The Shadow Patrol by Alex Berenson Read Free Book Online Page B

his calves and forearms were thick with muscle. He had Wells’s deep brown eyes and solid nose, and his hair was long and straight and pulled back in a ponytail. He launched another fadeaway jumper, this one just short. Wells collected the rebound.
    “You must be Evan.”
You must be my son. Though I’m more or less guessing, since I haven’t seen you since you were a
baby.
    “I mustbe.”
    “I’m John.” Wells stepped in for a hug, but the boy took a quick half step back and extended a hand.
    “Nice to meet you.” Evan spoke softly, his words clipped flat. No hint of emotion. He sounded like a state trooper talking to a driver he’d pulled over for speeding. Without affect, the psychiatrists said. Though not without effect. Wells watched his son watching him. He supposed he’d earned that voice.
    “Practicing your jumper.”
    “Actually working on my dunks.”
    “Right.”
    Evan cocked his head at the flowers. “Those for me? I’m more into roses as a rule.”
    “Noted.”
    Evan dribbled twice, threw up a fadeaway. This time the ball clanged off the front of the rim and bounced at Wells, who laid the flowers on the ground and corralledit.
    “Coach tried to get me interested in ninth grade, but football was more my game,” Wells said. “Now I wish I’d listened to him. All those hits add up. I still feel some of them.” Though Wells was lying. He wouldn’t have traded football for anything. He’d loved the sport’s raw power, its velocity and contact. War without death.
    He spun the basketball in his hands, dribbled once, flung up a jumper. The ball bounced off the back rim. Evan grabbed it and tucked it under his arm, an oddly adult gesture, as if he were in charge and Wells the teenager. His self-possession impressed Wells.
    “You should probably tell my mom you’re here.”
    “Sure.” Wells turned to the house as Heather—his ex-wife—opened the door. Her hair, once a light honey brown, was streaked with gray and cut short, just above her shoulders. She and Wells had divorced barely a year after Evan was born, when Wells left them to go undercover in Afghanistan and infiltrate al-Qaeda for the first time. These were the prehistoric days before September 11. Wells had seen Heather only once since. Now he crossed the driveway and the stairs and hugged her. She hesitated and then reached for him and stretched her arms around his back. She was tiny, half his size. “You look great,” he said.
    “Youlie.”
    “Never.”
    “Fairly often, I suspect. But come on in anyway.”
    “What about . . .” Wells nodded at the side of the house, where Evan was once again shooting jumpers.
    “Let him be. He’ll come in on his own once he sees us talking.”
    * * *
    * * *
    SHE LED HIM THROUGH a house that was as handsome as Wells had imagined from the outside. The American dream alive and well in three dimensions. The pictures stung the most. Heather had remarried, a lawyer named Howard. They had two children, George and Victoria—Wells had looked up their names this morning. Family photos covered every wall. Victoria playing soccer. Evan spinning a basketball on his index finger. George standing on the Golden Gate Bridge. The five of them somewhere in Mexico or Central America, standing on a ruin, grinning.
    Wells knew that the photos weren’t for him. They’d been up long before he arrived. But he couldn’t help feeling they were meant as an object lesson, a reminder of the life he’d traded away. Though he was probably fooling himself. Probably this life had never been open tohim.
    “They’re beautiful. All of them.”
    “Thankyou.”
    “And they get along?”
    “You know, they’re kids, they fight, but the fact that Evan has a different dad, that’s never part of it. At least as far as I know.”
    “That’s great.”
What about me?
Wells wanted to ask.
Does he ever ask about me?
Even in his head, the question sounded impossibly self-centered.
    Heather put Wells’s flowers in a