Borden shrugged. “Checked out. Three days ago. Maybe he’s on the Turkish ship with the Mercedes.”
Before ten, McCall’s computer screen came on:
() DDL: Slane. Excerpt from USBSPERS0710918CYZ Mexico City: Random. During surveillance operation Project Catspaw, arms trader L. Slane was observed in lobby and bar of Orizaba Hotel with Caucasian male answering to the name of Joli or Jolly. End.()
()DDL: Peno Rus, Thomas Reilly, Stanislaus Winiski, Eric Rock, Giuseppe Nero. Nothing found in dailies. Continue search? End.()
McCall frowned at the first message. Joli? It was a new name to him. A new playmate for Slane. Caucasian male. Answers to the name of Joli or Jolly. Who might that be? And what is Slane doing in Mexico City?
He asked the computer to do a name search for Joli or Jolly plus seven spelling variants.
Then he sent a request to Chief of Station, Mexico City, for a complete list of names from the guest register of the Hotel Orizaba.
At one he took Dice to Khyber Pass for lunch.
Khyber Pass was an intelligence hangout. And McCall, sitting with Dice near the door, watched with interest as a whole miscellany of people ducked inside, shaking their dripping umbrellas, shucking their raincoats and hats, and smoothing their hair. Many headed right for the bar and the day’s ration of gossip. Others circulated among the tables.
McCall was looking at an anthology of Washington spookdom passing before him, what Charlie Brewer had once called the parade of bad boys.
It was the ideal place to be seen if you were a spook looking for a new connection. And Dice didn’t need anyone to tell him he was a spook looking for a new connection.
Two ex-CIA types came in, wiretappers now working for Senator Ritter of Wisconsin, who had unofficial friendly taps on at least three other senators’ telephone lines. Reelection in Wisconsin was such a chancy business these days, a candidate had to have all the help he could get.
“Hullo, Bobby,” said one of them. “How are the gunrunners treating you?”
Another agent, now with Naval Intelligence in the Pentagon, arrived in the company of a marine engineer who was a registered lobbyist for a naval construction firm. It was a not-so-subtle announcement that the agent would soon be leaving government employ for a job with the construction firm. What he had done for the construction company while in Naval Intelligence was worth a guess. And McCall made a silent one.
All about him men sat at tables over white linen tablecloths and conducted spooks’ business. Charlie Brewer had once said going to lunch at Khyber Pass was like putting the light on in the kitchen and seeing the cockroaches scramble.
McCall realized that Brewer’s name had kept turning up for one reason or another all day.
The current piece of chat among Washington’s within-walls personnel was the discovery by a congressional investigation committee of fifteen different illegal taps on its telephone lines. The FBI was supposed to be investigating, although rumor said that three of the taps at least were put there by people in the FBI.
The biggest laugh was drawn by Congressman Storm Pacek of New York, who bellowed that such conduct was subverting the government’s business and destroying the Constitution. One of the taps was purportedly his.
Dice smiled broadly at the crowd. “Kind of reminds you of the fall of the Roman Empire, doesn’t it?” And he emitted his obnoxious cynical guffaw. He stared boldly back at those who were looking at him. Their glances were furtive and they were making sotto voce remarks to each other. Such a lunch was a commonplace; all the agencies practiced it. It was said that Khyber Pass was the place where each agency abandoned its strays. Brewer had been blunter. He called it the human garbage dump.
McCall saluted Dice with his wineglass. “Cheers.”
“And jeers,” Dice replied.
“I wanted to talk to you,” McCall said, “about your performance.”
Dice nodded and glanced at his watch.
“You almost did it for four of our people.”
“Yeah.”
“They’re ready to float you in the river, Dice.”
“Imagine.”
“It isn’t just that you’ve done a poor job, Dice. I feel you’re doing the wrong job. You’re a street man, not an administrator.”
“I suppose.”
“Don’t take this so lightly, Dice. There are those who want you flogged through the fleet for what you did.”
“I appreciate the favor, Bobby.”
“Then there’s also the matter of the taps you removed. Perfectly legal taps. Installed by the FBI.”
“How did I know they were legal? All taps look alike. When a well-known candidate for President asks you to sweep out his Senate telephone lines and you find seven separate taps—”
“That’s just the point. You were moonlighting. What you did was illegal.”
“So were five of those seven taps. Hell, Bobby. Everyone knows this town is crawling with thousands of illegal taps. Put in by the very people who are pissed because I took them out.”
“Those are hardly excuses, Dice.”
I suppose.
“It’s too bad this isn’t working out, Dice. You were given the assignment in my group because you wanted it—in spite of the contrary recommendation by your superiors. There’s a lot of I-told-you-so going on in the corridors right now. I’m sorry. Maybe you can put the pieces back together in another outfit. Okay?”
“Okay.” Dice looked at his watch. “Not bad,” he said. “Under two minutes. Now we can enjoy lunch.” He guffawed and signaled the waiter for another martini.
They ate without talking. And all the while, Dice’s eyes shopped the faces at the other tables, seeking his next job.
“I must say, Bobby,” he said at last, “it’s a very peculiar world we live in. The people in this room are slowly but surely destroying the whole goddam country, and I get fired for filling out the wrong form.”
“A form that would have exposed four men in a very sensitive operation.”
“Do you believe that, Bobby?”
After lunch, Dice strolled into the bar and chatted with a knot of men. And soon everyone knew he was among the walking dead, a man with a paycheck but no assignments. And no desk. No place to go to in the morning. He had become part of the day’s gossip.
Several times McCall heard Dice’s insolent laugh carry from the bar and shook his head. Even in a town where screw-ups flourished, Dice was going to have a tough time finding a berth. He was now known as a bungler who had nearly caused the deaths of four field men. By filling out the wrong form. Silently McCall answered Dice’s question: No, he didn’t believe it. And neither did anyone else. Wrong forms don’t kill. They’re excuses to get your enemies—like Dice.
Dice was a casualty of office politics.
McCall went back to the office alone.
Around three, Borden looked in expectantly.
“We had lunch,” said McCall.
“They say Khyber Pass is a good place to get rid of a headache,” said Borden.
“So they say.”
“You’re too nice, Bobby.” Borden shook his head. “I would have sent him out on a Dawn Patrol.”
“There are more than a few around here who should be sent out on Dawn Patrols.”
“That son of a bitch is going to haunt you.”
“I hope you’re wrong.”
“I am never wrong.”
Chief of Station, Mexico City, was polishing up the handle on the big front door: Before five, he had sent to McCall almost two hundred names of guests registered in the Orizaba Hotel.
McCall sat scrolling the list on the computer screen. Slane, he noted, was registered for two nights. He asked the computer’s data bank to match up the two hundred names with his agency’s master list of more than 100,000 names of “watchables.”
Then he sent a message to all Chiefs of Station for a current status on Code List 12—Leading Arms Dealers, Traders, and Smugglers. Forty names. And among them w
ere the three names from his list: Slane and Rus and Rock.
In the morning he hoped to know the whereabouts of all three. He went off to dinner with his boss. Sufficient unto the day.
In the political monetary system, the principal unit of value is not a dollar or a piece of gold. It is the favor. The richest person in the capital is the one with the most favors due. A power broker is someone who can assemble a number of favors due from a coterie of powerful people and then use that agglomeration of callable favors to work a deal. Sometimes the deal borders on blackmail.
To build a fund of favors due, Martin Wainwright always exacted a little something extra on the side from every deal he worked in Washington. The extra then went into his little black book of political debits and credits.
Most of his side extras were aimed at subordinates and lesserlings and amounted to school-ground bullying, usually as harmless as swapping baseball cards. In fact, some of his detractors called him the one-horse-power broker.
McCall knew that Wainwright would demand something for the deal he’d worked on the three assassinations. And he had suspected from the beginning what the demand would be.
Now, as he waited in the small committee room on the second floor, he knew. The little something on the side was Monroe.
When he first arrived in Washington, McCall had been told: “It’s the double standard in the State Department that will ultimately drive you away. Either get connected with one of the oldboy networks or get out.”
McCall hadn’t listened. He’d not joined any network. And now each year he found himself growing more cynical. Daniels, on the roof that day, had uttered the general opinion of other branches of government: All you guys in State are screw-ups.
And up the stairs came a screw-up named Monroe.
Monroe was a member of the same eastern private-school Ivy League network as Wainwright. And McCall’s little side payment to Wainwright was to brief Monroe on the Brazilian situation.
Wainwright had said, “He’ll be off on a special junket in a few days, and it’s just the kind of background stuff he needs.”
But to get McCall to sit down with Monroe, Wainwright had had to ask three times and then insist.
McCall had been working on the Brazilian material for months, and as part of his program to promote his career he was planning to present it in a speech to the Washington Press Club. Not even Borden had seen the material.
McCall had seen Monroe in action before. Friendly, tentative, with a diffident air and a drinking problem, Monroe was trying to put things back together after making a hash of a job in Athens. There had been other hashes in Monroe’s career, a string of them.
If he’d had the same status as Dice, Monroe would have been taken for his last lunch at the Khyber Pass long ago. But Monroe was connected. He was part of the privileged network, protected by that double standard that had thwarted McCall so many times.
McCall stood at the top of the marble stairs and watched Monroe climb them. State was awash with Monroes, all wearing the same protective coating: Choate, was it? Or Deerfield Academy? He would still be known among his network cohorts by his school nickname: Buffy, was it? Or Frog?
After his fiasco in Athens, he was sporting a new image. Or, rather, trying to drop the old. Thinner. Trimmer. New tailor. New haircut. New wife: His original, an alcoholic, had been seen as a liability; the replacement was younger, attractive, with money, and related to a State Department ranker—in short, a career asset. Also she made him seem younger, more contemporary. She mixed Monroe in with the right younger people.
You could see it in the man’s eyes: Monroe was shopping for a new hobbyhorse. And Arms Control was one of the items on his shopping list.
He called affably up the stair: “McCall? Yes. Monroe. Awfully good of you to see me. I won’t keep you but a minute.” He came skipping up, bobbing his head. Then the condescending boneless handshake. The runt of the litter, but he was in the right litter.
McCall felt a touch of pity for him. Pale hair, pale face, and pale-blue eyes. It must be lousy to be incompetent, and to know it and to hate it and to know others know and to hate their knowing. And to know you can’t do anything about it.
It must be lousy to wake each morning with the same pathetic prayer on your lips: Oh, God, don’t let me screw up today. Amen.
Each day, the weak hand reaches for the bottle for just one more drink. One more drink, then I’ll be good. I’ll amaze the world. I’ll pull myself together. I’ll salute with my glass all those who find achievement so easy, and I’ll join them. They’ll say: How decisive he’s become. He’s a lion. He’s been posted to Paris and in weeks he shaped up the whole place—a model operation now. He has restored our faith in man and in the American system. They’ll praise me and they’ll feel good about me. I salute them all with just one more drink. (Oh, let my hand not rattle the neck of the bottle on the glass.)
Oh, God, keep me out of trouble today.
Every bureaucracy had its Monroes. The British did. So did the Russians. And the French. Affable, well-intentioned, filled with goodwill and with a gift of charm often given to the weak. But unable to make things work. Could never throw a football. Never catch a pass. Never get the school newspaper out on time. Always missing planes. Nodding off at meetings. Yet clinging like a limpet in the heaviest sea.
His glance said it all as he stepped past McCall. “In here? Ah, I see.” He was the kind of man who decorates himself with others’ feathers.
He sat down in the meeting room, facing the blank screen. “How long does it take?”
“How long do you want it to take?”
“Oh. I don’t know. Ah—let’s see.” He scratched the back of his head, the scholar searching for the answer. The year of the Pelopennesian War? The definition of the ablative absolute? He was baffled by McCall’s question.
McCall sat down across the table. “I understand you are interested in the international arms trade.”
“Oh, yes. Quite right. I’m going on a junket, mainly European capitals. And I need some backgrounding.”
“I see. Have you had any previous experience in the arms trade?”
“Oh, here and there.” Monroe watched the screen expectantly, almost like a child at a matinee.
“I have spent quite a bit of time gathering this material on Brazilian armaments,” McCall said. “I’m giving a talk on it later this month. So what I’m telling you is still confidential.”
“Quite right. Quite right,” Monroe said airily.
McCall commenced his presentation: with slides and overheads, a recitation of Brazilian arms and their effect on world arms and on the domestic arms market.
McCall identified his thesis: An avid student of the U.S. system, Brazil was now a serious, tough competitor to the U.S. arms industry.
It was storming through the worldwide markets with good stuff. Simplified. Equipment that can take rough wear, that can be fixed in minutes with a simple tool by unlettered Third World soldiers. Priced right. Stealing market after market from the complicated, higher-priced American arms.
Brazil was making more than half of all wheeled armored vehicles and selling them to buyers from China to Libya and Surinam; well over three hundred companies in Brazil were making a $3 billion full-course dinner for military customers: jet trainers, military aircraft, military helicopters, small warships, submarines, artillery rockets, cannon—whatever the market wanted.
Over strong U.S. objections, Brazil was also selling nuclear power material. It was Brazil that sold the uranium dioxide to Iraq for its nuclear power plant—the one that so alarmed Israel she sent her jets to destroy it.
Some military specialists doubted that the Persian Gulf War would have been possible without Brazil’s eager arms selling. Brazilian antitank missiles were fired from both sides.
Brazil was carrying arms sales to their logical conclusion: Anyone with the money gets the merchandise. Anyone.
With more and more nations relying on armamen
ts sales to improve their international trade balance, the world was awash in warfare potential. Since it was the United States that had largely shown the way, it was the U.S. that would have to find some means of reducing the threat. Even if it meant reducing its own enormous arms sales abroad. If it could find the will. Before it was too late. If it was not already too late. In the last five years, the potential for warfare around the world had increased twentyfold.
Monroe never asked a question. Didn’t seem unduly alarmed. In the end he said, “I would like to borrow a copy of your White Paper overnight. I’ll return it by messenger in the morning before I leave.”
McCall hesitated and Monroe, with unexpected firmness, picked up the White Paper and saluted McCall with a finger. “Thanks. Much. Big help. Return it tomorrow. Don’t worry. Mum’s the word.”
McCall watched him with contempt.
When McCall came into his office the next morning, the computer had matched its 100,000 names of “watchables” with the 200 names from the Orizaba Hotel guest list. It had isolated three names and they sat neatly stacked in the middle of his computer screen:
1) L. Slane
2) Aubrey Joli
3) Florian Gomez
The computer had also searched its Summary Reports for the name Joli or Jolly, with seven variant spellings. It had found a Summary Report on just one: Aubrey Joli. McCall punched it up on the screen:
() DS/Lon/V182243/580213/PSPT-J137465 Aubrey Joli, British national, b. Liverpool, 09/09/50. No criminal record. Former manager of the Duchess Club casino, London. Subject of three investigations into questionable casino practices, 1978, 1981, 1982. On all three occasions closely interrogated by British casino authorities. Also suspected of connections with organized crime. Once questioned on drug smuggling operations. After scandal at Duchess Club involving four dealers and two known gamblers, Joli voluntarily resigned casino position and vacated his gaming license June 12 last. Same day all charges dropped. Now persona non grata in British casinos. Reported to be working with Los Angeles office of Ampersand Film Productions, London. Application for American visa denied 85/12/12BTR. See also FBI files passim; US Embassy/Lon #R-107-2845 3.
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