Balkowitz sat on a faded armchair that smelled of its age. He was dressed in jeans and a polo shirt and looked more like a Little League dad than a lawyer. When Suter came in — tall, pale, pinched — Balkowitz got up and waited for Suter to sit. Balkowitz’s manner reflected his Agency’s own ambivalence — polite and stern, unsure and patriarchal. Suter, to judge from his sour smile, knew all about it and rather enjoyed the situation. “You keep trying,” Suter said. “A for effort.”
“Mister Suter—”
“Ray.” Suter spread his hands. “We know each other well enough. Call me Ray.”
“I just want to apprise you of your situation here. Really, you know, if you’d get yourself a lawyer—”
Suter shook his head. “I don’t need a lawyer.”
“Your situation is serious.”
Suter raised his eyebrows. “The food’s good. Hurley plays pretty good tennis. Except for the lack of females, it isn’t bad.”
“Mister Suter, you’ve been charged in Virginia and Maryland, and we’re holding off federal charges until, until—”
“Until I talk?” Suter laughed. “Don’t hold your breath.”
“I just want to impress on you the legal seriousness of—”
“You say that every time you come. I’ve told you, I think three times now, I’ve got nothing to say. You guys are holding me here without a charge; well, okay, I’m suspended from work, anyway. I assume that you want me to get a lawyer because you think a lawyer would tell me to bargain. But for what? With what?”
“If we file charges, you face twenty years to life on the federal issues alone.”
“If you do. Right.” Suter grinned. “Maybe you should file.”
Balkowitz sniffed and reached into his pocket for a tissue. He was allergic to something in the room. “Mister Suter, we’re holding off the local jurisdictions with some difficulty.” He blew his nose. “Your relations with the young man, Nickie, um, Groski — if you’d be willing to tell us anything there—”
Nickie Groski was a computer hacker whom Suter had hired to hack into George Shreed’s computers, but Suter hadn’t admitted to a word of that. Instead, he said now, “What would you like to hear?”
“You were in the boy’s apartment when the police broke in.”
“I was, yes.” Suter seemed pensive, as if what Balkowitz was saying was a little surprising.
“You paid the rent on that apartment.”
“Maybe I felt sorry for him. Or maybe I’m gay. Is he gay?”
Balkowitz stopped with the tissue at his nose. “Mister Suter, we know you chased women all over the place.”
Suter nodded almost sadly. “Maybe I’m bisexual. What is it you think I did with this boy?”
“That’s what we want to know.” Balkowitz got out a document, which he kept tapping as he talked. “If you agree to tell us about Nickie Groski and certain other things, then we’re willing to — but you really should have a lawyer to help with this—”
Suter didn’t even look at the document. “You’d like me to have a lawyer because then I’d be admitting I was ready to deal. But I’m not. No deal, Balkowitz.”
They went around for another ten minutes, Suter seeming to enjoy it all the more as Balkowitz’s nose ran and the lawyer’s face got red. At the end, the man’s patience ran out and he pointed a finger and said, “This is my last visit! You come partway to us or the shit will hit the fan out there!”
Suter gave his thin, acid smile. “I love the majesty of the law.” He patted Balkowitz’s shoulder. “Have you tried Allegra-D?”
Suter went back upstairs and changed into shorts and took the time to scribble a note on a very small piece of paper, which he signed “Firebird” and stuffed into a chartreuse tennis ball in which he’d already made a slit. When he went downstairs, he told Hurley he was going to practice some serves, and he went out the back door and, passing the stable block, threw the slitted tennis ball for an old golden retriever to catch. The dog lumbered after it, caught up with it, held it down with a paw until he could get his old teeth around it, and then, tail wagging, carried it to his owner, the maintenance man.
Colonel Lao tse-Ku touched the place where the two sides of his collar joined at his throat. The gesture was unconscious, not quite nervous but certainly atypical — a last check of self before opening a door through which you can pass only once.
The door itself was quite mundane — gray, metal, the surface broken only by a small nameplate, INFORMATION DIRECTORATE. The man who held the door’s handle, ready to open it, was inconsequential, too, a captain, balding, smelling of cigarettes, but seeming to share the muted panic that Lao felt in Beijing, where heads were rolling and careers were crashing to an end. Now, when the captain opened the door and stood aside, the slice of room that Colonel Lao could see beyond was no more impressive than the outside — yet, again, he checked his collar, wondering if his own head was the next to roll.
And went in.
The General was sitting at a desk of sleek, pale wood, certainly not government issue, the edges of its top slightly rounded, its proportions balanced and delicate. The door closed behind Lao; he braced, his eyes on the bent, bald head of the man behind the desk. Still, Lao’s first glance had registered an elegant bookcase, a scroll painting that was either old or well-faked, a silk carpet. All where they were not seen from outside the door.
And, to the right of the desk and slightly behind it, a pale second man in civilian clothes who was smoking.
The General looked up.
“Colonel Lao tse-Ku, sir,” Lao managed to say.
The old man smiled. “I know,” he said softly. He raised the fingers of one hand off the desk. “Sit.” The fingers seemed to indicate a chair to his left. Lao sat. The General looked at him for several seconds and then looked down at an open file on his desk, which he seemed to find more interesting than Lao. After several seconds more, the General glanced over his shoulder at the third man, but he made no move to introduce him.
“You have been called very suddenly from Africa,” the General said to Lao.
Lao was confused, uncertain whether he should say something banal about the soldier’s life or something enthusiastic about serving the nation, or — by that time, it was too late to say anything, and the General was going on. “You were ordered to Africa only a year ago.”
This time, saying “Yes, sir,” seemed best.
“You like it?”
What on earth could he mean? The old fox knew perfectly well that at his age and rank, a senior figure in intelligence, Lao wanted to be in a major capital or Beijing, not an African backwater. “The post has interesting aspects,” he managed to say.
The General glanced at his file and then at the third man and then said, “You were sent there because you lost a battle with your rival, Colonel Chen. Isn’t that so?”
This plain speaking caught him off guard. Although, when he thought about it, the General must know all about the savage struggles for supremacy within the service. He and Chen were on the same course toward the top, two of six or seven who might one day run all of Chinese military intelligence. And, yes, Chen had bested him this time and arranged to have him sent into darkness. Still, Lao said, “I did not question my orders, sir.”
He heard the third man flick a cigarette lighter and in his peripheral vision saw a new plume of smoke from that direction. He didn’t want to look directly at the man. Clear enough what he was.