Spooker

by Dean Ing

  From preschool age, he had learned how to assume a role, to lie with perfect ease, yet never shade the truth to his mom. At five he could shed real tears at her command; at six, had served as bait for an Englishman who, Romana had discovered, was not only an intelligence agent, but was addicted to dalliances with small boys. Andy had not wept when he'd watched the man die.

  Though Andy had grown up knowing his family life was vastly different from most, it had never seemed strange to him. In recent years, he had reflected that, had Romana been a cannibal, he would have shared her meals without a second thought. In a way, he now knew, she was exactly that; a consumer of a select group of men.

  Yet he needed to fit into the world of convention, to understand ordinary norms. Romana's solution to the problem had been ingenious. She leased a home on reservation land and enrolled him in the nearest small town school.

  The Yomo Indian reservation, near Millerton Lake, adjoins another reservation and had been administered by tribal elders since early in the century. Some reservations are dirt-poor and look it, but when the Yomo sold much of their land for mining claims they held out for fair compensation. The upshot was that, as long as a Yomo Indian chose to live on tribal land, he did not need to work and could spend a modest tribal income as he liked.

  Romana had shown the boy vendor stands in western Washington reservations where, on any day of the year, the passerby might buy fireworks the size of a trench mortar, illegal almost everywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. On Oregon reservations, the visitor is encouraged to risk a bit of cash in tribal casinos where the state government cannot prevent gambling. On California reservations, Asian card games add a modern touch; for a generation, Fresno's Hmong immigrants have cooled their gambling fever with the help of America's earliest immigrants. From the. first time she saw the Yomo reservation and its casino, Romana had told him, she knew that ordinary laws and law enforcement stopped at the tribal boundary.

  Because the courts tend to let a tribe keep its old ways as well, those Yomos who chose to live traditionally in half-submerged sod houses could do so, a stone's throw from a neighbor's mobile home or a standard ranch-style California bungalow. To a Yomo, building codes were a white man's bad joke.

  Romana discovered that a few reservation houses were for rent or lease, though the land was never for sale.

  As it happened, a Yomo had built two modern houses of concrete block and wooden framing, in their own declivity overlooking the lake. The Yomo had then changed his mind, or simply lost it among empty wine bottles, and had died without ever moving in. The tribe, then, could do as it pleased with the structures.

  One house had never been quite finished and, decades later, sat with no connected plumbing, bundles of interior trim rotting nearby under tuft grass. Twenty yards away sat its finished twin, complete with three-car garage and served by a graveled blacktop that thrust into a meadow and simply stopped, as though in astonishment, with Millerton Lake stretching away below in the distance.

  For Romana, the house, in such a site, could not have been a happier find. Here she had brought the boy and set up her workshop, had left him alone for days sometimes, could pursue her special calling with no worries about social workers or close neighbors. During those years, Romana might leave the boy alone for as much as a week, seeking her prey through connections in the Washington, D.C., area. She had used audio pickups in her visits to the Vienna Inn, a known hangout for CIA employees. The name of a Company-connected psychiatrist had been enough, after she spent three days bugging the man's office, to yield names of two agents stationed in the San Francisco region. And in California, newsmen had their favorite bars where Romana, paying for endless double Scotches, had engaged reporters in "casual"

  discussion about active intelligence agents. Never very far from her work, she was often far from young Andrew;

  And, in his way, Andy had been happy with the place - in their phrase, with implied capitals, The Place. Endowed with a lively curiosity, he had enjoyed classes in the three-room grammar school a mile down Millerton Road from the reservation. The foothills weather was rarely savage enough to prevent his walking both ways. If his mom forbade him to play after school with reservation kids, or any others, for that matter, he could still enjoy classmates in school or at recess.

  Forbidden to invite other children to The Place, often preparing his meals alone, Andy lavished affection on his pets. When Romana found the hamster he had stolen from school and the wire cage he had built in preparation for it, she praised him for his intelligent planning, then brought home an armload of translucent plastic cage modules. It did not escape her notice that the boy somehow recognized his kinship with small caged animals. She was amused, even touched, by the tubular plastic hamster tunnel he assembled; it was a deliberate copy of the tunnel he had helped her dig from The Place to the garage of the nearby vacant house.

  She brought him books on burrowing pets. Then, when he patiently treated a white-crowned sparrow until its wing had healed, she brought the materials for him to build a walk-in cage and provided books, some of them advanced and expensive, on land birds. Long ago trained as an engineer, Romana taught the boy the rudiments of structures, of triangulation, and, in the escape tunnel, of mine shoring. No wonder, then, with his succession of small birds and mammals, that his isolation did not seem impossibly confining to the boy, though he regretted it more in high school in the nearby town of Briant. He simply grew toward manhood without questioning the fact that the world was a lonely place - and that his mom spent a great deal of time searching out men who did not deserve to live in it.

  While other children watched cartoons on television, Andrew Soriano had built cages in the family room, or stood beside his mom in the bedroom she had turned into a windowless workshop. He knew the fragrance of acid-core solder as she made deft connections in tiny transmitters; understood the workings of night-vision monoculars as she increased their magnification; learned how a vehicle could be tracked by a transceiver that, once emplaced with a magnet, would signal its location only in response to a signal she sent. At twelve, he was comfortable wearing a body mike; at fourteen, he could have built its transmitter.

  But the one time she caught him in her workshop without permission, he preferred not to recall. Some memories were too painful to . . .

  "You're not listening," she said.

  He snapped from reverie to the present moment: "Sorry," he said, seeing the Pinto's lights veer at the reservation turnoff. "I'm wondering how you pinpointed Lane in the first place." Phrased that way, not exactly a lie. He had wondered about that.

  "His contact," she said. "He was part of a CIA group I've been monitoring. They're connected to a drug ring in some way. The tapes aren't very specific, but those people have a history of helping smugglers. Our Mr. Lane, though, seemed to be isolated from the others. And if he was that far under cover, he probably was experienced enough to keep a kit ready." From many hours of audiotapes they knew the term

  "spooker"; but Romana preferred the earlier phrase, "exfiltration kit."

  She went on, "Also, in such a job he might disappear for any of several reasons. I picked up several names; he was the best candidate, I thought. But sixty-seven hundred dollars!" Her humorless laugh suggested that Lane should have had more reasons than that; should have been more provident for a future that, thanks to Romana, he had not lived to enjoy.

  She drove past the casino and parked behind a series of mobile homes, among the accumulated debris of Native American families who saw no sense in having junk hauled away when, in a hundred years or so, it would rot away anyhow. Andy waited patiently, understanding her tactic. For the next few minutes, parked in shadow behind an engineless Pontiac, she could spot any vehicle that turned off the main road.

  Perhaps the surveillance tail that she had evaded for so many years and was still awaiting with unflagging suspicion.

  Meanwhile her eyes were growing accustomed to the dark so that, when she restarted the Pinto an
d eased it to the dirt road nearby, she did not need to use her headlights again. They were only a half-mile from The Place, and no one could be less inquisitive about such things than Native Americans. Their attitude, it seemed, was that people did things because they felt like it, and other people's choices were other people's business.

  The little car trudged its way up a steep incline, down another, around several bends, Romana squinting more than she had a year previous, with a final turn onto gravel for the final hundred yards or so. She triggered the garage-door unit and drove in, wheels straddling a metal pipe tipped with flex hose, lights revealing old cages that Andy kept intending to dispose of. "I'll take the bag," she said.

  He did not follow her into the kitchen immediately, but attended to his duties with the industrial-vacuum unit, first folding the filmy plastic drop cloth so that, whatever crumbs of evidence it might hold, the entire bundle would fit into a grocery sack to be tossed, anonymous trash, into a mall Dumpster on his way to his own garage apartment in Fresno. Had he found any blood, he would have burned that plastic in the fireplace. Working in the state lab, he knew only too well how DNA matching from a bloodstain could ruin the best of plans.

  Then he clamped a work light to the trunk lid and vacuumed the trunk repeatedly. Next, wearing cotton gloves, he took a roll of duct tape from Romana's supply and smoothed strip after strip down against the rubber mat, inspecting the strips as he removed them. It was possible that some microscopic mote of evidence might escape this kind of attention; possible, but unlikely.

  When he had finished wrapping used tape around the drop cloth to make a smaller bundle, he wiped the metal surfaces in the trunk area until they shone, then removed their camping equipment and stowed it all in assigned places on garage shelves. Finally he changed the vacuum unit's catch bag, dropping the used bag into another grocery sack for anonymous disposal.

  When he entered the kitchen, the scent of fresh coffee beckoned. He poured a cup, sipped, let tension roll from his shoulders. "Mom?"

  She answered from the workshop down the hall, and he detoured to the bathroom, relieving his bladder for a small eternity. He would not be thoroughly professional in this work, she had once told him, until he could finish a commission without feeling any special urges in body functions. Well, then, he wasn't a pro yet. By Romana's standards, perhaps he would never be.

  He had been taught never to enter her workshop before knocking if the door was closed but she had left it open, a tacit invitation, the room suffused with a pallid ice-blue light from her ultraviolet lamp. "No UV

  marks. A few bills canceled but no counterfeits," she said. He saw her studying a bill using a jeweler's loupe. She had already set aside a small stack of bills near the UV lamp, those with scribbled notations that would not erase. Once, years before, they had relieved a client of an attaché case full of cash only to find that every bill was counterfeit, probably tumbled with dirt to give it a well-worn look. Romana had not been fit to live with for a week after burning that temptingly dangerous pile.

  He picked up the bills that Romana had rejected and fanned them out, shaking his head as he saw what she classified as a cancellation. "Don't people know it's a crime to deface money?" he said. Perfectly legal currency, but they must burn - he counted it out - $450 on the off chance that some ballpoint scribble was a signal to law enforcement. On one bill was printed "bank"; on another, a cursive "Happy Birthday." As far as Romana was concerned, the words may as well have read "mass murderer." He restacked the bills and laid them on her work surface, then sipped his coffee. "It's really amazing," he said.

  "Don't be cryptic, Andrew."

  "Nothing less than a fifty. I can remember when you spent a week trying to bleach ballpoint ink out of a twenty," he said.

  "Inflation," she murmured, then said to his retreating back, "Where are you going?"

  "Milk," he called back from the kitchen. "You know how it is with me and milk."

  Returning with his cup refilled, he reached into the client's bag and withdrew the wallet, now emptied of cash, setting its array of cards out as if playing solitaire, then directing the spot illumination of a small halogen lamp toward his work. Charles Lane's wallet would look very different after all that fine stitching was removed.

  When he saw her regarding him he paused, the fresh X-Acto blade half-tightened in its holder. After twenty-some years, he still sometimes had trouble reading her expression. "Problem? You've shown me how a dozen times."

  "More like two dozen," she said. "You should have asked, but go ahead."

  He began to cut the stitches, teasing fine threads loose, opening the wallet out to its original pattern.

  Twice Romana had found useful information this way, including the address of a French safe house in Long Beach and identities of clients she had not previously suspected. Roughly half of her success, she claimed, lay in patiently expanding her knowledge of a client until he led her to his connections.

  And when occasionally she became certain that a potential client was exclusively a member of organized crime, Romana's interest ceased as fast as she could put away her night-vision glasses, her directional mikes, her tracer units. She had long ago made it clear to Andy that the Cosa Nostra, or a Latin drug ring, was not limited by law. In short, Romana Dravo did not like the odds, or their rules of engagement. They operated with the same merciless swiftness as she did.

  "You know," he said, separating a nylon inner liner from thin leather, "you could just cut off the canceled part of a bill. Banks will make it good. Or keep it whole and use it on a trip."

  She did not reply for a long time, typical of her. When she did, it was with that deceptively soft tone she sometimes used when he had said or done something stupid. "Is that what you will do when I have retired, Andrew?"

  "I don't know. Maybe. It depends," he evaded.

  "We have burned roughly three hundred thousand dollars in cash in all these years," she said softly.

  "Less than one-tenth of the total, most of which we still have in those ammunition boxes. Which does not even count the securities and the numbered accounts, or the stones and bullion." Her voice was hardening now, full of testosterone. "It is not worth the trouble, or the risk. Swear to me that you will never, ever take that risk as long as I live," she finished.

  Some imp of perversity made him delay his reply. "Sure," he said at last. "No problem."

  "Swear it!" she spat. He turned, and held the sigh he was about to vent. There were moments when Mom's blazing stare seemed more than human, less than sane, and this was one of those moments. That unblinking gaze signaled that he had somehow nudged a trigger in the mine field of her brain.

  Bearing down on himself, betraying none of his own exasperation as he failed to meet her eyes, he said,

  "I swear, Mom. I won't spend any canceled money, ever. Okay?" He drained his cup of milk.

  She continued to glare at him for another moment, baleful as a trapped lynx, then turned again to her work without answering. Angry as always when he allowed her to dominate this way, he continued to hold it in, knowing he had "outlets that usually worked. Masturbation helped, an outlet that Mom had endorsed for other problems. But this was a special kind of frustration. It called for an outlet he had discovered on his own, one that Mom did not know and probably could never understand. A few secrets were good for a man, their very existence a boost to the ego. He felt a bit easier with himself then, knowing that when he got back to his own apartment in the early hours, he would have no choice but to take one of his darlings.

  8

  MAY 1994

  It was after 1:00 A.M. before Andy Soriano disposed of his grocery bags in Fresno and directed his Pinto down Olive, under streetlights that made him think of his mom's workshop, to the familiar turnoff near Fresno's city limit. His apartment over the two-car garage could be a noisy location, placed as it was in the landing pattern of Fresno's major air terminal. But that kept the rent down, and from there to the state lab, out Olive from town
, was only a short drive. Andy had been trained to a frugal life for the best possible reason. Only months before, his mom had pointed to headlines, marveling aloud that the Russian mole Aldrich Ames could be clever enough to rise so high in the CIA, yet stupid enough to live so conspicuously beyond the salary of a government GS-14. Again, forever and again, Mom was right.

  He knew he should be exhausted after the past few hours but it was almost like cramming for finals back at Cal Davis: you reached a point where you didn't feel tired, or worried; you felt wired. He had felt this way after his first commission, really his only one alone, while still a high-school student. He hadn't even thought about it as a commission until Mom had demanded the whole story. And you didn't refuse Mom.

  When she had it all, she had sat for a long time thinking before she said, "Did you get what you were after?"

  He had sought only justice for Briant High's most insulting bully. "Ohh, yeah," he had said. "If I don't get caught."

  "I don't think you will. He was an unlikely client, from what you've told me, and it could have been an accident. I think," she said, with the kind of smile that was rare for her, "you should treat it as a commission."

  And she had hugged him close. It had been a wonderful moment, especially for a youth expecting to be thrashed. After all, he had done it all without consulting his mom. On later reflection, he had an idea why Mom might have chosen to praise him: it was either that or take a belt to him, and she had never beaten him from that day forward. Perhaps she had thought twice about the fact that he had taken that commission on his own. You might beat your dog, but you don't beat a wolf.

  Obviously, she had liked his choice of a disposal site because she'd used it herself much later, once during his junior year at the Davis campus. And then again tonight. And he had performed as well as anyone could, almost as well as Mom. But two hours later, she was castigating him, making him feel like shit, like nothing, like a pussy. It was strange to think of Mom as, well, as pussy: a forbidden thought. Oh, yes, she would forbid him any thoughts on his own if she could.