by James Phelan
“Well, I gotta say, your friend Dom isn’t pleased about your current arrangement with him; he told me that much.”
Andretti shrugged dismissively. “Okay, Croatia it is. But, there’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
Andretti gestured to his cell phone, which showed a photograph of the knife guy whose neck Walker had snapped. “Did you have to kill him?”
“He pulled a knife, so it was him or me.”
Andretti looked at the image like he was weighing up that thought. “I knew his family,” he said, then sighed. “They will ask for a price. I will pay it. It is how things work around here. And you know what that means for you?”
“I won’t be getting my Christmas bonus this year?”
“It means you will owe me. Again.”
“And let me guess,” Walker said, “you don’t take cash?”
Andretti smiled. “I like you, Jed Walker, you are a good man; a man who understands the way things must be.”
“See you around, Andretti.”
“Ciao. Until next time.”
Walker was sure that there would be no next time.
•
“I’ve been conducting a long-term investigation into a private intel outfit,” McCorkell said, stirring his double espresso at the cafe across the road from the embassy.
“Oh?” Somerville said, looking around the outdoor cafe and then back to McCorkell. “For the UN?”
“Yep.”
“Ah, the burgeoning intelligence industrial complex. Which outfit? Academi?”
“Nope.”
“Total Intel?”
“Closer.”
“Booz Allen?”
“Hell, no.”
“Stratfor?”
“No.”
“I give up.”
“INTFOR.”
“Ah, the new kid on the block.”
McCorkell nodded, watching on as Somerville sipped her macchiato. He said, “What do you know about Dan Bellamy?”
•
Jack Heller said, “But there’s nothing to deliver.”
“I know,” replied Dan Bellamy.
“The courier’s information was lost when they blew up the van.”
“Yes.”
“And his contact was killed in Athens, after the courier was spooked that he was being watched.”
“Yes.”
“So, it’s lost.”
“Lost.”
“And better lost than in the wrong hands, so I don’t see a problem.”
Bellamy said, “That’s right. But this is no longer about a delivery, or having the information out there.”
“What is it about?”
“Someone getting too close,” Bellamy said.
“Jed Walker?”
“Yes. And those surveilling in Greece—the FBI, we think.”
“Well, I had a guy here today, asking after Walker.”
“Who?”
“Some FBI nobody. I’ll handle it. Leave it to me.”
“Like you had Walker handled in Yemen?”
Heller was silent. He thought about responding, thought about the fact that it was his name that would add credence to Bellamy’s aims for INTFOR to take over the bulk of the hands-on intel role currently being played by the CIA. But he let it be. That was a fight for another day. Being a business partner was never going to be all his way. At least, not at first.
“There’s still a link left in the chain,” Bellamy said. “Lassiter’s next stop: the money man in Hong Kong. Well, money woman. She’s still expecting a courier to show up.”
Heller sighed impatiently. “We never should have put the money down like that.”
“But we did. We had to buy back our client list.”
“And so, what? She doesn’t get the info delivered tomorrow. The chain’s broken, link left or not. We’ve got bigger issues right now.”
Bellamy said, “My worry is, when we’re this close, if this woman doesn’t get what she needs? She starts looking. Talking. Digging. And who knows what she might find.”
“I’d be more worried about Walker finding her.”
Bellamy was silent. Heller could almost hear the gears turning in his mind, playing catch-up.
Heller said, “Walker will go there. I know the guy.”
“We need to break this final link,” Bellamy said, “and get Walker in the process.”
“This one’s a public figure, in Hong Kong.”
“I’m sure your office is adept at that sort of thing. If you can kill political leaders, you can kill a high-profile business woman, in Hong Kong or wherever.” Bellamy paused, then said, “And, Jack, remember, we’re just two days from the rest of our lives. We’re on the home stretch.”
“Fine. I’ll sort it out. You do what you gotta do.”
“And Walker?”
“Leave him to me.”
37
Dubrovnik
“You lousy old drunk.”
The guy turned and made eye contact with Walker. After a few seconds of silence he broke into a smile, stood and hugged him like a son.
“Jesus, have you spent your whole pension on food over here?” Walker said. “You’ve put on, what, four hundred pounds? You look like Templeton the rat, after the fair and Christmas lunch.”
“And I’ve enjoyed every bite. Croatia’s my smorgasbord.”
Walker laughed. He’d known Bloom in his prime, when Walker was just a boy and Bloom had worked for his father. He’d always been all-American football solid, but his appearance now was one of a hopeless gourmand.
“You look tired,” Marty Bloom said. He pulled out a chair for his old friend and protégé. “Long flight?”
“Long life,” Walker replied. They sat in a little bar in Dubrovnik, surrounded by tenth-generation local drinkers.
“When I saw your message on the Intellipedia boards, I freaked,” Bloom said. “Omega Down? You know that’s only a life-and-death message for help.”
“I think you’ll find reports of my death were grossly overstated.”
“Well,” Bloom said, leaning back, resting his hands on his huge girth.
“Yet here you are.”
“Here I am: 4239–185. Latitude and longitude for this fair city, the location of my savior.”
Bloom’s demeanor changed, from smiling to serious. “What’s up?”
“I need help getting into Hong Kong.”
“Ah, it figures. You’re still on your one-man mission. What do you need?”
“A Gulfstream G5 would do, landing at a private airport with no customs.”
Bloom smiled. “Nice. And in the real world?”
“I need papers. Cash. Travel docs. Made out in the name of a CIA courier.” Walker handed over a piece of paper with “Felix Lassiter” written on it. “I can’t get by on my own handiwork. And I’ll need another set to get into the US—bulletproof ID. I can’t be held up and made.”
“The full works, hey?”
Walker nodded.
Bloom nodded. “When do you need all this?”
“Yesterday.”
Bloom hesitated a moment, then said, “Damn, okay, give me a minute.”
He finished his beer and left the bar.
Walker watched through the tiny windows as Bloom walked up the street, perhaps to find privacy to place a call, or to speak quietly to someone in the flesh. Probably the latter, for this town, and most of new Europe, was the kind of place where you could get things. Dubrovnik was like any big international city in that regard, only on an intimate scale. It had centuries of smugglers and entrepreneurial types passing through. No wonder Bloom loves the place.
The barman brought water, and Walker ordered a beer. His car and boat rides to get here had been uneventful, an otherwise nice way to lose an afternoon. A good way to decompress from the last day of mayhem. He resolved he would never show his face in Naples again. Within the week he would be back in the States; all going well, that’s where he would stay. He
had been a ghost for too long.
Walker was going home.
Forty-three hours to deadline.
•
Bloom returned by the time Walker finished his first beer.
“I’ve got a guy working on your docs through the night,” Bloom said. “It’ll be ready by morning. They’ll tape the parcel under this table by opening time. The cash you can take from me; add it to the tab.”
“Thanks, Marty. You know I’m good for it.”
“Hey, I’m kidding, I hardly earned it. And someone else is doing the all-night work.”
“False modesty to the last.”
Bloom looked sideways at Walker. “Don’t think I don’t know how badly you want to watch while these docs are made, to try and speed things along, to pick up the papers the second they’re ready and then run.”
“Pretty much.”
“But this is as quick as things will move, if you want them as good as they need to be,” Bloom said. “In the meantime, you can stay on my couch. We’ll book you on a flight to Hong Kong, and I’ll get you to the airport first thing.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Walker leaned back. “So . . . seems we have a few hours to catch up.”
“Seems we do.”
Bloom ordered a bottle of Scotch. “Johnnie Black do?”
“Good enough for Churchill and Hitchens.”
“I got a taste for it dining with the Ba’ath party and Hamas in the eighties.”
“Now you’re just showing off, and showing your age.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, how was it on that trip with Rumsfeld and kickin’ it with Saddam in the palaces? What was that, must have been around eighty-three, right? When Rummy was Reagan’s man?”
“Okay, you’re right, I’m an old man.”
“Old as dirt.”
“Old as Dubrovnik maybe.”
“To Dubrovnik.” They clinked glasses and drank.
Walker said, “What is it about you and this place?”
“What’s not to love?”
Bloom gestured around, and Walker couldn’t argue. The beautiful stone buildings in the medieval walled town were so spectacular that UNESCO had long ago declared its heritage status.
“Too bad you’re too old to chase the local women.”
“There’s a pill for that, so the old codgers in my fishing club tell me.”
“Seriously, though, why did you retire here? Why not the Keys? You always used to talk about the Keys. Catching big fish. Hell, looking at you now, you could enter their Hemingway lookalike comps.”
Bloom chuckled. “I fell in love with this city when I passed through while working on Yugoslavia falling apart. Then when the JNA were shelling the crap out of this town, I fell in love with it some more, and I came back before the Bosnian War properly set in.”
“I forgot that this was once an Agency hot spot, that you operated so much around here.”
“Long time ago.”
“Before my time.”
“Hell, you were probably still at high school.”
“Probably preschool.”
Bloom smiled, his gaze far off into his glass as he spoke. “There’s something I’ll never forget about those early trips. During the evacuation one of the UN people I helped get onto a boat said to me, as a way of trying to explain the war, ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’”
“You quoting Voltaire at me?”
“Yeah, though I didn’t know Voltaire from my elbow back then, college boy,” Bloom said, again looking into his glass as though the memories were somewhere in the bottom of it. “It struck a chord with me, is all. It became something I kept telling those who would listen about the Taliban. But there’s too many deaf ears these days.”
“Yeah, well, I listened to you,” Walker said. “And I read a lot on those cold nights in Afghanistan; took a stack of my old man’s books with me on my first tour. Voltaire also said, ‘The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.’”
“Which we know is now bullshit, because today it’s about ninety-nine percent to one.”
They laughed and clinked glasses.
“And I got one more,” Walker said. “‘No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.’”
“Yeah,” Bloom said. “And how about, ‘Objectivity is the search for truth even if it leads you to unwelcome conclusions.’”
“Who said that?”
“Your father.”
“Ah.” Walker was silent as he gazed down into his Scotch.
“Good old David.”
“Yeah.”
“Look, Jed, take it from an old—older—man, you’re reading too much into this Yemen op,” Bloom said. “Do you know how many agents I know who were burned for no good reason other than that their sacrifice was deemed the lesser of two outcomes?”
“A few.”
“Few? A shit load. Count the stars on the wall at Langley. Go speak to other old hacks like me—I mean, the Cold War? We were cycling through guys like the army goes through boots. Agents especially. Lose a few, gain a few, keep your eye on the prize.”
“Winning the war.”
“Fuck that. So long as we beat the other guy, that’s what it has always been about. And we only beat them in the end because our bureaucracy was smaller.”
“So that’s where I always got it wrong . . .” Walker said with a smile and topped up their whisky.
“You ran into that damned house in Yemen against orders,” Bloom said. “If not for that, hell, you’d still be shoveling their shit for them.”
“You know that’s crap. Sure, you’re right about going into the house, but . . .”
“But?”
“They cooked us. KIA. Do I look KIA to you?”
“I’ve met a lot of dead men.”
“I’m serious about this,” said Walker. “It’s bigger than someone on high at Langley pulling the plug on an op and cooking a couple of field guys for the sake of bagging a big fish.”
“And what?” Bloom countered. “You’ve obsessed for the past year, all so you can clear your name?”
“No. It’s not that. I want justice. There’s a lot I have to set right.”
“Then you’re in the wrong industry, bub. Just bug out while you can—this is your chance, don’t you see? You’re a dead man, about to get a couple of new passports and a nice little pay day courtesy of your Uncle Marty. Take it and disappear. Start again. You won’t get another chance. If you keep kicking this hornets’ nest, you’re gone. For real this time.”
“So, you agree there’s something there.”
“We all know there’s something there, but what? And what are you going to do about it? Hang them all up by their bootstraps and shake ’em until they confess? Water-board the executive arm of the Agency until they all come clean and sing a tune you want to hear? Then what? It’ll never see a court, whatever it is, because it’s under ten layers of national security BS and then some.”
“I’m getting close, Marty. I feel it. I made the courier, Lassiter, and his next contact. They were there too; they killed them both.”
“Who is they?”
“The same crowd who wanted Yemen to disappear.”
“Why?”
“Because of Zodiac.”
Bloom shook his head.
“It’s a real thing, Marty.”
“It’s a goddamned ghost, more transparent than you. Zodiac’s probably some bullshit op, delivering food stamps to some shitty place in exchange for God-only-knows-what.”
“No. It’s not. I tracked it and confirmed it in Yemen. It’s as real as me sitting here. And it’s still in play.”
“Says who?”
“Says the actions of many. Because someone is still chasing me all over the world. Because I’ve seen people getting killed and bombs going off—that was yesterday, Marty. Because I was grabbed and taken to an Agency safe ho
use, and someone in the CIA knew it and sent in another team, killing three of our own paramilitary guys.”
Bloom sat back and looked at Walker, processing this latest bit of information. “I didn’t know . . .”
“Right?” prompted Walker. “See what I’m getting at?”
Bloom drank. “Shit,” he said, stunned. “What are you going to do?”
“What I’ve been doing: chasing leads.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
Walker swirled the Scotch around in the glass.
“Jed . . . talk to me.”
Walker looked up to him. “Yemen,” he said. “My CIA guy, Bob Hanley.”
“Listed as KIA with you.”
Walker nodded.
Bloom said, “What—you’re gonna tell me that he’s alive too?”
“No. Bob’s as dead as they get. But it’s what he did before he died . . . he drew down on me.” Walker leaned forward, said quietly, “It was an assassination. A clean-up. He was meant to walk out of there alone. The whole thing was meant to be a hit and clean-up and only he would have been witness to how things really went down.”
38
Pip Durant took two pain-killers and phoned Bellamy from his hire car. The call came in over the car’s radio speakers, the voice loud and clear.
Bellamy said, “You okay?”
Durant turned the volume down, said, “Yes.”
“You okay?”
“Yes.”
“You sound like shit. All nasally.”
“Busted nose, cheekbone and eye socket will do that.”
“You should be resting, recuperating. I want you to be there with me in New York.”
“I’ve got a little work to do first,” Durant replied. “And I’ll be there. I’m always there when you need me. Heller too. I’m that guy, aren’t I? Dependable.”
“Yeah, you’re that guy.” Bellamy paused, then said, “I heard about the trouble at the safe house.”
“Yeah . . .” Durant replied, wary.
“You shouldn’t have been there,” Bellamy said.
“I heard of the Walker sighting and hauled ass—I wasn’t gonna miss out on that.”