Inside Outt

call that ‘two birds with one stone.’ You have a problem mixing a little pleasure with your business?”
    “So you fucked me for business. What does that make you?”
    “But I told you, I enjoyed it, too.”
    “Good that you enjoy your work.”
    Again she said nothing.
    “There’s no other way for you, is there? You can’t do something only for yourself. Even when you try, it’s really for the people who are pulling your strings.”
    “You can think what you want.”
    “Exactly. That’s the difference between you and me.”
    “You’ll come around. Everybody does.”
    “You’re confusing me with you,” he said, shaking his head. “Look it up. It’s called projection.”
    He walked away, past the traffic, the blank-eyed buildings, the commuter zombies.
    He imagined a frog in a pot, the water getting gradually warmer, the frog never noticing any of it. He imagined people telling themselves they would never be part of something corrupt, then telling themselves they would only be part of it to make it better, then telling themselves, hey, the thing wasn’t corrupt in the first place, it was just the way of the world, they’d been naïve before and now they were savvy.
    He thought of Paula. He didn’t hate her. He almost felt sorry for her. He wondered if she’d realized what was happening to her, or if she only saw it in retrospect, after it was too late to do anything about it. Or maybe Ulrich had something on her, the way the Agency now did on him, the way all of them did on one another. It didn’t matter. At some point, she’d made a choice. Now she was part of it.
    He wondered if he was different.
    Maybe he had a way to find out.

CHAPTER 43
The Polite Thing
    T he next morning, Ben waited in another rental car outside Marcy Wheeler’s house in Kissimmee. He was nervous in a way that was weirdly different from the familiar pre-combat jitters.
    He didn’t need to be here. He knew she wasn’t really expecting to hear from him, or, if she was, that she didn’t expect the truth. But he’d said he would tell her if he could. And he sensed that somehow, if he avoided that, rationalized it away, arrogated to himself the power to shape and distort and withhold, it would make him like what he now recognized in Paula. And in Hort. Maybe he was making too much of it, but even that consideration felt like the worm of a rationalization. He thought he’d have to be vigilant about things like that. Disciplined. Alert to threats to his integrity the way he was to threats to his person.
    At just past eight o’clock, Wheeler’s front door opened, as it had a few days before. She kissed her son and watched him while he waited for the bus, then went back in the house, again with that sad look he’d noticed last time. He got out, walked over, and knocked on her door.
    When she answered, she took a step back. “Agent Froomkin,” she said. “I… I didn’t think you’d come back.”
    Ben felt a weird tightness in his chest. He could tell her anything, he realized. She’d have no choice but to believe it. Why make it hard on her? Why burden her, when she already had so much on her hands and on her mind? A little piece of fiction, a white lie, would free her from her doubts. Wouldn’t anything else just be cruel? And selfish, too, to unload on her just to prove something to himself.
    “It’s not Froomkin,” he said. “And I’m not FBI.”
    Her jaw tightened. “What are you?”
    He shook his head. “I can’t tell you that.”
    A little fear crept into her eyes. “What can you tell me?”
    “What you wanted to know. If you still want to know it.”
    She looked at him for a long time. He thought maybe she was going to tell him no, don’t tell me, it’s too much. Free him from the responsibility. Free him from the choice.
    “I want to know,” she said.
    He cleared his throat. “Your husband was having an affair.”
    She didn’t blink. She didn’t flinch. She looked at him, and he could tell without knowing how that she hated him.
    “Who was she?” she said, her tone so flat it could have been produced by a synthesizer.
    He hesitated.
    Just fucking say it.
“It wasn’t a she.”
    Her pupils dilated. He could feel her sudden revulsion for him. He felt it for himself.
    She said, “God.”
    He didn’t respond.
    A long moment passed. She said, “Well, I asked you to tell me, didn’t I?”
    She shook her head as though in wonder at her own stupidity.
    “Still. I really can’t believe