Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “What did Hopkins do for 157?”

  “Says radioman. When he was assigned there, we backgrounded him, along with the FBI. Flying colors. Except.”

  “Except?”

  “Except there’s a request in our files for us to do another check on him, real deep and real tight. Hopkins still came up squeaky-clean.”

  “Why the second check?”

  “Ask the guy who requested it.” Greco gave Wes a piece of paper. “Ted Davis. Retired commander. A mustang who came up through the ranks, did every kind of job before running ops for 157. Davis’s good people. He’ll be at that bar at three-thirty.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Ted’s a friend of mine. Even if he weren’t, only a fool would fuck with him.”

  Wes stuffed the manila envelope in his briefcase.

  “Looks like you’re starting to pack a load, Marine.”

  “Odds and ends,” answered Wes.

  The old hand of NIS looked around the neighborhood. A decade earlier, this had been the border of the ghetto. Now, affluent professionals were taking over the town houses.

  “I won’t ask what you’re doing for the boys across the river,” said Greco, “but don’t let ’em cut you loose in deep water.”

  “I can swim.”

  “As raggedy ass as you’re looking this morning, I doubt you can even float.”

  The two men laughed.

  “I worked late,” said Wes. “But at least my hair is close to regulation, not some gray rope dangling over my ears.”

  “That’s the point,” answered Greco.

  “What?”

  “When I was policing St. Lou, a junkie bit off my right ear. Wear my hair long, I look like a stubby old man who don’t know the hippies are dead. Easy to forget a guy like that.”

  The Navy counterspy dropped Wes off at his car. Wes got out, asked, “What happened to the junkie?”

  “I beat the dog shit out of him,” said Greco.

  Wes checked his watch after Greco drove away: 10:30. The wind stirred dead leaves and paper trash in the gutter. A pay phone hung on the wall of a Veterans of Foreign Wars bar next to the Squash Club.

  Don’t cross that line until you have to, he thought.

  The Martin Luther King Library in downtown Washington had three novels by Nick Kelley. The face in the latest book’s flap-jacket picture was an older version of the black-haired man sitting next to Jud Stuart in the snapsnot Wes had stolen in L.A.

  “Shit,” Wes whispered.

  He found a bank of pay phones in the library corridor. He got an answering machine when he dialed Jack Berns’s number. Wes left no message. He checked his watch: 11:15. Maybe the private eye was at an early lunch. Wes checked out the Nick Kelley novels.

  The wind had grown stronger outside the library. Black clouds rolled across the gray sky. A vendor at an umbrellaed aluminum cart sold Wes two hot dogs and a cup of metallic coffee.

  “Gonna rain,” said the vendor as he made Wes’s change.

  “Better get inside,” said Wes.

  “Ain’t my job, man.”

  “No shit,” answered Wes.

  The Marine carried his lunch to a marble bench in front of the library. The vendor watched his coat-and-tied, trench-coated customer sit down to eat. Shook his head and grinned.

  One of the books was Flight of the Wolf. Wes remembered the movie. The other two novels were not about spies. While he was reading the inside jacket of the latest novel, a glob of mustard fell from his hot dog and stained the book.

  “Damaging public property,” he told the wind. He shook his head, unfastened the book’s plastic protective sheath, and tore the three-year-old photograph of Nick Kelley from the cover.

  His mother had preached that the journey to hell was made one small step at a time.

  At a pay phone not far from the vendor, Wes called Jack Berns. Again got the answering machine, again left no message.

  Not quite noon. He was halfway between his apartment and the bar where he had a rendezvous in three hours. A pellet of cold rain hit his face. The Freer Gallery where Beth worked was almost a mile away. The mammoth gray-stoned National Museum of Fine Arts was across the street. They’d have pay phones in there.

  For half an hour, Wes wandered through corridors of abstracts and surrealists. When he found a pay phone by the rest room, got Berns’s machine, he left the pay phone number.

  As Wes waited by the pay phone, a blue-uniformed museum policeman walked past once, walked past twice, casually checking out the strange man loitering by the men’s room.

  The phone rang. Wes answered it.

  “Wes!” Jack Berns’s voice sounded as if he were in an aluminum barrel. “Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m at a pay phone.”

  “I’m in my car. Ain’t technology great? I can retrieve your message and call you back, drive and check out chicks, all at the same time. Get a car phone. Portable plus almost impossible to intercept. I can get you a deal, Noah will love it.”

  The museum cop strolled past Wes.

  “Phones are what I’m calling about,” said Wes.

  “Uh-huh.”

  The museum cop was ten paces gone.

  “The writer you know. He has a home. And an office.”

  “Nick Kelley. You want tapes on his lines? Or just long-distance records, from that date to when: now?”

  “Not the first,” said Wes. “Just a list of who and where and when.”

  “How ’bout if I see if I can find out why?”

  “Just do the job I’m paying you for. When can I have it?”

  “I’m on the Fourteenth Street bridge. There’s the Pentagon—want me to wave for you? Nah, they ain’t your boys no more. I’ll be home in twenty. I can get it for you by the time you get there.”

  The museum smelled musty and cool. Footsteps and whispers echoed down marble corridors, and Wes felt a tingle of invisible electricity.

  “Berns, did you already do this?”

  “Hey, I’m just an order follower.”

  In the black and white swirls of a canvas mounted not far from where he stood, Wes saw a twisted figure. Screaming.

  “Raining like a son of a bitch out here,” said Berns.

  “What’ll this cost?” said Wes.

  “Don’t worry: you got the budget.”

  The connection broke off. The museum cop stood at the end of the corridor, watched Wes walk toward him.

  “Small steps,” Wes said to the cop.

  “Have a nice day, sir.” The cop’s eyes burned holes in Wes’s back all the way to the door.

  The rain had stopped by the time Wes arrived at the bar in Arlington. He parked his car in the broken-pavement lot next door, checked his watch. He was twelve minutes early.

  The four other cars in the lot were empty.

  As he walked into the bar, Wes glanced across the street. A bristle-headed man sat in a car parked outside a dress shop.

  The only people in the bar were the man in a white shirt and black vest who was polishing glasses and a woman in her fifties playing on the bar’s TV. Wes carried a beer to a dark table.

  The bristle-headed man entered the bar at exactly three-thirty. He walked to Wes’s table, stuck out his right hand.

  “How you doing, Wes? Ted Davis.”

  The bartender brought Davis a clear iced drink.

  “Glad to do Frank a favor,” Davis told Wes after hearing his thanks. He smiled. “You one of Billy’s boys?”

  “Billy?” asked Wes.

  “General Billy Cochran.”

  Wes hesitated; remembered Greco’s warnings.

  “I’m working for the number one out there. And only for this.”

  Ted Davis nodded, took a pull from his drink.

  “You requested a special backgrounder on a radioman who worked for Task Force 157 from 1970 to 1972,” Wes said. “Mathew Hopkins.”

  “I remember him.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do I remember him or
why did I do what I did?”

  “Both.”

  “We ran our own show,” said Ted. “Picked Hopkins off a short list the Navy gave us. We had our own como system, separate from everybody—and secure. Encrypting machines smaller than your briefcase, radios, you name it.”

  “So Hopkins handled message traffic. Any one area?”

  “Normally, radiomen rotated. They got stuff as it came, not by area or op. A good radioman doesn’t notice what comes out of his encoding machine, once he gets it in plain text. He follows the procedure for that message, goes on to the next one.”

  “Normally,” said Wes. “What about Hopkins?”

  “He smoked too much.”

  “What?”

  “He smoked too much. That’s why I noticed him. Plus.”

  “Plus?”

  “When Kissinger snuck into China, he didn’t trust anybody. Sure as shit not State. Not CIA. He got the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs to loan him the most secure communications system the U.S. had, one even the Chiefs didn’t control: us.”

  “We’re talking when?”

  “About 1971.”

  “And Hopkins …?”

  “Remember the rotation system. And remember como wasn’t my billet. I was ops. But I was between gigs, being useful. I happened to check the como logs. Noticed Hopkins had been swapping duty times quite a bit. Worked out so he always had duty when Kissinger had China shit in the pipeline.”

  “And he smoked too much,” said Wes.

  “Frank told me you’re a cherry,” said Davis. “You take a few more tricks after this one, you’ll meet some guy in the trade who’s convinced The Bad Joes are targeting him. The guy swears he knows about clearances and ops that nobody else knows.

  “You can tell by the paranoia,” explained Davis. “A good op makes the right moves, but he doesn’t live in fear. The Bad Joes want to hit you, you’re dog meat, so you just accept that. Don’t be stupid, but don’t psyche yourself out. A paranoid is either an op man who’s been too long in the field or too long in his head—or an analyst with a wild imagination. Guy like that, they start doing things, seeing things. Big things.”

  “Hopkins wasn’t an op or an analyst, but you thought he was crazy.”

  “That was one possibility. The Kissinger-China stuff, the too much smoking, I could fit crazy into that profile. ‘Course, Kissinger was global politics. Lot of people cared about it.”

  “So Hopkins could have been a spy.”

  “A spy in the spies. Best place to have one.”

  “Was there any other evidence?”

  “There never was any evidence of anything.”

  “You eased him out of 157,” guessed Wes.

  Davis laughed. “Maybe Hopkins was right to be paranoid.”

  “Can you tell me anything else about him?” asked Wes.

  “Anything else, he’ll have to tell you,” said Davis. “Where is he now?”

  Greco didn’t tell him, thought Wes; said, “Out West.”

  The retired spy grunted. Their glasses were empty.

  “Was Jud Stuart ever assigned to Task Force 157?” asked Wes. “An Army guy. Probably loaned out as an operative.”

  “Nobody by that name with us. We didn’t get loan-outs from the Army.”

  “How about in another group? Anybody have other off-the-books groups?”

  “You are a cherry. Sure, there were other off-the-books groups. Army had some before they put together the Activity and got into funny-money trouble a few years back—they should have come to us for advice. CIA runs some. Who doesn’t? Ask your Marine buddy Ollie North. If they’re real off-the-books, I wouldn’t know about them. Jud Stuart rings no bells.”

  Wes handed him the picture Jack Berns had taken.

  “Don’t know the face,” said Davis.

  After hesitating, Wes asked, “What happened to you guys?”

  “You know the public legend about Ed Wilson, his crooked deals and how he pissed off a certain admiral?”

  Wes shrugged, nodded.

  “If you want to understand why the Navy got rid of us, the only organization, including the CIA, that was doing secure, productive, legal HUMINT—given that spies are a bunch of thieves and liars and con artists, we weren’t jerking around Americans—then you got to understand our friend General Billy, currently Deputy Director of your team.”

  “He’s Air Force, you were Navy.”

  “Then he was National Security Agency with buddies from his days on the Joint Chiefs. The color of his suit doesn’t matter.”

  “Billy doesn’t just have stars on his shoulders, he’s got ’em in his eyes. First thing he did when he got to be a mucky muck over Air Force Intelligence was have a clean outside phone line wired to his office. Handy to feed reporters tidbits, get some young press hound on the way up, make him your dog. Keep in touch with buddies on the Hill, help a staffer here, a senator there. Create your own legend. With truth wrapped in shadows. Brilliant.”

  “If he’s so brilliant …”

  “He’s a letter opener. His idea of intelligence is clean and bloodless intercepts. Satellites. HUMINT—street men finding out what’s making hearts beat and minds tick—that gets sticky. Sticky gets you trouble, and trouble’s no good for Billy. He’s a ladder climber. Those thick glasses of his must have steamed up when the President named Denton to head the CIA and not him.

  “Lot of people know how to grease skids,” said Davis. “Billy helped woo the best guys out of 157. Suggested replacements. He owned ’em or they were so bad they made the team look bad. When Wilson went renegade, the grease was already laid.

  “Do me a favor,” said Davis.

  “If I can.”

  “Tell Denton that when Billy starts being nice, it’s time to put your back against the wall.”

  Wes made it to Jack Berns’s house while there was still light in the sky. In Berns’s den, Wes studied Nick Kelley’s telephone billing sheets with addresses matched to the numbers. He ruled out the television studio, the publishers, the talent agency. Calls to Michigan to a woman who shared the writer’s name—his mother? Maybe the calls to Wisconsin were to his wife’s family.

  A call from Nick Kelley’s office to a Los Angeles number made nine days after Jud Stuart pushed the CIA panic button caught Wes’s eye: Dean Jacobsen.

  Who the hell was Dean Jacobsen?

  Wes scanned the list again; Dean Jacobsen seemed to be the only unexplainable call. Three and a half minutes, nine days after Jud Stuart had called the CIA.

  “Who’s your source at the phone company?” Wes said, looking at the Xerox copies of billings.

  “Hey: fuck you, Major,” answered Jack Berns. The stubby private eye leaned on his desk. “You got what you want?”

  “I got what I asked for.” Wes yawned. “How much?”

  “Figure five,” answered the private eye.

  “That’s steep.”

  “Cost of doing business.”

  Wes put ten fifty-dollar bills on Berns’s desk.

  “Write me a receipt,” said the Marine.

  “First off, Wes, we’re talking thousands, not hundreds.”

  Sunset broke through the clouds outside; soft waves of pink light flowed through the windows. Wes counted out ten more fifty-dollar bills, dropped them on the desk.

  “That’s twice what it’s worth, probably four times what it cost you.”

  “You’re way out of line here, Major.”

  The private eye glared at his client—who smiled, walked to the wall of law books, and ran his hand over their spines.

  “You think I’m out of line?” said Wes. “I’m an officer of the court. You’ve just given me phone company records, illegally obtained. You’re pushing the good graces of Uncle Sam with one hand, trying to shake him down with the other. I might be out of line working with you, but you’re the one without a safety net.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Doesn’t matter to me.” Wes kept his smile.

 
; “Hey!” said the private eye, spreading his arms wide. “We’re on the same team.” He chuckled. “Maybe you’ll make a businessman after all.”

  “Write me out a receipt, and sign it.”

  With a shake of his head, a patronizing laugh, Berns complied. When he had the document, Wes headed for the door.

  “What next?” Berns yelled after him.

  “I need you, I’ll call.”

  Outside, night had fallen. Wes yawned again.

  Dean Jacobsen. Los Angeles. Could be Jud Stuart’s alias, his hideout; could be Nick Kelley’s college roommate. One call, from a man who knew Jud Stuart to a man in a city where he disappeared. Wes could have Greco or Detective Rawlins run Dean Jacobsen through the computers, but that might draw attention to Wes. Besides, official records had helped very little so far.

  Dealing with a stranger in Los Angeles would be safer than taking a run at Nick Kelley, Washington writer and reporter.

  Wes yawned, started his car. He could catch a red-eye. Get something close to sleep on the plane. Be back in twenty-four hours.

  Maybe Beth would be home. Maybe she’d drive him to the airport.

  SINISTER FORCE

  Friday, June 16, 1972, began as just another muggy, cloudy day in Washington, D.C., for Jud.

  Unbeknownst to him, men who embodied the winds of his life were gathering across the Potomac River at Arlington cemetery for the eleven A.M. funeral of John Paul Vann, a key manager of America’s ongoing Vietnam war.

  Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Edward Lansdale was at the funeral. Lansdale was a CIA saint, the man who’d beaten a communist insurgency in the Philippines in the 1950s, the American intelligence wizard who’d midwifed the creation of South Vietnam.

  Lansdale’s most infamous Vietnam protégé also came to Vann’s funeral: Lucien Conein. Three-fingered Black Luigi. The Dark Prince of Ops. As an Office of Strategic Services agent in World War II, Black Luigi parachuted behind Japanese lines into Vietnam when it was called French Indochina. As a cold war CIA agent, he crafted the bloody coup that overthrew the Diem regime.

  In that year of 1972, Black Luigi retired from the CIA, and President Richard Nixon drafted him to form a secret Special Operations Group within the new Drug Enforcement Agency. Staffed in part by ex-CIA agents, DEA’s SOG worked out of a D.C. safe house, with orders to penetrate international narcotics rings. Rumors claimed that Conein’s people were setting up assassination programs to eliminate drug kingpins. Black Luigi denied such rumors.