Peacemaker. Gordon Kent

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СКАЧАТЬ and they had been through a very tough time together and almost got themselves killed. Now, he listened to Mike and Rose chattering in the kitchen about food, and they made him happy.

      Then O’Neill came, and he and Alan made a lot of noise because they hadn’t seen each other in eight months or so. O’Neill was hardly in the door before Alan lunged toward him; O’Neill swayed back and said, “Oh, I say, old chap!” and shook Alan’s hand. Then they boogied for three seconds, then gave each other high fives, and then fell on each other, squeezing and whacking and saying, “Hey, that’s fat, man, you put on fat!” and “Muscle, that’s muscle!” and each told the other he looked great, and they held on to each other and just grinned. Rose came in and smiled at them and kissed O’Neill, and Dukas asked him how the Ranch had been. O’Neill made a face and they all laughed.

      “Can you eat vegetarian lasagna?” she said. She sounded worried. O’Neill was big and looked as if he ate whole cows or roadkill or something.

      “If I could eat grits, I can eat anything. They gave me grits every goddam morning. I think it was a test!” He and Alan began to remind each other of horrible food they had eaten on the boat. They did a lot more happy shouting. Dukas and Rose looked at each other and shrugged and went back to the kitchen.

      The Peretzes were late. The Peretzes were always late. Abe Peretz had been a kind of mentor to Alan, even though his own Naval career had ended when he hadn’t made the cut for commander. Now he worked in the J. Edgar Hoover Building and made sad jokes about being a G-Man.

      “How’s the G-Man?” Alan said as he took their coats a few minutes later. They were embracing O’Neill and asking him how the Ranch had been. Alan grinned at Bea. “How’s Mrs G-Man?”

      “He got a promotion!” Bea shouted. Bea shouted everything. She was handsome and noisy. “Tell them about your new job!” Bea was wearing black pants and a pale yellow, shiny blouse with a huge saxophone on it in green—the saxophone was a bizarre touch, some kind of joke? Some reference he didn’t get?—and enough buttons left unbuttoned so her very attractive cleavage showed to good advantage. She seemed very up, maybe too much so.

      Abe shrugged. “So I got a promotion.”

      “To what?”

      “I don’t know; it’s classified.”

      Bea bounced into a chair, bounced right out again. “You make me so damn mad, Abe, I could kill you! He’s been made department head. I hate false modesty!”

      Abe kissed her. “Nobody would ever dare accuse you of it.” He began to explain the organizational structure of FBI headquarters, which was so complex that Alan wondered if he’d finish before the evening ended. Then he realized that O’Neill was chuckling and that what Abe was saying was an elaborate shaggy-dog story, an invention. He began to laugh, too, and Abe, seeing he’d got the joke, roared.

      Then Mike and Rose came in with wine, and they all got noisier, and the dog made his rounds, poking his big nose into everybody’s crotch and spilling a wineglass, and there was a lot of loud talk. Dukas told a couple of his Clinton jokes, and Alan glanced over at Rose and saw her face shining, and she gave him a wink and he was glad that Mike’s girl or woman or whatever she was hadn’t come, because these were the people he most liked to be with. He and O’Neill sat next to each other and started saying, “Hey, remember when—” and the others tuned them out. When Alan started listening to them again, Rose was trying to talk Abe Peretz into doing his two weeks of Reserve duty at her new station, someplace called Interservice Virtual Intelligence.

      Peretz whistled. “Interservice Virtual Intelligence! Wow, how’d you like them apples? Virtual intelligence, that’s for me! If you can’t have real intelligence, by all means have virtual! What do they do, Rose, teach monkeys to talk, or something?”

      “I don’t start for another week. All I know is, it’s a great-looking place, they’ve got a fantastic cafeteria, and they’re hungry for analysts.”

      O’Neill squinted his eyes. “As a trained interrogator, I sensed a missed step there. What is a helicopter pilot doing in something called ‘virtual intelligence’?”

      “She’s hiking her ass up the ladder toward being an astronaut. I need space-related duty for my next tour.”

      O’Neill looked at Alan and swung into his WW-II-Japanese-officer voice. “So, American flygirl, your intelligence is space-related!” And then to Humphrey Bogart: “You’re good, Shweetheart, you’re really good, but there’s something you aren’t telling me.”

      Rose batted her eyes. “It’s something about satellites, Mister Spade, and I can’t say more because it’s classified.”

      And O’Neill swung into his Big Badass voice and growled, “Who you callin’ a spade?”

      “That kind of joking makes me nervous,” Bea Peretz said. Rose and O’Neill laughed, the indulgent way that people laugh about their parents, and Rose began to shepherd them all toward the table. When they were all seated, there was a sudden silence, everybody looking at everybody else, and Bea said, “I think the CIA sucks.”

      “I’ll drink to that,” O’Neill said.

      “Yeah, that’s about how I’d put it,” Dukas said. “You got a way with words all right, Bea.” He smiled at her. “So how’d our boy O’Neill do at the Agency’s finishing school?” he said.

      “Well, our boy O’Neill got through,” O’Neill said. “But not first in his class.” He twirled his wineglass. “Folks, I want to be pampered tonight, because I just spent three days with my parents explaining why I wasn’t first in my class. I mean—it was expected.”

      “Ah, why would anybody expect you to be first at that zoo?” Dukas said.

      “God, yes,” Alan said. “You’re the wrong type, O’Neill. Harry’s an aristocrat,” he told the others, as if that explained everything. He had heard this theory from O’Neill in the long days and nights on the carrier, years before.

      “I thought the CIA was the Old Boys’ Club for Ivy League graduates,” Bea said. She was shoveling down vegetarian lasagna. “William F. Buckley was CIA. George Throttlebottom Bush was CIA. I thought the CIA was the Washington branch of Skull and Bones.”

      “Yeah,” O’Neill said, holding out his wineglass as Rose went around the table with a bottle, “but I’m a real aristocrat. My father’s a federal judge, my mother’s a partner in quite a good law firm. One of my ancestors was a governor during Reconstruction. I went to Harvard, not Yale, which is a far, far better place, and you’re talking about the CIA of fifty years ago, which is where I would probably have felt at home, except there was the problem back then of my, um, hue.” He sighed. “My mother thinks I’m slumming.”

      Rose did her imitation of O’Neill’s mother. “I just wish he’d meet a nice Spelman girl.” More laughter.

      “Anyway,” Alan went on, “you got through the course, which is better than about eighty percent of the people do. So, did you get the orders that you wanted?”

      O’Neill raised his eyebrows. “Not quite. No-o-o-t quite. In fact, as the Brits say, not by a long chalk.” He speared a floweret of garlic-sauteed broccoli. “I’m afraid I promised my parents that I was going to France. They thought France was where I deserved to go, being their son, and СКАЧАТЬ