A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  “Kind of hot for a casual visit, too,” Lensky said. We had already acclimatized to a way of life in which nothing much happened between noon and 4 p.m. “What brings you this way, Nelson? Why didn’t you call first? We might not have been in.”

  “This time of day,” Finch said, “everybody is home in the shade.” He shrugged off his suit jacket and dropped it over the back of a chair. “I just took a fancy to see what kind of a setup you’d rented. Christ, couldn’t you find anything with air-conditioning?”

  “It’s convenient to the part of town where we’re working,” Lensky said. “And it’s easy to do an SDR between downtown and here, as I trust you’ve noticed?”

  Finch brushed off that question and demanded a beer.

  “SDR?” I murmured to Lensky when we were in the kitchen.

  “Surveillance detection run. Remember how we got to the apartment? Very basic tradecraft. I’m sure Finch can do it in his sleep.” He took the bottle out to Finch. Just as he set the beer down, somebody else banged on the door.

  “Oh, for –! Victor,” he called, “it must be some of your friends. Everybody I know in Mombasa is already here!”

  “Except Khamisi,” Ben said, coming out of his room.

  “Khamisi?” Finch looked up.

  Lensky waved one hand. “Nobody important.”

  Ben bristled. “What do you mean, nobody? He’s the first useful asset we’ve acquired!”

  Ben had been spending so much time with Lensky, CIA-speak was rubbing off on him.

  There was a rather heated discussion going on at the front door. In Swahili, so I couldn’t really eavesdrop.

  “You’ve recruited an asset?” Finch repeated. “You should have run the name by the office first. We have a list of people who aren’t to be trusted.”

  Seemed to me a list of people who could be trusted would have been more useful, not to mention shorter. But – as Finch would doubtless point out if I said anything – I wasn’t a highly trained field operative, and he was.

  “If you’re talking about Khamisi bin Ali bin Abdallah, the old Sheikh’s grandson, you’re making a mistake,” Finch went on after a lengthy pull at his beer. “I know your buddy Victor Salvez uses that family as informants, but there’s a bi-ig difference between anthropology and our work. I wouldn’t trust any of them with sensitive material.”

  “Perhaps you are forgetting,” said Lensky, tight-lipped, “that the flow of information usually goes the other way. I don’t give Khamisi sensitive information – that’s what I pay him to give me.”

  Not that we’d had anything like that from him yet.

  Victor stomped into the living room then, looking as ruffled as I’d ever seen him, and complained that he couldn’t work when idiots kept showing up at the front door and demanding to see the apartment.

  “I had to tell him six times that I’d rented the place from Prajapati and he’d need to go through him, and he didn’t go away until I told him one of the friends I’m sharing the apartment with has a gun!”

  Lensky compressed his lips. “Not the ideal way to get rid of importunate visitors, Victor. Have you forgotten that the point of working through you was to keep a lid on the Company’s involvement?”

  “I didn’t say anything about you being CIA. And if you’re so picky, you can deal with the next intrusion. In Swahili, and good luck with that!” Victor stamped out again, probably congratulating himself on having had the last word.

  Finch shook his head, laughing quietly. “It has been a while since you were in the field, hasn’t it, Lensky? I can’t say I congratulate you on your choice of cutout – or your first asset. You’d really better run everything through the office from now on just for your own protection. I’m sure I can find some better people for you to talk to.”

  “If you really want to help, you could—” Lensky started.

  I was afraid he was about to mention the latest video, so I kicked him and interrupted. “That’s very good advice, Mr. Finch, I’m sure he’ll bear it in mind from now on. It’s so kind of you to offer to help us find agents.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Finch said, tilting his chair back and taking a long pull on his beer. “It’s not as if there’s a lot of business of world-shaking importance going through the office right now. The Company’s not what it was when we started, Lensky. There’s no room, any more, for initiative and – and style. It’s been strangled by nervous-nellie bureaucrats, always looking over their shoulders for fear the media will get hold of something that can make them look bad.”

  Over a second beer he expatiated on this theme, complaining that not only the CIA but all of America had become soft and nervous and useless. “If those with power are afraid to act, those with courage will take it from them,” he declaimed with the air of somebody stating an unvarying truth. “America will have nobody to blame but herself when she goes under to younger, stronger nations with the courage to act on their convictions.”

  “I haven’t seen a whole lot of countries that I’d call stronger than the United States,” Brad said mildly.

  “Ah, that’s because you’re only looking at the surface of things. What good is it to have more divisions than the enemy, if the politicians are afraid to use those divisions? A real man can’t get ahead in America any more, Lensky. And certainly not in the Company. They’ve succumbed to fear. You know what that ass Taylor said the other day? ‘Whenever the guns come out, the CIA gets in trouble.’ I tell you, the Company’s rotting from within. They prefer to operate in the shadows and leave the real action to others. You should get out before it’s too late.”

  “Are you planning to do that?”

  “Never – never tell anybody your plans.” Finch banged his empty bottle down on the table and glared at us. “Never apologize – never explain. Duke of Wellington.”

  “Can I help you get back to the office, Finch?”

  He heaved himself out of his chair. “No need. I can find my way around this pissant little town. Not much more than a wide place in the road!”

  “You should have let me whisk him back,” I said when the apartment was quiet again. “I think he was followed coming over here, and that’s what attracted our pushy visitor that Victor had to get rid of.”

  Lensky sighed and sat down at the table. “I wanted to. Never thought I’d see Finch drunk on two beers, but maybe he’d started before he came over here.”

  “He was slurring a bit, towards the end.”

  “And misquoting. Badly.”

  “What, the Duke of Wellington didn’t say, ‘Never apologize, never explain?’”

  Lensky gave me a tight-lipped smile. “No. It was John Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.”

  Lensky is an aficionado of old movies, and as I may have mentioned, his world view frequently reflects them.

  “I’m very much afraid you may be right about Finch,” he went on now. “He has gotten stale here. But there’s no way to prevent him from being just as careless again – and right now I am not sure how he’d react to a demonstration of your particular abilities.”

  I brought him a beer. I seemed to be serving a lot of drinks today, but never mind; he needed it.

  “If he was followed, Victor’s crack about my carrying will just have confirmed that this is a CIA house. I’m afraid this apartment won’t be good for much longer, Thalia. I’d like to keep it another couple of days, though; if we move without telling Khamisi, it might spook him. And anyway, re-establishing contact will be a bitch.”

  “I might be able to reach him through Zawadi.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl I went shopping with, who introduced us? A granddaughter of Mama Aesha’s? She went to Sarah Lawrence,” I added before remembering that this was just my imaginative gloss on her two years of college in America. It didn’t matter, did it?

  “That reminds me,” said Lensky, after another restorative pull at his beer. “You kicked my shins before I could tell him about the new video – okay, I took the hi
nt, but what gives? If we can’t share information with our own people, what chance do we have here?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” I confessed, “but his insistence on our running everything through his office bothers me.”

  “Just territorial maneuvering,” Lensky dismissed my concern. “Happens all the time. Harrison sent us straight here instead of contacting the local office and asking them to request our help. Finch probably feels we’ve stepped on his toes, coming in like this.” He finished the beer.

  “Maybe. Or maybe you’re insufficiently paranoid where some people are concerned. I didn’t like the way he dismissed Khamisi.”

  “Ah, you and Finch just rub each other the wrong way. I’ve noticed that from the beginning.” He caught me by the waist and drew me down onto his lap. “I hadn’t meant to mention Khamisi by name, but that’s not because I don’t trust Nelson; it’s just good operational security. Don’t worry about Finch. He may have spent too long in this backwater and become a careless son of a bitch, but there’s no harm in him. If he weren’t a good guy, don’t you think I’d have seen something wrong during our training at the Farm?”

  What I thought was, one, that maybe Finch had changed in more fundamental ways than Brad was willing to consider; and, two, that he wasn’t worth a fight with my husband. “Do you want another beer?”

  “I’d rather have a late siesta… with my wife.” He nuzzled the back of my neck and I forgot about any number of things I’d meant to think about.

  I didn’t even notice that Ben had quietly left the apartment.

  14. Thief-wiring

  We didn’t come out again until after the evening call to prayer.

  My first sight of the living room gave me a nasty shock. Ben’s body was sprawled out across the coconut matting.

  At first my heart thumped painfully; then I saw that he had flung one arm over his eyes and his fingers were twitching.

  “What happened to you?”

  He removed the arm and peered up at us. I repeated myself with more feeling when I got a good look at the bruises and cuts on his face. “What happened to you?”

  “They broke my glasses,” he informed me. “And don’t go like you’ve been worried sick about me. I’ve been back here for hours with nothing to do but not listen to the sounds emanating from your bedroom.”

  I could feel my face turning almost as red as the unbruised portions of his. “Next time read a – oh, right. They… Who broke your glasses? And why?”

  “We didn’t exactly have a lengthy philosophical discussion about it.”

  It seemed Ben too had felt there was something off about Nelson Finch. When Finch left the apartment, Ben had generated camouflage around himself and followed him.

  “I didn’t really expect him to do anything but go home or to the office,” he confessed, “and then I planned to come right back here.” He’d certainly spent enough time in the apartment to use it for a destination; he could have teleported back from anywhere in the city.

  But instead of the expected moves, Finch had walked through the fringes of Old Town and on into a part of Mombasa that, although furnished with street signs and sidewalks, was in other respects considerably less savory than our own neighborhood.

  Lensky sucked in his breath when Ben mentioned the names of the major streets he’d crossed.

  “Majengo. That is not a good part of town, Ben.”

  By now we were all seated around the table, making further inroads into the beer supply. Well, Lensky and I were, and Victor was nursing an open bottle that he seemed to be using mostly to cool his hands. Ben was holding a bag of ice cubes over a swollen eye that looked worse by the minute, and he said he felt too queasy to drink anything but water.

  “So I learned,” Ben said grimly.

  “But you were using camouflage?” I asked. “You should have been all right.”

  “That’s what I thought too,” he said. “I also thought that if Finch could go for a stroll there, it must be at least sort of an okay neighborhood.”

  Both those beliefs had turned out to be inaccurate.

  Finch had paused at a street corner to talk to a group of men who were lounging in the scanty shade of a couple of mango trees. Ben wasn’t sure whether they were Arab or Swahili. Not, he said definitely, pure African. By now we’d all seen enough of the blue-shadowed blackness of pure Africans to recognize people with a more blended heritage.

  Of course, ‘blended’ described approximately sixty percent of the population of Mombasa, so it didn’t really narrow things down much.

  They looked like a tough bunch, Ben said. He’d certainly felt intimidated and grateful for his camouflage. But Finch had seemed quite at his ease, exchanging jokes and, eventually, passing out money.

  “He runs his own assets,” Lensky said. “Any field officer worth his salt would do the same.”

  “What, right out on the street in front of God and everybody?”

  The guys ignored my interruption.

  “These fellows,” Ben said, “are not what I’d call assets. Not in the old meaning of ‘assets to society,’ anyway. If I were you, Lensky, I’d worry about the company your friend keeps.”

  Ben’s quiet surveillance had come to an abrupt end when a little boy on an antique bicycle rode into him.

  “You know how hard it is to maintain camouflage when you’re being jostled,” he said to me. “Suddenly I couldn’t keep picturing the set of open covers that I’d envisioned projecting a background image over me.”

  “And you couldn’t get it back?”

  “It all happened so fast,” Ben said defensively. “The kid and I both hit the sidewalk, he started wailing, Finch looked around and saw me. He pointed at me and shouted something, and the next thing I knew, I had my arms over my head and his native buddies were kicking me and stomping on my glasses. The only thing I could think to do was to teleport back here.”

  “Thank God you did that.” At some later time I’d bug him about remembering to raise a shield. This was the second time in a couple of weeks he’d forgotten to protect himself against violent thugs. And these people sounded even more dangerous than those high-spirited wannabe-rapists we’d tangled with in Germany.

  “You’re sure Finch recognized you?” Lensky asked. “He couldn’t just have been startled by somebody appearing out of thin air?”

  “No, I’m not sure. I’m just telling you what happened. If you want an official CIA interpretation, go ask your buddy Finch what he thinks he saw, and why he sicced those guys on me.” Ben was veering from defensive to aggrieved, and I couldn’t blame him.

  “It doesn’t look good,” Lensky said in response to a look from me. “But you can’t expect me to condemn an old friend unheard!”

  “No. Of course not. Only… could you just not tell Nelson Finch about the video or anything else we’ve got? For a couple of days anyway?”

  A deep sigh. “Thalia. That video is our key to getting complete and total CIA support. When Steve Harrison sees it, he’ll put an army of operatives in this city. You can’t expect me to bury it!”

  “No. But if you do what Finch demanded, and pass everything through his office… I’m afraid it might get buried. Could you contact Harrison directly with the video? Make sure he knows about it?”

  Lensky sighed and rubbed his face with the palm of his hand. “Yes. Right. I’ll…” He glanced at the laptop. “I’m not sure how secure Prajapati’s wi-fi is.”

  “Not at all,” Victor said cheerfully. “All the neighbors have probably figured out how to tap into it, and anybody else can do so easily enough. Didn’t you notice that his password is ‘PASSWORD’?”

  “Damn. I don’t want to go back to the Royal Court Hotel, not after the way you two terrified that maid.”

  “I’ll call Jimmy,” Ben volunteered. “If we give him Harrison’s contact info, he can send the best-definition version of the video he’s been able to find directly to Langley.”

  Lensky nodded. “That’ll do�
�� for now. Dammit, I can’t figure out why they haven’t already seen it and contacted me!”

  I could come up with more than one hypothesis to account for that. One was that the people at Langley weren’t looking, that Harrison’s boss had squashed his belief in an East African connection. Another was that too many people, including those at Langley, had fallen for Nelson Finch’s desire to be at the center of all communications in this part of the investigation… and that Finch had already buried the information.

  But why would he do that? Territorial disputes, rivalry with his old Farm buddy, a desire to be the star of the show… nothing I could think of would account for Finch’s doing something so nakedly destructive. Probably I’d been around Brad so long that his paranoia was rubbing off on me.

  When I woke up screaming in the small hours, though, I knew that what wakened me hadn’t been a bad dream or a paranoid fantasy. Mr. M. had the evidence to prove it.

  Brad crashed through the bedroom door, gun drawn, and flipped on the lights. “Thalia? What happened? Are you all right?”

  I was shaking; I sat up, pulled the discarded sheet around me and tried to take in the situation. Brad was wearing only his boxers. He hadn’t been in the bed when I woke up. Sitting up, brooding? Probably. I stored for future reference the fact that he could get to his preferred weapon at light speed even when practically naked.

  Ben was behind Lensky, peering over his shoulder. And Mr. M. was zipping around the room at head height. He had something gripped in his beak that interfered with actual singing, thank God, but he still managed to buzz a wordless song of victory.

  “Something… poked me. Here. Sharp.” I pointed at my right thigh, now covered by the sheet.

  “A dream?” Ben hazarded.

  “A bug?” Lensky suggested, lowering his weapon.

  Mr. M. dropped his trophy into my lap and said, “A thief.”

  I picked up the twig he’d dropped. It looked like the tip of a bamboo fishing pole, but instead of hanging from a string at the end of the pole, the fishing hook was attached to the bamboo by tightly wrapped wires.