Exile Hunter (17 page)

As Linder and Denniston
entered the club’s dimly lit foyer, the owner, a portly but
immaculately suited Filipino in his mid-thirties, welcomed Denniston
with theatrical deference and noted in a discreet aside that “Sheila
was delighted” that he was coming tonight.

“May I show her to
your table, Mr. Denniston?” the man asked.

“Certainly, José,
but let’s wait until after dinner. My friend and I have some
catching up to do and I’m afraid it might bore Sheila. Why not send
her, and perhaps a friend, if you could arrange it, to our table for
an after-dinner drink once the dance floor opens?”

“But of course,”
José responded with an obsequious bow before ushering them past the
enormous bar, designed to evoke fantasies of an 1890’s saloon, with
faux wood paneling, tufted red-leather cushions and a brass foot
rail. Along the walls, attractive and demurely dressed young women
shared curtained booths with rough-looking oil drillers and
clean-shaven military types. Linder was startled to see how
remarkably good-looking the hostesses were, definitely a cut above
the bar girls and hookers he had encountered at his favorite dives in
Beirut, Dubai, Cairo, and Bangkok. Far from hard-bitten
professionals, these young women looked like every man’s fantasy of
the girl next door or a college sorority girl. Perhaps, he thought,
some of them actually were students by day. Certainly, financing a
college education had never been more difficult. Nor, after a decade
of economic depression and civil unrest, had the hopes and
self-respect of young Americans ever sunk so low.

When the two men
reached the table Denniston had reserved, José left them in the care
of their waiter. Denniston ordered a vodka martini on the rocks,
garnished with a blue-cheese stuffed olive, while Linder ordered a
Manhattan made with rye whiskey and extra bitters, straight up. When
the drinks arrived and the rosy glow of alcohol swept over them,
their conversation turned to old times in college and their early
days in the Agency. Both men downed their first drinks in a few gulps
and ordered another round.

“Glad you’ve
learned to properly appreciate a well-made cocktail after all these
years,” Linder teased, pointing to Denniston’s empty glass.
“Celebrating a special occasion? Like handing in your resignation
and telling the Agency to shove it?”

Denniston smiled
blandly and shook his head.

“Actually, I wasn’t
thinking of that at all. To tell you the truth, I’ve been
fortifying myself to tell you about the visit I had from my Dad.”

“The Dad you haven’t
seen since college?”

“None other,”
Denniston answered darkly. “He looked me up in Dubai last month. He
lives in London now.”

Linder recalled that
Denniston had been born into a wealthy Louisville family whose
history of bootlegging, political influence peddling, and tax evasion
dated back to the Whiskey Rebellion. On his father’s side, his
extended family owned interests in horse breeding, tobacco farming,
and bourbon distilling. But his parents had divorced when he was a
freshman in college in a contest so bitter that Denniston’s mother
later snitched on her ex-husband to the IRS for tax fraud and
testified against him at trial. Denniston’s father lost everything
he owned and spent three years in federal prison. Then, when the IRS
placed tax liens against property that otherwise would have gone to
his wife and two sons in the divorce settlement, they were left
penniless, as well.

Denniston managed to
finish college through a combination of scholarships, handouts from
his maternal grandparents, and student loans. Unable to finance
graduate school or to find a private sector job, and unwilling to
accept help from his father’s side of the family, he joined the
Agency a year after graduation. Though his father had been saddened
that Neil took his mother’s side in the divorce and severed
contact, he let it be known that he approved of his son’s decision
to join the Agency.

That had been more than
a decade ago. As his father’s family was Republican, Denniston
accordingly became a Democrat, though not so radical as to bar him
from passing the Agency’s background check. Until now, Denniston
had always seemed able to halt his risk-taking and rebellion just
short of self-destruction.

“So how did it go?”
Linder asked Neil about the meeting with his father.

“He’s still a liar
and a crook. But my Dad told me something that caught me by surprise.
I’m not sure if he meant it to ingratiate himself with me or to
punish me for having shunned him for so long.”

Denniston had confided
to Linder many times about his father over the years, generally only
after heavy drinking. By Neil’s own description, his father was a
born horse-trader, cardsharp, whiskey salesman, and land promoter who
had lived on the edge and by his wits his entire life.

When Denniston was a
child, his father had served as a Kentucky state legislator, earning
a reputation as a political fixer who dabbled in small-scale graft
and political favors. As Denniston recalled, local bureaucrats and
party officials were always hanging around the house waiting to see
his father privately after hours. During the formative years of his
childhood, his father had built the foundation for his son’s street
smarts, along with a deep antipathy toward big corporations,
white-shoe lawyers, and Eastern bankers, whom his father distrusted
as an article of faith.

While in Dubai on
business earlier in the year, Denniston’s father had inquired about
his son at the American Embassy, having heard from a family member in
Washington that Neil had been doing counterterrorist work for the CIA
in the Middle East. The father, having moved overseas during the
nadir of the Events, was living in London on a modest income from
sales commissions and consulting fees in the global whiskey trade,
and from running a Thursday night poker game at a private club that
existed to fleece hapless Brits and fellow American émigrés.

Upon learning of his
father’s inquiry, Denniston had decided to meet him for lunch at
one of the emirate’s sumptuous midday hotel buffets. At one point
in the desultory conversation, Denniston had referred to the heavy
burden of his student loan payments and his father had expressed
surprise.

“Surprise that the
government was stupid enough to lend that much to you or surprise
that you were keeping up with payments?” Linder joked, trying to
lighten the conversation’s tone.

“Surprise that I had
any loans at all,” Denniston declared. “He told me that he had
set up a college trust fund for my brother and me when we were little
and appointed Mom as trustee. The thing is, she never told us about
it. Her story all those years was that the IRS took everything and
nothing was left for college.”

“That sounds awful,”
Linder broke in. “Who are you supposed to believe when your parents
have entirely different versions of the truth?”

“The one who produces
documents,” Denniston replied coldly. “Dad had copies of bank
statements. No doubt about it, Mom withdrew the money. The moment I
got back from Dubai, I flew home and confronted her. At first, she
denied it, but when I showed her the withdrawal records, she admitted
that she spent it all on living expenses. Half a million dollars, can
you believe it? Of course, she had her reasons, but if she was so
damned sure she was doing the right thing, why did she have to lie
about it and blame everything on Dad? If she hadn’t ratted on the
guy in the first place, the IRS wouldn’t have been able to grab all
their money and leave us high and dry.”

Denniston’s quavering
voice and the unsteady hand with which he lifted his glass to down
the dregs of his second martini attested to the devastating impact of
his father’s revelation. After more than a decade of despising and
shunning his father and idolizing his mother, he had discovered that
his mother had stolen his birthright. If Denniston had not been a
total cynic already, one might have forgiven his loss of faith in
humanity.

Another round of drinks
arrived.

Linder noticed
Denniston’s faraway look assume a hard and menacing aspect and
decided to change the subject fast. So, he asked Denniston how the
idea of leaving the Agency to join the Department of State Security
had come to him.

In the blink of an eye,
Denniston regained his composure.

“You won’t believe
this,” he began, suddenly reenergized. “But I actually started to
explore the idea last fall before the elections, long before anybody
had an inkling of the President’s pullout scheme. I had been taking
some flak from Headquarters and, around that time, it reached the
point where I worried my career might take a nosedive.”

“What could they
possibly complain about?” Linder interjected, pretending to be
unaware of the disciplinary action against Denniston. “Hell, they
promoted you last year and you’ve already racked up a couple more
recruitments since then. What more could they want?”

“That’s kind of how
I felt, too,” Denniston agreed, “but they did some kind of
financial audit and dinged the Base for recycling captured property
back into an off-budget ops fund.”

Linder noted that
Denniston seemed to watch his reaction closely and appeared to sense
that Linder harbored doubts about his story.

“Heck, it’s done
all the time,” Denniston offered with a broad wave. “Routine
budget shenanigans. It’s not as if we blew it all on booze and
women.

Here Denniston paused,
perhaps expecting Linder to agree, but the latter offered him no such
satisfaction.

“Never mind,” he
went on. “Once I transfer to the DSS, the whole episode will go
away and I’ll start with a clean slate. Which is all I care about
at this point. Hell, the President says we’ve made the world safe
for democracy, so why not forgive and forget, eh?”

Denniston let out a
deep sigh and grinned as if he didn’t have a care in the world, but
Linder could see that he did care. If there was anything Denniston
could not tolerate, it was being judged.

When the waiter
returned, the two men ordered dinner while continuing to reminisce
about old times in the Agency as if their tenure were already at an
end. Then they moved on to the President’s unilateral withdrawal
order, his claims of a growing threat of domestic insurgency, and the
sort of action that might await them in the DSS if they made the
transfer.

While they ate, a
ten-piece Latin dance band began to set up on the platform at the
front of the restaurant, complete with piano, xylophone, horns, bass,
and a full percussion section including congas, bongos, timbales, and
maracas. A dark-haired woman in a sequined dress set up a microphone
and adjusted it to the proper height before testing the volume.

The two men had barely
finished their entrees when a tall, leggy blonde with a low voice and
high bosom approached the table and slithered onto the seat next to
Denniston. Like most of the girls at the club, she wore a simple
black dress with very little jewelry and even less makeup. The look
was fresh, youthful, and enticingly modest.

“I saw your name on
the reservation list, Neil Boy” she opened slyly. “I was hoping
you’d come back, but you must like us even more than I thought for
you to come all the way down from Washington so soon,” she said in
a soft Tidewater drawl.

“I hope you realize I
dropped absolutely everything to be here,” Denniston deadpanned.

The blonde dismissed
him with a smile and turned to Linder.

“Who’s your
good-looking friend?” she asked Denniston without taking her eyes
off Linder. “Are you going to introduce us?”

Denniston performed a
proper introduction as requested.

“You look lonely,”
she told Linder bluntly, bringing her face close to his. “You know,
I could fix that. I have a friend I think you might hit it off with.
Would you like to meet her?”

Linder glanced past
Sheila to Denniston, who rolled his eyes.

“She’s a sorority
sister of mine,” Sheila went on. “Do you like redheads?”

“How did you ever
know?” Linder answered with feigned surprise. “I have an
appalling weakness for redheads. You’ve simply got to bring her
over here.”

“You know, I like
decisiveness in a man,” Sheila replied earnestly as she rose from
her chair, offering a generous view of her cleavage. “We’re all
going to get along just fine, Warren. I can see that already.”

A few minutes later,
Sheila arrived with her friend in tow. She was a stunning redhead
with sparkling green eyes and freckles from head to toe, nearly as
tall as Sheila, and dressed in a green silk sheath that fit her like
a glove.

Linder wasted no time
in introducing himself and, when their eyes met, he felt good things
start to happen. Her name was Nora, and she had a playful, outgoing
manner that hinted at intelligence and wit. Sheila then introduced
Nora to Denniston and, to Linder’s surprise, Denniston gazed at the
redhead as if he had never seen anything like her in his life. He was
obviously smitten with her, but when he tried to start a conversation
with her, she fended him off politely, as if territorial boundaries
had been set and Denniston was off limits.

Linder broke the ice by
asking the women what they would like to drink, knowing full well
that their job was to induce the men to drop as much money on alcohol
as possible.

“Oh, you’re so kind
to ask, Warren,” Sheila replied. “Let’s see, what drink works
both as an aperitif and an after dinner drink?”

“I see where you’re
going with this,” Nora observed, shaking her head and laughing.

“Really, don’t
y’all think we ought to celebrate?” Sheila continued. “I think
a bottle of champagne would be perfect for that. After all, it’s
Warren’s first visit. And I’m so delighted that Neal Boy
remembered me fondly enough to come back again.”