Nature of the Game (42 page)

SUBWAY

A
lthough he completely loved his wife, Nick Kelley was enchanted by the receptionist on the fifth floor of the Washington, D.C., think tank that Watergate Plumbers had schemed to firebomb. She had milk-chocolate skin, black hair that curled to her shoulders, warm ebony eyes, and a smile that never quite stopped. She was lean. Supple. And at least fifteen years younger than him.

“Can I help you?” she asked when he got off the elevator.

“I'm here to see Steve Bordeaux,” said Nick, wondering if she realized the balance of guilt and innocence in his stare.

“Do you need me to show you the way?”

“I get lost easily,” he said. Truthfully.

He followed her taut hips through a maze of cheap partitions, conference tables, stacks of paper and books. Scotch-taped editorial cartoons, maps of Central America, and charts of America's foreign affairs bureaucracies covered the walls. The people working at computer terminals wore blue jeans and ties. Nick smiled, remembering his rebel days of muckraking for Peter Murphy.
Rock
'
n' rolling in the heart of the beast
.

Most of you were in grade school then
. He wanted to tell them a thousand things; he wanted them to know who he was, that he'd
been there
. Was
there
still. They watched him pass by, a lean guy in a gunmetal sports jacket and not a power suit, a man whose silver black hair and hard eyes put him out of their warless generation, an average-looking guy, not too tall and on the skinny side. His tired face wasn't in their treasured scrapbooks of personas. The looks in their unscarred eyes told Nick that they'd listen to but not hear any wisdom he could speak.

The old guy
, he thought; then he laughed aloud.

“Excuse me?” said the pretty woman. Her perfume was musk.

“It's nothing,” he said. “Nostalgia.”

“That's Steve,” she said, pointing through the open door of an office before she glided away.

A man all of thirty-four sat behind a cluttered desk, blue shirt and loose tie, dark slacks, glasses, and a cheap haircut. He put down the proof sheets he was correcting to shake hands.

Nick took the chair beside his desk. An intercom announced that Tom and Malcolm were wanted on a conference call.

“Thanks for seeing me,” said Nick.

“Hanson said you were a good guy,” Steve told him. “You know Hanson, he knows me. In this town, who you know decides where you go.”

“My problem is I don't know who I know. That's why I came to you and the Archives.”

The National Security Archives is a creature of the 1980s, one of the capital's legion of nonprofit groups struggling to push the Sisyphean boulder of government. The Archives rents space from the older, more prestigious think tank that inflamed the Watergate men, lives off foundation grants, and exists to uncover core data about America's foreign policy.

“I'm after intersects,” said Nick. “I've got some topics. I want to check Iran-contra for links. Identify players.”

“Anybody special in mind?”

“An old source.” Nick shrugged. “I've heard some wild theories I don't buy.”

Steve frowned. “Like what?”

“Like cocaine. I don't figure the contras were running it as policy, or the CIA was being that kind of creative to fund their secret war against Nicaragua, but …”

“
But
.” Steve smiled. “Anytime you get a gang-bang covert operation like the contras, you get guys who cut their own deals in the hush and the fury. Like ex–2506 Brigade members who bought into the latest anticommunist crusade. They used a fishing business to surveil the Nicaraguan coast until Customs in Miami unthawed ice blocks of shrimp and found bags of coke. And some of Oliver North's memos talk about Young Turks in one contra group being into coke. That the kind of stuff you want?”

“Sounds too normal,” answered Nick.

They laughed.

“Who is this guy you're after?” asked Steve.

“Not
after:
tracking. There may be a coke connection involving him, but it'd probably be … twisted. And very creative.”

“What about the Barry Seal stuff?” asked Steve.

“I don't know the name.”

“Not enough people do,” said Steve. “Louisiana boy. Like me, only he was Baton Rouge and I'm a Catahoula kid.”

“A world of difference,” said Nick, and Steve laughed.

“Barry was a pilot. Nicknamed Thunder Thighs. He got jammed up with Louisiana cops who knew he was bringing in coke and weren't buying any of his
undercover agent
or
CIA asset
bullshit. In 1984, he was about to do hard time when he shows up at the Vice President's Florida Drug Task Force, where he claims he can prove the Sandinistas are running coke.”

“The White House went orgasmic. Our spooks fitted Barry's plane with cameras. He brought back photos
he claimed
showed a Nicaraguan official loading his plane with coke. Of course, what was being loaded was in bags, and maybe it wasn't an official Sandinista mission, but hey: it was great PR and our Iran-contra boys used it.”

“What happened to Barry Seal?”

“The law got pulled off his case for a while. In 1986, two guys machine-gunned Barry to death in his white Cadillac.”

“Sounds like business as usual,” said Nick.

“There's more. A plane owned by a former CIA proprietary got shot down over Nicaragua while dropping supplies to contras. The Sandinistas caught one survivor. He talked, claimed to work for the CIA, and that started unraveling the Iran-contra scandal.”

“I remember the plane,” said Nick.

“Barry Seal sold that plane to our Iran-contra boys. He'd used it to smuggle coke.”

“Ironic, but nothing for me,” said Nick.

Steve shrugged. “What about the other half of the scandal, the Iran stuff?”

“My guy has a link to Iran,” said Nick. “But it's old.”

“Are you writing history or journalism?” said Steve.

“I'm a novelist,” said Nick.

“Then you can just make it up.”

“Yeah.”

The two men smiled.

“Later this spring,” said Steve, “we're publishing an index of Iran-contra. We've got every document cross-referenced, names of almost everybody mentioned anywhere in the six key years of the scandal, organization glossaries—”

“Biographies?” interrupted Nick.

“Brief ones. Couple hundred listings in thirty pages.”

“Can I get a copy of that?”

“Sure, but it's easy to check if your guy's profiled.”

“He won't show up on lists,” said Nick. He hesitated, decided,
What you have to lose is this chance to find out
.

“Do you have anything peculiar about intelligence ops against the cocaine cartel?” asked Nick. “Not busts: strategic. Links to politics, terrorists. Long about ten years ago.”

“Ten years ago nobody used the name cartel.” Steve frowned. “Give me a minute.” He left the room.

Nick stared through Steve's window toward eight-story glass-and-brick warrens he knew were filled with lawyers who worked sixty-hour weeks under fluorescent lights. He closed his eyes and amidst the aromas of ink and paper and dust burning in computer electricity, imagined he could smell musk perfume.

“I found it,” said Steve, striding back into his office, a smudged manila file folder open in his hands.

“This is a project I never finished. State Department cables, clipped articles, Hill testimony. Nothing about intelligence
operations
, but some about intelligence
product
.”

“On the cartel?” asked Nick, listening to the researcher as he paged through the file, scanning for Jud's name.

Steve waved his hand. “On drugs
and
terrorists: Colombian left-wing guerrillas doing muscle work for drug dealers. Right-wingers in El Salvador using drug profits to pay for an assassination attempt on the President of Honduras. Reports of Cuban and Nicaraguan officials working the coke trade. The right-wing Gray Wolves in Turkey selling heroin and dealing with communist Bulgarian intelligence services in the same business. Plus some early '82 stuff on the Shining Path in Peru shaking down coca growers.”

“Same jungle,” said Nick. “Makes sense that spies, revolutionaries, and drug dealers would walk the same trails.”

“What's in a name?” said Steve. “Narco king or terrorist, shared tactics merge disparate groups. I toyed with writing a paper showing how the drugs would eventually turn revolutionaries into capitalists—it's happened in Burma with the heroin and the Shans—but … other priorities.”

“Where did the information for these cables and study papers come from?” asked Nick.

“Since '83, there's been an abundance of it: busts, informants. Looking back, drugs and political outlaws were historical lines waiting to cross. Like you said: same jungle.”

“But before that inevitability was clear,” said Nick, “where did the
first
intelligence come from?”

“Beats me,” said the researcher who'd collated the reported data. “Drugs are an eighty-billion-dollar-a-year business. People pay attention to those kind of dollars.”

“Money makes the world go round.” Nick frowned. “What about the money in Iran-contra? Close to twenty million dollars. Who got it?”

“The scandal blew up too soon for giant rake-offs. But markups on weapons and food, consulting fees to PR groups and middlemen, padded expense reimbursements—hell, the cachet of working for the White House: we'll never know what it was worth to the bad guys.”

“Or what it cost everybody else,” said Nick.

He rode the subway to Capitol Hill, his briefcase on his lap. A train wasn't the place to pour over the fifty pages of fine print in the Iran-Contra Names and Organizations Glossaries he'd photocopied at the Archives.

A black man in a blue suit and white shirt, attaché case at his side, rode across the aisle from Nick.

Marketing executive
, decided Nick, not sure what that term meant, making up a life story for the man with whom he shared the train. An innocent life story.

A pretty, eagle-faced woman with strawberry-blond hair chopped off at her shoulders got on at the next stop. She was about forty, with bright blue eyes and inexpensive but jazzy clothes.

Lobbies for a do-good group
, thought Nick.
Lefty, but with a sense of humor. No ring, doesn't look gay, and doesn't look as if she'd be unloved
.

She didn't notice Nick.

Three prep-school teenage girls, backpacks, torn blue jeans, and oh-so-bored faces slumped into the last empty seats on the car. As the train pulled out of the station, they loudly prattled on about how,
like
, stupid some people were and how,
like
, stressed they were,
ohmyGod
. They were each careful to say
fuck
at least once per rambling paragraph.

The eagle-faced woman smiled at the girls' prattle.

Three bulky construction workers stood in the aisle, their thick arms dangling from the overhead aluminum pole, their blue, plastic hard hats jaunty on sweaty brows.

The subway clattered through tunnels beneath D.C.'s streets, a train bearing tourists from Indiana and Kyōto. A Chinese nanny with two tow-haired, giggling little girls. Nick wondered what Juanita and his son, Saul, were doing right then. Briefcases outnumbered shopping bags in this car, and a dozen passengers wore ID badges on silver chains around their neck: this was midafternoon on a Friday in a city defined by work.

Nowhere on the train or the subway platforms did he see a white-haired man in a blue wool topcoat.

Nowhere did he see private eye Jack Berns.

He switched subway lines at Metro Center, shouldering through the bustling crowd, jumping through the doors of the next train just as the warning bell dinged and the doors slid closed. He looked around him, saw no one from his old car: the eagle-faced woman must have stayed on the other train.

A man shaking coins in a McDonald's Coke cup stood at the top of the escalator that brought Nick above ground. Nick had ridden to the stop near the Capitol so he could walk along Pennsylvania Avenue's row of bars and restaurants, see the congressional players strolling in the fresh air. The windows of the well-stocked bookstore where his novels were unavailable reflected no one suspicious behind him.

A woman wrapped in a filthy brown blanket shouted at Nick, “
Give me a goddamn quarter!
” Nick's eyes cut through her. She didn't care. Nick suddenly wished he had all the quarters in the world to give away, the hell if they went for wine or crack cocaine or food for hungry babies.

Three buzz-saw-haircut young Marines in red shorts and gray T-shirts from the Commandant's barracks a mile away jogged toward the Capitol. None of the pretty girls on the street cared.

The block of town houses where Nick had his office was lined with cars, but void of pedestrians. He climbed the five-stair, black-iron porch, put his key in the locked door to the stairs leading up to his office….

Whirled around: saw nobody on the street.

Nobody.

Just static electricity in the air
, he told himself.

His office looked undisturbed. The only message on his machine was from Sylvia, asking him to pick up milk on his way home, signing off with a soft
I love you
. He remembered musk perfume, chocolate skin, laughed at his flush of unwarranted guilt.

There was one fresh yellow legal pad left in his stack. He found a pen and took out the photocopied glossaries.

Jud Stuart had not been annotated by the Archives.

The alphabetical Names Glossary had biographies ranging from two sentences to four dense paragraphs. Nick looked for common ground between the names and the legends he associated with Jud: Vietnam, Special Forces or other elite military groups, Iran, Chile (What had Jud done in Chile?), Watergate, drug smuggling.