The Falconer's Tale (37 page)

He walked around a couple of buildings, looking for life.
The wind was raw now, the drizzle turned to real rain. He
started to shiver again. At last, life found him.

“Help you?” a girl said from the corner of a building. She
might have been fifteen, might have been twenty-two, pink-
cheeked, small-chinned, smiling. “You're a bit wet.”

“Been swimming.”

She laughed. “Feels like it, doesn't it.” Her voice went up
and down like the island roads. You could
really
learn to like
living here, he thought.

“Mister Michaels said this was the best place on the island
to see the birds.”

“I don't know a Mister Michaels. Is he a falconer?”

“Friend of mine. American.”

She shook her head. “No, sorry. But we've lots of birds!
We're closed just now, but we're doing an exhibition at four
o'clock; you can come back and see them flighted.”

“Well—” He was trying to play the confused tourist, but
he was shivering so hard he was having a hard time concentrating.
“I'm sure my friend said there was this falconer on
Mull he knew. That was the idea—a personal friend. Let me
get close to the birds.”

“Oh, we couldn't do that.”

“Um.” He tightened his back to stop the shivering. “Is
anybody else on the island into birds?”

“Well, there's the sea eagle project at Craignure. And there's
bird-watchers galore.” She giggled suddenly. “Well, there's
old Mister Hackbutt up at Killbriddy. But he's—” She stopped
as if it would be impolite to say what old Hackbutt was.

“Yeah, Jack said he was a little—” Alan put a shaking hand
out, rocked it back and forth.

She giggled again. “I've never seen him m'self, but I've
heard he can be a little dee-ficult. He's American.”

“We're a difficult lot.”

She laughed, not a giggle but an older, womanly sound.
She looked at him and blushed, as if she might be saying,
You're far too old for me, but still
— He got out his map and she
showed him where Killbriddy was. He saw the double lines
of the “highway”—a single-lane road—then the thread of
what might be a sheep track leading to old Hackbutt's farm.
The rental-car company wouldn't be pleased with what he
was about to do, he thought.

“You really helped.”

“Come back at four.”

“I'd like to.” He really meant it but knew he wouldn't.
But he left smiling, thinking how much he really would like
to come back.

The road to Hackbutt's was not as bad as he'd feared, paved
after a fashion, helped by the lack of other cars. He drove
past the house that corresponded to Hackbutt's location on
the map and went over a hill, up and up, not passing another
house, at last finding a place to turn around where a pasture
gate made a little lay-by. He headed back past the place and
pulled in over the brow of the next hill and walked back off
the road, his pant legs wet from the knees down from the
grass.

He found himself a kind of snuggery in a rock outcrop
and sat down. His waxed-cotton coat gave him a dry seat,
but when he tried to stretch his legs out, the backs of his
thighs were immediately soaked. He put his binoculars to his
eyes and tried to look like a man watching birds.

After an hour, a girl he thought to be in her teens came
down the road on a bicycle from the other direction. She
turned into Hackbutt's and propped the bike against the
house, prompting great enthusiasm in a black-and-white
dog who had been lying near a fence. She didn't go in
but patted the dog and went around the back, then reappeared
heading for some sort of shed, from which she
emerged after fifteen minutes with a bucket whose weight
pulled her far down to that side. He thought she was probably
like the young girls you see around stables, who
wouldn't run a vacuum cleaner at home but were delighted
to muck out horseshit for free. He watched the girl go to
a series of pens, some invisible behind trees or other buildings,
the bucket getting lighter as she worked. It took her
forty-five minutes. He saw only two birds; the rest, he
guessed, were inside the ramshackle coops that dotted the
terrain behind the house. Then she took the dog for a
quick walk beyond the fence and got back on her bike,
rubbing her hands on her wet blue jeans—blood, he
guessed, from raw meat for the birds—and pedaled up the
long hill and out of sight.

The falconer and Piat weren't there, then. And they were
away for at least the day and maybe more, or they wouldn't
have needed the girl.

Craik walked down to the farm and looked in the house
windows. A few items from Bali or someplace similar,
souvenirs—Hackbutt had lived in Southeast Asia, perhaps.
Another window showed him a not particularly clean kitchen,
another a bedroom. The bedroom told him that a woman
lived there, too.

He caught the last ferry of the day and was on the late
plane out of Glasgow for London. No sleeper trains on
Saturdays. He was thinking about what he would tell Rose
when he called home. He would say,
I've found us a place to
retire to
.

To begin with, Piat's flight was two hours late getting to
Bahrain.

Bahrain was, as usual, full of surveillance—it just wasn't
directed at him. He passed through several bubbles and noted
their activity—local police, local military, American. All busy
watching somebody else.

He went to his hotel, a faceless modern high-rise, and right
to his room to shower and try to wash off some of the jet
lag. He put a cell phone where he could reach it from the
shower—one call and the cell phone would be finished, but
the call was an important one. It was the comm link with
whoever had brought Bella into Bahrain.

He had finished the shower and had dressed again and
was lying on the bed thinking about how he would recruit
Mohamed when the ditzy little jingling went off.

“Yes?”

“Uh—I'm calling about a bird.”

That's what the man was supposed to say, silly as it sounded.
Piat said that birds could be found at the Manama zoo, which
also sounded equally silly but was supposed to satisfy the
guy at the other end.

“Uh, yeah—well—”

“Where and when?”

“Uh, sir, well— Uh, there's a small problem.”

Small problem
never meant small. Piat cursed silently and
felt his blood pressure go up. What he was supposed to do
next was walk the route he'd want Hackbutt to take next
morning. “What kind of problem?”

“Uh, sir, the bird is, uh, sick.”

“Sick! Sick how?”

“He
looks
sick. He isn't eating. He's, uh, kind of shaggy—”

“It's a she, not a he. Where have you got her? Is she in
the animal quarters?” Bella was supposed to be in the special
animal transfer facility at Manama International, or at least
that was where Piat had expected her to be. They had a vet
there, and they should know how to care for even an eagle
that was off its feed.

“No, sir. She didn't come in to Manama. We have her at
another location.”

Unless she'd come over the causeway by truck or in some
cockamamie boat by sea, that meant she had been landed
at the Navy airfield. Piat could feel his blood pressure rising
still farther.
We spies avoid military installations like the plague
.
One or two visits to a military base, and you're made
. Then he
realized that Partlow had probably saved money, and maybe
time and trouble, by consigning Bella to the military.

“I want to see her.”

“Yes, sir, that's why I'm calling.”

“At once.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was poor procedure. They were supposed to deliver the
bird to him, and he was supposed to hand it over to Hackbutt.
Piat had left a few hours for contingencies, although nothing
like this; Hackbutt would fly in four hours from now. By
then, Bella was supposed to be at Hackbutt's hotel, which
had been alerted that he would have a falconing bird in his
room. Arabs understood things like that.

Now this. So, the first phase of the op plan went out the
window, and Piat heaved himself off the bed and went downstairs
to wait for a man named Carl. When he appeared, Carl
looked like somebody who might have come to fix the air-
conditioner: he had thinning brown hair, a stoop, granny
glasses, and a gray golf jacket that looked as if it ought to
have his name over the pocket.

“I'm Carl.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. Piat was to
see a lot of that gesture in the next couple of hours. Carl
offered ID, which was useless to Piat; it said his name was
Carl Trost and his face looked much like that of the man in
the glasses and the jacket. So what?

“Let's go.”

“I got my car.”

Piat didn't want to get into Carl's car—bad security, bad
tradecraft, and danger. Getting into a car with a stranger was
as stupid in an agent as it was in a teenage hitchhiker.

Piat did it anyway. He did register the fact that Carl's car
was a rental. Significant? Did he care?

Once they were in the car and rolling, Carl started to say
again how sorry they were. Whoever “they” were. The
transfer company, Piat thought. He was trying not to show
signs of impatience or nervousness, but in fact he was in a
rage because he wanted to focus on Mohamed. This part of
the operation was supposed to run on automatic.

Carl navigated a roundabout and passed Bahrain's largest
mosque. Piat was pretty sure they were headed for the military
base. “Where are we going?”

“Navy base. You know it?”

Yes, he knew it, but he didn't say so. It had been a while,
because it was one of many places in Bahrain where he
shouldn't be seen. Piat changed the subject to Bella's condition,
which lasted for only a few seconds; then there was
silence until the car rolled to a stop at the gate of the base.
Carl showed a plastic ID. Piat concentrated on it—it wasn't
a military ID, and it had a red edge and a photo. Other than
that, he didn't recognize the type. Not State Department, not
diplomatic security, not military. Absolutely not Agency. But
as American as apple pie. Carl was passed through with a
wave. Nobody had even requested Piat to show ID.

Okay, so Carl had easy access to the base but didn't live
in Bahrain, if he could judge from the rental car.

Carl drove too fast along the base's crowded streets, past
Fifth Fleet headquarters and the NCIS office, to where the
pavement gave way to a dirt track lined with warehouses,
then trailers. He stopped next to a trailer. “Not very upscale,”
Carl said with an apologetic bob and a push at his glasses.

They had to cross a plank over a foundation to get to the
front step of the trailer, which was a only piece of plywood
nailed across two supports. The interior was warm and
smelled of bird shit. Bella was sitting on a Navy-issue desk
with newspaper, perhaps originally spread under her,
scratched and pulled into loose wads around her.

The cage in which she had left Mull was on the floor. It
had a crack running from the top of the door all the way
across to the back, with a hole the size of a grapefruit punched
in the top.

“Sick, bullshit!” he shouted. “What the hell happened?”

“Uh, well, as I understand it, the guy with the forklift—
uh, Arab guy—there was some kind of uh accident when
they unloaded—”

Piat went straight to Bella. She was underweight—he could
see her weight loss from the doorway. And she was dirty.
But she was not, so far as he could see, injured.

“Get me some water,” Piat snapped.

Carl snatched a gallon plastic jug and walked down the trailer.
“I don't know a thing about taking care of birds.
Is
he sick?”

Piat took the whole weight of her on his arm—his ungloved
arm and wrist. Bella was quiet. He stroked her head. “Turn
up the goddam air-conditioning! And get me some raw
chicken. And a heavy glove. Any goddam glove.”

“Yes, sir.” Carl was back with the water—and another man.
A very different type—older, a bit of a gut, muscle. Dark-
skinned, “African American,” but maybe Latino, as well.
“Raw chicken,” Carl said. He looked at the other man, who
looked back and shook his head. He didn't do raw chicken,
he meant.

Carl was out the door. Carl was good at obeying.

Piat poured water into the cap of the jug and held it while
Bella poked the water with her beak. He repeated the process
again and again. Bella developed some energy as she drank,
and her wings stirred, and her talons began to lacerate Piat's
wrist.

Piat had heard the car start outside and heard Carl drive
away. He walked up and down the trailer, ignoring the lances
of pain from his wrist, crooning to Bella, stroking her feathers.
He found a heavy web belt in a kitchen and shifted Bella
while he wrapped the belt around his left arm and wrist and
then put her on it. He gave her more water. He sang “Roland
the Headless Thompson Gunner” for her.

The whole time, the dark-skinned guy watched him. When
Piat walked Bella out of the office and down the trailer, he
followed. Then he followed them back. Piat said, “You got a
name?”

“Yeah.”

Piat decided not to make anything of it. He had problems
enough.

Piat wanted to build her a real perch. He started rifling
the trailer, moving carefully with the bird on his arm from
countertop to desktop. The nameless man followed him. Piat
removed a curtainless rod from a window, and jammed it
into a corner, supporting one end on a window ledge and
the other on a hole he seemed to have punched in the wallboard.
He found an aluminum foil tray from somebody's
takeaway lunch under the packaging and warranties for a
couple of international pagers in the wastebasket, washed it
out in the kitchen sink and wired it next to the perch with
wire he found on spools from another desk. He filled the
aluminum tray with water.

Bella watched him work with her head on one side, then
hopped up on the rod and began to drink again. Piat salvaged
the newspapers from the desk and laid them on the floor
under her. Under the newspaper he found the extensive
packaging for the two international pagers. He made a food
tray from one of the heavy plastic bubbles. He put all the
rest of the packaging into the wastebasket on the crap from
the pagers. The other man watched him all the time and,
when he was finished with the wastebasket, put his foot on
top of the contents and pushed them way down. Human
trash compacter.

Piat heard the car outside and went back to Bella.

Carl held out a bag as soon as he was through the door.
“Don't know about the gloves. Chicken's fresh.” He saw Bella
and pushed his glasses up. “She going to be okay?”

“I'm not a vet. She could
die
for all I know. And then you
guys are responsible. Understand?” Piat pulled a pair of
gardening gloves out of the bag. Better than nothing.

The other guy grinned, and Carl shot him a look and he
went blank, so maybe there was some question about who was
in charge here. Carl, at any rate, was the one who made the
apologies and said it wasn't their doing, and they were sorry,
and he thought the bird looked better already. And so on.

Piat fed her some chicken, concealing most of the chicken
breast in the glove as he had seen Hackbutt do. “I can't feed
her too much. It'll hurt more than it helps. She'll need to
be fed again tonight.” Piat was trying not to think of anything
but Bella. He needed to get over this hurdle; then he'd worry
about the rest, Mohamed most of all.

He fed her some more and then put her on the perch.
Carl took the rest of the chicken off to the kitchen. When
he came back, the dark-skinned man went off to the back
of the trailer. He had said one word—yeah.

“I can't use this cage for her,” Piat said. He had been
looking at it. Bad enough that it looked like hell—the prince
would be put off—but a lot worse that she could catch her
neck in the crack if she tried to put her head out the hole.
He didn't want a strangled bird. That would end the operation
before they ever got to Mohamed. He looked at his
watch, making sure he had time to get to the airport to meet
Hackbutt. “You guys owe me a cage.”

“And we're on it. I've got my girl right on it. She's found
one that we think will be okay, but she's still calling around
because we, uh, because we know this is on our nickel and
we're obligated. Really. We'll deliver her to you in a brand-
new cage. I swear it.”

“The bird was to have been delivered to me two hours
ago. You bring her to me and I find her underweight and
scared and with no water! You know what this bird is worth?”

“Uh, yes, sir, no—I can hazard a guess but I don't know.
She's a valuable bird. We're on it—really. We'll deliver her
in a new cage by five local. Honest.” He looked hard at Piat.
“Are you born again?”

“Oh, come on—”

“I am. We don't say ‘Honest to God,' but when we say
something we know we stand in Jesus' sight. I mean this,
sir. Five o'clock.”

Piat was looking down at the desk at an untidy litter of
correspondence. He could see three dates from several
months before. All three had a letterhead for Force Air.
Glancing at it, he had thought it said Forced Air, and he
thought how funny it would be if Carl really was an air-
conditioning man. But it said Force Air. He said, “You with
Force Air, Carl?”

“Yes, sir.”

That made some sense. Maybe one of the Agency's inhouse
airlines. That would be Partlow's style, he thought.

“Well, I know who to blame, then. Five o'clock. You better
be there with the bird and new cage, or you're up shit creek.
Can you get her into the new cage?”

“Uh—well, if I have to—” Carl was looking at the glove,
which Piat had tossed on the desk.

“Don't try to handle her. Don't try to feed her until then.
Then, put a little of the chicken in the new cage. Let her see
it and smell it before you put it in.” He was thinking of
Hackbutt in Kenya, luring the red-tailed hawk out of the
tree. “Maybe she'll walk right in. If she doesn't, you call me,
same number you did before.” So the one-call phone would
become a two-call phone. Bad procedure, bad security. It was
a clusterfuck. “Okay?”

Carl pushed his glasses up his nose and said “sir” several
times and “yes” several times, and, staying away from Bella,
he circled around to Piat and asked if he wanted to stay in
the trailer with the bird or did he want to go into Manama?

He checked his watch again. No point in letting Carl know
anything about what he was doing. “Take me back to my
hotel.” He'd get a cab there to the airport.