Magic Terror (4 page)

They did this more than they ever admitted. One time in four, the field teams left something out. He had to cover for their mistakes and take the fall for any screwups. Now they were going two for two—the team in Singapore had failed to learn that his subject always used two bodyguards, one who traveled in a separate car. When he had raised this point afterward, they had said they were “working to improve data flow worldwide.” The blond woman was a glitch in the data flow, all right. He traveled three cars behind the Mercedes as it went through a series of right-hand turns on the one-way streets, wishing that his employers permitted the use of cell phones, which they did not. Cell phones were “porous,” they were “intersectable,” even, in the most delightful of these locutions, “capacity risks.” N wished that one day someone would explain the exact meaning of “capacity risk.” In order to inform his contact of M. Hubert’s playmate, he would have to drive back to the “location usage device,” another charming example of bureaucratese, the pay telephone in Montory. You want to talk capacity risks, how about that?

The Mercedes rolled beneath a streetlamp at the edge of the town and wheeled left to double back. Wonderful, he was looking for a tail. Probably he had caught sight of the field team while they were busily mismanaging the data flow. N hung back as far as he dared, now and then anticipating the subject’s next move and speeding ahead on an adjacent street. Finally, the Mercedes continued out of Mauléon and turned east on a three-lane highway.

N followed along, speculating about the woman. In spite of her clothes, she looked like a mistress, but would a man bring his mistress to such a meeting? It was barely possible that she represented the South Americans, possible but even less likely that she worked for the buyers. Maybe they were just a lovely couple going out for dinner. Far ahead, the Mercedes’s taillights swung left off the highway and began winding into the mountains. They had already disappeared by the time he came to the road. N made the turn, went up to the first bend, and turned off his lights. From then on, it was a matter of trying to stay out of the ditches as he crawled along in the dark, glimpsing the other car’s taillights and losing them, seeing the beams of the headlights picking out trees on an upward curve far ahead of him. Some part of what he was doing finally brought back the lost memory.

From inside the telephone booth, he could see the red neon sign,
AUBERGE DE L’ETABLE,
burning above the walled parking lot.

“Tonto waiting,” said the contact.

“I would have appreciated a few words about the girlfriend.”

“White man speak with forked tongue.”

N sighed. “I waited across from his building. Hubert seemed to be doing a lot of running up and down the stairs, which was explained when he came out with a stunning young lady in a motorcycle jacket. I have to tell you, I hate surprises.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“He dodged all over the place before he felt safe enough to leave Mauléon. I followed him to an auberge way up in the mountains, trying to work out how to handle things if the meeting was on. All of a sudden, there’s this variable, and the only way I can let you know about it is to turn around and drive all the way back to this phone, excuse me, this location usage device.”

“That would have been a really terrible idea,” said his contact.

“I waited for them to go into the lot and leave their car, and then I pulled up beside a wall and climbed uphill to a spot where I could watch their table through the glasses. I was trying to figure out how many reports I’d have to file if I included the girl. Remember Singapore? Improvising is no fun anymore.”

“Then what?”

“Then they had dinner. The two of them. Basque soup, roast chicken, salad, no dessert. A bottle of wine. Hubert was trying to jolly her up, but he wasn’t getting anywhere. The place was about half full, mainly with local people. Guys in berets playing cards, two foursomes, one table of Japanese guys in golf jackets. God knows how they found out about the place. When they drove out, I followed them back and waited until all the lights went out. In the midst of all this wild activity, I remembered something.”

“Nice. I understand people your age tend to forget.”

“Let me guess. You knew about the girl.”

“Martine is your background resource.”

“Since when do I need a backup?” Seconds ticked by in silence while he struggled with his fury. “Okay. Fine. I’ll tell you what, that’s dandy. But Martine does all the paperwork.”

“Let me work on that one. In the meantime, try to remember that we’ve been mainstreaming for some time now. Martine has been in field operations for about a year, and we decided to give her a shot at learning from the old master.”

“Right,” N said. “What does Hubert think she is?”

“An expert on raghead psychology. We positioned her so that when he needed someone to help him figure out what these people mean when they say things, there she was. Doctorate in Arab studies from the Sorbonne, two years doing community liaison for an oil company in the Middle East. Hubert was so happy with the way she looks, he put her up in his guest room.”

“And Martine told him that his partners would have him followed.”

“He never laid eyes on you. She’s impressed as hell, Kemo sabe. You’re her hero.”

“Martine should spend a couple of days with me after we’re done,” N said, almost angry enough to mean it. “Let me advance her education.”

“You?” The contact laughed. “Forget it, not that it wouldn’t be educational for both of you. If you could handle encryption programs, you wouldn’t have to use LUDs.”

It took N a moment to figure out that the word was an acronym.

“I hope you realize how much I envy you,” the contact said. “When you came down the trail, this business was a lot more individual. Guys like you made up the rules on the fly. I was hired because I had an MBA, and I’m grateful to help rationalize our industry, move it into the twenty-first century, but even now, when you have to dot every
i
and cross every
t
, fieldwork seems completely romantic to me. The years you’ve been out there, the things you did, you’re like Wyatt Earp. Paleface, I was honored to be assigned your divisional region controller.”

“My what?”

“Your contact person.”

“One of us is in the wrong line of work,” N said.

“It was a pleasure, riding through the Old West with you.”

“To hell with you, too,” N said, but the line was already dead.

Thirty-odd years ago, an old-timer called Sullivan had begun to get a little loose. A long time before that, he had been in the OSS and then the CIA, and he still had that wide-shouldered linebacker look and he still wore a dark suit and a white shirt every day, but his gut drooped over his belt and the booze had softened his face. His real name wasn’t Sullivan and he was of Scandinavian, not Irish, descent, with thick coarse blond hair going gray, an almost lipless mouth, and blue eyes so pale they seemed bleached. N had spent a month in Oslo and another in Stockholm, and in both places he had seen a lot of Sullivans. What he had remembered during the drive into the mountains was what had brought him to the French Pyrenees all that time ago—Sullivan.

He had been in the trade for almost a year, and his first assignments had gone well. In a makeshift office in a San Fernando Valley strip mall, a nameless man with a taut face and an aggressive crew cut had informed him that he was getting a golden opportunity. He was to fly to Paris, transfer to Bordeaux, meet a legend named Sullivan, and drive to southwest France with him. What Sullivan could teach him in a week would take years to learn on his own. The job, Sullivan’s last, his swan song, was nothing the older man could not handle by himself. So why include N? Simple—Sullivan. He seemed to be losing his edge; he wasn’t taking care of the loose ends as well as he once had. So while N absorbed the old master’s lessons, he would also be his backstop, make sure everything went smoothly, and provide nightly reports. If Sullivan was going to blow it, he would be pulled out, last job or not. The only problem, said the man with the crew cut, was that Sullivan would undoubtedly hate his guts.

And to begin with, he had. Sullivan had barely spoken on the drive down from Bordeaux. The only remark he made as they came up into the mountains was that Basques were so crazy they thought they were the sole survivors of Atlantis. He had dropped N off at the hotel in Tardets, where he had a room and a waiting car, with the suggestion that he skip coming over for dinner that night. N had spoken of their instructions, of his own desire to be briefed. “Fine, I give up, you’re a Boy Scout,” Sullivan had snarled, and sped off to his own lodgings, which were, N remembered once more as the Peugeot rolled downhill from the telephone booth, the Auberge de l’Étable.

Though the inn had been roughly half its present size, the dining room was the same massive hall. Sullivan had insisted on a table near the lobby and well apart from the couples who sat near the haunch of mutton blackening over the open fire. Alternately glaring at him and avoiding his glance, Sullivan drank six marcs before dinner and in French far superior to the young N’s complained about the absence of vodka. In Germany you could get vodka, in England you could get vodka, in Sweden and Denmark and Norway and even in miserable Iceland you could get vodka, but in France nobody outside of Paris had even heard of the stuff. When their mutton came, he ordered two bottles of bordeaux and flirted with the waitress. The waitress flirted back. Without any direct statements, they arranged an assignation. Sullivan was a world-class womanizer. Either the certainty that the waitress would be in his bed later that night or the alcohol loosened him up. He asked a few questions, endured the answers, told stories that made young N’s jaw drop like a rube’s. Amused, Sullivan recounted seductions behind enemy lines, hair-raising tales of OSS operations, impersonations of foreign dignitaries, bloodbaths in presidential palaces. He spoke six languages fluently, three others nearly as well, and played passable cello. “Truth is, I’m a pirate,” he said, “and no matter how useful pirates might be, they’re going out of style. I don’t fill out forms or itemize my expenses or give a shit about reprimands. They let me get away with doing things my way because it almost always works better than theirs, but every now and again, I make our little buddies sweat through their custom-made shirts. Which brings us to you, right? My last job, and I get a backup? Give me a break—you’re watching me. They told you to report back every single night.”

“They also said you’d give me the best education in the world,” N told him.

“Christ, kid, you must be pretty good if they want
me
to polish your rough edges.” He swallowed wine and smiled across the table in what even the young N had sensed as a change of atmosphere. “Was there something else they wanted you to do?”

“Polishing my rough edges isn’t enough?” asked the suddenly uncertain young N.

Sullivan had stared at him for a time, not at all drunkenly but in a cold curious measuring fashion. N had known only that this scrutiny made him feel wary and exposed. Then Sullivan relaxed and explained what he was going to do and how he planned to do it.

Everything had gone well—better than well, superbly. Sullivan had taken at least a half dozen steps that would have unnerved the crew-cut man in the strip mall, but each one, N took pains to make clear during his reports, had saved time, increased effectiveness, helped bring about a satisfactory conclusion. On the final day, N had called Sullivan to see when he was to be picked up. “Change of plans,” Sullivan had said. “You can drive yourself to the airport. I’m spending one more night with the descendants of the Atlanteans.” He wanted a farewell romp with the waitress. “Then back to the civilian life. I own thirty acres outside Houston, think I’ll put up a mansion in the shape of the Alamo but a hundred times bigger, get a state-of-the-art music room, fly in the best cellist I can get for weekly lessons, hire a great chef, rotate the ladies in and out. And I want to learn Chinese. Only great language I don’t already know.”

On a rare visit to headquarters some months later, N had greeted the man from the strip mall as he carried stacks of files out of a windowless office into a windowless corridor. The man was wearing a small, tight bow tie, and his crew cut had been cropped to stubble. It took him a couple of beats to place N. “Los Angeles.” He pronounced it with a hard
g.
“Sure. That was good work. Typical Sullivan. Hairy, but great results. The guy never came back from France, you know.”

“Don’t tell me he married the waitress,” N had said.

“Died there. Killed himself, in fact. Couldn’t take the idea of retirement, that’s what I think. A lot of these Billy the Kid–type guys, they fold their own hands when they get to the end of the road.”

Over the years, N now and again had remarked to himself the elemental truth that observation was mostly interpretation. Nobody wanted to admit it, but it was true anyhow. If you denied interpretation—which consisted of no more than thinking about two things, what you had observed and why you had observed it—your denial was an interpretation, too. In the midst of feeling more and more like Sullivan, that is, resistant to absurd nomenclature and the ever-increasing paperwork necessitated by “mainstreaming,” he had never considered that “mainstreaming” included placing women in positions formerly occupied entirely by men. So now he had a female backup: but the question was, what would the lady have done if M. Hubert had noticed that N was following him? Now there, that was a matter for interpretation.

A matter N had sometimes weighed over the years, at those rare times when it returned to him, was the question Sullivan had put to him before he relaxed.
Was there something else they wanted you to do?

In institutions, patterns had longer lives than employees.

The parking lot was three-quarters full. Hoping that he still might be able to get something to eat, N looked at the old stable doors as he took a spot against the side wall. They were closed, and the dining room windows were dark. He carried the satchel to the entrance and punched the numerical code into the keypad. The glass door clicked open. To the side of the empty lobby, the dining room was locked. His hunger would have to wait until morning. In the low light burning behind the counter, his key dangled from the rack amid rows of empty hooks. He raised the panel, moved past the desk to get the key, and, with a small shock like the jab of a pin, realized that of the thousands of resource personnel, information managers, computer jocks, divisional region controllers, field operatives, and the rest, only he would remember Sullivan.