And Beck had been a good student: he was nothing if not precise. The kid—Beck was only five years younger than Ashmead, but elapsed time had nothing to do with manhood, in Ashmead’s scheme of things—was coordinated and as sharp as the knife in his belt. He’d studied diligently and practiced until he was black and blue in the appropriate places. The only thing Ashmead hadn’t been able to teach Beck was that Ashmead was never wrong. Beck had given a negative assessment of Ashmead’s last intelligence report on the Islamic Jihad, or Ashmead wouldn’t have been pulled off the scent—the kid carried a lot of weight with the suits back home.
“I hope nobody knows you’re here. I sure as fuck know nobody at the Agency could have helped you find me.”
It wasn’t a question, but Beck felt compelled to answer: “No, Sir. I was very careful. I assume you know about Home Plate—that you were right?”
Ashmead gave a disgusted snort; he was looking into a gloom for some sign of Slick. As they passed the midpoint of the alley, a cat jumped out of a garbage pail with a yowl and Ashmead’s gun came up, yam and all.
“What the hell—?” said Beck, squinting at the odd shape in Ashmead’s hand. “What’s that?”
Without a word, Ashmead handed it to him: it would explain a lot of things.
“Oh, Rafic, I’m sorry,” Beck said, as if he’d just run over Ashmead’s best dog.
“It’s not your fault, it’s Jesse’s.” But that wasn’t true—Jesse had never met Beck, couldn’t have guessed, and had been implicitly instructed against interdicting anyone who might come up that street unless he felt it necessary to warn Ashmead of local law approaching.
“Jesus…” Beck’s 50 Meg mind was beginning to work on the bits of data he’d accumulated: “The Arab kid—the one who left so fast when he heard your name—a target? Islamic Jihad? A controller?”
“We’ve been calling him Schvantz,” Ashmead said glumly.
Beck, a linguist, chuckled, then said carefully, “Ashmead, I’m not here to apologize, though I take full responsibility for the way we mucked things up—I’ve got a go on the drawing board that won’t fly unless you’re part of it.” Before Ashmead could explain to Beck that he wasn’t interested, Beck rushed on: “And it beats the hell out of seeing how many terrorists you can put in your shopping cart before the clock runs out.”
Then Ashmead, full of adrenalin from his aborted operation, snatched the Tokagypt back, shook the yam from its barrel, thumbed the pistol on safe and threw it into his net bag: “Why, whatever do you mean, Mister INR honcho?” he said with exaggerated innocence. “My boys and girls are just taking a little well-deserved R&R with their dear old surrogate-poppa. I promised them they could spend their vacation any way they wanted, and this is their idea of a good time. They’ve earned it, and I’m seeing to it that they get it—uninterrupted.”
Ahead, a headlight flared: Slick’s signal.
“Come on, Ashmead, you know I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t—”
“Kid, I don’t know anything of the sort. Like you said, you interrupted me. I’m busy. Find somebody else for your cockamamie mission. Want me to recommend somebody—?”
“Rafic, please just hear me out!”
“Look, Beck, there’s no room for you on that bike up there and there’s no room for you on my team. So go away. Compute casualty figures or something. Fucking bastard.” Ashmead, still moving, edged away from Beck before his temper got the better of him: “You could have rammed that report of mine up Langley’s back channel and saved us all a long, slow death. Why didn’t you?”
Beck’s head lowered in the gloom. His shoulders slumped. He said, with the most emotion Ashmead had ever heard from him: “I made a mistake.” The admission had an edge of incredulity to it.
“You’re a master of understatement, Beck, you know that? You fucked up like only somebody as smart as you are could. Now say that.”
“I fucked up,” Beck whispered.
“Good boy,” Ashmead grinned. “Lesson number two: when you fuck up, you don’t come run ning to me to help you ease your conscience. You bit this one off by yourself, and you’re going to have to swallow it by yourself. Now say bye-bye. Me and mine have got lots of rag-heads to grease while we still can.”
Beck reached out to touch Ashmead, who was close enough now to Slick’s bike that the driver’s helmeted head was turned their way and Slick’s hand was resting inside his leather jacket, just in case Beck turned out to be a problem Ashmead couldn’t handle.
Ashmead dodged the touch: “Beck, you want me to kill you, just ask, don’t make me guess. I’ll be glad to oblige you.”
“Jesus, Rafic, why won’t you listen to me? I’ve got something on that could save untold American lives—maybe make up for some of the harm I… we…” Beck broke off.
“Do I look to you like some pussy from the International Red Cross, Beck? Covert action, remember? We don’t save lives, we take them.”
Beck said only, “Please, Ashmead?”
And there was something in his tone that prompted Ashmead to give him the name of the hotel where he’d be having dinner: “You bring anybody with you, Beck, you’re history. Comprende? Even if it’s people you don’t know, somebody following you. We’re not going to care; we’re not going to ask any questions. We’re going to get you very dead, very quick.”
“Right. Nineteen hundred hours. I’ll be there.”
Ashmead, as he slipped onto the bike behind Slick and the BMW roared away, could have sworn that Beck was smiling.
The dining room of the Abu Dhabi Hilton faces the Persian Gulf; Ashmead’s party had a table in the corner where they would probably survive if the glass window-walls imploded and from which Ashmead could see both the customer entry and the door to the kitchen.
His team kept glancing at the sky; he couldn’t blame them. These were the best operatives he’d ever had, perhaps the best anybody’d ever had in Covert Action; they were young and smart and healthy and they had everything to live for.
Unlike the networks they’d set up for him, the terrorists they’d infiltrated and on occasion assassinated for him, or the agents they’d run for him, all five team members were stone professionasls: Jesse, at the far end of the table, who had been born in the Galilee and spoke more Semitic and Indo-European dialects than even Ashmead, was their paramilitary expert—the consummate adviser to anybody’s insurgency, a hardware connoisseur. Yael, next to him, a Bennington-educated Sabra, was a specialist in explosive ordnance as well as their queen of black and gray propaganda—when Covert Action wanted to set up a newspaper or a radio broadcast or place an editorial, it was Yael with her clear blue eyes and Aryan beauty who got the job done through persuasion, seduction, or loyal intermediaries; solid, stolid Zaki, next to her, was their chief interrogator and a field collector as good with Arabs as Dulles had been with Germans—Zaki had a string of informants among every Marxist-Leninist group involved with terrorism, a face nobody would look at twice in the Mediterranean or South Asia, and a way with electronics which had earned him the nickname Elint, for Electronic Intelligence; on Zaki’s left, with a Lockheed Hercules baseball cap backwards on his scruffy head, sat Thoreau, their Signals and Communications man and transport/logistics maven—Thoreau had been seconded to Ashmead five years ago from the SEALS for a mission that needed a very special pilot and Ashmead had point-blank refused to return him; opposite Ashmead was Slick, Ashmead’s deputy, who could overthrow a dictatorship and replace it with a friendly government single-handed—Slick had it all.
The team had a wolfishness in common, always, but tonight there was a dullness to their edge that bothered Ashmead, a frustration that had more to do with the fact that the sun hadn’t broken through the Gulf haze for three days than that they’d lost Schvantz: it saddened Ashmead inexpressibly to see his covert actors up against a wall they couldn’t blow up, tunnel under, fly over, or maneuver their way around—the Forty-Minute War wasn’t their fault.