Chardy said nothing.
“Well, sure you do, Paul,” Bill said. “We took that Skorpion and twenty-five hundred of those rounds into Kurdistan with us in ’seventy-three In the operation we called Saladin Two, the Kurdish show. My show, your show. Especially, at the end, your show. Along with the other stuff, the AKs, the RPGs. Enough to start a small war. And we did start a small war.”
Bill knew all about gear. His specialty was logistics, clandestine resupply, and he had organized the distribution of arms to guerrilla operations all over the globe, back when he was one of the cowboys of the Special Operations Division. He had been through some hairy moments himself.
Chardy nodded, as if in memory of the small war and its hairy moments.
“And you recall that you gave Skorpion to a certain man?”
“I gave it to Ulu Beg,” Chardy said. “Where’d you get it?”
Speight told him of the deaths of the two Border Patrol officers.
“That case was one of forty recovered on the site. He fired two magazines. Those officers were torn up pretty bad. You know what a Skorpion can do.”
The Skorpion was a Czech VZ-61, a machine pistol. Ten inches long with its wire stock folded, it weighed three and a half pounds and fired at 840 rounds per minute, cyclical. It was one of the world’s rare true machine pistols, smaller than a submachine gun and deadlier than an automatic pistol.
“Bill, it’s just one shell. You’re dreaming. You’re building crazy cases from nothing. A shell, an arsenal mark, a scratch in the brass.”
“And there’s this, Paul,” Bill said. He reached into his briefcase and after thumbing through the reports from Science and Technology, the airline tickets, the maps, he came up with a picture of a body in the desert.
Chardy looked at it.
“How was he facing?” Chardy asked.
“He was facing east. The report says the body was moved. They think the killer was searching for money or something. Yet the wallet was left untouched. They can’t figure it. But you could figure it, couldn’t you?”
“Sure,” Chardy said. “He didn’t mean to kill the guy. He didn’t want to. He felt bad about it. So in the frenzy of the moment, he tries to help his soul to paradise. He turns him on his right side, and faces him toward Mecca, as the Kurds bury their dead.”
“You saw enough of it, Paul.”
“I guess I did. A Kurd is here. Maybe Ulu Beg himself.”
“Yes, Paul. After all, we never got any confirmation of his death after Saladin Two went under. And if it’s any of them, it’s him. And you know how the Kurds feel about vengeance.”
A bell rang.
Bill looked to Chardy. The moment was here; shouldn’t Chardy be reacting? A man he’d trained and fought next to and lived with seven years ago in Kurdistan was here, with a gun, willing to kill.
The children began to collect in a riotous mass near a set of steel double doors. Nuns appeared. Small skirmishes broke out.
“Mr. Chardy—” a nun called from the doors.
“Paul, it’s—”
“I know what it is, Bill,” Chardy said. “Goddamn you, Bill, for bringing all this back.” He turned and went inside with the kids.
So Bill had to wait after all. He found a bar, a seedy, quiet little place in the next town up the road, and killed the afternoon with rum-and-Cokes at a table near a pinball machine in an empty room. He smoked half a pack of Vantages. He set the glasses before him in a neat formation. He had five of them at the end.
He’s got to come, he thought. He’ll think it over; he’ll see it’s just as much his job as anybody’s. Ulu Beg is a loose end of a Chardy operation, no matter that Chardy was kicked out, no matter that he’s been hiding out here, playing schoolteacher all these years. He has to come, Bill thought, wobbly.
It’s his legacy. He stood for something, all those years. He was one of the heroes, one of the cowboys, and the thing about the cowboys, they never said no. Nothing was too hairy for a cowboy. They were crazy, some people said, they were animals; and lots of the staff couldn’t stand them. But when you needed a cowboy, he was there, he went in. He lived for going in; it’s why he became a cowboy in the first place, wasn’t it?
Bill tried to convince himself. He looked at his Seiko and had trouble reading the hands. He’d had too much to drink; he knew it.
“You okay, mister?” The waitress, looking down at him.
“Sure, I’m fine.”
“You better call it quits,” she said.
“Truer words,” he said, laughing grandly, “was never spoke.”
The traffic had gotten pretty thick and he didn’t reach Our Lady of the Resurrection until 5:15. He parked again in the visitors’ space and walked across the empty playground to the school and entered.
He blinked in the darkness. Children’s paintings hung along the dim corridor. Speight thought them absurd, cows and barns and airplanes with both wings on the same side of the fuselage. The crucifixes made him nervous, too, all that agony up there on bland, pale green walls. He encountered a nun and overdid the smile, worried she’d smell the booze or pick up on the vagueness in his walk. But she only smiled back, a surprisingly young girl. Next he found a group of boys, scrawny and sweaty in gym clothes, herding into a locker room. They seemed so young, their bones so tiny, their faces so drawn, like child laborers in some Dickensian blacking factory. But one was bigger, a black boy, probably the star.
“Is Mr. Chardy around, son?” Speight asked him.
“Back there,” the boy said, pointing down the hall.
The destination turned out to be an old gym, waxy yellow under weak lights that hung in cages too low off the raftered ceiling. They must have built this place twenty years before they built their slick glass-and-brick cathedral. One end of it was an auditorium, with a stageful of amateurish props for what would be some dreadful production. Speight saw Chardy, in gray sweats, a wet double dark spot like Mickey Mouse ears growing splotchily across his chest, with some kind of bright band, like an Indian brave or something, around his head at the hairline. He wore white high-topped gym shoes and was methodically sinking one-handed jump shots from twenty or twenty-five feet out. He’d dribble once or twice, the sound of full, round leather against the wood echoing through the still air, then seize the ball and seem to weigh it. Then the ball rode his fingers up to his shoulders, paused, and was launched, even as Chardy himself left the floor. The ball rose perfectly, then fell and, more often than not as Speight watched, swished through. Occasionally it did miss, however, and then the bearded man would lazily gallop after it and scoop it off the bounce one-handed, and turn and rise and fire again, and he looked pretty good for a man — what, now? — nearly forty. He did not miss twice in a row in the ten silent minutes Bill stood in the doorway watching him.
At last Bill called, “You’re still a star.”
Chardy did not look over. He completed another shot, then answered, “Still got the touch.”
His talent with a ball was one part of the legend. During his two stateside tours — disasters in other respects — he’d torn up the Langley gym league, where a surprisingly competitive level of basketball was played by ex-college jocks; Chardy had set scoring records that, for all Bill knew, still stood. Chardy had been some kind of All-American at the small college he’d gone to on a scholarship, and he’d had a tryout with a pro team.
He canned another jumper and then seemed to tire of the exercise. The ball rolled across the floor into darkness. Chardy retrieved a towel and came over to Bill.
“Well, Old Bill, I see I didn’t wait you out.”
“Did you really want to, Paul?”
Chardy only smiled at this interesting question.
Then he said, “I guess they want me. I guess I’m an asset again.”
Why deny it? Speight thought. “They do. You are.”
Chardy considered this.
“Who’s running the show. Melman?”
“Melman’s a big man now. Didn’t you know? He’s Deputy Director of the whole Operations Directorate. He’ll be Director of it someday, maybe even DCI if they decide to stay in the shop.”
Chardy snorted at the prospect of Sam Melman as Director of Central Intelligence, with his picture on the cover of
“What the hell is this ‘Operations’?” Chardy asked suddenly.
He really had been out of touch, Speight realized.
“I’m sorry. You were in the mountains, I guess, when they reorganized. I didn’t learn until later myself. Plans is now called Operations.”
“It sounds like a World War Two movie.”
“Paul, forget Operations. Forget the old days, the old guys. Forget all that stuff. Forget Melman. He was just doing his job. He’ll be a long way away from you. Think about Ulu Beg in America.”
“All the stuff about Ulu Beg is in the reports, in the files. The reports of the Melman inquiry. Tell them to dig that stuff out.”
“They already have, Paul. Paul, you know Ulu Beg, you trained him. You fought with him, you know his sons. You were like a brother to him. You—”
But talk of Ulu Beg seemed to hurt Chardy. He looked away, and Speight saw that he’d have to play his last card, the one he didn’t care for, the one that smelled. But it had been explained to him in great detail how important all this was, how he could not fail.
“Paul—” He paused, full of regret Chardy deserved better than the shot he was about to get. “Paul, we’re going to have to bring Johanna Hull in too.”
Chardy said, “I can’t help you there. I wish I could. Look, I have to take a shower.”
“Paul, maybe I’d better make myself clearer.” He wished he’d sucked down a few more rum-and-Cokes. “These are very cold people, Paul, these people in Security. They’re very cold about everything except results. They’re going to have to bring Johanna under some kind of control — and they want you to do it — because they think Ulu Beg will go to her. She’s about the only place he could go. But if you don’t do it, believe me, they’ll find somebody who will.”
Chardy looked at him with disgust.
“It’s gone that far?”
“They’re very frightened of Ulu Beg. They’ll play rough on this one.”
“I guess they will,” Chardy said, and Speight knew he’d won his little victory.
But what could they do? For he was in the mountains now. Ulu Beg felt almost comfortable here; he knew this place. He had been born and raised in mountains and fought in mountains and these, though in many ways different, were in just as many ways the same as his own.
They were known as the Sierritas, ranging northward from the border for twenty or thirty kilometers before panning out into cruel desert plain on the way to the American city of Tucson.
These mountains were perfect, a wilderness of bucking scrub foothills shot with oaks and bitter, brittle little plants poking through the stony ground; until, reaching the altitude of 5,000 feet, they exploded suddenly into stone, a cap, a head of pure rock, bare and raw and forbidding. The saying went, “Each mountain is a fortress,” and he felt the security of a fortress up here.
Let them come. He’d learned his skills in a hundred hard places and tested them in a hundred more and would set his against anybody’s in mountains. But he doubted Americans would try him. They were said to be a people of pleasure, not bravery. Still, suppose they had a Jardi to send against him?
The Kurd paused on a ledge, staring at the peaks about him, dun-colored in the bright sun. Everywhere he looked it was still and silent, except for a push of wind against his face.
What if it were written above that a Jardi would be sent against him? What if that were God’s will?
Who knew the will of God? What point was there in worrying about it? Yet, still …
But there was another advantage, beyond security, to the solitude in the higher altitudes. And that was privacy: he could still think like a Kurd, move like a Kurd,
“You must be one of them,” he had been instructed. “But it won’t be hard,” they assured him. “Americans think only of themselves. They have no eyes for the man next to them. But of course, certain small adjustments must be made in your natural ways. Do you agree?”
“Yes,” he said. “Teach me. I will make any sacrifice, pay any cost. My life is nothing. It has no meaning other than as the instrument of my vengeance.”
“Excellent,” they complimented him. “Your hate is very pure, and to be nourished. It will sustain you through many difficulties. Some men must be taught to hate. You come to it with a gift. You are holy. You make a holy war.”
“This is not holy,” he had said, glaring, and watched them show their discomfort at the force of his glare. “It is a blasphemy. I must defile myself. But it is no matter.”
He moved northward through the mountains slowly, enjoying his journey. He crossed a dirt road late in the night in a low place. He skirted campsites, places where Americans came to play. The sky was fiercely blue, angrily blue, and in it a sun of almost pure whiteness, a radiance, beat down. The clouds were thin and scattered. At the top of one mountain he could see nothing but other mountains. One spine of crests gave way to another. There was dust everywhere, carried by the wind, and even patches of snow, scaly and weak, that gave when he put his American boots through them. At twilight the mountains were at their richest and in the shadows and the soft air they seemed almost
At one point he saw a vehicle. He ducked back, for just a second, terrified. The thing lurched up a gravel track, an ungainly beast. Something in the way it moved: sluggish yet determined. He felt his body tensing, and a feeling of nakedness — the nakedness of the prey — overwhelmed him.
The vehicle pulled to a level stretch. He saw it was almost a bus, gaudily painted, an expensive thing. Bicycles were lashed to its rear and the top was bulky with camping gear. He sat back, watching the thing move. It was obviously some kind of vacation truck for rich or fancy Americans, so that they could tour the wilderness in high style, never far from showers and hot water.
He watched it poke along beneath him, pulling a trail of dust, glinting absurdly, its bright colors flashing in the sunlight. It was almost a comical sight, a preposterous American invention. No other country but America could have produced such a thing. He wanted to smile at the idiocy of it.
America!
Land of wealthy fools!
Yet he continued to breathe heavily as the machine passed from view. Why? What frightens me about this monstrosity? You’ll be among them soon, if things go well. Is this how you’ll perform, frozen with terror at the sight of the outlandish?
You’ll never make it.
I must make it.
But it had been terror in his heart. Why?
Was it the shooting at the border? Would there be a huge manhunt for him? Would his mission be endangered? These things troubled him, but not nearly so much as the killing of the two men.
It put a darkness on his journey, a bad beginning. Damn that fat Mexican! They had told him this Mexican knew the best way, the safest way. The Mexican would get him across.
What would happen to the Mexican now? He was glad he wasn’t the Mexican, because he knew now the Mexican was expendable. They would have to take care of the Mexican, because of the stir the shooting would make.
Death, more death, still more death. It was a chain. Every little thing leading out of the past into the future: heavy with death.
The two policemen, dead, for being in the wrong place. The Mexican, dead. And he himself, ultimately, finally …
“If they catch you, you have failed. They will never free you. They will use you and use you. Do you understand this?”
“I do.”
“It is not that in captivity you no longer can advance your cause; it is that you hurt it. You destroy it. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“Swear then. We will help and support you, but you must swear. You will not be taken alive. Do you swear?”
“Beware the desert,” he’d been told. “If you have to cross the desert you are an unlucky man.”
But beyond the desert lay Tucson and in Tucson lay a bus route into America and toward the Northeast, where his destiny was
There is no silence in the mountains, for always there is wind, and always something to blow in its path. Here, on the bright floor of the earth, he could hear nothing. There was no wind, no noise, nothing but the sound of his own boots sloughing through the dust or across the fine rocks.
There was no water either, and the heat was suffocating. He thought only of water. But there was no water and no mercy, only the sense that he had to move ahead. Miles beyond stood a last escarpment of hills, and beyond that had to lie Tucson.
He hurried onward, the dust thick in his throat. The saguaro cactus towered above him, exotic and beckoning. And a hundred other needled monsters, some whose delicate flowers mocked their ugly spikes. Small tough leaves slashed at his boots. He raced ahead, exposed in the great undulating flatness. He knew he had only a day to make the journey, for he’d freeze out here at night, and the next day the sun would come and bake him.