A fish hawk skimmed over the scrubby brush and we watched it disappear over a dune.
Begay went on. “One of the things these outfits don’t want people to know about is how cozy they get with contractors. A whole lot of money exchanges hands, to say the least, and there are tremendous cost overruns that Congress doesn’t know anything about.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised, then, when Rockwell International’s name is on the new NRO building.”
“That’s the idea. Rockwell International hasn’t lost any money contracting for Uncle Sam.
“Another thing they’d like to keep pretty quiet is some of their fieldwork, the black stuff and some of the gray stuff. Some of it doesn’t work, and some of the rest can be pretty rough.”
He stopped talking and walked on in silence. I looked ahead at the rising cliffs and wondered if he was remembering or thinking about something that had taken place during the twenty years after he’d left the army and before he met Toni. He glanced at me, seemed to become aware of his own silence, and went on:
“Anyway, these agencies not only keep busy doing their work and hiding their books, they also keep an eye on each other as best they can, so nobody will get an economic or political jump on them. And they watch other agencies, too. Not officially, maybe, but they do it. They keep an eye on the Secret Service, the FBI, the DEA, and other departments that have to do with crime or security. Part of it’s probably just habit, but more of it’s out of self-defense. They don’t want anybody to know anything they don’t. Washington’s a political town, so you can’t entirely blame them for watching their asses. If they don’t, nobody will.
“To get to the point: The first guy I talked with just now used to work for the Department of Defense and has a lot of contacts. Now he’s a civilian again. He does research for some foundation, teaches, and gives lectures. He says that even now, after years inside the Beltway, he still stumbles across secret outfits and facilities that he never knew about when he was on the government payroll.
“He told me he’s heard about a threat to Cricket Callahan. Not the run-of-the-mill sort of threat that the president and his family get all the time.” He glanced at me again. “And you’d be surprised how many and how routine the threats are. Most of them end up being nothing, but they all have to be checked out. This one, though, was different. Worse. But he didn’t know the details, so he gave me a name to call. I called it.
“The second person I called is a woman I’ve worked with, so I think I got the truth, but maybe not. You never know. She knows a lot of people in a lot of places, and what she told me was this, more or less:
“During Joe Callahan’s first months in office, while he was still new at the job, he apparently inherited and reapproved covert action abroad that was supposed to clear the way for the election of a government sympathetic to us. But something went wrong. Not only did a small group of innocent civilians get killed or maimed by a bomb intended for the bad guys, but those bad guys came into power as a result. A bungled job all the way around. Of course, our own people didn’t actually do the deed, but they were overseeing the job, using local assets, which is the preferred way of doing things since it puts a screen between our agencies and the consequences of their work.
“In this case, though, after the bad guys got in power they also got their hands on a couple of the local assets who did the work, and the assets told them everything they knew, which wasn’t much, since you never tell anybody more than they absolutely need to know. I think you’ve run into that sort of thinking in just the last day or two, haven’t you?”
“Indeed.”
“So these assets didn’t know much, but one of them did know who contacted him for the job, and he gave up that name before his first fingernail was gone. One thing led to another, and pretty soon there’s the latest American Satan story spread all over the Middle East, complete with pictures of the victims of the explosion, including a particularly bad one of a teenage girl whose face now looks like hamburger. There’s another picture to go with it, showing what she looked like before. A beautiful girl. Mangled. You may have seen the pictures in the newsmagazines.”
“I did.” And now I could see them again. I tried to push them away. They didn’t want to go. I pushed harder, and looked at the rising clay cliffs and then out to sea, trying to let nature clean my memory of the post-bomb picture of the girl whose face no longer had eyes, a nose, or skin.
I must have made some sort of sound, for Begay looked at me for a moment.
“Yeah,” he said, walking on, “it was pretty bad, all right. Jesus, the things we do.”
Ahead of us, there were young people taking an illegal mud bath between sorties by beach cops, who were supposed to prevent such things, the idea being that such use of the colored clay that had washed off the cliffs would somehow destroy the cliffs themselves. I tried to figure how long it would take the mud bathers to wear away the towering cliffs. Quite a while, I guessed. Meanwhile, the bathers were having what seemed to be a quietly good time. I wished them well.
“Anyway,” said Joe Begay, “these letters that started to come in about Cricket Callahan include the pictures of that girl. They say, as I understand it, that Cricket’s going to look like the girl looked after the bomb. Every time a letter comes, the pictures come, too. The letters say that Joe Callahan ordered the action, and that it’s only fair and just that his daughter pay the same price as the other girl paid. Of course, there’s a good chance that the president never really knew what he’d okayed. The agency that supposedly did the job probably clothed the mission in the sort of jargon that later lets everybody claim they knew nothing about the details. It’s part of the Washington waltz.”
My forehead felt tight. “Does Cricket know about this?”
“She probably knows there’s been a threat of some sort, but she doesn’t know the details.”
“Well, that’s one good thing, at least. Have they got a line on whoever’s sending the letters?”
Begay stopped and looked at the mud bathers. “What do they get out of that?” he asked.
“Ask your wife,” I said. “If she’s anything like mine, she spreads something like that over her face every now and then and lets it dry. Something to do with making her skin better. Ask Zee, or ask Toni, but don’t ask me.”
“These people are all face, I guess,” said Begay. “Let’s go back.”
We turned and retraced our steps, the cliffs now to our right and the lapping waves to our left. Overhead, the seabirds circled and called beneath an arching blue sky.
“They’ve been trying to trace the letters, of course,” said Joe Begay. “One thing about them is that they’ve been mailed to Cricket from wherever she’s staying. Of course, she never actually gets them. Her staff opens all her mail, and you can bet that Cricket never, sees these or a lot of others. The point is that when she’s in Washington, they’re mailed from Washington. When she travels with her parents, they’re sent from wherever they stay. Early this spring, when the president and his family were in England, a letter was sent from London. That’s how it works.”
“And now one’s been mailed from Martha’s Vineyard,” I said.
“Two, actually,” said Begay.
“Counting their first trip?”
He nodded. “It was mailed to them here and was posted from Edgartown. Just about a year ago, a week after the Callahans got here.”
I thought for a while, then said, “It sounds to me like whoever’s sending the letters has a lot of resources. Your normal would-be assassin or blackmailer doesn’t have any way to get to a local mailbox everywhere that Cricket travels.”
Begay nodded. “Thus the theory that whoever it is is part of the president’s retinue, or at least has an inside contact who’s cooperating by mailing the letters wherever Cricket goes.”
I thought some more and saw what looked like a bit more light. “That’s why Cricket is still with Zee and me, and not back in Washington or at the compound. B
ecause in either of those places she’s exposed to more suspects than she is when she’s with us. At our place, the only possible suspect is—”
“Right you are. Cousin Karen. No other member of the Callahan staff or the Secret Service is around. Only Karen Lea.”
Only Karen Lea. “But that wasn’t Karen who was tailing us,” I said.
“No, it wasn’t. It might have been another agent, though, somebody Walt Pomerlieu sent to keep tabs on things, Karen included.”
“It wasn’t an agent. We checked.”
He smiled at me. It was an ironic, grim little smile. “Did you?”
“Yes.” Then the lightbulb went on in my brain. “No. Karen told us that it wasn’t another agent. But—”
“That’s right,” said Begay. “But if she’s one of the bad guys, and if she wanted to get free of surveillance, one of the best ways to do it is to give you the idea that your shadow is a bad guy, and get you to shake him, as, in fact, you did, with my help.”
I ran possibilities through my head. They did not produce happy thoughts. “The trouble is that you can’t trust anybody. It could be Karen, or it could even be Walt Pomerlieu, or it could be somebody I don’t even know about. It could be anybody.”
“Too bad Louis Renault isn’t here to round up the usual suspects,” said Begay dryly. “Still, I think we can eliminate the president and his wife, and for the moment, let’s eliminate you and Zee. And if you really feel daring, you can eliminate Toni and me.”
“All right, I’ll eliminate all of the above.”
“And you can eliminate everybody you personally know on the island. None of them are in on this.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure enough not to waste any time worrying about them. But that’s not to say that nobody outside the compound is involved. A second part of the current thinking is that some disgruntled spook or ex-spook may be in on it. My lady in Washington says the details in the letters show a pretty esoteric knowledge of what went wrong over there. And as you may know, there are so many spooks and ex-spooks on this island that some people call it Spook Haven.”
I hadn’t heard that one before.
“A bunch of the old boys have retired here,” he went on. “In any case, whoever is doing this has a serious grudge and also has at least one person close to the president.”
“Why haven’t they been able to nail him?”
“It’s an imperfect world,” said Joe Begay, as we approached the house. “I’d say they may be close. I think that’s why the girl is with you. So they can close the trap with her out of the way, and so she won’t get hurt in case something goes wrong.” He gave me another of those small smiles. “Don’t look so skeptical. It’s working so far. The girl is still fine.”
“Terrific.”
“You still got that old thirty-eight of yours?”
“Yeah. At home in the gun case.”
“You might load it up and stick it in your pocket. The president is only gonna be on the island for another few days. If anything is going to happen here, it’ll happen before he goes. And you know the old NRA saying: It’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.’ ”
“Yeah, yeah.” Manny Fonseca loved the NRA and that quotation in particular. But I don’t like the organization’s idiot fringe, and I really hate it when they’re right.
— 10 —
There was a cheerful babble of baby talk going on when we came into the house. There seems to be nothing women enjoy more than talking about babies. Their own, if possible, but anyone’s will do. I have heard grandmothers and great-grandmothers eagerly exchange detailed stories of their long-ago pregnancies and deliveries as though they had just happened yesterday. And the younger women and girls are all ears and, if they are young moms, eager to discuss their own babies and the labors involved in producing them.
“This talk is a female hormone thing,” said Joe Begay, making sure his voice was just loud enough to be heard by the women. “Sort of like guys talking about the National Football League. You’ll have to get used to it now that you’re married. Oh, hi, ladies.”
“It’s nothing at all like the National Football League,” said Toni, raising her chin a bit. “You just don’t understand. Testosterone has clogged the arteries to men’s brains.”
Zee gave her a wide smile. “That explains a lot about Jeff that I never understood before. You’re so smart.”
Toni patted her belly. “Having babies makes you wise and strong.”
Zee had envy in her face. It was still there when she looked at me. “Have you finished with your manly conversation? National Football League talk or whatever it was?”
“Our Super Bowl predictions are all made, and the bookies have our money,” I said. “Time for our gang to head back down-island, if we’re going to go clamming.”
“What about our shadow?” asked Karen. “He’ll keep following us.”
“No, he won’t,” said Joe Begay, and he told her about the bug and where we’d put it. “With any luck at all, Shadow is hanging out in some driveway over in Lobsterville, waiting for you to come out of the parking lot there. You should be home before he figures it all out.”
“When we get there,” said Karen, “we’ll check the other cars. If this one was bugged, the others probably are, too.”
My very thought.
We said our good-byes and drove back down to Edgartown, passing the famous Chilmark gravestone of a once-renowned comedian who OD’ed himself to death at the height of his fame. His grave, a sacred site to his admirers, who honor his memory by adorning his stone with roaches, bottles, and beer cans, was once located farther into the cemetery. But the legions of his pilgrim fans wore such a wide trail to the holy sepulcher that the entire cemetery was in danger of being seriously damaged, so the Chilmarkians did the smart thing and moved the stone right next to the road, so it’s the first one you see when you go in.
“Just like Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris,” said Debby J., who thus revealed that she knew more about Paris than I did.
“Of course,” said Zee, “some people say that the grave is still right where it used to be, and only the stone was moved.”
“It’s not what’s true, it’s what people think is true,” said Debby.
“More evidence that you have a future in politics,” said Zee, with a smile.
“No,” said Debby firmly. “When I grow up I want a job that doesn’t attract any attention.”
“You can become a professional clammer,” I said. “I’ll teach you the art this afternoon.”
“Good.”
“Or you can be a nurse or a schoolteacher or a cop,” said Karen. “Nobody ever pays any attention to them.”
“There are endless possibilities,” said Debby. “Is this a great country, or what?”
Not a bad kid, for a president’s daughter.
When I got to John Skye’s farm, I turned in.
“Qué pasa?” asked Zee.
“I thought I’d invite John and Mattie and the twins to the big clambake. Debby and her sister here can use some company closer to their own age.”
“Oh, good!” exclaimed Debby.
“I also thought some of the Skye gang might want to go clamming with us this afternoon.”
“Good again!” cried Debby.
We pulled into the yard, where, not so long ago, Zee and I had gotten married under a summer sun. We got out of the Jeep as Mattie Skye came out of the house. Seeing Debby and Karen, she pointed toward the barn.
“Jen and Jill are in there, working on some tack,” she said.
Debby and Karen went toward the barn.
“You’re all invited to a clambake Sunday,” I said to Mattie. “There’ll be some other people there, too.” I told her when.
Debby, Karen, and the Skye twins came out of the barn. “We’ve been invited to go clamming,” said one of the twins. “Can we take the Wagoneer?”
Mattie gave a look of appeal to th
e sky.
“We really do have to go clamming with them,” said the other twin. “Because there are four of us Skyes, and we can’t expect J.W. and Zee and Karen and Debby to get clams for all of us, too. We have to go and help out.”
“And we’ll need the Wagoneer to do it,” said her sister.
“Well,” said Mattie, with a sigh, “I guess it’s all right. John is going to be busy in the library, working on that book of his, and I’m not going anywhere. But you girls have to start saving your money so you can buy a car of your own. You can’t expect to use the Jeep every time you feel like.”
“Spoken like a classic mom,” said a daughter, giving her a fast hug. “Where are the keys?”
“You and Debby can ride with us,” said her sister to Karen. “We’ll all go to Zee’s house first, so you can get your baskets. Then we’ll go . . .” She looked at me. “Where?”
“Eel Pond,” I said.
“Excellent!”
As we approached our driveway, I did a good deal of looking here and there, along the highway and in the trees on either side, but saw no Secret Service agents, villains, or any other kind of human beings, not even the normal joggers and bikers. Ditto for the driveway itself. I pulled into the yard and did another fast survey. Nobody was in sight.
I went through the house and out the back door, then followed my thread around through the trees. It was unbroken. I came back into the yard as John Skye’s Wagoneer came down the driveway. By the time the Wagoneer had unloaded its passengers, I was underneath the Land Cruiser, looking for a bug. I looked everywhere I could think of, but found nothing. Karen was searching her car, and I went to help out. Just as I got there, she found it. It looked like the one Joe Begay had found on Zee’s Jeep.
Karen ran a hand through her hair. “Just my car and Zee’s. Why not yours?”
“Maybe Shadow never got a chance to bug it.”
I thought maybe I should know, but I didn’t. Neither did she.
“Strange,” she said. She looked at the bug. “Maybe our people can trace this.”
A Deadly Vineyard Holiday Page 9