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She was putting leaves in a tea ball. Her hand paused for a moment. “Really?” she said. Her feigned disinterest was the first hopeful sign Piat had detected. “Jack, I’m not sure that you know Eddie very well. He feels that—that you betrayed him.” With her last words, she turned around, teapot in hand.
“I certainly abandoned him. Yeah. I thought it was for the best. Look, can I level with you?”
Irene sat. In one motion, she brushed her shapeless bag under her knees and pulled her legs up under her, so that she sat sideways in a wing-backed armchair. She looked like a yoga master. Her smile was social. “My father told me that the expression ‘can I level with you’ always means the opposite. He was a capitalist pig of the first water, but he knew people.” She poured tea into heavy terracotta mugs.
He was nervous and making mistakes. He shrugged and exhaled hard. “Okay. Point made. I’m done.” He swallowed some tea—good tea. Big gamble. She has to want the money. He must have told her that there’s money. Or I’m out the door.
She smiled again—but it was a different smile. Secret pleasure. “So—why did you fire Dave?”
“He didn’t know how to deal with you,” Piat said, from the hip.
“And you do?” she asked.
“Irene, I know I have to deal with you.” He just left it there. She wanted to be in control—being in control was one of the things that made her tick.
She sipped her tea demurely. “What do you want?”
“Digger’s help. A contact. It’ll require hard work and some lifestyle adjustments for both of you.”
“Like what?” She leaned forward.
Piat sensed the intensity of her interest but misplaced it as revulsion. “It’s just cosmetic, Irene. Like a costume. Like makeup.” She wore a little. Not much, but enough to suggest that she had a human interest in her own looks.
She made a gesture of dismissal with her teacup. “What changes?”
Piat felt a ray of hope—just a single ray, but as bright as the rare Scottish sun. She was bargaining—her body language and intensity said she was bargaining.
“Clothes. Haircut. Table manners. Social interaction. Travel.”
She looked at him over her mug of tea. “And me?”
Piat smiled blandly. “What do you want me to say? I suspect you’re already pretty good at wearing a string of pearls and chatting with debs. Right?”
She leaned back, put her feet up on the old trunk that did duty as a coffee table. Her soles were dirty. “I shit that life out of me with the last meat I ate,” she said in a matter-offact voice.
Irene used words like shit to shock. It had been one of Piat’s first clues to who she was, or might be—that she had grown up with people who didn’t say shit every third word. Rich people. People with culture.
“I need Hackbutt. I need his expertise with these birds. I know he can do this. And Irene—it’ll help him. He can help change the world, and he can spend the rest of his life knowing that he did it.”
She nodded, but she didn’t look very impressed.
“You and the birds—together—have made a more confident, more rounded man than I knew in Southeast. So let him do this. It won’t hurt him—far from it.” Piat tried to hold her eye as he made his little speech, but she glanced away and then back. She’d looked at her photographs, he knew. She had as much as said, What’s in this for me?
“And I’ll pay both of you, handsomely. I know that you guys don’t run on money, but it’s what I have. Give it to charity if you want.” Most people liked to pretend they didn’t want money. He suspected that Irene would pretend pretty hard.
He was wrong.
She swiveled to face him, plunked her bare feet down on the stone floor. “How much money?” she asked directly.
“Fifty thousand dollars,” Piat said.
“We’ll need more than that. I’ll need more than that. You pay for my installation—materials, transportation, insurance, chai. The works.”
Piat shook his head, apparently reluctant. “I’m sorry, Irene. I can’t make open-ended financial commitments. I can offer you a lump sum—I can set a payment schedule. I can’t just say I’ll pay for every expensive hotel you book in Paris—or wherever you get your show.”
Irene leaned forward over the table, her breasts visible almost to the nipple under her dress, her well-defined arm muscles in high relief. She’s tense. “Fifty thousand each, then.” Her voice was low, a little raspy. “I love the irony—the military-industrial complex paying for my installation. I might have to add some new pieces.” But the tension remained, and only when it was too late did he realize that she was, perhaps unconsciously, trying to set her price too high. She wanted him to say no. She wanted—what? She wanted not to have to follow through with her “art.”
But by the time he’d understood, the moment was past. He hadn’t flinched at the amount. He’d kept his tone businesslike. “Five thousand each when Hackbutt agrees. Ten thousand each when Hackbutt completes the cosmetic part to my satisfaction. The balance when we’re done. Either way, success or failure—but not until we’re done.”
She looked at the photographs and then at the front door, as if she were looking for an escape, and said, “You have ten thousand dollars on you?” she babbled. “This is all happening too fast—my God, we just met you—really, I think you’re moving us too fast—”
So.
Piat opened his blazer and took out four envelopes. He laid them out on the old trunk. Two said “Irene.” Two said “Hackbutt.” He pointed. “Five thou.” He moved his hand. “Tickets to London. For shopping.” He waved at the other two. “Ditto, for you.”
“I don’t get all giggly at the prospect of shopping.”
He knew he had to push. “Deal, Irene?”
She rose to her feet. “More tea?”
He drove away from the farm without having seen Hackbutt but with a sense of release from danger. And a little elation. The next part—making up with Hackbutt—would be messy and difficult and emotional, but that was life in the business.
From a roadside phone kiosk, Piat dialed the number he and Partlow had arranged to use for routine communications and left an eight-digit code that he typed out on the stainless steel keypad. Then he spent three hours counting his remaining money and renting a room in Tobermory. The woman at the front desk of the Mishnish remembered him. He told her he was back for the fishing.
“Oh, aye,” she said.
Piat believed in living his cover. He spent the rest of the evening on the estuary of the Aros River, fishing.
In the morning, he didn’t go straight to the farm. Instead, he put on his boots and first drove, then climbed to his loch. He took a rod, but he didn’t set it up. Instead he took a cheap digital camera. Then, from the pub in Craignure, he accessed his “Furman” account online. Furman was the identity he used in Athens to sell antiquities. He uploaded three digital images of the crannog from the cheap camera and sent them to three different addresses; one in Sri Lanka, one in Florida, and one in Ireland. He wasn’t sure just what he was meaning to do yet. So he was testing the water.
* * *
As he drove back down the gravel road to the farm, he caught a flash of Hackbutt among the cages behind the house. His stomach rolled over. He pulled around the house, parked, and took a deep breath.
As he got out of the car, Hackbutt came around the house and waved. Hackbutt’s wave said it all, he hoped. Piat gave up the idea of trying to make contact with the dog and faced him.
“You really pissed me off,” Hackbutt said from thirty feet away. His tone was high, almost falsetto. As he walked toward Piat, he said, “It’s not that I can’t be your friend. Not that I’m angry—really angry. But it wasn’t decent, leaving me like that.” He looked like shit. He looked like a beggar in the wilderness—beard uncombed, hair wild.
“No, Digger. No. I abandoned you. It’s not the way I meant it to be, but I did it. I’m sorry.”
Hackbutt’s hands were trembling. He rubbed them together. “Why? Irene says I should forget it. That it’s not our business. But I can’t—I think you have to tell me.”
Piat had forgotten how Hackbutt really was—the pile of insecurities and grandiosities. Piat put an arm on the other man’s shoulders. Lies that he might have told other agents wouldn’t work on Hackbutt—lies that he had been busy, that he had had to use Dave, that he’d been somewhere else saving the world. Waste of breath. To Hackbutt, there was only Hackbutt—and maybe Irene. Instead, he said, “I needed to get you guys the money. That’s all I can say, okay?”
Hackbutt’s face was blotchy. “Dave said you weren’t coming back. That you didn’t give a shit about me or Irene. That you only worked for money and that he was my real friend.” He was almost crying. He was very much the Hackbutt that Piat had run in Malaysia.
Piat nodded, hugged Hackbutt a little harder. He could imagine the vitriol that Dave must have spewed. He could see how a fool like Dave would think that he could achieve control that way.
“But I came back, Digger.” Piat didn’t care that he could see Irene at the window, that he was practically hugging her man on the driveway. “I came back. I should never have left.”
“And you won’t leave again?”
“Not until the end.” Piat believed in being prepared for the end, right from the beginning. “And then we’ll just go back to being friends.”
Hackbutt was crying now. But he was returning the hug. Piat was patient, almost tender.
“Irene will think we’re making out,” Hackbutt said after a full minute. He giggled.
That laugh’s got to go, Piat thought.
Irene had made tea. The door to her studio was still closed, but a third of the photographs had been taken down, and some lay in untidy piles on the furniture. Irene was taciturn, seemingly nervous. Regretting it?
Piat cleared a space on the couch and sat, opening his backpack.
“Okay, folks. Today we start working. First, anybody have something on their schedule for the next two months? Weddings? Funerals? Spill it now, because the moment I’m paying, you’re on my calendar. Okay?”
“He’s always like this at the start,” Hackbutt said to Irene.
Irene stared at him.
“Good. Digger, you remember these forms?” The forms themselves were creations from Piat’s laptop, but they were enough like CIA documents to pass muster with an agent. “You pay US taxes?”
“No,” they said together.
“Then we don’t need this one.” Piat crumpled a W-2 invoice form he’d downloaded. He’d always thought it funny that US agents paid income tax on black ops money, but they did. “Contract. Security agreement. Confidentiality. These don’t constitute a security clearance, just an arrangement. Okay?”
“We have to sign,” Hackbutt said to Irene. “It’s okay.” He was reassuring her from his years of experience as an agent, and he sounded fatuous. She, however, was reading the whole document and not listening to him. Looking for a reason not to sign, he thought, but there was a resignation about her that suggested that she was simply going through the motions. If the idea of actually putting her art on display frightened her, another part of her very much wanted to do it. That part, he guessed, had already won.
Piat had looked at her website. She actually had a small reputation, had done “installations” in Auckland and Ontario and Eastern Europe. But the website hadn’t been updated in three years, and he wondered if she really was an “artist”—he couldn’t think of the word without the quotation marks—who’d run out of ideas. Or whatever it was that “artists” had in their heads.
At any rate, she signed. Looking unhappy. But sexually interesting.
When they had both signed, Piat handed out envelopes. “Five thousand each. Okay?”
He’d made a mistake, and he saw it too late. Hackbutt’s face froze and his skin got blotchy again. He followed Hackbutt’s eyes and saw that Hackbutt only now realized that Piat was paying both of them, and that as much as that made sense to him and to Partlow, it wasn’t the right move for Hackbutt, who wanted to give her the money himself. Without much of a pause, he turned to Irene. “Hackbutt wanted you to have this money for yourself. The contract’s with him—but he wouldn’t do it without you. And I’m sorry to be so crass with both of you but, Digger, you remember that we have to play for the bureaucrats with money. I can get you more for both than I can get just for you, Digger.” He said it all so smoothly that Hackbutt’s face was calm again before he was done.
Hackbutt smiled shakily at Irene. “I thought I’d get to give it to you myself,” he began, but she launched herself out of her chair and embraced him. In seconds they were locked together, kissing like teenagers.
Piat busied himself collecting the documents. After ten seconds he said, “Okay, kids. Really.”
Irene pulled herself free and shook out her hair, laughing. Hackbutt laughed, too—a real laugh, not a giggle.
Piat smiled with them and opened a calendar. “Digger—you first. You need clothes.”
Hackbutt nodded. “Irene’s been telling me that for a year.”
“Now Uncle Sam’s paying. Irene may need some too. It’s too early to tell you the whole ball of wax—you know the rules, Digger. But let’s just say you’re going to meet some rich, powerful people. You have to be ready to be with them. Okay? I don’t expect you to become James Bond, but I need you to look the part and act the part.”
Hackbutt crossed his arms, his scrawny elbows showing through rents in his ancient sweater. “Jeez, Jack. I’m not good at social stuff.”
Piat looked at him without mercy. “If this were easy, we wouldn’t be paying so much money for it. Okay? This is go-no-go stuff, Digger. You have to do the social stuff. We’ll have training for it—practice, role-play. Just like in Jakarta. Okay? Same for Irene.” He tossed the last in because he wanted Hackbutt to feel that he wasn’t alone in being targeted.
Irene’s frown caused her eyebrows to make a single, solid line on her face. Piat didn’t know her facial expressions yet. Tension? Anger? Hard to know.
His eyes roved down his list. “Right now, I’m mostly focused on clothes. Digger, can you wear some real clothes?”
“Like what?” Hackbutt sounded suspicious.
“Wool trousers, for a start,” said Irene. “Green like your eyes, Eddie.”
Piat felt as if Irene were speaking lines he’d written for her, except that he hadn’t. What a fool Dave had been to ignore her. “Exactly. Clothes. I don’t want to overdo it—you’re an American, you’d look silly in breeks—but the Arab idea of a Western gentleman is an Englishman. I need you to look the part.”
“What’re breeks?” Hackbutt asked.
“Knee breeches. For shooting.” Piat paused to see if Hackbutt would respond.
“Sounds kind of faggy,” Hackbutt muttered. He clearly thought Piat was making fun of him.
“You both have to eat meat. Not all the time. Okay? But enough so your systems don’t reject it.”
“No way,” Hackbutt said. “I’ve given all that shit up.” He looked at Irene for confirmation.
She gave Piat a considering look. “I won’t eat pork. Lamb or beef I can probably hack.”
Hackbutt stared at her.
Piat nodded. “Fair enough. Okay. I won’t hide from you that our target is Arab. He won’t eat pork, either. It’ll probably actually help his subconscious cues with you two if you don’t eat pork. Fine. Pork’s off the training menu. Anyway—you’re game for the clothes and food. Right? Okay. Conversation.”
Hackbutt all but cringed. Irene put a hand on his knee.
“Here’s the plan. We three eat together three nights a week. Okay? At dinner we play a game. It goes like this. Irene and I speak only when we’re spoken to. Understand, Digger? We’ll answer questions. If encouraged, we can respond and ask questions of our own, but otherwise, we just sit there. Boring dinners, Dig, unless you come to them with some prepared topics and you get them started.”
Hackbutt looked back and forth between them. “Why you and Irene? I mean—when does Irene get the training? You’re not helping her.” He trailed off.
Piat nodded, wondering just what to say.
Irene picked up the ball immediately. “Sweetie—I know how to make conversation. How the hell do you think I deal with agents and gallery owners and buyers? It’s you, dear man, who can’t make small talk with a telemarketer.”
Hackbutt nodded. “Why would anyone want to make small talk with a telemarketer?”
“And three days a week you give me some training with the birds,” Piat said.
Hackbutt sat up. “Really? That’s great, Jack. I didn’t know you were interested!” Then more slowly, “Oh, for the op, you mean.”
“I have to travel with you. I’ll be with you most of the time. So I need to know enough to pass.”
Hackbutt frowned. “The birds’ll know in a second if you don’t want to be with them, Jack. If you’re—afraid. Or fake.” He realized what he’d said. “Oh, Jack—sorry.”
