The Falconer's Tale (16 page)

“We're square?” Partlow asked.

Piat wished that he'd asked for even more money, but
what the hell. “Square. Can we talk Opsec? Or do I have to
wait for you to bring it up?”

Partlow shook his head. “Not yet.”

“You're going to leave me wandering Europe in my true
name?”

“Yes.” Partlow looked confident in his decision. “Until you
go operational. I'll have an identity prepared for that.”

“Lived in? Ready to take a scrutiny?”

“Yes.”

Partlow looked determined. Piat had serious doubts. He'd
never have run it that way himself—left to his own devices,
he'd have covered his principal agent and
both
the sub-agents
from the git-go, just to hide any little traces left in purchasing
and training.

He looked at his watch again and decided he didn't have
time to argue. “Next meeting?”

“You call it,” Partlow said, getting up. “When he's ready.”

Piat nodded. “Clyde?”

Partlow had the Burberry over his arm and the suitcase
in his hand. He was already mentally on his way to his next
meeting. He snapped back. “Yes?”

“Clyde, we don't have any recognition signals. No serious
fallbacks. What happens if you get hit by a car?”

Partlow put his hand on the doorknob. “You get to spend
all that money, and everybody goes home.”

And Piat thought,
Jesus, Clyde, what are you up to?
But what
he said was, “See you next time, then. Keep an eye on the
traffic.”

Partlow said, “Thanks, Jerry.”

Piat started to say something further, but Partlow had closed
the door.

Piat stopped at a bank and used his new passport to open
an account. He called the airport and changed his flight and
made a few arrangements that included wiring money to
two email addresses and visiting a friend in the Plaka who
sometimes made antiquities for old friends. Piat showed him
some pictures of northern European Bronze Age pieces. Piat
had the glimmerings of an idea that might make him enough
money so that he would never have to worry about money
again.

He paid for his house on Lesvos for another year, in cash.
Then he sat in a café at the base of the Plaka and doodled
on a napkin. He was trying to figure Partlow's operational
cycle. Partlow had identified the target and the possible
agent—Hackbutt—at least two months ago. But he only had
the money now. So he'd lined up his players before he got
his approvals.

Piat crumpled his doodles and put them in his pocket,
stood and finished the last dregs of his Helenika. Partlow had
started his operational activity before he had his approvals.
Piat was sure of it.

Not a good sign.

He left a decent tip on the cup. And then he collected his
bag and headed for Scotland.

Alan Craik was sitting at his desk, coat off, sleeves rolled up.
He was in civilian clothes—chinos; white button-down shirt;
rather nifty raw silk tie his wife had given him, a sort of
dusty orange and olive. A black blazer was draped over the
back of the chair. Allen-Edmonds loafers, whose name he
wouldn't have ever heard of except for Dick Triffler, protected
the feet that were perched on an open drawer.

He was working through a stack of roughed-out fitness
reports, going fast but thinking about each person, picturing
the face, remembering what the man or woman did. At the
same time, his mind was flicking back and forth over Partlow's
operation and the unexplained contact report. It rankled.

He wanted to talk to somebody about it at length. If Dukas
had been in Washington, he'd have talked to Dukas. But not
over a STU. Not at a three-thousand-miles remove.

He finished a fitness report for Meserve, Geraldine, USA,
and initialed the rough and tossed it on a different pile. Then,
instead of picking up another, he reached for his outside
phone and dialed a number from memory.

“Pearsall, Hench, Rostoff and Gallaher, good morning how
may I help you can you hold?”

“No.”

“What?”

“I can't hold. Please give me Mister Peretz.”

“Oh—really—!” The phone disgorged music but didn't tell
him that his call was valuable and would he please stay on
the line. The firm was too classy for that. The music was
vaguely classical, too, suggesting that they were serious
lawyers.

“Peretz.”

“Abe, Al Craik.”

“Hey, my God, good to hear from you.” Peretz was an old,
old
friend, first his father's friend and then a mentor to Alan
himself. He wasn't a lawyer but, nowadays, a security
specialist.

“How about we get together for a drink?”

It wasn't code, but since his injury, Peretz believed that
he was surrounded by enemies, and he insisted on caution.
Craik, in fact, wondered if something in his old friend had
been pushed over the edge of caution into paranoia.

Peretz said that a drink would be great. “Sixish?”

“How's that place that used to serve the great whitefish?”
This wasn't code, either, but nobody listening would know
that it referred to a neighborhood bar and grill in Northwest.

Peretz okayed that, and they chatted about Craik's wife
but not about Peretz's wife or daughters. Then Craik hung
up and spent the rest of the day writing fitness reports and
doing other things that collections officers do, which is mostly
stuff that makes other people dislike them.

It was cold in Mull, and the rain was falling in sheets instead
of the usual heavy drizzle. Piat parked his car and walked
down the gravel slope to the cottage. The dog was always
happy to see him now, but today it stayed in the shelter of
the tarpaulin, its pleasure made evident by its tail and the
posture of its head. Piat detoured to greet him, crouching in
the rain to ruffle the hair behind his ears. Then he paid a
visit to Bella, the sea eagle, who glared at him through the
wire mesh of her cage in the way only a big predator can
do—in other words, she looked at him as potential food.

Piat stood bare-headed in the torrent, still stunned by her
size. She had easily four times the mass of any of the other
birds, twice the wingspan, more than twice the height, with
long white feathers sticking straight down from her back,
and a pale golden head. Beautiful, in a scary way.

Piat had done some reading. There were fewer than four
hundred sea eagles left in the world.

Nice bait
.

They gazed on one another with much the same look.

The packages from Farlow's had come that morning.
Hackbutt was trying everything on.

“I never knew,” Irene said.

“Me either,” Piat replied.

They spent an hour watching Hackbutt preen. Irene was
on edge—perhaps because Hackbutt had center stage. To jolly
her, Piat went through her cards from the shops, going
through the motions of being the man in charge of the money,
secretly appalled by the cost of every garment she had chosen.
He wondered fleetingly if this was the feeling he had given
Partlow. Or whether she was looking for his refusal.

“Three hundred pounds for a
skirt
?” he asked and instantly
wished he hadn't.

“Fine.” She snatched at the card he was holding. “I don't
need this shit at all. I gave this shit up. I feel like I'm working
for my fucking
mother
.”

Piat noted that with two shits and a fuck, it was
mother
that sounded like the curse.

Hackbutt peered out from the bedroom. “Honey? What's
wrong?” he asked. “Do you know what I did with my new
hat?”

Irene's face had the puffy look of someone about to cry.
“On the bed!” she shouted, and fled to the kitchen, where
she began to take out her aggression on some dough.

“What did you say to her?” Hackbutt asked. He was wearing
a pair of tweed trousers and his new boots with his ancient
sweater. It had once been a good sweater, and Piat noted
that he looked
just right
for a flaky American, which Piat had
decided was the best they were going to do, anyway.

Piat let out a long sigh. “Irene,” he started.

“Don't try to sweet-talk me, you pompous shit,” she said
while pounding the dough. She now had her runway model
face on. Piat suspected that from a woman, most people
found this pretty intimidating. He found it interesting.

Hackbutt looked back and forth between them. “What?”
he asked. “Irene, I really like the clothes. It's okay.” He smiled
hesitantly at Piat. “The pants are warm.” The new tweed
pants, part of a suit that had cost four hundred pounds used,
had pigeon blood on them. “She's mad because she thinks
you're making me do this, you know?” and to Irene, “It's
okay, honey.”

In the kitchen, Irene cut a wodge of dough in two with
a cleaver. The sound echoed like a pistol shot. Hackbutt
headed for the bedroom again, muttering something about
a jacket.

Piat walked into the kitchen. “I'm sorry. Really. I've never
spent six hundred bucks on a skirt before as an ops expense.”

Her back was to him. “Fuck yourself. I'm not your fucking
agent and don't you forget it.”

He sighed again. “Wrong,” he said. “You are my fucking
agent and you can sink this thing as fast as Digger can—no,
faster. Okay?”

She whirled on him. Her face was flushed but set, her
knuckles white where she was clutching the counter behind
her. “Don't imagine that your money gives you the right to
talk to me like that,” she said. “You and your money and
your planning—you're driving me off my center. Robbing
me of my energy. You are making me a thing, not a person.”

No swear words at all—different attack altogether. Piat
thought she had a few people running around in her head—
rich girl, tough girl, artist. He didn't flinch. “Okay,” he said.
“So you're out. Game over?”

“That's what you do when you're threatened?” she asked.
“Just give up? I thought you were the trained tough guy.”
Her voice was low, with the clear intention of hiding the
quarrel from Hackbutt. Maybe, then, she wasn't serious.

He shrugged. “Whatever. Irene, I like you fine. We can
work together.
But there's room for just one touchy, insecure dick
on this case, and that
role's
taken
. Okay?”

“How dare you speak about Eddie that way?” She was
truly interesting when angry—positive that she could use it
to get her way, even when most of it was a put-on. And sex
was the bass accompaniment.

“Who said I meant Digger?” Piat laughed. “Now, are we
ordering some clothes, or not?”

“Fuck yourself,” she said. But the tone said she was ready
to back off, if he would.

He spent four thousand dollars of ops funds off the credit
card in five phone calls while she made witticisms from the
kitchen and Hackbutt fed the birds. It was too wet for flying.
When Hackbutt was done, Piat helped him rig the outdoor
heaters that would keep the birds warm if the temperature
dropped any more.

The encounter in the kitchen had rattled him. He didn't
think about it while he nailed an extension cord into the
rafters of the shed, and he didn't think about it while he
rewired an ancient space heater with ceramic coils that had
been new when Hitler was the chancellor of Germany, and
he was still not thinking about it when he left the cottage
late in the day.

Northwest Washington's Park View Grill didn't have a view
of Rock Creek Park but was close enough that you could
walk there in three minutes if that was important to you.
Craik arrived first, bought himself a beer, and went to a booth
near the back. When Peretz came in, Craik winced, as he
did every time he saw this old friend who was no longer
quite like the old friend he used to know. It wasn't age that
had changed Peretz but a bullet, which had gone through
somebody else first and then fragmented in Peretz's abdomen,
destroying his spleen, reducing his bladder to the size of an
orange and leaving him with a bent back and a permanent
drag to his left foot. And a conviction that the world was
made up of enemies.

“Abe! Back here.”

Peretz came back—more slowly now than he used to—an
old man's uncertain smile on his face. When beer had
appeared, and when they had both shut up until the waitress
had gone, Peretz said, “We've got to stop meeting like
this.” He smiled. But it was a joke wrapped around a sadness.
“I feel like the other woman.” He waited for Craik to laugh,
but Craik didn't get it. “Meeting in holes-in-the-wall so the
wife won't find out.”

Craik smiled. “Not my wife, but your uncle.” Peretz didn't
laugh at the reference to Uncle Sam, the implication of his
fear of his own government. Craik didn't want to launch
into his problem straight away; he didn't want to seem indifferent
to Peretz's situation, to the sadness inside the jokes.
He said, “Anything new on the family?”

Peretz's face contracted. “I got a message from Leah.” Leah
was the younger of his daughters—now, Craik thought, about
eighteen. She had vanished in Israel with her sister and mother,
presumably into the arms of Mossad, when she was fifteen.
Her mother had been passing classified material that she had
found on Abe's desk at home—a double whammy for him
because, like everybody else, he had violated a rule by taking
stuff home, and, unlike everybody else, his wife was a traitor.

Abe talked about his daughter's message. “This stuff they
do with cell phones. Like email only without spelling.”

“Text-messaging.”

“She wants to come home.” His voice broke on the last
word. Like some men who have been tortured, Peretz didn't
have the tight control he'd had before he'd been shot. Or
before his wife had committed treason. “It started—” now
he was writing with a finger on the table—“p-l-z, p-l-z, p-l
z. It took me a while to see she meant ‘please, please, please.'
Then—no caps—i w-n-t numeral 2 c-m h-o-m. ‘I want to
come home.' And it ended with please, please, please again.”
Tears shone in his eyes.

“How did she get it to you?”

“She sent it to somebody. They sent it on. Maybe somebody
she met over there.” A bitter look passed over his face.
“Or maybe Mossad.” Peretz chewed on his upper lip and
looked away before he said, “Now she'll be on a list. So will
whoever forwarded it. So will I. Everything any of us sends
will get read.”

Craik wondered how sane his friend was. “Not legal,” he
said, although he knew how often legality was ignored.

Peretz shot a finger into the air. “These people make up
their own definition of legal!” He bent forward, lowered his
voice. “Anybody give you grief because you called me today?”

“No, no, no. We're old friends. I've been over it with my
security officer. Oh, yeah—don't look so shocked, Abe—you
were one of the people I made a point of telling her about.
And you know why. You took a bullet for all of us, and so
you're a great guy and you got three medals and a swell
medical retirement package, but you have a wife who did a
Pollard, so you're a suspect guy and a possible security risk.
Come on, you know all that.”

Peretz was quiet, and then he smiled. “If I weren't a
goddam socialistic, secular-humanist, fallen-away Jew, I'd be
the darling of the right.”

Alan let a little silence fall to mark a change of subject.
He said, ready now to talk about his own problems, “A funny
thing's happened.”

“Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?”

“Not very ha-ha.”

“Too bad. I could use a shot of ha-ha. What's up?”

Alan told him—the heavily edited contact report, the visit
to Partlow, the existence of a classified version he wasn't
allowed to see. He emphasized the strange task number.
“That's a real red flag, Abe. An operation can't go through
the process without a task number. I looked up the task
number that was on Partlow's computer. It wasn't generated
until six months after the contact report was written—that's
what ‘superseded' meant. Somebody ran an operation and
then
made it legal.”

“Who says it went through the process? You say it was
the end of 2001—that was a dumbnuts carnival. Washington
was a very dicked-up place.”

“Even so. My computer geek says the classified version
has a DIA code blocking it. DIA wouldn't have honchoed
something without a task number.”