“You better check her goddamned purse! Maybe up her skirt! Her lipstick might be a bomb!” came the shout from the unseen general officer.
Lin Shoo turned back to Devereaux in bewilderment. Sam gently moved the Chinese out of the way, pushed the button himself, and yelled into the speaker.
“Get off it, you chickenfucker! Show that hairy ass you call a face or I’ll open the slop-shoot and drop in that fucking lipstick! I’ll frag you, you miserable son of a bitch!—– Incidentally, Regina Greenberg says hello.”
The immense head of MacKenzie Hawkins slowly appeared in the pane of unidirectional glass. It merged from the side, huge, crew-cut, leather-lined. Mac’s expression was one of utter consternation. A half-chewed cigar was gripped between his teeth, beneath wide, bloodshot eyes that betrayed disbelieving curiosity.
“How so? What do you say?” Lin Shoo’s controlled lips were parted in astonishment.
“It’s a highly classified military code,” said Devereaux. “We only employ it under extreme conditions.”
“I will not pursue the matter; it would not be courteous. If you flip the lever on the side of the glass, General Hawkins will see you. When you feel comfortable, I shall admit you. However, I will remain outside, please.”
Sam pushed the small handle on the sides of the glass; there was a click. The large, squinting face reacted with instant hostility. Devereaux had the feeling that Hawkins was observing something very obscene but unimportant: Sam, the military accident.
Devereaux nodded to Lin Shoo. The Chinese reached out with both hands, as if to pull with one and push with the other, and unlatched the door. The heavy steel panel opened; Sam walked in.
To an enormous fist that came rushing toward him, on a direct collision course with his left eye. The impact came; the room, the world, the galaxy spun out of orbit into the shimmering of a hundred thousand splotches of white light.
Sam felt the wet cloth over his face before he felt the pain in his head, especially his eye, and he thought that was strange. He reached up, pulled the cloth away and blinked. All he saw at first was a white ceiling. The center light hurt his head, especially his left eye. He realized he was on a bed, so he rolled over and everything came back to him.
Hawkins was at the writing desk, papers and photographs scattered about the top. The general was reading from a sheaf of stapled papers.
Devereaux did not have to move his painful head farther to know that his opened attaché case was somewhere near the general. Nevertheless, he did so and saw it at Hawkins’s feet. Open and upside down. Empty. The contents in front of the general.
Sam cleared his throat. He could not think of anything else to do. Hawkins turned; his expression was not pleasant. Somehow absent was that welcoming, manly bond of recognition between comrades-at-arms.
“You little pricky-shits have been busy, haven’t you?”
Painfully, Devereaux swung his legs over the side of the bed and touched his left eye. He touched it gently, mainly because he could barely see out of it. “I may be a shit, General, but I’m not so little, as one day I hope to prove to you. Christ, I hurt.”
“You want to prove something”—Hawkins gestured at the papers and allowed himself the inkling of a cynical grin—“to me? With what you know about me? You’ve got moxie, boy. I’ll say that for you.”
“That phrase is about as antediluvian as you are,” muttered Sam as he stood up. Unsteadily. “You enjoying the reading material?”
“It’s some goddamned record! They’ll probably want to make another movie about me.”
“Leavenworth Productions. Film processed in the prison laundry. You are a bonafide fruitcake.” Devereaux pointed to a blanket draped over the door covering the pane of unidirectional glass. “Is that smart?” He gestured at the blanket.
“It’s not dumb. It confuses them. The oriental mind has two very pronounced pressure points: confusion and embarrassment.” Hawkins’s eyes were level.
The statement startled Sam. Perhaps it was Hawkins’s choice of words, or maybe the quiet intelligence behind the voice. Whatever it was, it was unexpected. “I mean it’s a little useless; the room is bugged. Bugged, hell! All they have to do is push a red button and they can hear everything we say.”
“Wrong, soldier,” replied the general as he got out of the chair. “If you are a soldier and not a goddamn lace-pants. Come here.” Hawkins walked over to the blanket and folded back, first, a corner on the right, then the opposite section of the cloth on the left. In both small areas were barely visible holes in the wall, now very visible with wet toilet paper shoved into the centers. Hawkins dropped the two sections of the blanket and then pointed to six additional plugs of wet toilet tissue—two on each wall, upper and lower—and grinned his leather-lined grin. “I’ve gone over this fucking cell palm-spread by palm-spread. I’ve blocked out each mike; there aren’t any others. Naturally, I didn’t touch ’em before. See how careful the goddamned monkeys were? Even got one right over the pillow in case I talked in my sleep. That was the toughest to spot.”
Grudgingly, Sam nodded his approval. And then he thought of the obvious. “If you have plugged every one, they’ll race in here and move us. You should realize that.”
“You should think better. Electronic surveillance in close areas is wired terminally into a single unit. First, they’ll figure they’ve got a short in the unit circuit, which will take ’em an hour to trace—if they don’t have to break down the walls and can do it with sensors—and that’ll confuse ’em. Then, if they rule out a short, they’ll guess I plugged ’em and that’ll embarrass ’em. Confusion and embarrassment; the pressure points. It’ll take ’em another hour to figure how to get us somewhere else without admitting error. We’ve got at least two hours. So you better do some pretty fine explaining in that time.”
Devereaux had the distinct feeling that he had better be capable of some pretty fine explaining. Hawkins was a wily pro and Sam did not relish any confrontation. Certainly not physical or, he was beginning to suspect, mental.
“Don’t you want to hear about Regina Greenberg?”
“I’ve read your notes. You’ve got lousy handwriting.”
“I’m a lawyer; all lawyers have lousy handwriting. It’s part of the bar exam. Also I didn’t intend to have them typed up.”
“I should hope not,” said Hawkins. “You’ve also got a dirty mind.”
“You’ve got terrific taste.”
“I don’t discuss former wives.”
“They’ve discussed you,” countered Sam.
“I know the girls. You didn’t get anything you could use. Not from the girls, you didn’t. Anything else you got is none of my business.”
“Do I detect a moral position?”
“In my own crude way. I got a little class, boy.” Hawkins pointed to the desk; his arm, hand, and extended finger all were very steady. “Now, start explaining that stuff.”
“What’s there to explain? You’ve read it, you say. So do I have to tell you that it represents an airtight case of persona non grata on one side, and a large embarrassment for the other? If I do, I just have.” Devereaux touched his eye; it hurt like hell, so he sat down again on the bed.
“That stuff in Indochina,” growled Hawkins, walking to the desk and picking up the stapled pages, “it’s written up like I was working for the fucking gooks!”
“I wouldn’t go that far. It raises certain questions as to your methods of operation—–”
“That’s going that far, boy!” interrupted the general. “I was either working for ’em or working with both sides, or just pocketing half the pouch money in Southeast Asia! Or I was so dumb I didn’t know what I was doing at all!”
“Ahh!” sang Sam in a lilting, false tremolo. “Now we are beginning to understand, said Alice to Cock Robin. A military, really military, man with two Congressional Medals of Honor is a dubious bet for traitor. But all that combat, all those banging noises and that scurrying behind the line and captu
re and torture and primitive means of brutal survival—the cumulative effect of all that would certainly flip out said hero right into laughing land. Very sad, but the human psyche can take only so much.”
“Horseshit!” roared Hawkins. “My head’s screwed on a hell of a lot tighter than those fuckers who asked for all this crap!”
“Two points for the general,” said Devereaux, holding up his fingers in the V sign. “I hereby state for the record that the general’s head is screwed better than anyone at Sixteen-hundred. And, I might add, so is the general.”
“What does that mean, boy?”
“Oh, come on, Hawkins. You’re finished! How and why it happened, I don’t know. I just know that you got in the way at a rotten time; you made too much noise and you are expendable! Not only expendable, but a goddamned pawn that Sixteen-hundred’s giving up loud and clear. You’re even an example!”
“Horseshit, again! Wait’ll the Pentagon gets wind of this!”
“They’ve—it’s—already got its nostrils full. The brass noses are colliding with each other, running to the deodorant factories. You don’t exist, General! Except maybe as a wayward memory.” Sam got up from the bed. The pain in the eye was spreading throughout his head again.
“You can’t sell that and I won’t buy it,” said Hawkins defensively, his voice indicating a slightly diminished confidence. “I’ve got friends. I’ve got a career sheet that reads like a recruiting poster. Goddamn it, soldier, I’m a general officer who came up from the ranks—from the fucking mud in Belgium! They won’t treat me this way!”
“I’m not a soldier. I’m a lawyer and I’m telling you you’ve been treated with several layers of forget-me gas. Those telephotos from your buddies in Peking sealed the whole ball of wax. You’ve bubbled over.”
“They’ve got to prove it!”
“They’ve got that, too. I was given it in a pitch-black wine cellar about an hour ago. By a psychotic holding a candle. A very solid citizen. They’ve got you.”
Hawkins squinted his eyes and removed the chewed, unlit cigar from his mouth. “How?”
“ ‘Medical records.’ That’s the hard evidence. Psychiatric and physical. ‘Stress collapse’ is only the beginning. The Defense Department will issue a statement that says, in essence, you were purposely placed in ambivalent situations so they could ascertain the development. ‘Schizoid progression,’ I think it’s called. Conflicting objectives like the Indochina stuff. Also those pictures of you pissing on the mission’s roof have a very complicated psychiatric explanation.”
“I’ve got a better one. I was goddamned angry! Wait’ll I give my version.”
“You won’t get a chance to tell it. If the game plan becomes an issue, the President plans to go on the air, praise your past, show your current medical records—with heartbreaking reluctance, of course—and ask the country to pray for you.”
“Couldn’t happen.” The general shook his head confidentially. “No one believes a president anymore.”
“Maybe not, but he’s got the buttons. Not his own, maybe, but enough others. You’ll be strapped down in a Nike silo, if he says so.” Sam saw that there was a metal mirror in the small cubicle that housed the toilet. He walked toward the door.
“But why should he do it? Why would anyone let him do it?” Hawkins’s cigar was held limply in his hand.
Devereaux looked at the size and hue of the shiner over his left eye. “Because we need gas,” he replied.
“Huh?” Hawkins dropped his cigar on the rug. Obviously without thinking, he stepped on it, grinding it into the surface. “Gas?”
“It’s too complicated. Never mind.” Sam pressed the sensitive flesh around his eye with his fingers. He hadn’t had a mouse in over fifteen years; he wondered how long it would take for the swelling to recede. “Just accept the situation for what it is and make the best deal you can. You haven’t got much choice.”
“You mean I’m supposed to lie down and take it?”
Devereaux walked out of the toilet, stopped and sighed. “I’d say the immediate objective was to keep you from lying down in Mongolia. For some four thousand-plus years. If you cooperate, maybe I can pull it off.”
“Out of China?”
“Yes.”
“How much cooperation? With the gooks and Washington?” Hawkins’s squint was very pronounced.
“A lot. All the way down the pike.”
“Out of the army?”
“No point in staying. Is there, really?”
“Goddamn!”
“I agree. But where does it get you? There’s a big world out of that uniform. Enjoy it.”
Hawkins crossed back to the desk in angry silence. He picked up one of the photographs, shrugged and dropped it. He reached into his pocket for a fresh cigar. “Goddamn, boy, you’re not thinking again. You’re a lawyer, maybe, but like you say, you’re no soldier. A field commander sucks in a hostile patrol, he doesn’t feed it, he cuts it down. Nobody’s going to let me enjoy. They’ll put me in that Nike silo you mentioned. To keep me from talking.”
Devereaux exhaled a long breath through his lips. “It’s just possible I can build a shield acceptable to all parties. After you went down the pike over here. Full confession, public apology, the works.”
“Goddamn!”
“Mongolia, General.…”
Hawkins bit into the cigar; the bullet between his teeth, thought Sam.
“What’s a ‘shield’?”
“Off the top of my head, I figure a letter to the secretary of the army, accompanied by a tape of your reading it—verified by voice print. In the letter, and the tape, you state that in moments of complete lucidity you’re aware of your illness—et cetera, et cetera.”
Hawkins stared at Devereaux. “You’re out of your mind!”
“There are a lot of Nike silos in the Dakotas.”
“Jesus!”
“It’s not as bad as it sounds. The letter and the tape will be buried in the Pentagon. Used only if you publicly make waves. Both to be returned, say, in five years. How about it?”
Hawkins reached into his pocket for a book of matches. He struck one and a cloud of pungent smoke nearly fogged out his face; but his voice was clear behind it. “Down this Chinese pike of yours, there’s no talk about that psychiatric bullshit. No one tries to make me out a nut.”
“Hell, no. Nothing like that. Simple fatigue.” Devereaux paced back and forth in the small enclosure as he so often did in conference rooms, weaving the fabric of defense. “A little booze, maybe; that’s sympathetic, even kind of cute when the client’s a ballsy type.” Sam stopped, clarifying his thoughts. “The Chinese would prefer an ideological approach; it’d soften them up. You saw the light. They’ve been generous to you, nice to you. The People’s regime is dandy. And tolerant. You didn’t realize that. You’re really sorry for all those nasty things you’ve said for a quarter of a century.”
“Goddamn! You make me bleed, boy!” With a technique that escaped Sam, Hawkins actually chewed on his cigar as he roared. And then he removed it and lowered his voice. “I know, I know—. The silos are Mongolia. Jesus!”
Devereaux watched the man—painfully. He took several steps toward him and spoke softly. “You’ve been squeezed, General. By righteous pieces of plastic; nobody knows that better than I do. I’ve read your file and I agree with maybe one-fiftieth of what you stand for; in many ways I think you’re a menace. But one thing you’re not is a manipulator. And you’re no joke. Remember what you told the girls? You said everyone’s his own inventory. That says a lot to me. So let me help you. I’m no soldier, but I’m a damned good lawyer.”
Hawkins turned away. In embarrassment, thought Sam. When the words came, there was a defenselessness about them that made him wince.
“Don’t know why I’m so concerned about what anybody says—or why I don’t settle for a silo or Mongolia. Goddamn, boy, I’ve spent thirty-some years in this man’s army. You take off the uniform—no matter what you put
me into—I’m as naked as a plucked duck. I only know the army; I don’t know anything else, not trained for anything when you come right down to it. Never spent any time with the technological—except little stuff in G-two, things like that. Don’t know anything about fancy doings like ‘negotiations.’ All I know how to do is fuck up and trap pouch thieves—those Indochina reports are right about that: I outsmarted the KGB, the CIA, the ARVN, and even the sellouts on the Saigon general staff. But that’s different. I can handle personnel, I suppose. But they always gave me the misfits, the stockade products; if they’d been civilians they wouldn’t be allowed on the streets. I was always good with them. I could control those devious bastards; I could put myself in their slimy shoes and use ’em, use their goddamned angling. But there’s nothing I can do on the outside.”
“That doesn’t sound like the man who said everyone’s his own inventory. You’re better than that.”
Hawkins turned and faced Sam. He spoke slowly, reflectively. “Shit, boy. You know what? The only goddamned thing I’m trained for is to be a crook, maybe. And I’d probably fuck that up because I don’t give that much of a damn about money.”
“You look for challenges. Talented people always do. Money’s a by-product; usually the challenge there is in the amounts, what they represent, not what they can purchase.”
“I guess so.” Hawkins took a deep breath and stretched; his resignation was coming into focus for him, thought Devereaux. He walked past Sam aimlessly, humming the opening notes of Mairzy-Doats. Devereaux knew from long experience with clients to let the moment subside, allow the client time to fully accept the decision.
“Wait a minute, boy. Wait a minute—.” Hawkins took the cigar out of his mouth and leveled his eyes with Sam. “Everybody wants my cooperation. The Chinks, those assholes in Washington—probably a dozen gas conglomerates. I mean they not only want it, they need it. So much so they’ll fake records, build a case—. That ball of wax got out of control—–”