Such Men Are Dangerous (9 page)

I was up well ahead of the sun. I showered and shaved and put on Maj. Walker’s uniform. The fit was good enough to be true and not too good for a cover identity. They tossed the room while I had breakfast, and I would have known it without the rug fibers or powder. They put a pair of socks back on the wrong side of the drawer. That was good enough to mention to George, if I ever saw him again.

At eleven o’clock I got in the car. I was supposed to have arrived that morning around ten, and my orders called for me to report to my new commanding officer immediately upon arrival. That was fine, I was back on schedule. I drove through the center of Sprayhorn and northwest toward the base. I had my wallet in my hip pocket, my orders on the seat beside me, and my Agency card in the inside breast pocket of my jacket. I drove six miles. The snow had stopped during the night, but there was enough of it on the road to make the drive an ordeal. I had to concentrate on it when I would have preferred to spend the time reminding myself who I was. I was an Agency man pretending to be a career officer. George insisted it was much easier that way, that double covers reinforced each other. I wasn’t so sure.

The compound would have been hard to miss. It was the only thing on the road besides snow. A fifteen-foot fence, barbed and electrified, circled it. Rectangled it, if you prefer. Inside there was a lot of empty ground and three concrete block buildings. They were all about the same size, and they were all about forty-five feet tall, and none of them had any windows. There were also soldiers all over the place, all in heavy brown overcoats, none performing any apparent function.

A sign reappeared every fifty yards along the fence. It announced that all of this was the product testing division of the General Acrotechnic Geodetic Corporation, that admittance was restricted to authorized personnel, and that the fence was electrified. The last statement was true, the middle one misleading, the first a lie. There was no such thing as the General Acrotechnic Geodetic Corporation and probably never would be, since the phrase was gobbledygook. Admittance was restricted specifically to military personnel specifically assigned to the base, the correct name of which was Fort Joshua Tree. It was named for a longdead general who would have been sickened by the things inside the place, a far cry from muskets and cavalry sabers. New times, new customs.

There was a corporal at the front gate. We played the salute game and I gave him my orders. He told me where to park and which building to enter. I parked where he said, received and returned salutes, and showed my orders to another corporal in the entrance hall of the appointed building. This kept happening until I reached the offices of General Baldwin Winden. His secretary announced me over an intercom. He said he wasn’t expecting me, and the secretary said something about misdirected memos and took my orders inside. I opened the intercom and listened to them discuss me. My tan was mentioned, damn it. The general and his secretary tried to figure out who or what I was and decided that asking me might save time.

“I don’t know what he’s doing here,” I heard the general say, “but if it says he belongs here, that’s all that counts.”

The military mind. Nothing ever changes, orders are always orders. Extraordinary.

I went into the general’s office. We saluted each other, and I made a point of doing nothing until the secretary went away. I figured he would listen in on the intercom, but that was fine with me. When the door closed I said, “General Baldwin, I—”

“Winden,” he said. “Baldwin’s my first name, Major.”

It wasn’t a slip on my part. It was the sort of bad prep military men liked to expect from civilian agencies.

“Hell,” I said. “They never get anything right.” I put a finger to my lips, moved it to my ear, then pointed at the walls and ceiling. He looked at me as though I was bucking for a Section Eight. I handed him my Agency ID. He flipped it open and did a take that was almost too good to be true. You could almost see a cartoon-style light bulb over his head.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “Have a seat, Mr. Lynch. You know, I’m not surprised. Something about those orders didn’t ring true.” Oh, sure. “Sit down, tell me what I can do for you. Oh, we can talk here, sir. Oh, don’t you worry now, we can talk here, sir. This is United States Army property, there hasn’t been a civilian on the grounds since the fence went up. Except for your sort of people, of course. Sit, sit …”

I sat. I had wondered what sort of general they would pick to run a candyass warehouse in the middle of South Dakota, and now I knew, and he was better than anything I could have dreamed up.

“So you came to see us,” he said. “Well, well, what can I do for you people? Hmmm?”

“You can find me something innocuous to do for the next three weeks,” I said. “If there’s an empty office, put me in it and pile papers on my desk. If anybody asks, I’m Major John Walker and I’m doing something confidential. Don’t tell anyone otherwise, not even your secretary. And don’t—”

“Now one moment, sir! Now one moment!”

I stared at him.

“You have no authority here, sir. None! You are a civilian, sir, and you have no lawful right to be here, let alone furnish me with instructions. No right at all! You are a civilian and we are military and—”

I stood up, and he stopped talking. Just like that. I wondered if General Tree was as much of a washout as this moron.

I broke the silence. I said, “If you want to order me out, for Christ’s sake go ahead. I left the middle of a Brazilian summer for this. They put me up here in Eskimoland and issued me a pretty little soldier suit and forgot to put an overcoat in my bag. I’m supposed to spend three fucking weeks doing nothing waiting for something that isn’t going to happen. I couldn’t sleep last night and I had a stinking breakfast this morning and the clowns who searched my room this morning did everything but autograph my pillow. You can’t want me out of here as much as I want to get out of here, sir, and I’m sure this is God’s own country in the summer, but—”

“Sir!”

I stared at him, and this time he gave me his guarded look. “You’ll be here for three weeks?”

“I’ll be here until your shipment goes out, which could be any time during the next three weeks but which we both know will be on the fourth of February.”

“The date has not yet been determined, Mr., uh, Lynch.”

“Maybe they haven’t notified you.” And, as an afterthought, “Or maybe our information is wrong.”

“The latter, I’m sure. The date will purposely remain undetermined until the last moment.” If he honestly believed they wouldn’t set the date until they were ready to give him the word, then he was too dumb to live. “Now let me see, Lynch. You’re concerned with the shipment?”

I just nodded. I had already been enough of a wiseass.

“But you’re civilian. We should have someone from Military Intelligence.”

“You probably do.”

“If that were so, I would know about it.” The hell he would. I told him his boys would probably have a man or a team down any day but that I was under orders to work independently.

“We have an interest in this ourselves,” I said. “You know the eventual destination of the shipment.”

He named a military compound in Florida, another in Texas, a third in the northeast, a fourth in California. It was the most obvious breach of security since the Trojan horse. I had trouble repressing a fairly sincere moment of civic outrage.

Instead, I filed the information. George had thought everything was being routed to Florida, and either he or the general was wrong. I figured anybody would have to pick the general for this honor, but George might have misread something. Four trucks, four destinations-there was a certain degree of logic there.

I said, “I mean final destinations.” He looked completely blank. This was a whole new concept to him. “Without going into detail,” I said, “The goods will be shipped onward from the places you mentioned. That’s where we come in, that’s where it stops being military and becomes civilian.”

“Oh, I see.”

“So while the first delivery stage is legally your baby, my team wants me here. I think it’s about as necessary as it is warm, but orders are orders.” There was a phrase he could cuddle up with. “So I have to be here unless you order me out. I’ll try not to get in anyone’s way, believe me. Keep me a secret. A blown cover would look bad. I went five years in the Amazon without getting blown, and I ought to be able to do three weeks in South Dakota.”

He stood up, and I saluted. He had trouble returning it; I could see it didn’t seem right to him. You didn’t spend your life getting to be a general just to salute camouflaged civilians.

“I will give you whatever help I can,” he said, stiffly.

“I’ll appreciate it. I’m bunked down at the motel, and I’m under orders to go on living there. I’m frankly damned if I know why.”

“Orders,” he said.

“I doubt that anyone will ask, but my story will be that I’m awaiting assignment of permanent quarters. I don’t think the point will come up—”

“I doubt it, sir.”

“—but just in case. Well. Do you have an office available? It will have to be private, but that’s my only requirement. And could I figure on moving in around two this afternoon? Good, very good.”

I extended my hand, and we shook. I could tell he liked it a hell of a lot better than a salute.

EIGHT

T
HAT
A
FTERNOON
T
HEY
had an office ready for me, and, more important, a heavy overcoat. A few junior officers managed to walk past my open door and take a quick glance inside. This might be simple curiosity—what else could they do for kicks?—or the word might already have gotten around that I was an Agency snoop. It didn’t matter. The on-base intelligence crew was no threat, and if MI was going to send in a team, that was something to worry about later. The possibility always existed that the Agency had an undercover op already planted. George was certain this wasn’t so, but that I didn’t have to worry anyway. My Brazil cover would help explain the fact that he didn’t know me, or I him.

The only problem with the Brazil background was that I couldn’t speak Portuguese. I had a touch of Spanish, though, and my accent was poor, and if anyone started talking to me in Portuguese I could try answering in the worst Spanish possible. “Never could keep from mixing up Portugee and the old Español, and where I was they were all Indians and we talked the native jive”—and then hit ‘em with a mixture of Cambode hill dialect and gibberish.

I left the office around four. From Sprayhorn I sent a wire to T.J. Morrison at a hotel in downtown Washington. It was an hour later there, so George would be picking up the wire in an hour or less. He was supposed to have checked in at the hotel around noon, signing in but not going to his room. Now he would pick up the telegram, and then he would never come back.

I wired:
BIRTHDAY GREETINGS AND ALL OUR LOVE, WISH WE COULD BE WITH YOU. KEN AND SARAH
. It didn’t mean anything. Any message from me meant only that I was on the spot and everything was going according to plan. The important thing was maintaining contact without leaving any threads dangling that could possibly tie Walker-Lynch to George Dattner. He could communicate with me in any of a dozen ways, because it was to be expected that I would get messages from Washington, but we needed elaborate arrangements for me to reach him.

That night I hit a few bars until I found one with a colonel’s wife who was looking to get picked up. She was crowding forty and overly fleshed. She was drinking gin and coke. “A traditional drink down home,” she drawled. “If y’all spent any time in Nawlins, Ah wouldn’t have to tell y’all that.”

I had spent enough time in New Orleans to know that y’all is plural, so either the accent was artificial or she was seeing two of me. Or both. She was half in the bag when I got there and I kept her company through three more gin and cokes and they hit her pretty hard, tradition or no.

On the ride back to my room she unzipped my fly and told me how her husband was a bastard bird colonel who only got stationed where it was cold enough to freeze her blood. And by Gawd a girl had to do something to keep warm, didn’t she? Then she started giggling.

In bed she behaved wildly, out of passion or practice, and seemed to enjoy herself. God knows why. Afterward she lay back with her head on my pillow and a cigarette in her mouth. When her eyes closed I took the cigarette from her mouth and carried it into the bathroom and flushed it away. I came back and sat down next to her and watched her. Her mouth had fallen open and she was breathing noisily through it.

I studied her. Her hair needed reblonding. A full half inch of brown root showed. I touched her hair. It remained unruffled, artfully sprayed into place, and it felt like plastic.

Old acne scars showed dimly beneath her facial makeup. The rest of her skin was a washed-out white. I touched parts of her and she made grunting sounds in her sleep. She felt unhealthily soft, like cheap latex pillows.

I straddled her, leaned my weight on my elbows. I placed my hands on either side of her throat, thumbs together in front. I pressed, just a little.

She opened her eyes and said, “Darling …”

I made myself raise my thumbs, and then I crawled into my own head and walked around there for a moment, opening doors and looking inside, letting things sort themselves out.

Puzzled, “Darling?”

So I threw it to her a second time, a more symbolic and less permanent ritual of murder, and she heaved and bucked and perspired and moaned. I wouldn’t let her go back to sleep afterward. I made her get up and dressed, and I drove her to where her car was parked and helped her open the door and sag behind the wheel. She drove off, weaving all over the road, and I figured it was about even odds that she would kill herself on the way home.

The smell of her was all over the room. I opened doors and windows, stripped the sheet from the bed, then went and stood under the shower for a long time. When I came back the air was cold but cleaner. I put the sheet on the bed upside down and killed the light. I got into bed. The pillow reeked of her hair spray, so I tossed it across the room and slept without it.