showed up with a tanker truck of vodka and called for a mutiny.”
“No one ever got stars on his collar by taking chances.”
“That said, Wells is going to have to leave the base. Nuton is insisting.”
“He can’t. Not yet.”
“I’ll buy you a couple days, but — are you close, Ellis?”
“Not sure. You leave in a week, right?”
“Six days.”
“Can you push it back?”
“Congressmen don’t like it when you mess with their schedules on short notice. Not without a good excuse. Which I don’t have. No, I’m going.”
Pride made men strange, Shafer thought. Duto was willing to put himself and his congressional paymasters at risk, simply to avoid admitting a problem. “Your call. But there’s something you should understand.”
“Do tell.”
“Whoever this guy is, he’s smart. And he’s gone to a lot of trouble to stay unfindable. I just have a feeling that it’s not about the drugs for him, or even about destroying our networks. I think he has something bigger in mind.”
“Spit it out, Ellis.”
“You going over there, it could be his chance. I’m not saying don’t go, but—”
“Ellis. You don’t like me, true?”
“I can’t see the percentage in answering that question.”
“You can say it. We’re grown-ups, and I know it anyway.”
“Not particularly.”
“But have you ever known me to be a coward?”
Shafer didn’t need to answer. Duto was arrogant, power-hungry, and vain. But no one had ever accused him of being afraid, not physically anyway. As a case officer in Colombia, he’d been captured by leftist rebels, held for two months. In the pre-al-Qaeda days, the jungle rats were the agency’s worst nightmare. When a Special Forces team finally hit the camp and pulled him out, Duto had lost twenty-eight pounds and two teeth.
Normally, after that kind of ordeal, officers went to Langley for at least a year of recovery. Many never went back to the field. Duto? He took his wife and kids to Barbados for two weeks, stayed at a five-star hotel on the agency’s dime. Then he went back to Bogota. A year later, he was station chief.
“I’m going. I’m counting on you and your boy to sort this out before I get there. If not, maybe the congressman and the senator and their aides will get a more honest view of the war than they bargained for.” Duto hung up. For the first time in a long while, Shafer felt something like respect for the man.
SHAFER HAD BARELY CRADLED the phone before it rang again.
“Ellis?” The voice belonged to Jennifer Exley, once Shafer’s deputy. A blue-eyed tornado, irrepressible and good-hearted and a brilliant analyst. She and Wells had nearly gotten married. Shafer supposed he’d loved her, too, in his own way. Though he’d never given his feelings the slightest space for fear they’d explode into the open and destroy his marriage. She was the steadiest member of their troika. But she’d quit years ago, after nearly dying in a botched assassination attempt on Wells. Now she was in exile. When they’d last talked, a few months before, she’d claimed to be at peace with the world. Raising her kids and getting on with her life. Shafer wasn’t so sure. Being on the inside, knowing the world’s secrets, left an itch that civilian life could never really scratch. Maybe Exley was different, but Shafer didn’t think so.
“Jennifer.”
“Ellis. How are you?”
“My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” Shafer winked at the photos of Weston and Rodriguez. They didn’t wink back.
“Lies both ways.”
“Not like I believe in human perfectibility or anything, but do we have to make the same mistakes over and over?”
“I believe we do.” She laughed her deep, throaty laugh. “And speaking of making the same mistakes, how’s John?”
“In Afghanistan.”
“In the mountains?”
“Believe it or not, he’s at a base of ours. Though not necessarily safer.”
“Is he okay?”
“He’s John. He went to see his son a few weeks ago and it didn’t work out and he was disappointed.”
“I’m glad he went. Anyway. He needed to.”
“How are yours?”
“David’s looking at colleges. He applies next fall.”
The last time Shafer had seen Exley’s son, he’d been playing thirteen-and-under youth soccer.
“We’re all getting old. He have anywhere in mind?”
“Dartmouth, believe it or not.”
“John can give him the tour.”
“They want him to play soccer. Though he’s thinking about UVA, too, and I have to admit I wouldn’t mind that.”
“You’d save a few bucks.”
“There’s that. Plus it’d be two hours to see him instead of ten.”
“No doubt he views that as a disadvantage.”
“But I don’t think he’d get to play soccer at Virginia. They recruit from all over the world.”
“Be good for him. Teach him that disappointment starts early and never stops.”
“Life lessons from Ellis Shafer.”
“Not playing soccer would give him more time to get laid.”
“You’re talking about my little boy.”
“I’ll bet if you check out his Facebook page, his Twitter feed, you’ll find plenty of evidence he’s all grown up.”
“Precisely why I’ve resisted the urge so far.”
And then Shafer realized he might have another way to find the connection between Weston and Rodriguez and the SF officer. He would need them to be a little bit gullible, and a little bit horny — but then, they’d been in Afghanistan for ten months. The horniness wouldn’t be a problem.
“Jenny. I have to go.”
“Something come up?”
Shafer could hear her disappointment. No doubt she’d love to know what he was working on, but she was too much of a pro to ask. “You could say that.”
“Knock ’em dead. Literally.”
“Come on by sometime for a cup of that famous Langley coffee.”
“Tell John to be safe, okay?”
“You want to tell him that, tell him yourself.” Though Shafer wasn’t sure that he wanted her to follow through. Sometimes the past was best left undisturbed.
“Bye, Ellis.”
He hung up, got to work.
21
