Point Of Impact

“Somebody did,” Nick said. Not normally religious, he had a brief impulse to make the sign of the cross for Eduardo, who opened the door expecting to see dull old Nick but instead caught three bad hitters in the face and died the death only a Mandarin torturer could have invented…and yet who cared so much that even after the executioners had left and his guts were like dirty socks in the bed and the shock had worn off enough for the pain to be the fifth act of every opera ever written, this guy still had the machismo to crawl to the linoleum and pass on the message.

ROM DO.

ROM DO?

What did it mean? What was this clue, so tantalizing, so goddamn cute?

“I got another weird one for you. This guy, he left a message written in his own blood. ROM DO, in caps. What’s the words Rom, Do mean to you, Tommy. Anything? I spent thirteen hours in the library the other day, just going through books on crime and espionage, looking for something. I asked the big smart guys at Quantico in the Behavioral Science Department, you know, our intellectuals. They came up with nothing. Any idea?”

“Rom Do? Could be anything, man.” Then he laughed. “Funny, it reminds me of something.”

“Okay,” said Nick, “so sing. Tell me.”

“Oh, it’s crazy.”

“Crazier the better, my friend, that’s where I’m at.”

“You know I was on the island in sixty-one? Bahia de Cochinos, huh, my friend? The Bay with the Piggies?”

“Yeah, so it’s said.”

“Okay, my battalion was first ashore at Red Beach, you know, near Playa Larga. Okay, we used Army call signs, just like the American army, because we believed in America and we believed in that cocksucker JFK, man, we loved him and we loved our little invasion.” The bitterness spurted out and clouded his words. Then he caught himself.

“Anyway, later they changed it. Okay, they changed it and made it more jet age. The D, I mean.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The D became Delta. D for Delta. Not Dog no more, but Delta. You went on the radio and your call sign was a D, you were Delta. Delta Company, Delta Flight, Delta squadron, Delta Force, that sort of thing. But in the early sixties, they hadn’t changed. D was Dog. R was Romeo. It was call signs and I was in Second Battalion, 2506 Brigade, La Brigada, and we were Romeo Dog Two, there was a Romeo Dog Three, Four and Five, the guy running the show, the patron, out there on the ship, he was Romeo Dog Six. ‘Rom Do’? Your guy’s hurrying on that floor, his mind ain’t working right, he’s dying. He’s sending you a message from the past. Romeo Dog. Get it?”

“Romeo Dog? No, I don’t get it,” Nick said, turning the info over in his head.

What the hell was Romeo Dog?

Howdy Duty hadn’t changed; he was one of those men who couldn’t change. But then Nick hadn’t changed, either. Nick would never change: he’d always be a special agent, and never a supervisory agent. Maybe he didn’t really mind that, because in his own heart he knew he wasn’t cut out to give orders and he wasn’t interested in power and a fine home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. But having the no-promotion tag on his record would at least keep him off of the really interesting squads and out of Washington forever. He’d never get Anti-Terrorist, which was the creme de la creme in the eighties and probably would be well into the nineties; it was fast-reacting jungle gym stuff, guns and SWAT tactics, and interfacing with some extremely interesting other agencies, the fastest league of all. He’d never get a Hostage Rescue Team. Now those boys were the elite: HRTs kicked down doors and smoked bad guys when it came the time to walk the walk. And he’d never get Organized Crime either, and that was hot stuff, sinking through the membrane of the Mafia, entering that twisted, yet fascinating world; if you got that, you were doing something. It was true of counterespionage too, only the hard part of that was simply following Cubans around Washington and wiretapping embassies. But also interesting.

No, Nick would stay forever in out-of-the-way, B-city offices; Baltimore or Richmond or Frederick were as close as he’d come to Washington and though less than a hundred miles each way from the Big Town, they were still universes away, and the leap from one to another, without a validating stop in New York or Miami or L.A. (where Nick would never go, either) was a quantum leap…impossible by the physics of Bureau culture.

Yet for all of that, he did not hate Howdy Duty. Utey had simply faced the hard decision of sorting out the Tulsa incident so that it would do the Bureau the most good, and if he identified himself and his own career as “The Bureau” in some way, it wasn’t a selfish decision so much as a helpless one. That was how it went; that was how he thought.

And so, when Nick picked Howard D. Utey up at the New Orleans airport, it wasn’t a particularly tense or awkward thing. They both understood.

Howard stood on the curb outside the American terminal and waved when he saw Nick in the gray government Ford. He even had a little smile as he ducked to come in, tossing his bag in the backseat.

“Hi, Nick. Boy, you’re looking great. Still keeping that hair, huh?”

“That’s right, Howard. It just won’t fall out, I don’t know why.”

“Nick, I was sorry to hear about Myra. Was she in any pain at the end?”

“No. She’d been in a coma for a long time. She just stopped breathing. It wasn’t hard end. She had a hard life but she had an easy end.”

“Well, thank God for small and tender mercies.”

“I know, Howard,” said Nick, dully, concentrating on not calling him Howdy, though it occasionally happened, and Utey, who knew his nickname well, always pretended not to notice.

Howdy Duty was quite a small man, actually, small and ferrety, but not stupid or slow. He had simply given himself totally to the Bureau, and had set about to rise with the patience and the fury of a poor boy. He managed it with certain political gifts, to be sure; but also by working as hard as it was possible to work.

“They still call me ‘Howdy Duty,’ Nick?”

“I’m afraid they do, Howard,” said Nick as they drove in from the airport.

“Well, that’s all right, as long as it’s behind my back, and as long as I never hear that it’s gotten to Secret Service, Nick. That I would have to regard as an act of treachery, not to me personally, but to the Bureau as a whole. You know, everybody here likes you, Nick – everybody everywhere likes you, that’s one of your gifts – and it’d do everybody a lot of good if you’d pass that information around. I know that informally passed information is sometimes more efficiently communicated than office memos. Fair enough?”

“Yes, Howard,” said Nick. That was Howard. He established the rules and played by them – unless it suited his purposes to change them.

“Now, Nick, a lot of what we’ll be doing in the next few weeks is liaison, which again is why it’s great to have you on the team. You have a wonderful gift for getting along with people. Don’t think it hasn’t been noticed. And you’ll need all your affability, all right? All of it. Every bit.”

“Sure, Howard. So what’m I going to be doing? I heard the pres – ”

“That’s right, Nick. On March first, the president will be flying down from Washington in the morning for a speech and presentation in downtown New Orleans. He’s going to be giving Archbishop Jorge Roberto Lopez the Freedom Medal – you know, the Archbishop of Salvador who won the Nobel Peace Prize?”

Nick knew, of course. Archbishop Roberto Lopez was a validated Great Man, the heir to the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero; he had worked tirelessly at getting the two sides in that bitter war, exacerbated so terribly of late by the Panther Battalion massacre, to talk.

Nick remembered the news footage: Bishop Roberto Lopez walking among the dead children by the riverbank in his humble black cloth with a humble silver cross about his neck, his eyes wracked with tears behind the wire-frame glasses. A poet, an expert on medieval Latin alchemy, a complete apolitical, who had the love in his heart to tell NBC, “I do not hate the men who did this. I love them and I forgive them. To hate them and to demand their