Shift. Part 34

Melchior noted how quickly Sturgis s.h.i.+fted gears. He might be an a.s.shole and a turncoat, but he was a professional. And let's face it: they were all a.s.sholes, which was why they'd become soldiers of fortune in the first place, and the only thing that mattered was whether they could do their jobs. Melchior figured he could count on Sturgis in the days ahead-a.s.suming he didn't have to kill him first.

"Bogey at four o'clock," the Guatemalan pilot was calling through the open door of the c.o.c.kpit. "Too low for commercialism. No se No se if they made us, but you gonna have to bail just in case." if they made us, but you gonna have to bail just in case."

"s.h.i.+t," Sturgis said. "At least tell me we're over land."

"Cerca de. Nearling." Between the accent and the engines, Melchior couldn't tell if Pablo was joking or not.

The plane banked hard to the right. Robertson, who'd been reaching for the door handle, smacked his head against the window, and the spoon sticking out of his mouth clanked against the gla.s.s.

"Jesus Christ, Pablo, give a guy some warning. You could-a poked a hole in my cheek."

"Definitely bogey. You want out, you got to go now."

"f.u.c.k. I wasn't finished eating. Last American food we're gonna have for a while, I wanted to enjoy it."

Even as Robertson spoke, he rolled the hatch open. Outside, the clouds were dense as cotton batting. Except for the rain that whipped into the hold, he could've been standing in front of a blank movie screen, one hand reaching casually for his chute like a commuting businessman grabbing an umbrella before heading off to the train. He stood in the spray, chewing slowly, then tossed the empty can into the void.

Sturgis had buckled Don Gutierrez Rave de Mendez y Sotomayor's chute on him and was dragging him toward the door. Blood streamed down the defector's face, and his legs trailed after him as limply as the tentacles of a jellyfish. "I'm gonna have to jump with Donny here, or he'll be too busy praying to open his chute. Rip, you come next. Garcia, Lopez"-the Miami exiles, although Melchior hadn't bothered to learn which was which-"after that. And you, Agent Domenico Agent Domenico"-the contempt was audible in Sturgis's voice-"bring up the rear."

He didn't wait for an answer. Just tossed Donny out the side of the cabin like a bag of garbage and hopped after. Robertson waited till Sturgis was gone before grabbing three cans of Spam in one of his big hands.

"Betcha I finish 'em before I pull cord." Spoon in one hand, cans in the other, he jumped out of the plane. Another sharp turn more or less dumped Garcia and Lopez into the clouds, and then it was Melchior's turn.

Up in the c.o.c.kpit, Pablo was manhandling the unwieldy cargo plane through the zero-visibility slop like a little boy on a dirt bike. Something about the kid-the sharp-featured face, s.h.i.+ny and desperate for approval-reminded Melchior of Caspar, and before he knew it he'd taken one of the cigars out of the box and lit it as he made his way to the cabin. d.i.c.k Bissell, the Wiz's replacement as deputy director for plans, could deduct it from his pay.

It was d.a.m.n good cigar. Sat on the tongue like gunpowder and blood. If the Catholics handed out these instead of those stale wafers, he'd go to ma.s.s seven days a week.

"To keep you company on the ride home, Pablito," he said, stealing one more drag before pa.s.sing off the fragrantly smoking imperiale imperiale. "Cuban tobacco. El mejor El mejor. Gracias, Senor." Pablo shoved the cigar in his mouth, more Groucho Marx than Jimmy Cagney. "Next year in Habana!"

The honor of being chosen haloed the kid's angular face. He couldn't have been more than twenty, twenty-one. Caspar's age. Most kids his age were just getting out of college, starting a family, and here these guys were, risking their lives for Company and country. He didn't care how many chemicals TSS pumped into someone's bloodstream. Only a leader could inspire this kind of loyalty.

Melchior had just turned from the kid from when something slammed into his back and threw him ten feet into the hold. He thought it was turbulence at first, or who knows, maybe one of Castro's hand-me-down Russian fighters had actually managed to get off a shot. But when he turned back to the c.o.c.kpit he saw that the blow had come from inside the plane.

Pablo's torso still sat in the pilot's chair. His feet were still on the pedals and his hands still held the wheel, but where his head had been there was just a jagged stump spurting fountains of blood.

"Oh give me a G.o.dd.a.m.n f.u.c.king break," Melchior said, even as the plane dipped and spun toward the left. He'd known the plan was going to be stupid, but he had no idea it was this this stupid. "You've stupid. "You've got got to be f.u.c.king kidding me." to be f.u.c.king kidding me."

The plane's sharp turn put the open hatch almost directly above him, and he had to climb the floor like a ladder, cursing Robert Kennedy, Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Sidney Gottlieb, and everyone else who had anything to do with such a c.o.c.kamamie scheme. Grunting, he chinned himself through the opening. The plane's engines screamed as it dipped into a death spiral. If he timed his jump wrong, he was going to get sliced in half by a tail fin. But Pablo'd been instructed to come in under 2,500 feet, so it was now or never. He counted-three, two, one! one!-and threw himself clear. The left elevator ripped by so close that if he'd turned his cheek, he could've gotten a free shave. A second later, the plane disappeared into the clouds.

He pulled the cord as soon as he was level. There was that interminable quarter second when it always seemed like nothing was going to happen, and then he felt the familiar snap and tug as the chute opened and caught. He listened for the sound of a crash but the cloud-choked air wrapped around his head like a pillow, and all he heard was the sound of his own breath. The cigar's smoke still sat on his tongue.

"Jesus f.u.c.king Christ," he muttered as he spat the taste of gunpowder and blood into the cottony void. "Exploding f.u.c.king cigars." In the category of need-to-know, he was pretty sure someone could've bothered to mention that that.

The next minute or so was a surreal interval, as he floated through a layer of cloud so dense he could've been a fly suspended in amber. He found himself remembering certain rumors that had come to him-rumors that, until sixty seconds ago, he'd dismissed as Communist propaganda or, who knows, an exercise in disinformation on the Company's part, an attempt to make the rest of the world think CIA had lost the thread in the wake of the Bay of Pigs. Now it was starting to look like the rest of the world was right.

Before he left the Congo, Joe Mobutu-this was before all that Sese Seko Nkuku nonsense-told him about a microphone in a radio station that would spew deadly gas when Castro delivered his weekly address. In Saigon, a jaded British journalistc.u.mMI-5 freelancer named Fowler told him about a jar of poisoned cold cream one of Castro's mistresses was supposed to put in his mouth while he was sleeping, and on the Laotian side of the Vietnamese border, a Hmong warlord told him about a seash.e.l.l packed with C4 that Castro was supposed to find when he went scuba diving. In a wh.o.r.ehouse outside Clark AFB, a Filipino madam of questionable gender (but unquestionable a.s.sets) told him about a ballpoint pen that was really a syringe filled with poison, and the Marine who handed his girl off to Melchior told him about a wet suit infected with some kind of toxic fungus. Perhaps the most ridiculous story of all, though, had come from Caspar: a plan to put thallium salts in El Jefe's boots, which would supposedly cause his hair to fall out (apparently the bright young things Bissell had brought in with him felt that Castro's power, like Samson's, was vested in his hair-more specifically, his beard-and a bald, bare-cheeked leader would lose his hypnotic hold over the people). Caspar'd told this story at a bar a few miles outside of the Atsugi Naval Air Facility on the east coast of j.a.pan; Melchior had flown there for the sole purpose of having a drink with him before he went into deep cover, and he was inclined to put the story up to their third or nineteenth bottle of saki. But the wet stains splattered all over the back of his s.h.i.+rt suggested that Caspar'd been telling the truth. That all the stories were true. The Company hadn't just lost the thread, it had lost its head. All due respect to Pablo, of course.

The fact that these rumors seemed to be true lent credence to other things he'd heard about during his time away. Namely that Technical Services, under the leaders.h.i.+p of its clubfooted, folk-dancing Jewish genius, Sidney Gottlieb, had all but superseded the Directorate of Plans as CIA's paramount division and was pus.h.i.+ng an ever greater reliance on technology over manpower-everything from wiretaps to U-2 stratoflights to crazy drug experiments designed to create truth serums and knockout drops, with, apparently, exploding cigars and poison pens and who knew what other James Bond type of stuff thrown in for good measure.

Melchior couldn't help but think that none of this would've happened if Frank Wisdom, the man whom Bissell and Gottlieb had made redundant, were still around. The man who, with the help of James Forrestal, the nation's first secretary of Defense, built CIA out of the remnants of the wartime OSS and pretty much single-handedly founded the concept of covert ops. The man who led the fight against Communist expansion in France, Italy, and the Ukraine (two out of three seemed like a pretty good win-loss record in that department, especially given which two they'd won), in Korea, Persia, and Guatemala (ditto the two-out-of-three stat, and they'd only lost half of Korea anyway). The man who recruited Melchior and Caspar out of that orphanage in Dallas almost exactly twenty years ago, anointing them the first of his Wiz Kids. Twenty years later, they were the last of the Wise Men. The Wiz himself had been out since '58. Not officially retired, no, but sidelined. There were rumors of a breakdown, time in a sanatorium, shock treatments. The last Melchior heard, he was stationed in London. For a man who'd spent his whole life fighting Communism in Eastern Europe, Central America, the Middle East, and beyond, cold, gray Westminster must've seemed like a fate worse than death.

Well, it wasn't as cold and gray as Moscow. Caspar could've told you that.

Just then he broke through the clouds. Immediately he snapped into focus. He could see a few twinkling lights in the distance, judged the nearest to be at least three miles away. The area directly beneath him, however, was a dense black void. It could've been open water or a cane field or ...

"Aw, s.h.i.+t."

Melchior jerked his feet up as the jagged outlines of forest canopy suddenly came into view. Pablo'd dropped them directly over the G.o.dd.a.m.ned Zapata Swamp. He tried to steer clear but ran out of airs.p.a.ce way too soon. His right ankle slammed against a branch and he whirled around in an explosion of pain. He did his best to shelter the volatile cargo in his backpack even as branches pounded his legs, ribs, arms, head. A sudden jerk and then a long tear as the chute tangled in the branches. Something smacked him right in the kisser, something else slammed into his gut, and his descent came to a sudden, stomach-churning stop.

He hung there for a moment until he could breathe, then opened his mouth, let a thin stream of blood and saliva fall to the ground. A faint splat reached his ears about two seconds later, meaning he was about twenty feet up. He flexed his throbbing right ankle. It didn't seem to be broken, but even so. This wasn't gonna be fun.

He was reaching for his knife to cut himself free when he heard a rustle, grabbed his light instead. A pair of green eyes glared up at him, but it took a couple of seconds to discern the outline of the full beast. Some crocodile-looking critter, jaws wide open like a toothy funnel, as though all it were doing was drinking the drizzle still falling from the sky. It was only seven or eight feet from nose to tail-an iguana compared to the behemoths he'd seen in the Congo-and it seemed to be alone, as well, but Melchior wasn't in the mood to mess around. Although it occurred to him to light one of the cigars and drop it in the croc's mouth, he pulled his sidearm out instead, sighted between the twinkling orbs of its eyes, squeezed the trigger. The croc collapsed like a punctured tire. Melchior waited thirty seconds to see if anything else came running, then used his knife to sever the strings of his chute one at a time, slipping and jerking his way downward. When he was about six feet off the ground, he unbuckled his harness and dropped right on the croc's back. He took most of the weight on his left leg, but his right still screamed with pain. If he got out of this p.i.s.sant country alive-never mind if this c.o.c.keyed plan came off-he vowed to put his throbbing foot all the way up Richard Bissell's pasty white a.s.s. He'd save the cigars for Sidney Gottlieb.

He figured the shot would bring the others to him, so he sat down on the dead croc, took off his right boot, reached for one of the rolled strips of fabric he always carried with him. It had been one of the Wiz's first field lessons all those years ago. Flat ribbon was more compact than a similar length of rope, and more versatile too: you could use it to bind wounds as well as wrists, write ciphered messages, or rappel out a third-floor window. Sturgis found him before he'd finished wrapping his ankle. One of the exiles-Garcia, it turned out-came in about five minutes after, but there was no sign of Robertson or Lopez or Donny.

They found Robertson hiding in the low branches of a mangrove, a half dozen empty candy wrappers littering the base, which smelled strongly of urine. They found Lopez a half hour later. He'd broken his wrist in the landing but was otherwise okay. Melchior set it with a pair of sticks and a couple yards of fabric, and then they spent another two hours combing the swamp before they finally found Donny-or what was left of him, which was mostly the smell of his cologne. He'd drifted two miles east of the drop point. Whether he'd landed in a nest of crocs or they'd simply come across his dead body (Sturgis joked that the weight of all those names was too much for his parachute to carry) was anybody's guess.

"Guess it's only fair," Sturgis said, leering at Melchior. "We killed one-a them, they get to kill one of us."

"But we didn't eat eat it," Robertson said, his protest reeking of Spam and nougat. it," Robertson said, his protest reeking of Spam and nougat.

"Surprised they managed to keep him down," Sturgis said, "what with that nasty-a.s.s perfume he wears. So, Poco?" He turned to Melchior. "You think it's about time you let us in on the plan?"

Melchior looked at Sturgis, who was trying to work Donny's crucifix free from what remained of his head and neck. Even so, there was more of him left than Pablo.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

Sturgis gave up and just snapped the chain. He rinsed the gore off in a puddle of swamp water and dropped it in his pocket. When he stood up, his rifle was hanging loosely off his shoulder, the snout pointing directly at Melchior.

"Try me."

Melchior combined what he knew with what he surmised, presented it all as though he'd been in on everything from the beginning. Bad enough that he was the Company representative for such a stupid plan; no need for him to look like a patsy as well.

What he knew for sure was that before the revolution Donny had worked in the Sans Souci with a man whose wife's sister or daughter or cousin was a chorus girl turned housekeeper, now employed in Castro's private offices off the Plaza de la Revolucion. What he surmised was that the housekeeper had agreed to add one of the Company's exploding cigars to the box on Castro's desk, presumably in exchange for payment, or else because the Company had something on her. Castro's love of a good cigar was well known, as was the fact that the box in his office always contained a representative selection from the island's top growers: Diplomatico, Bolivar, La Gloria Cubana, and of course Montecristo, which was the name on the band Sidney Gottlieb's whitecoats in TSS had wrapped around their boom-boom sticks. When Sturgis asked him how powerful the explosive was, an image of Pablo's headless torso flashed in Melchior's mind.

"Let's just say the housekeeper should be working below the belt by the time Castro's on his third or fourth puff. And she shouldn't use too much hairspray that day."

"Ha!" Robertson burped. "That shouldn't be a problem! I bet they don't even got got hairspray in Cuba no more!" hairspray in Cuba no more!"

The real problem, of course, was that Donny didn't have arms and legs arms and legs no more, so it was going to be a little hard for him to deliver the cigars to the housekeeper, and G.o.d forbid no more, so it was going to be a little hard for him to deliver the cigars to the housekeeper, and G.o.d forbid one other member one other member of the team should've known her name. Welcome to the new CIA. Streamlined and simplified. Apparently the endangered Cuban crocodile hadn't been let in on the new bureaucratic structure. of the team should've known her name. Welcome to the new CIA. Streamlined and simplified. Apparently the endangered Cuban crocodile hadn't been let in on the new bureaucratic structure.

Once they made it to Havana, Garcia and Lopez tried bribing random female members of the Ministerio's housekeeping staff, which got Garcia arrested the second day and shot, as far as they could figure, sometime on the third. Then Robertson took half a dozen of the cigars to the Mexican emba.s.sy. First he tried to reach Howard Hunt at the Mexican field office, and then he tried to convince the Mexican Amba.s.sador to Cuba to present them to Castro as a gift, which got him him deported the fourth day. On the evening of the fifth day, after Garcia's execution had been announced in the papers under the headline deported the fourth day. On the evening of the fifth day, after Garcia's execution had been announced in the papers under the headline TRAITOR TO THE REVOLUTION BROUGHT TO JUSTICE TRAITOR TO THE REVOLUTION BROUGHT TO JUSTICE, Lopez got so drunk that he smoked one of the cigars himself, or at least that's what Sturgis and Melchior a.s.sumed when they found his headless, armless torso slumped in a chair, the fingers of his left hand still wrapped around the neck of a bottle of Cuban rum. At that point, Sturgis just bolted, which left Melchior by himself, nothing but a half-full box of exploding cigars for company, along with a little rum still left in the bottle in Lopez's hand.

Three days later, as he was leaving a wh.o.r.ehouse in Barrio Chino, he pa.s.sed a couple of police officers on their way in, one fat and dopey looking, the other more solid, and scowling.

"You smell like s.h.i.+t, my friend," the fat policia policia said genially enough. "What were you doing, f.u.c.king your girl up the a.s.s?" said genially enough. "What were you doing, f.u.c.king your girl up the a.s.s?"

In fact, Melchior had had penetrated Rosita a.n.a.lly. Another of the Wiz's field lessons: the Company only provided one condom per man per mission, but b.a.s.t.a.r.d children, whether fathered on a Cuban prost.i.tute or a field slave like the one the Wiz's grandfather had owned, always came back to haunt you, so one had to improvise. And besides, Melchior'd doubled the girl's rate, so as far as he was concerned, he'd paid for any inconvenience. penetrated Rosita a.n.a.lly. Another of the Wiz's field lessons: the Company only provided one condom per man per mission, but b.a.s.t.a.r.d children, whether fathered on a Cuban prost.i.tute or a field slave like the one the Wiz's grandfather had owned, always came back to haunt you, so one had to improvise. And besides, Melchior'd doubled the girl's rate, so as far as he was concerned, he'd paid for any inconvenience.

Nevertheless, the two policias policias reminded him a little too much of Robertson and Sturgis, and he was half blind on rum to boot: before he knew what he was doing, he'd kicked the fat reminded him a little too much of Robertson and Sturgis, and he was half blind on rum to boot: before he knew what he was doing, he'd kicked the fat policia policia's nuts through the roof of his mouth. Over the course of the next fifty years, he would realize that that single action, more than anything since the day the Wiz picked him and Caspar out of the orphanage, set him on his destiny.

He turned to go for the second policia policia, only to find a Makarov trained on him.

"I would much rather give one of these ladies an evening of pleasure then take you to the station. So please. Give me an excuse to pull the trigger."

Melchior looked up from the stubby, rust-flecked pistol to the policia policia's piggy little eyes. All four of them. Really, the resemblance to Sturgis was uncanny.

Even s.h.i.+t-faced, he had enough self-awareness to know that his smile wasn't the kind of smile that set other people at ease.

He smiled anyway.

"I'm sure we're all reasonable men," he said. "Why don't we discuss this over a nice cigar?"

Project Eurydice

It hit her as she pa.s.sed through the muted spotlight over the inner door: not just the heat, the smoke, the urgent murmur of voices. The need need. Though no one actually stopped what he or she was doing to inspect her entrance, she still felt her presence sizzle through the room like an electric current. Felt the sidelong glances and equally circ.u.mspect feelings that accompanied them, that ineffable combination of l.u.s.t and derogation on the part of the men, sympathy and jealousy on the part of the women.

The emotional miasma swirled around her as palpably as the smoke. Against its press, all she could do was fasten her eyes on the bar and forge ahead. Fifteen steps, she told herself, that's all you have to take. And then you can reward yourself with a nice tall gla.s.s of gin.

The men looked at her openly now, their stares as tangible as the sweaty hand of a soused uncle at a wedding reception. Barely five feet, four inches in heels, Naz was inches shorter than the rangy la.s.ses scattered around bar stools and tables, but there was something oversized about her presence. Her pearl-gray dress directed their attention to her hips, her waist, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s-her cleavage-but it was her face that held them. Her mouth, its fullness made even more striking by lipstick the color of a darkened rose; her eyes, as large and dark as walnuts. And of course her hair, a ma.s.s of inky black waves that sucked up what little light there was in the smoky room and radiated it back in oily rainbows. Or who knows, maybe it was just her nose, which had more length than any native-born woman could carry off, let alone work to her advantage. It would be thirty or forty years before anyone in the room would recognize the faint dimple in her left nostril as the mark left behind by a nose ring, ceremonially administered on her thirteenth birthday, and removed less than a year later when Uncle Kermit put her on a plane to the States carrying a single suitcase equipped with a false bottom into which the remnants of her mother's jewels had been stuffed. Even without that tidbit of knowledge, everyone in the bar could see the newcomer was foreign. Exotic. If it was a husband she wanted, a boyfriend, some kind of lasting connection, she wouldn't have stood a chance. She was too strange. But strangeness was a virtue in her line of work and, well, no one came to the Firelight for a lasting connection.

The women noticed her too, of course. Their stares were as hard as the men's but significantly less friendly. They recognized her for the threat she was. It was Tuesday, after all. Business was slow.

"Hendrick's and tonic?" The bartender was already setting a chilled Collins gla.s.s on the bar. "Easy on the tonic?"

The man's voice and face were professionally neutral, but Naz could feel the pity behind them, knew just what he thought of her. Knew too that it didn't prevent him from wanting her, like all the other men in the room.

"A slice of cuc.u.mber, please," Naz answered. "I haven't eaten anything all day."

She tried not to gulp her drink as she perched on the bar stool and turned halfway out. Not quite facing the room-that would read as too obvious, too desperate-but not quite facing the bar either. The perfect angle to be looked at yet not seem to be looking back.

She brought her gla.s.s to her lips, was surprised to find it empty. That was quick, even for her.

"Another?" The bartender was already there, his voice a bit bolder, the heat of his desire a degree warmer. Naz knew it would happen one day. It always did, and then she would have to find another bar.

"May I get this one?"

She turned rapidly on her stool. A young man was sitting next to her. She wasn't sure if he'd been there the whole time or if he'd sat down after she arrived. He was tall and taut as a ripcord on a parachute, affected a broad-brimmed fedora that he pulled low on his forehead despite the heat and the dimness of the bar. Naz noted that it was an expensive-looking suit, probably bespoke-Saville Row, she guessed, acquired during his postcollegiate European tour. Cartier watch, matching silver cuff links. So he was a rich boy, which automatically set him apart from everyone else in the bar, as did the fact that he radiated none of the s.e.xual energy everyone else here did. But his smooth-skinned, shadowed face, though slightly smug, was honest looking. All Naz felt was curiosity and a slight sense of ... of mischief almost. No malevolence. No l.u.s.t. But still. A free drink was a drink.

"Thank you." She tried not to clutch the drink. "My name is Joan."

"Really?" The boy's mischievous grin widened. "I thought it was Nazanin. Nazanin Haverman."

Naz's blood went as cold as the drink in her hands. The drink. She looked at it a moment, then drained it in a gulp.

"Easy there, Miss Haverman. I'd rather not have to carry you out of here."

"Pardon me, but I think there's some kind of mistake. My name is Joan."

"Really? Joan what?"

Naz's eyes darted around the bar. No one ever asked for a last name. She caught a glimpse of her panicked face in the mirror over the bar. "Mir-ren," she stuttered. "Joan Mirren."

The boy looked at the mirror a moment, then back at her. "Nice save, Miss Haverman. Now," he went on, "I can show you my identification in here, or I can save you the embarra.s.sment and you can walk outside with me."

Naz realized she was still clutching her gla.s.s like a lifeline. She thought of throwing it at him, running, but knew she wouldn't get anywhere. Not in these shoes, this skirt. Not after two gin and tonics. And there was still no sense of malice coming from the boy, nor the kind of contempt she'd encountered during her one or two run-ins with Vice. Indeed, she almost thought she sensed compa.s.sion.

Straightening her back, she offered him her widest smile. She would s.n.a.t.c.h what victory she could from this disaster. "Put your hand on the small of my back as we walk out," she said. "So it looks convincing."

As the boy followed her out, he said, "If I wanted to be convincing, my hand wouldn't stop at the small of your back."

"If you want to keep your fingers," she said, "they won't go any lower."

Once they were outside, she quickened her step a half pace to dislodge his hand from her body. They walked a block in silence to the edge of a small park. The air was brisk and cleared her head a bit, even as the alcohol calmed her nerves and dulled her senses. I can handle this child, she told herself. Everything will be just fine.

The boy motioned through the gates. The gesture was diffident, almost abashed, and part of her wondered if he'd ever been unchaperoned in the company of a female.

She shook her head. "Let's see that ID."

The boy grinned again, reached inside his jacket. Naz saw the Henry Poole label and congratulated herself for guessing his suit's origins, then chided herself for losing focus. He brought out a slim wallet and flicked it open. Instead of a badge, she saw a simple white identification card. His employer's name had been printed in full, and she had to squint to read the tiny letters in the faint light.

She looked up at him. "Do you really expect me to believe this?"

The boy shrugged, as if acknowledging the incongruity of someone as young and innocent looking as him belonging to such an organization. As he slipped his wallet back inside his suit, he said, "Do you remember a man by the name of Kermit Roosevelt?"

Naz's eyebrows rose. Uncle Kermit had been one of her father's closest friends and business a.s.sociates in Tehran, had dined with the family at least once a month.

"Mr. Roosevelt was, as they say, our man in Tehran, and your father, owing to his lifelong residence in Persia, was one of his most valuable a.s.sets."

Naz smirked, but it was an act. This boy wasn't lying. She could tell by the awe in his voice, as much as any sense of his emotions.

"My father was a British citizen. Why would he work for the Central, the Central ..." She couldn't bring herself to say it aloud; the idea of her father as a spy was just too absurd. "Why would he work for the United States rather than the English?"

"Like many British nationals living abroad, your father admired everything about his fellow tribesmen save their country itself. As proof," he said in a slightly louder voice, "I offer the simple fact that he sent you here when the fighting broke out, when it would have been just as easy to send you to England."

Naz was silent a moment. Then, almost against her will: "Have you ... do you know what happened to him? Or to my ..." Her voice broke off.

She felt a wave of compa.s.sion from the boy, but it was detached, almost intellectual: he kept his hands in his pockets rather than putting one on her shoulder.

"I was still in prep school when the counterrevolution occurred."

"So was I."

The boy winced. "I know that your time in this country hasn't been easy, Miss Haverman. Your adolescence was plagued by emotional problems. Depression, anger, and, ah, s.e.xual precocity."