“You should have seen Jesse.” Ashmead, too, looked out at Slick’s white-suited figure limned against the new spring grass of the outdoor range, the horizon distant and empty beyond him. Empty was about how Ashmead felt: the loss of Elint, Jesse and Yael was something he’d come to terms with later. Maybe it was for the best, kinder; maybe Morse’s serum wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It certainly wasn’t going to be efficacious against the sort of radiation hazard they’d be exposed to in Georgetown. But, like Slick and Thoreau, Ashmead had to believe that the sacrifices were worth the price.
“I heard,” Mac was saying. “Did you train him?”
“Slick? He trains me, half the time—he’s a natural. Want to rate Watkins’s record for me?”
Mac put down the glasses slowly and shook his head: “I can’t think of a single nice thing to say.”
“Gotcha. That’s what I thought. But what about Watkins and Beck? Why the vendetta? Without Beck, none of you guys would be sitting around rubbing your inoculations.”
“Something happened in Tel Aviv, Beck said. Beyond that, I don’t know anything except that Beggs trusts Watkins like I wouldn’t trust my own mother. It’s like CIA’s running the country—no offense personally, of course.”
“None taken. Suits or no suits, I’m ready to get those kids in out of the wind. Then I’d like to go over the Black Hawks, inside and out, with you.”
“I’ve got my own people standing over them—there won’t be any tampering. Everybody’s so high-tensile, I couldn’t sleep if I’d done it any other way. But you don’t have to take my word for it—I’ll be in one of those birds; I’d as soon get a hands-on, myself, before we take your dips sightseeing. And we don’t have much time.” Mac looked at his watch. “We’re cleared for takeoff in three hours for the first leg.” He started the Lincoln’s engine and looked straight at Ashmead: “When we get to Bragg, there’ll be plenty of time to stage enough of a little mixup that Patrick will end up in your Black Hawk instead of mine—just in case I’m getting complacent in my old age and you’re right about a scratch order coming down.”
“Thanks, Mac. I owe you one.”
“If this inoculation’s what it’s cracked up to be, I’m going to do my damnedest to find you in a year or two, when things calm down, and collect.”
“You’re on,” Ashmead promised with real affection. Then he opened the car door, whose armored windows wouldn’t roll down, and motioned to Slick, who was reloading and looking their way, to bring the team in out of the radioactive spring wind blowing in off the panhandle.
Chapter 6
Beck had finally put Sam Nye’s story into perspective and two and two together: it wasn’t that Nye was addled, it was that he was acting under orders.
Sam hadn’t admitted it, of course, which just proved that the Agency was still paranoid and Beck, more than ever with Watkins running the show, was still considered an outsider.
But the Agency, and Nye, who had worked on 159 for two years after Beck had left, apparently thought it was feasible to revive 159 in a last ditch attempt to turn back the clock, to literally correct the intelligence failure that had led to the Forty-Minute War before it occurred.
Beck still didn’t believe it could be done, but Nye had evidently convinced the Agency that it was worth a try. That was why Chris Patrick was on the other chopper with the sightseers rather than in the Black Hawk carrying Beck, Nye, Ashmead, Slick and Thoreau to Fort Bragg that night, and that was why it was going to be very difficult to get any time alone with her at Bragg or find a way to sneak her aboard his chopper in the morning.
And Beck wasn’t so sure he wanted her along. Not only was the mission at a security level that defied classification, but it was almost certainly one from which none of the participants would return.
Langley was simply too hot. No radiation suit, not even the black ones which they’d been issued to separate them from the dips and Patrick in their white ones and provide some operational cover if they ended up running through city streets at night, could protect them totally in a red zone like Langley, where ambient ionizing radiation was the least of their worries. If, by some miracle, he got out of Langley alive, it wasn’t just a matter of a shortened lifespan: Beck wouldn’t be producing any more children; Morse’s serum wasn’t effective against genetic damage or sterilization.
He was feeling resentful and paranoid; he knew he was shocky with grief over Muffy and the kids, but the Agency could have leveled with him, not tried to manipulate him like a civilian and use his best friend to do it.
Still, if Nye was right and President Beggs was seriously considering a second strike, what difference did it make?
Two years ago, when the ancient cat he’d gotten Muffy on returning from their honeymoon had been put to sleep, Beck’s wife had broken down so completely she was sure for a number of hours that the vet had just told them their cat had to be put to sleep so that he could sell it to an animal experimentation program: that sort of paranoia was a function of physiological grief and, though intellectually he understood what was happening to him, Beck couldn’t help but wonder if Nye was telling him the truth about Muffy and Seth and little Jen. For all he knew they were really alive somewhere, in an Agency holding facility or a burn hospital like the one they’d taken the dips through earlier today en route to Bragg in a nicely orchestrated bit of psychwar that silenced all accusations that the fact-finding tour wasn’t going to be shown anything embarrassing to America.
The burn hospital had done more than that: it had silenced all conversation and brought Dugard, the NATO honcho, to tears.
For Beck, it had been a personal nightmare: he kept looking for familiar faces among those laved in cream and gel and once, standing above the bed of a woman who had only one side of her face left and merely a handful of remaining hair, he’d thought he saw one.
But the woman wasn’t his wife; not only the chart at the foot of her bed but the look in her single eye told him that.
Still, he’d had all he could do not to bolt when he excused himself to find the men’s room, and then he’d seen Chris Patrick, a white-swathed lonely figure in the hall, packing a Detonics in a strap holster and leaning her head against the tiled corridor wall while tears streamed unheeded down her face.
He couldn’t help himself; he took her in his arms and held her head against his chest: if he’d broken her cover, he didn’t care about it at that moment; any man would have held a total stranger in those circumstances.
She said to him, “What I don’t understand is why the sky looks so friendly. The clouds are white, the air smells sweet, and it’s all a lie.”
“Shh,” he said. “Shh.”
“If it weren’t for you, I’d use this thing,” she pushed her hip, where the pistol nestled, against him. “Please, let’s get out of here, go home, go back to Israel, together, alive.”
“We will,” he’d promised. “In three days’ time. Just hold on. We need you so badly. America’s counting on you.”
“Fuck America.”
He didn’t say that America was pretty well fucked already; he said: “I’m counting on you.”
She could relate to that. She pulled back from him of her own accord as they heard footsteps and pushed her way into the ladies’ room, a gamin if puffy-lipped smile on her face: “Right,” she said in an imitation of Slick. “Check.”
It wasn’t until they’d piled back into the two Black Hawks waiting outside the burn hospital and lifted vertically into a magnificent sunset that Beck began to feel guilty about lying to her, about caring about her when his own family remained unaccounted for, about the degree to which her presence made him willing to accept at face value Nye’s—CIA’s—assurances that his wife and kids were dead in Georgetown.