by Gordon Kent
Surfer laughed. “You’re a man of many talents, Al.”
“Fuck off.” The traditional Navy reply to a compliment. He went back to talking with the tower. He’d filed their flight plan and he had a comm card. He thought about the distant days when this had all seemed so hard. Now he did it while thinking of other things.
“Let’s go fly,” Surfer said happily.
Alan envied him at that moment, the simple happiness of the craftsman, but he smiled. “Okay, bro,” he answered, as if they were both still twenty-three.
Tacoma.
Jerry Piat found himself standing outside the police building, shaking with anger, not least at himself for having screwed up Jakarta so that he was still working with a yo-yo like Marv Helmer. He almost backed into another car in the parking lot and then pulled out too fast into traffic and heard a shriek of brakes and a horn. He blew his own horn in answer and held up a finger. He got lost twice trying to get back to 5 and cursed, feeling his armpits wet with the stinking sweat of nerves and even fear, and he hated Helmer and wondered why he feared him. It was his power—the power to make or break him. He did admit that about Helmer: He had real power, and he could use his connections to get Piat reinstated, or he could get him blackballed from decent security jobs all over the country, much less at the Agency.
He drove at eighty up Route 5 and then forced himself to slow. He thought of Helmer’s local power, specifically his ability to command cops. It wouldn’t do to get into trouble with the state cops.
He drove north, bringing himself down, forcing himself to think about what he was going to do about Bobby Li, and even before he got to Tacoma he knew that he was being followed. Helmer had laid on a three-car surveillance, for exactly what reason Piat couldn’t yet see. Probably to demonstrate his power, because he had to know that Piat would catch on to being followed.
The surveillance actually helped him, giving him something else to focus on. He drove toward Seattle, making sure they could see him and stay with him, turning it into a surveillance exercise where you wanted them to see every move you made. Until you were ready to do something else.
Whidbey Island.
Surfer had taken them off the runway and up to twenty thousand feet without much conversation. Alan was not familiar with the comm card, the local air-traffic control, or the airspace around Bremerton and Seattle, so the plane and the radios had occupied them both. Well out to sea and above any possible interference with civilian aviation, Surfer unclipped his harness and excused himself. “I ought to know better. I need a piss.”
“I thought this was a forty-minute flight,” said Alan, glad that it was not. Bad hand and all, he was enjoying the return to simple routines. Punch in the frequency. Get a check. Call the tower. Call ATC Seattle. It hadn’t challenged him since he was a nugget, but it was reassuring to do it. To remind himself that he had been away from his own detachment for only a month and that he might yet return.
“You got it?” Surfer looked meaningfully at Alan, his hands on the controls. “Just like flying your Cessna, huh?”
Alan laid his hands on his set, the left one odd and throbbing. He thought about all his failures on the simulator.
“I’ve got it,” he said tentatively.
If Surfer noticed his hesitation, he didn’t pause as he wriggled out of the cockpit into the rear of the aircraft. Alan steadied the plane. He had unconsciously started a shallow turn to starboard. He thought about being away from his detachment and he faced the reality. He was afraid. He was afraid every day that a set of orders would arrive, removing him from command of the detachment and sending him elsewhere. He had too little time left. It would make perfect sense. Rose was stateside, attached to NASA, and the detailer might even think he was doing Craik a favor—both Craiks, really. He was afraid of the plane he was in, too. He had a fear of failure that he’d never felt, and his hands were twitchy on the yoke.
He needed to be back in the saddle.
His hand throbbed. Nonexistent fingers hurt.
“Want to look at Seattle?” Surfer said, slipping back into his seat and plugging his comm cord back in.
“You got it?” said Alan.
“I have her. Hey! You didn’t lose any altitude!”
“Hey! I have a pilot’s license.” Alan tried not to sound relieved. “I know what I’m doing.” He grinned. “Sort of.”
“I know that. Do you know that? Okay, enough adolescent psychiatry, man. Want to see Seattle?”
“Roger.”
“Get us an altitude for crossing the bay.”
“Roger that.”
Alan talked to a controller and got them an altitude. Surfer started to imitate a tour guide.
“Beautiful Bremerton, Washington, home of USS Carl Vinson and her battle group. On our left, the submarine base.”
“Wow.” Bremerton was beautiful from the air, if your taste in beauty ran to giant warships.
“Should have seen it a couple of weeks ago, when Carl Vinson and her battle group steamed out for an exercise.”
Alan was looking down at the long rows of boomers and attack boats. His first thought was about power, a complex thought about how dangerous warships looked, and how well they suited their role in diplomacy by showing a capability without direct effort. Sending a warship off someone’s coast was like showing a gun hidden under your jacket.
“Hey, buddy, if I wanted to fly solo, I’d have left you at home.”
Alan ran his hands lovingly over the computer screen.
“This is great,” he said, and meant every word.
“What’re you thinking?” Surfer said. “You sure ain’t talking.”
“Oh—what they’d look like on radar—stuff like that.”
Surfer turned and smiled at him.
“Ever think you’d be better off as an NFO than a spy?”
“Yeah. And then I wonder about spending the rest of my adult life with people like you.”
Surfer laughed. “Don’t let anybody tell you you’ve changed, Spy.”
Seattle.
Piat checked out of his hotel, drove to Sea-Tac, turned in the car, and headed for the desk of the airline on which he’d flown in. There, because he’d spotted a pair of Helmer’s people—dark suits, sidewall haircuts, sunglasses—he pretended to check in and in fact got the woman there to take back his ticket (“Maybe we can get you a refund—maybe—“) and make him a reservation on the next plane out to Las Vegas.
Then he headed toward the security gate, making sure that his tailers saw him go. Very diligent young men, and very bad at surveillance. However, they served his purpose: They’d see him go through the gate of the Washington flight, and so Helmer would now believe that Piat had been so dismayed by the meeting that he’d cut short his time in Seattle and gone home with his tail between his legs to spy on Dukas and Craik.
Which was true, to a point.
The point came when Piat walked back up the ramp and headed for the Las Vegas flight. His tails were gone.
Whidbey Island Bachelor Officers’ Quarters.
Rose had spent the day admiring her F-18 and being admired by a lot of male aviators who said they wanted to see the plane. She’d walked around it, felt it, kicked the tires, done a preflight, and spent three hours with a pilot who checked her out on it. She was very full of her day at dinner.
“Enough about me,” she said finally. “Let’s talk about you. What d’you think about me?” She laughed. “Joke—it’s a joke.”
“I was going to ask when it was my turn.”
“Well, I had a great day!” She made a face. “But I miss the kids. And the dog. Is it wrong to miss your dog?”
“Not if you miss your kids more. My day was great. Just like yours.” He told her about Surfer and about being allowed to fly again. He told her about flying over Bremerton, the long line of ships there. Sea power. “I’m reading this book about a guy who spied on the German fleet at Bremerhaven in World War I. It made me wonder when I saw all those ship
s at Bremerton: How does an enemy keep track of sailings and returns these days?”
“They look at the wives’ site on the Internet?”
Alan laughed. “Seriously. There are lots of classified sailings. Think of subs! My God, they dive as soon as they clear the shipping lane.”
“Satellites?” she said. She wasn’t really interested. She put her hand over his and said, “Want to hear about this really good-looking captain who flirted outrageously with me?”
Mogadishu, Somalia.
Ahmed Fazrahi hated Americans. In fact, what he hated were white Westerners, but he thought of them all as Americans. He was, himself, dark-skinned and handsome in the slender, bony, Somali way, with a long, narrow head and thin lips. His grandfather had hated the British and the Italians, by which he also meant white Westerners, because in his generation it had been the British and Italians who had said they “owned” Somalia, as if it had been something they had bought at a shop, and who had brought their noise and their religion and their power. Now, Ahmed hated Americans, because now they were the ones who filled the air with their godlessness, with images of sex and luxury, with impious songs with the beat of sex and words suitable for a whorehouse, with their materialism, their advertising, their world of things, in which there was no place for God, the only God, the one true God. So he hated Americans.
“I need five hundred kilos of C-4,” he said to the man who was supposed to be Palestinian.
The Palestinian grinned, showing a gap in his front teeth. “I need a hundred kilos of refined opium.”
“I can move a hundred kilos from Hazara across the border to the tribal area of Pakistan. There is a lab there where you would have to pick it up.”
He didn’t mean that he would personally move the opium. He meant that he could set in motion a chain of orders, arrangements, transactions, that would end with the movement of the opium. It was like the halal money system, which also operated entirely on trust and which allowed you to move, let us say, a thousand dollars from a conversation in Ibadan to Houston, Texas, without records or checks or bank balances.
“I can get C-4,” the Palestinian said. He, too, meant that somebody else would actually get and move the explosive, which, in fact, the Palestinian knew only in theory, having no real idea where it was or how it would be got. In fact, the C-4 that would finally be moved was presently in a former Crusader citadel in the Bekaa Valley, but that was of no consequence to either the Palestinian or Ahmed.
“Here in Mogadishu,” the Palestinian said, “or—?”
“Here will be fine.”
11
Whidbey Island.
Sunrise revealed mountains away to the east, and an endless forest stretching away inland. Rose bounced from their bed with the sun, eager to meet her borrowed maintenance crew and get in the air. She moved so fast that she was in her flight suit and kissing him good-bye before he was shaved, so that he suddenly found himself alone, razor in hand, searching their suitcases for shaving cream that he began to suspect hadn’t made the trip.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered, and caught himself. He made himself smile at the face in the mirror. Smile and forget the anger, he thought.
He wanted to smoke.
An hour later, he saw a lone F-18 rolling out on the runway, and he watched with love and envy as the plane taxied out, tested its engines to high power and full military, and then rolled out. Rose didn’t do anything fancy like pulling the nose straight up into afterburner as soon as she launched, but her takeoff was pure and beautiful, and he smiled to watch her go, the hot wind of her engine check washing over him in waves as he jogged in place. It struck him that, just now, this was an allegory of their lives. He ran back to a second shower. He wanted to get into the air, too.
Las Vegas.
Everything about Vegas made Piat’s skin crawl, perhaps because it was so much the opposite of Jakarta and the places where he’d spent his recent life. This was foolish, he knew; the tarts of Vegas were fundamentally no different from the tarts of Jakarta, nor were the hustlers nor the tourists nor the shop owners trying to make a buck. But Vegas still made his skin crawl. Before he ever left the airport, he made himself a reservation for an evening flight to L.A. and Jakarta by way of Manila.
He got in a rental car and drove to a far suburb of Tahoe, where retired middle managers and executives who’d never made the top tier had bought gimcrack houses that were all size and landscaping and that would start to fall down in ten years. But then, so would their owners.
Jill Petrack lived in one of them with her new husband. He was affable, Southern, and discreet, or at least he seemed so, but he was in a hurry to get to the golf course. A handshake and a joke and he was out the door.
“Well, Jerry,” she said, “what a surprise!”
“Long time.” He’d called ahead and she’d been really surprised then. He’d seen her a few times here and there, but it had been twenty-five years since they’d worked together in Jakarta.
“To what do I owe the honor?” Smiling but uncertain. He remembered that about her—an uncertain woman, never quite right with the men she attracted, of whom Jerry had never been one because she was older and he liked a certain sluttishness. She was still thin and a little too tall and much too ladylike for him. But they’d got along. Now, she went through the offers—coffee, tea, booze—and the politeness—weather, old times, did he ever see so-and-so—and then he got down to it, sitting in her somewhat colonial living room with the cactus outside the window and a big TV that he guessed she’d just turned off.
“I’m following something up, and I need your brain,” he said.
“Oh, I haven’t used my brain in years; it’s the nicest thing about retirement.” She smiled, but he didn’t believe it. Her usual uncertainty was tinged with something more acid, maybe regret. She was a fundamentally negative personality, he remembered, one of those cursed people who never manage to say yes often enough to be happy.
“Jakarta,” he said. They’d overlapped there by almost a year; Shreed had been chief of station and she’d been his administrator. Maybe in love with him.
“Poor George,” she said. “I hear terrible things, even here.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear. George was the best. That’s sort of what I’m here about.” He told her that he was working with some people to clear Shreed’s reputation, not quite true but not too far off the mark. “I have to ask you to keep this to yourself, Jill. There are people around who, you know—it’s in their interest to smear George. I don’t want them knowing what I’m doing.” He didn’t have to tell her that he’d been retired early because of George. Something she said suggested that she already knew that, so he guessed that she had sources and contacts still. “I’d like to keep my visit quiet,” he said.
“Nobody bothers with me anymore,” she said. “You weren’t followed, were you?” Making it a joke, except it wasn’t a joke.
He shook his head. “Jakarta,” he said again. “When I got there, you’d been working for George for a good while; you knew what he did and how he did it. You know what they’re saying now, don’t you? That he was a Chinese agent?”
She shook her head. “That’s so ridiculous. We ran ops against the Chinese as hard as we could go. My goodness, the Chinese were running a network right in Jakarta; George was the one who busted it. And Malaysia—Singapore—he had some big successes.”
“Do you remember a kid George used, named Bobby Li? Chinese, about five-two, very willing—he was only a kid then.”
She thought about that, smiling a little. She was weighing old secrets against the present, he thought, perhaps telling herself that she had been out of it so long that nothing she knew could matter now. But she’d never gossiped, never published a memoir, never broken that oath they’d both signed when they took the Agency’s nickel. “I don’t think we called him that,” she said.
“I inherited him when George left. You were gone by then.”
“
Yes,” she said a little sadly, as if getting out of Jakarta had been a penance. “I think we called him Go-Boy,” she said. “I think it started as Gofer Boy and got cut down, because George used him as a gofer. He was only twelve.”
“A little older.”
“Well. I was never very good at guessing the age of Asians. I didn’t deal with Go-Boy that much, either; he was sort of George’s dog, you know? He’d send him out for the newspaper if he wanted one. Had him cutting his grass one time, I think. He wasn’t really an agent.”
“But George used him as one.”
“Oh, sometimes, little jobs. Messenger boy, and so on.”
“By the time I got him, he was an agent, Jill. Sundance. Because of the movie, Butch Cassidy. They said he loved that movie and the name stuck to him.”
“I was gone by then. He was Go-Boy when I knew him, if we’re talking about the same one.” She shook her gray curls. “He was only a kid.” She offered him iced tea and lemonade and water, and he took water because of the heat outside, giving her the chance she wanted to leave the room for a while, he thought. She wasn’t comfortable with the past, or not with this past. He looked at the room, which seemed to him empty and toneless and bland, and maybe that was what she wanted now, including the man she’d married when she was sixty-seven. Maybe she hated the past, or maybe she simply felt guilt about its secrets. Piat thought he’d kill himself before he’d settle for bland as the only reward at the end of his life, but perhaps for her the blandness was soothing after saying no for so long.
“Did you ever think the kid was a double?” he said before she even set the water down in front of him. She had a tray with lemonade for herself and a bottle of water for him, and rather good glasses with heavy bottoms.
“He would have been vetted,” she said. She put one of the glasses down and poured the chilled water into it. When she was done, she smiled, as if she’d been practicing pouring water and thought she’d done it very well.