10
When plotting a counterinsurgency, it’s important to recognize that not all of your decisions can be based on what would be considered, in everyday life, acceptable ethics. Breaking the law for the good of the country is practically a right of passage for American presidents, so imagine how often it happens with spies.
But if you’re leading a counterinsurgency operation, you must gauge the moral well-being of your subordinates after these activities and be prepared to act as a sounding board for them or, if needed, remove them from duty. What this means is that in a war zone, you may need to order a Black Hawk in to medevac a soldier to an appropriate mental facility. But if you’re fighting in close quarters, with a small fighting unit, a good leader may have to serve as the mental health provider.
Which is why when I called Barry-a man with exceptionally questionable ethics and usually very little guilt about it-I could tell that he needed the equivalent of two Xanax and a good nap, but that he was pondering something more along the lines of a guy with two guns showing up at his door and offering him a dirt nap. So I did the one thing I could think of: I invited him to my mother’s house for lunch. Sometimes a guy just needs a sandwich with crusts cut off to feel better about himself.
Plus, my mother’s house was a safe place. If anyone from the Latin Emperors happened down the street, the neighborhood watch commander would scuttle an F-16.
I’d been at my mother’s for only a few minutes when Barry knocked on the door. My mother opened it, saw him looking pitiful there on the front porch and did the one motherly thing she could do in this instance: She gave him hell.
“Did someone kill your dog?” she asked by way of greeting.
“No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I’ve just had a hard week. Busy time in my line of work.”
“You think you have it any harder than anyone else?”
Barry looked over my mother’s shoulder at me-she hadn’t let him in yet-and I gave him the universal sign of surrender. “No, Mrs. Westen,” Barry said. “I guess I don’t.”
“Well, then wipe off your feet, take off those ludicrous sunglasses and come inside. Michael’s been waiting for you for hours.”
It’s not that my mother had no concept of time-since I’d been there only fifteen minutes on the outside-it’s that she’d been saying the same thing to me and my brother, Nate, for so long that it was just second nature. Someone was always waiting for hours to give us hell.
Barry did as he was told and then sat down across from me at the kitchen table. He had bags under his eyes, and his normally sculpted facial hair had a bit more scruff than usual to it. “You look good,” I said.
“I haven’t been sleeping too well.”
“Conscience bothering you, Barry?”
“Before I make my confession, would it be possible to get something to eat?”
“Ma,” I said, “can you make Barry a sandwich?”
My mother came into the kitchen and gave Barry another once-over, as if she hadn’t seen him just a few seconds earlier. “You look like hell,” she said. “When was your last proper shower?”
“Two days,” Barry said. “I’ve been staying on a boat.”
“The Atlantic Ocean out of water now?” she said.
Barry looked at me for help, but I’d been on the blunt end of this weapon before and knew to stick out. “Could I get a grilled cheese?” he said.
“Could you?” she said.
“May I?”
“That’s better,” my mother said. “I’ve got two types of cheese: American and Velveeta. Which would you like?”
“Velveeta isn’t a kind of cheese,” Barry said. “It’s a brand. Right, Michael?”
“Popular misconception,” I said.
“Then I guess I’ll have both?” Barry said, more than a hint of hesitation in his voice. He’d finally caught the drift of my mother’s tough-love approach… which usually contained a lot more tough than love. “And could I get a glass of milk? You don’t happen to have any strawberry Quik, do you?”
“I think there’s some in the pantry,” she said. I was going to tell her that that strawberry Quik had been in the pantry since 1983, but opted not to. If a dying man wanted strawberry Quik, who was I to withhold his wish? It was just a good thing he didn’t ask for a Sanka, because she had a vacuum-sealed can of that, too, that hadn’t seen the light of day since Carter was in office.
While my mom prepared Barry his schoolboy lunch, I thought it might be prudent to figure out just what the hell he’d done.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” I said.
“That’s a good thing, right? Means both of us have been able to live our lives without need for too much trouble.”
“Sam tells me you’re in the consulting business now.”
“I thought I’d try to diversify my interests. Make sure I’ve always got a good revenue stream. It’s just smart business. Like how sometimes for you, you’re helping little old ladies or sick kids, or other times it’s someone who’s got pimp problems or just escaped a Russian prison. Same kind of thing.”
“Right,” I said. “I see that. Exactly the same thing.” I got distracted for a moment by the smell of burning paper. I turned and looked, and my mother had started a small fire on the counter where she was making Barry’s grilled cheese. She’d gone for the old-fashioned touch and was cooking the sandwich using a clothes iron. The problem was that she had the sandwich on top of a stack of newspapers. And now there were flames.
“Uh, Ma,” I said. “You maybe want to shove that in the sink.”
“You think I don’t know how to put out a kitchen fire, Michael? You’re not the only one with some training around here.” My mom slid the sandwich and the newspapers and was just about to drop the iron into the sink, but fortunately, the power cord wasn’t long enough and so she opted to leave it on the counter so she could electrocute herself at a later date. Barry and I both stared in stunned silence until she finally realized the near-fatal error of her ways. “What?” she said. “I didn’t do it.”
“Do you have peanut butter?” Barry asked.
“I have a jar of Peter Pan in the pantry,” she said.
“Crunchy or creamy?”
“Barry,” my mother said, “you’ll eat it either way. What does it matter? And once it’s in your mouth, it’s all creamy.” A few moments later, my mother set down a sandwich-minus the crusts-and a glass of strawberry Quik in front of Barry. “Eat,” she said, and Barry did.
When he finished, he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Now, this really did feel like therapy. “You ever ask yourself, Mike, what is simpler than just being at home?”
“No,” I said. “Street fighting in Tikrit was simpler than being at home.”
“Simple pleasures,” Barry said, ignoring me. “Peanut butter and jelly. Strawberry-flavored milk. Why’d I ever leave home in the first place?”
“I’m going to guess it was to go into juvenile hall,” I said.
“It even smells like home here, Mike,” Barry said.
I reached across the table and grabbed Barry by his shirt collar and yanked him back to real life. “Welcome home,” I said. “Time to start talking, or my mother will give you a spanking.”
Barry straightened himself out, emptied the remnants of the strawberry Quik and then leaned forward on his elbows. “Truth? I wasn’t made for the consulting business. I’m a hands-on, do-it-yourself kind of guy. Independent contractor.”
“What did you tell Junior Gonzalez?”
“Look, he came to me, said he had some questions, could I give him some advice. And I said, ‘Sure,’ named a price; he came back and offered double, and we were in business.”
“And let me guess-he paid you double by giving you a bag of skank bills up front.”
