“Who said I was turning it over?”
“All right, for the sake of argument I’ll pretend you won’t. You give me this stuff about being a man without a country, but you don’t want me to give away my country’s secrets. I mean, what do you care?”
Corbett took his time, switching the monitor to FLIR mode, seeing no strong aircraft emissions. Then, savagely, “Screw ‘em all. The Sov spooks, everybody else’s, and especially, oh yes, especially Uncle Sam’s alphabet soup of agencies who have no compunctions about burning a loyal employee. They’ve always got their reasons; screw their reasons, it’s my personal ass they tried to burn.” A short, unpleasant bark of a laugh. “In my case, literally burn. God damned near did it. Just pure luck they didn’t.”
“In some ways you can behalfway decent, actually,” she said. “I envy the education you must have had to help design this plane. But what really gets me is that you were Uncle Dar’s friend. Not one of the Old Boy net, as he calls it, but he didn’t care. He doesn’t make friends with bad people, Corbett.”
A long sigh, as he considered telling her to shut the fuck up, maybe slapping her to drive the point home. And for some reason he found himself incapable of that. There was much that he must not tell her, but some of it? Maybe. Why the hell not? It might leak through enough offices to redden some faces, might even force one into sudden, unsought retirement. “Let me tell you a story, Petra. About two guys fishing on the Potomac.”
He’d left the Company for the Snake Pit; spent years under Ben Ullmer on several special projects, he said, careful to avoid telling her things she did not need to know. He did not even hint to her of his work on new versions of the false shrubs that oriented themselves aerodynamically, falling from a Lockheed Quietship over East Germany, impaling their stems so that they would stand in plain sight within the landing pattern of a MiG and record the emissions of Soviet top-line electronic gear.
Instead, Corbett talked about his work on Black Stealth One, remembering to maintain Medina’s cover. “So our retreaded ex-spook got a lot of flack from a colleague, little tinplate hotshot named Medina. Just a personality conflict, I suppose, but it sure made our man value his time off.
“So he gets a chance to spend a weekend in a flat-bottom boat with an old friend. They don’t even share much shoptalk, maybe a hint that some project’s becoming a real bastard, something the other guy already knows.” He turned to her, his eyes smouldering. “At the very worst, a thing to get you a royal ass-chew if your best friend cops on you. Not worth blacklisting you for, much less fixing you up with a fatal accident. The truth is to this day I don’t know why.”
“You’re certain someone did that on purpose?”
His laugh was almost a snort of derision. “You be the judge. Second morning with the boat on the Maryland side, a cooler full of Heineken, just a touch of mist on the river. Little Evinrude was cranky to start but our poor boob thinks he’s a mechanic so he fiddles with it while his good buddy lugs the other stuff into the boat. Including the spare fuel can, one of those steel jobs with a screw-on cap you can get your fist into.”
He saw her gaze steady on him, both of them fully aware that Corbett was the boob and Dar Weston the buddy, and she seemed scarcely to be breathing as he went on: “They’d fished this way a few times before, but this time the best buddy has a beeper on his belt. Never before, just this time. And of course ol’ buddy-buddy has a ‘phone in his tow car, one of those belchfire ponycars that I am sure you’ve seen. And the good buddy is back at his car a couple of hundred yards off, and comes back to the boat with a face a mile long. He tells our fool the bad news while snugging the fuel can down where you can reach it while you steer the boat. Very thoughtful.
“The bad news is, his beeper went offand maybe it did, who knows? So the buddy says he called in, and maybe he did. There’s some little brushfire back at Langley that requires him personally, but it won’t take long. Well, hell, that’s no problem. The buddy will make a quick run to Langley. Back in a couple of hours. No sweat, right?”
“No sweat,” she said, prodding him on.
“The boob says sure, he’ll mooch along in the boat and find where they’re biting and watch for the car, butI remember this very wellas he putters away from the landing he says don’t expect all that Heineken to wait. And the buddy shouts back, ‘I trust you.’ Wasn’t that sweet? Then he drives off.
“Ten minutes later, just noodling along against the current, the goddamn old Evinrude packs up; something I don’t think was in the plan, somehow. Our boob manages to steer into shallows with cattails higher than Iowa corn. Drops anchor. The way the engine stopped, sounded like it was just starving for gas. Our guy starts to haul the gas can a little closer so he can reach the pump.
“And something thunks inside. Not loud, but when you’ve fiddled with mechanical stuff all your life you get attuned to certain noises. This wasn’t a fuel pickup sound, or”
“All right,” she said breathlessly. “I don’t want a list of what it wasn’t!”
He shrugged and continued. “The cap unscrews. The can is half full of gas, but there’s enough sun to shine on the bottom where there’s a flat brick of something like, oh, jack cheese. It’s wrapped inside a bag. It comes out nice and easy. It’s got something like a ballpoint pen jabbed into it, with a screw-type plunger on top.”
“Now you’ve lost me,” she said.
“It’s a pound of plastique, Petra, the most concentrated chemical explosive on earth. The chemical detonator can be set for various times with that screw adjustment. Do you have any idea of its radius of destruction with a few gallons of gasoline on a small boat?”
She gazed at him slack-jawed, as outrage grew in her face. “My uncle would never, never do such a thing! Maybe that bomb was intended for him.”
“It was his boat, and his gas can, and that chemical fuse is a one-hour item at most. I sure didn’t do it myself. Maybe he didn’t build that booby trap, but he put it in there, all right.” Corbett punched an instruction into the keyboard and added, as if to himself, “You bet he did.”
“He’s not a killer,” she said, choking it out. “You’re lying, Corbett.”
“Uh-huh; yeah. Listen, it was misplaced loyalty that put me where I am. I realized that while I was staring down at a brick of C-4. Dar Weston, not a killer? He set booby traps in Greece in 1944, or so he told me. I believe it.”
“God. That’s trueat least my dad told me it was true.” She was almost whispering, half submerged in old memories. “So what did you do?”
“I was a dead man. There was no way I could go back to the Snake Pit, for all I knew my own people had made the decision to burn me. I dumped the brick back, jumped down into chest-deep water, and flailed like hell through cattails to the shore. The highway wasn’t far off, but I didn’t want to get picked up all muddy and sopping wet. I skirted the shore feeling like the whole world was watching, heading upstream. Might’ve been another ten minutes, less than a mile from the boat, when that C-4 went up. Jesus, it made a fireball you could’ve seen for miles.”
Petra said nothing for perhaps a minute. Then, “Why didn’t I ever hear about it?”
“Why would you? Hell, it probably wasn’t even in the papers. I’ll bet Dar had a good story worked out, though. And I’ll give you odds he was parked in that Javelin somewhere along the river, listening. Petra, when people in my line of work go belly up, sometimes it doesn’t make the obituary column.”
“I suppose,” she said softly. “What did you do after that?”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, punching again at the keyboard, looking back at the swept wing. He had told her all he could without placing Petra herself in possible jeopardy. No point in describing his pilgrimage with thumbed rides to Depew, a suburb of Buffalo; withdrawing his spooker from the post office box in Depew; outfitting himself at St. Vincent De Paul; buying a 72 Datsun in Buffalo using his spooker ID; crossing the toll bridge into Canada; then returning a week later through Duluth on the next leg of his trip to Mexico.