“Yes.”
“You put them on the payroll?”
“No payroll. I can’t afford it, and the city makes it hard to use their money.”
“You’d rather have somebody motivated by something other than money?”
“Sure.”
“Same with a good case officer. What’s ideal is somebody with a dream or a beef, or maybe both. They work out better than a mercenary. They may not be as smart. They may not have as good an access. But you can rely on them.”
“And Kevin Gentry could find those people?”
Sims smiled, and it seemed to Frank that the smile had behind it memories of other times and other places. “He was one of the best. Kevin had a nose for recruiting the true believers.”
“Why’d he leave the Agency?”
“I didn’t want him to. We talked… hell, we argued… about it for several weeks. He didn’t feel that the Agency was doing enough in the drug war.”
“Meaning?”
“Look,” Sims said slowly, perhaps picking his way through a minefield of secrets, “the druggies were a new target for the Agency. If it had been up to us, we never would have gotten involved.”
“Why?”
“The old-line Agency guys, the Ivy League Wasps, cut their teeth in the OSS in World War Two. They saw drugs as a law enforcement problem.”
“Beneath their dignity.”
Sims smiled ruefully. “That, and they were afraid of it too.”
“Why?”
“The money. Enough goddamn money to buy a country or two. The cartel bosses almost bought Colombia. You could lose your soul in the drug trade. You can’t find out about the cartels by going to embassy receptions. Young Sammy Straightlace from Harvard or Yale would have to get chummy with the producers, the distributors, the street men. It was safer dealing with the commies and their nuclear weapons than it was dealing with the Colombians. The commies had rules. Tough rules, but they were rules. It was… cleaner… more fastidious.”
“More honorable than law enforcement,” Frank said with a touch of sarcasm.
Sims gave him a long, regarding look. “I didn’t say that. My father was a cop here in the District. A good one.”
“Retired?”
“Dead,” Sims said, the hurt shadowing his voice. “Fought his way through Korea, then got killed here in the King riots… ’sixty-eight.” He motioned toward Arlington National and the Kennedy flame. “Buried over there.”
Letting out a deep breath that was almost a sigh, Sims picked up the Colombia thread again.
“When I first got to Bogota, we were targeting the KGB in Latin America, the Cuban connections, the contras in Nicaragua. Then, when the Soviet Union crashed, the Ivy League mafia at headquarters sat back on their butts.”
“Until the cartels caught somebody’s eye.”
Sims nodded. “The White House woke up one fine morning and found that the drug lords like Pablo Escobar had decided they wanted their own country and part of ours. Somebody had to do something to keep Colombia from becoming Cocaine Central. And so the president dragged the Agency into spying on the drug business.” He laughed cynically. “There were heel marks all the way from Langley to Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue.”
“And Kevin Gentry?”
“Like I said, he was one of the best. Same talents he used against the Soviets and Fidel he turned against Escobar and his pals. He built up a stable of solid-gold sources high inside the Medellin and Cali cartels.”
“You guys finally got Escobar, didn’t you?”
Sims didn’t say anything, but a smile twitched at the corners of his mouth.
“So, after he left the Agency, you kept in touch with Gentry?”
“He was a friend.”
“Officially?”
“The Agency can’t do that kind of thing in the States.”
“You’re not supposed to,” Frank said. “When’d you see him last?”
“Week before he was killed. We had dinner at a Tex-Mex place on the Hill.”
“He doing anything that could get him killed?”
“Easy to do these days, give somebody a reason to kill you,” Sims said. “Drive too slow, wear shoes somebody wants, be white, be black.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Sims looked at Frank as though trying to get behind his eyes.
“I know,” Sims said wearily. “I know.”
Silence stretched out until he took a deep breath. “Kevin had recruited somebody. A source.”
“For?” Frank asked, feeling the adrenaline kick in and his pulse pound in his throat.
“He didn’t say, exactly. I got the idea he was stoking up for some kind of investigation.”
“Source have a name?”
“Sure. But Kevin didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask.” Sims paused. “Look, it was a couple of buddies eating tacos and drinking Coronas. Most of the conversation was guy stuff… football, women, jobs. The part about his source took up less than a minute. It wasn’t anything you’d talk about in a bar.”
“Male?” Frank persisted. “Female?”
Sims shook his head. “No idea… none.”
“When do you think he recruited this source?”
Frank waited. Sims stared toward the river and the bridge with its lane of lights. Frank waited some more. Finally Sims looked at him.
“Summer ’ninety-eight.” He nodded, as if confirming that something inside had whispered the answer. “June, sometime.”
Kevin Gentry was standing out in sharper relief now, but Frank still had the sense of being surrounded by something he could not see.
“Do you think,” he began carefully, “there’s any chance Gentry got involved in something he shouldn’t?”
“Meaning?” Sims asked.
“Like you said, the money could buy a person’s soul.”
“No!” Sims cut off each word: “Absolutely… fucking… no!” Then, more softly, “There’s only a few people I’ve trusted with my life. Kevin was one.”
“I had to ask. Women friends?”
“Nobody serious. He was a refuge from a hatchet-fight divorce. Had a saying that second marriages-”
“Were a triumph of faith over experience,” Frank finished.
Sims gave him a sidelong grin. “You’ve been there too.”
“Anybody he was working with before he was killed?”
Sims thought, started to shake his head, then held it. “Woman, first name Elena. She ran one of those associations up on Dupont Circle.” Sims worked on it more. “Institute for… ah, yes! Institute for a Free Drug America.”
“You mean ‘drug-free’?”
Sims grinned. “Nope. Free drugs. As I recall, they want to give the stuff away.”
“Elena?”
“Yeah. Like I say, I don’t think I ever had the last name.”
Frank looked at his watch. “It’s been a day.”
The two men headed toward the front of the memorial. The floodlights had been turned off. The Park Service guide sat on one of the steps, filling in a report on a clipboard she held on her knees. Side by side, the two men went down the steps.
“By the way,” Frank said, “he ever say anything about his boss?”
“Not really. I got the impression the boss was a guy who bought his way through life with other people’s
