Agents of Darkness Read online

  “Since we’re talking desperate, Charlie, go look at yourself in a mirror.”

  “So what? One desperate man looks for another. Don’t you appreciate the symmetry?”

  “What would you do with him, Charlie? Bring him in with cuffs on? Take him prisoner? Is that the notion?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Teng’s armed. He’s a killer. Do you even remember how to fire a pistol?”

  “I hate guns.”

  “Whether you love ’em or loathe ’em isn’t quite the point here, is it? You can’t go unarmed against a man with a gun. Be reasonable.”

  “Okay. Watch me. I’ll get my gun. If that’s what you call being reasonable, in your funny Yankee way, reasonable I’ll be.” The gun to which Galloway referred was a Colt Government Model that lay on top of the piece of bedroom furniture Charlie knew as a wardrobe but which Karen called an armoire. He had absolutely no enthusiasm for guns. Although he’d cheerfully returned his police pistol to the Department, he owned the Colt because Karen had insisted, during a spate of muggings and rapes, that home and person had to be protected from the menace that lurked in Los Angeles. So Charlie reluctantly purchased the weapon even though the fatal American infatuation with the pistol bewildered him. People were encouraged by an outmoded Constitution to use guns in defence of their liberty, which was clearly jeopardized on a seasonal basis by ducks, moose, and deer. Sometimes people just got in the way – say during liquor-store holdups and burglaries and muggings. But the right to bear arms was inviolate. So be it. Charlie moved to the foot of the stairs, put his hand on the rail and prepared to climb.

  “Charlie,” Clarence said. “You’re making me miserable.”

  “I’m going for my bloody gun. You told me to be reasonable. So I’m showing maturity, Clarence. As if by magic, the Scotsman turns before your very orbs into a man of admirable responsibility. The Colt awaits me on yonder armoire, Clarence, old chap, old pal. See me climb. Up and up. I have a sense of purpose.”

  “Wait, Charlie. Let’s talk.”

  Galloway paused on the stairs, turning to look down at Clarence Wylie, who asked, “Even if you knew where Laforge lives in Pennsylvania, how do you propose to find Teng? Where do you start looking?”

  Galloway felt an odd little dizziness dance through him. Hunger, imbalanced chemistry, too much alcohol in the bloodstream aggravated now by a blast of adrenalin. He had the sensation he was crazy, that the tiny germ of insanity he’d carried around for years was suddenly full-blown, and yet when he heard himself speak he thought how rational, how sensible, he managed to sound. “If Teng has a specific location in mind, then it’s not so hard. You try to think the way he’d think himself. You put yourself in his situation. If you know where he’s going, you imagine how he’d try to get there.”

  “Oh, that’s rich, that’s a great speech,” Clarence remarked. “The reality isn’t going to be anything like that.”

  “I’ll take the chance, Clarence. I don’t have a lot on my plate at the moment. You might have noticed. So what about that address?”

  Clarence shook his head, chewed his lip in the manner of a man warring with himself. Jesus, how was he going to resist that imploring note in Charlie Galloway’s voice, that lost look in the eyes, the suggestion of despair about the mouth? How was he supposed to withstand all that? “No, Charlie –”

  “Clarence, please.”

  “Don’t put me in this position –”

  “A favour, Clarence. That’s all. One last favour. For auld lang syne. Don’t leave me hanging.”

  “God help me,” Clarence said. “God help me if this is a mistake, because I’ll never forgive myself if anything happens to you.” He scribbled in his notebook and tore out the page, holding it aloft before setting it down with great reluctance on the coffee table. Raggedly perforated, it had an innocuous, improvised look to it, the casually insignificant presence of a grocery list.

  Charlie walked to the table. He looked at the paper, then folded it twice before pocketing it. “Nothing’s going to happen, Clarence.”

  Clarence said, “No more favours, Charlie. Okay? I had a problem getting what I already got. I think I used up any leftover clout I might have had in the office. Too many new faces there. They see me as some kind of dinosaur. A lot of the old crew have taken their pensions. I’m going back inside my nifty little shell of retirement, away from it all. I like it there. I don’t like it where you live, Charlie. I’ve had it with danger.”

  Danger: the word did a little hopscotch step in Galloway’s head. He placed a hand on Wylie’s shoulder, a gesture of gratitude. Clarence walked to the door, where he paused to look back. “Keep me informed. I want to know everything that happens. Where you go. What you do. You owe me that.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Charlie said.

  “And please don’t let me live to regret this,” Clarence added. A voice nagged him in his mind: You’ve made a big mistake, Wylie. Your biggest.

  The dawn that broke over Bucks County was the colour of a ripened peach. The day, barely begun, was going to be as torrid as the one before, and the one before that. From the window of his bedroom William Laforge watched the spectres created by the trees, the flattened shadows that spread across the grass and under the picnic table.

  Already dressed, Laforge stood with hands in the pockets of his cotton slacks, his pale blue shirt open at the neck. He’d been unable to sleep, tossing, turning, his mind a hare chased by the hounds of the upcoming Senate hearings. Then he’d risen and showered and was halfway through shaving when the telephone had rung. The call was from his assistant at Langley, a pleasant apple-faced young man named Frank Christian.

  Only bad news came at dawn, Laforge thought. Nobody called at that time of day to say you had won the lottery.

  There has been an incident in Dallas, Christian said. An incident. Christian had a way with euphemisms and doublespeak and would inevitably go far in the Company. An incident in Dallas. Laforge had listened in silence and then put the telephone down. His face was still covered with shaving soap, a fluff of which he left attached to the receiver.

  Tom Railsback was dead, shot in his own driveway. It was an awful blow to absorb even if Laforge had known it was coming. Railsback had scoffed, that was the worst of it. He hadn’t listened. It’s only Billy behaving like some goddam housewife, that’s probably what he thought. Fussy Billy. If only Tom had paid attention. But he’d blustered. Nobody’s going to get me in my own back yard. Poor Tom.

  Laforge changed his angle of perception. Beyond the beech trees, where the gravel driveway led to the stables, a dark car and a van had been parked. Inside the larger vehicle were two men, an array of communications equipment, TV consoles depicting images relayed from cameras strategically located around the estate. In the car sat a couple of armed guards, men in white shirts who didn’t conceal their weaponry. On the back seat lay several rifles. The trunk doubtless contained tear gas, grenades, more firearms. Out of Laforge’s view, at the place where the old bridge straddled the creek, three men armed with rifles and carrying walkie-talkies patrolled the area. This was the protection afforded the man nominated to be head of the CIA. What had happened to Tom couldn’t happen here. A killer could not get close to the house. There was simply no way.

  It was difficult not to be impressed by all the security, the attention, Laforge thought, hard not to yield to the notion that you were a man of some consequence. He was excited by the idea of running the show at Langley, impatient to forge a different, sharper intelligence agency out of the blunted instrument Sandy Bach had left behind. Hadn’t McCune said as much?

  I want an Agency with teeth, William. I want Intelligence with some bite to it. I’ll give you that, Mr President. And he knew he could because he knew how the Agency worked, where it was weak, where strong, he knew the men who deserved promotion and those who were time-servers and clock-watchers; above all else, he knew secrecy, a favourite old mistress whose hot embrace never failed t
o enthrall him.

  Now, as he studied this brand new dawn and tried not to think of poor Railsback, he recalled President McCune also saying that the Central Intelligence Agency, if it was to have goddam fangs, needed a strong man at the helm. I believe you are that man, William. There, in the Oval Office, McCune had smiled, offering a brief handshake of extraordinary firmness, like a steel gauntlet to which Laforge was obliged to yield; a crack of fingerjoints, the pressure on bone. Laforge had smiled dutifully, knowing in his heart that he didn’t like McCune, that the President was crude in ways Laforge found offensive. It was more than the handshake, the insincerity of the smile, the strange way he sometimes had with syntax. There were reprehensible jokes of an ethnic nature, told with an air of WASP confidence. There were, surprisingly, Havana cigars. Blockade isn’t worth a damn, McCune had said, winking, nodding. Laforge, a dedicated non-smoker, had had a hard time breathing. Tension, smoke, the sense of place and occasion – and the upsetting feeling he kept having that this was all an elaborate joke and he was going to be found out and dragged from the White House by Secret Servicemen. On your way, asshole. Take your act down the road. The evening had been surreal.

  Laforge’s mind went back inevitably to Tom Railsback. Despite the rising sun, he felt cold. He towelled soap from his chin, then continued down the hallway to Carolyn’s bedroom. As he walked he thought any invader on this property would be shot.

  Asleep, one arm curled characteristically around a pillow, Carolyn looked like an angel who has fallen only a short way from grace. He loved her: a simple perception. If it could not be love of any common kind, it was the only form he was capable of feeling. He knew she’d been with Truskett last night. And why not? They had something to celebrate, after all. He reached for her hand, held it in his own, squeezed.

  Carolyn slowly opened her eyes. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  Laforge shook his head. “Absolutely nothing. Why do you ask?”

  Coming out of sleep, she always appeared very young and fragile. “You look … troubled,” she said. She raised her arm, laying the warm palm of her hand against his cheek. He shut his eyes. She made him feel secure in a way no battalion of guards could ever do.

  “I’m not troubled,” he replied. Railsback is dead and I’m not troubled. “It’s just very strange to look out of one’s window and see a detachment of security personnel.”

  Carolyn smiled. “Did you really think your life would go on as before after last night?”

  “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “You’re an important man, my love. You need protection.” She tossed her bedsheets back. She always slept naked. He gazed at the flatness of her stomach, the delicate shallow of shadow created by her navel, the deeper shadow between her legs. Her skin was impressively smooth, unmarked as yet by age.

  She said, “You have nothing to worry about now.”

  Laforge didn’t speak.

  “You’ll make an enormous contribution to this country,” Carolyn said. “Do you doubt that?”

  “No.”

  “Do the hearings trouble you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then stop looking so grouchy.” She rose from the bed and stood before him, running the flat of one hand through her yellow hair. Not for the first time in his life did he wish he felt the sexual desires most men feel; the urge to reach for her and draw her to him was very strong. But he was disabled, crippled, a fact he reflected on with a sense of ironic detachment: while he was perfectly capable of running the Central Intelligence Agency, of operating the great machinery of secrecy, he couldn’t muster what it took to satisfy his wife. It was an irony whose deeper levels he had no urge to probe.

  “McCune wants the hearings to begin next week,” he said.

  “The sooner the better. Then you won’t be mooning around the house waiting. You’ll be running Langley.”

  Laforge wandered to the window. He saw the van move and for one heart-turning moment he imagined it was about to leave, that all the security on the property was being stripped away from him because he’d been found out, his secret had unravelled – but then the vehicle stopped and the engine died. It had simply been changing position, perhaps to better monitor the estate. That was all. A brief panic passed out of Laforge, but his hand, which had become a claw upraised to the window pane, remained inflexible, as if it had atrophied in fear.

  Carolyn said, “You must relax, William.”

  “I am relaxed,” he insisted. Railsback, Costain and Deduro. All dead. He stared over the meadow at the stand of trees, which looked different to him just then, unfamiliar, altered overnight.

  “And I’m from Missouri,” Carolyn remarked, thinking how very proud she was of William, and of how little he might have achieved had it not been for her unselfish dedication to his career. Now she need never see Truskett again, a realisation that caused her relief and, to her surprise, regret in equal measure. She gazed at William as she drew her robe on, and she remembered her extraordinary flight with Byron, the thrill, the deprivation of air, the frightening, powerful sense of unity with him. All that was over. All that was done.

  And she would miss it.

  18

  It was seven a.m. when Byron Truskett parked his car under a stand of fir trees at the edge of an isolated lake in Prince Georges County, some thirty miles southeast of Washington. He scanned the water, which was still and very blue in the morning light. He got out of his car, put on dark glasses. Underfoot, dry pine needles crackled. He walked to the water’s edge in the wary manner of a man concerned about putting a fine Italian shoe into an unspeakable pile of shit.

  About fifty yards along the shoreline a decrepit jetty jutted into the water. A small sailboat was tethered to this uncertain anchorage. A big man in a bright yellow T-shirt and dark blue shorts was visible on board. As Truskett got closer to the pier he saw discoloured light streak from the man’s green plastic visor.

  Truskett reached the jetty. Planks of grey wood were here and there rotted through. Silvery minnows darted in the shallows where a collection of old Coors cans lay in silt. Truskett, his shirt already soaked with sweat, noticed that the boat was called the J Edgar.

  Only now did the man in the yellow T-shirt look up. He had been undoing a knot in a length of rope, and he tossed the rope aside, indicating with a gesture of a large hairy hand that Truskett should come on board. The man, Hugo Fletcher, vanished inside the tiny cabin, leaving Truskett to board without assistance. The boat swayed slightly as the Senator clambered into it. He stooped, stepping into the cabin, conscious of how close to his skull a kerosene lantern hung. Brass fittings, hemp coasters on a table of ancient oak, Bavarian beer tankards, a pistol holstered and slung over a cross-beam – a mariner’s world of weathered surfaces and hard objects.

  “Brewsky?” Fletcher asked.

  “It’s a little early for me,” said Truskett.

  Fletcher opened a styrofoam ice-chest and took out a Budweiser, which he tossed into the air and caught on the way down. Its contents fizzed out when he popped the tab. “Never too early for American beer, Senator,” he said. “Horse’s piss. Drunk stronger water in my time. Anyway, this is supposed to be my one day off per month. A man’s got to get away. If possible. If he isn’t hounded.”

  Fletcher gave Truskett a funny little look, knowing and supercilious, unsmiling. Hugo wasn’t renowned for his mirth. He had reputedly been heard to laugh in 1971 when Richard Nixon had uttered the phrase ‘peace with honour’, but this was apocryphal. He had in common with Nixon one thing – a problem with facial hair, which grew at such a rate he was obliged to shave two or three times a day. The visor cast a pale green pall over his complexion, giving the impression of a malignant illness.

  Fletcher thunked the can on the table and stared at Truskett, who noticed a curious irregularity in the pigmentation of Fletcher’s eyes. The right eye was blue, the left grey.

  “So,” said Fletcher, languidly scratching a hairy black leg. “Th
is the day of reckoning, is it? Calling in your marker?”

  “That’s one way of putting it, Hugo,” Truskett replied.

  Fletcher made Truskett feel like a debt collector of the worst sort. But Truskett had nothing about which to be ashamed. Fletcher owed him, it was that simple. A few years ago, Byron Truskett had convinced John J Coleman to promote Fletcher to the number two spot inside the Bureau at a time when Coleman was undergoing one of his regular ‘retreats’ at a cosy clinic in the Berkshires. Like many people, Coleman had a hunch that Truskett would be the next President, and therefore a man to oblige; even if he considered Fletcher a threat to his empire, he’d honoured Truskett’s request. Tranquillised, indifferent to his surroundings, how could Coleman have made a sound judgement in any case? He’d never been known to make solid decisions, straight or zoned-out. He’d risen to the Directorship of the FBI through the rapid transit system of the old boy network, correct prep school, grammar-school, Ivy League university, the proper clubs. His competence was of less importance than his connections, his weakness for soporific drugs less significant than his reputation for bonhomie and clubmanship.

  Hugo Fletcher was an altogether different kind of animal from his nominal superior. Unlike Coleman, a gregarious raconteur, he was perhaps the most secretive man Truskett had ever met. He was never photographed, frequented neither fancy restaurants nor nightclubs. He had never married. It was rumoured he kept a woman on a country estate somewhere near Wheeling, West Virginia, but nobody had ever verified this. A mystery, self-perpetuating.

  Truskett said, “There are certain aspects of the national interest at stake.”

  “And some of your own, no doubt,” Fletcher said, and crushed his beercan cheerfully.

  “My concerns often coincide with those of the nation.” Truskett said this with due gravity, giving it the timbre of a campaign pledge.

  “And so do mine, Senator.” Fletcher ran fingertips over his bristled jaw. “From the tone of your phone-call, I’d say you’re anxious to get me to cover your ass in the matter of a certain individual, am I correct?”