So, it came down to this last thing. He went to find the young woman, who of course was on break, and had to wait for half an hour feeling stupid and preposterous until she came back from the cafeteria. At last she hove into sight, beaming pep, with a small roll in her shoulders as she walked. She’d probably had a date every night in her life, Nick thought; her Saturday nights were one long festival. She probably dated quarterbacks and shortstops. Looking at her, he sank a bit deeper into his depression.
“Hi, uh, Sally, uh, someone said – ”
“Nick, hi! Did I keep you waiting? Gosh, I’m sorry. Those fingerprint techs; they just wouldn’t let me get out of the cafeteria.”
Great. He’d been hung up here like a fish on a line, Howard’s newest trophy, for the office to admire, while those lazy clowns were trying to make time with Sal.
“Well, anyway,” she went on. “I have this thing for you. It just came in today. Where have you been? I called out to Arkansas yesterday and they said you’d gone, but you didn’t check in last night.”
“Uh, I sort of awarded myself a night off. You know, a little R and R, for a job well done.”
“Shhhhh,” she said. “Don’t say that out loud. Someone might hear you and not realize you were joking.”
“I’m beyond hurt at this point. Anyway, what’s up, I really have to – ”
“Well, it’s only partially official. I wanted to say something to you. I just wanted to tell you how much I admired what you did with your wife. How you stuck with her. I think that’s neat. Not many men would have done such a thing.”
“Oh,” said Nick, taken aback. “Oh, well, it seemed like the kind of thing you sort of had to do, that’s all. You know, I don’t like to quit on things. I like to stick with them. That’s all. Stubborn. Stupid, but stubborn, just like a mule.”
She laughed.
“Well,” she said, “that’s neat. Not many like that. Lots of people just quit on you.”
“Ummm,” Nick grunted, having run into a conversational brick wall and splatted against it. “Yeah. Ummm.”
“
Her eyes were bright and sweet. She was so pretty. It angered him that she should be so pretty on the last day of his career and she was just prattling on about things he didn’t understand.
Nick blinked.
“Huh?”
“You know. Don’t you remember the last time I talked to you?”
He couldn’t begin to put it together again in his head.
“You wanted that file from Washington, but they wouldn’t send it because you weren’t cleared.”
He remembered asking her about it in the hallway at some point or other.
“Yeah?”
“Well,
“
“Oh, Mr. Utey signed it. He wasn’t sure what it was, and anyway he was so busy I don’t think he cared and you were his right-hand man and everything.”
It suddenly occurred to him with a stupendous flash that Sally Ellion was so busy being the office’s favorite girl that she hadn’t caught on quite yet to the fact that he’d gotten the sack.
She smiled again.
“And you got it. The clearance.”
“Uh huh,” he said, not quite sure where this was going.
“And so they just authorized a printout. I just got it from the printing room.”
She handed him a thick sheaf of computer-printed paper.
It was marked TOP SECRET/SENIOR SUPERVISORY PERSONNEL ONLY.
Nick looked at it.
It was the RamDyne file.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Shreck, alone in his office now, was surprised how little elation he felt. It reminded him of the way it was when he came off a hill in Korea in 1953, when he was seventeen years old. Not relief, not guilt, just simple numbness. He knew it was classic postcombat stress syndrome; depletion, emotional and physical, and as you recharged you went into a kind of torpid state.
But it had only happened to him that one time in Korea, because he was so new to it. In all his other operations, as they wound into the triumph or bitterness but always survival, he’d felt incredibly lightened, charged, made whole again. This fucker Swagger had really gotten under his skin; a tough guy, a dangerous guy, just the sort of guy who could bring it all down.
When the phone call finally came, it was something of an anticlimax. Dobbler had managed to meet the Bureau contact without difficulty and was handed the actual forensic lab report, complete with X rays. From then on, Dobbler just babbled to Shreck, couldn’t control himself, spoke too plainly, dithered and yammered too much. But the gist got through. The X rays checked. Everything was fine. Bob was dead. It was over.
Shreck felt some lightening of feeling, but not much. He was not a man of many pleasures; only duty and mission were pleasures. But this really was his finest triumph. He thought maybe he’d go shoot sporting clays this weekend. Maybe he’d buy a new car. But mainly he wanted to -
The secure phone rang.
He looked at it for a long second, before picking it up.
“Shreck.”
It was Hugh Meachum.
“Colonel, we have a problem.”
LANCER CLEARANCE NECESSARY
IF YOU ARE NOT LANCER CLEARED, IMMEDIATELY RETURN THIS FILE TO ITS JACKET, SECURE IT, AND RETURN IT TO ITS POINT OF ORIGIN. YOU MUST NOTIFY THE LANCER COMMITTEE IF YOU HAVE ENCOUNTERED THIS FILE IN AN UNAUTHORIZED METHOD.
Nick looked at it dumbly. In his years in the Bureau he’d bumped into a few strange commands, but he’d never hit this one before. He blinked, but the warning would not go away; there it was, big as life, all caps, booming out at him. He felt extremely guilty. Practically from birth, Nick had obeyed rules, signs, orders, directions, speed limits, legal technicalities, everything. Yet at the same time the illicit thrill of what he was about to do was giddy and sweet, even if it brought his breath from his lungs and made his head ache where he’d smashed it against the truck door.
He sat in his basement. It was well past nine, and after waiting all afternoon he’d at last come down the stairs, turned on the overhead light and settled into an old lawn chair. The air smelled of moisture and wood and oil. The bare bulb wobbled slightly. There was no other sound.
Lancer, he thought, taking one more deep breath.
Lancer? He knew that in their many years of uneasy operational coexistence, the Bureau and the Agency had many times bumbled into each other. And sometimes, under strict control (at least in theory) the Agency would do something that was technically in violation of the law; thus the Lancer Committee had to be that elite group in high Bureau quarters that was kept informed of these transgressions and made certain that no Bureau operatives moved forward aggressively to apprehend the perpetrator, thereby blowing an Agency scam or endangering Agency personnel.
