Nature of the Game (3 page)

Jud stepped outside beneath the red neon OASIS sign, silently screaming as he waited for the bullet to cut him down.

Nothing.

A dozen parked cars, all empty. No one in the doorways. No one crouched on the skid-row fire escapes. A police siren wailed down distant boulevards, wrong direction and too soon to be for Jud. He didn't have the time to match the dead man's keys to a parked car. Jud had no car. His $l7-a-night hotel was four blocks away, easy to stumble home to after a hard night at the Oasis. Or to crawl. But he wouldn't risk going there. He had next to nothing in his room. Suitcases of worn clothes. A couple snapshots. Keys to a Mercedes he gave to Lorri when she left. His wallet held his driver's license and empty slots for credit cards.

And the men from yesterday finally wanted him dead.

What the hell, he thought. Make 'em work for it.

The least important difference between California and the East Coast is that the sun rises three hours earlier over the Atlantic. On that last Monday in February 1990, dawn broke in Washington, D.C., at 7:21, EST, filling Nick Kelley's suburban Maryland bedroom with gray light. Nick slept quietly beside his wife, her black hair spread on her pillow like a Japanese fan.

The telephone rang.

Which spooked their rottweiler, who barked and woke the baby in the next room; Saul cried. The phone rang again before Nick could grab the receiver. Beside him, Sylvia stirred.

“'Lo?” whispered Nick into the phone.

“This is the A T and T operator. Will you accept a collect call from, ah, Wolf?”

Nick closed his eyes, sighed. Opened his mouth to say no, then shook his head and said, “Yes.”

“Who is it?” mumbled Sylvia, sitting up, brushing her hair off her forehead. She wore a long, white nightgown.

“Jud,” whispered her husband as he sat on the edge of the bed.

“Shit,” she said. Nick half-hoped her curse hadn't carried over the phone line, half-hoped it had. Sylvia flipped the covers back, padded from the room to care for their son.

“It's me,” Jud said on the other end of the line.

“I guessed,” replied Nick. Partly for his wife, he said, “Do you know what time it is?”

At a corner pay phone in Los Angeles, Jud checked the dead man's watch.

“Zero four-thirty, my time,” he told Nick.

“You woke the baby.”

“Oh. Sorry. How is he? Saul, right?”

“He's fine.” Nick sighed. He ran his hand through his steel-flecked black hair—prematurely gray, he noted.
And this is how it got that way
. “He was due to wake up anyway.”

“Look, I just called to tell you, if you don't hear from me for a while—”

“I haven't heard from you for a while.”

“—I've got to go under.”

“Again?” said Nick flatly. He yawned. Nick was a wiry man, almost too lean for his just under six-foot height.

“This time is different.” Jud's calm tone held none of his practiced drama.

“Is something wrong?”

“No shit.”

Nick licked his lips; Sylvia was still out of the room. “Does it have anything to do with us?”

“With you?” said Jud, understanding. “Doubt it.”

What if you're wrong?
thought Nick.

“We had us some times, didn't we, partner?” said Jud.

“Yeah.”

“You know I love you like a brother.”

Nick's face burned. Sylvia walked back in the bedroom, their sixteen-month-old son in her arms. The sleepy baby burrowed his face into Mommy's chest.

“Uh, yeah.” Nick avoided Sylvia's glare. “Me, too.”

“In case I don't get to, tell Saul about me.”

“Tell him what?”

“The truth.”

“What's that? Where do I start?”

“With good-bye,” said Jud. A pair of headlights rolled toward him. He hung up.

On the East Coast, Nick heard the phone click, waited, then hung up, too, and knew that
finally
, this had been the call.

In Los Angeles, the headlights flowed past Jud. He rested his throbbing forehead on the pay phone, closed his eyes.

Jud had caught a bus seven blocks from the Oasis. He played the forgettable wino for the bored black bus driver, five laughing Hispanic women dressed in janitor's uniforms, three stoic Korean men, and a sleeping black woman, a bowling-ball bag on the seat beside her. In the green light of the bus's interior, Jud made a convincing wino.

When he went to work for Angel Hardware & Lock six months earlier, Jud mastered the alarm system and cut himself a set of store keys. Inside the store, he turned on the coffeemaker and started a can of tomato soup on the hot plate. He went to his time card. He was owed for eleven shifts, plus overtime.

One shelf held dusty gym bags. Jud ripped the tags off two and cruised the aisles. Swiss army knives. A nylon jacket. Four pairs of work socks; a soldier could always use socks. Jud blushed when he realized he wasn't wearing any. Leather work gloves and cotton gardening gloves. A flashlight. From the workroom, he took lockpicks and tension bars, master keys, compact screwdriver and wrench kits, a ball peen hammer, a jimmy, and a plastic shimmy.

The tomato soup was bubbling. He ate the whole can, drank strong coffee. He put socks on under his sneakers. In the bathroom, he found a bottle of aspirin and a safety razor. He took four aspirin, put the bottle and razor in his bag.

Jud let himself into the owner's office and snapped on the snake-necked desk light. Musty papers, ledgers, lock parts, and tools covered the desk. Jud took $131 from a cashbox. He sat in the desk's squeaky chair, thought about the fat, cigar-smoking owner who drove a Caddy and hated and feared the world. Taped to the bottom of the middle drawer, Jud found an envelope with pictures of hard-looking women naked except for black boots and whips. The envelope also held three $100 bills. Jud put the money in his pocket, the pictures back in the envelope, retaped it to the drawer. The owner would tell no one of that loss. Clipped inside the right-hand drawer, Jud found a dusty snub-nose .38 revolver.

The gun was loaded. Jud cleaned and oiled the weapon. He wedged the gun between his belt and his right kidney, hoped the nylon jacket would cover it, hoped he could still do the cop draw.

He scrawled
We're even
across his time card and dropped it on the office desk.

Bags in hand, he walked six blocks to a pay phone. He leaned against a light pole and tried to clear his brain before he called Nick. After they talked, he rested his forehead on the phone. The Dodgers were using his head for batting practice. When he breathed, he tasted tomato soup, cheap whiskey, and bile. The gun dug into his back.

Don't need bullets
, he thought,
I'll just blow on 'em
.

He picked up the receiver, reconsidered:
Do that last
.

On a sleeping residential street four blocks away he found a Chevy without a locking gas cap. Jud wore the cotton gloves. He slid the plastic shimmy along the passenger window, sprang the door lock, popped off the ignition cover, spliced the wires into a switch stolen from his old shop. The engine purred. He put his two bags on the front floor, eased the Chevy into gear, and coasted down the block with the lights out.

He drove back to the pay phone, parked so the receiver was a fast step away from the open car door. Stared at the phone until it became nothing. Punched in a toll-free number.

On the other side of the continent, where it was now 8:26
A.M.,
five men in conservative shirts and ties sat in a windowless room, enjoying croissants and coffee at their computer-laden desks. Clocks on the wall showed the time in every U.S. zone, Greenwich, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The men laughed about a woman they barely knew.

A blue phone rang on the second desk from the left. The desk's computer screen automatically split. The man at the desk looked like a Yale professor, an image he'd cultivated since graduating from the University of Wyoming five years before. He adjusted his earphone and mike headset, held up his hand for silence, then flipped a switch to answer the call.

“Hello?” he said, his eyes on his computer screen.

“Why don't you answer ‘Security Force' anymore?” said Jud.

“Hello?” repeated the man, frowning.

“This is Malice.”

The man typed
MALICE
onto the screen, pushed the enter key. Within seconds, a six-word column appeared on the screen's left side. The man chose the first word.

“Is that
M
as in
mother?
” he asked.

“
M
as in
malign
.”

“
E
as in …”

“
Enigma
,” said Jud. “Lame, don't waste time running the list. You know who I am.”

The right side of the screen lit up.

“Yes,” said the man who'd answered the call as he read the computer's instructions. “I think I know who this is.”

The man's coworkers looked over his shoulder. One whispered, “Malice—I had him twice.”

“Shame on you guys,” said Jud. “Shame on you.”

“What?” said the man who'd answered his call.

“That was no way to say good-bye,” Jud told them.

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“Ask around the Oasis Bar, Lame. You'll figure it out. If you're cleared high enough.”

“What can I do for you?” asked the man Jud had called.

Suddenly, in L.A., the dead man's watch began to beep. Jud poked buttons on the watch dial. The beeps didn't stop.

“Do you hear a beeping noise?” asked the man in front of the computer screen.

Jud banged the watch on his wrist against the pay phone's glass wall. The glass cracked, but the watch kept beeping.

“Are you there?” said the smooth voice in Jud's ear.

Jud curled his arm outside the phone cubicle so the beeping watch was on the other side of the glass.

“Can I help you?” tried the would-be Yalie one last time.

“You tell 'em I said hello, huh? Not good-bye, Lame. Not like that. You tell 'em all I said
hello
.”

Across the bottom of the right-hand screen the computer printed the number of Jud's pay phone.

“Tell who?” asked the man. He kept his voice calm.

“Yeah,” said Jud. “Yeah.”

He hung up.

The watch quit beeping.

“God, I don't need this,” muttered Jud. He fastened the dead man's watch around the telephone receiver. Left that high-tech prankster for
them
. Drove away in the stolen Chevy. To the west waited the ocean. South was Mexico and bad karma. East was where he'd been. Jud headed north, the direction a mouse took in search of the wren he loved in the only happy story Jud remembered from his childhood.

THE CHOSEN ONE

M
ajor Wesley Chandler, United States Marine Corps, drove past two sheriff's deputies parked at the mouth of a suburban Virginia cul-de-sac, their windows cracked so they wouldn't suffocate, their engine chugging so they wouldn't freeze in the March night. He nodded to them; they noted his uniform and nodded back, comrades-in-arms against the barbarians.

Cars lined the residential street, middle-class mobility machines. He saw no limousines. And no parking spaces.

A man with an unbuttoned overcoat stood in the porch light's glow at the rambling Tudor home that matched the address on Wes's notepad. A second man wrapped in Washington's ubiquitous Burberry trench coat lounged against a blue sedan with three antennae on its trunk. The Burberry was unfastened. A plastic tube ran from the coat to the man's left ear. The two men's eyes rode with Wes as he cruised past the house.

He drove back to the mouth of the cul-de-sac. The parking space he found was too close to the corner for the law, but the deputies didn't seem to care.

Wes shut off his engine. The night chill reached through the car to stroke him. He checked his watch and remembered the two phone calls that had summoned him here.

The first phone call had come to his office at the Naval Investigative Service headquarters on Thursday. Yesterday. He'd been staring at the computer screen in his gray-walled cubicle a mile from the Capitol building, trying to convince himself that the memo he was writing really mattered. That first call had been from a woman.

“Is this Major Chandler from New Mexico?” she'd said.

“That's where I was born.”

“I'm Mary Patterson. Way back when, I was Congressman Denton's secretary. We met when the Academy bused the cadets up from Annapolis to meet the members who appointed them.”

“That was twenty-five years ago,” said Wes.

“Now I'm working with the boss at his new shop.”

“Congratulations.”

“That's why I'm calling you,” she said. “Mr. Denton wants to honor the people from his days on the Hill—like his staffers and you fine men who did him proud at the service academies. Just an informal cocktail party after work.”