The boat had been stolen from the university boathouse on the other side of the lake, which had to be one of the most popular burglary sites in the entire county. It was almost a mandatory rite of passage for young men from either the high school or the university to break into it at some point during their lives, steal a rowboat or canoe, and go out on the lake for some aimless, drunken fun. From the beach where Clyde brought this particular boat to shore, he could look directly across the lake and see the streetlights that had been put up in the boathouse parking lot as a pathetic self-defense measure. He considered simply rowing this boat across and putting it back where it belonged, which would have taken a while but would have been more useful and productive than his usual night-shift activities. But one of the boat’s oars was missing. So he dragged it up on the beach as far as he could. This was not very far, because the boat had a couple inches of rainwater in the bottom, and a bit of gravel, so it was heavy. He tied the painter to the leg of a picnic table and made a mental note to call the boathouse in the morning and let them know about it.
Desiree mumbled something that was lost in the self-righteous harrumphing of the Mr. Coffee.
“Come again?” Clyde said.
“Get rid of that car,” Desiree said. “It’s not a good kid car.”
Clyde dropped the paper and stared at his wife’s back, which now, only three weeks postpartum, was just as skinny as it always had been before. “You mean the pickup truck?”
“We need the pickup truck to haul things,” Desiree said. “Baby furniture. Stuff for fixing up your buildings.”
“So you’re saying—”
“We have to get rid of the Celica,” Desiree said. She said it as if it were a new idea, and hers. In fact, Desiree had bought the Celica to begin with. Clyde had been trying to get rid of it ever since. But he knew that it would be unwise to agree right away, because this might be construed as gloating.
“Are you sure?” he said craftily.
“We can’t deal with a two-door. It just doesn’t work with a baby seat. Ask Marie. Marie and Jeff had two two-doors, and they had to get rid of both of them.”
“If you say so,” Clyde said, and when Desiree did not change her mind and protest right away, he felt quietly satisfied. An issue of long standing had now been settled, and Clyde had been given carte blanche to settle it his way.
While standing in various roadside ditches of Forks County, holding a flashlight as the medics wielded the Jaws of Life, he had got a pretty clear idea of which cars were well built and which weren’t. If getting T-boned by a one-ton pickup at a rural crossroads didn’t reveal all of a vehicle’s structural deficiencies, then the Jaws of Life sure did.
Forks County was an especially good place to learn these lessons. County Sheriff Kevin Mullowney was not the kind of politician who spent a lot of time worrying about policies, but he did have one hard and fast rule: never arrest drunk drivers. Follow them home if you like, but don’t arrest them. Methodical application of this rule over a twelve-year reign had led to a situation in which Forks County had the lowest drunk-driver arrest rate, and the highest traffic fatality rate, in the state of Iowa.
So for quite some time, especially since the pregnancy, Clyde had been itching to swap the Celica for something with a little more stopping power. He had tried many arguments out on Desiree, told her many gory car-crash anecdotes. Desiree always had a devastating rebuttal handy: the Celica was “cute” and “a neat little car.”
Now, this very morning, with her mind occupied with long-range strategization, she had made the crucial error of telling him to ditch the Celica without saying anything about whether the replacement needed to be cute. Clyde changed the subject to something very different, ate hastily, excused himself, stripped all known copies of Celica keys from all known key chains, snatched the title out of the bill-paying desk, hopped into the cute little thing itself, and careened down the street. Just in case the Big Boss had second thoughts and tried to run him down, he did not look into the rearview mirror until he was out of shouting and waving range. Another torrential rainstorm had just commenced, which helped.
Fortunately, Desiree always kept the Celica pretty clean on the inside, so that it would stay cute. Clyde threw the few remaining personal items into a garbage bag, ran the vehicle through a car wash so that the rain would bead up attractively on its hood, and then drove straight over to the First National Bank of NishWap, a structure that had been gleamingly modern twenty years ago and now looked older than its nineteenth-century neighbors. It had a gravel parking lot in back, and before going inside, Clyde swung through that lot one time, looking for a particular vehicle.
It was still there. Clyde grinned and whacked the Celica’s steering wheel with the palm of his hand, feeling that everything was going his way for once. He parked right next to it; it was so heavy that he almost felt the Celica rocking toward it on its flimsy suspension, drawn in by its gravity.
The vehicle in question was a 1988 Buick Roadmaster station wagon. It was red inside and out. It possessed many luxury features, none of which Clyde cared about. He had done much theoretical car-shopping during the last nine months. At first he had paid careful attention to the various features and options. But as time went on, his mind became more focused, and he became fixated on one single number: namely, throw weight. And this vehicle right here weighed more than anything else you could buy. To exceed it, you had to go all the way back to the Lincoln Continentals of the mid-1960s. This beast had enough mass to drive all the way through a car like the Celica with only minor turbulence; but just in case—on the off chance you might hit two or three Celicas at the same time—it had an airbag, too.
“I’ll trade you my Celica for the Roadmaster, straight up,” Clyde said.
That Jack Harbison, branch manager, did not immediately chortle and scoff at this suggestion told Clyde that he almost certainly had himself a deal. For the first time in more than half a year, Harbison saw a way to get rid of the Murder Car.
The late owner of the Murder Car, a longtime EIU football booster and season-ticket holder, had come home unexpectedly early from a Twisters game and surprised his wife and her lover in bed. A fight had ensued. His head had got bashed in. Wife and lover had lined the inside of the Roadmaster with lawn and garden bags, laid the husband out in the middle, put more bags on top of him and an old rug on top of that. By the time they had got him out to Palisades State Park, he had died of asphyxiation or brain swelling—Barnabas Klopf, the coroner, flipped a coin and put down brain swelling. They had dragged him out over the tailgate and put him in a shallow grave at the edge of the woods. But the edge of the woods was just where hunters and their dogs were likely to be during the months that coincided with the football season, and so not more than a week later the body was found by someone’s golden retriever. Clyde himself had helped haul the body bag out to the main road.
Now both of the killers were down in Fort Madison for a long, long time. The First National Bank of NishWap had foreclosed on the auto loan and repossessed the station wagon, and it had sat in their lot ever since, an object of morbid fascination to schoolboys who made lengthy detours to ride past it every day on the way home from school, but not very inviting to anyone else.
Except Clyde. Jack Harbison came out and gave the Celica a wary test drive, consulted his blue book, put his glasses up on his forehead, and rubbed his eyes. “Done,” he said resignedly, and within minutes Clyde was headed for home behind the wheel of the Murder Car.
nine
AFTER THE meeting at the Agriculture Department, Howard King followed Betsy Vandeventer all the way out of the building, insisting that she ride back to the Castleman Building in his car. She tried to avoid him by taking the stairs, but he plunged in after her, shouting at her like a furious schoolmaster. “Betsy! Stop where you are immediately and listen to me!”
She surprised herself by overriding her instincts and continuing down the stairs. King stood his ground until she was almost
down to the ground floor, then pounded down after her, his comb-over and his necktie flapping. It wasn’t that Betsy had somehow broken free of the need to be a good girl. It was that something had changed since this morning. Howard King no longer had any authority. Spector’s orders had hinted at it, Millikan’s keelhauling had made it obvious, and now King’s own desperation served as proof.
He followed her halfway to the metro stop, hot in the spring sunshine, failed hair transplants dotting his sweat-beaded scalp. Once, twice, he almost reached out to grab her. Both times he controlled the urge, inhibited by the strolling office workers all around them, the tour groups piling out of the buses. She turned her back on him one last time and headed down into the metro.
When she arrived on the seventh floor of the Castleman, she stopped to chat with the security person on duty by the elevators, an ex-cop. “Morning, Miss Vandeventer,” he said.
“Morning, Martin,” she said. “Too nice a day to be locked up in a vault.”
“That’s true,” he chuckled.
“Has Mr. King come in yet?”
The look that came over Martin’s face when she mentioned Mr. King was the final and conclusive proof, if she wanted any, that something bad was about to happen to her boss. “Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said. “Mr. King came in early this morning.”
“I mean recently—within the last half hour.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, he’ll be coming in soon,” Betsy said, “and I think he may be very . . . emotional.”
Martin nodded reassuringly. “I understand.”
She went into the vault, said hello to a few colleagues in other cubicles, accepted congratulations from a couple of them who hadn’t been around yesterday for her five-year polygraph celebration. She settled into her own cubicle and signed on to her workstation to find an urgent memo waiting for her: it came from DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, and it was an invitation for her to attend a Deputies Committee meeting several days hence, to discuss the intelligence community’s views on Iraq. There was a number she was to call on secure line number two.
The DCI’s executive assistant took the call and confirmed the invitation. “Let me know if you have any questions.”
Through the vault door Betsy could hear a commotion coming down the hall. “I have one question already.”
King punched a wrong code into the lock, cursed, did it again, and shoved the door open.
“Shoot,” said the DCI’s assistant.
“Have you cleared this with my branch chief?”
“Cleared what?” King demanded. Behind him Martin prevented the door from closing and stepped quietly into the vault, his gaze fixed on the back of King’s head.
“There’s no need,” said the assistant. “But to cover you, there is an advisory to him on his computer mail. Tell him to read that.”
“Cleared what?” King demanded, stepping threateningly close to Betsy.
“The DCI’s executive assistant said you should check your computer mail,” Betsy said.
The mention of the DCI forced him to moderate his tone. He spun on his heel and went into his office, cursing under his breath. He logged on, pulled up his mail, and exploded. He stormed out and said, “You big cunt!” then stopped in his tracks as Martin interposed himself between him and Betsy.
“Mr. King, I sure was hoping to make it through the day without having to file any incident reports with my superiors,” Martin said.
King did something unexpected: closed his eyes and breathed deeply several times. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and defeated. “Nothing,” he said, and went back to his office. Betsy did not dare to sneak a glance at him until several minutes later. He had opened the tasking envelope from Millikan and was poring over it, apparently intending to handle the job himself rather than passing it on to one of his subordinates.
Betsy informed her officemates that she would be in the library and retreated to the third floor. It was a pathetic excuse for a library, but it worked nicely as a place where analysts could get away from their bosses. She had brought some blank paper along, which she used to write out an account of the day’s occurrences, using the Cross ballpoint pen her parents had given her as a high-school graduation present. When she thought it seemed good enough, she went up to the fourth floor and handed it to Spector’s secretary, saying, “He wanted this.”
The secretary—an old Agency hand—said, “I know, dear.” She handed Betsy an interoffice envelope. “The courier just brought this to you from the DCI’s office.”
Betsy accepted it, her gaze going immediately to the “Eyes Only” stamp. “Thanks.”
She went back to the library. The seventh floor was still a little too emotionally charged. She opened the envelope to find a set of marching orders with her name on them. “The White House wants your views on Iraqi misuse of USG funds. Be prepared to make an oral report on the sixteenth. In order to be prepared for this assignment, you are now seconded to the DCI’s personal staff 04/13/90 to 04/20/90. You will do no further work in the Castleman Building until your return on 04/21/90.”
By now it was half-past noon. She ventured back to the seventh floor, knowing that King would be gone to lunch. A few minutes after she arrived, Spector cruised in. “Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? The next week is going to be pretty intense. King knows about your new orders.” He looked about the vault. The other analysts shoved their faces into the screens of their workstations as if they hadn’t been listening. Spector took one hand out of his pocket and beckoned to her. “Come this way.”
Betsy stood up and followed him into King’s office. He shut the door and walked slowly around the office, looking at King’s stuff appraisingly. “None of what you do is to come back to this building,” he said. “When you return, you’ll go back to monitoring Southwest Asian Commodities. King won’t be here.”
“Pardon me?”
“We’ve floated him an administrative editorial excellence award. He’ll be promoted to a fifteen and assigned to run the Collections Office in Mobile, Alabama.”
Collections officers were the CIA’s ears to the ground. Their basic function was to pay uninvited visits on people who had recently been abroad and ask them if they’d seen anything interesting.
Betsy could not hide her amazement. Spector said, “You’ve been here long enough. We can fire analysts. We can’t fire managers. And you know why. So don’t ask.”
“See you in a week, then,” Betsy said. She was already trying to think of what she’d do with a free spring afternoon.
“Be careful. You’ll be swimming with the sharks now.”
The notion that she would never see Howard King again, never have to worry about him again, had left her so elated that she hardly heard Spector’s words. But she noticed Spector looking at her intently. “Thanks for the warning,” she said. “Can I call you for help?”
Spector, unexpectedly, reddened. “You can call me for advice.”
The next morning she took the Blue Bird bus from its stop outside the Rosslyn Metro out to Langley. The orders had said she was on the DCI’s personal staff for the week, but that was a sort of marriage of convenience, existing only on paper. They assigned her a windowless nook, far away from the office of the DCI or of anyone else important, and they left her completely alone. No one ever came by. That didn’t mean that someone wasn’t checking up on her; every time she logged on to her workstation, every time she punched a key on the keyboard, a record went into a file somewhere, and the DCI, or Spector, or whatever important person was responsible for putting her into this nook for the week, could get a very clear picture of how and what she was doing simply by pulling up that file.
The same Somebody had also temporarily upgraded her access privileges, and so, with the exception of nuclear-related and undersea-warfare compartments, she had virtually free run of all the information she could ever want.
She did not waste any time taking advantage of it. Spector had to
ld her that she was asking the right questions, so she followed her nose, sure that there would be no Howard King to get in her way, confident that no hovering snoops would notice an anomalous pattern of requests and blow the whistle on her.
What was Saddam doing with all the money that Ag had sent him for food? The weapons guys had chased down most of that information, tracing the dollars to banks in Cyprus, Austria, Jordan, and, unbelievably, Nepal. The Agency knew where the Chinese-missile money was going, where the German-chemicals dollars were going—including one really clever diversion through Libya. They knew where the North Korean nuclear-research cash was flowing, where the French-computer checks were going, where the American-food bucks flowed. The Iraqis did have the good taste to buy some food from big American suppliers: Soo Empire Grain, Louisiana Rice, and Great Lakes Co-op. But there were still three hundred or so million dollars unaccounted for. That kind of money wouldn’t get Saddam very far in the nuclear department, but chemical and biological weapons were much simpler and cheaper—much more his style. Three hundred million could buy a lot of nerve gas, a lot of anthrax.
She pulled up the tracking documents of the various departments involved: Agriculture, which maintained that all the money not spent on American food products was still in the Baghdad treasury; Commerce, which maintained that Ag was hiding something—that there were funds that should have gone to buy American technology; ACDA, which noted the Chinese weapons flowing in, but said that there was still a lot in the treasury; the Pentagon, which had tracers on all its surplus weapons sprinkled around the world and was watching them converge on Baghdad. She sent a request to a local Collections person and had him ask the Mossad liaison in D.C. if they would care to share their read on the dollars flow; within forty-eight hours the answer came back that four times the amount of money allocated the Iraqis out of the most recent batch had been spent. She called up HUMINT sources in what was left of the contacts the Agency had in the Middle East and got nothing, except one tantalizing hint that a number of Iraq’s best microbiologists were gone, that an entire chunk of the curriculum at Baghdad University was being taught by Pakistani and Palestinian adjunct professors.