Hour of the Assassins (5 page)

“When are you leaving?”

“In the morning, after I've enjoyed the steak—and the girl,” he added pointedly.

“I'm glad to see my employees enjoy their work,” Wasserman said, trying to reassert his authority. Then he added, “Stay in touch, Caine. Do stay in touch.” And Caine knew that what Cunningham had told him so long ago still applied. He would have to watch his back.

C.J. put her arm around his waist in the chill sea breeze outside the restaurant, clinging to him as if for warmth, while the Mexican parking lot attendant went to get her car. The Mexican brought the car, a silver Mercedes 450 SL hardtop, around to where they were standing. As they got in, two thoughts occurred to Caine: that the mistress business was still damn lucrative and that the Mercedes was the Chevy of West Los Angeles.

C.J. drove swiftly, surely, up the Pacific Coast Highway to the beach house. As she drove, she repeatedly glanced at Caine out of the corner of her eye. Although his face was shadowed, his green eyes seemed luminous in the reflected light of the dashboard dials. He caught her looking at him and they smiled, accomplices in the gentle urging of the California night.

“What did you discuss with Karl?” she asked.

“Business.”

“What kind of business? What do you do, anyway?”

“I'm a PR man.”

“What are you selling?”

“Hot air mostly,” he replied and when she giggled, added, “Myself. That's what we all sell, isn't it?”

She looked at him sharply in response to the implied put-down.

“You think we're all so decadent, don't you? I think you have a touch of the Puritan in you. That wonderful self-righteousness of the solid citizen who goes to church on Sunday and then sneaks into the massage parlor on Monday,” she said, contemptuously tossing back her hair.

“Perhaps you're right. I've been away a long time,” Caine admitted.

“Then don't sit there making judgments about me. As Ivan Karamazov said, ‘If God is dead, everything is permitted.'”

Caine looked at her curiously. Her erudition surprised him. She was beginning to interest him, much more than he would have ever admitted.

“How did you get hooked on Dostoevsky?” he asked.

“I majored in English Lit. at Berkeley. I'm really a very intellectual hooker,” she said with a wry smile.

“We're all hookers, one way or another.”

C.J. glanced at him with frank interest, green pinpoints of light from the dashboard reflected in her eyes. Then she smiled, as though he had passed some kind of test. The car slowed as they approached the beach house.

She turned into the driveway and they went into the house. Wasserman had gone. He had taken the dossier with him, and Caine quickly scanned the living room but found nothing to indicate that Wasserman had ever been there as C.J. put an album on the stereo. The man is as slippery as an eel, he thought C.J. lit the fire and poured them snifters of Grand Marnier.

They sat before the fire and gently touched glasses, the brandy a molten orange gold in their hands. Her hair caught the firelight and tumbled down her cheeks like glowing streams of lava. For a brief moment they kissed, suddenly aware of each other, like two hyperbolas become tangent at a single point before being swept away in opposite directions for all eternity. She reached out and ran her fingers through his sandy hair, something she had been wanting to do all evening.

“What does C.J. stand for, anyway?” he asked.

“C for Carole, as in Lombard; J for Joan, as in Crawford. My mother was a fan,” she shrugged.

“I'm glad my mother didn't feel the same way. Her favorite star was Lassie,” he said, and she laughed.

Gold flecks of firelight flickered in her eyes. They gazed at each other with a strange sense of discovery.

“What do you want to do?” she said, her voice a drowsy whisper.

“You know what I want to do,” he said, and smiled.

“I thought you'd never ask,” she said with a throaty laugh and, taking his hand, led him into the bedroom.

CHAPTER 3

The French have a word for it. They call it the post-coital
tristesse
. It's a kind of vague sadness that comes sometimes when the act of love is over. Maybe because the reality of sex doesn't always measure up to the expectation. Maybe that was it, Caine mused as he lay next to C.J. in the darkness.

During his training in Virginia, his instructor had warned them that an agent was never more vulnerable than right after sex. Perhaps because the time after sex was a time for truth, Caine thought, remembering Lim.

“Tell me the truth, Tan Caine. Who are you really?” Lim had asked him that first time, her voice barely audible over the rain on the bamboo slats.

“Just a soldier,” Caine replied, wondering if she was asking out of a woman's curiosity or whether she was really Pathet Lao.

“All men are soldiers now,” she said. “Is that why you are fighting?”

“No,” reaching for a cigarette. In the brief match flare her dark eyes searched his face, as though some answer might be written there.

“Then why do men make war?”

“Because the women are watching,” he replied. And then she had giggled, “Make love, not war. Isn't that what you Americans say?”

Well, he was no good at making love anymore either, Caine decided. C.J. certainly wouldn't disagree with that. They lay together in the soft California night, catching their breath and after a long silence she finally brought it out.

“You're a lousy lover, you know that,” she said bitterly.

“Does it really matter?”

“Christ, that's a new one,” she snapped. “You're the first guy I ever slept with who didn't want to know how good he was. You don't really care, do you? You just jerked off inside me, you bastard,” bitterness eroding her anger.

“No, I guess I don't care very much. Is that what you felt?” Don't think about it, he told himself. This is the vulnerable time and you don't want to feel anything, just get it off so you can get some sleep.

“I felt that you wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible, like an unpleasant duty.”

“Maybe you're right,” he said. “I must be regressing.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing really. It's just that when you're young the object of sex is relief, not pleasure.” Something in his tired voice plucked at her.

She leaned over him, her long blond hair tickling his face and said softly, “Boy, she really must have been something.”

“Who?”

“The woman who did this to you,” she replied. “But don't take it out on the rest of us. We've all been through the mill. You don't know what I went through with my old man. You think you've had it bad. Well you don't know what bad is.”

“You're right,” Caine said and then he lit a cigarette because there was no way to stop it now and sleep wouldn't come till morning. He rested his head on his arm and watched the smoke curl into the darkness.

The CIA, like most large corporations, does the bulk of its recruiting on college campuses. The Company, as it is called by the people who work there, looks for two types of recruits among the students it interviews: those with technical degrees in engineering, accounting, computer science, etc., to do “white” work at Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and those with language skills and graduate majors in international-related studies to be enrolled in the Career Training Program. The CTP is a one-year course designed to prepare an agent in “black” work, which may involve hazardous assignments overseas.

John Caine had his first interview on a sunny spring morning at the Career Placement Center at UCLA, where he was completing his M.B.A. with a major in international finance. The recruiter was a shrewd, gregarious man in his early sixties with a ready smile and wit. Caine remembered with a wry smile that he had told the interviewer he was considering the CTP because he loved foreign travel and, besides, it sounded like fun. God, was I ever that young, he wondered. Shortly thereafter he sent in his application and medical history, similar to most job applications, except that it was much longer and more detailed, even requiring him to list every address he had ever stayed at for the past fifteen years. He then sat for a long three-part examination. The first part of the exam was a standard intelligence/knowledge test similar to the entrance exam for grad school. The second part was one of those psychological tests designed to determine which you would rather be: a lighthouse keeper or an insurance salesman. The last section was a test of the applicant's abilities in language acquisition. He was timed to see how quickly he learned an invented language. Since Caine claimed proficiency in German and Spanish, he was also given translation exercises.

When he passed the exam, a security check lasting nearly seven months was run on him. After he had been cleared by the Agency and the FBI, Caine was flown to Washington and interviewed again. A month later he received a verbal offer to join the CTP at a Civil Service Grade 9, which paid about eleven hundred dollars a month.

Twenty-nine months later Caine was on a jet to Laos.

He lay next to C.J., his bare arm touching hers, a world away, staring into darkness and listening to the occasional sounds of night traffic along the coast highway. From somewhere came the sound of a late newscast, muffled and indistinct—something about a kidnapping. Insomnia must be the major disease of the twentieth century, he thought. C.J. stirred restlessly beside him. After a long silence she snuggled against his shoulder and whispered,

“Are you asleep?”

“Yes,” he said, and smiled.

“I'm sorry I snapped at you before. It's never really good the first time. Oh, hell, it's lonely lying here by myself. Put your arm around me,” she said in a little girl voice.

“I'm never any good the first time, either. Nerves, I guess,” putting his arm around her.

“Your bracelet is scratching me. What is it anyway? I've never seen one like it,” she said, running her fingers along the dull metal ring around his wrist.

“It's from Asia,” he yawned.

“Were you in Asia?”

“Weren't we all?”

“You're like a politician,” she laughed. “You have a way of answering questions without saying anything. What kind of a bracelet is it?”

“It's a Meo bracelet,” he replied, remembering Dao. “It's supposed to protect you against evil
tlan
spirits.”

“You don't really believe in spirits, do you?” she asked, amused.

Wouldn't it be lovely if you could blame it all on the
tlan
the way the Meo did? he thought. What do we Westerners know about spirits anyway? Just the Bible. They knew about it all right.
The spirit of man will sustain his infirmity. But a wounded spirit, who can bear?
But then, no one with a white skin knew much about Asia.

“In a way,” he said.

“What's a Meo?” she asked in a sleepy voice. “It sounds like a cat.”

“They're a mountain tribe in Indochina,” he said. That had been his first mistake. He remembered Dao correcting him the first time they met at Airstrip 256. As they ducked under the air blast from the helicopter blades and ran to the edge of the clearing, Caine had shouted something about being glad to be with the Meo force at last. The chopper pulled heavily into the sky with an incredible clatter as Dao remarked pedantically:

“We are not Meo.
Meo
means ‘barbarians' and is a name the Chinese gave to us thousands of years ago. We call ourselves
Hmong
, which means ‘free men.'”

“I'll remember,” Caine said, shouldering his pack. Thorns tore at his fatigues as he stumbled through the dense undergrowth, following Dao's wiry body tirelessly scrambling up the trail. He quickened his pace as Dao's blue air force jumpsuit almost disappeared into the dense jungle shade. Cunningham was right, Caine thought. It's going to be tricky. He'd met Cunningham, a hard hawk-nosed Yankee, ten minutes after he had landed at Long Tieng Air Base, CIA headquarters in Laos, The fan in Cunningham's tiny office barely stirred the air, stifling in the dense noon heat Cunningham handed Caine a lukewarm Coke, sizing him up in a brief speculative glance. He took in Caine's muscled shoulders, sandy hair, bright green eyes, and almost too-handsome features. He looked like what you like to think an American looks like.

“Relax,” he said. “You've got twenty minutes till your chopper takes off. You'll rendezvous with General Dao at Strip two fifty-six in the Annam border sector. I suppose Washington briefed you.”

“They told me you'd be my control,” Caine replied.

“Sure. I'll have about as much authority over you as you'll have over Dao, which is to say, zilch. Officially your assignment is to advise Dao. He's got about three thousand tribesmen attached to the Royal Lao Army and paid by us. They operate in Sector Five against twenty thousand Pathet Lao guerrillas and one, maybe two, NVA regiments in the area.”

“Then I'd advise him to surrender,” Caine snapped. “What's my real assignment?”

Cunningham smiled briefly with approval, gulped down his Coke, and let out a loud belch.

“To keep the roof from caving in. Dao may not be much, but he's the only thing keeping Charley from moving down into the Plain of Jars. It's going to be damn tricky, Caine. The Meo are brutal and superstitious. If you offend a
tlan
spirit, they might kill you five minutes after you walk into camp. And Dao has his own ambitions. We're using each other right now, but don't put any bets down on this marriage. Come on, I'll walk you to the chopper.”

They walked out to the chopper, eyes squinting against the intense glare of the tarmac. As Caine slung his pack and M-16 aboard, Cunningham shouted: “You'll be on your own, Caine, so watch your back. And one more thing”—his voice almost lost in the scream of the rotor—“whatever you do, don't let them take you alive.”