The Second Saladin (33 page)

He’d left Boston and driven straight from National into D.C., stopping only at a sporting-goods shop in a suburban mall to buy a luxurious pair of shoes—Nike high-tops, leather, the pro model—and a good Seamco outdoor ball, and headed deep into the city until he saw a playground, a good one, a big one, across a bridge in a meadow between a highway and a slow river. The place was called, after the river, Anacostia. He knew the best ballplayers would go there.

He felt he could play forever. At thirty-eight, he felt sixteen. If there was a heaven on this earth, he had at last
found it: a playground, two hoops, and a shot that was falling.

Jesus, was it falling.

“Fill it.”

“Drop it.”

“Put it
down
, man.”

“Jam it.”

“Damn
, you hot.”

He hit four in a row, then five, then six before missing. He fired rainbows that fell like messages from God, dead center, without mercy. He tried tap-ins and finger rolls and fallaway jumpers and drives off either hand. He fought to the baseline to receive a pass and curled backward through two defenders for a reverse lay-up. The ball felt like a rose, it was so light and smelled so sweet. In a trance he shot a wish from forty feet, only to watch it drop without a rattle. Even the postman gave him a tap on the butt after that one.

But eventually, in the hazy hour of twilight of the third day, when the moths had begun to gather in the cones of the fluorescent lights that would illuminate the hoops until midnight, into this athlete’s Eden there came a snake. Chardy pretended not to notice; but how could he miss the only other white face among so many black ones, even if it was far away, behind the windshield of a nondescript car.

Whoever was stalking him had patience. He waited like a grim statue in his car through several more games, even allowing Chardy to drink a can of cold beer that someone offered from a six-pack.

Finally, almost into full dark, as Chardy was firing from the baseline—a rare miss, too—the door popped and a short figure emerged.

Lanahan. They’d sent Lanahan.

Chardy missed the next two shots, and the man he was theoretically guarding put in two buckets.

Lanahan, in his disheveled suit, wandered over shyly, paused, and finally found a seat in some bleachers adjacent to the court.

Chardy missed another shot. All of a sudden he could not buy a basket. A terrible weariness suffused his limbs.

“Come
on
, Jack,” the postman ordered.

The ball came to him on the perimeter. Inside, a man on his team slipped open and Chardy should have hit him at the low post with a bounce pass; greedily he merely faked it. Chardy dribbled back and forth, the ball rising to meet his eager hands. He searched for an opening. Another teammate slipped out to set a pick and Chardy drove suddenly to it, losing his defender in the process.

He set himself for half an instant, and felt the ball rise and almost of itself decide to flee the thrust of his two hands as he leaned from behind the pick. The ball, obediently, disappeared through the basket.

Chardy got two quick baskets after that, and the postman finished the run with a ringing slam-dunk. Chardy raised his hand, announcing the desire to sit one out, and a high-school boy of great repute but few words jogged in emotionlessly to take his place.

“Nice stuff, man,” the kid said.

Chardy plucked a towel off the grass and circled the court to the bleachers. He flopped down a row behind Miles, stretching his legs out before him and working over his face with a towel. One of his knees was bloody. He couldn’t even remember a fall.

“You’re good,” said Miles, watching the new game before him, the cuffs and shouts and bounces now reaching them through the heavy summer air. “I had no idea how good.”

“I seemed to be on tonight,” said Chardy.

“We had a lot of trouble finding you.”

“I just had to play some basketball.”

“Sure.”

Chardy watched for a while. Before him, in the glow of the overhead fluorescents, the postman and the new kid went after each other.

“That tall guy is pretty good,” Lanahan said. “Not the kid, the other guy. He could play in the pros.”

“No, he couldn’t,” said Chardy. “Who gets the ax? I saw the papers. We got out of it pretty good. I didn’t see any mention of the Agency or any mention of the Kurds. Thank Christ, Danzig didn’t kick off anyway on a heart attack with all the excitement.”

“Two people did die, Paul.”

“Three. Johanna.”

“Well, I meant in the shooting.”

“Johanna was shot,” Chardy said stubbornly.

“Paul, it’s really not possible for us to see her as a victim.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t.”

“In any event, nobody ever connected her with Danzig. We didn’t ourselves until yesterday. Somebody must have moved her if she was close to the shooting.”

“She was across the street.”

“So it was you?”

“Yeah.”

“That was smart, Paul. It was real smart. It could have gotten so complicated, so lurid if the papers had tied it all together. Can you imagine
Time?”

“I wasn’t thinking about the papers, Miles.”

“It doesn’t matter what you were thinking about, Paul. It only matters what you
did.”

“You still haven’t told me who got the ax. But I can guess. Not you, or you wouldn’t be here. Not me, not with
Ulu Beg still around with his machine pistol. I’m still an asset. That leaves—”

“He didn’t do very well. He deserves what he’s getting. He authorized the cutback on the surveillance of Johanna. He overcommitted to the Midwest. Sam called it a dreadful performance.”

“Ver Steeg is out?”

“Way out. They bumped him over to a staff job in Scientific Intelligence. Something to do with satellites. He’s one of the old guys; he goes way back with Sam, so they didn’t fire him. Imagine what they’d have done to one of us, Paul?”

“So Sam’s running things. They’ve moved it to Operations? He’s calling the shots?”

“Well—” Miles smiled. His fiery skin seemed neon in the fluorescent light. His teeth were still bad.

“You, Miles?”

“I was lucky. I didn’t catch the flak. And they needed someone who was all read-in. So I’m field supervisor.”

“But under Sam?”

“Sam’s a smart guy, Paul. He’s had his eye on me for some time. We work well together. But I’m not here about Sam. I’m here about you.”

“Suppose I say no? Suppose I say I’m tired of it, it’s only going to end in more senseless killing?”

“Well, you can’t say no. You signed a contract. We could make it pretty sticky. Your name’s on the dotted line. You can’t just back out. But Paul, consider. Danzig really wants you. He believes in you.”

“The jerk,” Chardy said.

“Paul, look at it this way. Danzig wants you Danzig’s got clout. That means Melman wants you. Melman’s going places, Paul. He’ll get the top job one of these days. He’s one of the inside boys. Paul, you and me, we’ve always been on the outside and we’ll always be on the
outside unless we have an insider really pulling for us. Somebody who’s old Agency, Harvard, WASP, upper-management. That’s Sam, Paul. He can really help guys like us, Paul, two Irish-Catholic Chicago street kids. He wants to start over with you, Paul. Clean slate. No ’seventy-five hearings, no recommendation for termination. It all disappears. Paul, you could have your career back. You could have it all. If Sam owes you, Paul, you’re in extremely good shape when he lands on the top floor. He could take you with him.”

Playing the seducer in the Anacostia night didn’t suit Miles. His features were too squirrely, his acne too fierce. As he spoke his tiny dark eyes lit with conviction and he jabbed and gestured with his small hands. He pressed, crowded, yipped. A good case officer—Chardy had known a few in his time—could charm you into selling your mother, but Miles had no talent for it. It was a question of timing, of rhythm; he came to the point too fast.

Melman must be on the desperate side to have resorted to a clumsy operator like Lanahan. It was a curiosity: Why couldn’t Melman have come up with somebody smoother? No, he was recycling the people he’d started with, simply shuffling them around. For some reason he wanted to keep the operation contained, keep the number of players down.

Chardy looked across the river. The unlovely city gleamed cool and glossy on the far shore. The Capitol, arc-lit and melodramatic, loomed frozen against the night. Near it, also lit for drama, rose the shaft of the Washington Monument—cathedrals in the Vatican of government, a faith which just now Chardy saw as desperately hollow, as much a hoax as the Catholicism in which he’d been raised.

But did he have a choice? Of course not. Which perhaps
was Melman’s real message in sending this awful kid.

He thought of Johanna and his promise to her. Was it invalidated by her treason? Or Ulu Beg? What did Chardy owe the Kurd, who had made him a brother? He wondered about all sorts of things too: why was Melman so desperate to have him back? Why had Melman been so driven to destroy him seven years ago? Who really was running Ulu Beg? And what about pitiful Trewitt, stuck out on his secret limb in Mexico?

He knew that whatever the answers were, they would not be found on a playground.

“Let’s go, then, Miles,” he said.

D
anzig sat in his bathrobe out back, by the garden. There were at least seven men around, three of them with radios. And beyond, in the thickets, still more men. Government cars orbited the block too: nondescript Chevys with two men in suits and Israeli submachine guns. And helicopters? Perhaps even helicopters.

“You certainly appreciate
scale
,” he said to the man next to him.

Sam Melman laughed.

“With all the taxes you pay, you deserve something a little special,” he said. “How’s the chest?”

Danzig winced. The Kelvar vest had stopped all three slugs and diffused the impact; still, they’d cracked two ribs and left him nearly immobile, with bluish bruises running from inside his arm across his chest to his stomach. He’d been kept sedated much of the past few days, the pain had been so acute, and he remembered it only vaguely. His wife had appeared heroically at his bedside and gone on television shows with communiqués; she seemed to enjoy the process and it gave her something to
do
. Meanwhile an ocean of telegrams poured in, sweet words from men who loathed him, mostly composed under
the impression he would soon die (the early reports had been confused).

“My chest is splendid,” said Danzig. “It’s wonderful.”

“I saw the medical reports. I bet it hurts like hell.”

“It hurts terribly,” Danzig said. “Please spare me any witticisms. Laughter would kill me.” He looked off glumly into the garden, a full green universe by this time. “I suppose if it took you three days to find Chardy, your own man, who was not even hiding from you but was playing basketball in a public park not three miles from here, you haven’t had much luck with the Kurd.”

“No. But the troops are out now. We are optimistic. It’s wide open now, so perhaps it all worked out for the best. Now we’ll get him. It’s really all over.”

“It certainly didn’t work out for that poor girl.” Danzig could remember watching her die. He could place the exact moment: a certain sloppy repose slid through her limbs and her head fell back spastically. A beautiful woman held herself with a certain discipline and pride; it was a universal. And when he saw that go, he knew she was finished. There was blood on her everywhere. Later he found out a ricochet had torn through her aorta. Curious and frightening, the ways of this world: from fifteen feet a man had fired a sophisticated modern weapon at him and, because of a trick of technology, failed to harm him seriously; this poor woman, whose only crime was to be present, had paid with her life, falling victim to a missed bullet that had deflected off of something. Their parallel fates were an accumulation of statistical improbabilities that were astonishing.

“It’s tragic, yes,” said Melman. “Tragic and pointless. But we didn’t bring the Kurd. The Kurd came himself.”

“Still, you can’t be pleased with the Agency’s performance.”

“Of course not. But steps have been taken to prevent a recurrence.”

Danzig nodded, but what had really happened was that the system had broken down. Entropy again, the factor of disorder and randomness. They’d had him in a net tight as a drumskin for weeks, but gradually it had worn down of its own volition, and the Kurd had slipped through. And no amount of precaution could prevent it from happening again.

“Here, Dr. Danzig.” Melman handed him something. It was a mashed piece of copper. “That one would have killed you. That’s the one. Thank God for the vest.”

Danzig preferred to thank the Secret Service and the U.S. Army whose Natick Research and Development Laboratory had developed Kevlar for his early trips to the Middle East.

“I’m not sentimentally attached to little souvenirs,” he said. “Is it of any significance?”

“No. We’ve a dozen more.”

Danzig stood and awkwardly threw the bullet into the lawn; the pain came in a sudden wave, but watching the thing disappear into the grass gave him a kind of pleasure he felt even as he doubled over, wincing and grunting. He wished he could make all the bullets in the world disappear.

“All right, Sam,” he said, turning, “tell me. Who’s trying to kill me?”

Melman studied him with some detachment. A cool customer, this Melman. No wonder he was doing so well now. A faint smile crossed Melman’s well-bred face.

“A Kurd. They’re a violent people. They don’t appreciate the subtleties of your strategic thought.”

“Please. I’m not a stupid man. Don’t address me as one.”

“Dr. Danzig, we have no information, not the tiniest scrap, to suggest anything other than—”

“Who recruited the woman, the Harvard instructor? The one who so conveniently has committed suicide and is therefore beyond our questions?”

“She was with Ulu Beg in the mountains for over seven months. They endured the collapse of the Kurdish revolution together. Perhaps they made an agreement then. He simply got to her and—”