The Falconer's Tale (22 page)

Piat tried to dredge up the right way to motivate both of
them to fucking
obey
. “Digger—we'll have another chance at
our guy. Soon. I promise. You can talk birds with him until
the sky falls.”

Hackbutt was still staring at Irene as if he'd never seen
her before. “They aren't stupid. And neither am I.” He
looked up at Piat. “Sometimes you both think I'm stupid.”
He turned his back and started toward the hotel. “It pisses
me off.”

Irene stood on the sidewalk, her jaw working and a blood
vessel throbbing on her temple.

“I'm sorry!” she shouted. “Fuck, I hate this place!”

Somehow, he got them alive and unbroken to their hotel.
He was tempted to stay and watch them pack, but they might
make up if he left them, and he needed them to make up.

Christ, he needed a little luck.

He opened the door to his room still wishing for a little
luck and found two middle-aged men sitting in his easy
chairs. Neither was very tall or formidable, but they were
grave, careful men with receding hairlines and guns. The
guns were holstered under excellent Italian tailoring, but Piat
knew they were there.

“Mister Michalis?” the nearer one asked. He rose to his feet.

Piat knew his cover. He always knew his cover. Jack
Michalis was the name on his new passport. He said, “Is
there a problem?” as bloodlessly as he could manage.

The graver of the two remained seated. “We are very sorry
for interrupting your privacy, Mister Michalis,” he said.
“Would you please join us?” He indicated the seat vacated
by his companion.

Piat didn't want to take it, but they had every advantage—
guns, numbers, local knowledge. So he sat. If they were going
to arrest him, they wouldn't have troubled to let him sit.

Probably.

“We work for the casino, Mister Michalis.”

Piat nodded.

The graver man reached out a hand. “May I see your passport,
Mister Michalis?”

Piat handed it over. He'd already passed on the option to
bluster and protest—these struck him as men who were past
masters at dealing with bluster. So he limited himself to a
single question. “Can you tell me what this is about?”

The graver man flipped the passport open, glanced at the
photo and looked at Piat. Then he closed it and handed
the passport back.

“We have a great deal of very serious security in the
casino,” he said carefully. “Also the hotels, yes?”

Piat nodded.

The grave man gave a small, grave smile. “I don't know
who you are. I'm quite sure you are
not
Mister Michalis. You
understand?”

Piat decided to die trying. “There must be some kind of
mistake—”

The man shrugged. “Of course. But no. As I say, I don't
know who you really are. But my computer tells me that
you are
not
this man, or perhaps there never was this man.
You see my trouble? And my own eyes tell me that this passport
is real. Terribly real, yes?”

Piat started to rise. Busted in fucking Monaco.

“Please sit down, Mister Michalis. If I may call you that?
So my computer and I, we would like you to leave. And
please, never come back. Do I make myself understood? Right
now, I cannot be bothered to think of anything with which
to charge you—perhaps if you came back, or didn't leave, I
would change my mind. Yes?”

Piat watched them. The younger one was to his side, not
actually behind him. Not as threatening as he could be. The
graver one was—grave. But not hostile. Piat reviewed his
options, including the option to play the hidden card—the
Interpol card Partlow had given him.

But he passed. Despite the liquid in his muscles and the
sweat in his armpits, besides the humiliation for any spy at
getting caught (never mind about what) by a
casino
—it just
didn't matter a damn. They wanted him to leave.

He wanted to leave.

“Fine,” he said.

He signaled Partlow from south of Paris. “1.”

He caught the noon ferry the next day to Mull.

He called Digger. He checked his pager. And then he slept
for sixteen hours.

The alarm crashed on his dresser across the room, and Piat
swung an arm at it. Failing to find the snooze button, he
woke up enough to get himself out of bed, shut off the alarm,
and took stock.

After his usual struggle with the mechanics of the shower,
he dressed and walked around the corner to the Island Bakery
for coffee. His brain was working. It was working too hard.

In Piat's experience, the case officer's view of an operation
went through three phases. In the first phase, the case
officer made his plans and met his agents, and everything
seemed possible. In the second phase, reality began to affect
his plans. Difficulties arose. Personalities clashed and potentials
failed to be recognized; outside factors that had been
ignored suddenly rose up to get in the way of the operation.
The simple cleanliness of the original plan became a dirty
muddle of exigency and compromise. In the third and final
phase, the case officer either succeeded or failed in his attempt
to meld the original plan and the patchwork of reality.

Piat leaned against the steel railing along the edge of
Tobermory's main pier and confronted the fact that he was
squarely in phase two. For whatever reason, the security of
the casinos of Monaco, and by extension, the French security
services, had developed an interest in him. His agents were
discovering fissures in their relationship. Piat grimaced as he
considered that he might, himself, be responsible for the fissures.

On the other side of the balance, the target was not unapproachable.
The target really did have a passionate interest
in birds. The target had obvious, visible contempt for his
uncle and the rest of his uncle's entourage.

Piat spent the whole of his double espresso weighing the
balance. Since the value of every item, good or bad, was
intangible, he could judge them only from experience. He
could, by manipulation and self-control, get Irene and
Hackbutt to the next meeting. And perhaps after that, from
meeting to meeting, for as long as Partlow required. He
couldn't guess what effect French security might have. He
didn't think that they had any notion of his actual purpose.

It probably didn't matter.

Unless, of course, it did.

On the other side of the ledger, he had a package of manufactured
antiquities in the trunk of his car that could now
be “found” at the crannog. The apparently illegal looting of
the ancient site would lend them cachet and provenance to
certain collectors. And from that, he would make a great
deal of money.

On balance, it was worth continuing.

Before he left for the farm, he read a chapter from one of
his falconry books on hunting from trees and waiting on.

In Washington, Abe Peretz had invited himself to the Craiks'
for dinner. He was a good enough friend to be able to do
that. He'd called Rose at her Pentagon office and asked her
when she was cooking and could he come, and she'd laughed
and told him that she cooked less nowadays, but for him
she'd do it any night. He specified Italian; she asked if pasta
with broccoli was acceptable; he said that from her, he'd take
even broccoli.

“The thing is, it's fast. You throw the broccoli in with the
spaghetti while it boils, heat some garlic in oil, and you're
done. I don't get home until eight or nine now, Abe.”

“I can take you guys to dinner.”

“No. No, you're too good a friend, and the kids love you,
and so do we. Come Friday.” She didn't say that she worked
Saturdays, and Sundays were for lying in bed if neither of
them had to work that day, too.

And she promised him a baked apple with boiled cider,
which wasn't Italian but was as good as it gets. And so the
date was made.

Rose and Abe sat late at the table, well fed and wined. Alan
was upstairs, making sure the two older kids were doing
homework; the baby was already in bed. They talked about
his family, his troubles.

“Abe, if it happened—if you could—would you take Bea
back?” Bea was Abe's wife.

“Not for a second.” He had been playing with some crumbs
and a knife. “It sounds sexist to start with, doesn't it—the
idea of a husband ‘taking his wife back.'”

“I said it; you didn't.”

“I couldn't. The kids, in a heartbeat. But her—” It was as
if he couldn't pronounce her name. “It's worse than if it had
been some other man. She's a
traitor
, Rose.”

“I thought, maybe—” She smiled almost apologetically.
“Love conquers all?”

“Well, it doesn't.”

When Alan came back, Abe offered to help with the dishes,
said he'd become a good dishwasher since his daughters had
left. Alan said he threw things into a machine and let it do
the work, and he began to demonstrate by carrying dishes
away from the table.

“Could Al and I have a little private talk, Rose?”

“God, yes!” She had no jealousy about such stuff—now.
She started to carry things to the kitchen, too. “Go, go—!”

Alan actually had something like a study. The house was
big, what used to be called a stockbroker Tudor—two captains'
salaries. As they were settling in big chairs, Abe said, “Two
sexists we—women cook, men talk guy talk?”

“Rose and I split the duty. She shops and does the meals
and I do the cleaning-up and the kids. When I can.” He
grunted. “When she can.”

Abe had a long envelope in an inner jacket pocket. Alan
wondered if he had carried it that way so he wouldn't be
seen arriving with a briefcase or an attaché. But seen by
whom?

“I got your list of the people who worked for OIA. I looked
around a little,” Abe said. “Or I had somebody look around.
Big-time law firm, they have some dynamite investigators.”

“My God, Abe, billed to who?”

“Billed to me. No, don't tell me a lot of nonsense; I wanted
to do it. Anyway, I get a cut rate. And in-house, it's entirely
discreet. The woman we use could find Judge Crater if she
had to.” He looked up at Alan over a pair of half-glasses.
“Judge Crater? Have I got so old my references don't mean
anything? Before your time. Before
my
time, in fact. A guy
who disappeared, okay?” He was taking things out of the
envelope and arranging them on the fat, padded arm of his
chair. Alan saw a typed page, several pieces torn from newspapers
and underlined, a hand-written note. The papers were
like a metaphor for a cluttered, disorderly mind. Abe was
brilliant, but again he wondered if he was entirely sane
anymore. His hands, Craik saw, were trembling. “Okay! What
all this impressive paperwork is about is, I know where the
folks from the Office of Information Analysis went.”

“Abe, I didn't ask you to do this.”

“I know you didn't, so you're off the hook.” He opened
his hands. “You want to know what I've got or don't you?”

“Of course I do!”

“Okay then.” Peretz leaned forward. He was pretty much
trapped in the deep chair, and whenever he handed anything
to Alan, he had to grunt and struggle forward. “It's all written
down, but I want the pleasure of telling you about the good
ones. So you have to listen to me. Okay—you know what
the Office of Information Analysis was, right?—do-it-yourself
intel, a bunch of amateurs proud of their virginity. In
the beginning, they were in it only to channel raw intel to
the White House. Raw intel of an acceptable kind, of course.
Then, maybe—this is what you're into, right?—then maybe
they got into a more operational kind of intelligence.

“And that's where maybe it gets interesting. I know I said
to look for people who moved somewhere after the first term,
but there were actually some maybe relevant moves much
earlier. Three people, for example, went to your current shop,
the Defense Intelligence Agency, in 2002.”

“From
OIA
?”

“Am I talking about the Government Printing Office?”

“But my God, Abe—you're saying they had no background
in intel, and they came over into Defense Intelligence?”

“I can even name names: Herman Ritter, Alice K. Einhorn,
Geoffrey Lee. Ring any bells?”

Craik shook his head. “I'll check the DIA phone directory.
It could just be the way people flow through government.
Or the administration placing their own people everywhere.”
He wiped a hand down his face. “But that isn't supposed to
happen in intelligence agencies.”

“Then there's Ray Spinner.”

“Spinner was a munchkin.”

Abe held up the hand-written note. “She had to do a little
tracking on him. They fired his ass out of OIA right after the
clusterfuck in Tel Aviv.” He handed the note over. “February,
2002. He didn't go anywhere else in government. Sort of
dropped out, in fact.”

Alan looked at the scribble. He had known Spinner slightly,
years before, hadn't liked him. “Grad school?”

“That's where she found him.”

Alan folded the note along its old lines and put it on a
desk. “Spinner might know some things. Maybe he's bitter
enough that he'd talk to me.”

Abe made a disgusted face. He'd go to his grave believing
that Spinner had got him shot. He shrugged, as if to rid
himself of Spinner, and went back to his notes. “Okay, to
the important people who moved after the first term ended.
Until 2005, OIA was under a guy named David Sasimo, a
deputy assistant secretary. Big-time dome-head, lots of think-
tank credentials, wrote Op-Ed pieces, all that crap. Okay,
comes the second term, when OIA was eliminated—work is
done, mission accomplished, onward and upward—he went
to Havers University as president. Five times the pay, double
the prestige.”