“Sure, be my guest.”
By the time Pete knocked on the apartment door, Oscar was head down in the chow bowl and Mike was well into second thoughts. The microwave oven buzzed for attention just as the door rattled. “Come on in. I was just about to eat—”
“S’okay.” Pete held up a plastic bag. “I figured you wouldn’t turn away a six-pack, and I hit Taco Bell on the way over.” The bag clinked as he planted it on the kitchen table.
Mike grinned. “Grab a chair. Glasses in the top cupboard.”
“Glasses? We don’t need no steenkin’ glasses!”
Mike planted his dinner on a plate, still in the plastic container, and grabbed a fork and two glasses. “Mm. Smells like . . . chicken.” He pulled a face. “I’ve got a freezer-load of sweet ’n’ sour chicken balls, can you believe it? The job lot was going cheap at Costco.”
“Lovely.” Pete eyed Mike’s food warily, then twisted the cap off a bottle. “Sam Adams good enough?”
“It’ll go down nicely.” Mike started on his rice and chicken as Pete poured two bottles into their respective glasses. “What’s with the Taco Bell thing? I thought Nikki liked to cook.”
Pete shrugged sheepishly. “Nikki likes to cook,” he said. “Healthy things. Y’know? Once in a while a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, ’specially if it involves a barbecue and a slab of dead meat. And when it’s not barbecue season, a dose of White Castle, or maybe Taco Bell . . .”
“I see.” Mike ate junk food out of necessity born of eighty-hour working weeks: Pete ate junk food because he needed a furtive vice and most of the ordinary ones would cost him his job. “What’s she doing?”
“It’s her yoga class tonight.” Pete took a long mouthful of beer. “Figured I’d come by and cheer you up. Chat about a little personal problem I’ve been having.”
Mike looked at him sharply. “Beer first,” he suggested. “Then let’s take a hike.” Pete didn’t do personal problems: he had what by Mike’s envious standards looked like an ideal marriage. He especially didn’t drop around co-workers’ apartments to wail about things, which meant . . . “Is it that thing we were talking about over lunch the other day?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess it is.” Pete managed to look furtive and scared over his beer glass, which put the wind up Mike even more. “How’s the beer?”
“Beer’s fine.” Mike shunted his dinner aside and stood up. “C’mon, let’s go down the backyard and sit out. There’s a couple of chairs down there.”
Outside, the air hit him like a freshly washed towel, heavy and hot and damp enough to make breathing hard for a moment. Mike waited until Pete cleared the doorway, bag of bottles in hand. “Spill it.”
“Chairs first. You’d better be sitting down for this.”
Mike gestured at the tatty deck chairs on the rear stoop. “How bad is it?”
“Bad enough.” Pete dropped into one of the chairs and handed Mike a bottle. “Go on, sit down.”
Mike sat. “I don’t think anyone’s listening here.”
“Indoors.” It was a statement, not a question.
“They lock everything down.” Mike popped the lid off the beer. “Can’t blame them for being suspicious of cops—we don’t have that kind of home life.”
“Yeah, well.” Pete glanced up at the roof suspiciously, then shrugged. The rumble of traffic and the scritching of cicadas would make life hard for any eavesdroppers. “I called Tony Vecchio up today.”
Mike sat bolt upright. “Shit, man! Not from work—”
“Relax, I’m not that stupid.” Pete took another swig from his bottle.
Mike peered at him. He was obviously rattled. Maybe even as badly rattled as Mike was, in the wake of his little chat with Smith. Explosive collars. What else is going on? “I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“I needed to ask some questions.” Pete looked uncomfortable. “We’ve gone native, you know? Inside FTO, surrounded by the military and their national security obsession, we’ve stopped trying to do our jobs properly. I don’t know about you, but I swore an oath to uphold the law—remember that? Anyway, I wanted to get some perspective. Tony knew about Matt because he was there when Matt came in, so I figured he’d help.”
“You wanted a priest to hear your confession.”
“Exactly.”
Mike sighed. “Okay, so spill it.”
“Tony stonewalled!” Pete looked angry for a moment. “First he said he didn’t know anything. Then he told me that he’d never heard of Matt, that nobody of that name had come in, there were no WPP admissions this year. Then he told me I’d been suspended on full pay, medical disability in the line of work, for the past ten weeks, and he appreciated how I must feel! I mean, what the fuck?”
“Shit.” Mike tipped the last of his bottle down his throat, then leaned forward. “You want to know what I think.”
“Yes?”
“Close call.” He wiped his forehead. “Listen, what you did was amazingly stupid. If you’d asked me . . . shit. They’ve farmed us out to the military. We belong to Defense right now, we don’t exist on personnel’s books—I mean, I’ll bet if you went digging you’d find that we’ve both been listed on medical leave ever since this thing started. And the paperwork on Matt will be a whitewash. He’s a ghost, Pete, like the poor fucks in Gitmo, trapped in Daddy Warbucks’s machine. Have you met Dr. James yet?”
“James? Isn’t he Smith’s boss? The political one?”
“Yeah, him. I take it you haven’t met . . . James is a Company man, all the way through. Works for the NSC, runs covert ops, the whole lot. That’s who we’re working for. And you know what happens to people who go outside official channels in CIA land? You just don’t do that. I’ve been doing some reading in my copious spare time. You, me, we got sucked in because we were already on the edge of something very big and very classified and very black. Eric told me some, some stuff. About how the military perceive the national security implications of what we’re up against. It made my hair stand on end. I think he’s wrong about some—maybe most—of this, but I couldn’t tell him that to his face. Now, I happen to think we ought to be treating this more like a policing problem, ought to be enforcing the law—but doesn’t that sort of presuppose that we’re dealing with criminals? What I’m hearing is that like Matt, they think we’re dealing with another government, a rogue state, like North Korea or Cuba or something. And right now, they’ve won the argument. I don’t see us getting any backup from Justice, Pete. If you start going behind their backs without evidence, they will stick it to you hard. But if we don’t, who knows what kind of mess they’re going to get us into?”
“Shit.” Pete stared at him.
“Drink.” Mike reached into the bag, thrust another bottle at Pete. “Listen, we’ll work on this together. Just keep an eye on what’s going on, okay? Compare notes. Try to remember who we are and what kind of job we’re supposed to be doing, so that if the spooks fuck up we’ll be in the clear and able to carry on. Maybe talk to Judith, she’s FBI, I think she’ll see it our way. Form a, I guess, a Justice Department network.” He found he was waving his hands around helplessly. “We’re the underdogs right now. Defense grabbed the ball while our team’s back was turned. But it’s not going to last forever. And when we get an opportunity to make our case we need to be ready . . .”
TELEPHONY INTERCEPT TRANSCRIPT
LOGGED 18:47 04/06
“Hello, who’s this?”
“Paulie?”
“Miriam—I mean, hi babe! Wow! It’s been ages, I’ve been worrying about you—”
“Yeah, well, there’s been some heavy stuff going down. I take it you heard—”