THE FALCONER’S TALE

Gordon Kent

THE FALCONER’S TALE

To those who didn’t cross the line

Contents

Half Title Title Page Dedication Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Epilogue By Gordon Kent Copyright About the Publisher

1

A steady, cold rain fell from low clouds on the naked rock of the hillsides and became white waterfalls plummeting to the coarse grass below, soaking the thin soil and filling the streams and rivers.

Piat had walked up the valley from the road at Horgsa without wetting his feet, but the stream between his legs now roared. Where he stood to cast on a tongue of gravel, the water rose around his ankles and then his shins, pushing heavily against him. The river came down the mountain behind his left shoulder and curved in front of him before running into a long, slow, deep pool forty meters long, and from there falling away into a canyon.

His hands were slick and nearly numb on the cork grip of his rod, and when he raised his arm to flick another cast over the river, more water ran down from his wrist to his armpit, soaking his old wool sweater.

After a long, slow retrieve, he cast again, then pulled the line with his rod just as the fly struck the water so that it moved an inch on the surface before sinking. A sea trout struck just after Piat thought he had missed again, the pull before the first leap sending a shock down the rod to Piat’s wet hands. Then the fish jumped again, three quick jumps, pulling line off the reel after each one, and then ran away upriver.

Piat, burning with adrenaline, steadied himself by replanting his feet. One of his wellies filled with water. The big trout took almost a hundred feet of line in a continuous stream from Piat’s reel, and then the weight on the line changed. Piat’s first thought was that the fish was gone—a fraction of a second’s pressure on the rod, and then he could tell that the fish had changed direction, running in at him and his submerged gravel beach. Piat began to reel up as quickly as he could. His reel was too small, too light for this kind of action, but he knew what he was doing, and he pulled line and reeled up and raised his rod as high as he could, risking his footing in the rising stream and filling his other boot with a considered advance into the deepening water.

The fish leaped again and then again, the leaps shorter, farther apart, and Piat caught up with the line on the reel and started to use the rod to work the fish. It felt his first real effort at control and reacted like an unbroken horse, fighting the rod with a new series of short jumps and fast pulls that served only to tire it faster. Piat had time now, and he ratcheted up the drag on his reel to make the fish’s task of taking line off all the more difficult. He took his first careful shuffles toward the safety of the bank. He was in too deep, and when his heel caught on a rock in the gravel, he almost went down—he turned his head, caught his balance, and the fish was moving again, this time toward two straggling weed beds to his right. He tried to turn it, using the strength of the rod and the line against the fish, but even now the fish was too strong.

Piat took a long, gliding step up the bank, his filled boots clumsy. With his feet planted, he risked a strong pull and turned the fish. The sea trout leaped once more, its silver length flashing across the low gray clouds.

He didn’t have a net, and it took him more time to get the fish up on the gravel above the water line. The trout was a little smaller than he had thought; the poetic clarity of its last leap had suggested a much larger fish, but he wrestled it under his arm and hit its head with his knife handle. It thrashed, and he hit it again until it was dead.

Only after he had its guts out and his hands and knife clean did he take off his socks and wring them out. He had nothing to dry the insides of his boots, so he dumped out the water and the gravel, used the socks to towel his feet and the insides of the wellies, and wrung them out again before pulling a dry pair from his pack. The change was immediate—even rammed back into wet rubber boots, his feet were warm.

The rain slowed. He poured himself a celebratory cup of coffee from the thermos in his pack and admired the fish, now lying on a patch of grass.

While he sipped his coffee, the rain stopped altogether and the low cloud blew off down the river valley toward the sea. In a minute, the vanishing curtain of rain and cloud revealed the vast landscape of the valley and the rise of mountains beyond. Before his coffee was gone, he could see for miles across the river, the mountains high and snow-capped to his left and the river valley descending in deep-cut canyons to his right until it vanished a mile away where it crossed the road to town. He was content. A rare feeling for him.

He poured a second cup of coffee and watched a distant falcon soaring above the river. A flicker of color on the most distant hillside caught his eye and he glanced up to see one of Iceland’s many buses stopped on the high road above him, hardly more than a white dot amidst a tumble of rock. It was well over a mile away. A ray of cold yellow sun flashed off the windscreen; it must have been that that had diverted him from the falcon. Even without binoculars, he could see a passenger get off, and paranoia made him suspicious—there was nothing to get off the bus for out here except fishing. Perhaps serious rock climbing.

He went back to his study of the falcon, finished his coffee and changed his fly. His hands were warmer and more nimble after holding the coffee. He smiled when he saw the fish on the grass, considered bagging the rest of his fishing and going back down the valley to his room, but he had paid the last of his diminishing supply of cash for three days’ fishing on this river and he didn’t want to waste it, although this first fish satisfied his need. He had caught a good fish.

He wished he had waders. He looked at the river, now moving with considerable speed, still beautifully clear despite the press of water.

I need waders, he thought. But he didn’t have money for waders. And they couldn’t be bought anywhere short of Reykjavik.

He made several lackluster casts. The wind had changed and developed flaws; the combination made casting tricky. He moved to his left along the rocky shore and cast again. As his eye followed the fall of the fly, another dot of color caught his attention. The bus passenger had donned a yellow slicker and was coming down the hillside. Piat had climbed that hillside himself, and he wished the late-season hiker luck in negotiating the steep, sodden marsh that passed for a trail, with grass tussocks surrounded by ankle-twisting holes you could go into to the knee. He noted that the hiker did not have a rod.

Piat fished automatically until he focused again to discover that he had moved to a place with no weed and no wind—and no fish. The casting was easy, but to little purpose, and he reeled up and started back to the beach. The pale sun became stronger at his back. Out in the river, a fish rose noisily. Piat looked up to see the size of the ring, checked on the hiker’s progress with the same glance, and was startled by how fast the hiker was moving. He was almost down to the base of the hill, walking purposefully.

Piat went to his pack and took out binoculars. He took a careful look. Then he carefully dried the lenses with a cloth, replaced the binoculars in their case, and put them in his pack with his thermos and the fish wrapped in a plastic sack. He broke down his rod, stowed it, pocketed his reel, and started back down the valley. No one watching him would have thought him hurried or panicked.

The streams really were full, and Piat remembered having crossed four on his way up from Horgsa. He crossed the second one that he came to with trepidation; the third was running so heavily that he turned and followed it rather than crossing. He knew that the stream should bring him down the glen to Horgsa. A narrow track ran along the side, cut so deep into the turf by rivulets of water that he had to catch himself constantly to keep from falling. Patches of gravel were like rest stops. Even a few steps on solid ground felt like a holiday.

Piat pushed on, crossing a boulder field and passing over the last crest before all the land fell away to the sea three miles distant.

He did not look back.

The stream he had followed roared along to his right, sometimes close beside him and sometimes more distant as he followed the gentlest contours. He had a sense that he was too far to the east and might have a long walk on the road once he reached it, but he relished the thought of a walk on the shoulder of a paved road, no matter how narrow, and his unease was growing.

The hillside suddenly became steeper and the stream fell into falls, straight to the plain more than a hundred feet below. Piat stood at the top for several minutes, watching the falls and trying to gauge his chances of either crossing the stream above the fall or making his way down the cliff. He didn’t like either, but neither did he relish the notion of backtracking up the long hillside behind him. He felt that he was being watched.

He started down the cliff, following another deep-cut track. Luck revealed an old road that seemed to spring from nowhere and ran along a hedge of boulders for a hundred meters. Piat couldn’t imagine what conveyance could have climbed a road so steep, or how much effort it must have taken to hew the road. Just as suddenly, the road vanished into steep rock fall, but he was around the very worst of the cliff and he began to move cautiously straight down, grasping handfuls of grass at every step.

The last of the climb down took twenty minutes. When he at last reached the base of the cliff, he jumped across a feeder of the waterfall stream into the backyard of a local farmer. He crossed the yard into a farm road and walked down the hill past an old byre full of Icelandic sheep. In half a mile he was on the main road, and in fifteen minutes he was waiting at the bus stop.

Only then did he look down his back trail. Even with binoculars he couldn’t find the yellow slicker, or the man who had been wearing it—a man he had seen several times through various lenses, and never met. Nor did he wish to. He cursed the loss of his fishing.

The bus arrived on time. Piat climbed wearily aboard, paid his fare, and settled into one of the high-backed seats after placing his backpack in the rack.

He was just opening his book when a voice said, “Hello, Jerry.” It was a voice he knew, and it belonged to a man he didn’t want to see just then. Mike Dukas.

“Hello, Mike,” he said.

“Good to see you, Jerry.”

It was a day to see people he didn’t want to see. Piat had been walked, gently but firmly, from the bus to a private car, and from the car to the lobby of the Kirkjubaejarklaustur Hotel, and from thence to the bar. In the bar, a bright, modern, Nordic bar with good Norwegian wood counters and clean glasses hung from wooden racks, sat Clyde Partlow. Piat knew a great deal about Partlow, and he didn’t like him much.

“I wish I could say the same, Clyde.” Piat shook hands, not quite ready to cross the social line and refuse.

“Sun is over the yardarm, Jerry. Want a drink?” Partlow indicated the bar and the bottles with a proprietary hand that indicated that Piat could help himself—and that Partlow had complete control of the hotel.

Piat walked over to the bar, feeling his wet socks inside his wellies and the weight of the fish in the bag on his shoulder. He’d cleaned it—it’d keep for a few hours. Odd thing to worry about. He knew he was rattled—rattled by the men who had picked him up, rattled by Partlow, who looked prosperous and well groomed, rattled that they had taken him so easily. It was unlikely he was even going to eat the fish. He poured himself a stiff shot—more like two shots—of twenty-five-year-old Laphroaig. It looked to be the most expensive scotch on the bar.

Partlow raised his glass. “Old friends,” he said.

“They’re all dead,” said Piat. He drank anyway, a little more than he had intended. “Okay, cut the soft crap, Clyde. What do you want?”

“As you will, Jerry.” Partlow reached into an expensive leather bag and retrieved a file. “A project has resurfaced one of your old agents, Jerry. We’d like you to bring him in.”

Piat struggled with the scotch and the adrenaline to hide his relief. It could still be a trap—they could still arrest him or turn him over to Icelandic immigration or any number of other things. But the file looked real, and it all seemed a little elaborate for an arrest. In fact, now that his hour-long panic was beginning to subside, it had all been too elaborate for an arrest. He hit his panic with a little more scotch.

He circled to the chair that had been placed opposite Partlow, slipped his fishing bag over his shoulder to land on the floor, removed his rain jacket, and sat. “Who?”

“Not so fast, Jerry. You are aware, I think, of your status with us—nil. In fact, you are a wanted man, aren’t you? So try to keep your usual greed in check, Jerry. First, I want your agreement that you’ll go and fetch this fellow for us. Then there will be some documents to sign. Then we’ll talk about who it is.”

Piat looked at Partlow for a few seconds, and his hand holding his scotch began to shake. Piat took the plunge anyway. “If I’m a wanted man, Clyde, then you’d better arrest me, hadn’t you? Because otherwise you’ll be in defiance of an executive order about dealing with known felons, won’t you, Clyde?”

The two men glared at each other for seconds. Partlow shook his head. “Really, Jerry, you are wasting my time.”

“I’m not the one who just got kidnapped, old boy. So thanks for the scotch. I’ll be going now. I paid a mint for the fishing that Mike Dukas interrupted.” Piat rose to his feet and started to don his jacket, thinking—now we’ll see what cards he really has. Fuck, my hands are shaking.

Partlow took a deep breath, sucked in his cheeks, and blew it out in a little explosion of petulance. Rain came against the big plate glass windows in rhythmic surges. “You know, Jerry, whole years pass when I don’t see you and I almost forget how much we dislike each other.”

Piat zipped up his coat. Partlow looked sleek and well dressed, and Piat felt every pull in his sweater and every tear in his rain jacket. “I never forget, Clyde.”

Partlow shook his head. “Fine, Jerry. Fine. Point to you—I overplayed my hand. I’ll pay you handsomely to bring in this agent, and I’ll drop the line about ‘wanted felon.’ Now be a good fellow for once and sit down.”

Having scored his victory, Piat had a hard time believing it was true. The shaking in his hands didn’t improve. Much the opposite. He had to struggle to get his jacket back off—a pitiful performance that made him feel even less secure in the face of Partlow’s careful grooming and assurance.

“How much?” Piat said, reverting to his time-honored role as greedy man of action.

“Five thousand dollars. In and out. You can be done in two days.”

“Ten thousand,” Piat demanded.

Partlow shrugged as if the subject pained him. “If you must.”

“Okay. Who is it?”

Partlow took out a sheet of paper. “I think you are familiar with the terms.”

Piat read it—a standard agency document for the recruitment of agents. Piat had always been on the other side of the document before—the case officer making the recruitment. Case officers were carefully trained professional spies. Agents were their amateur helpers. Mostly riffraff and rejects. That’s me these days, Piat thought to himself.

Partlow slid over an envelope. “I was sure you’d insist on getting money in advance.”

Piat cursed under his breath, but he took the envelope and scrawled his name on the agreement.

“Excellent. Welcome back, Jerry, if only as a lowly agent. You understand confidentiality, etcetera?”

“You’ll be running me yourself, Clyde?” Piat already disliked being an agent.

“Of course not, Jerry. I run a department. A case officer will come to deal with you and your needs. He’s waiting outside until you and I are finished.”

“I smell a rat already, Clyde.”

“As you will, Jerry. Your man—Hackbutt.” Clyde made a show of checking Piat’s signature before he handed over the dossier.

“The nerd? Christ, Clyde, what do you want him for?”

“Nerd?”

“Nerd. A hopelessly antisocial geek, Clyde. Who specializes to the point of obsession.”

“I don’t think you ever used that phrase in a contact report, Jerry.”

“No, I don’t think the agency pays its officers to write reports explaining what a bunch of fucking basket cases their agents are, Clyde. Nonetheless, he’s a handling nightmare and a freak. I take it there is sudden movement in Malaysian oil futures?” Hackbutt had been a small-time informer in Malaysia. Good enough at what he did—report on the oil industry—but useless otherwise.

Partlow looked at him from under his heavy gray brows. He steepled his fingers in front of him. He was clearly trying to decide what to tell Piat. “He’s now into falconry—the birds, you know.” Partlow started in a patronizing tone. “Falconry is the use of birds for hunting—”

“Thanks, Clyde, I know what falconry is. Eddie was always into birds—I smuggled him a couple as part payment for one of his best reports. But no way am I getting from here to Jakarta and back in two days.”

“Mull.” Partlow said the word as if delivering a sentence of doom.

“Mull? Where’s Mull?” Jerry thought the name could even be local. When Icelandic names weren’t an endless chain of harsh consonants, they were often quite simple.

“Scotland, Jerry. The Isle of Mull is off the west coast of Scotland.”

“Scotland? That’s as cold as this place. He used to be cold all the time in Jakarta.” Jerry finished his scotch, rose and poured himself another. Ten thousand dollars and relief from arrest—he had a lot to celebrate. “Whatever—I’ll need a passport.”

“Absolutely not. Your case officer will walk you through immigration.”

“Christ—really? You can do that? The world has changed.”

“The gloves are off, Jerry. People in Washington have realized that we are the most powerful country in the world.”

Piat shook his head. “Most people in Washington couldn’t find their asses with both hands, Clyde. Okay. I go, I meet this guy, I set him up with—who? Same guy who’s running me? That right?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. And no doubt wait around to make sure they get cozy?”

“Absolutely not, Jerry. You set him up and go home.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Partlow had returned to sounding smug. Piat didn’t like it, or him, but the money was good.

“So no chance for a little salmon fishing here before I go?”

“Jerry, sometimes I think you are not quite sane.”

“The feeling’s mutual, Clyde. Okay, I guess that’s a no. When do you want this done?”

“There’s a military plane leaving from Keflavik in three hours. I want you on it.”

“What about my fishing equipment? My luggage?”

“I’ll see to it that it’s returned to you when your assignment is complete.”

“Be careful of my rods.” Piat looked out the window at the vividly green grass. The hotel had the largest lawn he had seen outside of Reykjavik, as if a lawn was itself something to watch on one’s holiday. He felt the weight of the fish in his bag again.

He said, “Dukas? He staying here?”

Partlow thought a long time before saying, “Yes.”

“And you’re sending me to Scotland with this case officer, right?”

Again, Partlow took his time answering. “Yes, Jerry,” he said with mock patience.

“Okay.” Piat got to his feet. “I’d like to fetch some clothes.”

“No. You can buy them en route.”

“Not outa my cash, you won’t.”

“Fine, Jerry. As you will. I’ll have your case officer take you shopping. Otherwise, we’re done?”

“Yeah.”

Partlow got to his feet, looked Piat over carefully, and then walked to the bar’s main door to the lobby. Piat followed him to the concierge desk.

“I’d like to leave something for one of the guests,” he said. He ignored the heavyset man who appeared by his elbow and crowded his personal space.

The concierge nodded. “A package, sir?”

Piat thumped his bag down on the counter. “Dukas—Mike Dukas. Not a package. A fish. See to it he gets it for dinner.”

Regrettably, the concierge said, Mister Dukas had already checked out.

Mike Dukas was sitting at a table in an airport bar that was so atmospheric it felt like a film set for the kind of movie he wouldn’t go to see. Still, he knew that the rest of the world might find it warm and comforting and sweet, or at least a relief from Scandinavian modern. The motif was Olde Englande and the beer cost six-fifty a bottle. Dukas, begrudging the money but thirsty, figured the high price was really the admission charge to the Charles Dickens Theme Park, Iceland.

Dukas had kept his khaki raincoat on but placed his waterproof hat on the table. A small puddle had formed around it. Now, he sat with his right elbow next to the hat and his lower lip pushed against the knuckles of his right hand, watching Alan Craik saunter toward him. Craik was smiling. He looked relaxed and pleased, and also, Dukas conceded, handsome in a sort of rugged, fortyish, Hollywood way. What the hell, who cared about looks, anyway? (The ravishing blonde two tables away, that’s who.)

“I think we did that pretty well,” Craik said as he slipped into a chair. He was wearing some sort of weathered corduroy sport jacket and a nubbly shirt, and he had tossed a waxed cotton coat (veddy, veddy English) over the back of his chair.

“Piat didn’t think so.”

“Not pleased to be jerked away from fishing?”

“It costs five hundred bucks a day to fish here, he told me. For salmon, anyway.”

“If you all got to the point of talking about fishing, I’d say he wasn’t too upset.”

Dukas shrugged. Craik ordered a beer. He said, “Partlow telling him what this is about, you suppose?”

“One assumes. Now if they’d just tell me what it’s about. How about you tell me what it’s about, Al?”

“I told you over the phone—if I knew, I’d tell you. All I know is Partlow was looking for Jerry Piat for an operation, and you keep up with Jerry Piat. Our part was to bring him in, period.”

“You’re trusting Clyde Partlow?”

“Not with anything important like my wallet, but yeah, as little as you and I are involved, yeah.”

Dukas drank the last of his beer and stared gloomily at the bottle. “I don’t get you helping a shit like Partlow.”

“It’s called ‘I’ll scratch your back now and you’ll owe me one.’”

“I wouldn’t want Clyde Partlow to owe me one.” Craik shrugged. Dukas gave up trying to save money and ordered another beer and then said, “This is a fine mess you’ve got us into, Stanley.” He waited for a response, got none. “Well?”

Grinning, Craik said, “You know what a working group is?”

“Mrs Luce, I am a Catholic.”

“Okay, I was at a meeting of a working group—sixty people in a big room sharing secrets. Or not sharing secrets, as the case may be. Although, with all the bullshit that’s been said since Nine-Eleven about agencies not sharing intelligence, in fact the amount of sharing that actually goes on is astonishing. Anyway, Partlow is a long-time regular at this particular working group; I’m a regular now because of my new job. When we took a break, Partlow made a beeline for me and asked me if you weren’t a friend of mine.”

“‘Oh-ho,’ you said to yourself, ‘this is suspicious.’”

“No, I said to myself, ‘Clyde Partlow is a good guy to do a favor for.’” Craik was silent for several seconds. “Now Partlow owes me one. And he owes you one—what’s wrong with that?”

“I was building up debts from assholes like Partlow when you were in Pampers.” Dukas waited while a fresh bottle of beer was put in front of him. “You’ve changed.”

“Older and wiser.”

“Where’s the Al Craik who used to say, ‘Damn the torpedoes, we’re going in without a country clearance’?”

“You know what the shelf life of a collections officer is? Short. I figure doing a favor for somebody like Partlow might give my sell-by date a little leeway.”

“I feel like I don’t know you so good anymore.”

“Yeah, you do. Same old lovable Craik, only I’ve wised up about Washington politics. Anyway, Partlow came over to me and asked about you, and I said why and so on, and he finally dropped Piat’s name like he was passing me the secret combination to Bush’s wall safe.” He slipped into a Partlow imitation, cheeks puffed, head back. “‘Might your friend Dukas know how Piat could be reached?’ So I said I’d check. And I did. And here we are.”

“Why?”

“Ah, da big question! I love da big questions! I dunno, Mike—Partlow has an operation that he wants Piat for, that’s all I could get. It’s on the up-and-up—it’s got a task number; and it’s passed the working group. It’s kosher.” He lowered his head, smiled. “But why would he want an untouchable like Piat?”

“You mean it smells.”

“N-o-o-o—”

“If it’s passed the working group, you heard it discussed.”

“Unh-unh. Discussion is general—tasks and goals. Peons like me not to know.”

“That’s sure what I call sharing information.” Dukas wiped a hand over his face. “Man, I’m tired. You at least got a night’s sleep. You know what you have to do to fly to Reykjavik from fucking Naples? Now I gotta do it in reverse. You of course feel great and look great, you bastard.”

“A healthy mind in a healthy body.”

Dukas sat looking at him, lips pushed out, eyebrows drawn together “You’re the guy who used to lecture me about honor, duty. Idealism. Now you’re running errands for one of the most political shits in the business.” He shook his head and held Craik’s eyes. “What happened to that fine rage you used to work up when other people did things for slimy reasons?”

Craik’s smile was tentative, apologetic. “My last fine rage got me a call from my detailer saying that if I didn’t can it, I wasn’t going to make captain.”

“And now you’re a captain.”

Craik nodded. The same small smile was still on his face “‘Honor, duty, idealism.’ Right.” He looked up. “But I believe you gotta pick your battles and your battlefield. And lost causes get you nowhere. Isn’t it okay to scratch the itch of my curiosity about Partlow’s wanting Piat, and maybe have Partlow owe me a favor at the same time?”

Dukas stared at his friend, then finished his second beer. Setting the bottle down carefully on its own old ring, he said, “It sure is comforting to know you’re still an idealist.”

2

Piat had never had a case officer before. Case officers are the men and women who recruit agents and then handle them—long hours of manipulation, a shoulder on which to cry, a voice when it is dark. Piat was used to being the shoulder and the voice.

“Dave’s” was not the shoulder or the voice that Piat would have chosen. Dave was clearly the man’s cover name—he didn’t always respond when the name was called. His voice was rough, assertive, yet with a surprising repertoire of high-pitched giggles and nervous laughter. He had had trouble parking his rental car. He had shown considerable resentment while walking Piat through some shopping in Oban. Piat had been tempted to start coaching him then and there.

Two hours later, Piat sat next to the man on the cafeteria deck of MV Isle of Mull and tried not to gnaw on the sore ends of how little he wanted to do this. He’d taken the money, and there wasn’t much he could do about any of it, but it smelled.

Partlow should have run him himself. They loathed each other, but Partlow was a competent case officer and would have made sure that things got done on time and under budget. Dave was so clearly a second stringer that Piat wanted to ask him what other agents he’d run—if any. It was as if, having recruited Piat, Partlow was now distancing himself from the operation. That wasn’t like Clyde. He didn’t usually let go of anything once he had it in his well-manicured hands.

Piat was sure that if he wanted to, he could ditch Dave at Craignure, the ferry terminal he’d already noted on the map of Mull. And then he’d walk. It was a tempting thought. Dave struck Piat as the type who’d order a lot of searches done by other people and spend a lot of time in cars. Piat thought it might be fun to walk away. In Piat’s experience, the way to lose Americans was to walk. It worked on Russians and Chinese, too.

He’d been paid half the money and he’d discovered that the Agency really didn’t have much on him—or had buried the evidence to protect themselves. He could probably manage a day’s fishing before he flew—

Pure fantasy. He had one passport—his own—and they’d come looking for him. Mull was an island cul-de-sac with only a couple of exits.

Ten thousand dollars for two days’ work, no matter how dirty, would get him back to Greece. If he was careful, the money would see him through the winter. By then it was possible that he would find something in the antiquities market to sell.

Because Dave had taken the window seat, Piat got up and pulled a sweater out of his bag. It was a very nice sweater—Burberry, more than a hundred pounds in Oban on the High Street. Piat had never been able to resist spending other people’s money. He had purchased a wardrobe that would last him five years—good stuff, if you liked English clothes. Piat liked anything that lasted. He pulled the sweater over his head and added the clothes to his list of positives. He could leave Partlow holding his baggage now—there was nothing in it worth as much as the clothes he had just encouraged Dave to buy for him. Scratch that thought—Piat wanted the rods back. He sat and admired his wool trousers and smiled again.

Dave didn’t even look up. He was reading The Economist with an air of self-importance that Piat longed to puncture. He shrugged internally. Why bother? Piat took out a guide to the early European Bronze Age and browsed it, trying to separate the useful facts from the clutter of drivel about prehistoric alphabets and runic stones. The early European Bronze Age was the hottest market in antiquities. Piat tried for fifteen minutes, but the book didn’t hold his attention.

Why does Partlow need me? Piat chewed the question. Hackbutt was a handling nightmare—did Partlow know that?

He looked at the cover of his book and wondered if any of the Roman authorities had commented on the world before Greece. All too damned speculative. He allowed his eyes to skim past the usual photos; a bronze breastplate, a helmet, a spectacular sword with an early flanged hilt, some badly decorated pottery. He knew all the objects. They decorated major museums. It needed a remarkable coincidence of durability, placement and luck for anything that old—the second millennium BC—to be found in northern Europe. Even to survive.

Partlow is doing something around the rules—above, below, whatever. He had to be. He’d involved Dukas—Piat went back with Dukas, not exactly as pals but with some respect. He’d involved Alan Craik. Piat didn’t love Craik but he had seen him in action. Dukas and Craik were buddies. Dukas and Partlow were not buddies at all.

And Hackbutt was into falconry—and Partlow had said right out that’s why they wanted him. Most of the Arab bigwigs were into falconry, too. No big leap of logic there.

Like speculating on what classical authority might have a bearing on the Bronze Age, speculating on Clyde Partlow’s motives from the deck of the ferry wasn’t getting Piat anywhere.

I can find a partner and a dig when I get back to Lesvos. Worst case, I’m a few thousand richer, and I have some new clothes.

Piat shrugged, this time physically. It made Dave glance up at him from his magazine. For a moment their eyes met. Piat smiled.

“I’m trying to read,” said Dave.

Piat nodded, still smiling. He started to prepare himself to meet Edgar Hackbutt, bird fancier, social outcast, and ex-agent.

Piat swung the rented Renault down into Tobermory’s main street, reminding himself to get over to the left, toward the water. The morning was brilliant, with thin, pale-blue mare’s tails high up against a darker blue sky. The tide was in, and big boats rode alongside the pier; as always when he saw them, he thought, I could live on one of those, but in fact he never would. Too much a creature of the land, or perhaps too suspicious of the predictability of a boat, too easy to find. On land, you could always get out and walk.

He drove along the waterfront, brightly painted buildings on his right, memorizing them—hardware store, chandler’s shop, bank, grocery—and then pulled up the long hill out of town and around a roundabout to the right, heading not down the island’s length but across its northern part. A sign said “Dervaig”; he followed it, passed a chain of small lakes (Mishnish Lochs, fishing, small trout—he’d pretty much memorized a tourist brochure) and, with a kind of fierce joy, drove the one-lane road that twisted and switch-backed up and down hills. He played the game of chicken that was the island’s way of dealing with two cars driving straight at each other: one would have to yield and pull into a supposedly available lay-by. Locals drove like maniacs and waved happily as they roared past; tourists either went into the lay-bys like frightened rabbits or clutched the wheel and hoped that what was happening to them was an illusion. Piat, flicking in and out of lay-bys, waving when he won, giving a thumbs-up when he didn’t, had the time of his life.

He climbed past a cemetery above Dervaig and, following a map in his head, turned left and south. Halfway down the wide glen would be a road on the right; from it, a track went still farther up and then briefly down. At its end, Dave had assured him, Hackbutt’s farm waited. Piat drove slower, head ducked so he could look out the windscreen. He’d have said that landscape didn’t interest him, but in fact, it fascinated him, only without the sentimentality that led other people to take photos and paint watercolors. He always saw possibilities—for escape, for hides, for pursuit. Here, the sheer scale of the place surprised him: this was an island, and Tobermory was almost a toy town, but out here was a breadth of horizon that reminded him of Africa. Even with the mountains. The glen was miles wide, he thought, the mountains starting as rolling slopes that careened abruptly upward and became almost vertical climbs to their summits. Strong climber could shake anybody up there. The landscape was brown and green and gray; grass, not heather; bare rock and bracken. You could walk and walk. Or run and run. If the footing is okay.

He found the road to the right and drove it more slowly; it was ancient tarmac, crumbling along the edges, potholed, hardly wider than the car. He came over a rise and almost ran into a goofy-looking runner, some old guy wearing what looked like a giant’s T-shirt that flapped around him in the crisp wind. Hardly noticing him, the runner plodded on. Piat thought, I could give you half a mile and still get there first. After another mile, the road forked and he went right. Almost there. When he had gone half a mile farther, he pulled up just short of a crest and got the car into a lay-by and stopped. “Please do not park in the lay-bys,” the tourist brochure had said. You bet.

Piat got out and spread an Ordnance Survey map on the hood, traced his route from Tobermory, found the fork, followed with his finger, and judged from the contour lines that if he walked over the crest, he’d be looking down on Hackbutt’s house. Or farm, or whatever the hell it was. His aviary, how would that be?

He had borrowed a pair of binoculars from good old Dave—Swarovskis, 10x50, nice if you didn’t have to carry them very far—and walked the hundred feet to the top of the hill. He made his way into the bracken and moved toward a rock outcrop, keeping himself out of sight of the house he’d glimpsed below, until he reached the outcrop and put his back against it and turned the binoculars on the house.

It could have been any house on the island—central doorway, two windows on each side, a chimney at one end, second storey with two dormers. The color of rich cream but probably stone under a coat of paint, possibly an old croft fixed up but more likely built in the last hundred years. At the far side of the house, clothes blew in the wind on a circular contraption with a central metal pole. Behind it, as if to tell him it was the right house, were pens and little shacks like doghouses that he took to be sheds for the birds; beside a half-collapsed metal gate, a dejected-looking black and white dog lay with its head on outstretched paws, beside it what was apparently supposed to be a doghouse made out of boxes and a tarp. The bird pens seemed to have been set out at random, the hutches put together by somebody who didn’t know which end of a hammer to hit his thumb with. That’d be Hackbutt, for sure.

Piat studied the place. He hoped to actually see Hackbutt so he’d go in with that advantage. They hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years; let the other guy feel the shock of change. Hackbutt would have an idea he was coming but wouldn’t know when: Piat had sent him a postcard with a picture of a bear on the front, a nonsense message on the back signed “Freddy.” From “ready for Freddy.” It meant “get ready;” the bear was the identifier, an old code between them. Would Hackbutt remember? Of course he would. In fact, Piat thought, he’d piss his pants.

After fifteen minutes, nobody had appeared near the house. Piat eased himself around the outcrop and walked back through the bracken to the car. He leaned on the roof and trained the binoculars around him, idling, not wanting to go down to the house yet. Apprehensive? Cold feet? He looked down the road. The goofy runner was coming back. He was making heavy going of it now, his feet coming down as if he were wearing boots, his hands too high on his chest. The too-big T-shirt blew around him. He had a beard and long, gray hair, also blowing, the effect that of some small-time wizard in a ragged white robe. Smiling, Piat put the binoculars to his eyes to enjoy this sorry sight, and when the focus snapped in, he realized with a shock that the runner was Hackbutt.

The last time he had seen Hackbutt, he’d weighed about two-thirty and had had a sidewall haircut, smooth cheeks, and eyes like two raisins in a slice of very white bread. Now, there was the beard and the long hair, and the face had been carved down to planes that made his eyes look huge; his skin was almost brown, and he had lost a lot of weight—so much that his legs looked fragile. The T-shirt, Piat realized, must be one of his own from the old days.

He still can’t run for shit, at least.

Hackbutt toiled up toward him. Piat moved around to the rear of the car and leaned back against the trunk. The runner came on, his breathing hoarse and hard, his eyes on the crest. He was going to pass Piat without looking at him, Piat knew—eye contact had always been hard for the man, confronting new people a torment. Now, as he came almost even, Piat said, “Hey, Digger.”

Hackbutt was the kind of nerd who actually did double takes. He might look like a wizard now, but inside was the same insecure fumbler. Still running, he looked aside toward Piat, looked away, then really looked back and, finally believing the evidence of his eyes, came to a stop with his mouth open and his T-shirt flapping. “Jack?” he said, breathing hard. He’d always known Piat as Jack Michaels.

“Hey, man, you look good. Putting in the miles, that’s great.” Piat was still leaning on the car. He held out his hand. “Sight for sore eyes, Digger.”

“Jeez, Jack, this is—” Hackbutt took a death grip on Piat’s hand. The guy was really strong. “I got your card, but I didn’t know when you were coming!” He grinned. “Wow, this is unbelievable!” Then they both said it was great, and unbelievable, and a long time.

“You look good, Dig. Lost some weight, haven’t you?”

“Some weight! Sixty pounds, Jack.” His breathing was getting better and he was able to stick his chest out. “Surprised?”

“Amazing.”

“Jeez, Jack, you haven’t changed. You look just the same. You look great.”

“Little older, little grayer.” He grinned at Hackbutt. Piat was surprised to find he was pleased to see him. Good old, easy old Eddie Hackbutt. “Let me run you down to the house.” That was a slip; he shouldn’t have admitted he’d already seen the house. Hackbutt, however, didn’t notice; he was too busy shaking his head and frowning.

“No, no, Irene wouldn’t like it. I can’t give in like that. Anyway, I’m just coming up on the big finish—over the hill and then I sprint to the front door.”

Piat thought that would be worth seeing. Most of his concentration, however, was on Hackbutt’s “Irene.” Partlow’s file had said nothing about a wife, had mentioned only a “companion,” name unspecified. “Keeps your nose to the grindstone, does she?”

Hackbutt’s face darkened. “No, it isn’t like that!” This was new—he’d grown a spine in fifteen years. “You’ll have to meet her.” And Hackbutt turned about and started his painful plod up the last hundred feet of the hill before his final sprint.

Piat sat behind the wheel without starting the car; he wanted to let Hackbutt get home and tell “Irene” about meeting good old Jack. The house was no more than a third of a mile away—give the man four minutes. Five, so he could get out of that T-shirt. And Piat wanted to think: he’d made a mistake. He’d thought he’d told himself that Hackbutt would be changed, but he’d thought only that he’d be more like Hackbutt—fatter, nerdier—and not that he’d have reinvented himself as a skinny, bearded exercise freak. Or been reinvented by a woman named Irene, who now took on an importance that Piat hadn’t even guessed at.

Losing my touch. Or getting rusty.

He started the engine.

Irene Girouard wore a long dress, as if she had something to hide, but otherwise she was very much in evidence. Piat thought that her first initial, I, probably summed her up, so he didn’t need the confirmation of the wallful of photographs that greeted him as soon as he was taken into the house.

“Irene’s a photographer,” Hackbutt said. His tone said, I’m crazy about Irene.

The photographs were all of Irene, taken by Irene. Irene’s left eye, Irene’s chin, Irene’s right knee, Irene’s vagina (oh, yes), Irene’s left breast in profile, full front, and close-up, emphasis on big nipple. Piat decided that the long dress wasn’t meant to hide her but to refer curiosity to the photos.

“I’m doing an installation in Paris any time now.” Her voice had a hint of something foreign. “I just need to get my shit together and then it’s go any time I say so. Hackbutt’s gathering found objects for me.”

Hackbutt smiled. “Irene’s going to be a household name.”

“These are all, mm, you?” Piat said.

“I don’t fuck around with false modesty. Yes, that’s my cunt, if that’s what you want to ask. The photos’ll be assembled on stuff we’ve found, mostly animal bones, to make a humanoid construction. I’m fastening the photos to the bones with barbed wire from an old fence he found.”

“It’s called I Sing the Body Electric,” Hackbutt said.

“Whitman,” she said.

Piat thought of saying Whitman Who? but didn’t, aware that he didn’t like the woman at all, that she was going to be a problem, and at the same time finding a woman who took pictures of her own vagina perversely interesting. She also had a big, hearty, apparently healthy laugh, as if despite all the photos she was as sane as a stone and he ought to get to know her. For the sake of saying something, for the sake of having to put up with her, he said, “Are you going to cut the parts out of the photos when you, mm, barbed-wire them to the stuff?”

“God, no, that would be so calculated!”

That was just the central hall of the house, as far as they’d got at that point. There had been introductions, a pro forma question about something to drink—they didn’t drink tea or coffee, but they had water “from the hill” and juice, source not given—and then the photos, Hackbutt saying, as if they were the reason for the visit, “These are Irene’s photographs.”

There was more of Irene throughout the house, Piat learned. Nobody picked up after him/herself, apparently, so parts of both of them were left where they fell: the living room, just to the left after you came in the front door, was thick with art magazines, falconry paraphernalia (Piat had bought a book in Glasgow, so he recognized the jesses, at least); batteries, probably used; a battery charger, plugged in but empty; a sizable number of animal bones; a plate that had held something oily. Four spindly plants in the windows, yearning for a sunnier climate. The kitchen, next behind the living room, was furnished mostly in dirty dishes, a camera, burned-down candles. Piat, himself scrupulously neat, wondered if he’d dare to eat anything that came out of it. On the right of the central hall were, first, a small bedroom (“You’re going to stay, aren’t you, Jack?”), then a closed door that led, he supposed, to their own bedroom, which he hoped they wouldn’t show him. He imagined dirty laundry in shoulder-high heaps. At the end of a corridor, another closed door hid what Hackbutt called “Irene’s studio.”

Then it was out to see the birds, which were to Hackbutt as the photos were to Irene. They were hawks and falcons, different types that Piat couldn’t distinguish; hooded, silent, they sat on perches and occasionally turned their heads. Hackbutt insisted on feeding two of them for him to watch, and he demonstrated their training with one of them and an old sock that was supposed to represent a rabbit. Hackbutt almost had a glow around his head; his eyes were those of a fanatic. Partlow, he thought, had chosen well—if Hackbutt could be recruited.

“I wish I’d known you were coming,” Irene said when she’d decided they had spent enough time on the birds. “We could have had lunch.”

“I thought I might take you to lunch.”

She laughed that big, healthy laugh. “Oh, Christ, you can’t do that in this godforsaken place! We don’t eat human food. We’re fucking vegans, nutcases. I go in a restaurant here and the smell makes me barf before I sit down!”

“Maybe,” Hackbutt said, “maybe, honey, we could have a salad or something.”

“I don’t think Jack is a salad type.” She looked Piat up and down. “He looks like a carnivore to me.”

“Raw buffalo, mostly,” Piat said. He added no, no, he wouldn’t stay; no, thanks; no; but he had some things for them in the car he’d meant to bring in. Just sort of getting-reacquainted stuff.

He hadn’t known why, but he’d thought Hackbutt would be poor. On a city street, Hackbutt could have passed for one of the homeless, but in his own context, he looked right, neither poor nor rich, certainly not needy. And Irene, no matter what she was now, had known money, he thought. The accent, a casual remark about “when I was at McGill,” a long-cultivated air of rebelliousness without penalty—no starving in garrets, please—told him she was doing a trapeze act over a very safe safety net. And the net, it turned out, was named Mother. “Oh, Mother sent that in her last Care package,” she said of a CD player. Said it with contempt, but then socked a CD into it and said she hoped he liked bluegrass. He didn’t, in fact, but knew it would do no good to say so.

He brought in the plastic shopping bag he’d filled in a supermarket in Oban, feeling not like Santa Claus but like the guest who’s brought the wrong kind of wine. He’d been wrong about Hackbutt; he’d underestimated him. Now he’d pay with the embarrassment of the wrong gifts.

“Oh, friend, this is so wrong for us,” Irene said as she took out a tin of pâté. And the crackers. “God, they’ve got animal fat in them!” And the Johnnie Walker black, which had always been his gift to Hackbutt in the old days. “Oh, Eddie doesn’t drink anymore, do you, sweetie? Ohmmmm—” Big wet kiss. Ditto the Polish ham, the smoked salmon, and the petits fours (white sugar and animal fat).

“You think I’m a nut, I know you do,” she said. She ran her fingers through her long, untidy hair. “You’re right. I am. I’m a crank. I’ve turned Eddie into a crank. But we’re fucking healthy!” She grinned. “And I do mean fucking healthy.” Hackbutt looked shy.

Piat decided things were awful and it wouldn’t work. Dumb Dave wouldn’t be able to run Hackbutt with Irene around; Irene would be running Dave in about twelve hours. But if it didn’t work, at least not to the point where Piat got Dave and Hackbutt together, he was going to lose half his ten thousand bucks.

“Actually,” Piat said when Hackbutt went off to the john, “actually, Irene, you’ve thrown me a curve.”

She smiled. Whoopee.

“What I mean is, I have a sort of, um, business to talk to Hackbutt about.”

“Oh, Jeez, I never would have guessed.” She gave that big laugh. “Sweetie, of course you’ve got business to talk to Eddie about! The first thing he said when he got your card was, ‘He’ll want something.’” She tipped her head, smiled with her eyes a little scrunched up as if he was giving off too much light, and played with her hair. “What kind of thing do you want?”

“You his agent?”

“I’m his damp crotch, and don’t you forget it. Look, Jack, Eddie’s a wonderful man, but he needs somebody to take care of him. Don’t come here thinking you can push him around. Okay?”

“I never pushed him around in my life.”

“Somebody did.”

Piat opened his mouth to say something that would have been ugly, then thought better of it and leaned back—they were in the small living room, he on the sofa in a bare spot in a pile of mess—and said, “What did he tell you about me?”

“He said you were a great guy.”

“That sounds right.”

“But he won’t tell me how he knew you, so that part doesn’t sound so great, does it?”

“We used to bum around together in Southeast.”

“Southeast?

“Asia.”

“Yeah, he said he knew you from Macao. So, what did you two do together?”

“This and that. Some deals.”

“You were in oil, too?”

“I was in a lot of things. We just bummed around together, had some laughs, some drinks.” He thought he’d launch a trial balloon. “Some girls.”

She didn’t like the balloon. “Eddie didn’t know his cock from a condom till he met me.” She gave all the signs of talking a better sexual game than she actually played, he thought. But you never could tell.

Piat shrugged. “We were guys together, how’s that? Pals.”

She looked at him. She put her chin up, ran her fingers through her hair. She said, “You look to me like bad news.” She laughed. “I like that in a man.”

By then, Piat was hungry and annoyed, and when Hackbutt came out of the bathroom, he said he had to go. Both of them protested, but he could see that she wasn’t going to let him talk to Hackbutt alone, and there was no way he was going to go into his recruiting pitch with her there. He could see Partlow’s five thousand growing wings. He was damned if he’d let it fly away. “I’d like to come back,” he said.

Oh, great, yes, great idea, sure!

He gathered the handles of the shopping bag in his fingers—they absolutely didn’t want the stuff—and said, “I’ll come back tomorrow; how’s that?”

Oh, sure, wonderful idea, yes, they’d even have lunch.

“But I want to talk to Digger alone.”

That was not so well received. Hackbutt looked pained; she looked insulted.

“I need one hour with Hackbutt. Then he can talk to you, Irene, and then the three of us can talk, but first it’s just him and me, and the girls have to stay at the other end of the dance floor. Nothing personal.”

Hackbutt said, “Honey—” and looked at her. His face was flushed, as if he liked being fought over.

She said, “Just gonna be guys together?”

“Something like that.”

“Unless you can offer him eternal youth and a lot of really cute chicks, I can make him a better offer than anything you can say. Can’t I, sweetie?”

“It isn’t a competition.”

She looked at him and then at Hackbutt and then at Piat again, and she fluffed her hair and said, “I need a bath, anyway. An hour’ll be about right.”

They all smiled and touched each other and said tomorrow, then, right, yeah, tomorrow. And Piat went out to his rented car, but to temper the humiliation of seeming to have been chased away, he detoured by the dog.

It was still lying with its head on its paws. It watched him come, then cringed when he put out his hand. Piat squatted and extended the hand, but the dog pulled back, then got up and went into its hovel, dragging a length of chain behind it.

Frowning, Piat made his way to the car, still feeling like an asshole because he was carrying back all the gifts that Hackbutt was supposed to be pathetically grateful for. And because Irene had made it very clear just who was Hackbutt’s real case officer.

When Piat wheeled the rented Renault into the grass in front of Hackbutt’s house next day, he was better prepared. During an evening much clarified by the Johnnie Walker he’d bought for Hackbutt, he’d scolded himself for poor preparation and overall laziness; then, the personnel work done, he had decided what he must do. It all came down to two things: learn to like Irene Girouard, because she ran Edgar Hackbutt; and accept the new Hackbutt, consigning the old one to history.

Now, as he got out of the car, he grinned as Irene appeared in the doorway. She was in another long dress, blue denim, fairly waistless. Piat was wearing a black polo shirt and a sweater and a pair of khakis. He waved. She waved. He took a plastic sack from the car and loped up to the door. “I’m going to try this again,” he said, holding out the bag.

“For little ol’ me?”

“For both of little ol’ you.” She hesitated, holding the storm door open for him. He had to go past her, face to face. Going by, he bent his head and kissed her, quickly, lightly. “Good to see you again.”

“Edgar’s with his birds.”

“Good chance for me to talk to him?” Make it a question, he told himself; get on her good side. When she didn’t answer, he said, “What’s your dog’s name?” People like you ought to like their dogs, right?

“No idea,” she said. “He kept hanging around when we moved in.” She was taking things out of the sack. “Greek honey—well!” He’d found the gourmet shelves at the Island Bakery in Tobermory. “Oh—!” She had something clutched between her breasts. “Porcini cream!”

“Organic.”

She gave him an odd smile. “You’re a quick learner.” She pulled out other things—balsamic vinegar, olive oil crushed with blood oranges, a set of hemp place mats. She was pleased, maybe only with the effort and not the things themselves, but she was pleased. “Sure, why don’t you go talk to Edgar. I’ll get naked.”

And if that wasn’t a peace offering, what is? She made sex so overt, however, he was suspicious. He thought that maybe she was performing her sexuality, not being it. Maybe for her it was like a language she’d learned on paper but couldn’t get fluent in. If so, if they actually got to it, there would be a lot of drama—costumes like crotchless panties, oils and perfumes, sound effects like yum-yums to go with the obligatory blow job and glad cries for orgasm, real or simulated, probably the latter. And afterward, the reviews: You were so good. Was it good for you? Was I good? But maybe it wouldn’t be like that at all. But either way, he already wanted to know.

He was only going to be with them for a few days, and then he’d be on his way, so it wouldn’t be endangering his own operation if he took what she seemed to be offering.

He went out the rear door and stumbled because of the unexpected step down. Nobody cut the lawn at Hackbutt’s, but a path was worn between coarse grass and a bed of nettles, which Piat knew from Greece and managed to avoid. He tried to remember how to get to the bird pens; giving up, he shouted, “Digger! Digger!”

Hackbutt appeared, much closer than expected. “Jack! You did come back!” His hands were covered with red goo. “How nice. I won’t shake hands.” Part of the nettle bed was between them. “I’m cutting up some pigeons.”

Piat steered around the nettles and joined Hackbutt in the remains of an outbuilding. There was bad smell and a lot of feathers. “Where do you get the pigeons?”

“A kid shoots them for me with an air gun.”

“That doesn’t sound so vegan.”

Hackbutt shrugged. “Raptors aren’t vegans.” He had a bucket on the ground half full of pieces of pigeon, partly plucked, bloody. On a rough table that had started life as something else, he was chopping a dead bird with a cleaver.

“Can’t they do that for themselves?”

“Sure. They love to do it themselves. But you got to train them not to do it, so they’ll bring you game birds if you fly them at them.” He whacked off a wing. “Falconry’s a sport. Like shooting. There’s a quarry—in the old days, the object was to bring in game to eat. See, it’s hard to get a carnivore to bring meat to you instead of eating it itself. Like using a tiger for a retriever.” He whacked off the other wing. “You see Irene?”

“She was off to take her bath. I brought you some sort of veggie stuff. She seemed pleased.”

“Oh, that’s good.” He swept the edge of the cleaver across the blood on the table, then held the bucket under the edge so he could push the blood into it. “Irene’s a wonderful gal, Jack. I want you two to like each other.” He wiped his hands on a rag. “She changed my life. They talk about people reinventing themselves—she reinvented me. Really. I’m still not much, I know that, but I’m a hell of a lot more than I was.”

“You were always a good guy. And a good agent.”

Hackbutt looked pleased and said, “Well—” but didn’t really rise to it. In the old days, he would have been like a cat, doing everything but arching his back. He picked up the bucket and pushed past Piat. “The birds are a full-time job. It’s fun, and I love my birds, but, Jeez, man, it’s your life!”

He went along the pens, talking to birds he told Piat were immature, making noises to them, tossing pieces of pigeon to them. He strapped a guard over his left arm and enticed a young falcon to perch on it by holding up a pigeon neck with the head still attached, and then he gave it to the bird.

One of the cages was twice the size of the others. So was the occupant. Alone of the birds, the giant received a whole pigeon. Piat watched as the big bird held the head down with both feet and tore out pieces of meat from the neck, plucking as it went, feathers drifting down and now and then getting stuck to its beak.

“I thought you had to teach them not to rip the prey to shreds?” Piat asked.

“She’s different. Jeez, Jack, can’t you see how big she is? Bella’s a sea eagle, Jack. I’m in a program for them. We get the chicks—long story there—and raise ’em by hand, then release ’em in the wild. Helps rebuild the population. They’re nearly extinct. Isn’t Bella great?” Hackbutt smiled like a parent with a bright toddler. “I love my birds!”

“You told Irene I’d want something,” Piat said.

Hackbutt was picking up another piece of meat with a gloved hand. “Well—yeah, I apologize, Jack. I just meant—”

“You were being honest. And you were right. I want something.”

Hackbutt looked at him and then turned so that Piat could see the bird better. He should have said something like What?, and in the old days he would have, but now he kept his mouth shut.

“How much did you tell Irene about what you used to do?”

“Nothing! Honest to God, Jack, nothing. I signed that paper, didn’t I? I swore I’d never say anything and I didn’t.”

“What did you tell her I do?” He put it in the present tense because he wasn’t going to tell Hackbutt that he was long out of the CIA and in fact a kind of renegade.

“Nothing.”

“She must have asked.”

“Oh, she said something like, ‘Does he work for the government?’”

Irene was a lot smarter than that, Piat thought, although maybe she was one of those people who paid no attention to the worlds of war and politics and tricky shit. Still, she’d have heard of the CIA. “What did you say?”

“Oh, I just said, ‘Sort of.’” The sea eagle had finished the pigeon and now snatched the next one from the glove and put it under one foot, then tried to disentangle the other foot from the remains of the head. It looked like a swimmer trying to shake water out of its ear. The mangled head fell to the ground and the bird started on the new prey.

“Tell you what, Digger.” Digger had been an early code name, from the Digger O’Dell of an old comedy program; it had become a nickname when Hackbutt had become more than an incidental source. “I know that anything I ask you to undertake, Irene’s got to know about—right? I see that. I acknowledge that’s the nature of your relationship. It isn’t usual, but we go back and—you two are bonded, right?” He was talking bullshit, but this was his spiel.

“Bonds of steel,” Hackbutt said. “I heard that someplace. It says it all. It’s love. It amazes me, but she loves me. Me. Thanks for understanding, Jack.”

“I do understand, Digger, and I respect it, and I respect you as a man. That’s why I’ll shut up right now if you want me to. I do want something; I want to offer you something, but I’ll keep it to myself and we’ll have a visit and we’ll part friends and that’ll be that, if you want.” It was like ice-skating where you know that the farther you go, the thinner the ice gets: had he now gone too far?

Hackbutt, finishing with the bird, was offering it its regular perch; it seemed to want to stay on his arm, but he urged it, moving his arm, nudging the perch, and the bird moved over. Hackbutt picked up the bucket. Down the ragged line of pens, Piat could hear birds stirring as they smelled the blood. Hackbutt said, “I told myself I wouldn’t do any more of that stuff. Not that I’m ashamed of it! But—” He came out of the pen and latched the makeshift gate. “I’m a coward, Jack. It scares me, what could have happened some of those times.”

Piat had watched him handle the sea eagle, the bird’s vicious beak four inches from his eyes. You used to be a coward, Piat thought.

“This wouldn’t be like that.” Piat shook his head. The old Hackbutt had merely provided information. He had been that kind of agent—records of meetings, oil contracts, stuff he heard at the bar from other geologists in Macao and Taipei—actually not running much risk but always sweaty about it. “This wouldn’t be dangerous. But I don’t want to push it on you, Digger.” They walked along the pens. Hackbutt stopped at the next gate. “It’s just that you’re the only man who could do it. Correction: the best man to do it.”

“I don’t want to go back to Southeast, Jack.”

“This wouldn’t be in Southeast,” Piat lied watching him feed another bird. The older ones, Hackbutt had said, would be flown before they were fed; Piat could see him having to spend all day trying to get Hackbutt to say yes. Still, he made himself go slow. When Hackbutt had focused on the bird for ten minutes and nothing more had been said, Piat murmured, as if it had just come to him, “Doing a big art installation must be expensive.”

“You better believe it. But worth it.” This bird was restless and maybe dangerous; it flapped its wings while on his arm, and its beak flashed too close to Hackbutt’s face, Piat thought. “Irene’s going to be a household name. She has her own website. But that costs money, yes it does. Just moving an installation around from gallery to gallery costs a lot. Just the insurance! Plus we’ve got ideas for a coffee-table book of Irene’s art, and she’s into video now, maybe a DVD of the making of The Body Electric. She shot a lot of video of me boiling up a dead sheep I found. There’re these great shots of the bones sort of emerging out of the flesh—sort of stop-action.”

“The galleries pay for that?”

“You kidding?” Hackbutt laughed. He was wrestling the bird back to its perch. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“So where’s the money come from? Irene’s mother?”

“That’s a sore subject.” Hackbutt trudged along with his pail. “Between you and me, they had a big fight. Her mother doesn’t understand about Irene’s art. She hates feminists. We have to do everything ourselves. Irene’s a free spirit.”

“The project I have in mind might be able to help with that.” Piat caught Hackbutt’s head move out of the corner of his eye, and he said quickly, “Maybe you could support Irene’s art and she wouldn’t have to go crawling to her mother.”

Hackbutt put the bucket down and folded his arms over his skinny chest. “You better tell me about that.”

“I don’t want to tempt you to do something you don’t want to do, Digger.”

“It’s legit?”

“Oh, shit yes, well, if that’s what’s bothering you— Yeah, this is top-drawer, Dig. Have I ever bullshitted you? You know I was into some shitty stuff in Southeast; so were you, smuggling those parrots—”

“Irene doesn’t know about that!”

“I’m just saying, this isn’t anything like that. This is US policy. The most important kind.” He lowered his voice as if he were going to pronounce the secret name of Yahweh. “Anti-terrorism.”

“I told you, I haven’t got the guts for that stuff.”

“Not that kind of ‘antiterrorism’. This is sort of social. It’s a matter of contact. And maybe recruitment. You remember how that goes. Shmoozing. If anything starts to go down, the whole thing’ll be moved to other people.”

“I’m not very social, Jack.”

Piat knew that, and he was looking at Hackbutt’s wild hair and his scraggy beard and his bloodstained clothes and thinking that anything social was going to take a total makeover. But that wasn’t his problem “You’d be fine.”

“Why me?”

It was the moment he had been aiming toward. It was either going to make everything else a piece of cake, or it was going to end it with the finality of the cleaver. He leaned closer and almost whispered, “The birds.”

Hackbutt didn’t get it. He looked as if he didn’t get it and he said so. Piat, his own arms folded now because he was cold, the early sun behind clouds that were piling over the whole sky, said, “You’re an authority on falconry. No, you are, Dig, don’t deny it. But you also love the birds. That love comes through in everything—when you handle them, when you talk about them. It’s great—it’s nice, it’s a good quality. It’s what makes you right for this project and it’s what would make the project easy for you. See—” He looked up where the sun should have been and saw only a bright smudge behind deepening gray. “The means to make contact with a certain guy is through falconry. He’s like you—he lives for the birds”. Piat hoped it was true. He could push invention only so far.

“He flies them.”

“Exactly.”

“Is he an Arab?”

That caught Piat off guard. It was an obvious leap—It was the guess on which he was building the tale—but not one he’d expected Hackbutt to make. “You’re getting ahead of me, man. What’s the rule—we find out when we need to know?”

“Sorry.”

“No, no—” He put his hand on Hackbutt’s arm and then let go. “It would be meeting this individual and talking birds with him, letting him get to know you a little. Then, if that goes well, then the powers that be maybe would make a bird available to you to give him or something. Then—”

“What kind of bird?”

“Well, I don’t know birds, Dig—”

“Do I get to pick the bird? There are some fantastic birds out there, Jack, I’d give my left nut just to handle one of them! Is that the way it would work?”

“That’s the way it could work, I guess. You’re the expert here, after all. Sure, I’d think you could maybe write your own ticket about that.” Would Partlow buy it? Did it matter?

Hackbutt was hot-eyed. “There are some incredible birds out there! But Jeez, man, they cost thousands—I mean, big five figures!”

Piat knew he was overstepping his bounds. Still, what the hell. “The US is the richest country in the world, Dig.”

Hackbutt looked away, his mouth working. Was he calculating figures? Almost without voice, he muttered, “Wow,” and picked up the bucket. He unlatched a gate and then turned back. “I don’t want to seem mercenary, Jack, but—Irene’s installation, and everything—what kind of money are we talking? For me?”

On firmer ground, Piat said, “Fifty thou?”

Hackbutt’s lips moved: fifty.

“If you score.”

“God, I’d love to do that for Renie. God, that’d be great.”

They went down the pens, feeding and handling birds, Piat lying back, letting Hackbutt think it over. They were heading for the farther pens where the older, trained birds were, and Hackbutt said as if out of nowhere, “Let’s trot it past Irene. I think it’s a fantastic opportunity. Incredible.” He beamed at Piat.

A woman after her bath was always attractive to Piat. There was something about the skin, which seemed whiter, cooler, enormously tactile. If you added to this the baking of fresh bread, the appeal was overwhelming. He wanted to put her on the rug and go to it. Unfortunately, her husband was standing next to him.

Irene smiled at him as if they had a secret. “Almost done,” she said. She was back in the day’s long-skirted dress, without jewelry, little makeup that he could see on her broad face. She was a fairly tall woman, not Rubenesque or heavy but strong. Vegetarianism hadn’t made her thin the way it had Hackbutt. “Surprised?’ she said.

“The bread? I guess I am. I didn’t figure you to cook.” Piat was surprised.

“I’m a damned good cook. I do great country ham and shit like that, or I used to.”

“Bread smells fantastic.” He was laying it on too thick, but the smell of the bread—he pushed his mind back into the role of case officer.

“Baking bread is an art.” She opened the oven, looked in, poked something. “Did you boys talk?”

“We did. Now you two need to talk.” That seemed to please her.

Hackbutt went into the small living room, leaving the two of them in the kitchen.

She took the bread out and put it on the already littered table. One loaf was a low-mounded oval with coarse salt and something else on the top; the other was more ordinary, but both were beautifully browned and high. “No tasting,” she said. “It has to cool.” She came past him, stopped where he was in the doorway. She kissed him lightly on the lips. “So do I.” She smiled. “All things in good time.” She went out.

When he left, Piat paused at the dog again. This time, it sniffed his extended hand, then looked at him. He tried to pet it, but it withdrew its head; something like a warning, no more than the sound of the most distant thunder, came from its throat.

“You’re a tough sell, doggie. Thank God you’re not the falconer.”

Explaining Irene and her importance (tactically, not sexually) didn’t go down so well with Dave.

“It was great until she got involved,” Piat said as if he hadn’t planned it that way. “Then I had hell’s own time with it.”

“What the fuck did you even let her near it for?” Before Piat could answer, Dave shouted, “It’s not the way you do it! You don’t recruit the fucking girlfriend!” His broad face was red. Dave had been to the Ranch and had taken the courses, and so he knew at least in theory how things were done. Piat again had the feeling that he hadn’t put the theory into practice much.

“This ‘girlfriend’ is different.”

“You deal with the guy alone and keep her out of it. That’s how it’s done!”

“There’d be no deal if I had.”

Dave made a contemptuous sound. Piat said, in a voice that meant See how hard I’m working to keep from calling you a stupid asshole, “Dave, you don’t know this guy or this woman. They don’t do things without each other.”

“You’ve blown security and you’ve saddled me with a big fucking problem. I’ve got to run this guy!”

“Yeah, now thanks to me, you do.”

“Christ, if I’d known you were going to tell the girlfriend, I’d have aborted you right the hell out. Jesus, what a bush-league thing to do. You know what Partlow would do to you if he knew?”

“Yeah, Dave, I know what Partlow would do. He’d say, ‘Well, if that was your judgment call, okay.’”

“He wouldn’t! He’d tell you you blew it and to get lost. Now I’m stuck with it.” Dave was standing by the window of his room in the Western Isles Hotel, his fists clenched, his face blotched with rage. He was scared, Piat realized. Scared because he was going to have to do something that wasn’t in the book. Dave said, “You’re a fucking loser.”

Piat didn’t miss a beat: he didn’t raise his voice or get red or insist on the challenge of eye contact. He said, as if he were lecturing a beginning class, “You get to him through her, at least at the start. Hackbutt will take a lot of stroking. Pass some of it through her. It’ll please both of them and—”

“Don’t tell me how to do my fucking job!”

Piat waited for him to stop and then went right on. “Hackbutt’ll need a makeover. Clothes. A decent haircut. You’re going to have to teach him how to—”

Dave lumbered toward him. “Get the fuck out of here! Stop talking to me! Get lost!”

Piat waited for him to come close. He thought it would be nifty to put Dave on his back. Maybe Dave saw that that was a possibility, too, because he pulled up before he was quite close enough. He shouted “Get lost!” again. Piat looked him in the eye and, in the same tone of somebody doing a routine, file-it-and-forget-briefing, said, “You’re meeting Hackbutt at lunch tomorrow. I’ve made a reservation at a restaurant called the Mediterranea in Salen, partway down the island. Noon.” He waited for Dave to take it in. “The hardest part of all was getting Hackbutt to agree to anybody but me as his CO. It took me an hour. You’re going to have to turn on all the charm when you meet him, Dave.”

“I know how to do my job.”

“Hackbutt’s prepared to dislike you, because you aren’t me. Hackbutt thought it was going to be me. He’s a one-man man.”

“That’s fucking laughable—that we’d trust a job like this to you.” Dave jabbed with his finger, but not very far, because there was always the possibility that Piat was fast enough to catch a flying finger and break it. “You’re an agent! You’re nothing but a goddam pissant agent! And don’t you forget it!”

Piat put his hands up a little above his waist, palms out. Dave’s hands jerked as if he expected a blow. Piat said, “There’s an old Patsy Cline song—‘Why Can’t He Be You?’ You might want to give it a listen to understand Hackbutt’s position. Or you can just go on being an asshole and lose him and then you can tell Partlow why your agent won’t work with you. I won’t be around to blame, unfortunately for you. Lucky me. See you at noon tomorrow, Dave.”

Piat went out and closed the door very softly.

It rained most of the night and was still raining when they started for the meeting with Hackbutt, a depressing dribble from the low overcast, as if the universe above was saturated and had to let the water leak out somewhere. Dave was driving. Piat, in the left-hand seat, wasn’t sure how he was supposed to get back to Tobermory after lunch if Dave took off with Hackbutt, but there was a bus, at least; asking Dave what he had in mind would prove too explosive, he thought, and anyway he didn’t want Dave to get the idea that he could plan Piat’s day.

Dave was still angry; maybe he’d been chewing on the scene in his room all night. He had bitched about the island roads all the way down, and he had come close to hitting another car more or less head on because he hadn’t gone into the lay-by that opened next to them, and instead he had thought the oncoming car would be terrorized into getting out of his way. It hadn’t been.

“Nice move,” Piat couldn’t resist saying when they were as far off the road as a stone wall would let them. The other car was vanishing behind them. The passenger-side fender was crumpled against the wall, and Piat couldn’t have opened his door more than inch even if he’d wanted to.

It hadn’t helped that another car had passed and the driver had laughed.

When they got out in the drizzle at Salen, Dave was in the silent phase of anger. He didn’t bother with his raincoat but hunched his shoulders and walked toward the restaurant—if you can’t punish somebody else for being stupid, punish yourself. Piat regretted having said what he’d said, because he knew he had made things worse, and it would all rub off on the meeting with Hackbutt. He didn’t know why he cared that the meeting go well, but he did. Maybe for Hackbutt’s sake. Maybe some vestigial pride of craft.

“Reservation,” Dave growled to the smiling man behind the combination bar and reservation desk.

“Name?”

Dave ground his teeth. He didn’t know Piat’s cover name.

“Michaels,” Piat said. “Jack Michaels.”

“Oh, yes, right—we chatted on the phone about running.” They had, in fact; now they chatted a bit more while Dave secreted bile. Piat had run a route the day before that this young man had suggested. “Fantastic,” Piat said now. “Great scenery. Great run.” The young man talked about hamstrings.

Hackbutt wasn’t there yet. They sat at a table for four, from which the young man whisked a table setting. Dave folded his arms and looked around as if he expected somebody to call him a bad name. Piat ordered a glass of Brunello and bruschetta, which wasn’t on the menu but didn’t raise any eyebrows. He tried to mollify Dave by offering him some of the toasted bread when it came, but Dave simply looked at it. He wasn’t going to allow himself to enjoy anything.

Hard on poor old Hackbutt.

“We could order,” Piat said when Hackbutt was twenty minutes late.

“We’ll wait.”

Piat shrugged and asked the young man if by any chance they had some roasted pepper in olive oil. He was enjoying that when at last Hackbutt stumbled in, looking as if he’d just come from Lear’s blasted heath—hair soaked and tangled, beard dripping, ancient drover’s coat glued to his legs by the wet.

“I walked.”

All three of them were standing by then. Hackbutt looked only at Piat. Piat saw Dave stick out his hand, and he said quickly, “This is the guy I’ve told you so much about, Digger. You two will really get along.” He ducked out of the way of Dave’s paw and went behind Hackbutt to help him off with the enormous and very wet coat. Hackbutt tried to turn to keep eye contact as if it were his only contact with reality. Piat gently turned him back and eased the coat off his shoulders, preventing Hackbutt from putting out his own hand. By the time he was able to do so, Dave had withdrawn the offer and was pulling back his chair.

“Siddown,” Dave said.

Hackbutt looked at Piat for permission. Piat nodded. Hackbutt sat.

So did Piat. He picked up his fork and stabbed it into a piece of glossy roasted pepper and prepared to say something light and conversational about the weather, and Dave said to him, “You’re done here. Bug out.”

Piat looked at him. Dave, he thought, was incredible. He put the pepper in his mouth and picked up his last piece of bruschetta and mopped up some of the olive oil. When he looked at his old friend, Hackbutt’s face showed frozen panic.

“You hear me?” Dave said.

“I did.”

“You’re done. Head out.” He jerked one thumb toward the door. “Look for a Land Rover.”

Hackbutt at last managed to open his mouth and wheeze, “Yeah, but—Jack, Jeez—”

Piat was on his feet. He patted Hackbutt’s shoulder. “Everything’ll be fine. It’ll be great.” He glanced at Dave and saw an expression of malice and triumph. Dave, he knew, was right—the case officer’s the boss—but my god! he was a shit. Piat walked the few steps to the entryway, picked his raincoat off a hook, and opened the door. It was raining harder. He didn’t look back because he didn’t want to see Hackbutt’s face.

He went out to the road and started looking for a Land Rover, found one around the corner of the restaurant. Partlow was just visible through the rain at the wheel. Piat climbed in the passenger door.

“There we are, Jerry,” said Partlow. “Probably the easiest ten thousand dollars you ever earned.” He put the car in gear and started out of town. The big chassis barely fit the single-lane road past the old inn that dominated the north end of Salen.

“That’s it?” asked Piat. “And you’re sure Dave can handle this from here?”

Partlow changed gears. “I’m sure Dave can handle him as well as anyone, Jerry.” There were headlights visible on the long hill down from Aros Mains, and Partlow pulled into a lay-by to let the other car pass.

Piat considered a number of bitter replies and realized that, whatever mistakes Dave made, he himself was out of it. For two days, he had returned to the world of being a case officer. He had allowed Hackbutt’s needs to become the horizon and limit of his world, just as he always had. The shoulder to cry on. The voice in the dark.

All done. Never again, and all that. He took a deep breath and let it out.

“So, now what?” Piat asked. He was gripping the hand-hold over the passenger window a little too hard. Partlow was driving fast in the rain, taking curves too aggressively, and with what Piat saw as a reckless disregard for the possibility of further oncoming vehicles on a single-lane road.

“I take you back to the hotel. You check out and take the ferry back to the mainland. And goodbye.”

Piat trod hard on his anger. Partlow’s dismissal was a little too much like Dave’s. Stick to what matters. “When do I get my money? And my rods?”

“Why, immediately, if you like. Really, Jerry, your constant paranoia depresses me. You are done. You were hired to perform a service and you did a fine job. No hard feelings, I hope?”

Piat eyed an upcoming double hairpin turn with some misgivings, but he said, “No, Clyde. For once, I have no hard feelings.” He shrugged, mostly at himself. But Partlow was clearly pleased with the progress of the operation, and he probably had money just lying around—“Although I did lose a thousand dollars’ worth of fishing in Iceland, a trip I had planned and anticipated for some time.”

“Jerry, just come out with it. I take it we’re leading up to a demand for more cash?” Partlow sounded like a loving but aggrieved parent.

“Well.” Piat’s grasp on the handle loosened as Partlow reached the two-lane road that led into Tobermory. “Well, to be frank, Clyde, I’d think you could get me an airplane ticket and refund me the value of my trip to Iceland.”

Partlow sighed. “I had intended to add fifteen hundred dollars as a success bonus, Jerry. Is that sufficient? You can purchase your own ticket.”

Piat watched the town of Tobermory spreading out below them as they drove around the traffic circle. “Throw in the car for the rest of the day,” he said. “Let me have the car. I’ll go fishing.”

Partlow sighed again. “Jerry, sometimes I think you aren’t quite sane. It’s raining. It’s cold.”

“So you won’t leave the hotel. It’s a spate, Clyde. Give me the money and my rods and I’ll get an afternoon’s fishing here. And no hard feelings.” Curious how easily manipulated Partlow was on this. It had never occurred to Piat before that Partlow wanted his approval. But he did. Interesting.

Partlow turned and looked at him, as if assessing him. Almost certainly was assessing him. Then he smiled. “What the hell. Just don’t run off with the car, Jerry, okay? It’s a rental, and I signed for it.”

Piat smiled. “Clyde, why would I run off with the car?”

Piat spent thirty minutes with Partlow signing forms. It amused him that Clyde was so punctilious on his forms—another sign that the man hadn’t spent enough time running real agents. Perhaps that was the root of his insecurity. Piat complied cheerfully, however, especially when he discovered that he could sign all the forms in a cover name. He acquired sixty-five hundred dollars in large bills and retrieved his fishing gear and his battered backpack.

In his own room at the Mishnish he called Irene. Hackbutt would still be at the restaurant; Piat’s responsibility to the operation was over; what better time to get her to join him? Except that nobody answered at the farm. He called airlines at Glasgow and discovered that, as he had suspected, he couldn’t get back to Greece for twenty-four hours. Irene was vanishing over his horizon—Hackbutt would get back to the farm soon; complications would set in. He shrugged. In an hour, he was in the car, which he loathed as too big and too flashy—and too damned short to carry his rod already set up.

He had ideas about where to go to fish—he’d virtually memorized the green tourist brochure in his room. He sat in the car, watching the rain over the sea, and tried to remember how fishing worked in Scotland. You had to buy tickets—there was virtually no public fishing. At least, that’s what he’d read in the brochure. A glance at his watch told him that it was two p.m. He shut off the car and went back into the hotel.

The windows of the bookstore were full of children’s books and travel guides to catch the tourist’s eyes, but as soon as he was through the door and out of the rain he saw the case of flies and the corner dedicated to fishing. The floor was old wood, the ceiling low—it was an eighteenth-century shop front, or perhaps two joined together.

A pretty young woman stood behind the counter, perhaps sixteen years old—a little young for Piat, but a pleasure to see. “I wonder if you could tell me about the fishing,” Piat asked. “I have the afternoon.”

“Would you be wanting the trout, then?” she asked.

“Salmon?” Piat asked, a little wistfully. “Or is there sea trout fishing here?”

“Some, aye. My da would know better.” She spoke quite seriously—fishing was a serious subject here. “He’s in the back. Shall I get him, then?”

She made Piat feel quite old. “Yes, please,” he said, like a boy on his best behavior.

She vanished into an office in the back. Piat began to browse. The front of the store was full of books for tourists, with maps and walking guides and a whole series of books on the genealogy and history of the island. All locally printed. He flipped through one, a walking guide with historical notes. The antiquarian in him automatically counted the hill forts, the duns, the standing stones—the island boasted a strong archaeological record.

“Are you looking for sea trout?”

Piat turned from the book rack and saw a tall man, gaunt, with a huge smile and a shock of black hair. He did not have the expected accent.

“Yes. Sea trout,” said Piat.

“Not what they used to be, I’m afraid. Had some Americans catching them in the Aros last year—they come every year. Aros estuary. I can give you that for this evening, but there’s no point in going there now. The tide’s down.”

Piat nodded. “How much?”

“Five pounds for the estuary. It’s best fished two hours either side of high tide. I wouldn’t even start on it until six. I’m Donald, by the way.”

“Jack,” said Piat, shaking hands. He’d been Jack for two days. The lie came automatically, and Piat thought Why’d I do that? “I’d like to fish this afternoon, too.”

“You have a car?” Donald asked. Donald spoke the way Clyde Partlow wanted to speak, with no trace of an island accent—like someone who had gone to all the best schools. Eton. Oxford. Maybe Cambridge. “I don’t guarantee you’ll get any fish, but Loch Làidir is available.” He seemed wistful. “It’s quite a climb from the road.”

The man was already filling out a bright orange card. “Leave this on the dashboard of your car.”

Piat watched him for a few seconds. “Where am I going?” he asked.

“Oh, yes. Right.” Donald flashed his gigantic smile again. “Do you know the island at all?”

“I can get from here to Salen,” Piat replied with a shrug. “I’ve driven over near Dervaig.”

“Right. You’ll want a map.” He pointed to the rack of Ordnance Surveys. He rattled off driving directions. “It should take you less than half an hour to get there. Then the climb—you see this stream?—strenuous but worth it.” His forefinger covered the mark on the map. “Just follow it up to the loch. Nothing in it but wee trout. The sea trout come up the other side, from the sea, of course. Once you reach the loch, it’s still difficult going—rock all the way round. But there’s a gravel beach on this shore. I’d fish there, by the crannog.”

Piat saw a tiny island on the Ordnance map, with the word “crannog” in minute italics. “What’s a crannog?” he asked.

Donald laughed. “A local oddity. An artificial island. Built long ago. You have waders?”

Piat shook his head.

Donald considered him. Piat knew that Donald had just written him off as a novice.

“I forgot them,” he muttered.

“You really will need them.” Then, cheerfully, “I suppose that you could just skip about on the shore. The loch is very deep in places.”

With a sigh for the money, Piat chose a pair of heavy rubber thigh waders from the fishing equipment. He wondered if the bulky things would go in his pack. He noted that the shop had light waders—very pricey. But they’d fit in his pack, and in effect, Partlow was paying. What the hell.

Piat paid.

The climb to the loch was spectacular. The terrain was very like Iceland, with shocks of coarse grass over gravel and volcanic rock. There was a path at first, but it soon divided into hundreds of sheep tracks, all going in the same general direction up the stream. It took him almost an hour to climb over the last crest and look down into what had to be the caldera of an extinct volcano. The shingle of gravel was clearly visible across the loch, and so was the crannog, seen at this distance as a humped island with a single tree growing from it, the tree visible for a mile in any direction because it was the only one. Again, Piat was reminded of the immense vistas of Africa.

Beyond the far lip of the caldera was only sky. High above, an eagle circled. Piat drank a cup of tea from his thermos and started down. The sense of openness—freedom, even—Piat couldn’t think of the origin of the tag, but the words above him, only sky ran around and around his head. The Bible? The Beatles?

It was three-thirty before he arrived on the gravel and set up his rod. He fished the shallow water between the gravel and the crannog for fifteen minutes, hooking and releasing a half-dozen minute brown trout. Then he put on the light, stocking-foot waders, a wet task in the rain, and pulled his boots on over them. No choice there. His boots were in for a pounding.

He worked the seaward end of the gravel, moving slowly into the deeper water. The loch itself was quite deep and very clear, so that when the watery sun made momentary appearances, he could see the complex rock formations in the depths. Right at his feet was a hollow cone of rock thirty feet across and so deep in the middle that light couldn’t penetrate it, some sort of ancient volcanic vent. He cast to the edge of the vent and immediately caught a strong brown trout, perhaps a pound, which he watched rise from the depths to seize the sea-trout fly. As far as he could see, the loch was short on food for fish and long on fish, but watching the predatory glide of the brown to his fly was pure joy.

A younger and braver fisherman could walk out along the vent’s top ridge to fish the deeper water. Piat actually considered it for a moment while he landed the brown trout before deciding that the creeping cowardice of age was going to win this one. He released the brown. He’d eat in a restaurant for his last meal on the island, and they wouldn’t want to cook his fish.

The crannog rose like a temptation, only fifteen or twenty meters off shore, the perfect platform from which to fish the vent, and whatever further wonders might lurk in the loch beyond. Piat climbed out of the water on the shingle and eyed the crannog. The water was too deep to walk out directly—he’d be over the top of his belt at the midpoint, soaked to the skin and cold. But there were stones under the surface of the water, two sets of stepping stones. The stones themselves were well down, but he thought he could move from one stone to the next without going over his waders.

Piat knew he was going to attempt it. He laughed at himself while he drank some tea, because his failure to accept the lure of the vent ridge meant that he was going to try and prove himself on something just as ridiculous. Partlow had thought he was crazy for fishing in the rain. Piat raised his cup of tea to Partlow. Then he stowed it, put his pack under a particularly large clump of grass as the best shelter from the rain available, and studied the stones one more time.

The left-hand stones looked more accessible. They started in deeper water but stuck up higher and seemed to have larger and flatter tops. Piat waded out to the first stone and stepped up. The surface of the stone was covered in a dark olive slime and his hiking boots slipped badly. He moved cautiously to the next stone. The water came to the middle of his knee. He used his rod as a staff, heedless of the wetting of his reel, and took a long gliding step to the third stone. It was less slippery, and he paused to rest, sweat already pouring down his chest under his sweater.

The fourth stone was clearly visible now, a darker and larger stone that marked the halfway point. Piat knew the moment his boot touched the surface under water that this stone was slippery, and then he was in the water, his waders full and then his mouth. The water was cold—so cold that it hit him like an electric shock—and the bottom was ooze, not rock, so that his feet were sinking and he had no purchase.

Piat had long experience of his own panic reflex and he beat it down, kept hold of his rod and kept the other hand in contact with the stepping stone until he had control of his brain, and then he used the strength of his arms to pull himself up on the rock, heedless of the temperature of the water. The wind on his head was like a new shock of ice. He’d lost his hat, which was scudding across the loch on the surface of the water. Mud and ooze billowed around his thrashing feet. He pulled himself up by the strength of his arms, heaving the weight of his full waders to the rock.

He fell again, just one stone out from the shore, but he was prepared this time, and his fall merely caused him to sit down hard on the stone and take a new batch of cold water over his waders.

Close up, the crannog was composed of small, round rocks the size of his fist, raised in a low mound. Underneath the water, the mound of rubble continued, although he could clearly see a beam or heavy rafter of wood deep in the clear water of the leeward side.

He stripped. He wrung out each sodden garment and put the wool socks and the jeans and sweater back on under the now empty waders, made a bundle of the rest of the clothes and tied it around his waist. He was warmer already—his jacket and the waders were windproof, and the wool was warm even when wet. Just to make a point to himself, he made some desultory casts into the deep water beyond the crannog. Something made a sizeable silver flash on his fourth cast—

Gone. A sea trout, without question. A good fish. He cast again, and again, trying to relive the moment of the earlier cast and remember just what he had done, eventually wondering if he had imagined the whole thing. His head was cold, and that wasn’t good.

Time to go.

The crannog interested him, even while he stood shivering on it. Between casts and retrieves, he tried to imagine how it had come here, how much effort it would have taken people (how many people—a family? Two families?) to build—and why. For the fishing? And when?

He left his boots off for the return trip. With his socks worn over the waders, he had reasonably sure footing and made his way without incident. He was losing too much heat from his head. He drank the rest of his thermos of tea and ate a sandwich made of the leftovers from his attempt to find presents for Hackbutt and pulled the plastic bags over his head, and then his cotton shirt, now wrung out, and then another bag. Better than nothing.

The walk back out was easier than he had expected. Perhaps because it was downhill, or the psychological effect of having his car in sight from the moment he climbed out of the caldera, but the climb down served only to keep the worst of the chill away. The Land Rover’s heater was a magnificent, efficient machine and he was warm before he negotiated the mountain pass on the road back to Salen. The heater almost made up for the width of the monster, but as he negotiated lay-bys and oncoming headlights, he cursed the car again. Darkness was falling. He drove carefully, passed the Aros estuary with regret, and went straight to the hotel.

In the morning, he stopped at the bookstore on his way to his car. Donald was already at work and greeted him enthusiastically. “Did you get anything?” he called, as soon as Piat was through the door.

Piat recounted his adventures. He had recorded his catch on the tickets and produced them.

Donald laughed. “You climbed on the crannog, then?”

“Who built it?” asked Piat.

Donald shrugged. “We have some books—people always want to know. There are four of them on the island, more on the mainland of course.” He pulled out a battered Ordnance Survey map and flipped it fully open. “One here, on the Glen Lochs—that’s quite a walk. Some fishing if you like wee browns. One here, on Loch Frisa. The one you climbed, of course, down south. And one just above the town, here. Quite a story to go with the local one.”

Piat had watched Donald’s thick fingers moving over the map, thinking automatically no cover, no cover, visible from the road. “Hmmm?” he said. “A story?” Piat was a good listener.

“A local man, a farmer, had the notion that he could build a dam on the loch above the town and regulate the flow of water—perhaps he intended to build a mill. What he did in fact was to drain the loch. The crannog was revealed as the water ran out—and they found a boat, completely intact, all sorts of other objects.”

Piat made interested noises throughout. “Where are they?”

“Oh, as for that, you’d have to ask Jean or my daughter. Perhaps in the museum?”

Piat left with two books on crannogs, one an archaeological report from a dig on the mainland and one more general. He stopped at the museum, but it was closed.

He made the ferry line with seconds to spare, checked in at Lufthansa two hours early in Glasgow, and landed in Athens via London and Munich in time to eat a late dinner on the Plaka and fall into a hotel bed. He had nine thousand, four hundred and twelve dollars and some change, a new wardrobe, a new historical interest, and a return ticket to Glasgow. It’d been cheaper that way. What the hell, he thought as he lay in bed. Maybe someday I’ll go back.

The next day, he splurged and caught the high-speed ferry to Lesvos, saving twelve hours. He called Mrs Kinnessos from Piraeus and told her that yes, he would be taking the house for another six months, even at the summer price, and he was absurdly pleased when she offered him a discount for his constancy. By the time the ferry reached Mytilene, he had made himself the middleman on a deal for some Roman statuary from the Ukraine headed to the United States. His cut would be seven hundred euros.

Molyvos seemed ridiculously crowded after Mull. He sat in the chocolate shop half way up the town with his laptop open, drinking Helenika and thinking about sea trout and crannogs.

3

A week later, Clyde Partlow was sitting at a computer in an office that was, by CIA standards, big. Not as big as the director’s, but big. No private dining room, but a private john. Partlow was a somebody, so all the more reason that he read reports direct from the computer screen. Partlow sneered at the old fogeys who still insisted on hard copies and who had to telephone for help if their screen coughed up an error message. After his fashion, Partlow was with it.

His right hand was on a mouse so that he could scroll down easily. On the screen was something that called itself a “draft contact report,” typed into a template so that the form number was at the top and the headings were boxed. The ones that interested Partlow were the operation number and the “task number served.” Together, they interested him deeply.

He began to read. Almost at once, the slight frown of concentration that had puckered his smooth, sleek face deepened to a scowl of concern. Another paragraph, and the scowl began to take in anger, then anxiety, then despair. He scrolled down faster, clearly glossing text, whipping to the next page and then right to the end. He read the final paragraph and then sat back and pressed his forehead. He breathed deeply and rubbed his fingers and thumb back and forth across his forehead as if smoothing the wrinkles that the reading had created. He breathed out, the air expelled in little puffs, lips pushing out and in. He shook his head.

Partlow hadn’t got where he was by wasting energy on his feelings. He’d never been known to blow up at anybody and he’d never been known to weep with gratitude or joy or even grief. He gave congratulations well and he censured well, right up to and including firing people. They always left thinking that there was nothing personal about good old Clyde. So now, instead of doing what his adrenal gland and the atavistic, caveman part of his brain wanted to do, he sat back and read the entire four-page document with care.

When he was done, he called up his address book, picked a name, tapped it into his telephone and waited. When a voice at the other end said, “Defense Intelligence Agency, Petty Officer Clem speaking this-is-not-a-secure-line, sir, to whom may I direct your call, sir!”

“Captain Alan Craik, please.”

Mike Dukas was sitting late in his office because he was the Special Agent in Charge, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Naples, and he and about half of his responsibilities were behind schedule. Down the hall, his assistant, Dick Triffler, was spending valuable time filling out paperwork for a three-year antiterrorism self-study that nobody would ever read; beyond him, two special agents were together in an office, trying to hammer out the charges against a sailor who had got drunk and beaten up a Turkish police cadet.

Dukas heard the ping of his secure telephone; he hit the button without taking his eyes off what he was reading. He was always reading now—reading or writing or going to meetings; the good days of getting out into the field were over. He sighed, looked up at the screen of the secure telephone, and read, “From: Defense Intelligence Agency, Captain Craik.”

He hit the talk button and said, “Al, that you?”

The answer came like static from deep space, Craik’s voice laid over it like an alien signal. “Mike?”

“Yeah. Al?”

“Hey, Mike.”

“Would you like to move to a conversation, or you want to stay with IDing each other?” He heard Craik laugh, and then they spent thirty seconds on how-are-you-how-are-thekids-how’s-your-wife. Their spat—if that was what it had been—in Reykjavik was forgotten. Then Craik said, “I just got off the phone with Clyde Partlow.”

“Better than getting on the phone with Clyde Partlow. Now what?”

A barely perceptible pause, but enough to sound a warning. “He wants Piat back.”

“Oh, shit. What the hell for?”

“Wouldn’t I like to know! Of course he didn’t say. He just asked if I knew where I could get hold of Piat again.”

“And you said, ‘Oh, sure, my pal Dukas carries him around in his back pocket.’ Right?”

“I said I’d see.”

“Al—” Dukas had been trying to read a report while they talked; now, he tossed the stapled papers halfway across his desk. “I’m not Piat’s personal manager.”

“Chill out, okay?”

“Once, as a favor, I found him for you. Twice is too much like a job.”

“I think he wants him again because something’s wrong.”

“Contact didn’t work.”

“Or it worked for a while and then it went bad. It’s been more than a week, after all.”

“Piat could be anywhere.”

“Yeah, but I’ll bet you know how to reach him.”

Dukas saw his number two, Dick Triffler, appear in his doorway, and he waved him in and pointed at a chair. “So maybe I know an address in cyberspace where sometimes he takes messages. So?” He mouthed “Al Craik” at Triffler, who raised his eyebrows.

Craik’s artificially tinny voice said, “Get a message to him.”

“What—‘Go see Clyde Partlow’? That wouldn’t even get him off a bar stool.”

“Persuade him.”

“Al, I know where you’re coming from, but why should I persuade Jerry Piat to do anything? The man’s a loner, a renegade, a goddam outsider! He doesn’t want to go see anybody! Piat’s opted out and he knows the price and he’s willing to pay it.”

“Will you try?”

“Al, I got an NCIS office to run!” He winked at Triffler. “Sitting right here is Dick Triffler, who would take my place if I took the time to persuade Jerry Piat. Do you want the US Navy to have to depend on Dick Triffler?”

“Say hello for me.”

“Al says hello.”

Triffler smiled. “Tell him I said hello.”

“Triffler says hello. We all cozy now? Okay. Listen, I’ll do this much: I’ll send Piat a message. If he’s willing to listen, I’ll try to talk to him. By phone. But I can’t devote my life to this, Al. Neither can you, for that matter. It isn’t as important as running the Naples office of NCIS. It isn’t as important as being the collections officer for DIA.”

“It’s important enough for Partlow to have messaged the head of NCIS to ask for special cooperation, attention Michael Dukas, NCIS Naples.”

Dukas flashed Triffler a look of disgust. “This was your idea?”

“This was Partlow’s idea. He asked me to call you before the message got to you so you wouldn’t take it the wrong way. Mike, I know it’s an imposition; I know you’re working your ass off; but so am I. I’m just the messenger here. Don’t take it out on me.”

Dukas sighed. “So Partlow wants me to bring Piat in. Even if I have to take time away from my job. And NCIS has already said that’s what I should do. Are you in it with me?”

“Not this time. I got no authorization, no orders.”

“You know, I thought I might actually take Saturday off this week and take my wife to Capri, which I’ve been promising to do for two years?”

Craik made sympathetic noises, and they tossed stories about overwork back and forth, and they parted friends. Dukas, when he had hung up, looked at Triffler with an expression of disgust. “I’ve been drafted,” he said. His hand was still on the secure telephone.

Triffler, an elegant African American who played Felix to Dukas’s Oscar, merely smiled. “Al got another wild hare running?”

Dukas grunted and held up a finger, as if to say Wait until I check something. He picked up the phone, and, shaking his head at Triffler’s pantomimed offer to leave, called his boss in Washington. After a few pleasantries, Dukas said, “I hear I’m being ordered to run an errand for the CIA.”

A brief silence, then his boss’s voice: “Not my doing.”

“Higher up the line? The DIA?”

After another hesitation, “Higher than that.”

When Dukas had put the phone down in its cradle, he turned to Triffler. “What’s the Pentagon’s interest in sending me to do the CIA’s work?” He cocked a cynical eye at Triffler. “You remember Clyde Partlow?” Dukas told him about the Iceland trip and the new request to find Piat. “Piat isn’t exactly my asshole buddy.”

“So you send him an email, and if he doesn’t answer, you’re off the hook.”

“Well—” Dukas hitched himself around toward his pile of paper. “Apparently I’m getting orders to bring Piat in. I may have to leave the office.”

“And put me in charge for a day? Lucky me!”

Dukas waved a hand at the pile of paper. “My son, one day all this will be yours.”

“What’s your wife going to say?”

Dukas groaned.

Piat’s Ukrainian deal went down without a hitch, and the seller paid up, just like that. He’d been home for ten days, and Mull seemed very far away. Now Piat sat on the precarious balcony of his favorite chocolate shop and drank his second Helenika of the day, closed his laptop with a snap, and contemplated the archaeological report he had bought on Mull about Scottish crannogs. He was bored and he had nothing better to do than read it. He’d glanced through it on the plane—very dry, almost no analysis at all—and now he turned to the color plates of the finds. Most of them were dull, and worse, unsaleable—who would buy a three-thousand-year-old bundle of ferns once used as bedding? But there were valuable items, as well: a single gold bead, a copper axe head, a remarkable slate pendant shaped with sides so well smoothed he could almost feel them under his hands.

Crannogs were late European Bronze Age. And the cold water preserved things very well indeed. Piat sipped coffee and ordered a third. He felt rich.

Lesvos was full of tourists. Piat had avoided them for a year by leaving the island during the height of the season—one of the reasons he’d headed off for Iceland, and devil take the consequences. Now Molyvos was crawling with them, and his chocolate shop perched on the edge of the town with a hundred-foot drop to the old Turkish gate below was filling up. Soon enough, Sergio would give him the eye and suggest that he move along and make room for more customers. Piat looked into the shop. There was a big, dark guy at the counter with a very pretty woman with a baby. Piat admired the woman’s backside for a moment, and then—

“Jesus,” Piat said, out loud. The man at the counter was Mike Dukas. Again.

Dukas led the woman out on to the balcony. The whole structure moved under their weight—it was sturdy, but it did protrude well out over the cliff. Dukas looked embarrassed.

“Jerry?” he said. His hand was out.

There wasn’t anywhere to run. Piat shook hands. “Mike.” He gave the woman a smile. She smiled back, and then looked up at Dukas as if exchanging a joke.

Dukas said, “This’s my wife, Leslie.” Leslie Dukas was twenty years younger than her husband, rather stunningly pretty next to such an ugly man despite the pack full of baby that she carried.

Piat indicated his table and waved through the window for Sergio.

Leslie stood for a moment, shaking hands with Piat. “You guys can just do the guy thing. We’ll go have a feed, won’t we, kiddo?” A tiny pudgy hand reached out of her baby pack and tweaked one of her nipples. She laughed. “Gotta go, guys.”

Piat was left with Dukas. Dukas ordered coffee and a big pastry. He made a joke to Sergio in decent Greek.

“Your wife’s lovely,” Piat said.

“Yeah,” said Dukas. And again, “Yeah.”

“That’s the small talk, then. What are you doing here?”

Dukas still looked embarrassed. He doesn’t want to be here, Piat thought.

“Partlow wants you back,” Dukas said. He shrugged.

“Dave’s already fucked it away?” asked Piat.

Dukas shrugged again, looking as Greek as a local, his arms spread wide on the bench back, his weight slumped a little. “Did you expect it?”

“Phff.” Piat’s noise was contemptuous. He had realized himself that he was still smarting under the speed with which he’d been tossed aside. “I don’t know what Clyde was thinking. The guy couldn’t handle a hooker.”

Dukas snorted. His eyes were on Piat’s book, but they flicked up and met Piat’s quickly. Piat was off thinking about Dave and Partlow. “So where do I meet Clyde? Is he hiding in a hotel in Mytilene?”

Dukas passed Piat a slip of paper. Piat disappeared it into his pack with a minimum of fuss. Dukas said, “Not as far as I know.”

“Still in Scotland?”

It was the look on Dukas’s face that finally warned Piat—a little look of interest, almost triumph, at “Scotland.” Dukas had been looking at the book—Dukas hadn’t said anything—

“You don’t know, do you?” Piat said.

Dukas hesitated and then shook his head. “Nope,” he said. And then he smiled and said, “But I bet it’s in Scotland.”

Piat leaned closer to Dukas. “I thought you were in on this.” He shoved the crannog book into his pack and glanced at the slip of paper—just a DC telephone number.

“Partlow doesn’t know where to find you.” Dukas rubbed his nose and his eyes met Piat’s. “I thought you might prefer it to stay that way.”

It wasn’t said as a threat, or at least it didn’t sound like a threat to Piat, and he had been threatened by experts. But it did speak volumes. Dukas was saying I could have fucked you and I didn’t, so you owe me.

“I do. I like it here.” Piat glanced out over the cliff to the brilliant blue sea and the black volcanic beach. It all flitted around his brain—Hackbutt and Irene and the birds and Dave and Partlow and the sea trout in the loch. On balance, it didn’t look very attractive from here. It looked like work. “How much?”

“I’m just the messenger.” Dukas was looking over the balcony. Piat realized that Dukas’s wife was directly below them on the street.

They both watched Leslie. Her laugh and the baby’s mewl of delight were easy to hear. Then Dukas said, “Listen, Jerry—Al Craik thinks it’s important. You know—”

“I know you two go way back. Everyone in the business knows.”

“Okay. That’s all I can say, except I’ve been straight with you, and now I’d like a little payback. I’d like to know what this is about.”

Piat sat back. “I don’t really know, Mike.” He didn’t want Dukas to feel he was shutting him out—Piat was gathering his thoughts and trying to decide where his interest lay. And, he admitted to himself, Dukas had been straight with him. “Partlow asked me to re-recruit an old agent.”

“In Scotland?”

“Mull.”

Dukas made a gesture: “Mull” had no meaning.

“Mull’s an island. Scotland.” Piat shut up. He’d said enough—way too much, probably, but he’d provided plenty of data for a guy like Dukas.

“And?” probed Dukas.

“I signed a piece of paper. Ask Partlow.” Piat indicated the backpack, and by extension, the phone number.

Dukas shook his head. “That’s the best you can do for me, Jerry?”

Piat sipped the last of his Helenika. He found that he wasn’t thinking about what favors he might owe Dukas. He was seeing another angle—his own safety. Something about this operation just didn’t smell right. Now it stank more. He felt the pull of the scrap of paper and he thought that he might just tell Partlow to suck eggs—but he suspected Partlow was going to have to make a big offer. After all, Mike Dukas had come all the way here with his pretty wife. So, big money. And Piat reacted to big money.

So, say he did it. Took the money. Dukas might give him an angle. What if the whole thing was bad. Piat had seen ops go bad, back in the day.

All that in the blink of an eye and a sip of Helenika. “The guy—my old agent—is a falconer.”

They shared a long look.

Piat pushed his cup aside and leaned forward to Dukas. “My turn. I really don’t know squat about this, okay? And I just told you everything you’d need to know—right? Okay. So here’s my side. Give me your home number and an address. Maybe I’ll tell you a thing or two as we go along. Or maybe I’ll tell Clyde to fuck off. Okay? And in return—in return, if I do this, and it goes to shit, you get me out. Because, let’s face it, I don’t like Clyde Partlow.”

He certainly had Dukas’s attention. “Get you out? Jerry, no offense, but I’m no part of this.”

Piat looked him squarely in the eye. “Bullshit. You want the goods on Partlow’s op. Frankly, I think Partlow will work overtime to keep me in the dark, but I’m offering you my ‘cooperation.’ Right? And you give me a nice number on a piece of paper somewhere, and poof! I’m an informer, and you can protect me. Right?”

Dukas shook his head. “I don’t hire informers inside the CIA.”

Piat laughed. “You would if there were any available. I’m not ‘inside the CIA’ anymore. I’m some guy, a petty crook, that Partlow wants for the great game. I could even be a pretty decent source on antiquities.”

Dukas looked so dubious that Piat laughed, and then they both laughed. Other patrons glanced at them.

Dukas leaned forward and shook his head. “No, Jerry. No protection. I’d like to hear what you have to say. I’d probably go to bat for you if Partlow tries to screw you in the end. But I’m not going to give you a security blanket so that I can find in a year that you left it wrapped around my head while you liberated the contents of the British Museum.”

Leslie returned and interrupted them. They were staying in Skala Eressos and she said they had to go. Piat walked them down to the old Turkish gates as if he were their host, pointing out other features they might enjoy, rating the quality of pots in each shop, indicating the good silversmith and the bad one. In the tunnel of the gate, he stopped, and he and Dukas shook hands. Dukas’s handshake included a slip of paper.

When he opened it in his house, it had a phone number in Naples and an address. Piat smiled. He realized that he felt reassured. Few things and fewer people had that effect on him anymore.

He went out the door to call Clyde Partlow.

4

Piat’s passport was less than a year from expiry. This cost him an hour in UK customs at Glasgow and preyed on his mind as he drove his rental Renault up the A82 along Loch Lomond and into the highlands. Ingrained paranoia and a horde of legal issues prohibited him from simply renewing it.

The Green Welly Stop at the turn for Oban provided him with terrible coffee and a delicious, fat-filled pastry, and fuel for his car as well. He browsed the sporting goods, annoyed as usual by the prices that the English and Scots paid for stuff that would cost a few dollars in a Wal-Mart. He was looking for something to buy for Hackbutt or Irene. Nothing offered—and besides, he didn’t have a contract yet. No need to spend his own money.

Oban reminded him of Mytilene—same harbor shape, same stone houses, same odd mixtures of industry, fishing, and tourism. He parked on the high street, checked his time, and whiled away fifteen minutes in a very promising shop that catered to high-end “anglers” and sportsmen in general. The shop carried rifles for stalking and shotguns for pheasant and grouse—not that Piat ever felt the need to have a gun, but always handy to have access. They also had a wide selection of sporting clothes—decent wellies, good boots, shooting coats. In his mind, he was spending Partlow’s money. He thought that he knew what was coming with Partlow. Why else summon him back?

When his watch read three exactly, Piat paid for a tide table for the area and a handful of flies and walked through the door, casually checking his car, the street, and the faces and apparel of passers-by in one sweeping glance. He didn’t see anything to alert him and moved off down the high street toward the Oban Hotel. He entered the lobby at four minutes after three and went to the main desk.

In minutes he was on his way to meet Partlow. The opening door revealed a cheerful room with a view of the harbor and two comfortable chairs. One of them was occupied.

“Hello, Clyde,” Piat said.

Partlow smiled. It was a rare smile—quite genuine as far as Piat could tell. It told him a great deal. Partlow was genuinely glad to see him. Piat added a zero to his fee.

“Right on time, Jerry. I’m so glad.”

Piat considered saying that the ability to be in a place on the dot of a particular minute from half the world away was a matter of basic competence in the profession. He thought about several ways of saying it—snappy, derogatory, modest. Wrong. Partlow needs me, and this is the time to make a new start. Because he couldn’t decide how to begin, he said nothing.

Partlow didn’t seem to know how to begin, either. He cleared his throat, twice. “Good trip, Jerry?”

Piat shrugged. “My passport’s almost expired. It cost some time. I’m here.” Now he was enjoying it. Partlow was discomfited by the absence of raillery or outburst.

Partlow nodded as if Piat had said something important. He clasped his hands over his knees.

Finally, Piat decided that they might sit that way all day. He was curious. “I take it Hackbutt tossed Dave out.”

Partlow rubbed his face. He looked short on sleep. Piat couldn’t remember seeing Clyde Partlow short on sleep. After a few seconds, he said, “Well, no. I tossed Dave out, Jerry. But in effect, the result is the same.”

Piat nodded. “And you want me back, I take it? Or just some advice?”

Partlow had been fed the hook, but he didn’t take it immediately. “Where did you leave Dave with the matter of the girlfriend, Jerry?”

Piat narrowed his eyes and slouched. “I told him we had to recruit the girl to get Hackbutt back. He told me to fuck off.”

Partlow nodded slowly, as if his fears were confirmed. “No bullshit, now, Jerry. You told him to recruit the girl.”

Piat was annoyed. He took his time, and then said, “Yes.”

“Dave believes you sabotaged him and the operation.”

“He’d have to believe that, wouldn’t he? Otherwise he’d have to believe he wasn’t competent to recruit and run a US national in a friendly country.” Piat allowed a little edge to creep in, but otherwise stayed at Partlow’s level—remote, professorial, as if the operation were an academic exercise.

Partlow steepled his hands and pursed his lips. “My fault. I should have kept you on board. I did have another CO lined up, but he went to Iraq instead.”

Piat spoke quietly, the way he did when he consoled a survivor. “I tried, Clyde. He just played the goon, and I walked away.”

“You could have warned me.” Partlow held up a hand and winced. “No, forget I said that.” He blew out several puffs of breath. “You did try to tell me.”

Piat raised his eyebrows.

They sat in silence for a while. It finally dawned on Piat that there might not be an operation anymore. Pisser if true. He glanced at Partlow, who was watching a sailboat, a two-masted ketch out in the harbor, as she got her foresail up, the boat and the sail crisp and clear against the blue water and the clear sky. Maybe not a pisser. Back to Greece and shot of the whole thing.

“I could run you directly. That’s how I should have done it to begin with. Free hand, Jerry. On an op that matters.”

Piat had pretended to be a gentleman for ten minutes, and he found the restraint wearing. “I could make a real difference?” he said with gentle sarcasm. “I’ve heard this speech a few times, Clyde. Hell, I’ve made it a few times.”

Partlow nodded, or rather his head swayed back and forth as if he were laughing very softly. He said, “Listen, Jerry. As such things are reckoned, you were one of the best of your generation. So good that everyone passed you over for promotion so that they could use your reports and your agents to make their careers.”

Piat shrugged. The flattery was an essential part of any recruitment speech, but he couldn’t completely resist its allure, as he suspected it was true.

“Now I have an operation with one of your old agents, a prickly man with a bitch of a wife. I need him, Jerry. I don’t have another falconer to hand, and Mister Hackbutt gets top grades from some people that matter in the falconry world. And here you are. Will you do it?”

“What, for love?”

Partlow sighed. Piat thought he was secretly pleased to be on familiar ground. “For money, Jerry.”

“How long?”

“As long as it takes.”

Piat had this part ready. “Fifteen hundred a day. All expenses and no bullshit about them. That’s going to be a lot, because Hackbutt’s a social basket case and needs clothes, deportment, time eating where rich people eat, all that stuff. No bullshit about any of it.”

Partlow looked over his hands. “Jerry, why do you think Hackbutt needs all these things?”

Piat was dismissive. “Falconry is about money and power. You’re targeting an Arab right? Somebody rich, somebody with old money and birds.”

Partlow deflated very slightly. “Touché,” he murmured.

“Ten thousand advance, ten thousand on termination. Success bonus—up to you. Payment monthly. In cash.”

Partlow nodded.

“An EU passport for me. And you walk my true-name passport through State and renew it for ten years.”

“Not possible, Jerry. I mean, sure, I can get your true-name passport renewed by Friday. You could do it yourself—I know, paranoia reigns supreme—but I don’t hand out cover passports to agents, however much I need them. I can’t, Jerry. The world has changed.”

Piat leaned forward. In his head, he was already a case officer again. It was an odd change, to suddenly think like a case officer and not like an agent. “Clyde—you want me? I want to play. I want to do a good job. And I’ll still be me. You want to bury me in flattery, Clyde? Look how many ops I lost in my whole career—two, and how many were penetrated—none, and how many of my agents got waxed—one, Clyde, one, and that was the lapse of some dickhead in SOG. I run a tight ship. The tight ship starts with operational security. I’m a petty black-market art dealer. Small-time. But still—by now, somebody has noticed me—the Brits, the Swedes, the Russians. No way am I jogging back and forth from here to Dubai or Riyadh or wherever the fuck you want Hackbutt going without a passport.”

Partlow smiled. “I’ll pay fifteen hundred a day for that,” he said. “I’ll consider the passport. To be honest, I hadn’t imagined you’d travel with the falconer. Tell me why you’d need to.”

“I wouldn’t send Hackbutt to cross the street on his own. He’ll need control all the way. He’ll panic the first time he sees the target. He’ll suck at border crossing. He’ll take Irene as his security blanket, but he’ll need a shoulder to cry on—she’s hard as rock.”

Partlow uncrossed and re-crossed his legs. “The girl?”

“We have to get her on board and keep her happy.” Piat was holding Partlow’s eyes now.

“Bad operational procedure.”

“Yeah, for newbies. If this doesn’t matter, Clyde, if this is some petty-ass grab at some two-bit creep, then just walk away. Okay? Hackbutt’s a pain in the ass and Irene’s going to do something fucked up, and they’re a tangle of loves and resentments. On the other hand, Clyde, if this operation counts, if this one could make a difference, then you need that woman and all the risk and crap and baggage that she’ll bring.”

Partlow had both hands up in front of his face. “Sold—sold—sold before you told me. We need the woman. If we didn’t, Dave would still be here. How do we keep her?”

Piat shrugged. “Money?” he asked. “Works for most people.”

“Dave thought she was ‘anti-American.’ Said she hated everything about the administration—” Partlow gave a little half-smile. “I gather she’s Canadian.”

“She’s sounding better by the second, isn’t she? Come on, Clyde.”

“How much for her?” Partlow asked. The word “soul” lingered invisibly in the air at the end of his sentence.

“Hundred thou?” Piat guessed.

“Christ Jesus!” muttered Partlow, in Anglican agony.

“Let me promise Hackbutt a new bird.”

Partlow hesitated, his hand on his chin. Piat drove over his caution.

“You want this guy? Promise him a bird. It’ll help, both as a control tool and as a bargaining counter. And it can stand in lieu of payment, I’ll bet. Promise him a bird at the end and he’ll be happy. Besides, we’ll need a McGuffin for the Arab.”

“I’ve never said the potential target was an Arab.”

“You never said your wife was the daughter of an Anglican minister, either.”

“Sometimes I find you just a little scary, Jerry.”

He saw the challenges and the roadblocks ahead and he had to swallow a laugh.

“You can work for me, Jerry?”

“Yep.” Piat looked around the room. “Got anything here to drink? Yeah, Clyde. As long as I get to write the contract and as long as you let me consult on operational issues, I can work for you. Just this once, old times’ sake, all that jazz.”

“Scotch in the bedroom. Laphroaig and a local—try it. You just added two hundred thousand to my operational budget.”

“Air travel. Probably six trips—three for training, three for real. Three contact attempts—he’ll fuck up the first one, so I’ll plan it for him to fuck up—third one just to have a fallback.” Piat was feeling a little high. The scotch settled him.

“You still don’t know what the op is. Aren’t you curious?”

Piat spread his hands. “No. Yes. Listen—first I lay out my terms. Then you accept them and we sign something. Then you brief me. Right?” He shrugged and waved his glass. “Or you reject them and I walk away.”

Partlow made a moue of distaste. “Not much chance of that, is there, Jerry? Which you bloody well know.”

Piat raised his glass to Partlow and drained it. “I think I’m being damned good about the whole thing, old boy.”

Partlow leaned forward. “That’s what worries me.”

Piat laughed. One scotch had hit him and his adrenaline high like a hammer. “You know what, Clyde?”

Partlow looked a little pained.

“I think I want to do it. One more time.”

Partlow went into the bedroom and poured them both more scotch, and then they raised their glasses and drank.

And then they signed some papers and made a plan to communicate. They discussed Piat’s cover and Partlow’s role and the nature of the target—“no names yet, Jerry, we’re not there yet”—and Piat, despite three glasses of scotch, had no difficulty dictating notes on targeting possible meeting venues.

Partlow handed over ten thousand dollars, mostly in pounds. “All I have. I want hand receipts on that. Deduct your travel here. I’ll meet you in a week and we’ll see where we are on cover and money.”

Piat had a faraway look in his eyes. “Don’t come near Scotland again, Clyde.”

“Where?” Partlow was in the room’s tiny front hall, ready to walk out the door, dapper in light tweeds, and somehow, obviously American. “Jerry—I’ll decide the meeting location, okay? Try and remember that I’m your case officer, and not the other way around.”

Piat shrugged. “Whatever. Just not Scotland. London, Antwerp, Dublin. Athens would be nice—I could get some stuff from home.”

Partlow nodded. “Athens it is. I have business there.”

They shook hands. Partlow’s jawline moved, but whatever he had to say, the moment passed, and he was out the door.

Piat lay on the bed and started his shopping list.

5

Piat woke next morning in Oban with a hangover and a mix of foreboding and guilt. The operation was all very well when discussed from the safety of an expensive hotel room, but in the chilly gray air of a Scottish morning all he could think about was Hackbutt—and Irene. Partlow had been cagey about what exactly had cued him to fire Dave.

Hackbutt had changed from the old days in Southeast, but Piat still felt he knew where his mind would go. Betrayal. Personal betrayal of trust by his old friend Jack. From Hackbutt’s perspective, good ol’ Jack had walked off and abandoned him to the tender mercies of Dave.

Piat considered it from a number of angles while he drank grapefruit juice in the hotel’s restaurant. He added to the list in his head—props. Envelopes. Tickets.

On the ferry to Mull he read more about crannogs to keep his mind off his worries.

This wasn’t going to be pretty.

The dog greeted him with silent appraisal, its eyes following him from the car to the door while Piat’s stomach did back-flips in anticipation of Hackbutt’s welcome. He temporized by extending a hand again, letting the dog sniff; and he was about to try petting it again when he heard footsteps and the door opened.

“Look who the dog dragged in,” Irene said as she opened the door. Her face had all the expression of a runway model’s. The sexual performance was not on offer. Piat guessed she was angry. Over his sudden disappearance, or for her husband’s sake? Or was it Dave and whatever he’d botched? Piat had too few cues to do anything but guess wildly, but since he had to guess, he suspected that Hackbutt had told her everything and she had hated it. Not a good start.

He narrowly avoided the trap of asking for Hackbutt. That way lay Dave’s disastrous attempt—excluding Irene.

Piat met her eyes. “I want to try again,” he said.

Irene’s face didn’t move. “Can I offer you anything, Jack? Tea?”

Piat nodded—not too eagerly, he hoped. “Tea would be great.”

Irene was wearing another shapeless bag. The slight sheen of the material and the coarse beadwork suggested that it was an expensive shapeless bag. She was barefoot, and as she walked off to the kitchen, he saw that she had small feet arched like a ballerina’s. Her back remained straight, her shoulders square. Nothing sexual was being shown, and he was grateful.

She put water on. The door to the room she called her “studio” was closed; the photographs were still up in the same places; there was no sign that she was “working” or doing whatever people who thought they were artists did.

“Hackbutt’s up on the hillside. He’s flying his young birds.” She paused, reached into a jar and pulled out a handful of loose tea. “Herbal, or do you run on caffeine?”

Nice to have the right answer made obvious. “I drink coffee when I want caffeine. Herbal, please.”

Irene’s back remained to him. “Good black tea has more caffeine than coffee and is better for you. I’m sorry Eddie isn’t here—but I’m not sure he’d have much to say to you.”

“I fired Dave,” Piat said. It came out easily, smoothly—the foundation lie on which he intended to build his castle.

She was putting leaves in a tea ball. Her hand paused for a moment. “Really?” she said. Her feigned disinterest was the first hopeful sign Piat had detected. “Jack, I’m not sure that you know Eddie very well. He feels that—that you betrayed him.” With her last words, she turned around, teapot in hand.

“I certainly abandoned him. Yeah. I thought it was for the best. Look, can I level with you?”

Irene sat. In one motion, she brushed her shapeless bag under her knees and pulled her legs up under her, so that she sat sideways in a wing-backed armchair. She looked like a yoga master. Her smile was social. “My father told me that the expression ‘can I level with you’ always means the opposite. He was a capitalist pig of the first water, but he knew people.” She poured tea into heavy terracotta mugs.

He was nervous and making mistakes. He shrugged and exhaled hard. “Okay. Point made. I’m done.” He swallowed some tea—good tea. Big gamble. She has to want the money. He must have told her that there’s money. Or I’m out the door.

She smiled again—but it was a different smile. Secret pleasure. “So—why did you fire Dave?”

“He didn’t know how to deal with you,” Piat said, from the hip.

“And you do?” she asked.

“Irene, I know I have to deal with you.” He just left it there. She wanted to be in control—being in control was one of the things that made her tick.

She sipped her tea demurely. “What do you want?”

“Digger’s help. A contact. It’ll require hard work and some lifestyle adjustments for both of you.”

“Like what?” She leaned forward.

Piat sensed the intensity of her interest but misplaced it as revulsion. “It’s just cosmetic, Irene. Like a costume. Like makeup.” She wore a little. Not much, but enough to suggest that she had a human interest in her own looks.

She made a gesture of dismissal with her teacup. “What changes?”

Piat felt a ray of hope—just a single ray, but as bright as the rare Scottish sun. She was bargaining—her body language and intensity said she was bargaining.

“Clothes. Haircut. Table manners. Social interaction. Travel.”

She looked at him over her mug of tea. “And me?”

Piat smiled blandly. “What do you want me to say? I suspect you’re already pretty good at wearing a string of pearls and chatting with debs. Right?”

She leaned back, put her feet up on the old trunk that did duty as a coffee table. Her soles were dirty. “I shit that life out of me with the last meat I ate,” she said in a matter-offact voice.

Irene used words like shit to shock. It had been one of Piat’s first clues to who she was, or might be—that she had grown up with people who didn’t say shit every third word. Rich people. People with culture.

“I need Hackbutt. I need his expertise with these birds. I know he can do this. And Irene—it’ll help him. He can help change the world, and he can spend the rest of his life knowing that he did it.”

She nodded, but she didn’t look very impressed.

“You and the birds—together—have made a more confident, more rounded man than I knew in Southeast. So let him do this. It won’t hurt him—far from it.” Piat tried to hold her eye as he made his little speech, but she glanced away and then back. She’d looked at her photographs, he knew. She had as much as said, What’s in this for me?

“And I’ll pay both of you, handsomely. I know that you guys don’t run on money, but it’s what I have. Give it to charity if you want.” Most people liked to pretend they didn’t want money. He suspected that Irene would pretend pretty hard.

He was wrong.

She swiveled to face him, plunked her bare feet down on the stone floor. “How much money?” she asked directly.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” Piat said.

“We’ll need more than that. I’ll need more than that. You pay for my installation—materials, transportation, insurance, chai. The works.”

Piat shook his head, apparently reluctant. “I’m sorry, Irene. I can’t make open-ended financial commitments. I can offer you a lump sum—I can set a payment schedule. I can’t just say I’ll pay for every expensive hotel you book in Paris—or wherever you get your show.”

Irene leaned forward over the table, her breasts visible almost to the nipple under her dress, her well-defined arm muscles in high relief. She’s tense. “Fifty thousand each, then.” Her voice was low, a little raspy. “I love the irony—the military-industrial complex paying for my installation. I might have to add some new pieces.” But the tension remained, and only when it was too late did he realize that she was, perhaps unconsciously, trying to set her price too high. She wanted him to say no. She wanted—what? She wanted not to have to follow through with her “art.”

But by the time he’d understood, the moment was past. He hadn’t flinched at the amount. He’d kept his tone businesslike. “Five thousand each when Hackbutt agrees. Ten thousand each when Hackbutt completes the cosmetic part to my satisfaction. The balance when we’re done. Either way, success or failure—but not until we’re done.”

She looked at the photographs and then at the front door, as if she were looking for an escape, and said, “You have ten thousand dollars on you?” she babbled. “This is all happening too fast—my God, we just met you—really, I think you’re moving us too fast—”

So.

Piat opened his blazer and took out four envelopes. He laid them out on the old trunk. Two said “Irene.” Two said “Hackbutt.” He pointed. “Five thou.” He moved his hand. “Tickets to London. For shopping.” He waved at the other two. “Ditto, for you.”

“I don’t get all giggly at the prospect of shopping.”

He knew he had to push. “Deal, Irene?”

She rose to her feet. “More tea?”

He drove away from the farm without having seen Hackbutt but with a sense of release from danger. And a little elation. The next part—making up with Hackbutt—would be messy and difficult and emotional, but that was life in the business.

From a roadside phone kiosk, Piat dialed the number he and Partlow had arranged to use for routine communications and left an eight-digit code that he typed out on the stainless steel keypad. Then he spent three hours counting his remaining money and renting a room in Tobermory. The woman at the front desk of the Mishnish remembered him. He told her he was back for the fishing.

“Oh, aye,” she said.

Piat believed in living his cover. He spent the rest of the evening on the estuary of the Aros River, fishing.

In the morning, he didn’t go straight to the farm. Instead, he put on his boots and first drove, then climbed to his loch. He took a rod, but he didn’t set it up. Instead he took a cheap digital camera. Then, from the pub in Craignure, he accessed his “Furman” account online. Furman was the identity he used in Athens to sell antiquities. He uploaded three digital images of the crannog from the cheap camera and sent them to three different addresses; one in Sri Lanka, one in Florida, and one in Ireland. He wasn’t sure just what he was meaning to do yet. So he was testing the water.

* * *

As he drove back down the gravel road to the farm, he caught a flash of Hackbutt among the cages behind the house. His stomach rolled over. He pulled around the house, parked, and took a deep breath.

As he got out of the car, Hackbutt came around the house and waved. Hackbutt’s wave said it all, he hoped. Piat gave up the idea of trying to make contact with the dog and faced him.

“You really pissed me off,” Hackbutt said from thirty feet away. His tone was high, almost falsetto. As he walked toward Piat, he said, “It’s not that I can’t be your friend. Not that I’m angry—really angry. But it wasn’t decent, leaving me like that.” He looked like shit. He looked like a beggar in the wilderness—beard uncombed, hair wild.

“No, Digger. No. I abandoned you. It’s not the way I meant it to be, but I did it. I’m sorry.”

Hackbutt’s hands were trembling. He rubbed them together. “Why? Irene says I should forget it. That it’s not our business. But I can’t—I think you have to tell me.”

Piat had forgotten how Hackbutt really was—the pile of insecurities and grandiosities. Piat put an arm on the other man’s shoulders. Lies that he might have told other agents wouldn’t work on Hackbutt—lies that he had been busy, that he had had to use Dave, that he’d been somewhere else saving the world. Waste of breath. To Hackbutt, there was only Hackbutt—and maybe Irene. Instead, he said, “I needed to get you guys the money. That’s all I can say, okay?”

Hackbutt’s face was blotchy. “Dave said you weren’t coming back. That you didn’t give a shit about me or Irene. That you only worked for money and that he was my real friend.” He was almost crying. He was very much the Hackbutt that Piat had run in Malaysia.

Piat nodded, hugged Hackbutt a little harder. He could imagine the vitriol that Dave must have spewed. He could see how a fool like Dave would think that he could achieve control that way.

“But I came back, Digger.” Piat didn’t care that he could see Irene at the window, that he was practically hugging her man on the driveway. “I came back. I should never have left.”

“And you won’t leave again?”

“Not until the end.” Piat believed in being prepared for the end, right from the beginning. “And then we’ll just go back to being friends.”

Hackbutt was crying now. But he was returning the hug. Piat was patient, almost tender.

“Irene will think we’re making out,” Hackbutt said after a full minute. He giggled.

That laugh’s got to go, Piat thought.

Irene had made tea. The door to her studio was still closed, but a third of the photographs had been taken down, and some lay in untidy piles on the furniture. Irene was taciturn, seemingly nervous. Regretting it?

Piat cleared a space on the couch and sat, opening his backpack.

“Okay, folks. Today we start working. First, anybody have something on their schedule for the next two months? Weddings? Funerals? Spill it now, because the moment I’m paying, you’re on my calendar. Okay?”

“He’s always like this at the start,” Hackbutt said to Irene.

Irene stared at him.

“Good. Digger, you remember these forms?” The forms themselves were creations from Piat’s laptop, but they were enough like CIA documents to pass muster with an agent. “You pay US taxes?”

“No,” they said together.

“Then we don’t need this one.” Piat crumpled a W-2 invoice form he’d downloaded. He’d always thought it funny that US agents paid income tax on black ops money, but they did. “Contract. Security agreement. Confidentiality. These don’t constitute a security clearance, just an arrangement. Okay?”

“We have to sign,” Hackbutt said to Irene. “It’s okay.” He was reassuring her from his years of experience as an agent, and he sounded fatuous. She, however, was reading the whole document and not listening to him. Looking for a reason not to sign, he thought, but there was a resignation about her that suggested that she was simply going through the motions. If the idea of actually putting her art on display frightened her, another part of her very much wanted to do it. That part, he guessed, had already won.

Piat had looked at her website. She actually had a small reputation, had done “installations” in Auckland and Ontario and Eastern Europe. But the website hadn’t been updated in three years, and he wondered if she really was an “artist”—he couldn’t think of the word without the quotation marks—who’d run out of ideas. Or whatever it was that “artists” had in their heads.

At any rate, she signed. Looking unhappy. But sexually interesting.

When they had both signed, Piat handed out envelopes. “Five thousand each. Okay?”

He’d made a mistake, and he saw it too late. Hackbutt’s face froze and his skin got blotchy again. He followed Hackbutt’s eyes and saw that Hackbutt only now realized that Piat was paying both of them, and that as much as that made sense to him and to Partlow, it wasn’t the right move for Hackbutt, who wanted to give her the money himself. Without much of a pause, he turned to Irene. “Hackbutt wanted you to have this money for yourself. The contract’s with him—but he wouldn’t do it without you. And I’m sorry to be so crass with both of you but, Digger, you remember that we have to play for the bureaucrats with money. I can get you more for both than I can get just for you, Digger.” He said it all so smoothly that Hackbutt’s face was calm again before he was done.

Hackbutt smiled shakily at Irene. “I thought I’d get to give it to you myself,” he began, but she launched herself out of her chair and embraced him. In seconds they were locked together, kissing like teenagers.

Piat busied himself collecting the documents. After ten seconds he said, “Okay, kids. Really.”

Irene pulled herself free and shook out her hair, laughing. Hackbutt laughed, too—a real laugh, not a giggle.

Piat smiled with them and opened a calendar. “Digger—you first. You need clothes.”

Hackbutt nodded. “Irene’s been telling me that for a year.”

“Now Uncle Sam’s paying. Irene may need some too. It’s too early to tell you the whole ball of wax—you know the rules, Digger. But let’s just say you’re going to meet some rich, powerful people. You have to be ready to be with them. Okay? I don’t expect you to become James Bond, but I need you to look the part and act the part.”

Hackbutt crossed his arms, his scrawny elbows showing through rents in his ancient sweater. “Jeez, Jack. I’m not good at social stuff.”

Piat looked at him without mercy. “If this were easy, we wouldn’t be paying so much money for it. Okay? This is go-no-go stuff, Digger. You have to do the social stuff. We’ll have training for it—practice, role-play. Just like in Jakarta. Okay? Same for Irene.” He tossed the last in because he wanted Hackbutt to feel that he wasn’t alone in being targeted.

Irene’s frown caused her eyebrows to make a single, solid line on her face. Piat didn’t know her facial expressions yet. Tension? Anger? Hard to know.

His eyes roved down his list. “Right now, I’m mostly focused on clothes. Digger, can you wear some real clothes?”

“Like what?” Hackbutt sounded suspicious.

“Wool trousers, for a start,” said Irene. “Green like your eyes, Eddie.”

Piat felt as if Irene were speaking lines he’d written for her, except that he hadn’t. What a fool Dave had been to ignore her. “Exactly. Clothes. I don’t want to overdo it—you’re an American, you’d look silly in breeks—but the Arab idea of a Western gentleman is an Englishman. I need you to look the part.”

“What’re breeks?” Hackbutt asked.

“Knee breeches. For shooting.” Piat paused to see if Hackbutt would respond.

“Sounds kind of faggy,” Hackbutt muttered. He clearly thought Piat was making fun of him.

“You both have to eat meat. Not all the time. Okay? But enough so your systems don’t reject it.”

“No way,” Hackbutt said. “I’ve given all that shit up.” He looked at Irene for confirmation.

She gave Piat a considering look. “I won’t eat pork. Lamb or beef I can probably hack.”

Hackbutt stared at her.

Piat nodded. “Fair enough. Okay. I won’t hide from you that our target is Arab. He won’t eat pork, either. It’ll probably actually help his subconscious cues with you two if you don’t eat pork. Fine. Pork’s off the training menu. Anyway—you’re game for the clothes and food. Right? Okay. Conversation.”

Hackbutt all but cringed. Irene put a hand on his knee.

“Here’s the plan. We three eat together three nights a week. Okay? At dinner we play a game. It goes like this. Irene and I speak only when we’re spoken to. Understand, Digger? We’ll answer questions. If encouraged, we can respond and ask questions of our own, but otherwise, we just sit there. Boring dinners, Dig, unless you come to them with some prepared topics and you get them started.”

Hackbutt looked back and forth between them. “Why you and Irene? I mean—when does Irene get the training? You’re not helping her.” He trailed off.

Piat nodded, wondering just what to say.

Irene picked up the ball immediately. “Sweetie—I know how to make conversation. How the hell do you think I deal with agents and gallery owners and buyers? It’s you, dear man, who can’t make small talk with a telemarketer.”

Hackbutt nodded. “Why would anyone want to make small talk with a telemarketer?”

“And three days a week you give me some training with the birds,” Piat said.

Hackbutt sat up. “Really? That’s great, Jack. I didn’t know you were interested!” Then more slowly, “Oh, for the op, you mean.”

“I have to travel with you. I’ll be with you most of the time. So I need to know enough to pass.”

Hackbutt frowned. “The birds’ll know in a second if you don’t want to be with them, Jack. If you’re—afraid. Or fake.” He realized what he’d said. “Oh, Jack—sorry.”

“Why? Why be sorry? You’re right. But let me have a go at it. They’re beautiful and I imagine I can make my way.” In fact, Piat was not at all sure he’d be steady with those killers flashing their beaks a few inches from his nose, but he had to try, and he’d done worse in the line of service.

Later at the car, Piat nodded toward the dog and said, “Why’s he so unfriendly?”

“Is he unfriendly?” Hackbutt looked at the dog as if he’d never thought about it. “He’s a nasty animal.”

“Well, shy.”

“Before I knew what he was like, I left the gate open and he got in with the birds and scared them. He went crazy—running around and barking and stressing them. I kicked his butt right out of there.” He was proud of himself. “I mean, I kicked him.” He thought about that, apparently with satisfaction, and then said, “Then I chained him up.”

“Do you walk him?”

“Annie does. Sometimes.”

“Who’s Annie?”

“Oh—a kid who helps with the birds sometimes. Sort of an apprentice. She likes the dog. I’ve told her, if that dog gets in with the birds again, I’ll take my shotgun to it. I won’t have the birds stressed.”

Piat suppressed the things he might have said.

Over the next couple of weeks, Piat, coming every other day to the farm, made more progress with the dog than he did with Hackbutt or Irene. The falconer didn’t want to become a social creature, it turned out, and he dug in his heels; Irene didn’t want to be an agent and stayed in her “studio;” the dog, on the other hand, wanted to be a real dog, and he accepted Piat’s fingers, then his hand on his head, and then a caressing of his ears. After several days of it, Piat took him off the chain and opened the derelict iron sheep fence and let them both through and up the hill. To his surprise, the dog stayed at his left knee.

“Don’t you want to run?” Piat said. The dog looked up at him. The dog expected something but couldn’t tell him what.

“Run,” Piat said. “Get some exercise.”

The dog looked at him.

“Run!” Piat said. He made a sweep with his arm to suggest the openness of the world, and to his surprise the dog took off. Later experiments showed that it was the gesture. All he really had to do was point ahead, and the dog went; if it went too far, he found he could whistle it back—it would dash to his feet and then sit, head up, ears alert.

“What does he want?” Piat said to his new friend, the owner of the tackle-and-book shop. He’d made the shop part of his off-duty routine, cruising the books every few days and usually buying something. “The dog comes back and sits and looks at me and I don’t know what to do.”

“It sounds like quite a good dog. Probably a herder: you get a lot of those here. They’ll herd anything—sheep, children, ducks. Quite smart, is he?”

“Well, he sure seems to know things I don’t.”

“Ye-e-e-s.” The man stroked his long, unshaven chin. “Sounds as if he’s been trained and expects you to know the signs. Or partly trained, perhaps—young dog, is he? Tell you what, carry a few treats in your pocket; try one on him when he sits down like that. He may be used to the odd reward for coming back. Not every time, mind—if you do it every time, he’ll use it as a dodge to gorge—but often enough.” He talked about hand signals that the dog might know. “Friend’s dog, is he?”

“They neglect him.”

The shop owner laughed. “Mind he doesn’t become your dog, then.” He grinned. “You know what Kipling said.” He waited. Then: “‘Don’t give your heart to a dog.’”

“Kipling also said, ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone.’ I travel fast.”

But he bought a packet of something called Bow Wowzers, and when he gave the sitting dog one, a new relationship was forged. He became the replacement for some earlier man, the trainer, the giver of treats, the divinity. The dog ran for him, returned for him, herded for him, waited for him. Every day.

It was Annie who gave him a name. “I call him Ralph,” she said, “because it’s what his bark sounds like—Ralf! Ralf!” Annie was perhaps sixteen, not pretty, but, despite her big shoulders and heavy hips, she had the kind of complexion that was imitated in decorating china figurines and postcards. She also appeared to be as strong as an ox, and her handshake was firm. She was more or less Hackbutt’s apprentice, apparently as daft about falcons as he was. If she felt any jealousy of Piat over the dog, she certainly didn’t show it. She was basically a good kid who liked animals.

“Ralph,” Piat said. The dog wagged his tail. What the hell, he’d be Ralph or Emily or Algernon if this man would just be his human being.

Piat bought Ralph a green tennis ball. And then a chewing toy.

Irene was sardonic about Piat and the dog. Amused, but sardonic. In fact, he didn’t see her as much as he’d expected to, as much as in fact he’d hoped. He found himself responding to that tall body, the more so as she toned down her sexual advertising—the shock words, the wet kisses with Hackbutt—as Piat became part of her landscape. Whatever her fears of her “art” were, she’d grasped the nettle. Every day he came to the farm now, she was “working.” Mostly, she was shut away in her “studio” and he didn’t see her, and he increasingly found he wanted to. He sensed that increasingly she didn’t want to see him.

In his hindbrain, he wanted to see more of her. In his professional brain, he was satisfied that she kept her distance. When he was bringing Hackbutt in to Partlow as a one shot, the thought of fucking her had been exciting, but Piat had rules, and one of them was that sex and operations didn’t mix. This was his operation now.

The rules didn’t always penetrate his hindbrain.

When she came out of her isolation, it was to cook and take part in the training sessions, which started by not going very well and then got worse.

“I don’t know how!” Hackbutt’s voice would quaver like the whine of a housefly. “Why won’t you talk to me?”

Piat, Irene, and Hackbutt were silently eating their way through a curry with some shreds of lamb, Irene’s first attempt to add meat to their diet. The food was simple but good. The conversation was nonexistent. So far, Piat had managed only three kinds of interaction: silence, a harangue from Hackbutt about falconry, and a harangue from Irene about overwork.

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