Running Dog (11 page)

“I’m back from Europe, Lightborne. We came down in the dark. I hate nighttime landings.”

That squeaky voice sent little tremors rippling through Lightborne’s nerve apparatus.

“Hear that music? That’s my disco. People are dancing. They danced right through the landing. Listen, I want to ask.
Is it still warm? Full-length, I mean. The business you mentioned. How hot’s the trail?”

“I’d say very warm, Richie, without fear of overstating.”

“Good, listen, we’ll talk. I’m coming over there. It’s a layover, for maintenance. I definitely want to explore this thing. The more I talk to people, the more I hear about profit potentials with first-run. I made new connections in the European capitals. Features. They’re feature-crazy. Exhibitors are hollering for more product. So I think I want to get my toe in the water, Lightborne. Eventually distribute worldwide maybe.”

These last remarks Richie delivered in a subdued and earnest manner. An encouraging development. Lightborne was heartened.

“Betty’s Azalea Ranch,” Moll said.

The man read a newspaper.

“Topside Pool Supplies.”

About a hundred yards beyond the Centreville Free Will Baptist Church, the limousine turned into an unmarked dirt road. Half a mile in, they passed a one-story L-shaped building, both wings very long, no landscaping out front. Farther on, maybe two miles, the car stopped in a grove of scarlet oaks near a large stone house. Two Shetland ponies stood in a split-rail cedar corral. There was a pond to the side of the house and some stables beyond that.

They got out of the car. Moll watched a small helicopter setting down in a field nearby. Two men hopped out, both wearing skin-tight jeans, denim jackets, sunglasses and Stetsons. They walked toward the back of the stone house as the helicopter slowly rose, slanting now toward the deep woods in the distance. The men were Orientals, she was quite sure, looking boyish in those narrow pants and small-scale western hats.

Earl Mudger stood in the doorway. Moll was aware her escort had paused, leaving her to approach the house alone.
Mudger wore a blacksmith’s apron and heavy-duty gloves. He was a thickset man with curly hair trimmed close, with ash-blond eyebrows and a strong jaw, slightly jutting—the picture of a man who wouldn’t yield easily to aging. His eyes were a fine silky blue. He had a bent nose, broadly columned neck and something of a surfer’s numinous gleam—his eyes and hair and brows shining just a bit, as though bleached by the elements.

She followed him to a wicker table set under an oak tree. He took off his gloves and apron and tossed them onto one of the extra chairs. An old woman, an Oriental, brought out lemonade and some cookies. Moll could tell Mudger fancied himself a charmer. Tough but winsome. She set her face to Executive Chill.

“Let’s us talk some.”

“Fine,” she said.

“Fact number one, everything Percival told you last night was exaggerated by a factor of seven.”

“What did he tell me last night?”

“I can replay it for you any time. Fact number two, it doesn’t matter anymore because I’m no longer involved with PAC/ORD, or Radial Matrix, or Lloyd Percival. Born free, that’s me. No more attachments. I’m shaking loose. Time to retire.”

“A life of meditation,” she said.

“Fact number three, you’ve got the alliances all mixed up, assuming you believe what the Senator’s been telling you. Did you ever wonder how Percival’s select committee gets their input? Lomax is Percival’s man. Lomax is the source of everything the committee knows.”

“Who is Lomax?”

“Man in the limousine.”

“I’ve mistaken him twice for the Senator’s man. Once in New York, I
think
. Now here.”

“You weren’t mistaken,” Mudger said. “Loyalties are so interwoven, the thing’s a game. The Senator and PAC/ORD
aren’t nearly the antagonists the public believes them to be. They talk all the time. They make deals, they buy people, they sell favors. I doubt if Lomax knows whether he works for PAC/ORD or Lloyd Percival, ultimately. You have to understand, agencies allow this to go on all the time. People know what’s happening. But they allow it. That’s the nature of the times. You go to bed with your enemies.”

“I assume you feed Lomax false information.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “Sometimes this is so much fun, I’d do it for nothing.”

“Who is Glen Selvy?”

“No idea.”

“Howard Glen Selvy?”

“Not a leaf stirs.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

“I like your smile.”

“I’m not smiling.”

“I thought that was a smile. I mistook that for a smile. Have some lemonade, why don’t you?”

“These are Vietnamese, these people you’ve got here?”

“We have some Vietnamese here, definitely.”

“That you got out just in time.”

“I’ve had hairier moments. So have they. Compared to the life most of these people have had, getting out of Saigon was on the level of an escapade.”

“Ho Chi Minh City,” she said.

“Yeah, Ho Chi Minh City. A lark with firecrackers.”

Moll nibbled on a cookie and drank some lemonade. She couldn’t shake the feeling she’d crossed an invisible frontier into another way of life. The rules were different here. Sitting in the shade. White wicker and lemonade. Ponies motionless in their small corral.

“Back that way along the road,” she said. “Radial Matrix?”

“Right.”

“Thriving, by all accounts.”

“Systems. It’s one of the areas we still excel in.”

“ ‘We’ meaning Americans.”

“Nothing but.”

“In Vietnam you were involved in drug trafficking, no?”

“We did some of that. We were a link. As I say, I’ve unlinked myself. Too much software, hardware, so on. Technology. The whole thing’s geared to electronics. There’s a neat correlation between the complexity of the hardware and the lack of genuine attachments. Devices make everyone pliant. There’s a general sponginess, a lack of conviction.”

“You had your own zoo in Vietnam.”

“Checking up on me.”

“A little,” she said.

“My pride and joy, that zoo. We got to the point where we were making exchanges with real zoos halfway around the world. We had an animal dealer from Michigan come all the way out to see our operation. I had more gibbons than I could use. I was laying off gibbons the way bookmakers lay off excess bets. I had this rare type lynx, Eurasian, almost extinct, this one variety, and we bred it successfully in captivity. I tell you what, that made my war.”

“Victory after all.”

“We won far’s I’m concerned. Revise the texts.”

“What sort of retirement plans—forgive the skeptical look.”

“Domestic bliss,” he said. “My wife’s off having a baby, matter of fact.”

“Nice.”

“I’m fifty-two years old.”

“Interesting.”

“Wife number three.”

“Not bad.”

“She’s a gook,” Mudger said.

Apron and gloves. Helicopter landing in a field. She recalled what Percival had said before his sour mash whisky slowed him to a crawl. One set of rules. Mudger’s. Nobody else gets to use them. Vietnamese in cowboy hats.

“Not that I don’t have something to fall back on,” he said.

“Aside from domestic bliss.”

“I’ve got a shop in the basement. Sometimes I go down there and work half the night. Do a little planing, a little sanding. Lock things in vises. It’s good for the soul. Punch holes in metal, do a little buffing. So anyway I got to fooling around with a small machine of my own devising that tests the hardness and content of steel. Machines that size do hardness alone, normally. I can tell you high carbon, low carbon, how much nickel or manganese. Is this boring?”

“Sort of.”

“The machine has a thing called a diamond tip penetrator. I trademarked it as the Mudger tip.”

“A little better,” she said.

“I’m building a large shop about twenty miles south of here, If things work out, I’ll be filling contracts for Radial Matrix.”

She watched him light up a little at the irony of that.

“This is what’s called negotiating a termination,” he said.

He laughed, eyes not leaving her face. She judged him the kind of man deeply pleased by the appreciation of others. He would be a studier of faces, eager to gauge people’s reactions to things he said. Robust men were always like this.

“It’s real work,” he said. “Doesn’t involve secret transmitters, hot mikes, all the rest. Like for instance”—she watched his face shade with amusement—“I can let you hear dialogue and other noises pertaining to last night’s amorous activities.”

“Involving whom?”

“You and the Senator, of course.”

“Never happened. Sorry to disappoint.”

“It doesn’t necessarily have to happen,” Mudger said. “All we need’s your voice and his, which we have. The rest is purely technical.”

“You make it happen.”

“Sure.”

“In this case has it already happened or is it pending?”

“I don’t know. Lomax would know.”

“Being the Senator’s man, Lomax might push the wrong button. Scramble the voices beyond recognition. Or erase the tapes.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

“You’ve got me thinking I’ve done something wrong.”

Mudger seemed to grow serious. He sat sideways in his chair, left arm extended, resting on the table, his right arm hanging over the back of the chair.

“When technology reaches a certain level, people begin to feel like criminals,” he said. “Someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. You can’t escape investigation. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected or are being collected. Banks, insurance companies, credit organizations, tax examiners, passport offices, reporting services, police agencies, intelligence gatherers. It’s a little like what I was saying before. Devices make us pliant. If
they
issue a print-out saying we’re guilty, then we’re guilty. But it goes even deeper, doesn’t it? It’s the presence alone, the very fact, the superabundance of technology, that makes us feel we’re committing crimes. Just the fact that these things exist at this widespread level. The processing machines, the scanners, the sorters. That’s enough to make us feel like criminals. What enormous weight. What complex programs. And there’s no one to explain it to us.”

That night Mudger stood behind the bar in his living room, mixing himself a drink. He put his glass down on the red folder, the Dorish Report. Lomax sat near the French doors, looking at a magazine. The doors were open, revealing a small Buddhist shrine in the garden beyond the patio.

“Been meaning to ask.”

“What’s that, Earl?”

“Why was the subject carrying a gun?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s over there in Percival’s office, reading, isn’t he? Or hanging around some art gallery. I’d like for you to tell me why he’s carrying a gun.”

“Earl, he shouldn’t have been.”

“Is he some kind of cowboy? What is he, a junior G-man? Because I thought we trained people better than that.”

“It was contrary to procedure.”

Mudger was sitting at the bar, his back to Lomax.

“This business with guns. He’s, what, some kind of sportsman? Shoots fucking bear with a handgun?”

“He was on the Lower East Side. Maybe he thought it was dangerous.”

“He was right, it turned out.”

They both laughed.

“Who’d you press into service?” Lomax said.

“I called Talerico. He’s in Canada these days. We’ve done things for each other before. Always worked out. Tal said he’d see what he could do.”

“That’s what he did?”

“He got some guy from Buffalo. His old jurisdiction. Supposed to be a weapons expert. Famous for midnight raids on National Guard armories.”

“Who?”

“Augie the Mouse.”

They both laughed.

“So Augie goes in there wailing,” Mudger said. “He’s got his fancy little two-pound Kevlar vest. He’s got yellow glasses and ear protectors. He’s wearing everything but platform shoes. And he’s wailing, he’s got this AR-18 and he’s strafing the place, he’s busting it up.”

“What happens, he gets hit.”

“He gets hit but doesn’t know it. When he gets home he takes off his armor and sees this little hole in it. So he starts feeling his chest, his belly. He tells his driver maybe it got deflected into his lungs. He starts coughing and spitting, looking
for blood. Finally his driver shakes out the vest and this small lead mushroom hits the floor. Which isn’t the worst of it. Ignorance of technique. The worst of it is that he’s supposed to isolate the subject before going to work. The subject’s supposed to be a-lone. Not a sin-gle wit-ness in sight.”

“You got the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre.”

“Jerk-off. I told Talerico. Where’d you find this jerk-off?”

“Augie the Mouse.”

Mudger laughed, hitting the bar with the palm of his hand.

“Tell you what, it was my fault. Ought to have used different people.”

“Such as?”

“Tieu to dac cong.”

“That’s not your average man in the street they’ll be dealing with,” Lomax said. “I have to tell you I felt a little surge of pride or satisfaction or what-have-you when I got word he walked out of the bar without a mark on him. Plus putting a bullet in the Mouse. I felt gratified, Earl, truth be known. Certain amount of my own time and effort invested there. This is the best penetration I’ve run, frankly. I don’t think your adjusters will find this is just another day’s work.”

Mudger shrugged. The phone at his elbow rang. He picked it up, listened a while, said something, listened some more. Lomax went out on the patio. It was a warm night. He stood in the garden watching Mudger put down the phone and say something over his shoulder at the same time. Lomax walked back into the room, belatedly realizing what it was Mudger had said.

“Congratulations, Earl.”

“Where’s your glass? We’ll have another drink.”

“How’s Tran Le doing?”

“She’s fine. She’s great. Never better.”

“I couldn’t touch another drop, honestly.”

“An eight-pounder,” Mudger said over his shoulder.

“What is it, a fish?”

“Where’s your glass?”

“Maybe just a wee snort, to mark the occasion.”