Back on her Korea shots, April 7 now, fifty miles north of where she’d spotted the convoy-and look at that, she thought. The same damn thing as Shandong. Another military exercise. Ghostly outlines of tanks in the field. Bright spotting-probably mortar fire or antitank guns-blooming in the fog beneath the thinner sections of cloud cover.
Laramie zoomed all the way in and still wasn’t able to see much. This was the kind of thing that the North Korea analyst wouldn’t ordinarily spot; with the wider angles the section analysts reviewed in the course of their routine coverage, there would be little to see here, even under intense scrutiny, outside of brighter-than-normal clouds in a remote and otherwise irrelevant part of the country.
But know what to look for, and you find it in three nights of lab work.
Who else, she thought, had signed on here? If, she cautioned herself again, it was anything at all. Which it probably wasn’t. It was likely she’d stumbled across a pair of military exercises with no real-world meaning, occurring in the same time period only coincidentally. But spend two weeks instead of three nights, and who else would she find-
She looked at the time stamp on her monitor: 2:39 A.M.
Time, she thought, to leave. As long as she was pulling images that fell within the jurisdiction of her clearances, she knew she was on solid ground-under the inspirational leadership of Peter M. Gates, long hours were increasingly common in what she understood to have been, before his reign, a clock-punching culture-but it was always a variation in one’s pattern that tripped the alarms, and she didn’t exactly pull all-nighters as a matter of course.
She logged off.
Shuffling across the parking lot-which, as always, remained half-full-it occurred to Laramie that perhaps, for once, she might consider following Agency protocol. Perhaps, having found this second military exercise, she should now discuss the discovery with her immediate supervisor and, with his permission, craft a properly formatted summary utterly lacking in editorial comment and leave it at that.
If she did, Eddie Rothgeb would be pleased.
Before she found her pillow, she found Eddie’s fax. Handwritten, and scrawled in a rudimentary code on a single sheet with no cover page, the document contained three names-or at least three sets of initials Laramie took to represent names-and matching phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Alongside each set of initials, Rothgeb had scrawled a pair of parentheticals:
A.K. (NC) (S)
Given her sleep deprivation, it took Laramie a few minutes to translate, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to crack the code. (S) indicated a senator; (NC) was the state designation. As was the case with the majority of her Beltway bureaucrat colleagues, Laramie maintained a loose familiarity with the names of the more prominent politicians on the Hill, so it was fairly clear to her the initials A.K. stood for Alan Kircher, the Republican senator from North Carolina.
She took a moment and identified the other names on the list, but for Laramie there was no contest: if she decided to go for broke and try, by means of a Deep Throat e-mail, to compel Pete Gates & Co. to take her findings onward and upward, then Alan Kircher was her man. She’d seen him, seen too much of him, on Hardball, On the Record, Hannity and Colmes, and maybe sixteen or seventeen other prime-time cable opinion shows. She did not exactly share his political ideology, presuming he had one outside of his evident pursuit of under-the-table handouts from the military-industrial complex, but if you want somebody who’ll take a different view of your findings-different from the administration’s party line as strode by PeterM. Gates and his staff-well, she thought, I suppose Eddie knew what he was doing, didn’t he, putting him on the list.
It occurred to her, collapsing in bed, that she was being idiotic even entertaining the notion of popping the esteemed Senator Kircher a note. Her newfound inclination to follow protocol was the way to go. Even if she and her theories of “rogue factions” were right, what business was it of hers how and which decisions were made by the leaders of the country? Peter M. Gates’s appointment had been approved by a majority vote of the U.S. Senate nearly a decade and a half ago, while she, meanwhile, had gleefully secured her junior analyst position just under four years back by successfully filling out a copy of the CIA summer internship form posted on the bulletin board outside of Eddie Rothgeb’s office.
Lemme give you some career advice, Pete, she thought: Why don’t you stick your neck out, roll the dice, and risk your twenty-year career on the speculative whim of a junior analyst armed with an undergraduate political science degree!
She managed to set the alarm for eight-thirty before plunging into the bliss of unconscious stupor.
14
The ’74 Chevy got them up the mountain in eight hours, Cooper getting a workout cranking the wheel, the pickup climbing the roadless slope fifty times faster than Alphonse could have taken them on foot, but still doing no better than an hour or two per mile. Cooper tacked the Chevy back and forth, thinking if he tried for a more direct course straight uphill, the smallest bump would send them into a backward tumble. From time to time Alphonse would point and mutter a few words; Cooper used his gestures like a compass, always heading, as the looping tacks progressed, toward Alphonse’s magnetic north. The needle on the truck’s temperature gauge pegged the red zone for the last four hours of the ride, but the truck held out.
Out here on this barren hillside, Cooper kept coming back to one question: where had the kid caught the fucking fish?
At dusk Alphonse motioned frantically for him to stop. Cooper didn’t particularly need the prompt, as he could see through the windshield, directly before them, that the earth seemed simply to end. He eased the Chevy to the edge, cranked hard right, and gave himself a view out the driver’s-side window.
He could see, even in the twilight, a downward grade that looked to him like the view from the top of an Olympic ski jump. A few clicks down the slope he spotted a patch of green-had to be the lake, or the river, he thought, where Alphonse had caught the fish. Long fucking way to walk, he thought, for six skinny fish.
“We walk from here be go,” Alphonse said, stating the obvious in his triple-broken dialect. “The village you looking for? C’est-li là, down that bottom.”
Cooper threw the Chevy in reverse, backed into a thicket of dead brush, killed the engine, got out, pissed over the edge of the slope in a high arcing stream, returned to the pickup, dug into his bag, and came out with a bottle of rum. He noticed Alphonse staring, befuddled, the kid having watched his every move.
“How ’bout a highball, Kareem?” he said, and reached out to offer his guide a sip from the rum bottle. When Alphonse didn’t move a muscle, Cooper cracked the seal and took a swallow. “Cab’s yours,” he said, and opened his bag to offer Alphonse something from the selection of candy bars and bottled water. Hungry enough to overcome his reluctance, Alphonse chose a pair of candy bars. Cooper pulled out a pair of T-shirts to use as a pillow and climbed into the bed of the pick up with a Milky Way, some water, and the rum. When he’d consumed all three, he leaned through the rear window of the cab, where Alphonse, still befuddled, remained.
“Sleep tight,” he said. He rolled around until he got comfortable and dozed off, staring at a sky full of constellations bright enough to make the notion of a telescope seem absurd.
They spent a full day on the downgrade, Cooper seeing insufficient plant life to fuel a brush fire until they came to Alphonse’s lake, a verdant swatch of plateau spanning, by Cooper’s guess, a quarter of a square mile. The green appeared to be fed by a spring-a trickle of water tumbling downhill inside a narrow crevasse-looking to Cooper like a scale model of your average whitewater rapids, the creek about two feet across where it pooled, six or seven inches wide where it ran at speed. Wordlessly, Alphonse strode past the miniature lake and led him downhill. The foliage dried up and vanished again within yards. Cooper knew how it worked: dry as a bone for a few years; then a hurricane swept through, and the floods that followed tore every hint of vegetation from the slope, leaving even less to dry out over the succeeding years of drought.