Angel Eyes (17 page)

"By God, Tori, you look a damn sight better than when you left here a year and a half ago.'' Bernard embraced her warmly. "It's good of you to have come back," he said so softly that she was the only one to hear. Then he broke away. "Russell, you've done well to bring her home.''

Briefings were traditionally held in a plush suite of rooms which were insulated from and surrounded by the Mail's own electrical generators. The entire complex was totally self-sufficient, a prerequisite-albeit an expensive one-that Bernard Godwin had insisted upon when the Mall was first founded. Besides anything else, the placement of the enormous generators ensured that no listening devices could penetrate to the suite.

The rooms were furnished in the typical style of a men's club, comfortable, broken-in, masculine. Which was, in part, why Tori had chosen to wear so provocative and feminine an outfit. She had not been back to this center of clandestine power in eighteen months, and now that she was, she wanted the men who ruled it to feel her presence in every way.

The three of them settled around a burl table. Sandwiches, fresh fruit, coffee, juices were waiting for them, and they ate while they talked. Tori found that she had lost the sense of whether or not she was hungry, but she ate anyway out of force of habit. She automatically helped herself to the blueberries. They were one of a number of what was known in the Mall as "mission food." Blueberries had been fed to fighter pilots during World War II, they were filled with an enzyme that temporarily increased visual acuity.

Tori looked at Bernard, but he merely said, "Russell, you're on."

Russell Slade opened a buff-colored file. Tori saw that it was imprinted with the title ice cream and had a scarlet band in the upper right-hand corner, signifying it contained "Eyes Only" documents, the most highly classified in the Mall: they could not be photocopied or taken from the premises, and one needed D.C.-"Director's Clearance"-to access them.

Russell cleared his throat, said, "Tori, I told you on the plane that our adversaries had come up with something particularly nasty. I wasn't kidding, and I wasn't exaggerating. This concerns the global transshipping of drugs."

"Cocaine?"

Russell and Bernard Godwin exchanged a brief glance. "Yes," Russell said, "and no. It was bad enough when the South American drug lords bribed their own governments into becoming witting accomplices to the growing, manufacturing, and shipping of cocaine, but now an entirely new element has entered the arena, and the implications are staggeringly dire for the United States."

He paused here to take a sip of orange juice. Russell was a good public speaker, Tori remembered. His sense of timing was impeccable.

"The first hint we had of something sinister," Russell continued, "was just under a year ago. A Washington kid died. Doesn't sound like much, I know. But the death got odder, its implications more frightening as the investigation went on. First off, the kid was a girl of about fifteen, a white girl from a socially prominent family. That, sadly, was a break for us. Had the victim been an inner city kid, her case most likely would never have come to our attention.

"But this girl's father has plenty of bread and-and this counts for much more-clout. He hires a forensic specialist-a former New York City chief medical examiner who's off writing his memoirs. This M.E.'s a smart cookie, and he begins to dig. He delivers his prelim report to the father, who's so appalled he phones several of his government pals. At this point a red flag pops up on our computer screen, and I send someone-Ariel Solares-out to interview the principals."

Russell detached a sheet from the file, slid it across to Tori. ''This is the M.E.'s report, but I can summarize it for you. This fifteen-year-old white girl died not of a drug overdose, which had been the original diagnosis, but of chronic cocaine use."

There was silence for some moments, and Tori thought that Russell had not lost his touch for the dramatic.

"Do you begin to see the conundrum we were presented with? A fifteen-year-old girl dies of chronic cocaine abuse. But the M.E. tells us it would take at least ten years of heavy usage to get her to that stage. Impossible. Yet we were all looking directly at the proof.''

Russell's fingers fumbled in his jacket pocket, and Tori knew he was searching for a cigarette. But he didn't smoke anymore, so he poured himself some more juice, instead. "It took the M.E. the girl's father hired six weeks to come up with the answer, but the clever old dog got it. It was cocaine the girl had been using, but only for the last three months." Russell's eyes locked onto Tori's. "In three months her body had deteriorated ten years' worth. How? The answer lay with the cocaine itself. It was cocaine all right, but an exhaustive molecular analysis revealed differences. They seemed at first subtle, but when we recreated some in our own labs and fed it to mice, the results were astounding. This stuff is poison, plain and simple. Oh, it doesn't work like poison, rapidly causing death. In fact, the high it brings to the user makes regular cocaine seem like sugar. It is ultraaddictive, and it destroys the body within three months. Taking it is tantamount to swallowing a time bomb."

Tori considered all this. "Then this is the lead Ariel was working on in Buenos Aires?"

"Yes."

She said, "The two Japanese Yakuza in the tunnels?"

Russell glanced at Bernard, then back to Tori. "Ariel had assumed they were part of the pipeline. Then, according to his last report, he began to uncover another-and far more disturbing-link between the Yakuza and the supercocaine."

"Wait a minute," Tori said. "Are you saying that the Japanese are manufacturing this supercoke?''

"That appears to be the case," Russell said.

"Where did Ariel get this intelligence?" Tori asked. "Who were his contacts?"

"We don't know," Russell admitted. "He convinced me in order to get close to these people he had to be cut loose from all normal Mall procedure. That meant no day-by-day control, no timed dead-drop reports, no backup, no shield, nothing. He told me he was in a red zone, that if they suspected anything-" Russell stared down at the ice cream file, but Tori could see he was looking at nothing. Perhaps he was remembering-and regretting-Ariel's death.

"This is why we need you," Russell said. "You know the Japanese culture, and the people. They can't invent anything, but give them a prototype and they'll refine it better than anyone else on earth."

"It isn't true that they can't invent anything."

"You know what he means, Tori," Bernard said. "This isn't a synthetic drug. The real thing is needed to metamorphose it into this most potent, untraceable, unstoppable weapon."

"This is insane," Tori told them. "Why would the Japanese create the ultimate cocaine? To make money, yes, that's understandable, but to create such a thing as a weapon-it's monstrous."

"I couldn't agree more," Bernard Godwin said. "There are elements within our own government who feel strongly that for years the Japanese have been waging systematic economic war on us, that they will stop at nothing to defeat us." He pursed his lips, as he often did when analyzing complex data. "Personally, I don't believe this, but you'd be surprised at who does in the White House and on Capitol Hill." He looked firm and resolute, a leader still. "All that seems clear at the moment is the intelligence Ariel unearthed that the Japanese created the supercocaine. We want you to find out the rest: who is manufacturing it, who they're selling it to, and why. Then we want you to shut the whole goddamned thing down."

"You should try to be more tolerant of Russell," Bernard Godwin said. "He's a good man."

''He fired me," Tori said.

"Yes, indeed. And he had my blessing."

"Your-"

"Tori, I trained you, and I love you. I brought you into the Mall, and, I must say, I knew the risks involved when I did so. I was convinced that your extraordinary physical talents and your unique mind more than outweighed your rebelliousness, your unpredictability, your insubordination.

''But the fact remains that the Mall is an organization, not so very unlike the military in ways you already are quite familiar with. And like the military, strict rules and regulations have been instituted for the benefit of the Mall as a whole. No one individual must be allowed to rise above those rules and regulations. You tried to do just that, and you reaped the consequences. Russell did what he had to do as director, so stop blaming him."

They were walking out past the corrals where the striped wooden bars were set out to put the hunter-jumper horses through their paces. No one else was around, and by a bond of unspoken tradecraft, they kept near the trees and foliage, natural barriers against electronic listening devices.

"All right," she said, "perhaps I've been unfair to him. But I still want what I want."

"And what is that?"

"To come back on my own terms."

"That's too loaded a request for me to agree to outright," Bernard said. "Tell me exactly what it is you want."

Tori thought a moment. "I don't want to rise above the rules, I just want them bent a little. I want autonomy-"

"Impossible."

"You need me."

Bernard turned, and his eyes bored into hers. "Let's not dance. We know each other too well, Tori. The fact is, we need each other. If you deny this, I cannot under any circumstances allow you to come home, because in deceiving yourself, you're likely to deceive us. Not willingly, perhaps, but that possibility would be far more perilous for us. You love the hunt, the danger-even, yes, the blood being spilled so close to you. No, no, don't bother to deny it, we both know it's the truth. The dance so near death is your dance, Tori, and you do it better than anyone I ever met."

There was silence for a moment, broken only by the sound of a nearby woodcock. "If you'd have allowed me to finish," Tori said at length, "perhaps you'd agree to what I'm asking for."

"I doubt it," Bernard said, "but be my guest."

They began to walk again. They stopped within a copse of huge maples. It was cool and dark within the eaves of the shade trees. In the sun-drenched distance they could see horses grazing, nuzzling one another. It was very peaceful.

"I want Director's Clearance, so if I need to, I can get Mail materiel without going through interminable red tape," Tori said. ''And I want Russell with me in the field.''

The silence between them was momentarily so deep that Tori could hear a horse snorting on the hillside a good six hundred yards away. This was her revenge on Russell Slade: to take the desk jockey into the warrens, get him muddy, let him see the face of the enemy, and, if she were lucky, have him stare death in the eye.

She had not for a moment been swayed by what Bernard said. He was an ex-actor. One of his talents lay in manipulating emotions with what he said. But Tori had grown up with such guile, and she was by now inured to it.

"A director's place is not in the field," Bernard said at last.

"Nevertheless-"

"I cannot allow it."

Tori gave him a little salute. "Then maybe I'll see you in another eighteen months or so."

"Tori, you need us as much as we need you."

She took a step away from him, into the sunshine. Bernard reached out, stopped her. "All right. You'll get your D.C." He closed his hand over hers. "I've never asked you for anything, Tori. But I am now. We do need you. Far more than Russell was willing to admit back there. He's only human; he's got his pride." He took her hand in his. "And perhaps you need us more than you're willing to admit to yourself. Damnit, you know there's truth in what I say.''

Tori's eyes held his; she did not blink. "I want Russell with me, Bernard."

"Why?"

"He's ultimately vulnerable here, locked away on this impregnable farm, in his bulletproof limos, his terrorist-proof jets. He's out of touch with the world. You weren't like that. Think back. Your experience encompassed more than the think tank and the communications center. Once in a while you've got to put your ear to the ground instead of to a wireless grill. Russell will be a danger to me if he sits here and runs me, which is what he's got planned for me. He ran Ariel, so he'll run me. Let me bring him into the field. He needs the experience, and I'm going to need the help."

"I 'm not sure this is the mission for him to get his feet wet."

Now it was Tori who impaled him with her eyes. "You mean you can afford to lose me in the field, but not Russell."

Bernard said, "I can't, at this moment, afford to lose either of you.'' But he seemed to be wavering.

"Neither can you afford to allow this new cocaine to begin flooding the country. Your own evidence shows that it's already started. Can you possibly imagine where it will end? If this mission doesn't get off the ground, there may not be another one for Russell to go out on."

"How did she talk you into it?" Russell Slade said. "I know this couldn't have been your idea.''

"Don't be impertinent," Bernard Godwin said. "I sanctioned it."

Russell grunted. "You always did have a soft spot for her."

"With good reason," Bernard said. "It seems to me, Russell, that you never fully appreciated Tori's talents."

"To the extent that's so," Russell said, "it's because I've never fully trusted her. Oh, not in the usual sense. But she's chronically unpredictable. I know when you brought her in, you thought she'd grow out of her rebelliousness. But you saw, as I did, that she never matured."

"I'm not so sure 'mature' is the operative word," Bernard said. "She's got a healthy hatred of organizations of any kind. I'm beginning to see that's an asset in her line of work.''

Russell snorted derisively.

Bernard said, "If you'd put aside your personal antipathy toward her, you'd understand what I 'm talking about. Her hatred of organizations makes her one hundred percent secure. Do you think anyone could ever get to her to turn her? Not a chance. In that sense, she's pure, and that free spirit of hers guarantees it. Be grateful for that."

"All of this is bullshit," Russell said. "I'll be goddamned if I'll go into the field taking orders from her."