Jack Ryan, Books 7-12 by Tom Clancy Read Free Book Online Page A

like ... I don’t know. I knew something wasn’t right, like you get drunk right away, out of control.” Then her voice stopped for fifteen seconds or so, and Dr. Golden watched her—like he had done, she thought. The irony shamed her, but this was business; it was clinical, and it was supposed to help, not hurt. Her patient was seeing it now. You could tell from the eyes, you always could. As though the mind really were a VCR, the scene paraded before her, and Barbara Linders was merely giving commentary on what she saw, not truly relating the dreadful personal experience she herself had undergone. For ten minutes, she described it, without leaving out a single clinical detail, her trained professional mind clicking in as it had to do. It was only at the end that her emotions came back.
    “He didn’t have to rape me. He could have ... asked. I would have ... I mean, another day, the weekend ... I knew he was married, but I liked him, and ...”
    “But he did rape you, Barbara. He drugged you and raped you.” This time Dr. Golden reached out and took her hand, because now it was all out in the open. Barbara Linders had articulated the whole awful story, probably for the first time since it had happened. In the intervening period she’d relived bits and pieces, especially the worst part, but this was the first time she’d gone through the event in chronological order, from beginning to end, and the impact of the telling was every bit as traumatic and cathartic as it had to be.
    “There has to be more,” Golden said after the sobbing stopped.
    “There is,” Barbara said immediately, hardly surprised that her psychologist could tell. “At least one other woman in the office, Lisa Beringer. She ... killed herself the next year, drove her car into a bridge support-thing, looked like an accident, she’d been drinking, but in her desk she left a note. I cleaned her desk out ... and I found it.” Then, to Dr. Golden’s stunned reaction, Barbara Linders reached into her purse and pulled it out. The “note” was in a blue envelope, six pages of personalized letter paper covered with the tight, neat handwriting of a woman who had made the decision to end her life, but who wanted someone to know why.
    Clarice Golden, Ph.D., had seen such notes before, and it was a source of melancholy amazement that people could do such a thing. They always spoke of pain too great to bear, but depressingly often they showed the despairing mind of someone who could have been saved and cured and sent back into a successful life if only she’d had the wit to make a single telephone call or speak to a single close friend. It took only two paragraphs for Golden to see that Lisa Beringer had been just one more needless victim, a woman who had felt alone, fatally so, in an office full of people who would have leaped to her aid.
    Mental-health professionals are skilled at hiding their emotions, a talent necessary for obvious reasons. Clarice Golden had been doing this job for just under thirty years, and to her God-given talent had been added a lifetime of professional experience. Especially good at helping the victims of sexual abuse, she displayed compassion, understanding, and support in great quantity and outstanding quality, but while real, it was all a disguise for her true feelings. She loathed sexual predators as much as any police officer, maybe even more. A cop saw the victim’s body, saw her bruises and her tears, heard her cries. The psychologist was there longer, probing into the mind for the malignant memories, trying to find a way to expunge them. Rape was a crime against the mind, not the body, and as dreadful as the things were that the policeman saw, worse still were the hidden injuries whose cure was Clarice Golden’s life’s work. A gentle, caring person who could never have avenged the crimes physically, she hated these creatures nonetheless.
    But this one was a special problem. She maintained a regular working