by Gordon Kent
Piat was full length on the bracken, a cup of tea in a trembling hand. He waited for Hackbutt to go on but the other man was suddenly silent. As if aware that the silence was wrong, Hackbutt snatched up the binoculars and began to search the rocks and the sky. Piat, exhausted, was happy to let him do it; it was just Hackbutt being Hackbutt.
But it wasn’t. After the silence had extended and extended and then snapped and been replaced by Piat’s own thoughts, a desire to sleep, Hackbutt put the binoculars on the ground and said, without turning around, “Irene and I had a fight last night. She slept in her studio.”
Piat heard a warning in the voice. About me?
“I wanted to make love, as a way of—” He waved a hand. He still wasn’t looking at Piat; his eyes were on the nest. He laughed. “There’s an old joke about two newlyweds. They put a jar at the head of the bed, and every time they make love for the first year, they put a penny in it. Then, for the rest of their lives, every time they make love, they take a penny out. And they never empty the jar.” He shook his head and pulled at a piece of bracken. “I’ve always thought that’s the saddest joke I ever heard.” Now he turned to look at Piat. “We’ve been together five years.” He went back to plucking at the bracken.
“Is she still mad?”
“She was never mad. She’s thinking of leaving me.” He smiled back at Piat, his head tilted so that the smile looked furtive. “I don’t think she knows it herself, but it’s what she was fighting about.”
“You can’t know that, Digger! She loves you!”
Hackbutt didn’t seem to hear. He looked out over the vast expanse below them, all the way down the mountain, over the thread of road, the flattened, green land, to the sea and the islands far off in the haze. “It’s like I’m seeing Irene through a zoom lens, getting smaller and smaller, going away— I thought it was about you, but I decided that it wasn’t.”
“Me!” He tried to cover, talking fast. “Irene and I got over disliking each other, Dig; she’s not upset about me being there all the time anymore.”
“I thought it was you.” He turned and looked at Piat. “But you wouldn’t do that, would you, Jack.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement. Perhaps, just perhaps, a warning.
Piat thought about equivocations. He probably thought too long. He shrugged. “No,” he said after too long a delay.
“It would sink the operation. And that’s what you care about.” He picked up the binoculars, but he didn’t put them to his eyes. “And—I don’t think you’d do that to me.”
He looked back and their eyes met. Piat said, “This is why you got me up here.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Hackbutt frowned at his thought. “I can say what I mean up here.”
Then he began to watch the eagles, and after a few minutes he began to talk about them and then to point out the islands and tell Piat which was which. Piat, still weak from the climb, let himself be silenced by the display of authority he’d seen. But Hackbutt wouldn’t stop, and Piat pulled himself together because that was what Hackbutt expected.
I like him, Piat thought. It was a revelation. But he couldn’t say so. He didn’t even know how. Instead, he said, “Holy mother of God, Digger, is that Ireland?”
“No, Jack. That’s Ulva. There’s Iona—see? I forget the others—the big islands. Ulva has another nesting pair. Iona has some unique terns.” Hackbutt passed his glasses over the infinite spaces behind them and then lay down and pointed his binoculars up the mountain at the nest.
“Both of them. Oh, Jack!” he whispered. “Look!”
Piat looked. The birds were big, well developed. Their nest was a pile of offal and bird shit at the top of the cleft, supported by two big rocks. There were bones and bloody bits scattered over the top of the nest and coating the rocks all the way to the base.
“Old nest?” Piat asked.
“I think so. I think they’ve been here forever. The old Ordnance Survey calls that feature Creag na h-Iolaire—that’s the eagle’s crag, in Gaelic. Gaelic! How long have they been here, Jack? Two thousand years? Five thousand years?”
“Fantastic,” Piat said. In fact, it was better than fantastic. The two birds—Bella’s parents—were huge through his binoculars. They were quite clearly repairing the nest.
Hackbutt was beaming at him. “I’m so happy you came,” he said. “I’ve tried to get Irene to come—but it’s not her—”
“Cup of tea?” Piat murmured, the binocs still perched on his nose. “It’s a tough climb, Digger. I’m wasted. You’re not even breathing hard.”
Hackbutt laughed. “You’re so good at everything, Jack. You’re so surprised to lose at anything. You remember that night in Jakarta—in the bar? You sang ‘Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner.’ You turned off the karaoke machine. You remember?”
Piat nodded. He remembered that there had been such an evening. He must have been pretty drunk.
“And I thought—God, he can even sing.”
“You’re embarrassing me.” Piat shook his head.
“No, Jack—you started it. You made me see that I needed to do something—something worth doing. Here I am.”
Piat found himself looking at a man who could climb a mountain and handle a wild eagle. He thought of the same man’s crying on the gravel drive. Without thinking it through, he said, “Digger—why can’t you always be like this?”
Hackbutt had started to root in his pack, and now he stopped, and a slow smile spread over his face.
“Like what?” he asked. But the smile suggested that he already knew.
It was dark by the time they made it down the mountain. Piat was obscurely pleased that Hackbutt had forgotten to bring a torch—he might have thought that every trace of the nerd had been washed away down the mountain. They didn’t talk much, climbing down or in the car. But when Piat pulled up at the farm, he gave Hackbutt’s shoulder a squeeze.
“That was a great day,” he said.
“Yup,” Hackbutt replied. “You said it, Jack.”
“Take the weekend off, Digger. I’ll see you Monday.” Piat had other plans in motion and some other work to do, and he already dreaded what his leg muscles would do in the morning.
“Don’t you want to come in and see Irene?” Hackbutt asked. Piat wondered what, exactly, Hackbutt was asking.
“No,” Piat said. And then, realizing that he’d made a gaffe—“Just send her my regards, Digger. I’m beat.”
Hackbutt leaned back into the car with a wide smile. “You need to get more exercise, Jack.”
Piat laughed as he drove away, because it was the phrase with which he’d ended almost every meeting with Digger in the old days.
The next day, Piat awoke with aching joints and the thin memory of a dream. As he washed his face, flashes of the dream came up at him, as if from the water in the sink. Something about Irene and Partlow—Hackbutt had been in it too.
He drove to the farm, equally afraid that he would see her and that he wouldn’t. He wasn’t sure he had anything to say to her. He still wanted to say something.
But she wasn’t there. She was moving the first load of boxes to the ferry, and Piat found Hackbutt on the hillside. Hackbutt was standing in a circle of beaten grass with Bella on his arm. He smiled at Piat when he came up, but otherwise the big bird had his complete attention. He was talking to her quietly, and she had her head turned a little away, as if she only had one good ear and were listening carefully.
Piat moved until he was at Hackbutt’s elbow.
“You want to hold her, Jack?” Hackbutt asked.
Piat reached out and took her. She hesitated only a moment before stepping from Hackbutt’s arm to his.
“I’m saying goodbye, Jack,” Hackbutt said. He had the tracks of tears on his face, but his voice was strong and soft. Controlled. “I thought about what you said. About everything you said. I guess I’m willing to give up Bella—to save people. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Because that guy—the prince—he’s a bad man. I can tell.”
> Everyone’s the hero in his own movie, Digger. Piat almost said it, because it was the truth, and terms like good and bad had no meaning to Piat. Except that, while causes didn’t move him, people did, and right now, with the big eagle on his fist under the slate-gray sky, Piat didn’t feel like lying to Hackbutt at all.
So he stood with the man and the bird and the sky, and together they said goodbye by saying nothing at all. And then they walked back down the hill.
The next day, the cartons that had filled the house’s corridor were gone, and so was Irene. She hadn’t told him when she was going. It was better that way, he thought: with Hackbutt standing by, they could hardly have talked about where they would meet when he was back from Bahrain. If they were going to meet at all. Piat already had the uneasy feeling that the prospect of wealth would change him. And that the Piat who owned his own future might not have much to offer Irene. Or was it the other way around?
Then there were two days of marking time, when he took long walks with the dog and walked for the twentieth time through Tobermory’s shops and sat in the Mishnish bar and nursed some single malt he hadn’t tried before. Without Irene, Edgar was both edgy and elated: he missed her, but no relationship is perfect, and without admitting it he liked the freedom of being alone. He asked Piat to make macaroni and cheese for supper, a dish he liked but Irene wouldn’t make (“Redneck food, Eddie”). Yet the imminence of parting with Bella had him staring out of windows at the rain and moving through his own house like a restless ghost.
The next day, a man appeared in an aging green van to get Bella. Piat had helped Hackbutt find the perfect travel cage for her: they had sat together going through the back pages of his falconry magazines, looking for advertisements. When they found one Hackbutt thought he might approve, Piat would make a note and later look it up on the web. Hackbutt had had almost impossible requirements, but Piat had told him that he had to choose because they were in now and they had to go through with it. In the end, he had ordered a huge, dome-topped cage of ABS plastic with screened windows and cast-in food and water dishes that could be filled from the outside.
The pickup man was sandy-haired, middle-aged, cheerful. Piat thought he had a look of the long-time sergeant, probably one now double-dipping for MI6. It made sense that Partlow had informed the Brits, particularly to get the paperwork on the strictly illegal shipping of an endangered bird to a foreign country.
“Sign, if you please,” the man said. “Six places—there’s a little red arrow stuck to each one. Hard to miss.” He looked around, stretched. “Beautiful day.” They were outside; it was sunny with a few big clouds like puffs of cigar smoke. The dog was running among the three of them.
“Thank you,” he said. He produced another sheaf of papers. “Your copies of the shipping packet—customs forms, letter from the ministry, letter from Foreign Affairs—” Piat glanced at it and read “…for transfer of a rare avian female to another government for breeding purposes—” Well, close enough.
The man was going on. “—letter from the Royal Ornithological Society—waiver of CITES treaty requirements—” Piat handed each one to Hackbutt. He didn’t want to hear about breaking laws or violating a trust after the bird was gone.
Partlow had done his part well. Barring a personal note from the prime minister, a nation could hardly have put more clearly on paper its willingness that its laws and international treaties be violated.
“Well, then.” The man checked over the signed documents and removed the little red stickers, which he rolled between his fingers and thrust into a pocket. “Let’s have this bird then, shall we?”
Hackbutt turned away. Piat went with the man, who dragged a red dolly behind him, to the bird pens, where Bella was already in the new, commodious cage. Hackbutt had been trying to accustom her to it. The man looked at it, looked at Bella without getting too close, whistled in appreciation. “Do you a right wound with that beak, wouldn’t she!”
He began to work the dolly under the cage.
“You’re driving her to Glasgow?”
“Holy Loch.” He gave Piat a look that meant he’d say no more about that, but if Piat had any sense he’d see that Bella was going to be flown out by military air.
Better and better. Holy Loch to Bahrain, one way, no customs.
When they were back in the front yard, Hackbutt had his own bundle of paper to hand over. He’d written out in painstaking block printing instructions on feeding, watering, petting, flying Bella. He’d in fact written a monograph on the care of traveling eagles.
The man took it all. “Right. Going to ask you about this sort of thing.” He’d already found the cast-in pocket on the side of the cage for documents. He put the feeding and watering instructions in it and taped them down with a roll of black tape from a pocket. “Don’t you worry, sir,” he said. He seemed to have grasped at once who the real owner of the bird was and how he felt. “She’ll be cared for like she’s a baby.” He put the rest of Hackbutt’s writings with the legal papers. He brandished the packet. “This’ll ride with her every step of the way.” He winked at Piat. “Wouldn’t want to get in trouble with the powers that be, would I?”
He and Piat lifted the cage into the van; the doors closed, and Hackbutt winced. The dog, sitting nearby, cocked his head.
“I’m to be contacted when she arrives,” Piat said.
“Not my area of responsibility, sir, but I’m sure that if that’s the arrangement, then that’s the way it will happen.” Then he waved at them and got into his vehicle and drove away.
They looked after the van long after it had climbed the hill and disappeared. Piat put an arm around Hackbutt’s shoulders. Tears were running down Hackbutt’s nose.
20
The London Conference came around every year, and if you were one of the ones who went you pissed and moaned but in fact you knew that you were one of a very select group in the intelligence community. It was what one old hand had called a “love feast with the cousins,” but there was a lot of acrimony these days, too. Nobody on either side had come off well after Iraq; blame was inevitable.
For Alan Craik, it was a first time, and he was therefore a little apart from the old Anglo-American irritations. Nonetheless, nervous that he do it right, he had scheduled himself to go over early, learn the ground, taking with him a lieutenant-commander and Sergeant Swaricki as backup. He landed at Heathrow on the Friday morning, less jet-lagged than most because he was an old hand at sleeping on aircraft, went right to the obligatory four-star hotel and was checked in by eight-thirty. Uncle could pay for the extra half-day. Uncle was getting his money’s worth.
Leaving Swaricki to catch up on his sleep, he went to the American embassy to touch base and introduce the lieutenant-commander around, then MI5’s glass castle on the Thames to do the same, then out to an obscure suburban business park where they went over the meeting rooms, got briefed on security, found the johns and made sure there would be coffee. Swaricki met them there and Craik left him and the lieutenant-commander to establish a beachhead. By lunchtime, he was ready to meet his British opposite numbers—four of them—and the US deputy naval attaché at somebody’s club. He was back in his hotel by four.
He sat on his bed and let himself be tempted by the idea of a nap. Another idea was more tempting, however: the island of Mull, where Dukas said Partlow’s perhaps kinky operation was supposed to be preparing, only a few hundred miles away: Mull, Piat, Falconer. He admitted to himself that that proximity was the real reason he’d come to London on Friday and sailed through his London responsibilities, the idea of a visit always at the back of his mind. He could still be in London in plenty of time for Sunday’s pre-conference brief—plenty of time, for that matter, to see Partlow if he had to. Partlow was a fixture at the London Conference.
He pushed a pillow aside as if it represented the idea of a nap and picked up the telephone. He could fly to Glasgow, but not to the island, and a sleeper train left London at ten-thirty and would put him i
n Glasgow sixish; he winced at the price but made the reservation—no having to hustle to and from airports, no super-early wake-up. Another call got him a rental car, and a few minutes on his laptop brought him a ferry schedule to Mull and a reservation on the early ferry. Piece of cake.
Then he called his wife and explained how easy the expense was on a captain’s salary.
He rolled the little car up the welted steel of the ramp and off the ferry, and he was on Mull. The island had risen around them as the ship had got close to it; then, coming to it with his back to the sea, it looked like its own small mainland, solid and self-sufficient. There were a shop and a tourist center and a gas station and a pub, a big parking lot and a lot of people waiting to walk on board—weekend shoppers headed to the mainland, perhaps. He thought he knew on sight that they weren’t an American crowd, something about posture and maybe clothes, although any notion that the British were any longer bound by jacket-and-tie dress codes was nonsense. The faces looked pink—sea mist and cold air—hospitable, very alive. The women in the information center were absurdly helpful and—the only word for it—nice.
Craik drove north toward Tobermory, the only town of any size (all of a thousand people?), wondering where Piat was right then. To find out, he’d have to start where he and Piat had last left off—fishing. Piat had seemed pretty dedicated to the sport; if he was living on the island now, Craik thought, he had to be doing some fishing. Unless he was that good—so adept at cover that he could completely shed the old skin of himself, including even his hobbies.
Tobermory’s Tackle and Books was the place for fishing, according to all the tourist brochures. It was at the far end of the town’s main street, thus not easy for the novice to find by sight. Nevertheless, a few minutes’ walking found it. He took it in at a glance, made sure Piat himself wasn’t in there, entered; a tall man looked up from a counter and grinned and went back to explaining something about a USB stick to a frowning, middle-aged woman. Alan waited, hung about, looked at a book or two, came back when no customers were at the counter.