“What does work?” Jack asked. “What would have made the difference?” It was a sufficiently general question that it might generate a truthful answer.
“Signals intelligence-we’re still the best at that, probably-but there’s no substitute for HUMINT-real field spooks, talking to real people and finding out what they really think.”
“And killing some?” Jack asked, just to see what would result.
“There’s not much of that,” his father responded. “At least, not outside Hollywood.”
“Not what it says in the papers.”
“They still report Elvis sightings, too,” Arnie replied.
“Heck, maybe it would be good if James Bond were real, but he isn’t,” the former President observed. It might have been the undoing of the Kennedy administration, which had started to buy in to the 007 fiction, except for an idiot named Oswald. So did history take its major turns at accidents, assassins, and bad luck? Maybe a decent conspiracy was possible once, but not anymore. Too many lawyers, too many reporters, too many bloggers and Handycams and digital cameras.
“How do we fix it?”
That caused Jack Senior’s head to look up-rather sadly, his son thought. “I tried once, remember?”
“So then why is Arnie here?”
“Since when did you become so curious?”
“It’s my job to look into stuff and figure it all out.”
“The family curse,” van Damm observed.
That’s when Sally walked in. “Well, look who showed up.”
“Finished dissecting your cadaver yet?” Junior asked.
“The hard part’s putting it back together and having it walk back out the door,” Olivia Barbara Ryan shot back. “It beats handling money-dirty stuff, money, full of germs.”
“Not when you do it by computer. Nice and clean that way.”
“How’s my number-one girl?” the former President asked.
“Well, I got the lettuce. Organic. The only way to go. Mom told me to tell you it’s time for you to grill the steaks.”
Sally didn’t approve of steak, but it remained the one thing her father knew how to cook, along with burgers. Since it wasn’t summer, he had to do it on a gas grill in the kitchen instead of outside over charcoal. It was enough to get her father to stand up and head toward the kitchen, leaving Junior and Arnie together.
“So, Mr. van Damm, is he going to do it?”
“I think he has to, whether he accepts it yet or not. The country needs him to do it. And it’s Arnie now, Jack.”
Jack sighed. “That’s one family business in which I have no interest. It doesn’t pay enough for all the heartbreak that comes along with it.”
“Maybe so, but how do you say no to your country?”
“I’ve never been asked,” Jack responded, lying to a minor degree.
“The question is always internal. And your father is hearing it now. What’s he going to do? Hell, you’re his son. You know him better than I ever will.”
“The hard part for Dad is us-Mom and the kids. I think his first loyalty is to us.”
“As it should be. Tell me: Any nice girl in your life?” van Damm asked.
“Not yet.”
This wasn’t entirely true. He and Brenda had been dating for a month or so, and she was special, but Jack wasn’t sure she was
“She’s out there, waiting to be found. The good news is that she’s looking for you right now, too.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Question is, will I be old and gray before it happens?”
“You in a hurry?”
“Not especially.”
Sally appeared in the doorway. “Dinner, for those who want to devour the flesh of some harmless and inoffensive creature, murdered in Omaha, probably.”
“Well, he had a fulfilling life,” Jack observed.
Arnie chimed in, “Oh, yeah, they brought the food right to him, lots of friends, all his own age, never had to walk too far, no wolves to worry about, good medical care to handle any diseases he might have had to worry about…”
“Just one thing,” Sally shot back, leading them down the steps. “They made him climb up a steep ramp into a one-critter cage and zapped his brains with an air hammer.”
“Has it ever occurred to you, young lady, that a head of lettuce might scream when it’s cut off the stem?”
“It’s hard to hear them,” Jack chimed in. “They have small vocal cords. We’re carnivores, Sally. That’s why we have so little enamel on our teeth.”
“In that case, we are maladapted. Cholesterol kills us as soon as we’re past reproductive age.”
“Christ, Sally, you want to run around the woods naked with a stone knife to live? What about your Ford Explorer?” Jack demanded. “And the steer that made our dinner also made the leather for your designer shoes. You can push the eco-freak stuff too far, remember?”
“It becomes religion, Jack,” Arnie warned, “and you can’t hassle a person over religion.”
“A lot of that going around. And not all of it’s expressed in words.”
“True,” Arnie conceded. “But no sense in our adding to it.”
“Okay, fine. Sally, tell us about the ozone hole,” Jack invited. He’d win that one. Sally liked having a tan too much.
28
AS VITALIY HAD PREDICTED, his charters didn’t drink vodka. He’d purchased four full liters to stock his own cupboard, but though they all smoked, they didn’t drink. It only confirmed what he suspected about them. Not that it mattered one way or another. Their money spent the same as anyone else’s.
He’d beached his landing craft on a gentle gravel sloping shore, what passed for a beach here. The landing ramp he kept in the up position, lest a bear wander aboard. They were even heading toward prime hunting country, though the hunting season was now closed. While his charters had firearms, they were not of the type fit for big game. He’d thought about shooting one for his own purposes. It would make a good decoration for his wheelhouse, something for clients to remember him by. But he’d never found the time.
The charter party was camped out in the cargo area. Vitaliy had set out plastic mattresses and some folding chairs. They sat there and smoked and talked quietly among themselves, not bothering him much at all. They’d even brought their own food. Not a bad idea. Vanya was not a gourmet cook by any means, and mainly fed himself on Russian Army rations, which he bought for cash from a supply sergeant at Arkhangel’sk.
It was eerily quiet here. Airplanes flew too high to hear them, and even seeing their anticollision lights was difficult and rare enough, so remote from civilization was this part of Russia, home to the occasional adventurer or naturalist, as well as the local fishermen trying to wrest a meager living from the sea. To call this part of Russia an economic backwater was generous. Except for the moribund Russian Navy, there was nothing here for men to do, and half of that was cleaning up a mess or disaster that had gotten sailors killed, the poor sods.
But that, he remembered, was what had brought him here, and for some reason he liked it. The air was always fresh, and the winters were beyond brisk, something a true Russian had in his blood, what made him different from the lesser European breeds.
He checked his watch. The sun would rise at an early hour. He’d shake his charter party loose in five hours or so, let them drink their wake-up tea and eat their buttered bread for breakfast. He had bacon to supplement it but no eggs.
In the morning he’d go out to sea and watch the merchant traffic. There was a surprising amount of that. It made more economic sense than either trucks or the rail line into the new oil fields and the gold-mining complex at
