Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “But before that inevitability was clear,” said Nick, “where did the first intelligence come from?”

  “Beats me,” said the researcher who’d collated the reported data. “Drugs are an eighty-billion-dollar-a-year business. People pay attention to those kind of dollars.”

  “Money makes the world go round.” Nick frowned. “What about the money in Iran-contra? Close to twenty million dollars. Who got it?”

  “The scandal blew up too soon for giant rake-offs. But markups on weapons and food, consulting fees to PR groups and middlemen, padded expense reimbursements—hell, the cachet of working for the White House: we’ll never know what it was worth to the bad guys.”

  “Or what it cost everybody else,” said Nick.

  He rode the subway to Capitol Hill, his briefcase on his lap. A train wasn’t the place to pour over the fifty pages of fine print in the Iran-Contra Names and Organizations Glossaries he’d photocopied at the Archives.

  A black man in a blue suit and white shirt, attaché case at his side, rode across the aisle from Nick.

  Marketing executive, decided Nick, not sure what that term meant, making up a life story for the man with whom he shared the train. An innocent life story.

  A pretty, eagle-faced woman with strawberry-blond hair chopped off at her shoulders got on at the next stop. She was about forty, with bright blue eyes and inexpensive but jazzy clothes.

  Lobbies for a do-good group, thought Nick. Lefty, but with a sense of humor. No ring, doesn’t look gay, and doesn’t look as if she’d be unloved.

  She didn’t notice Nick.

  Three prep-school teenage girls, backpacks, torn blue jeans, and oh-so-bored faces slumped into the last empty seats on the car. As the train pulled out of the station, they loudly prattled on about how, like, stupid some people were and how, like, stressed they were, ohmyGod. They were each careful to say fuck at least once per rambling paragraph.

  The eagle-faced woman smiled at the girls’ prattle.

  Three bulky construction workers stood in the aisle, their thick arms dangling from the overhead aluminum pole, their blue, plastic hard hats jaunty on sweaty brows.

  The subway clattered through tunnels beneath D.C.’s streets, a train bearing tourists from Indiana and Kyōto. A Chinese nanny with two tow-haired, giggling little girls. Nick wondered what Juanita and his son, Saul, were doing right then. Briefcases outnumbered shopping bags in this car, and a dozen passengers wore ID badges on silver chains around their neck: this was midafternoon on a Friday in a city defined by work.

  Nowhere on the train or the subway platforms did he see a white-haired man in a blue wool topcoat.

  Nowhere did he see private eye Jack Berns.

  He switched subway lines at Metro Center, shouldering through the bustling crowd, jumping through the doors of the next train just as the warning bell dinged and the doors slid closed. He looked around him, saw no one from his old car: the eagle-faced woman must have stayed on the other train.

  A man shaking coins in a McDonald’s Coke cup stood at the top of the escalator that brought Nick above ground. Nick had ridden to the stop near the Capitol so he could walk along Pennsylvania Avenue’s row of bars and restaurants, see the congressional players strolling in the fresh air. The windows of the well-stocked bookstore where his novels were unavailable reflected no one suspicious behind him.

  A woman wrapped in a filthy brown blanket shouted at Nick, “Give me a goddamn quarter!” Nick’s eyes cut through her. She didn’t care. Nick suddenly wished he had all the quarters in the world to give away, the hell if they went for wine or crack cocaine or food for hungry babies.

  Three buzz-saw-haircut young Marines in red shorts and gray T-shirts from the Commandant’s barracks a mile away jogged toward the Capitol. None of the pretty girls on the street cared.

  The block of town houses where Nick had his office was lined with cars, but void of pedestrians. He climbed the five-stair, black-iron porch, put his key in the locked door to the stairs leading up to his office….

  Whirled around: saw nobody on the street.

  Nobody.

  Just static electricity in the air, he told himself.

  His office looked undisturbed. The only message on his machine was from Sylvia, asking him to pick up milk on his way home, signing off with a soft I love you. He remembered musk perfume, chocolate skin, laughed at his flush of unwarranted guilt.

  There was one fresh yellow legal pad left in his stack. He found a pen and took out the photocopied glossaries.

  Jud Stuart had not been annotated by the Archives.

  The alphabetical Names Glossary had biographies ranging from two sentences to four dense paragraphs. Nick looked for common ground between the names and the legends he associated with Jud: Vietnam, Special Forces or other elite military groups, Iran, Chile (What had Jud done in Chile?), Watergate, drug smuggling.

  On the yellow pad he listed the CIA station chief in Beirut who’d been kidnapped and tortured to death, but not the American journalist snatched from that same city. Hostages were the rationale behind the Iran half of the scandal the glossary covered, but Nick didn’t associate Jud with random victims.

  A CIA agent who’d been tarred by an arms scandal made Nick’s list, as did a retired Air Force colonel who formed a host of companies to get contra supply contracts. Two Iranian arms dealers made the list: maybe Jud had known them during his mission to the Shah’s regime. An American rancher in Costa Rica who’d been linked to the contras and later fled that country’s narcotics cops made the list, as did an admiral who worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the same group that in Watergate had been implicated in the military spy ring in the White House. Nick logged the name of a food store magnate, Vietnam veteran, ex–Klu Klux Klansman who founded a private mercenary group that worked with the secret White House team and sent “missionary-mercenaries” to aid the contras.

  A handful of Cuban Americans made the list, mostly members of right-wing groups or veterans of the 2506 Brigade.

  A CIA agent with service in Laos and involvement with a now-imprisoned Task Force 157 renegade caught Nick’s attention, as did a retired American general who’d consulted on covert warfare training and Iran, formed companies to sell the contras guns. Nick wrote down the name of an ex-major in England’s most elite commando unit who’d organized a mission that in 1985 blew up a Nicaraguan military depot and a hospital.

  Many of the men on Nick’s list had code names; many of them had won fame as criminals in the scandal—admirals, generals, White House aides, military officers, high-rolling political money men, and Iranian arms dealers: guilty of charges such as tax fraud, lying to Congress, destroying government property, bribery, and conspiracy.

  Distilling the Names Glossary took Nick two hours. He picked up the Organizations Glossary.

  Twelve pages of tightly packed paragraphs on about a hundred organizations, from air transport companies and airlines to CIA proprietaries. From the CIA to a half dozen conservative, taxexempt foundations and committees that had raised millions of dollars for the contras, sometimes spending it on things such as illegally smearing American congressmen. A handful of Swiss banks made the glossary, as did shell corporations used to sell weapons secretly to the anti-American government of Iran and turn the profits back into the contra war or to other secret operations.

  Complexity aids concealment, thought Nick. Had Jud taught him that maxim or had he thought of it himself?

  Nick rubbed his eyes, checked his watch: almost time to go home. He didn’t know how to categorize the organizations.

  The afternoon light through his bay windows was gray, like a stream in a steel town. He looked out at the rooftops and budding trees of the world’s most successful democracy.

  Saw no one in the street below.

  But he felt naked. Exposed. Watched. The sensation was so strong it felt like an unseen train bearing down on him; a train he was on, a subway.

  In his car, none of the other pas
sengers had faces.

  LOVESICK HEART

  Wes spent three days healing.

  Beth was there when he woke up Friday; even when she wasn’t in the room, he felt her presence, her soothing touch; smelled her skin, her hair.

  “I expected our first weeks in bed to be a little different than this,” she said as she sat on his bed the morning after he’d returned. She held his plate of scrambled eggs. An ice pack rested on his leg.

  “They will be,” he said.

  “Just so you’re around for them.” Her eyes went to the window; came back, took in his pale, bruised face.

  Wes brushed her cheek with his fingertips.

  “The papers say peace has broken out,” she said, “but you came back to me wounded. I don’t know why or for what. The uniform I can take—hell, you don’t know how bad I want semper fi, always faithful. True. Maybe I can handle all of it, even if you had to go … If it were stopping Hitler, we’d do it together.”

  “I don’t think the Commandant would allow that.”

  “Fuck the Commandant, I don’t love him!”

  The sky opened up for Wes. He cupped her face in his hands, felt her tears running over his fingers and whispered, “I love you, too!”

  She buried her face in his neck and whispered, “What are you doing? What is this? Why are you hurt?”

  “One time,” he said, “a onetime thing. Then it’s over.”

  She leaned back, her eyes wet and happy, scared. “What?”

  “I have to find something out. Do something.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Don’t do it,” she said. “Don’t die. It isn’t right.”

  “I won’t die. Believe me: especially now, I won’t die.”

  “Yeah, look at you, you’re doing so well.” She sniffled.

  “Honey, I chose the Corps to do what should be done. That’s what I want to do with my life. Be part of the solution. Make sure that … my folks, my nephews … you: make sure you’re safe. Make things work. I can’t leave that to chance or not pick up my share of that responsibility. I’m part of the right team, and I’m also my own player. I went after the big leagues. If you’re going to play, go all the way. This … mission: that’s what it is.

  “I didn’t define the battle, but I can’t walk away like it isn’t there. I can’t leave it for someone else to do.”

  “Why you?”

  “It’s my trail. My jungle.”

  Someone knocked on his front door.

  She left the bedroom. He heard Greco ask for him and Beth introduce herself. Greco told her his first name. Wes covered the ice pack and tried to look better. She led Greco into the bedroom.

  “There’s coffee on the stove,” she told Greco, whose face was polite. “If you two want some.”

  To Wes, she said, “I’ve got some calls I have to make.”

  She kissed him lightly, worry in her touch, left the apartment.

  “Who is she?” asked Greco.

  “Beth’s …” Wes grinned. “Somebody special.”

  “She lives across the hall?”

  Wes nodded.

  “That’s convenient. How long you known her?”

  “All my life,” said Wes.

  “Old friends,” said Greco, pulling up a chair, “they’re the best. You remember that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Your subject didn’t surface so far,” said NIS’s head counterspy. “I can keep my boys scouting for another seven hours before it starts to smell. After that, you’re in luck.

  “You ever hear of the Gs?” asked Greco.

  Wes shook his head.

  “FBI runs ’em. The Special Support Group, SSGs. Civil servant contractors. Too fat or short or too-thick glasses to qualify as agents, but they want to play. They get paid shit. Get surveillance school, camera school, work case-by-case contract. No busts, no guns, no glory. Budget savers on surveillances. Plus they’re harder to spot. Bad guys don’t suspect fat old ladies.

  “They can’t work for private concerns. In slack times, the Bureau lets other agencies use them, if they pay the bill.”

  Greco shrugged. “Your NIS loan-out to CIA is legit: shaky but sanctioned. I made some calls. The Bureau’s got Gs in L.A. they ain’t using. One of ’em’s Seymour, who I’ve used. He can pull together what you need. If you can pay the bill.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “If you can pay the bill,” said Greco. His tone was flat. He handed him the G’s phone number. “My agents can get Seymour copies of that driver’s license photo within the hour.”

  “There’s some photos in my suit jacket hanging on the chair,” said Wes.

  Greco found the pictures. Though not certain of their worth, on principle he asked, “You secure these like that?”

  “Turns out that was the safest place.” Wes tore a piece of medical tape from a spool by the bed, stuck it over Nick Kelley in the Polaroid of the writer sitting beside Jud Stuart.

  “The guy in this Polaroid and that café surveillance photo is the primary target,” said Wes. “Could you wire copies of those photos to Seymour? Your guys, too. They spot the motorcycle man, they’re to stick with him, but if they have to choose, cover the primary target.”

  Greco rubbed his thumb across the tape on the picture.

  “How many roads must a man go down, huh?” he mimicked out of a song Wes hadn’t thought the counterspy would know.

  “I need to go to the firing range tomorrow,” said Wes.

  “I’d keep horizontal for a few more days.” Greco shrugged. “You can break it in on Monday.”

  “I’ll be gone, then. Out of town.”

  Greco stared at the man in the bed.

  “Don’t worry,” said Wes. “No big deal.”

  “Don’t jerk my chain,” said Greco.

  “I’m not going to the combat zone.”

  “You taking her?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s the combat zone.”

  After Greco left, Wes called Seymour the G in L.A.

  “Man, are you good news!” said Seymour. He had a nasal voice. “Between glasnost and Graham-Rudman budgets we ain’t been working a lot. This isn’t narco, is it? My people say no to drugs.”

  “No,” Wes told him, shifting in his Washington bed.

  “Or gang-bangers. Too many shotguns and AK-47s.”

  “No street gangs. Strictly fed S.O.P.”

  “Beautiful. Covering six square blocks in Westwood, two guys, motorcycle, locate and surveil, full-time press.”

  Seymour tapped a pocket calculator.

  “You need two guys at thirty dollars an hour per, twenty-four-hour coverage, equals fourteen forty. Make it fifteen hundred to cover expenses. Two fifty more a day for vehicles and radios—I get a discount from the rental folks because I only take dirty cars.” Seymour laughed. “If you issue radios, we don’t have to rent.”

  “Rent,” said Wes.

  “I got a guy in Torrance. Figure forty an hour for me and my backup at control center—we’ll use my apartment, no cost. Ten bucks an hour extra for us because we’re field commanding, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “My backup lives with me, so the radio and phones are covered even when I’m in the tub. Don’t worry about any inspector general crying nepotism: we ain’t married. Figure we’ll give you a flat sixteen hours for the two of us on full-time—fair?”

  “Fair.”

  “Man, you’re great! No committees, no Request for Proposals. Did you process the authorization papers yet?”

  “They’re in the works,” lied Wes. Greco would help him create legitimizing documents. “But you’ll probably be off-line before the paper comes through.”

  “Ain’t it the way? So we got six hundred and forty dollars a day for me and mine.”

  “Keep all the receipts, work up documentation for—”

  “Man, I bury paper pushers like you wouldn’t believe!”

 
“I hope so,” said Wes.

  “If you really are the solo center of this, get a portable cellular phone.”

  “I will.”

  “So, our end will run Uncle two thousand three hundred and ninety dollars a day. Are we on?”

  “I’ll FedEx a cash advance of ten thousand today.”

  “Cash? You’re too good to be true!”

  Wes asked Beth to take the sealed envelope to the Federal Express office. She didn’t mind; kissed him good-bye.

  He got out of bed, gingerly stretched his long body. Everything ached, but his leg could hold his weight as long as he was careful. He looked in the bathroom mirror. The bruises on his face were losing their color, the swelling was going down. His unshaven skin was pale, and the old shrapnel scar looked like a jagged brown tattoo line. He found a baseball in his closet, took it back to bed with him, and squeezed it as he made phone calls.

  At the CIA, Noah Hall was out. Mary, the Director’s personal secretary was unavailable, as was Director Denton.

  At NIS, the commander agreed to issue Wes credentials authorizing him to carry a concealed firearm on federal business. Questions echoed in the commander’s voice, but the man didn’t ask.

  Wes slept most of that afternoon. When he woke up, his headache was gone, though his body still ached. Beth cooked him dinner, helped him bathe, changed his bandages. She slept beside him. They were both careful not to say the word love again.

  Caution returns, thought Wes. But he felt curiously free, happy for the risk while terrified at his exposure.

  He was out of bed the next morning before Beth woke up, coffee made, paper half-read, a healthy smile on his face. He sent her off to her job, then dressed and drove to NIS headquarters to pick up his weapons permit. At the NIS firing range, a husky instructor who served on the terrorist takedown team and protective services detail spent an hour working with Wes.

  The Marines had taught Wes how to handle a pistol in uniformed combat; the NIS instructor worked with him on plainclothes street technique: hip holster and FBI draw, the Weaver stance. Wes squeezed off his box of practice rounds, started good, got better. His left leg could hold its share of weight; his ribs hurt, but he swallowed aspirins and ignored the pain. The pistol felt good in his hand: bucking, roaring, slamming lead into the world with each squeeze of Wes’s finger.