The Falconer's Tale

by Gordon Kent

  Partlow murmured, “So far as I know, DIA doesn’t do clandestine operations.”

  “Have they known the details of your operation all along? About me, Dukas—Piat?”

  Partlow laughed. He had found his groove—comradely condescension. “You ask the most remarkable questions!”

  “Contact reports? So they knew exactly what was going on day by day?”

  Partlow looked pained. “I’ve no idea who ‘they’ are.”

  “I thought you said DIA,” Craik said patiently. “I know every approved tasking that DIA touches. This is something else. And you know it. This is the bunch over on Mulholland Avenue.”

  Partlow looked at him. He hadn’t been able to keep his eyes from reacting. But he was able to laugh again, not very convincingly. “You have a frame of reference I just don’t understand, Craik.”

  “They’ve screwed up, Clyde. They’ve screwed up their paperwork and they’ve screwed up their finances, and maybe now they’ve screwed up your operation. Maybe they’ve screwed you, too. But they’re not going to screw me and they’re not going to screw Mike Dukas!”

  Partlow waved his hands. He might have been trying to quiet an unruly crowd. “You don’t have— I really can’t—” He dropped his arms. He looked hard at Craik, a kind of test run of one Partlow style, found it wasn’t going to work. “I have no comment to make.”

  Craik studied him, gave up. Partlow might have known more, might tell it another day, but probably wouldn’t now.

  Craik stood, thinking about flying time from Bahrain to Glasgow, then the trip to Mull. Would Piat come back to Mull with his falconer? And there was a woman—was she with them? He said, “I’m going to have to miss some of tomorrow’s meeting. You’re going to cover for me.” He smiled. “As a quid pro quo.”

  “I’m sorry, my friend, but—”

  “I have a good officer to stand in for me; I’ll clear it with DNI. He won’t like it, but I’ll persuade him. This officer can handle most of the stuff, but if it gets sticky, you’re going to make it happen that everybody waits until I get there. Okay, Clyde? To keep me from being unhappy?”

  Partlow smoothed his robe over his thighs. He stood. “I suppose so.” He checked his watch.

  Craik headed back to his room and the STU. Maybe Dukas could track Piat and the others out of Bahrain. Or maybe they were still there.

  Or maybe Piat’s call had been ado about nothing—but Craik didn’t believe that. If Piat had called Dukas, he thought something was going on.

  He knew the tree was huge, alone on the floor of a desert valley dominated by low, rocky ridges. He knew, too, that it was home to a swarm of flies and not much else. He’d been there before.

  But now he could see it.

  Twelve minutes. Two miles at his best running pace. How big did a big tree look at two miles?

  At the eight-minute mark he picked up a gravel road and stayed on it. He was taking long strides, was running as well as he had ever run over such a distance. He was aware, like a man gambling his last chip, that at the end of this run, whenever he stopped, he’d have nothing left—that the running was all that was holding him up, even now, and when he stopped it would be to fall.

  Tough shit. Suck it up, princess.

  Four minutes to eight. Might get a minute or two if he was lucky or some part of the op—the other op, the enemy op—was slow. His thinking was completely clear, his head was clear. He saw the whole thing. Somebody—it didn’t matter who—had played Partlow from the start, because the op, the contact op, was never a recruitment. It was an assassination. Except that Partlow—and Piat, of course—had done such a good job that instead of walking away, they’d found a way to make it work, and so here he was.

  Partlow was in it, but knew nothing of the bomb. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been so pleased by “Bob.” Partlow had a good poker face, but he couldn’t hide pleasure.

  Piat wished he knew who it was who wanted the prince dead.

  Now he could see two clusters of tiny people near the tree. A white SUV. A van like a toy car.

  Don’t jump the gun. Don’t just hand over the bird, Digger, or you’re dead. Stand there. Don’t let the prince near the cage—that’s when they’ll trigger it—

  Five hundred meters. More than a quarter of a mile. The human body looks like a speck at that distance. A good high school athlete can run it in just a little over a minute.

  Four hundred meters. Where was the man with the pager? Was Carl with him? Carl of the eyeglasses and the yessirs and the shit-eating manner? Carl, who’d blindsided him? Led surveillance right to him?

  They could be anywhere on the north–south ridges. Anywhere within sightline. They’d have wonderful optics and the pager and nothing else to give them away.

  Three hundred meters. Carl must see him—except that he was on foot, running—not what Carl would expect. Except that their surveillance should have alerted them that he had run off.

  If Carl cared about him at all. Almost close enough to shout now.

  Two hundred and fifty meters, and the human body is as tall as the distance between the quick and the tip of a thumb held at arm’s length.

  Two hundred and twenty meters, and two of the minuscule figures were bending to take something big from the van. Wired Bella.

  Piat threw himself forward into the stumbling remnant of the sprint he didn’t have left in him, but he covered ground until he could recognize Hackbutt’s face and Hackbutt’s straight back as he and Mohamed carried the heavy cage in both arms toward the white SUV. The prince, recognizable by the men clustering around him, was standing to receive them.

  Fifty meters. Five seconds for a world-class sprinter. More for a tired spy of fifty. The standing figures were as tall now as the whole nail of a thumb held at arm’s length.

  Piat knew that the man on the ridge would need several seconds to dial the number that would detonate the bomb. Seconds.

  He stopped running. He was gasping. He wanted to put his hands on his knees, rest. He tried to get enough breath to shout. “Digger! The cage is a bomb!” His voice seemed to stay in his throat. He fought for air. “Digger! Bomb! Get out!”

  Mohamed did hear him—younger ears. Hackbutt didn’t. Mohamed turned his head, looked at Piat, and dropped his end of the crate. And ran.

  The prince heard him as well. He focused on Piat, and then he was running for the white SUV, and his security men were trying to get between him and Hackbutt.

  Hackbutt had held on to his end of the cage and had even tried to catch Mohamed’s end before it hit the ground. The thing was too heavy. He staggered and lost his hold, and the cage hit the sand and tipped back, and Hackbutt kept it from tipping over with an effort that almost pulled him down.

  Piat wanted to run to him, but he was done. Panting, he managed to shout, “Digger! The cage is a bomb!”

  Hackbutt heard him this time. He looked once at Piat, and then he reached and wrestled with the latch of the cage’s door. Piat was screaming but didn’t hear himself. He was trying to shout Run, run! but he wasn’t making the words.

  Hackbutt pulled Bella out of the cage by the jesses, and then, a huge effort made possible only by adrenaline and passion, he swung the big bird up, up, running two steps forward, and threw his arms at the sky, and she clawed for the air, at first feebly and then more strongly, seeming to sink and then to rise, up, up, sweeping up into the first circle that would carry her far above them all, and Piat saw Hackbutt simply stand there to watch her, his arms still raised as if he were accepting some tribute, his long hair blowing, until he was wrapped in the flame of the explosion.

  23

  Piat had got out of Bahrain hugger-mugger, not sure who might be after him or even if anybody cared. His clothes were thrown into his bag; his sweaty running clothes were still on him under a five-dollar Ahmadinejad jacket and blue jeans. He took the first flight he could get a ticket for and flew to Karachi, from there started backtracking. He tried to call Irene twice from Karachi, aga
in from Prague. He practiced old routines of evasion.

  He called again from Frankfurt. This time, she was in her hotel room in Arras.

  “Oh, my God!” she said. “At last!” Before he could say what he had to say, she was rushing on. “It’s fantastic, the show’s fantastic! It hasn’t even opened yet and a Paris gallery wants it; it’s going to be even better, they’re promising me much better lighting—the lighting here sucks; but anyway it’s fantastic! The local rag, which isn’t really bad, the art critic has a reputation, she came yesterday even though I wasn’t ready, she called it ‘a profound meditation on death and womanhood!’ How’s that for meaning!” Excited, happy, she stopped. He said her name, but she interrupted, her voice now almost harsh. “Where the hell is Eddie? He was supposed to call me. He was supposed to call hours and hours ago. Where’s Eddie?”

  Piat cleared his throat. Even so, his voice was hoarse. “Edgar’s dead, Irene.”

  She didn’t say anything for what seemed like minutes, could have been only seconds. Then: “How can that be?”

  “I can’t tell you anything over the phone. I’ll tell you when I see you.”

  She said nothing. He didn’t hear breathing or sobbing—nothing. He said again, “I’ll tell you when I see you. All about it.” He waited. “Irene?” He waited again. “Irene—I’m going to see you. Right?”

  She was silent for so long he thought they had been cut off, and then he heard her mutter, “Jesus Christ,” and she hung up.

  Later, sitting numbed in the airport lounge, he knew that she had meant that they were never going to get together. She had meant what he had known from the moment the bomb had gone off but hadn’t been able to admit to himself: she could fuck him if Hackbutt was alive, but she couldn’t go near him if Hackbutt was dead, because that would be fucking on his grave and being glad he’d died.

  He had hoped he’d be changing his flight to Paris, a train to Arras. Now, he went on to London, then Glasgow. He picked up his rental car there and caught the last ferry to the island. He didn’t go to the farm or the Mishnish but made a phone call and then went to the cottage in Dervaig and sacked out on the divers’ floor.

  He didn’t know who might care about what had happened or what they might do. “Carl” wouldn’t be happy about his screwing up the bombing. The prince might not be happy, either, although if he had any sense he was thinking that Hackbutt was a hero, and so was the man in the running shorts who’d done the shouting. But one or the other might be vindictive, and Piat didn’t want to be surprised by somebody’s lust for revenge.

  In the morning, he told the two divers that he wanted them to cover his back for a day or two.

  “Wot? We’re supposed to be humping that gear down from the crannog.”

  “Give me a day or two. I want to see who shows up.”

  He still had a hope—or a fear—that it would be Irene—that she would come back to the farm for things she valued, for the money she was owed. He didn’t want her to arrive and find a couple of “Carl’s” tough guys or a couple of Saudi specialists.

  He drove out to the farm with the divers tailing him, pulled off where he had waited the first time he’d ever come there, and watched the house. He was pretty sure that nobody had got there before him, or the dog and the birds would be showing signs. Nothing happened for several hours; then, Annie came down the hill on her bike, stayed for an hour, walked the dog, and pedaled her way back up the hill.

  “Come on.”

  “Now what?”

  “We’re going down to that farm. Park the van around back where it can’t be seen from the road.” He drove down. The dog was ecstatic. He let himself in and went straight to Hackbutt’s bedroom and the closet where he knew Hackbutt had kept a shotgun. He found it leaning in the corner behind clothes that smelled of dead chickens and bird lime. Two boxes of shells sat on the floor beside it.

  “One of you take the shotgun. The other go up on the hill where we stopped and keep an eye out.” He handed over his own cell phone. “You see anything headed this way from either direction, you call. I don’t want to be surprised.”

  McLean looked like a man who was ready to bail out. “How serious is this, chum?”

  “You’ve been getting your money for doing nothing the last week.”

  “Yeah, but there’s jobs and jobs. I’ve done a tour with the hard ones. That was enough.”

  “Then take off. Leave me the gun.”

  But they didn’t go. Instead, both of them went up to watch and Piat was left with the shotgun. Not the kind of backup he’d hoped for.

  In the middle of the afternoon, he let the dog in. It was suspicious of the house. It went from room to room, sniffing, backing away from things, suddenly trotting, then standing still. In the end, it threw itself down at his feet, ears alert. When he touched it, it winced.

  “Hey, it’s me.”

  One car passed in the whole day. It was Annie’s dad, heading out and then returning two hours later. The divers took turns coming down to eat. They foraged in the kitchen cupboards, found cans and frozen things—Irene food. They were apologetic, but they weren’t going to change their minds about getting killed for him. At nine, with darkness falling, he told them to go home. He’d call them if he wanted them next day.

  “Sorry to draw the line, chum.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Dykes lingered in the door. “How bad is it?” he asked. He had I’m sorry written all over him.

  Piat shrugged. “Like McLean didn’t say, it’s not your problem. Not your op. Something else went very, very wrong. Go home, Dawg. Get out of here.”

  Dykes hesitated. They went back together, and he was thinking about that.

  Suddenly Piat realized he didn’t want Dykes and his wife and college-bound daughter on his conscience. “Seriously, Dawg. As soon as the lapis sells, I send you a cut. Get gone.”

  He ate standing in the kitchen; a canned potpie of some indeterminate meat that said it was beef. He washed it down with beer, then took out a bottle of single malt that he had brought when the dietary rules had started to crumble. It seemed a long time ago—the two of them just starting to eat meat, nibbling at it; then Irene drinking more, smoking. Coffee. A long time ago. Teaching Hackbutt stuff that didn’t matter a damn now.

  Role model.

  For a dead man.

  He went into the sitting room with the dog and the bottle and the shotgun. The dog, he thought, would hear anybody who came close now; he’d certainly see any car lights himself.

  He sat in an armchair in the dark. He drank the salty, seaweedy scotch. After a while, he slipped down next to the dog, sat with his back against the chair.

  “He was a good guy, Ralph,” he said aloud. His voice was rough with whisky and emotion. The dog lifted its ears; he could feel the movement under his hand. “He was a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

  He was drinking the scotch from the bottle now; his glass was up above somewhere. “You think you’re pretty good, and you think you do something just right, and then—” He swallowed hard. His eyes felt hot. “I was behind it the whole time. He did all that shit, put up with all my shit, so that he could—so he could stand there and let his fucking bird go. And I didn’t protect him.” He put his face down into the dog’s long, silky hairs. The dog was warm and responsive; his breathing rose and fell, and, answering Piat’s contact, he rolled back, exposing his side and part of his belly.

  “Oh, Christ, doggie, doggie—!” Tears ran into the dog’s fur, and Piat sobbed. Only for seconds, but he hadn’t cried in a long time and he was surprised. He said, “Shit.” He sat up, exhaled, wiped his eyes on his sleeves. “My God.” He still had a ball in his throat, his nose now stuffy. “Oh, God, doggie!”

  That was his mourning for Edgar Hackbutt. And for himself, because, as Hopkins more or less made clear, it is always ourselves we weep for.

  * * *

  He woke at six on the floor. The bottle was mostly empty. The dog lay against
him, snoring lightly. Piat was cold, but the dog was warm where they touched. He remembered the tears, added them to the list of things he wouldn’t tell other people. Now, he knew, came the hardening of the heart: first, an instant of surrender to feeling, then the hardening. You hardened your heart against women you were going to leave, against death, against the claims of other people’s lives. It takes practice.

  He went to the kitchen and put on coffee, then went to the bathroom and tried to vomit but couldn’t; he took four aspirins from the medicine cabinet, showered, rubbed himself hard with the towel, felt like hell.

  “How about a walk, Ralph?”

  The dog jumped up. He quivered, wagged, raised his head and made barking motions but no sound. He backed toward the door and sneezed. It was raining out, but he didn’t care.

  “I think the answer’s yes.”

  They went up the hill as far as the place where Edgar had flighted his birds. Up here, he had told Edgar about wanting Bella for the operation. Now Edgar was dead, and Bella was soaring over the desert or the Arabian Gulf, or she was sick and hungry and hiding somewhere. Mohamed, he thought, would try to coax her down the way Hackbutt had coaxed the red hawk in Kenya. It had all gone to shit—the prince, Mohamed—and it was his operation and it was his fault, and he was back to thoughts he was trying not to think.

  He came back down the hill, head pounding, nauseated. He clipped the dog to his chain again and went inside. He put the shotgun across the arms of a chair and sat in another one with the rest of the coffee. He didn’t believe anymore that anybody was coming. He’d panicked because of the shock of his failure.

  And she wasn’t coming back, either. Maybe she’d come back eventually, two or three months or a year from now, but not now. Not for so long as she thought there was a chance that he might be there.

  He was sitting there, the cup empty, when the dog started barking. Piat stayed low, looked out the window, saw a car he didn’t know. He went out the back door and hung at the corner of the house until he saw who was in it.

  He waited until the men were out of the car and dealing with the dog’s enthusiasm before he set the gun against the house and stepped into view. One man—the Navy captain, Craik—was wearing the same thing he had been the last time Piat had seen him: yellow slicker, bucket hat, old corduroys. Craik looked up from the dog and saw him, smiled. Dukas, lingering behind, stared around him. Then he started toward Piat.