“Could I see it before I leave? I’ve never been aboard a cutter before.”
“Follow me.” In less than a minute, Murray was standing in the center of the deck, directly on the crossed yellow lines painted on the black no-skid deck coating. Wegener was explaining how the lights at the control station worked, but Murray was looking at the mast, drawing an imaginary line from the yardarm to the deck. Yeah, he decided, you could do it easy enough.
“Captain, for your sake I hope you never do anything this crazy again.”
Wegener turned in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“We both know what I mean.”
“You believe what those two -”
“Yes, I do. A jury wouldn’t – at least I don’t think one would, though you can never really tell what a jury will believe. But you did it. I know – you can’t say anything…”
“What makes you think -”
“Captain, I’ve been in the Bureau for twenty-six years. I’ve heard lots of crazy stories, some real, some made up. You gradually get a feel for what’s real and what isn’t. The way it looks to me, you could run a piece of rope from that pulley up there, down to here pretty easy, and if you’re taking the seas right, having a man swing wouldn’t matter much. It sure wouldn’t hurt the radar antenna that Riley was so worried about. Like I said, don’t do it again. This one’s a freebie because we can prosecute the case without the evidence you got for us. Don’t push it. Well, I’m sure you won’t. You found out that there was more to this one than you thought, didn’t you?”
“I was surprised that the victim was -”
“Right. You opened a great big can of worms without getting your hands too dirty. You were lucky. Don’t push it,” Murray said again.
“Thank you, sir.”
One minute after that, Murray was back in the car. Agent Bright was still unhappy.
“Once upon a time, when I was a brand-new agent fresh out of the Academy, I was assigned to Mississippi,” Murray said. “Three civil-rights workers disappeared, and I was a very junior member of the team that cleared the case. I didn’t do much of anything other than hold Inspector Fitzgerald’s coat. Ever hear about Big Joe?”
“My dad worked with him,” Bright answered.
“Then you know that Joe was a character, a real old-time cop. Anyway, the word got to us that the local Klukkers were mouthing off about how they were gonna kill a few agents – you know the stories, how they were harassing some families and stuff like that. Joe got a little pissed. Anyway, I drove him out to see – forget the mutt’s name, but he was the Grand Kleagle of the local Klavern and he was the one with the biggest mouth. He was sitting under a shady tree in his front lawn when we pulled up. He had a shotgun next to the chair, and he was half in the bag from booze already. Joe walks up to him. The mutt starts to pick up the shotgun, but Joe just stared him down. Fitzgerald could do that; he put three guys in the ground and you could see in his face that he’d done it. I got a little worried, had my hand on my revolver, but Joe just stared him down and told him if there was any more talk about offing an agent, or any more shitty phone calls to wives and kids, Big Joe was going to come back and kill him, right there in his front yard. Didn’t shout or anything, just said it like he was ordering breakfast. The Kleagle believed him. So did I. Anyway, all that loose talk ended.
“What Joe did was illegal as hell,” Murray went on. “Sometimes the rules get bent. I’ve done it. So have you.”
“I’ve never -”
“Don’t get your tits in a flutter, Mark. I said ‘bent,’ not broken. The rules do not anticipate all situations. That’s why we expect agents to exercise judgment. That’s how society works. In this case, those Coasties broke loose some valuable information, and the only way we can use it is if we ignore how they got it. No real harm was done, because the subjects will be handled as murderers, and all the evidence we need is physical. Either they fry or they cop to the murders and cooperate by again giving us all the information that the good Captain Wegener scared out of ’em. Anyway, that’s what they decided in D.C. It’s too embarrassing to everyone to make an issue of what we discussed aboard the cutter. Do you really think a local jury would -”
“No,” Bright admitted at once. “It wouldn’t take much of a lawyer to blow it apart, and even if he didn’t -”
“Exactly. We’d just be spinning our wheels. We live in an imperfect world, but I don’t think that Wegener will ever make that mistake again.”
“Okay.” Bright didn’t like it, but that was beside the point.
“So what we do now is figure out exactly why this poor bastard and his family got themselves murdered by a sicario and his spear-carrier. You know, when I was chasing wise guys up in New York, nobody messed with families. You didn’t even kill a guy in front of his family except to make a special kind of point.”
“Not much in the way of rules for the druggies,” Bright pointed out.
“Yeah – and I used to think terrorists were bad.”
It was so much easier than his work with the Macheteros, Cortez thought. Here he was, sitting in the corner booth of a fine, expensive restaurant with a ten-page wine list in his hands – Cortez thought himself an authority on wines – instead of a rat-infested barrio shack eating beans and mouthing revolutionary slogans with people whose idea of Marxism was robbing banks and making heroic taped pronouncements that the local radio stations played between the rock songs and commercials. America had to be the only place in the world, he thought, where poor people drove their own cars to demonstrations and the longest lines they stood in were at the supermarket check-out.
He selected an obscure estate label from the Loire Valley for dinner. The wine steward clicked his ballpoint in approval as he retrieved the list.
Cortez had grown up in a place where the poor people – which category included nearly everyone – scrounged for shoes and bread. In America, the poor areas were the ones where people indulged drug habits that required hundreds of cash dollars per week. It was more than bizarre to the former colonel. In America drugs spread from the slums to the suburbs, bringing prosperity to those who had what others wanted.
Which was essentially what happened on the international scale also, of course. The yanquis, ever niggardly in their official aid to their less prosperous neighbors, now flooded them with money, but on what the Americans liked to call a people-to-people basis. That was good for a laugh. He didn’t know or care how much the yanqui government gave to its friends, but he was sure that ordinary citizens – so bored with their comfortable lives that they needed chemical stimulation – gave far more, and did so without strings on “human rights.” He’d spent so many years as a professional intelligence officer, trying to find a way to demean America, to damage its stature, lessen its influence. But he’d gone about it in the wrong way, Félix had come to realize. He’d tried to use Marxism to fight capitalism despite all the evidence that showed what worked and what did not. He could, however, use capitalism against itself, and fulfill his original mission while enjoying all the benefits of the very system that he was hurting. And the oddest part of all: his former employers thought him a traitor because he had found a way that worked…
The man opposite him was a fairly typical American, Cortez thought. Overweight from too much good food, careless about cleaning his expensive clothing. Probably didn’t polish his shoes either. Cortez remembered going barefoot for much of his youth, and thinking himself fortunate to have three shirts to call his own. This man drove an expensive car, lived in a comfortable flat, had a job that paid enough for ten DGI colonels – and it wasn’t enough. That was America right there – whatever one had, it was never enough.
“So what do you have for me?”
“Four possible prospects. All the information is in my briefcase.”
“How good are they?” Cortez asked.
“They all meet your guidelines,” the man answered. “Haven’t I always -”
“Yes, you are most reliable. That is why we pay you so much.”
“Nice to be appreciated, Sam,” the man said with a trace of smugness.
Félix – Sam to his dinner partner – had always appreciated the people with whom he worked. He appreciated what they could do. He appreciated the information they provided. But he despised them for the weaklings they were. Still, an intelligence officer – and that remained the way he thought of himself – couldn’t be too picky. America abounded with people like this one. Cortez did not reflect on the fact that he, too, had been bought. He deemed himself a skilled professional, perhaps something of a mercenary, but that was in keeping with an honored tradition, wasn’t it? Besides, he was doing what his former masters had always wanted him to do, more effectively than had ever been possible with the DGI, and someone else was doing the paying. In fact, ultimately the Americans themselves paid his salary.