Courier (12 page)

He would go to his grave convinced that they had been betrayed.

It was in the aftermath of the failed invasion that he took on a different line of work. Silent violence in the shadows with no one by his side. Cut adrift from all contact with the Agency; those on the inside could go on fighting the forces of tyranny abroad while he cleaned up messes here at home.

There was always a mess. Today was no exception.

The door to the street opened and two young Vietnamese men came in. They stood there for a moment, clearly looking for someone until the man in the back raised a hand. They came to his table, bowed slightly, and sat upright in their chairs with their hands carefully folded on the table.

For a time, there was silence. The young men stared at the tablecloth as if it held some great secret, or perhaps just a reasonable excuse for failure. Despite their working name, they were not twins. Nguyen Vien was slightly taller and heavier than his partner, and had his long hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. Today he was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. Quan Tung looked older and more businesslike in a shirt and tie, and, indeed, he usually took the orders and made the deals.

Today, they both had scrapes and bruises on their hands and faces. These would heal and fade away, but when you looked in their eyes, it was easy to see that both men had many older, deeper scars.

The quiet man sipped his coffee – sweet and almost violently strong in the proper Cuban fashion – and ran his eyes over everyone in the room.

Then, without looking at the two men seated across from him, he spoke. "The courier got away?"

"We hit him twice!" Tung burst out. "He should have crashed, but he put that goddamn bike right into the goddamn trees. We tried to follow, but we would have smashed the car. Then we ran through the bushes on foot. Look at us."

He made a dramatic gesture to the damage on his face.

The deep blue eyes blazed. Tung fell silent and his hand fell back to the table.

"The courier got away."

Sullenly, Tung said, "Yes."

"So."

The man in gray raised a finger and ordered another coffee. He didn't offer to get anything for the other two. There was another silence until the coffee arrived. The man took a sip, carefully put the tiny cup back in its saucer, settled back in his seat, and folded his hands in his lap.

He spoke. "There will be no more mistakes. None. Do you understand me?"

Both men nodded, keeping their eyes on the empty table in front of them.

"We need to clean this up. All of it. The courier, the film – everything has to be taken care of." He sighed. "It's gone too far to be kept utterly silent. We'll just have to hope that it gets lost in all the other bullshit going on in this town." He shook his head. "Jesus, the Watergate operation was a complete screw-up. I still can't believe they couldn't handle a basic black-bag job. They certainly weren't that stupid when I worked with them. At least everyone is looking at them and not at us. We just need to make absolutely damn sure that there are no loose ends – none."

The two Vietnamese nodded again.

"Look at me," he said. There was another silence as he stared at first one, then the other. "I do not want to have to consider both of you expendable. Do you understand?"

This time they didn't nod; they just stared into his eyes and saw the bottomless cold of a Korean winter.

"Good. Now leave."

The two men got up and left without a word.

The man in the gray suit took another sip of his coffee. Damn, it had gone cold. He raised his hand for another cup.

 

Rick carefully drove the BMW across the sidewalk and up the narrow passage next to the bureau. In the center of the block, he turned and bumped over the wooden walkway, then parked in the courtyard between the buildings. No one would accidentally spot the BMW here, he thought.

If those two were waiting for him when he came out, he'd know that someone in the bureau was to blame.

He swung stiffly off the bike and walked around the tiny courtyard for a couple of minutes, limping as he stretched out the places on his legs where they'd been pummeled by branches or battered by the jolting motorcycle. Then he stood still, straightened up his spine, took a deep breath, and headed for the back door.

When he entered the bureau, he was walking without a limp and had his usual half smile on his face. He passed the main studio, glancing inside to see one engineer up on a stepladder setting lights, another engineer puffing on a cigar and idly holding the bottom of the ladder, and yet another engineer sitting in a chair and observing. For a moment, he thought how nice it must be to have a union job.

He continued to the main newsroom, where the pre-show chaos was in full swing. The anchor wasn't in his chair and Tom Evans, the senior producer, was sitting back with his feet on the desk, just looking at the ceiling and smoking.

He looked down at Rick and raised one eyebrow.

"Nothing interesting, just the weather film. What's going on?"

Evans picked up a sheet of paper from his desk. "Well, here's the first lineup, which we know will change, but let's see. We'll begin with the war. The B-52s hammered Hanoi again, but the bastards are parading the aircrews who were shot down yesterday in front of the cameras, so that is at best a draw. Then Hopson over at State will talk about the diplomatic situation, which is, to put it simply, entirely screwed up. Even he can't stretch that out, so that should only take a minute."

He drew on his cigarette.

"OK, then we've got Apollo 17 pulling off the final moon landing, and Marcus will tell us how much money we wasted on that little project."

He paused and ran his eyes down the page.

"Well, after that, we pretty much run out of news except for that poor bastard at the
LA Times
who's getting locked up for refusing to give up his Watergate interviews, and… that's it. We plunge headfirst into the land of cuddly kids and even cuddlier animals."

He looked up and smiled, squinting a bit from the smoke. "All in all, a tip-top newscast."

Rick laughed. "Well, you could always run the weather loop."

"We're not that desperate. At least not yet." His smile vanished. "Oh, and we're going to do a story about Hadley and the guys at the end of the broadcast. Almost forgot about that – wishful thinking."

Don Moretti's voice came from his edit room. "Hey, Rick, did anyone ever find Hadley's film?"

Rick turned. "I thought that Shelley from the affiliate group found it."

"Nah, that turned out to be some other interview from months ago. Smithson's not happy about it, either."

"That sucks. She's a good kid."

Evans nodded. "She is. However, you'd better drop by and say your good-byes. Smithson fired her."

"What about Hadley's story? Anyone else going to take it?"

The producer looked at Rick for a moment, then said slowly, "One of the things you learn in this business is that some stories–"

One of the secretaries called from her desk, "Tom, New York's on line four."

Instantly losing any interest in speaking to Rick, Evans picked up the phone and said, "What do you want now?" Listening intently, he lit another Lucky and started making notes on a yellow pad.

Rick knew he should deliver the weather film directly to the affiliate service instead of the processing lab, since it had been developed before he picked it up. The moment he walked in, a weeping Shelley hit him like a linebacker.

"I screwed up," she sobbed. "They're going to fire me and…"

Any intelligible words were lost against his chest in a storm of tears. Rick realized that, again, she was wearing one of those damn sheer nylon shirts, so, thinking that it was probably a good thing that he still had his leather jacket zipped, he once again began patting her on the shoulder.

When she paused for breath, he broke in. "I have the weather film."

A big smile instantly replaced the tears. "Oh, great. That needs to go out right now." She brushed past him on a dead run, and Rick, with the vague feeling he'd just narrowly escaped a disaster, went across the hall to the courier desk. Sam was sitting in the number one chair with a big smile on his face.

On second thought, Rick thought it looked more like a leer.

"Damn, man, you look like you're going to get lucky." Sam said.

Definitely a leer.

Rick gave him a raised eyebrow and went to hang his riding gear on the end of the cubicle partition.

Sam chuckled, and then his face became serious. "Hey, did you hear about Kyle? He got busted."

"For what? Driving while stupid?"

"No, that's not a crime in this city. Grand larceny."

"You're kidding. What did he do? Rob a bank?" Rick immediately answered his own question. "No way. Kyle's not smart enough to even plan something that big."

"Yes, as you point out, our friend Kyle isn't too bright." There was a certain relish in Sam's voice – this promised to be a good story. "But he is persistent. Three weeks ago, he went to a car dealer and stole two tires for his new used Volkswagen. Jacked their car up and took 'em in the middle of the night – got away clean, no problems." Sam paused for dramatic effect. "Well, the new tires looked so good on the front, he starts thinking how much better it would be if he had matching tires on the back."

Rick collapsed into the other chair. "Please don't tell me he went back."

"Yes, indeedy. It's only been three weeks, but that doesn't stop the brainless fool from going right back to the same dealer – he goes to the same damn car! And surprise, surprise, the lights go on, and there are police everywhere."

"Is he in jail?"

"No, it happened a couple of days ago, and he managed to talk his way into getting bail – first offense and like that. Or, at least, it's the first offense he got caught at." Sam pointed at Rick's chair. "He was sitting right where you are now, moaning about being broke and needing a lawyer and how unfair it all was."

The courier phone rang. Sam picked it up.

"I'm sorry. No one is available to take your call. Please call back tomorrow."

Clearly, whoever was on the other end of the line wasn't buying it. After a couple of minutes of listening, Sam put down the receiver and stood up with an exaggerated groan.

"Well, it's off to the OSOB for me. Payment for my sins. See you later."

"Later."

Rick smiled as he remembered his first day at ABN. He'd been told to get up to "the OSOB" on the double, and he'd responded, "Yes, sir!" and almost ran out of the building. He waited until he was a block away and out of sight before he stopped the bike, pulled out a map, and struggled to find his destination. After an hour and several conversations with passers-by and bemused Capitol Hill cops, he finally identified the Russell Senate Office Building as older than the Dirksen Senate Office building and therefore called the "Old Senate Office Building" or "OSOB".

Just another example of how this town was designed to confuse anyone who wasn't born here.

 

Since he was usually assigned to the late shift, one of Rick's regular runs was to Union Station. Sort of like a diplomatic pouch, ABN sent bags every day on the last train up to New York and the last train down to DC. They usually held archived films that someone had ordered from the library, but the contents could be almost anything, from stacks of memos or expense reports to parts for some broken machine.

Rick had always liked Union Station. It felt like only yesterday thousands of young men in green woolen uniforms had passed through on their way to the battlefields of Europe or beach landings on remote Pacific islands. Walking in through the wooden swinging doors, he looked up at the vaulted ceiling. Once painted white, smoke and dust had turned it a splotched yellowish gray. On a balcony that ran around the sides were statues of Roman warriors in robes and togas holding shields in front of them. Rick smiled, remembering that Sam had told him that at least one or two were "anatomically correct" behind their shields.

The main hall had an echoing marble floor and dark wooden benches that appeared to have been designed for maximum passenger discomfort when steam engines still smoked and whistled out in the rail yard. Rick waved at the two cops who stood on the side, amiably observing the passing crowds. The fatter one smiled back and touched the brim of his cap in mock salute.

The baggage checkroom was in the back, behind the ticket counters, where the floor changed from marble to worn linoleum tile. Rick leaned on the wooden counter while the elderly black attendant made his usual laborious search for the brightly colored mesh sacks that Rick had immediately spotted right in the front section of the second set of shelves. He wondered briefly if he should say anything, but then realized that he wasn't in any real hurry and decided to just relax.

Instantly, he froze. The very act of relaxation had triggered all his battle reflexes – letting down for even a second could mean a quick death in combat. He didn't move, but he was suddenly acutely aware of every movement, every sound around him.

It saved his life.

There was a quickening in one set of footsteps approaching from behind him, and he whirled and jerked to one side as a knife slammed through the space where his back had been. He grabbed his attacker by the neck as the man lost his balance – betrayed by the lack of resistance to his knife thrust. Pulling hard, Rick used the man's momentum to slam his head against the wooden counter and then into a stumbling sprawl on the slick tiled floor. A long, thin knife went spinning across the waiting room and disappeared under a heating unit.

His assailant spun to his feet and faced him. For an instant, Rick thought he was back in the Ia Drang Valley, caught in another flashback. In front of him was a Vietnamese face twisted in rage – like in every one of his nightmares. Then the man reached into the small of his back, pulled out a pistol, and cocked it as his arm came up to aim.