Joe Service was into simplification. The rest of the world, it seemed, was not. His ultimate simplification was this: I am. After that, things got complicated. Lately, even the first premise was modified. The modifier was Helen.
Sometimes he thought it had started with being shot in the head. He’d been a little confused afterward; it was no simple thing to say “I am.” He felt he’d succeeded. But then he began to think that the complications had begun even earlier, when he’d met Helen. He’d been a fairly simple person up until then. Now he wrestled.
They wrestled. It always ended with grappling. It might start with a workout in the gymnasium in the basement of her late father’s mansion—the weights, the fancy machines, or just intense aerobic exercises—or it might be a grueling game of racquetball. They were well matched: what Helen gave up in power she gained in mobility. Joe had incredible stamina, however, now that he had regained his physical fitness. He could wear her down. But whatever they played at was only a prelude to wrestling.
Neither of them were particularly skilled at wrestling. They both had some experience with tae kwon do, but that isn’t wrestling. What they liked was the physical contact. They tried different holds, writhing their slick, naked bodies against each other like snakes—it was difficult to tell where one left off and the other began.
They were superficially similar physically, although Joe was an inch or two taller and more heavily muscled. But to others they seemed like brother and sister, fraternal twins, perhaps. Helen was very fit, with almost no bosom and slim, boyish hips. She had a heart-shaped face with a great volume of black hair. Joe’s facial features were heavier, but like hers strong and handsome, with a well-defined nose, a firm mouth, and sensual lips. They were both of an age, about thirty.
The wrestling started casually, as if they were panther cubs, tussling. It would get more intense, sometimes becoming quite serious, as with their utmost energies and strengths employed, each gained a position of superiority at least briefly. But it always ended the same way—with sexual penetration.
Without ever discussing it they had arrived at a commonly held conceit: that they shared a phallus. This notion stemmed from Helen’s gradually acquired ability to seemingly relax her large muscles, to submit to Joe’s driving force, only to contract her vaginal muscles so as to grasp his member so firmly that when she drove her buttocks back into his groin he actually experienced a kind of penetration of himself. It was a sensation that initially surprised, even shocked them, but which they had both come to enjoy.
On this occasion, however, he had wrestled her into a facedown position and had pinned her arms behind her. They were on a thin mat beside the pool in the dim light. She groaned quietly, struggling, expecting him to enter her now, but when she thrust her buttocks upward he did not allow her to gain her knees, but lay along her back, forcing her into the mat. His right arm encircled her neck. He tightened his grip, choking her.
She waited, sensing something a bit different. It was always different, of course. No sexual act could be precisely reenacted. But this was different yet. He pressed her brutally against the thin mat. She couldn’t breathe well. She struggled now, but he only tightened the crook of his arm across her throat and forced her face more firmly into the mat. She tried, in a panic, to free her arms, but his grip was fierce and the pressure of his body further restrained her arms.
“Mmmf!” She grunted, but it was muffled. She felt an awakening fear. This was going much farther than she liked. Then suddenly he seemed lighter. He didn’t release her but he braced himself with his elbows and knees, relieving the weight and easing the pressure on her head and her neck. She turned her head to the left and gasped.
“What are you doing!”
“Killing you,” he whispered hoarsely into her ear, panting from the exertion.
“Why?
“They want me to.”
“Who?”
“The Lucani,” Joe said.
Unable to see Joe’s face Helen couldn’t tell how serious he was. He sounded serious, and her situation felt very serious. She was afraid that she might lose consciousness.
“If you kill me … that means you’re one of them?”
“Something like that,” he rasped, allowing his weight to rest fully on her now. She was finding it extremely difficult to breathe.
“All right,” she grunted. “But let me die happy.”
“What a good idea.”
It was not a frenetic coupling but a long, drawn-out thrust and counterthrust, until finally they seemed to merge into each other and both felt the thrilling pulse of fluids pumping through the conduit that joined them.
They collapsed onto their sides, embracing. When they had regained their breaths they rolled to their feet and dove into the adjacent pool together, side by side like dolphins. They swam back and forth, pushing and playing with another. Joe was in a swirling underwater swoop, looking up at the underside of the surface, intending to break through it and breathe, when he felt her arms encircle his legs and she drew him down.
He was more buoyant than she, with his greater lung capacity. Still, she drew him down. It occurred to him that she might have taken a breath before her attack, whereas he was now desperately short of breath. She was clearly kicking down, carrying them both toward the tiled bottom. He could not free his legs, and he clawed with his arms. This was a payback, he knew. He forced himself to relax, to yield to her superior force. And graciously, she responded, releasing him so that they both shot to the surface.
They came up gasping. He pushed at her. “You almost drowned me!”
Helen splashed water at him, retorting with nearly as little breath, “You almost choked me!” They chased each other around the pool like otters, racing from one end to the other. At last they clambered out and padded into the sauna.
As they relaxed in the dry heat, sitting on the aromatic cedar slats, Helen lifted her head and spoke. “They really asked you to kill me?”
“It was more a suggestion,” Joe said.
“And you gave it a try?”
“I wondered how far you’d let me go,” he joked. “You knew I couldn’t resist one last fling. And once I did that …”
“You were lost,” she said. “But, were you tempted?”
“In that death grip of yours? I’d never have been able to get out of you.”
“That’s right,” she said, her dark eyes gleaming. “Never. I’ll never let you go.”
He lifted his head, not so much wearily but from utter relaxation in the heat. He smiled slightly.
“Are they crazy?” she asked.
“Oh yeah,” Joe said. “Crazy as wasps in honey.”
“What is it?”
“They’ve had a taste of some kind of weird power trip, juiced up by danger and fear. They’re wrestling, too—like a couple of octopi. Too many tangled arms to unravel. They can’t break off … they can only go on. That’s my guess, anyhow.”
“They are a danger,” Helen said, her hand unconsciously rising to her throat. It was still a little sore. “Not just to each other, but to others—us.”
“That’s it,” Joe said. “And now they’ve had some success, but not enough. They want more. Still, they could be useful to us. They have a scheme. It’s not very clear, not focussed. But then … they weren’t very clear what they wanted or how to go about getting what they thought they wanted in the Humphrey deal. Now they want us to go back to Butte.”
He told her what he’d heard from the colonel. Helen was interested. She knew that Joe still felt bad about losing his place out west, near Butte. Conceivably, this new scheme would make it possible for him to rebuild, to establish a safe haven—never safe enough, of course, as long as the Lucani had leverage on him. Still … the potential was there. If they were clever, and had luck, they might be able to recover some lost ground.
Colonel Tucker was thinking, Joe Service was a mistake. Maybe an irreparable mistake. Fatal.
He had first met Joe in Salt Lake City, where the colonel was conducting a stakeout of the residence of Helen Sedlacek. She had been observed converting large amounts of cash into bank certificates—nothing illegal, restricting her purchases to amounts just under the limit that required Internal Revenue notification. But an alert bank official had notified the IRS of her suspicions, who had, in turn, notified the colonel.
At the time, the policy was to allow the suspect to continue the process; indeed, there were no grounds for intervention, despite a strong indication of illegal intent.
The point of the stakeout was to observe the suspect’s activities over a period of time, identify her associates, and if suspicions were confirmed, swoop in, confiscate the remaining money, and interrogate Sedlacek and her confederates. It was a joint operation of the DEA, the INS, the FBI, the IRS, and the Treasury Department. The idea was to fund the war against the drug barons with their own loot: they would never attempt to recover the confiscated money, because establishing its provenance would be self-incriminating.
The amounts seized were small change compared to the staggering profits of the drug trade, and the “smurfs” were rarely seriously prosecuted—except for incidental, unrelated violations—but the project had a win-win nature that was much admired in law enforcement circles. As a matter of fact, Colonel Tucker was one of the architects of this program, and it had been very successful in the short time it had been running.
In the meantime, his crew would run their checks on Sedlacek and try to get a fix on what her activities had been, what was the source of this money she was “smurfing.” Early returns were promising: she was associated with known mob figures in Detroit; her father had been involved in various criminal activities for years before being assassinated, evidently in a dispute about drug collections. It was believed that Helen had played a role in the revenge assassination of the Detroit mob boss, Carmine Busoni, who was thought to have ordered the hit on Sedlacek’s father, but the Detroit police had come up with no convincing evidence of this.
Prior to the Busoni assassination she had not attracted the interest of any agency. She had been in a legitimate business, a partnership with another woman, consulting in interpersonal communication for large corporations and government or educational institutions. She had studied to do this in college, achieving a master’s degree.
But the chief reason to be skeptical of her as a putative assassin was the fact that she was not only still alive but active. It even appeared that she had reestablished friendly contact with Humphrey DiEbola, Busoni’s successor. That didn’t look like she was in trouble with the mob. A Detroit police precinct detective, a Detective Sergeant Mulheisen, had some different theories, but Tucker didn’t buy them. A colonel was not inclined to accord much credibility to a municipal police sergeant’s theories.
One day when Helen was away from her Salt Lake City residence, the stakeout team was excited to observe a stranger attempting to break in. The colonel intervened, as a “concerned neighbor.” After a few questions and a surreptitious check of the man’s credentials, the colonel had apologized to Joe for bothering him and had let him run free, but with an electronic tag on his vehicle. In due course, this exercise backfired. The colonel found himself trapped by Service and Sedlacek. It was a humiliating episode, and one might have thought that the colonel would have been furious, would have pursued Service and Sedlacek vindictively, seeking his own revenge. But Tucker was a pragmatist. He had respect for his opponents, something he had learned in Vietnam.
Another lesson learned in Vietnam was a distrust of his masters. Like any loyal, patriotic soldier with a genuine dedication to duty, Tucker had a deep need to believe in his mission. He had been brought up to respect and honor his government. As he saw it, the American government was unlike other national governments. It was a flexible, ever-changing organization. Policy could rarely be exclusively attributed to one faction or another; it was subject to constant curbs and influences from opposing factions. To be “in power” was merely to be nominally in control. Despite this, somehow the country managed to muddle through, more successfully than other countries, in fact. Whether this was due to the seemingly flawed system, to luck, or to the will of the Almighty (or some other suitably nebulous superior principle) sometimes occupied Colonel Tucker’s mind. After Vietnam, he didn’t often waste a lot of time on the “why” of such things, however. His motto was, If it won’t fly, fix it; if you can’t fix it, find someone who can.
Vernon Tucker had been born and raised on a modest ranch in northern Montana. His family owned a few thousand acres and leased many more thousands, on which they ran cattle and grew wheat and occasionally some other grain products. When he was twelve he contracted scarlet fever and was forced to spend many months in bed. This was a critical moment in his personal development. He became a reader, for one thing. His mother was a schoolteacher, or had been. She made sure he kept up with his studies, and also, for a while, was able to reassert the primary control of his upbringing, after a typical early boyhood that was mostly spent outdoors, hunting, fishing, and working with his father and older brothers. Now she was able to guide his reading, play classical records for him, and answer his questions, big questions, about Life, the Universe, and Meaning.
She was pleased that at least one of her four sons took to literature so eagerly. He’d been, like her, better at math and science. But mostly, he’d been good at riding, shooting, and fishing—in fact, just about anything he tried. He was also crazy about airplanes. He’d started flying early, with his father, who was accustomed to traveling the country in a Cessna. The other boys were happier on horseback.
It was inevitable that the boy would enter the air force. The big fear was his heart, but evidently he had not been seriously affected by the bout of fever. He was not a large man, which from the point of view of cockpit space in a jet airplane was a blessing.
Vern Tucker loved Montana, but he had no interest in ranching. He tried, a couple of times, particularly when he came back from Vietnam, and again when he quit active flight duty. But it just didn’t appeal. He still loved to fly-fish, but ranch life was not for him. As much as he’d loved riding as a boy, as a man horses annoyed him. They looked smart but they weren’t, and they could never really do what you thought you could make them do. Now an airplane … you could figure out an F-105 and it would do what it was supposed to do.
He also got interested in the administrative duties of the squadron, especially in the legal aspects. He had an interest in education, as well. When he was looking around for something to do after his active flight duty ended, an old squadron buddy popped up, a fellow trout fisher. This buddy was now in Air Force Intelligence. He got Vern in. Vernon proved good at it. At one point he worked with the DEA on a narcotics case. From there he moved into the field. Increasingly, the complex, international character of the drug trade made interdepartmental cooperation a necessity. Tucker liked that. It gave him a degree of freedom to work with various agencies, at first on an at-loan basis, but ultimately as a kind of roving superagent, almost an agency of his own.
What he hated about military service in Vietnam continued to affect him in his work in the intelligence services, however. Very often, he found, he would pursue some drug criminals to a point where legal action should ensue, only to be thwarted by international policy complications, domestic political concerns, or corruption. Cases were sidetracked or abandoned; or he’d be transferred to another investigation. It was frustrating.
Before long, he met other agents with similar complaints. In the course of off-duty socializing they would express his own frustrated attitude, and often, very often, the suggestion would be voiced that they “ought to do something.”
In due time, when he found enough like-minded agents that he could trust, he proposed forming an informal direct-action extra-official task force. This group, “the Lucani,” carried out a handful of cautious actions to achieve at least a measure of what they saw as justice.
This was where Joe Service entered the picture. Service was a shadowy operator in the organized-crime world. As best as the Lucani had been able to determine, Service had a long and ambiguous career in organized crime. He didn’t seem allied with any of the major families, but he had good relations with all of them. He seemed to be primarily an investigator, like the Lucani themselves, but one often called upon to carry out sanctions. The crime world, it appeared, like all large, loosely affiliated organizations, had internal problems, interdisciplinary problems, so to speak. A nominally independent agent was required, someone all sides more or less trusted and respected.
Independent operatives are of value in any field—it was one of the justifications the Lucani claimed for themselves. The advantages are clear, the results widely applauded, and if the operator has the sanction of the organization (as the Lucani, obviously, did not) the organization congratulates itself on having had the wisdom to create such a useful internal organ.
But soon enough, the infatuation fades—independence is all well and good, as long as it doesn’t annoy the ruling faction. Organized crime, perhaps even more so than legitimate enterprise, is riddled with factions and, inevitably, with corruption. The censor, as one might term the internal investigator, comes to be resented, suspected of acting not out of disinterested evenhandedness but of being corrupted by invidious factions, and so on. The role can’t last, as Joe Service had discovered.
Service had made a good living out of this for some time, and might have continued for at least a little longer, but he fell in love with Helen Sedlacek. Tucker didn’t have much experience with these attachments, distrusted them as human motivations, but he had concluded that it must be a genuine factor in this case. There was no other explanation for the behavior of the two young people. The two had essentially destroyed their heretofore promising careers in favor of a joint activity that was, apparently, neither lucrative nor productive. They both seemed to be interested in money—always a reliable motivation in Tucker’s eyes—but then they would do things that ran counter to their financial interests. Or so it seemed. Their activities had also been highly dangerous, which might be seen as an attraction to young and daring operatives, but these two were practical-minded souls.
Tucker believed that it was Joe Service who had killed Busoni, perhaps with Helen’s help, or at her urging. What would drive a man to do that, if not love? It hadn’t helped Joe’s career, obviously.
But it was a good thing for the Lucani, he’d thought at the time. When they encountered Service they were looking for just such a man. The Lucani had a familiar problem for intelligence agencies engaged in proactive operations: insulation and deniability. Someone had to carry out these actions, someone who, if caught, could not be associated with official (or in their case, unofficial) policy.
Joe Service was a criminal. He was, at the time, in a Denver hospital recovering from complications of being shot some months earlier. He was due to be tried for several crimes. It was unclear how strong a case there was against him, but there was the likelihood of a long prison term. The Lucani debated his recruitment and decided it was worth a chance. The colonel had been mightily impressed by Joe’s cunning, his quick-wittedness, his tendency to act expeditiously but judiciously, and his success ratio. Best of all, he appeared eminently susceptible to their control: if he screwed up, they could easily betray him to the usual law agencies, or they could terminate him in other ways; and his association with them was easily deniable.
They decided to help him escape. And it paid dividends: the foreign drug dealer was neutralized, in a way that made it seem that it must be an action by rival criminals. The mission had the inestimable value of being completely deniable by legitimately constituted authority—indeed, the issue never even arose.
Subsequently, Joe was employed in an action against the powerful Detroit mobster DiEbola. Here again he had succeeded, at least to the extent that DiEbola was indeed neutralized. But now it wasn’t clear to Tucker just how that had been carried out. Worse, the unaccountable loss of one of their own had raised dangerous warning flags. And Joe’s behavior about the money was also objectionable. He had an appearance of being a rebel, an uncontrollable servant. Worst of all, he might be a rebel clever enough to mask his rebellion.
Naturally, at this juncture, the colonel was forced to consider a judicious removal. Some of his fellow Lucani were frankly scared of Joe Service. Others, however, notably Dinah Schwind, the agent who had recruited Joe in Denver, were opposed to purging Joe. Colonel Tucker considered whether Schwind might not be, herself, romantically or at least physically attracted to Service. But knowing Schwind to be a sensible, level-headed agent, he was inclined to think that was nonsense. She knew Joe best, had spent the most time with him—he was her protégé. Naturally, she was protective.
This was always the difficult part of administration, the colonel knew. As in the past, he tended to fall back on his experience in the squadron. You had to think of the mission first. Then you had to consider your resources. He had known good pilots, brave and intelligent men who were not good strike leaders, or even good wingmen. He’d known, on the other hand, pilots in Vietnam who had lost confidence in their mission, who no longer believed that it was right to bomb Hanoi. One or two of them had continued to fly, however. They would go on the missions, carry out their responsibilities as wingmen, but never drop their bombs until they were out of the target area. Astounding behavior. They put themselves at risk, apparently solely for their comrades, unwilling to let them down. Nothing was said, although everyone knew about it. Such a pilot, of course, could not be asked to lead the strike force.
Now what about that? Tucker had been impressed by these men, honored them for their faithfulness to the unit. But it had been troubling. Others, he knew, had despised them. Tucker could never do that; he knew these men. In MiG Alley, he wanted these guys on his wing. He had this same feeling about Joe.
He contrasted Joe with Pollak, the man who had not returned from the DiEbola mission. Tucker had a feeling that whatever had happened up there, it hadn’t been Joe who had precipitated the mischance, such as it was. Pollak, now, he was one of those hard-nosed types, a guy who saw himself as the leader in any situation, the guy who would make the tough decisions. Unfortunately, he didn’t always have good judgment, and he was likely to have made decisions that were not his to make. Joe was a guy, the colonel felt, who could react coolly to unforeseen developements. Joe’s first priority would be to survive, but he’d also do everything possible to save the mission—and, of course, the mission had been accomplished. You wanted to be close to that guy, in any kind of scrap.
The colonel had been nervous about Pollak before this. He had considered him dangerous. If Pollak ever lost faith in the Lucani’s mission, he’d be the one to blow the whistle on all of them, and there would be no warning. He was competent, but he might not be a good comrade if the basic premise was seriously challenged. Until this episode, from which he hadn’t returned, Pollak had never given the colonel reason to object. When the operation was proposed and planned, Tucker had agreed with Pollak’s volunteering to go, mainly because he had figured that whatever problems there might be with Pollak, Joe’s presence would probably override those problems. In other words, without actually saying as much to anyone, including himself, he’d seen Joe as the de facto leader of the operation.
He’d made a mistake, though. He realized it now. Before they’d left, he’d said to Pollak, “If anything goes wrong, make sure it’s you who comes back.” What he’d meant by that, he thought, was simply that Joe was the expendable one, the guy who would have to take the fall for a failed mission, the cutout, the insulation. That was Joe’s role from the beginning, wasn’t it? But, he considered, Pollak might have taken that another way. Maybe that was what was eating Joe. Maybe he thought that Tucker had meant for him to be neutralized, that it was an integral part of the plan, rather than a prudent option.
Tucker sighed. The simple fact was, something had gone wrong and it wasn’t Pollak who had come back. Maybe it wasn’t a disaster, but now he would have to do the cleanup, disinfect the situation. Was Joe a mistake? He hoped not.
In the meantime, he had other concerns. One of them was Franko. Another disappearance. Unlike Pollak, Franko’s disappearance was eminently explicable. The intelligence community had pretty much accepted the notion that Franko had been caught up in a Serbian militia operation and been killed. There were a lot of people missing over there. The problem was if Franko hadn’t been captured or killed. Where was he? What was he doing?
Lieutenant Colonel Vern Tucker was a man of action, of course. He had already put some actions in train to find out the whereabouts of Franko Bradovic, his man in Kosovo. The trouble was, nothing had come of it. The actions had turned up nothing. The only fallback was some suspect information about Butte.
So, he was back to Joe. He didn’t want to think about Joe anymore tonight. Joe had gone off with a pocketful of dough. He had a feeling Joe was like the cowboys he’d known in his youth, the hands that came and went on the ranch. When you paid them on a Saturday, you knew some of them wouldn’t be back—at least, not until they got rid of their pay, which didn’t always take longer than Saturday night in Great Falls. He had a feeling Joe was right now in bed with Helen.
Damn Helen, he thought. Joe without Helen was just about the ideal tool. With Helen … who knew what they’d get up to? To hell with it. If he were home now, he’d pour himself some of that ancient single malt he’d acquired, get out some reports to read or maybe study up on the history of Serbia, and listen to some Bach. He wasn’t at home. He was stuck in a hotel in Detroit, albeit about the best the city could offer, but still sterile and not very accommodating to a man of sophisticated tastes. Still, he had picked up one of those clever little clamshell CD players with some decent earphones. He had been surprised to find Tureck’s splendid version of the Bach partitas in a large music store in the nearby shopping center. There was some commercial Scotch in the minibar. He could tough it out with that. He settled down with Michael Sells’s interesting text on the religious aspect of the Bosnian strife.
The wind must have changed, he thought a half hour later. The airliners were making their approach to Detroit-Wayne just west of the hotel. An old pilot notices these things, almost unconsciously.