The Gamma Option Read Online Free PDF Page A

ends now from the dampness. His eyes were brown and radiant and he carried himself with a smoothness and confidence that seemed entirely natural.
    “Want me to call him over?” Neville offered.
    “No, please. Let him be.”
    “Him or you?”
    “What?”
    Neville smiled. “After practice then?”
    “Yes. Much better.”
    “With you to be introduced as …”
    “A friend of his mother’s. A good friend.”
    “And tomorrow’s holiday?”
    “We’ll do something. If he wants.”
    “You’re underestimating him, Blaine. Not only will he want to, it won’t take him long to figure out what’s going on. You’d be wise to prepare for that.”
    “I’ll try.”
    “I was a friend of your mother,” he told the boy before John Neville had a chance to as they shook hands after practice. “A good friend.”
    The boy’s grip was sweaty but firm. Blaine was surprised when he smiled. “Really? Did you know her from America?”
    “Accent give me away?”
    Another smile. “Would she have mentioned you, sir?”
    “Call me Blaine, please. No, I don’t think she would have.”
    In the next instant neither knew what to say, and John Neville stepped in.
    “Matt, Mr. McCrack—er, Blaine—is going to be in the country for a bit and would like very much to spend some time with you. I suggested tomorrow’s school holiday as a possibility.”
    “If you don’t have any plans,” Blaine added, wanting the boy to have a way out, or maybe himself.
    “I’d like that very much, sir.”
    “Blaine.”
    “He was thinking an outing to London might be smart,” Neville proposed.
    “Oh yes! Smashing!” The boy beamed. “It’s been ages since I’ve been there.”
    “Done, then,” Neville concluded.
    But it isn’t done , Blaine reckoned, not by a longshot. Do I tell him, and if so when? Damn you, Henri, for dropping all this in my lap … .
    Later, thrashing his thoughts about, Blaine drove from the school through Henley on Thames to the small Norman village of Hambleden where Lauren Ericson had lived and been buried. The village was quiet to the point of seeming deserted, and Blaine found himself easing the car door shut to avoid an echo. The moist air had the same sweaty feel as it had back in Reading. Here, though, it was laced with the warm scent of wood smoke coming from chimneys on houses that might have been fashioned out of the same light reddish brick. It was difficult to date the structures since even the newer ones had been built to blend in with and maintain the village’s rustic appeal. There were graves in the churchyard dating back to the eleventh century but only a few dug in the last few years, and their tombstones hadn’t been aged as the buildings had.
    Lauren’s was a simple affair wedged in a small family plot her ancestors had obtained four centuries before. Dying, Blaine supposed, should be like coming home, and perhaps this was as close to that ideal as possible. He knelt by the grave wanting to feel something other than the confusion and uncertainty racing through him.
    In recent weeks he had for some reason been reminiscing about his own parents, and all this served to only intensify his confused feelings. How unglamorous the story was. His parents had married late and had him, their only child, later. His father was an insurance salesman who made his living on the road and died in a Milwaukee hotel room of a heart attack at the age of sixty when Blaine was in high school. His mother had held up through it bravely and built a decent life for herself that ended after a painful struggle with cancer while Blaine was in Vietnam following an aborted attempt at college. She’d been dead for six months before he learned of it, due to the incommunicado status of men who were assigned to clandestine duty such as his. In those same six months and the six that came before he had not been allowed to send a single letter. Strange how when word came about her death he wondered more than anything what he might