When he returned to the bathroom to drink more water and saw himself in the mirror he almost laughed. He looked like one of the inbreeds he’d left for dust in a Kentucky holler when he’d enlisted in the Marines during the elder Bush’s presidency.
Jesus, he looked like his father.
Gidley stepped away from the mirror and from this memory, and slid his feet into the flip-flops that waited by the door, his cracked gray heels swelling over the rubber.
The elevator wasn’t working and he walked down three floors to the lobby, the beach shoes slapping the uncarpeted stairs. Piped Indonesian music blared. Some of the windows of the lobby were still shattered from a car bomb weeks before, and the entrance was sandbagged. Teenaged soldiers cradling AKs slumped in the shade, their eyes glazed from smoking putauw, street-grade heroin.
Gidley found the American on the outdoor terrace, drinking tea with condensed milk. He looked like a teenager himself. The terrace faced the square, and the four men who had been executed swung from gibbets, their heads wrapped in plastic bags dangling beside them.
The American smiled his dazzling smile. “Tea, Mr. Gidley?”
Gidley shook his head and took a seat, ordering a lychee juice from a hovering waiter.
When the waiter left Gidley said, “So who are you?”
“My name’s Kip Littlefield.”
“And just what kind of a name is Kip?”
Littlefield shrugged. “Kipling. As in Rudyard Kipling.” Gidley just looked at him. “You know ‘If’?” Gidley remained expressionless. “‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…’” Littlefield laughed. The pale man did not.
“Who do you work for?” Gidley said.
“I interface between a conglomerate of multinationals and the U.S. government.”
“Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, DynCorp, Halliburton?”
Littlefield waved a dismissive hand as he sipped his tea. “You’re in the general area.”
“And you, what, funnel money into senate and congressional elections and super PACs?”
“Well, our remit is a little broader than that.”
“Come on, Kippy, I’ve spent a lifetime singing in that choir. No need to be coy. You buy influence. Throw around dark money.”
“If you like.”
“So what’s a vulture capitalist like you doing in the butthole of the planet, saving my neck?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I had business in the region. You were by way of an afterthought.”
“Well, I’m alive, and for that I thank you.” Gidley’s juice arrived and he sipped at it and winced. It was fermented. “But my head’s a hornet’s nest of questions.”
“Like?”
“Like what the hell you want with me.”
Littlefield pushed his tea cup away and sucked his teeth. “Of course you know about the president’s new Middle East peace initiative?”
“Well, I’ve been out of the media loop a while, but when I last watched the news it was getting talked up. What’s the status?”
“It’ll probably fail. They always do. But we can’t be passive.”
Gidley smiled. “No. I’ll bet you and your bosses want peace about as much as a vampire wants a suntan.”
Littlefield giggled like a little girl and then he went all stony faced. “We believe that the cost of this peace initiative will come at the price of American freedoms.”
“Kippy, c’mon, you don’t have to pitch me. Bottom line it, son.”
“Well, we have various scenarios in place to, shall we say, negatively impact on this peace process.”
“Okay.”
“Our flagship venture was the death of Catherine Finch in a drone strike.”
Gidley narrowed his eyes. “That happened?”
“You need to get back onto the news cycle, my friend. Yes, a day ago. The target was Ahmed Assir. She was collateral.”
“Kudos, son.”
“But there’s been a setback. Finch’s husband gave a press conference this morning and read a text message purportedly from her, asserting that she is alive. Wounded, but alive.”
“Any chance that’s true?”
“We believe it’s a maneuver by the presidency. To buy time.”
“But you don’t know for sure?”
“No. We had an operative on the ground in Raqa. An Islamic State security officer. He guided the drone via a SIM card. Problem is he was killed in a Russian airstrike two hours later.”
“He was your only asset?”
“Yes. It’s a difficult arena.”
“Uh huh, that it is.”
“Which is why I’m here.”
“Okay.”
“We know you have friends in Islamic State.”
“Well, I once had relationships with people in the groupings that became Islamic State. There’s a telling difference.”
“Sure. But are any of those relationships current?”
Gidley tapped his glass with a fingernail. “I’d have to reach out.”
“Will you do that? Will you reach out?”
“First we’ll have to come to terms.”
“I’ve just saved you from a beheading.”
“And I’ve said I’m grateful, but I’ll still need some guarantees.”
“What guarantees?”
“Money and a new identity. The promise of being able to go home when all this is over.”
“I’m sure we can come to some agreement.”
“I’m sure we can. And what I can offer in return is to establish whether Catherine Finch is alive or dead.”
“That would be helpful.”
“And if she’s alive, I’ll do my best to change her status.”
“And if she’s dead?”
Gidley looked out at the dangling bodies and smiled. “Then I’ll go after who’s putting out the misinformation and shut them down.”
NINE
Rick Finch opened the French doors at the far end of the living room and stepped out onto the paved patio that dominated the small backyard. In the spill of buttery light from the house he could see the empty wine bottles and smudged glasses from three nights ago, when he’d entertained a fetching young female journalist from a news and opinion website—Salon, maybe, or The Daily Beast. He couldn’t recall. Anyway, her politics had been way left-of-center and she’d been in awe of Catherine and had promised that her piece on American hostages still in captivity would be sympathetic.
Her infatuation with his wife (the unspoken word martyr hovering between them over the slatted wooden table) had made it awkward for him to segue from stoically disconsolate husband to seducer, and he had gone to his bed alone that night, left with a trace of the woman’s scent on the air and her assurance that she would be in touch to discuss the finished piece before she posted it.
The piece, no doubt, had been rendered obsolete in the light of what had happened in the last twenty-four hours. He was cheered by the thought that the journalist may reappear and this time he would breach her friendly but off-handedly neutral demeanor.
Finch looked back toward the living room and saw Special Agent Branch standing with her back to him near the fireplace, talking on her phone. They were alone in the house—her underlings had disappeared when the news people had slowly dispersed.
Watching the media unravel like untwining skeins of thread until, at last, the street was empty, Finch had understood that if he’d told the truth, if he had not listened to the gray man, his wife’s story—and by definition, his—would be all but over.
A bit of mopping up. A few follow-up pieces.
But it would be done.
Old news.
As the gray man had said, Catherine would be dead, and so would he.
The notion filled him with unease, for he had very little idea of who he would be if he had to stand alone without Catherine’s conspicuous absence to lend him dimension.
Finch had sneaked a couple of drinks in the course of t
he day, but he was hanging for a joint, and he liberated a pinched doob from under a flower pot on the deck where he’d stowed it the night he’d sat out here with the journalist.
He wandered across onto the lawn, sinking to his ankles. The grass needed cutting. The garden was a mess. He could no longer afford the Mexican guy who had come in once a week and tended it.
Finch made sure that Amy Branch was still indoors, the phone held to her ear, before he fired the joint and took a long hit, hearing the comforting little crackle of the paper burning, feeling the soporific smoke sucked deep into his lungs.
“Mr. Finch?” the FBI agent said from the doorway and Finch coughed out a cloud of pungent smoke.
He held the blunt behind his back like a guilty kid and Amy Branch laughed as she stepped out through the doors and walked toward him.
“It’s okay, Rick,” she said, “I’m not going to bust you.”
He allowed his hand to reappear and, emboldened by the realization that she’d used his given name for the first time, held the joint out to her and said, “Care to join me?”
Amy Branch hesitated and then she shrugged and took the spliff and took a sippy little hit. She exhaled and he thought she was done, but she returned the doob to her lips and hit it hard this time, the ash glowing red, and stood awhile with her lips clamped shut, making those little coughing sounds that only a season imbiber makes and then she spilled smoke from mouth and nose.
“Shit, that’s good,” she said, handing the blunt back.
“Well, well, Special Agent Branch,” he said. “Look at you.”
She laughed. “I take it my little secret is safe with you?”
“Safe as Guantanamo,” he said, all chilled and relaxed, and she gave him a look but she smiled and shrugged.
“I need to ask you something, Rick,” she said.
“Sure, Amy,” he said, eyeing her in the gloom, giving her that smile.
“Who came here before me this morning?”
He stared at her, his relaxed mood dispersing like the smoke from the joint.
“Nobody,” he said, his smile fading a little.
“Bullshit,” she said, not making nice any more.
“What’s going on here?” he said.
“Answer me.”
He flicked the remnants of the blunt away and started back toward the house, regretting now that he had smoked the weed. That he had let his guard down.
Amy Branch followed him. “You knew about the strike on your wife before I arrived here to break the news, didn’t you?”
“No,” he said, walking inside, wanting a drink but reluctant to display his nervousness to this woman.
“Know what I think, Rick?” she said.
“No, why don’t you tell me.”
“I think your wife’s dead. I think that’s inconvenient for some people out there. People who reached you before I did and persuaded you to lie for them. People who arranged for that bullshit text to be sent to your phone.”
“Jesus,” he said, “I think the wacky tabaccy has got to you, Amy.”
“Special Agent Branch, you little shitheel.”
He stepped back as she advanced on him. “You’ve cashed in on your wife’s fame, her infamy, and you don’t want it to end, do you? So somebody came to you with a proposition and you grabbed at it with both hands. You’re committing a felony, Mr. Finch, and believe me your little friends will evaporate into thin air when the shit hits the fan. So level with me and maybe we can work something out.”
“I have nothing to tell you.”
She shrugged on her jacket and crossed the room. “The last chance to save your ass is busy walking out the door.”
The woman paused with her hand on the doorknob and Finch’s fear spoke to him and urged him to tell her everything, but he tamped it down and said, “I’m going to contact your superiors.”
Special Agent Branch laughed. “Sure. Good luck with that.” She shook her head. “We’re not done, Rick.”
She opened the door and slammed it shut after her and he heard her heels tapping away down the pathway.
TEN
Pete Town felt the particular kind of numbness that came after prolonged exposure to the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Felt that his synapses had been turned to pulp, that the more he knew about the world—or the version that he was being force-fed—the less he felt part of it.
Lying on the bed in his hotel room, staring at the ceiling, letting the TV—as it’d done the entire day—debate, refute, insinuate and rebut all it wanted on the subject of Catherine Finch, Town realized how outdated he was. A younger man, a man more in sync with his time, would not have been the passive recipient of this slew, he would, wielding a tablet or a smartphone, have been changing the narrative via Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or YouTube—putting his spin on the story, misdirecting, reframing, creating a digital news microclimate—as one skilled in these arts now could.
But Town was a near-illiterate in social media.
A few months before, at a coffee shop in Brooklyn, Town, drinking a coffee and reading the print version of the New York Times, had sat at a table adjacent to that of two kids in their twenties with sharp haircuts and designer glasses, an arsenal of phones and tablets arrayed before them. He’d heard one of them say, “Of course entry level is speaking digital without an accent.”
Town, like a traveler who knew only a few words of a foreign language, hadn’t fully understood the statement, but he had understood its import. Understood that he was now forever marooned in a world where his skills, and therefore his worth, would diminish year by year.
So why had Golding chosen him, a relic from the analog past, as the showrunner of this very modern boondoggle? Why not choose some cyber warrior?
Perhaps Town’s very limitations, his lack of access to the Twitterverse and the other organs of social media, made him safer, more controllable, stranded as he was in a pre-digital time, and handicapped by the particular muteness that came with it.
On air a coiffed hack said, “Do I believe that she survived that drone blast? That’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer. I’m not a hundred per cent on it. Irrefutable proof is really just a relative concept and the bell curve in this instance is plump.”
He closed his eyes and thought about Catherine Finch. The woman who, because of what he’d coerced her husband to say, was, like Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously dead and alive.
But this was no hokey thought experiment about an imaginary kitty in an imaginary box with an imaginary bottle of poison that may or may not break, this was a real woman who had been blown to nothing in a real drone strike.
Dead at the age of thirty-three.
The same age his daughter would’ve been had she lived.
This uncomfortable thought had Town standing, wincing as his left leg locked and bitched at him. The room was gloomy, lit only by the flicker of the TV. He ignited the lamp on the dresser and the bulb threw its yellow light across the rumpled bed.
Town crossed to the refrigerator, reaching in for a bottle of Evian and finding none.
He could have called room service but he needed air, even L.A.’s photochemical smog, so he shrugged on his jacket and limped the two floors down to the lobby, forcing his reluctant leg to work, and walked out into the dusk of Koreatown. He strolled down Wilshire, past a hairdressing salon, its windows festooned with Korean script, past a gogigui barbecue joint and a taekwondo dojo. Or was it dojang? He thought back to his time in Seoul and decided that, yes, it was dojang.
And then the mix of the smoky smell of the grilling meat and the blare of K-pop from a passing convertible conjured a memory that grabbed hold of Town too quickly for him to dodge it. He was back in that hotel room in Seoul thirty years ago, opening the door to reveal not his asset from the north—an Air Koryo flight attendant based in Pyongyang who’d been sharing with him both her boyish body and tidbits about Kim Il-sung’s pariah fiefdom—but a functionary from the American embassy, a gang
ly Texan who looked as if he’d yet to start shaving. Town had been ready to chew the kid out for compromising his cover when the cowboy’d looked down at his boots and mumbled something about a car wreck in Akron, involving Town’s ex-wife and daughter.
Town had called his one-time sister-in-law in Ohio and she’d told him that his ex-wife had been back on the booze and had driven drunk with the girl, Sally, in the car. She’d run a red light in downtown Akron and a bus had T-boned them and they were both killed instantly.
Town hadn’t seen his daughter in more than a year, since the day after her second birthday when he’d arrived bearing a big pink teddy bear he’d bought at the airport. The bear had scared the child and made her cry and his wife had glared at him. They’d sat without speaking in the grim apartment (the air thick with blame, for, of course, it had been his fault she’d had to leave D.C. and go to Ohio and sponge off her sister) listening to the child weep and he’d walked out and hadn’t gone back again or called. Always too busy putting out fires or—God knew, starting them—in Central America and Africa and Asia.
He’d been a no-show at the double funeral and had never seen his daughter’s grave.
Town stood on the corner of Wilshire and Western, feeling the warm wind of an orange metro local passing too close to him, thinking of the child he could barely remember, her features lost to time.
He had two photographs of her in a steamer trunk in the Brooklyn house, taken when she was a few months old, but he never looked at them. He couldn’t recall her soft pink face in the pictures, but he could remember his face, as he’d sat holding her, staring at the camera. A face made hard and careless by youth, his smile as dumb as the bandito mustache he’d sported back then, along with a shaggy mullet, all part of his cover when he’d been running cocaine to help fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
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