by Michael Crow
They laugh, the three of them.
“Right, right,” Allison says. “Your car, Rob. We’ll probably have to taxi it back, though. Unless you’re willing to be the designated driver and skip all the drinking?”
“Let’s see how it goes,” Rob says. “If I get polluted, Terry can always drive. He never has more than a beer.”
“I think we should try to get Terry really drunk.” Nadya smiles at me. “Make him babble all his secrets. He’s full of secrets, I know it.”
All I’m full of is some mild curiosity about what sorts of clubs these kids can possibly have in mind. Not the sort I’m used to, I’m thinking, as I go up to my room, strip, shower. And then some consternation, when I look in the armoire. All the Ecko, Quicksilver, Billabong stuff I’m used to wearing is gone. I mean, what? I’m going for a night out in a junior executive suit? Or, worse, Ralph Lauren chinos? I do what I can: mess my hair up, wear a black T under the darkest gray suit, black suede loafers, put my earring back on.
I make a quick study in the mirror, see I look okay, and feel instantly like a fool. What does any of it matter? I’m going out with three spooks, in buttoned-up Washington, not to some ’hood hip-hop club with metal detectors at the entrance. I don’t have to be credible to anyone, and there isn’t anyone to look good for. I really ought to grow up.
That’s brought home when I hit the foyer at seven. Rob’s wearing baggy jeans with Hyde bowling shoes, a T over a long-sleeve waffle-weave. Allison’s wearing red suede flares and a top that leaves about an inch of her belly bare.
“Terry! Love the mob hit-man costume,” Nadya laughs. She’s looking great, super-short spandex dress that shimmers like mercury, a gold chain around her neck that loops just where her cleavage starts.
“People’ll think we’re rock stars or something, with our own security man,” Allison says.
“Ignore ’em, Terry,” Rob says. “They live to bust balls.”
They’re all in on this. They’ve decided I’m the disaffected one, the wayward one they’ve got to bring back on board. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am a little, anyway. Rob did nice work, making it seem he was the one going off-team. God, I’m getting tired of this.
Rob’s ride is a deep blue Volvo S60. Common, anonymous in this town. Unless you check the low-profile performance tires. Unless you notice when he keys it, lets out the clutch and winds it up a bit in first gear that some serious engine work’s been done. He’s smooth, using the car’s quickness subtly, darting through traffic without drawing attention to the maneuvers.
First stop is Miss Lucy’s, a joint on Capitol Hill that specializes in Deep South food: three kinds of barbecue, fried chicken with mashed potatoes and red-eye gravy, baby back ribs, greens, yams, corn bread. The crowd’s split about fifty-fifty, race-wise, but no split at all in economic status. The prices on the menu would keep me from being a regular on my cop’s salary. Off limits entirely on military pay. Little Nadya turns out to be the chow-hound, even lets out a burp when she’s swallowed the last forkful of pecan pie.
Then Rob hustles us across town to a place on the edge of commercial Georgetown called Matrix. Failed New York imitation: fake velvet ropes channeling a line of people who want in, a white guy with a long ponytail flanked by two big black dudes picking who gets that privilege. Nadya just leads us straight up to the door, does a little eye and smile thing with Ponytail, and we’re in.
It’s dead, despite the black kid DJ working turntables hard. We take a table up on a tier around the dance floor. Nadya orders a bottle of Stoly; it comes encased in a block of ice—an actual fucking block of ice. There are four shot glasses. I take mine, turn it upside down in front of me, ask the waitress for a Rolling Rock, check out the place. Don’t spot anybody I’d make for a player, not even a resident small-time coke merchant hawking a night’s high for fifty bucks. Don’t see a soul who isn’t post-college or grad school but under thirty. The bouncers are pure window-dressing; the kinds of people I’m seeing never get into it, mix it up, tussle. Too respectable, too career-centered to risk any static. Like yuppies, only they’re the generation after gen-X and I don’t know if there’s a name for them yet. Maybe there won’t be.
X-squared. That’ll do.
They’re trying hard. They’re churning on the dance floor, doing their best to get loose, get revved. They aren’t making it, though. Too intense, approaching fun like they approach work. Nobody’s letting go, gliding.
Until Nadya, after three quick shots of Stoly, grabs Rob by the arm and leads him down into the crowd. She stands there a sec, cocks her head to catch the beat, then goes mobile, sleek as a seal. Rob’s playing catch-up, always a stuttering step or spin behind. I laugh.
“Russki slut,” Allison says. “You dance, Terry?”
“Usually just watch,” I say. “Usually on the job when I’m in clubs.”
“That’s past tense. You’re not on the job tonight.”
“But you are, aren’t you?”
“Partly,” she says. “But I could put it down, if you’d meet me halfway.”
“Yeah? Let’s just check that out.” I stand up, take her hand, lead her down to the floor. She’s the insecure kind, the type who reins herself in, tries to make up for it by flipping her hair and catching my eyes once in a while. My style’s minimalist. I know I look just as awkward, but in a few minutes I let go, allow the sound to take me where it wants to. I’m down with it, pretty much dancing by myself, Allison sort of recoiling when our bodies happen to brush. Next thing I know Nadya’s slipped in between us, her face close to mine, and Allison’s spinning with Rob. Nadya locks those arctic-blue eyes of hers on mine, we get into sync, she smiles and slides a palm across my cheek. For a while I’m tight with her, though we’re not touching. I’m feeling the connection, jamming on it. When the DJ cranks down, segues into a slowly pounding rhthym, Nadya presses close so my hands find her hips and hers lock around the back of my neck. I don’t even care if this is part of the game. I’m just feeling the girl, liking her moves and her smile and her smell.
Then Nadya’s lips graze my ear, and I hear, “One time only. That interest you, Terry?”
I lose the rhythm instantly, but manage to paste a huge smile on my face. A couple of years ago, I’d have been panting at an offer special as that from a girl special as the one looking up at me, taking her wrist and leading her somewhere—a booth in the ladies’ room, the backseat of a car, anywhere we could get right down to it.
Not now. Not with Nadya.
It all breaks over me, like a rogue wave. The quick lurch of my heart when I walked into my room and saw her for the first time, the sense of deep contentment I’ve felt ever since just being near her, hearing her voice. The pulse-quickening but always suppressed feeling that this woman is my match, my mate, that we were born for each other—a range of emotion I’ve had only once or twice before in my life.
“No,” I say. “Don’t think it would be a good idea, pretty.”
“Just once, Terry? See how we feel about replays after this mission?”
“No, Nadya.” My smile’s still fixed, but my eyes slide away from hers. I’m afraid of what she might see in them.
“Whoops!” Nadya cries, pulling back and spinning as the tempo revs again. “We’re being watched.”
I glance at our table. Rob and Allison are there, looking.
“I don’t give up so easily,” Nadya says, when her spin brings her near me again. “Soon, Terry.”
“It’s impossible. You’re so lovely, but it’s impossible.”
“I’ll find a way.” She moves in as close as seems natural, dancing. “I’m a spy, remember?”
I laugh. So does Nadya. But for different reasons.
“And you claimed you didn’t dance, Terry,” Allison says when Nadya and I return to the table. The Stoli bottle’s more than half empty. Nadya picks it up, iceblock and all, takes a long swallow. Then she starts mussing up Rob’s hair. He ducks away, grinning.
“He
y, you got me up and moving,” I say to Allison.
“Up, maybe. But somebody else got you going.”
“Don’t be bitchy, dear,” Nadya says. “Hardly my fault Rob’s a spaz, is it?”
“Now you’ve really hurt me, Nadya,” Rob says.
“Oh, don’t be a twit, mate. Come try again, I’m just getting into form,” Nadya says, tugging Rob out of his chair and leading him back down to the floor.
Allison’s looking at me, not them.
“What?”
“Nothing much,” she says, sipping her vodka. “Having fun? Feeling good?”
“Are you?”
“Sure. Absolutely.”
“Not real convincing, Allison.”
“Now don’t go all cop on me, Terry. Do you always see shadows behind shadows? Can’t things sometimes be nothing beyond what they seem?”
“I think you have it reversed here. You’re the one trained to assume absolutely nothing is what it seems.”
“You are, too.”
“Wrong. And you know it. Christ, I’m not even a very good detective. I’m only a walking weapons system. You’re the one who’ll aim and fire me, if necessary.”
“Is that how you see all this?”
“Is there any other way of seeing it?”
“Shit, Terry. This is going the wrong way. I just wanted us to relax, have a good time.”
“I am. Nadya sure is. Don’t know about that Rob, but he could be. Just isn’t real demonstrative about it. But you?”
“Yeah? Well—”
“Let’s dance.”
We do. There’s less self-conscious hair-tossing this time. She doesn’t recoil when our bodies connect. She giggles when she makes a misstep. It’s almost genuine.
We leave two empty bottles of Stoly behind when we exit Matrix around two in the morning. I make Rob try to walk straight along the curb. He wobbles, falls after four steps. So I take the keys, drive his Volvo back to the spook house, following Allison’s slurred directions. Have to pull over once so Nadya can lean out the rear door and puke.
“She always does that,” Rob says, then sort of passes out. We have to help him into the house, stuff him into bed in one of the extra rooms. Nadya weaves her way into another.
“Stay tight, Terry. We’re almost good to go,” Allison says to me as she closes the door of her room. I hear the deadbolt click.
Three evenings after club night. Pizza in the library and a viewing of Snatch. The whole crew minus Westley. Then Allison drops the hammer.
“Pack tomorrow. We’ll take two cars to the Sheraton near Baltimore-Washington International about five in the afternoon. Rooms are reserved in your work names. Wake-up call at three forty-five in the morning. We’re going to California.”
thirteen
ALLISON’S SITTING CROSS-LEGGED IN THE VERY MIDDLE of my bed, watching me pack. She doesn’t seem to care that I’m fresh from a shower, wearing only my skivvies.
“Unusual set of scars,” she says.
“The best ones are invisible.”
She laughs. “God, Terry. What movie did you steal that line from? It had to be one where the girl instantly falls for the tough guy’s unexpected sensitivity. Straight to video.”
“Tough? I’m a pussy, everybody knows that.”
“Hey! Careful with the pants,” she says. “Alternate each pair, cuffs to waist, then fold all of them over the coats. We don’t want a lot of creases and wrinkles, do we?”
“Think I’ve got the method. You did demonstrate, remember?”
“Right. So look over here for a moment and I’ll demonstrate something else.”
“Nothing I’m likely to get off on,” I say, but I see her hold up a titanium wafer about the size of a Camel pack.
“You might. You cross-trained in communications as well as weapons specialist, no?” she says. In her other hand is the little Olympus digital memo recorder.
“I’ve been pondering possible memos ever since that thing showed up in my room, weeks and weeks ago,” I say.
“You wasted your time, then. Pay attention now,” she says. “This Olympus is a burst-transmitter. Yes, it will do memos, though I doubt you’ll use it that way. But if you have an urgent message, say it plainly into the recorder. No code necessary. Then press the play button twice, quick. It’ll send your message to a satellite in, oh, maybe a nanosecond. Too fast to be unscrambled in transit. Mostly never even detected. Satellite hides it, unscrambles, codes, microbursts it to one of our ground stations, which patches it through to my cool little magic box here.”
She puts the Olympus on the bed, holds up the key holder, which now seems to have acquired a key to a car I don’t have. “The center pad, the blue one, that’s the panic button. If it looks like you cannot get the package away, just tap it twice and keep on moving if you can. Some people will show up fast at your location, wherever you wind up, ’cause it’s a finder beacon, too.”
“And where will you be, Allison?”
“Oh, out there somewhere. Out of sight, out of mind. Unless you send a message or tap the panic button. What you should be asking is battery life, where the spares are.”
She gets up, comes over to where I’m packing. Takes a look at my efforts.
“It would save some space if you stuff a couple of pairs of socks into each shoe,” she says. “Batteries, the little round watch type, are in the heels, by the way.”
“Blown before I start, then. Won’t get past airport security shoe checks.”
“There won’t be any. We don’t fly commercial.”
We do take a commercial airport limo from the spook house, out along New York Avenue to the B-W Parkway. Rob and Nadya must have other arrangements, and Allison won’t say a word as we cruise up one of those lovely, old-fashioned highways built long before the six-and eight-lane interstates. Two lanes north, and you can’t see southbound traffic because the median’s a meticulously maintained park maybe a hundred meters wide, thick with poplars, oaks, pines, and maples planted to plan at least sixty years ago. The lanes follow the terrain, sinuous as a snake. Reminds me, in the gathering dusk, of so many roads taken so many times, me in the backseat of Papa’s big Chevy station wagon, cached amid suitcases, duffels, cardboard boxes that overflow the cargo space into the rear bench. Heading toward a new post, Papa always cheerful, teasing Mama, singing along when he finds a radio station that plays Motown sounds. And me glum and silent, for reasons I can’t explain. It was never as if I was leaving good friends behind—never made any, on any base. Still, there was always a vague sense of loss, of saddening departure. Papa looked forward to destinations; I looked back to places I hadn’t even liked much when I lived there.
Not this trip, though. I pull out of memory and into a pleasant anticipation; I want to go, go faster, go now. I want the action to hurry up and happen. I want to get into it, deep as I can.
The ride, the Sheraton check-in, watching my Terry Prentice Amex card swiped through the slot, being given a card key by the smiling redhead in a blue blazer and skirt—it’s all too slow.
Allison senses it. “Soon,” she says as we ride the elevator up to our rooms. “Pick you up in five minutes, we’ll go down for dinner, okay?”
It’s okay. I love airport hotel restaurants. Done by the numbers, always the same, no surprises. No ambient visual noise, a sort of blank in which the only thing that might matter—who’s there—stands out clearly. I order prime rib, usually as dependable as the decor, and quarter the room. A couple of middle-aged suits, worn-out salesmen is my guess, dining alone. A few couples in what still passes for flight uniform even now: upscale sweatsuits with brand names prominent, upscale runners. A couple of families in varied states of disarray and uproar, depending on how many kids, and how old. Small people going to small places, or they’d have had direct connections from their incoming and wouldn’t have to overnight it here, waiting for tomorrow’s flight.
When an old couple already dressed for Florida clear away from the salad bar,
I spot Rob at the far side of the room. Alone. He’s done up like a photojournalist who’s never been in a war zone, pressed khaki safari jacket and olive cotton shirt, probably the kind with epaulets and two pockets too many. He’s concentrated on devouring a drumstick and thigh of fried chicken.
To my right, on our side of the salad bar, which is the epicenter of the room, I glimpse Nadya. Dressed rich urchin, sipping from a glass of wine, intent on conversation with a mousy-looking, fifty-something guy in a tweed sports coat and knit tie. An intelligence wonk, or maybe one of those fierce desk heroes who bay for war—so long as they’re safely ten thousand miles from the front.
“Like that pussy Wolfowitz,” I mutter.
“Stop looking at them. Look at me. Or that raw slab of heart attack fodder on your plate,” Allison says. “Feel free to keep muttering, though.”
“There ought to be a rule that civilian national security guys got to go in with the first wave on at least one major action before they’re allowed to bend the president’s ear,” I say. “So they can get sprayed with blood and brains when some kid grunt takes a round through the head. So they can see and hear and smell the troop whose abdominal wall has been sliced open by shrapnel, yards of intestines spilling out on the ground.”
“Jesus, Terry! I’m trying to eat here.”
“They always try to grab ’em, stuff ’em back in.”
“What?”
“The intestines. Dust and dirt all over them, but the guy tries to shove them back inside. Never works. Too slippery. But they try. Must be some kind of instinct.”
“Do not feel free to keep muttering,” Allison says, pushing her plate two inches away from her. “Just shut up, okay? I understand your dislike of the desk warriors, but must you share combat details over dinner?”
“I apologize. Sorry.”
“It’s all right. Some other time, if you care to tell me some things, I’ll be a good listener. I just have this small problem when I’m eating.”
“I think I’ve pretty much killed my own appetite.”