The Falconer's Tale

by Gordon Kent

  Dykes poked him with a hard finger. “Come on. You was hoping.”

  Piat smiled. “Okay, I was.” He looked up at the clouds coming in around the summit of the mountain. “How much longer do you think you guys’ll need?”

  Dykes and McLean exchanged a glance. They both shrugged. “A week?” said Dykes. “Two if we string it out.”

  Piat nodded. “Do you mind stringing it out?” he said. He poured tea from his thermos and handed it around. It started to rain.

  McLean shrugged. “It’s your money. Sure, I can stay two weeks.”

  Dykes flourished his envelope. “If I send this here home, I can probably stay another two weeks. What for, though? If you don’t mind my asking?’ Cause we’re just about done, like I said.”

  Piat knew that he kept them there for two mutually exclusive reasons—as a trip wire against investigation, and as muscle in an emergency. He wasn’t entirely logical about it. He shrugged. “I don’t know myself. Insurance. Just in case. Hey, it’s my money, right?” He looked back at them. “Any problems? Anybody come by?”

  McLean sipped some tea. “His lordship came by. Nice chap—came up on his ATV, watched us fish, came down to the water’s edge. He drove right over the pipe—I had to replace her. Either he didn’t twig to it or he didn’t give a shit. All he wanted to hear about was the fish.”

  “I sent him home with one of his own sea trout,” Dykes said. “Only one I’ve caught.”

  McLean cocked an eye at Dykes. “That’s because you’re a hopeless caster.”

  “Fuck you,” said Dykes, serving up another pan of fish.

  Piat stayed most of the afternoon, casting in the cold rain, freezing his hands and arms, his nose and ears almost numb, happy. He didn’t keep anything he caught, and he ended his day with a warm bath in his hotel.

  When he got into bed, he realized that he hadn’t thought about Hackbutt, Irene, or Partlow since the morning.

  Mombasa was four days away. He fell asleep thinking about Mombasa, and he dreamed of an empty hotel where someone was hunting him.

  The next morning, Piat made reservations for Mombasa by computer. He spent Partlow’s money. He read websites on hotels and took the operational plunge of putting his own party at the same hotel as the target. With all the issues Irene and Hackbutt had, with all of Partlow’s reservations, with whatever shadow the congressman cast, Piat had to figure he had one shot.

  Mombasa.

  Late that afternoon, he drove to the farm and collected his agents. Irene looked different—neither the shapeless dress of their first meeting nor the wool skirts of her “rich girl” persona nor the cargo pants and flannel shirts of her “art”. Instead, she had fitted jeans and a raw silk shirt with baroque buttons, set off by a necklace of African trade beads. She wore it with a jacket from her operational clothes.

  Now, she looked to him like an artist.

  Hackbutt had on his oldest sweater with a pair of stained climbing pants and hiking boots. But he didn’t look like a refugee or a bum. The change was subtle but evident, not just in his own behavior but also in how the hostess greeted them. Hackbutt, for instance, smiled at her. She smiled back.

  Piat wondered if the feeling Hackbutt gave him was anything like the feeling Bella gave Hackbutt.

  “We’re going to Mombasa,” Piat said, when they were seated.

  Both of them tried to talk at once.

  “I have work to do!” Irene said.

  “I’m training Bella!” Hackbutt said.

  That got an older and meaner look from Irene. But instead of commenting on Bella, Irene turned to Piat. “You said no spy games.” She said it loudly enough for the restaurant’s handful of late-season patrons to hear her.

  Piat had to restrain himself from turning to look at the patrons’ reaction. He leaned back, feigning indifference. “I lied. But that’s for later. I just wanted to get it out in the open. You’ll leave Thursday.” Oops, he thought. Mistake.

  It was Hackbutt who continued to surprise him. He leaned forward, almost a conspirator. “Time for that later,” he said. “It’s our night off.”

  Piat made himself relax. “You’re absolutely right, Digger. Apologies all around.”

  The food was excellent, and so, for once, was the company. Irene rattled on about her contacts in France. “They take me seriously,” she said, for perhaps the fifth time. She was drunk on it—on being taken seriously.

  She was into her fourth glass of wine by the time she began to describe her next installation. “Tools,” she said. “I’m going to get a lot of old tools. I mean, a lot of old tools. Don’t ask me why.” She looked around. “Women and tools. Something about women and tools.” She sneered. “I hate the idea of being ‘about’ something. It isn’t about women and tools, it is women and tools. Maybe I can get the Bush administration to give me an NEA grant,” she said. “What do you think, Jack?”

  Piat flicked his eyes around the room. “I think maybe we should call it a night.”

  Irene laughed again, a rich, horsey laugh, tough and happy and brave and far, far too assertive.

  With Hackbutt’s aid, he got her into the car. He drove the long way, to give her a chance to sober up a little, and he started telling stories because she was in the mood to laugh, and then Hackbutt told a story from Jakarta that made both of them look like fools, and she laughed all over again. All three of them did. Piat looked at Hackbutt in the electric blue light of the instrument panel and tried to remember if he’d ever heard the man make a story funny before. Hackbutt laughed, not a nasal whine but a head-thrown-back full-throated roar. The car raced along a two-hundred-foot drop to the sea below, the occupants laughing like teenagers hearing their first dirty joke.

  Piat and Hackbutt each took an arm and helped her to the door of the farm. Just on the stone sill, she turned and kissed Hackbutt, a passionate kiss.

  “I think I’ll save the briefing for tomorrow,” Piat said.

  She took all her own weight on her own feet, stood straighter, chuckled. “I’m not as think as you drunk I am,” she said.

  Piat caught Hackbutt’s eye and flicked a glance at Irene.

  “I think you are,” he said, and headed for his car. When he looked back, they were kissing again in the doorway, He stamped too hard on the accelerator, so that gravel flew from the wheels despite the weeks of wet weather.

  Alan Craik was down in the DIA cafeteria, staring through a tilted sheet of glass at a big metal tray full of something that had to be eggplant. It was Italian day—eggplant, pizza, spaghetti. He had his doubts. The women who cooked and served were all friendly and willing and probably talented, but they weren’t Italian.

  “How’s the eggplant?” he said to a black woman in a white hairnet who was waiting to serve somebody.

  “It’s good, you like that kinda thing.”

  He thought of Rose’s eggplant with black olives and tomato sauce. It wouldn’t be like that. It probably wouldn’t be like anything, except maybe boiled greens with hog jowls. He said he’d take some.

  He swayed around chairs, heading for a table where a woman he knew was sitting, Nice woman, forties, Air Force. Targeting specialist. He put his tray on the table, established that she wasn’t saving the place for somebody, and sat down. At the same time he watched half a dozen people join the cafeteria line, recognized one of them, couldn’t place him, and then did and said out loud, “That congressman again.”

  “What congressman?” He liked her voice—husky, like his wife’s.

  He bobbed his head toward the line. “That one—the silver-back in the expensive suit.”

  “Kwalik,” she said. “And his entourage.”

  “Kwalik?”

  “Representative Kwalik. Ohio.”

  “How do you know something like that?”

  “He’s on the intelligence committee. I got sent up there to brief them because everybody else in my outfit had already gone and they said it was my turn to blow smoke.”

  “What’s
he doing here? Hard to believe he comes for the food.”

  She laughed. “Have you tried the eggplant?” she said. She laughed again. “Don’t.”

  He did anyway. If you didn’t think of it as Italian, it wasn’t so bad. He listened to her talk about somebody in her department, and he ate and watched the congressman go through the line. Kwalik. He remembered the face from Abe Peretz’s briefing. People from OIA had gone to Kwalik’s staff after OIA was disbanded.

  Which brought him back to his question: What’s he doing here?

  In the morning, Piat went out to the farm, headache and gut ache and all. Irene looked fine—in fact, she was drinking orange juice and was ready for work. Hackbutt looked like hell—but a happy hell.

  “Mombasa,” Piat began. He told them about Mombasa and its beaches and resorts. He bored them with maps and diagrams. He finished by saying, “The target’s uncle and his entourage have booked twenty-six rooms for five days. They have conference rooms, a section of private beach, their own restaurant in the hotel and their own pavilion outside.”

  Hackbutt was lying on the sofa like an invalid. He nodded with every sentence as if he already knew everything Piat had said, but now he rubbed his chin. “What are they doing there? Mombasa?”

  Piat shook his head. “Hard to say. The uncle has some appointments—among other things, his family have paid for a mosque in Kilini, up the coast.” Piat decided that a digression on the various types of Islam on the east coast of Africa wasn’t suited to the audience. “He’s going to shoot some animals in the game park. Illegally, of course. And there’s an Islamic film festival in town, and it’s possible the uncle is a heavy hitter among the donors.”

  Hackbutt, however, was not to be led astray by talk of film festivals. “What about the birds?” he asked. “What about the man with the birds?”

  Piat clicked to a still picture of the Nyali. “He’ll be somewhere in the hotel. I assume he’ll have birds with him—if he took them to Monaco, I think he’ll take them to Africa. I think he’ll fly on the beach. And I think that’s where we’ll get him.”

  Hackbutt rubbed his head, which obviously hurt, but when he took his hand away, he had a light in his eyes. “I want to talk to that man about his birds.”

  Piat nodded.

  Irene finished her juice and stood with her hand on her hip. “So we’re going to a beach resort in wintertime.”

  “High summer there.”

  “And a film festival,” she said.

  “If you like Islamic film.”

  “Maybe I will. This sounds a fuck of a lot more satisfying than Monaco.” She shot Piat a smile—enigmatic.

  “Always happy to please,” Piat replied while sorting their tickets.

  “And I need to be back by Tuesday. I have an installation to complete. And I’ll need some of my money, too.”

  Hackbutt pulled himself up on an elbow. “We both do.”

  Piat handed them their tickets. “Half up front, half on completion, bonus for success. That was the deal.”

  Irene scowled. “But I need the money next week.”

  Hackbutt nodded. “Jack, it’s really important to her. And I need some cash too—I have costs. I have to pay the girl who takes care of my birds.”

  Piat snarled inside at the eternal mercenary nature of agents, but he nodded. “That’s an operational expense, Digger—we need Bella fed and flown. In top condition, like you said.” He glanced at Irene. “I’ll see about some money for you.”

  Irene looked out the window at the stream which ran past their drive and out to the small loch at the base of the hill. She seemed to be lost in contemplation of the interplay of grays—gray sky, gray water, gray grass. “I need the money soon,” she said quietly.

  “It’s not due until we land our fish,” Piat said. It never worked to give an inch on payments.

  She raised her eyebrows at him. “Well, then. I guess we’ll need to land him in Mombasa.”

  That night, he drove to Glasgow. At four a. m., he flew to Mombasa via Brussels and Nairobi. He thought that he knew everything that could go wrong.

  Ray Spinner was the youngish man who had been in OIA and who Abe Peretz believed was responsible for his having been shot. Alan Craik had known Spinner vaguely a few years before and thought he was too feckless to do much of anything. The skinny on Spinner in the Navy was that if it hadn’t been for his father, he’d have been working at Jiffy-Lube. His father was a partner in one of the heavy-hitting Washington law firms, one that always had connections in government, no matter which party was in power, although it was said that they were particularly tight with the current bunch. Ray Spinner should have done well, then, but he hadn’t: resignation from the Navy over a screwup that involved his tipping his father off about privileged information; abrupt discharge from the Office of Information Analysis for the data-gathering trip he’d made to Tel Aviv that had ended in the disaster when Peretz had got part of a bullet that had hit somebody else first.

  “So I got fired—even though it was my boss’s idea. To go to Tel Aviv. And be a spy.”

  Spinner and Alan Craik were sitting at a table in a Thai restaurant near American University. Craik thought that Spinner had changed for the better—physically thinner, but maybe psychologically so, as well, as if he’d lost pounds of self-confidence and self-love.

  Craik said, “Pretty dumb, sending somebody to a foreign country that way.”

  “Yeah, well—” Spinner gave him an embarrassed smile. “Greta says it was my own fault and I should suck it up. I mean, I didn’t say no, she says.”

  It had already been established at the beginning of lunch that Spinner had married. It was also evident that somebody had taken him in hand, given him a good talking-to, made him understand he’d been a shmuck and had to do better from now on. The hand would be Greta’s, Craik guessed, a woman who apparently had Spinner under tight control: he’d mentioned doing the dishes and the vacuuming as “my share of having a home.”

  “Who was your boss?”

  “The great Frank McKinnon.”

  One of the people Peretz had given him notes on, now doing something “creative” at the Petroleum Education Council. Craik nonetheless pretended ignorance. “Do I know him?”

  “Nobody knows McKinnon. You just know about him.”

  “Like what?”

  “Big-time neocon, academic when it suits him, published American Millennium—you read it? Very persuasive. Actually a wonderful book, as Greta says, until you do the math and see what it would cost to keep the US as the world’s only superpower forever. McKinnon’s a big thinker.”

  “So he sent you to Tel Aviv as Ray Spinner, Boy Spy, and then fired you because you got caught?”

  Spinner flushed. “Well, there was more to it than that. But yeah, he waited a month and then fired me. I didn’t take it very well at the time. I thought—I was accustomed to having my dad bail me out.” He looked away and then back, directly into Craik’s eyes. “Greta says I have to admit my dependence on my dad.”

  “Like a twelve-step program.”

  Spinner laughed. “Greta’ll love that! Wait till I tell her. Losers Anonymous.” He filled his fork with something that had coconut and pork in it and then held the fork in the air halfway to his mouth. “McKinnon firing me was the best thing that ever happened. Reality check.”

  Alan ate a little of his peanut-sauced chicken and said, “The Office of Information Analysis was a sort of off-the-cuff intel project when you worked there, right?”

  Spinner nodded, chewing. “Finding nuggets you guys had ‘suppressed.’ Don’t get mad! ‘Suppressed’ was their word, not mine. Actually, I bought into it while I was there. It was my job. After I got bounced, I wasn’t so crazy about it.”

  “Just finding nuggets, or did they do operations, as well? Other than yours, I mean.” Alan smiled, making it a little joke. Spinner hadn’t been in intelligence in the Navy; Craik didn’t know how much he understood about the field.

  S
pinner forked more food into his mouth. He ate, Alan thought, like a hungry graduate student. Spinner said, “Everybody in OIA was really close-mouthed. If they did operations, I didn’t hear about it. Everything was top-down, need-to-know, classify it Secret or above if you possibly can.” “Ever hear of something called Perpetual Justice?”

  Spinner looked at him in a different way. Maybe it was the moment when he realized why Alan had asked him to lunch. “Is this official?”

  “I’m in the US Navy; the Navy has an interest in something called Perpetual Justice. I’m not on some sort of legal case, if that’s what you mean.”

  Spinner moved his lower jaw way over to one side, his cheek bulging where his tongue was. He looked perplexed. Maybe he was wishing that Greta were there. “I saw a folder on McKinnon’s desk once with ‘Perpetual Justice’ on the cover. I had to read it upside down.”

  “Read anything in it?”

  Spinner shook his head. His bowl was empty, but he made a point of going around the sides with his fork, picking up the last gobs of sauce. Alan changed the subject back to Greta and learned that Greta was a nurse, and Spinner was studying to be a physician’s assistant. It was such a revolution in his goals that Alan wondered if he would really stick with it. Then Spinner told him that becoming a physician’s assistant was Greta’s idea, so Craik thought the chances of his becoming one were pretty good.

  “How’s your father?”

  “We don’t communicate much. He doesn’t like Greta. The feeling’s mutual.”

  They both had more tea, and Spinner had a brightly colored, gelatinous dessert. Alan allowed a silence to grow, and then he said casually, “So what’s OIA up to now?”

  “They closed up shop. There was an agenda there about invading Iraq; once that went down, probably the big guys looked for new worlds to conquer. Especially with the aftermath in Iraq going to hell—I can’t see McKinnon wanting to be associated with that.”

  “So where’s he now?” Even though he knew the answer.