Fiona sighed. 'No spontaneity,' she said. 'You should try it, Michael. It wins girls' hearts.'
Once you're out of the trade, there's not much you can do to earn a living that is remotely like what you've done before, unless you've been working under a cover during your years of service that actually entails a real job- liking hosting The Gong Show, for instance-and thus can just keep on working after you've been sunsetted out of your security clearances.
But if you've been flying around the world killing people and blowing up enemy targets, it's tough to slide behind a desk. Most spies are spies because they lack certain people skills:
Honesty.
Ethics.
Respect for property.
So your choices are generally limited. You can work for a paramilitary security group like Black-water, which presents its own set of problems, not the least of which is that you can now get arrested for what you used to do legally. Like: Shooting people. You can get a job as a bodyguard for someone wealthy enough to require one. But wealthy people typically pay for crap, the reason they have so much money being that they don't squander it on things like expensive security details. Or you do what Sam Axe has done, which is live well by being the kind of man women want to sleep with, take care of and, occasionally, give a Cadillac to.
One of the first times I can recall working with Sam Axe was in the midnineties. We were in the Northern Caucasus Mountains training for an operation in Dagestan that ended up being aborted at the last moment. At the time, Sam still looked like the Navy SEAL he'd been-lean muscle mass stacked on a body fit for a linebacker-though he was under the employ of the Special Forces by then, mostly doing ops in the former USSR and the Middle East.
Figuring we had nothing to lose since the job was off anyway, we went to a bar Sam knew of in the village of Burl, about two dozen clicks from our base camp. Sam always knows of a bar. 'Way I see it,' Sam said then, 'worst thing that could happen is we'd get into a fight and they'd know a team of Special Forces was hiding in the mountains preparing for some kind of armed action, and we'd end up on trial at the Hague.'
It seemed like a reasonable risk. By the end of the night, we were eating goat stew in a sprawling ranch house owned by a widow named Theckla, when Sam was seriously considering marrying. She promised him all the goat he could eat. For life. It didn't end well, of course.
He essentially washed out a few years ago, and now, if you were sitting across from Sam Axe, you might think he was a retired surfer: He favors Hawaiian shirts to camouflage, his muscles are covered by a subtle sheen of beer fat and he's let his hair grow out over his ears, where it's now touched with wisps of gray. All of his hard edges have been smoothed over with suntan oil, boat drinks and ocean views. He's technically still on the books with the government, but is mostly just playing out the string, taking the odd investigative job, which has dovetailed into us working together solving other people's problems.
Otherwise, his main job is to drink and sit in the sun… when he's not engaged watching me for the FBI. Watching is maybe a bit of a misnomer: It's more like proctoring, since there's nothing covert about what he's doing (at least not anymore-for the first few weeks, he made a go at being secretive, but then just told me he had to do it or they'd hold up his Navy pension), and his goal isn't so much to forbid me from doing anything as it is to make sure I don't piss off the FBI enough that they have me erased completely. He only gives the FBI what they want, but never volunteers information, which is fine. Having a friend as the conduit to the people who may eventually pull your card isn't so bad-it's not like he's the Stasi.
Plus, everyone needs to eat, and drink, maybe especially drink, which is what Sam was doing when I found him at the News Cafe. I called Sam just after meeting with Fiona to see if he could plug into a few of his sources to find out what the chatter was about the Oro. The thing about anyone with a security clearance is that they're like sixteen-year-old girls when you get down to their core: They all want to talk about the pretty outfit they did or didn't get, assign blame and start pulling hair.
Sam, well, he's got powers of persuasion. He can usually just pick up the phone and ask a question of these people-be they CIA, FBI, NSA or the most clandestine of all agencies, the DMV-and they'll at least tell him whom they're pissed at.
It was three o'clock and Sam sat facing the ocean, his shirt unbuttoned just enough so that passing tourists could see a few tufts of hair climbing up toward his Adam's apple. For a buck, he'd pose and let the savages take digital pictures. He was joined by five empty bottles of Corona, a ramekin filled with spent limes and a plate of congealed fat that might have once been cow based. I sat down across from him and tried to work the angle of the sun so that I wouldn't pick up the glare off of Sam's slimed over plate. I switched seats three times before giving up and putting on my sunglasses.
'You just missed Veronica,' Sam said. Veronica was Sam's girlfriend, in the same way any woman has been Sam's girlfriend, which is to say she didn't have a strong opposition to congealed fats and beer, or at least Sam's particular charms outweighed the opposition. What those charms are, I've never been certain, except that I think he must excrete some kind of chemical in his sweat that attracts women with money. The same chemical also tends to attract women with husbands, which has caused problems in the past, though nothing Sam couldn't manage by kicking through a wall or two and running nude through the Everglades. That's one way of applying your specialized training in everyday life.
'A shame,' I said. 'We always have so much to talk about.' The longest conversation I've ever had with Veronica consisted of her saying hello to me and me raising my eyebrows at her. It used to be that the fewer people I got to know personally, the less I might be disappointed by them later, but now it's just about convenience. 'I hope she wasn't driving.' I picked up one of the bottles of Corona and blew into it, making that humming sound. One of the perks of not constantly being in hiding anymore is that sometimes, just for the hell of it, I can act like a human.
'Oh, those are all mine,' Sam said.
'You don't say. How many is that today?'
'Depends when you think today technically begins.'
'Sunrise seems like a good starting point.' Sam closed his eyes and started counting on his fingers; when he started doing laps around his thumb, I figured stopping him would make the day go easier on both of us. 'Round off.'
'About half,' he concluded, which seemed right, since the day still had nine hours left in it. The difference between Sam Axe and most men is that alcohol doesn't seem to faze him much. No one ever claimed Sam wasn't complex. 'Veronica's got a job for us,' Sam said. 'Friend of hers is in a bit of a jam.'
'In a jam? What does that constitute, exactly?'
'You know,' Sam said, 'someone's in over their head. In a fix. In a bind. Needs a tall, dark stranger to make things right. All that.'
'Let me guess,' I said. 'International terrorists? Peruvian gun cartels? Jehovah's Witnesses?'
'No.' Sam squirmed in his chair. I'd come to talk to him about the incident at the Hotel Oro, and now here I was being put on the spot to help a friend of Veronica's, again, which wouldn't be so bad if they weren't the kind of people whose problems tended to start out as one thing and ended up as something else altogether. Rich people say it's all a mix-up with paperwork, and then, a couple days later, someone is trying to slit my throat.
'Well, that's a nice change. I'll guess again.'
'Mikey…'
'Now, hold on, let me think. Drug dealers?'
'No,' Sam said. 'Forget it.'
'No?'
'Not really.'
'So, they're sort of drug dealers?'
'If you're not interested,' Sam said, 'I can handle the job myself.'
'The last time you handled the job yourself,' I said, 'what was the final body count? Ten? Fifteen?'
'Which I thanked you for,' Sam said.
'I don't like to kill people, Sam,' I said. 'I've got enough problems.'
'They were all very bad,' he said.
They were all bad-that was true-but a human life is a human life, and my sense is that I'm not living in a cartoon. Even the worst psychopath is someone's child, brother or sister, husband or wife or parent. If you have to
