Rogue's March (29 page)

Masakita sat in silence.

“You're holding something back. What is it? You've got to come clean sooner or later. You can't hold out like this. Why'd you accept that cabinet post and return here after your radical friends offered you the leadership? That never made any sense to me. What was behind it? Did the Soviets recruit you? Someone else? Come on, God damn it, open up! Make it easy for me to understand. I'm trying to help.”

“It was nothing like that,” Masakita replied. “I've told you all I can.”

No wonder the army couldn't get its hands on him during the rebellions, Reddish thought, descending alone in the elevator to the basement. Who could? A Marxist riddle in 130 pounds of pure Cartesian ectoplasm.

Chapter Five

The dawn light was still gray in the kitchen when Reddish took the telephone call. He had come downstairs to put the coffeepot on, dressed only in his pajama bottoms. He'd sat up until after midnight in the study trying to patch together a cable to Langley, but the cable wouldn't write and he'd given up. A vascular flush dulled the whites of his eyes, as if he'd just awakened from a drinking weekend in the saltwater sun. The call was from his ex-wife, telephoning from her house in the Washington suburbs.

“Who'd you think it was, anyway,” she demanded suspiciously, “that Vietnamese tramp who used to send you pictures of her kids?”

“I wasn't sure,” he answered guiltily. Her voice scraped across his scalp like fresh pain from an old wound.

“Yeah, I'll bet. All right, Papa-San, where's her tuition check? That school you put her in has been pestering me to death, and I'm sick of it. What do you expect me to do, pay it myself?”

It was midnight in Washington and the connection was poor. He knew she'd been drinking. She only called when anger and alcohol dulled her judgment enough to make her forget the transatlantic toll charges. In the morning she would remember and send him the bills.

“
Listen
, are you still there? If you hang up on me like you did last time, I'll jerk her out of that school so fast it'll make your head swim.”

He thought sometimes that she was only what he'd made her—the anger, the drinking, even the language. She'd been a secretary at Aberdeen Proving Grounds when they'd first met, a happy, outgoing blond girl from rural Maryland with two years of college in a small denominational school in the Maryland mountains. She liked to bowl, play hearts for a penny a point with her brothers and father, and attend the local football and basketball games in the autumn and winter. Her father was the manager of a Western Auto store. The family lived on five acres outside of town, had a chicken dinner every Sunday after church, and a stocked pond where they jigged for bass and crappies on Sunday afternoons after the horseshoe and croquet games. He was working on a special weapons project at Aberdeen when he met her.

She'd adjusted to living in the Virginia suburbs but, after he'd joined the clandestine services, not to the life overseas. She'd never been abroad before. The first year had been interesting for her, but the years that followed a nightmare. She was frightened by the foreign environment, often a hostile one, by Reddish's absences, the smell of the
suqs
, the servants, cocktail-party decorum, and his colleagues' wives. Insecurity and self-consciousness made learning a foreign language impossible. She had a nervous breakdown in Syria and was evacuated to a US military hospital in Germany. While Reddish was in Vietnam, she stayed in Bangkok, where she fell in with a group of NCO wives from the US military mission. They gave each other permanents, played canasta, bowled, shopped in the commissary, and taught her to dye her hair. Reddish flew to Bangkok as often as he could, but not often enough. She met a Voice of America stringer as mixed up as she was, and the marriage fell apart after that. She'd returned to Washington alone.

Reddish said, “I mailed the check last week.”

“You'd better have. Have you sold the house yet? I need the money. Living in Washington isn't cheap these days. Starting a business isn't either.”

They'd bought a house on the Atlantic shore near Rehoboth, Delaware, twelve years earlier, the only permanent home their daughter had known. The VOA man she'd met in Bangkok had resigned to start his own public relations firm in Washington.

“I'll buy you out. It'll take me a little time to get the money together.”

“You told me that last winter. What's wrong, aren't you making it big these days? What about that hardship post you're in? Don't they pay you big bucks for that these days? What are you spending it on—booze, women, or what?”

“I'll get the money together.”

“Yeah, you said that before too.” She turned away from the phone. “Hey, would you turn that goddamned TV down!”

He saw them sitting in the small ugly overheated living room of the red brick bungalow in the Washington suburbs, the dinner burned and cold on the stove, both of them drinking and worried about money, both getting uglier, drunker, and more frightened, talking about money.

“… we can't all be on the government dole, you know. I mean, some people have to work for a living. You could save us both a lot of grief if you took Becky out of that rich man's school. She could live here, with me—”

“She's happy where she is. We've been all through that.”

“She'll never be happy with you putting all those fancy ideas in her head. She'll end up the way you did. She could live out in Aberdeen with Mom and Dad.”

“Look, I'll be back there in a couple of weeks. I'll talk to you then.”

“You're coming back? I heard on TV that the government fell apart over there. God, you must have screwed it up royally again, just like Damascus.”

“I've got to go. I'll see you in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, try to get yourself together.”

He went back upstairs to shave. In the kitchen again, he made breakfast and listened to the seven o'clock bulletin over the national radio announcing the names of the new Revolutionary Military Council. Colonel N'Sika was the chairman, his deputies Majors Fumbe and Lutete.

Lutete
? He paused as he scribbled the names. Which Lutete? Ten men formed the new council, all of them military officers, none above the rank of colonel.

The sun was still pale in the courtyard as Reddish climbed the embassy steps. His seersucker jacket was wrinkled, his thin hair untidy. A few strands fell forward over the high tanned forehead. The Marine who opened the door thought he smelled whiskey beneath the pungence of the cigar that smoldered in his fingers. Taggert, freshly groomed in South Africa suntans, trailed Reddish across the reception hall reeking of the spice of an aftershave lotion once popular in the PX's of the Far East, as deeply embedded in Reddish's memory as the stinking rice paddies and the snow-swept mountains of the Korean war. It came in blue bottles and looked like embalming fluid. He despised it. It reminded him of a terrible drunken weekend he'd once spent in a Seoul bordello where the Korean girls wore it like perfume.

“They say you were once a weapons man,” Taggert said in a bright whisper as he followed Reddish up the stairs. “Small bore, handguns, cold guns, what have you.”

Reddish paused on the landing to twist the cigar butt into the urn. “Who told you that?” he asked softly.

“The commo people,” Taggert told him uneasily. “The reason I'm asking is that I've got a problem with mine—a Beretta .38. I was wondering if you'd look at it.”

Reddish stood searching his pockets. His daughter's letter was there, together with a half-dozen telephone call slips, some scribbled messages from Sarah, and others he'd scrawled to himself. He pulled his steel-rimmed spectacles from his pocket, scrutinizing a slip of paper he'd almost forgotten, hardly conscious of Taggert. He looked at that moment less like a diplomat or an intelligence officer than a broker on small margins, a man without expectations.

“I'll look at it,” he said finally, folding the slip away. “But don't tell me what the commo people told you—me or anyone else.”

Sarah hadn't arrived in the second-floor suite. The offices were empty, the coffee maker cold. He took a coffee mug from the table and went down the corridor to the defense attaché's suite. Colonel Selvey's office was deserted; so were the cubicles where the army and air attachés sat. A solitary Air Force corporal sat at a lighted desk in the outer office as he typed a cable, a dictionary open on the desk in front of him.

“How are you making it, Mr. Reddish?”

“All right, I guess.” He crossed to the coffee table, dropped a dime in the saucer, and drew coffee from the urn.

The corporal bent forward at the keyboard, fingers lifted, hesitated, and then brought his fingers down, his head ducking forward immediately to look at the typed word. “God damn it. I knew I shoulda looked that little mother up. How do you spell guerrillas, Mr. Reddish? Not the ape kind, either.”

“Two
r
's and two
l
's.”

“I shoulda known. The colonel can't spell for shit.” He pulled an eraser pencil from the drawer and scrubbed at the cable. Reddish sipped the hot coffee, studying the wall map with the plastic overlay. Marked with a grease pencil were the locations and command structures of the army units in the interior. He searched for the units that hadn't answered the National Revolutionary Council's request for support two days earlier, wondering if the release of the names of the council members meant that they'd fallen in line.

“Is this map up to date?”

“Pretty much. Major Miles keeps it up pretty good.”

“Where is Major Miles? I haven't seen him.” He put down the cup and brought from his pocket the forgotten routing slip he and Sarah had puzzled over.

“He's in Jo-burg. Went down on a MAC flight last week and now he's busting his ass to get back. Wants us to hold up the goddamned coup for him.”

“Do you type Major Miles's reports?”

“Yeah, most of them. You think DIA reads all that shit?”

Miles was an over-age major a year away from retirement unless he was promoted. Now he was a compulsive report writer and busybody, trying to overhaul his career in a flood of make-work, all of it useless.

“Maybe. See if you can read this for me. It's a note from Miles to Selvey. Haversham left it, but I can't read the writing. That's Miles's handwriting, isn't it?”

The corporal took the slip and held it closer. “Yes, sir, that's his scratching. He's left-handed.”

“What's this word here—‘avoiding'?”

“What's it say? ‘Re Major Lutete: we've been [something] this guy for ten months. Can Les help out. We need more stuff.' No, not ‘avoiding.' Couldn't be.
‘Stroking.'
That's it. ‘We've been stroking this guy for ten months. Can Les help out.' That's what it says.”

Reddish took back the slip. “Stroking?
Stroking
Lutete?”

“Yes, sir. That's one of the major's buzz words.”

“What the hell's it mean?”

“Lutete's a major up on the GHQ G-2 staff, foreign intelligence, I think. Major Miles got him a training tour back in the States last year, Leavenworth, I think it was, and Miles has been in his britches ever since he came back. Only don't say I said so. Lutete's responsible for most of the shit Miles grinds out—order of battle, new weapons talks with the Europeans, all of it.”

“So Major Lutete's on your payroll, a controlled source?”

The corporal glanced uneasily toward the open door, and his voice dropped. “Yes, sir. Only don't say I said so. Miles has been feeding him stuff too.”

Startled, Reddish said, “What kind of stuff?”

“He's been bootlegging DIA studies to him. From what I heard, G-2 and the foreign intelligence staff was in piss-poor shape when Lutete got assigned there, so Miles was helping him out. You know, giving him DIA staff studies on the Middle East, the Arabs, the Chicoms, and Soviets. DIA gave him the go-ahead, but it was pretty low-grade shit. Most of it had been cleaned up, sanitized.”

Reddish looked at the slip again. Can Les help out? We need more stuff. “How did it work, did Lutete ask for material or did Miles just bootleg what he thought would be useful?”

“Both ways, I think.”

“Did he ever give him any of our material?”

“You mean Agency stuff? I don't know.”

“I'll ask Selvey then.”

“O.K., but don't forget.”

“Don't worry. Mum's the word. Thanks for the coffee.”

Sarah was standing at her desk as he went by angrily, her face fresh, her purse open on the desk in front of her as she rubbed her hands with lotion, her typewriter still covered.

“Open my safe, will you. Bring me those reports we found in Haversham's safe.”

She lifted her head, following his plodding back. “Do you know how long I waited for you to come back last night?”

“I told you not to wait.” He moved behind his desk.

She stood in the door.

“You most certainly did not.”

“Then I told someone to tell you. It comes to the same thing. Bring me those reports. My box too.”

“What's so special about these all of a sudden?” she asked as she left the six reports on his blotter. “I thought you'd forgotten about them or that they didn't matter.”

“They matter. Major Miles passed them to someone up at GHQ, a major at G-2, foreign intelligence staff.”

“Isn't that usual?”

“Sometimes.” Intelligence liaison with G-2 required Washington's interagency approval, granted for DIA documents but not for CIA material. He scanned each report in turn, moving them aside. When he'd finished, he read them again, this time arranging them in three separate piles. Only a single report remained on his desk as he returned the others to Sarah. “This one may be it. The others are too old, too vague, or too far away.”