The accidental joe, p.19
The Accidental Joe, page 19
I was last to arrive at the pagan rite of bonding, coming straight from my unsettling stroll with Gregg Espy. Cammie was already there sandwiched between Latrell and Hoss at the far side of a pair of four-tops they had jammed together on the patio of Les 3 Diables. She and I traded perfunctory nods across a tablescape of beer bottles, wine glasses, and frozen cocktails the color of a Chernobyl discharge. We kept our acknowledgments slight to thwart gossip. It helped that the only remaining seat was eight feet away from her. The chair back pressed against my burn from the stun belt, and I shifted, trying not to moan. Cammie locked eyes on me for appraisal while I yelled my drink order over the homicide-by-karaoke of “Bohemian Rhapsody” pounding out from the indoor bar.
At first, I worried that her study of me was heat fueled, and it would give us up as a couple. But except for new the Food Sarge, who was pretty much clueless to everything but the Food Sarge, the crew must have guessed something was going on. After all, the host and the producer were staying in one hotel while they were lodged in another. Road Rules applied, though. If they suspected anything, they kept it to themselves. Nothing to see here.
My beer arrived. While I led the traditional group toast, the story in Cammie’s eyes unsettled me. It wasn’t heat. She was looking for tells about my disappearing act with the DSA.
Could she see how much Espy got into my head?
Try as I did, I couldn’t kick him out. Even though I felt I could take Nova at face value, he’d embedded a pernicious nugget of what-if.
To quiet my brain, I discounted Espy. Not as a leader, but as a casualty of his profession. Suspicion was a side effect of the gig and fostered paranoia. All I had to do to prove it was play back the DSA’s Strangelove spew, the pretzel logic of the truth hiding the thing that fits inside the thing that doesn’t fit. But then I wondered, Could that paranoia be hiding an actual truth? Was Espy right to suspect a double on our inside?
I surveyed my crew. Nova apart, could one of them be working against this mission? Latrell, no. Hoss, no. Declan, no. Marisol—shit, now I was doing it. These were my peeps, my Globers. After years of laughing, having each other’s backs, smelling each other’s BO on the roadie bus, what was I thinking? The Food Sarge made a walrus beer belch. Hmm. The Food Sarge. Nope, scratch Chuck Ludik. Not just because he was inept. What-the-Chuck was too new.
What about someone else? Someone not in the traveling company? PPO Harrison. Talk about the potential to be hiding inside an apparent truth. Where did the paramilitary protection officer first make the scene? Paris. When things started getting deadly. Kurt Harrison, always Johnny-on-the-spot. A little too cool. A little too present… I stopped. I was doing it again. If paranoia was a virus, suspicion was a bioweapon.
“Ready to go?” Cammie Nova stood over me. Everyone else had hit the pissoirs before making the trek around Castle Hill to their hotel.
“Yuh. Unless you’d rather tag in on the karaoke.”
“I’d rather get alone with you.” I followed her between tables and out onto the Cours Saleya. We passed a strolling accordionist who nodded approvingly at us, the two lovers. American tourists on a carefree vacation in Provence.
The apparent truth.
When we entered her hotel room, Cammie started punching a code in the room safe. “I’ve got a bottle chilling in the mini-fridge but no corkscrew. Want to see if you’ve got one?”
Housekeeping had left the connecting doors open, and I went into my room to check the minibar. Passing the bed, I stopped. My toilet kit rested on the pillow. Odd. Why would housekeeping move it from the bathroom? I went in to hook it on the towel rack. It felt heavy. I unzipped the case and saw why.
Inside, I found the snub-nose PPO Harrison tried to give me on training day. The K6s was nested in its nylon pocket holster. I took it out and checked the cylinder. Loaded. Plus, there was a box of .357 cartridges in my kit. A note penciled on a sheet from my hotel pad said, “You never know.” No signature.
A minute later, standing in the connecting doorway, I said, “Hey, look what I found.” I held up a corkscrew.
I didn’t tell her about the gun. If it had only been the snubbie and its ammo in that bag, I might have. But the note.
You never know.
If it had come from Harrison, wouldn’t he have signed? No signature smelled like Espy. From my close-combat trainer, it meant a general caution; from the DSA, it grew more charged. I didn’t buy Espy’s lethal warning about Nova. But to bring up the revolver to her meant a deeper conversation than I had the bandwidth for. I wasn’t proud of it, but I surrendered to the male strand of DNA of benign avoidance. I’d slip the K6s back to Harrison in the morning.
“Good timing. All clean.” She stashed her bug sweeper. I opened the local rosé and poured.
“To tomorrow.”
“You’re a better chef than a sommelier.”
There was enough cork in our wine to fill Sammy Sosa’s bat. “Hotel corkscrews. You know.”
“It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.” Cammie smiled and fished out some floaters. Her cell vibrated. “The DSA.” She read the text and tapped acknowledgment. “Our man is en route from Moscow.”
“So I hear.” Her eyes narrowed. They stayed on me while she plucked a cork crumb off her tongue. “Espy told me. On our walk.”
It gave her pause, but not much. “He told you before me? That petty shit.” She sat with her wine and patted the cushion beside her. “Not bad enough the big dog’s made a career of undermining me every chance. Now he’s playing you against me because he can’t stand to see it’s all coming together.”
“Why wouldn’t he want that?” I sat next to her, and Cammie slid against me. Her familiarity felt natural. I leaned into the warmth coming off her.
“Because it’s all happening without him. Espy is on the road to faded glory with none to show. His legacy is zip. A bland caretaker. He marginalizes me so he can claim credit. He wants a scalp before he rides into the sunset.” She cocked an eye. “Still, that was a long walk just to tell you our man’s airborne.”
“All the better to mess with you, I guess.” I hid the lower half of my face in my rosé, sloshing some on my thigh.
“What’s with you? Are you tweaked about tomorrow? Don’t be. If this goes according to plan, the crew will never even know it’s happening.”
“If.”
“It will.” Cammie set her glass down and squared herself to me for a reading. “What.” I sat there, my avoidance no longer feeling so benign. She took my hand.
There’s no discounting chemistry. Her magnetism drew me closer. Yet holding her gaze wasn’t easy. I knew this was a moment to get right or regret. The sort of thing, if done wrong, a man carried forever into the dark hours. I’ve always been guided by Hemingway’s maxim that what’s moral or immoral is what makes you feel good or bad afterward. That’s always been my compass. I saw no reason to ignore it. “Espy told me to hold this in confidence. But I can’t live with myself if I keep it secret from you.”
I told her everything he’d said. Nova let me download without interruption. Not when I shared Espy’s suspicions over her joes who died in Paris and Aigues-Mortes, not when he speculated she and Ringstad might have a deal, not even his mention of her ex, the Russian plant. Although her mouth did curve downward at that one. When I finished, she closed her eyes a few seconds to process, then opened. “Did he say anything else?”
I nodded. “Three things. Cedric Devlin is dead.”
“Oh no. When? How?”
“They got him last night in his apartment.”
“Who got him?”
“He’d been tortured to death. Electrocution.”
“Damn. Did you tell Espy Cedric may have seen Ringstad?”
“No. He was too busy making his parting shot. Telling me to watch my back.”
“Again?”
“And he told me not to sleep with you.”
Her laugh burst out, a cleansing release. I was too uptight to join in. “Aw, come on, that’s funny.” I wagged my head side to side, all the joviality I could muster. Still, I didn’t open the can of worms about the gun. I wanted to be finished unburdening for the night.
Nova had other ideas.
“Let’s circle back to what Espy said about my ex.”
“Are you interrogating me?”
She chuckled. “Can’t help it. I’m a pig after truffles. Espy. Walk me through the conversation about me and my ex. Every inch.”
I dropped my chin to my chest to summon the exchange. “He initiated. He said your ex was a Russian plant. And then he got in a twist because I said I already knew.”
“OK… Keep going.”
“We got into the note your fiancé smuggled to you.”
She jerked upright. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You told Espy about that?”
“He, um, sort of knew.”
“Explain sort of.”
“He mentioned something about it, and I said something like, ‘Oh you know about that?’ and he was all gloating, ‘I do now.’ Shit, I’m sorry, Cammie.”
“Son of a bitch took you fishing and hooked what he was after.”
“He tricked me.”
“All technique designed to throw you off. Here’s a timely piece of advice from the Field Interrogation Manual: ‘Never answer more than you are asked.’”
“Again, my bad.”
Cammie pinched another of the endless flakes of cork out of my glass. “The good thing is you didn’t hold back from me. I know what I’m dealing with now.”
“I couldn’t hold back. Not from you. We’re past that.”
“Are we?”
I smiled. “I’ve learned never to answer more than I’m being asked, so yes.”
She cupped her fingers under my chin, and we kissed. An incoming email chimed from my room. I didn’t want to budge from her, but on the eve of the mission, Cammie said I had better check. I returned in seconds grinning at my iPad. “Reply to my note to Ilona Tábori.”
“What did she say?”
“No content, only a photo. You don’t want to see it.” But Cammie did want to.
Ilona’s pic was similar to her others, except this was in a black lace teddy, with some areolae reveal. “Good lord.” She handed the tablet back like she might catch something from it. When I closed Napsugár’s email, I noticed I had something in my spam folder. Cammie read my reaction. “What is it?”
“Email from CDevlin_at_Sea. That’s Cedric. Time stamped yesterday, a couple of hours after we left him. Subject: ‘A Memory of Better Days.’” After two missed taps, I fumbled the email open to a photo of Astrid and me toasting the camera with glasses of beer.
“Something good, I hope.”
I sat down with it. “Wow, I remember this. Cedric took it the weekend I met up with Astrid when Kogg’s yacht was in Hamburg. Happy hour on the rooftop bar of the Blockbräu brewery. Poor Cedric must have sent it to make amends after our shitty visit.” The moment it captured brought me a smile. A melancholy one, but at least a smile.
I shared the screen with Cammie. “It was a fun day. And a stunning view. Right on the Elbe. See the port?” I spread to zoom and enlarged the freighters and container ships across the river. But zooming in also brought forward the rooftop’s background. My breath caught. At a table behind Astrid and me, far at the end of the deck, turned from the camera but recognizable, sat Cammie Nova.
thirty-one
Thunderstruck, my gaze darted from the iPad to Cammie, back to the iPad, then back to her. One was Nova in three-quarter profile, avoiding the lens; the other was Nova three inches away at the same angle, avoiding me. When I finally could speak, I didn’t sound like myself. What words I summoned came out dry and abraded. “…What the hell?”
While I sat with my head spinning, Nova had been organizing herself. She must have been. She came off so centered. “This is not the time to discuss this.”
“Christ, how can you even say that?”
“I’m telling you, this is not the time.” No strain, all composure.
“Seems perfect to me.” I held up the photo. “Not waiting on this.”
“You have to. This feels like a sucker punch, I get that. And it breaks my heart for what it must be doing to you, but right now is when we need to avoid distraction and keep our eyes on tomorrow.”
“The mission.”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Fuck the mission. I want to know what this is about.” I whacked the iPad with a knuckle. So what if I shattered the screen. “What were you doing? Tailing me? Hamburg was, what…a year and a half ago? More? I want an answer. And don’t tell me it was a coincidence.”
“Pike, listen to me. Don’t go over the top. This has to wait.”
“Like when you and Espy held back Glinka’s name? Meanwhile Ringstad turns me into a human light bulb.”
“That was different.”
“Damn straight. That was about your mole. This is about me. And, for who the hell knows why—you. And you’re not talking. And calling it a sucker punch… That so minimizes it. I believed in what was going on here. Between us. But this? Can’t you see how this knocks the ground right out from under me?” The room became small, suffocating. I got up to pace, shaking my head and hissing “sucker punch” to the rug.
“You know, since I was a kid, I’ve been into the whole spy thing. Why do you think I devour those books like crazy? Shit, when I’m in London, I even go to Ian Fleming’s old barber shop in Mayfair. Call it geeky, but it’s one reason this…little diversion…intrigued me. If you haven’t guessed, the novelty’s wearing off.” I opened the sliding glass door. I needed air. “I’m not naïve. I know double dealing is baked into the job. And have I witnessed the full spectacle this week. The office intrigues, the information withholding, the backstabbing…the exploitation of the vulnerable…the death of innocents. I can almost deal with the culture of lies. But now, with us?” I crash-landed back on the couch. “Do you even know the CIA motto? It’s from the Bible.”
Cammie said, “‘And ye shall know the truth—’”
“ ‘—and the truth shall make you free.’ I’d laugh if it weren’t so twisted. I mean, what do we value if we don’t value the truth? What’s true is our core. It’s who we are. What we believe. What we do. Rather than what we’re willing to do. Now I’ve smelled a dumpster load. How expediency makes it A-OK with everybody. Like the real motto is ‘Life is short, then you lie.’” A quivering inhale, and I downshifted. After I got myself composed, I turned to Cammie. “Where is the honor? What happened to principles? Who on God’s wretched mistake called Earth are the good guys?”
We sat through a fragile silence. Then she spoke in a ragged voice. “Don’t you think I’m one?”
“I want to. And I have thought that since we met. But then I see this.” I lifted the Hamburg photo and plopped it back on the cushion.
Nova pondered another beat. “All right. It’s against my judgment—but in the interest of clearing the air, I’ll let you in.” I didn’t reply. I waited. “The idea of embedding in your show wasn’t recent. I got it during your second season. The Agency is a bloated bureaucracy, so it was a tough sell. They gave me the go-ahead conditioned on two things. First, that I got some culinary training and second, that I shadow you and thoroughly vet you.”
“You had me in your sights back then?”
“I told you; I am thorough.”
“How long did you tail me?”
“Long enough to see who you made contact with, to watch you for criminal or clandestine activities…”
That one took me aback. “Clandestine activities? Me?”
“If our side could think of something like this, so could the bad guys. This had to be ironclad. That’s as far as I go.”
“One more thing.”
“You’re not dropping this, are you.”
“The crystal meth verdict. Was all this how you found out Kogg didn’t do drugs?”
“Please, take a breath.” She put a hand on my arm. I didn’t pull away. By coming clean Cammie had settled me down. “Didn’t I promise to dig into all that, after? It still stands.”
I believed her. Not just because I wanted to, I needed to. “Sorry I went off on a rant.”
“Totally understandable. That picture was a shock. I’m sorry, too. For your upset.”
“It freaked me out to think you were, I dunno, up to something.” Thank Gregg Espy for planting that seed. “I can’t stand to be lied to, including by omission.”
“Don’t you think it eats me up not to tell you everything?”
“Have you told me everything?”
“Of course not.” We laughed. I felt lighter by a ton. Cammie inclined her face toward me and raised her eyes to mine. “Are we going to be OK?”
“You mean the mission?”
“I mean us.”
The rhyme of that moment, its curve back to the last conversation I ever had with Astrid on a different eve of peril, almost became too much to bear. Enough to make me examine my role in my life’s infinite loop. If I’d learned anything during a year of rumination since Athens, it’s this: be careful of the words you leave people with. Life is short, death is a prankster. This time I would do it better. “We’re going to be OK,” I said. Then I closed Cedric’s picture of Astrid and me and Cammie. “All I ever want is the truth.”
“And you will get it. Promise.” We found our smiles and kissed.
Even though the lunch segment was booked for noon, at eight thirty the next morning my crew was already adjusting LED panels and ring lights for Ignaz Tábori’s interview at le Vide. Cameras were white balanced and batteried up. Spares were getting charged. Latrell set two tripods for his Gemini A-cam, one in the kitchen, one at Tábori’s dining table. Marisol would rove. Declan set up his audio shop on a breakfront against a far wall. He tested the three wireless mics the Táboris and I would be wearing. Check, check, and check. His backup fish pole leaned in the corner.
