He was returned to the United States after six months in a Moscow prison.
Johanna Hull showed up in Rezā’iyeh by methods unknown in April of 1975 and returned to the United States, and her life at Harvard. She had lived quietly ever since. Except that three times she had tried to commit suicide.
Ulu Beg, one source reported, was finally captured by Iraqi security forces in May of 1975 and was last seen in a Baghdad prison.
The fate of his people — his tribe, his family, his sons — was unknown.
“Lights,” Yost said.
Trewitt fumbled a second too long for the switch but finally clicked it on.
The brightness flooded the room and men blinked and stretched after so long in the dark.
Yost stood at the front of the room.
“Briefly, that’s it,” he said. “I wanted to keep you informed. Chardy arrives tomorrow.”
“Lord, you’re bringing him here?”
“No, not to the Agency. We’re running this operation out of a sterile office in Rosslyn, just across the river from Georgetown.”
“Yost, I hope you can control this Chardy. He can be a real wild man.”
“I don’t think you understand,” Miles Lanahan said.
He smiled, showing dirty teeth. He was a small young man with a reputation for ruthless intelligence. He was no sentimentalist; the “old cowboy” stuff wouldn’t cut anything for him. He’d started out as a computer analyst working in “the pit,” Agency jargon for the video display terminal installation in the basement of Langley’s main building, and worked his way out in a record two years. Everybody was a little afraid of him, especially Trewitt.
“All right, Miles,” said Yost, “that’s enough.”
Down, boy, thought Trewitt.
But Miles had one more comment.
“The plan,” he said, “is not to control him.”
5
Chardy sometimes thought only the game had kept him sane. At the end of Saladin II, the worst time in the cellar, he thought not of Johanna or the Kurds or his country or his mission; they’d all ceased to sustain him. He thought of the game. He shot imaginary jumpers from all over a huge floor and willed them through the hoop. Magic, they floated and fell and never touched metal. The game expanded to fill his imagination, to push out all the dark corners, the cobwebs, the spooky little doubts. Later the game had become, if anything, bigger. Into it he poured all his energy, his natural fierceness, his frustrations and dissatisfactions, his resentment: his hate. The game, more loyal than any human or institution on this earth, absorbed them — and him.
And now, on the night before what he knew was the most important day of his life, the game was especially kind to him. For of late his shots would not fall, his legs had been thick and numb, his fingers clumsy. But all that was a memory: tonight he could not miss. From outside, inside, but usually from the baseline with no backboard for margin of error, he shot, the ball spinning to the rafters and dropping cleanly through. It was only a Y-league game, mostly ex-college jocks like himself, or black kids with no college to go to; and it took place in a dim old gym that smelled of sweat and varnish and sported a shadowy network of old iron girders across the ceiling.
But for Chardy there was nothing but basketball court, no outside world, no Speights or Melmans or Ulu Begs. It was an absolute place: you shot; it went in or it didn’t. There was no appeal, no politics, no subtle shading of results. It was a bucket or it wasn’t.
Toward the end even the cool black kids were working the ball to him, just to watch it fall.
“Man, you hot,” one called.
“Put it down,” another yelled.
He hated to see it end, but it did. The team he played for, which represented a manufacturer of surgical instruments, easily vanquished a team that represented a linoleum installer; the margin was twenty-eight points and could have been greater. A buzzer sounded and the bodies stopped hurtling about. Somebody slapped him on the ass and somebody clapped him on the back and somebody shook his hand.
“You had it tonight,” somebody said.
“Couldn’t miss, could I?”
“No way, man, no way.”
Chardy took a last glance toward the floor — two other teams, the Gas Stations and the Ice Cream Stores, were warming up. It meant nothing, but Chardy hated to leave it. A ball came spinning his way and he bent to scoop it up. He held it, feeling its skin springy to his fingers. He looked at the hoop and saw that it was about fifty feet away.
Shoot it, he thought.
But a black man came galloping up to him and without a word Chardy tossed him the ball, and off he went. Chardy pulled on his jacket and headed for the doors and what lay beyond.
6
He stared at the picture. Yes. Ulu Beg. Years younger, but still Ulu Beg.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Good. Getting it was no easy thing,” said Trewitt, the young one, a wispy pseudo-academic type who was tall and thin and vague.
“Once upon a time,” Chardy said. “Years and years ago.”
“Okay,” said Trewitt. “Now this one.”
The projector clicked and projected upon the screen on the wall of a glum office in Rosslyn a plumpish face, prosperous, solid.
“I give up,” said Chardy.
“Look carefully,” said Yost Ver Steeg. “This is important.”
I know it’s important, Chardy thought irritably.
“I still don’t — oh, yeah. Yeah.”
“It’s an artist’s projection of Ulu Beg now. Twenty years later, a little heavier, ‘Americanized.’”
“Maybe so,” said Chardy. “But I last saw him seven years ago. He looked” — Chardy paused. Words were not his strong point; he could never get them to express quite what he wanted — “fiercer, somehow. This guy was in a war for twenty years. He was a guerrilla leader for nearly ten. You’ve got him looking like a Knight of Columbus.”
A harsh note of laughter came from the other young one, Miles something-Irish. It was a caustic squawk of a laugh; Miles was a kind of Irish dwarf, an oily little jerk, but he’d know what a Knight of Columbus was.
“Well,” Trewitt said defensively, “the artist had a lot of experience on this sort of thing. He worked all night. We just got the picture in yesterday. It’s the only one of Ulu Beg extant.”
“Try this one, Paul,” said Yost Ver Steeg.
Johanna. Chardy stared at her. The face could have been spliced out of any of a thousand of his recent nights’ worth of dreams. It meshed perfectly with all those nights of memory and struck him with almost physical force.
“It’s very recent,” said Yost.
Chardy stared at the image projected against the wall. He felt as if he were in a peep-show booth for a quarter’s worth of pointless thrill with other strange men in a dark place.
“A week ago, I think. Is that right, Miles?” Yost said.
“Tuesday last.” Miles’s voice was sure and smug and had a recognizable Chicago tang to it.
“Has she changed much in seven years?”
“No,” was all Chardy could think to say, offended by the ritual he knew the shot to represent: some seedy little man from Technical Services, up there with a motor-driven Nikon with a 200-millimeter lens, parked blocks away in his car or van, shooting through one-way glass after three days’ stalk.
Chardy rubbed his dry palms together. He glanced over at the three shapes with whom he shared Johanna’s image: Yost, almost a still life, a man of deadness, and the two younger fellows, dreamy Trewitt and the loathsome Miles What-was-it? the dumpy little Irish guy from Chicago.