“You with the Company, then?” the old man asked. “One of the new regime? A Powers man? Hear he’s doing good things. About time, I suspect, what?”
“Ex-Company. I was fired a few years ago.”
Owens stared at him through eyes suddenly shrewd. “Knew I’d remembered the name. You’re the hit man who got canned over the Chile thing. A Carter regime casualty.”
McGarvey nodded.
“Who are you working for now? What are you doing here?”
“Looking for answers.”
“You going to kill him? Is that it? Is this an old vendetta? Are you settling an old score? You’re on intimate terms with the bad guys, then?” McGarvey had the feeling that the old man was enjoying this, even though he was skeptical and mistrustful. It probably got very lonely out here on the beach. Especially in the winter when the winds blew the weather in. With spring came hope. He could see it written on the man’s face.
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“He hadn’t planned on it,” the old man hooted. He turned to the dog who looked up again from its sleep. “Hear that, he hadn’t planned on it. Maybe it’ll just happen, then. Moscow Center rules and all? I suppose he’s packing a piece. Probably a Makarov … light, accurate, reliable. Maybe even a Graz Buyra, the heavyweight. Do the job right. Final.”
“Are you familiar with Oliver Leonard Day?”
Owens’s eyes narrowed. “Justice?”
“He would accept a telephone call from you. If you needed any kind of a confirmation he would make it, though he wouldn’t necessarily like it. I can give you his number if you have a phone out here.”
“I’m capable of looking up a telephone number,” the old man said. He shook his head. “I’m truly sorry you are here, you know, though I suspected someone like you would be showing up on my doorstep sooner or later. Part of the business, I guess. Though one could always hope.” Again he shook his head. “Justice.”
McGarvey didn’t know if he was referring to Justice the department, or justice the noun.
Owens stacked the dishes on his tray and picked it up. “Would you like something to eat?”
“No thanks.”
“A beer?”
“If it’s not so cold,” McGarvey said off-handedly.
Owens grinned. “Been in Europe for a while, then. Make yourself comfortable.” He left the room.
McGarvey took off his jacket and dropped it over the back of the chair. The crackle of the fireplace was real. Nothing else seemed to be. On a table was a stack of magazines: Central Intelligence Retirees Association Newsletter. They went back a number of years. Over the mantle were photographs showing Owens with Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and finally Ford. All of them were signed best wishes or with similar sentiments except for Kennedy’s, which made mention of Cuba: Cuba libre — next year, Darrel. The date on the photograph was more startling, however. It was November 21, 1963—the day before Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.
“Washington was called Camelot in those days, remember?” Owens said coming in from the hall. He’d brought a couple of beers.
“I was in the service, stationed in Germany. I remember the day Kennedy was shot perfectly,” McGarvey said.
“Everyone remembers that day.” Owens handed McGarvey his beer. It was cellar-cool. “I was convinced a shooting war was imminent. After the Bay of Pigs, and the missile crisis, there wasn’t much left except for an all out exchange of ICBMs.” Owens looked up at the photograph, his eyes moist. “He wasn’t such a hot president, you know. But he cleaned up nice, and his wife was a looker. Our country was young — we weren’t even two hundred yet — and so was our president. Hell, we could lick the world, or at least show them the way into the twenty-first century. We were going to the moon!”
A ways off they could hear the horn of some very large ship, the sound blown onto the shore by the breeze. Then it faded as the breeze momentarily died.
“Will you trust the memory of an old man?” Owens asked softly. He hadn’t taken his eyes off the Kennedy photograph. “Could be faulty.”
“As long as no one has tampered with it, such as is done with paper records, I’ll be satisfied.”
Now Owens looked at McGarvey. “You’ve got a bone in your teeth, haven’t you, lad,” he said. “You’ve got the look about you. Oh, boy, have you ever got the look.”
Owens was married for forty years. His wife had been dead now for nearly ten. McGarvey figured the man could write the book on loneliness.
“Yarnell played double for the Bay of Pigs,” Owens began with no preamble. “It was his first real field assignment. We knew the Russians were getting themselves involved in a big way down there, so we decided to throw Yarnell into the equation. We wanted to see if we couldn’t hold them off. Provide a little diversion, if you catch my drift. Misdirect them. By then it was too little, too late. It was one of the few projects at which Darby Yarnell ever failed. But then, it wasn’t his fault. The conception was all wrong.”
McGarvey hadn’t thought the man would begin with an apologia for Yarnell, but then it was Owens’s story and he’d tell it in his own fashion. Only if he got off the track, McGarvey decided, only if the old man wandered too far afield, as old men are wont to do, would he bring him back. McGarvey settled down with his beer to listen and listen closely, because if there was one lesson he’d learned well from the early days, it was that more than half of any story was between the lines. So pay attention, boyo, and you just might learn something.
In those days, Owens explained, the agency was very young. They were still learning their lessons from the NKVD straight out of Moscow and still trying to assimilate everything their own OSS had taught them. Overlap as a conceptual term became the bane of their existence. The organizational chart had gaps a mile wide in some places, and even worse, crossovers wider. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians was the watch phrase. Their pariah was the man who tried to play both ends against the middle, and they were loaded with the type. It gave just a hint of the troubles they were having and would continue to have in the years to come.
“In the midst of all this came Darby Yarnell, the bright young MBA directly out of Harvard. Oh, what a force he was in those days. But how ready we were for him. Let me tell you,” Owens said.
He was recruited in the spring of his senior year right there at the school. It was before the Vietnam era when the mention of an agency recruitment team on a campus was cause for a major riot. In the late fifties there was still a lot of idealism around. The recruiting teams consisted mostly of a grade-one clerk, a regional desk officer, and as often as possible a field man home for debriefings. The clerk covered the entry-level possibilities, the desk jock talked about the advancement, the good pay, and the intellectual challenges of the Company, and of course the field man bespoke the James Bond romance of the job.
“I don’t remember who we sent up there that year, but the young Yarnell nearly talked every one of them out of the Company, convincing them that they were wasting their time, that theirs was an immoral task, and furthermore, that someday they’d be remembered by their children as no better than Gestapo thugs, mindless wretches for whom 1984 had already become reality.”