He made a great effort to avoid swallowing, or changing the pace of his breathing. “Did you ask Rogers that question?” If she did, there will be no way I can protect her in the future.
Her glance held a trace of scorn. “Give me a break! I’d have that guy underfoot for a week if I stepped into such a can of worms. In fact, I withdraw the question. You wouldn’t have done it if you didn’t think it was right.”
“It was a matter of crucial importance to national security, Pets,” he said with soft intensity. “And unless you want to be hounded in ways I couldn’t control, you’re going to have to accept what I’ve said, and try to forget about it.”
Now her look carried more compassion. “Is that what you did?”
“If only it were that easy; but my job is remembering, not forgetting. I have very few outstanding regrets about my life, but Corbett is one of them. I can’t tell you any more than this: it had to be done.”
“For the higher good, no doubt”
“There was no doubt at the time,” he said. “Corbett wasis a man who puts no one’s decisions above his own.”
Petra vented a small “hunh” of wry amusement. “Tell me about it,” she said, with sarcasm that implied “don’t tell me about it.”
“And his decisions aren’t always in the country’s best interest, Pets. Do you need any more proof beyond what he’s done? Including the airplane, the search, and damages, he’s probably cost the taxpayers a billion dollars.”
“Wow.” Petra stared at nothing for a moment. “That ought to make him happy. He said revenge was the last passion of old men.”
“He said that, did he? The son of a bitch.”
“Funny, that’s just how he speaks of you,” said Petra, now with an impudent smile. She must have seen his jaw twitch because she grabbed him again with that exuberant hug that he often drove hundreds of miles to experience. “But you’re my son of a bitch, and I love you.”
He blinked hard, hoping that she would not look up and see the tears welling in his eyes. To keep from breaking down completely, he said into her hair, playfully, “Rogers thinks I’m not the only thing you love.”
He felt her stiffen. She did not look up. “I can’t imagine what he meant,” she said.
“Black Stealth One,” said Dar. “He thinks you’ve fallen for a piece of machinery.”
“He’s very perceptive,” she said, relaxing.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Within twenty-four hours of the girl’s release from Brooks, a score of middle-echelon men in both CIA and NSA knew many details of the Black Stealth One fiasco. Ivan the Terrible, his nose buried in a tin of Chicken of the Sea, did not even look up from his feast as Sasha said, “You know, Ivan, I never thought I would add a name to the list of possibles.”
Sasha had added Kyle Corbett to his list of possible decoys after realizing the man had broken Snake Pit security well in advance of the theft perhaps years before. It did not matter so much where the man had been hiding since the false report of his death. What mattered most was that Corbett’s record went back a long way, and he had proven himself adept at espionage.
“What a joke if the KGB has been running him all this time, Ivan,” murmured Sasha, giving the cat a languid scratch on the rump. Ivan lifted his sleek hindquarters in response, but continued to pursue a morsel of tuna inside the tin. “But if the man had gone over, it’s probably old Pyotr what’s-his-name, Karotkin, who’d have handled him. And those people are no slouches at wringing a man dry of information.” Karotkin, and the men who made his policies, would not have waited for years to make use of Corbett’s intelligence; that much was certain.
“So it’s most likely that Mr. Kyle Corbett is running loose with his own agenda. As you do, Ivan.” Now the cat looked up. “And as I do,” Sasha went on, giving the cat a scratch between the ears. “I need not care about his motive unless he’s waited until now so that he could go over to the Other Side with the airplane. That would be good news and bad news, and it’s certainly possible.” But so long as the mysterious Corbett remained a loose cannon after his rolling rampage through U.S. security, he might still have a close connection within the intelligence community somewhere, and he might pop up almost anywhere. Sasha mulled those implications over until the cat’s nose emerged from a perfectly clean tuna can.
Ivan commenced an elaborate ritual, licking a paw, then using it to remove the last traces of tuna oil from his face. “Oh, you can get clean”Sasha smiled at the cat“but Corbett can’t. He would be a more credible Sasha than I am. And even if he is finally caught, who would believe his denials?”
The loss of Black Stealth One was already having its effect on all those who had endorsed the false ransom operation. Men at the very top would have their sacrificial victims chosen; men near the top would be wise to prepare for early retirement. And that could cut the decoy list in half. “Well, no matter,” Sasha said. He had a new decoy, returned from the dead as it were, who would serve nicely. The point might well be moot; Sasha himself might never again perform a service of any great importance.
It suddenly occurred to Sasha that his own survival and that of the evasive Mr. Corbett were tightly intertwined, an irony as broad and as deep as espionage itself. Sasha began to laugh so abruptly that Ivan bolted from the table.
THIRTY-NINE
Corbett had crossed the Rio Grande at Fourteen thousand feet because a lot of armed, frustrated airmen were looking for him lower, and even though blessed with his barrel chest he could not fly higher in an unpressurized cockpit without some loss of alertness. It was barely possible that the Mexican Air Force would be waiting in their ancient T-33’s, despite the political invective hurled back and forth across the border.
Living in Mexico, Corbett had watched those hostilities build. The torture and murder of a U.S. drug agent named Camarena, in Mexico, had lifted the edge from a blanket of Mexican deceit. Evidently the same government officials pledged to stop international drug traffic were, themselves, peso billionaires because of that traffic. The Mexicans had now replaced many of their top people within the federal judicial police but some of those changes seemed, to the yanquis, mostly cosmetic. And Mexican complaints of yanqui meddling into affairs of state had escalated into a national clamor against the colossus to the north. American tourists now faced a stronger likelihood of trouble than a fleeing American skyjacker. Still, Corbett knew he could not afford to relax. He could resume skimming the surface, however, to stretch his range.
Under ideal conditions he might have reached Hidalgo del Parral without stopping for fuel. The city was more than halfway across Mexico, beyond the sun-blasted hell of western Coahuila in a region more mountainous, but also more hospitable. He knew a man there who would ask no questions about his fuel requirements as long as that man did not see the hellbug itself. Even among the shadowy folk who prospered by making themselves useful to smugglers of all kinds, Black Stealth One was worth a few questions.
But conditions were rotten, and Hidalgo del Parral was out of the question. Corbett had squandered fuel with a lunatic’s abandon during his escape in Texasthough only a lunatic would have pulled half an inside loop in a ravine, and nothing less could have saved him. Some of his extra fuel had splashed around the cockpit, and the two quarts remaining in his plastic container proved a bitch to chase down with that siphon hose while flying the airplane in choppy winds. Skimming low through the state of Nuevo Leon, with the hellbug in its buzzard’s plumage, he knew he had been seen at least twice. On one occasion he saw a farmer cross himself frantically, fifty yards away. On the other a goatherd who might have been ten years old waved a hefty stick to ward off this vast predator. By that time Corbett knew that his only assured source of fuel would be Torreon, on the Durango-Coahuila border.