"You knew?" John Terrence Clark asked.
Sandy nodded. "Patsy told me last week."
"It was supposed to be a secret," the new father objected.
"I'm her mother, Ding!" Sandy explained. "Breakfast?"
The men checked their watches. It was just after four in the morning, close enough, they all agreed.
"You know, John, this is pretty profound," Chavez said. His father-in-law noted how Domingo switched in and out of accents depending on the nature of the conversation. The previous day, interrogating the PIRA prisoners he'd been pure Los Angeles gang kid, his speech redolent with Spanish accent and street euphemisms. But in his reflective moments, he reverted to a man with a university master's degree, with no accent at all. "I'm a papa. I've got a son." Followed by a slow, satisfied, and somewhat awestruck grin. "Wow."
"The great adventure, Domingo," John agreed, while his wife got the bacon going. He poured the coffee.
"Huh?"
"Building a complete person. That's the great adventure, sonny boy, and if you don't do it right, what the hell good are you?"
"Well, you guys've done okay."
"Thanks, Domingo," Sandy said from the stove. "We worked at it pretty hard."
"More her than me," John said. "I was away so damned much, playing field-spook. Missed three Christmases, goddamnit. You never forgive yourself for that,T-" he explained. "That's the magic morning, and you're supposed to be there."
"Doing what?"
"Russia twice, Iran once-getting assets out every time. Two worked, but one came apart on me. Lost that one, and he didn't make it. Russians have never been real forgiving on state treason. He bit the big one four months liter, poor bastard. Not a good Christmas," Clark concluded, remembering just how bleak that had been, seeing the KGB scoop the man up not fifty meters from where he'd been standing, seeing the face turned to him, the look of despair on the doomed face, having to turn away to make his own escape down the pipeline he'd set up for two, knowing there was nothing else he might have done, but feeling like shit about it anyway. Then, finally, he'd had to explain to Ed Foley what had happened-only to learn later that the agent had been burned-"shopped" was the euphemism-by a KGB mole inside CIA's own headquarters building. And that fuck was still alive in a federal prison, with cable TV and central heating.
"It's history, John," Chavez told him, understanding the look. They'd deployed on similar missions, but the Clark Chavez team had never failed, though some of their missions had been on the insane side of hairy. "You know the funny part about this?"
"What's that?" John asked, wondering if it would be the same feeling he'd had.
"I know I'm gonna die now. Someday, I mean. The little guy, he's gotta outlive me. If he doesn't, then I've screwed it up. Can't let that happen, can I? JC is my responsibility. While he grows up, I grow old, and by the time he's my age, hell, I'll be in my sixties. Jesus, I never planned to be old, y'know?"
Clark chuckled. "Yeah, neither did I. Relax, kid. Now I'm a"-he almost said "fucking," but Sandy didn't like that particular epithet "goddamned grandfather. I never planned on that, either."
"It's not so bad, John," Sandy observed, cracking open the eggs. "We can spoil him and hand him back. And we will." It hadn't happened that way with their kids, at least not on John's side of the family. His mother was long dead from cancer, and his father from a heart attack on the job, while rescuing some children from a dwelling fire in Indianapolis, back in the late 1960s. John wondered if they knew that their son had grown up, and then grown old. and was now a grandfather. There was no telling, was there? Mortality and its attendant issues were normal at times like this, he supposed. The great continuity of life. What would John Conor Chavez become? Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief? That was mainly Domingo and Patsy's job, and he had to trust them to do it properly, and they probably would. He knew his daughter and knew Ding almost as well. From the first time he'd seen the kid, in the mountains of Colorado, he'd known that this boy had something special in him, and the younger man had grown, blossoming like a flower in a particularly tough garden. Domingo Chavez was a younger version of himself, a man of honor and courage, Clark told himself, and therefore he'd be a worthy father, as he'd proven to be a worthy husband. The great continuity of life, John told himself again, sipping his coffee and puffing on the cigar, and if it was yet one more milestone on the road to death, then so be it. He'd had an interesting life, and a life that had mattered to others, as had Domingo, and as they all hoped would, John Conor. And what the hell, Clark thought, his life wasn't over yet, was it?
Getting a flight to New York had proven more difficult than expected. They were all fully booked, but finally Popov had managed to get himself a coach seat in the back of an old United 727. He disliked the tight fit, but the flight was short. At La Guardia, he headed for a cab, on the way out checking his inside coat pocket and finding the travel documents that had gotten him across the Atlantic. They had served him well, but they had to go. Emerging into the evening air, he surreptitiously dumped them into a trash container before walking to the cabstand. He was a weary man. His day had started just after midnight, American East Coast time, and he hadn't managed much sleep on the transatlantic flight, and his body was-how did the Americans put it?-running on empty. Maybe that explained the break with fieldcraft.
Thirty minutes later, Popov was within blocks of his downtown apartment, when the waste-disposal crew circulated past the United Airlines terminal to change the trash bags. The routine was mechanical and fairly strenuous physical labor for the mostly Puerto Rican work crew. One at a time, they lifted the metal tops off the cans and reached in to remove the heavy-gauge plastic garbage hags, then turned to dump them into wheeled containers that would later be tipped into trucks for transport to a landfill on Staten Island. The routine was good upper-body exercise, and most of the men carried portable radios to help themselves deal with the boredom of the work.
One can, fifty yards from the cabstand, didn't sit properly in its holder. When the cleanup man lifted the bag, it caught on a metallic edge and ripped, spilling its contents onto the concrete sidewalk. That generated a quiet curse from the worker, who now had to bend down and pick up a bunch of objects with his gloved hands. He was halfway through when he saw the crimson cardboard cover of what appeared to be a British passport. People didn't throw those things away, did they? He flipped it open and saw two credit cards inside, stamped with the same name on the passport. Serov, he saw, an unusual name. He dropped the whole package into the thigh pocket of his coveralls. He'd bring it by the lost-and found. It wasn't the first time he'd discovered valuable stuff in the trash. Once he'd even recovered a fully loaded 9-mm pistol!
By this time Popov was in his apartment, too tired even to unpack his bags. Instead he merely undressed and collapsed on the bed without even a vodka to help him off to sleep. By reflex, he turned on the TV and caught yet another story about the Hereford shootout. The TV was,ovno, shit, he thought. There was the TV truck whose reporter had come close and tried to interview him. They hadn't used it, but there he was, in profile, from twenty feet away, while the reporter gave a stand-up. All the more reason to clear out now, he thought, as he drifted off. He didn't even have the energy to switch the TV off, and he slept with it on, the recurring stories entering his mind and giving him confused and unpleasant dreams throughout the night. The passport, credit cards, and a few other items of apparent value arrived at the waste-disposal company's Staten Island office actually a trailer that had been towed to the spot-after the close of regular business hours. The trash collector tossed it on the correct desk and punched his time card on the way out for his drive back to Queens and his usual late dinner.