He felt feverish now, as if the virus were advancing to another, terminal stage. He stared at the Bardem program without his usual concentration. “Just remember this last bit of advice, mate,”Liss had said to him. “More often than not, women are the downfall of men.”
Was it all coming apart, was there nothing but loss in the world?
Thrusting the laptop aside, he stood and strode out of the tent into the alien atmosphere of Iran. The architectural spiderwebs of the oil rigs circled the area like prison towers. The sound of their pumping filled the oily air with the low, steady rumble of mechanical animals prowling around their cages. The screech and clang of outmoded trucks shifting ill-maintained gears punctuated the afternoon, and the smell of crude was always in the air.
And then, above it all, came the scream of the jet engines as the Air Afrika plane appeared like a silver tube against the hazed and mottled blue of the sky. Arkadin and his men were moments away from landing. Soon the air would be thick with tracer fire, explosions, and shrapnel.
It was time to go to work.
Please tell me this is a joke,‖ Peter Marks said when he and Willard walked into the Mexican restaurant and saw the man sitting alone at the rear banquette. Apart from this figure, Marks and Willard were the only customers in the place. The room smelled of fermented corn and spilled beer.
―I don‘t make jokes,‖ Willard said.
―That really sucks, especially right at this moment.‖
―Don‘t ask me to do better,‖ Willard said with some asperity, ―because I can‘t.‖
They were in a part of Virginia unknown to Marks. He had no idea a Mexican restaurant would be open for breakfast. Willard raised an arm, a clear invitation for Marks to head on back. The man sitting alone was dressed in an expensive bespoke charcoal-blue suit, a pale blue shirt, and a navy tie with white polka dots. A small enamel replica of the American flag was pinned to his left lapel. He was drinking something out of a tall glass with a sprig of green growing out of the top. A mint julep, Marks would have thought, except that it was seven thirty in the morning.
Despite Willard‘s pressure, Marks balked. ―This man is the enemy, he‘s the fucking anti-Christ as far as the intelligence community is concerned.
His company flouts the law, does all the things we can‘t do, and gets paid obscene amounts of money to do them. While we slave away in the shit-filled belly of the beast, he‘s out there buying his Gulf-stream Sixes.‖ He shook his head, stubborn to the last. ―Really, Freddy, I don‘t think I can.‖
―Any route that leads to roadkill—weren‘t those your words?‖ Willard smiled winningly. ―Do you want to win this war or do you want to see the Old Man‘s dream flushed into the NSA recycle bin?‖ His smile turned encouraging.
―One would think that after serving all this time in, as you say, the shit-filled belly of the beast, you might crave a little fresh air. Come on. After the first shock, it won‘t be so bad.‖
―Promise, Daddy?‖
Willard laughed under his breath. ―That‘s the spirit.‖
Taking Marks‘s arm he steered him across the linoleum tiles. As they approached the banquette, the solitary man seemed to appraise them both. With his dark, wavy hair, wide forehead, and rugged features, he looked like a film star; Robert Forster came immediately to mind, but there were bits and pieces of others, Marks was certain.
―Good morning, gentlemen. Please sit down.‖ Oliver Liss not only looked like a film star, he sounded like one. He had a deep, rich voice that rolled out of his throat with controlled power. ―I took the liberty of ordering drinks.‖ He lifted his tall, frosty glass as two others were set down in front of Marks and Willard. ―It‘s iced chai with cinnamon and nutmeg.‖ He took a swig of his drink, urging them to do the same. ―It‘s said that nutmeg is a psychedelic in high doses.‖ His smile managed to convey the notion that he‘d successfully tried out the theory.
In fact, everything about Oliver Liss exuded success to the most exacting degree. But then he and his two partners hadn‘t built Black River from the ground up on trust funds and dumb luck. As Marks sipped at his drink, he felt as if a nest of pit vipers had taken up residence in his abdomen. Mentally, he cursed Willard for not preparing him for this meeting. He tried to dredge up everything he‘d read or heard about Oliver Liss, and was dismayed to discover that it was precious little. For one thing, the man kept out of the limelight—one of the other partners, Kerry Mangold, was the public face of Black River. For another, very little was known about him. Marks recalled Googling him once and discovering a disconcertingly short bio. Apparently an orphan, Liss was raised in a series of Chicago foster homes until the age of eighteen, when he got his first full-time job working for a building contractor. Apparently the contractor had both contacts and juice, because in no time Liss had begun working in the campaign of the state senator, for whom the contractor had built a twenty-thousand-square-foot home in Highland Park.
When the man was elected he took Liss with him to DC, and the rest was, as they say, history. Liss was unmarried, without family affiliations of any kind, at least not that anyone knew about. In short, he lived behind a lead curtain not even the Internet could pierce.
Marks tried not to wince when he drank the chai; he was a coffee drinker and hated any kind of tea, especially ones that tried to masquerade as something else. This one tasted like a cupful of the Ganges.
Someone else might have said, Do you like it?just to break the ice, but it seemed Liss was uninterested in icebreaking or any other form of conventional communication. Instead he directed his eyes, the same deep shade of blue as the background of his tie, to Marks and said, ―Willard tells me good things about you. Are they true?‖
―Willard doesn‘t lie,‖ Marks said.
This brought the ghost of a smile to Liss‘s lips. He continued to sip his vile chai, his gaze never wavering. He seemed not to have to blink, a disconcerting asset in anyone, especially someone in his position.
The food came, then. It appeared as if Liss had ordered not only their drinks but their breakfast as well. This consisted of buttered fresh corn tortillas and scrambled eggs with peppers and onions, drenched in an orange chile sauce that just about incinerated the lining of Marks‘s mouth.
Following the first incautious bite, he swallowed hard and stuffed his face with tortillas and sour cream. Water would just spread the heat from his stomach to his small intestine.
Graciously, Liss waited until Marks‘s eyes had stopped watering. Then he said, ―You‘re quite right about our Willard. He doesn‘t lie to his friends,‖
just as if there had been no gap in the conversation. ―As for everyone else, well, his lies seem like the soul of truth.‖
If Willard was flattered by this talk, he gave no indication. Rather, he contented himself by eating his food as slowly and methodically as a priest, his expression Sphinx-like.