Nothing is worse than an old spy, Alex Law thought. He’d been an intelligence officer for over twenty-five years and he really didn’t trust anyone now—governments, religion, most people, even himself. That was the problem: alcoholics can’t even trust themselves. That was the final irony; he had now to spy on himself, to look into his own heart and see things without anyone noticing that he was watching.
He’d been a bad man in many ways. He’d cheated on his wife. He’d drunk too much and been out of touch with his family. And he had done things he wasn’t proud of in the name of God and country. These were the truths. Now his job—in the attempt to better himself—was to sift through his past to find the truth about his life.
He’d carried with him a weapon of personal destruction for most of his adult life, a WPD. Buried in his subconscious, ready to go off and wipe out all decency and self-respect and right thinking. That weapon had made him effective at his job; that was the horrible truth, too. He’d been effective because he’d been more than a little crazy.
You get to a certain age, and a lot of things don’t matter any more, he thought. It was early in the morning. He’d ordered coffee to be sent up and he was sitting, watching the Acapulco skyline from his little house at the Villa Vera. He had the one in the very back that his father had always gotten for them when he’d been a kid. It was the same one that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had lived in once. It was the best one, the biggest one at the hotel and the most private. He loved it; if he could, he’d have lived the rest of his life there.
He looked down at the beach, a few miles down the hill. He’d had his first sexual experience down there at fifteen, on a yacht with the daughter of the Pan Bimbo empire. She was the older woman; she was seventeen. He smiled, remembering it.
The waiter in his starched white coat came around the corner, checking first that it was all right, calling ahead to announce himself as he wheeled the room service cart up the path. Alex Law, the CIA’s station chief in Mexico—head of the agency’s largest post in Latin America—waved the waiter through with a quick smile.
He didn’t look the part of spymaster. He had planned the overthrow of Hugo Chavez, which had gone badly, but otherwise he’d done well here. Chavez’s resilience had been unexpected. But because of that failure, the higher-ups now viewed him as no longer up to the job at hand. It would be only a matter of time before he would be replaced; that was the cost of failure.
The young waiter and he talked for a moment about the weather, which was going to be perfect again. They’d come for their anniversary, Alex told the young man. Twenty-six years today, he said. The young man congratulated him and said he hoped to be as lucky. He said that he was getting married soon and had great expectations for married life. He was all of twenty, Alex thought.
“The important thing is to be nice . . . no, kind,” Alex said in Spanish. “If you do that, it will be all right, no matter what else you do wrong. Never say anything you’ll regret. That’s what I’ve learned.” The boy looked at him a moment and nodded, taking it in.
“You know what I mean?” Alex said.
“Yes. I know. Something hurtful, once said. . . . You can never take it back,” the waiter said.
“Right,” Alex said. “That’s it. The trick is never to say it.”
His wife, Helen, was standing in the window watching him. He wondered, waving to her, what she really thought of him.
The waiter left. Helen wouldn’t come out until he’d gone. She was a very beautiful woman, even now, but she was always careful that way, a little shy. When he’d been such a whore, she’d been always proper, a good wife—until he’d gone too far, and then she’d struck back and hurt him, the way only a woman can. And then she’d walked out and taken life, as he’d known it for twenty years, with her.
“Is it clear?” she said from the door.
“All clear,” Alex said. He poured coffee for the both of them.
She was wearing a bathrobe with the Villa Vera’s blue logo. They’d made love in the morning, and it had been very beautiful. The coolness of the room, the knowing her that way, and what she liked, and making sure that it was good. The falling asleep again with her.
“Why is it so perfect here, Alex?” she said, looking out. The little pool had a few orange bougainvillea leaves floating on the water. She held the big French-style coffee cup with two hands.
“I guess because it’s Acapulco and it’s the Villa Vera in winter, which is perfect. And you’re here with me,” he said.
She smiled. “No. I mean the place, this spot. The quiet. If I were a writer, I’d come here. I’d only work here.”
“Well, you’d have to be a successful writer,” Alex said.
“I would be. Terribly. I should have been something like that.”
“We all should have been something else, right?” She knew what he did, and they never talked about it. Her father had been in the game, too; she considered spying the family business.
“Are we going to make it, Alex? This time.”
“Yes.”
They’d been separated for five years. It was a long time. He’d tried to get her back several times. Each time, she’d said that she wouldn’t come back until he stopped drinking. He kept lying and she kept refusing until one day he did the unthinkable and checked himself into a place in Napa. He called her from there and had the doctors call her from there.
She’d shown up the day he was leaving, which he hadn’t expected—and he’d cried. He’d been to a lot of frightening places and he’d done a lot of frightening things, and he’d never once cried. He hated it when men did, but he’d cried that day when he saw her standing there. Cried like a baby. She was the only thing he’d ever really wanted, even when he was with other women and the WPD’s were going off and he was in hell.
“It’s never too late,” he said.
“Are you going to be a good boy, Alex? Do you promise me?”
“I promise. Cross my heart,” he said.
“I’m not pretty the way I was. I know how you like pretty women. I know that. I’m not stupid. I’m going to be fifty soon. You know that. Can you accept that? Because I don’t want to be one of those sad women wearing mini skirts and getting operations. I won’t do that. Not even for you, Alex.”
“. . .Don’t care about that. Just care about you,” he said, and he meant it. All that super-model culture that was being shoved down the world’s throat was dead to him now. He’d crawled out the other side of something, and was free.
“What is it with men, anyway?” she said. She tousled his hair. “You’re getting gray, too, you know. I’m glad. Maybe it will slow you down. Your problem was, you were too handsome. My girlfriends told me that—that you were, and it wouldn’t be good for me.”
“Was I?” he said. “I’m going to go to the gym and work out. . . . And get my bottom lifted. Brazilian butt lift.”
She laughed. She didn’t look her age. She’d been his opposite, eating right, never drinking. She put her feet in his lap. He looked every bit of his age.
“So we have a deal, Alex?”
“We have a deal,” he said.
“Okay. I’ll move in with you.”
“Thank you. I’ve bought out the Victoria’s Secret catalog. It’s all waiting for you. . . . Just kidding.”
“You want to take a swim? Remember, we used to when the kids were gone to the beach. I always liked that.”
“Okay.” He watched her stand up. She took her robe off and, naked, walked across the verge to the steps of the pool. He bit his lip. He was a lucky man.
“God, you look like a wolf,” she said, the water moving up her flat waist.
“I can’t help it.” He took his robe off and followed her. The water was neither warm nor cold. They swam to a ledge at the deep end. He was happy holding her, kissing her, the feel of her wet hair on his shoulder with one of the papery bougainvillea petals caught in it. He hadn’t felt happy in so long that it was a little frightening. Being an old spy, he couldn’t trust even himself. But he was going to try, he thought. He was going to try to trust himself to be happy.
When they were drying off, his cell phone rang. It was the embassy. He listened for a long time. Twice, Helen tried to kiss him. They were going to order more breakfast, then go shopping for furniture for the house he’d bought in the city.
“Yes. Okay. I’ll see him. Have them send someone. In, say, an hour.” He saw her girlish smile leave her face. The job—if he told the truth—had always been a problem. He never really wanted to admit it. The job, in fact, had given him the excuse he’d needed to be a bastard to her.
“I’ve got to go out. Work. For an hour or so.”
“Here.”
“Yes. I promise I’ll be back for lunch.”
“Alex. It isn’t . . . I mean . . . I’ll kill you if you have some little. . . .”
“No. It’s not that. I swear.”
She looked at him a long time; in the past, he’d been capable of that.
“Okay. National security, then?” she said.
“Yes.”
“I hope it’s important,” she said.
“It might be. It was Butch on the phone.”
“He’s always been a bad influence on you, Alex. You two are always getting into trouble.”
“He’s got a girlfriend now,” Alex said. “He’s changed. Keeps regular hours.”
“Poor woman. If you’re not back by lunchtime, I’m taking up with that cute waiter. I’ll order everything off the menu, too.”
“Deal,” he said.
He was dressed for the Villa Vera and not for the main jail that served Acapulco. Like all jails he’d ever been in, it was noisy. But like all things Mexican, the jail had the feeling that it wasn’t what it appeared. The inmates ran the place, and the guards were just cooperating with the strange status quo.
Alex took out his glasses. The liaison from the Mexican intelligence service was a slight young man, nervous because he was dealing with Alex, who was a somebody.
Alex opened the file that was sitting on the wooden table of the little room near the entrance. He was relieved that he didn’t have to go see the prisoner in the general population; there was something pathetic about seeing men in cages, even if the cages were better than American ones.
The file contained the man’s passport, Indonesian, and a brief description of his crime. He’d murdered two young women in a brothel the previous Saturday. Alex flipped through pictures of the crime scene, immediately hating the man. He read through the charges, but they gave no explanation for the violence.
The man had been arrested with less than fifty dollars in his possession. He was a sailor on a cruise ship and the file concluded with the fact that he was a Muslim. His ship had sailed. The man had insisted that he had important information that he would discuss only with someone from the American embassy, information he claimed was critical to the safety of Americans.
Alex pulled his glasses off and closed the file.
“Do you want to see him now?” the young man asked.
“Yes,” Alex said. “Does he speak English? It doesn’t say here.”
“Yes. He speaks some English,” said the young officer, whose English was perfect.
The young man left Alex alone in the small room. He looked at the dirty green walls, then at his watch. It was just ten-thirty. He worried about getting back to the hotel. He looked at his cell phone. His daughter had called from New York while he’d been studying the file. He saw her number.
The door opened and a short Asian man in his forties came into the room shackled, still dressed in the clothes he’d been arrested in. Two unarmed guards led him to a chair directly across from Alex. The prisoner’s chains clinked as he walked around the table, taking small steps.
He glanced at Alex as he sat down. He looked frightened and exhausted.
“I’ll see him alone,” Alex said.
“You’re sure?” the young man asked from the doorway.
“What’s he going to do to me, shackled like that?”
The young man spoke to the guards, and they all left the room. Alex took his reading glasses and laid them on the file. He said nothing for a moment.
“What your name?” the prisoner asked.
“Tom. My name is Tom,” Alex said.
“You American from the embassy?”
“Yes.”
“How do I know that?” The man said. He put his hands on the table.
“You don’t,” Alex said.
“I have to be sure,” the man said. “I want to see something that says that you’re from the American embassy.” The man had black hair that was very dirty and matted and a mustache above a cruel mouth. Something about his full lips looked almost like a woman’s. He looked like what he was, Alex thought: a low life, probably a butcher. And now he was frightened, because he’d been caught.
“Well, it’s been a pleasure. We really have to do this more often.” Alex stood up, dropped his glasses in their case, and headed for the door.
“Okay,” the man said. “Okay.”
Alex waited a moment, then sat down again.
“What is it you wanted to tell us?” Alex said.
“I have a problem,” the man said. He turned for a moment and looked at the door. Alex could see the young intelligence officer’s face in the little window. He was keeping a close eye on them.
“Yes. I can see that.”
“I’m innocent,” the man said.
“I’m sure you are,” Alex said. “I’m sure you are.”
“They have death penalty here, Tom?”
“No. But I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, from your point of view. You have no money, you see. Everything costs money here. Even your food.”
“I need lawyer. I got no money. Nothing.”
“I’m sorry for your troubles, but you really must tell me why you wanted to see someone from our embassy.”
The man rubbed the side of his cheek with his shackled hands. Alex saw a small red stain on his shirt pocket.
“I didn’t kill those girls,” he said.
Alex looked at his watch. It was almost eleven. He felt himself get angry; perhaps it was the room, or the disgusting man, or his own anxiety. You’re an asshole, he thought to himself, who will probably ruin everything you ever loved. Maybe they can write that on your tombstone. Asshole.
“Listen, my friend. I’m about to get up and leave this place, and that’s going to be the end of it. I don’t give a shit whether you are innocent or guilty. Do you understand? Not one shit. That isn’t why I’m sitting here. And now that I think you have something important to say, I may make your life even more difficult. Do you understand that? If you want my help, you’ll tell me what it is you have to say, now. Is that clear?”
“I heard something, Tom.” the man said.
“What?”
“Something on the ship, Tom. . . .”