Wag the Dog (54 page)

Of course, Maggie reads the file that Hartman gave her. She asks me if it's true.

Well, how true is a piece of paper, ever. Is it going to make her stop loving me? Does the record mean we're over?

She just wants to know if it's true.

Sure, it's true. I went to Vietnam to kill people. Enemies of the United States of America, my country. An opposing army, that fights in a particular way. At first I'm there in uniform.

It's hard. War is supposed to be hard. It's frightening and the commandments are broken and you find out if you're a man and what kind. It's the insects and the snakes and the wet, the skin fungus and the smell of unwashed bodies. The smell of shit and urine and sweat and fear. I became a sergeant and I liked it. More than like. It was what I was born for. The truth is, it didn't really matter that it was the United States of America. If I'd been born for some other war, that probably would have been alright. Winning would have been good too. The whole war, I mean. I won most of my battles and I killed more of them than they killed of us and I kept my guys, my squad, and when I had a lieutenant would listen, safer than most, most of the time, and I made the enemy fear and respect us.

Then there comes a time, things get out of hand. I get into a dispute with an officer and the easiest way to solve it is for me to leave the Marines. I'm thinking that the Marines are a career, that that's my home. So that's hard, but under the circumstances it's a better deal than I have a right to expect. It's Griff, Preston Griffith, who helps me find an out. If they'll let me go, he's got work for me. I can stay in Vietnam. I can fight.

It's a different kind of fighting. More like the VC's way. It's called
Phunng Hoang,
Phoenix. Dress like VC, eat like VC. They say we own the day, the VC owns the night. We take back the night from the VC. We are assassins.

So I tell Maggie, yes, the file is true.

She doesn't leave me. She doesn't grow frightened or angry and pull away. She presses her body next to mine. Moonlight comes in the window and she goes to sleep.

I begin to look for someone who can tell me what the mystery disc is.

We split up the material that we can read. Everything that Brody writes in his letters and his notes says that Beagle is working on a war movie or television series of some kind. This is more or less in accord with what everyone in town knows. In two days of
reading we discover nothing that tells us significantly more than did the letter to his mother that I found on the first go-round, except that Teddy wrote a piece for Beagle about propaganda. There are several versions of it, each getting shorter and shorter.

Of course, what Teddy couldn't know was that someone would kill him rather than let him talk to me, or perhaps to any outsider. We—Universal Security—have done employee-departure cases before and we assume that an employee will talk to his new employer about what he did at his last place of employment, even—or especially—if those things are trade secrets or some other form of proprietary information.

Had Teddy seen his assailant, that would not have told him what it told me. Bo Perkins was Phoenix. There were people who became affected by the power that they had. I won't say that I didn't. That I was pure or something. But there is a difference between loving war—the contest, the danger, the risk, the adrenaline rush, the feeling of power, the high feeling—and loving pain and death. In Phoenix it was possible to hurt, to torture, to kill for pleasure. It was possible. For some, that is a great temptation.

The Dark Side—
da-dum
—like Darth Vader, once in a Galaxie, long, long ago . . .

But that's a movie and a kid's story. It doesn't tell you how dark the dark side is.

Bo went over—maybe was always over—and he didn't come back.

The other thing, of course, that Teddy couldn't know, very few people know, is that U. Sec. does work for the government. I mean secret work. Stuff that if you worked for the CIA you are supposed to inform somebody, like in Congress. And you're supposed to see a special memo or order before you do it. Plus, there are certain things, like assassinations, that by law the CIA and the other security agencies of the United States, and there are quite a few, cannot do. It's possible, though I don't know, because it's not the level where I operate, that U. Sec. may be, or maybe once was, a CIA proprietary.
¹⁰⁶

Bottom line, Maggie said it—you don't kill someone over a movie.

You especially don't send Bo Perkins unless it has been authorized at the highest level of invisible government.

The thing is, if we write down the few simple things we know, it's like an equation. Simpler than that even. Arithmetic.

At this time I don't think the answer is as simple and stark as that. That appears to be, on the face of it, insane. Beagle makes excellent films but—that's insane. Yet the equation remains.

Add to that the whole operation. The amount of surveillance—personnel, electronics, transcripts—someone is spending a tremendous amount of money.

What I figure, at this point, is that Beagle is working on war propaganda. From the memo the kid wrote. Why would that be such a serious secret? No big deal. In Vietnam we built television stations to broadcast propaganda. Then when someone realized the Vietnamese didn't have televisions, we gave them televisions. People do propaganda in war. In all sorts of forms. That's OK, unless Beagle's doing propaganda for a war that he knows will exist that nobody else knows about. It means that somebody has already decided that we're going to
have a war and they've hired Beagle to tell them how to present it. So they don't fuck it up like they did Vietnam.

Having just enough information to deduce this does us more harm than good. Hartman and Bunker, who are smarter than we, can figure out that I can figure it out. And sooner or later, that will be unacceptable. David Hartman tried to tell Maggie not to get involved, way back at the beginning. I don't know that there is a way, anyway at all, to get uninvolved.

“Tell me, Maggie, why? What do you want?”

“A little power,” she says. “David could stop my career dead. Or more likely, when I get a little older and it's easier to sell a younger piece of merchandise, he just won't bother. Nobody cares. Bottom line. There isn't a person in the world that cares for me and my career. Except you. Now. But you're not David Hartman or Ray Stark or Mike Ovitz or Michael Eisner or David Geffen. That's not self-pity, that's a financial statement.

“I'm lucky to be where I am. I understand that. But I also understand it could all go away. If I have something on David that gives me an edge, that gives
me
power over him for a change—I want it. That's my truth. Now, are you going to fall out of love with me for that?”

“No.”

The last hope that there is some easy way is the disc. Three-and-a-half-inch floppy. Black plastic. Indistinguishable from any other Mac or DOS disc. No label.

 

 

 

¹⁰⁶
It may not be news to anyone anymore what CIA proprietaries are and that they exist. If it is, they are ostensibly private businesses secretly owned or funded by the CIA. They are more than fronts in that they really function as businesses. Some of them make a profit and need no subsidy. Some of them have been known to make money for the Agency, which makes for very secret spendable funds. The most famous proprietary was Air America, an airline in Southeast Asia that flew agents and commandos and opium and cash and virtually anything else. When Ollie North wanted to send arms to Iran, he approached a CIA contact about a proprietary airline. This contact said, in essence, that Ollie didn't need to make special arrangements so long as he could pay the normal air-freight rate. Just like any other customer.

C. H. B
UNKER CAME
to much the same conclusion that Joseph Broz did.

His arithmetic was slightly different But the sum was the same.

He thought a long time about firing Mel Taylor. He liked David Hartman's logic. In the world as Bunker saw it, there were qualities far more mysterious than IQ and measurable education and whether actions were logically correct. Some people won, some lost. Some day the people measurers—the psychologists, sociologists, test writers—would realize they were measuring the wrong thing. They would make up fancy new words for winners and losers. Then they would think up fancy new standards to measure them. And they wouldn't get that the measuring
sticks were already in place and that everybody but them knew what they were—money and power.

But even trickier than recognizing today's winners and losers was figuring out how they would perform tomorrow. Or rather, what shape tomorrow would have, because the world changed, constantly, and the exact same things that won for you today would make you a loser in the new world you woke up to tomorrow morning.

That, in the end, was what he decided to bet on.

Bunker happened to know why Taylor hated Broz. Griff had told him about it. It was one of Griff's favorite stories. Joe had won a lot of credit with C. H. by getting Griff home. Who would have thought that Preston Griffith would have been that weak. Turned into a goddamn sniveling junkie. That wasn't quite true either. Griff had turned into a cynical, charming, smart junkie. With a lot of baggage, too few illusions, and in a conspiracy with his pain to utilize opium and its derivatives.

Goddamn Vietnam. Next time they have a war, they better run it right. Nobody that came back from that goddamn place had
a good war.
Except maybe Joe Broz. Not even him. Joe would never admit to it, but it took him some years after he came back to handle it.

They came back heroes from C. H.'s war. American Heroes, saviors of the world, ready to run the world, for its own good, and they'd done a damn good job of it. If Griff had come back the way they all expected him back, he would have made a goddamn good son-in-law. The best. Been the heir apparent. Given C. H. grandsons. Goddamn, he knew the boy had good seed in him. Seed enough to plant grandsons, C. H. knew that for a fact. There was a little bastard boy running around somewhere, he'd heard about it before Griff left for Vietnam. Everyone hushed it up. C. H.'s daughter had cried for a month over that. College-kid stuff. A little wild oats. They'd made it up, the girl and Griff, before he left. But the way he'd come back . . .