O'Farrell's Law Read Online Free PDF Page A

why didn’t he simply quit? Go to Petty and Erickson and tell them how he felt and ask to be taken off the active roster? He knew there were others, although naturally he wasn’t aware of their names. Not as good as he was, according to Petty, but O’Farrell put that down to so much obvious bullshit, the sort the controller doubtless said to them all.
    So why didn’t he just quit? Had his great-grandfather ever backed down? O’Farrell wondered, attempting to answer one question with another. Bullshit of his own now. Until these handshaking doubts, O’Farrell had always found it easy to consider himself a law officer like his great-grandfather, merely obeying different rules to match different circumstances. Now he acknowledged that if he made the analogy with objective honesty, what he did and what his ancestor had done in the 1860s were hugely different. So that answer didn’t wash. What did? O’Farrell didn’t know, not completely. There was a combination of reasons, not sufficient by themselves but enough when he assembled them all together, the way the individual parts of an automobile engine came together into something that made functional sense. Different though his job might be from that of his great-grandfather, he was enforcing justice. It was something very few people could do. (Would want to do, echoed a doubting voice in his mind.) And he genuinely did not want to back down, submit to an emotion he could only regard as weakness, although weakness wasn’t really what it was.
    There was also the money to consider, reluctant though he was to bring it into any equation because he found the self-criticism (blood money? bounty hunter?) too easily disturbing. For what he did he was paid $100,000 a year, $50,000 tax-free channeled through CIA-maintained offshore accounts. The system enabled him to live in this historically listed house in Alexandria and help John now that he’d quit the airline to go back to school for his master’s. It enabled him and Jill to fly up to Chicago whenever they felt like it to visit Ellen and the boy.
    He wouldn’t quit, O’Farrell determined. He’d get a grip on himself and stop constantly having such damned silly doubts and see out his remaining four years. If he were called upon to take up an assignment, he’d carry it out as successfully and as undetectably as he’d carried out all the others in the past. Not that many, in fact. Just five. Each justified. Each guilty. Each properly sentenced, albeit by an unofficial tribunal. And each performed—albeit unofficially again—in the name of the country of which he was a patriot.
    Jill’s car was smaller than his, a Toyota, and it did not take O’Farrell as long to clean as the Ford. He did it just as meticulously, seeking rust that he could not find, and regained the house before the tourist invasion.
    O’Farrell was relieved by the decision he’d reached. And his headache had gone, like his inner tension.
    O’Farrell and Jill drank coffee while they waited for eight o’clock Arizona time, knowing that John would be waiting for their call. In the event it was Beth who answered, because John was upstairs with Jeff. O’Farrell, immediately concerned, asked what was wrong with his grandson, and Beth said “nothing,” and then John came on the line to repeat the assurance. He thanked O’Farrell for the last check but said he was embarrassed to take it. O’Farrell told his son not to be so proud and to keep a record so that John could pay him back when he got his degree and after that the sort of job he wanted. It was not arranged that they call their daughter in Chicago until the afternoon and when they did, they got her answering machine, which they didn’t expect because Ellen knew the time they would be calling; it was the same every weekend. Always had been and particularly after the divorce. They left a message that