Nature of the Game (30 page)

He liked how she had no trouble finding a cup and saucer, pouring her coffee; the natural way she came into the living room, moved their clothes out of the chair and curled into it like a cat.

“Good morning.” She smiled at him over the steaming cup. “Sorry I kept you up all night.”

“Don't worry about it.”

She put her cup on the end table, took her cigarettes from his shirt, lit one. The burnt match dropped on her saucer.

“I'm going to have to get some ashtrays,” he said.

Her eyes twinkled.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Gray light filled his windows.

“About twenty to seven. Looks like it might rain.”

“You can wear that funny hat on your closet shelf.” She shrugged. “I was looking for a robe. I get cold.”

“I don't use that floppy hat these days,” he said. “We wore them in Recon, on patrol. Better protection against sun and rain than a helmet. Lighter. Doesn't stop bullets, but it breaks up the outline of your head in the bush.”

“Vietnam.”

He nodded, braced for whichever of the dozen clichés she'd hit him with.

“Why are you a Marine?” she said. “Why did you fight over there?”

“For you,” he told her.

She looked at him—not stared,
looked
, and he felt like she saw, understood.

“What was the hardest part?” she asked.

“The worst?”

“No,” she said. “The hardest.”

“The letters.”

Beth frowned.

“I'm an officer. When I lost a man, I had to chop a letter to his parents or his wife or his girlfriend. Tell them something. I'd make it back from patrol, sit in a hooch, stinking from the jungle, burned-out and beat-up. Copters flying overhead. Rock music blaring from some radio. Guys laughing. And I had to sit in a sandbagged womb, come up with
words
to put on paper, give comfort and meaning and worth to something as sad and brave as one nineteen-year-old boy taking a bullet while other men and I made it. We don't have the words to do that. We can take the bullets. We can return fire. But we can't write the words to do it justice.”

They drank their coffee for a moment.

“What are these?” she asked, fingering the metal maple leaves on his shirt.

“They're my rank insignia. They mean I'm a major.”

“Yes, you could be,” she said. Then laughed her husky, unforgettable, staccato laugh.

Wes couldn't stop the grin, the blush.

“What time do you have to be to work?” she asked.

“These days, I'm very flexible.”

“Sounds like it,” she said. “L.A. junket, no clock to punch. Not quite the picture I had of a Marine.”

“When do you need to be at work?”

“I usually get to the museum around ten. I've got some studying for my classes I should do first, but it's routine.”

She put her coffee cup on the table, stretched her slim bare legs out in front of her. Her thighs were lightly freckled.

Angel kisses
, Wes's mother would have said.

“You look like a runner,” Beth said, eyeing his sneakers, the sweatpants hugging his strong, long thighs.

“As long as my knees hold out,” he told her. “Physical conditioning goes with the job.”

“The Marines are looking for a few good men.”

“We want to keep them that way.”

“That's understandable. A good man is hard to find.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the saucer, combed her fingers through her long hair, pulled it back from her face and her widow's peak. “So, are you going to go for a run before you do whatever it is a Marine major does?”

“I should stay in shape.” Wes's throat was dry.

She leaned forward, and her hair fell alongside her face. Her bruised lips smiled as she whispered, “I agree.”

Two hours later, they stood leaning against his closed front door. He was naked. She'd put his shirt back on, held her clothes bundled against her chest. She fingered his shirt.

“I'd say I'd wash and iron it, but I'm a lousy liar.”

He kissed her forehead, ran his hand through her hair.

“No pressure,” she said, “but when will I see you again?”

“As soon as possible.”

“That might not be soon enough.”

She kissed his chest, opened the door, and walked across the hall to where she lived. He watched her close her door, watched her not look back.

The phone rang inside his apartment.

“Do you know who this is?” the man's voice on the phone asked Wes.

“Sure,” he answered: Frank Greco, the NIS counterspy who'd agreed to get the service records of the dead man in the bar.

“You're gonna make our squash game today, aren't you?”

“When?” asked Wes. Neither he nor Greco played squash.

“I got us a court at that club on the Hill. Third and D, Southeast. Forty minutes.”

Wes barely had time to shave and shower, dress. He found a parking spot a block from the three-story red-brick Squash and Health Club he'd never been inside and walked toward its door.

“Hey, Marine!” called a voice behind him. “What a ride?”

Greco, piloting a two-year-old Honda sedan.

They drove to a less crowded residential street and parked. The Navy Yard and NIS headquarters were a mile to their right, the Capitol dome slightly closer to their rear. No one was walking along the rows of town houses. Few cars drove past them.

“Mathew Hopkins,” said Greco, dropping a thick manila envelope on the console between them.

Greco's silver hair was thin on top and long on the sides. He was squat and wore suits from Sears Roebuck. Greco had a black belt in judo and could lift as much iron in the NIS gym as most agents younger than his fifty-one years.

“Check the paperwork later,” he told Wes. “Hopkins was a radioman, volunteered for Nam, pulled Special Ops. In 1970, he posted to the Naval Field Operational Support Group. Two years, then he's sea-dutied around until he retires out in '79 with a hundred-percent disability. Navy shrinks claimed psychiatric trauma so bad Uncle's gotta pay him off, but not so bad he needs mandatory care. Guy had superior ratings, some commendations, but no hero. Almost nobody anybody would notice.”

“Except,” said Wes.

“Naval Field Operational Support Group. Sounds like paper-pushers, right? That's the real name for Task Force 157.”

“I don't know them.”

“They got shut down in 1977. Since the 1960s, they were the Navy's best secret. Civilian contract types, ex-service guys who were bored selling cars, career Navy officers and enlisted men. No diplomat cover, no sitting safe on a ship and intercepting Russian sub signals. HUMINT. Spy dogs. CIA barely knew about 'em. Same for the Navy chain of command. They were the first military group allowed to create real businesses for cover. They had guys everywhere: salesmen, dockworkers. Got people into China. Your pals at the CIA don't want to leave the embassies. The 157 guys ignored the embassies.”

“And Hopkins was with them. If they were so good, why were they shut down?”

“Politics.” Greco shrugged. “One of their ops was Ed Wilson. He went renegade to get rich. Cut deals with Qaddafi in Libya, making money off Colonel Crazy by selling him assassination gear. Wilson even conned Green Berets into working for his private program. They figured it was all just another deep-cover dodge. Now Wilson's doing thirty years hard time.”

“What did Hopkins do for 157?”

“Says radioman. When he was assigned there, we backgrounded him, along with the FBI. Flying colors. Except.”

“Except?”

“Except there's a request in our files for us to do another check on him, real deep and real tight. Hopkins still came up squeaky-clean.”

“Why the second check?”

“Ask the guy who requested it.” Greco gave Wes a piece of paper. “Ted Davis. Retired commander. A mustang who came up through the ranks, did every kind of job before running ops for 157. Davis's good people. He'll be at that bar at three-thirty.”

“Thanks.”

“Ted's a friend of mine. Even if he weren't, only a fool would fuck with him.”

Wes stuffed the manila envelope in his briefcase.

“Looks like you're starting to pack a load, Marine.”

“Odds and ends,” answered Wes.

The old hand of NIS looked around the neighborhood. A decade earlier, this had been the border of the ghetto. Now, affluent professionals were taking over the town houses.

“I won't ask what you're doing for the boys across the river,” said Greco, “but don't let 'em cut you loose in deep water.”

“I can swim.”

“As raggedy ass as you're looking this morning, I doubt you can even float.”

The two men laughed.

“I worked late,” said Wes. “But at least my hair is close to regulation, not some gray rope dangling over my ears.”

“That's the point,” answered Greco.

“What?”

“When I was policing St. Lou, a junkie bit off my right ear. Wear my hair long, I look like a stubby old man who don't know the hippies are dead. Easy to forget a guy like that.”

The Navy counterspy dropped Wes off at his car. Wes got out, asked, “What happened to the junkie?”

“I beat the dog shit out of him,” said Greco.

Wes checked his watch after Greco drove away: 10:30. The wind stirred dead leaves and paper trash in the gutter. A pay phone hung on the wall of a Veterans of Foreign Wars bar next to the Squash Club.

Don't cross that line until you have to
, he thought.

The Martin Luther King Library in downtown Washington had three novels by Nick Kelley. The face in the latest book's flap-jacket picture was an older version of the black-haired man sitting next to Jud Stuart in the snapsnot Wes had stolen in L.A.

“Shit,” Wes whispered.

He found a bank of pay phones in the library corridor. He got an answering machine when he dialed Jack Berns's number. Wes left no message. He checked his watch: 11:15. Maybe the private eye was at an early lunch. Wes checked out the Nick Kelley novels.

The wind had grown stronger outside the library. Black clouds rolled across the gray sky. A vendor at an umbrellaed aluminum cart sold Wes two hot dogs and a cup of metallic coffee.

“Gonna rain,” said the vendor as he made Wes's change.

“Better get inside,” said Wes.

“Ain't my job, man.”

“No shit,” answered Wes.

The Marine carried his lunch to a marble bench in front of the library. The vendor watched his coat-and-tied, trench-coated customer sit down to eat. Shook his head and grinned.

One of the books was
Flight of the Wolf
. Wes remembered the movie. The other two novels were not about spies. While he was reading the inside jacket of the latest novel, a glob of mustard fell from his hot dog and stained the book.

“Damaging public property,” he told the wind. He shook his head, unfastened the book's plastic protective sheath, and tore the three-year-old photograph of Nick Kelley from the cover.

His mother had preached that the journey to hell was made one small step at a time.

At a pay phone not far from the vendor, Wes called Jack Berns. Again got the answering machine, again left no message.

Not quite noon
. He was halfway between his apartment and the bar where he had a rendezvous in three hours. A pellet of cold rain hit his face. The Freer Gallery where Beth worked was almost a mile away. The mammoth gray-stoned National Museum of Fine Arts was across the street. They'd have pay phones in there.

For half an hour, Wes wandered through corridors of abstracts and surrealists. When he found a pay phone by the rest room, got Berns's machine, he left the pay phone number.

As Wes waited by the pay phone, a blue-uniformed museum policeman walked past once, walked past twice, casually checking out the strange man loitering by the men's room.

The phone rang. Wes answered it.

“Wes!” Jack Berns's voice sounded as if he were in an aluminum barrel. “Where the hell are you?”

“I'm at a pay phone.”

“I'm in my car. Ain't technology great? I can retrieve your message and call you back, drive and check out chicks, all at the same time. Get a car phone. Portable plus almost impossible to intercept. I can get you a deal, Noah will love it.”

The museum cop strolled past Wes.

“Phones are what I'm calling about,” said Wes.

“Uh-huh.”

The museum cop was ten paces gone.

“The writer you know. He has a home. And an office.”

“Nick Kelley. You want tapes on his lines? Or just long-distance records, from that date to when: now?”

“Not the first,” said Wes. “Just a list of who and where and when.”

“How 'bout if I see if I can find out why?”

“Just do the job I'm paying you for. When can I have it?”

“I'm on the Fourteenth Street bridge. There's the Pentagon—want me to wave for you? Nah, they ain't your boys no more. I'll be home in twenty. I can get it for you by the time you get there.”

The museum smelled musty and cool. Footsteps and whispers echoed down marble corridors, and Wes felt a tingle of invisible electricity.

“Berns, did you already do this?”

“Hey, I'm just an order follower.”

In the black and white swirls of a canvas mounted not far from where he stood, Wes saw a twisted figure. Screaming.

“Raining like a son of a bitch out here,” said Berns.

“What'll this cost?” said Wes.

“Don't worry: you got the budget.”

The connection broke off. The museum cop stood at the end of the corridor, watched Wes walk toward him.

“Small steps,” Wes said to the cop.

“Have a nice day, sir.” The cop's eyes burned holes in Wes's back all the way to the door.

The rain had stopped by the time Wes arrived at the bar in Arlington. He parked his car in the broken-pavement lot next door, checked his watch. He was twelve minutes early.