He knew, but didn't care.
"Are you flaking? Jesus Christ. I'll try to cover for you, but you know Tracey."
"You know Tracey, what?" Special Agent John Tracey, his detail supervisor said, walking in the room. "Forget protocol, Pope? I've been calling you for forty-five minutes. You don't get up, check in before detail? How long have you been with the Service?"
"Longer than you," Ray said. He'd never gotten along with Tracey who was anal, a control freak, an asshole, a few of the nicer things Ray and his fellow agents said about him.
He looked at Ray, looked around the room. "Pope, if you've been drinking alcohol again, you're through."
Ray saw him staring at the bottle of Dewar's.
"Look at you," Tracey said. "You think I'm going to put you on detail in your condition? Christ, you can barely stand up. What don't you understand about not drinking when you're on call? This is a strict breach of discipline, a violation of the Service professional code of conduct. Pope, the reason you never made SAIC, you can't follow the rules."
Ray said, "If you're finished, I'm going back to bed."
Sturza flashed a grin and shook his head.
"You're the one who's finished," Tracey said. "I'll tell you one thing, you won't be on another protective assignment for the rest of your career. That I can pretty much guarantee." His pale white face was flushed red now like he was going to explode.
Ray was called back to Washington and dressed down by the Director of Protective Operations who told him he was in trouble, a walking time bomb.
The director said, "What were you thinking? You know what on-call means. Secret Service regulations strictly forbid the consumption of alcohol at any time during a protective assignment. Violations or slight disregard for this rule are cause for removal from the Service."
He was a big man with a folksy style, talking down to Ray in that bureaucratic voice, like Ray was an idiot.
"I have Agent Tracey's report right here. In it, he states: When you didn't check in, and didn't answer numerous phone calls, he went to your hotel room. He said he found you in an intoxicated, disheveled condition. In Agent Tracey's opinion, you were not in full possession of your mental and physical abilities. He observed a bottle of Scotch whisky in your room, and he said you smelled like you had been drinking. Further, when he questioned you about it you were belligerent and uncooperative. Agent Pope, you've demonstrated a pattern of behavior that is extremely troubling. This is your third breach of conduct. You're what the Service defines as a risk. Your bad judgment could've put the protectee and everyone in your detail in serious jeopardy. We can no longer trust you in a protective capacity. We no longer have confidence in you as a field agent, and as you know, trust and confidence are the core values upon which the Service was built."
He sounded like he was reading it out of the agency manual. He told Ray his behavior warranted dismissal, but they would make an exception and let him finish out his career in the uniform division. Ray pictured himself at the entrance to a foreign embassy, bored out of his mind, watching cars go by. He told the director "no thanks" and that was it.
Chapter Seven
McCabe opened his eyes and had no idea where he was. His head hurt where he'd been hit, a lump the size of a fifty-cent piece over his ear. The room was dark and musty. His hands were cuffed to a chain that went over the edge of the bed. He couldn't see its end point. Not yet, eyes adjusting to the light coming from a window high up on one the walls, light beaming in sharp and bright at the margins where the dark paper or cloth didn't cover it.
He heard water dripping. Heard a train, the ticket-ticketticket sound as it passed close by, shaking the beamed ceiling above him, sending dust through the cracks. He thought he was in the country outside Rome, no idea where, which direction. He pictured the farmhouses he'd seen on train trips to Florence, tile roofs and stucco walls painted colors like umber and sienna, colors he'd never seen anywhere but Italy. The houses and their outbuildings were built close to the tracks and he wondered why with all the acreage they had.
He heard a dog bark somewhere outside. Heard a car pull up, tires crunching on gravel. Heard two car doors close. And voices. He pictured the scene in Villa Borghese. They had cuffed his hands behind his back and picked him up and carried him to a van parked nearby. Borghese had streets and walking paths crisscrossing through it.
He tried to remember how long he was in the van, how long it took to drive there, but couldn't. He was dazed, in and out of consciousness. They blindfolded him and lifted him out of the van and led him across a gravel area through a doorway into the house and down an old wooden staircase that creaked and groaned, into the cellar.
He was lying on a stained mattress on a bed with a metal frame. The room was twenty by twenty, the walls made out of brick, reminding him of the ancient brickwork in the Forum, the same simple style. There was a chair ten feet or so from the bed. He saw something moving out of the corner of his eye, a rat walking along one of the walls, long tail dragging. The rat looking over at him. What're you doing here? This cellar is mine. The rat went through a hole in the wall and disappeared.
He'd felt something crawling on him during the night and swatted it off. Probably the rat checking him out. He thought of the movie Papillon, Steve McQueen in solitary confinement, making friends with a bug. If McCabe was down here long enough, he might hang out with the rat, give it a name. How about Caesar? That sounded like a good Italian rat name.
He was handcuffed to a chain that snaked across the floor and looped around one of the wooden support posts that held up the house. Picking the lock or breaking the chain wasn't going to happen, so he'd have to come up with another way to escape. Behind him he could see meat hanging from ropes attached to the ceiling, cylindrical rolls of salami and the skinned carcasses of game animals.
There were shelves against the far wall. He moved as far as the chain would let him and looked at the jars of canned fruits and vegetables, McCabe starving, thinking it had been close to twenty-four hours since he'd eaten, but the chain wouldn't go far enough. There were also wine racks against a wall, filled with bottles. He couldn't reach those either.
He went back to the bed and sat with his legs over the side, feet on the floor. He thought about Angela setting him up, if that was really her name. Did this have something to do with the newspaper article that transposed his name with Chip's? The kidnappers thinking they had the son of a United States senator, a slam-dunk ransom. McCabe didn't have his wallet with him, rarely carried it unless he was traveling and needed ID. He'd left it at school so there was no way they could identify him. All they knew, he was Charles Tallenger III. Eventually they'd find out he was the wrong guy. They'd call the school and Mr Rady would check and see that Chip was in Sicily, call his cell phone and that would be that. They'd realize McCabe wasn't who they thought he was and let him go.
Hours later he heard keys rattle and a door open upstairs. Then he heard someone coming down and saw him appear, first his feet and legs and then the rest of him. It was the big guy, the nose guard from Villa Borghese, carrying a tray like he wasn't used to it, taking small steps so he wouldn't tip the wine bottle over. He still wore the blue-and-white bandana over his face like an outlaw waiter. He came over, stood in front of McCabe, fingers thick as sausages, holding the tray that had olive branches painted on it.
"Mangia," he said.
McCabe took the tray, staring at the plate of salami, bread and cheese, and put it on the mattress next to him. The big man picked up the wine bottle, filled a stemmed glass about halfway and handed it to McCabe. He took the wine bottle and the other glass and sat in the chair. He drank wine, lifting the bandana to bring the glass to his mouth.