by Gordon Kent
Dukas came close enough to speak, then came a step closer and said, “What happened?”
“You’re late,” Piat said. “Too late.”
“You know what I mean, Jerry. With your agent and the Saudi. Hackbutt. What happened?” Craik, still kneeling by the dog, was listening.
“Is it on the news yet?”
“Al-Jazeera says there was an attack on a Saudi official in Bahrain and an unidentified man was killed. We think the Bahrain government and the Saudis are sitting on it.” Dukas hunched his shoulders and pushed his fists deeper into his pockets. The rain was like cold spray. “You were in Bahrain. What happened?”
“I got blindsided.”
“Muhad al-Hauq. What happened?”
Piat looked up at the gray sky. “Ask Partlow.”
Craik came over, shook his head the way a dog does, fast, as if he were trying to shake the water off his hat. “I don’t think it’s Partlow. The people who did it have been in it since the beginning. They’ve been waiting. You got them to al-Hauq. What did they do?”
It wasn’t that he saw any professional reason not to tell them. It was that the moment was so wrong—he wanted time to be alone, time to get over Hackbutt. Time to get over Irene. He didn’t want the little obscenity of talking about it. “I’ll put it in my final report. When Partlow pays me.”
Both men looked at him. Craik shook his head again and then took the hat off and shook it with his hand. Piat guessed that water had been dripping down his neck. Craik put the hat on a little off-line. He said. “I know about your archaeological dig up at the loch. I’ve already been by there today. Didn’t see your car so figured we’d find you here.” He squinted into the rain, as if somebody else might turn up to make trouble, and he said, “I was up at your crannog on Saturday, too. I got enough from what I found up there so I guess I can pull in the people who’re working for you. They’ll rat you out to save themselves. Tell me what happened.”
Piat let the possibilities speed through his mind—tell Craik to fuck off and risk the cops; run for it; or tell Craik what he wanted to know, the unseemliness of it, but on the other hand the symmetry of it, because Craik was the first one he’d seen when all this had started in Iceland.
“That’s rich,” he said. “You got me into this. Now, you’ll burn me to the cops to make me talk about it.” His bitterness filled his voice, so that he sounded like a stranger even to himself. “Why’d you come looking for me here?”
Dukas grunted. “Because you aren’t in Greece and you aren’t in Bahrain and the cousins say you were on your way here as of last night.”
He remembered the probable MI6 man who’d picked up Bella. Of course. “You know who lives here?”
“The falconer.”
“Yeah.” He decided then to stop being a horse’s ass and tell them. What the hell. “Well, he’s dead.”
“In Bahrain?”
“Yeah.” Piat lifted one side of his mouth in a mock-smile. “He died for love.” He scratched the dog’s ears and told them the story of the bird.
When he was done, Dukas was incredulous. “They killed an American citizen as part of an operation?”
“First-class clusterfuck.” Piat shrugged, watching the hillside. “From what little I saw of them, they were idiots. Except that they fooled Partlow, but maybe he wanted to be deceived.”
“What the hell were they thinking of? No, belay that, they weren’t thinking. Jesus! Who were they?”
“The ones I saw were all Americans. Force Air.” Piat shook his head. “It probably looked neat on paper—kill al-Hauq, hustle me and Hackbutt out of country, fade away. They didn’t even get the first part right—what they got was kill Hackbutt, miss al-Hauq, scare the shit out of me, and leave evidence all over the place.”
“Why the hell did you come back here, then?”
Piat could have said several things, but he didn’t see any point in dragging all that into it. “The crannog,” he said. He patted the dog.
Craik took a small tape recorder from his pocket. “Let’s go inside. We want you to go through it in detail, and then I want it in writing, longhand, signed, and we’ll witness it.” He glanced at Dukas. “Both of us want it.”
Piat held the door to make it perfectly clear he could keep them out if he wanted to. He suspected that Craik didn’t care what he wanted. Dukas looked solemn and perhaps pitying.
They sat in the kitchen, the dog under the table among their legs, his tail slapping the floor. Piat turned the heaters up, which were in the energy-saving phase and would respond only slowly. He made more coffee. Craik fussed with paper and a pen and the tape recorder, and then Piat gave each of them coffee and got ready to rat out his own operation.
“Expecting company?” Dukas said.
Piat realized he had been looking out the windows a lot. He thought he’d been discreet. “That’s my business.”
“Anybody from Bahrain likely to come after you?”
“Why?” Piat glanced out the window at the end of the kitchen. “I didn’t kill anybody, they did.”
“Witness?”
“There were lots of witnesses.”
“The Saudis?”
“The Saudis probably want to give Edgar and everybody who was connected with him a medal. He saved their guy’s life.”
“What about the wife?”
“She’s in France. She’s an artist.”
Craik turned on the tape recorder and said who he was and where they were and who Piat was, only he called him by his cover name, Michaels, surprising Piat. Dukas, watching him with the pitying look, turned the tape recorder off. “You’re going to sign the paper as yourself. That’s for Craik’s personal safe, photocopy for mine. The tape’s for DNI.” Dukas kept a hand on the tape-recorder switch. “Jerry, we’re sorry. About your guy. I know what it’s like when you lose an agent.” The pitying look got more so.
Piat shrugged. Harden your heart. But then he thought that he’d never have a better chance to say the words, so he said them. “He was my friend.”
And Dukas nodded. He said, “Like that, uh?”
Piat nodded back, and said, “Just like that.”
Craik had never run an agent. So he just sat quietly for a minute.
Dukas turned the tape recorder on again and they went through the whole tale, or as much of it as Piat wanted to tell. He gave everything about Edgar’s death, maybe was even a little maudlin, he thought, leaning hard on the nobility of saving the bird. “He was heroic.”
“Did he know he was going to die?”
“I suppose he did. Or he thought saving the bird was what mattered and he didn’t care.”
Then he answered Craik’s questions about the attackers.
“Were they pros?”
“At the bomb part, yes. Blindsiding me, not so good—if I hadn’t had my head someplace else, I’d have put it together. I should have put it together. They weren’t all that good.”
They talked some more and Craik said, “That’s it,” and snapped the tape recorder off. He nodded at the paper and pen. Piat had gone on looking out the window, checking. Maybe for Irene, maybe for somebody else, because no matter what he’d told himself about the attackers, one of them might have a bean up his nose and decide that taking revenge on whoever was in or near Hackbutt’s farm would ease the pain of failure. He started writing but kept checking the window. He was still a little worried, was the truth.
Edgar’s shotgun was still outside.
“I gotta piss.”
Piat walked to the bathroom, the dog at his knee—he wasn’t going to let Piat get away from him again—flushed the toilet, stepped out of the back door, and got the shotgun. He left the gun open and put it on the kitchen table. “Think I was going to shoot you?” he said.
“No.”
He went back to writing, finished, read it over, signed his cover name and threw the pen down. Craik read it over, got to the signature, shook his head. “Real name.”
“Suppose
I tell you to fuck yourself.” Piat realized he wanted an opportunity for anger—maybe violence.
“Your crannog is still there, with all the evidence your guys left. I took photos.”
Dukas said, “Look, Jerry, Partlow’s got to be pissing his pants because he’s afraid he’ll be tagged with your guy’s death. The tape pretty much exonerates him of the worst of it, although he’ll get hit for being suckered out of his own operation. Your real signature on the paper nails it down. I’ll go before Congress and swear, I’ll go to court and swear, that the tape is genuine and I have it in writing, but I won’t give it up. If you’ll feel better, I’ll let Craik bury it somewhere in ONI.”
“And someday somebody will put your back to the wall and say we want the signed statement or you’re doing ten years in Leavenworth.”
Dukas shrugged.
Piat thought it over. “What the fuck.” He signed his real name.
Craik folded the paper and put it in an inner pocket and climbed into his yellow slicker. “How long you going to stay here?” he said.
“I want to square things away. There’s a kid comes in to feed the birds, I need to pay her. There’s the dog.” The dog, now under the table again, thumped his tail on the floor.
“What about the wife?”
Piat shrugged.
“There’s stuff at the crannog.”
“Mind your own business.”
Craik and Dukas went down the corridor and opened the front door. The rain had turned to a finer drizzle. They stood in the little porch, looking out at the vast, wet landscape. Craik said, “Believe it or not, I think I’d like to live here.”
“That’s the first likable thing I’ve heard you say.” Piat almost smiled. He found Craik easy to dislike.
Craik lifted the corners of his mouth. “The beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
Dukas gripped Piat’s shoulder. “Jerry, I know it’s tough. It’ll get better, okay? Stay in touch.”
They got in the car and drove away.
Piat spent the rest of the day cleaning his own things out of the house and trying to conquer his hangover. He slept that night in a bed, the dog stretched out at his feet. In the morning, he went to the loch with the dog in the car. It was a cold, windy day; the rain was gone but heavy cloud lingered. When he parked, he couldn’t see the tops of the hills.
He and the dog made the climb. His legs still hurt from the run in Bahrain.
From the top, Mull spread away to the north. He could see the mountain where Bella’s parents lived, and he could see the opening of the Great Glen, and everywhere, the sea.
With the dog, he walked down to the crannog. He walked around the beach. The cleanup was good, and by now, Dykes and McLean were gone.
Piat drove back to the farm and made a last check around. When he came out, Annie was just wheeling her bike in. She was startled but looked severe.
“I didn’t expect you, Mister Michaels.”
“I was just getting a few things, Annie.”
“Where’s the Hackbutts, then?”
He had the story prepared, went through it smoothly: Hackbutt had been in an accident and was now in a hospital in France. Irene was with him.
“Oh, that’s terrible. How bad is he?”
“I think he’ll be back in a week or two. She wasn’t hurt.”
“Oh, the poor man.” Then she asked what had become of Bella, and he told a prepared tale about the ornithological society and a breeding program in another country. Even if she believed him, she didn’t like the story much.
“Irene wanted me to ask you if you can go on caring for the birds for a couple of weeks.” She looked annoyed—there were only four birds now, but she had a long ride each way, and taking care of them was a lot. It had been Hackbutt’s full-time job, after all. He said, “She knows you deserve more, so she asked me to give you this.” He held out a hundred pounds.
“Yes, well.” She took it and looked at the money and then shoved it into her wind-cheater. “Well, goodbye, then, Mister Michaels.” Her severity was for him—the severity of the superior morality you get to practice at sixteen. Piat thought of the moralist he had been at that age, the idealist—the war-lover too young to go to Vietnam and for whom, when he was old enough to go, there wasn’t any more war. He had settled for spying, which had suited his adult morality better, as it turned out.
He went back inside and waited until she was gone. He put the shotgun and the shells down, then stood in the doorway of Irene’s studio and looked around at it. Inhaled it. Some of her beach combings were thrown into a pile against a wall: he saw the arm of a doll, a bottle, a battered log. He’d never understood what it was she did or how she decided what to put in and what to leave out. He never would.
After Annie had left, he took the dog outside. He walked it to its improvised kennel, stopped over for the chain, and clipped it to the collar.
“Time to go, Ralph.” He caressed the silky ears. “You’re a good, good dog. Somebody’ll take you, for sure. A dog like you, you can’t miss.” He stood up. There was no point in trying to find something final to say to a dog. “So long.” He turned away and walked to the car.
The dog lay with his head on his extended paws for a long time. The Man had gone away before and had come back, so now he was gone away and he would come back. Before The Man there had been somebody else, somebody he no longer remembered but would know if he saw or smelled him, but now there was The Man and that was enough. He would lie here and wait and The Man would come back.
He slept. He smelled a fox going by far up on the hill and he woke. Sat up. Sniffed. He filled his mouth with the scent, but it was weak and it came and went with the wind. He smelled the birds in their hovels, smoke from a house a mile away, something dead down the burn. He smelled the remnants of the man and woman who had been here and who hadn’t liked him. He smelled the girl and the tires of her bicycle, even though she had ridden away.
He lay down. Dusk began to fall. He put his head on his paws and slept.
He woke to the sound of the car. It was almost dark now, and he saw the lights as they turned into the farm and came toward him. The car stopped. The door slammed.
The Man stood over him. “Well, come on, then,” he said. He unsnapped the chain from his collar, and the dog raced for the car.
Epilogue
Craik led Abe Peretz across Mulholland Avenue and through the entrance of the building where Perpetual Justice had its offices. Peretz had trouble keeping up because of his left leg, and Craik turned and waited for him inside the door. He led the way to the building directory and pointed out Elastomer Engineering.
“Their front company. They’re sloppy about it. Somebody even held the door for me to go in.”
“They going to hold the door for you today?”
“Probably not. Unless it’s on the way out.”
They went up in an elevator and got out at the sixth floor and walked along the corridor. It was the middle of the day, but nobody seemed to be about. Nothing looked any different until they got to Elastomer Engineering’s door, and then Craik saw that the electronic keyboard was gone.
“Shit.”
He pulled on the door’s handle. The door swung open. Inside, the floors were uncarpeted. The night duty officer’s desk was gone. The place was empty. Stripped.
“My guess is it wasn’t like this the last time you were here,” Peretz said.
Craik strode down the long corridor to the T and turned to the door that had led to Ritter’s office. It stood open. The room beyond was bare—no carpet, no desk, no nothing. The inner door was open, too. Inside Ritter’s office, a man in a white cap and paint-spotted coveralls was leaning over a bucket.
“Hi,” Craik said.
“Hi, there. You not the new tenant, I hope. It ain’t ready, if you are.”
“No, no—in fact, I’m looking for the old tenant.”
“They’re gone.”
“Since when?”
“I been
here since yesterday. Nobody here then. I paint the walls; I don’t ask questions.”
“Fast work.”
“They come and they go.” He thrust the end of a wooden pole into a roller and began to roll paint across the ceiling.
Craik backed into the lee of the doorway and said to Peretz, “The guy died in Bahrain only four days ago. Jesus.”
“Fast work, as the man said.” Peretz shifted his weight to look around Craik at the painter. “This kind of shop, the shit hits the fan, they’re very fast.” He grinned. “‘They fold up their tent like the Arab, and as silently steal away.’ Except that they weren’t Arabs, were they.”
Craik walked back through the offices, looking in every door, staring out of windows and studying up close the nail holes where somebody’s photos or diplomas or posters had hung. “Right to the floors.”
“Lot of shredding, I imagine.” Peretz looked pained. “My bladder needs a john. How much nothing do you want to go on looking at?”
Craik directed him to a men’s room he’d looked into. “Or, there’s a ladies’ room the other way.”
“I’ll stick with convention.” He limped off. When he came out, Craik was standing by the front door. They went down in silence, crossed to the parking garage, and climbed to Craik’s car. Peretz said, “Is Dukas going to investigate?”
“DNI has everything. He’s going to pass it off to Dukas if Dukas wants it. The connection with NCIS is thin—it looks as if the bomb was made on the Bahrain navy base—but it’s enough.”
“FBI?”
Craik looked down the long, gritty gloom of the garage. “I think there’s a feeling of ‘Who can be trusted?’”
“You going to push it with DIA?”
Craik smiled. “I’ve been relieved of my duties at DIA.” He leaned back on the vehicle and folded his arms. “I’m going to DNI for my final tour. Two years and retirement.”