“Okay,” he said, “I think we ought to bump something back to Ver Steeg. The hell with cables. I think we can call it in. Then we can open a link to Mexican Intelligence — I’m sure we have some guys in Mexico City who are in tight with them — and get a license to do some nosing around over there.
“Bill, I was saying—”
“I know, I know,” said Speight, nodding. He took a long swallow. Trewitt knew he had once upon a time been a real comer, a man with a great future, though it was hard to believe it now. He looked so seedy and didn’t want to be rushed into some mistake.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “That’s a great idea, a fine idea. But maybe we ought to hold off on this one. Just for a while.”
“But why?” Trewitt wanted to know. They sat in a dim bar, at last safe from the bright desert sun that seemed to bleach the color from the day almost instantly. They were not far from the border itself. Trewitt had glimpsed it just a few minutes ago; it looked like the Berlin wall, wire and gates and booths, and behind it he had seen shacks crusted on suddenly looming hills, a few packed, dirty streets — he had seen Mexico.
“Well …” Bill paused.
Trewitt waited.
“First, it never pays to make a big thing out of your own dope. Second, it never pays to rush in. Third, I am an old man and it’s a hot day. Let’s just sit on it, turn it around, see how it looks after the sun goes down.”
“Well, the procedure is—”
“I know all the procedures, Jim.”
“I just thought—”
“What I’d like to do — you can come along too, if you want; you might find it interesting — what I’d like to do is a little quiet nosing around. Let’s just see what we can develop in a calm way.”
“I don’t know,” said Trewitt. Mexico? It frightened him a little bit.
“We’ll go as tourists.
It seemed to take a great deal of time for her to cross the shelf of worn grass that separated the Georgian mansions of several Harvard houses from the cold Charles. She wore jeans over boots and her tweed jacket over a turtleneck. Her hair was hidden in a knit cap. She had on sunglasses and wore no makeup. She looked more severe, perhaps more bohemian, certainly more academic than last night.
Chardy walked to meet her.
“You get some sleep?”
“I’m fine,” she said, without smiling.
“Let’s go down to that bridge.”
His head ached and he was a little nervous. A jogger, ears muffed against the cold, loped by and then, traveling the other direction, a cyclist on one of those jazzy, low-slung bikes. They reached the bridge at last, and walked to its center, passing between trees only a little open to the coming of spring.
Chardy leaned his elbows against the stone railing, feeling the cold wind bite; his ears stung. He had no gloves, he’d left them somewhere. Chardy could feel Johanna next to him. She had her arms closed around her body and looked cold.
He scanned the left bank, Memorial Drive, which ran through the trees. Cars sped along it. He looked off to the right, where the road was called Storrow Drive and studied the traffic on it, too.
“This should be all right,” he said.
“What are you worried about?”
“They have parabolic mikes that can pick you up at two hundred feet. But you need a lot of gear to make it work, which means you need a van or a truck. I was looking for a van or a truck parked inconspicuously somewhere.”
Chardy looked down at the water.
“I think,” he said, “they’ve only let me see a little of the operation. I think it’s much bigger than they’ve let me know. I haven’t worked it out just yet — just what they’re up to, just how much more they know than they say they know. They’ve got me working with some jerk without a human twitch in his body and an Ivy League drone and a dreamy kid. It’s got to be bigger. I just know it is. And somebody’s watching.”
“You gave me such an awful night, Paul.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What choice do I really have?”
“None. If you care for him.”
“I hate the fact we don’t have a choice.”
“I hate it too. But that’s the game.”
The wind was quite strong; he turned against it, looked the other way down the curving river. He could see the rower, fighting his way back to the boathouse.
“You hurt us so bad, Paul. Oh, you hurt us, Paul.”
“Things happen,” Chardy said. “You do your best and sometimes it’s not nearly enough. I just got into something I couldn’t handle. I’d give anything, my life, to have it to do over again. But I can’t do anything about it.”
The wind had really become strong now, and he could see it pushing up small waves in the river.
“Don’t they believe in spring in Boston?” he said.
“Not till June.”
“Has he gotten to you? Has anybody reached you?”
“No.”
“Can you think of what he might do? Is there a Kurdish community, an exile community, where he might go? Are there people who might help him? Where can we look for him? What can we expect?”
“There’s no Kurdish community, Paul. A few Kurds, I suppose. Paul, there’s something I have to tell you. Something else. It was something I wanted to put into the book, but I couldn’t. It’s something I just wanted to forget, to bury away. But it comes back on me, Paul. It comes back at odd moments. I think it’s made me a little crazy.”
Chardy turned to look at her.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”
“We went into the clearing after the helicopters left. We thought we could help people.” She giggled in an odd way. “And we did. Most of them were … blown apart. You’ve been in wars; you’d know.”
“It’s—”
“It was like a meat shop. The bullet holes were burning, had burned through people. There was a smell of cooked meat. Paul, one of his boys was still alive. He had a bullet in his stomach that was burning. He was crying terribly. He was crying for his father. Ulu Beg knelt and told him that he loved him and kissed him on the lips and shot him through the temple with that gun you gave him. Then he walked around, shooting other people in pain. His own son, then maybe fifteen, maybe twenty others. They were all screaming.”
Chardy was shaking his head slowly, breathing with difficulty.
“That was what it cost to become involved with the Americans, Paul. Not only the death of his family, his tribe, his way of life, but that he was required to kill his own child.”
Chardy could say nothing.
“We’ve got to save him,” she said.
“Somehow we’ll do it,” he said.
It’s a funny place for a war — or maybe not. Anyway, it
It is a simple proposition: analysts are warriors. Given a terminal with access to the database, then given a mission by the upstairs people, they simply hunt for ways to make things happen. They look for links, oddities, chinks in armor; they look for irregularities, eccentricities, quirks, obsessions; they look for proofs, patterns, fates, tendencies. They comb, they cull, they sift and file. The good ones are calm and bright and, most importantly, literal-minded. They just have a brain for this kind of thing, a symbiosis with the software based on the sure knowledge that the machine is never ironic, never witty, never clever: it always says just what it means and does just what it is told; it has no quaint personality, but at the same time its etiquette is remorseless and its willingness to forgive nonexistent.
Down here also there are champions. Some men just do better than others, by gifts of genes or drive, by luck, by nerve. Miles Lanahan was one such. It was said he could do more with less data than any man in the pit. He became a kind of legend himself, and got so good, made them so scared of his talent, that he actually rose from the pit and entered the real world, the operational realm. It had not happened before in the pit’s living memory. The current champion, however, was Michael Bluestein.
Michael Bluestein, twenty-four, had been a math major at MIT; he had the lazy genius, that unerring sureness of touch that scared everybody too. He also worked like a horse. On the same Sunday afternoon that Chardy struggled to come to terms with Johanna while evading Miles, Michael Bluestein sat in jeans and a polo shirt (Sunday shift cavalierly ignores the unstated dress code — another tradition) in the semidarkness in his cubicle in front of his VDT, nursing a sore left index finger — he played first-base on a softball team (his teammates thought he worked at the Pentagon, which he encouraged because he caught such shit if he mentioned the Agency) and the day before, at practice, he had jammed it, pulling a low throw from the dirt. Now, stuff flowed across his screen, plucked up from the Ongoing Ops file on a random basis by the machine for his delectation, for his best effort. The stuff was Kurdish poetry.
Not that Bluestein was a fan of poetry: he didn’t know T. S. Eliot from Elliot Maddox. But there was a big scam going on up at Security, and a sense of crisis had suffused the entire apparatus. Bluestein, not immune to these vibrations, could feel it. He didn’t exactly know
Funny, there wasn’t much. Only the legendary Melman Report, the postmortem on Saladin II, and since Bluestein wasn’t Blue Level cleared yet, he couldn’t get the code to call it up. But there was very little else to go on; nobody knew much about the Kurds, or maybe some of the stuff was missing from the records. There was no pre-mission dope on Saladin II, none of the working papers or feasibility studies were there. Mildly odd, but not unheard of. There was also no critique scenario of the operation, pinpointing why it went sour. Again, mildly odd, but not unheard of. It wasn’t that he
But there were public documents, material acquired randomly, perhaps as part of Saladin II’s planning, perhaps as part of the postmortem, and never examined terribly closely before. Political pamphlets, position papers, volumes of poetry (the Kurds are extremely poetic), posters, the text of an appeal to the U.N. in 1968 accusing the Iraqis of genocide, the notes of Baathist (reform party) meetings, Command Council decrees, hymns, the usual detritus of a failed political movement, all of it begrudgingly translated into English and programmed into the machine for textual examination.
Bluestein looked at the poem before him. Surely the translation was a poor one, for even allowing for his lack of enthusiasm for the material and even allowing for the Islamic tendency toward flowery, overstated rhetoric, it was simply awful.
for the sake
of liberated Kurdistan.
the vengeance of the Kurds
and of Kurdistan.
We shall wreak vengeance
upon the many guilty hands
which sought
to destroy the Kurds …
Bluestein had read enough. He cleared a line and typed EN on the screen, directing the computer to remove this one and pick out something new from the Kurdish file.
Another poem! They need an English major, not a math star, thought Bluestein. What was he supposed to make of it, anyhow? The preliminary note explained that this item was from a 1958 edition of
well!
We the Kurds must be strong
and fight the masters of war
who would have us surrender.
We must fight the jackals of the night,
we must be lions.
We must fight the falcons of the sky,
we must be lions.
We must fight the merchants of honey
who offer sweet promises
and scents of delight
yet sell bitter, dead kernels
that become bones under the earth.
We must be lions.
He swiftly sent the item back into the computer memory and diddled up another from the Kurdish file, and while he waited for it to arrive he nursed his aching finger. His legs ached a little too; he was very tall, and they didn’t quite fit in the cubicle without bending in places where they oughtn’t bend. He wiggled the finger. Broken? No, probably not. He could bend it; it wasn’t swollen too badly.
A new item trundled up across the screen. Poetry? Blessedly, no. The prelim note explained that it was an anonymous propaganda bulletin issuing from HEZ, a radical Kurdish underground group in Iraq, dated June of 1975, just a few months after Saladin II was closed down. It was predictably vitriolic, a torrent of abuse directed at the United States in general and one of its public figures in particular.
Bluestein had read a hundred of them and doubtless would read a hundred more. Pity the people in Translation who sit there all day long and work the stuff into English, so that it can be programmed into the computer memory. Don’t they ever get
here
Bluestein scanned the green letters, the columns of type flying across the screen. How long is this one, how long will it go on, what the hell is he looking for, why are they so scared, why is this so big, who is Yost Ver Steeg, why doesn’t my finger stop hurting, why did Shelly Naskins dump me three years ago, when is
Bluestein halted.
Something just went click.
He looked very closely at the words before him, almost saying them aloud, feeling their weight, lipping their shape.
“… a merchant of honey, who offered us sweet promises” — this was an American somebody in HEZ was describing — “and scents of delight. Vet he sold bitter, dead kernels that became bones under the earth.”