The Second Saladin - Страница 48

“I seemed to be on tonight,” said Chardy.

“We had a lot of trouble finding you.”

“I just had to play some basketball.”

“Sure.”

Chardy watched for a while. Before him, in the glow of the overhead fluorescents, the postman and the new kid went after each other.

“That tall guy is pretty good,” Lanahan said. “Not the kid, the other guy. He could play in the pros.”

“No, he couldn’t,” said Chardy. “Who gets the ax? I saw the papers. We got out of it pretty good. I didn’t see any mention of the Agency or any mention of the Kurds. Thank Christ, Danzig didn’t kick off anyway on a heart attack with all the excitement.”

“Two people did die, Paul.”

“Three. Johanna.”

“Well, I meant in the shooting.”

“Johanna was shot,” Chardy said stubbornly.

“Paul, it’s really not possible for us to see her as a victim.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t.”

“In any event, nobody ever connected her with Danzig. We didn’t ourselves until yesterday. Somebody must have moved her if she was close to the shooting.”

“She was across the street.”

“So it was you?”

“Yeah.”

“That was smart, Paul. It was real smart. It could have gotten so complicated, so lurid if the papers had tied it all together. Can you imagine Time?”

“I wasn’t thinking about the papers, Miles.”

“It doesn’t matter what you were thinking about, Paul. It only matters what you did.”

“You still haven’t told me who got the ax. But I can guess. Not you, or you wouldn’t be here. Not me, not with Ulu Beg still around with his machine pistol. I’m still an asset. That leaves—”

“He didn’t do very well. He deserves what he’s getting. He authorized the cutback on the surveillance of Johanna. He overcommitted to the Midwest. Sam called it a dreadful performance.”

“Ver Steeg is out?”

“Way out. They bumped him over to a staff job in Scientific Intelligence. Something to do with satellites. He’s one of the old guys; he goes way back with Sam, so they didn’t fire him. Imagine what they’d have done to one of us, Paul?”

“So Sam’s running things. They’ve moved it to Operations? He’s calling the shots?”

“Well—” Miles smiled. His fiery skin seemed neon in the fluorescent light. His teeth were still bad.

“You, Miles?”

“I was lucky. I didn’t catch the flak. And they needed someone who was all read-in. So I’m field supervisor.”

“But under Sam?”

“Sam’s a smart guy, Paul. He’s had his eye on me for some time. We work well together. But I’m not here about Sam. I’m here about you.”

“Suppose I say no? Suppose I say I’m tired of it, it’s only going to end in more senseless killing?”

“Well, you can’t say no. You signed a contract. We could make it pretty sticky. Your name’s on the dotted line. You can’t just back out. But Paul, consider. Danzig really wants you. He believes in you.”

“The jerk,” Chardy said.

“Paul, look at it this way. Danzig wants you Danzig’s got clout. That means Melman wants you. Melman’s going places, Paul. He’ll get the top job one of these days. He’s one of the inside boys. Paul, you and me, we’ve always been on the outside and we’ll always be on the outside unless we have an insider really pulling for us. Somebody who’s old Agency, Harvard, WASP, upper-management. That’s Sam, Paul. He can really help guys like us, Paul, two Irish-Catholic Chicago street kids. He wants to start over with you, Paul. Clean slate. No ’seventy-five hearings, no recommendation for termination. It all disappears. Paul, you could have your career back. You could have it all. If Sam owes you, Paul, you’re in extremely good shape when he lands on the top floor. He could take you with him.”

Playing the seducer in the Anacostia night didn’t suit Miles. His features were too squirrely, his acne too fierce. As he spoke his tiny dark eyes lit with conviction and he jabbed and gestured with his small hands. He pressed, crowded, yipped. A good case officer — Chardy had known a few in his time — could charm you into selling your mother, but Miles had no talent for it. It was a question of timing, of rhythm; he came to the point too fast.

Melman must be on the desperate side to have resorted to a clumsy operator like Lanahan. It was a curiosity: Why couldn’t Melman have come up with somebody smoother? No, he was recycling the people he’d started with, simply shuffling them around. For some reason he wanted to keep the operation contained, keep the number of players down.

Chardy looked across the river. The unlovely city gleamed cool and glossy on the far shore. The Capitol, arc-lit and melodramatic, loomed frozen against the night. Near it, also lit for drama, rose the shaft of the Washington Monument — cathedrals in the Vatican of government, a faith which just now Chardy saw as desperately hollow, as much a hoax as the Catholicism in which he’d been raised.

But did he have a choice? Of course not. Which perhaps was Melman’s real message in sending this awful kid.

He thought of Johanna and his promise to her. Was it invalidated by her treason? Or Ulu Beg? What did Chardy owe the Kurd, who had made him a brother? He wondered about all sorts of things too: why was Melman so desperate to have him back? Why had Melman been so driven to destroy him seven years ago? Who really was running Ulu Beg? And what about pitiful Trewitt, stuck out on his secret limb in Mexico?

He knew that whatever the answers were, they would not be found on a playground.

“Let’s go, then, Miles,” he said.

36

Danzig sat in his bathrobe out back, by the garden. There were at least seven men around, three of them with radios. And beyond, in the thickets, still more men. Government cars orbited the block too: nondescript Chevys with two men in suits and Israeli submachine guns. And helicopters? Perhaps even helicopters.

“You certainly appreciate scale,” he said to the man next to him.

Sam Melman laughed.

“With all the taxes you pay, you deserve something a little special,” he said. “How’s the chest?”

Danzig winced. The Kelvar vest had stopped all three slugs and diffused the impact; still, they’d cracked two ribs and left him nearly immobile, with bluish bruises running from inside his arm across his chest to his stomach. He’d been kept sedated much of the past few days, the pain had been so acute, and he remembered it only vaguely. His wife had appeared heroically at his bedside and gone on television shows with communiqués; she seemed to enjoy the process and it gave her something to do. Meanwhile an ocean of telegrams poured in, sweet words from men who loathed him, mostly composed under the impression he would soon die (the early reports had been confused).

“My chest is splendid,” said Danzig. “It’s wonderful.”

“I saw the medical reports. I bet it hurts like hell.”

“It hurts terribly,” Danzig said. “Please spare me any witticisms. Laughter would kill me.” He looked off glumly into the garden, a full green universe by this time. “I suppose if it took you three days to find Chardy, your own man, who was not even hiding from you but was playing basketball in a public park not three miles from here, you haven’t had much luck with the Kurd.”

“No. But the troops are out now. We are optimistic. It’s wide open now, so perhaps it all worked out for the best. Now we’ll get him. It’s really all over.”

“It certainly didn’t work out for that poor girl.” Danzig could remember watching her die. He could place the exact moment: a certain sloppy repose slid through her limbs and her head fell back spastically. A beautiful woman held herself with a certain discipline and pride; it was a universal. And when he saw that go, he knew she was finished. There was blood on her everywhere. Later he found out a ricochet had torn through her aorta. Curious and frightening, the ways of this world: from fifteen feet a man had fired a sophisticated modern weapon at him and, because of a trick of technology, failed to harm him seriously; this poor woman, whose only crime was to be present, had paid with her life, falling victim to a missed bullet that had deflected off of something. Their parallel fates were an accumulation of statistical improbabilities that were astonishing.

“It’s tragic, yes,” said Melman. “Tragic and pointless. But we didn’t bring the Kurd. The Kurd came himself.”

“Still, you can’t be pleased with the Agency’s performance.”

“Of course not. But steps have been taken to prevent a recurrence.”

Danzig nodded, but what had really happened was that the system had broken down. Entropy again, the factor of disorder and randomness. They’d had him in a net tight as a drumskin for weeks, but gradually it had worn down of its own volition, and the Kurd had slipped through. And no amount of precaution could prevent it from happening again.

“Here, Dr. Danzig.” Melman handed him something. It was a mashed piece of copper. “That one would have killed you. That’s the one. Thank God for the vest.”

Danzig preferred to thank the Secret Service and the U.S. Army whose Natick Research and Development Laboratory had developed Kevlar for his early trips to the Middle East.

“I’m not sentimentally attached to little souvenirs,” he said. “Is it of any significance?”

“No. We’ve a dozen more.”