She nodded. “Like I spent two days watching the envelope, not the newspaper.
Preconceptions.”
“But they should know better.”
“I guess.”
“Military Intelligence,” I said.
“The world’s biggest oxymoron,” she replied, in the familiar old ritual. “Like safe danger.”
“Like dry water,” I said.
“Did you enjoy it?” Elizabeth Beck asked me, ten years later.
I didn’t answer. Preconceptions get in the way.
“Did you enjoy it?” she asked again.
I looked straight at her. Preconceptions.
“Sorry?” I said. Everything I had heard.
“Dinner,” she said. “Did you enjoy it?”
I looked down. My plate was completely empty.
“It was fabulous,” I said. Everything I had seen.
“Really?”
“No question,” I said. You haven’t found anything useful.
“I’m glad,” she said.
“Forget Hopper and Pasternak,” I said. “And Raymond Chandler. Your cook is a genius.”
“You feeling OK?” Beck said. He had left half his meat on his plate.
“Terrific,” I said. Not a thing.
“You sure?”
I paused. No evidence at all.
“Yes, I really mean it,” I said.
And I really did mean it. Because I knew what was in the Saab. I knew for sure. No doubt about it. So I felt terrific. But I felt a little ashamed, too. Because I had been very, very slow. Painfully slow. Disgracefully slow. It had taken me eighty-six hours. More than three and a half days. I had been every bit as dumb as Quinn’s old unit. Something can be plain as day and it passes them by. I turned my head and looked straight at Beck like I was seeing him for the very first time.
CHAPTER 11
I knew, but I calmed down fast during dessert and coffee. And I gave up on feeling terrific. Gave up on feeling ashamed, too. Those emotions were crowded out. I started to feel a little concerned instead. Because I started to see the exact dimensions of the tactical problem. And they were huge. They were going to force a whole new definition of working alone and undercover.
Dinner ended and everybody scraped their chairs back and stood up. I stayed in the dining room. I left the Saab’s headliner undisturbed. I was in no hurry. I could get to it later. There was no point risking trouble to confirm something I already knew. I helped the cook clean up instead. It seemed polite. Maybe it was even expected. The Becks went off somewhere and I carried dishes through to the kitchen. The mechanic was in there, eating a bigger portion of beef than I had gotten. I looked at him and started to feel a little ashamed again. I hadn’t paid him any attention at all. Hadn’t thought much about him. I had never even asked myself what he was for. But now I knew.
I loaded the dishes into the machine. The cook did economical things with the leftovers and wiped off the counters and within about twenty minutes we had everything squared away. Then she told me she was headed for bed so I said good night to her and went out the back door and walked across the rocks. I wanted to look at the sea. Wanted to gauge the tide. I had no experience with the ocean. I knew the tides came in and out maybe twice a day. I didn’t know when or why. Something to do with the moon’s gravity, maybe. Possibly it turned the Atlantic into a giant bathtub sloshing east and west between Europe and America. Maybe when it was low tide in Portugal it was high tide in Maine, and vice versa. I had no idea. Right then the tide looked to be changing from high to low.
From in to out. I watched the waves for five more minutes and then headed back to the kitchen. The mechanic had left. I used the bunch of keys Beck had given me to lock the inner door. I left the outer door open. Then I walked through the hallway and checked the front. I guessed I was supposed to do stuff like that now. It was locked and chained. The house was quiet. So I went upstairs to Duke’s room and started planning the endgame.
There was a message from Duffy waiting for me in my shoe. It said: You OK? I replied:
Sincere thanks for the phones. You saved my ass.
She came back with: Mine too. Equal element of self-interest.
I didn’t reply to that. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just sat there in the silence. She had won a minor postponement, but that was all. Her ass was toast, whatever happened next. Nothing I could do about that.
Then she sent: Have searched all files and cannot repeat cannot find authorization for 2nd agent.
I sent: I know.
She came back with just two characters:??
I sent: We need to meet. I will either call or just show up. Stand by.
Then I shut down the power and nailed the device back into my heel and wondered briefly whether I would ever take it out again. I checked my watch. It was nearly midnight. Day fourteen, a Friday, was nearly over. Day fifteen, a Saturday, was about to begin. Two weeks to the day since I had barged through the crowd outside Symphony Hall in Boston, on my way to a bar I never reached.
I lay down on the bed, fully dressed. I figured the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours were going to be crucial, and I wanted to spend five of the first six of them fast asleep. In my experience tiredness causes more foul-ups than carelessness or stupidity put together.
Probably because tiredness itself creates carelessness and stupidity. So I got comfortable and closed my eyes. Set the alarm in my head for two o’clock in the morning. It worked, like it always does. I woke up after a two-hour nap, feeling OK.
I rolled off the bed and crept downstairs. Went through the hallway and the kitchen and unlocked the back door. I left all my metal stuff on the table. I didn’t want the detector to make a noise. I stepped outside. It was very dark. There was no moon. No stars. The sea was loud. The air was cold. There was a breeze. It smelled of dampness. I walked around to the fourth garage and opened the doors. The Saab was still there, undisturbed. I eased the hatch open and pulled out my bundle. Carried it around and stowed it in its dip. Then I went back for the first bodyguard. He had been dead for several hours and the low temperature was bringing rigor on early. He was pretty stiff. I hauled him out and jacked him up on my shoulder. It was like carrying a two-hundred-pound tree trunk. His arms stuck out like branches.
I carried him to the V-shaped cleft that Harley had shown me. Laid him down next to it and started counting waves. Waited for the seventh. It rolled in and just before it got to me I nudged the body into the cleft. The water came in under it and pushed it right back up at me. It was like the guy was trying to grab me with his rigid arms and take me with him. Or like he wanted to kiss me good-bye. He floated there for a second quite lazily and then the wave receded and the cleft drained and he was gone.
It worked the same way for the second guy. The ocean took him away to join his buddy, and the maid. I squatted there for a moment, feeling the breeze on my face, listening to the tireless tide. Then I went back and closed up the Saab’s hatch and slid into the driver’s seat. Finished the job on the headliner and reached back and pulled out the maid’s notes. There were eight legal-size pages of them. I read them all in the dim glow from the dome light. They were full of specifics. They had plenty of fine detail. But in general they didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I checked them twice and when I was finished I butted them into a neat stack and carried them back to the tip of the point. Sat down on a rock and folded each page into a paper boat. Somebody had showed me how, when I was a kid. Maybe it had been my dad. I couldn’t remember. Maybe it had been my brother. I launched the eight little boats on the receding tide one after the other and watched them sail and bob away into the pitch darkness in the east.
Then I went back and spent some time fixing the headliner. I got it looking pretty good. I closed up the garage. I figured I would be gone before anybody opened it up again and noticed the damage on the car. I headed back to the house. Reloaded my pockets and relocked the door and crept back upstairs. Stripped to my shorts and slid into bed. I wanted to get three more hours. So I reset the alarm in my head and hauled the sheet and the blanket up around me and pressed a dip into the pillow and closed my eyes again.
Tried to sleep. But I couldn’t. It wouldn’t come. Dominique Kohl came instead. She came straight at me out of the darkness, like I knew she would.
The eighth time we met we had tactical problems to discuss. Taking down an intel officer was a can of worms. Obviously MPs deal exclusively with military people gone bad, so acting against one of our own was not a novelty. But the intel community was a case apart. Those guys were separate and secretive and they tried very hard to be accountable to nobody. They were tough to get at. Generally they closed ranks faster than the best drill squad you ever saw. So Kohl and I had a lot to talk about. I didn’t want to have the meeting in my office. There was no visitor’s chair. I didn’t want her standing up the whole time. So we went back to the bar in town. It seemed like an appropriate location.
The whole thing was getting so heavy we were ready to feel a little paranoid about it.
Going off-base seemed like a smart thing to do. And I liked the idea of discussing intel matters like a couple of regular spies, in a dark little booth at the back of a tavern. I think Kohl did, too. She showed up in civilian clothes. Not a dress, but jeans and a white Tshirt with a leather jacket over it. I was in fatigues. I didn’t have any civilian clothes. The weather was cold by then. I ordered coffee. She got tea. We wanted to keep our heads clear.
“I’m glad we used the real blueprints now,” she said.
I nodded.
“Good instinct,” I said. As far as evidence went we needed to slam-dunk the whole thing.
For Quinn to be in possession of the real blueprints would go a long way. Anything less than that, he could start spinning stories about test procedures, war games, exercises, entrapment schemes of his own.
“It’s the Syrians,” she said. “And they’re paying in advance. On an installment plan.”
“How?”
“Briefcase exchange,” she said. “He meets with an attache from the Syrian Embassy.
They go to a cafe in Georgetown. They both carry those fancy aluminum briefcases, identical.”
“Halliburton,” I said.
She nodded. “They put them side by side under the table and he picks up the Syrian guy’s when he leaves.”
“He’s going to say the Syrian is a legit contact. He’s going to say the guy is passing him stuff.”
“So we say, OK, show us the stuff.”
“He’ll say he can’t, because it’s classified.”
Kohl said nothing. I smiled.
“He’ll give us a big song and dance,” I said. “He’ll put his hand on our shoulders and look into our eyes and say, Hey, trust me on this, folks, national security is involved. ”
“Have you dealt with these guys before?”
“Once,” I said.
“Did you win?”
I nodded. “They’re generally full of shit. My brother was MI for a time. Now he works for Treasury. But he told me all about them. They think they’re smart, whereas they’re really the same as anybody else.”
“So what do we do?”
“We’ll have to recruit the Syrian.”
“Then we can’t bust him.”
“You wanted two-for-one?” I said. “Can’t have it. The Syrian is only doing his job. Can’t fault him for that. Quinn is the bad guy here.”
She was quiet for a moment, a little disappointed. Then she shrugged.
“OK,” she said. “But how do we do it? The Syrian will just walk away from us. He’s an embassy attache. He’s got diplomatic immunity.”
I smiled again. “Diplomatic immunity is just a sheet of paper from the State Department.
The way I did it before was I got hold of the guy and told him to hold a sheet of paper up in front of his gut. Then I pulled my pistol out and asked him if he figured the paper was going to stop a bullet. He said I would get into trouble. I told him however much trouble I got into wasn’t going to affect how slowly he bled to death.”
“And he saw it your way?”
I nodded. “Played ball like Mickey Mantle.”
She went quiet again. Then she asked me the first of two questions that much later I wished I had answered differently.
“Can we see each other socially?” she said.
It was a private booth in a dark bar. She was cute as hell, and she was sitting there right next to me. I was a young man back then, and I thought I had all the time in the world.
“You asking me on a date?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
I said nothing.
“We’ve come a long way, baby,” she said. Then she added, “Women, I mean,” just in case I wasn’t up-to-date with current cigarette advertising.
I said nothing.
“I know what I want,” she said.
I nodded. I believed her. And I believed in equality. I believed in it big time. Not long before that I had met a woman Air Force colonel who captained a B52 bomber and cruised the night skies with more explosive power aboard her single plane than all the bombs ever dropped in the whole of human history put together. I figured if she could be trusted with enough power to explode the planet, then Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl could be trusted to figure out who she wanted to date.
“So?” she said.
Questions I wished I had answered differently.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Unprofessional,” I said. “You shouldn’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’ll put an asterisk next to your career,” I said. “Because you’re a talented person who can’t get any higher than sergeant major without going to officer candidate school, so you’ll go there, and you’ll ace it, and you’ll be a lieutenant colonel within ten years, because you deserve it, but everybody will be saying that you got it because you dated your captain way back when.”
She said nothing. Just called the waitress over and ordered us two beers. The room was getting hotter as it got more crowded. I took my jacket off, she took her jacket off. I was wearing an olive-drab T-shirt that had gotten small and thin and faded from being washed a thousand times. Her T-shirt was a boutique item. It was scooped a little lower at the neck than most T-shirts, and the sleeves were cut away at an angle so they rode up on the small deltoid muscles at the top of her arms. The fabric was snow white against her skin.