by Gordon Kent
“The contact report sounds like there was torture.”
“Tell me about it! There was also a feeling of ‘No more Mister Nice Guy.’ International law was out—batten down the hatches, do it ourselves, get tough. And they had clout.”
“Not enough clout to ride roughshod over the whole intel community.”
“Oh, really? Al, sweetheart, look around you! Who’s been blamed for Nine-Eleven? The intelligence community. Who wasn’t defending America until the current administration came along? The intelligence community. Who favored criminal prosecution of terrorists instead of military action? The intelligence community. Who needed reforming and got a new Galactic Intercontinental All-Powerful Czar to clean things up? The intelligence community!” Peretz’s voice had risen; the waitress looked over at them. “By contrast, the geniuses in the White House and DoD were white hats—never committed intelligence in their lives! Virgins! And true believers.”
“Off-the-books operations cost a lot of money.”
“This administration has money up the wazoo.”
“But no professionals. Even the DIY Detective Agency wouldn’t send an amateur like Spinner to torture somebody. Or to shoot you. They sent him to Tel Aviv on a collection mission—okay, that was stupid. But a black op would be something else.”
Peretz tapped the table with a fingertip. “I wouldn’t put anything past them! If you offer a thousand bucks a day, you’d be amazed how many private contractors there are just waiting to rip somebody’s fingernails out.”
Craik said nothing, not wanting to provoke a tirade.
Peretz said, “If we were playing Let’s Pretend, I’d look for a private company that’s got a lot of traction with the administration. Probably one that’s post-Nine-Eleven.”
“That’d take big bucks.”
“What did I just say?”
Craik stared at the bar without seeing it. He raised his eyebrows as if to say that even stranger things were possible. He tried to make it a joke. “Well, I wanted to talk to you because I knew your take on it would be cynical. I didn’t know just how cynical.”
Peretz tapped the Formica tabletop again. “Look to see where the hotshots went for their payoff after the second term started. First term, you do the service; second term, you leave government and make big bucks. These people believe that patriotism is everything, but it should pay well.”
Craik was silent. He didn’t want to listen to another tirade. He said, “Let’s stop talking about it for now. What are you going to do about Leah?”
“What can I do? I don’t know how much freedom she has. I doubt she can leave Israel.”
“I thought you said it came from Mossad.”
“I don’t know. If I knew—” His face got the bitter look again. “I can’t trust them.” He didn’t say who “them” was.
They left the bar separately.
Piat started Hackbutt on role-playing. Piat played various targets, sometimes with Irene to help him, sometimes with Irene as Hackbutt’s other half. They played at being in airport bars and dinner parties, both equally hard to imagine in the slovenly confines of the cottage. Hackbutt’s attempts to make a contact were forced. Transparent. Laughable. And they made his hands shake. The more he screwed it up, the more impatient Irene got. She drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. She fidgeted. One afternoon, she got up and went into her studio, slamming the door.
The only subject that Hackbutt could start and maintain was falconry. He used it on them at dinner, at breakfast, in pretend ticket lines and in make-believe rail stations. He had assimilated only enough of Piat’s teaching to be able to turn any subject, any hint, into a conversation about falconry. He could talk about raising young birds when children were mentioned; he could discuss Frederick of Hohenstaufen’s manual of falconry when the Middle Ages surfaced. Food, wine, sex, music—all led him to falconry.
Piat decided that it would have to do. But it certainly was boring.
Then Piat began to give them some basic understanding of the methods and means of espionage. It wasn’t an obviously important part of the training; Piat couldn’t imagine either one of them engaging in lengthy counter-surveillance routes, making carefully timed meetings, or servicing dead drops in dangerous foreign countries. The importance of the training was to remind them of the real purpose of the clothes and the conversation, to focus them both on the target and the goal.
With most agents—like Hackbutt—the espionage training served both to sober them up and to understand the depth of the commitment they had made. It was a trick of the trade.
It had the opposite effect on Irene. The professional paranoia and counterintuitive nature of routine tradecraft made her laugh. It wasn’t her fake, self-conscious laugh, but a genuine amusement that angered Piat and raised resentment in Hackbutt.
She and Hackbutt scrapped about it, and then she became bored. After that, she got tense and impatient and said she could be spending her time better at her own work.
They drove around the island, crammed into Piat’s Renault, as he pointed out the possibilities of landscape and road layout—where a meeting could be held, the turn that would allow them to see a potential surveillant, another set of turns that would sort a real pursuer from a random encounter. The training irritated Irene (stupid games, sweetie, and don’t you forget it, and I’m a busy woman now, and don’t forget that, sweetie). Hackbutt loved it, of course.
10
Tension, irritation, bickering—Piat wasn’t sure what to call it, but it began to run through the little house like some low-voltage, barely felt current. At first, he blamed Irene, thought it was her “work,” her “art,” her self-induced stress. Then he saw that some of it came from Hackbutt, as well. One evening, he and Hackbutt came in from dicking about with the birds; Hackbutt went into the kitchen, and abruptly there was a slamming of cupboard doors, and Hackbutt was screaming Irene’s name. It was unusual enough that her studio door popped open and she looked out, her eyes wide.
“Goddamit, where’s my cup? I can’t find my cup!” He had a favorite cup with a hawk on it.
“Oh, Eddie, I’m sure it’s around—”
“Jesus Christ, is it asking too much that my fucking cup be put back in the same place? For Christ’s sake!”
“Eddie, please—”
“Don’t Eddie ple-e-e-ze me! Find my fucking cup!”
It was a childish tantrum. Rare—in fact to Piat unique. Even he was infected by its violence; he got up and went into the kitchen, hands spread. “Jeez, it’s my fault, Digger, I helped put the dishes away last night. My fault.” He tried to make a joke of it. “‘New girl, new ways.’”
Hackbutt’s voice changed to a whine. “Well, where is it?”
Piat found it in the cupboard with the plates and saucers. He remembered putting it there. He apologized again; Hackbutt poured himself tea, then went into the sitting room and sulked, his silence extending into the evening as embarrassment at what he must have known was childishness.
Then Piat saw that the tension came from him, or from him and Irene and their mutual attraction-avoidance. By then, he had begun unwittingly to merge into their lives. Trying at least to seem sympathetic with Irene’s work (to keep her happy as the agent’s girl, but also to keep her happy), he had offered to cook one night. He wasn’t a very good cook, mostly man-who-lives-alone stuff, but he could manage by multiplying the quantities by three. Then he did it again; then he was helping with the dishes, then the shopping. Irene didn’t seem particularly grateful: “Well, you’re the one that gets every other day off. It wouldn’t kill you to drop by a shop now and then.”
Three days a week should have been enough to train them as agents. He found himself coming more often, however—for Irene and for the dog. Coming for a woman was understandable; coming for a dog was laughable. He took it with him to the loch one day, let it sit on the bank while he fished. It had taught him the flat-palm-out gesture that meant “stay,” and when he used it, Ralph staye
d—sitting or lying down with his head on his paws, alert to the bend of the rod, ecstatic when a fish flopped on the bank.
A woman and a dog. It was bad practice to have a relationship with your agent, but nothing was said about her dog.
But the more he was there, the more uneasy he found the atmosphere. Something was happening to them—to them, he thought, not to himself—some process that was changing them. He thought he was the catalyst, not himself one of the reagents.
* * *
He came in one day and smelled coffee. An old-fashioned percolator sat on the stove, half full. He had a cup, found it not bad, later saw Irene pour herself some. She looked at him, shrugged. Maybe it was the meat she was eating now, changing her metabolism. Something, certainly, was changing.
The house had a covered porch that protected the front door from the local climate. Stone-floored, the porch was a last clutch at dryness before you plunged into the rain to make the sprint to your car. The coal box sat out there; so did mops and a shovel and an axe with a broken handle.
He found Irene there one day. She was in her work clothes. Smoking a cigarette—another change. Seeing him, she blew smoke sideways and said, “All my bad habits are coming back. Soon I’ll start fucking strange men.”
He smiled, took the cigarette and puffed and gave it back.
“You’re not a stranger. Would that you were.”
“That one hurt.”
“Everything’s different since you came.” She took a pack out of a front pocket of her jeans. It was already half empty. She took one out, lit it, put it back, then remembered to offer him one.
“I’ll just puff on yours. Next best thing to kissing.”
She looked at him, puffed, blew smoke to the side. “We’re doing all this stuff. All this shit. Eddie goes to his goddam birds every day like he’s running away from home; I go into that room and work my ass off.” She shook her head. “Changes.”
“You were working before I got here. All those photos.”
“Those photos had been up there for a year. Eddie and Irene’s little fantasy—Irene’s an artist; Irene’s going to be a household word! I hadn’t done squat for a year, two years, three, Jesus, until you— I’d lost it. What do jocks call it? My drive, my edge. Now look at me.”
“You should thank me, then.” As soon as he said the words, he wished them unsaid.
She shook her head. “Change scares me.”
“It’s only temporary.”
She dropped the cigarette on the stone and ground it out with a toe. “Everything’s temporary, isn’t it?”
She went inside; he went to walk the dog.
Hackbutt was beginning to learn—maybe it was the clothes—but had another tantrum, this one aimed at Annie—maybe that was the clothes, too, the squire and the slavey. Piat wasn’t there but heard about it when he found that the dog hadn’t been fed. Irene and Hackbutt had forgotten. Annie, it appeared, hadn’t been back for two days.
“She upset Bella,” Hackbutt said. “She’s a stupid little bitch. I don’t want her around anymore.”
But Hackbutt found he couldn’t really get along now without Annie, who, as well as helping with the birds, fed and watered and walked the dog when Piat wasn’t there and did the washing-up when Irene or Piat didn’t have the time or the inclination.
Annie came back after Hackbutt drove to her father’s farm and apologized to the entire family, but she wasn’t the same. Like the rest of them, she was altered by whatever Piat had brought to the house.
One day, she said to him, “Are you taking the dog for your own, then?”
“You mean, home with me? No, Annie, of course not.”
“It’s fair cruel to lead him on then, isn’t it?”
“I’m not leading him on.” He laughed. “I’m giving him some attention.”
“I saw you and him on the road, he was sitting up in your car with you like he was a ship’s captain or something. You take him about with you everywhere. He’ll be that brokenhearted when you go away.”
“Why don’t you take him, then, Annie? He likes you.”
“I’m not staying one day after I leave school. Next day, I’m off to Glasgow.”
“I thought you were daft about the birds!”
“There’s birds in Glasgow. And people!”
“No dogs?”
“Poor tyke.” She tossed her hair back and looked him in the eye to say, “I’ve as much right to go my way as you, Mister Michaels. And it isn’t me will be breaking the doggie’s heart.”
Then Irene was drinking more. It was part of the smoking and the coffee-drinking, he supposed, a return to an old, perhaps more genuine pattern. He cooked two or three nights a week now; she helped sometimes, a glass of wine always close by. When they touched, she didn’t jump away; sometimes she responded with a light bump or an elbow. But nothing more. One night, they were cleaning up; Hackbutt was in the sitting room; they passed each other close, both with dishes in their hands; neither could have grabbed the other even if grabbing had been on the menu. She looked at him. He looked at her. She chuckled. “You, too?” She was a little drunk.
They put their dishes down and he turned toward her and she half-dodged away, a move like the overtly sexy Irene of the first time he’d seen her. She giggled, kept her voice low. “When you first got here, I thought you were going to be the Zipless Fuck. You know that book? I read it—a woman author— Anyway, the Zipless Fuck. Then we didn’t, and now everything’s complicated.” She took out a cigarette. “And now you can’t because it’ll ruin your operation, and I can’t because—” She jerked her head toward the room where Hackbutt was still sitting. “Why can’t things ever be simple, eh?” She laughed at having used the Canadian “eh?” and ran out of the room.
* * *
Then, briefly, Irene gave up her “art.” She said she couldn’t make the deadline she’d been given. The agent and the show could go fuck themselves. She wasn’t going to be their gallery slave.
For a day, she sat around in one of her baggy dresses and read an old book that had come with the house. Then, a couple of days later, her door was closed and Piat heard hammering, and everything went on as before.
One afternoon there was a fierce thunderstorm. Hackbutt dragged Piat out to help him comfort the birds; Piat didn’t know what “comfort” meant, so he went and held the dog and nuzzled him because the dog was frightened. After the storm came cold and brilliant sunshine; when they went inside, new sounds were coming from the studio. Mostly, an almost rhythmic groaning; then a throaty scream, drawn out and guttural. The moans might have been sexual but suggested pain, too, even death. Then another scream would come, and he thought of rape, but the pitch was wrong.
“Irene’s music,” Hackbutt said. He knew all about it. She had recorded hours of the waves on the rocks where the Atlantic broke against the island, then had paid somebody in Glasgow to re-record and overlap and slow everything down.
“The screams were gulls,” Hackbutt said.
“Sounds like the track for a horror movie.” But he didn’t say that to her.
It was late morning in Naples, a brilliant day that felt as if it had been washed overnight and laid out in the sun to dry. Dukas had for once got seven hours of sleep. He was sitting a leg-length away from his desk with both feet on the desktop, a six-cup Moka Express perched within reach and a cup in his hand. On the computer table were the remains of a box of honey-covered fried dough. Without looking, Dukas took one and brought it to his mouth, still reading.
“You should have a bed moved in,” Dick Triffler said from the door. He crossed to the far side of the desk from Dukas and leaned over to look into the pastry box. “Those things will kill you.”
“Promises, promises.”
“You eat too many of them.”
“I’m an addict and I’m not responsible for my actions.”
Triffler was munching one as they talked. Dukas scowled at him, looked into the box, and took the last one. “Did
you come in here just to steal my last zeppole?”
“No, I came to ask why Al Craik wants me to stand by a secure phone at eleven-thirty.”
“Because I told him you’re the world authority on the Office of Information Analysis.”
“They’re out of business.”
“Al’s interest is historical. Post-Nine-Eleven. I told him you’d got me an OIA personnel roster when I was having my adventure with their jerk-off in Tel Aviv.”
“Aha.” Triffler leaned over and looked in the box again. Finding crumbs, he tipped them into a corner and then dumped them into his palm. “Italian food is addictive. What’s A’s interest in OIA?”
“Can you see that I’m reading?”
“Yes. Are you worried about my eyesight?”
“I’m worried that I got a week’s work on my desk and you’re keeping me from doing it!”
“Anybody who can’t read and talk at the same time doesn’t deserve to be in NCIS. Some of us can read, talk, and think all at the same time. My theory is you should be promoted out of this busy posting and let me take over. You go to DC, I stay here, and we’ll mail you care packages of Neapolitan pastry.”
“Al will want the OIA personnel list. You still got it?”
“Nothing is ever created or destroyed.”
A woman poked her head in the door and said that Triffler had a secure phone call. Dukas said, “Thanks, Jesus.” Triffler said he was a blasphemer but likable and went out and along the corridor to his own office. “Triffler,” he said into the STU.
“Hey, Dick—Al Craik.” It didn’t sound like Craik, but that was the effect of the STU.
Triffler said, “The great man just told me what you want. I got an OIA personnel list as of the end of 2001. That do you?”
“Just what I want.”
“This didn’t come to me exactly through channels, Al, so don’t put it on CNN, okay? A couple people did me favors.”
