The Seventh Floor, page 22
He crossed through the bedroom toward the bath, seeing Irene’s face glowing pale in the light of the monitor. She’d turned up the sound on another battle video: grunts, screams, harried, exhausted bits of Russian. Another margarita sat full, sweating on the nightstand. Her jaw was locked, a cord of muscle flickering in her neck. She did not look up. He took a long shower and when he returned Irene was unmoved, the margarita still untouched, the sound of gunshots and explosions and screams trickling through the video. For a while he watched alongside her.
“The way we do it,” she murmured, “will be, like, super-important. A message in itself.”
“What do you mean?” Peter asked. Stalin, who had been curled up at her feet, jumped off the bed and whined by the patio door. Peter let him out.
“Some theater might help,” she said. “I mean, it should be impressive, help draw their attention to us as serious soldiers. I’m not kidding, Peter. We can, like, make a splash.”
30
LAS VEGAS
Afternoon in Vegas is like daybreak at a bar: the glitz and shimmer of the party long gone, replaced by muscular odors and sticky floors. All around the taxi was a living memorial to bad decisions: crumpled nudie flyers carpeted the sidewalks, a bewildered, suited man tripped over a bench at a bus stop; a party of four were facedown, asleep on their table at Denny’s. The light flicked green, the cab puttered ahead, and when it turned onto the Strip, Sam felt like he was bumping up his driveway, coming home. For a season before joining CIA he had lived out here to play poker professionally. Vegas was, in fact, where a CIA talent spotter had first laid eyes on him, and it was where he felt most at home outside the Agency. He knew then, in a glorious strike of certainty, that once this work with Procter was done he would break it off with Natalie, spend some time with his family in Minnesota, and then move out here for good. See how it felt a second time. His CIA lives were used up. Time for another run of cards. The cab pulled past the Bellagio fountains, licking skyward into the clear bright desert sun.
He dumped his suitcase in his room; he wanted to get his hands, quick as he could, planted on the felt of the Bellagio’s poker room.
Sam played for hours, in communion with the cards and the table, enjoying the ballet inside him and the great pleasure of blotting out the noise and distractions of the casino and also his life: Natalie’s phone call was answered with a text: “Sorry—can’t talk now. Working.” (A minute later, sensing he’d been too curt, he sent her a heart emoji before turning off his phone.) Then he was back in the tunnel, only to emerge, briefly, when the table conjured an image of sitting with Golikov in Singapore, and he stood for a stretch and a smoke outside. More cards soon flushed that unhappy memory, and he pressed on, up seventeen grand by the late evening and riding the warm feeling that he could not lose. Money wasn’t the goal, it was just a way to keep score. Winning was the idea. And he was winning. For a run of about twenty hands Sam was sorely tempted to melt into Vegas for a few weeks, see how it might feel to put aside justice and revenge and duty and just live, were such a thing even possible.
Around dinnertime the Chief called. “Goddamn airlines. Well, I’m here and I’m hangry,” she said. “Those big-ass buffets still a thing around this shithole of a town?”
Buffets, Sam was learning, were very on brand for the Chief. The Wynn’s was in a soaring art deco atrium with bright red awnings covering the stations, green parquet marble floors, and chairs upholstered in silky gold plush. The Chief had arrived first, plopped at a table behind a sad couple bickering over their gambling losses and a gaggle of ladies fretting over a missing bride-to-be. When Sam sat down Procter said, “No offense, Jaggers, I know you’re partial to this place, but this town is weird as hell.”
“That’s a bit harsh coming from a woman whose mailing address is literally in Gatorville.”
She gave him a weird wink. “Let’s put this buffet to work.”
In truth he was not very hungry, but he assembled a thin spread of fish, rice, vegetables, and a lonely strip of prime rib. He slid back into the leather booth with a squeak. Procter returned with a heaping plate that seemed at war with itself: a multiethnic smorgasbord of an American cheeseburger and fries arrayed against Chinese egg rolls, some baklava, and a few scallops on the side caught in a spray of ketchup spattered across the plate like blood.
He took a bite of fish and smiled at one of the women. A redhead. Her smile showed a row of teeth: brilliant white, impossibly crooked.
“Woof,” Procter said, turning back to Sam. “Can’t un-ring that bell. And those jeans.” Procter let out a soft whistle. “Those are the lowest-slung jeans I’ve seen in my life. Are they getting their vaginas lowered, now? Good grief. How’s Natalie, by the way?”
“Same. Good.”
“Those,” Procter said, with a slice of a scallop, “are not the same thing.”
“She’s the same, then.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. And I’m already on the record here, as you are well aware, but I will say it again, because for some stupid reason I care. Jaggers, just because she’s dumb enough to fall in love with you doesn’t mean you get to torture the sweet girl for sport. Or to assuage the guiltier regions of your midwestern conscience. Now, I get it. You can’t help yourself. Your decision making is both checkered and fiercely dick-centered. But, please, leave the poor girl out of it.”
“I don’t know why I told you about Natalie,” he said.
“Me neither.”
The toothy redhead plopped a piece of paper scrawled with a phone number on the table as she sashayed past. Sam took it with a smile. Procter rolled her eyes. “Good grief,” she said.
Procter was hacking away at an egg roll with a steak knife when Sam broke the news.
“They fired me.”
A twitch of rage shook her face before it went blank. She looked down at her lap, where she kept her eyes for a long time before returning them to Sam. “When?”
“Tuesday.”
“Who did it?”
“Gus was the messenger. Might have done it, too, for all I know.”
“But you don’t know who did it?”
“I don’t know. Sweet signed the papers and Gus passed a message. I don’t have any other fingerprints.”
“And the reason?” Her eyes were wide and still stuck on her lap.
“Some garbage about how the pysch evals ruled out any future fieldwork, and they knew I wouldn’t be happy unless I was in the field.”
Picking up her knife and fork, Procter tentatively returned to her work on the egg roll. “Hard to figure how they would have made us, given the way we ran the tradecraft outside the building.”
“Had to be the REMORA documents,” he said. “But if anyone but the mole knew I’d taken those, well, they would have done more than fire me. And if the mole knows we took those documents . . .”
Procter pointed a forkful of egg roll at him. “This is good news. This is proof we are on the right path.”
“Glad you think the unceremonious end of my career is good news, Chief. Hadn’t thought about it that way.”
“Well,” she said, standing with her plate, “that’s because you’re the one who just got fired.”
The buffet crowd had thinned out: the bordering tables and booths were empty. Across the room sat two old men and a table of college kids glued to their phones, making a racket. Sam refilled his coffee, and when he’d returned the kids had moved along, leaving behind a serene silence that was entirely off brand for this psychotic and beautiful town.
“You’re not even going to ask me how I’m doing?” Sam teased. “Pretty insensitive, Chief, after what happened. And here I thought you were a people person.”
“I hate people,” she said. “Plus: Maybe put on your big boy pants? I’m supposed to inquire about your feelings? That’s like asking a guy who’s had his leg bit off by a shark, How are you feeling about all this? right after you haul him into the boat. You know how he’s feeling? Like he lost a goddamn leg, that’s how. I’m not a dumbass, Jaggers, I don’t ask questions that have too many answers, or, worse, none at all.”
He looked down at his plate. Smiled but didn’t feel like it.
“But I’m not heartless,” she said. “You want a job at Gatorville, you got one.”
“Couldn’t be worse than paper-pushing at Langley.”
“Now you’ve got it. Say”—she stared off for a moment, her voice dropping to a whisper—“speaking of paper. Who was in the Backroom when you took the REMORA files?”
“The four of them. They were up there for a meeting. They all saw me in one of the bullpens.”
“Anyone pay special attention?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“But all four of them saw you? Gus, Mac, Theo, Debs? All of them? You’re sure of it?”
“I’m sure of it.”
They sat for a while in a flung-open silence, watching the ebb and flow of diners, listening to the faint jingle of the slots from the distant floor. The Chief made another strafing run through the rest of the buffet, returning with a lone chocolate muffin. A question had nagged for a few weeks and, unsure of how he might set it up, he simply let it fly: “You were all together that night in Afghanistan, that right?”
Procter, who’d brought the muffin to her lips, set it down without taking a bite. “That’s right.”
“Would you tell me what happened?”
Procter did not answer. Instead, she picked up the muffin and took a bite while gazing off at the prime rib station. Then she said: “You think you know someone, but you actually don’t. There’s something, or someone else, in there with your friend. And that other thing has been watching you for years, but you never knew it existed.”
“Do you really believe one of them could be a mole?”
“Even now, not really. No.”
He frowned at his coffee. “Why are you doing this, then?”
“Because one of them almost certainly is.”
31
LAS VEGAS
Procter busied herself with the muffin for a few moments, her mind turning. Sam wanted to ask who she thought the mole might be. But he intuited that, though she doubtless had a frontrunner, she would not share it with him, at least not yet. That perhaps the Chief was still reluctant to allow such speculation across her lips.
Instead, she began talking about Afghanistan. About her friends.
“In those days war zone tours were when, not if, kinds of things. And Gus was Base chief in Shkin. He lobbied for us to join him. I was divorced. Theo was divorced for the second time. Loulou was in one of her fugues, fine if Mac left the country for a while so she could sow her oats, which seems to happen about once a decade or so.”
“But Sweet and Gosford weren’t stationed there?”
“No. They were out for a short visit.”
“Why?”
“They were going to see an asset. This was a decade after the Farm. Debs is Gosford’s assistant and he’s running the Counterterrorism Center at that point. Gosford wants to shake the hand of Shkin Base’s best asset, guy who reports on Taliban plans and intentions. Gosford had played some role in recruiting him maybe two years prior, when he’d been in Kabul, though the details are fuzzy to me. So on a whim, really, they come out to our little claptrap frontline Base near the Pak border, our fort peeking into Indian country, hostiles all around. Gosford wanted to see this guy again, and he wanted to visit Shkin, but it wasn’t the best meeting to drop in on.”
“Why was that?” Sam asked.
“First item on the agenda was paying blood money for a donkey. Wait. Haven’t I told you this story?”
“You have not.”
She shoved her plate aside and leaned forward with her elbows on the table. “Two or so weeks before Gosford and Debs pop in, we had an engagement party at the Base for one of the case officers. Chick whose future first husband had proposed when she’d gone home for her three weeks of R&R. The aforementioned asset loaned us a camel and a donkey for the party. He’d no idea why we asked but he said yes. Well, the party went as it went, and of course everyone’s shitfaced, well beyond the norm. Base had a legendary bar, Christmas lights up year-round, all the hats of the officers who served before us hung up on the wall. I left one of my Chief Wahoos for them. Anyway, we’re drinking in the bar, then out in the courtyards, and we’re doing camel and donkey rides. Camel bit Theo, if memory serves. Spit on Gus. Chucked Mac clean off his back.
But the donkey was a quiet sufferer. Apparently pretty old, too, because after we’d all had a ride, the bride did one final stroll through the Base on the back of the donkey, waving at all of us, kind of a Palm Sunday vibe, you know, except in this case the crowd’s wasted and the rider is trashed and in a trashed wedding dress, and first time she waves to her adoring fans she tips right off the side and into the dust. Donkey goes over next, except he’s dead. Keeled over. Killed by the bride-to-be. Right there at the damn party, in the middle of the CIA’s Shkin Base.”
“Dead, dead?” Sam said.
“As a doornail. Asset’s pissed, of course. The donkey is a source of value. And we can’t prove it was the old age that killed him. I mean, that played a role, there’s no doubt. But so did the proximate factors. Hours of backbreaking work. And the bride wasn’t so slim, you know? Point of this being that we had debts to pay. The meeting with the asset’s scheduled for the evening of the day when I injected Debs’s yogurt with the hot sauce. She’s retched by that point, and she’s come on back into the bullpens with Gosford. There’s a war party to get to the bottom of things. And Gus says, guys, look, I don’t know shit—he said crap, it was Gus, after all—about this yogurt sitch (and that was true) but we’ve got an espionage business to run here, and a big meet tonight, and—”
“Camel was fine?” Sam interrupted.
“Not a scratch,” she said. “Though of course we’d all wished the camel had died, what with the bucking and spitting and biting, and not the poor silent donkey, who’d been a real workhorse through the entire party. But there’s no justice this side of eternity, and that’s as true for Afghan livestock as it is for all of us. Where was I?”
“The logistics of meeting the guy . . .”
“Right,” she said. “Gosford insisted that we all go. Something dumb about numbers making the asset feel warm and celebrated or some nonsense. And the relationship with the asset is fairly casual, which was true. He loaned us the camel and donkey, after all. Place is up in the mountains. Two Hilux pickups, bouncing around. All us old buddies from the Farm, riding silently and joylessly to pay off an Afghan for killing his donkey. Now, it’s the Wild West out there in those days, so we’re all ready for a gunfight, always and everywhere. Helmets and body armor and M4s and Glocks. Seven-man Afghan security detail. Back of the truck’s an armory: single-shot grenade launchers, rifles, pistols, ammo. Debs and me in the backseat. After an hour she leans close, says she knows I did it, that I poisoned her, that she can’t prove it but knows it was me. And I said, hon, if I’d done it you wouldn’t be walking right now. That made her laugh, a nasty one, and we went back to our hateful silence until we arrived. Big metal gate out front. House is two stories of broken cinder blocks covered in mud. Nice little stand of pomegranate trees in the courtyard. Our security guys fan out. They’ve been here fifty times and there’s a routine. Asset’s going to be tickled because there are two people here from Washington. He’s a big deal, meriting such thoughtful attention on account of his poor deceased donkey. We go inside, sit around a table on the floor on old silky pillows while tea is served. Gosford is talking him up like he’s shouldering the load of Afghanistan’s flowering Jeffersonian democracy. We’re chatting all friendly, but I can feel that something is off with the vibes. I give him the pack with the donkey blood money, he puts his hand to his heart. Then, boom. Explosion outside, in the courtyard. Invades the ears first. I feel it in my teeth. Suicide bomber. One of the source’s bodyguards. Blew himself up, along with four of our security guys, out near one of the pickups. Plan, we found out later—much later—was to take us captive. Or as many of us as they could get. But then it’s chaos, right? Even now there are portions of my memory with holes blown clean through them; gaps I’ll never fill because I can’t really talk about it with them. Even Mac and Theo. I imagine a few psychologists and Security types are floating around who could reconstruct it all—just none of the people who actually went through it. For example, I remember a few of the big important set pieces to that night, clear as day. But lots of brain space is clogged with little useless details. Debs wearing a powder-blue hijab, blinking incessantly in the seconds after the blast. Theo flicking at the radio. Gus and Gosford sitting there in a stupor, looking helpless.”
And here the Chief stopped for a moment. She ran her finger through a few crumbs on her plate and licked it clean.
“And Mac?” Sam asked.
She shook her head. “Lost him for a spot, there. Theo is shouting into the radio for the reaction force from Shkin, the helos. Twenty-minute ETA. A lifetime. Gus has gathered himself, and so have I. We peek out the kitchen door. The two pickups are mangled. Half the metal gate’s been blown right off. Blood and barbecued human are streaked across the walls and the pomegranate trees. Gus takes a step outside, and squish. Still hear it, even now I can hear it. Squish. Like he’d stepped on an overripe orange. Squish. It’s a hand. Human hand. Not sure Gus ever saw it, because the first baddie pickup truck is in through the hole in the gate. A round clips off the wall near Gus and he gets a bunch of concrete chips in his face. We turn back, head upstairs for the lay of the land.
