“Oh? I have one myself.”
“And you must chase her around the office…”
“Consuela is old enough to be my mother. She worked for my father. Is that how it is in America? Does your boss chase you?” A hint of jealous outrage.
Another chuckle. “Not exactly. I work for Emil Jacobs. He’s the Director of the FBI.”
“I do not know the name.” A lie. “The FBI, that is your federales, this I know. And you are the chief secretary for them all, then?”
“Not exactly. Mainly my job is to keep Mr. Jacobs organized. You wouldn’t believe his schedule – all the meetings and conferences to keep straight. It’s like being a juggler.”
“Yes, it is that way with Consuela. Without her to watch over me…” Cortez laughed. “If I had to choose between her and one of my brothers, I would choose her. I can always hire a factory manager. What sort of man is this – Jacobs, you say? You know, when I was a boy, I wanted to be a policeman, to carry the gun and drive the car. To be the chief police officer, that must be a grand thing.”
“Mainly his job is shuffling papers – I get to do a lot of the filing, and dictation. When you are the head, your job is mainly doing budgets and meetings.”
“But surely he gets to know the – the good things, yes? The best part of being a policeman – it must be the best thing, to know the things that other people do not. To know who are the criminals, and to hunt them.”
“And other things. It isn’t just police work. They also do counterespionage. Chasing spies,” she added.
“That is CIA, no?”
“No. I can’t talk about it, of course, but, no, that is a Bureau function. It’s all the same, really, and it’s not like television at all. Mainly it’s boring. I read the reports all the time.”
“Amazing,” Cortez observed comfortably. “All the talents of a woman, and also she educates me.” He smiled encouragement so that she would elaborate. That idiot who’d put him onto her, he remembered, suggested that he’d have to use money. Cortez thought that his KGB training officers would have been proud of his technique. The KGB was ever parsimonious with funds.
“Does he make you work so hard?” Cortez asked a minute later.
“Some of the days can go long, but really he’s pretty good about that.”
“If he makes you work too hard, we will speak, Mr. Jacobs and I. What if I come to Washington and I cannot see you because you are working?”
“You really want… ?”
“Moira.” His voice changed its timbre. Cortez knew that he’d pressed too hard for a first time. It had gone too easily, and he’d asked too many questions. After all, lonely widow or not, this was a woman of substance and responsibility – therefore a woman of intellect. But she was also a woman of feelings, and of passion. He moved his hands and his head. He saw the question on her face: Again? He smiled his message: Again.
This time he was less patient, no longer a man exploring the unknown. There was familiarity now. Having established what she liked, his ministrations had direction. Within ten minutes she’d forgotten all of his questions. She would remember the smell and the feel of him. She would bask in the return of youth. She would ask herself where things might lead, but not how they had started.
Assignations are conspiratorial by their nature. Just after midnight he returned her to where her car was parked. Yet again she amazed him with her silence. She held his hand like a schoolgirl, yet her touch was in no way so simple. One last kiss before she left the car – she wouldn’t let him get out.
“Thank you, Juan,” she said quietly.
Cortez spoke from the heart. “Moira, because of you I am again a man. You have done more for me. When next I come to Washington, we must -”
“We will.”
He followed her most of the way home, to let her know that he wished to protect her, breaking off before getting so close to her home that her children – surely they were waiting up – would notice. Cortez drove back to the apartment with a smile on his face, only partly because of his mission.
Her co-workers knew at once. With little more than six hours’ sleep, Moira bounced into the office wearing a suit she hadn’t touched in a year. There was a sparkle in her eye that could not be hidden. Even Director Jacobs noticed, but no one said anything. Jacobs understood. He’d buried his wife only a few months after Moira’s loss, and learned that such voids in one’s life could never quite be filled with work. Good for her, he thought. She still had children at home. He’d have to go easier on her schedule. She deserved another chance at a real life.
8. Deployment
THE AMAZING THING was how smoothly things had gone, Chavez thought. After all, they were all sergeants, but whoever had set this thing up had been a clever man because there had been no groping around for which man got which function. There was an operations sergeant in his squad to assist Captain Ramirez with planning. There was a medical corpsman, a good one from the Special Forces who already had his weapons training. Julio Vega and Juan Piscador had once been machine-gunners, and they got the SAWs. The same story applied to their radioman. Each member of the team fit neatly into a preselected slot, all were sufficiently trained that they respected the expertise of one another, and further cross-training enhanced that respect even more. The rugged regime of exercises had extended the pride with which each had arrived, and within two weeks the team had meshed together like a finely made machine. Chavez, a Ranger School graduate, was point man and scout. His job was to probe ahead, to move silently from one place of concealment to another, to watch and listen, then report his observations to Captain Ramirez.
“Okay, where are they?” the captain asked.
“Two hundred meters, just around that corner,” Chavez whispered in reply. “Five of them. Three asleep, two awake. One’s sitting by the fire. The other one’s got an SMG, walking around some.”
It was cool in the mountains at night, even in summer. A distant coyote howled at the moon. There was the occasional whisper from a deer moving through the trees, and the only sound associated with man was the distant noise of jets. The clear night made for surprisingly good visibility, even without the low-light goggles with which they were normally equipped. In the thin mountain air, the stars overhead didn’t sparkle, but shone as constant, discrete points of light. Ordinarily Chavez would have noticed the beauty, but this was a work night.
Ramirez and the rest of the squad were wearing four-color camouflage fatigues of Belgian manufacture. Their faces were painted with matching tones from sticks of makeup (understandably the Army didn’t call it that) so that they blended into the shadows as perfectly as Wells’ invisible man. Most importantly, they were totally at home in the darkness. Night was their best and most powerful friend. Man was a day-hunter. All of his senses, all of his instincts, and all of his inventions worked best in the light. Primordial rhythms made him less efficient at night – unless he worked very hard to overcome them, as these soldiers had. Even American Indian tribes living in close partnership with nature had feared the night, had almost never fought at night, had not even guarded their encampments at night – thus giving the U.S. Army its first useful doctrine for operations in darkness. At night man built fires as much for vision as for warmth, but in doing so reduced that vision to mere feet, whereas the human eye, properly conditioned, can see quite well in the darkness.
“Only five?”
“That’s all I counted, sir.”
Ramirez nodded and gestured for two more men to come forward. A few quiet orders were given. He went with the other two, moving to the right to get above the encampment. Chavez went back forward. His job was to take the sentry down, along with the one dozing at the fire. Moving quietly in the dark is harder than seeing. The human eye is better at spotting movement in the dark than in identifying stationary objects. He put each foot down carefully, feeling for something that might slide or break, thus making noise – the human ear is much underestimated. In daylight his method of moving would have appeared comical, but stealth has its price. Worst of all, he moved slowly, and Ding was no more patient than any man still in his twenties. It was a weakness against which he’d trained himself. He walked in a tight crouch. His weapon was up and ready to guard against surprise, and as the moment approached, his senses were fully alerted, as though an electric current ran across his skin. His head swiveled slowly left and right, his eyes never quite locking on anything, because when one stares at an object in the darkness, it tends to disappear after a few seconds.