Bill stopped in the middle of the playground. He felt a little queasy. He wished he had a Gelusil. The church building loomed above him; he was surrounded by children. He had to go to the bathroom suddenly. Maybe he could find a john and get settled down, get himself composed.
But then, maybe the best thing would be to get it over with. Get it over with fast. He’d come this far, quite a way.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a Binaca canister, and squirted a blast of the mouthwash into his mouth. Its cool sweetness pepped him up considerably, burying that sour taste that had collected in his throat.
I’ll just do it.
He turned as a basketball glanced off his knee and a horde of little jerks roared by in pursuit.
“Hey, excuse me.” He hailed the old duffer, who was bent in conference with two sniffling children. “Is there an office around here? Where would I find an office?”
“Are you sure you’re looking for the office, Bill?” asked Paul Chardy, rising.
It was the coat, cloaking the man’s size. And it was the beard, surprisingly shot with gray, masking the dark half-Irish face, blurring that pugnacious chin. And the hair, longish, almost over the ears, where Paul’s had always been short, after the military fashion, like Bill’s own. And it was also the playground full of kids, the bright sun, the bouncing, sailing balls, the noise, the church: it was all so different. The last time Bill had seen Paul had been at an arms dump on the border. Chardy wore baggy khaki pants then, and an embroidered coat and a black-and-white turban and sunglasses and had magazine bandoliers crisscrossed on his chest like some kind of bandit and had been almost mahogany from the sun. He’d carried a Soviet assault rifle, the AK-47, and had a couple of rocket-propelled grenades in their launchers slung over his back, and a belt full of Russian F-l grenades.
“I-I didn’t recognize you, Paul. The beard—you look so different.”
“Old Bill, Jesus. I saw you getting out of the car. They still make you rent cheap little Chevys, huh? How are you?” He took Bill’s hand and shook it. “You’re looking good, Bill.”
“You’re lying, Paul. I’m looking old, which is what I am. You’re getting some gray yourself.”
“It’s these kids. I look a hundred. These damned kids, they took my youth.” He laughed, and clapped Bill on the back.
“Paul, we had some trouble finding you.”
“You were supposed to. That was the point.”
“Well, anyway. It’s some old business. Have you got a minute?”
Chardy looked at his watch, a big Rolex. He still had it. All the Special Operations people wore them.
“This is my most open period. They work you pretty hard in these joints. I’m off around five. Can it wait?”
“Ah.” It couldn’t. Get to it, they’d told Speight. Don’t give him time to think about it, to nurse his furies. Plunge in.
I know, Speight had answered bitterly. I’m not a kid at this game either, you know; thinking, you bastards.
“Well,” Speight started, feeling outpositioned in his first move, “it’s only that—”
But Chardy darted off—he still had that old quickness—shouting, “Hey, hey, Mahoney, Mahoney,” and leapt into some sort of ruckus, pulling apart two squalling, clawing boys. He shook the big one hard, once, and spoke to him in an earnest, deadly voice. Speight imagined Chardy speaking to him like that.
Chardy came back. “That little prick thinks he’s tough. He likes to hit people,” he said. “His father’s a cop.”
“Paul, I never would have imagined this kind of a life for you,” said Speight, stalling.
“At the parochial schools,” Chardy said, looking at him squarely with those dark eyes, “you don’t need a degree in education. You just need to be willing to work like a horse for peanuts. A big-deal sports background helps. What about you, Bill? Still playing cowboy?”
“They put me in a different section. Over in Central Reference.”
“Siberia.”
“Just perfect for a harmless old geezer like me.”
“You show ’em, Bill.”
“Paul, about the Melman hearings. You’re not mad? I just told them what I’d seen.”
“Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”
Bill licked his lips.
“Thanks, Paul.”
“Is that why you came?”
“Well, it’s—”
But Chardy darted off again. Speight stood helpless and watched him handle another crisis. Was that all these kids did, fight? But that’s all grown-ups did, wasn’t it?
Presently Chardy returned. “They really keep you jumping,” he said.
“They sure do.”
“Well, Bill?”
So this would be it then. On the playground, full of kids, no time to sit down and work it out in a civilized fashion. Chardy was playing him, he could tell. It was a no-win situation, all the noise, all the distraction. He wouldn’t handle it well. A presentiment of failure crossed his mind.
We should have sent somebody younger, they would say, back at Langley. They would say it to his face. They could be so cold these days.
“This,” Bill said, lurching ahead. He drew from his pocket and offered Chardy—who accepted it reluctantly—his treasure, the thing that had them running in circles at Langley.
Chardy looked at it, rolling it in his palm.
“A seven-six-five-millimeter Czech auto pistol shell. Must be ten million of these things floating around the world.”
“Look at that scratch on the rim, where the ejector rod popped it out of the breach,” Bill said.
“It’s a Skorpion shell. I can recognize a Skorpion shell. There’re Skorps all over the world. African generals love the goddamned things.”
“Let me give you the rest of it.”
Chardy looked at him. Bill could never read Chardy. The dark eyes squinted; the mouth now lost in beard seemed to tighten.
“Go ahead.”
“That particular shell is from a cache of stuff some boys from a battalion of the One-seventy-third Airborne liberated on a search-and-destroy in July ’sixty-seven, a big Charlie ammo dump out near Qui Nhon. Mostly AK-forty-sevens, and those mean-ass RPG rocket launchers. Some mortars, some light artillery. The usual. But also a Skorpion. Very unusual for ’Nam in ’sixty-seven because the Czech stuff didn’t start showing up until much later. But there was a single mint Skorpion in this dump, still packed in grease, and thirty-five hundred rounds of seven-six-five.”
“And you’re telling me this is one of those thirty-five-hundred rounds?”
“Yep,” Bill Speight said almost proudly. “The arsenal marks check out exactly. See here on the base. It’s marked ‘VZ-sixty-one.’ That’s their manufacturing code for the Brno Arsenal and that lot of seven-six-five was made in January ’sixty-six. Same lot as we found in ’Nam. It can’t be coincidence. You know what happened to that ammo?”
Chardy said nothing.
“Well, sure you do, Paul,” Bill said. “We took that Skorpion and twenty-five hundred of those rounds into Kurdistan with us in ’seventy-three In the operation we called Saladin Two, the Kurdish show. My show, your show. Especially, at the end, your show. Along with the other stuff, the AKs, the RPGs. Enough to start a small war. And we did start a small war.”
Bill knew all about gear. His specialty was logistics, clandestine resupply, and he had organized the distribution of arms to guerrilla operations all over the globe, back when he was one of the cowboys of the Special Operations Division. He had been through some hairy moments himself.
Chardy nodded, as if in memory of the small war and its hairy moments.
“And you recall that you gave Skorpion to a certain man?”
“I gave it to Ulu Beg,” Chardy said. “Where’d you get it?”
Speight told him of the deaths of the two Border Patrol officers.
“That case was one of forty recovered on the site. He fired two magazines. Those officers were torn up pretty bad. You kn
ow what a Skorpion can do.”
The Skorpion was a Czech VZ-61, a machine pistol. Ten inches long with its wire stock folded, it weighed three and a half pounds and fired at 840 rounds per minute, cyclical. It was one of the world’s rare true machine pistols, smaller than a submachine gun and deadlier than an automatic pistol.
“Bill, it’s just one shell. You’re dreaming. You’re building crazy cases from nothing. A shell, an arsenal mark, a scratch in the brass.”
“And there’s this, Paul,” Bill said. He reached into his briefcase and after thumbing through the reports from Science and Technology, the airline tickets, the maps, he came up with a picture of a body in the desert.
Chardy looked at it.
“How was he facing?” Chardy asked.
“He was facing east. The report says the body was moved. They think the killer was searching for money or something. Yet the wallet was left untouched. They can’t figure it. But you could figure it, couldn’t you?”
“Sure,” Chardy said. “He didn’t mean to kill the guy. He didn’t want to. He felt bad about it. So in the frenzy of the moment, he tries to help his soul to paradise. He turns him on his right side, and faces him toward Mecca, as the Kurds bury their dead.”
“You saw enough of it, Paul.”
“I guess I did. A Kurd is here. Maybe Ulu Beg himself.”
“Yes, Paul. After all, we never got any confirmation of his death after Saladin Two went under. And if it’s any of them, it’s him. And you know how the Kurds feel about vengeance.”
A bell rang.
Bill looked to Chardy. The moment was here; shouldn’t Chardy be reacting? A man he’d trained and fought next to and lived with seven years ago in Kurdistan was here, with a gun, willing to kill.
The children began to collect in a riotous mass near a set of steel double doors. Nuns appeared. Small skirmishes broke out.
“Mr. Chardy—” a nun called from the doors.
“Paul, it’s—”
“I know what it is, Bill,” Chardy said. “Goddamn you, Bill, for bringing all this back.” He turned and went inside with the kids.
So Bill had to wait after all. He found a bar, a seedy, quiet little place in the next town up the road, and killed the afternoon with rum-and-Cokes at a table near a pinball machine in an empty room. He smoked half a pack of Vantages. He set the glasses before him in a neat formation. He had five of them at the end.
He’s got to come, he thought. He’ll think it over; he’ll see it’s just as much his job as anybody’s. Ulu Beg is a loose end of a Chardy operation, no matter that Chardy was kicked out, no matter that he’s been hiding out here, playing schoolteacher all these years. He has to come, Bill thought, wobbly.
It’s his legacy. He stood for something, all those years. He was one of the heroes, one of the cowboys, and the thing about the cowboys, they never said no. Nothing was too hairy for a cowboy. They were crazy, some people said, they were animals; and lots of the staff couldn’t stand them. But when you needed a cowboy, he was there, he went in. He lived for going in; it’s why he became a cowboy in the first place, wasn’t it?
Bill tried to convince himself. He looked at his Seiko and had trouble reading the hands. He’d had too much to drink; he knew it.
“You okay, mister?” The waitress, looking down at him.
“Sure, I’m fine.”
“You better call it quits,” she said.
“Truer words,” he said, laughing grandly, “was never spoke.”
The traffic had gotten pretty thick and he didn’t reach Our Lady of the Resurrection until 5:15. He parked again in the visitors’ space and walked across the empty playground to the school and entered.
He blinked in the darkness. Children’s paintings hung along the dim corridor. Speight thought them absurd, cows and barns and airplanes with both wings on the same side of the fuselage. The crucifixes made him nervous, too, all that agony up there on bland, pale green walls. He encountered a nun and overdid the smile, worried she’d smell the booze or pick up on the vagueness in his walk. But she only smiled back, a surprisingly young girl. Next he found a group of boys, scrawny and sweaty in gym clothes, herding into a locker room. They seemed so young, their bones so tiny, their faces so drawn, like child laborers in some Dickensian blacking factory. But one was bigger, a black boy, probably the star.
“Is Mr. Chardy around, son?” Speight asked him.
“Back there,” the boy said, pointing down the hall.
The destination turned out to be an old gym, waxy yellow under weak lights that hung in cages too low off the raftered ceiling. They must have built this place twenty years before they built their slick glass-and-brick cathedral. One end of it was an auditorium, with a stageful of amateurish props for what would be some dreadful production. Speight saw Chardy, in gray sweats, a wet double dark spot like Mickey Mouse ears growing splotchily across his chest, with some kind of bright band, like an Indian brave or something, around his head at the hairline. He wore white high-topped gym shoes and was methodically sinking one-handed jump shots from twenty or twenty-five feet out. He’d dribble once or twice, the sound of full, round leather against the wood echoing through the still air, then seize the ball and seem to weigh it. Then the ball rode his fingers up to his shoulders, paused, and was launched, even as Chardy himself left the floor. The ball rose perfectly, then fell and, more often than not as Speight watched, swished through. Occasionally it did miss, however, and then the bearded man would lazily gallop after it and scoop it off the bounce one-handed, and turn and rise and fire again, and he looked pretty good for a man—what, now?—nearly forty. He did not miss twice in a row in the ten silent minutes Bill stood in the doorway watching him.
At last Bill called, “You’re still a star.”
Chardy did not look over. He completed another shot, then answered, “Still got the touch.”
His talent with a ball was one part of the legend. During his two stateside tours—disasters in other respects—he’d torn up the Langley gym league, where a surprisingly competitive level of basketball was played by ex-college jocks; Chardy had set scoring records that, for all Bill knew, still stood. Chardy had been some kind of All-American at the small college he’d gone to on a scholarship, and he’d had a tryout with a pro team.
He canned another jumper and then seemed to tire of the exercise. The ball rolled across the floor into darkness. Chardy retrieved a towel and came over to Bill.
“Well, Old Bill, I see I didn’t wait you out.”
“Did you really want to, Paul?”
Chardy only smiled at this interesting question.
Then he said, “I guess they want me. I guess I’m an asset again.”
Why deny it? Speight thought. “They do. You are.”
Chardy considered this.
“Who’s running the show. Melman?”
“Melman’s a big man now. Didn’t you know? He’s Deputy Director of the whole Operations Directorate. He’ll be Director of it someday, maybe even DCI if they decide to stay in the shop.”
Chardy snorted at the prospect of Sam Melman as Director of Central Intelligence, with his picture on the cover of Time and Newsweek as had been Helms’s and Colby’s and Turner’s.
“We’re not even running this thing out of Operations, Paul. We’re running it out of Management and Services, their office of Security. So—”
“What the hell is this ‘Operations’?” Chardy asked suddenly.
He really had been out of touch, Speight realized.
“I’m sorry. You were in the mountains, I guess, when they reorganized. I didn’t learn until later myself. Plans is now called Operations.”
“It sounds like a World War Two movie.”
“Paul, forget Operations. Forget the old days, the old guys. Forget all that stuff. Forget Melman. He was just doing his job. He’ll be a long way away from you. Think about Ulu Beg in America.”
“All the stuff about Ulu Beg is in the reports, in the files.
The reports of the Melman inquiry. Tell them to dig that stuff out.”
“They already have, Paul. Paul, you know Ulu Beg, you trained him. You fought with him, you know his sons. You were like a brother to him. You—”
But talk of Ulu Beg seemed to hurt Chardy. He looked away, and Speight saw that he’d have to play his last card, the one he didn’t care for, the one that smelled. But it had been explained to him in great detail how important all this was, how he could not fail.
“Paul—” He paused, full of regret Chardy deserved better than the shot he was about to get. “Paul, we’re going to have to bring Johanna Hull in too.”
Chardy said, “I can’t help you there. I wish I could. Look, I have to take a shower.”
“Paul, maybe I’d better make myself clearer.” He wished he’d sucked down a few more rum-and-Cokes. “These are very cold people, Paul, these people in Security. They’re very cold about everything except results. They’re going to have to bring Johanna under some kind of control—and they want you to do it—because they think Ulu Beg will go to her. She’s about the only place he could go. But if you don’t do it, believe me, they’ll find somebody who will.”
Chardy looked at him with disgust.
“It’s gone that far?”
“They’re very frightened of Ulu Beg. They’ll play rough on this one.”
“I guess they will,” Chardy said, and Speight knew he’d won his little victory.
3
He assumed they would be hunting him, but it did not matter and did not particularly frighten him. He had been hunted before—by Iraqi soldiers and policemen, by Arabs, by Iranians, by Kurds even. Now Americans.
But what could they do? For he was in the mountains now. Ulu Beg felt almost comfortable here; he knew this place. He had been born and raised in mountains and fought in mountains and these, though in many ways different, were in just as many ways the same as his own.
They were known as the Sierritas, ranging northward from the border for twenty or thirty kilometers before panning out into cruel desert plain on the way to the American city of Tucson.