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  "Until you fuck it up, yes. But on one condition."

  "What?"

  "Do whatever you have to to solve this Gregory mess. Buy him out of there. Kidnap him. Hell, shoot him if you have to. But I don't want a trial. Understood?"

  It was Bartlett's turn to rumple his hair. He puffed on the pipe, but it had gone out. He shook his head slowly. "Understood."

  "What do I tell the boss?"

  "Tell him we'll use agents in place to negotiate his release. No fanfare. No publicity. Just a nice, quiet resolution."

  "What if he wants to know what agents?"

  "Tell him he needs deniability. Tell him we can't risk compromising them. Just tell him we'll do it."

  "Can you do It?" Gardner asked.

  "I don't know. But that's what he wants to hear, isn't it?"

  Bartlett stood down from the desk. He looked Gardner in the eye.

  The director blinked first.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Vince Arledge sat at the breakfast table, staring at undercooked bacon. It was getting cold, and the grease had already started to congeal and turn white. He scraped some of the mess away with his fork, then picked up a napkin. Laying the three strips of bacon on the crinkled paper, he folded the napkin around the rashers, pressed the napkin flat with his palm and tugged each strip out of the paper. Each strip fell onto the plate with the dull thud of a large bug hitting a windshield. Angrily he jabbed the yolks of both eggs with his fork, watching the yellow fluid ooze from under the whitish skin like blood from a dying alien.

  His appetite was long gone, but he ate, anyway, mechanically. The coffee, at least, was hot. He didn't know when he had lost his taste for the job, but it had been some time ago, and probably he'd suppressed it for a while before that, not letting himself face a truth about himself that he had always feared.

  His nerves were gone.

  He liked to tell himself that anyone would get tired of dealing with the lowlifes he had to work with day in and day out. And while working with them was bad enough, he had to do even more — he had to trust them to do what they were told, when they were told and how they were told. Not only that, he had sometimes to place his life in their hands. It was that last glitch that had worn him down.

  There were times — and they were more and more frequent lately — when he felt as if every nerve in his body ended in a small flame, each one burning like a drop of molten steel. Late at night he had taken to imagining that his skin glowed with the collected fire, and he made shadow figures on the ceiling, fluttering his hands like moths with broken wings, fashioning distorted alligators and ducks with monstrous beaks. He was losing it, had probably already lost it.

  But he couldn't quit. Not yet. He had this one last op, the one that would make it all worthwhile. It would take some doing; he knew that. There were some things you just couldn't kid yourself about. It was like a game, really, seeing if he could pull it off, if the old flair was there.

  He was worried, though. He thought of all the times he'd won because the asshole on the other end had fucked up, sometimes big, sometimes little, but fucked up all the same. And that was his edge. He was always looking for the dropped stitch, the rust spot in the metal. And he'd always found it. But everybody has rust spots; everybody, sooner or later, drops a stitch. That was why he had to do it now — get out before it caught up with him.

  Doing drugs had helped at first, letting him move like a madman through the shadow world where he was forced to spend every waking minute. But the drugs no longer worked, not even in the massive doses he had begun to use. All they did was keep him awake, staggering from rendezvous to meeting to appointment. At night, in some nameless armpit of a motel in some town whose name he couldn't remember, he'd roll a joint, light up and lie back, trying to unwind.

  He'd lie there, too tired even to close his eyes. He'd stare at the ceiling and think of the slime on his hands, the slugs he dealt with, things that crawled out from under rocks, so strange they had no names, some new species for biologists to puzzle over. His idealism was the first casualty, a victim of pragmatism. He found himself doing things that repulsed him to get the job done. It was the job, after all, that was paramount. And after a while some inner anesthesia kicked in and he didn't feel the pain anymore, or the queasiness in his stomach when he took the next rung down the ladder to hell.

  Arledge wanted it to end, but he didn't know how to take his own life. He'd spent too long keeping himself alive to throw it all away that easily. But if he couldn't take his life, at least he could take it into his own hands.

  He had thought he could fake it for a while. But he couldn't do it anymore, not any of it. He had to get out. He was coming unglued, and it was starting to show. He thought Pagan had already noticed it, and if Pagan had noticed, others had, too. That made him too risky to keep around. Sooner or later one of them would come for him. They'd take him out and tell themselves they were doing him a favor.

  Like a man who's just been told of a terminal illness, Arledge had started to count his days. He didn't know when it would happen, how long he had. All he could do was cross each day off the wall, draw an X through it and stare at it, congratulating himself for another twenty-four hours of drawing breath.

  Unless he could pull off the long shot, hit one out in the bottom of the ninth. His whole career, even his whole life, had been a preparation for it. Now it was crunch time. He didn't know whether he still had it, but he was still man enough to give it a whirl. Hell, even the mighty Casey got three strikes. Why not Vince Arledge?

  Why not go for it?

  The first few steps had already been taken. He hadn't stumbled so far. What the hell? If he blew it, at least he'd go out smoking.

  * * *

  Winston Bartlett didn't like being alone. With the kids on their own, he had grown closer to his wife, and felt incomplete when she was away. The demands of his job seldom came between them, but there were times when she needed to be away from the strain. The midnight calls, the meetings at all hours, the strange men on the other end of the phone all took a toll. She had been drinking on and off for years, but Bartlett sensed a change in her drinking habits in the year since his promotion to DDO.

  For her own good he had packed her off to her sister's. A month in the California sun would do her good. They both knew it, and they both knew why it was necessary. Even so, Bartlett felt a little let down. He couldn't help blaming her, just a little. Lois hadn't expected her life to turn out the way it had. For that matter, neither had he. But a man did what he had to do, what was expected of him. That was the way he'd been raised, and he felt he had a right to expect the same acceptance from his family.

  But Lois couldn't handle it all that well. Sitting alone in his study, he wondered whether he ought to resign. It was the best thing for Lois, of that he had no doubt. Whether it was the best thing for himself, he wasn't so sure. Despite his prissy exterior, there was something deep inside him that relished the sleaze, the seaminess of the job. He knew it said something about him, but he wasn't quite sure what.

  He had days when he wondered whether anything he did made the slightest bit of difference in the world. He wanted to believe it all mattered, that it all helped, and if it did, even a little, then it was worth the trouble. But lately he had begun to doubt the wisdom of recent policy decisions. They seemed ill advised and badly thought out. Precision was something he valued highly. Decisions couldn't be made in a vacuum. You didn't change the world overnight just because you wanted to. You had to recognize realities, you had to deal with what was, not with what you wanted to be there.

  And Gardner was such a dolt that it made life impossible, especially for the old-timers, the thirty-year men. Maybe it was the wisdom of experience, or maybe it was because they prided themselves on being above doctrine. They were hardheaded realists, pragmatists, these men he had worked with for three decades. Collectively they had a wealth of wisdom, hard-won and costly, that you ignored at your peril.

  Now G
ardner wanted to chuck it all. The days of retrenchment under Carter had been brutal. But this was something else again. People were leaving by the half dozen, fed up with the nonsense, frightened by the impetuous, unreasoning rush to remake the world overnight.

  He cleaned the table, stacked the dishes in the washer, then slipped into his suit coat, tugging the silk vest into place with an impatient shrug. With Lois away, he had elected to spend a few days in the District at their apartment. It would do him some good to be away from the empty house, he had thought. He wasn't so sure now, but it was too late to do much about it.

  The car would meet him in ten minutes. He browsed through the last couple of paragraphs of an article in the Post, folded the paper three times and stuck it in the garbage. The August sun was already heating up, and the humidity was certain to be brutal. Closing the door to the apartment, he rubbed idly at the back of his neck. It had been stiff for three or four days in a row, a sure sign of the stress he was under. He arranged for a car and took the elevator down, standing up front, against the control panel, as he always did.

  It was amazing to him how neatly ordered his life was, how many habits he had, and how many things he was able to do without even thinking. In some ways, he thought, he was more than a creature of habit — he was an automaton. Dulles had always teased him about it, even once suggesting that too many habits made a man too predictable, and therefore unfit for being a spy. Dulles had actually used the word very seldom, and it was the only sign that he wasn't perfectly serious in his warning. Even so, Bartlett had taken it to heart, only to find that he was hopelessly bogged down in trivia if he had to think about everything he did. Better to lead an automated life on some level in order to free his mind for more complicated affairs.

  Stepping into the morning heat, he was pleased to see that the car was on time. The driver stood by the door, leaning against the front fender, his back to the traffic. He recognized Bartlett immediately and opened the rear door with a nod. The DDO dropped into the seat with a sigh, then rolled his window partway down to enjoy the breeze as the car rolled out of the city. Langley was just a short hop away, and anything to salvage the morning before Gardner ruined it was welcome.

  The driver slowed on the approach to the main gate, waved to the attendant, who waved him on through after glancing into the back seat to see who was in the car. The driver dropped him at the main entrance. "What time shall I pick you up, Mr. Bartlett?"

  "Not before seven, I'm sure. I'll have to let you know."

  "Very good, sir."

  Bartlett stood beside the glass door and watched the car pull away. When it turned the corner and disappeared, he puffed his cheeks with an escaping sigh, then turned to push the smoothly pivoting panel open. The polished floor, still unmarked by the morning's heels, gleamed softly under the indirect lighting. He glanced at the CIA seal on the wall as he went by, then opened his pass case to show his ID. Once he was past the guards, the building looked distressingly anonymous. It was more like the headquarters of a giant insurance company than the home of cloak-and-dagger men.

  He took the elevator to his floor, unlocked his office and dropped the briefcase in a chair just inside the door. Allison Hodges had the day off, and he thought he just might decide to cancel a few appointments. He clicked the light switch and walked to the window. Pulling the draperies aside, he wished again, as he had every morning since the Agency had moved into the building, that he could open the window. But the architect, ostensibly on orders from Dulles, had made no provision for open windows. It was suggested that Dulles was afraid secrets might escape. That was probably not that far off the mark, Bartlett thought at the time, and again this morning.

  For a moment he considered wandering down the hall to see if Gardner was in yet. A few words alone before the meeting might save them a lot of time and aggravation. But Gardner seldom got in before the time of his first meeting, if then. Sloppy to a fault, in his habits and in his dress, the man was a walking disaster, but neither Bartlett nor any of the remaining holdovers had the heart to complain. They were all either too afraid for their jobs to risk offending the new man or, like Bartlett himself, so appalled by so much else wrong with the man that they saw no point in interfering. It would be like repainting a condemned building — far too little and way too late.

  Dropping into his chair, Bartlett watched the green numbers on the clock change minute by minute, almost numb. He was burning out, and he knew it. What he didn't know was whether there was anything he could do about it. Perhaps it was time to step aside.

  In the center drawer of his desk he kept a folder. He opened the drawer now and took it out, carefully opening the flap and adjusting the single sheet of paper inside. It was a neatly typed letter of resignation. All it lacked was a date and his signature. He'd kept it for years, and only Allison Hodges knew it was there. Every six months she retyped it for him. He never changed a word.

  Bartlett read the letter over and nodded at the economy of its language, the elegant simplicity of it. He thought of it as an insurance policy of sorts. Retyping it was like paying the premium. It was always available and always paid in full. He thought about signing it more frequently of late.

  But he had one more job to do. Nicaragua was too much on his mind. And as bad as Rivera was he was preferable to Guillermo Pagan. Bartlett knew that now, and knew that if he left, Gardner would manage to mess things up.

  One more operation. That was all.

  Chapter Twenty

  The plane banked to the left, and Bolan looked out the window at a moonscape. Managua looked like something out of a postapocalyptic extravaganza. The ruinous earthquake more than a decade before had left its mark.

  The flight down had been uneventful, but Bolan found it unsettling. He'd had time to think, and he didn't like the results of his own analysis. The operation had all the hallmarks of a classic disaster. There were too many cooks and nowhere near enough broth. Rivera was the hub around which it all wobbled, and the warrior still hadn't gotten a fix on the eccentric general.

  But having to leave the planning stage to avert disaster was not a good sign. Bartlett had been adamant that nothing go forward until Tony Gregory was recovered. That he sat in a rural jail in the highlands was cold comfort for the man who had to get him out. He would meet Hoffman here, and they wouldn't have to pull it off alone. But he'd had such assurances before. The most unsettling aspect of the whole affair, however, was the idea that one man knew enough to sink the Rivera ship before it even got out of dry dock. Either that man knew a hell of a lot more than usual in the compartmentalized world of special operations, or the whole mess was a house of cards, vulnerable to the first sneeze. If he had to guess, Bolan would go with the latter.

  Watching the barren grid of broken brick and block after grassless, uninhabited block slowly rise to meet the plane, Bolan crossed his fingers and leaned against the glass as if it would support the insupportable.

  As the plane touched down at Sandino Airport, Bolan stretched and ran through his cover again. He was unarmed in order to clear customs, but someone would meet him at the airport. He felt naked without a weapon and, when he thought about his situation, even worse, he felt stupid.

  He stood before the plane stopped, ignoring the scowl of the flight attendant, and tugged his small suitcase from the overhead rack. He sat down only when the woman started toward him, waving her arms. The plane taxied to the terminal, its whole body shuddering as the pilot angled the nose in and urged it snugly home.

  Bolan was on his feet before the engines stopped whining, and was the first one through the hatch. The accordion tube through which he walked bounced under his weight, and he felt like a novice on a trampoline. He followed the colored lines on the floor to the customs desk, attaching himself to a short line left over from another flight. The agents seemed efficient, if a little brusque. When it came his turn, he handed his papers to the smiling agent. The smile vanished almost at once.

  "Norteamericano? Please s
tate your business, señor."

  "I'm in the electronics business. Parts, actually."

  "You have clients here?"

  "I hope so. I have an appointment with Señor Allende, of Centam Electronico. This afternoon, as a matter of fact."

  The man nodded, but he seemed more interested in Bolan's bag. He pulled the zipper, but it was locked. "Open this, por favor," he said, turning the case for Bolan to reach the lock. He fished the tinny-looking key from his pocket, undid the small padlock and jerked it free. He started to open the zipper, but the customs man raised a hand. "Uno momento, por favor. I'll do it."

  The agent spun the bag back and opened it slowly, as if he feared it might be full of snakes. He opened the lid a couple of inches, then closed it again. Taking the bag under his arm, he stepped away from the desk, nodding to a colleague to take the next person in line. "Come this way, please," he said, standing back and waving Bolan through the turnstile.

  The customs clerk marched briskly toward a metal door set in one wall. Bolan was starting to worry. There was nothing in the bag that should have provoked this response. He knew it might be a subtle form of harassment, making one American pay for the sins of another, not uncommon in the Third World. The clerk pushed the door open, then stood aside for Bolan to precede him through.

  Inside, the warrior found himself facing two more men in the dark green uniform of Nicaraguan customs. Like the first man, they were anonymous, wearing no name tags or badges with an identifying number.

  The older of the two, who was also the shorter, said, "Sit down, please, Mr. Corday." Bolan registered the greeting without surprise, but wondered how the man knew his name, since the agent had said nothing. It was more than obvious they were expecting "Mr. Corday." What Bolan wanted to know was why and, more to the point, how.

  "What's the problem, Señor…?" Bolan waited patiently, but the man didn't offer his name, and he didn't bother to answer the question, so he pushed on. "I can't imagine what the problem is."