“Anyhow,” she said, after a minute when it became obvious first of all that she wanted him to say something like, “Gee, why don’t we go out for lunch or a drink sometime?” and second of all that he didn’t begin to possess the vocabulary for such a thing, “anyhow, I thought you might want to know, it came.”
Her eyes were bright and sweet. She was so pretty. It angered him that she should be so pretty on the last day of his career and she was just prattling on about things he didn’t understand.
Nick blinked.
“Huh?”
“You know. Don’t you remember the last time I talked to you?”
He couldn’t begin to put it together again in his head.
“You wanted that file from Washington, but they wouldn’t send it because you weren’t cleared.”
He remembered asking her about it in the hallway at some point or other.
“Yeah?”
“Well, I put you in for the clearance.”
“You put me in?” he asked, incredulously. “But that needs a supervisor’s signature and, uh, I mean – ”
“Oh, Mr. Utey signed it. He wasn’t sure what it was, and anyway he was so busy I don’t think he cared and you were his right-hand man and everything.”
It suddenly occurred to him with a stupendous flash that Sally Ellion was so busy being the office’s favorite girl that she hadn’t caught on quite yet to the fact that he’d gotten the sack.
She smiled again.
“And you got it. The clearance.”
“Uh huh,” he said, not quite sure where this was going.
“And so they just authorized a printout. I just got it from the printing room.”
She handed him a thick sheaf of computer-printed paper.
It was marked TOP SECRET/SENIOR SUPERVISORY PERSONNEL ONLY.
Nick looked at it.
It was the RamDyne file.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Shreck, alone in his office now, was surprised how little elation he felt. It reminded him of the way it was when he came off a hill in Korea in 1953, when he was seventeen years old. Not relief, not guilt, just simple numbness. He knew it was classic postcombat stress syndrome; depletion, emotional and physical, and as you recharged you went into a kind of torpid state.
But it had only happened to him that one time in Korea, because he was so new to it. In all his other operations, as they wound into the triumph or bitterness but always survival, he’d felt incredibly lightened, charged, made whole again. This fucker Swagger had really gotten under his skin; a tough guy, a dangerous guy, just the sort of guy who could bring it all down.
When the phone call finally came, it was something of an anticlimax. Dobbler had managed to meet the Bureau contact without difficulty and was handed the actual forensic lab report, complete with X rays. From then on, Dobbler just babbled to Shreck, couldn’t control himself, spoke too plainly, dithered and yammered too much. But the gist got through. The X rays checked. Everything was fine. Bob was dead. It was over.
Shreck felt some lightening of feeling, but not much. He was not a man of many pleasures; only duty and mission were pleasures. But this really was his finest triumph. He thought maybe he’d go shoot sporting clays this weekend. Maybe he’d buy a new car. But mainly he wanted to -
The secure phone rang.
He looked at it for a long second, before picking it up.
“Shreck.”
It was Hugh Meachum.
“Colonel, we have a problem.”
LANCER CLEARANCE NECESSARY
IF YOU ARE NOT LANCER CLEARED, IMMEDIATELY RETURN THIS FILE TO ITS JACKET, SECURE IT, AND RETURN IT TO ITS POINT OF ORIGIN. YOU MUST NOTIFY THE LANCER COMMITTEE IF YOU HAVE ENCOUNTERED THIS FILE IN AN UNAUTHORIZED METHOD.
Nick looked at it dumbly. In his years in the Bureau he’d bumped into a few strange commands, but he’d never hit this one before. He blinked, but the warning would not go away; there it was, big as life, all caps, booming out at him. He felt extremely guilty. Practically from birth, Nick had obeyed rules, signs, orders, directions, speed limits, legal technicalities, everything. Yet at the same time the illicit thrill of what he was about to do was giddy and sweet, even if it brought his breath from his lungs and made his head ache where he’d smashed it against the truck door.
He sat in his basement. It was well past nine, and after waiting all afternoon he’d at last come down the stairs, turned on the overhead light and settled into an old lawn chair. The air smelled of moisture and wood and oil. The bare bulb wobbled slightly. There was no other sound.
Lancer, he thought, taking one more deep breath.
Lancer? He knew that in their many years of uneasy operational coexistence, the Bureau and the Agency had many times bumbled into each other. And sometimes, under strict control (at least in theory) the Agency would do something that was technically in violation of the law; thus the Lancer Committee had to be that elite group in high Bureau quarters that was kept informed of these transgressions and made certain that no Bureau operatives moved forward aggressively to apprehend the perpetrator, thereby blowing an Agency scam or endangering Agency personnel.
That’s what he guessed the Lancer Committee to be.
And as he looked at the early documents before him, he could see that the Lancer Committee had quite early on declared its power.
LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY INTERESTS ARE AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B) was one of the first such decrees, dating from 1964, when agents in Los Angeles had uncovered a warehouse full of fifteen hundred Armalite rifles headed for the presidential guard of the then obscure country of South Vietnam. Perusing the material, Nick saw that the warehouse was owned by something called RamDyne Security, with an address in Miami. He whistled. He knew the Armalite was the early name for the rifle that was later called the M-16 when it was adopted by the United States Army and Marine Corps. Whoever could get Armalites in such numbers before they were officially adopted a) knew they were going to be adopted and b) put some big money up front. Who would that be? Only one answer.
So that meant RamDyne was CIA.
Or did it?
As he paged through the documents, LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B) suddenly began happening all over the place. RamDyne Security and Lancer Committee had a very busy time of it in the late sixties and early seventies; the imprimatur was showing up on Air America shipments from Bangkok to Manila – and not for envelopes, Nick guessed. RamDyne Security had a contract to import Swedish K’s to something called the Special Operations Group – SOG – up near the Laotian border. RamDyne Security bought ten thousand surplus M-1 carbines from the Republic of Taiwan and shipped them to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for unspecified use. RamDyne Security imported two thousand pairs of Hiatt’s handcuffs to the Saigon police force. RamDyne Security shipped fifty obsolete T-28 trainers to the Cambodian Air Force. RamDyne grew and grew and prospered as the war expanded.
But by the mid to late seventies, the action had moved elsewhere. Riffling through the material, Nick was fascinated to see that RamDyne had connections in the Middle East. For example it served as a conduit for the shorty M-16’s that showed up in the hands of Israeli commandos at Entebbe and for much of the sophisticated electronics that was the specialty of the Israeli air force.
Who are they? Nick wondered. Because he saw at a glance that although just about everything that RamDyne did was conceived in such a way as to advance American interests, it also involved large sums of money for equipment, training or expertise in…
…in war?
Well, not exactly. What RamDyne sold was something that, although it was the essence of war, wasn’t war itself, and it certainly wasn’t standard military doctrine. No, it was something different, a purer distillation of a government’s role on earth.