2

The shuttle from Guantánamo taxied to the bitter end of a remote runway at the Bethesda Naval Air Station. Portable steps were rolled up to the fuselage. A petty officer with a handlebar mustache cracked the door, then stepped aside deferentially. Hunched over like a parenthesis, Rear Admiral J. Pepper Toothacher (retired) appeared in the doorway. Listed on the plane’s manifest as a Navy dentist deadheading into D.C. for a symposium on wisdom teeth, he was in his late fifties, but his chalk-colored hair made him seem a dozen years older. His first wife (as he called her, though never to her face) had been after him for years to dye it, but the Admiral flatly refused; every white hair, he liked to say, represented a secret that would go to the grave with him.

Wearing spit-shined oxfords, aviator glasses with trifocal lenses and civilian sport clothes that might have fit him before he went on a macrobiotic binge, the Admiral had the lean, hungry look that comes from pecking cocktail peanuts at one happy hour too many; retirement was slowly boring him to death. With his sloping shoulders, his sunken cheeks, his mournful face, his pasty complexion, his bulging eyes that seemed to take in absolutely everything, he could have passed for a perfect Polonius spying from behind a silver arras; the archetypal fin de race nobleman who knew not only where the various bodies were buried, but what they had died of—and who had profited from their deaths and could be accused of murder if the need arose.

The Admiral sucked air into his lungs until his rib cage ached, then plunged down the steps and danced a little one-legged jig on the tarmac to celebrate his safe arrival back on earth. The celebration was cut short when he caught sight of the hulking figure of Chief Petty Officer M. Huxstep (also retired) leaning insolently against the door of a car pool Chevrolet. The Admiral organized the various limbs of his lanky body so that they would function more or less harmoniously and ambled over to Huxstep.

“Of all people,” the Admiral remarked.

“Small world,” Huxstep agreed.

The Admiral cocked his head. “What is the cube of one twenty-one?” he demanded.

Huxstep yawned. “Too easy,” he said.

“You’re playing for time,” the Admiral said.

“Don’t need time. One twenty-one cubed is one seven seven one five six one.”

“How about the cube root of 12,812,904?”

Huxstep, who always looked bored, managed to look more bored than usual. “The third power of twenty-three point four.”

The Admiral pouted in bewilderment. “How do you do it?”

“How does the Admiral tie his shoelaces?” Huxstep retorted. He indicated with an imperious toss of his head that the seaman deuce struggling with the Admiral’s two Vuitton suitcases was to deposit them in the trunk compartment. Toothacher favored the automobile with a baleful stare. “Don’t pretend this was the very best you could do,” he admonished Huxstep.

“I was instructed not to draw attention to the Admiral’s presence in Washington,” Huxstep said.

“You might have at least washed the beast.” The Admiral dusted the passenger seat with a handkerchief and settled uneasily into it, but pointedly left the door on his side of the car open. Huxstep, whose short cropped hair and eyes were the color of pewter, snorted loudly enough for the Admiral to hear him as he strode around to the passenger side and kicked it closed. He climbed in behind the wheel and gunned the motor. The Chevrolet lunged toward the gate in the chain link fence.

The Admiral nodded vaguely at the Marines in full battle dress guarding the gate, sniffed delicately at the interior of the car, checked the ashtray for butts, wrinkled up an incredibly Roman nose when he found one. He investigated the glove compartment and discovered Huxstep’s handgun hidden under the road maps. It was a Smith & Wesson. 357 Magnum, a weapon that punched a hole the size of a fist in anything it hit. “I see you are armed,” Admiral Toothacher noted. “Couldn’t you have selected something slightly more”—he racked his brain for the appropriate word—“discreet?”

“A derringer, for instance? Or a walking stick that opens into a sword?”

Toothacher sighed in frustration. “Another thing—you might have had the decency to give the sailor back there a hand with my bags.”

That was too much for Huxstep. “I would like to respectfully point out that the Admiral has been on the ground five fucking minutes and he has so far managed to complain about the car I am driving and the handgun I am carrying and the bags I did not help some sailor with the lowest fucking rank in the entire United States of America Navy put into the trunk.”

“If I really wanted to be picky,” the Admiral said sweetly, “I would comment on your sentence structure.”

Huxstep snorted again and tucked the stray hairs that appeared back up into his nostrils with delicate clockwise thrusts of his thick pinky.

The Admiral closed his eyes in pain. “Tidying up?” he baited Huxstep.

The driver glanced sideways at his passenger. “Fuck the Admiral.”

“Tch, tch,” cooed Toothacher. He caught Huxstep’s eye and batted both of his lids in a conspiratorial double wink.

Huxstep melted, cleared his throat, tried to swallow the emotion that welled up, failed. “I am glad to see the Admiral after all these years,” he mumbled awkwardly. “The truth is, when I heard the Admiral was coming, I volunteered to meet him.”

Toothacher nodded emphatically. “If I had known you were available I would have insisted on you as a condition of my coming.” He muttered under his breath, “What a fool I was not to specify the make of the automobile.”

Huxstep produced what, coming from him, passed for a laugh. “Just like old times,” he said. “The Admiral was always preoccupied with the perks.”

“Since when is it a crime for a man to know what he’s worth?” Toothacher asked defiantly.

“Since when,” Huxstep agreed affably.

Heading toward downtown Washington, Huxstep broke a silence. “So the Admiral is walking back another cat.”

“And who in heaven’s name planted that idea in your head?”

“I just assumed, the Admiral being here and all. And them laying on a car and driver.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“To meet the man I work for, Mister R for Roger Wanamaker.”

“Roger Wanamaker,” Toothacher repeated, narrowing his eyes to stir an almost photographic memory. He nodded carefully as it came to him. “He was my man Friday when I ran Naval Intelligence. Mid-thirties. The kind of face that normally comes equipped with a lisp. Weak chin. A nose with a knob on it. Broke it at Yale, if I recall, playing intramural squash. Disheveled hair full of static electricity and dandruff. Always overweight, always dieting; he used to eat low-calorie cottage cheese at his desk. I could tell which dossiers he’d seen because they had cottage cheese on them. He was the sloppiest individual I ever had the displeasure to work with. But the sloppiness masked an intellectual rigor. He collected details the way other men collected lint in their trouser cuffs, had a nose for the oddball operation, which is why I took him with me when I was kicked upstairs to Counterintelligence.”

Huxstep laughed under his breath. “I remember the Admiral saying something about misery loving company.”

“How’d you wind up in Wanamaker’s shop?” Toothacher asked.

“The Navy gave me the boot because of a dumb manslaughter conviction. I was at loose ends. I heard on the grapevine that Mister Wanamaker was recruiting for a hush-hush antiterrorist operation. You don’t mind I gave your name as a reference when I applied?”

The Admiral was following his own thoughts. “I recall another thing about friend Wanamaker,” he said. “Everyone called him Friday. You called him Bright Eyes. You spread it around that he bathed every day but never changed the water. He didn’t appreciate your sense of humor.”

Huxstep elevated his chin a notch. “The ones who don’t know how to laugh at themselves I ignore.”

“Error,” the Admiral observed wryly. “In our business they are the ones you must pay attention to.”