The Falconer’s Tale. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ farm. Instead, he put on his boots and first drove, then climbed to his loch. He took a rod, but he didn’t set it up. Instead he took a cheap digital camera. Then, from the pub in Craignure, he accessed his “Furman” account online. Furman was the identity he used in Athens to sell antiquities. He uploaded three digital images of the crannog from the cheap camera and sent them to three different addresses; one in Sri Lanka, one in Florida, and one in Ireland. He wasn’t sure just what he was meaning to do yet. So he was testing the water.

      * * *

      As he drove back down the gravel road to the farm, he caught a flash of Hackbutt among the cages behind the house. His stomach rolled over. He pulled around the house, parked, and took a deep breath.

      As he got out of the car, Hackbutt came around the house and waved. Hackbutt’s wave said it all, he hoped. Piat gave up the idea of trying to make contact with the dog and faced him.

      “You really pissed me off,” Hackbutt said from thirty feet away. His tone was high, almost falsetto. As he walked toward Piat, he said, “It’s not that I can’t be your friend. Not that I’m angry—really angry. But it wasn’t decent, leaving me like that.” He looked like shit. He looked like a beggar in the wilderness—beard uncombed, hair wild.

      “No, Digger. No. I abandoned you. It’s not the way I meant it to be, but I did it. I’m sorry.”

      Hackbutt’s hands were trembling. He rubbed them together. “Why? Irene says I should forget it. That it’s not our business. But I can’t—I think you have to tell me.”

      Piat had forgotten how Hackbutt really was—the pile of insecurities and grandiosities. Piat put an arm on the other man’s shoulders. Lies that he might have told other agents wouldn’t work on Hackbutt—lies that he had been busy, that he had had to use Dave, that he’d been somewhere else saving the world. Waste of breath. To Hackbutt, there was only Hackbutt—and maybe Irene. Instead, he said, “I needed to get you guys the money. That’s all I can say, okay?”

      Hackbutt’s face was blotchy. “Dave said you weren’t coming back. That you didn’t give a shit about me or Irene. That you only worked for money and that he was my real friend.” He was almost crying. He was very much the Hackbutt that Piat had run in Malaysia.

      Piat nodded, hugged Hackbutt a little harder. He could imagine the vitriol that Dave must have spewed. He could see how a fool like Dave would think that he could achieve control that way.

      “But I came back, Digger.” Piat didn’t care that he could see Irene at the window, that he was practically hugging her man on the driveway. “I came back. I should never have left.”

      “And you won’t leave again?”

      “Not until the end.” Piat believed in being prepared for the end, right from the beginning. “And then we’ll just go back to being friends.”

      Hackbutt was crying now. But he was returning the hug. Piat was patient, almost tender.

      “Irene will think we’re making out,” Hackbutt said after a full minute. He giggled.

      That laugh’s got to go, Piat thought.

      Irene had made tea. The door to her studio was still closed, but a third of the photographs had been taken down, and some lay in untidy piles on the furniture. Irene was taciturn, seemingly nervous. Regretting it?

      Piat cleared a space on the couch and sat, opening his backpack.

      “Okay, folks. Today we start working. First, anybody have something on their schedule for the next two months? Weddings? Funerals? Spill it now, because the moment I’m paying, you’re on my calendar. Okay?”

      “He’s always like this at the start,” Hackbutt said to Irene.

      Irene stared at him.

      “Good. Digger, you remember these forms?” The forms themselves were creations from Piat’s laptop, but they were enough like CIA documents to pass muster with an agent. “You pay US taxes?”

      “No,” they said together.

      “Then we don’t need this one.” Piat crumpled a W-2 invoice form he’d downloaded. He’d always thought it funny that US agents paid income tax on black ops money, but they did. “Contract. Security agreement. Confidentiality. These don’t constitute a security clearance, just an arrangement. Okay?”

      “We have to sign,” Hackbutt said to Irene. “It’s okay.” He was reassuring her from his years of experience as an agent, and he sounded fatuous. She, however, was reading the whole document and not listening to him. Looking for a reason not to sign, he thought, but there was a resignation about her that suggested that she was simply going through the motions. If the idea of actually putting her art on display frightened her, another part of her very much wanted to do it. That part, he guessed, had already won.

      Piat had looked at her website. She actually had a small reputation, had done “installations” in Auckland and Ontario and Eastern Europe. But the website hadn’t been updated in three years, and he wondered if she really was an “artist”—he couldn’t think of the word without the quotation marks—who’d run out of ideas. Or whatever it was that “artists” had in their heads.

      At any rate, she signed. Looking unhappy. But sexually interesting.

      When they had both signed, Piat handed out envelopes. “Five thousand each. Okay?”

      He’d made a mistake, and he saw it too late. Hackbutt’s face froze and his skin got blotchy again. He followed Hackbutt’s eyes and saw that Hackbutt only now realized that Piat was paying both of them, and that as much as that made sense to him and to Partlow, it wasn’t the right move for Hackbutt, who wanted to give her the money himself. Without much of a pause, he turned to Irene. “Hackbutt wanted you to have this money for yourself. The contract’s with him—but he wouldn’t do it without you. And I’m sorry to be so crass with both of you but, Digger, you remember that we have to play for the bureaucrats with money. I can get you more for both than I can get just for you, Digger.” He said it all so smoothly that Hackbutt’s face was calm again before he was done.

      Hackbutt smiled shakily at Irene. “I thought I’d get to give it to you myself,” he began, but she launched herself out of her chair and embraced him. In seconds they were locked together, kissing like teenagers.

      Piat busied himself collecting the documents. After ten seconds he said, “Okay, kids. Really.”

      Irene pulled herself free and shook out her hair, laughing. Hackbutt laughed, too—a real laugh, not a giggle.

      Piat smiled with them and opened a calendar. “Digger—you first. You need clothes.”

      Hackbutt nodded. “Irene’s been telling me that for a year.”

      “Now Uncle Sam’s paying. Irene may need some too. It’s too early to tell you the whole ball of wax—you know the rules, Digger. But let’s just say you’re going to meet some rich, powerful people. You have to be ready to be with them. Okay? I don’t expect you to become James Bond, but I need you to look the part and act the part.”

      Hackbutt crossed his arms, his scrawny elbows showing through rents in his ancient sweater. “Jeez, Jack. I’m not good at social stuff.”

      Piat СКАЧАТЬ