again in the visitors’ space and walked across the empty playground to the school and entered.
He blinked in the darkness. Children’s paintings hung along the dim corridor. Speight thought them absurd, cows and barns and airplanes with both wings on the same side of the fuselage. The crucifixes made him nervous, too, all that agony up there on bland, pale green walls. He encountered a nun and overdid the smile, worried she’d smell the booze or pick up on the vagueness in his walk. But she only smiled back, a surprisingly young girl. Next he found a group of boys, scrawny and sweaty in gym clothes, herding into a locker room. They seemed so young, their bones so tiny, their faces so drawn, like child laborers in some Dickensian blacking factory. But one was bigger, a black boy, probably the star.
“Is Mr. Chardy around, son?” Speight asked him.
“Back there,” the boy said, pointing down the hall.
The destination turned out to be an old gym, waxy yellow under weak lights that hung in cages too low off the raftered ceiling. They must have built this place twenty years before they built their slick glass-and-brick cathedral. One end of it was an auditorium, with a stageful of amateurish props for what would be some dreadful production. Speight saw Chardy, in gray sweats, a wet double dark spot like Mickey Mouse ears growing splotchily across his chest, with some kind of bright band, like an Indian brave or something, around his head at the hairline. He wore white high-topped gym shoes and was methodically sinking one-handed jump shots from twenty or twenty-five feet out. He’d dribble once or twice, the sound of full, round leather against the wood echoing through the still air, then seize the ball and seem to weigh it. Then the ball rode his fingers up to his shoulders, paused, and was launched, even as Chardy himself left the floor. The ball rose perfectly, then fell and, more often than not as Speight watched, swished through. Occasionally it did miss, however, and then the bearded man would lazily gallop after it and scoop it off the bounce one-handed, and turn and rise and fire again, and he looked pretty good for a man — what, now? — nearly forty. He did not miss twice in a row in the ten silent minutes Bill stood in the doorway watching him.
At last Bill called, “You’re still a star.”
Chardy did not look over. He completed another shot, then answered, “Still got the touch.”
His talent with a ball was one part of the legend. During his two stateside tours — disasters in other respects — he’d torn up the Langley gym league, where a surprisingly competitive level of basketball was played by ex- college jocks; Chardy had set scoring records that, for all Bill knew, still stood. Chardy had been some kind of All- American at the small college he’d gone to on a scholarship, and he’d had a tryout with a pro team.
He canned another jumper and then seemed to tire of the exercise. The ball rolled across the floor into darkness. Chardy retrieved a towel and came over to Bill.
“Well, Old Bill, I see I didn’t wait you out.”
“Did you really want to, Paul?”
Chardy only smiled at this interesting question.
Then he said, “I guess they want me. I guess I’m an asset again.”
Why deny it? Speight thought. “They do. You are.”
Chardy considered this.
“Who’s running the show. Melman?”
“Melman’s a big man now. Didn’t you know? He’s Deputy Director of the whole Operations Directorate. He’ll be Director of it someday, maybe even DCI if they decide to stay in the shop.”
Chardy snorted at the prospect of Sam Melman as Director of Central Intelligence, with his picture on the cover of
“We’re not even running this thing out of Operations, Paul. We’re running it out of Management and Services, their office of Security. So—”
“What the hell is this ‘Operations’?” Chardy asked suddenly.
He really had been out of touch, Speight realized.
“I’m sorry. You were in the mountains, I guess, when they reorganized. I didn’t learn until later myself. Plans is now called Operations.”
“It sounds like a World War Two movie.”
“Paul, forget Operations. Forget the old days, the old guys. Forget all that stuff. Forget Melman. He was just doing his job. He’ll be a long way away from you. Think about Ulu Beg in America.”
“All the stuff about Ulu Beg is in the reports, in the files. The reports of the Melman inquiry. Tell them to dig that stuff out.”
“They already have, Paul. Paul, you know Ulu Beg, you trained him. You fought with him, you know his sons. You were like a brother to him. You—”
But talk of Ulu Beg seemed to hurt Chardy. He looked away, and Speight saw that he’d have to play his last card, the one he didn’t care for, the one that smelled. But it had been explained to him in great detail how important all this was, how he could not fail.
“Paul—” He paused, full of regret Chardy deserved better than the shot he was about to get. “Paul, we’re going to have to bring Johanna Hull in too.”
Chardy said, “I can’t help you there. I wish I could. Look, I have to take a shower.”
“Paul, maybe I’d better make myself clearer.” He wished he’d sucked down a few more rum-and-Cokes. “These are very cold people, Paul, these people in Security. They’re very cold about everything except results. They’re going to have to bring Johanna under some kind of control — and they want you to do it — because they think Ulu Beg will go to her. She’s about the only place he could go. But if you don’t do it, believe me, they’ll find somebody who will.”
Chardy looked at him with disgust.
“It’s gone that far?”
“They’re very frightened of Ulu Beg. They’ll play rough on this one.”
“I guess they will,” Chardy said, and Speight knew he’d won his little victory.
3
He assumed they would be hunting him, but it did not matter and did not particularly frighten him. He had been hunted before — by Iraqi soldiers and policemen, by Arabs, by Iranians, by Kurds even. Now Americans.
But what could they do? For he was in the mountains now. Ulu Beg felt almost comfortable here; he knew this place. He had been born and raised in mountains and fought in mountains and these, though in many ways different, were in just as many ways the same as his own.
They were known as the Sierritas, ranging northward from the border for twenty or thirty kilometers before panning out into cruel desert plain on the way to the American city of Tucson.
These mountains were perfect, a wilderness of bucking scrub foothills shot with oaks and bitter, brittle little plants poking through the stony ground; until, reaching the altitude of 5,000 feet, they exploded suddenly into stone, a cap, a head of pure rock, bare and raw and forbidding. The saying went, “Each mountain is a fortress,” and he felt the security of a fortress up here.
Let them come. He’d learned his skills in a hundred hard places and tested them in a hundred more and would set his against anybody’s in mountains. But he doubted Americans would try him. They were said to be a people of pleasure, not bravery. Still, suppose they had a Jardi to send against him?
The Kurd paused on a ledge, staring at the peaks about him, dun-colored in the bright sun. Everywhere he looked it was still and silent, except for a push of wind against his face.
What if it were written above that a Jardi would be sent against him? What if that were God’s will?
Who knew the will of God? What point was there in worrying about it? Yet, still …
But there was another advantage, beyond security, to the solitude in the higher altitudes. And that was privacy: he could still think like a Kurd, move like a Kurd,
“You must be one of them,” he had been instructed. “But it won’t be hard,” they assured him. “Americans think only of themselves. They have no eyes for the man next to them. But of course, certain small adjustments
