I wondered about the small recorder that Doctor Harpending had given me, or rather gifted me, since no discussion had taken place about ownership. The good doctor was known for being cheap, driving an older Volkswagen, and infamously buying used tires for it from one of his students. The video camera was state-of-the-art, coming with an adaptor to allow the small ‘micro’ tapes to be inserted into the much larger regular cassettes being used to slip into the playing machines. JVC was the manufacturer. The company was Japanese, I knew it as the same company that produced the truly excellent stereo stuff sold at U.S. PX stores when I was still in the Marine Corps (which I still was, but on some sort of strung-out out extended play officers modality neither I nor anyone else I talked to about it knew much about).
Once I got home, Mary was eager to talk about everything, and I wasn’t in the mood for that kind of discussion, which I also knew would mean spending hours just catching her up. I plopped the JVC video recorder box down on the table in front of the living room couch and sat in front of it.
“What do you think of this?” I asked her, but before she could answer, I went into a full rendition of what had passed between Harpending and me. The flight for life with Denis, the accomplishment of ISOS’s main goal, and my interaction with Weh would have to wait, if I could make them wait. My wife was smart as a whip; however, I also knew that over time, I’d have to fill her in about nearly everything.
“Expensive gear, I think,” Mary said, handling the neat little recorder. “The battery’s already charged. Doesn’t seem like college stuff at all.”
“Yeah, I got the same feeling,” I agreed, wanting a Bacardi and Coke but not about to go there. Coffee would have to do. I had to rest, the flight having been hard physically. The King Air was an expensive private plane, but the small space and slow speed of travel had eaten away at me. The bruises I’d suffered in the hard balloon landing ached, although I knew they were minor injuries. The accumulated effect was coming at me like a freight train in a tunnel.
“I’ve got to talk to Tony,” I said, as Mary simply stared at me, along with my son and Pushkin, Tigger and Phoebe, the three cats it had taken to replace Bozo. The cats were lined up like plaster statues, Tigger sitting, Pushkin leaning against the television set, and Phoebe flat down on the rug. With Julie off to live in sorority housing on the UNM campus, the family was a bit pulled apart but not broken. Why having added the non-human animals to the mix made such a difference, I didn’t really understand, except that it did.
I got up and went to the kitchen, ground the Kona coffee in the grinder, and started a pot brewing. I looked at the phone. I was becoming glued to the instrument for just about everything. The money, the orders, the explanations, the supplies, and support for the lies I had to tell everyone to make sure that the truth was something fully adjusted and modified to fit the circumstances of everyone around me. I didn’t want to make the call. I wasn’t a real Marine Officer in my own mind, and I wasn’t a real intelligence officer either. I was in a modified, and therefore fake, Ph.D. program that was likely to award me a real doctorate in a discipline I was only learning from the bottom up. Even my insurance office, considered a success by the Principal Financial Group because of its generation of such significant premium payments, was not really real. Tom Thorkelson and Chuck Bartok, long fallen away, would attest to their hard-held beliefs that life insurance was not to be sold by using extortion and bribery unless they fully grasped what my small but powerful agency was really doing. The coffee was ready as the pot stopped percolating. The upper cabinet door nearby, above the phone, was closed. Behind it was the rum.
I picked up the telephone receiver and punched the CIA numbers into the facing buttons on the base of the phone.
In only seconds, I was talking to Tony, almost like he had been sitting somewhere just waiting for my call.
“Yes,” he said, and then waited.
“I’m looking for guidance, not approval,” I replied, having little idea about how to approach the man to get his help in bringing some order into my life and operations in every area.
“I understand,” Tony replied, his voice smooth and accommodating, like he’d been waiting for me to say exactly what I’d said.
“You’re centering everything right now,” Tony informed me.
“Okay?” I asked, without really asking.
“Leave the other stuff to the others,” he went on, as if I was understanding him perfectly, which I was not.
“Let Quincy handle the new offices, Weh handle ISOS, and Pat process the insurance. Marlowe is off to Colombia. The university’s agreed with us about your special education, so all you have to do is manage the spreading out of the policies and agreements you designed to cover the world.”
I sat back in shock, holding the receiver out and looking at it. I’d done everything the Agency wanted, and then some, and now I was feeling like I’d created, almost accidentally, this disease that was infecting the world itself. Could it possibly be that something so hastily and loosely thought out and then attempted could make itself into such a powerful monstrosity?
The receiver seemed to attract itself back to my ear. My shock was changing into a thought process of possibilities. What could I use of what was happening to better my own situation? Even before that, I was beginning to comprehend that I first needed help in understanding my situation and that I was on new ground. I was like Captain Kirk on the Enterprise in Star Trek. I was going where no man had gone before.
“What’s next, then?” I asked, afraid to hear the answer.
“Korea, of course, they’re waiting for you to sign the document since you are the new sales vice president for Blue Cross Blue Shield of the National Capital Area.”
“BCBS doesn’t serve D.C.,” I informed him, already knowing that he would be prepared for the question.
“No, of course not. It would have to be licensed and all that rigmarole, so it’s strictly limited to serving Americans living abroad. They can only use the insurance when they’re out of the country, however, but there’s no point in telling anybody that right off.”
I mentally shook my head. “You’ve never been in the insurance industry, have you?” I asked.
Tony didn’t respond.
“You’re going to need a boat, so you might consider a quick trip down to Miami or somewhere close there,” Tony went on, as if the conversation we were having had a shred of sanity to it.” `
“You’re going to need a bigger boat,” I quoted almost automatically, Roy Schneider’s famous line from the movie Jaws.
I could hear my wife in the background turning off the television and then turning on the stereo. I waited for Roy to continue, wondering what music she might provide that might be slaved to illustrate the moment.
“Yes,” Tony replied, like he was talking to the way I was talking to him by everyone every day. “It’s got to be big. Say forty feet. Fast. Say about sixty miles an hour, and it’s got to be solid enough to support and tolerate the firing of a fifty caliber tripod-mounted Browning.”
Mary dropped the record onto the surface of the turntable, and the first song began to play. “If I listened long enough to you, I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true, knowing that you lied, straight-faced, while I cried, still I look to find a reason to believe…” I turned my head and smiled, but she was gone.
Somehow, the woman had hit the nail right on the head. Before becoming whatever, I was in the CIA, I would never have believed that the Agency would lie to its own agents to get them to either do illegal things or not do things they shouldn’t, or things that were against all manner of integrity or honor. It had not taken me long to come to discover that lying was one of the Agency’s most effective tools, right behind using attractive women and bribing vital people with huge sums of money.
“I don’t suppose anybody’s going to tell me what the boat is to be used for? What the budget is, what the needed range might be, or how quiet it should be, any of that?” I got all the words out one after another.
Finding a boat for a mission I knew nothing about was the same as building all that I was building without truly understanding what was going to be done with it when it all came online.
“The usual,” Tony replied, and hung up.
I put the receiver gently back on its base and turned. Mary was only a couple of feet away.
“Korea again?” she said, no expression on her face.
I nodded, not surprised that here, keen hearing around the corner of the dining room wall, no doubt deliberately, had picked up that quiet mentioning of that country’s name.
“You don’t care for oriental women, so you can go,” she said, stopping me in my tracks as I was moving into the living room to join Pushkin, who lay flat on the coffee table with his eyes wide open but not looking at anything.
“I have never said that,” I answered, truthfully.
“You were raised in Hawaii. You called the locals not only locals but Kanaka, which means something lower than lowlifes. You went to Vietnam and fought the women in black pajamas, and they fought your highly vaunted Marine company to a standstill. You hate Asian women. You have to. I understand. It’s okay. You can go to Korea.”
With that, she turned and went out the front door, leaving it hanging open. Pushkin saw his chance and went to the door. Just before exiting, he stopped, turned his head like it was on a swivel, and briefly stared into my eyes. Then he was gone.
“Gotcha,” I breathed out what the cat could not say. I didn’t want to be prejudiced, but even more I didn’t want anybody to know I was if I was.
“This is just stupid,” I said to myself, throwing my body back down on the Taos bed of a couch.
When I awakened, it was dark and deadly quiet. There was no moon, or it was overcast outside, as the windows radiated no light at all. After working with the Starlightscope in Vietnam, I knew that wasn’t true. There were simply too few photons for the sensors in the back of my eyes to pick up. A sub-scientist of Hans Bethe had also informed me that even that conclusion on my part was wrong. My sensors did pick up the photons, but could not organize what they were picking up enough to send a message to my brain. The Starlightscope merely multiplied the photons by a factor of thousands in order to fool my sensors and thereby allow an image to be formed. That conclusion was too god-like for me to accept, but it impacted me anyway.
I checked the clock on the stove in the kitchen, moving slowly so as not to either fall or knock anything over. I’d been beyond tired when I collapsed onto the Taos bed, although I hadn’t intended to fall asleep there. Three in the morning, the digital clock showed, and I had no reason to doubt it.
The bedroom was coal black, but small, and I knew my way around. Mary was asleep, but she slept like a cat with one eye slitted and waiting for the merest hint of a threat, which, upon hearing, would have her poke me to get a gun and check out the threat. Her own umbrella with a sharpened steel tip was always under her side of the bed. A ridiculous caricature of a weapon that never came out, but one that served to allow her to sleep more soundly.
I slid under the covers on my own side, always the right side in staring down at a bed, the side I’d been either relegated to or selected; I could never remember which. It just was. As I closed my eyes and tried to cycle back to sleep, I finally recalled the woman’s name who had helped me at the dive on the west end of town that bad day. It wasn’t her real name, but who was expecting that in the mix master mess of the construct I was creating? Joan Rosley Ryan was the name she’d taken, and I had no idea what any of the three names meant to her, as they meant nothing to me. The next day would see her brought forth to become the medical head of ISOS, get training for that, and also to become the bane of Allen Weh’s existence. That thought made me smile into sleep.
The next day began early with the cats, one, two, and three exited through the slit in the screen Mary had cut for them to do just that. Although this created problems with the potential of insects coming in and out too, she didn’t care and I, begrudgingly in silence, didn’t either.
I made Kona coffee from Lion, toasted some Wonder bread, my favorite, although I referred to it as Caucasian Wonder Bread, and then got on the phone before showering and facing the day. I called Nash to get Joan to show up at the office. Then I called Quincy to put him on opening the satellite offices in Clayton, Socorro, and Raton, along with finding the kind of UFO wackos who just might be willing to do work that most sane people would not consider. Weh and ISOS would become Joan’s problem just as soon as she could be brought up to speed. Michael was up and came into the kitchen to pour milk into a bowl and then a load of Rice Krispies, his favorite cereal, on top of the milk. Out of nowhere, Pushkin appeared, and Mike immediately went to the pantry and pulled out more cereal boxes. He stacked them neatly between where Pushkin sat, eyeballing his every move across the table.
I called Tony and then had to wait while they found him at such an early hour. Meanwhile, Pushkin jumped up onto the windowsill and outflanked Mike’s well-assembled defenses in an instant. He drank some of the milk and then sat back to regard my son, his muzzle and eyes staring into my boy’s eyes as if to say ‘make my day’ or something like that. Michael groaned, murmured “Come on, Dad,” but did nothing more. I turned away from the normal morning battle to talk to Tony, glad for the excuse. The cat was going to win anyway. He always did. I was reminded of the song from the fabulous movie everyone in the family loved called Back to the Future. Pushkin had used and abused the power of love the family had for him.
“Two hundred thousand,” I said to Tony, without bothering to say good morning.
“For what?” he asked, his voice scratchy. I knew he’d just awakened. It was just past six a.m. in New Mexico, which made it eight if he was in D.C. I hadn’t slept until eight in the morning since the Nam. In fact, I’d worked to extend my sleep hours to four hours a night, mostly so the family could have some quiet instead of me roaming either the insides of the home or out around the perimeter,
“The boat,” I replied, knowing that he knew what I was referring to but would not admit it.
“There’s no budget yet,” Tony said, letting that last word hang for a second or two.
“There’s a mission, or you wouldn’t have said anything,” I replied. “If there’s a mission, then there’s a team leader. If there’s a mission and a team leader, then there’s a budget if the team leader says there’s a budget.”
“It’s early here,” Tony squeezed out, taking as few seconds after to likely have a drink of coffee or maybe light a cigarette. I knew so little about the man. Maybe he didn’t even smoke. I didn’t ask him, however.
“I can fly round-trip to Seoul, but if I have to stop in Miami and then come home, that’s going to be a couple of thousand more the way the airlines do these things now.
“So?” Tony answered, not saying anything more.
“So, is the extra money budgeted for the Seoul mission or the Miami thing?”
I asked, keeping my tone of voice as flat and analytical as possible.
There was a silence that lasted for almost a minute. I waited out the ‘Thorkelson-Bartok’ time period by keeping my mouth deliberately shut.
“Stop it,” he finally said, his voice a raspy whisper. “You’re screwing with me for your own entertainment, and I know it. I threw some stuff at you last evening that you’ve had a hard time accommodating, so you’re doing that Marine Corps thing of ‘attacking in a different direction’ instead of retreating. Do the Korea thing and come back. There’s no Miami mission.”
I said nothing, merely holding onto the receiver and watching my son and the cat eat the cereal from the same bowl. It was unhealthy, I thought, but then wondered, for whom, the boy or the cat?
“Murder Island,” Tony finally said.
“What the hell?” I shot back
“That’s the name of the very last little island in the Florida Chain. I don’t think it’s an official name. There’s a tiny airstrip on it.”
“What does that have to do with anything we’re talking about here?” I asked. It was like Tony was playing my own game back on me, until he spoke again.
“That’s the name of the mission, between you and me, and this is not a secure line, as you know.”
My mind adjusted instantly. He was right. What was I thinking? I’d already talked too much about what might be ahead on an unsecure line. When other people knew what might be ahead, they prepared, and that was never healthy for a team being sent into play.
“Understood,” I said, and hung up the phone.
The two hundred thousand was an imaginary amount I’d dreamed up, although I was almost certain it would be a number that would be close to what was needed, and I also knew that there was an actual mission being planned, and I would be leading it. Where the money came from or was accounted for didn’t really matter. Not yet, anyway. Korea was a diplomatic mission. A mission of analytical application to enlist the Korean medical complex in allowing its hospitals, doctors, clinics, nurses, and whoever or whatever to charge for services and direct bill BCBS of the National Capital Area. I would have to wade through the complex mess of that, maybe using Kingsley to help, but the Murder Island mission was Nguyen and me all the way.
Mary was already preparing to pack what I would need to present myself in Korea. Formality was at the top of the list over there. Everyone wore a suit or even a tuxedo for late-night attire. I headed to the office, although my need for a secure line had diminished. Murder Island would absorb whatever costs were necessary, so the flights didn’t really matter, at least when it came to accounting for the money to make them happen. I couldn’t fly first class, but I could be upgraded to such a seat if things worked out. It was easier, roomier, and much quieter to get preparations done before landing at Kimpo Airport.
When I got to the office, I noticed a new BMW three Series automobile sitting in the first angled slot. Usually, everyone knew that the parking place was where I normally parked, so it was generally kept clear. I found another spot, then stepped outside and walked through the double doors to the office.
When I pulled the door on the right open, I was assaulted with music, which was more than surprising. It was early, not business hours at all. Nobody but maybe a few of the mixed hodgepodge of agents might be around, or should be around. I stopped dead and simply stood inside the slowly closing door. I knew the Richie Valens song, the one sung by Bruce Willis in Moonlighting, that made him famous. “Para bailar La Bamba, para bailar La Bamba, se necesit, una poca de gracia, Una poca de gracia…” was blasting from the conference room down the hall past my closed office door. Out of that room strutted a woman in a red skirt, black blouse, and topping it all off with a giant black sombrero. She came toward me singing the song, sweeping the big hat off, and then doffing it in a giant wave in front of me.
“It’s great to be working here,” she said, breaking out of song, and I wanted to thank you.”
Joan Rosley Ryan had arrived.
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