government?” Charlie asked.
“Exactly.”
“Foreign?”
Cadaret spat a piece of hardened blood as if it were a sunflower seed. “Or American and, for the usual reasons, keeping it black.”
“Black for the usual reasons.” Charlie looked off, pretending to chew this over. He was reluctant to expose his ignorance. Fuck it, he thought, that toothpaste was out of the tube. “Let me just clarify two things: What are ‘the usual reasons,’ and what do you mean by ‘keeping it black’?”
“Whether you’re the Mafia or the CIA, killing people is illegal,” Cadaret said. “And if you’re the CIA, your problem is it’s easier than ever to get caught. So you go ‘black’-you leave nothing to link what’s being done to the organization doing it. And if Mr. Clark here’s outfit stands to get wind of it and take you to task, you go blacker still. You make it look like an accident, if you can.”
“His outfit?” Charlie said.
“The Cavalry,” said Drummond. Remembering, it seemed.
“Actually, I think they disbanded,” Charlie said.
“It’s just a nickname.”
“Okay?” Charlie waited for more.
“Clandestine operations…” Drummond couldn’t summon anything else.
“They’re a legendary special operations group,” Cadaret said. “Probably CIA, maybe SOCOM, but who knows? Whichever, you’d find them on the books, if you could find them on the books at all, as ‘Geological Analysis Subgroup Alpha’ or ‘Research and Development Project Twenty backslash Eighteen’ or something like that.”
“Isn’t CIA already secret enough?” Charlie asked.
“If only.” Cadaret laughed. “Bureaucracy and oversight have a way of effectively revealing the best-laid clandestine plans to their targets, let alone gumming up the works. At the end of the day, it’s best for everybody if the bureaucrats and overseers are lulled into complacency by an hour-long PowerPoint presentation on the subject of geography, allowing the spooks to get down to their real business.”
“So other than geographical analysis, what’s the Cavalry’s business?”
“It’s hard to say how much is apocryphal, but word is that they recruit the ballsiest of the best and the brightest, and they run covert ops that no one else can-or would dare. The one you hear the most is that, in the mid-nineties, they replaced the king of one of the less-stable Arab countries.”
“Replaced?”
“One day the king jumped off his yacht for a quick dip. When he climbed back aboard, he was literally a new man.”
Things were beginning to make sense to Charlie. Turning to Drummond, he asked, “So Clara Barton High graduation day, when you had that appliance expo in Tucson you couldn’t get out of, were you really in the Red Sea in a frogman suit?”
“What appliance expo in Tucson?” Drummond said.
“So how do we call out the Cavalry?” Charlie asked Cadaret.
“To me, the most astounding thing in all this is they haven’t tried to get hold of you.”
“We’ve been trying to be hard to get hold of lately,” Charlie said.
“We use the horses,” Drummond said.
“I think that’s the other cavalry,” Charlie said. A fraction of a second later, it dawned on him that he’d missed the patently obvious for years. Playing the horses was about a thrill, and thrills were practically anathema to Drummond-at least the Drummond he knew. Taking him aside, Charlie asked, “Or is that why you always bought the Racing Form?”
“Right, right, the Daily Racing Form. There was something in the ads.”
“That could be more than just an interesting piece of information, couldn’t it?”
Drummond brightened. “Do you have today’s Racing Form?”
“As my luck would have it, today is probably the first day in ten years I didn’t buy it. But if I had, what would I find in the ads?”
“A number for us to call maybe.”
“Placed by this Cavalry?”
“Possibly.”
It wasn’t a lot to go on. Still, at the end of the long, dark tunnel Charlie’s life had become, a bulb flickered on.
He looked around, trying to determine which way east was. The general store was to the east-after all the driving, he had no doubt about that. They might find the Daily Racing Form there-it was sold everywhere there were gamblers, which is to say it was sold everywhere. Alternatively, they might access it online or find transportation to someplace else that sold it.
The trees partitioned the woods into narrow alleys, and those alleys formed a maze. Charlie had dreamed of camping and outdoor adventure as a boy. The closest he got was reading about it. He’d spent maybe eight weeks of his adult life outside urban environments, and most of that time was at racetracks. Still, he remembered that the sun travels west. He looked up. The treetops obscured the sun. But the shadows were shifting slightly, clockwise, enabling him to determine west.
“Dad, what do you say we take a walk?”
“Do us all a favor and let me go along with you,” Cadaret said.
“Your gang will be here soon,” Charlie said. “Probably too soon.”
“They’ll be looking for you. And they’ll find you. If I’m with you, I can vouch for the fact that you don’t know anything.”
“So? Didn’t they kill my friend for knowing only the address of the Monroeville club?”
“Ramirez?”
“Yeah.”
“That was just a math thing. He added up to better off not alive.”
Guilt and horror pummeled Charlie anew. He felt a hand on his shoulder and jumped. Drummond wanted a private word.
“Let’s not leave him like this,” Drummond whispered.
“You really think he can help us?”
“No.” Drummond retrained the gun on Cadaret.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Neutralizing him.”
“Neutralizing him? You and I would look like lasagnas now if it hadn’t been for him.”
“Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated.”
“Listen, I don’t mean to diss the Big Book of Bloodshed, but what’s he going to do if he’s stuck here? I’ve got a twenty-dollar bill that says you know some good tying-guys-up knots.”
Drummond relented with a grunt.
With more wire from the helicopter, he bound Cadaret at the ankles, knees, and thighs; and in the time most people take to tie a pair of shoes, he near-mummified the assassin from waist to shoulders.
Standing by and watching, Charlie wondered why Cadaret had put forth such a specious argument on behalf of being freed. Did he really expect them to trust someone who murders people for a living?
His eyes fell to Cadaret’s five-buck wristwatch: not the sort of watch he would expect on someone who has a vacation house on St. Bart’s.
23
“… and the code name of the operation?” Cranch asked.
He’d been firing questions all morning. He hadn’t touched his water. He’d seldom shifted from his perch on
