Exile Hunter by Preston Fleming Page A

the war on terror had when the President
withdrew all but a token level of American forces from overseas.
    He had been so fearful
of losing his income, perks, and the prestige of belonging to a
tightly knit elite unit, that he had been willing to trade his equity
in the CIA for a slot in the newly formed DSS. But in exchange for
the job security and generous pay and benefits in the powerful new
organization, it was clear that, eventually, he would be expected to
direct the special counter-terrorism skills that he had used on
foreign enemy combatants against domestic enemies of the Unionist
regime.
    Now, in retrospect,
Linder could see clearly that, by making that trade, he had signed
over his future to the Department and put everything he valued in his
life at risk. After swearing an oath of loyalty to the DSS, he could
no longer raise scruples against being assigned to questionable
grab-and-go operations, repatriation teams, or other émigré hunting
parties. To the Department, such operations did no more than extend
the reach of extraordinary rendition from foreign enemy combatants to
domestic insurgents residing abroad. As a DSS officer, he was now in
for a penny, in for a pound, and sauce for the goose was being
applied liberally to the gander.
    In his early years with
the Department, pursuing the rebels had seemed like a game of wits
played for high stakes against well-matched opponents. By nature,
Linder was an aggressive competitor who had whetted his natural
predatory instincts to a sharp edge and relished the game of luring
overconfident insurgents to their doom.
    But by the time Linder
arrived in Beirut, nearly five years after the end of CWII, his
sporting instincts had dulled and he had wearied of the game. Of the
millions of American expats who had escaped the country before the
borders closed, most had turned their backs on America and conceded
it to the Unionists until such time as that misbegotten regime
toppled of its own weight like the Soviets’ eighty-year reign in
Russia. Most American émigrés had scattered across the globe,
settled in new homes, begun new jobs and businesses, and taken
permanent residence or citizenship wherever they had landed. In cases
like these, Linder sometimes asked himself, what was the point of
further pursuit? To prosecute former enemies in absentia for
long-forgotten offenses seemed a waste of state resources.
    From time to time, when
alone with his thoughts, he wondered whether an amnesty program,
administered perhaps by a truth commission like the ones pioneered in
South Africa and Argentina, might be a way to reconcile regime and
rebels and end the fruitless pursuit of former enemies. But this was
a dangerous idea to voice openly, as amnesty and reconciliation had
long been anathema to the President-for-Life and his inner circle.
Like King Herod, Caligula, Stalin and Snow White’s mother, to
compensate for his deep sense of inferiority, the PFL hungered to
destroy all rivals who might someday surpass him and to settle scores
with all those who had ever denied him their full support.
    Only over the past few
months had Linder begun to realize the extent to which he had fallen
under the spell of Unionist double-think and had come to accept the
premise that the Department was always right and that the rebels were
always wrong. Now the spell was lifting. With 20-20 hindsight, Linder
recognized in Neil Denniston and Bob Bednarski the superior, mocking
smile of the President-for-Life.
    But of what conceivable
good was his change in attitude now? What could he possibly do in
captivity that would undo the damage he had already done to people
like Philip Eaton, Patricia, and their families?

S4
    A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always
ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good. Varlam
Shalamov
    MAY, TWENTY-FIVE YEARS EARLIER, GATES MILLS, OHIO
    The first time Warren
Linder laid eyes on Patricia Eaton was during seventh-grade ballroom
dance lessons