by Gordon Kent
At that point, she became aware of him. She pushed a clear plastic face guard up on her forehead. “Can’t you see I’m working?”
“Yes, I— Yes, of course.” It was humiliating to be flustered by her. How had she put him in the wrong? “I didn’t know.”
“Now you do. This room is off-limits, Jack. I got so fucking hot I had to open the door. It’s not an invitation.”
“I’m sorry. Really.”
She came toward him, still carrying the drill. She brushed hair away with the back of her left hand, blew air out in a way that made her lips bulge and shake. “Fucking hot.” She looked around the room. “Yes, this is mine. This is it. Surprised?”
“I didn’t know what to expect.”
“You expected to find me in here reading magazines and eating chocolates, right?” She breathed out again, then began pumping the front of her shirt in and out to make a breeze. He saw parts of a no-nonsense brassiere. “That fucking Paris agent got me a date for a show that’s months ahead of what I told her, Jesus Christ, I’m running around in here like a chicken with its head cut off trying to make stuff.”
“Hey, that’s great! A real show?”
“Yeah, a real show. If you call a two-bit gallery in a two-bit French town a show. She promised me Paris, she delivers a provincial burg called Arras. But the truth is, I either take what I can get or I give it up. It’s no secret I’m not exactly a household name, right? You looked at the website? I thought you would. Not too impressive. I need them more than they need me. But Jesus Christ, she’s got me on a schedule that’s a real bitch.”
Piat said nothing. He didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure whether he was impressed or repulsed—or what his reaction was. He could tell she wanted one. And that it was important to her.
“Don’t think this all happened because of your money, either. Don’t flatter yourself.” She walked into the middle of the room and looked down at the plastic mound. “This is fiberglass,” she said. “It’s going to take me weeks to finish, no matter what.” She looked at him. “What do you think art is, Jack?” The question wasn’t flirtatious, but at the same time it was a question, a prolonging of his being there, so he knew she wanted him to stay. Then he knew that she was as divided as he—wanting him, just as he wanted her, but held back, she by Hackbutt, he by the operation.
“The creation of beauty,” he said slowly, knowing it was the wrong answer. Irene, of course, knew nothing of his other life as a dealer in antiquities, and he wasn’t going to tell her.
“Bullshit. Art has nothing to do with beauty.” Irene smiled, as if the apparent ignorance of his answer satisfied her. She looked around. “This is art. This is the bust-your-ass part of art.” She gave him the same look. “You think art’s some kind of fake, don’t you, Jack? You think it’s a way of gaming life—right? Art is some woman pouring a can of beans over her naked ass, right? Art is some weirdo wrapping Canary Wharf in pink plastic, right? It’s all bullshit and hype, stuff that fags and women make up because they can’t cut it in the real world, right?” She aimed the drill at him and pulled the trigger, got an angry whir.
Piat raised an eyebrow. “No,” he said.
She glared at him and pulled the trigger on the drill again. “No? Just no?”
Piat took a deep breath and let it out. She wanted a quarrel. And behind that was something else—maybe sex, maybe something deeper or older, some kind of scar. Something about art.
Piat knew something about bullshit and hype and art, but he kept his mouth shut. After a moment that went on too long, he said, “Just plain no.”
Irene snorted. “Next time, try to remember that not every open door is an invitation.” She came back, put her free hand on the knob. “I’ll come out in a few hours and be nice Irene and play Miss Manners with you and Edgar.” She leaned in to him, making closing the door part of the motion. “But I’m feeling a lot of pressure, and you’re part of it.”
And she closed the door.
The dog was a relief after that.
Then there were the sessions when he and Hackbutt reversed roles and Hackbutt tried to train him—about the birds.
“Don’t flinch like that, Jack. Sheila, stop!” Hackbutt reached over the head of the angry bird he called Sheila and stroked her plumes, despite the fact that she had just taken a few grams of skin from Piat’s arm and looked mad as hell. Hackbutt’s tone was imperative.
Piat tried to support the weight of the bird on his fist and remain nonchalant while watching a stream of blood flow down his arm. He had flinched—no point in denying it. And at another level, he marveled at the Hackbutt he had just seen—Hackbutt the commander of birds and men.
Patiently, Hackbutt stroked her, fed her a morsel of red meat from his pocket. “She knows you’re afraid, Jack.” He smiled out at the endless rolling gray beyond the dripping moor. “I was afraid myself. Sometimes I still am. Can’t let them see it, okay? It’ll take time. Just get used to her—the weight of her, the smell.” His voice was gentle, soothing—not like his usual voice at all. “Here, pass her over. That’s a good bird. What a pretty lady. See? She’s back in the zone, Jack. Just like that. Now you take her again.”
Sheila had hopped on Hackbutt’s hand quite willingly, but no amount of Hackbutt’s moving and rolling his wrist would get her to step back to Piat’s glove; in fact, she clung to Hackbutt, constantly reorienting herself on the moving comfort of his wrist and arm.
“Jack!” Hackbutt said carefully. “You have to participate! Put your fist next to mine. Now push the bones of your wrist against her feet. Don’t flinch. There. There. Well done.”
Once again, Piat had the weight of the heavy falcon on his arm. He took a deep breath. Sheila raised her wings a few inches, rocked her head back and forth. Yeah, I don’t like it any more than you do, honey. Piat let out his breath, realized that he was full of adrenaline.
“Just walk around, Jack. Just walk over to the wall and back a few times. I’m going to get the other haggards. Okay? Just walk.” Hackbutt turned and walked down the hill toward the farm.
Piat started to walk. The bird had a hood on, but somehow she still managed to track Hackbutt’s retreat. Suddenly she raised her wings to almost full extension and gave a scream.
Piat kept walking. The bracken had been knocked back here by generations of human feet and some cattle, and the grass was as short as a lawn and far finer. Just beyond the wall of loose stones a stream poured water down the hillside and a white rush to the loch at the bottom of the hill. Piat concentrated on the middle distance and walked. Sheila folded her wings and sat.
He turned at the wall and started back, the weight of the bird tugging at his arm. She was starting to preen, her wings safely in. His pulse slowed. He could just see losing one of Hackbutt’s precious birds—he said they wouldn’t fly while they wore a hood and jesses, but Piat wasn’t sure—and then he found that he’d made another circuit and she was still preening.
“Pretty lady,” he said.
He decided it was time to get them all to London and see if that would work.
6
Two weeks after he had asked Mike Dukas to find Piat for the second time, Alan Craik, in civilian clothes, finished a meeting at the FBI and rode the Metro around to the Anacostia station. He’d left his car there, now drove down to Bolling Air Force Base. Once he was free of the parking lot there, he found it a pleasure to walk: the day was warm but not hot, not too humid as Washington days went. Women were still in summer clothes—always a plus. He walked fast out of habit; even if he’d been going nowhere, he’d have looked like a man with a mission. In the elevator of DIA’s building, he rode up with a woman from counterterrorism, a three-striper but in civvies, as he was. Their chat was short, meaningless, not unpleasant. You never knew who would have something useful.
Craik was the collections officer for the Defense Intelligence Agency. A collections officer deals with numbers and ideas; he is a bureaucrat with one foot in the world of operati
ons—not because he will be operational but because he has been—and one foot in desk work. What a collections officer does, in four words, is say yes or no. Or at least convey messages of yes or no, because he sits on several committees and belongs to several working groups, at which people from the entire intelligence community decide whether proposed intel operations should be allowed to go forward. You want to plant a bug in Osama bin Laden’s drawers? Find an intelligence task in what is called the Green Book and make sure your proposed operation fits within it, no crowding, nothing left over, and then justify it with references and persuasive prose and recommendations from heavy hitters, if not in writing then on the jungle telegraph.
The Green Book is the bible of the collections officer’s religion. It is the same book for the entire community; any notion that the individual agencies work independently is nonsense, at least at this stage. They all see the proposals; they all review the proposals; they all pass on the proposals. Afterward, there may be some fudging and some lying, but at the collections phase, everybody is on board.
An intelligence task is like a template. Your idea has to fit into the template. Will the bug in bin Laden’s drawers fit under 57L9-3, “Acquisition of East German intelligence through electronic means?” Obviously not. Will it fit under 98K147-13, “Recruitment of key Islamic persons in nuclear technology?” Probably not, no matter what you’ve heard about bin Laden and the bomb. But there are thousands and thousands of tasks, dating back to the end of World War II, so somewhere in there you’ll find one into which your idea will fit.
Except that sometimes the idea won’t fit, and then you need to go to the collections officer and write a new requirement. And that requirement has to be approved by the community, by the collectors, by politicians—in some cases, by the General Accountability Office. Because really, collections management usually comes down to one limiting factor—money. The taxpayers only provide so much. And the collections officer and his staff are, at the simplest level, deciding where that money will be focused.
And then at a meeting, somebody from an agency’s ops will say, “Bin Laden doesn’t wear drawers,” and everybody will vote no, and the affected collections officer will have to go back to the person who proposed it and say, “No dice.” Which is why collections officers get quickly unpopular with their constituencies, because everybody hates the messenger, no matter what logic says. And the hatred will be deep and long, because what depended on approval of your idea was next year’s budget and the chance for looking good.
It was in this job that Craik now found himself. It was a hot billet—so long as you did it well and didn’t piss off the wrong people. You could springboard from it to higher rank. Or you could end your career if you screwed up. Sometimes even if you didn’t screw up. But it was interesting.
Now, in his own office overlooking a vast room full of people who worked for him, Craik hung his coat over a chair and sat in front of his computer, clicking the mouse and eyeballing his desk for message slips. Only four, none urgent. In his inter-office mail were three draft tasking orders from other agencies; glanced at, they told him little except what he’d already heard about them in a working group. Iraqi education system, penetration and utilization of; HUMINT in Northern Iran, expansion of; Vatican assets in East Asia, cooperation with. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He called up a subroutine he’d written when he’d first made captain and taken this job. It allowed him to search such intelligence traffic as he was allowed to see—a lot—for terms that he defined. It wasn’t illegal, but it wasn’t necessarily something he should be doing, either. Its advantage was that it allowed him to pull items of information together in clusters that hadn’t been intended when the information was disseminated. Occasionally, this produced something that gave him a leg up in one of the working groups and allowed him to beat the drum louder for DIA. Knowledge is power.
Now he added as a search term the collection management number of Clyde Partlow’s operation (more numbers—he worked with more numbers than Albert Einstein). He clicked the mouse, and the subroutine put its snout into the classified traffic of the intelligence community and began to root. Specifically, it was looking for subsidiary taskings—those items that would show that Partlow was moving to a second phase, data gathering—of his operation. All that Craik knew of the operation so far was what he had told Dukas and what they had approved in the working group, a specific but undescribed operation under a counterterrorism task titled “Penetration of al-Qaeda Financial Resources.” All that Partlow had said in the meeting was that they “were going in through the target’s hobby.” Sounded good. Go for it, Clyde. (What hobby? Stamps? Golf? Macramé?) Brilliant.
Without so much as a grunt, the subroutine found a truffle.
The computer dumped three subsidiary taskings on the screen. He was about to learn some details of Partlow’s operation:
One tasking was directed to collection officers and attachés, Middle East, asking for “ongoing data concerning individual named Bandar Muhad al-Hauq in the specific areas of (1) falconry (2) collection and display of Islamic art, including donations to museums, funding of art exhibits, and similar activity (3) financial transactions, including via Grandwell and Forstone Bank of Grenada, which individual is believed to have taken over two years ago (lengthy citation here of two classified reports).
One was directed to active intelligence-gathering operatives and their superiors in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, asking for data on travel within the last five years by individual named Prince Bandar Muhad al-Hauq and for data on planned or rumored travel by this individual.
One was directed to the National Security Agency and to the signals office of the Defense Intelligence Agency, asking for data on international intercepts of telephone and computer contacts with or about an individual named Prince Bandar Muhad al-Hauq within the last five years. Oops, thought Alan. I shouldn’t have been able to see that.
Taken together, the three taskings meant that Partlow was planning a move against a Saudi named Bandar Muhad al-Hauq, who might be an al-Qaeda bagman (the banking), and that he was looking for a place to do it (the travel stuff). Either falconry or art would be the means of contact (the hobby), which must have meant finding an agent with knowledge in one of the areas so that he or she could show a common interest. In fact, Partlow must have had an agent already in his sights, because pretty clearly he had needed Piat to make the agent contact. At least Craik couldn’t see any other reason for wanting Piat right there at the beginning of the operation. And that meant that Piat knew the prospective agent, knew him well, maybe even—the ploy would hardly be new—had run him before. But falconry? Or art?
Interesting. Very interesting.
But Craik wasn’t going through the taskings to find what was interesting. He wanted to make sure that he wasn’t connected, even remotely, with a turkey. (There had been a set of orders, money spent, time used, to go to Iceland.) Such was Partlow’s reputation that, in the plainest terms, he wanted to cover his ass.
Craik read the taskings again, glanced over the headers, pursed his lips over the references. There were five in all, used in various combinations in the three taskings. Presumably, they bolstered the cases for gathering data on the Saudi. One he recognized as a defector report from before the Iraq war, probably not worth a crap. One he remembered from the working group as a CIA paper on the al-Qaeda money-laundering and money-moving operation. He drew a blank on the others.
He glanced at his watch. He was running behind already, and it was still morning. He isolated the three unknown references and then sent them to a Marine sergeant sitting against the far wall of the room beyond. He typed in, “Sergeant Swaricki: Please locate these and send to me. Not urgent.”
He squeezed as much work as he could into an hour, then walked through the big space where his people were working, checking with some, nodding to anybody who met his eyes. Showing the flag, checking with the troops.
He went to another floor fo
r a briefing, stopped to report quickly to his immediate superior on the meeting at the FBI (“the usual crap from Justice—‘trust us, it’s legal’—but no underpinnings”) and had a quick and not very good lunch in the basement cafeteria. He had a limited appetite for boiled greens and black-eye peas. The banana custard with vanilla wafers was good, though. The place was full of people he knew, lots of waving and smiling, but there were also civilians he didn’t know, including, somebody told him, a congressman.
“What’s he want?”
“Who the hell would know? Just hold on to your wallet.”
Craik had forty people working for him, mostly analysts, both civilian and military from all the services. He had started them on a big push to update the Green Book, get rid of the chaff left over from decades ago and give attention to new tasks that would put collection right where breaking news was. It wasn’t an easy job. There was a big constituency of the lazy and the fearful for the oldest and least pertinent tasks: to the people who gave out money and medals, a task was a task, and if you managed to get an operation going under one and brought it home successfully, up went your budget and your reputation. Should anybody care that the task had been written in 1947 and had to do with assessing the threat level posed by radical Buddhists in the old Siam? Not the people who gave out the money and the medals, certainly; to them, a task was a task, so don’t waste your sweat on the hard ones, boys.
On his way back from lunch, he went through the big room again, but this time managed to pass all the cubicles and have at least a word or two with half the people. He was really focusing on the seven who were leading the internal Green Book review groups. Clustered by geographical area, the groups were each reading all the old documentation from when the tasks were first created. Boring, sometimes laughable—the early Cold War had some people in stitches—but essential. He touched base with all of them, not necessarily happy with himself for doing it but knowing it should be done. My God, he thought, I’m shmoozing. He remembered a day with his father, who had been a Navy squadron CO—the same glad-handing, the same constant greetings, the jokey tone.