The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  “Paul, what the—”

  “Just relax, Miles.”

  “Paul, this—”

  “Miles, be quiet.” Chardy’s teacher voice, Chardy’s teacher look, authoritative, unarguable. What Chardy was this? A Chardy in command? What the hell gave Chardy the right?

  But Miles shut up. He’d been deposited firmly into a straight-back chair, trussed not by bonds but by the weighty presence, the will, of others. Who were they? What kind of hospital was this, anyway?

  “Miles,” Chardy said, “we start with one question. One important question.”

  “He’s not wired yet,” somebody said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Chardy.

  “Hey, Paul, this—”

  “Shh now, Miles. Shhh. Trust me.”

  Chardy solicitous? What kind of new Chardy was this?

  For yes, this was a new Chardy. Had he found his religion, or lost it? He’d never seen a calmer Chardy, a less hostile Chardy. Where had Chardy’s chip gone, the one that weighed a ton that he carried around on his shoulder? Where was that ex-jock’s snarl, that willingness to punch out, fuck the consequences? It was as though he’d had a face-lift or a brain-lift or something.

  “Look,” Chardy began, almost pleasantly, “one little question. Help us, okay? We know you were monitoring me; we know you had guys on me; we know that guy in Boston who was recording Johanna was reporting to you. So you saw the wiretap transcripts. Right?”

  Lanahan looked sullenly at Chardy.

  “Sure you did, Miles. You wouldn’t have missed a chance like that. Now here’s the big question. A call came to me. From Illinois, from Resurrection. From a nun. You may remember helping her find me. Anyway, she read me a telegram. Okay?”

  “Okay, Paul.”

  “Did you see it?”

  A moment of triumph. Lanahan could not help the little smirk.

  “Yes,” he finally said.

  “I knew you would. Didn’t I say so, Leo? Miles is very, very smart. Here’s the tough one. Let’s take it another step, and we need the truth on this, Miles. I’ll have them blast you full of sodium p if I have to.”

  Somebody looped a strap across Lanahan’s chest and drew it tight. Another man leaned over him, pushed his sleeve up, and bound onto his arm an elastic band.

  “Hey, you have to have my permission to polygraph me,” he said.

  “Now, now, Mr. Lanahan, let’s just be patient. He’s all set. Let me get a control reading here. Is your name Miles Lanahan?”

  “Miles?”

  Lanahan was silent.

  “Come on, Miles, play the game. Answer the man.”

  Miles looked at the ceiling, at the men in the room, so many of them.

  “Who are these guys, Paul? Just what the hell—”

  “I’m Leo Bennis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Lanahan. These people are on my staff. They’re all professionals, and they all have high-level security clearances. All right?”

  But Lanahan shot a look of horror at Chardy.

  “Feds! Jesus Christ, you went to the feds. Oh, Paul, I’m so disappointed in you. Oh, Jesus, Paul, Sam is going to screw you, he’s going to—oh, Paul, that’s just the worst—”

  “They’ve been on this thing for a little while, Miles. And they listened You guys wouldn’t. Nobody else would. So I had to go play with them. It’s their ball. Come on, Miles, let’s get going. Give the man your name so we can get the game started.”

  “Paul, you—”

  “Miles, this wouldn’t be going on if we didn’t think it absolutely fucking had to. Had to. Come on, Miles. Come on.”

  Miles looked around again. It was said that Chardy had been worked with blowtorches before he finally cracked. But that had been different, a kind of war. He’d had time to get ready; he’d been trained. Miles looked around the room, then back to Chardy, whose glare leaned in to him. He broke away from it, looked elsewhere. But there was no mercy for him anywhere in this room.

  “My name is Miles Lanahan.”

  “Where do you reside?”

  Miles gave the address.

  “What’s your mother’s name?”

  Miles answered.

  “Okay,” the technician said. “It would be better if he wasn’t so excited, but I guess that can’t be helped. I’ve run them on jumpier guys. Go ahead, Chardy.”

  “Okay, Miles. What did you make of the telegram?”

  Miles took a deep breath. Here was a test he was going to pass.

  “You’re running Trewitt. In Mexico. Trewitt’s alive.”

  “See, Leo, I told you he had a nose for this stuff. He’s sharp; he can do an awful lot with very little dope. Okay, Miles. Here’s the last big one. Who did you tell?”

  “Paul, these guys are just using you. They don’t give a shit; they’re just conning you. They love to scramble the Agency. Paul, you’re going to get in so much trouble. Paul, this isn’t—”

  “Shoot him up, Leo. Miles, I have to know. It’s very important.”

  “Don’t stick me, goddammit. Keep that thing away.”

  He looked around the room, finding it surprisingly big. He saw that once upon a time it had been an operating room: high ceiling, bright yellow walls ribbed with pipes. Now it was—what? HQ for some weird fed operation, Judas Chardy up there rubbing asses with G-men.

  Sam’s words came to him, delivered only days ago, clear and penetrating: He will make you choose. He will tempt you, test you. He’s clever, smart. You’ve never seen the man he really is.

  “Miles, let’s go. It’s confession time. Who’d you tell?”

  “Nobody.”

  “What kind of reading you get?”

  “Respiration’s flat. No jump. Unless he’s stoned on downers or a real pro at riding these things, which he might be.”

  “I was never on one of these things in my life,” Lanahan said irritably, offended at the notion.

  “Why, Miles? Why didn’t you tell Sam? It was a big scoop. It was your ticket to the top.”

  “Because I couldn’t read it. I played it over two hundred ways and I still couldn’t read it. I wanted to develop it, or hold it in reserve, and pull it out when it really counted, or when it took me someplace.”

  “You played it just right, Miles. We’re very lucky nobody in that outfit is quite as bright as you.”

  “Good old Miles,” Leo said.

  Miles saw that the tension in the room was considerably released. Now what the hell?

  “Trewitt got a guy out of Mexico—yeah, Trewitt, Dreamer Trewitt—that a lot of people want dead. But somehow Trewitt did it. It only cost his life. A Mexican smuggler and vice lord who brought Ulu Beg across the border back in March. He’s in the room next door, under my name, right now.”

  “I don’t—”

  “This fat slob had one secret and one secret only. Not that Ulu Beg was in America—we knew that. But that the Cubans were running interference for him, backtracking to wipe out his tracks.”

  “Jesus, Paul, what would the Cubans—”

  “Come on, Miles. The Cubans are acting for the Russians. This means Ulu Beg isn’t here on his own, but as the final part of a Soviet Intelligence operation.”

  “They should know that at the Agency. We should tell them that at the Agency.”

  “No. Because if they know that at the Agency, the Russians will very quietly put a bullet in Ulu Beg’s skull and back off. We’ve got to let them push it the last step, so that we can flip it over on them.”

  Miles said nothing.

  “All right, Miles,” said Chardy. “Now I’m going to tell you how you’re going to stop them. Stop Ulu Beg and a Russian named Speshnev, who’s running their op, who thought it up. Miles, you’re going to be a cowboy. A computer cowboy.”

  49

  Danzig sat in his office, amid the litter, the empty cups, the craziness. The room seemed full of black bats, broken glass, the stage props of melodramatic insanity; on the other hand, it also seemed just a dirty room
, a room in which once a book had been written but which was now a mess. He sat inertly. He could hear, hear the slow drain of time slipping away: most peculiar. The world is made of atoms, as we know, and even smaller particles; what can this thing we call time be, except the passing of one particle, then another, as they transform themselves into another dimension?

  Crackpot stuff, of course. Yet lately he’d been taking refuge in the crackpot, the harebrained, the addled, the twisted, the hopelessly banal stupid ideas of this world. The Bermuda Triangle, for one, held a great fascination for him, as did this notion of Chariots of the Gods. Can Aliens in pre-Biblical times really be responsible for this lurid thing we call civilization? Can an Alien influence, a Martian shadow, be divined in his current predicament, rich as it is in literary irony? Are moonmen behind it all?

  Or again: Bigfoot? Fascinating creature, the missing link; they even had it on film. It looked strangely like a man in a monkey suit—but no matter! It was a system of belief, a way of organizing data coherently. Which Danzig at this point in time lacked, and he was not willing to sit in judgment on any other man’s techniques for doing so. There were others too: saucers, phrenology, Rosicrucianism, Mormonism, Scientology, nudism. All systems of belief, perfectly logical, askew in only one tiny detail which, like one degree’s misaim in a compass reading, took them further and further into the ether the farther out they got, yanking them off into the realms of the purely crazy. Yet comforting! Full of abiding love! Offering safety!

  I have no safety, Danzig thought.

  What I mean is … What do I mean?

  He looked about. Files spilled into files everywhere.

  He needed a way to organize it. No matter how insane, how Rosicrucian, how bizarre, he needed a single theory by which the thing could be looked at, tested, then, if false, disregarded.

  He needed science.

  What he had was madness.

  The room terrified him. It was the entropy principle, once again: randomness, disorder, the release of pure energy to no meaningful purpose other than disaster.

  There lay the file on BANGLADESH, in one terrible isolated corner, starvation and treachery reeking from the jumble of typed pages (he remembered the photos of the Paki intellectuals bayoneted to death by teenagers for the benefit of the Western cameramen). And over there, huge one, most of it blurred papers, that thin stuff from State with a mad mix of CIA documents thrown in for good measure, CHINA, carbons, wads of it (he remembered Chou in the great hall: curious, a pinnacle moment in Western and Eastern civilization, the two cultures meeting as equals for the first time in two million years of humanhood, and all he could remember about it now, having talked and written about it extensively for almost a decade, were the terrible Chinese toilets, pissholes, sinks, shitdrains of primordial infection); and over there, tidier, a much smaller pile, indicative of how history had really passed her brave, pretty buildings and picturesque mountains by, W. EUROPE; then AFRICA, undeveloped, a few niggardly papers; and a huge and messy pile for SE ASIA, where history had paused for seven long and bitter years; and finally—he hadn’t the nerve to face it—MIDEAST, all the little countries, the passionate, violent, rich, desperate little lands, a horror of exile and betrayal and steel will, profligacy. Who could make sense of it? No man. Not even a man of outstanding intellect and ambition, a Danzig.

  He spun (barefoot in tattered terry-cloth robe, his flat veined feet and yellowed toes before him) to face it: MIDEAST. It covered half a room. He’d begun, one time or other in his hibernation here, to divide the huge archive into smaller piles, IRAN and IRAQ and SAUDI ARABIA and the terrible, terrible little PALESTINE and a huge ISRAEL. It looked like a fleet, a formation, stacks and stacks of paper: working papers, reports, indexes, trade tables, economic profiles, intelligence reports, satellite photos, computer printouts, abstracts, memo drafts, think-tank bulletins—the gunk, the stuff, the actual plasm of history. And all this was A-level documents, the cream of the cream. In the basement there lurked still another ton and a half of ungraded documents; and in a warehouse in Kensington still more, press clippings, embassy invitations, routing slips. No man could master it all, the complexities, the strange subtleties. And in it somewhere, in one file or in a hundred, lay the ANSWER: who was trying to kill him. And why. No wonder he was going insane. Who wouldn’t? It’s a miracle I haven’t gone crazy before. No wonder I seek solace in crazy ideas, fascinated at the bizarre halls through which human minds can drag the hulking bodies that surround them.

  He stared at the piles, aware finally of his own sour odor. He felt like a character in a Borges story lost in a paper labyrinth, time having been decreed to stand still. Truly: he was in a situation that could only have been designed by a blind Argentinian librarian-genius. Yet there was no other place to be. He could not leave. They would kill him if he left the labyrinth.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. Now, suddenly, the bridge of his nose hurt. It had supported glasses for all his adult life; yet now, in an hour of maximum stress, it too revolted. His body ached; he was disgustingly flatulent; his head ached, always, always, always. All systems were breaking down; he could not concentrate for more than a few minutes (he kept whirligigging off on wild tangents). Each time he set out to do something, he thought instantly of something else equally urgent, and veered to it immediately. Consequently, nothing even neared completion. He was becoming Howard Hughes, walled genius, brilliant lunatic, out of touch with any reality except the lurid one between his ears.

  I am out of control. I am an exile in my own house, my own brain.

  He stood suddenly, but in the effort lost contact with the reason for standing. By the time he was fully up he could claim no reason for the move. He sat down again, just as suddenly, and began to weep.

  How long did he weep? It must have been hours. His self-pity took on Homeric weight and gravity. He wept forever. Night was falling. He was growing weary. Twice men had crept down the hall to listen. He was trying to control himself, but he could hear them listening.

  Oh, help me, please. Somebody. Please.

  Who would help him? His wife? She was worthless. They had not fucked in years. When he spoke he saw her eyes wander to the ceiling; she had the attention span of a grasshopper. Sam Melman? Help me, Sam, please help me. But Sam was too greedy, too smooth, too ambitious. Help me, oh, please help me.

  Lanahan? The little priest, whose adolescent acne still erupted on his bitter young face, so bent, so determined to succeed. Yet Lanahan was more insane than he was, even.

  Help me, help me, oh, help me.

  Help me, Chardy, help me.

  He wished Chardy were here. Yet he hated Chardy also. Not Chardy; Chardy was another disappointment. Chardy had disappointed him too. Chardy had looked at him dumbly. He’d sat there stolidly, eyes dull, radiating aimless violence. Chardy was another fool.

  Danzig stared into dim space, working himself into rage over Chardy’s stupidity. Chardy didn’t know a thing. Chardy was entirely a figment of Danzig’s imagination; he was an invention, a contrivance, an assemblage. He was a simple soldier, man of violence, narrow of mind and imagination. Danzig had foolishly built him into something he was not. It was where his illness had begun, this business of Chardy. It was the first sign of his weakness. Hadn’t Chardy almost gotten him killed in his carelessness with the Harvard woman? Hadn’t Chardy allowed the Kurd to get within killing distance? Chardy was no good. He was ordinary in the worst sense.

  He hated Chardy. It occurred to him to call Sam Melman this second and demand that Chardy be fired, be let go. No, more: that he be punished, disgraced, imprisoned. Chardy was no good. You could not depend on Chardy. Once Chardy had come aboard, the whole thing had begun to fall apart.

  His rage mounted. He saw Chardy arrested, interrogated, humiliated. He saw Chardy in prison among lunatics and blacks and hillbillies. Chardy violated, Chardy abused. Chardy ruined. Danzig absorbed a great satisfaction from the scenario. He drew warmth and pleasure from it and at on
e point actually had the phone in his hand (miracle that he could even find it in the rubble) and had dialed the first two numbers.

  But then he froze.

  Perhaps they wanted him to hate Chardy. Perhaps they had driven a wedge between him and Chardy, knowing them to be natural allies, fearing the potency of any allegiance between them. Maybe, therefore, it would be better to …

  Once again, he sat back.

  My mind is going nowhere. I’m agitated at nothing. They are taking my mind away from me—this Kurd, whomever he works for.

  His bowels began to tense. The scalding need to defecate came over him. He thought he would mess himself, foul his own nest, the ultimate degradation.

  My own systems betray me also. They are in revolt.

  He passed a terrible burst of gas. Its odor nauseated him. He ran into the adjacent bathroom and sat on the toilet. He sat there for a long time, even after he had ceased to defecate, making certain the attack was over.

  I can still do one thing, he thought.

  I can still shit.

  He reached for the toilet paper and unreeled a long train of sheets, gathering them in his hand. Yet as he pulled loose the last of them, separating it at its perforations with a smart tug, something fell away to the floor. In the dark he could not see. He leaned over, his fingers on the tile. He felt a piece of paper. He brought it quickly to his eyes.

  Metternich, it said.

  Danzig cleaned himself, rose, and went swiftly back to his office and to the shelves.

  He picked up Metternich, Architect of Order, by Joseph Danzig, Harvard University Press, 1964, and began to page through it.

  A piece of paper fell out.

  You must flee, it said.

  They will kill you, it said.

  It told him where to go, and when.

  It was signed Chardy.

  50

  “All right, Miles. Now we’re going to talk computers.”

  “So talk,” said Miles. He would just sit back and be pleasant. He would not get anybody mad. It would all work out and then he’d go to Sam so fast—