The Second Saladin - Страница 19

“Okay,” he said, “I think we ought to bump something back to Ver Steeg. The hell with cables. I think we can call it in. Then we can open a link to Mexican Intelligence — I’m sure we have some guys in Mexico City who are in tight with them — and get a license to do some nosing around over there. Then—”

But Speight was not listening. He sat gazing thoughtfully into his rum-and-Coke. It wasn’t even noon yet!

“Bill, I was saying—”

“I know, I know,” said Speight, nodding. He took a long swallow. Trewitt knew he had once upon a time been a real comer, a man with a great future, though it was hard to believe it now. He looked so seedy and didn’t want to be rushed into some mistake.

“You’re probably right,” he said. “That’s a great idea, a fine idea. But maybe we ought to hold off on this one. Just for a while.”

“But why?” Trewitt wanted to know. They sat in a dim bar, at last safe from the bright desert sun that seemed to bleach the color from the day almost instantly. They were not far from the border itself. Trewitt had glimpsed it just a few minutes ago; it looked like the Berlin wall, wire and gates and booths, and behind it he had seen shacks crusted on suddenly looming hills, a few packed, dirty streets — he had seen Mexico.

“Well …” Bill paused.

Trewitt waited.

“First, it never pays to make a big thing out of your own dope. Second, it never pays to rush in. Third, I am an old man and it’s a hot day. Let’s just sit on it, turn it around, see how it looks after the sun goes down.”

“Well, the procedure is—”

“I know all the procedures, Jim.”

“I just thought—”

“What I’d like to do — you can come along too, if you want; you might find it interesting — what I’d like to do is a little quiet nosing around. Let’s just see what we can develop in a calm way.”

“Mexico? You want to go to Mexico? We don’t have any brief to—”

“Thousands of tourists go over there every day. You just walk across and walk back, it’s that simple. It’s done all the time.”

“I don’t know,” said Trewitt. Mexico? It frightened him a little bit.

“We’ll go as tourists. Turistas. We’ll buy little curios and go to a few clubs and just have a fine time.”

Trewitt finally nodded.

“Turistas,” Old Bill said again.

11

He waited by the huge old boathouse, a Victorian hulk; it was a clear, chill day, almost a fall day, and before him he could see the wind pushing rills across the water. Some Harvard clown was out in a scull working up a sweat and Chardy watched him propel himself down the river toward the next bridge, bending and exploding, bending, exploding. The rower developed surprising velocity and soon disappeared under the arches, but by that time Chardy’s vision had locked on an approaching figure.

It seemed to take a great deal of time for her to cross the shelf of worn grass that separated the Georgian mansions of several Harvard houses from the cold Charles. She wore jeans over boots and her tweed jacket over a turtleneck. Her hair was hidden in a knit cap. She had on sunglasses and wore no makeup. She looked more severe, perhaps more bohemian, certainly more academic than last night.

Chardy walked to meet her.

“You get some sleep?”

“I’m fine,” she said, without smiling.

“Let’s go down to that bridge.”

His head ached and he was a little nervous. A jogger, ears muffed against the cold, loped by and then, traveling the other direction, a cyclist on one of those jazzy, low-slung bikes. They reached the bridge at last, and walked to its center, passing between trees only a little open to the coming of spring.

Chardy leaned his elbows against the stone railing, feeling the cold wind bite; his ears stung. He had no gloves, he’d left them somewhere. Chardy could feel Johanna next to him. She had her arms closed around her body and looked cold.

He scanned the left bank, Memorial Drive, which ran through the trees. Cars sped along it. He looked off to the right, where the road was called Storrow Drive and studied the traffic on it, too.

“This should be all right,” he said.

“What are you worried about?”

“They have parabolic mikes that can pick you up at two hundred feet. But you need a lot of gear to make it work, which means you need a van or a truck. I was looking for a van or a truck parked inconspicuously somewhere.”

Chardy looked down at the water.

“I think,” he said, “they’ve only let me see a little of the operation. I think it’s much bigger than they’ve let me know. I haven’t worked it out just yet — just what they’re up to, just how much more they know than they say they know. They’ve got me working with some jerk without a human twitch in his body and an Ivy League drone and a dreamy kid. It’s got to be bigger. I just know it is. And somebody’s watching.”

Sam, he thought. Sam, I bet you’re there.

“It’s safe to talk here?” she said.

“If they really want to nail you, they can do it, no matter what. But they don’t have much respect for me now. So it’s safe.”

“You gave me such an awful night, Paul.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What choice do I really have?”

“None. If you care for him.”

“I hate the fact we don’t have a choice.”

“I hate it too. But that’s the game.”

The wind was quite strong; he turned against it, looked the other way down the curving river. He could see the rower, fighting his way back to the boathouse.

“You hurt us so bad, Paul. Oh, you hurt us, Paul.”

“Things happen,” Chardy said. “You do your best and sometimes it’s not nearly enough. I just got into something I couldn’t handle. I’d give anything, my life, to have it to do over again. But I can’t do anything about it.”

The wind had really become strong now, and he could see it pushing up small waves in the river.

“Don’t they believe in spring in Boston?” he said.

“Not till June.”

“Has he gotten to you? Has anybody reached you?”

“No.”

“Can you think of what he might do? Is there a Kurdish community, an exile community, where he might go? Are there people who might help him? Where can we look for him? What can we expect?”

“There’s no Kurdish community, Paul. A few Kurds, I suppose. Paul, there’s something I have to tell you. Something else. It was something I wanted to put into the book, but I couldn’t. It’s something I just wanted to forget, to bury away. But it comes back on me, Paul. It comes back at odd moments. I think it’s made me a little crazy.”

Chardy turned to look at her.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”

“We went into the clearing after the helicopters left. We thought we could help people.” She giggled in an odd way. “And we did. Most of them were … blown apart. You’ve been in wars; you’d know.”

“It’s—”

“It was like a meat shop. The bullet holes were burning, had burned through people. There was a smell of cooked meat. Paul, one of his boys was still alive. He had a bullet in his stomach that was burning. He was crying terribly. He was crying for his father. Ulu Beg knelt and told him that he loved him and kissed him on the lips and shot him through the temple with that gun you gave him. Then he walked around, shooting other people in pain. His own son, then maybe fifteen, maybe twenty others. They were all screaming.”

Chardy was shaking his head slowly, breathing with difficulty.

“That was what it cost to become involved with the Americans, Paul. Not only the death of his family, his tribe, his way of life, but that he was required to kill his own child.”

Chardy could say nothing.

“We’ve got to save him,” she said.

“Somehow we’ll do it,” he said.

12

The pit is usually kept in half-dark and the supervisors, perhaps sensing they are not needed or wanted, look down on the analysts from a bank of brightly lit windows. They look like monks or angels, just pure dark silhouettes against the light. But down on the floor, nothing disturbs: by tradition there is no talking between the analysts — each sits in his or her cubicle, bent over a video display terminal, face illuminated in the weird glow of the screen, fingers clicking dryly.

It’s a funny place for a war — or maybe not. Anyway, it is a war zone, a combat theater of operations: here the real battles are fought, the private Thermopylaes and Agin-courts and Trafalgars of the Central Intelligence Agency, in electraglow (greenish) in sans serif letters on a TV screen plugged into an electric typewriter, observed by grim young men who rarely smile. Agents half the world away never dream that their shadow selves float in the currents of destiny in the great memory of the Langley computers.

It is a simple proposition: analysts are warriors. Given a terminal with access to the database, then given a mission by the upstairs people, they simply hunt for ways to make things happen. They look for links, oddities, chinks in armor; they look for irregularities, eccentricities, quirks, obsessions; they look for proofs, patterns, fates, tendencies. They comb, they cull, they sift and file. The good ones are calm and bright and, most importantly, literal-minded. They just have a brain for this kind of thing, a symbiosis with the software based on the sure knowledge that the machine is never ironic, never witty, never clever: it always says just what it means and does just what it is told; it has no quaint personality, but at the same time its etiquette is remorseless and its willingness to forgive nonexistent.