The Falconer's Tale

by Gordon Kent

  “We’re square?” Partlow asked.

  Piat wished that he’d asked for even more money, but what the hell. “Square. Can we talk Opsec? Or do I have to wait for you to bring it up?”

  Partlow shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “You’re going to leave me wandering Europe in my true name?”

  “Yes.” Partlow looked confident in his decision. “Until you go operational. I’ll have an identity prepared for that.”

  “Lived in? Ready to take a scrutiny?”

  “Yes.”

  Partlow looked determined. Piat had serious doubts. He’d never have run it that way himself—left to his own devices, he’d have covered his principal agent and both the sub-agents from the git-go, just to hide any little traces left in purchasing and training.

  He looked at his watch again and decided he didn’t have time to argue. “Next meeting?”

  “You call it,” Partlow said, getting up. “When he’s ready.”

  Piat nodded. “Clyde?”

  Partlow had the Burberry over his arm and the suitcase in his hand. He was already mentally on his way to his next meeting. He snapped back. “Yes?”

  “Clyde, we don’t have any recognition signals. No serious fallbacks. What happens if you get hit by a car?”

  Partlow put his hand on the doorknob. “You get to spend all that money, and everybody goes home.”

  And Piat thought, Jesus, Clyde, what are you up to? But what he said was, “See you next time, then. Keep an eye on the traffic.”

  Partlow said, “Thanks, Jerry.”

  Piat started to say something further, but Partlow had closed the door.

  Piat stopped at a bank and used his new passport to open an account. He called the airport and changed his flight and made a few arrangements that included wiring money to two email addresses and visiting a friend in the Plaka who sometimes made antiquities for old friends. Piat showed him some pictures of northern European Bronze Age pieces. Piat had the glimmerings of an idea that might make him enough money so that he would never have to worry about money again.

  He paid for his house on Lesvos for another year, in cash. Then he sat in a café at the base of the Plaka and doodled on a napkin. He was trying to figure Partlow’s operational cycle. Partlow had identified the target and the possible agent—Hackbutt—at least two months ago. But he only had the money now. So he’d lined up his players before he got his approvals.

  Piat crumpled his doodles and put them in his pocket, stood and finished the last dregs of his Helenika. Partlow had started his operational activity before he had his approvals. Piat was sure of it.

  Not a good sign.

  He left a decent tip on the cup. And then he collected his bag and headed for Scotland.

  9

  Alan Craik was sitting at his desk, coat off, sleeves rolled up. He was in civilian clothes—chinos; white button-down shirt; rather nifty raw silk tie his wife had given him, a sort of dusty orange and olive. A black blazer was draped over the back of the chair. Allen-Edmonds loafers, whose name he wouldn’t have ever heard of except for Dick Triffler, protected the feet that were perched on an open drawer.

  He was working through a stack of roughed-out fitness reports, going fast but thinking about each person, picturing the face, remembering what the man or woman did. At the same time, his mind was flicking back and forth over Partlow’s operation and the unexplained contact report. It rankled.

  He wanted to talk to somebody about it at length. If Dukas had been in Washington, he’d have talked to Dukas. But not over a STU. Not at a three-thousand-miles remove.

  He finished a fitness report for Meserve, Geraldine, USA, and initialed the rough and tossed it on a different pile. Then, instead of picking up another, he reached for his outside phone and dialed a number from memory.

  “Pearsall, Hench, Rostoff and Gallaher, good morning how may I help you can you hold?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t hold. Please give me Mister Peretz.”

  “Oh—really—!” The phone disgorged music but didn’t tell him that his call was valuable and would he please stay on the line. The firm was too classy for that. The music was vaguely classical, too, suggesting that they were serious lawyers.

  “Peretz.”

  “Abe, Al Craik.”

  “Hey, my God, good to hear from you.” Peretz was an old, old friend, first his father’s friend and then a mentor to Alan himself. He wasn’t a lawyer but, nowadays, a security specialist.

  “How about we get together for a drink?”

  It wasn’t code, but since his injury, Peretz believed that he was surrounded by enemies, and he insisted on caution. Craik, in fact, wondered if something in his old friend had been pushed over the edge of caution into paranoia.

  Peretz said that a drink would be great. “Sixish?”

  “How’s that place that used to serve the great whitefish?” This wasn’t code, either, but nobody listening would know that it referred to a neighborhood bar and grill in Northwest.

  Peretz okayed that, and they chatted about Craik’s wife but not about Peretz’s wife or daughters. Then Craik hung up and spent the rest of the day writing fitness reports and doing other things that collections officers do, which is mostly stuff that makes other people dislike them.

  It was cold in Mull, and the rain was falling in sheets instead of the usual heavy drizzle. Piat parked his car and walked down the gravel slope to the cottage. The dog was always happy to see him now, but today it stayed in the shelter of the tarpaulin, its pleasure made evident by its tail and the posture of its head. Piat detoured to greet him, crouching in the rain to ruffle the hair behind his ears. Then he paid a visit to Bella, the sea eagle, who glared at him through the wire mesh of her cage in the way only a big predator can do—in other words, she looked at him as potential food.

  Piat stood bare-headed in the torrent, still stunned by her size. She had easily four times the mass of any of the other birds, twice the wingspan, more than twice the height, with long white feathers sticking straight down from her back, and a pale golden head. Beautiful, in a scary way.

  Piat had done some reading. There were fewer than four hundred sea eagles left in the world.

  Nice bait.

  They gazed on one another with much the same look.

  The packages from Farlow’s had come that morning. Hackbutt was trying everything on.

  “I never knew,” Irene said.

  “Me either,” Piat replied.

  They spent an hour watching Hackbutt preen. Irene was on edge—perhaps because Hackbutt had center stage. To jolly her, Piat went through her cards from the shops, going through the motions of being the man in charge of the money, secretly appalled by the cost of every garment she had chosen. He wondered fleetingly if this was the feeling he had given Partlow. Or whether she was looking for his refusal.

  “Three hundred pounds for a skirt?” he asked and instantly wished he hadn’t.

  “Fine.” She snatched at the card he was holding. “I don’t need this shit at all. I gave this shit up. I feel like I’m working for my fucking mother.”

  Piat noted that with two shits and a fuck, it was mother that sounded like the curse.

  Hackbutt peered out from the bedroom. “Honey? What’s wrong?” he asked. “Do you know what I did with my new hat?”

  Irene’s face had the puffy look of someone about to cry. “On the bed!” she shouted, and fled to the kitchen, where she began to take out her aggression on some dough.

  “What did you say to her?” Hackbutt asked. He was wearing a pair of tweed trousers and his new boots with his ancient sweater. It had once been a good sweater, and Piat noted that he looked just right for a flaky American, which Piat had decided was the best they were going to do, anyway.

  Piat let out a long sigh. “Irene,” he started.

  “Don’t try to sweet-talk me, you pompous shit,” she said while pounding the dough. She now had her r
unway model face on. Piat suspected that from a woman, most people found this pretty intimidating. He found it interesting.

  Hackbutt looked back and forth between them. “What?” he asked. “Irene, I really like the clothes. It’s okay.” He smiled hesitantly at Piat. “The pants are warm.” The new tweed pants, part of a suit that had cost four hundred pounds used, had pigeon blood on them. “She’s mad because she thinks you’re making me do this, you know?” and to Irene, “It’s okay, honey.”

  In the kitchen, Irene cut a wodge of dough in two with a cleaver. The sound echoed like a pistol shot. Hackbutt headed for the bedroom again, muttering something about a jacket.

  Piat walked into the kitchen. “I’m sorry. Really. I’ve never spent six hundred bucks on a skirt before as an ops expense.”

  Her back was to him. “Fuck yourself. I’m not your fucking agent and don’t you forget it.”

  He sighed again. “Wrong,” he said. “You are my fucking agent and you can sink this thing as fast as Digger can—no, faster. Okay?”

  She whirled on him. Her face was flushed but set, her knuckles white where she was clutching the counter behind her. “Don’t imagine that your money gives you the right to talk to me like that,” she said. “You and your money and your planning—you’re driving me off my center. Robbing me of my energy. You are making me a thing, not a person.”

  No swear words at all—different attack altogether. Piat thought she had a few people running around in her head—rich girl, tough girl, artist. He didn’t flinch. “Okay,” he said. “So you’re out. Game over?”

  “That’s what you do when you’re threatened?” she asked. “Just give up? I thought you were the trained tough guy.” Her voice was low, with the clear intention of hiding the quarrel from Hackbutt. Maybe, then, she wasn’t serious.

  He shrugged. “Whatever. Irene, I like you fine. We can work together. But there’s room for just one touchy, insecure dick on this case, and that role’s taken. Okay?”

  “How dare you speak about Eddie that way?” She was truly interesting when angry—positive that she could use it to get her way, even when most of it was a put-on. And sex was the bass accompaniment.

  “Who said I meant Digger?” Piat laughed. “Now, are we ordering some clothes, or not?”

  “Fuck yourself,” she said. But the tone said she was ready to back off, if he would.

  He spent four thousand dollars of ops funds off the credit card in five phone calls while she made witticisms from the kitchen and Hackbutt fed the birds. It was too wet for flying. When Hackbutt was done, Piat helped him rig the outdoor heaters that would keep the birds warm if the temperature dropped any more.

  The encounter in the kitchen had rattled him. He didn’t think about it while he nailed an extension cord into the rafters of the shed, and he didn’t think about it while he rewired an ancient space heater with ceramic coils that had been new when Hitler was the chancellor of Germany, and he was still not thinking about it when he left the cottage late in the day.

  Northwest Washington’s Park View Grill didn’t have a view of Rock Creek Park but was close enough that you could walk there in three minutes if that was important to you. Craik arrived first, bought himself a beer, and went to a booth near the back. When Peretz came in, Craik winced, as he did every time he saw this old friend who was no longer quite like the old friend he used to know. It wasn’t age that had changed Peretz but a bullet, which had gone through somebody else first and then fragmented in Peretz’s abdomen, destroying his spleen, reducing his bladder to the size of an orange and leaving him with a bent back and a permanent drag to his left foot. And a conviction that the world was made up of enemies.

  “Abe! Back here.”

  Peretz came back—more slowly now than he used to—an old man’s uncertain smile on his face. When beer had appeared, and when they had both shut up until the waitress had gone, Peretz said, “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” He smiled. But it was a joke wrapped around a sadness. “I feel like the other woman.” He waited for Craik to laugh, but Craik didn’t get it. “Meeting in holes-in-the-wall so the wife won’t find out.”

  Craik smiled. “Not my wife, but your uncle.” Peretz didn’t laugh at the reference to Uncle Sam, the implication of his fear of his own government. Craik didn’t want to launch into his problem straight away; he didn’t want to seem indifferent to Peretz’s situation, to the sadness inside the jokes. He said, “Anything new on the family?”

  Peretz’s face contracted. “I got a message from Leah.” Leah was the younger of his daughters—now, Craik thought, about eighteen. She had vanished in Israel with her sister and mother, presumably into the arms of Mossad, when she was fifteen. Her mother had been passing classified material that she had found on Abe’s desk at home—a double whammy for him because, like everybody else, he had violated a rule by taking stuff home, and, unlike everybody else, his wife was a traitor.

  Abe talked about his daughter’s message. “This stuff they do with cell phones. Like email only without spelling.”

  “Text-messaging.”

  “She wants to come home.” His voice broke on the last word. Like some men who have been tortured, Peretz didn’t have the tight control he’d had before he’d been shot. Or before his wife had committed treason. “It started—” now he was writing with a finger on the table—“p-l-z, p-l-z, p-l z. It took me a while to see she meant ‘please, please, please.’ Then—no caps—i w-n-t numeral 2 c-m h-o-m. ‘I want to come home.’ And it ended with please, please, please again.” Tears shone in his eyes.

  “How did she get it to you?”

  “She sent it to somebody. They sent it on. Maybe somebody she met over there.” A bitter look passed over his face. “Or maybe Mossad.” Peretz chewed on his upper lip and looked away before he said, “Now she’ll be on a list. So will whoever forwarded it. So will I. Everything any of us sends will get read.”

  Craik wondered how sane his friend was. “Not legal,” he said, although he knew how often legality was ignored.

  Peretz shot a finger into the air. “These people make up their own definition of legal!” He bent forward, lowered his voice. “Anybody give you grief because you called me today?”

  “No, no, no. We’re old friends. I’ve been over it with my security officer. Oh, yeah—don’t look so shocked, Abe—you were one of the people I made a point of telling her about. And you know why. You took a bullet for all of us, and so you’re a great guy and you got three medals and a swell medical retirement package, but you have a wife who did a Pollard, so you’re a suspect guy and a possible security risk. Come on, you know all that.”

  Peretz was quiet, and then he smiled. “If I weren’t a goddam socialistic, secular-humanist, fallen-away Jew, I’d be the darling of the right.”

  Alan let a little silence fall to mark a change of subject. He said, ready now to talk about his own problems, “A funny thing’s happened.”

  “Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?”

  “Not very ha-ha.”

  “Too bad. I could use a shot of ha-ha. What’s up?”

  Alan told him—the heavily edited contact report, the visit to Partlow, the existence of a classified version he wasn’t allowed to see. He emphasized the strange task number. “That’s a real red flag, Abe. An operation can’t go through the process without a task number. I looked up the task number that was on Partlow’s computer. It wasn’t generated until six months after the contact report was written—that’s what ‘superseded’ meant. Somebody ran an operation and then made it legal.”

  “Who says it went through the process? You say it was the end of 2001—that was a dumbnuts carnival. Washington was a very dicked-up place.”

  “Even so. My computer geek says the classified version has a DIA code blocking it. DIA wouldn’t have honchoed something without a task number.”

  “Maybe it isn’t theirs. Maybe it just has their code on it.”

  “What’re you saying?”

  “
I don’t know. I’m offering options—isn’t that what you want me to do? I’d ask the question differently, Al. Is anybody dumb enough to have got an operation going without a task number, meaning without going through the process?”

  “Nobody.”

  “But maybe somebody. Somebody who’s never done it before.” Peretz got a new expression on his face, something approaching a fanatic’s gleam. “Somebody who doesn’t even know there is a process. Somebody who never heard of task numbers. Somebody who doesn’t know dick-all about intel but thinks he knows everything!” He poured more beer into his glass, sipped, licked his lips. “Take that kid who got me shot.”

  “Spinner?” Craik hadn’t been there, but he’d heard the story from Dukas, later from Peretz. “He isn’t a kid, and he didn’t get you shot, Abe. He got suckered by Mossad because he was too dumb to walk and chew gum at the same time, and your shooting was an accident.”

  Peretz checked himself, then apparently thought better of getting angry. “My point is, he got sent to Tel Aviv to gather intel and he sure as hell didn’t go under any task number.”

  “Yeah, but—” Craik thought about it. “You think?”

  The fanatic’s face returned. “The DIY Intelligence Agency, aka the Department of Defense Office of Information Analysis. The brilliant stars of the new regime. Those guys were so smart they sent Little Running Dumb-Fuck off to Tel Aviv with no cover, no country clearance, no nothing. And I got shot.”

  “You’re a little bitter.”

  “More than a little.” Peretz got up. “I shouldn’t drink beer. I have to change my Pampers.” He’d had about a quarter of the bottle.

  While he was gone, Craik ordered a second beer and thought about the possibility of the contact report’s having come out of a rogue Defense Department operation. In that case, why would it be classified under a DIA code? And did “OIA” on the version he’d seen in Partlow’s office really mean Office of Information Analysis? He was still worrying over it when Peretz came back.

  Abe said, “Al, a lot of stupid stuff was done right after Nine-Eleven. People were scared shitless. They were also in shock. There was a feeling of, ‘Forget dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s; forget the fine print—go for it!’ A missing task number wouldn’t touch some of it.”