by Tom Clancy
Hasul kept his fingers pressed against the glass now, remembering his walk beneath dusk’s heavy overcast. He had left the office building hooded and gloved, a face guard draping down from bridge of his nose, protective sunglasses with side panels over his eyes. His pulse had raced with expectancy. As he did on the rarest occasions — no more than twice, perhaps three times a year — Hasul had decided in his approximate way to know the world as one who was altogether part of it.
For a while he had paused on a hammock near the edge of the trees and looked west in the direction of the expiring sun. At the distant limit of his vision, the clouds above the mountain humps were stained the color of old bruises. Hasul had seen the vapor of his rapid breaths puff into the winter air through his face guard’s mesh ventilation panel, his excitement increasing as the latest precious moment to be caught in hand raced up on him.
It was no sudden urge, that wish to feel the cold against his skin. Indeed, Hasul’s earliest memories consisted of the excruciating lessons of impulsiveness. The constant forethought and rigorous preparation for which he was lauded in the scientific research community were not, in his eyes, points of pride but absolute necessity.
As he stood out in the gloaming, Hasul had unclipped his portable dosimeter from his coat pocket, held it before him to determine that the UV level was within a comparably tolerable range, and set its timer function for thirty seconds. Caution relaxing its leash on him just so far, he had worn 100 SPF sunblock makeup tinted to match his flesh tone and applied a thick layer of cream to his lips.
His physicians would have crowed in disapproval regardless, not to fault them. Their job was to butler his health. But Hasul had already given them forty-eight years worth of validation, some of it aided by chance, since it was probable he would have died in childhood had his genetic defect not been the variant type… and still that wasn’t truly the point. In the end nothing escaped decay, flesh least of all, and he saw human longevity for the illusion it was. The body was perishable; only its spirit was eternal. Five years, fifty, a hundred — the difference between one life span and another did not amount to a murmur in the flowing river of time. Hasul had calculated and been willing to accept that each exposure would have consequences along the way. What mattered was that he remain true to the plan for which he was created, and this he had done, sparing none of his wealth and ability. Following God’s will through personal discipline, Hasul was soon to reach the culmination of his purpose in this world.
Today at dusk he had permitted himself thirty seconds of release.
No more, no less.
With a quick motion, Hasul had pulled the guard down below his chin. His head thrown back, arms outspread, he stood on his mound of earth and let the trailing remnants of the sunlight press against his naked face. The sound of blood rushing in his ears had been so loud, a thunderous roar beneath which his awareness had been briefly submerged, swept away like a soul in the eternal river.
And then the warning tones of his dosimeter, sounding into the tide.
Now Hasul stepped back from the window, watched his reflection withdraw into the black of night like a disembodied spirit, staring, its hand extended as if groping for the glass’s fixed solidity. He turned away and looked across his desk, his eye catching a slip of movement outside the mouth of an artificial rock cave in the large aquarium tank built into the wall to his right. In the opposite corner of the room, a broad, dark-suited man sat at a closed circuit digital surveillance console, his attention fixed on its flat panel monitor.
Hasul noticed his frown.
“Zaheer,” he said. “Something troubles you.”
“May I speak freely?”
“Please.”
Zaheer nodded toward the display.
“This kaffir who comes to see you,” he said. His use of the Islamic term for nonbelievers was full of disdain. “I fear his inclusion is a mistake.”
Hasul strode up to the console and studied the wide screen image. It showed three men in the ground-floor entry vestibule. Two were members of the Cadre, Aasim passing a handheld weapons detector over their visitor’s rangy frame, Qamal standing by in guarded readiness.
“He has proven capable and worthy of his reputation,” Hasul said.
“More than any of our own?”
“You know what lies ahead of us,” Hasul said. And then inserted the expedient half-truth. “No contribution will be greater than yours in coming days.”
Zaheer held stiffly silent, his eyes on the monitor.
Down in the vestibule, Aasim finished wanding the visitor and accompanied him through an inner door into the main lobby. Zaheer pressed a channel-selection key on his digital multiplexer and the CCD-TV screen view shifted to an overhead of the elevator bank, where the two men entered a waiting car.
Hasul glanced down from the monitor and saw the barely restrained skepticism on Zaheer’s face. “I think of the street dentists in Islamabad, Peshawar, and Karachi,” he said. “I remember their offices are dirty blankets and wooden crates on the open sidewalk. Their tools common pliers, chisels, screwdrivers. They are unlearned, work with grime on their hands, and for anaesthesia plunge needles into one side of the patient’s mouth to distract him from the agony of a rotting tooth being chopped and filed on the other.” He paused, continued to regard the other man. “Their skills are crude, bloody, and yet indispensable to those that require them.”
Zaheer’s face remained tight.
“Are we then among the poverty stricken who must turn to such a one in desperation?”
Hasul looked at him. Again, the partial falsehood. “We are for a higher mission, and above the sordid errands the infidel will be turned upon,” he said.
Zaheer fell silent, switched the monitor to its picture-in-picture mode. The area directly outside the office suite appeared in its main window. Smaller frames on its right tracked Aasim and the visitor as they rose five levels inside the elevator, exited, and then walked along the bends of the corridor to the suite.
Hasul watched them step into the main screen view, Aasim reaching for the buzzer on the electronic access control box beside his door.
He did not wait for the tone to sound.
“Show Mr. Earl through the reception area,” he said.
“Then I would meet privately with him.”
As he rose from his console, Zaheer made another weak effort at masking his unhappiness. Then he bowed his head in formal deference and went to carry out his instructions.
Hasul was standing behind his desk when John Earl came into the office. Zaheer lingered at the doorway only a moment, then backed out to leave them alone.
Earl waited a step or two inside the closed door. Sandy-haired, blue-eyed, sharp-chinned, his nose long and curved with flaring nostrils that gave him a raptorial look, he wore a black leather car coat, gray muffler, and jeans.
Hasul greeted him with a slight nod.
“You’ve arrived right on time.”
“Always.”
“And it is always appreciated.”
Earl stepped forward into the room, paused, and glanced over his shoulder at the wall aquarium. Nothing stirred amid the stony hollows and ledge formations of its habitat.
“Our pal Legs okay in there?”
“Yes.”
“One of these days he’ll have to come out and say hello,” Earl said. “I’ve been here enough so you wouldn’t think we’d be strangers.”
Hasul looked at him. “The blue-ringed octopus is a dangerous but retiring creature,” he said. “Its perception of who is or isn’t a stranger may be be different from yours.”
Earl grunted, still peering into the tank.
“I think maybe Legs just isn’t too fond of the nickname I gave him,” he said.
Hasul’s smile left a barely perceptible stinging sensation in a corner of his lower lip. He touched it with the tip of his tongue, tasted a fleck of dry ointment. Thirty seconds. Might damage to his skin have resulted from only thirty seconds?
Earl looked across at him and unwrapped his muffler. The smallest portion of a tattoo showed on the right side of his neck — just a stroke of red, the actual markings covered by his collar.
“All right,” he said after a moment. “What’ve you got?”
“Two projects for now,” Hasul said. “More accurately, a single project with two distinct and crucial elements.”
Earl had become very still.
“Break it down for me,” he said.
“One of my dealers vanished a week ago with costly inventory in his possession. He may have abused my trust and stolen it, or he may have come to harm during a transaction that was to take place. In either case, something has gone very wrong.”
“His name?”
“Patrick Sullivan.”
“What about the party he was showing the goods?”
“A buyer whose name I do not know.” Hasul shrugged. “As a rule I distance myself from the market chain at that level.”
Earl nodded.
“If your man ran off, you want me take care of him.”
“Yes.”
“If he was hijacked, you want me to track down whoever did it.”
“Yes. I also wish to determine whether the offender was acting independently or on orders… and have my inventory returned to me if possible.”
Earl tipped his head up and down a second time.
“What’s the other part of the job?” he said.
Hasul was quiet a second, his palms flat on his desk.
“Patrick Sullivan’s woman,” he said. “Whatever the reason for his disappearance, I’ve learned he has shared extremely sensitive information about my business affairs with her.”
“And?” “Unfortunately, I cannot risk her passing this information along to anyone else.”
Earl looked at him with a hint of a smile.
“I’m guessing you know her name,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Where I can find her.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, leave everything to me.” Earl paused. “That takes care of the ‘for now’ part…”
Hasul raised a hand, offering his own taut smile.
“The later,” he said, “is for later.”
Silence. They looked across the room at each other.
“Zaheer will give you the pertinent details,” Hasul said, then. “Of course you can expect to be well compensated.”
“Never would doubt it.”
Earl rose from his chair, buttoned his jacket, tugged its sleeves down over his arms.
“Better be on my way,” he said.
Hasul stood to show him from the office, but Earl had already started toward the door as he came around his desk, breaking stride for only an instant to have another look at the aquarium.
Its inhabitant remained gathered in its sheltering hole.
“See ya when I see ya,” Earl said to the glass front of the tank.
Then he turned back toward the door, opened it, and was gone.
* * *
Lathrop had noticed Missus Frakes’s waning interest in her ball of yarn for quite some time, but it was just recently that this change of behavior had started to infiltrate his thoughts.
It was another of many signs the coon cat was getting up there in age, signs that were inescapable unless Lathrop deliberately blinded himself to them… and he wasn’t a believer in papering over reality’s moldy walls as if calm pastel colors and landscape prints could stop the decay from spreading underneath, turning it to heaps of dust and rubble. The house hadn’t been built to last, and Lathrop could smell its infectious rot every waking minute of his life, penetrating the framework like an incurable cancer of the bones. He supposed his biggest goal was to keep a step ahead of the rest as it fell apart piece by piece, edge beneath the final section of roof to come crashing down. He wasn’t sure why he ought to care, but there was a certain appeal to the idea of staying on his own two feet to the bitter end and having a good look around at the wreckage.
Now Lathrop sat watching Missus Frakes from the convertible sofa of his studio apartment on the corner of East 63rd and Lexington, a co-op he subleased for a couple thousand a month, no paltry sum for a single room with a view of the faceless high-rise and twenty-four-hour Gristedes supermarket across the street. The cat was curled on the rug near the radiator, warming herself there, her head tucked into her breast, a half-lidded green eye gleaming out from under one furry paw the only discernable evidence that she wasn’t asleep. Nearby lay what used to be her favorite plaything, a ball of brown yarn Lathrop had brought across the thousands of miles he’d traveled with her in the past six years, on the move, always on the move, crossing borderlines he couldn’t even remember anymore, slipping through the darkest of cracks and crannies in the slowly disintegrating house that God built.
The coon had belonged to a meth chemist in Albuquerque when Lathrop first made her acquaintance. Half starved, beaten, mean, she’d almost completely reverted to a feral state, living off scavenged trash and whatever rodents she could catch in and around some chicken barn her nominal owner was using as a clan lab. This was when Lathrop was still DEA, still chasing drug peddlers, trying to hold on to the belief that it was possible to keep the house upright, or at least slow its inevitable deterioration with management and control, patching holes with mortar, digging out the fungus that had invaded its timbers. His special agent’s badge pushed way up where the sun didn’t shine — no decent place to keep it clean — he’d been working deep to bust a relocated East Coast mafia squealer who’d used witness protection’s get-out-of-jail-free card as a ticket to organize a hot meth distribution syndicate out west, turning half the teenage kids in his new neighborhood into strung-out jugglers. That winner ended up in a supermax prison as a result of the sting operation, but before Lathrop called a task force down on the speed factory, he’d rushed to pay an unofficial call on the guy with the chemistry set, given him his justs for all the times he’d kicked the cat. Lathrop had tried to be environmentally responsible in his efforts to keep his visit a secret, and figured the pieces of the chemist he’d scattered across the desert might have endured to this day as shriveled droppings in abandoned vulture nests and coyote dens.
It wasn’t the first bit of personal justice Lathrop had administered before cutting ties with the agency. Nor would it be the last. But it was the only instance on which he’d gotten a new house pet to compensate for his trouble.
All taken into account, it hadn’t been a bad deal.
Lathrop could remember when Missus Frakes had loved going vicious on the yarn. She would attack without any quit, first stalking it, then batting it around with her front paws, then pouncing, tearing at it with tooth and claw until the whole thing unraveled, as if hoping to find some sort of bloody reward in the center, a steaming heart or liver that would satisfy her honed killer instincts.
There had been a time when Lathrop would have needed to rewind the long, scrambled skein of yarn within ten minutes after putting it down on the floor beside her.
The ball had been wrapped tight for days now, untouched, ignored.
Missus Frakes was getting old. Her muscles were stiff at the joints and her hindquarters dragged a little when she walked. She slept most of the day, needing help up onto the high perches she had once been able to reach with supple leaps. She hadn’t lost any of the toughness or smarts that had carried her along when she’d adapted to fending for herself, and Lathrop thought she still had what it took to make it on her own, might even hang on to that ability for a while longer… but the point always came when the senses dulled, and the reflexes slowed just enough to give an enemy the split-second chance it needed to get in under the throat.
Lathrop leaned forward on the couch, winked at the jade green eye studying him from across the room.
“We make some team,” he said, and p
atted his leg to invite her over. “Fellow travelers, partners in crime.”
Missus Frakes dropped her paw from her face, stretched, sat, yawned. Then she sauntered over in her listless, draggy way and came brushing up against his legs.
Lathrop stroked her back, heard and felt her purr, gently massaged the tight, stiffened muscles of her hips.
Suddenly a sharp hiss. She twisted clear of his fingertips and raked the back of his hand with her claws before he could pull away, slashing into it from wrist to knuckle.
Then she stood in front of the sofa, facing him calmly.
The scratches on his hand already burning, Lathrop looked at her and almost smiled. She’d gotten her message across loud and clear.
“That a girl,” he said. “You show me where it hurts, I’ ll be more careful about where I touch.”
Missus Frakes watched him, her motor purring again. After a moment she turned into the kitchenette with a noticeable little strut in her gait and sat down near her empty food dish.
Lathrop followed her inside, turned on the cold water, held his bleeding hand under the tap, and dabbed it with a paper towel. The furball had skinned him one good, he thought.
He held the blood-splotched paper towel to his hand a minute and disposed of it. Then he reached into an overhead cabinet for a can of moist cat food, opened the flip top, dropped it onto the trash as well. It occurred to him Missus Frakes had parked herself on potentially millions of dollars worth of high-tech swag. The cat’s ass. In a safe embedded in the flooring under one of its parquet wood tiles — bolted into the surrounding joists, its composite-steel door panel accessible only by enabling its invisible algorithmic lock with Lathrop’s credit card — sized remote control — were the gemstone case, data minidiscs, and hard copied schematics he’d acquired from Sullivan’s attaché. He was sure he’d be able to move the stones in a hurry once Avram the broker returned from his trip to the Antwerp bourse. The discs, though… what got him about the discs was that Sullivan had been telling the irrefutable truth when he’d insisted they were much more valuable with the keys than without them.
