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 T-shirt 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 attaché from the Syrian Embassy. They go to a café 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 attaché. 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. And it was slightly translucent. I could see that she was wearing nothing underneath it.
“Military life is full of sacrifices,” I said, more to myself than to her.
“I’ll get over it,” she said.
Then she asked me the second question I wish I had answered differently.
“Will you let me make the arrest?” she said.
Ten years later I woke up alone in Duke’s bed at six o’clock in the morning. His room was at the front of the house, so I had no view of the sea. I was looking west, at America. There was no morning sun. No long dawn shadows. Just dull gray light on the driveway, and the wall, and the granite landscape beyond. The wind was blowing in off the sea. I could see trees moving. I imagined black storm clouds behind me, way out over the Atlantic, moving fast toward the shore. I imagined sea birds fighting the turbulent air with their feathers whipped and ruffled by the gale. Day fifteen, starting out gray and cold and inhospitable, and likely to get worse.
I showered, but I didn’t shave. I dressed in more of Duke’s black denim and laced my shoes and carried my jacket and my coat over my arm. Walked quietly down to the kitchen. The cook had already made coffee. She gave me a cup and I took it and sat at the table. She lifted a loaf of bread out of the freezer and put it in the microwave. I figured I w
ould need to evacuate her, at some point before things turned unpleasant. And Elizabeth, and Richard. The mechanic and Beck himself could stay to face the music.
I could hear the sea from the kitchen, loud and clear. The waves crashed in and the relentless undertow sucked back out. Pools filled and drained, the gravel rattled across the rocks. The wind moaned softly through the cracks in the outer porch door. I heard frantic cries from the gulls. I listened to them and sipped my coffee and waited.
Richard came down ten minutes after me. His hair was all over the place and I could see his missing ear. He took coffee and sat down across from me. His ambivalence was back. I could see him facing up to no more college and the rest of his life hidden away with his folks. I figured if his mother got away without an indictment they could start over somewhere else. Depending on how resilient he was, he could get back to school without missing much more than a week of the semester. If he wanted to. Unless it was an expensive school, which I guessed it was. They were going to have money problems. They were going to walk away with nothing more than they stood up in. If they walked away at all.
The cook went out to set the dining room up for breakfast. Richard watched her go and I watched him and saw his ear again and a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
“Five years ago,” I said. “The kidnap.”
He kept his composure. Just looked down at the table and then looked up at me and combed his hair over his scar with his fingers.
“Do you know what your dad is really into?” I asked.
He nodded. Said nothing.
“Not just rugs, right?” I said.
“No,” he said. “Not just rugs.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“There are worse things,” he said.
“Want to tell me what happened five years ago?” I said.
He shook his head. Looked away.
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
“I knew a guy called Gorowski,” I said. “His two-year-old daughter was abducted. Just for a day. How long were you gone for?”
“Eight days,” he said.
“Gorowski fell right into line,” I said. “One day was enough for him.”
Richard said nothing.
“Your dad isn’t the boss here,” I said, like a statement.
Richard said nothing.
“He fell into line five years ago,” I said. “After you had been gone eight days. That’s the way I figure it.”
Richard was silent. I thought about Gorowski’s daughter. She was twelve years old now. She probably had the Internet and a CD player and a phone in her room. Posters on her walls. And a tiny dim ache in her mind about something that had happened way in the past. Like the itch you get from a long-healed bone.
“I don’t need details,” I said. “I just want you to say his name.”
“Whose name?”
“The guy who took you away for eight days.”
Richard just shook his head.
“I heard the name Xavier,” I said. “Someone mentioned it.”
Richard looked away and his left hand went straight to the side of his head, which was all the confirmation I needed.
“I was raped,” he said.
I listened to the sea, pounding on the rocks.
“By Xavier?”
He shook his head again.
“By Paulie,” he said. “He was just out of prison. He still had a taste for that kind of thing.”
I was quiet for a long moment.
“Does your father know?”
“No,” he said.
“Your mother?”
“No.”
I didn’t know what to say. Richard said nothing more. We sat there in silence. Then the cook came back and fired up the stove. She put fat in a skillet and started heating it. The smell made me sick to my stomach.
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said.
Richard followed me outside to the rocks. The air was salty and fresh and bitter cold. The light was gray. The wind was strong. It was blowing straight in our faces. Richard’s hair strung way out behind him, almost horizontal. The spray was smashing twenty feet in the air and foamy drops of water were whipping toward us like bullets.
“Every silver lining has a cloud,” I said. I had to talk loud, just to be heard over the wind and the surf. “Maybe one day Xavier and Paulie will get what’s coming to them, but your dad will go to prison in the process.”
Richard nodded. There were tears in his eyes. Maybe they were from the cold wind. Maybe they weren’t.
“He deserves to,” he said.
Very loyal, his father had said. Best buddies.
“I was gone eight days,” Richard said. “One should have been enough. Like with the other guy you mentioned.”
“Gorowski?”
“Whoever. With the two-year-old girl. You think she was raped?”
“I sincerely hope not.”
“Me too.”
“Can you drive?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“You might need to get out of here,” I said. “Soon. You and your mother and the cook. So you need to be ready. For if and when I tell you to go.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m a guy paid to protect your father. From his so-called friends, as much as his enemies.”
“Paulie won’t let us through the gate.”
“He’ll be gone soon.”
He shook his head.
“Paulie will kill you,” he said. “You have no idea. You can’t deal with Paulie, whoever you are. Nobody can.”
“I dealt with those guys outside the college.”
He shook his head again. His hair streamed in the wind. It reminded me of the maid’s hair, under the water.
“That was phony,” he said. “My mom and I discussed it. It was a setup.”
I was quiet for a second. Did I trust him yet?
“No, it was for real,” I said. No, I didn’t trust him yet.
“It’s a small community,” he said. “They have about five cops. I never saw that guy before in my life.”
I said nothing.
“I never saw those college cops either,” he said. “And I was there nearly three full years.”
I said nothing. Mistakes, coming back to haunt me.
“So why did you quit school?” I said. “If it was a setup?”
He didn’t answer.
“And how come Duke and I were ambushed?”
He didn’t answer.
“So what was it?” I said. “A setup or for real?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You saw me shoot them all,” I said.
He said nothing. I looked away. The seventh wave came rolling in. It crested forty yards out and hit the rocks faster than a man can run. The ground shuddered and spray burst upward like a star shell.
“Did either of you discuss this with your father?” I said.
“I didn’t,” he said. “And I’m not going to. I don’t know about my mom.”
And I don’t know about you, I thought. Ambivalence works both ways. You blow hot, then you blow cold. The thought of his father in a prison cell might look pretty good to him right now. Later, it might look different. When push came to shove, this guy was capable of swinging either way.
“I saved your ass,” I said. “I don’t like it that you’re pretending I didn’t.”
“Whatever,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do anyway. This is going to be a busy weekend. You’ve got the shipment to deal with. And after that you’ll be one of them anyway.”
“So help me out,” I said.
“I won’t double-cross my dad,” he said.
Very loyal. Best buddies.
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“So how can I help you?”
“Just tell him you want me here. Tell him you shouldn’t be alone right now. He listens to you, about stuff like that.”
He didn’t reply. Just walked away from
me and headed back to the kitchen. He went straight through to the hallway. I guessed he was going to eat breakfast in the dining room. I stayed in the kitchen. The cook had set my place at the deal table. I wasn’t hungry, but I forced myself to eat. Tiredness and hunger are bad enemies. I had slept, and now I was going to eat. I didn’t want to wind up weak and light-headed at the wrong moment. I had toast, and another cup of coffee. Then I got more into it and had eggs and bacon. I was on my third cup of coffee when Beck came in to find me. He was wearing Saturday clothes. Blue jeans and a red flannel shirt.
“We’re going to Portland,” he said. “To the warehouse. Right now.”
He went back out to the hallway. I guessed he would wait at the front. And I guessed Richard hadn’t talked to him. Either he hadn’t gotten a chance, or he hadn’t wanted to. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Checked my pockets to make sure the Beretta was safely stowed and the keys were there. Then I walked out and fetched the car. Drove it around to the front. Beck was waiting there for me. He had put a canvas jacket over his shirt. He looked like a regular Maine guy heading out to split logs or tap his maple trees for syrup. But he wasn’t.
Paulie was about ready with the gate so I had to slow but I didn’t have to stop. I glanced at him as I passed. I figured he would die today. Or tomorrow. Or I would. I left him behind and gunned the big car along the familiar road. After a mile I passed the spot where Villanueva had parked. Four miles after that I rounded the narrow curve where I had trapped the bodyguards. Beck didn’t speak. He had his knees apart with his hands held down between them. He was leaning forward in his seat. His head was down, but his eyes were up. He was staring straight ahead through the windshield. He was nervous.
“We never had our talk,” I said. “About the background information.”
“Later,” he said.
I passed Route One and used I-95 instead. Headed north for the city. The sky stayed gray. The wind was strong enough to push the car a little off line. I turned onto I-295 and passed by the airport. It was on my left, beyond the tongue of water. On my right was the back of the strip mall where the maid had been captured, and the back of the new business park where I figured she had died. I kept on going straight and threaded my way into the harbor area. I passed the lot where Beck parked his trucks. One minute later we arrived at his warehouse.
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