The Consignment (3 page)

“He wasn’t working for our operation, period,” Channon corrected me sternly when I ventured the remark. “Once the IRS showed me what they had on Dimitri, I suspended him. I made it absolutely clear that the only reports I wanted from him were the duplicates of what he was giving the IRS. As far as I was concerned Blue Hawk had crashed and burned. I hit the switch and shut him down.”

“Then why was he so concerned about Trevanian’s order?”

“Jack Trevanian?”

I nodded, handing the list across the desk. Channon’s head drew back, and by the time he was done reading, he was regarding the list with a narrow, sideways look. He asked me what I made of it.

“Best guess? Dimitri had it tagged as a breaker.” A breaker, I meant, of international sanctions or Customs regulations, the kind of order we were working undercover to detect.

“Did he say that?”

“No.”

Channon studied the list. “If this turned out to be a breaker,” he decided, “and Dimitri had it covered, maybe he thought that might save him. One last big trophy for the wall. I’d have to be grateful.” He grunted and dropped the list on his desk. He shook his head at this further evidence of Dimitri’s mendacity. But his eyes stayed on the list.

“I’ll call Rita,” I said. Rita Durranti, our contact at Customs. “Let her know we’ve got one to watch.”

“No you won’t.” Channon looked up. “I’m shutting Hawkeye down.”

“You can’t.” When he gave me a look, I indicated the list. “It’s a breaker. We can’t just walk away from it.”

He rounded on me. “You think I’ve got a choice, Ned? You think I’ve got a whole truckload of generals down in Washington cheering for me right now? Let me tell you, that is not the fucking case. What I’ve got is every enemy I ever made in the Pentagon shaking the goddamn ladder, trying to bring me down. I’ve got lieutenants—lieutenants, for chrissake—cracking jokes about me. Our man from the IRS, that’s what they’re calling me. And can you imagine how it’s gonna play when they find out what’s happened to Spandos? Holy shit.” He turned his head, then pointed. “I stayed loyal to you two.”

I said that I knew that. I told him I appreciated it.

“Do you, Ned? Do you know how many scars I’ve got from the scraps I’ve had keeping you two in the game? And then this.” His hand sliced upward. “One of you’s been stiffing me all along, playing me like some rube from the sticks. I’m in there pitching for you while you’re giving me the shaft.”

“That was Dimitri.”

“Yeah,” Channon agreed bitterly. “That was Dimitri.”

I gave it a moment, then I placed a finger on Trevanian’s list. “This is a breaker.”

Channon shook his head a couple of times, then puffed out his cheeks and blew. Finally he picked up Trevanian’s list and considered it. Dimitri’s insistence that the prospective order was his; the unusual size of the order; the apparent involvement of Cecille Lagundi, an African intermediary: The whole thing smelled like a breaker. I thought I could see what Channon was thinking. If he left me at Haplon, and I nailed it, maybe he could use that triumph to restore himself to favor. He could present it as a peace offering to the wrathful demigods of the Pentagon, maybe place it in the balance against an Intelligence operation that had cratered and one dead U.S. Army officer.

And me, what did I want? To discover the truth? To do my duty as a soldier and not leave a comrade and one-time friend lying dead and unavenged on the field of battle? I admit that was part of it. Revenge. It had to be. It was me who’d recruited Dimitri into the operation in the first place.

“Alex.” I spread my hands. “I want to stay with it. And I think you owe me that.”

He dropped the list on his desk, then clasped his hands together, turning it all over. The IRS involvement. Dimitri’s death. A breaker coming over the horizon.

“If I don’t bring you in now, Ned—Christ, look what happened to Dimitri. What would I tell your wife? Or your kid?”

“He’s twenty-three years old.”

“That’s hardly the point.”

“You have to let me stay with it.”

“I don’t have to do anything.”

“Look, I got Dimitri into Hawkeye. You can’t expect me to just walk.”

Channon swiveled in his chair and faced the window. Outside, the current batch of cadet officers, immaculately turned out in the West Point uniform, were on their way to the mess. Bright as buttons. Laughing. Still at that stage when the famed Honor Code held them with the unshakable force of born-again revelation. Upright and keen, barely more than boys. Kids for whom war, like so much else of life, was still just a theory. Their faces fresh, engagingly open, and so incredibly, unbelievably, young.

“You’re sure you want this,” Alex said, finally turning back to me.

As I nodded, there was a knock at the door. Ernie Small, the Point’s head of Infantry, looked in. I stayed in my chair. Under Channon’s instructions I’d made a habit of dropping in at West Point at various times, touching base with old colleagues and generally showing my face around. Channon’s idea was that my presence at any time wouldn’t then be a matter for comment. He didn’t want our occasional meetings to be clandestine, he wanted them to simply blend with my life. The best cover, he told me, was no cover. Channon knew his business. The tactic had worked. Now Ernie Small simply winked at me, asked jokingly if I was chasing my old job, then reminded Channon that fifty cadets were over in the main lecture hall waiting for his pearls of wisdom. Channon made a face. Ernie smiled and withdrew.

“You pull out now, no one’s gonna hold it against you,” Channon said when Ernie was gone.

I didn’t reply.

He studied me, then rose to his feet. “You phone in each day, every day. You give me a full brief. And next time you hear me tell you you’re coming in, that’s it.” He jabbed his finger onto the desk. “You are coming in. Clear?”

I dipped my head. He let his look linger on me a moment, as if he still wasn’t quite sure about something. My response to Dimitri’s death? My insistence that I wanted to go on? At last he gave it up and glanced at his watch. He told me the hour he expected my first call.

“What if there’s nothing to report?”

He looked up slowly. “Just phone me,” he said simply. When he saw that I got it, he nodded. My call would be my report. Confirmation that Ned Rourke—unlike Dimitri Spandos—was still in the game.

CHAPTER 3

Our family home was a brick-and-tile place on Ellis Street in Yonkers, lawns front and back, with tall hedges on both sides to screen us from the Walters and the Bidwells. The street was tree-lined and peaceful, the trash collection Mondays the sole point of drama in the week.

We bought the house back when I was a West Point instructor. I never expected to like it, but my life up till then had been so footloose that the settled calm of Ellis Street, the almost soporific blandness of the neighborhood, grew on me. The passing years did their work and rooted me to the place. The Haplon factory was just over the state line in Connecticut, so we kept the house after I resigned my commission, and I commuted up there daily. I never told my wife or son about the double life I was leading. I knew that any hint that I was back on active service—overt or covert—would probably collapse our marriage and ruin our lives. And Channon’s orders had always been to keep the operation strictly to myself. It was safer for everyone that way, he said. For me. For them. And he was right. In spite of everything that has happened since, I still believe he was right, it really was safer. Whether it was better for everyone is another question, one I didn’t properly consider until Dimitri’s death. And by then, as I discovered, it was already too damn late.

“Maybe it was gambling trouble.” My wife Fiona was seated at the breakfast bar eating muesli and reading the latest
Scientific American
. I’d just showered and dressed after my routine morning exercises—sit-ups, skipping rope, then some stretches—and these were Fiona’s first words as I walked into the kitchen. “Olympia told me the kind of money he used to lose,” she said, looking up from her magazine. “Maybe Dimitri went in over his head.”

I remarked that Dimitri had gotten over his problem a long time ago.

She sniffed. “He said.”

“Yeah.”

“And you really believed him?”

I gave her a dark look, and Fiona dropped her gaze back into the magazine. When I’d gotten home the night before, I’d given her all I really wanted to about Dimitri’s death—that it was a tragic accident, a loose shot from the range—and the last thing I needed was to chew over the remainders of his long-failed marriage. I took some ham from the fridge and a carton of eggs. Nodding to her magazine, I asked what was new in the wonderful world of geochemistry.

“Well no one there got shot yesterday,” she said.

She turned another page. I got the frying pan out of the drainer.

“He really was the pits,” she murmured.

“Can we leave this? He hasn’t been dead twenty-four hours. You think he was a slimeball? Fine. I don’t want to hear it just now.”

I received a less than sympathetic look.

“Right,” she said.

I turned and reached up to the plate rack. I asked what she had on at work that day. Fiona relented a little and gave me a quick run-through of her schedule: office in the morning, lunch with some Geometrics clients, then down to the lab for most of the afternoon. Geometrics was the company she worked for, a specialist in testing geological samples. Their office and lab were just two blocks from home, one of the reasons we bought the house in the first place.

My wife’s career, let me say right off, was a real lesson in how far sheer guts and determination can get a body in this world. Back in the early years of our marriage, when we moved from base to base around the country with our baby son in tow, Fiona never once complained. But as our boy got older she decided she wanted more from life than the usual round of coffee mornings with the other officers’ wives, followed by housework, then half a bottle of gin in the afternoon with Oprah. She started studying again. Some correspondence courses first, then she got herself on some program the U.S. Army had going, and within a couple of years she was launched on a degree course offered in modules by some college out west. Just chemistry at first, but we used to go camping a lot in those days and she got interested in all the different types of terrain we hiked through. After six years’ hard grind, she graduated in geochemistry. From there she picked up work wherever I was posted, but it was a frustrating time for her, having to leave her job whenever the Army moved me on. When I took the West Point job after Mogadishu, it wasn’t just the guarantee of my personal safety that made her so happy. At last she had stability in her life. Her own home, and her first steady job since our marriage.

She started in the lab at Geometrics and worked her way up. It was a small company back then, developing new techniques to evaluate rock samples for the mining industry. When Geometrics boomed, more promotions followed. After five years Fiona was their head geochemist, managing the main lab and overseeing their international facilities. Quite an achievement for any woman; for one like Fiona, written off by her family when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen, simply amazing.

Now she made a note in her diary, then came over to the percolator. Dropping some bread in the toaster, I drummed my fingers lightly on the bench. I asked if Brad had been down.

“Haven’t seen him,” she said, and she gave my drumming fingers a do-you-mind kind of look. I decided I was not prepared, at a quarter of eight in the morning, to face yet another outbreak of low-level hostilities. I beat a retreat down the hall and opened the side door to the garage.

“Brad!” I hollered. Our son Bradley had been holed up in semi-independent quarters above the garage since the age of sixteen. We built the conversion for Fiona’s widowed mother, Charlotte, but when Charlotte made the only spontaneous decision of her life and hitched up with a widower from Denver and married him—all this a month before she was due to move in with us—Brad hauled his desk into the conversion and claimed it as his own. A place to study, he told us. Before long the rest of his junk was making the short migration across the house, concluding some weeks later with the grand finale, the dismantlement and disappearance into the conversion of his bed. Seven years later, a high school diploma and a college degree behind him, he was showing no sign of moving on. Now he was working on his doctorate, an inquiry into the meaning of lumps of Mesolithic rock discovered in a layer of Precambrian. “Brad!” I hollered again, but there was no answer, so I climbed up and rapped on his door. “Eggs and ham. You want some?”

When he called me inside I found him sitting at his desk, freshly showered, wearing nothing but a pair of white briefs. He was tapping away at the keyboard of his PC.

“You want to leave that alone for five minutes, come and have some breakfast?”

“Has Mom left?” he asked without turning.

His mother, I told him, was still down in the kitchen.

I glanced around. He had more books stacked along one wall than I’d read in my entire life, and more again on the shelves. A couple of trophies up there too, from college baseball.

I nodded to the PC. “You don’t get enough of that nine to five?”

“Tell Mom to wait, can you?” He scratched the stubble on his jaw, his eyes fixed on the screen. “I’ll be down in two secs.”

I could have asked him what he had to say to his mother that he couldn’t say to me, but what, finally, would be the point? The emotional parameters of our family had been firmly entrenched for years, the special bond that existed between Brad and Fiona was one I’d long ago accepted as exclusive. It was more than just the mother-and-son thing. Physically he resembled me, tall and lean, but Brad and his mother were intellectual kin. It was no surprise to anyone when he decided to major in geology at college, by then he’d been involved in an informal private seminar with his mother on the subject for years. She never forced it on him. It started way back on our family camping trips. He gradually lost interest in fishing with me and took to wandering off fossicking with Fiona, armed with a hammer and a sample bag. If I thought about it at all, I guess I thought that most kids have phases, that in time he’d come back to me, we’d do our things later. Fishing and hunting. Just spending time together like my father had with me. Of course, it never happened. From the age of around ten, rocks, for Brad, were no longer just things you threw at squirrels and skipped over the lake; he could not tell you where a trout might rise or how to stalk a lone deer up a wooded valley, but he could distinguish igneous from metamorphic rock at a glance and give you three good reasons why the lump of stone you held in your hand was neither.

And later, in high school, he spent hours each week down the road with Fiona at the Geometrics laboratory, a kind of unofficial and unpaid assistant. When Fiona set up her study at home in Brad’s vacated bedroom, he treated it like his own; using her microscope; walking off with her books and periodicals; borrowing any interesting new rock samples that caught his eye and taking them for an extended inspection out in his own quarters above the garage. It drove her crazy sometimes, but I’m sure Fiona wouldn’t have changed those years for anything.

When I returned late from work at Haplon, I’d often find them in her study, drinking coffee and talking, Brad seated with his legs stretched out on the floor in front of him. My appearance in the doorway could generally be relied upon to bring their talks to a premature end. I guess they just didn’t have that much to say to a guy who’d been out selling arms all day.

I can’t complain. My son grew up and became himself, the man he was going to be, through this deep tie with his mother. But what I wouldn’t have given that morning, standing in the room of my twenty-three-year-old son, not to feel that the relationship between us had probably peaked somewhere back in those distant days when I was still a young soldier and he was barely a boy of nine.

“Ham and eggs,” he said, nodding to his PC. “Excellent.”

When I retreated down the stairs he called after me, reminding me to tell his mother to wait.

Brad arrived in the kitchen five minutes later, his shirttail hanging over his jeans, with a printout in his hand. He placed the printout in front of Fiona, then came over to inspect the ham and eggs sizzling in the pan. He looked over my shoulder. “Got a job,” he told me, then he wandered around the breakfast bar and pulled up a stool by his mother.

“This is great,” she said after a moment, squeezing his shoulder as she carried on reading the printout. “Who sent this?” She scanned for a name. “Barchevsky?”

Brad picked up a knife and fork, gave a quick drum roll on the breakfast bar. “Da-dah,” he said, then dropped the cutlery, laughing, and hugged his mother. “Thanks,” he told her. “One I owe you. A big one.”

She pinched his cheek, then they bent their heads over the printout, smiling like a pair of kids.

I, meanwhile, was still in my usual place back at the starting post. Brad’s Ph.D., as far as I knew, was not due to be finished till the new year.

“What happened to the doctorate?” I asked.

Brad looked at me curiously. “This isn’t a for-life kind of job. It’s a few months in the field. A couple of mines and some virgin claims, somewhere I can test out a few ideas.”

I dished up the ham and eggs. Brad sat down opposite me at the bar, and we ate while Fiona continued perusing the e-mail printout. Eventually I had to ask.

“So who’s this Barchevsky?”

Ivan Barchevsky, Brad explained between mouthfuls, was the owner and head geologist of a small mining company. “I just met him the once, but he’s a big fan of Mom’s. Hey”— he turned to Fiona —“you see they’re gonna pay me? I’da known that, I woulda asked for share options. Wayne Mitchell paid off his college loan like that. Summer job out in California, they hit pay dirt, Wayne walks off with fifty thou.”

Fiona gave Brad the printout. I asked him where he was going to be working.

“Mbuji-Mayi area,” he said.

When I glanced at Fiona she took her coffee cup to the sink. I turned back to Brad.

“That doesn’t sound like California.”

“Africa.” He forked some more ham into his mouth. He turned the printout for me to see, pointing to a name halfway down the page. “Congo somewhere.”

I read it aloud: The Democratic Republic of the Congo. “They’re handing out visas?” I said, surprised.

Brad drew my attention to another part of the printout. Apparently his visa had already been arranged and paid for, he simply had to go to the consulate to get his passport stamped. “I’ll go in today, they say it might take a few hours.” He shrugged. Foreigners.

“Brad, have you read up any background on this place?”

“Sure.” He dipped his head, swallowing the last of his breakfast. “There’s a whole bunch of kimberlite pipes right on the boundary of the main claim, they’re getting magnetic anomalies like you wouldn’t believe. Hey, Mom. I mean, just everywhere.”

I made a face. “I was thinking more in terms of politics.”

“Yeah, well, they had some kinda trouble till late last year, Barchevsky said. But now it’s like fine.” Brad took his plate to the dishwasher. “You know. Stable.”

Stable. A country where the good citizens had spent the previous year slaughtering each other at the rate of several hundred per month.

“Brad—” I said, but he was already talking to his mother. In a few weeks she’d be making her own journey to Africa—Johannesburg, where Geometrics had a lab. It was part of the annual whistle-stop tour she’d instituted three years earlier, calling in at all Geometrics facilities to hear their problems firsthand, making them feel the head office cared, and presenting the annual bonuses. Brad, from what I could make out, was hoping they could meet up in South Africa and go to the Kruger National Park together. I got the impression this wasn’t the first time they’d discussed the idea.

“Okay, okay. I’ll check my schedule,” she finally conceded.

“Great.” He came around the bar and grabbed the printout. He addressed his mother as he headed down the hall. “I’ll call Joe, tell him I’m not interested in Canada anymore. Catch you later down at the lab.” Voice fading into the garage, he told me that breakfast was great.

I pushed my knife and fork together on the plate. Behind me I could hear Fiona going through the routine, wiping down the sink then putting a powder pellet in the dishwasher. At last I turned, one arm resting on the breakfast bar.