by Gordon Kent
“So what?” So what wasn’t on the list of Agency-approved phrases in dealing with an overwrought agent, but all of Piat’s balls were in the air. While we watched the damned bird, the prince was right there in the lobby, watching through the window. Watching his bird. Or watching us. And talking to some American heavy hitter about something. Reason said that there was no way the prince could be on to him so quickly. Reason said it, but that didn’t calm the bubbles in his belly or the sweat under his arms.
Irene was glaring at him, and he suspected that there was something here he ought to know and didn’t—was she on the lam? Had she done something really fucked up before leaving mom and dad?
Christ, the things he didn’t know.
He made a snap decision. Actually, he made a whole series of decisions, on the wing, right there on the promenade. “Okay, let’s get out of here,” he said.
Irene’s face relaxed as soon as he said the words. It was Hackbutt’s turn, however, to be annoyed. “We just got here. I want to meet this guy!”
Irene was dismissive. “Last night all you wanted to do was get back to your stupid birds.”
Stupid birds hung in the air between them like a veil of poison gas.
Piat stepped between them—literally. “Okay, everybody. Keep your voices down. We’re all wound up tight and in a minute we’re going to start drawing attention. This is not the time, Digger. Okay? Everybody saddle up and go. We’ll go together—we haven’t tried to hide anything, no need to start now. My car. Go to your room, pack, and check out. Don’t rush. Don’t get panicked. There’s nothing at all to be afraid of.” Both of them were spooked.
Hackbutt looked past Piat at Irene. “Birds aren’t stupid,” he said quietly.
Piat tried to dredge up the right way to motivate both of them to fucking obey. “Digger—we’ll have another chance at our guy. Soon. I promise. You can talk birds with him until the sky falls.”
Hackbutt was still staring at Irene as if he’d never seen her before. “They aren’t stupid. And neither am I.” He looked up at Piat. “Sometimes you both think I’m stupid.” He turned his back and started toward the hotel. “It pisses me off.”
Irene stood on the sidewalk, her jaw working and a blood vessel throbbing on her temple.
“I’m sorry!” she shouted. “Fuck, I hate this place!”
Somehow, he got them alive and unbroken to their hotel. He was tempted to stay and watch them pack, but they might make up if he left them, and he needed them to make up.
Christ, he needed a little luck.
He opened the door to his room still wishing for a little luck and found two middle-aged men sitting in his easy chairs. Neither was very tall or formidable, but they were grave, careful men with receding hairlines and guns. The guns were holstered under excellent Italian tailoring, but Piat knew they were there.
“Mister Michalis?” the nearer one asked. He rose to his feet.
Piat knew his cover. He always knew his cover. Jack Michalis was the name on his new passport. He said, “Is there a problem?” as bloodlessly as he could manage.
The graver of the two remained seated. “We are very sorry for interrupting your privacy, Mister Michalis,” he said. “Would you please join us?” He indicated the seat vacated by his companion.
Piat didn’t want to take it, but they had every advantage—guns, numbers, local knowledge. So he sat. If they were going to arrest him, they wouldn’t have troubled to let him sit.
Probably.
“We work for the casino, Mister Michalis.”
Piat nodded.
The graver man reached out a hand. “May I see your passport, Mister Michalis?”
Piat handed it over. He’d already passed on the option to bluster and protest—these struck him as men who were past masters at dealing with bluster. So he limited himself to a single question. “Can you tell me what this is about?”
The graver man flipped the passport open, glanced at the photo and looked at Piat. Then he closed it and handed the passport back.
“We have a great deal of very serious security in the casino,” he said carefully. “Also the hotels, yes?”
Piat nodded.
The grave man gave a small, grave smile. “I don’t know who you are. I’m quite sure you are not Mister Michalis. You understand?”
Piat decided to die trying. “There must be some kind of mistake—”
The man shrugged. “Of course. But no. As I say, I don’t know who you really are. But my computer tells me that you are not this man, or perhaps there never was this man. You see my trouble? And my own eyes tell me that this passport is real. Terribly real, yes?”
Piat started to rise. Busted in fucking Monaco.
“Please sit down, Mister Michalis. If I may call you that? So my computer and I, we would like you to leave. And please, never come back. Do I make myself understood? Right now, I cannot be bothered to think of anything with which to charge you—perhaps if you came back, or didn’t leave, I would change my mind. Yes?”
Piat watched them. The younger one was to his side, not actually behind him. Not as threatening as he could be. The graver one was—grave. But not hostile. Piat reviewed his options, including the option to play the hidden card—the Interpol card Partlow had given him.
But he passed. Despite the liquid in his muscles and the sweat in his armpits, besides the humiliation for any spy at getting caught (never mind about what) by a casino—it just didn’t matter a damn. They wanted him to leave.
He wanted to leave.
“Fine,” he said.
He signaled Partlow from south of Paris. “1.”
He caught the noon ferry the next day to Mull.
He called Digger. He checked his pager. And then he slept for sixteen hours.
The alarm crashed on his dresser across the room, and Piat swung an arm at it. Failing to find the snooze button, he woke up enough to get himself out of bed, shut off the alarm, and took stock.
After his usual struggle with the mechanics of the shower, he dressed and walked around the corner to the Island Bakery for coffee. His brain was working. It was working too hard.
In Piat’s experience, the case officer’s view of an operation went through three phases. In the first phase, the case officer made his plans and met his agents, and everything seemed possible. In the second phase, reality began to affect his plans. Difficulties arose. Personalities clashed and potentials failed to be recognized; outside factors that had been ignored suddenly rose up to get in the way of the operation. The simple cleanliness of the original plan became a dirty muddle of exigency and compromise. In the third and final phase, the case officer either succeeded or failed in his attempt to meld the original plan and the patchwork of reality.
Piat leaned against the steel railing along the edge of Tobermory’s main pier and confronted the fact that he was squarely in phase two. For whatever reason, the security of the casinos of Monaco, and by extension, the French security services, had developed an interest in him. His agents were discovering fissures in their relationship. Piat grimaced as he considered that he might, himself, be responsible for the fissures.
On the other side of the balance, the target was not unapproachable. The target really did have a passionate interest in birds. The target had obvious, visible contempt for his uncle and the rest of his uncle’s entourage.
Piat spent the whole of his double espresso weighing the balance. Since the value of every item, good or bad, was intangible, he could judge them only from experience. He could, by manipulation and self-control, get Irene and Hackbutt to the next meeting. And perhaps after that, from meeting to meeting, for as long as Partlow required. He couldn’t guess what effect French security might have. He didn’t think that they had any notion of his actual purpose.
It probably didn’t matter.
Unless, of course, it did.
On the other side of the ledger, he had a package of manufactured antiquities in the trunk of his car that could now be “found” at th
e crannog. The apparently illegal looting of the ancient site would lend them cachet and provenance to certain collectors. And from that, he would make a great deal of money.
On balance, it was worth continuing.
Before he left for the farm, he read a chapter from one of his falconry books on hunting from trees and waiting on.
In Washington, Abe Peretz had invited himself to the Craiks’ for dinner. He was a good enough friend to be able to do that. He’d called Rose at her Pentagon office and asked her when she was cooking and could he come, and she’d laughed and told him that she cooked less nowadays, but for him she’d do it any night. He specified Italian; she asked if pasta with broccoli was acceptable; he said that from her, he’d take even broccoli.
“The thing is, it’s fast. You throw the broccoli in with the spaghetti while it boils, heat some garlic in oil, and you’re done. I don’t get home until eight or nine now, Abe.”
“I can take you guys to dinner.”
“No. No, you’re too good a friend, and the kids love you, and so do we. Come Friday.” She didn’t say that she worked Saturdays, and Sundays were for lying in bed if neither of them had to work that day, too.
And she promised him a baked apple with boiled cider, which wasn’t Italian but was as good as it gets. And so the date was made.
Rose and Abe sat late at the table, well fed and wined. Alan was upstairs, making sure the two older kids were doing homework; the baby was already in bed. They talked about his family, his troubles.
“Abe, if it happened—if you could—would you take Bea back?” Bea was Abe’s wife.
“Not for a second.” He had been playing with some crumbs and a knife. “It sounds sexist to start with, doesn’t it—the idea of a husband ‘taking his wife back.’”
“I said it; you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t. The kids, in a heartbeat. But her—” It was as if he couldn’t pronounce her name. “It’s worse than if it had been some other man. She’s a traitor, Rose.”
“I thought, maybe—” She smiled almost apologetically. “Love conquers all?”
“Well, it doesn’t.”
When Alan came back, Abe offered to help with the dishes, said he’d become a good dishwasher since his daughters had left. Alan said he threw things into a machine and let it do the work, and he began to demonstrate by carrying dishes away from the table.
“Could Al and I have a little private talk, Rose?”
“God, yes!” She had no jealousy about such stuff—now. She started to carry things to the kitchen, too. “Go, go—!”
Alan actually had something like a study. The house was big, what used to be called a stockbroker Tudor—two captains’ salaries. As they were settling in big chairs, Abe said, “Two sexists we—women cook, men talk guy talk?”
“Rose and I split the duty. She shops and does the meals and I do the cleaning-up and the kids. When I can.” He grunted. “When she can.”
Abe had a long envelope in an inner jacket pocket. Alan wondered if he had carried it that way so he wouldn’t be seen arriving with a briefcase or an attaché. But seen by whom?
“I got your list of the people who worked for OIA. I looked around a little,” Abe said. “Or I had somebody look around. Big-time law firm, they have some dynamite investigators.”
“My God, Abe, billed to who?”
“Billed to me. No, don’t tell me a lot of nonsense; I wanted to do it. Anyway, I get a cut rate. And in-house, it’s entirely discreet. The woman we use could find Judge Crater if she had to.” He looked up at Alan over a pair of half-glasses. “Judge Crater? Have I got so old my references don’t mean anything? Before your time. Before my time, in fact. A guy who disappeared, okay?” He was taking things out of the envelope and arranging them on the fat, padded arm of his chair. Alan saw a typed page, several pieces torn from newspapers and underlined, a hand-written note. The papers were like a metaphor for a cluttered, disorderly mind. Abe was brilliant, but again he wondered if he was entirely sane anymore. His hands, Craik saw, were trembling. “Okay! What all this impressive paperwork is about is, I know where the folks from the Office of Information Analysis went.”
“Abe, I didn’t ask you to do this.”
“I know you didn’t, so you’re off the hook.” He opened his hands. “You want to know what I’ve got or don’t you?”
“Of course I do!”
“Okay then.” Peretz leaned forward. He was pretty much trapped in the deep chair, and whenever he handed anything to Alan, he had to grunt and struggle forward. “It’s all written down, but I want the pleasure of telling you about the good ones. So you have to listen to me. Okay—you know what the Office of Information Analysis was, right?—do-it-yourself intel, a bunch of amateurs proud of their virginity. In the beginning, they were in it only to channel raw intel to the White House. Raw intel of an acceptable kind, of course. Then, maybe—this is what you’re into, right?—then maybe they got into a more operational kind of intelligence.
“And that’s where maybe it gets interesting. I know I said to look for people who moved somewhere after the first term, but there were actually some maybe relevant moves much earlier. Three people, for example, went to your current shop, the Defense Intelligence Agency, in 2002.”
“From OIA?”
“Am I talking about the Government Printing Office?”
“But my God, Abe—you’re saying they had no background in intel, and they came over into Defense Intelligence?”
“I can even name names: Herman Ritter, Alice K. Einhorn, Geoffrey Lee. Ring any bells?”
Craik shook his head. “I’ll check the DIA phone directory. It could just be the way people flow through government. Or the administration placing their own people everywhere.” He wiped a hand down his face. “But that isn’t supposed to happen in intelligence agencies.”
“Then there’s Ray Spinner.”
“Spinner was a munchkin.”
Abe held up the hand-written note. “She had to do a little tracking on him. They fired his ass out of OIA right after the clusterfuck in Tel Aviv.” He handed the note over. “February, 2002. He didn’t go anywhere else in government. Sort of dropped out, in fact.”
Alan looked at the scribble. He had known Spinner slightly, years before, hadn’t liked him. “Grad school?”
“That’s where she found him.”
Alan folded the note along its old lines and put it on a desk. “Spinner might know some things. Maybe he’s bitter enough that he’d talk to me.”
Abe made a disgusted face. He’d go to his grave believing that Spinner had got him shot. He shrugged, as if to rid himself of Spinner, and went back to his notes. “Okay, to the important people who moved after the first term ended. Until 2005, OIA was under a guy named David Sasimo, a deputy assistant secretary. Big-time dome-head, lots of think-tank credentials, wrote Op-Ed pieces, all that crap. Okay, comes the second term, when OIA was eliminated—work is done, mission accomplished, onward and upward—he went to Havers University as president. Five times the pay, double the prestige.”
“I never heard of Havers University.”
“Neither did I. But he’s the third highest-paid university president in California. Okay? Okay.
“Under Sasimo at OIA, and in direct charge of the intel work, was somebody named Frank McKinnon. McKinnon has been in and out of academe, several books, blah-blah-blah. In late 2004, he went from OIA to something called the Petroleum Education Council as ‘director of creative projects.’ If you can figure out what that means, you get a free box of Crackerjacks.
“Two other people—I’ll skip names now because it’s late—one man, one woman, went to Hooper and Gretz. You know Hooper and Gretz? What we call a ‘K Street firm.’ Lobbyists, to the vulgar. Clients include one major automobile manufacturer and two oil companies, plus some defense-contract firms—stars of the military-industrial complex.”
Abe held up his hand. “Now the biggie.” He grinned. “Three people with OIA c
onnections show up in a security company called Force for Freedom. You like that—‘force?’” He rattled one of the newspaper articles. “Two of them founded the company in 2001; the other, a guy named Stern, joined the board in 2004. The L.A. Times did an investigative piece on civilian contractors in Iraq. Force for Freedom got two no-bid contracts from the provisional authority, both to provide ‘military-spec’ security for entities inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. They wear camo battledress, reportedly have better body armor than the military, and they pack weapons all the time. They’re ‘highly respected in the field.’”
“Rent-a Grunt, Inc.”
“Pretty good for a company that was formed within a month of Nine-Eleven by two guys with no security experience, wouldn’t you say? Two young guys with no security experience—one was twenty-four, the other twenty-seven. Nothing in their past suggests they had access to big bucks, either, but they got a PO box and a phone and, so far as my gal can tell, started making big money immediately. They now have an office suite in McLean, Virginia, and a ‘training and exercise compound’ in the Blue Ridge. No IPO yet, but they’re making big money, not just in Iraq.” Abe held up another hot-lined newspaper clipping. “An article in the Post on private police in New Orleans after Katrina lists them as having upwards of forty people in Plaquemines Parish to guard a refinery.” He waved the other clipping again. “Investigative reporter tracked down a former employee, says that a ‘typical’ Force for Freedom guy is ex-military, either special forces or operational intelligence, at least five years of service, young to young-middle-aged, very focused. Typical pay is seven hundred to a thousand a day out of country. And they get way out of country: the Times says they were able to track one guy in Iraq, Bulgaria, and Thailand.” He handed Alan the newspaper clippings, grunting as he struggled with the chair. His hand was still trembling.
Alan had his elbows on his knees, his hands joined in front of him. He was looking at Abe’s chest. “So Force for Freedom was set up in—what, October?—2001, before my suspect document was written. OIA is listed as the originating source on the document. Then in the middle of 2002, three OIA people go to DIA, and about then a task number was generated that then got put on the document, ‘superseding’ a number that’s meaningless to the intel community but could have been an in-house number, the house being OIA.”
