OMEGA–8

THE LIGHT FROM THE FIREPLACE WAS REFLECTED IN HIS EYEGLASSES. I EVEN saw the logs flicker as I spoke.

“Let’s take it for granted,” I said, “that my separation from the service will be equitable.” I do not know if my voice sounded inadmissably smug in its assessment, or if Rosen had been playing me with a well-chosen fly, but now I could feel him taking in slack.

His thin lips took on the severity of a bureaucrat about to land his trout.

“Let us assume,” he said, “that concerted cooperation will permit separation on equitable terms so far as relevant guidelines allow.”

Not everyone could speak bureaucratese. I nodded scornfully. I realized I was drunk. That didn’t happen often these days no matter how much I drank, but you do get to feel competitive about your command of the tongue after more than twenty-five years in the government.

“Subject,” I told him, “to appropriate conjunction, we will engineer a collateral inquiry out of the competing contingencies.”

I said this to get that highly domiciled little smile off his face, but he merely looked sad. I realized that Rosen was as full of liquor as myself. We had been running a small rapids on the great river of booze. Now the drop was over. The river was calm.

He sighed. I thought he was about to say, “How could you have done it?” but instead he murmured, “We’re not ready to make deals.”

“Then where are we?”

“I’d like your overview.”

I took a sobering swallow of Scotch. “Why?”

“Maybe I need it. We’re in the middle of a disaster. Sometimes you see things more clearly than me.”

“All right,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said. I began to think he did.

“What do we have?” I asked. “You are holding a body that is Harlot’s body?”

“Yes,” he said, but reluctantly, as if ready to deny his own affirmative.

“I assume,” I said, and I took another sip of Scotch before bringing my voice down this gravel path, “the remains are damaged and swollen by water.”

“The body, ostensibly, belongs to Harlot.”

We were silent. I had known it would not be routine to speak of Harlot’s death in any fashion, yet was still surprised at the engorgement of my throat. Sorrow, anger, confusion, and a hint of hysteria at my own confusion were all groping alike for a safe spot in my larynx. I discovered that it helped to look at the fire. I studied a log as it glowed into incandescence before collapsing softly upon itself, and I began to mourn Harlot—along with all else! Yet mortality, we learn from every sermon, is the dissolution of all matter, yes, all our forms flow down to the sea, and Harlot’s death was entering the universe. So, too, did my throat feel less impeded.

I discovered I did want to talk about Harlot’s death. No matter how much had taken place this evening—or was it precisely because of all that had happened?—I felt as if I had finally retreated to the middle of myself, to the clear logical middle of myself, and if my emotional ends had been consumed, so was the middle stronger. If drunk ten minutes ago, I now felt sober, but then drunkenness is the abdication of the ego, and mine had just surfaced like a whale. I felt a considerable need to recognize all over again just how sane I could be, which is to say, how lucid, how logical, how sardonic, how superior to everybody’s weaknesses, including my own. Did Rosen look for analysis? I would give it to him. Something of the old days was coming back to me—the sense the two of us used to share of being Harlot’s best and brightest. And certainly his most competitive. It did not matter any longer how tired I was, I felt tireless in the center of my brain.

“Ned, the first question is whether it’s murder or suicide.”

He nodded.

To myself I thought: Suicide could only mean that Harlot had been playing for large stakes and lost. The corollary was that the High Holies were mortally disloyal to the Company, and I was, therefore, in no small trouble.

“Keep going.”

“If, however, Harlot was murdered,” I said, and stopped again. Greater difficulties commenced here. I chose an old CIA saw: “You don’t lance a boil,” I told him, “without having some idea where the drainage will go.”

“Of course,” said Rosen.

“Well, Reed, if Harlot suffered a hit, do the sluiceways point east or west?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know whether to look for the King Brothers or closer to home.” He exhaled from the tension of having carried this by himself all these hours.

“It can’t be the King Brothers,” I said.

He tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth. It would be the next thing to mutual kamikaze if we and the KGB ever began killing each other’s officers. By unspoken covenant we didn’t. Third World agents, perhaps, and an occasional European, but not each other. “No, not the Russians,” I said, “unless Harlot was working a double game with them.”

Rosen sighed.

“On the other hand,” I proposed, “it could be us.”

“Would you expatiate on that?” Rosen asked.

“Harlot was riding one hypothesis fairly hard. He had decided there was an enclave among us using our most classified information as a guide to buy, sell, and invest all over the world. By his estimate, these covert finances are larger by now than our entire budget for Operations.”

“Are you saying, then, that Harlot was killed by Agency people?”

“They stood to lose billions. Maybe more.”

I was partial to the thesis. For Harlot’s sake and for my own. If he was the good sentinel on guard against massive internal corruption, then to have worked with him might cast an honorable light on me.

Rosen, however, shook his head. “It’s not productive to go in this direction yet,” he said. “You don’t know the worst-case scenario. There’s a hell of a roadblock in front of your thesis.”

I poured a little more Scotch for both of us.

“You see,” said Rosen, “we are not, in fact, sure it’s Harlot’s remains. Not what washed up in the Chesapeake.”

“Not sure?” I could hear the echo in my voice.

“We have what purports to be Montague’s body. But the labs can’t give 100-percent probability to the cadaver. Although the specificities are respectable. Good fit for height and weight. On his third finger, left hand, a St. Matthew’s ring. The face, however, is no help at all.” Rosen’s pale gray eyes, usually unremarkable, now looked awfully bright behind his eyeglasses.

“I couldn’t get myself to tell Kittredge,” he continued. “The face and head were blown off. Shotgun muzzle pressed against the palate. Probably a sawed-off shotgun.”

I did not wish to contemplate this image longer than I had to. “What about Hugh’s back?” I asked.

“There is a severe back injury on the body. No perambulative functions would be possible.” He shook his head. “We can’t be positive, however, that it’s the Montague injury.”

“Surely you have Harlot’s X-rays on file?”

“Well, Harry, you know Harlot. He had all records transferred from his hospital treatment center to us. He would never allow information about himself to repose anywhere out of the domain.”

“What do his X-rays tell you?”

“That’s the roadblock,” said Rosen. “The X-rays can’t be found.” He took his pipe out of his mouth and scrutinized the progress of the char in his bowl. “We have a first-rate headache.”