I will call him Jimmy Costello, not his real name, because he has sons alive in the Washington, D.C., area, all, like mine, prosperous and well-regarded members of the community. I want no shame affixed to them on account of their father’s deeds. Years later, I wrote the middle one a letter that got him in to Yale; it was the least I could do for Jimmy Costello.
Jimmy was in his forties by this time and well known in the intelligence trade. Though we assumed he had learned the trade on the far side of the law, he had somehow turned to the side of us angels and now worked strictly for the Agency or the Agency’s friends, some other agencies, and a number of divorce lawyers. He may have been the best burglar in Washington. He could get into any place because he had a natural genius for locks. I’m guessing he was raised in the locksmith’s trade, as no one could pick up so much any other way. He simply looked at a lock and understood how it worked, and carried with him always a set of picks and, in a matter of seconds, could spring any secured door. Safes took a little longer, but not much. He had no fear of heights or of walking at midnight along the precipice of an embassy roof, gymnastically lowering himself to a window under the eaves, hanging by one hand from a gutter and with the other popping the lock, then propelling himself through the open orifice. Our embassy section used him to plant microphones and wire, and with his nimble fingers, he could loot an inner sanctum of its secrets in a matter of minutes, then be gone and leave no trace of having been there, and from that night on, we were a third party to any discussions between Igor and Boris and their supervisor just in from Ye Olde Country. I don’t know if we used the intelligence cleverly or not, but we got it cleverly. The FBI used him against both Sov agents and the Italian mafia; divorce lawyers against wealthy philanderers, so that after the proceedings, they were not so wealthy. He could have stolen the recipe to Coca-Cola for the Pepsi people if it had come to that, and he could have gotten us the bomb diagrams if we hadn’t beaten the reds to it.
The best thing about Jimmy was his loyalty. He could be counted on. He was a stand-up guy; all you have to do is look at the history of the Irish to understand how that attribute ran in his veins. He would have kept mum to the point of torture; it was bred into him by long centuries on the bog plotting against my ancestors, and leaving them dead more often than not, and never snitching when caught, out of fear of facing the eternal hell of the traitor. That he would never be; that he never was.
His other skill – it goes with his profile – was his charming brazenness or possibly his brazen charm. He had that Irish gift of conviction, and when the sneak wouldn’t do, bullshit would. He could talk you out of your underpants and send you home happy. I suppose he was a complete psychopath, but he was our psychopath, and that was exactly what the proposition demanded.
I met him in the bar of the Willard, where he hung out every night when he wasn’t working.
“Jimmy, me boy,” I said in my phoniest movie brogue, a joke between us.
“I am,” he said, affecting his own version of a brogue, which he’d probably learned from Bing Crosby movies, “and how’s his eminence Mr. Meachum?” He always called me Mr. Meachum, as if I were of the castle and he of the cottage, and no amount of argument could convince him to do differently.
“Don’t know about his eminence,” I said, “but I’m fine.” It was an old line, but he pretended otherwise and laughed.
We exchanged banal chitchat for a few minutes, each consciously eyeing the room to see that no known adversaries happened to be there. When we were satisfied that we were publicly in private, we proceeded to business.
“Might you have a few days toward the end of the month for your old pal Meachum?”
“I might, though I am busy this time of year. Is there any flexibility?”
“Alas, no. My sales plan is cued to something I cannot control. It would require your presence in the city of Dallas, Texas – our expense, of course – from the nineteenth to the twenty-fifth. We’ll stay at the Adolphus–”
“A first-class joint.”
“Indeed, it is. I need a trusted fellow at my side while I deal with problems as they may come up. Someone smart, tough, fast. He’s not available, so I thought of you.”
He laughed. “They do keep James Bond busy these days, do they not?” James Bond was on everybody’s mind then.
“Never have trusted the Brits, Jimmy,” I said. “Wouldn’t take him if I could have him. Give me a son of the auld sod, with a twinkle in his eye and steel in his fists.”
He liked the compliment, even if we both seemed to be playing movie roles. “So, Dallas?” he said. “Not your usual sales area, Mr. Meachum.”
He was drinking Glenlivet on the rocks, myself Pinch and soda.
“Duty takes us where it takes us, Jimmy. I’d rather it were Paris myself. I do pay well, and if there’s hardship involved and some schedule shuffling, then I’ll pay for that; a kind of schedule-rearrangement bonus, as it were.”
“Well, Mr. Meachum, yours is my own favorite firm, and continuing in their favor is definitely in my interest, so aside from travel expenses, I’ll not charge more, and I will see you where you want me in Dallas at any time on the nineteenth.”
Simple as that, I got Jimmy, and as with Lon’s genius and talent for rifles, what happened could not have happened without his contribution. He was always a rogue and hero, the bravest of the brave, the truest of the true. You see, we weren’t monsters. I suppose that’s the lesson. You’ve been taught that if we existed, we were the vilest of the vile, snatching greatness from the young prince and sending our nation on its way to hell. But to us, we were professionals, patriots, and men of honor. We weren’t in it for the money, or to sell more Bell helicopters and McDonnell-Douglas fighter jets, but to save lives and lead the nation through the swamp to the hilltop. Besides, we were only going to kill a screwball right-wing general.
CHAPTER 16
As I said, Sergeant,” said Harry Gardner, “Dad was a man of literature, really. So his books, his private books, were all fiction.”
Swagger once again stood at the threshold of Niles Gardner’s office, that book-lined cave where the CIA’s famous Boswell had tried for thirty years to write novels and failed. He could see the Red Nine lying undisturbed on the desk and the four ceramic bluebirds and the illustration of the six green elm trees on the shelves.
“Well,” said Swagger, “as I say, it’s a long shot. But I noted that beside the pistol, which is sometimes called a Red Nine, there’s that collection of bluebirds, four of ’em, and that picture of elm trees, six of ’em. It occurred to me that somehow the phrases ‘Red Nine,’ ‘Blue Four,’ or ‘Green Six’ might have had some meaning to him, like in some private way he was commemorating them.”
“Wow,” said Harry, “you know, that’s remarkable. I noted those things too, and I thought them strange, but it never occurred to me to put them in a pattern. They were so unlike Dad. He was not a sentimentalist, and those bluebirds in particular are so kitsch that I can’t understand why they’re there. Let’s look at the picture.” He took it down from the wall, handed it to Swagger, then took it back. “Dime-store frame. Let’s see what the picture is.”