“Who gets the toast,” she said.
“Here,” Hawk said.
The waitress put the food down and went away. “Be hard,” I said, “for anyone to distinguish you from the rest of us.”
“Yeah,” Hawk said. “Me and four honkies, how could she remember?”
“That’s real progress, I should think,” Ives said.
“That someone confuse me with you?” Hawk said.
Ives cleared his throat. “Let’s begin again,” he said. “We may be in a position to trade marbles.”
I nodded. Hawk cut a square off one of the pieces of French toast and held it across the table toward Quirk. Quirk lipped it off the fork and ate it.
“Costigan has chips on a lot of squares,” Ives said. “One is selling armaments. He is licensed and in and of itself there is nothing illegal about being an arms dealer, as I’m sure you people know. But Costigan deals covertly with proscribed nations.”
“Heavens,” I said.
“There’s nothing frivolous about this,” Ives said. “It translates into a lot of human suffering. Moreover, Costigan or his representatives not infrequently act as agents provocateurs, burning the oil on troubled waters in sensitive parts of the world. It enhances their marketing posture.”
Hawk finished his second piece of French toast. The waitress came over and asked if we wanted anything else.
McKinnon said, “No.”
The waitress slapped a check down in front of him and went away.
“We, that is the government, have penetrated Costigan’s schoolyard several times. Each time the agent has disappeared. We have had the organization under surveillance for five years. Nothing. For God’s sake, we do better infiltrating a foreign national organization. That’s where most of our information comes from, the buying end of Costigan’s business. But no paper. No records. No bills of lading. No invoices. No checks. No letters of credit. Everything appears to be cash and numbered bank accounts. Over the years we have had two eyewitnesses. Both of them were killed.”
The waitress came back and looked at the check still lying facedown in front of Ives. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and went away again.
“Now we have information which suggests that he may begin dealing nuclear weapons. Not the big bang, but tactical weapons, and tacs are plenty bad enough. You might wish to pause and think about the implications of atomic weaponry in the hands of, say, Idi Amin.”
“I thought he was out of business,” McKinnon said.
“He is,” Ives said. “I chose to use him as a hypothetical example for just that reason. But we all know that there are leaders in the Middle East and Africa and other suburbs of civilization who are just as irrational and savage. You can understand our concern.”
Hawk gestured toward the waitress. She came over, looking at the check. “I’ll have another hot chocolate, please,” Hawk said.
The waitress looked as if she was going to say something. Hawk smiled pleasantly at her. She paused, then she picked up the check and huffed away. Ives was silent while she went for the hot chocolate, and silent when she came back and put it down and slapped the revised check down beside it and cleared Hawk’s dish and cutlery away. When she had gone again he said, “We had decided to recruit someone to de-effectuate Costigan. All of this is, of course, off the record.”
“Deep background,” I said.
“When, fortuitously…” Ives said.
“He mean lucky,” Hawk said to McKinnon.
Ives sounded a little impatient. “Fortuitously, perhaps, for all of us, it was brought to our attention that you two were already involved in a pissing contest with Costigan.”
“How did that come to your attention?” I said.
“McKinnon.”
“How did it come to your attention?” I said. McKinnon nodded at Quirk.
“You knew about Costigan?” I said to Quirk. Quirk shrugged and tipped his cup so as to drain the last of his coffee without lifting his elbow from the table.
McKinnon said, “He won’t tell you, so I will. He didn’t know Costigan except as a famous name any more than you did. When the arrest warrants for you two started flowing in from California, he came in to see me. See if we could do anything to get your ass out of the crack, you know? I’d been talking with other people”-he nodded at Ives“-about their problem with Costigan and I got hold of them, and here we are.”
Hawk looked at Quirk and raised his eyebrows. “I knowed that, I give you two bites of my toast.”
Quirk said to Ives, “Let’s hear the rest.”
“So, when your situation came to our attention, we looked into you both. What we found about you tells us that you are just the people to twist Costigan’s tail for us.”
“And if we do?” I said.
“You’ll be doing your country a service. Your country will wish to repay you.”
“We kill Costigan,” Hawk said, “and you kill the charges on us.”
