Without Remorse

  No, he told the ground, thirty-seven thousand feet below.

  And what did Kelly feel about it? He pondered that question for a while, leaning back and closing his eyes as though napping. A quiet voice, perhaps conscience, told him that he ought to feel something, and he searched for a genuine emotion. After several minutes of consideration, he could find none. There was no loss, no grief, no remorse. Lamarck had meant nothing to him and probably would be no loss to anyone else. Perhaps his girts—KeHy had counted five of them in the bar—would be without a pimp, but then maybe one of them would seize the opportunity to correct her life. Unlikely, perhaps, but possible. It was realism that told Kelly he couldn’t fix all the problems of the world; it was idealism that told him his inability to do so did not preclude him from addressing individual imperfections.

  But all that took him away from the initial question: What did he feel about the elimination of Pierre Lamarck? The only answer he could find was, Nothing. The professional elation of having done something difficult was different from satisfaction, from the nature of the task. In ending the life of Pierre Lamarck he had removed something harmful from the surface of the planet. It had enriched him not at all—taking the money had been a tactic, a camouflage measure, certainly not an objective. It had not avenged Pam’s life. It had not changed very much. It had been like stepping on an offensive insect—you did it and moved on. He would not try to tell himself different, but neither would his conscience trouble him, and that was sufficient to the moment. His little experiment had been a success. After all the mental and physical preparation, he had proven himself worthy of the task before him. Kelly’s mind focused behind closed eyes on the mission before him. Having killed many men better than Pierre Lamarck, he could now think with confidence about killing men worse than the New Orleans pimp.

  This time they visited him, Greer saw with satisfaction. On the whole, CIA’s hospitality was better. James Greer had arranged parking in the VIP Visitors’ area—the equivalent at the Pentagon was always haphazard and difficult to use—and a secure conference room. Cas Podulski thoughtfully selected a seat at the far end, close to the air-conditioning vent, where his smoking wouldn’t bother anyone.

  “Dutch, you were right about this kid,” Greer said, handing out typed copies of the handwritten notes which had arrived two days earlier.

  “Somebody ought to have put a gun to his head and walked him into OCS. He would have been the kind of junior officer we used to be.”

  Podulski chuckled at his end of the table. “No wonder he got out,” he said with lighthearted bitterness.

  “I’d be careful putting a gun to his head,” Greer observed with a chuckle of his own. “I spent a whole night last week going through his package. This guy’s a wild one in the field.”

  “Wild?” Maxwell asked with a hint of disapproval in his voice. “Spirited, you mean, James?”

  Perhaps a compromise, Greer thought: “A self-starter. He had three commanders and they backed him on every play he made except one.”

  “PLASTIC FLOWER? The political-action major he killed?”

  “Correct. His lieutenant was furious about that, but if it’s true about what he had to watch, the only thing you can fault was his judgment, rushing in the way he did.”

  “I read through that, James. I doubt I could have held back,” Cas said, looking up from the notes. Once a fighter pilot, always a fighter pilot. “Look at this, even his grammar is good!” Despite his accent, Podulski had been assiduous in learning his adopted language.

  “Jesuit high school,” Greer pointed out. “I’ve gone over our in-house assessment of KINGPIN. Kelly’s analysis tracks on every major point except where he calls a few spades.”

  “Who did the CIA assessment?” Maxwell asked.

  “Robert Ritter. He’s a European specialist they brought in. Good man, a little terse, knows how to work the field, though.”

  “Operations guy?” Maxwell asked.

  “Right.” Greer nodded. “Did some very nice work working Station Budapest.”

  “And why,” Podulski asked, “did they bring in a guy from that side of the house to look over the KINGPIN operation?”

  “I think you know the answer, Cas,” Maxwell pointed out.

  “If BOXWOOD GREEN goes, we need an Operations guy from this house. We have to have it. I don’t have the juice to do everything. Are we agreed on that?” Greer looked around the table, seeing the reluctant nods. Podulski looked back down at his documents before saying what they all thought.

  “Can we trust him?”

  “He’s not the one who burned KINGPIN. Cas, we have Jim Angleton looking at that. It was his idea to bring Ritter onboard. I’m new here, people. Ritter knows the bureaucracy here better than I do. He’s an operator; I’m just an analyst-type. And his heart’s in the right place. He damned near lost his job protecting a guy—he had an agent working inside GRU, and it was time to get him out. The decision-weenies upstairs didn’t like the timing, with the arms talks going on, and they told him no. Ritter brought the guy out anyway. It turned out his man had something State needed, and that saved Ritter’s career.” It hadn’t done much for the martini-mixer upstairs, Greer didn’t add, but that was a person CIA was doing rather well without.

  “Swashbuckler?” Maxwell asked.

  “He was loyal to his agent. Sometimes people here forget about that,” Greer said.

  Admiral Podulski looked up the table. “Sounds like our kind of guy.”

  “Brief him in,” Maxwell ordered. “But you tell him that if I ever find out some civilian in the building fucked up our chance to get these men out, I will personally drive down to Pax River, personally check out an A-4, and personally napalm his house.”

  “You should let me do that, Dutch,” Cas added with a smile. “I’ve always had a better hand for dropping things. Besides, I have six hundred hours in the Scooter.”

  Greer wondered how much of that was humor.

  “What about Kelly?” Maxwell asked.

  “His CIA identity is ’Clark’ now. If we want him in, we can utilize him better as a civilian. He’d never get over being a chief, but a civilian doesn’t have to worry about rank.”

  “Make it so,” Maxwell said. It was convenient, he thought, to have a naval officer seconded to CIA, wearing civilian clothes but still subject to military discipline.

  “Aye aye, sir. If we get to training, where will it be done?”

  “Quantico Marine Base,” Maxwell replied. “General Young is a pal from the old days. Aviator. He understands.”

  “Marty and I went through test-pilot school together,” Podulski explained. “From what Kelly says, we don’t need that many troops. I always figured KINGPIN was over-manned. You know, if we bring this off, we have to get Kelly his Medal.”

  “One thing at a time, Cas.” Maxwell set that aside, looking back to Greer as he stood. “You will let us know if Angleton finds out anything?”

  “Depend on it.” Greer promised. “If there’s a bad guy inside, we’ll get his ass. I’ve fished with the guy. He can pull a brook trout out of thin air.” After they left he set an afternoon meeting with Robert Ritter. It meant putting Kelly off, but Ritter was more important now, and while there was a rush on the mission, it wasn’t all that great a rush.

  Airports were useful places, with their bustling anonymity and telephones. Kelly placed his call, as he waited for his baggage to appear—he hoped—in the proper place.

  “Greer,” the voice said.

  “Clark,” Kelly replied, smiling at himself. It seemed so James Bond to have a cover name. “I’m at the airport, sir. Do you still want me in this afternoon?”

  “No. I’m tied up.” Greer flipped through his daybook. “Tuesday ... three-thirty. You can drive in. Give me your car type and license number.”

  Kelly did that, surprised that he’d been bumped. “You get my notes, sir?”

  “Yes, and you did a fine job, Mr. Clark. We’ll be going over them Tues
day. We are very pleased with your work.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Kelly said into the phone.

  “See you Tuesday.” The line clicked off.

  “And thanks for that, too,” Kelly said after he hung up. Twenty minutes later he had his bags and was walking off to his car. About an hour after that he was in his Baltimore apartment. It was lunchtime, and he fixed a couple of sandwiches, chasing both down with Coca-Cola. He hadn’t shaved today, and his heavy beard made a shadow on his face, he saw in the mirror. He’d leave it. Kelly headed into the bedroom for a lengthy nap.

  The civilian contractors didn’t really understand what they were up to, but they were being paid. That was all they really required, since they had families to feed and house payments to make. The buildings they had just erected were well to the right of spartan: bare concrete block, nothing in the way of utilities, built to odd proportions, not like American construction at all except for the building materials. It was as though their size and shape had been taken from some foreign construction manual. All the dimensions were metric, one worker noted, though the actual plans were noted in odd numbers of inches and feet, as American building plans had to be. The job itself had been simple enough, the site already cleared when they’d first arrived. A number of the construction workers were former servicemen, most ex-Army, but a few Marines as well, and they were at turns pleased and uncomfortable to be at this sprawling Marine base in the wooded hills of northern Virginia. On the drive into the construction site they could see the morning formations of officer candidates jogging along the roads. All those bright young kids with shaved heads, one former corporal of the 1st Marines had thought this very morning. How many would get their commissions? How many would deploy there? How many would come home early, shipped in steel boxes? It was nothing he could foresee or control, of course. He’d served his time in hell and returned unscratched, which was still remarkable to the former grunt who’d heard all too often the supersonic crack of rifle bullets. To have survived at all was amazing enough.

  The roofs were finished. Soon it would be time to leave the site for good, after a mere three weeks of well-paid work. Seven-day weeks. Plenty of overtime on every working day he’d been here. Somebody had wanted this place built in a hurry. Some very odd things about it, too. The parking lot, for one. A hundred-slot blacktopped lot. Someone was even painting the lines. For buildings with no utilities? But strangest of all was the current job that he’d drawn because the site foreman liked him. Playground equipment. A large swing set. A huge jungle gym. A sandbox, complete with half a dump truck’s load of sand. All the things that his two-year-old son would someday cavort on when he was old enough for kindergarten in the Fairfax County Schools. But it was structural work, and it required assembly, and the former Marine and two others fumbled through the plans like fathers in a backyard, figuring which bolts went where. Theirs was not to reason why, not as union construction workers on a government contract. Besides, he thought, there was no understanding the Green Machine. The Corps operated according to a plan that no man really figured out, and if they wanted to pay him overtime for this, then that was another monthly house payment earned for every three days he came here. Jobs like this might be crazy, but he sure liked the money. About the only thing he didn’t like was the length of the commute. Maybe they’d have to do something equally crazy at Fort Belvoir, he hoped, finishing the last item on the jungle gym. He could drive from his house to that place in twenty minutes or so. But the Army was a little more rational than the Corps. It had to be.

  “So what’s new?” Peter Henderson asked. They were dining just off The Hill, two acquaintances from New England, one a Harvard graduate, the other from Brown, one a junior aide to a senator, the other a junior member of the White House staff.

  “It never changes, Peter,” Wally Hicks said resignedly. “The peace talks are going nowhere. We keep killing their people. They keep killing ours. I don’t think there’s ever going to be peace in our time, you know?”

  “It has to, Wally,” Henderson said, reaching for his second beer.

  “If it doesn’t—” Hicks started to say gloomily.

  Both had been seniors at the Andover Academy in October 1962, close friends and roommates who had shared class notes and girlfriends. Their real political majority had come one Tuesday night, however, when they’d watched their country’s president give a tense national address on the black-and-white television in the dormitory lounge. There were missiles in Cuba, they’d learned, something that had been hinted at in the papers for several days, but these were children of the TV generation, and contemporary reality came in horizontal lines on a glass tube. For both of them it had been a stunning if somewhat belated entrée into the real world for which their expensive boarding school ought to have prepared them more speedily. But theirs was the fat and lazy time for American youth, all the more so that their wealthy families had further insulated them from reality with the privilege that money could buy without imparting the wisdom required for its proper use.

  The sudden and shocking thought had arrived in both minds at the same instant: it could all be over. Nervous chatter in the room told them more. They were surrounded by Targets. Boston to the southeast, Westover Air Force Base to the southwest, two other SAC bases, Pease and Loring, within a hundred-mile radius. Portsmouth Naval Base, which housed nuclear submarines. If the missiles flew, they would not survive; either the blast or the fallout would get them. And neither of them had even gotten laid yet. Other boys in the dorm had made their claims—some of them, perhaps, might even have been true—but Peter and Wally didn’t lie to each other, and neither had scored, despite repeated and earnest efforts. How was it possible that the world didn’t take their personal needs into account? Weren’t they the elite? Didn’t their lives matter?

  It was a sleepless night, that Tuesday in October, Henderson and Hicks sitting up, whispering their conversation, trying to come to terms with a world that had transformed itself from comfort to danger without the proper warning. Clearly, they had to find a way to change things. After graduation, though each went a separate way, Brown and Harvard were separated by only a brief drive, and both their friendship and their mission in life continued and grew. Both majored in political science because that was the proper major for entering into the process which really mattered in the world. Both got master’s degrees, and most important of all, both were noticed by people who mattered—their parents helped there, and in finding a form of government service that did not expose them to uniformed servitude. The time of their vulnerability to the draft was early enough that a quiet telephone call to the right bureaucrat was sufficient.

  And so, now, both young men had achieved their own entry-level positions in sensitive posts, both as aides to important men. Their heady expectations of landing policymaking roles while still short of thirty had run hard into the blank wall of reality, but in fact they were closer to it than they fully appreciated. In screening information for their bosses and deciding what appeared on the master’s desk in what order, they had a real effect on the decision process; and they also had access to data that was wide, diverse, and sensitive. As a result in many ways both knew more than their bosses did. And that, Hicks and Henderson thought, was fitting, because they often understood the important things better than their bosses did. It was all so clear. War was a bad thing and had to be avoided entirely, or when that wasn’t possible, ended as rapidly as one could bring it about; because war ended lives, and that was a very bad thing, and with war out of the way, people could learn to solve their disagreements peacefully. It was so obvious both stood in wonder that so many people failed to grasp the simple clarity of the Truth that both men had discovered in high school.

  There was only one difference between the two, really. As a White House staffer, Hicks worked inside the system. But he shared everything with his classmate, which was okay because both had Special Access security clearances—and besides, he needed the feedback of a trained
mind he both understood and trusted.

  Hicks didn’t know that Henderson had taken one step beyond him. If he couldn’t change government policy from the inside, Henderson had decided during the Days of Rage following the Cambodia incursion, he had to get help from the outside—some outside agency that could assist him in blocking government actions that endangered the world. There were others around the world who shared his aversion to war, people who saw that you couldn’t force people to accept a form of government they really didn’t want. The first contact had come at Harvard, a friend in the peace movement. Now he communicated with someone else. He ought to have shared this fact with his friend, Henderson told himself, but the timing just wasn’t right. Wally might not understand yet.

  “—it has to, and it will,” Henderson said, waving to the waitress for another round. “The war will end. We will get out. Vietnam will have the government it wants. We will have lost a war, and that will be a good thing for our country. We’ll learn from that. We’ll learn the limits of our power. We’ll learn to live and let live, and then we can give peace a chance.”

  Kelly arose after five. The events of the previous day had left him more fatigued than he had appreciated, and besides, traveling had always tired him out. But he was not tired now. A total of eleven hours’ sleep in the last twenty-four had left him fully rested and alert. Looking in the mirror, he saw the heavy beard from almost two days’ worth of growth. Good. Then he selected his clothing. Dark, baggy, and old. He’d taken the whole bundle down to the laundry room and washed everything with hot water and extra bleach to abuse the fabric and mute the colors, making already shabby clothing look all the more unsightly. Old white gym socks and sneakers completed the picture, though both were more serviceable than their appearance suggested. The shirt was too large for him, and long, which suited his purposes. A wig completed the picture he wanted, made of coarse black Asian hair, none too long. He held it under a hot-water faucet and soaked it, then brushed it out in a deliberately sloppy way. He’d have to find a way to make it smell, too, Kelly thought.