The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  “And you got a bite?”

  “Christopher’s name was the bait, so yes, I did. A day or so later Ze Keli came to see me. Walked right into my hotel in broad daylight.”

  It was midnight in Rome. The coffee bar was silent. In English the cashier called out, “Signori, it’s closing time.”

  We left immediately. The coffee shop’s metal shutter squealed down behind us. The cashier locked it and strode off into the night, high heels clicking. David turned right; I would have gone the other way. We walked by the Pantheon. Not a soul in sight. Shadows, weak bulbs, cobbles underfoot, the lingering smell of coffee.

  I said, “And?”

  “There weren’t a lot of preliminaries,” David said. “Ze was very up front about Christopher. He told me the whole history of ten years of questioning, how the man had never yielded, how he would rather die than lie to save himself, as Ze put it. This behavior won Ze’s undying admiration. Apparently Christopher was his first sinless sinner. This prisoner was like an ancestor, he said, so removed from weakness and vanity. He actually said this.”

  Paul did stick in people’s memories. I said, “How old is Ze now?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Soon to be an ancestor, however. Maybe that’s why he didn’t seem to care what he said to me or who was listening. He must have know that hotel rooms for foreigners are bugged by the Guoanbu, but it didn’t seem to matter to him.”

  “Maybe he was running an errand for Guoanbu.”

  “Or maybe not. Emotionally he’s out of the Party, I think.” Very quietly, after letting a puddle of silence form, David said, “Ze had word of Christopher.”

  “What word?”

  “Some people from Guoanbu had come to him to ask about Christopher. They pumped him out, actually. They wanted every detail, everything he could remember, every character trait, every gesture, every weakness. Ze told them Christopher had no weaknesses except that he had lost his mother when he was a child. He said Christopher always talked about her when they came to an impasse in the interrogation. Which was every day, more or less.”

  “Is Ze making this up?”

  David said, “I don’t think so. Ze says that the young bucks who were questioning him suddenly perked up when he mentioned Christopher’s mother. They had arrested a man they thought was Christopher and a very old woman in the forbidden zone. They had no papers. The old woman dressed as a Kyrgyz and spoke Kyrgyz to them. The man spoke illiterate Mandarin. They didn’t know what to make of either one of them.”

  These words took my breath away. My skin crawled, I was shaken to the bone, I was speechless, I trembled like a leaf. Clichés are clichés for a reason, my friends.

  We were standing in the middle of the street. David put a hand on my arm. He said, “It may not be as bad as you think. They asked Ze to go with them to Xinjiang to talk to his old friend Christopher. He was on his way to Xinjiang on the day I talked to him. I gave him my satellite phone.”

  “What satellite phone?”

  “The one you gave me. I have another. The point is, he took it. I gave him your number.”

  All around us the underwater hush of the sleeping city simulated deafness—sound remembered instead of sound itself.

  “I don’t think you understand,” David said. “This is good news, Horace. Cheer up. Christopher is alive.”

  I understood, all right. Paul’s luck had not changed. Nor had his gift for confusing the issue as a means of clarifying it.

  4

  Two hours later David delivered his report to the full group. Eyes went cold, faces froze. In the opinion of the group, Ze Keli’s information about Paul and Lori was hearsay. Worse than that, it was speculation upon hearsay. It was a diversion, a thing apart from the real purpose of the mission. The reality was that we were very close to success or disaster. Willy-nilly, which is always the way things work in our business, we had come into possession of a body of facts. We knew that Ibn Awad was alive. We knew where he was likely to be during the next month or so. Success was possible at last. It was time to act.

  Jack Philindros said, “What do we do about Christopher?”

  “Same mission,” I said. “Always was. Paul wasn’t wandering around the forbidden zone in Xinjiang for the fun of it. He knows something.”

  “Like what?”

  “We’ll know that when we find him.”

  “Find him?” Jack said. “What does finding Christopher have to do with it?”

  “You’ve been asking that question from the beginning, Jack. The answer hasn’t changed. I owe it to him. We all do. And even if that weren’t the case, I say again: He knows something we need to know.”

  Jack said, “Even if we don’t know what that might be. I give up. What’s the plan?”

  I told them. They listened carefully, with expressionless faces. After I had laid out the details nobody broke the silence for a while. Ben smiled. He was the quickest mind in the room, as always.

  “To state the obvious,” I said, “this could get us all killed. It could all come to nothing.”

  “What’s different about that?” Harley asked.

  Nobody answered. But nobody said he wanted to forget the whole thing and go home.

  Something like enjoyment—or maybe the memory or anticipation of it—seemed to be present in the twitch of the lips that was Jack’s idea of a smile. “We’re going to rely on the kindness of strangers,” he said. “Is that the idea?”

  I said, “What choice do we have? Nobody who knows us is going to help us out.”

  I took a vote. The shrugs had it.

  NINE

  1

  Points of interest to tourists in Sofia, formerly the darkest capital in Eastern Europe, are connected by a yellow brick road—or at least by a trail of yellow bricks embedded in the sidewalks. Maybe that’s why Mr. Osborn Denison, formerly known to me as Kevin Clark, chose Sofia as an appropriate place for the two of us to meet even though it was crawling with Russian mobsters. According to Kevin, the local wise guys were provincials, not really connected to the central nervous system of Russian crime. On the other hand, they were used by the Russians as assassins and kidnappers and no-nonsense interrogators, just as they were in Soviet times when what was now the Moscow mob were still members of the KGB and the Bulgarians were an off-brand copy of that famous service.

  Neither one of us had ever been to Sofia before. Kevin seemed to think this provided a margin of safety, and in a way he was right. It takes a day or two to organize surveillance on strangers who arrive by surprise, and by that time we would be out of town. All the same, regarding Sofia as a safe haven required a leap of the imagination. We met as arranged in an underground passage near the National Palace of Culture. When Kevin saw me coming he bought an ice-cream cone, the signal that we were not under surveillance. He was dressed in a suit, tie, trench coat and crushable hat and, for once, grownup shoes. Perversely, this outfit gave him a boyish look. I followed him upstairs to the street and then along the yellow brick trail. It was evening, cold and damp. The crowds were eerily silent. The police-state hush, the costuming and the whey faces created the illusion that we were walking through an underlit scene in a silent movie made by a devoted Marxist in the 1920s. Kevin led me through a labyrinth of streets to an improbable restaurant called the Mexicano. It featured Tex-Mex food along with other Latin-American specialties. Entertainment was provided by a duo called the Singing Twins, who dressed as cinema Mexicans and sang south-of-the-border favorites complete with coyote yips and ai-ai-ai-ais. The place was mobbed. The din was terrific. I guessed that Kevin had chosen the Mexicano because he thought it would be a good place to talk, but we couldn’t hear ourselves think. This left the dubious pleasures of the menu. We both ordered beer and the combination plate. After the first taste I shouted, “How did you ever find this place?”

  Kevin replied that it was recommended by a friend. The Tex-Mex was not bad, though not up to Texas standards, Kevin said. I wouldn’t have known. Texas was another place I�
��d never been. After finishing our beans and rice and several unidentifiable gummy things, we wandered back into the street. As a steeple clock struck nine, we found ourselves sitting on a bench in a small park beside the Russian church. Apparently Sofia went to bed early. The streets were deserted. We were alone. Because Kevin and I had been unable to outshout the Latin beat at the Mexicano, the ice had not yet been properly broken. How to begin?

  I said, “You’ll be glad to know that Harley is all right. He had a rough week or two, spent more time in the hospital, but he’s doing fine now.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” Kevin said.

  This New Age phrase set my teeth on edge, but the look on Kevin’s face was nothing if not sincere. In spite of all that had happened between us—more likely because of it—I was rather fond of him. In my palmy days I had kept an eye out for young fellows like Kevin. He had, in spades, what it took to do the work he did—the ability to mistake the absurd for the significant. That’s why I was about to try to recruit him. In a way this was a maidenhead experience for me. He represented my first try at turning an American against his own government, but I didn’t see why that should be any more difficult than suborning a Chinese or an Arab. The principle was the same—make him believe that I was asking him to do something for his country. In this case, that happened to be true. The other magic ingredient, gratification, was also present. I knew what he wanted to do and I had it in my power to make it possible for him to do it.

  I said, “Kevin, I need your help.”

  Of course he had been expecting something like this. Why else would I have asked to meet him? Not a flicker of surprise. No response, either. He simply waited to hear what I was going to say next.

  “You’ve been trying to get me and my friends to get out of the way,” I said. “We’re prepared to do that.”

  This got Kevin’s attention. “You mean you’re giving it up?”

  “Up to a point. The target is beyond us.”

  He put a hand on my arm. It was a filial gesture, I thought. “It’s beyond everyone,” he said.

  I said, “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean we don’t have a clue, either. Really.”

  “Do you expect me to swallow that?”

  He hesitated, but only for an instant. Then he said, “No. I think you and Harley and whoever else is involved have got it right. So do a lot of people, deep down. That’s the problem.”

  Ah ha. The seed of doubt. I said, very softly, “Then why are you going along with this exercise in denial?”

  Kevin was mute. Hands in pockets, legs stretched out in front of him, hat tilted over his eyes, he gazed intently at the unremarkable church. This was no weather for a long conversation in the open air. Damp cold seeped through three layers of wool. A clammy lump of undigested Bulgarian Tex-Mex lay heavy in my stomach.

  At last Kevin said, “An exercise in denial? That’s one way to put it.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “Word choice is not my job.”

  “It’s not your job to protect and defend the United States?”

  This was a low blow. I was trying to trick him into revealing that he worked for U.S. intelligence—or, depending on how devious one’s mind might be, giving him an opportunity to deceive me into thinking he worked for America when in fact he worked for someone or something else. Kevin retaliated by letting me think he had been tricked. Or maybe was pretending actually to be tricked. Or both. I wouldn’t have given a nickel for him if he had done otherwise.

  “What am I supposed to do?” he asked. “Do as you did and run an operation against the Constitution?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that,” I said. “But let me ask you this. How much leave time have you accumulated?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Kevin was fully alert now. He recognized Beelzebub when he saw him.

  I said, “Because I think we’d all be better off if you took a vacation from hound-dogging us. It’s distracting to all parties.”

  “Meaning what?”

  I said, “If you have a month or so to spare, off-duty and on your own, I wanted to invite you to go hunting with me and some of my friends.”

  “Hunting what? The sheik of Araby?”

  “No. The houbara bustard.”

  This time Kevin was truly puzzled. He even forgot to smile. The what? I told him everything—or nearly everything—I knew about the bird and Ibn Awad’s enthusiasm for hunting it with falcons. I described Kalash’s map, outlined my plan to let the houbara bustard lead us to Ibn Awad. There was little risk involved in spilling all these beans. Even if Kevin shared what I told him with his employers, whoever they were, there was little chance that my theory would be believed. In their wisdom, his masters would almost certainly mistake the truth for a ruse.

  At the end of my spiel, Kevin wasn’t so very sure that he himself believed me, but I had aroused his interest.

  He said, “So why are you telling me this?”

  “Let’s just say I’ve learned to like you,” I said.

  “Horace, I do believe you’re trying to recruit me.”

  “On a temporary basis, yes.”

  Frankness pays. Kevin smiled. It was nice to see the Ohio quarterback again. He said, “You’re crazy.”

  “I am? Why?”

  “Why on earth would any sane person think I’d be open to such an offer?”

  It was my turn to smile. If Kevin hadn’t been open to the offer he wouldn’t have asked that question. He would have jumped to his feet, denounced me for an enemy of all that was good and decent, and walked away in a dudgeon.

  “Let’s just say I have a feeling about you,” I said. “I think you’ve got a sneaking sympathy for us. I also think you’re not entirely happy with the people you work for.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m ready to betray them.”

  “What does betrayal have to do with it?”

  Kevin said, “Don’t tell me, let me guess. I’ve got you all wrong. You’re giving me an opportunity to do something really special for humanity.”

  Such cynicism! Who would have guessed that such bitter wit lurked behind that wonderful all-American smile?

  I said, “No, I’m giving you a chance to make the Outfit look like a bunch of jackasses.”

  “Why?”

  “For the satisfaction of the thing. You say yourself that you think us old fogies are right about Ibn Awad and the Outfit is wrong. Think about the consequences if you take the easy way out and go along with these dopes and this man of God blows up a dozen American cities.”

  A silence. Under the rules of recruitment I couldn’t be the first to break it. Kevin had to speak first. And if he did, I was across the goal line.

  Finally he said, “Okay, let’s take this a step further. What do you want from me?”

  Hallelujah. I said, “Two things. Your commando skills and cover.”

  “What do you mean by commando skills?”

  “I want to take Ibn Awad alive. He has bodyguards, lots of them. I hope that you and your men can kidnap the old fellow in the night and be gone before his people wake up.”

  “You think we can do that?”

  “I’ve seen what you can do. The question is, will you do it?”

  Kevin answered as though his mind was already made up on that point and he had moved on to practicalities.

  He said, “Take him alive? I can’t promise that.”

  “I know that. But do you think it’s possible?”

  “It depends on the circumstances. And what you have in mind for him afterward.”

  “Not torture or death,” I said.

  “Why the change of heart?”

  “We live and learn. This time I mean the old lunatic no harm. All I want to do is stop him and find his bombs and disarm them. Really.”

  Kevin thought this over and decided to answer the question. He said, “Yes, it’s theoretically possible to take him alive, assuming that we can find him and assuming that his
men aren’t under orders to kill him to save him from capture.”

  “Understood.”

  “I have another question,” he said. “You want me to provide cover for you. Exactly what does that mean?”

  I thought he’d never ask. I said, “Somebody has to take the credit. We don’t want it.”

  “What if I don’t want it, either?”

  “Then you’ll just have to depend on Washington to take all the credit for themselves.”

  Kevin was smiling again, but this time to himself.

  He said, “And I will have the deep satisfaction of having saved the world. Is that the deal?”

  “What more could you want?”

  Kevin laughed out loud. “Okay,” he said. “What’s the timetable?”

  We settled the details then and there.

  2

  That left the budgetary questions. I discussed these with the Old Boys. We had plenty of money in the bank—almost $900,000, plus a few thousand left over from the $25,000 advanced to each of us at the beginning of the operation. These weren’t government funds, meant to be scattered to the winds before the end of the fiscal year. It was real money, Paul’s money, and everybody understood this. It doesn’t cost much to fly tourist class. Staying at cheap hotels and monasteries and eating mutton in backstreet restaurants in remotest China consumes very little cash.

  Charley said, “How many people is your friend Kevin bringing with him?”

  “Half a dozen,” I replied. “Not his own men. Independent contractors. Former special-ops types. He’s recruiting them as we speak.”

  “We’ll have to pay them?”

  “They want Ibn Awad. I said they could have him.”

  “Handsome gesture, Horace.”

  I handed Charley the list of arms and equipment Kevin wanted. It was detailed and specific. He looked it over.

  “Saints preserve us,” he said. “Belgian assault rifles with grenade launchers and grenades, sniper rifle with scope, Swedish 74U submachine guns, nine-millimeter Beretta pistols, hand grenades, Semtex explosive, detonators, ammunition, knives. A month’s ration of Meals-Ready-to-Eat. Medical kit. Two-way low frequency radios. Satellite phones. GPS whatchamacallits.” Charley peered over his reading glasses. “I thought the idea was to take Ibn Awad alive.”