NCIS goon walk in on them. No, it wouldn’t. It would be the end of everything. Carl, he knew, was his only chance to make it big.
“One aircraft,” he said. “One aircraft, you might get away with it. Some of these hotshots, they’ll lie when they test the IFF, because they don’t want to scrub. Especially a real mission. Some of these guys piss themselves they’re so hot to go. Like—” He was thinking fast. “The skipper of the A-6 squadron. A fucking kamikaze. He wouldn’t abort if the wings fell off his fucking aircraft.” He shifted, began to get interested. “And if it was only one, see, they wouldn’t trace it back to whoever put the codes in. A whole squadron, Christ, they’d know in three seconds it had to be something like the IFF, even if you could get around the test run. They’d put every sonofabitch who has access to the aircraft on a polygraph. Or they wouldn’t even have to. They got us all on lists, computers. Big Brother is watching.”
“Can you do it?”
“Me! Get some other sucker.” Bonner folded his arms. “That’s not my specialty. I’ve never done stuff.”
“Can’t you do it?” Carl’s voice was soft and pleading, almost feminine. “Sheldon, I need you to do it. Only this once.”
Bonner started to whine again. “I’d have to find out which plane he’s gonna fly, and that can be tricky; then I gotta get at the plane, but I gotta nick the gun that inserts the codes and reset it. It’s too much!”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“I’m not a saboteur! I’m a—a—” He shrank into himself. “Specialist.”
“I need you to do this for me, Sheldon. For both of us. The Iranians will be charmed to shoot down the CO of an attack squadron. They will love us! We will have years and years with them, Shel.”
“I need more money.”
Carl frowned. “I might get you thirty-five. I can try. I promise I will try.”
“That’s it? Tops?”
Carl nodded.
Actually, thirty-five was more than he’d dared think about. He owed about fifteen. Still, it would be a horrible effort. His gut would be a mess until it was over. He continued to object. “You’d have to get the frequency to me. So I’d know what to set in the plane. I’d try to give you the target. The timing’s all wrong.”
“I’ll have a frequency for you when you put into Mombasa. Then you should know the rest by the time you reach Bahrain.”
“What if we make the hit before we get to Bahrain?”
“We’ll take that chance. These people understand that such a thing is not easy. They have a good idea what the potential targets are, anyway.”
“I oughta get my money either way.”
“That is understood. I think there will be a bonus for a confirmed kill. Yes, I think it is a very good idea, this one. They will be able to test their system and the Navy will have no idea it has happened. Then, the next time—” He fluttered his fingers in the air like disintegrating aircraft.
Bonner felt sweat trickling down his ribs. “I’ll be shitting bricks until it’s over,” he said.
“Yes, but when it’s over, think how good you’ll feel. Money, Sheldon!”
They spent some time talking over the details, and the longer they talked, the more familiar it seemed to Bonner, therefore the more workable. This was a trick he would have to play on himself, making it familiar, so that after a few days he would not come to with a start and remember that he was going to do this thing, feeling his colon lurch. Actually, even now, once he got a little used to it and the chill of fear had passed, he liked the planning, and he liked sitting here with this important man, who had been a big gun in Moscow and now was going to be a big gun in Tehran. He liked being wanted. And he liked the money.
“How is your son?” Carl said when they were done.
“Good. He writes, like, once a month.”
“He is still in the satellite communications school?”
“Yeah. Four months, he comes out, he’s an E5, one bump down from his old man.”
“Tehran are very interested in him. They are mad for communications technology. You will speak to him?”
“The time isn’t right. When it’s right, I will.”
“Maybe, the slow approach, Sheldon—little by little—”
“Don’t tell me how to handle my own son! I’ll do it. In my time! He’ll come around. I gotta put it to him just right—father and son, doing it together. He’s very idealistic. He doesn’t know I do this, I’ve told you that. I’ll bring him around, but—Just don’t tell me how to handle my own son.”
“Well—Of course. It is a wise father who knows his child—eh?”
They walked up the hill to the car. Carl told him a taxi was waiting for him around the next curve.
They did not touch. Carl put on sunglasses, as if he were withdrawing his personality. “You must bring your son in, Sheldon. It will be worth—lots of money. Eh?”
The car pulled away, and Bonner was left feeling suddenly isolated on that sunny stretch of road, with the city close by but somehow unreal, as if it was unpopulated, as if he was the only man on earth. He had no idea how close he had come to dying.
He walked up the hill, sweating again, and found the taxi. On the back seat was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Bonner went back to his hotel and turned on the television and began to drink. It was only early afternoon, but he was content to sit there, watching the bright colors, hearing the language he did not understand, a man more comfortable with his loneliness than with any other companion the teeming city could offer.
He began to plan how he would turn his son into a spy.
1615 Zulu. Moscow.
Ouspenskaya slipped into the Director’s office after a single knock. The receptionist was gone, the building quiet except for the duty crews on the second floor, and here and there some manager like the Director plugging away. He knew she was coming.
“Well? What is urgent?” His cold was worse.
“Efremov.”
“Yes?”
She sat down. Her hands were trembling. She was truly wretched, for something monstrous had obtruded into this place, this idea she had of Moscow and being Russian, as if an obscene animal had dragged its slime across her foot. “Five days ago, a gang attacked an office in the Stitkin Building here in Moscow. Twenty-nine dead.”
“I remember.” He guessed at once; his voice showed it.
“The office was Efremov’s latest front operation.
