Cooch

by Robert Cook

  Alex swung out of the booth and attempted to look haughty.

  “I’m just selective, Sam. You know, you just have to wait for them to come to you.”

  Washington,

  DC

  THE 737-400 banked steeply as it followed the curves of the Potomac River, south toward the District of Columbia. Cuchulain looked over the wing to see workers at their desks in an office in a Rosslyn high-rise, just up the river from Washington’s Reagan airport. He could hear the whine of the flaps coming down to their landing position, followed by the bump of wheels striking the runway. The flight attendants immediately began pleading with passengers to stay in their seats “until the captain turns the seatbelt light off,” to little avail. The passenger complement of New Yorkers, bureaucrats, and politicians didn’t lend itself to being controlled, unless a real or virtual pistol was being held to its collective head.

  The plane lurched to a stop at the gate, and the “fasten seatbelt” light was switched off, accompanied by its usual, annoying clang. The Delta Airlines shuttle from New York to Washington had been packed, as usual. As Alex stood and pulled his bag from the overhead bin, a pleasant-looking woman in her early fifties rammed an elbow into his ribs and stepped on his toe as she jostled to leave the plane first, then race for a cab. She turned and glared at him as someone behind gave a push, bumping him against her back.

  The door opened and the crowd surged forward. As he walked through the Jetway and entered the terminal building, he looked for someone who looked as if he might work for Mac. To his surprise he saw Mac himself leaning against a concrete pole just outside security, a toothpick hanging from the corner of his grinning mouth, his short gray hair long enough finally to show a part on the left side, above a scar.

  Alex felt a rare rush of affection and emotion. Since his father had died, Mac was as close to being both a father and best friend to him as he could imagine. They shook hands, grinning at each other, then turned without speaking and walked out of the terminal to the short-term parking lot. Using a remote, Mac popped open the trunk of a top-down, bright-blue Shelby Mustang convertible, then motioned for Alex to throw his bag and briefcase into it. Both men took off their suit jackets and put them, folded at the shoulders, over the bag.

  “Whoa, Mac! What kind of government wheels are these?” Alex whistled. “You’ve gone uptown on me since I saw you last!”

  Mac grinned and slammed the trunk. “Nothing but the best for Uncle Sam’s prodigal son. I always wanted one of these, so I bought one last week. With you managing my savings, there’s enough extra that I could buy a Rolls Royce Corniche without feeling any pain. Besides, this frivolous filly fits my semi-retired image. You’re my first passenger, but I did put the top down last Sunday and drove down to Annapolis to watch the sailboats. I think I’ve entered my second adolescence— or maybe just my first, since I was a marine at eighteen. Let’s just drive around for a while…I enjoy this thing, and nobody can listen to us here.”

  Mac pulled the car into gear, swung around the parked cars, and pulled out of the airport.

  “You’re sure about that?” Alex said. “I have increasingly less interest in sharing our extra-legal homicidal adventures with our politically sensitive law-enforcement brethren. Particularly with feds who have no sense of humor and a hook or crook promotion agenda.”

  “Watch this!” Mac laughed, and flicked two green buttons beneath the radio. The buttons turned to red and blinked for thirty seconds or so, then one returned to solid green and the second began a slow blink.

  “Your protégé Lev Epstein outdid himself on this one. The first run looks for bugs along every spectrum, and if it finds none, the second creates white noise to foil anything the first missed.”

  Alex looked chagrined. “I should have thought of that! Ah well, I knew the first time I talked to Lev that he was a lot smarter than me.”

  Mac smiled. “He’s the best! He has a sense of larceny in his heart that warms me. The Mossad trains them well.”

  Alex loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar button, enjoying the crisp air of Washington’s fall. As they drove up the George Washington Parkway, a slight breeze blew leaves across the road. The glory of fall foliage was a few weeks past, and most of the leaves were now a flat, dull orange.

  They drove for a while, silent, each thinking about different parts of the past.

  “How’s your love life, stud? You’re getting to the age that you should be settling down and having a few kids,” Mac said quietly.

  “Yeah, stud. More like steer. I’m lucky to get laid about once a month, maybe less, but it has been better lately. I had a nice date on Friday and another on Saturday. The Saturday date was better, but they were both good. Before these two, it was mostly older women I’ve known for a while who know exactly what they want, and for the most part know exactly what I want. Most of them even want to buy me dinner first and show me pictures of their kids. Love ain’t a part of that picture. No kidding, Mac. I think they were starting to pass me around. Jeez!”

  “What, you can’t find younger women who like you?”

  “In New York? I can find a new bimbo every night, but what do I need with bimbos? I can’t find anybody who has anything to say after the morning orange juice. I’d sure like to find someone who’s fun after the sex. At least with the older women, the sex is better than good and nobody is bullshitting anyone about what is going on. So we don’t talk much. That’s okay. I lie less if I don’t talk. You can put that on my tombstone.”

  They drove awhile longer, silent, exiting the parkway down Route 123, past the entrance to the CIA, and then veering right through Langley and then McLean toward Great Falls.

  Mac turned to look at him and seemed mildly concerned. “I think that you’ve taken my advice of the past a little too seriously, my friend. I once told you that to open yourself up was to give the other guy advantage, that you should be quiet and let others open up to you to your own advantage. That’s true for our profession, but probably less true for our social lives right now. Not that I mean you should talk, or even hint, about our extracurricular activities, but I suspect we have to open up a little personally if anything worthwhile is going to happen.”

  Alex shrugged, then turned to look at Mac. “How about you, Mac? You finally found someone you like?”

  Mac sighed. “Maybe. There’s a professor at George Washington—an air force widow. I’ve just decided that no one worth having will let you see her, if you don’t let her see you in the spiritual sense. I’m having an easier time with women I find attractive when I open up a little personally. But of course, I can’t open up too much. My nint national security job lets me justify a little paranoia—makes me mysterious too. Some women like that.”

  “I’m willing to open up a bit when I get some good vibes, but that hasn’t happened much lately,” Alex said. “My personal philosophy of life as manifested by our little homicidal efforts would turn most reasonably intelligent women off immediately. That woman in the biker bar that I told you about seemed to think I was a bit disturbing, and Dodd didn’t help much with his little speech there.”

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t take Jerome. He’d have splashed Dodd when he reached for the gun, and you two would have had to take the place apart. Then she really wouldn’t have liked you!” Mac shook his head a little and chuckled. “The serial-killer business just ain’t what it used to be!”

  “Did you look into Dodd?”

  “Yeah, he got tossed from the navy. He was dealing some coke. Nothing for us there. Brooks says those bikers are scarcer around New York than a watch shopper at Tiffany’s. Billy’s still in intensive care; you seemed to have interfered with his future love life.”

  “Pity. Billy getting any visitors?”

  “Nary a single one,” Mac said with a little grin.

  “Go figure. Even sick scumbags don’t like working for sick scumbags.”

  “Uh-huh.” Mac was quiet for a second, then said, “First, there
is no loyalty among scumbags; witness Billy’s visitor list. Unless, of course, there is religion involved and manipulated. Second, if you take out the scumbags’ leadership, they dissolve into individual dumb scumbags.”

  “So we let the local law pick them up when they screw up. Works for me.”

  “Dodd?”

  “Don’t bother looking for Dodd, unless he acts up and we see him do it. Dodd gets it; he knew who I was and who I knew. He came over to me quickly after the half-dollar gig.”

  “Well, you are a charming, convincing guy,” Mac said with a little chuckle.

  Alex grinned. “True.”

  MacMillan drove across a bridge over the beltway—the highway that defines the political geography of Washington, and looked down at the bumper-to-bumper traffic. “At least we’re not down there, and our lives ain’t boring.”

  Alex looked down and laughed. “I think we live some version of the old Chinese curse. We certainly live in interesting times! Of course, most of it is by our choice.”

  “Do you think it beats a couple of brats and a fat wife who bitches every day about money?”

  “Probably.” Alex laughed. “But you and I both know there are a lot better family-building choices out there than that.”

  “Oh ho!” Mac exclaimed, turning his head with eyebrows raised to look at Alex. “Do I hear the faint sound of the romance bugler sounding the charge?”

  Alex laughed. “I liked the woman from the biker bar a lot, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she runs the next time I see her. The good news is that Brooks doesn’t think she will, and he has known her pretty well for a long time. I’ve talked with her by phone a few times, and she seems to be dealing with the whole scene well, and even with a bit of humor.”

  “Caitlin O’Connor.” Mac nodded. “There’s nothing in Uncle’s files that would make me think she’s a danger to us, and she has a slew of security clearances. God, what a looker! And how does it feel to be around someone smarter than you? Is it obvious when you’re with her?”

  Alex was still for nearly a minute, looking out the window at the passing scenery of Great Falls National Park.

  “It’s most obvious when anything quantitative is being discussed,” he said. “She does complex algebra in milliseconds, and draws conclusions from several disparate problems that it would take me hours to synthesize and apply to the overall problem. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to compete with her in an advanced calculus class. But so far, she hasn’t tried to bully me with it, so it doesn’t bother me. If we had similar educations and experiences, it might. She also has a giant ego, and constructs conversation games to exercise and protect it; I guess that’s okay with me. She’s not the nicest woman I ever met, but I find the whole package immensely attractive. She’s invited me out to Northern California for a benefit next week.”

  “So, you’ll get a chance to see her again in a couple of days. That worked out well.”

  Alex smiled. “What’s up? Does our new el presidente want us to shut up the Christian Right in the Republican Party?”

  “We ain’t got enough ordnance to do that, Alex,” Mac laughed. “But there is a problem out there he wants us to handle. I told him I’d look into it.”

  “Did the cowboy convince the president that we were useful, or did someone else?”

  Mac chuckled and said, “A little of both, I think. The president hinted that he got a call from a predecessor, where we were discussed in some detail. Senator Elliot dropped by as well, I think, just to chat.”

  Mac pulled off into a dirt parking area and put the Mustang into park, then turned a little in his seat, looking at Alex. “I don’t give a rat’s ass for the old president as a person, Alex, or the new one. Politicians mostly care about two things—money and votes. They’d give us up in a heartbeat, if it benefitted them. That said, I do care a lot about having the only society that works in this world and trying to protect it. If things weren’t bad here, we wouldn’t be given the resources that we have. We wouldn’t have access to the databases, we couldn’t get the staff or equipment we need, and we consequently couldn’t make a difference.

  “At least both of these presidents recognize the problem and have given us the power under presidential protection—fragile and unreliable protection though it may be—to go out and touch bad guys that the Constitution won’t allow us to touch legally,” he continued. “The new president appears to have some balls, and he’s quick. I like him so far. Are you still in or do you want out?”

  Alex sighed. “I’m in as long as you keep us away from any gigs but the ones that only we can do. I just hate to see the whole system fail because of a relatively few scumbags the law can’t touch. I’m willing to touch them, and take the risk that goes with the effort. But you already knew that, Mac. We’re still the patriotic assassins.”

  “Yeah, I did, and we are, so let’s get to it. We have a group of Colombian druggies who have corrupted some key players in Silicon Valley.”

  Alex interrupted. “I hope I’m not risking a murder charge, among others, to protect a bunch of computer nerds from design piracy!”

  Mac erupted. “Will you shut the fuck up until I’m done talking? I’m in this thing as deep as you, maybe deeper, and I ain’t going to do any wet work, super-secret presidentially sponsored spook outfit or not, that doesn’t involve serious national security issues that I understand. As usual, you can hear the story and decide whether you want to play or not.”

  Cuchulain looked chagrined. “Sorry, Mac. Tell me the story.”

  “Yeah, and maybe I shouldn’t have jumped down your throat. I’m just a little uptight about this one. It’s within the US.”

  Mac glanced down at the still blinking green light on the dash. “‘The computer jocks on contract to DARPA in Silicon Valley have figured out how to use radar to beat the stealthiness of the F-117, and probably even its successors. They’re using a centrally controlled network of five geographically dispersed radar dishes. Basically, the five different radar images come in to the central computer server over fiber-optic lines. They’ve been digitized by the computer workstation integrated with each of the dishes.

  “The digital images are compared, to look for anomalies that can’t be accounted for by the difference in geographical perspective,” he went on. “The central server then goes through comparisons of speed, altitude, and direction to see if those three parameters are within the flight capabilities of a tactical aircraft or cruise missile, or whatever it’s set up for. If it gets a match, it turns out that pinpoint high-powered radar searches are much more efficient at spotting stealth hardware than broad-based sky-sweeping searches, and it goes into pinpoint mode. The main computer takes the radar data, chooses a spot in the sky, and directs the ground-to-air weapons systems to fire at it. In a test at Nellis a couple of months ago, they shot down six of nine stealth drones beyond a half-mile envelope around their targets, three of them with conventional ack-ack that was just being fired at a directed point in the sky.”

  Alex whistled softly through his teeth and was silent for a few seconds, thinking about Mac’s revelation.

  “I guess I’m not too surprised. The concept makes sense. Computer power for the buck grows at an unbelievable rate over time, so it’s probably already cost-effective if we need to deploy it, and will get a lot better. Better yet, the components don’t have to be miniaturized, because weight and size isn’t much of a problem in a ground-based tactical system; that would keep the cost down. For less than a million dollars, you can get more scientific computer power in a box the size of a file cabinet today than all of General Motors had twenty years ago. In an application like this, it would be easy to build specialized chips to do the math calculations and probably the comparisons. Not having to translate the software to machine instructions would speed things up dramatically.”

  Alex looked out the window for a second, no longer seeing the landscape. “I’ll tell you, though, Mac,” he said, “from what I’ve read, the bad guys are a
t least ten years from having the manufacturing technology alone to build stealth aircraft, let alone the computer and software to make it effective.”

  Mac chuckled grimly and said, “You are a quick study, son. Sometimes I wonder what that mind of yours would have produced if things had worked out differently, and you had ended up at Caltech at seventeen instead of in the marine corps. But now, put your thinking cap on backward and tell me another way to look at the problem, given that the bad guys aren’t going to able to build stealth hardware for quite a while. Think about why the powers that be have approached me about using our specialized, wholly unconstitutional set of services. What could possibly make them quit shitting their pants about our mere existence and their knowledge of it, and want to put us back to work, breaking the law for them?”

  Mac pulled the Mustang back onto the road and turned right on a narrow country trail called Great Falls Road, falling in behind the heavy commuting traffic of Mercedes, Porches, and BMW sedans on their way to estates nestled behind the trees. Horses grazed behind freshly whitewashed fences, and from time to time, there was a glimpse of a private riding ring and hard-hatted, high-booted riders jumping low obstacles. Alex resumed his sightless gaze out the side window, missing the high-priced pastoral scenery.

  Finally he looked over at Mac, eyes wide, and said, “You gotta be joking, Mac! Someone grabbed it? No, that’s not it, is it? It’s that someone is trying to grab it! Man, we could kiss our ability to blast Iraq at will, or anyone else, good-bye if they get hold of this thing! Any ability we have to act as the world’s policemen without serious US casualties will vanish.”

  “Bingo!” Mac snorted. “Give the man an exploding cigar of his own design.”

  Alex shifted in his seat to look directly at Mac. “Man, that would be a real hit with DOD and the Congress! What do they have invested in all of that stealth technology? Fifteen billion, maybe twenty billion bucks in R&D alone? I gotta assume that the Arabs, the Chinese, and our faithful allies, the Japanese, would love to get access to it. Anyone else? What’s the story?”