Nature of the Game

by James Grady

  “Where else can I go? What else can I do? Besides, they don’t know when I’m coming. They don’t know I know who he is.”

  “Who is he?” asked Nick. “What can he give you?”

  “I can see him,” was Jud’s answer.

  “Meet the Marine,” said Nick. “Wes Chandler. He’ll do it by your rules. Talk to him. Let him help you—help us.”

  “He’s one of them,” said Jud. “Even if he’s not lying to you, he’s one of them. He could be the Erasureman.”

  “The what?”

  “When they want to clean up a problem, erase it, hit somebody, they have a meeting, a chat with Dr. Gunn, who’s the expert. Then they send the Erasureman.” The growl that always chilled Nick’s blood came into Jud’s voice. “I ought to know.”

  “He’s not the Erasureman,” whispered Nick. “If he were, he would have sat on me until you showed. He knew you’d come to me. He’d have had people on the house. He’d have … finished by now.”

  Jud’s hand trembled as he touched the stubble around his dry mouth. He licked his lips. Maybe Nick would give him a drink.

  “It’s not one big them,” said Nick. “I know who your ‘he’ is. So does Wes Chandler.”

  “What?” Jud’s hand rattled the coffee cup and saucer.

  “Varon,” said Nick. “General Varon.”

  Jud couldn’t keep the truth off his face.

  “He’s not God,” said Nick. “He’s not invincible or invisible.”

  “Who told you? Who broke security?”

  “He did,” said Nick. “When he started serving himself.”

  “He knows? The Marine?”

  “Yes. And he’s finding out more.” Nick leaned across the table and grabbed his friend’s arm.

  “It’s coming apart,” he said, “the whole damn thing. Your only chance is to come in. Chandler’s cutting a deal for you with the CIA.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  Jud stood. This octagonal, bay-windowed dining room with its lace curtains and shiny mahogany table, its china cabinet and paintings, this house in a quiet suburban neighborhood: everything whirled around him. He caught his balance, saw the door to the kitchen, the refrigerator, and he was there, finding two bottles of Peruvian beer. He chugged half of one. The cold, tangy shock cleared his eyes. He walked back to the living room, a bottle in each hand.

  He leaned against the doorjamb, finished the first bottle in a long swig.

  “When is he doing this deal?” asked Jud.

  “He’s there now.”

  “Shit.” He tossed the empty bottle into an open trash can in the kitchen. Two points, he thought as the beer warmed his stomach, hit his blood.

  “With who?” he asked. “The hack the President put in?”

  “No. With General Cochran, the number two. The pro.”

  “Shit.” This third time the expletive was a drawl, not a whine. “Billy C. When he was at NSA and the Chiefs …”Jud shook his head. “A deal: Billy C. knows how to deal.”

  “My phones are hot,” said Nick. “Varon’s people. But we don’t think he has many. When Wes makes the deal, he’ll call and—”

  “I’ll be gone.”

  “You can’t run forever!”

  “I’m done running,” said Jud.

  “Come with me,” said Nick. “To Wes.”

  “I’m done with deals, too.”

  “You put me in this,” said Nick. “You owe it to me.”

  The last one, thought Jud. Nick’s the last one left.

  “Okay,” he said. “I owe you. I’ll see your Marine. After Varon.”

  “That’s not—”

  “That’s the only way!” snapped Jud. “I don’t give a damn about any deal with the CIA! What can they give me? Can they sew Lorri’s wrists back up? Make Nora alive again? Give me back everything I fucked up and heal every fucking I’ve gotten?

  “Don’t you get it? If I don’t do it myself, face him myself, it’s all their game, and I’m a waste, all for nothing.”

  “You do that, he’ll … You can’t …”

  Jud shrugged. “Besides, if he’s still got some sanction and I go around him, I’m the traitor.”

  “You know he’s not legit.”

  “None of us were ever legit.”

  “Don’t,” said Nick.

  Jud smiled. “I love you like a brother.”

  “Then treat me like one and trust me.”

  “You, I trust. But this isn’t about you.” Jud winked. “Don’t worry: he can’t beat me.”

  “He can kill you.”

  “No, he can’t,” said Jud.

  The doorbell rang.

  The dog barked.

  Sylvia’s footsteps sounded on the stairs; Saul’s laughter came closer.

  The dog charged the front door.

  The doorknob turned….

  Nick and Jud raced to the front hall. Nick snatched his backpack off the floor, clawed at its straps as he saw Sylvia coming down the stairs, Saul in her arms, as the door swung open….

  “Hola!” called Juanita, hurrying in from the rain. “Sylvia! Soy …

  “Me,” she said, slipping into English as she saw Nick. The dog licked her hand. Nick waved Jud back.

  “My cousin told me you called,” said Juanita, the worry clear on her face.

  “Take Saul,” said his mother, pulling a yellow rain poncho over the baby’s head, pulling the hood’s drawstrings tight, kissing his forehead. “Por la noche.”

  “Sylvia,” whispered Nick, “what are you …”

  “What I have to,” she said.

  Juanita saw Jud’s shadowed hulk backing into the dining room, whispered, “Señora, tu quieres la policía?”

  “No,” said Nick.

  “Gracias, no,” said Sylvia.

  Juanita looked at her friends, the parents of her amorcito. She hugged Sylvia. More shyly, she hugged Nick.

  The parents knelt, kissed their perplexed child, held him, and made their good-byes gentle. Juanita shouldered a diaper bag.

  “It’s okay,” said the Mommy, “you’re going to be fine, baby baby boy. Mommy and Daddy love you. We’ll see you soon.”

  Saul grinned: he liked going in the car.

  Sylvia cried as Juanita led the yellow-slickered child into the rain.

  “He’s never been away from us at night,” whispered Nick. “He’ll be so scared.”

  The look Sylvia gave her husband could have frozen the rain. “My baby isn’t going to be in this!”

  Nick put his hand on her shoulder; she was tense, but she didn’t shy away. They closed the door.

  Wandered back into a living room that seemed empty and bitter. Jud waited for them by the mantel with its pictures of Saul in swaddling clothes, Saul taking his first step, Saul getting licked by the dog.

  “What are you going to do?” Sylvia asked them.

  “I’ve got to go see a man,” said Jud. “Then there’s somebody Nick wants me to meet.”

  Outside, the rain fell.

  “How are you going to get there?” asked Sylvia.

  “I’m driving him,” said Nick.

  “What?” Sylvia and Jud said together.

  “Yes,” said Nick.

  “No,” said Sylvia.

  “I can borrow your money, get a cab or—”

  “If you vanish,” said Nick, “I’m who’s left for them.”

  The couple glared at each other.

  Jud coughed. “Look, I don’t have any fresh clothes, but—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Sylvia.

  After she scurried upstairs, Nick told Jud, “Don’t give me any argument.”

  “Okay,” he said, “but I’m in charge.”

  “Bullshit,” said Nick.

  Sylvia came back. “There’s towels and a toothbrush in the first bathroom. Nick’s pants won’t fit you, but one of his aunts sent him a shirt for his fortieth birthday that might. There’s clean socks, underpants a friend of ours left who’s …”

  �
�Big,” said Jud.

  “Soap and shampoo,” she said, her eyes on Nick.

  “Don’t do this to us,” she told her husband when Jud closed the upstairs bathroom door.

  “I’m doing it for us,” said Nick.

  “And what do we get out of it? Widows and orphans?”

  “I fixed that,” said Nick. “Now isn’t the time to explain—”

  “He’s in the shower!”

  “If I get polygraphed, I don’t want to flunk questions about who knows what.”

  “I’m your wife. The lawyer. Polygraphs are always voluntary. Who are you going to be talking to?”

  “Nobody, I hope. This time tomorrow—”

  “Today!” She choked down a sob. Fear overcame anger, and she slid into his arms, crying. “My baby’s gone and you’re doing something stupid you won’t tell me about, and I can’t—”

  “Shh” he whispered. “Shh. It’ll be all right.”

  “Says who?”

  “I’m just giving him a ride, then turning him over to a guy I know. An official who—”

  “Who better get rid of him for us!”

  Nick turned her face up to his. “Who’ll do the right thing. And then we’re out of it. Clean. I promise you.”

  “That’s what you mean. You can’t always be right.”

  “This time I am,” he said.

  A thousand thoughts swirled through her, but she could only hold him close, sob, and tell him she loved him.

  Jud coughed before he walked down the stairs. A snapbuttoned, cowboy printed shirt strained across his chest and belly.

  “My blue Gore-Tex mountaineering coat should fit you,” said Nick. He found that coat in the closet, switched his sports jacket for a dark red nylon windbreaker.

  “We might not be back until tomorrow morning,” Nick told his wife, certain that he’d be home by midnight but not wanting to terrify her if he wasn’t.

  “No problem,” said Jud.

  “For you,” snapped Sylvia, then instantly regretted it.

  “The phones,” said Nick, and he remembered he had to call his homicide cop, clear the Union Station meeting alert and set him up for this move. “Don’t say anything on them.”

  Sylvia’s red-streaked face paled.

  “What is this?” she whispered.

  “Just a road trip,” said Nick. “A couple of guys.”

  Jud emptied the blue Gore-Tex raincoat’s pockets of all pieces of paper, all traces of the coat’s owner.

  “Where are you going?” said Sylvia.

  “Better you don’t know,” said Jud.

  “Damn you both,” she whispered.

  “We could use a map,” said Jud.

  “There’s one in the study,” said Nick, leading the way up the stairs, around the corner; leaving Sylvia in the hall.

  She waited until they were out of sight, then quickly tiptoed up the stairs. Pressed against the wall, she heard their voices murmur.

  Jud: “… there once. Off Route Fifty by Annapolis …”

  Nick: “… dozen exits.”

  Jud: “Multiple … remember multiple … Four Twenty-four. Highway Four Twenty-Four.”

  She heard the map being folded.

  Sylvia raced down the stairs, made it to the couch in the living room in time for them to see her rise from it. As if I’d been sitting there, waiting, she thought.

  Jud looked at her, shook his head. “Guess the best thing you can hear from me is good-bye.”

  He walked out into the rain.

  Nick’s arms held her tight. “I love you. I’ll be back.”

  And then he left, too.

  Rush hour in the rain. By the time they got to the Beltway, the cars were bumper to bumper at thirty miles per hour, a chain of yellow headlights crawling over a mirrored highway. They’d taken Nick’s four-door family Jeep. Their windows were open to keep the windshield unfogged. The wipers beat a quick-march cadence.

  “You’ve never met Varon?” said Nick.

  “No. Made sense. Security, need to know. Deniability.”

  “There’s some documents in my knapsack,” said Nick.

  Jud found the revolver, stared at his writer friend.

  “We took it off the guy at Union Station,” said Nick. “You better take it.”

  The gun was a familiar weight in Jud’s hand.

  “No,” he said.

  Jud scanned the Archives documents. “The Marine knows all this?”

  “Yes.” Nick put on his left blinker, eased into a lane where the cars crawled faster. “He says you know you can trust him because of the desert, when he could have killed you but didn’t.”

  Jud’s eyes floated beyond the windshield.

  “Tell me,” said Nick. Before, he wouldn’t have pushed.

  “Dean.”

  “Shit,” said Nick, another notch on his conscience.

  “You did what you had to do,” said Jud. “We all set it up. Dean pushed it over the edge.”

  The windshield wipers thumped for half a mile. Tears streaked Jud’s cheeks.

  “What happened in the desert?” asked Nick.

  Jud shook his head, wiped his eyes. “I say what I did, it’s all over. Give something a name, you die with it.”

  “What about Dean?” asked Nick.

  “If the Marine made it, Dean didn’t.”

  A passing truck splashed water over the Jeep.

  “You know the ultimate truth about us?” said Jud.

  Nick drove, waited.

  “You always wanted to be me,” said Jud. “A spy, a tough guy like in one of your books. Out there, on the line. Dark knight for a good cause. Dangerous.”

  And Jud laughed. “What romantic bullshit.”

  “And I always wanted to be you,” Jud added. “A straight fuck who was his own somebody. Who people knew. Picket-fence parents, clean hands, easy sleep, a wife, a kid … A life.”

  “And you for a friend,” said Nick.

  “I targeted your ass.” There was ice in Jud’s words; warmth, too. “My mission was to tag your columnist boss’s sources. You were there. You wrote a novel about my world, were a journalist, had some legal immunity. I profiled you, folded you in … I thought you would be my—”

  “Your redeemer,” interjected Nick. “That I’d write something because of knowing you and that would redeem you.”

  “You’ve thought about it, too?”

  “No,” said Nick.

  They laughed.

  Jud shook his head. “You were my confessor. And I taught you about hell. But you never got your wish, Mr. Dangerous. Congratulations.”

  They rode in silence for a moment.

  “Neither did I,” said Jud.

  “Is that what you want?” said Nick. “Straight life?”

  “I gave up wanting the impossible in Nebraska,” said Jud.

  “Then what?” asked Nick. “You can’t stay in this life. You lost your stomach for it. If spy games don’t kill you, the booze will. Both are shit ways to go. What do you want?”

  Jud said nothing for ten miles.

  “All these years,” Nick finally asked him. “How much of what you told me was true?”

  “I don’t know,” Jud honestly answered.

  They followed Nick’s headlights and the compass of Jud’s memory. The map lay between them. Their route circled D.C. toward Annapolis. Traffic was thick as commuters shuttled along the Washington-Annapolis-Baltimore corridor. Exit 424 was a two-lane state highway through cornfields and groves of trees. This land held too many houses with twinkling lights to be pure country, too few homes to be suburbia or a town of its own.

  Their rearview mirror was empty.

  “You’re sure you know the way?” said Nick. If they got lost, he could convince Jud to turn around; link up with Wes.

  “There’s a bar up ahead somewhere.”

  The white lines in the road arced to the left. A red neon light glowed along the road a mile beyond the curve.

  “We’re not sto
pping to drink,” said Nick.

  “Just a landmark.”

  They whooshed by the tavern, where four cars were parked.

  “What do you want from Varon?” said Nick. When Jud didn’t answer, Nick said, “What if he’s not there?”

  “He’s got nowhere else to go either,” said Jud.

  “We could …,” began Nick, and then he caught Jud’s stare. Nick sighed, said, “No, I guess we couldn’t.”

  “Up there,” said Jud. “Turn left at that general store.”

  Later, they went left again, then again, and then a right that Jud decided was a mistake. They backtracked to the preceding intersection, made a left off their original route.

  The compass on Nick’s Velcro watchband spun.

  This road was only two lanes and erratically striped. At every intersection, Jud made Nick slow the car to a crawl while he peered through the rain and darkness.

  “Here,” Jud finally said. “I remember that basketball court where the streetlight is shining down on the road.”

  A battered green road sign read AULDEN DRIVE. They left paved highway for its bumpy gravel path.

  “It’s a straight shot,” said Jud. “Down this road maybe four, five miles. The house is on the right. There’s a mailbox.”

  The path was a tunnel through swaying sycamore trees; their bark shone black and pale gray in Nick’s headlights. Shadows of pines and scrub brush waved behind the sycamores. Rain fell through wisps of fog.

  “The Chesapeake Bay is close,” said Nick. “When I was in fifth grade, we had to trace it over and over for history.”

  “Stop,” said Jud.

  A mailbox stood sentry by the road. Nick braked the car, turned off his headlights. The wipers kept up their heartbeat. He pushed the button, and his electric window slid down. The air was cool, damp, smelled green and wet and gravelly. The rain in the forest sounded like a thousand rushing streams.

  Through the woods, Nick saw the glow of house lights. A chipped-rock driveway led toward the house in the trees.

  “It’s about a hundred feet off the road,” said Jud. “The trees have grown up around here. I’ll hump it in. You go home, I’ll—”

  “No,” said Nick. “We have a deal.”

  “I’ll keep it,” insisted Jud. “But you’re not coming with me—that would be stupid. When I’m done, I’ll call a cab or—”

  “A cab? That’s stupid! Cabs don’t—”

  “Go home, Nick,” said Jud. “You’ve done enough.”