Chapter 15

Epilogue

Twelve years later, Charles and his wife Laura sat having pancakes at IHOP, before making the traditional phone call to Claire and Lance he asked, “Have you noticed how people are looking at us, Laura? Maybe they think I have robbed the cradle?”

“I just think your ego has finally caught up with you, Charlie,” Laura said. “You think everybody is looking at you. What a far cry you are from the man I married. I wasn’t even nineteen and you were days away from your forty-sixth birthday. You were so reserved then. Now you’re like a peacock.” She laughed. “Half the middle-aged men in America have trophy wives. I don’t think there are too many people here who would think a man of fifty-five being married to a woman of twenty-eight is very high on their list of oddities.”

So much had changed in his life in the last twelve years. It seemed that Laura was the sensible one now and he was the teenager. He asked, “But do you think Claire is jealous of you?”

She almost choked on her coffee. “Get real, Charlie, think of the things we do together; think hard about it and tell me that she could be jealous.”

“But do you think Lance is bothered by the fact that we have children, and he doesn’t?”

“For crying out loud, Charlie, what’s got into you?”

He had been visiting Stacy every weekend for the last six weeks. Their time together had become amazingly comfortable. Yet she still had made no sexual moves on him. Each time they parted at the dorm they embraced and kissed (on the cheek). He was beginning to think that his daughter “the sexual predator” had gone through an epiphany. The warning her mother had given him about their daughter trying to get involved with him sexually didn’t seem to carry much weight. He was glad but kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Life seemed to be sailing on a calm sea, but he still had grave reservations about the incest that had wrapped its tentacles around his family.

He had been talking with his mother about it. But Marvella’s attempts at plowing furrows of acceptance into his mind had little success. It didn’t start to solidify until his friend and associate, Martin Corrigan, stopped by Denver on his trip back to Washington. After his recent visit to Stacy in Boulder he and Martin had lunch together at the Brown Hotel.

Martin Corrigan, the son of the current director of “The Company,” was one of the men who had been kidnapped along with Charles and Aziza by the Taliban in Afghanistan. His father, Simeon Martin and Charles’s father, General Craig Moore, had been in a power struggle in the agency for years. When Craig Moore undertook the mission to save the kidnapped operatives, dying in the successful attempt, Simeon Corrigan was humbled by Moore’s audacious success. He had given Corrigan his son back.

At their lunch at the Brown Hotel Martin Corrigan told Charles that since nothing was secret in the life of a member of the Company there was a reason Martin’s father sent him to talk with him. “I have to be very careful in the way I put this Charles, but there are things in your family’s files at the Company that could be damaging to you personally ... to every member of your family.

Since “every member” consisted of just four people: his mother, Claire, Stacy and himself he knew that one of those “things” was the relationship between his mother’s deceased father, his wife’s deceased father and the women in his family, namely Marvella, Claire and Stacy.

“There are things in those files Charles that are uncomfortable for me to talk about, illegal for that matter. Though we both know that illegal is something the Company doesn’t worry about, others do. I want to be perfectly frank so there is no misunderstanding. The topics have to do with incest and murder.”

When he saw how Charles’s brow furrowed and his face became flushed Martin said, “Bear with me Charles. This is going to turn out alright. To ease your concerns, I am going to tell you a story about myself, something I didn’t plan on telling. But since my family owes such a debt of gratitude to your father, we owe you this.”

He talked with little interruption: “As you might recall Charles I spent five years in the Mojave Desert at Ridgecrest, connected to the Naval Weapons Station. I met my wife there. She was the daughter of a weapons scientist ... was attending Stanford University and was home for the summer. We had so much in common that it almost seemed like we could have been members of the same family. We’ve both commented on it over and again throughout the years.

Like Los Alamos and so many other research sites, Ridgecrest is remote. The community is made up of very highly educated and close-knit people. These sites all came about during WWII and have been in existence ever since. When I was there the community consisted of naval personnel, scientists, retired military—Including a community of retired airline pilots—and townsfolk who had no connection with the government. But they take care of the governance of the community. My father, who had been a rear admiral in the Navy, was in charge of weapons testing for about two years during the Vietnam War.

One of the peculiar traits of communities like Ridgecrest Los Alamos and Oak Ridge is the preponderance of couples who came to be known as ‘swingers’ (husbands and wives who share sex with other couples in the community). While my wife Sarah and I kept away from the swinging set we both knew our parents had been involved. I should say that she knew it growing up. I found out later. It was a shocking surprise for me, but I never confronted my parents about it. You know, Charles, that so many strange things go on in the Company that nobody asks questions about them. Sure, there are straight arrows like you and me. But we are two of the exceptions.

Anyway, before your father died saving us in Afghanistan, he asked my Dad to have a test run on your daughter’s panties; to cross-match her DNA with yours.

You probably didn’t know that DNA tests were routine for potential agents in the Company. Until your father made his request they have only been run on the agents and their wives; just in case some black ops people on the other side are doing research on their own. We’ve never run DNA on the children. But after we ran it on your daughter it has become SOP (standard operating procedure). We also found dried semen in the crotch. By the look on your face, I probably shouldn’t have said that. Sorry, I got carried away.

Here’s my confession, Charles. After the agency tested your daughter’s panties, they decided to do tests on all members of the families in the Company. Some surprising things popped up.

Remember me telling you how comfortable I was with my wife even before we got married? Hold on to your hat. It turns out that Sarah and I are actually brother and sister. I am the product of my mom and dad. Sarah is the product of my mom and a guy who will remain nameless.

“How did I find out?”

Good question. Sarah and I were visiting the family over the last Labor Day weekend. Dad asked me to come into his office. He was sitting with two agency files that were of our family’s and yours. They were restricted files that are never supposed to leave the Company Compound. He asked me to read them, yours first then ours. I was blown away to find out that Sarah was my sister. It switched on a light though and I understood.

“What did my father think? Jeez Charles, you ask questions like a detective. He said he was surprised. At the same time, he said he wasn’t. It had happened so long ago. And Mother’s and his attachment had really not been formed with Sarah until we got married. He’s not going to tell Mom, nor am I going to tell Sarah. There’s nothing to be gained in that.”

“What about the incest laws?”

“That was the reason he showed me the files. He knew I would be discreet. What he didn’t know is that I would share my secret with you. I’ll not tell him that I did. But for what your father did for our family he wouldn’t say anything negative about it if he knew. It’s because of what your father did for me that I am sharing my secret with you; I know you’ll be discrete. Anyway, regarding the incest laws, they don’t apply to Sarah and me. My file and my Dads have gone into limbo, to a spot so remote that it is like the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant went at the end of the movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Nobody will ever be able to find them. So have yours.”

“Why did he do it?”

“My father did it for you, Charles, and your mother ... and your ex-wife and your daughter. He feels like he owes it to your father and whoever was attached to him, or whoever he has spawned, which includes Emmi Kahn. He also did it to hide the murders of your wife’s father, your mother’s father, and a couple of bit players in the whole molestation drama. Their files are now in the same limbo. So, you can be assured that no scandal will ever touch those whom you love.”

It was the strangest lunch Charles Moore had ever attended. Martin’s and Charles’ fathers were bitter rivals. Death though, particularly when achieved in saving a member of one’s family, can have an interesting way of opening doors, and closing them as well. At any rate, Martin Corrigan and Charles Moore were now co-conspirators, now in a grip stronger than a family bond.