Carl wore gloves, a canvas apron, and safety glasses. Through their dense lenses, he watched the burning coke in his forge, the thick strip of steel beginning to glow the requisite orange color while he worked the bellows. Heating the metal for exactly the right amount of time and at the necessary temperature, he used tongs to remove it from the forge and set it on his anvil. With his powerful right arm, he wielded a hammer, pounding the steel into submission, flattening, shaping. The forge's heat softened the metal, making it malleable, allowing him to impose his will upon it.
Clang!
Aaron.
Clang!
Aaron.
Bittersweet memories seized him. The rhythmic high-pitched din of the hammer on the anvil sounded to him like ricochets, like screams of pain. He pounded harder, then sensed another sound and turned toward the door, where someone had knocked.
“Come in.”
The door slowly opened. Raoul stepped apprehensively into shadows that were dissipated by the glow of the forge.
“Come closer. I want to show you something,” Carl said.
Raoul did what he was told.
“The knife I'm working on is named after the one the first Jim Bowie carried. You've made the connection? Bowie? The Bowie knife?”
Raoul showed that he'd absorbed one of the lessons Carl had taught him—to admit what he didn't know. “I've never heard of it.”
“It's the most famous knife of all time. Bowie was a land speculator along the Mississippi. A knife fighter. An adventurer. He died with Crockett and Travis at the Alamo. In 1827, he used a knife to kill one man and wound another in what's known as the Sandbar Duel. Nobody's certain what Bowie's knife actually looked like. The one I'm making is based on a design from a movie called The Iron Mistress. Alan Ladd played Bowie. But the knife was the true star. It was later used in other movies, Walt Disney's Davy Crockett and John Wayne's The Alamo. When you see the beauty of the finished product, you won't be able to take your eyes off it. A whole generation of knife makers was inspired to take up the craft because of this knife.”
Carl remembered the first time he'd seen The Iron Mistress. The old knife maker had taped it off television and lent the video to Aaron and him. The start of the movie was boring: Alan Ladd in frilly clothes trying to make Virginia Mayo fall in love with him. He and Aaron had hooted at the television. But then Ladd went to a blacksmith and showed him a wooden model of a knife he wanted made. The blacksmith got all excited and said he had a piece of a meteorite that he would melt and add to the metal. The knife would have a bit of heaven, he said, and a bit of hell. In the next scene, the knife was finished. It flew through the air and stuck into a post. It had a long, wide blade, the elegant curving lines of which made Aaron and him shout, “Cool!” The handle was black wood with a brass cap. It had Bowie's name engraved in ivory and set into the handle. It had a silver guard and a brass strip on the back of the blade. The purpose of the brass strip baffled Aaron and him until they asked the old knife maker about it, and he explained that it protected the knife's owner during a fight. Since brass was softer that steel, it snagged an attacker's blade and kept the edge from slipping down the back of the knife and cutting whoever held it.
Aaron and he watched the best parts of the movie again and again. There were all kinds of knife fights, especially one in a dark room during a lightning storm, blades flashing. A bit of heaven and a bit of hell. But then the movie itself went to hell when Alan Ladd felt guilty about all the men he'd killed and threw the Iron Mistress into the Mississippi.
Carl came back from his memory. “Pay attention,” he told Raoul. “The blade has to be carefully cooled.”
Raoul concentrated as Carl used tongs to set the long, wide strip into a metal container of olive oil. That had been one of the old knife maker's jokes—to use olive oil to cool metal and then pour the oil over a salad.
But contrary to the way it was depicted in movies, Carl didn't put the glowing knife in tip first. Rather, he set the knife in lengthwise so that the oil didn't touch the back of the blade. The oil hissed.
After a few moments, Carl lifted the knife slightly so that the oil cooled only the blade's edge. Vapor rose, the smell like a hot, oiled frying pan before a steak was added. After another few moments, Carl removed the knife and set it on the anvil.
“People who don't know anything about forging think the entire knife has to be plunged into the liquid,” Carl explained. “That could destroy the blade, because sudden cooling has only one purpose—to produce hardness in the metal. A blade that's been hardened one hundred percent shatters if you strike it against something. Instead, the cooling needs to be done in stages. Here, at the edge of the blade, I cooled it the longest because I want the edge to be hard enough to retain its sharpness. I cooled the middle of the blade for less time because I want it somewhat pliant as well as hard. And as for the back of the blade, I didn't subject it to any sudden cooling because I want it even more pliant.”
“Pliant?”
“Capable of bending under stress.”
Carl paused, hoping Raoul would demonstrate his intelligence by asking the appropriate question.
At last, he did. “I can understand why the blade needs to be hard to be sharp, but why does the back need to bend?”
“In order to be certified a master, a knife maker must produce a blade that passes four tests. First, the blade must be sharp enough to cut through a one-inch free-hanging rope with a single stroke. Second, the blade must be hard and sharp enough to chop through a pair of two-by-fours. Third, it must still retain sufficient sharpness to shave hair off the knife maker's arm. Finally, it must be pliant enough to be placed in a vice and bent ninety degrees without snapping. The only way to meet all of these requirements is to cool different parts of the blade for different amounts of time. The hard edge supplies the sharpness. The pliant back supplies the give. Otherwise, the knife snaps.”
Raoul thought about it and nodded.
“Can you be like this knife?” Carl asked.
“I'll be anything you want me to be.”
5
The door to the shed banged open. Raoul flew backward through the opening and landed hard on the packed earth. Carl stormed after him and kicked his side, sending him rolling.
At the nearest firing range, students sensed the commotion and turned, seeing Carl kick Raoul again and roll him farther across the parade ground.
“Nobody talks to me like that! Pack your stuff!” Carl shouted.
Raoul came to a crouch, barely avoided another kick, and lurched toward one of the barracks.
Carl stalked toward the students at the firing range.
“Ferguson! You, too! I'm sick of your sloppiness! Get your stuff! I'm driving you and that other asshole out of here!”
“But—”
“Now!” Carl twisted Ferguson's pistol from his hand and shoved him away. “You said you wanted out? You're out!”
“Do I keep the clothes you gave me?”
“And the money! That was the deal, wasn't it? I honor my word, even if you don't honor yours! Move! You and that other prick have five minutes!”
As Ferguson ran toward the barracks, Carl turned in a fury toward a pickup truck in front of the administration building. He pulled keys from his pocket, started the truck, and made so fast a turn that dirt flew. He sped toward the barracks, made another sharp turn, and skidded to a stop, waiting for Ferguson and Raoul.
Raoul got there first, holding his knapsack.
“Get in the back, damn it!” Carl yelled.
As Raoul climbed into the uncovered cargo space, Ferguson arrived with a duffel bag, breathing heavily.
“Inside!” Carl commanded.
Before Ferguson could shut the door behind him, Carl sped away, tearing up more dirt.
“You're sure you got all your stuff?” Carl demanded. “I want to keep my part of the bargain!”
“Quit trying to make me feel like a piece-of-shit quitter,” Ferguson said.
“Isn't that what you are?”
“Who wants to put up with the bugs and the heat and the fucking humidity?”
“Obviously not you.”
“And the snakes and the spiders and the damned rain most afternoons, and trying to sleep while those jerk-offs play those stupid video games. Bang, bang, bang. My ears haven't stopped ringing since I came here.”
“You knew from the get-go you were being paid to learn about guns.”
“I know about guns.”
“Yeah, right. I've seen the way you shoot.”
“And you didn't tell me I'd have to clean the damned guns after I shot them. And you didn't tell me I'd be humping heavy packs and crawling through swamps and . . . I might as well have joined the stupid army. Everybody telling me what to do. This is worse than when I was in the joint.”
“Not hardly.” Carl stared at the scars on his hands.
“And where the hell are we anyhow? How close to the nearest city? I want to get back to Chicago. Hang around with the guys. Find some action. Get laid. Man, that would be different.”
“Wanting sex too much is what got you in prison,” Carl said. “Maybe you should stick with guns.”
“Just answer the question. How close is the nearest city?” Ferguson demanded
“An hour. And it's not a city. It's a town.”
“What? Why didn't we fly out of here? That's how you brought me into this mess.”
“You're not worth the price of aviation fuel, buddy. You want to know a secret? You were part of a great experiment.”
“Living in a swamp? Some experiment.”
“About visualization.”
“Whatever that means.”
“First, I show you how to do something—shoot, use a knife, whatever. Then I make you close your eyes and repeatedly imagine doing what I showed you. I reinforce it by making you watch accurate movies of what I demonstrated, Hollywood stars doing things so smoothly you want to be those stars. Finally, I tell you to do what you imagined in the movie in your mind.”
The truck hit a bump. Carl heard it jostle Raoul in back.
“The military discovered that, by using visualization, a four-week course could be reduced to three days,” Carl said. “It's a form of self-hypnosis, reinforced by the video games.”
“Yeah? Well, I've been here three weeks. How come it didn't work on me?”
“Nobody's perfect. You want to know another secret? A long time ago, this used to be a plantation.”
“What's that got to do with anything? Drive faster.”
“Then the plantation went bust, and the owners tried to keep the land in the family, and finally a private foundation bought it as a nature preserve.”
“Tears, man. You're boring me to—”
“Then the CIA took over the foundation and all this land.”
“CIA?”
“Finally got your attention? Strictly speaking, not the CIA. It was a company that worked for a company that worked for the Company. They call it ‘compartmentalizing the risk. Plausible deniability.’”
“I call it yawning, man.”
“The whole point was to build a private airstrip that hardly anybody knew about. See, to fly what you'd call ‘spies’ into hot spots . . . in those days, Central America had a lot of those . . .”
“Yawn, man.”
The truck hit another bump.
“The CIA couldn't just pop their people onto a United jet and fly them to El Salvador or Nicaragua. They'd leave what's called a ‘paper trail.’”
“You know what I call it?” Ferguson made an obscene gesture.
“So this company that worked for the Company made up its own airline and flew its people out of here straight across the Gulf to where the action was.”
“Gulf?”
“Of Mexico.”
Ferguson looked interested. “We're near Mexico?”
“But then times changed, and the hot spots moved to other countries, and the company that worked for the Company didn't have any more use for this place. Besides, it had started to attract attention, so they sold it to some drug smugglers they'd been working with.”
“Drug smugglers?” Now Ferguson was really interested.
“Sure. The spy business is based on ‘you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours,’ the same as any other business. The spies had been working with the drug smugglers, getting tactical information from them, using them for cover, giving the spies an excuse to go in and out of various countries via secret airstrips. If you're a drug smuggler, nobody questions why you're so secretive. But if people think you're a spy, you're in trouble. So when it came time to get rid of the airstrip, it made sense to sell it to the smugglers, who were already using it. But eventually, the smugglers decided to switch locations, too, and the place was rotting until we bought it.”
“Yeah,” Ferguson said. “Rotting. Step on it, would you?”
“Can't.”
Carl drove slower.
“What are you doing?”
“Stopping to take a leak.”
“Man, can't you hold it till we get to town?”
“You want me to hold it for an hour?” Carl gave him a “get real” look and steered to the side of the road. He stepped out and went down a slope to the edge of the swamp. Under deceptively attractive Spanish moss—it was always bug infested—he undid his fly and urinated into the algae-covered water.
Ferguson banged the truck door open, stepped sullenly to the spongy earth, and walked to the water, fumbling at his fly.
Carl finished relieving himself, shook lingering drops from his penis, pulled up his zipper, and asked Ferguson, “You want to make a bet?”
Three shots roared. Crimson blossomed on Ferguson's shirt. Blood erupted from his face. He dropped on his back, thrashing.
The shots echoed across the water.
Carl turned toward where Raoul, on cue, had shot from the back of the truck. Under Carl's loose shirt, he had a Colt Commander .45. If Raoul had delayed, Carl would have drawn his pistol in a continuation of zipping up his fly, shooting both of them.
Raoul looked pale. The darks of his eyes were huge. Obviously, despite all his bravado, he had never killed anyone before.
Better distract him, Carl thought. “Very good, Mr. Ramirez. Two shots to the body and one to the head. Why were you taught that pattern?”
Raoul had to switch to a different section of his thoughts. “Uh . . .” He looked confused. His need to seek approval became greater than the shock of his emotions. “Uh . . . The target might be wearing a Kevlar vest, so I also shot him in the head.”
“Your instructor explained that?”
“No.” Raoul continued to look confused. “I just figured that was the reason.”
“It is the reason. Your intuition is excellent. Did you do what I told you and sit with your head against the back window?”
“Yes.”
“You heard what I said about the CIA?”
“Yes.”
“Then you understand the necessity for what I ordered you to do. There are serious issues at stake that I'm not allowed to reveal to you. Not yet. But the target's lack of discipline would have made him talk about our camp. He would have destroyed us.”
Using his shoe, Carl shoved the body into the scummy water. Immediately, an alligator erupted, snapping at the head, jerking the body under the surface. A second alligator fought for the corpse's right leg. Blood swirled amid the green scum.
“When I set up the camp,” Carl explained, “I drove here once a day, urinated into the water, then threw raw steaks in. After a while, the alligators learned to identify food with the sound of the truck, my footsteps, and urine streaming into the water. Now those signals bring them here for dinner.”
The turmoil in the water subsided. After the frantic splashing of jaws and tails, birds again sang.
Pleasing Carl, Raoul picked up his empty cartridges.
“Get rid of his duffel bag,” Carl said.
Raoul took
a chain from the back of the truck, shoved it into the bag, and hurled it into the water.
“Quick. Sharp. Obedient,” Carl said.
Raoul's eyes brightened.
“I'm going to pull you from the group,” Carl decided.
“No. What did I do wrong?”
“The reverse. You and a select few are coming with me.”
“To do what?”
“Hunt an old friend.”
6
Waking slowly, Cavanaugh felt as exhausted as when he'd gone to sleep with Jamie next to him. He reached to put his arm around her, discovered that she wasn't there, and opened his eyes, focusing on where she sat at the cigarette-burned table in their seedy motel room's corner. She wore a T-shirt and boxer shorts, her brunette hair hanging over her shoulders. She didn't notice that he'd wakened, too preoccupied re-reading the documents Rutherford had given them.
“You talked in your sleep,” she said.
So I'm wrong, he thought. She did notice I was awake.
“Oh? What did I say?”
“‘How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?’”
“Well, that's a relief. For a second, I was afraid I said another woman's name.”
“You did mumble something about ‘Ramona’.”
“My third-grade math teacher.” Cavanaugh pointed toward the documents. “Have you learned anything?”
“Didn't you tell me Carl's father died from alcoholism? Liver disease?”
“That's what Carl said in a phone call to me when I was still living at home.”
“According to this police report, his father stumbled while he was drunk, fell on a knife in the kitchen, and bled to death in the middle of the night.”
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