No Way Back (4 page)

“What was that like?” Allison asks.

“Wired off from the world. Very closed community. School, everything, right on the bases. The ethic was dependents didn’t mix much with the locals.”

“Sounds kind of claustrophobic,” Rob says.

“Felt like prison, when I was fourteen in Yokohama,” I say, knowing neither of them can compre
hend. CIA newbies don’t come from military families. They’re mainly middle-, upper-middle class, they’ve got bachelor’s and maybe advanced degrees from Stanford and Georgetown and MIT in computer science or Middle East Studies, they’re likely to be fluent in Mandarin or Farsi or Arabic as well as one or more of the major European languages. Junior year abroad, some post-grad studies in St. Petersburg or Beijing. Their passports are nearly full of visa stamps before they set foot on the Farm.

I laugh, give them something as we’re finishing the meal that maybe isn’t in the dossier. “You know how it is at fourteen, hormones doing a number on you. I was off-base in Yokohama as much as I could manage. Wanted some action, wanted some weed or speed. No luck. Not a lot of drugs on the streets in Japan. It was easier to score on base. Lots of supply sergeants’ pencils weren’t real sharp about certain crates that came in.

“Anyway, that left girls. Not much luck there, either. Supply sergeants’ daughters were easier than the wildest Japanese girls. Tended toward ugly, though. But I did make it with one lovely local. Miko Yamaguchi. God, I still remember that.”

“At fourteen? No way I’m believing you. This is a brag story, Luther,” Allison says.

“Oh, it’s true,” I say, pulling up the sleeve of my waffle shirt, showing them a six-inch scar on my left forearm. “Problem was, Miko had a boyfriend. Who happened to be the son of a local Yakuza underboss. The boyfriend and two of his pals jump me one night. But I’m big for my age. I hammer them. I pay extra attention to the boyfriend’s face. Radically rearrange his features, specially the nose and his dental work. Next time I’m in the neighborhood, two of the Yak’s men grab me, hold
me down, give me this cut on the arm, tell me they see me around again, it’ll be my balls.”

Rob and Allison stay slick. They’re grinning. I don’t have even ten years on them, and they’re humoring me like an old man. “So. You have to go back to the base hospital, get maybe twenty stitches, your father finds out, of course, and whips your butt. Bye-bye, sweet Miko,” Allison says.

“Affirmative. And then one night my papa and five or six of his buddies go down to the Yak’s bar, kick the shit out of him, the two cutters, and miscellaneous personnel. They then procede to totally trash the bar. Anything that could be broken got broken. Hoo-ah!”

“Sounds like an international incident of serious proportions,” Rob says lightly, as if he’s being bullshitted and wants it clear he knows it. “Wicked repercussions.”

“Zero repercussions, Rob,” I say, hard-eyed and holding. “This guy’s a gangster, a walking billboard of criminality with Yak tattoos covering his chest, back, and arms. Minus his left little finger, too, which means he lost face with his boss over some earlier fuck-up and had to atone in the traditional way. Is he likely to go to the police? Is he going to lodge a complaint with the American base commander? Worst of all, what if his boss finds out what he ordered done to me? He’d lose his other little finger.”

“Colorful! I think he’s got you, Rob,” Allison says. “Hey, one more beer for the road, guys?”

“No thanks,” I say. “I sense I’ll be getting an early wake-up call tomorrow.”

“Prescient, Luther,” Allison says. “Can you tell fortunes, too?”

NO CALL NECESSARY. I’M UP BEFORE SUNRISE, PULLING
on sweatpants and a hoody to go for a run, which is something I’ve skipped way too often these past years.

I’m in the foyer, my hand on the door latch when a guy I haven’t met grasps my wrist. I start to spin into a kick, pure reflex, when Westley materializes between us.

“You can’t, Luther,” he says.

“Can’t go for a run?” There’s no hand on my wrist now. In fact there’s no sight of whoever it was grabbed me. A cold bolt streaks up my spine, stops at the base of my neck.

“Leave the house alone,” Westley says. Early as it is, he’s already in suit and tie. His tone is easy, like he’s trying to soothe a dog that’s bared its fangs. “You want to run mornings, do it all you want. But let me know first. I’ll have a partner for you.”

“I like to run alone.”

“House rules. You’re never out by yourself. Put off the run for a half hour or so. Let’s have some breakfast, talk about your program.”

For a moment I consider telling him no, I’m going out. Very dumb, to permit any such notion to even flicker. No question I’d be stopped. No real surprise, that door guard. But I’m jolted when Westley leads me into an office done up like an English parlor with nailed leather Chesterfields and paintings of horses on the walls, and I see two cups on saucers beside a silver coffeepot, a creamer, and a sugar bowl on a round mahogany table.

It clicks. Sensors or cameras in my room. Somebody watching over me in my sleep, somebody knowing the moment I get out of bed, somebody aware if I’m just up for a quick piss or getting dressed and leaving. And Westley knows I never eat anything in the morning. Always get started with nothing but strong coffee, heavy on the cream and sugar, and cigarettes.

There’s an open pack of Camel Wides, a Bic lighter, an ashtray next to one of the cups. I don’t need to be told where to sit. I do need to start keeping who I’m working with front and center in my mind. Need to light that up bright and keep it lit. And shuck the habits and attitudes of Dugal’s narc squad.

“So,” Westley says, pouring coffee for me. “Room suit you? You getting on okay with Allison? So far, so good?”

“So far,” I say.

“So, good enough. All right. As we discussed, this is going to be easy duty, no strain, no stress. But maybe you need to get back up to speed in a couple of ways. Your weapons skills are as sharp as ever, I hear. What about the rest?”

“Not as good with my hands as I used to be,” I admit. “Haven’t had much use for that in a long time.”

“No problem. I’ll bring in a sparring partner every day. There’s a place here where you can work out.”

“Okay.”

“Next. As we discussed, some Russian practice every day. And you’re going to need some Korean, too. Just enough to get by in a pinch. Plus some style things. Manners, behavior, gestures. You know the drill.”

“Sure. Fit in, don’t stand out, don’t give offense. Unless you mean to.”

“Exactly. Now let’s talk weapons. Nothing heavy, no military-type tools. Your role will be purely, absolutely defensive. What you brought with you would be perfect, except they’re yours. You’ll need things just as concealable under a suit, but no serial numbers, no history, no discoverable source. Make a list of what you want, give it to Allison today.”

“So when do I get the exact who, where, and what? In detail?”

“Closer to the fact. Right now, let’s just take care of these few basics.”

“Fine. But how close to the fact?”

Westley laughs. “I won’t wait until five minutes before your plane takes off, you can count on that. You’ll know everything you’ll need to know to fulfill your task in plenty of time to digest, analyze, plan for various scenarios.”

“Who decides what I don’t need to know?”

“I do.”

There’s no perceptible change in Westley’s voice, but I feel absolute confidence, absolute authority behind it. At the same moment, there’s the sense that I’m seeing the man for the first time. He must be in his sixties. Even features, thin lips, skin still fairly taut but bearing the fine furrows and creases of age. No distinguishing marks, nothing anybody would remember. His gray eyes seem cold and soulless as the steel rims of his glasses, but in my trade half the people you run into have eyes like that.

“And if I decide there’s something vital missing, some
blank that could blow the op and me away, what about that?”

“There won’t be that sort of blank,” Westley says. “But you can ask me. I might even answer. Unlikely, but I might.”

“Ghosts playing a game with ghost rules.”

“That’s just occurring to you? I don’t think so. You’ve always known we’re called ‘spooks’ for good reason,” Westley says.

Allison’s waiting in the foyer, wearing sweats and doing straight-leg stretches, her heel on the staircase’s banister. “How long do you usually like to go?” she says, not looking at me, bending at the waist until her chin is almost touching a knee. “One K, max, am I right?”

“Wrong. Five minimum. Under thirty minutes.”

“Really?” She gives me a look that says she knows I’m full of shit, moves past me to the door, sniffs. “Smoker, too! I don’t think I’m going to get up to aerobic level if I pace you.”

There’s no place near we can go except Dupont Circle, which starts out looking really small but gets bigger and bigger with each labored lap. Labored for me. I hardly ever work out in any way, but in my head I’ve retained the cracked illusion that physically I’m still the eighteen-year-old who charged right through Special Forces training. Just how cracked that is gets demonstrated conclusively when, by the tenth lap, Allison starts running backward and stays side by side with me. She’s even laughing, while I’m starting to pant.

“Hey, don’t let me crash into anything that isn’t really soft, okay?” she says. “Hate having to keep turning my head to see if my way’s clear.”

“How ’bout a bus? That soft enough?”

“Don’t get bitter.”

“Oh, never. That’d be so inappropriate.” I have to gulp two or three breaths before I can even get that out. Goddamn Westley. He knows I’ve spent most of my time sitting on my skinny ass in a car with Ice Box for too many years. Knows it’s going to take a hard and concentrated effort to get back into the shape I’ll need to be. And uses humiliation as an incentive to get me on that road.

It’s working, too. When we’re finished, I’m determined I’ll run every morning, put myself through whatever PT torture it takes to get back to speed. Westley’s got me taped to the millimeter.

Lunch is in-house. An invisible kitchen, an invisible cook, but a steam table in the dining room, first floor rear, overlooking a fenced-in patio. The food’s standard government agency cafeteria for grades GS-13 and below: choice of mediocre meat loaf or breaded, fried fish patties, plus oversteamed peas and carrots, broccoli, mashed potatoes. Or the mini–salad bar, mainly a big bowl of nearly frozen iceberg lettuce with canned chickpeas, shredded carrots, croutons and bacon bits for add-ons.

Westley doesn’t eat this, and not because he’s GS-15. I’ve seem him scarf MREs and unnamable local specialties I’d want my dog to test first before I tried them, in that bad place we’d spent a year in. He’s out somewhere, doing whatever he does. It’s just Allison, Rob, and the semi-phantom that seized my wrist at the door this morning, who turns out to be a fairly small but lithe-looking guy called Terry.

“Yum yum. Sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear eats you,” Allison says, her plate heavy with meat loaf, mashers, and a load of gravy.

“Not a bad James Earl Jones,” I say.

“God. Movie-referential again. She’s always doing this,” Rob says. He’s a salad-only eater. “Okay, I’ll play. The film was, uh,
Gardens of Stone
, right? James Earl Jones, top sergeant. James Caan, next sergeant. Some actress with a short neck. Director…I give up.”

“Anjelica Huston, and her neck’s not so short. Coppola directed. How could you not know Coppola directed?” Allison says.

“Why not? Obscure film, a week in theaters, then straight to video,” Rob says. “
You
know it was Coppola, Luther?”

“Sure,” I say, experiencing a definitely gummy aftertaste of meat loaf. “Jones and Caan, they’re two-tour Vietnam lifers now running the infantry company that does all the formal military burials at Arlington. Caan hates it, wants out. But he’s got this real dick of a CO, played by that weird dude who was as likely to show up in David Lynch flicks as Dennis Hopper, what’s his name? Dean Stockwell.”

“Bingo,” Allison says. “So you spend some serious VCR time, too, Luther?”

“Nah, gotta be DVD. To get the full experience.”

“Limiting, limiting,” Allison says, shaking her head. “Lots of the greatest movies, the older ones, haven’t made it to DVD. I mean, think about it. Real classics, like
Best Years of Our Lives
,
The Lion in Winter
,
The Conformist
,
The Night Porter
, almost all of Garbo and Bergman.”

“You’re not buying any of this, I hope, Luther,” Rob says. “Her favorite all-time great, the one she’s watched six times, is, get this:
Gladiator
! You can’t imagine the depth of her interest in Russell Crowe. She cries when he slices the SPQR tattoo off his arm. Her big dream is that one day they’ll somehow meet and Crowe’ll be hit by the love-at-first-sight phenomenon.”

“Wrong,” Allison says.

“Wrong what?” Rob says.

“I don’t cry when he cuts the tattoo.”

Terry giggles. That’s it. He looks sideways at her and giggles.

“I only cry with rage when that spineless bitch stands over his dead body in the Colosseum and says, ‘He was a soldier of Rome.’ It’s her fault he got killed, dammit. She should be taken out and shot.”

“Oh, okay, just jump a whole bunch of centuries. ‘Taken out and shot.’ Little cognitive continuity problem here, Allison?” Rob’s smiling big-time.

“Oh, blow me, Rob.”

“Hey. Another little cognitive hitch.”

And it’s all kind of fun, watching these kids perform. They’re very good, they’re improvising around the script, which calls for drawing the outsider—me—into the group, making him feel he’s a welcome part of a tight crew. Smart and competent on duty, but open, relaxed folks off, the kind he’ll like and trust and maybe believe are his friends. Every contact—the Mex dinner, the jogging, now lunch—has had that object, and they haven’t fluffed many lines.

“Hey, you’ve got a free half hour before your next task, Luther,” Allison says as we’re finishing up. “Rob and I have some stuff to take care of, so do what you like. We’ll catch you later.”

What I’d like is more of a sense of the place that features, apparently, 24/7 surveillance in my room. What else have they got in place? How hardened is this house? This is definitely need-to-know for me, though nobody else seems to think so.

I decide I’ll try the back patio the dining room overlooks. It seems fenced no differently than every other house on the block I can see from the window. I find
some stairs going down a level, a short corridor that ends at a steel door. There’s a Terry clone sitting in a wooden chair there. I make a gesture, he nods, punches some keys on a numeric electronic lock. Interior bolts pull back with a heavy click, the door swings open, and I’m out on the flagstones, flickering patterns of light and dark from the sun peering through the leaves of trees. The door stays open, the Terry clone seems preoccupied with his fingernails, but I act as if someone’s watching me. I check out the flower beds built up against the fence, which is ordinary eight-foot cedar planking, I amble to the far end of the patio and look back at the house. The security’s damned near invisible, but after a few minutes I finally spot some telltales. Tucked under a couple of windowsills are small cubes I’m pretty sure are motion sensors, though they’re cased in wood painted the same off-white as the sills. Where the rain gutter meets the downspouts at each corner of the house, I spot a glint when the breeze shifts the leaves and sun hits glass. Surveillance cameras, but smaller than any I’ve seen before. My eyes track the downspouts. About a meter above the fence, I see the first of what look like copper rivets spaced evenly about six inches apart. Turning, I see the four-by-fours at the fence corners are about a meter taller than the planking and feature the same copper circles: infrared, or maybe the latest laser system. The ordinary-looking fence may as well be topped with coils of razor wire; nobody’s coming over unseen or unheard.

Tight. I’m walking back toward the steel door, which has to be four inches thick, hinges set inside so they can’t be popped, when I glimpse a bit of insulated wire poking through the moss between the flagstones. I take a little skip, feel the stone I come down on give just a fraction. Pressure pads under the flags, wired to the interior alarm system?

Christ! I’d thought this was a prep house, but if the rear security is representative, it’s been as hardened as a safe house for defectors or high-value sources some bad guys with lots of skills and resources very badly want to kill. That’s a nasty surprise.

But soon after I’m back inside, the armored steel door thunking solidly shut as I head upstairs, I run into an unexpectedly sweet one.