AHMM, March 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "So nothing's there?” inquired the leader. Disappointment in his voice said he'd had that spot in mind.

  "Well, we never found the two gold swords again. But I suppose someone else has since.” Tewayn shook his head. “Spring flood. Oh dear, oh dear. You need to think. A silver cow and six golden pigs can't be hidden on a rooftop, you know."

  The tall man let go of his short companion and sat in the spot the other had vacated, wincing a bit but asking, eagerly, “Six golden pigs?"

  The small man muttered something about seat hogs, but Polijn was listening to what seemed to be the grating of stone on stone. She backed toward the stairs. There was only one man to pass.

  Her back thudded against his chest. Polijn raised her shoulders.

  But instead of taking any action against her, the middle man merely tugged at the front of his cap, said “Excuse me,” and moved past her to the bench. The small man had knocked over another skeleton in sitting down, and this had made another seat available.

  "And the treasure is still there,” said the tall man, who liked to have his information confirmed.

  "With those slabs of gold holding it down?” demanded Tewayn, head high. “It took all my men just to move one at a time.” The treasure hunter's breath came in short, quick clouds in the cold air.

  "I'll, uh, just step up for a moment,” murmured Polijn. She glanced toward the stairs, hoping to see a bit of sky, but they were too steep. “No offense meant, but I think..."

  "None taken.” Tewayn waved a hand at her. “I remember the calls of nature, though I can't feel ‘em anymore. Had to plan for that as well, or we'd never have gotten those ivory mice past the Cat Creature. It was when Jareth had to..."

  Polijn shot up the stairs using both hands and feet, hoping there'd still be enough open space to squeeze through. Her head hit the capstone with enough force to make her grateful for all her scarves.

  She moved back a couple of steps and glared at the stone barrier, her mind on those rows of frigid men. Then she eased up slowly, feeling the wall. At a space where it was a bit rough, she braced her hip and shoulder and reached up to try to force a way out. Taking a deep breath of the tomb's air, she shoved at the stone with all the force of shoulders, back, and thighs.

  Spitting snow from her lips, she picked herself out of the imprint of her body she'd made in the landscape. Tewayn had apparently never worried about how easy the tomb might be to open from the inside. Once she was on all fours, she looked around to make sure the circle of stones wasn't falling, or closing in, or anything similarly cataclysmic, and then stood up to breathe the beautifully free, cold air.

  Before she was done admiring the atmosphere, she had taken her bearings on a faint but unmistakable smell of pork and carrots. After a few steps, she found the footprints and retraced her previous trip. Just beyond the circle of stones, she turned to look back.

  She shook her head. The bodies below were not men put to death by the fierce ghost. After listening to Tewayn for a few sentences, Polijn had realized they had died of boredom and the cold, trapped by Tewayn's windy ways and the door that closed above them. She had been wrong there too. The men were free to walk out at any time. Greed had held them in their places until the cold finished them off.

  She pulled her scarf back up over her mouth. They weren't bad men, at least two-thirds of them. She could go back and whisper the secret. But the door, after all, was open, and if they didn't come to their senses as their noses and fingers grew stiff, a word from her wouldn't do it. The best she could do for them, really, was return to the hut, feed the fire, and make sure any stew she left from her own supper didn't burn.

  Polijn nodded to herself and crunched on through the snow. The tall man was correct. You had to go at these problems with a logical mind.

  Copyright (c) 2006 Dan Crawford

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  MARLEY'S PACKAGE by JOHN C. BOLAND

  One doesn't expect intelligence-gathering to share the table with poetry, but Collins was grinning like a wolf with a soft throat in view as he lowered his glass. “'Thou hast betrayed thy secret, as a bird betrays her nest, by striving to conceal it,'” he announced.

  "Oh God,” said his wife.

  "That's in the training manual, isn't it?” said Charles Marley, who recognized the quote, couldn't remember its author, and agreed with its substance.

  "Yes, Longfellow.” Collins sipped his after-dinner drink. “You, Charlie, pretending so hard you haven't been reactivated. Everyone knows you carried the new director's book bag his first few years. Held his milk money. Old Castaneda figures it's your left hand directing the purge."

  "How is Carlos?"

  The joke was too old for either of them to bother smiling. It dated people, their choice of cover names.

  "His wife died, so he's splendid, chasing young Caribbean girls around the retirement home. Dreaming, actually, that the new director might call him back. An assassin in a motorized wheelchair. His mind is good."

  "Not that good, if he believes Popper would call either of us back,” Marley said.

  "'Methinks he doth protest too much,'” Collins said, looking to his wife for applause and obtaining only a grimace.

  "Was that in your stupid training manual too?” she asked.

  * * * *

  Collins, who had left active service in the nineties, had been involved in money-laundering for nearly three years. His CIA pension was adequate, the family home in Cleveland Park was long paid for and had appreciated vastly, his two sons were finished with college and lived far away. But a man in his early fifties needed something to do with the rest of his life—ideally something remunerative. Running black accounts through a downtown bank filled the bill.

  The bank, which was both old-line and political, had been delighted to get him as an officer. The chairman had been a commerce secretary several administrations ago. The board of directors included a law school dean, a retired two-star general, and a former deputy secretary of state, as well as several people who knew something about banking. Another director, a woman who had worked almost thirty years at the agency, had recommended Collins for the new post of senior vice president for overseas investment. She had thought the bank needed a money-laundering officer who could be counted on.

  There were, of course, varieties of money laundering. Collins apparently understood the differences. The bank had to keep its business on the right side of a policy line that was etched in sand. The year Collins signed on, Nigeria was in favor because of its oil reserves and distance from the Persian Gulf. When the Collinses had dinner with Marley, Nigeria had become a disappointment, but Eritrea, whose dictator was forward looking, seemed attractive for its long, porous border with Sudan.

  Collins funneled money into offshore drilling one year and into airport development and gold mining the next. Because the money pipeline was sometimes idle, he worked with private clients as well.

  One of the private clients, Daniel Rash, sold farm equipment throughout the developing world. The small implements measured fifty caliber. The larger ones could plow a tobacco field from the wings of a MiG-23. His business in land mines had fallen off, but the rest was always in demand.

  * * * *

  "Rash isn't one of those dealers you can get into a hotel room, talking for the surveillance camera,” Chick Donaldson said. “Like they say in Hollywood, he's got ‘people.’”

  "What?” said Marley.

  "'People’ who pick up his dry cleaning, that sort of thing. Rash has people who meet the buyers."

  Sitting with his troublesome leg elevated, Marley wondered if the prospective buyers had “people” as well. He wondered if he should hire someone to fetch his dry cleaning. He already had a Russian woman who cleaned his townhouse, most of the rooms of which he didn't use any longer. He could also use someone to cook his meals. He realized he was thinking of looking for another wife, that was where this led, and shut the thought down.

  Donaldson was fiddling with a c
igar that looked all right between his fingers but absurd in his face. You had to have a certain kind of face that could handle a cigar poking out of it, and Donaldson didn't have it. It helped if a smoker showed a little glint of teeth as he puffed.

  "The thing is, we don't want to step on Helen's toes,” Donaldson said.

  Helen was the bank director who had put Collins in place.

  "And we really don't want to shut Rash down,” Donaldson said. He had a Hollywood look, sideswept dark hair, an upturned nose, lobeless ears. There was something androgynous in all that, like the ability he prized in himself of being able to think on several tracks at once, with an utter lack of commitment to any one of them.

  "How friendly are you with the director?” Donaldson asked, and Marley was uncertain whether he had changed the subject.

  "We did a tour in Mexico in the seventies.” It was all in the files, Donaldson would already know.

  "Larry Popper was your best man."

  "That was no favor,” Marley said.

  "You trained him."

  "So I've heard,” Marley said.

  * * * *

  It was, Marley knew, increasingly a world of intermediaries. Someone to haul your dirty clothes. Someone to negotiate stingers for the Congo. Someone like Chick Donaldson to sound out old colleagues.

  Nobody was doing his own business.

  Marley's role, for which he hadn't volunteered, was to be an intermediary between Director Popper and Collins. Or perhaps between Popper and gunrunner Rash.

  It would be too clumsy for Marley to resurrect a friendship with Collins, which had never gone very deep. So he looked among his Washington acquaintances and settled on Melody Aichem, who was middle-aged, single, and involved in the arts. Her late husband had been an analyst at State. She was happy to go to the ballet with Marley, who looked good in a dinner suit and could talk about museum acquisitions. And she wasn't averse when he suggested a candidate for one of her boards. “Sheila Collins. I've known her for years,” he said. “Her husband, who's now a banker, used to work with me."

  Her eyes widened. Bankers’ wives were better catches than the bankers themselves. Wives pointed out to husbands the competitive aspect of donations.

  Melody Aichem brought them together for dinner, and two weeks later, having enjoyed the first meeting, the Collinses invited Charles Marley to their house one evening when, they regretted, Melody wasn't available. Before dinner was over, Collins was calling him “Charlie.” By the time the drinks were half done, they had gotten down to business.

  "You've still got a hand in, Charlie, don't deny it,” Collins said after his recitation of Longfellow.

  "Denying does no good,” Marley complained. “You don't believe the truth. But if I were still active, what would it matter?"

  "It could mean a hundred thousand dollars."

  "To whom?"

  "To you.” Collins was on his feet. To Marley's surprise, Sheila Collins had remained in the room. Her husband tilted a bottle over her glass. “That's your bonus, Charlie. All you have to do is get Director Popper to agree that Tazikstan should have independence, self-government, the blessings of democracy."

  "Shouldn't all God's children?” his wife said.

  "Just the Taziks right now,” Collins said.

  Marley stared for a moment at the crease in his trousers, wondering whose game he was playing. Not his own, certainly. He was seventy-two years old, and he couldn't think of anything to do with a hundred thousand except buy himself a seat on the board at his granddaughter's day school. He wondered if he was being set up, Collins and Popper having agreed they needed a fall guy. Marley had helped mentor Popper, it was true, but that experience hadn't made them friends.

  "What's the rest of it?” Marley asked, wondering if he could detect the lies, if they would begin halfway through or at the outset.

  "Would be nice if the Taziks could have a peaceful revolution, but that isn't in the cards,” Collins said. “If the director gives the nod, we can have a five million dollar deal. Four percent commission, which you and I split. If the new group gets control, there's a gas-line concession that ends up in the right hands. It doesn't need much spinning, Charlie. This is a win-win."

  Leaning forward, Collins reminded Marley of a sidewalk vendor pushing watches. The name on the dial seldom described the works.

  "Where does the money come from?” Marley asked.

  "What do you care?"

  "Five million doesn't buy much."

  "It gets the reformers friends, which is more important than guns."

  "So this isn't an arms deal."

  "God, no."

  "But we're messing with the Russians."

  "A little bit. Popper should like that."

  "I'm not up to date on policy,” Marley demurred.

  Collins leaned back, grinning on one side, apparently his skeptical side, though he didn't repeat anything about Marley protesting too much. He really looked like a banker, having never looked like a spy. Too sensible for that. Candid blue eyes, thinning gray hair, crisp French cuffs, but nothing flashy on them. If he recommended a mutual fund, you knew it would be steady. The fact that he wasn't steady was so well concealed that for a while Marley felt only professional admiration for Collins. “Last I heard,” the banker said, “our policy for Russia was friendship, including support for stability along her borders."

  "Where would backing Tazik opposition fit in?"

  "Wouldn't, Charlie, not at all. But it fits with the pipeline concession.” Collins had dropped the grin. The business plan was on the table. It was up to Marley to show it to the Director of Central Intelligence.

  * * * *

  Nine days later, Collins sent him to Paris.

  Helen Turner met him at a restaurant near the stock exchange that wasn't frequented by spooks. When she was in operations, before becoming a bank director, she had run the accounts that kept some of the less successful pro-democracy groups in Africa in business. She carried a small briefbag that might have been full of lost causes. There was that air about her, that she dragged every failure with her.

  "You know, when you were in Paris, I thought for a while you'd been turned,” she said. “You were so chummy with those intellectuals, you know the ones I mean."

  "No, I don't."

  "The ones who pretended they weren't in Moscow's pocket."

  He didn't like remembering his life as a young man. The subject always brought from memory a waving flower garden of young women, most of whom he had disappointed. The cute girl who had slept with everyone during the student uprising in 1968 would be closing in on sixty now, and the awareness of that fact only reminded Marley of how much of his life was gone. Whether the time had been well spent or misspent wasn't the point. In hindsight, everything looked misspent.

  "I was the reason they brought you home,” Helen Turner boasted.

  What had been the little Maoist's name?

  "I heard this might be a weapons deal,” Marley said, too bluntly for the surroundings.

  "Where did you get such crap? Never mind. The big guy signed off, that's all you need to care about. That and your commission.” Her elbows were on the table. She still had to prove she was one of the boys. “We've got a correspondent bank here that will send the money on its next leg. That's if you're satisfied with the Taziks. I call them Larry and Moe. Curley apparently was blown up by the security apparat.” She shook her head. “Tell me the truth, Charles. Can you think of any time we've gotten our money's worth from exiles?"

  By “our money,” she meant the Agency's.

  "Chalabi worked out pretty well,” Marley said, his face bland.

  Helen Turner said a couple of words that proved, to her mind, that she was one of the boys.

  * * * *

  Besides, it wasn't the Agency's money this time. Marley couldn't figure the two young Taziks for customers of Daniel Rash, the arms dealer. Their proper names were Alex Gresov and Juma Balzin. Neither of them looked over thirty years old. Th
eir political experience, according to Helen Turner, consisted of putting up posters around the London School of Economics, where they studied. As there were fewer than twenty Taziks in London with political ideals, the two young men had emerged as natural leaders.

  They had known better than to go home after forming a Democratic United Front with Alex's brother, Amad Gresov. Last summer Amad had accepted an invitation to come home and talk. “His car exploded outside the president's palace,” his brother said. “It was a message to all the democratic forces in Tazikstan."

  All six of them, Marley thought.

  "My brother will be remembered as a hero."

  "He was,” said his friend. His trouser knees were worn. Their room was in a one-star hotel in the Marais, where the smell of couscous came up through the floor. If they were to be Agency assets, the five million would buy a few cell phones, laptops, printers, and a dozen cases of Moldovan wine for the ground troops back home. Gresov and Balzin would invest in image-building suits from Jermyn Street.

  But they were going to be somebody else's assets. Alex Gresov had studied the economics of energy development. He had a square face, tightset eyes, spiky hair—and he spoke about pipelines and transportation costs per billion cubic feet of natural gas. Marley supposed he had his facts right or the people bankrolling him wouldn't have bothered. He wondered how many other Tazik groups were getting quiet funding.

  Seed money, that was what they used to call it. Sprinkle seeds here and there among disaffected groups and pretty soon the old regime had a half dozen flag-waving fronts pressing demands that could never be met. The next step depended on how soon the old regime rolled out the tanks.

  Given how boldly one Gresov brother had been dispatched, Marley wouldn't have bet against Tazikstan's tanks.

  They talked for three hours. Finally, Marley gave Alex Gresov a slip of paper that bore the number of a bank account in Brussels that would receive an infusion in the next twelve hours. He shook hands and left the hotel. He was in the bar of his hotel on Colbert when he spotted Daniel Rash's go-between.

  * * * *