by Bill Granger
“I got to cover my ass,” Bob Wagner said. He was very pale and he had been drinking awhile even though it was only eleven in the morning. He had the abused look that men get when they know they don’t have a chance anymore but they still have to go through the motions.
“Have a drink,” Pell said in his thin voice. His eyes were narrow and he was staring through Wagner’s head at a point six feet behind.
“Karen. She’s gone crazy. She’s burrowing into files that are like six years old. I know she’s making all kinds of file checks. Like a busy beaver.”
“You got a problem, huh?”
“She’s on my case. She’s like an FBI guy. You can see she’s spying on me. That business down in Santa Barbara, it set her off, whatever it was.”
“Whatever it was,” Pell agreed.
“You got to get me out of this.”
“Or what?”
“Everything I know—” began the threat.
Pell waited, peanuts in hand. “The fuck you know? You know shit. You know me? You know my number? You know anything about anything? This is real stuff in the real world, Bobby, and you are just stumbling around like a second-grade kid finding out what urinals are for. The trouble with you guys is you like the action but you can’t take the heat. You wanta turn State’s? Turn State’s. Confess your bleeding heart out. You know what they do to you? Put you inside one of those max places where all you do all day is lift weights to make your muscles big so that the cons leave your ass alone. You wanta be a fish?”
“I don’t wanta be nothing. I don’t wanta be involved.”
“You sap. You never were. I told you. Let her look through her files. What’s she gonna find?”
“I don’t know.”
Pell made a face and said nothing.
“They’re after me,” Bob Wagner sputtered as the barman brought up a Stoli on the rocks. He was thinking now what he had thought before he called Pell. They were going to make him the patsy in this thing. Wagner had thought about it all the way to work. He had decided he was going to kill Karen O’Hare because he had to. He stopped in the Chinese bar on Powell Street at eight in the morning and drank until ten and then he called Pell. He was thinking about how they were all working in this thing to put Wagner in the bag and it wasn’t going to be that way. He really had to face up to it: He really just had to kill Karen O’Hare because he couldn’t talk Pell into doing it.
He thought about Karen dead and the thought didn’t frighten him as much as going to jail did.
Pell studied his peanuts as though they might foretell the future. Then he ate one. “You got anything more to tell me?” he said.
“No,” Wagner said. He knew it was hopeless with Pell, that he was going to have to stop Karen himself.
“Don’t forget to stop by the bathroom again.”
“I’m not wired,” Wagner said.
“Yeah, sure, I know. But I think my friend likes you.”
34
FIFTEEN MINUTES OF FAME
Malcolm Crowder sat beneath the moose antlers in the den, the wood-paneled room with the heavy books on heavy shelves, and watched his life go before his eyes on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. His life was also passing before his eyes on the smaller Zenith with Tom Brokaw and it had already passed before his eyes with Dan Rather. It was hard to drown three times in one day.
The dirty bitch.
Malcolm was taking it all in like body blows from a street fighter, which is what Patricia Heath was. She was very good on television and the story was not a television story, so it was all the more impressive. When a congressman or senator starts accusing a semisecret government agency of being involved in the cover-up of one of its agents who was really a secret arms supplier to terrorists who intended to blow up the Alaska oil pipeline—well, it was the sort of thing that TV anchormen cannot talk about without their eyes glazing over. Usually. But Patricia Heath was a nice package and she talked short and clear, so she was worth letting the cameras linger on for more than the usual ten seconds.
She was waving papers around, she was shocking the world; there was an inset graphic showing that morning’s Washington Post front page, just to make sure everyone understood the story was important. It was hard to tell sometimes on TV news.
And there was a map of Alaska and a suitcase and FBI agents arresting security guards and the body of a terrorist found in a secluded area north of Fairbanks. Blackmail paid to terrorists, said the television set. Terrorists set up by a government intelligence agent who had already defected, along with a Soviet former defector who, it was now believed, had actually been a Russian double agent all along. The secret agency was called R Section and the name was on every newsman’s lips. Nobody really understood the whole story but everyone understood that it was important because Bob Woodward had been assigned to investigate it for the Post and Seymour Hersh was doing the same thing for the Times.
The dirty bitch was putting it all on him after all he had done for her.
Malcolm Crowder had the same feeling now that he had had the day she showed him the papers in Juneau and told him that he wasn’t a senator anymore. The only other time he had felt that way was flying through the storm in the little plane in 1955, bringing the vaccine up to the North Slope. He had been scared in that plane, he had seen death scratching at the cockpit windows. Damn, he thought suddenly, very sad for the young man he had once been.
He saw the logic as he watched his life slip away. It was too small a catch, what the terrorist on the telephone had left him. Two punk kids in a rooming house in Fairbanks. It just wasn’t enough. Whoever the man was, he had needed a bigger fish to muddy up the conspiracy. He had needed Malcolm Crowder and now Patricia Heath was skinning him with a big knife.
The story was so complicated—like Watergate or Wedtech—that everyone was trying to find a handle for it so that the news media would not have to re-explain it day after day. The Post tried “Pipelinegate” and the New York Times tried “Alaskagate” and neither term was very satisfactory.
But at the heart of it was Malcolm Crowder’s checking account in a Hong Kong bank, how he had hushed up terrorism on the pipeline, and now the disappearance of an American espionage agent and a Soviet defector who had worked on the terrorism on the line. They had provided an atomic device. And there was a dead American agent in Anchorage and there were reports of a mysterious dark-haired woman who acted in pornographic movies and was used by all three men for sex and for other duties.
The editor of the National Enquirer told his men he would pay a hundred thousand dollars for photographs of the woman, whoever she was. Playboy was already planning a tasteful spread of photographs of the woman, whenever she was found, wearing swimsuits and bared only to the breast.
The FBI was ordered by Justice to begin an audit of its San Francisco office of the Witness Protection Program and was alerted to the possibility that an unauthorized federal intelligence agency called R Section had contained traitors and terrorists on its staff.
Patricia Heath had everything: Glamour and guts, a sense of righteousness and pride in her home state.
Who was the missing American agent?
Who was the missing Soviet defector?
The questions were not to be answered, not today or tomorrow. The story was unfolding; the story was dribbling its way into the consciousness of Americans one fact at a time, the way it is always done. When the story was finished—in a week or a month—it would go on but not in the public eye. There would be congressional investigations and long tedious reports sent to the president and the National Security Council, and heads would roll quietly out of the quiet rooms of power in Washington.
But tonight was Malcolm Crowder’s fifteen minutes of fame.
35
RITA MACKLIN
Again, he came. It was exactly like the last time. It was the middle of the day and there was the messenger at the door. The last time was in Switzerland, in Lausanne, in the little apartment they had s
hared on the Place de la Concorde Suisse, which means “Square of Swiss Peace.”
Rita Macklin opened the door of the townhouse on Rhode Island Avenue Northwest, and did not cry or speak because, unlike the first time, she expected him.
David Mason was an intelligence officer with R Section. He was now thirty-four years old and he had been two years younger the first time he had come to Rita Macklin to tell her that Devereaux had disappeared on an assignment. That had been in Switzerland; now the same scene was to be played again on a quiet street in Washington.
She had heard the breaking story about Alaska and the pipeline and a bent agent in intelligence who had played terrorist for profit. She was a journalist. She had called her old sources and friends to find out the story behind the mad story being peddled by the senator from Alaska. And all the while, she had a bad feeling that it would all involve Devereaux and there would be a call in the night.
Hanley had called her and told her a very little, only that he had to send around a man to “babysit” her for a few days and would she cooperate?
“Where is he?” she had said to Hanley.
“I can’t reveal—”
“It’s about this Alaska business? This pipeline sabotage?”
“I cannot reveal—”
“Spook stuff,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m sick of it.”
“Miss Macklin,” Hanley had said.
“I won’t go through this again,” she said. She thought of the times she had thought him dead. You can’t do it over and over, she had thought. You can’t have that much pain all the time. There was screaming going on in her head. She said, “I won’t go through this again.” But she would go through it again and again and again, she thought. It would never end until one of them was dead.
And now David Mason had come.
“Is this intended irony?” she said to him. She had very mixed feelings about David Mason. David Mason was in love with her, she knew that, and it was part of the pain and the humor of it that he would again be sent to comfort her and protect her.
“Intended by Hanley, I suppose,” he said. He had grown in the two years in Section. There was a tiredness to his eyes and a glittering sort of hardness as well. He had not seen it all yet, just some. Hanley had told him so little that he might as well not have come to her. But she compelled him even more than Hanley’s order.
She was in her thirties, tall, with striking red hair and green eyes. She was very good at what she did, which was to be a journalist and to know part of her life was always a secret pool. The secret pool was Devereaux. They loved each other. Everything he was, she was not; everything she believed in, he disbelieved. So they did not speak of these things to each other but swam in the secret pool at night, when it was dark and when no one could see them.
She let him in and led him to the living room.
The room reflected her. It was spare and bright and full of books. He sat on the couch in the uneasy way of visitors.
“You want coffee?” she said. “Did I ask you last time you came to tell me bad news?”
“I don’t have bad news,” he said. “There was a threat made against you.”
“How do you know?”
“I was told—”
“By Hanley? Do you believe Hanley?”
Her voice was hard. She stared right through him.
“I was told,” he repeated.
“Tell Hanley I don’t want to be protected. Not by you.”
“He sent me because I—I knew you.”
“God, I hate you all.”
“Rita,” he tried again.
“And him,” she said. Her voice was very calm now but just as hard. “I’m not going through this over and over again. There are other things. Like children and vacations in Yellowstone Park and things like that. I’m not going through this again.”
David Mason stared at her and did not speak. It was as though he understood she was talking only to herself.
“Is he alive or dead? Tell me that,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Lie to me,” she said. “I really want him dead this time. I want him dead and that makes an end of it. I won’t be pushed around anymore.”
“I don’t know,” David Mason said.
“Do you want to comfort me? Put your arms around me and hold me while I cry?” Rita said. “Well, I won’t cry anymore.”
“Rita,” he said. “Don’t say all these things.”
“It’s finished,” she said. “It is going to hurt a long time but it’s finished. Women are built to take hurt but I don’t want it anymore, not every goddamn time he packs his bag and puts a pistol in it and says nothing about the job or where he’s going or when he’ll be back. Spies can’t talk about it and I can’t stand it, not anymore.”
David just stared because she really didn’t want him to say anything.
“I’m not kidding,” she said and this time she seemed to see him. “I don’t need a babysitter and I don’t need him, not anymore. I don’t need you. I can find a man when I need one and he can be a lawyer or lumberjack and I don’t care, I don’t need you people, any of you.”
And David saw that now she was not crying.
36
ONE LITTLE DETAIL MISSING
Henry McGee liked what he saw in the lobby of the Olympic Hotel in Seattle, liked the way she wore a dress, liked the pseudo-shy attitude that still had sophistication to it. The girl would play well just about anywhere, which was important to Henry McGee. He might take her to Tahiti with him if she worked out.
Her name was Mai-Lin. She was known to the boys down in the public market and in some of the fancy joints down on Alaska Way and some of the old-time joints, too. She was a nice girl and she spoke nice to people. She wore those shiny dresses that make boys working in the fish market dream. She was a hooker but a high-class hooker and Henry tried her out.
When he was finished, he told the girl he wanted an arrangement.
The girl said no.
He explained things to her.
When that was over, she went along with the arrangement.
Mai-Lin or whatever her real name was was not a problem. Just about every problem was cleaned up now, with Devereaux on his way to Siberia, with every connection wiped clean three times with ammonia, with R Section wringing its hands. One agent can destroy an intelligence section if he knows how to go about it. The trouble with counterintelligence was in the methodology called HUMINT, short for “human intelligence,” as opposed to the machine intelligence picked up from SIGINT or PHOTINT. Counterintelligence had to rely on machines, and when it used people, they were always vulnerable. People made stories.
Poor Narvak. She was having such a good time that she didn’t understand that a man travels best who travels alone, and when it comes down to it, a piece of tail is just a piece of tail. Henry McGee had genuinely admired that girl and not just for her body. She had manipulated the two chumps, she had killed the old trapper named Dobbins, she had even fooled Devereaux that time. A girl like that would have had a future if it wasn’t for the fact that she was a comeback, that she was such a real link to Henry McGee. Not even seventeen yet and now she was very asleep in the trunk of a car at Anchorage International Airport. Henry had regretted that for about thirty seconds.
Pell said to Henry McGee: “They only found one.”
“I can read a fucking newspaper,” Henry McGee said. The two men were sitting in the suite. Mai-Lin was in the bedroom, sleeping. Henry had kept her up all night. He had worked out an arrangement with her to stay in his suite for a few days.
Pell said, “You got any nuts, any peanuts, to go with the beer?”
“Do I look like a restaurant?”
“All right,” Pell said. “I took the plane up, all they got on airplanes anymore is these goddamn honey-roasted nuts. I hate it. I want to eat candy, I’d eat candy.”
“What about the other one? They misse
d him, didn’t they? They fucked it up, didn’t they?”
“Kools made it to Seattle.”
“I didn’t expect that.”
“Ernie Bushman didn’t expect it. He got a tree stuck through him.”
“Don’t give me names I don’t need.”
“The one gets iced, Ernie reaches for the other and he kicks Ernie out of the copter. Makes Bill Bradley land him in Anchorage, steals his wallet. We trace the credit card and he uses it for a plane to Seattle. Paid for a night at the Pacific Plaza Hotel.”
“Kools. I would have had to bet on Kools. Boy had some common sense to him, saw the main chance.”
“So what you want to do?”
“The problem is we don’t leave details behind. You got a way to ice Kools?”
“Are you insulting me or what?”
“Is Kools around?”
“Three-legged alligators are always around.”
“Do it,” Henry McGee said.
“Anything special?”
“Just do it.”
“You care about Wagner?”
“The geek in San Francisco? No, he’s not connected to me.”
“The only way he gets caught is if that little girl on his case down there really finds something, but I don’t think there’s anything to find. I think the only way he gets hung is if he hangs himself.”
“Couldn’t care less.”
“You need anything while you’re in Seattle?”
“Not at all. Just some rest and relax. Got a couple more calls to make in the next couple of days and then I go away.”
“Mr. Anthony said for me to say to you that we appreciate the stuff.”
“It’s good stuff all right, never use it myself but I know good cocaine,” Henry McGee said. He was all smiles with Pell. But he was thinking about details.
37
KOOLS AGAIN
Peewee was thinking about Kools again just when he came into the bar. The place was full of smoke and music. Couple of the girls were shaking their tails by the big juke and there was rain on the small front windows. Peewee felt good, as good as he ever felt; didn’t even think about his nose or the way he looked when he tried out a smile. Mai-Lin even wanted to feel sorry for him after she saw him and how bad he looked; that had been the only good thing. What the hell, he had a buddy now, that’s what it was about; the man was straight with him, Peewee be straight to the man. Guy had come down from Alaska, where Peewee always wanted to go. Guy was cool, had some bread on him, bought Peewee drinks. Kools and him were tight now, been buddies for three, four days. Kools all right, Peewee thought.