Chapter
11
Agent
Echo was enraged. His daughter's virtue had been questioned, but in
such a way that his own was intertwined. He knew what he had told
Etienne, but who else knew? What secret soul was privy to his
counsels? How had he been betrayed?
The
grapevine was alive with the story, and Sarah's budding social
expertise was tried by fire. Her father questioned her. She told
him that she had never suggested anything to anyone about him. Her
mother questioned her. Sarah assured her mother that, no, Dad never
laid a hand on me. Delegated Embassy personnel questioned her,
asking about the matter as delicately as possible, but from every
angle they could imagine. No one could believe that she was the
source of the story, but no one could imagine whom it might have
been.
It
was a nasty enigma.
Predictably,
Etienne became her confidant. Agent Echo could never doubt his
daughter's filial loyalty; while baring her soul to this lad in
embarrassing detail, she remained true to family trust. He was so intimately informed, that he imagined
he could have BECOME her lover, such was the candor of her
confidence. Her Etienne became solicitous, and Agent Echo
temporarily became sincere in his efforts in Etienne's stead.
Meanwhile,
the other half of his brain was a smoking engine of fury. He labored
to find a way to injure this upstart, with this intelligence. Yet he
had already done his worst. To intimate the protest, would be to
salve the anger that might be smoldering in the youth's imagination.
Nor could Agent Echo satisfy his soul that the offense had not come
from some other quarter. Had his missives been intercepted at the
other end? Etienne's Sarah became sleazy and promiscuous. Boys
became ineffectual in her letters; men became fickle.
Etienne
smelled a rat!
