Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  Nick glanced toward the shack. Dean had vanished.

  “You boys have a good time,” said Win.

  They roared away in a shower of asphalt chips.

  When the headlights were half a mile gone, Jud yelled, “What the hell are you doing!”

  Dean appeared off to their right.

  “Could have saved you twenty dollars,” he said.

  “Don’t bullshit around!” yelled Jud. “I had the play going down! You were out of it! I never sanctioned you for any shit like that! This isn’t game time! This is business!”

  “Is that what it is?” Dean drifted toward them.

  “I am serious as a heart attack!”

  “Just practice,” said Dean.

  “Not on my time,” said Jud. “Not on my dime.”

  Dean smiled. Shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

  He threw a leg over the motorcycle, zipped his jacket over the gun. The bike growled to life. Dean raced the engine twice, let it settle down to a purr.

  “We done?” he asked.

  Jud handed a roll of bills to the man on the bike.

  “Watch yourself,” ordered Jud.

  Dean grinned; his teeth were ivory. “See you around.”

  He roared off into the night. Left them alone with the whump-whump of the oil pumpers.

  “Rough,” said Jud, “but I handled it, we’re okay, and—”

  “He cocked his gun so they’d turn and he’d have an excuse to shoot them!”

  “You gotta understand Dean,” said Jud. “He loves me like a brother. He’d do anything for me. Balls to the wall, he’s one of the guys I’d go to. You have to understand—”

  “I understand him down to his bones!”

  “I know.” Jud’s tone deepened, quieted. “But you don’t understand just how heavy he is.”

  “What?”

  Jud waited for Nick to come up with the answer.

  “You saying he’s with the government?” Nick finally volunteered.

  “Not full-time,” said Jud. “You know that story based on a real-life hit you’re here to pitch? The Russian strolls up behind the Bulgarian expatriate in London, zaps a poison pellet into him with an umbrella gun? Dean’s less subtle.”

  “What did he do for you?” whispered Nick.

  “Nothing that big,” said Jud. “He had to talk to a guy.”

  “He works for you,” said Nick, disgust in his tone.

  “Me. Uncle. Guys who need guys like him.”

  “What’s his ‘hobby’?” Nick’s mouth tasted of bile.

  “He breaks into houses when nobody’s home. Does things.”

  “How do you know the cops are on to him?”

  “Come on,” said Jud, “let’s go.”

  He turned to the car; turned back and found Nick staring at the shack, the dimly lit asphalt lot.

  “This is the real shit, Nick. That’s what you wanted to know. You’ll never get this kind of experience anywhere else. Nobody else would give it to you, trust you enough to bring you out, and be heavy enough to cover your play so you can walk away.”

  Nick stared a thousand yards off into the night.

  “What are you looking at?” Jud asked.

  “Someplace new,” said Nick.

  “Nothing’s changed,” said Jud. “We’re okay. And you did good. Real good.”

  “No, I didn’t,” said Nick. “Not good.”

  He got in the car. They drove away.

  On a March morning, thousands of miles away and more than a decade later, Nick stared at his computer screen, remembering.

  Why didn’t I walk away then? he asked himself. He didn’t have an answer. Wasn’t sure one answer would be enough.

  He’d seen Dean once more, years later, at a party at Jud’s L.A. mansion. Dean had wrecked his motorcycle, mangled his leg. He was a wane ghost on crutches. But he still had cannibal eyes.

  “Balls to the wall, he’s one of the guys I’d go to.”

  That was years ago, thought Nick. Even before Jud and Nick finally redrew their line, Jud mentioned Dean less frequently. Now they could be enemies; Dean could be dead. If he wasn’t, why would he know if Jud was safe? How to contact him?

  The top right-hand drawer of Nick’s desk glowed. In there, jumbled with pictures of ex-lovers, the keys to his first car, postcards he liked too much to send, and lockpicks given him by Jud, was that old wallet.

  Nausea rose up in Nick. He felt as if he were riding a wave toward a shore he’d been approaching for years. On that wave was not where he wanted to be, but that didn’t matter.

  Outside his office window, tree limbs waved in the wind.

  After he met Jud, Nick had finished his novel about auto workers, left Murphy’s column, published four other novels, and created an on-the-road dramatic television show that ran for one season. Reviewers called his books street smart; wondered where he found his material.

  The computer screen glowed.

  The machine held five chapters of the novel Nick was writing about an unjustly imprisoned man. Another deal was percolating in Hollywood. He was busy. Had no time for suicidal quests. No desire to risk his wife and baby, whom he would slaughter thousands to protect.

  He remembered one of the early days of madness, whizzing down the L.A. freeway, Jud driving the Mercedes, Lorri between them, her chestnut mane floating in the wind. The radio blasting pounding drums and throbbing bass guitars. They were high on danger and drugs and destiny, Jud shouting explanations of the life.

  “You gotta know reality!” Jud yelled. “Or you’re just another chump!”

  Maybe Sylvia’s right, Nick told himself that March 1990 morning in Washington. After all these years, maybe the dangers to me are distant ghosts. Harmless. Maybe I do owe Jud nothing.

  Except scars that shaped your vision.

  The first night Nick had ever walked beside the bear who glowed in the dark, Jud had said, “Anybody ever explain to you that you could be too loyal for your own good?”

  “Nobody I ever believed,” Nick had replied. Proudly.

  The wind rattled Nick’s office windows.

  “What would you say now, Jud?” Nick asked the computer.

  But the computer had no answer.

  “When it comes right down to it,” Jud once asked Nick, “what can you know?”

  “That you do something,” said Nick, “even if you try nothing.”

  “So watch your ass, right?”

  Then they’d laughed.

  In his office, Nick rode the waves. He feared for his family and he feared for himself. What could happen, if. If was endless. The CIA motto said knowing the truth made you free. Nick was certain of little, but he felt all he treasured slipping into the hands of faceless strangers and nameless forces. He couldn’t merely wait for whatever knock sounded on his door.

  “One thing you never need to worry about,” Jud had told him. “I’ll be your friend. Forever.”

  They’d shaken hands.

  And it all meant what they made it mean, thought Nick.

  But he knew that wasn’t the bottom line. This wasn’t just about Jud. This was about him. And about being sure who he was. About being true to old ideals, no matter how much he’d tarnished them. He knew that even as he opened his desk drawer, pulled the old black wallet out, found the faded number scrawled on the diary page labeled C. Numbers change owners. No one would be there. No one he’d ever met. The moon wasn’t right.

  “Not if I’m lucky,” he whispered as he dialed.

  THE ABYSS

  Wes spent the weekend after Denton’s party grinding out as much of the work on his desk as he could. Monday morning, he couldn’t sleep past three-thirty. He left his Capitol Hill apartment to jog. Winter wind burned his face and lungs as he ran past the Capitol, down the Mall. Frozen earth crunched under his feet. He turned back at the Lincoln Memorial. Close by was the black wall etched with the dead from his war. His Washington Post was waiting at his top-floor apartment when he finished his seven m
iles. He turned on the PBS jazz station, did his twenty paratrooper push-ups. Made coffee, ate Grape-Nuts, read the news, and tried not to worry. He dressed in his uniform, put a civilian suit in his car, and drove down Eighth Street to the Naval Investigative Service’s Headquarters at the Washington Navy Yard.

  Behind brick walls and guard posts and within cannon range of the Capitol building, the Navy Yard houses dozens of red-brick buildings for high-security operations, ranging from the Library of Congress’s Federal Research Division, which produces secret studies of foreign governments, to the CIA’s six-story National Photographic Interpretation Center to the Navy Anti-Terrorist Alert Center.

  Wes went to Building 111. His ID cleared him through the security guards on the lower floor, then again on the second floor. He avoided his coworkers and closed his office door.

  And waited.

  At 9:31, a Navy chief rapped on Wes’s door: “Commander wants you pronto, sir!”

  Two cubicles down the carpeted hall, the Navy officer behind the desk passed a set of orders to Wes.

  “You know about this?” said Commander Franklin.

  Wes glanced at the paperwork confirming Denton’s plan.

  “I just read the orders now, sir,” Wes deflected, obeying Denton’s secrecy mandate.

  “Do I smell shit in those papers?”

  “No comment, sir.”

  “You could at least smile,” said Franklin.

  And Wes laughed.

  “If I’d known you wanted a cloak-and-dagger, we could have sent you up to the fourth deck,” said Franklin. The fourth floor of the building was NIS’s counterintelligence center.

  “I didn’t go looking for this,” said Wes.

  “But you’re not saying no.” Franklin shook his head. “It’s tricky out there. Play it tough.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “If you need something, give me a call. That’s both official and unofficial.”

  “I appreciate it, sir.”

  “My, we are formal today. You’re supposed to keep your NIS credentials. Don’t smear shit on them, okay? And hurry back.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “One more thing. General Butler requires your presence at the Pentagon before you commence your new detail.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “You and I do not ask Marine generals why.”

  Wes’s parting salute was friendly.

  “Anchors away,” said the man in the white uniform.

  Samuel Butler, United States Marine Corps, wore two stars on his starched shirt. His desk and its tidy piles of paper were at right angles with the walls of his Pentagon office. A picture of his wife and three children faced the general’s chair at exactly a forty-five-degree angle from the desk’s right-hand corner. The wall facing the general held a color picture of the Iwo Jima Memorial. On the wall to his left hung a black-and-white photo of then Major Butler breaking the rules and personally leading a patrol in February 1969. Butler’s square-jawed features were barely visible amidst the helmets and flack jackets, the M16s and radios, the nervous faces of young Marines. In that picture, Lt. Wesley Chandler’s fatigues were fresh. The coat-tree in the office corner held General Butler’s jacket with its four rows of ribbons. His desk drawer contained the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  Across from him sat Wes.

  “The Commandant told me about your detail,” said Butler.

  Wes dreaded lying to General Butler. Saying nothing let him keep both his integrity and his promise to Denton. In the instant he chose silence, Wes felt a chill brush his heart.

  “See the stars on my shoulders?” asked Butler.

  “Yes sir.”

  “They’re on a Marine uniform. No better suit. They mean I’m responsible for everybody in olive drab with less metal. You’re one of my men. And no Marine knows your marching orders.”

  “Sir, sometimes national security—”

  “Don’t tell me about national security,” snapped Butler. “And don’t tell me about intelligence requirements.”

  Butler shook his head. His silver hair was brushed flat. “Know why I joined the Marines, Wes?”

  “No sir.”

  “Because real national security is the damn most important thing a man can do. In a world like ours, that means you need to be prepared to go to war and damn well able to win it.”

  “But I don’t want any more of my men wasted because of politics camouflaged with words like national security and intelligence requirements. Bunches of tight-assed, ivory-towered politicians playing tough guy. Using my men.”

  “Sir, I am not at liberty to discuss any details of my current assignment. Like you, I trust the chain of command.”

  Butler shook his head. “Where you’re going, it’s not trust, it’s faith. And it’s not government, it’s theology.”

  Wes risked a smile. “I hope not, sir. Religion has never been a compass for me. I like a good team, but a chance to swing my own bat. And this … Sir, I have an authorized detail. A legitimate mission.”

  “Legitimate? Give me land to seize, an enemy to fight, a war to win. But don’t give me any more no-win, no-end missions.”

  Butler jabbed his forefinger at the man across the desk from him. “Don’t end up as another embarrassment to the Corps, whining in front of some congressional committee.”

  “No sir.”

  “You might need support,” said Butler, “wherever it is you’re going and whatever it is you’re doing. The Commandant says hands off, you belong to the suits in the woods now.”

  Butler shrugged. “I can’t send air strikes or artillery, but if you holler, maybe I can drop some flares in the shadows.”

  “I appreciate it, General.”

  The two men stood. Wes started to salute, but the general extended his hand. As they shook, Butler said, “When you get out there, remember who you are. Watch for mines.”

  The bare trees along Virginia’s George Washington Parkway swayed as Wes drove to the CIA. He’d changed to his civilian clothes in a Pentagon bathroom. At the CIA’s chain link fence, guards in a glass booth checked a clipboard, directed him to a parking space by the main doors. Up the marble steps, inside the marble foyer. Guards searched his briefcase, then turned him over to an escort who led Wes to an elevator that whisked them to the seventh floor. The escort nodded Wes toward a deserted reception area, then rode the elevator back down.

  A door opened. Noah Hall beckoned Wes. “Any trouble?”

  “No,” said Wes. The door Noah led him through had no number, no title.

  Three of the four desks in the windowed room were bare. Classified reports, file folders, computer printouts, phones, Rolodex files, and a battered aluminum briefcase with combination locks covered the desk nearest the window.

  “The boss is mopping up Iran-contra shit,” said Noah as he lumbered behind the cluttered desk. “I’ll get you going.”

  The bulldog sat. Wes took a chair from another desk.

  “Security will give you a building pass that’ll get you up here. If you need to go anyplace else in the facility, give a call to me or the boss’s secretary, we’ll clear you.”

  “Why not issue me a pass with building-wide clearance?”

  Noah waved his hand. “Too much monkey business.”

  As he turned the combination locks on his briefcase, Noah said, “When you’re at Security getting your pass, see Mike Kramer. He’ll play you the tape of your guy’s call, plus others from him that they just ‘happened’ to find.”

  The briefcase locks snapped open. From inside its scarred metal, Noah took an unlabeled folder.

  “That’s the pick shit paperwork, my notes,” he said.

  Noah tossed Wes a heavy white business envelope.

  “Fifty thousand dollars,” said Noah as Wes counted the used fifty- and hundred-dollar bills. Noah passed him a pad and pen. “Advance on expenses. Write me a receipt—and sign it.”

  Wes did, passed the pad and pen back, said, “Now you
write me a receipt—for my receipt. And sign it.”

  The CIA Director’s bulldog blinked. “We said we didn’t want a paper trail, Wes.”

  “You just had me make one. But it only goes one way.”

  Noah laughed, shook his head. As he scrawled a receipt, he said, “You might do after all.”

  “When you leave here today,” said Noah, “you got a guy to go see. Somebody to give you a hand when you need one.”

  “I thought this was a solo mission.”

  “There may be things you need expertise on, and since we’re frozen out of the apparatus here …” Noah shrugged.

  “Who?”

  “Jack Berns,” said Noah. “He’s a private eye. Nailed a senator in a divorce, fucked up a federal judge. A White House man in Watergate went to Jack for help when the law was closing in. But Jack had a hard-on for the Nixon crowd. Some deal gone sour. Jack had the guy come to his den, law books on the walls, pictures of big shots. Hidden microphones. Jack tapes the shit out of the Watergate guy spilling his guts, then gives the tapes to that fucking columnist Peter Murphy.”

  “Why do I want to have anything to do with him?”

  “Beats me, Wes. You figure it out.”

  “Has he worked for the CIA before?”

  “Our government doesn’t hire guys like Jack,” said Noah.

  They watched each other.

  “You want to know what I do with him?” asked Wes.

  “All we want to know is what you get,” said Noah. “But Berns expects you. I’d hate to see an old friend disappointed.”

  “I’d like copies of those tapes,” Wes told the gray-haired man behind the desk in the blank-walled room. A tape recorder and nine cassettes were the only things on the desk. A purple-coded picture ID was clipped to Wes’s suit jacket.

  “You don’t have clearance for that,” said the man. His ID badge had rainbow hues, a dozen numbers, said he was Michael Kramer, but didn’t say he was Head of Security, CIA.

  “How can I get clearance?” asked Wes.

  “Get that other butt boy Noah Hall to do it.”

  Kramer’s gaze was flat.

  “I’m not here to give you trouble,” said Wes.

  “Then why are you here?”