? Seven? It didn’t matter. The message remained the same.
    Life was better than death, and peace was better than war
.
    Yet death watched. So if you had a moment of joy, it wasbetter to conceal it. When your heart beat loudly with hope, you kept that as quiet as possible also.
    Curiously, although they were all war paintings, not a single dead body was visible in any of them. Yet it made a rare kind
     of sense. War was over for the dead. It existed only in the faces of the living, which was where Paulie Walters had looked
     for it—in the eyes and mouths of those in trouble, in the way flesh acted in grief and pain and shock. He had looked for it
     too, in the wounded reaching for each other, or giving comfort with the terrible tenderness people can show in the darkest
     places. He had found it even in those odd moments of laughter, in the rare joy that is the underside of the deepest anguish.
    Kate was stunned.
    How had someone so young learned so much?
    No wonder he looked so solemn.
    Kate Dinneson went back and stood once more in front of Paulie Walters’s unsmiling self-portrait. For several long moments
     she felt herself at the absolute center of his thoughts.
    I’m sorry about what I did to you here tonight
, Kate told him.
If I could change it, I would
.
    She finally left his parents’ house shortly before dawn.

Chapter 2
    P AULIE W ALTERS WAS FOLLOWING a Serbian army staff car through mountains that had once been part of greater Yugoslavia, but whose current ownership was
     much less certain. He had been tailing the car for almost three hours, ever since it had left the military barracks in Banja
     Luka at two-thirty that morning. He was waiting for it to make its first rest stop.
    Only one road ran through this part of the mountains, which allowed Paulie to maintain a good, safe tailing distance of close
     to two kilometers. Also, he had the added advantage of knowing exactly where the staff car was going. This in itself let him
     feel relaxed enough to watch the sky beginning to lighten in the east.
    It was beautiful country even in the dark, with a deep blue haze over the summits, and the shadows falling to purple between
     some of the lower pine-covered slopes. Normally, Paulie Walters would have been enjoying the purity of the air while imagining
     how he would paint what he saw. He called it mind-painting, something his father had taught him when he was five years old.
     But right now his thoughts were on more pressing things.
    At best, the operation was risky, delicately balanced. Orders had come straight from the top out of Langley, Virginia, and
     once Tommy Cortlandt himself was involved, Paulie never argued or tried to second-guess him. In a line of work where trust
     and honesty were in depressingly short supply, he had never known the director to disappoint. Still, given achoice, this was one job Paulie would have been just as happy to pass on.
    His orders were to either