Bob moaned, rare enough for him; the job seemed huge; his head ached. He looked and couldn’t tell if it was day or night, checked the jungle Seiko he’d worn since he’d bought it for twelve dollars in an Army PX in 1971 and saw that it was almost midnight. He sighed, and went back to work.
Location, time, distance, weapon. These were the points of his compass. As he studied the documents and tested a hundred shooting sites against them, he came up dry the first time through. He tried again, harder, sinking deeper into it. He tried to imagine the man, a shooter like himself, sunk in his sandbags, in a little dark room a mile out, watching through the scope as the president of the United States did this thing and that thing, and then his head blew off in a big red gout of tissue, a blizzard of bone and blood and brain. It would take weeks to find the room if he were firing from a mile out. They might never find it.
He worked it through, over and over and over, in slow, grinding degrees, sinking so far beneath the surface he wondered if there was a surface. Was there a solution? Could it be done? Where could he find everything. He—
Hey!
He watched it appear, watched it organize itself before his very eyes, saw it all fit together.
He saw in that instant how it would happen, how it had to happen. He knew where.
It was the third day, late, well past midnight. All right, he thought. You motherfuckers think it’s 1972, fourteen hundred yards outside the Da Nang wire as Sniper Team Alpha slides over the berm.
It won’t be.
Because this time I’ll be waiting.
CHAPTER NINE
“Nicky, Nicky,” said Tommy Montoya, “oh, my boy, this is not like you.”
Montoya was Cuban, deep into spook life, who occasionally came across tips that he passed Memphis’s way as he did his jobs for various agencies of the federal government and perhaps for other customers as well. He was one of those edge-masters, a bit too clever for his own good, who’d some day be found in the Big Muddy or Lake Pontchartrain with a diesel crankcase wired to his ankle and a school of guppies living in a thoracic wound cavity. But until then, Tommy Montoya would lick the oyster dry and now he smiled, holding an opened bivalve in one fat hand, and his thick tongue darted out to nudge the gelid thing loose from its tray of shell, so that he could suck it down in one intense, sensuous moment.
Nick tried to avert his eyes. Christ, how could anyone eat one of those things? Nick was of the opinion that if it didn’t bleed when you cut it, you didn’t put it in your mouth. But the Cuban still had his uses. He knew things nobody else knew—the business, for example.
“Nicky,” he said again, “you know you go through channels. DEA’s got priority on those big eavesdropping rigs, you apply through—”
“Come on, Tommy,” said Nick, in a hurry to get through Tommy’s coy games, because Howdy Duty was due in that afternoon and he wanted to be ready when the old Base got there, because if you got off on the wrong foot with Utey, you never got back to the right one, as Nick knew only too well.
So he was nervous and not handling this brilliantly. Besides, the bar on the riverfront was dark and seething with exotic men, and Nick, in a Stay-Prest blue poplin suit and a white shirt, felt as if he had FED stenciled between his hairline and his eyebrows in letters three inches tall and knew the long grip of his Smith 1076 was printing through the coat.
He plunged ahead, all illusion of finesse gone. “Say I needed one fast. I gotta circumvent the red tape. I got a big bust coming up but I’m afraid, say, there’s a leak, either in DEA or my own shop. I want ultrasophisticated listening technology and, just to make it worth somebody’s while, let’s say I liberated enough cash from a bad dealer to be able to pay the going tariff. So what’s my best move?”
“You ain’t wearing a wire, my friend? You’re not trying to bug a bugger or con a con man? You always seemed to me to be a pretty straight kind of guy.”
It was said of Tommy that he’d gone ashore with 2506 Brigade at the Bay of Pigs, and spent two years in Castro’s prisons—and that he had scars like star bursts on his back. He had that Latin thing—cajones, machismo, whatever—that lurid but nonneurotic willingness to do violence that radiated out of every pore of his ample body.
“No, I’m clean, man, that’s all. I just have to figure out how some guys got some powerful listening equipment into play out by the airport a couple of days ago. Where they got some stuff and got it quick, to set up a hit.”
“That guy had his insides cut to ribbons?”
“Yeah, that guy.”
“Ooooooo, Nicky, that’s a strange one. You know, you always hear things. Always. You know, the players, the teams, when something like this goes down. Except now. Nicky, my friend, would you believe, I ain’t heard nothing. It’s strictly from out of town. It’s got nothing to do with us, I’ll tell you.”
“Maybe not. Still, it’s kinda personal. Come on, Tommy. I’m just playing up the equipment angle. I have a source who swears the guy was some kind of Salvadoran spook, and I’m also hearing Agency on him, but the Agency won’t play ball with me and his records are so suspiciously clean it makes me wonder how come a guy could lead a whole life without ever getting a parking ticket.”
Tommy made a sour face, then with his tongue liberated another oyster. How such a thick man could do such an obscene thing with such quick delicacy really amazed Nick.
“I’m trying to figure how the hell the guys got in to whack the john. They heard him trying to reach me. With some gear. Now, where the hell you get stuff like that around here?”
“Well,” Tommy finally said, “what I think you want would be one of the Electrotek 5400 models. It’s a portable directional parabolic microphone, very state of the art, known for its capacity to penetrate even hardened rooms. We’re talking over a million the unit. Far as I know, only seven were built—four for DEA, two for the Agency, and one for a foreign client, very hush-hush.”
“What country?” asked Nick.
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to say, my friend. But they had themselves a nasty little war going on.”
“El Salvador! That’s it. Son of a bitch.”
He saw pattern before his eyes. It’s what he lived for: the magic connection between parts of a case.
He was thinking in great leaps: Electrotek goes to El Salvador in what year? Say, late eighties, when we’re pouring aid in. Okay, so this guy Eduardo Lanzman, he’s spook, but he learns something? Something big? Something dangerous? Scares his butt. So he thinks, who the fuck can I call? Obviously, it’s got spook business all over it, so he doesn’t want to go to his old pals in the Agency, right? Because he hasn’t shaken it out, doesn’t know quite who’s doing what to whom, who’s on which side—oh, I know how shadowy it gets—so he has to find someone outside—someone safe, someone he can trust—to tell. So he thinks of an old pal in DEA who might have some kind of perspective, except that guy is not in the life anymore. So, he then thinks of this FBI agent the DEA guy told him about. So he takes off. But now they know he’s gone. So he cools his heels somewhere, just to throw them off the track. But somehow they know he’s headed toward New Orleans, so that gets them time to get the unit up here and set up a surveillance at the airport. Where they spot him. They follow him. They’ve got the goddamn thing in play. They find the room; they penetrate it electronically, these Salvadorans. They get my name, they pop the room and turn poor Eduardo inside out.
Tommy looked at him.
“Nick, you look like you just had a religious experience. The Virgin, did she talk to you?”
“Somebody did,” Nick said. Not normally religious, he had a brief impulse to make the sign of the cross for Eduardo, who opened the door expecting to see dull old Nick but instead caught three bad hitters in the face and died the death only a Mandarin torturer could have invented … and yet who cared so much that even after the executioners had left and his guts were like dirty socks in the bed and the shock had worn off enough for the pain to be the fifth act of every opera
ever written, this guy still had the machismo to crawl to the linoleum and pass on the message.
ROM DO.
ROM DO?
What did it mean? What was this clue, so tantalizing, so goddamn cute?
“I got another weird one for you. This guy, he left a message written in his own blood. ROM DO, in caps. What’s the words Rom, Do mean to you, Tommy. Anything? I spent thirteen hours in the library the other day, just going through books on crime and espionage, looking for something. I asked the big smart guys at Quantico in the Behavioral Science Department, you know, our intellectuals. They came up with nothing. Any idea?”
“Rom Do? Could be anything, man.” Then he laughed. “Funny, it reminds me of something.”
“Okay,” said Nick, “so sing. Tell me.”
“Oh, it’s crazy.”
“Crazier the better, my friend, that’s where I’m at.”
“You know I was on the island in sixty-one? Bahia de Cochinos, huh, my friend? The Bay with the Piggies?”
“Yeah, so it’s said.”
“Okay, my battalion was first ashore at Red Beach, you know, near Playa Larga. Okay, we used Army call signs, just like the American army, because we believed in America and we believed in that cocksucker JFK, man, we loved him and we loved our little invasion.” The bitterness spurted out and clouded his words. Then he caught himself.
“Anyway, later they changed it. Okay, they changed it and made it more jet age. The D, I mean.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The D became Delta. D for Delta. Not Dog no more, but Delta. You went on the radio and your call sign was a D, you were Delta. Delta Company, Delta Flight, Delta squadron, Delta Force, that sort of thing. But in the early sixties, they hadn’t changed. D was Dog. R was Romeo. It was call signs and I was in Second Battalion, 2506 Brigade, La Brigada, and we were Romeo Dog Two, there was a Romeo Dog Three, Four and Five, the guy running the show, the patron, out there on the ship, he was Romeo Dog Six. ‘Rom Do’? Your guy’s hurrying on that floor, his mind ain’t working right, he’s dying. He’s sending you a message from the past. Romeo Dog. Get it?”
“Romeo Dog? No, I don’t get it,” Nick said, turning the info over in his head.
What the hell was Romeo Dog?
Howdy Duty hadn’t changed; he was one of those men who couldn’t change. But then Nick hadn’t changed, either. Nick would never change: he’d always be a special agent, and never a supervisory agent. Maybe he didn’t really mind that, because in his own heart he knew he wasn’t cut out to give orders and he wasn’t interested in power and a fine home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. But having the no-promotion tag on his record would at least keep him off of the really interesting squads and out of Washington forever. He’d never get Anti-Terrorist, which was the crème de la crème in the eighties and probably would be well into the nineties; it was fast-reacting jungle gym stuff, guns and SWAT tactics, and interfacing with some extremely interesting other agencies, the fastest league of all. He’d never get a Hostage Rescue Team. Now those boys were the elite: HRTs kicked down doors and smoked bad guys when it came the time to walk the walk. And he’d never get Organized Crime either, and that was hot stuff, sinking through the membrane of the Mafia, entering that twisted, yet fascinating world; if you got that, you were doing something. It was true of counterespionage too, only the hard part of that was simply following Cubans around Washington and wiretapping embassies. But also interesting.
No, Nick would stay forever in out-of-the-way, B-city offices; Baltimore or Richmond or Frederick were as close as he’d come to Washington and though less than a hundred miles each way from the Big Town, they were still universes away, and the leap from one to another, without a validating stop in New York or Miami or L.A. (where Nick would never go, either) was a quantum leap … impossible by the physics of Bureau culture.
Yet for all of that, he did not hate Howdy Duty. Utey had simply faced the hard decision of sorting out the Tulsa incident so that it would do the Bureau the most good, and if he identified himself and his own career as “The Bureau” in some way, it wasn’t a selfish decision so much as a helpless one. That was how it went; that was how he thought.
And so, when Nick picked Howard D. Utey up at the New Orleans airport, it wasn’t a particularly tense or awkward thing. They both understood.
Howard stood on the curb outside the American terminal and waved when he saw Nick in the gray government Ford. He even had a little smile as he ducked to come in, tossing his bag in the backseat.
“Hi, Nick. Boy, you’re looking great. Still keeping that hair, huh?”
“That’s right, Howard. It just won’t fall out, I don’t know why.”
“Nick, I was sorry to hear about Myra. Was she in any pain at the end?”
“No. She’d been in a coma for a long time. She just stopped breathing. It wasn’t a hard end. She had a hard life but she had an easy end.”
“Well, thank God for small and tender mercies.”
“I know, Howard,” said Nick, dully, concentrating on not calling him Howdy, though it occasionally happened, and Utey, who knew his nickname well, always pretended not to notice.
Howdy Duty was quite a small man, actually, small and ferrety, but not stupid or slow. He had simply given himself totally to the Bureau, and had set about to rise with the patience and the fury of a poor boy. He managed it with certain political gifts, to be sure; but also by working as hard as it was possible to work.
“They still call me ‘Howdy Duty,’ Nick?”
“I’m afraid they do, Howard,” said Nick as they drove in from the airport.
“Well, that’s all right, as long as it’s behind my back, and as long as I never hear that it’s gotten to Secret Service, Nick. That I would have to regard as an act of treachery, not to me personally, but to the Bureau as a whole. You know, everybody here likes you, Nick—everybody everywhere likes you, that’s one of your gifts—and it’d do everybody a lot of good if you’d pass that information around. I know that informally passed information is sometimes more efficiently communicated than office memos. Fair enough?”
“Yes, Howard,” said Nick. That was Howard. He established the rules and played by them—unless it suited his purposes to change them.
“Now, Nick, a lot of what we’ll be doing in the next few weeks is liaison, which again is why it’s great to have you on the team. You have a wonderful gift for getting along with people. Don’t think it hasn’t been noticed. And you’ll need all your affability, all right? All of it. Every bit.”
“Sure, Howard. So what’m I going to be doing? I heard the pres—”
“That’s right, Nick. On March first, the president will be flying down from Washington in the morning for a speech and presentation in downtown New Orleans. He’s going to be giving Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez the Freedom Medal—you know, the Archbishop of Salvador who won the Nobel Peace Prize?”
Nick knew, of course. Archbishop Roberto Lopez was a validated Great Man, the heir to the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero; he had worked tirelessly at getting the two sides in that bitter war, exacerbated so terribly of late by the Panther Battalion massacre, to talk.
Nick remembered the news footage: Bishop Roberto Lopez walking among the dead children by the riverbank in his humble black cloth with a humble silver cross about his neck, his eyes wracked with tears behind the wire-frame glasses. A poet, an expert on medieval Latin alchemy, a complete apolitical, who had the love in his heart to tell NBC, “I do not hate the men who did this. I love them and I forgive them. To hate them and to demand their punishment is to guarantee that such horror will be perpetuated.”
“The president’s popularity has slipped a bit since the war, Nick. I think he wants to get on the Bishop Roberto Lopez bandwagon. It certainly won’t do him any harm.”
“Maybe he just admires the guy,” said Nick. “A lot of people do.”
“Anyway, I know you’re not aware of this down here, you know�
��—he meant, Nick knew, at your level—“but recently relations between the Bureau and the Secret Service have not been very friendly. In Chicago three months ago, we ran into a problem of intersecting investigations—counterfeit money drew Treasury in and we were working it from an organized crime standpoint, and somehow we never knew the other was there. An arrest sequence got confused and one of our people shot one of theirs. Didn’t kill him, and they say he’ll probably be on his feet in six months or so, but it left bad feelings.”
Nick shook his head. It sure as hell must have. No one really liked working with the Secret Service, particularly on security details, where the guys in the sunglasses were absolute pricks, and by informal fiat took command of any situation. Feelings always were rubbed raw; no ten-year Bureau man liked being told what to do by a twenty-three-year-old boy in shades with an earpiece, a lapel pin, and an Uzi in a briefcase. And yet that’s the way it always happened.
“It’s the same drill, Nick, you know it. Secret Service will provide the manpower and the close-up security; they’ll run their own security investigations; but we’re there to back them up, to run interference with the locals with them, and to handle any investigative work that won’t fit into their time frames.”
To be their gofers, Nick thought bleakly.
“Now the director is adamant,” Howdy continued. “We’ve got some fence-mending to do. And that’s our job. Fence-mending. You and I, Nick, we are the fence menders. Through you, I’ll be turning over the resources of our New Orleans office to Secret Service; in turn, we’re to be granted a bit of security authority ourselves and indeed, we’ll be part of the operation on the day Flashlight arrives. It’s a good chance, Nick; it’s something I thought you’d enjoy, and if it goes well, I’ll certainly mention you prominently in the reports. You’ll have a great deal of latitude too; the freedom to do what best you can do. Who knows? Things can change. This might just get you out of your rut.”
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