“That so?”
“Oh, yes. I do think we have some crafty ragheads up there.”
“Anything of interest to law enforcement?”
This question seemed to touch off a large internal debate in Knightly’s mind, which necessitated the consumption of another cigarette. “I want to be clear,” he said. “So listen up.”
“I’m listening.”
“My students come in for all kinds of crap from the people here. Not just from rednecks but from people who are supposed to be educated and enlightened.”
“I know that.” Fazoul was not the first foreign student Clyde had pulled out of a scrape.
“I know you know it. I’m just chalking it up on the blackboard, so to speak, as a thing to keep in mind.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.”
“Good. So we’re being real gentlemen about this so far. We are being politically correct academic leftists, fully aware of the extent of racism in our society. And that’s good. But we also have to be very clear about something that is not very politically correct.”
“And that is?”
“Wapsipinicon is crawling with foreign spooks. Always has been. Hell, during the heyday of the shah we had our own local office of SAVAK here—the shah’s gestapo—and they would do surveillance on Iranian students and actually carry out wet ops on a small scale—like riddling some student’s car with bullets in the middle of the night, just to intimidate him. Most of our foreign students come from developing countries, Clyde, where they don’t have things like democracy and human rights, never have, and probably never will. They come here with a mind-set that is far more alien to our college-town openness than we can possibly imagine.” Knightly shook his head and laughed darkly. “Those Howdy Brigade people just kill me.”
“I know what you mean,” Clyde said.
“In these countries sending a student overseas for several years is a big deal. It’s not just a luxury for spoiled kids who haven’t decided what they want to do for a living yet. It’s dead serious. It’s a large expenditure of money, made by a government—usually sort of a nasty government—that expects to get a healthy return on its investment. So when you look at the foreign students from countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, there are few of these who haven’t been thoroughly vetted by their country’s equivalent of SAVAK. Many of them have actually signed up with such organizations. Many have had to leave wives and children behind, as hostages.
“The message being that there are all kinds of scary governments that have flung out tendrils of power into places where you’d never expect it. If you could do a thorough sweep on all the places frequented by my students—run-down houses in campustown, those tacky apartment complexes on University Boulevard, the offices and labs where they work—you’d find countless listening devices. You’d find bugs on top of bugs.”
“Well, sir,” Clyde said, “I know you’re expecting that I’m not going to believe you. But I do believe you.”
“Okay,” Knightly said. “So what do we have on the chalkboard now?”
“Number one, there is racism and prejudice,” Clyde said. “Number two, that doesn’t mean that a lot of these foreign students aren’t up to”—he groped for a word—“shenanigans.”
Knightly laughed hollowly. “Shenanigans. I like that. That’s Ebenezer’s word, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ve got used to the shenanigans. It’s part of my job. These guys know the rules, they always stay within certain boundaries, and we rarely have serious trouble. Fazoul is a fine example. He’s up to all kinds of shenanigans. But his behavior is flawless. If only they could all be like Fazoul.”
“You having trouble now?”
Knightly sighed in exasperation. He started to speak two or three times and then stopped himself before a full word had escaped his lips. “It’s not that there’s trouble per se,” he said. “Hell, maybe I’m just feeling a little jumpy because of the Gulf War.”
“I know I sure am.”
“Of course you are. But I can’t escape the impression that we have some very naughty students in town nowadays. Students who are looking at some big-time detention if they ever get caught.”
“Where are they from? What are they doing?” Clyde said.
“You realize that it’s totally unethical for me to say anything,” Knightly said, “because it looks like I’m feeding the racism and prejudice, which is a big no-no right now. And there’s another reason that, if this gets out, I’m in deep shit. I’ll get to that reason later.”
“Okay.”
“We seem to have some Jordanians in town right now who are not really Jordanians,” Knightly said. “Which makes me wonder, what are they? I happen to think they are Iraqis.”
“One of them is, at least,” Clyde said. “One of them is Abdul al-Turki of Mosul, Iraq. Thirty-two years of age.”
Knightly turned to look at Clyde to see whether he was joking. He was silent for a long time. “Now, how in the fuck did you know that?” he said.
“Noticed one of the Jordanians was a wrestler,” Clyde said. “Went over to the EIU wrestling department and looked through all their old wrestling magazines, found pictures of him from some international meets back in the early eighties. He was on the Iraqi national team. He was disqualified for the eighty-four Olympics because of steroid use.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Knightly said. “Hell, I’ll bet the CIA doesn’t even know what you know.”
“CIA?”
“I mean the FBI,” Knightly said, “they’re the ones who do counterintelligence.” He shook his head. “I’ll be damned. So they are Iraqis.”
“The one is, anyway.”
“If one is, they all are.”
“What kind of shenanigans are they up to?” Clyde said.
“I don’t know,” Knightly said. “I just know they’re not doing what they said they were coming here to do.”
“Which was?”
“One of Professor Larsen’s goddamn things,” Knightly said. “Supposedly these guys were coming to do some research sponsored by one of Larsen’s little spin-off companies.”
“Was it supposed to be an academic thing? Or a private-enterprise thing?”
“Hell, Clyde, there’s no difference anymore,” Knightly said. “The boundary has been erased, there are no rules. It’s the most corrupt aspect of the United States right now.”
A few beers plus getting hammered in the election had made Clyde a bit more inquisitorial than usual. “Tell me to shut up if you want to, but you did more than just teach people how to raise food when you traveled, didn’t you?”
“I’m telling you the truth. That’s all I did. Oh, I was on the edge of a bunch of things. And I knew a bunch of people. But I never did any kind of work like that—never. It would have been fatal for somebody like me. Where I worked, I was totally hanging out by myself. I was tolerated because I was useful for everybody. But I learned enough to know that what’s going on with Larsen, here, is something different. Case in point: Kevin Vandeventer didn’t get killed in a highway robbery. He was working visas for Larsen.”
“You think he got killed over visas?”
“Visas are hot shit. Anyone can get in to do anything on a student visa.”
“As long as someone like you is willing to vouch for them.”
“Exactly. And I have no choice but to vouch when I’m told to vouch.”
“Who’s telling you to vouch?”
“My boss, the president of EIU,” Knightly said, “who takes his marching orders from the board of regents, and they take their orders from whoever provides the funding—which used to be the State of Iowa and the alumni. But now these hybrid operations like Larsen’s have become hugely important.”
“Okay,” Clyde said, “I see why this is off the record. Because if Larsen finds out that you’re throwing a monkey wrench into his machine—”
“All fucking hell will break loose,” Knightly said. “Com
e on, I’m freezing my ass off.”
They sidestepped carefully down the levee and began strolling back up the alley toward the brewery. “Do you have any specific information about what these guys are up to?” Clyde said.
“Nah. I’ve heard from their neighbors. They keep their curtains drawn day and night. When they go out—which they usually do at odd hours—they use one of two vehicles, both of which have tinted windows, and they’ve got a garage-door opener, so they never have to show their faces out-of-doors. They seem to eat a lot of pizza and take-out food.”
“Why’d you hear from the neighbors?” Clyde asked. “People just call you up to gossip?”
“They call me up to complain.”
“What do they have to complain about? These guys aren’t being friendly enough?”
“The radio transmissions,” Knightly said.
“Radio?”
“None of their neighbors can watch TV, or listen to a message on their answering machine, or use their wireless phones or their baby monitors, without getting all kinds of strange radio noise.”
“In Arabic?”
“It’s not in any language,” Knightly said. “I’ve listened to it—one irate citizen played her answering-machine tape for me. It’s scrambled or something. They’ve played with the signals electronically so that not even an Arabic speaker can understand what they’re saying.” Knightly pulled the side door open and held it for Clyde. Clyde wanted to ask more questions, but he got the feeling that Knightly must have told him everything he knew by this point.
Much later he went out and transferred Maggie’s car seat into Ebenezer’s car, and his grandfather gave them a ride home. Maggie woke up during the transfer and spent most of the ride fussing and crying, so they didn’t converse much. Clyde had Ebenezer swing by the sheriff’s department, which was only a block out of their way, not far from the brewery. Ebenezer orbited the block, singing fragments of forgotten lullabies in his hoarse voice—worn to leather from eight decades of shouting hymns—while Clyde ran inside and borrowed a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen from the duty officer. He scrawled out a two-sentence note to Kevin Mullowney, congratulating him on his victory, and giving him notice that Clyde would serve out the remainder of 1990, minus any accumulated vacation days, and then leave his job there for good. He folded it up and shoved it under Mullowney’s door before he could think better of it, then ran outside and waited for Ebenezer to swing by again.
Clyde got Maggie into the house and settled back in her crib. He listened to the messages on the hated answering machine, mostly from reporters asking him to comment on his failed campaign. When he’d got to the end of the new messages, he unplugged the machine and put it on a high, dusty shelf in the back corner of the garage. Then he went into the house, locked the doors, turned on CNN, and settled back into the La-Z-Boy.
He had been awake for twenty-four hours and did not feel sleepy. He should have been thinking about the things Knightly had told him. Instead, though, his mind was stuck on one comment he thought he had heard from Marcus Berry. If memory served, Berry had said something like, “Come on, we know you’re more cosmopolitan than you let on.”
“Cosmopolitan” was not an adjective commonly used to describe Clyde or any other lifelong Forks County resident. It must have been a reference to the fact that Clyde had done some traveling around the world as a younger man. Or perhaps Berry was talking about Clyde’s relationship with Fazoul. Or even Desiree’s mysterious ancestry.
In any case Berry must have been referring to something that Clyde had never mentioned to the FBI. Which meant that the FBI had been learning about Clyde independently. Someone, probably Marcus Berry, had been checking Clyde out.
Which was to be expected if Clyde had actually applied for a job with them. But he hadn’t.
He remembered the job application in his pocket and took it out and tried to read it by the flickering light of the tube.
The next thing he knew, it was morning, and Maggie was crying upstairs in her crib. CNN was still running, going on and on about the Saudi women drivers, which meant nothing important had happened. The job application had fallen to the floor and remained there until Maggie went down for her nap, at which time Clyde sat down over it with a ballpoint pen and began to fill in the blanks with small, neat block letters. As he did, he could not help imagining that maybe, at this time next year, he’d be in Washington, D.C., where losers and incompetents like Mullowney were not tolerated, and where people really knew how to get things done.
forty-two
BETSY WAS not surprised when, a week after returning to work from her long absence in Nampa, she was called out to Langley for a polygraph. When she’d entered the Agency, they had done a test to establish a baseline against which all subsequent tests were compared. An emotional shock could change the baseline, making a new polygraph necessary.
She didn’t care. She had come back to the Agency to discover that she was no longer interim branch chief—the position had been filled by one of her former officemates. This was not the career blow it might have seemed—she had given them notice that she was going to outprocess 12/31/90 in any event. In the meantime they had stripped her of virtually all access she’d once had, revoked her passwords and privileges and clearances. Now they assigned her meaningless scut work on a day-by-day basis and didn’t raise any eyebrows when she failed to turn it in. Instead she worked in the third-floor library filling out applications to graduate school on the West Coast, hoping to get in under the deadline for the spring semester.
So when she presented herself at Langley’s main entrance and went to the reception area staffed by the ever-so-nice-wives-of-spies, she was relaxed. The receptionist motioned for her to come inside to meet her polygraph operator. Kim McMurtry was fairly new in this position, but that didn’t mean she was unknown in the rumor mills of the Agency. She had come out of Texas A&M, where she had been a cheerleader. But she was no airhead. She had served in the Agency as a summer intern after her freshman, sophomore, and junior years, specializing in what was euphemistically called personnel work. She was now the ace of the poly staff, a sweet little five-foot-three blond beauty with a nice Texas twang, a tight ass, and a mind like a steel trap. She believed in the poly, and she loved to crack people, especially people like Betsy who never fluttered. Betsy knew all of these things just from listening to office scuttlebutt. Poly operators loomed very large in the careers of Agency employees, and if Agency people were good at anything, it was gathering and exchanging intelligence.
They went across the hall in front of the security guards to the row of poly rooms, and Kim cheerily asked Betsy to sit in the cunningly uncomfortable straight-backed chair. “You know the drill, I’m sure. But before we hook you up, you’ll have to sign this release.”
“What kind of release?” Betsy asked. This was a new wrinkle.
“We have reason to believe that you have committed a felony while pursuing your work with the Agency.”
“What?”
“This release waives your Fifth Amendment rights. You’re welcome to read through it.”
The tactic had already worked; Betsy’s calm was thoroughly shattered. “This is bullshit! What kind of a setup is this?”
McMurtry smiled sweetly. “Could I just recommend that you take your seat again and lower your voice? As I said, you are under investigation for a felony.”
“So I’m not allowed to get angry?”
“Please sit down, or I will summon a security guard.”
“That’s more bullshit.”
“We have a signed and sworn statement from the DCI’s executive secretary, Mrs. Margaret Hume, that you physically assaulted her, right here on these premises, in April. Given that, and your size advantage, I think I have every reason to fear for my safety.”
Betsy fell back into the wooden chair and uttered the only sentence she could think of that wouldn’t get her in deeper. “I want a lawyer.”
“You don’t get a lawyer.
You signed away those rights when you came on board. Now, are you going to sign this release?”
Betsy considered her situation. She didn’t believe for a moment that the Agency would ever charge her with a felony. She was being mind-fucked, pure and simple. She knew it. She didn’t care anymore. She signed. What the hell.
Kim was happy. She already had Betsy on the defensive. She hummed a little tune to herself as she wrapped corrugated hoses around Betsy’s torso above and below her breasts to track her respiration. She attached fingertip detectors to note changes in the galvanic skin response. And then she put on the blood-pressure cuff and pumped it up—tight, tight, tight. Betsy’s arm felt like an iron pipe.
Kim McMurtry took on a stainless-steel sheen when she began to ask the control questions: Is the sky blue? Is your name Betsy Wilson? Is this November? Did your brother commit treason . . . ?
Betsy felt her heart pound into high gear and knew that the needles must be bouncing all over the chart.
“No.”
Kim said nothing, just began another round of questions, most of them of no consequence. Betsy tried to control her breathing, but she knew that for the first time in taking the poly she was shook. She had the feeling that, up on the seventh floor, where all of this was being monitored in real time, money was changing hands. Vandeventer had been rattled; McMurtry took the pool.
“Do you need to go to the toilet? You don’t look well,” Kim said.
“No.”
“We want you to be relaxed.”
“I’m dead,” Betsy said. “Let’s get this over with.” A deep-red rash had spread down her arm. The petechiae—little vessels under the skin—had begun to burst from the pressure of the cuff. She knew that within a couple of hours the rash would spread down the full extent of her arm.
She had done nothing, but she was guilty. She had bought into a closed system. She had seen the inside of the inside, and as Hennessey had pointed out months and months ago, there was nothing there. She must now pay.
“What do you want?” Betsy asked Kim after she had returned from talking to somebody outside in the hallway.
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