Dream of a Falling Eagle

Garth explained the second possibility. 'Or the sniper was sent in at the last moment specifically to kill Kranes in the event he did what he did. They had time. Kranes announced his resignation in Washington before hopping on the shuttle to New York. The CIA knew their former choice for president could suddenly end up causing them big- time trouble. He was a man who could single-handedly destroy the entire agency if he took a mind to it.'

Tony frowned. 'But how could they get a man armed with a rifle and silencer into the hall past the kind of security they had there?'

I laughed. 'Tony, there are some things the CIA does very well. Remember that they managed to place two shooters in a state delegation with front-row seats, didn't they?'

Mary ran a hand back through her waist-length, silver-streaked blond hair and fixed me with her sea blue eyes. 'Mongo, what's going to happen now?'

I smiled. 'You and Garth are flying off to Europe, and Harper and I are going to Tahiti.'

'Stop it! You know what I mean. What's going to happen?'

'The truth?'

'Of course.'

Garth said, 'Nothing's going to happen. All the people we know of who had any connection to the conspiracy are dead-including Taylor Mackintosh, who the paper says got drunk and fell off the balcony of his twentieth-floor apartment in Trump Tower. Cowboys one, Indians zero-as usual. We lost this one.'

There were a few moments of silence, and then Harper asked, 'Is it true, Mongo? The CIA is going to get away with this and the agency will stay the same?'

'I'm not quite as much a pessimist as my brother,' I replied, wincing slightly, 'but I'm afraid he's probably right. It depends on how far out of the sky the American eagle has fallen, and the old bird has been looking a little sickly. Americans have always been good at denial, and the country's politics of late have only made them better at it.'

'But the commission's report will be out, and everything that's happened to the two of you will be in it.'

'Sure,' I said, and shrugged. 'But, outside of the company's money-laundering operations in Haiti, we can't prove anything. That means our discussion of the murders of the two justices and the conspiracy to assassinate the president and vice president will be anecdotal, included in an appendix so that it won't taint the hard data we do have. The report won't be out for months, and by then we'll almost certainly have a right-wing president who's unlikely to act on most of the recommendations the commission will probably make. The CIA and right-wing politicians are already mounting a counterattack, claiming the company had nothing to do with any of this. They're also cobbling together a story that the attempted assassinations were part of a left-wing conspiracy to discredit conservative causes and destroy the CIA. That's all you'll be hearing on talk radio.'

Francisco snorted angrily-probably the most emotion I'd ever seen the man display. 'How can they claim that when two of their assassins were antiabortion fanatics?'

'It's easy,' Garth replied. 'They just claim it-and keep on claiming it. They'll say the Right-to-Life shooters were dupes. Like Mongo says, all you're going to be hearing on talk radio and reading in the right-wing press for months is how this was all part of a radical left-wing conspiracy. By the time the report is actually published, most of what's in it will have been leaked, considered old hat, and probably discredited by a majority of Americans. How could people have believed all the things that got us the crop of no-brain right-wing politicians we have in office now? People believe what they want to believe, Francisco, and they're not going to want to believe you, Mongo, and me. Right now Americans want a kind of chicken-fried, good-old-boy fascist government that's safe for business and the wealthy and dangerous to women and children. That's the bad news. The good news is that we don't give a shit. Right, Mongo?'

I smiled thinly. 'Right.'

Mary looked at her husband, said, 'I don't believe neither of you care what happens to this country. You two are the most American Americans I've ever met.'

Garth merely shrugged.

It was a lovely compliment, even if it wasn't entirely true. Garth had once been thoroughly American, in the sense that Mary meant, but his poisoning had changed a lot of things in him, opened up spooky depths in his soul I still did not think his wife fully understood, and it was probably just as well. I considered Garth more Intergalactic than American. As for myself, I had always felt intensely American, but in recent years it had begun to occur to me that the America I felt so much a part of was actually a myth. It had always been just a dream, and for too many people a nightmare, with some other, less magisterial, bird masquerading as an eagle. Vietnam had destroyed the illusion. I could have remarked that Garth and I had acted as we had for our own very personal reasons, with the murder of Moby Dickens at the top of the list and patriotism at the bottom, but I didn't. I didn't want to spoil the moment, or the compliment.

Harper put her hand on my knee-her touch instantly making me wish we were already in Tahiti, or anyplace else, for that matter, where we were alone. 'Robby, what about Guy Fournier? Was he really part of some secret, secret organization in the CIA?'

'That's another thing I don't think we'll ever know for certain one way or another. The Operations Directorate is secretive to begin with, a world within itself. I suppose some kind of 'Shadow Ops' within Ops is a possibility, but I personally think he was bullshitting us. He was a man who loved to talk-a good thing, that, or otherwise Garth and I would be dead. A lot of psychopaths and sociopaths are like