Damn, she thought, he’s good. Very good. Be careful, hon, be very careful of him. This isn’t some investment banker you’re interviewing, or some Silicon Valley geek who’s never seen a naked breast in his entire short life.
“No, I’m fine,” she lied. “And I appreciate you giving me the time this morning.”
He shrugged. “Not a problem. Just don’t take too much time, you know? The lunch crowd starts streaming in in just under an hour.”
Elaine flipped open her reporter’s notebook. “I’ll do my best.”
“So, before we start, mind telling me again how you decided to do a story on me?”
She smiled, and this time, at least, she was telling the truth. “I thought you and the diner would make for an interesting story.”
And maybe it was kismet, karma, or some other ordering of the cosmos that began with the letter k, but one day, cruising through her e-mail account, there was an invite, an honest-to-God invite, from someone she had known at the Journal, an assistant editor named Winslow, and the message was brief and to the point: He had gone off to a regional magazine in New England, needed some human-interest stories, knew she was in the wilds of upstate New Hampshire. Would she be interested in doing an article, five thousand words max, about some local feature, maybe a coffee shop or something, one of those stories about crusty New Englanders that the East and West Coast elites lap up and love so much?
When she had read the note, her very first thought was to turn it down. Damn it, she was trying to work on a novel, do something different, and—
Well. How was it working, then? How much had she accomplished?
So far, well, nothing. The novel was more than just dead in the water, it was sinking with no hope of survival.
But a freelance nonfiction piece... she had been amazed that the thought of doing a story about a diner or something had kindled that little spark of creativity that she thought had been snuffed out and drowned by her new life in Montcalm, and before she changed her mind, she had said yes.
Yes, oh God, yes.
Elaine said, “So, how long have you been here, Mr. Lovell?”
He grinned. “Please, call me Jason. And I’ve been here four years.”
“And what did you do before you came to the diner?”
“Worked in the government for a while, put in my thirty — pretty weird, hunh, spending thirty years in one place? — and then decided to cash out and come back up here. My parents had a summer place nearby and I had some great memories of the place when I was a kid, so I knew I’d retire here. And retire I did. But then I found out after a year that twelve months of fishing, canoeing, and goofing off was hard for the soul. I needed to keep busy... and when the diner came up for sale, I bought it and there you go.”
She scribbled quickly and efficiently, taking it all in. “Don’t you find it a big change, coming from government work, and then running a diner?”
He sipped from his coffee. “Found it an improvement, if you’ve got to know. People in government tend to be stiff-necked, can’t do anything without getting paperwork done in triplicate, or having completed stepladder safety training or diversity training or some other training. Tell you, it was a relief to leave after all those years. And here? Well, the BS level is pretty low. Has to be, at a diner. I mean, either the eggs are cold or they’re not, or the coffee sucks or it doesn’t. If it’s real, it’s real.”
“And your customers?”
Another sip from the coffee cup. “Real people, too. Not thinking about sticking a knife in your back, or tossing you under the bus, so they can get a better performance review or a step increase in their salary. Up here, if a guy says he’s gonna plow your driveway in the winter, he does it. If a guy says he’s gonna vote for you, he does. If a gal says, don’t worry, I can do your books and it’ll cost you this much every week, that’s what happens.”
Elaine said, “So you find most people are good up here, your customers.”
“Well, it can’t be a hundred percent. If it was, it’d be nirvana, and this place sure don’t look like nirvana now, does it?”
He laughed, but his smile quickly went away when Elaine decided to try again, from the beginning. “So, what exactly did you do in the government?”
No more smiles. No more laughter. “Oh, this and that.”
“I see.” Her heart now pounding, now looking to the file folder on the tabletop, next to her orange juice.
Once she had gotten the assignment, she knew that it was a chance to get back into the game and, by God, she was going to do it right. So she had spent more than the usual time getting prepared for the interview, by going to the local newspaper office and looking through clips about the Have a Seat diner, and then doing an Internet search on the diner and its owner, Jason Lovell, and when she had started, well, something wasn’t quite right. There were little faint trails of something more than just a retiree taking possession of a diner. Something a bit more... And she found out one bit of information, which led her to something else.
Something else that she had thought about the time Casey went after her with a leather belt because she wouldn’t iron his shirts.
After another ten minutes or so of interviewing, asking the right questions about the customers and characters in the diner, the challenges of getting to the diner at four a.m. in a blizzard to set up, and the usual and customary questions about running a small place in a small town, she glanced up at a clock. Okay, she thought. Time. Here we go. She took a deep breath, pushed her knees together to stop the shaking, and went to the file folder.
“Actually, Jason, I was wondering if we could talk about what you did before you came up here to Montcalm, a little more background,” she said, opening up the folder.
Hunched over the top of the booth’s table, Jason shrugged again. “Not much to say. Pretty boring stuff. Just government work, and I just put my time in until retirement came knocking.”
“I see. And where exactly did you work while in the government?”
He stared at her. But unlike Casey’s eyes, there was nothing evil or shifting there. Just a calm curiosity as to why she was doing what she was doing. “Here and there. Nothing special.”
She slipped a sheet of paper out, one of several she had collected over the past few days, in doing the research, research that had led her down some very strange paths indeed. And by relying on her Rolodex and other contacts, she had managed to find her way down those paths and eventually find her way here.
“Some people might disagree,” she said. “Working for the Central Intelligence Agency, all those years, sounds something very special indeed.”
And sheet one was an article showing a Congressional hearing from a few years back, concerning some controversy involving the CIA, and sitting behind one of the witness chairs — with a bit more hair and better clothes — was the man in front of her, though in the photo caption he was identified as Robert Jason Lovell.
He looked down, seemed to smile for just a moment, and then looked up. “Now I’ll say something I’m sure you’re familiar with hearing. No comment.”
“What did you do in the CIA, Jason?”
His face was friendly, but the words were not. “Sorry. No comment. Today, tomorrow, next century. No comment.”
Back to the file folder she went, willing her hands not to shake. She slid out two more sheets of paper. He looked down, and for a moment, just a moment, he stared at them with some sort of expression in his face, a passing expression that could be pride. Or something else.
She leaned over. “A newspaper article, and another photo. Of you in Afghanistan. You belonged to an outfit called the Special Activities Division, part of the CIa’s National Clandestine Service. Highly secret, highly covert. They conduct all sorts of classified military-style missions, including guerrilla operations, sabotage, and assassinations, from shooting people in the head to poisoning their hummus. Stories that never get made public, never make it into the newspapers. An elite group of killers. Am I right, Jason?”