A Deadly Vineyard Holiday (11 page)

“Man talk, eh?” said Begay. “Cousin Deborah, eh?”

“And her sister, Karen,” I said.

“If you say so.” He poured us more beer. “What can I do for you?”

“Listen,” I said. He was good at that, and I told him everything, including Jake Spitz's recommendation that I speak to him.

“Jake Spitz, eh? So you know Jake, and you want to know what's going on. You get yourself into some weird situations, kid. Cricket Callahan as a houseguest. Well, I swan.”

I nodded. “If the girl is in danger, why are they letting her stay with me instead of, say, taking her back to Washington or at least back to the compound, where they have plenty of security? It doesn't make sense, and nobody will tell me what's going on.”

“What makes Jake think I can help you?”

“Maybe you can't,” I said, looking at the amber fluid in my glass. “But maybe you can.”

He got up. “Let's have a look at your wife's car.”

I followed him out into the yard and watched him as he looked under the hood, then got down on his back
and had a look at things underneath. Finally he gave a grunt, reached up behind the rear bumper, and brought down a small object. He rolled to his feet, looked at it, and handed it to me.

“There's the reason Shadow was able to stay with you. This gadget lets him home in on you wherever you go. Let's take a ride.”

We got into his big four-by-four and drove out of the driveway. The blue car wasn't in sight. We turned down Lighthouse Road and headed for Lobsterville Beach, one of the best fishing spots on Martha's Vineyard. In the old days, happy fishermen could park alongside the road and walk the short distance to the fish-filled water, but now the road is lined with
NO PARKING
signs, and there is only a parking lot at the far end of the beach. Gay Head's government at work again, but what can you expect from a town that has only pay toilets?

At the lot, Begay paused and attached the device to one of the cars parked there. Then we turned around and drove back, passing a blue car as it came along the road. I looked in the driver-side window, but could see nothing. A pox on tinted glass.

“We'll let your shadow trail that other car for a while,” said Begay. “Meanwhile, I'll make a couple of calls.”

I sat on the porch and drank more beer while he made his calls. When he finally came out of the house, I could hear the sounds of the returning women's voices coming from the path behind the house.

Begay gave me an enigmatic look. “You are in a can of worms,” he said.

“Are these the famous man-eating worms from outer space?”

“The very ones,” he said. “The ones with teeth.”

“Let's take a stroll,” said Joe Begay. “This time I'll talk and you'll listen.”

We walked down the path that led to the sea, and met the women.

“Ships that pass in the night,” said Zee.

“We left you some beer,” said Joe to Toni. “We won't be long.”

“And they say women like to talk,” said Debby J. “Hah!”

“Truly manly men have truly manly things to discuss,” I said. “After all, we have to run the world.”

I dodged Zee's feigned kick, and Joe and I went on toward the beach.

“Here's what I heard,” said Joe. “You know anything about intelligence agencies?”

“Only what I read about in the papers.”

“Well, there are a lot of agencies in the business, and they all need money from the government to stay afloat, but at the same time they all like to avoid being noticed. So they hide themselves lots of times under covers that sound good to the Washington people who hold the purse strings.

“You remember a couple of years back when the National Reconnaissance Office got a lot of attention it didn't want? The NRO handles spy satellites, but most normal people never heard of them, even though
they've got the biggest intelligence budget in the country, one that's twice as big as the CIA's. You'll recall that Congress gave them three hundred million dollars to build a new headquarters and didn't even know they'd done it.”

“And even while it was going up, everybody thought it was a Rockwell International building.”

“That's the one. You'd think that it would be hard for Congress to fund a three-hundred-million-dollar project and not know it, but some say the NRO has an annual budget of six and a half billion dollars—that's
billion,
with a
b
—and in a budget that size, a third of a billion can get lost pretty fast. And the NRO isn't the only spy outfit that gobbles up a lot of tax dollars. Probably nobody really knows how much we spend on intelligence, but some of the smart guesses are that all told we spend pretty near thirty billion a year.”

“Good grief! That's more than I make!”

“Our tax dollars at work.”

We came out on the beach. There was a mist out over the water that hid the farther shores, but Cuttyhunk was in sight, and we could see fishing boats working the tides. To our left, the clay cliffs of Gay Head climbed out of the mild surf. We walked that way. Begay's hands were thrust in his pockets, and he was looking at seabirds as he talked.

“There's the National Security Council, and the CIA, and the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office—that's another outfit that most people never heard of. And the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Imagery Office—I always liked that name, and they're cheap, too; only a couple hundred million a year. And there are the military intelligence agencies, one at least for every service branch, and there are others.

“And all of them like secrets and have black budgets to keep people, including oversight agencies, from looking at them too closely. Some of the stuff they do is so stupid that they don't want anyone to know about it, and other stuff is so sensitive that they, don't trust Congress with it, and not entirely without cause, since Congress has never kept a secret in its life.”

A fish hawk skimmed over the scrubby brush and we watched it disappear over a dune.

Begay went on. “One of the things these outfits don't want people to know about is how cozy they get with contractors. A whole lot of money exchanges hands, to say the least, and there are tremendous cost overruns that Congress doesn't know anything about.”

“I shouldn't be surprised, then, when Rockwell International's name is on the new NRO building.”

“That's the idea. Rockwell International hasn't lost any money contracting for Uncle Sam.

“Another thing they'd like to keep pretty quiet is some of their fieldwork, the black stuff and some of the gray stuff. Some of it doesn't work, and some of the rest can be pretty rough.”

He stopped talking and walked on in silence. I looked ahead at the rising cliffs and wondered if he was remembering or thinking about something that had taken place during the twenty years after he'd left the army and before he met Toni. He glanced at me, seemed to become aware of his own silence, and went on:

“Anyway, these agencies not only keep busy doing their work and hiding their books, they also keep an eye on each other as best they can, so nobody will get an economic or political jump on them. And they watch other agencies, too. Not officially, maybe, but they do it. They keep an eye on the Secret Service, the FBI, the
DEA, and other departments that have to do with crime or security. Part of it's probably just habit, but more of it's out of self-defense. They don't want anybody to know anything they don't. Washington's a political town, so you can't entirely blame them for watching their asses. If they don't, nobody will.

“To get to the point: The first guy I talked with just now used to work for the Department of Defense and has a lot of contacts. Now he's a civilian again. He does research for some foundation, teaches, and gives lectures. He says that even now, after years inside the Beltway, he still stumbles across secret outfits and facilities that he never knew about when he was on the government payroll.

“He told me he's heard about a threat to Cricket Callahan. Not the run-of-the-mill sort of threat that the president and his family get all the time.” He glanced at me again. “And you'd be surprised how many and how routine the threats are. Most of them end up being nothing, but they all have to be checked out. This one, though, was different. Worse. But he didn't know the details, so he gave me a name to call. I called it.

“The second person I called is a woman I've worked with, so I think I got the truth, but maybe not. You never know. She knows a lot of people in a lot of places, and what she told me was this, more or less:

“During Joe Callahan's first months in office, while he was still new at the job, he apparently inherited and reapproved covert action abroad that was supposed to clear the way for the election of a government sympathetic to us. But something went wrong. Not only did a small group of innocent civilians get killed or maimed by a bomb intended for the bad guys, but those bad guys came into power as a result. A bungled job all the
way around. Of course, our own people didn't actually do the deed, but they were overseeing the job, using local assets, which is the preferred way of doing things since it puts a screen between our agencies and the consequences of their work.

“In this case, though, after the bad guys got in power they also got their hands on a couple of the local assets who did the work, and the assets told them everything they knew, which wasn't much, since you never tell anybody more than they absolutely need to know. I think you've run into that sort of thinking in just the last day or two, haven't you?”

“Indeed.”

“So these assets didn't know much, but one of them did know who contacted him for the job, and he gave up that name before his first fingernail was gone. One thing led to another, and pretty soon there's the latest American Satan story spread all over the Middle East, complete with pictures of the victims of the explosion, including a particularly bad one of a teenage girl whose face now looks like hamburger. There's another picture to go with it, showing what she looked like before. A beautiful girl. Mangled. You may have seen the pictures in the newsmagazines.”

“I did.” And now I could see them again. I tried to push them away. They didn't want to go. I pushed harder, and looked at the rising clay cliffs and then out to sea, trying to let nature clean my memory of the post-bomb picture of the girl whose face no longer had eyes, a nose, or skin.

I must have made some sort of sound, for Begay looked at me for a moment.

“Yeah,” he said, walking on, “it was pretty bad, all right. Jesus, the things we do.”

Ahead of us, there were young people taking an illegal mud bath between sorties by beach cops, who were supposed to prevent such things, the idea being that such use of the colored clay that had washed off the cliffs would somehow destroy the cliffs themselves. I tried to figure how long it would take the mud bathers to wear away the towering cliffs. Quite a while, I guessed. Meanwhile, the bathers were having what seemed to be a quietly good time. I wished them well.

“Anyway,” said Joe Begay, “these letters that started to come in about Cricket Callahan include the pictures of that girl. They say, as I understand it, that Cricket's going to look like the girl looked after the bomb. Every time a letter comes, the pictures come, too. The letters say that Joe Callahan ordered the action, and that it's only fair and just that his daughter pay the same price as the other girl paid. Of course, there's a good chance that the president never really knew what he'd okayed. The agency that supposedly did the job probably clothed the mission in the sort of jargon that later lets everybody claim they knew nothing about the details. It's part of the Washington waltz.”

My forehead felt tight. “Does Cricket know about this?”

“She probably knows there's been a threat of some sort, but she doesn't know the details.”

“Well, that's one good thing, at least. Have they got a line on whoever's sending the letters?”

Begay stopped and looked at the mud bathers. “What do they get out of that?” he asked.

“Ask your wife,” I said. “If she's anything like mine, she spreads something like that over her face every now and then and lets it dry. Something to do with making her skin better. Ask Zee, or ask Toni, but don't ask me.”

“These people are all face, I guess,” said Begay. “Let's go back.”

We turned and retraced our steps, the cliffs now to our right and the lapping waves to our left. Overhead, the seabirds circled and called beneath an arching blue sky.

“They've been trying to trace the letters, of course,” said Joe Begay. “One thing about them is that they've been mailed to Cricket from wherever she's staying. Of course, she never actually gets them. Her staff opens all her mail, and you can bet that Cricket never, sees these or a lot of others. The point is that when she's in Washington, they're mailed from Washington. When she travels with her parents, they're sent from wherever they stay. Early this spring, when the president and his family were in England, a letter was sent from London. That's how it works.”

“And now one's been mailed from Martha's Vineyard,” I said.

“Two, actually,” said Begay.

“Counting their first trip?”

He nodded. “It was mailed to them here and was posted from Edgartown. Just about a year ago, a week after the Callahans got here.”

I thought for a while, then said, “It sounds to me like whoever's sending the letters has a lot of resources. Your normal would-be assassin or blackmailer doesn't have any way to get to a local mailbox everywhere that Cricket travels.”

Begay nodded. “Thus the theory that whoever it is is part of the president's retinue, or at least has an inside contact who's cooperating by mailing the letters wherever Cricket goes.”