“Who knows you better than I?”
Becker laughed again. “Nobody.”
Gold waited, drawing horizontal bars where the serpentine line met the vertical.
“I’d been in the Bureau for about eight years,” Becker said. “Routine work for the most part, nothing to set the world on fire. I don’t think I had any particular desire to set the world on fire, for that matter. I was basically just learning the job and I don’t know that I’d shown any greater aptitude for it than anyone else. My job evaluations should be on your desk, so in this case you know more about me than I do. Have you looked at them?”
“Of course.”
“And?”
“Average, I’d say. Some of them thought you were a bit brighter than average-which your test scores confirm, by the way-but no flashes of brilliance in the beginning. Just another agent.”
“That’s fair… So. I was assigned to New York, working a counterfeit case, when a hostage situation developed in a bank robbery. Very bizarre situation. The cops had caught these two guys in the act, but the guys had the bank employees as hostages and they were demanding a plane to Libya. The television people found out about it and there was this freak-show atmosphere with the negotiations being held on camera and the media putting in calls to the clowns in the bank. A very wend situation. I was sent over to help Terry Dwyer who had taken over the negotiations from the local cop who had been giving away the store. This had been going on for hours, so we had time to prepare the limo that was supposed to take them to the airport. I wasn’t the only agent there, of course. There must have been a dozen of us, some of us with our badges showing, some dressed as cops, a couple in paramedics uniforms.
“The plan was to have Harper drive them since he was experienced at this, but all of us had been briefed just in case. One of the two clowns, the one who did all the talking, came out into the street and inspected the limo-this whole crowd of spectators standing behind the barricades and cheering for him like he was a hero of some kind. I think they thought he was Jesse James and not some doped-up moron who got caught with his dick in his hand. He was eating it up, of course, and playing to the crowd, so we knew he was going to make a mistake. We weren’t really worried about-Tony, his name was. It was his partner, Sal, who had us scared. A silent partner. The guy never said a word, but you could tell by his eyes he was dangerous. Stupid and scared silly, but God, was he paying attention. Tony was distracted, but Sal knew exactly where everyone was and what they were doing even if he wasn’t smart enough to know what was really going on.
“Anyway, the point is, Tony didn’t want Harper to drive. He knew that he was no good just by looking at him-you know. Harper?”
“Is he the one who looks like the loser in a headbutting competition?”
“Not the kind of man you want working undercover, unless you’re investigating a convention of hit men. So anyway, the clown who thought he had brains…”
“Tony.”
“Tony. He doesn’t want Harper and he does this eeny-meeny-miney-mo business with the rest of us. I was one of us whose badge was showing, and he picked me. Said at least he knew who I was. I didn’t even know who I was at that point, so what chance did he have? Anyway, he patted me down and patted Terry down and off we go to the airport, me driving, Tony next to me, Terry Dwyer next to him in the front seat because Terry has developed this “rapport” with him. Sal, with the eyes, is sitting behind me with an assault rifle pointing at my head as if I was going to suddenly drive him straight into the holding cell at the next precinct.
“I told him, ‘Sal, if we hit a bump and you pull the trigger, we’re all going to die.’ He just stared at me for about a minute. His eyes were as big as a deer’s and just that frightened, but boy, let me tell you, he saw things. He wasn’t like his pal, Tony. He didn’t have any illusions that he was center stage in a drama starring himself He knew he was in the middle of a police convoy on the way to the airport with about a thousand locals and feds and several SWAT teams all waiting for a chance to jump on him. Finally he pointed the gun down, but I had to keep checking him in the mirror all the way to the airport because his instincts kept telling him to hold that gun on my head and it just kept drifting up. He had great instincts. He was just too dumb to trust them.
“The plan was to take them when we got to the airport and they thought they’d made it and relaxed a bit. Dwyer was going to freeze Tony in place, which shouldn’t have been a problem because he was waving to the crowds along the way, and I was going to get the. 45 that was under the door covering-the armrest was rigged to come down and I could pull it out and take care of Sal. But halfway there, Tony got a little bit smarter. I don’t know what it was, but suddenly he tells me to stop and he opens the door and kicks Terry Dwyer onto the highway and off we go again. So much for the rapport. Maybe there weren’t enough cameramen on the highway, so Tony had a chance to remember he was in deep shit. Whatever, all of a sudden I have Tony’s shotgun in my ribs and Sal’s got the Kalashnikov right back where it belonged.
“We get to the airport, and I am driving very carefully now, believe me. I keep working on Sal, asking him to keep the AK-47 pointed away but he’s not buying it anymore, and when we hit the tarmac with all the airport lights and about a thousand more cops and the roar of the jets and the hostages in the back starting to wail because it looks like they’re going to have to escort our boys to Libya, old Sal’s discomfort level goes up about ten more notches. If I had sneezed, he would have blown my head off.”
Becker stopped abruptly and returned to the window. After staring blankly for a few moments, he turned to Gold.
“That should do it for today,” he said.
“What happened just now?” Gold asked.
Becker said, “This has been at least an hour; that’s enough for now.”
“What made you stop? What did you remember?”
After a pause, Becker said, “I saw Sal’s eyes. In my mind, I saw them very clearly. Clearer than yours. I haven’t had any reason to study yours.”
“And?”
“You know the most distinctive thing about his eyes? It wasn’t that they were scared or concentrated or dangerous. They were trusting. They didn’t trust me, or the situation, but you could see that this was the kind of guy who would normally trust people, things, life. He trusted his nitwit friend, Tony. He trusted in the ability of the assault rifle to intimidate me and everybody else. It wasn’t that he expected events to take an orderly progression; he’d been on the short end all his life, but even on that end, there were things you could trust. You could trust that might makes right, for instance. You could trust that a man with a weapon in his ribs and an automatic rifle point- blank to his head is not the man who is going to try anything to harm you… Once a man trusts you, once he thinks he knows what you’re going to do, he’s yours.”
Becker started toward the door.
“What did you do?” Gold asked.
“It’s in your file.”
“The file just says you shot him.”
“That’s all I did.”
“But why?”
“Why? He was in the act of committing a felony with a deadly weapon. He was kidnapping eight American citizens, he was…”
“But why you?” Gold interrupted.
“I was supposed to.”
“If Dwyer had been with you to take care of Tony. But even then you had contingency plans; there were snipers all over the place. The copilot was an armed agent, so was one of the stewardesses…”
“That’s not all in the file. You did a little research.”
“I told you, I wanted the assignment. Why did you go ahead with it? You could have just let them get out of the limo, and no one would have blamed you. Why did you do it?”
Becker grinned at him from the doorway. “You’re going to have to work harder than that,” he said and left the room. He eased the door closed behind him.
Dyce was startled to find the man lying in his living room. His mind had been so filled with his encounter with Helen that he had forgotten about the presence of the man. Even his resolve while shopping that he would not do this again had slipped his mind. The girl-woman-he did not know what to call her, how to think of her. She was
