The Nature of the Game

Why Here, Why Now

I often wondered if I’d be killed trying to write The Nature of the Game, the fictional spy saga of the Boomer generation.

History creates us even as we create history. Born after Word War II into the Cold War, I grew up in a tough, corrupt, but loving Montana prairie town surrounded by Minuteman missile sites, waiting for when—not if, but when—the button would be pushed and dynamite charges would blow concrete doors off those underground silos so that screaming missiles could scar our blue sky and create Dr. Strangelove’s mushroom-cloud Armageddon. The Civil Rights battles to let non-white kids my age share our bathrooms and schools and voting booths rippled through my youth. Assassination politics cut down JFK: If they could kill the President, for sure they could kill you. The Beatles blew the doors off the it’s only rock ’n’ roll prison already breached by poets like Woody Guthrie, Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and Bob Dylan. Guys I grew up with got swallowed by a 10,000-day Southeast Asian war where too slowly we realized victory for the United States defied definition or delivery.

Naïve but lucky sums up my youth. Whatever compels me to write fiction let me create a first novel called Six Days of the Condor when I was twenty-three, a story that became a great movie starring Robert Redford and gave wings to my dreams.

Thanks to Otto Penzler and The Mysterious Press, that book and its strange saga—including how Condor inspired a secret 2,000-man spy group in the Soviet Union’s KGB—is available as an e-book, as is the post-9/11 re-imagining of my Condor character in the novella condor.net.

The crucible for this novel came after Condor.

By the time I was twenty-five, I’d worked my way through the University of Montana on road crews and with part-time jobs like librarian and gravedigger. I’d been an aide to Montana’s U.S. Senator Lee Metcalf during Watergate’s last year. With first novel Condor on the bookshelves, I had two novels in publishing’s pipeline while my Robert Redford/Condor movie crouched, poised to fly to theaters across the world.

And then out of the blue, I stumbled into a job as an investigative reporter for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, the only reporter Nixon’s Watergate thugs feared enough to try to murder, a muckraker whose column appeared in 1,000 newspapers for twenty million Americans.

What a rush! Jack’s handful of investigative reporters covered who did what to whom, with no pretense of objectivity (then journalism’s official standard), but with the promise to be fair and fearless. I reported and wrote—in Jack’s bizarre Gilbert & Sullivan prose style—stories on Congressional investigations, spies in the Central Intelligence Agency and other organizations, heroin and cocaine dealing, extremist politics of both the left and the right that sometimes veered into terrorism, big money muscling public policy, cults like the Manson family, the old Mafia, new emerging crime groups, Wall Street shenanigans, billions in government waste, military mastery and military madness, American villains, and more than a few American heroes.

I worked for Jack for four years before I realized my hunger to write fiction—and to see my byline—was far stronger than my yen to be one of his muckrakers. Besides, I was no journalism star. Most of my colleagues at Jack’s were better journalists than I, as were the vast majority of American reporters who did not have the fear-stoked access granted those of us who carried Jack’s press pass.

While I was at Jack’s in those post-Watergate days, I ventured into America’s noir underworld. I rode with cops, went into prisons, made contacts in the intelligence community that I’d fictionalized in Condor without knowing any real spooks. What I experienced ranged from learning such minutiae as why a particular U.S. Navy plane landed in a backwater African country seemingly far from that day’s international crisis, to a snowy December day circa 1979 when—off the record—an executive of the Drug Enforcement Agency confided to me that in less than a decade, marijuana and cocaine would be legal. Of course marijuana, I told him, but I wasn’t sure about cocaine. Neither of us foresaw the personal, criminal, and international political horrors that created the twenty-first century’s narco-states.

By the time I left Jack’s team, I had learned all sorts of surprising things from spies who never revealed (maybe never knew) the whole truth, cops whose badges seemed bigger than their beats, warriors who fought different wars than my regular military friends, and outlaws who felt less than evil. From all that emerged a sense that the noir world that always shadows our official history was evolving with a new essence because of my generation.

It wasn’t just sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It wasn’t just the battle-scarred post-sixties political scene. It wasn’t just post-Vietnam War cynicism chronically misreported with bad clichés. It wasn’t just the entitlement clash of my Baby Boomer generation gaining its predictable footings within the harsh realities of the Cold War inherited from our parents. It wasn’t just an outlaws’ party where gun-heavy spies, smugglers, political extremists, and gangsters swapped angry, stoned stories about the quintessential American experience of high school.

It was some mash of all that and more. Some shift of our cultural consciousness that began the day bullets killed JFK in Dallas and—though I didn’t know it at the time—ran its Act One era until a movie star president rallied our country even as he beat a spy scandal called Iran-Contra. This was an essence captured best the same year of Redford’s Condor movie by my generation’s great American author Bruce Springsteen, who called it our runaway American dream.

That essence was something I felt compelled to write about.

So when I left Jack’s, I drove into our noir world.

Not knowing where I’d get.

But knowing that’s where my story was—a story that, unlike most other not-so-lucky authors, I might be able to base in reality.

At first I thought I was on a continuum from my Jack Anderson muckraker days. With three published novels notched to my name, I thought that maybe I could write a nonfiction book, try to capture factually what once upon a time I’d only been able to make up or experience in other people’s fiction.

I was more naïve than I realized.

But still lucky.

Because the combination of Condor’s fame, Jack’s reputation, and my own slight but vouched-for history let me go places I could never factually chronicle. This access made such places and the people who created them all the more fascinating and fit far better into my fictional drive than being a reporter or historian. I wanted to understand, to feel what our Baby Boomer noir world was like, and to know the other souls running out there. Sometimes we called it the game, sometimes we called it the life, but whatever you call it, I was there.

Not that there was or is any one there. The noir world is like a whiff of marijuana smoke on a city street, a transitory time and place defined by its transactions and attitude. D.C. San Francisco. London. Kentucky. Baltimore. Chicago. L.A. Paris. Montana. Manhattan. Somehow with my Anderson-Condor-schooled eyes, I kept discovering what was there before and what now came with my generation’s arrival.

When you walk amidst spies or terrorists or outlaws, and those who hunt them, it’s easy to end up as a proximity casualty. You cross legitimate borders even while you must never cross certain moral lines. Life gets kaleidoscopic, out of whack. Time and perspective distort. Violence or violation is only ever a heartbeat away. Mine was not a wise or safe journey, but while I cannot say I was right to take it, neither can I say I was wrong. I’m a writer. Even in my fiction, coming as close as possible to that never-attainable goal called truth, is the calling I chose to answer.

After about three years, I got out while I could. The game was not the life or death I wanted.

But while my writing had been changed—charged—forever, I still didn’t have the big book that triggered my quest.

I’d been up front and honest with everyone—good guys, bad guys, all the guys with guns. Everybody knew I was there for some grand story I’d make up that wasn’t about any of them but was about all of us then in the game, in the life. They all knew I was there to understand so I could write about what I grokked—as author Robert Heinlein called it in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

They were cool with that, that was our deal, and it worked, because Baby Boomers are the first media generation, so being chronicled overrode the omertà reticence of history’s previous noirs. Our generation is infected with the belief that being revealed in media, even as a secret source, equals redemption, makes us real in a world where what’s on TV or computer monitors or in movies or books creates a worthwhile existence. Writers more learned than I have chronicled this cultural/psychological phenomenon, but this force is part of what let me go out there and come back alive.

The decompression from that trip took a few years and writing a couple of novels.

Then, abruptly, what woke in me was a savage saga of the game as seen through the histories of three Baby Boomers, all of them in their own right spies, all trapped in a life-or-death chase from sea to shining sea, a noir odyssey that started with this vision:

"At seven minutes to midnight on an L.A. winter Sunday, Jud Stuart looked into the bar mirror and realized that the skinny guy in the plaid sports coat had been sent to kill him."

Complete fiction.

But written true.

That’s this novel: The Nature of the Game.

It came out originally under another title: River of Darkness.

When this saga of Baby Boomer spies ambushed me, it had no title. How could one name sum up that noir world? But as my characters of Jud and Wes and Nick emerged in my mind, what struck me is how their world felt, what it had felt like to be swept up in the noir spy saga of my past, swept up as if…by a river.

Like many Baby Boomers, a soundtrack of music energizes my life. I was a junior in my Montana north-country high school when my car radio crackled with Canadian signer Gordon Lightfoot’s great hit Ribbon of Darkness. Years later, as Jud and Wes and Nick raced through my mind, that song echoed behind them—but re-written as "river of darkness." That’s what the noir world I’d survived had been: a river of darkness. That’s what swept up Jud, Wes, and Nick, and the women who loved them.

Those were the days before the Internet, but I lived in D.C. My heart thundered against my ribs like I had a hellhound on my trail as I drove to Capitol Hill, raced into the Library of Congress, found a Help desk where the clerk checked her computer…and found no other novels titled River of Darkness. Relief flooded over me. I was home free with a title that captured the feeling of the novel.

A title I wasn’t sure how to work into the book.

A title that my editor liked but did not love.

A sentiment shared by a major source for the novel: a spy who sat at the bar of a south-of-Hollywood restaurant with me when I lived in L.A. while working on the novel and on a CBS TV drama about a Congressman.

Driving to that dinnertime rendezvous, my rental car radio played the great Rolling Stones song Sympathy for the Devil.

Too bad I can’t use that title, I told my source as we sat at the bar. A few years earlier, a Special Forces veteran named Kent Anderson…

Yeah, I think I know him, said my man.

Kent wrote a great novel about Vietnam that he called Sympathy for the Devil.

Scooped, said journalist me.

Too bad, said my source. I like what you got, but kinda wish it was more about the—I don’t know—the heart of what goes on.

"You mean like The Heart of the Matter?" I asked, and watched his face glow until I told him the great novelist Graham Greene had already grabbed that wonderful title.

My source shrugged.

Then he went back to revealing what spies can do with a B-52 bomber.

Authors are stubborn. Inspiration hit me with the River concept, and when none of my colleagues or sources could offer me a better title or a more convincing argument that I was wrong, I created an epigraph for the novel from its completely fictional spymaster, Deputy Director of the CIA General William Billy Cochran, that summed up a timeless truth: Every ship of state sails on a river of darkness.

So that’s the title my novel bore when first released in 1991.

Of its often glowing reviews, my favorite and most humbling came from Rambo’s creator David Morrell in The Washington Post. He loved my title’s metaphor, and after comparing the book to works by John le Carré and Charles McCarry, he wrote:

Grady has given us…an astonishingly effective and accurate fictional portrayal of American covert intelligence operations from the 1960s onward…. What distinguishes this thriller…is the vividness of the book’s characters, the relentlessness of its pace and the authenticity of its covert-operations tradecraft. The action scenes are exemplary, the sense of fear is palpable…. the best thriller I’ve read this year.

Crime novelist James Ellroy called my story: Brutal, moving…claims your soul and nails it to the wall.

Decades after its first publication, I still get fan mail praising the book.

And that’s great.

Enough reason to republish it now, with the added importance of remembering that my generation got here—for our Third Act—by crawling out of our First Act daze as my novel ends.

Plus, I get to make the story resonate more by using the perfect title that I realized on the day that I ripped open the box of my saga’s brand new published book edition.

Three thoughts collided when I first saw the book I’d risked my life to write.

First came the awe every author feels when he sees his inspiration made real right there in front of his eyes, whether it’s a movie or TV production, a hardback book or a poem in an obscure journal or the wondrous lines flowing from an e-book screen. That awe says: Some stranger can now see a vision as best as I could capture it.

Second came thoughts of Rudyard Kipling, who I thought coined the game to describe the world of spies. In fact, Kipling’s Kim popularized the great game to describe the rivalries between the British and Russian empires before World War II, a phrase probably coined by a British spy, but never mind reality, I was in the midst of a creative collision.

Third flashed my memory of that bar night with my source, the title regret generated by what I’d heard on the rental car radio, the Rolling Stones song Sympathy for the Devil with Mick Jagger proclaiming: …what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.

An epiphany burst out of my mental collision.

Not your game, Mick: the game.

Let the reader sort out the devils and angels.

Then, seeing my published book that first time, too late I realized what was the perfect title for the noir saga in which Jud, Wes, and Nick shoot through the spy history of their Baby Boomer generation: The Nature of the Game.

But now, thanks to this new edition in a new format, I can reveal and revise one of my best novels. That’s the title that is.

James Grady        

Washington, D.C.

WANDERER

At seven minutes to midnight on an L.A. winter Sunday, Jud Stuart looked into the bar mirror and realized that the skinny guy in the plaid sports coat had been sent to kill him.

It’s about time, thought Jud.

Perched on a stool by the front door, the skinny guy snapped a kitchen match to light a Camel. Nine stools away, Jud smelled sulfur over the tavern’s dried urine and stale beer. In the flicker of the match, Jud studied the killer’s face and was sure they’d never met.

Jud’s shaking hands knocked over the empty shot glass as he raised his beer schooner like a chalice. He drained the cup of its tangy brew, and along with fear and anger, a cold sense of relief flowed through him. After a thousand aimless and drunken days, he was on familiar ground. The assassin made sense.

The bartender was beefy and lied about having played college football. He sidled down to Jud, bobbed the toothpick in his mouth toward the coins by Jud’s empty glasses.

Ain’t enough there for another round, he told Jud.

Then I better go straight, muttered Jud. He was a big man on a barstool, barrel-chested with a truck-tire gut. Short reddish-brown hair. His arms were thick as most men’s calves. Once his face had been boyishly handsome, now it was slack, pale. Except for the flat blue of his bloodshot eyes.

Deception was the only way he could think of to escape. He closed his eyes, deliberately fell backward off the barstool, his arms wide to secretly use a judo breakfall.

But the alcohol in his blood ruined his timing, and he crashed honestly to the tile, smacking his head and blacking out.

Looks like a walrus, said the bartender.

The drunks at the bar didn’t look and didn’t laugh. The man in the plaid sports jacket had paid more for his clothes than anyone else in the bar; he was cleaner. He watched the bartender sweep Jud’s change into his own pocket as he walked around the bar.

Get up! yelled the bartender. Get up or it’s the bull pen.

The bartender kicked Jud’s blue-jean-clad shin. Unconscious, Jud’s stillness was true.

Shit! The bartender grabbed Jud’s ankles. I don’t get paid to haul shit. He jerked: Jud’s body scooted an inch.

Hell, said the bartender, he must weigh a ton!

I’ll help you, volunteered Plaid Jacket.

The bartender handed him one of Jud’s feet. Jud wore cheap black high-top sneakers and no socks. The bartender jerked his head toward the back door, counted, One, two, three!

They pulled Jud across the floor. His chopped-sleeve sweatshirt slid up over his massive belly and hairless chest.

The bartender said, You’re stronger than you look.

Yes, answered Plaid Jacket.

Jud felt his head bounce as they dragged him out the back door. He kept his eyes closed, his weight lifeless. The men dragging him rested on the porch landing.

The bull pen, said the bartender, nodding down to the wood-fenced, packed-dirt yard. ’Course these guys are steers.

Their laughter echoed in the cool night. The bartender squinted down the shadowed staircase.

Ain’t nobody else sleepin’ it off down there, he said. Let’s see if he can do it hi’self.

Jud let them muscle him to his feet. His head hung low on his chest, so he risked opening his eyes a slit. Saw a hand belonging to a plaid sleeve holding his right arm.

Hey! Buddy! The bartender shouted in Jud’s left ear. You all right? You can make it, right?

To Plaid Jacket, the bartender said, He can make it.

The bartender shoved Jud down the steps. Whirling, bouncing off the brick wall and the railing, Jud crashed to the ground. After a few seconds, he rolled on his side.

See? said the bartender. Drunks, you can’t hurt ’em.

He led Plaid Jacket inside for a beer on the house.

Get up, Jud told himself as he lay gasping in the dirt. Only got until Plaid Jacket establishes his cover.

He found the wall and used it to brace himself. Sitting. Standing. Leaning against the bricks. Not falling down.

From inside the bar, Jud heard laughter. Willie Nelson singing about federales and finks. Jud was surprised the bar had a jukebox. The only person inside who’d waste pocket change on music would be Plaid Jacket. Not a waste for him, realized Jud: cover.

A seven-foot wood fence surrounded the bull pen in the California night. The falls had knocked some of the liquor from his system. Jud shuffled to the fence, to the gate.

Locked. He caressed the lock’s smooth face. If he had tools, thirty seconds. If his hands didn’t shake. He gripped the top of the fence—couldn’t lift his bulk off his toes.

In the bar, another record started, a woman singing sweet and clear. Jud loved women who could sing sweet and clear and loud enough to cover whatever Plaid Jacket had planned.

Last good chance. Jud retreated until he was under the porch. Three deep breaths: he charged, resisting the urge to yell as he careened through the darkness like a human cannonball.

Smacked into the wooden gate.

Sprang back like a beach ball, sprawling on the ground as the fence shook and the gate held.

Jud lay on his back, his shoulder swelling, eyes open to the night where smog hid the stars. He could surrender, fade into blackness. He imagined Plaid Jacket laughing on his barstool.

They could have at least sent someone with more class.

He got up.

Inside, the woman stopped singing. Glasses clinked. In his mind, Jud saw Plaid Jacket slide off his stool, fish in his pocket for a quarter, feed the jukebox, and turn. Motion established. Cover.

Jud staggered up the stairs. Found no loose boards, no bricks or pipes, no jagged piece of glass. He stared at his trembling hands. The skills of a dozen teachers had been soaked out of that flesh. Tonight, there wasn’t a drunk in the bar who couldn’t beat him. And it wasn’t a drunk who’d try.

Dion’s The Wanderer, which had been a hit when Jud raged through adolescence, spilled out into the night.

Iron bars covered a window in the wall behind the half-open door. A drainpipe ran beside the window to the roof.

Hey! came the bartender’s yell from inside the Oasis. Where you going?

Jud slid behind the door, stepped on the windowsill, and grabbed the bars. He teetered but made it, back against the bricks, clinging to the drainpipe and heels on the window’s ledge.

Then he did his best to let go inside, to relax, to not-think. One chance, one play.

A form interrupted the light filtering through the open door. From his perch, Jud could see the top of a man’s balding head and the shoulders of his plaid jacket.

Somebody has to make sure he’s okay! the man yelled. He stepped onto the porch, intent on the darkness of the yard. While his eyes scanned the stairs inches from his shoes, his hand reached behind him, pushed the door shut.

Jud loosed his grip and fell off the windowsill, his arms wide as he surrendered to gravity and the night.

He slammed into Plaid Jacket like a walrus plopping on a leopard seal. The two men crashed down the wooden stairs, thudding onto the packed dirt. Jud landed on top.

The man beneath him was bony and still, his head at an awkward angle. Jud probed the man’s neck; found no pulse.

Next thing Jud realized he was leaning against the fence. Vomiting. His head swam and bile burned his throat each time he gasped. Tears stung his eyes and he blinked them away.

It was the fall, Jud agreed. If I hadn’t been drunk, I’d be dead, too. He was supposed to be stunned so I could run. He wasn’t supposed to die. Not him, too.

Jud silenced his conscience, bent to search the corpse.

A dime-store notepad and pen in the plaid jacket. A pack of Camels and a box of kitchen matches. From the pants came two hundred dollars in bills and loose change. Fingernail clipper. A handkerchief. A set of car keys, house keys. A wallet. Half a dozen credit cards matched the California driver’s license, which matched the face well enough. No work ID of any kind. First-rate paper cover. Innocent. He found no gun, but a good field man wouldn’t need one. Jud strapped the man’s digital watch to his own bare wrist, filled his pockets with the dead man’s things, looked down. Swallowed hard.

Walked up the stairs, eyes forward.

No one else who didn’t belong had come into the bar. Plaid Jacket’s backup might be waiting outside.

Fuck it, thought Jud. Don’t back down.

The bartender had his rear to the room, watering a rummy’s shot. He glanced in the mirror as Jud walked by.

Hey! called the bartender, turning. What about you?

Keep the change, Jud muttered.

Jud stepped outside beneath the red neon OASIS sign, silently screaming as he waited for the bullet to cut him down.

Nothing.

A dozen parked cars, all empty. No one in the doorways. No one crouched on the skid-row fire escapes. A police siren wailed down distant boulevards, wrong direction and too soon to be for Jud. He didn’t have the time to match the dead man’s keys to a parked car. Jud had no car. His $l7-a-night hotel was four blocks away, easy to stumble home to after a hard night at the Oasis. Or to crawl. But he wouldn’t risk going there. He had next to nothing in his room. Suitcases of worn clothes. A couple snapshots. Keys to a Mercedes he gave to Lorri when she left. His wallet held his driver’s license and empty slots for credit cards.

And the men from yesterday finally wanted him dead.

What the hell, he thought. Make ’em work for it.

The least important difference between California and the East Coast is that the sun rises three hours earlier over the Atlantic. On that last Monday in February 1990, dawn broke in Washington, D.C., at 7:21, EST, filling Nick Kelley’s suburban Maryland bedroom with gray light. Nick slept quietly beside his wife, her black hair spread on her pillow like a Japanese fan.

The telephone rang.

Which spooked their rottweiler, who barked and woke the baby in the next room; Saul cried. The phone rang again before Nick could grab the receiver. Beside him, Sylvia stirred.

’Lo? whispered Nick into the phone.

This is the A T and T operator. Will you accept a collect call from, ah, Wolf?

Nick closed his eyes, sighed. Opened his mouth to say no, then shook his head and said, Yes.

Who is it? mumbled Sylvia, sitting up, brushing her hair off her forehead. She wore a long, white nightgown.

Jud, whispered her husband as he sat on the edge of the bed.

Shit, she said. Nick half-hoped her curse hadn’t carried over the phone line, half-hoped it had. Sylvia flipped the covers back, padded from the room to care for their son.

It’s me, Jud said on the other end of the line.

I guessed, replied Nick. Partly for his wife, he said, Do you know what time it is?

At a corner pay phone in Los Angeles, Jud checked the dead man’s watch.

Zero four-thirty, my time, he told Nick.

You woke the baby.

Oh. Sorry. How is he? Saul, right?

He’s fine. Nick sighed. He ran his hand through his steel-flecked black hair—prematurely gray, he noted. And this is how it got that way. He was due to wake up anyway.

Look, I just called to tell you, if you don’t hear from me for a while—

I haven’t heard from you for a while.

—I’ve got to go under.

Again? said Nick flatly. He yawned. Nick was a wiry man, almost too lean for his just under six-foot height.

This time is different. Jud’s calm tone held none of his practiced drama.

Is something wrong?

No shit.

Nick licked his lips; Sylvia was still out of the room. Does it have anything to do with us?

With you? said Jud, understanding. Doubt it.

What if you’re wrong? thought Nick.

We had us some times, didn’t we, partner? said Jud.

Yeah.

You know I love you like a brother.

Nick’s face burned. Sylvia walked back in the bedroom, their sixteen-month-old son in her arms. The sleepy baby burrowed his face into Mommy’s chest.

Uh, yeah. Nick avoided Sylvia’s glare. Me, too.

In case I don’t get to, tell Saul about me.

Tell him what?

The truth.

What’s that? Where do I start?

With good-bye, said Jud. A pair of headlights rolled toward him. He hung up.

On the East Coast, Nick heard the phone click, waited, then hung up, too, and knew that finally, this had been the call.

In Los Angeles, the headlights flowed past Jud. He rested his throbbing forehead on the pay phone, closed his eyes.

Jud had caught a bus seven blocks from the Oasis. He played the forgettable wino for the bored black bus driver, five laughing Hispanic women dressed in janitor’s uniforms, three stoic Korean men, and a sleeping black woman, a bowling-ball bag on the seat beside her. In the green light of the bus’s interior, Jud made a convincing wino.

When he went to work for Angel Hardware & Lock six months earlier, Jud mastered the alarm system and cut himself a set of store keys. Inside the store, he turned on the coffeemaker and started a can of tomato soup on the hot plate. He went to his time card. He was owed for eleven shifts, plus overtime.

One shelf held dusty gym bags. Jud ripped the tags off two and cruised the aisles. Swiss army knives. A nylon jacket. Four pairs of work socks; a soldier could always use socks. Jud blushed when he realized he wasn’t wearing any. Leather work gloves and cotton gardening gloves. A flashlight. From the workroom, he took lockpicks and tension bars, master keys, compact screwdriver and wrench kits, a ball peen hammer, a jimmy, and a plastic shimmy.

The tomato soup was bubbling. He ate the whole can, drank strong coffee. He put socks on under his sneakers. In the bathroom, he found a bottle of aspirin and a safety razor. He took four aspirin, put the bottle and razor in his bag.

Jud let himself into the owner’s office and snapped on the snake-necked desk light. Musty papers, ledgers, lock parts, and tools covered the desk. Jud took $131 from a cashbox. He sat in the desk’s squeaky chair, thought about the fat, cigar-smoking owner who drove a Caddy and hated and feared the world. Taped to the bottom of the middle drawer, Jud found an envelope with pictures of hard-looking women naked except for black boots and whips. The envelope also held three $100 bills. Jud put the money in his pocket, the pictures back in the envelope, retaped it to the drawer. The owner would tell no one of that loss. Clipped inside the right-hand drawer, Jud found a dusty snub-nose .38 revolver.

The gun was loaded. Jud cleaned and oiled the weapon. He wedged the gun between his belt and his right kidney, hoped the nylon jacket would cover it, hoped he could still do the cop draw.

He scrawled We’re even across his time card and dropped it on the office desk.

Bags in hand, he walked six blocks to a pay phone. He leaned against a light pole and tried to clear his brain before he called Nick. After they talked, he rested his forehead on the phone. The Dodgers were using his head for batting practice. When he breathed, he tasted tomato soup, cheap whiskey, and bile. The gun dug into his back.

Don’t need bullets, he thought, I’ll just blow on ’em.

He picked up the receiver, reconsidered: Do that last.

On a sleeping residential street four blocks away he found a Chevy without a locking gas cap. Jud wore the cotton gloves. He slid the plastic shimmy along the passenger window, sprang the door lock, popped off the ignition cover, spliced the wires into a switch stolen from his old shop. The engine purred. He put his two bags on the front floor, eased the Chevy into gear, and coasted down the block with the lights out.

He drove back to the pay phone, parked so the receiver was a fast step away from the open car door. Stared at the phone until it became nothing. Punched in a toll-free number.

On the other side of the continent, where it was now 8:26 A.M., five men in conservative shirts and ties sat in a windowless room, enjoying croissants and coffee at their computer-laden desks. Clocks on the wall showed the time in every U.S. zone, Greenwich, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. The men laughed about a woman they barely knew.

A blue phone rang on the second desk from the left. The desk’s computer screen automatically split. The man at the desk looked like a Yale professor, an image he’d cultivated since graduating from the University of Wyoming five years before. He adjusted his earphone and mike headset, held up his hand for silence, then flipped a switch to answer the call.

Hello? he said, his eyes on his computer screen.

Why don’t you answer ‘Security Force’ anymore? said Jud.

Hello? repeated the man, frowning.

This is Malice.

The man typed MALICE onto the screen, pushed the enter key. Within seconds, a six-word column appeared on the screen’s left side. The man chose the first word.

"Is that M as in mother?" he asked.

"M as in malign."

"E as in …"

"Enigma, said Jud. Lame, don’t waste time running the list. You know who I am."

The right side of the screen lit up.

Yes, said the man who’d answered the call as he read the computer’s instructions. I think I know who this is.

The man’s coworkers looked over his shoulder. One whispered, Malice—I had him twice.

Shame on you guys, said Jud. Shame on you.

What? said the man who’d answered his call.

That was no way to say good-bye, Jud told them.

I’m not sure what you mean.

Ask around the Oasis Bar, Lame. You’ll figure it out. If you’re cleared high enough.

What can I do for you? asked the man Jud had called.

Suddenly, in L.A., the dead man’s watch began to beep. Jud poked buttons on the watch dial. The beeps didn’t stop.

Do you hear a beeping noise? asked the man in front of the computer screen.

Jud banged the watch on his wrist against the pay phone’s glass wall. The glass cracked, but the watch kept beeping.

Are you there? said the smooth voice in Jud’s ear.

Jud curled his arm outside the phone cubicle so the beeping watch was on the other side of the glass.

Can I help you? tried the would-be Yalie one last time.

"You tell ’em I said hello, huh? Not good-bye, Lame. Not like that. You tell ’em all I said hello."

Across the bottom of the right-hand screen the computer printed the number of Jud’s pay phone.

Tell who? asked the man. He kept his voice calm.

Yeah, said Jud. Yeah.

He hung up.

The watch quit beeping.

God, I don’t need this, muttered Jud. He fastened the dead man’s watch around the telephone receiver. Left that high-tech prankster for them. Drove away in the stolen Chevy. To the west waited the ocean. South was Mexico and bad karma. East was where he’d been. Jud headed north, the direction a mouse took in search of the wren he loved in the only happy story Jud remembered from his childhood.

THE CHOSEN ONE

Major Wesley Chandler, United States Marine Corps, drove past two sheriff’s deputies parked at the mouth of a suburban Virginia cul-de-sac, their windows cracked so they wouldn’t suffocate, their engine chugging so they wouldn’t freeze in the March night. He nodded to them; they noted his uniform and nodded back, comrades-in-arms against the barbarians.

Cars lined the residential street, middle-class mobility machines. He saw no limousines. And no parking spaces.

A man with an unbuttoned overcoat stood in the porch light’s glow at the rambling Tudor home that matched the address on Wes’s notepad. A second man wrapped in Washington’s ubiquitous Burberry trench coat lounged against a blue sedan with three antennae on its trunk. The Burberry was unfastened. A plastic tube ran from the coat to the man’s left ear. The two men’s eyes rode with Wes as he cruised past the house.

He drove back to the mouth of the cul-de-sac. The parking space he found was too close to the corner for the law, but the deputies didn’t seem to care.

Wes shut off his engine. The night chill reached through the car to stroke him. He checked his watch and remembered the two phone calls that had summoned him here.

The first phone call had come to his office at the Naval Investigative Service headquarters on Thursday. Yesterday. He’d been staring at the computer screen in his gray-walled cubicle a mile from the Capitol building, trying to convince himself that the memo he was writing really mattered. That first call had been from a woman.

Is this Major Chandler from New Mexico? she’d said.

That’s where I was born.

I’m Mary Patterson. Way back when, I was Congressman Denton’s secretary. We met when the Academy bused the cadets up from Annapolis to meet the members who appointed them.

That was twenty-five years ago, said Wes.

Now I’m working with the boss at his new shop.

Congratulations.

That’s why I’m calling you, she said. Mr. Denton wants to honor the people from his days on the Hill—like his staffers and you fine men who did him proud at the service academies. Just an informal cocktail party after work.

When?

Tomorrow, she said. Can I tell him you’ll be there?

I’ll try, said Wes.

Oh. Her voice chilled. Well, do try. Please.

The second phone call had come at nine-thirty A.M. Friday.

Major Chandler, said a man’s gravel voice, my name is Noah Hall. Exec assistant to Director Denton. We’ve never met.

The gray walls of Wes’s office drew closer.

You will go to his reception tonight, right?

Since you put it that way, answered Wes.

Noah Hall chuckled. Agreed Wes should wear his uniform.

You bringin’ a date? asked Hall.

No, should I? And who should I get? Wes wanted to add.

Come alone. Noah Hall told Wes when to be there.

Wes’s heels clicked on the sidewalk as he walked into the cul-de-sac. He exhaled silver clouds that vanished in the night. These houses were elegant barns. Sculpted hedges, chiseled trees, lawns trimmed even in their seasonal death. The rainbow flicker of television shone through the window of one home.

Laughter floated to Wes from his destination. The man by the door watched him approach, while the eyes of the man at the curb swept the street. In the dark yard behind the house, Wes spotted the pinpoint orange flare of a cigarette cupped in an overconfident hand.

Cold for this, isn’t it? Wes told the man at the door who unwisely had his hands deep in his overcoat pockets.

Don’t we know it? replied the man, with a smile, grateful for the professional recognition. Go on in.

Wes opened the door.

Warmth rolled over him like a wave. A smoky fireplace burned somewhere amidst the babble of voices. A woman screeched in delight: late thirties, cigarette in one hand, white wine in the other. She wore wedding rings, but her male companion with graying sandy hair, tweed suit, and bow tie looked not of the marriage persuasion. A Latin maid bustled past Wes, a tray of Swedish meatballs and bite-sized crab cakes clutched in her hands. She’d fled El Salvador after the right-wing death squad La Mano Blanca gang-raped her. On the interior stair landing stood another man with a suit and a tube running from under his jacket to his ear. The carpet beneath Wes’s feet was thick, the air rich in perfumes: rose and lilac and musk.

You must be Major Chandler! A woman in her fifties stepped from the crowd. You’re our only Marine. I’m Mary Patterson.

As she shook his hand, Wes felt her eyes soak him up.

In a roomful of quality men, Wes might not be the first man you’d notice, but he was the man you’d remember, even if he wasn’t wearing his Marine uniform. He was six three and well muscled. He gave an impression of strength rather than size, of energy contained rather than exuded. He was handsome, though nothing about his face was magazine-ad pretty. His brown hair was cut military short and brushed flat, but with style beyond any Marine barber. His nose was big, but not prominent, his mouth wide with even teeth and full lips. Time had etched a furrow across his brow, in the corners of his mouth, and shrapnel had nicked a scar on his chin. His eyes were black, wide, and large, but so deep set they looked like hooded slits.

Mary led him into a crowded living room. Wes spotted a Navy commander, wife on his arm, laughing with a man who Wes didn’t know was a counsel for the Senate Appropriations Committee. A glassy-eyed Army captain with routine ribbons on his chest and broken veins on his nose grinned anxiously at the silver star on the shoulder of a fellow Army officer. The general caught Wes’s gaze, nodded, then returned to his discussion with a man in a three-piece blue suit who headed a downtown firm of only ninety-three lawyers and the lean, bearded carpenter husband of the former secretary whose screech first attracted Wes’s attention.

Have you met Mrs. Denton? asked Mary Patterson.

I’ve never had the chance, replied Wes.

Across the room, a woman whose beauty had matured into elegance shook the hand of a Washington editor for a Florida newspaper chain. His wife, who’d gone from congressional aide to solid waste management specialist at the Environmental Protection Agency, nervously made the introductions.

I’m so glad you were able to make it, Mary Patterson told Wes as they waited for journalist and bureaucrat to move on.

"Lucky, wasn’t