Blood Makes Noise (11 page)

“Let’s get out of here.”

She touched his hand. “It’s okay, Michael.”

“We’ll do better down the street.”

“Promise?”

“On a stack of flatfoots.”

She laughed, and it cooled Michael off. He waved the waiter over, asked for the check. The waiter shrugged in the direction of the other table. “The gentlemen there took care of it.” A curdled wave from Norris.

He could just walk out—he wanted to—but then all of BA would be hot with the buzz by morning.

They walked over. “Thanks, Bud.”

“
Ajo
good?”

“Yeah, Bud. Great.”

“Karen? Yours?”

“Really good, Bud.”

Norris was hammered, maybe the most hammered Michael had ever seen him. Something dangerous smoldered in his eyes.

“You’ve met Generals Hoyos and Perez.” Michael shook their hands. The table fell into an awkward pause.

“Well, we’ll see ya, Bud, huh? Thanks again.” Michael turned for the door, waiting for it.

“Say hi to Hector, Mike.” Aimed between his shoulders. A look from Karen:
Let it go.

“Doesn’t stink, does it, Mike? Your shit?” Michael turned to the table. Latin faces trying to smile neutrally and just looking imbecilic.

“You got something to say, Bud?”

Lofton and Miller looked nervous, eyes alive between him and Norris, the station chief clearly not caring now: “I mean, your
shit stinks to
me,
but goddamn they lap it up with breakfast on E Street, huh?”

“Big talk from Hoover’s gin bottle. You need that with Flavia?”

“Fuck you, Suslov.”

Miller was all over Norris now. “Why don’t you just shut the fuck up, Bud, huh?”

“OSS’s own little pussy spy. Casa Rosada’s butt buddy. Everybody loves Mikey, don’t they?”

Michael felt the air ready to burn. Norris hissed at him, “Say something, you little shit.”

It could happen. He could smear the turkey-neck’s face against the wall and it’d feel good. Somehow he held his voice steady instead.

“Y’know, Bud, after all these years, I think you were right after all. We don’t work for the same company.”

      
Fuck them.

      
Fuck it all.

He’d do it.

H
ow?

Regular, legit postal service or straight air courier was out of the question. Somebody, somewhere, was going to want to peek inside a six-foot box. For sensitive transfers, the station used a trusted in-house courier company—Hapag-Lloyd—which would crate, seal, and label the item in question as a US diplomatic shipment, which made it immune to customs or foreign government inspection. This was the obvious choice but for a rather significant problem: getting something into this pipeline required a notification filed with WH Support under a station chief’s signature.

Bud Norris.

Michael had some juice with the SB Branch, but not over-Norris’s-head juice. How then?

Billy Patterson.

His spook camp playmate and
EYES-ONLY
tormentor. Billy worked on the comm desk that was the link between Norris and the WH staff offices in Barton Hall. He was flaky, unpredictable…

And maybe just weird enough to do it.

An ocean of white noise, drifting clicks, a faraway ring.

“Yes?”

“Peter North.” Billy Patterson’s working pseudonym.

“Who’s calling?”

“Frank Sniff.”

“One moment.”

Adrift in hiss. Finally, “Well, if it isn’t that cheap half-breed who never calls, never writes…”

“That’s because I don’t
like
you.”

A kissing smack from the DC end. Patterson: “So what do I owe the pleasure of…Where the hell are you, anyway? Sounds like a goddamn whorehouse.”

“I’m on a pay phone.”

“Norris getting cheap in his senility?”

“I want
you
to get on one.”

“Oooh…What’s it called again?…Damn, I used to know…”

“Peter—”

“Wait, it’s on the tip of my tongue—oh yeah,
TRADECRAFT
.”

“Just do it, huh?”

“Okay, okay. Give me the number…”

Michael hung up and waited by the phone as busboys bashed back and forth into the kitchen. He wished he’d gone further out of town, convinced someone from the station was going to walk in, as five, then ten minutes, clicked by.

Ring.

“CIA calling Senor Misterioso.” Patterson.

“Where are you?”

“Ptomaine Tavern.”

“Pizza gotten any better?”

“Two hundred stomach pumps can’t be wrong.” Michael could hear Billy shift the phone from one hand to the other. “I assume this isn’t a social ring, since we aren’t social.”

“I need a favor.”

“Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

Michael reflexively glanced over his shoulder. “I want to ship something secure courier under diplomatic protection.”

“Wrong department.”

“I want to do it without Norris’s signature.”

“Cute. Hang on a sec”—quarters dropping—“How big is this item in question?”

“Six feet.”

“What is it?”

“It’s just six feet, okay?”

There was a hanging moment on the line as Patterson’s voice changed. “Haven’t gone Sov on me, Frankie, have you?”

“What? Shit, no. Just something I don’t want the station to have a piece of.”

“What do you want from
moi
?”

“I can’t send it without a station chief cable through WH.”

“ ’Tis true.”

“I want you to fake an incoming cable from Norris authorizing.”

Silence.

“You in?”

More silence.

“You miserable little poison dwarf. Four years of ‘Eyes-Only’ bullshit. Don’t you play button-down now.”

Chuckles from the cheerful sociopath. “Okay. What the hell. I kinda like tweaking flatfoots—hang on.” More quarters. “You’re costing me a fucking fortune, Sniff.”

“Then you’ll do it?”

“Whoa. Down boy. Not that simple. Big brother has a lotta machines up here, and one of them counts incoming cables. I fake one that wasn’t sent, it’s gonna pop up orphan. Can’t you just send a phony yourself?”

“I don’t know Norris’s sign-on, and let’s just say our cable clerk is on the wrong side of this discussion.”

“Jeez. Paranoia in Patagonia. Okay, here’s what you do. Give her some cable traffic over your file name—only mangle it—use the wrong interfaces or something, so it transmits garbage. Then tell me when it’s coming, I’ll catch it, chuck it, and replace it with
your authorization. That’ll keep the incoming count straight.
Comprende
?”

“Got it.”

Again Patterson’s voice shifting: “You okay?”

“Yeah. Honest. Like I said. Just a favor. A gag on these guys.”

“Don’t do anything I would.”

“I’m not that crazy.”

“Ha—oh, what are you going to label this mystery package you’re shipping?”

“I don’t know. Something outlandishly boring.”

“Boring’s bad, son. Red flag. Tell ya what works. Label it ‘Decomposed Human Remains,’ toss in a couple a fish heads to give it a little stink, no State Department goon’s gonna want to mess with that shit. Promise. You there? I know it sounds goof but trust the Pete on this: ‘Decomposed Human Remains.’ That’s the ticket.”

Michael was still laughing at the irony when he hung up.

He told Hector he’d do it. The deputy head of Argentine military intelligence finished his sip of
mate
, pushed the straw aside, and took in the junior CIA officer’s face. “Thank you, Michael.”

There was still a complication: even if Billy Patterson faked an authorizing “approval” cable from Norris, any courier pickup would be logged at the main embassy security desk—courier in, courier out. The only realistic way to do this anonymously would be to piggyback Evita onto a courier shipment that was already scheduled and hope nobody looked too closely. The problem with
this
was the reality that Buenos Aires station wasn’t exactly the Grand Central Station of spydom these days; legit station courier requests were relatively few and far between. There was, however, one scheduled for a week from Tuesday that might work.

Panama City station handled all of Branch 5’s Technical Support Division needs: communication hardware, secret writing kits, disguises, bugging equipment, etc. A year ago WH Division decided to experiment with basing an area TSD officer at Buenos Aires station. An insanely eager-beaver fresh from training, the kid they sent was all over everything, trying to turn the simplest op into a TSD issue and generally driving Norris insane. He ordered crate after crate of audio, photo, and other technical equipment, including, bizarrely, five hundred pounds of car keys—one for every vehicle made anywhere in the last twenty years. The station had been quickly running out of space to store all this crap—and Norris close to strangling the kid—when the young TSD officer did the favor himself by breaking his hip in a boat accident at Los Olivos. So the TSD went home to Panama City but all the boxes stayed, as Norris sent out cable after cable asking,
begging
, if someone,
anyone
, wanted this stuff.

This month he finally got as nibble: five crates of photographic equipment to be shipped via Genoa to the CIA Milan substation in Italy aboard the SS
Conte Biancamano
. So if Hector wanted Evita out by secure diplomatic courier before Christmas, it would have to be to Milan and it would have to be a week from Tuesday—nine days away.

Michael had already decided he would squeeze Norris for a few emergency personal days, meet the casket in Milan, sign for it, and pass it off to Hector. End of story.

Except why he was doing it.

“You’re going to do it, aren’t you?”

He was staring at the ceiling in bed, Karen beside him. She was right, and it was coming off him like radium.

“It’ll get us out of here.”

“Is that really why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You should know why, Michael.”

They fell asleep, and he dreamed hard. Someone in the house, coming for him, stuffing a rolled newspaper down his throat, splitting his larynx…

He shot awake gulping for his life. The bed was soaked, and in the dark it felt like blood. He rolled over—Karen not there—and it panicked him. He coughed her name blind with fear. “Karen!”

She was in the doorway with a glass of water, and he was back in his skin in his home in his bed. “Michael? What? What is it?”

He coughed, unclenched his muscles. “Sorry. I…a dream. Sorry…”

She always got a drink of water at night from the kitchen, and never had he dreamt like that. Acid death in his mouth.

“This doesn’t feel good, Michael.”

“I know.”

“But you’re going through with it.”

“Yes…I think so, yes.”

F
irst stop a pay phone. Nine thirty a.m. Washington time. Other end: “Yeah?”

“This the poison dwarf?”

“Speak, you Latin fuck.”

“Cable coming through in twenty under my name.”

“Here we go.”

Up to the fourth floor of the First Boston Bank building, a.k.a. Embassy of the United States of America.

“Morning, Mike.” Lofton—Michael’s only hello on the floor. A wave from Wintergreen, something like a nod from Miller. Michael sat at his desk, tried to look his usual bored self as he slipped a colored pencil from his coat and wrote a cable.

Knock on Norris’s door. “Come in.” Today was the third morning since their restaurant confrontation and their first words.

“Got a cable.”

“For?”

“OTS.”

If Norris looked closely he’d notice the cable was unnecessary bureaucratic double-talk. Without looking closely at all he’d notice it was written not in blue ink but blue pencil. He didn’t. His eyes never left Michael’s as he initialed the sheet and handed it back.

Ducking into the toilet, Michael erased the blue pencil code interface numbers, wrote in expired ones, and handed it to the cable secretary, Esther. If
she
didn’t look too closely and catch the expired numbers, the transmission would lock out of phase en route and dump on Patterson’s end as a bowl of ink gumbo.

If Norris’s eyes had never left Michael’s, Esther’s never even found his end of the room. Hunched chain-smoking over the encoding machine, an arm reaching out behind was her greeting. “Cable?”

“Yeah.” He dropped it in her palm and walked out.

“Message received.” Patterson on the pay phone.

“A mess?”

“You could finger-paint with the stuff.”

“Thanks, man.”

“You’re committed now, wonder boy.”