by Gordon Kent
“Get me up straight—I’ve got to stand up straight—I’m all right, I’m all right—!”
7
August
East Africa.
O’Neill sits beside Lake Victoria. He is waiting for her—the female agent who responded to his sign.
O’Neill is at peace, perhaps for the first time. He has found he likes Africa. He understands now what Craik meant about its size, about its smell, the look of it. He has no feeling of coming home; to the contrary, it is the most alien place he has ever been. Yet it brings him peace.
She will wear green, and if something is wrong she will also wear a red scarf. This is not the sort of tradecraft they taught him at the Ranch, but Ranch tradecraft is not designed for Africa in the 1990s; it is designed for Europe in the 1970s. He smiles to himself. The wonder of it is that any of what they taught him actually does work here. The cops-and-robbers of counter-surveillance, for example. Most of the psychology of recruitment. It is like being a Boy Scout and finding that what the Boy Scout Manual says about building a fire really does make flame, even if nobody in his right mind would ever make it that way.
Perhaps, when he goes back, he will teach about Africa at the Ranch.
He sees a green dress coming toward him. It is still far away, but he can see the swing of her, her size, and he can see that she does not wear a red scarf.
O’Neill rises and goes to meet his future.
Which is Alan Craik’s future.
Near Newport, Rhode Island.
“You’re over-controlling.” Rafe’s voice was calm, devoid of criticism, an LSO voice.
Alan eased up on the stick, flexed his hand, and tried to keep the little gauge that measured rate of climb centered on zero through the turn. The single-engine plane wobbled slightly, very like a horse that knows it has a novice at the reins.
“See the runway?” The question seemed superfluous—the ancient runway of Quonsett Reserve Naval Air Station almost seemed to fill the viewscreen. “Center up. Ease up on the stick. The plane will fly just fine without you.”
Rafe spoke to the tower one more time, but Alan’s entire concentration was on the airplane and the runway. The runway, which had seemed miles long a moment before, now seemed to flow beneath him at the speed of light.
“Throttle down.” Rafe seemed to be running a checklist. Alan looked at his flaps and saw they were at full. His momentary glance broke his concentration on the stick, and the plane wobbled. He corrected automatically and was delighted to find that he had recentered. The plane dropped lightly; the altimeter ran slowly down toward zero, and the plane touched, less than a third of the way down the runway. Alan wanted to shriek with joy, but Rafe smiled wickedly and said, “Full power.”
Alan reacted automatically, running the throttle to full before the speed fell below thirty knots.
“Touch and go. Flaps up.” Alan ran the flaps all the way up with one hand, trying to watch the airspeed while keeping the plane centered on the runway. The airspeed needle passed through fifty-five knots and he pulled back lightly on the stick. His eyes flickered to the rate of climb; he was trying to hold on five degrees, with reasonable success. The plane began to climb away. Rafe spoke to the tower again and turned to Alan. “Nice job. You might have a stick hand, at that. Now ascend to 5500 and turn on course 172 for Naragansett. We’ll land there for lunch.”
The plane was Rafe’s. He kept it at Quonsett while he attended the War College. As a senior 0–4 with no kids and a busted marriage that so far hadn’t cost him alimony, he could maintain the sleek Cessna 182 in top condition and decorate the dash with gauges that were meaningless to Alan.
“You landing on the altimeter?” he asked casually, fiddling with the pocket on his windbreaker.
“Is that wrong?”
“Unfortunately, it just broke.” Rafe grinned and taped a piece of cardboard—he had been planning this, the sonofabitch—over the altimeter dial. “You liked flying with me off the boat, you get to learn my way.”
Rafe’s way was unnerving. Alan watched the ground, then started to glue himself to the angle-of-climb monitor. The airfield was down there, visible, and Alan was well into the approach, yet he felt lost. He kept waggling the wings to get a better view of the ground, and once, he almost panicked when he saw that he was in a 15degree descent instead of being level, but he fought the machine and himself and at last achieved lineup with the runway.
“How’s Rose?” Rafe asked.
Alan took a deep breath. “Rose was pregnant,” he said. “She lost the baby.”
He watched the runway and made a minute correction.
“Never try to correct so close to the ground!” Rafe shouted, and the wheels touched. He modulated his voice. “Nice landing, Buddy.”
“She fell down a ladder during sea trials on her new project.” Alan was thinking of Rose, the pale face on the hospital sheets, the limp hand in his, the averted face. No tears. Rose.
“Fucking A, Alan, that sucks.” With the engine at idle and no slipstream, the utter honesty of Rafe’s comment struck him. That was how it had been at the squadron. Confrontation, joy, sorrow—all right there. Not a lot of bullshit. “She taking it out on you?”
Two nights before, he had tried to make Rose talk about it and he still saw her gesture—hands raised on each side of her head, fingers spread, blocking out sound, sight, him; her voice, I’ll deal with it! Just let me deal with it! The hands, the voice shutting him out—
It was Rafe’s turn to try to smile, wryly now. “You don’t hide things very good, Spy.” He unbuckled his harness. “Get a hundred hours’ real time and you can solo in my plane. You’ll be a good pilot. Just stop paying such close attention to everything.”
Words to live by. Just stop paying such close attention. Right.
Houston.
Rose tears down the corridor and out a fire door, banging the handle with both palms to get it out of her way. The rental car waits in the parking lot and she almost runs to it. Drive as fast as she dares to the airport, dump the car; run to the check-in, only ten minutes to spare, slam down the ticket, run for the departure lounge—
If only I can stay busy. If only I can move fast enough. If only—
Work is a drug. She hates the evenings and the nights. Evenings, there isn’t always enough work to keep her mind from going back to it. Nights, there is never enough sleep, always the waking, the thinking, the pacing around the house or the hotel room. It is better on the road, because there is no Alan beside her there to remind her of what they have lost. Because of her. Because of going too hard, trying too hard, wanting too hard—
It was her fault. Not Valdez’s fault. Valdez had fallen on her, but that was because she had been hurrying him up on deck. Trying too hard. Going too fast. Her fault.
Now, so as not to remember, she tries to go faster. Cursing the people ahead of her in the aisle of the plane, the ones who left their overhead crap until the last moment, the ones who have to chat up the flight attendant, the ones who can’t walk fast enough. She hurries around them, almost running toward the terminal, toward the new rental car, the new offices. If she can only go fast enough—
Late that night, she calls Alan, as she does every night. She feels exhausted but doubts she will sleep. She hopes she has enough paperwork to last until tomorrow. She keeps her voice light, nonetheless. She must succeed in making everything seem okay, because he talks of other things: His job bores him. He has had lunch with Abe Peretz. He has heard nothing from O’Neill or Dukas; he is worried about them. What are they doing?
She tries to enter into his concern. Maybe it will get her through the night. What are O’Neill and Dukas doing? What are O’Neill and Dukas … ? All she can think about is the baby and the accident, and she turns on the light and begins to memorize the launch-parameter codes for Peacemaker.
8
August
East Africa.
Harry O’Neill had made a mistake.
In fact, he had
made the biggest mistake a case officer can make.
He had fallen in love.
With one of his agents.
All case officers, it is said, sleep with their agents—surely an exaggeration—but they don’t fall in love. It is the falling in love that is the mistake.
And he knew it was a mistake, and he was happy. He was happier than he had ever been in his life, happy in a way that reconciled him to his father’s snobbery and his ex-wife’s nastiness, to his own self-doubt and to the dangers of his mistake. If his life ended tomorrow, he told himself, he would say it had been worth it.
“I love you,” he said to her. “You make me happy.”
Elizabeth Momparu looked at him. Her eyes were slightly swollen from sex and sleep and fatigue, and when she half-closed them to look at him, they seemed to turn up at the corners. She had a fair idea of how she looked to him but no notion of how she really looked to him—the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most enchanting woman in the world. She had had a lot of men, white and black. Some of them had said they loved her. She had thought she had loved three. She had never known one like Harry.
“I like being with you,” she said. “I like being safe with you.”
They were sitting on the terrace of a game lodge in eastern Kenya. Night was almost there, coming fast; the retreating day had left a reddish light that made everything—waterhole, thorn trees, sky—seem like an old color slide that had lost all its blue and green. In front of them was a low wall, and a dropoff of twenty feet to an artificial waterhole that would be floodlighted later. For now, only rock hyraxes the size of gray squirrels were there, scrambling up over the wall and taking crumbs from the tourists. It was a safe place, she was right; O’Neill had looked for a long time before he had picked it. None of the Hutu Interahamwe would ever come there.
“Why don’t we get married, and you can feel that way all the time?”
“Harry—!”
He smiled, shrugged, as a man who has asked the question before will shrug. He would go on asking it, too. One day, as they both knew, she would say yes. He touched her fingers, and she twined hers into his.
The reason it is the worst of mistakes for a case officer to fall in love with an agent is that he endangers his very reason for being when he does so. An agent, cut it how you will, is expendable, but a lover is not. At the same time, the agent is rarely unique, is more likely part of a network. When the case officer wants to fold the agent into his real life, he destroys both of them, and often the rest of the network, too.
O’Neill knew these things. He was thinking of them as he sat in the near-dark and seemed to watch the hyraxes. He had already decided that he didn’t care, at least not about the theoretical part—his job, his career, the Agency. He did care about disentangling her from her role as agent.
“I don’t want you to go back,” he said.
She squeezed his fingers. “I have to.”
“I want you to fly to Paris. I’ve made a reservation for you.”
“Oh, Harry—”
“You’ll be safe. Somebody will meet you.”
She was silent for so long, she seemed to have forgotten. “You know I can’t,” she said at last.
He knew she wouldn’t go. He had to do it, had to make the arrangements, as if she would. Maybe she would. But of course she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t for the reason—one of the reasons—that he loved her: because she wanted to stop the killing. She had first allowed Hammer to recruit her because once she knew what he was doing, she thought that helping the Americans would bring their power and what she saw as their idealism into it. The Americans would stop the killing, she had thought. But the Americans hadn’t stopped the killing, as it turned out.
“I have to go back there,” she said. “You know you need me there. Six months, then maybe—”
“I’ll get somebody else.” He knew he wouldn’t, couldn’t. She was close to the leadership; he’d never find anybody so close, with all the turmoil. It would take years to replace her. That would be somebody else’s problem.
“Maybe,” she said, “things will change next year.”
Things wouldn’t change in a hundred years. They both knew that. But it was what people told themselves all over central Africa: maybe things will change. Meanwhile, the uneasy truce in Rwanda had become a preparation for war in Zaire, using the refugees there as a weapon. O’Neill had agents in Uganda and eastern Tanzania and Zambia now, and they all said the same thing: a splinter Zairean group in Tanzania was going to be supported in a takeover of Zaire. The other nations would all profit, grabbing slices of territory—buffer zones, minerals. The Hutu refugees were a kind of shield for all sides, behind which the Interahamwe sheltered and the potential invaders hid their intentions.
“What if I quit my job and we went home?” he said. Home was the States. She had been there on a holiday—Disney World—but she couldn’t think of it as home.
“You’re being silly. People like us don’t have a home. Nobody in my country has a home any more. We’re all refugees, even me, and I own a villa. You made yourself a refugee when you took your horrible job.”
“I’m an expat, not a refugee.”
“Yes, you’re American. Americans can’t be refugees, can they. They own the world.”
“I told you, I’ll quit the horrible job.”
“No, you won’t.”
They sat another twenty minutes. By then, it was black dark. Lights had been turned on in the trees below them, but no animals had come to the waterhole yet. They stood to go in to dinner. When she was facing him, close to him, she said, “I—” and stopped. She wasn’t looking into his face, rather down into the trees.
“What?”
She had a habit of pushing out her lower lip and pushing her tongue up against her lower teeth when she was challenged, getting an expression faintly like a chimpanzee’s. She shook her head. “We’ll talk about it later.”
She ate greedily. She was a big woman and she liked to eat. She did many things greedily—making love, talking, shopping—and he loved her for it because the greed extended to him.
The place was laid out with winding paths that ran along the curved front of the single-story buildings that housed the guest rooms. At night, guards were available to take guests to their rooms because animals came in from the bush, seldom anything more dangerous than a baboon, although a baboon can kill a child, maim a grown man. Elizabeth was afraid of neither the dark nor the animals, and she strode along, the low lights with shades like conical hats shining on her ankles, leading Harry by the hand as if it were he who needed her protection. Once in their room, however, she became tentative. She stood with her blouse partly unbuttoned, as if lost in some idea. Then she moved to the closet, took the blouse off, hung it up, and turned back—and stood there. When he put his arms around her she moved away, said, “No. Not yet.”
She continued to undress slowly. Wearing bra and thong panties, she took a cigarette from her purse and stood looking at it. He had been astonished that she smoked; he still didn’t much care for the taste of cigarettes on her. In Africa, everybody smoked.
“I want to tell you something,” she said.
He thought he had heard all her revelations. The ones about other men had been hard on him. He had shucked off a lot of immature bullshit, coming to grips with them, coming to realize that love in this case required accepting whatever had gone before. It had taken him weeks to come to it. Along the way, always, was the possibility of AIDS. He had coped with that, too.
“Is this place really secure?” she said. She had been tapping the cigarette, tapping it and tapping it, and at last she struck the lighter he had given her and put it to the end. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.” He had scoped the room and made sure it was clean. Kenyan security were not on to him. They would sometime, but just now he was not of interest to them. She was on a false passport he had got from the embassy and not interesting to them. They were secure.
She strode up and down. She was nervous, more nervous than he had ever seen her. After several minutes, she turned on her little radio, stubbed out the cigarette and took out another. When it was alight, she said, “I want to tell you something I haven’t been able to tell anybody else.”
Harry O’Neill prepared himself.
She sat on the bed and took his hand and drew him down next to her. They were both big, both mostly naked. She said, “I have something I didn’t give you. Business, you know.” Business meant in her capacity as agent. Harry felt immense relief. Not another lover, then. She swallowed noisily and smoked and said, “I couldn’t tell the guy before you. And Hammer—”
Hammer had been in his forties, overweight, and he had driven his Range Rover down to Ruaha in the rainy season, and they had found him after he’d been missing for two days. The vehicle had got stuck in a vast mudhole and he’d had a heart attack.
“Hammer died two years ago. I had this—something to tell him—but I couldn’t for a while; it was the bad time, the really bad time, you couldn’t travel and there were killings everywhere and everybody on the move, and—By the time I thought it was safe to send a signal, he was dead. Then that idiot came in and I couldn’t trust him.” She looked at him. “I just couldn’t trust him, Harry!”
Their bare shoulders and arms and thighs were pressed together, but O’Neill knew that he was supposed to sit and listen. This was one of those times when love and sex didn’t go hand in hand.
She got another cigarette. “I couldn’t tell you until I was sure. Even when I loved you, I wasn’t sure. It takes time, Harry, to trust somebody.” She meant, she had lots of lovers she had liked, spent time with, but she hadn’t trusted them. Well, he should be flattered, although he wasn’t. “Now, I’m going to tell you. But you have to promise me—promise, promise me, Harry—that you’ll protect me. It can’t get back to me!”
“You know I’ll protect you, my Christ—”
“I know, I know!” She put her fingers on his mouth. “I know, you have to protect me as an agent, I know all that. But I’m going to put my life in your hands, Harry. This isn’t like anything else I’ve ever had. Okay? You promise?”