style="font-size:15px;"> He managed to catch her in the cafeteria by making three trips there his second morning back. He was supposed to be reading targeting pubs, getting up to speed on the flashiest way of using Peacemaker. He was a speed reader, very good and very smart, if he did say so himself; he could spare the time to chase this wonderful-looking woman. And, the third time was the charm: there she was, in the same chair by the window. This time she was wearing a dress and looking like a businesswoman. Even more terrific.
“Mind if I join you?” he said. “I’m Ray Suter.”
She sort of smiled, but also looked a little pained.
“I’m a little lost, and I could use some sympathy. I’m new here.”
“Sure, sit.”
She was not an easy piece of work. Her eyes were amused by him, not charmed. She also had an innate toughness that surprised him; it hadn’t been evident on Friday. Maybe it had been the T-shirt, the suggestion of somebody young and naive.
“I thought you were one of the computer kids,” he said, trying to sound like a man who was embarrassed by some small stupidity. “I noticed you Friday.”
“Friday’s Casual Day in my place,” she said. “Today we’re just regular people. I gotta go.” She was on her feet, tossing her Styrofoam cup into a plastic receptacle.
“I’ll see you again,” he said. He stood.
“Probably.” She looked him up and down, still not charmed. A very tough woman inside that softness. But she smiled. “It’s a small place,” she said.
That afternoon, he called up her personnel file on his computer. He could do that because of Shreed’s influence with Touhey. He had access to everything. Almost the first thing he saw on her file was that she was married to Alan Craik.
His first response was that it was a real kick in the ass. The second was that something might be made of it. After all, taking Craik’s wife to bed would be killing two birds with one stone.
But it would take time. Well, he had time. Launch was still five months away.
IVI.
Rose loved the work at IVI. She was surprised. Desk jobs were usually a pain in the ass, something to be got through because the detailer said it was good for your career, but this one was both exciting and demanding. Two or three days a week, she was on the road, either visiting the contractors or hitting offices in the Navy department. She was going to be launch officer on a ship, and she didn’t know zip about ships, except what you had to know to land a chopper on one. More visits, more reading. She set herself up for a week’s cruise on a survey ship of the kind they would be using.
Alan was living in a short-term rental house in Falls Church, with Mikey and the dog. He hadn’t sold the Norfolk house yet and fussed about it—somewhat childishly, she thought. She missed him, but when the chance came to go to Houston to watch a missile launch from Mission Control, she went and lost a weekend with him. And Mikey. And the dog. She was pregnant but made little of it yet. In a few months, she told herself. When, at an IVI planning meeting, Touhey had talked about moving the test launch date up, she had found herself regretting the pregnancy. What if she had to take childbirth leave and they brought in somebody else and that’s when the launch went? Then, guiltily, she scolded herself. Where are your priorities?
East Africa.
O’Neill was getting the hang of it pretty well. Prior had told him so. Prior was fairly generous with compliments, actually, applying some version of the pop psychology the Agency rented from its consultants—” Motivate Your Subordinates,” “Catch More Flies with Sugar,” “The Four Steps to Excellence.” Or was it five? Or three? Mostly, what he said was, “God, at least you’re better than MacPherson!”
MacPherson fucked every female agent he could get close to and some of the men, I really believe it, Prior had told him. He had no more idea of how to behave than my golden lab. And the files and the stories around the embassy showed that, indeed, MacPherson had been one of God’s great fuckups, a possibly unique creation. Worst of all, he had let sex come into everything, which was not morally wrong but was, in O’Neill’s view, a mistake because sex was too powerful to use; it ended up using you. He would never make that mistake, he was sure.
O’Neill had a tiny house on the mountain slope outside Arusha, but he was seldom there. He also had an office in Arusha, but he was seldom there, either. The office ran itself, thanks to three female in-country employees who were vetted yearly out of Dar. Mostly, O’Neill was on the road, touting the wonders of capitalism and making contacts, but really driving, driving the roads to work out surveillance routes and trying to apply the lessons of the Ranch. The lessons were a bad joke in Africa, having been designed for cities and developed countries, the Ranch’s idea of the terrain of espionage being the shopping center and the parking garage and the supermarket. Now, O’Neill drove hundreds of miles, trying to establish routes from here to—where? That tree? This village without a telephone? That abandoned cement factory? This overgrown sisal field?
Thus, the Rotary Clubs and the Chambers of Commerce and above all the colleges and schools became major waypoints. His excuse for going there was his canned pep talk on Africa and the Free Market Economy. He thought of it as the Flea Market Economy but didn’t say so. He was a good speaker, and educated Africans in particular took to him because he reminded them either of their own days on an American campus or their days in England. English education was still the ideal, and Cambridge O levels, although abandoned in England, were revered here, and O’Neill, with his good clothes and his manners and his cultured voice, was very like those African academics who were more British than the British. They wore dark suits and had morning and afternoon tea in the Common Room, brought round by tea ladies pushing metal tea carts. Like academics everywhere, these were suckers for flattery and money, and the two in combination got him a lot of likely recruits. The trouble was, would they know anything worth squat or would they just want to spout off?
Mostly, they were merely excuses for trying to lay out detailed routes.
He had a five-year-old Toyota LandCruiser. Most of his travel was in the north and east of the country, where the modern economic activity was, but he made reasons to go west to the shore of Lake Tanganyika and up to Bikuba, where there were signs of military presence, because he knew that Rwanda was going to be big, no matter how cautious Prior was. He was also going nuts from the frustration of doing nothing important. On weekends, he came back to Arusha and sat in his nearly empty house. He wrote letters to Alan Craik full of up-to-date, inside stuff and sent them in the diplomatic bag. He reviewed the old files left by his woeful predecessor and the far better man before him, Hammer, who had set up the networks that MacPherson trashed.
He knew that there should be survivors out there who could be wooed back. To get the files, he had to drive to Dar, sign the files out, drive them to Arusha, read them, and drive them back and sign them in before his workday started on Monday. When he pointed out that the files could be sent via e-mail because Tanzania had no means of monitoring transmission, Prior told him that the official Agency position was that e-mail is not secure.
O’Neill selected what he saw as Hammer’s best three agents in Rwanda.
When he next went west, he left a sign at three places, and then he waited.
One agent was dead. One was terrified, living under a new name in Zambia. The third would respond.
