Charney nodded.
“But you didn’t go to Langley with this, you came to me. Musta had a reason.”
“Lubeck was working out of State on this assignment. I figured you should be the first to know.”
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
Charney took a deep breath. He hated himself for what he was about to do. “I don’t think Langley is the way to go with this. I want to keep all the three-letter people out of it for a while.”
“Got your reasons, I suppose.”
“Plenty of them. To begin with, we don’t know where to start a full-scale field case with what we’ve got. We send the Company or NSA out on Lubeck’s trail and all of a sudden the trail disappears. It’s happened before. I don’t think Lubeck changed the plans of whoever took him out in San Sebastian. I think he just hit on something and was killed for it. So the opposition has no call to change their plans and cover their tracks unless we give it to them by sending in the troops. The problem is time. We’ve got to figure that whatever Lubeck was on to has something to do with the hunger conference that begins in two weeks.”
“You sound pretty sure of that connection.”
Charney swallowed hard. “Lubeck and I went back a long time. He was a pro all the way, by the book. Never strayed from his assignment. We sent him on a goddamn throwaway mission and he came up with something.”
“So what do we do?”
“Send one man to retrace his steps. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Son, I don’t fancy anything that depends on luck.”
“It’s a random factor just like everything else.”
Roy’s eyebrows flickered. “So it’s a one-man game. What players are available?”
Now it was time. “I want to stay away from the pros altogether. I want to use an amateur.”
“Son, you’re talkin’ crazy to me.”
“I don’t think so. Let’s look at some obvious ramifications of San Sebastian. Whatever Lubeck uncovered is big and whoever’s behind it is big — organized too. They’d make a pro in no time. They’d know Lubeck put us on to something and cover their tracks.”
“So?”
“So let’s assume they’re not even sure Lubeck got through to Bogotá or transmitted anything we could make sense of. They would stay in their original pattern, the pattern Lubeck uncovered and a pattern an amateur would fare far better in picking up again.”
Roy regarded Charney with a taut smile and a slight squint in his eyes. “Back where I come from, they say you can always tell when a bull’s got somethin’ on his mind, even though he don’t say much. You got it all figured, don’t ya?”
Charney leaned back. “You know about Lubeck’s steel pincers?”
“Never would arm wrestle with him….”
“Ever hear how he lost his hand?”
“Crushed or something, right?”
“The circumstances, I mean.”
“Not that I recall, son.”
“Then let me tell you a story, Cal.” Charney squirmed in his chair, fighting for comfort. The upholstery seemed to be tearing at him. “Twenty years ago, I went to college with Lubeck. Brown University up in Providence, Rhode Island. We met during freshman week. Both of us were football players. There was a kid who tried to make the team as a walk-on but couldn’t. He did end up as our friend, though, and for much of the next four years the three of us were best friends.”
“Should I get out my handkerchief for this one, son?”
“His name is Christopher Locke and at present he’s an English professor at Georgetown.”
“‘At present’?”
“Flunked his final tenure hearing. This is his last semester.”
“You checked.”
“I checked.”
“I suppose this is all leadin’ us somewhere.”
Charney’s expression looked pained. “Locke was responsible for Lubeck losing his hand. It was an accident. Happened at the Academy six months into our training; we all joined up together, you see. The Three Musketeers,” Charney added cynically. “Anyway, the details of the accident don’t matter now.”
Roy wet his lips. “Then this Locke’s not an amateur, after all….”
“He dropped out of the Academy a week after it happened. The ironic thing was that he was the best in our class. As far as skills went, there were none better. But something was missing even before the … accident. Locke had the stomach; he didn’t have the heart.”
“You think that’s changed now?”
“One thing hasn’t: his guilt. Locke ran away from the Academy into academia and he’s been running ever since. Georgetown isn’t the first school he’s quit or been released from. The accident with Lubeck seemed to set a tone for his entire life, a string of failures and incompletions. I guess he never got over it. Whoever said that time heals all wounds was full of crap. It didn’t heal this one.” Charney paused. “We can offer to help him heal it now.”
“By sending him into the field?”
“By sending him after the men who killed Lubeck.”
Roy hedged. “He’s still an amateur, son.”
“And the only thing that stopped him from becoming a pro and a damn good one was that he lacked motivation, a clear sense of why. He’ll have that now. Flushing out Lubeck’s killers will more than provide it. Locke could never face the Luber because those damn steel pincers wouldn’t let him. That’s not a problem anymore. Lubeck’s dead. Finding out who did it will give Locke a chance to finally finish something, maybe the most important thing he never completed and ran away from: his friendship with the Luber … and me. The guilt’s been bottled up in him long enough. We can give him a vent for it.”
“How generous of us….”
“Locke’s the human option,” Charney continued. “In this case, infinitely preferable to any other that presents itself given the time frame.”
“And how much do we tell this human option of yours?”
“As much as he needs to know.” Charney paused. “That includes nothing about the massacre.”
“So we just drop him blindly in the field and tell him to run.”
“I’ll be his contact, his eyes,” Charney said softly. “I’ll shadow him everywhere he goes. The relays, the codes, the contacts — he drilled with similar ones before. All in an afternoon’s work. When the time comes, Langley’s only a phone call away.”
“You’ve thought this thing out.”
Charney nodded.
Calvin Roy’s eyes wandered briefly. “I come from farm country, son, and still I didn’t understand why you needed shit to make things grow until I got to Washington. This hasn’t been easy for you, has it, Brian?”
Charney just looked at him.
“One of your buddies is dead, son. You could leave it at that. You could turn the whole mess over to Langley.”
“You want me to do that?”
Calvin Roy sighed. “Nah, I suppose I don’t. But Lubeck was a pro and what he found out there ate him up alive. And I don’t care ’bout Locke shinin’ brighter than a baby’s backside at the Academy twenty years ago, none of that’s gonna get him very far against what Lubeck came up against.”
“It’ll get him far enough.”
Roy nodded deliberately. “You got the ball, son. You’re the one who’s got to live with this in the long run.”
Now, drinking his third Chivas Regal, Charney ran Roy’s final words through his mind. He could live with himself, he supposed; he couldn’t like himself any less anyway. He was doing what had to be done, what the job demanded of him. Maybe that was the problem; he had been in Washington too long, had let his role consume him until it deadened his conscience. Locke was the best man for this assignment, so he would make the offer too tempting for Locke to refuse. Charney was good at that.
He recalled his earliest impressions of Locke at double-session fall football practice at Brown. No one hit the bags harder, took the tires faster. Locke was a kid driven to make that team. In the end numbers had done him in. Faceless men had posted his name and that was that.