"You mean about the, um -- "

"The suspension, yes. Please stop by my desk on the way out." And she turned and left.

Nick watched her march off. There was something rigid and jointless in the way she moved. She was one of those people who'd just let the Bureau sink into her life until it filled her whole personality. Until it became her personality. She was a lifer in the worst possible way, so gone in the life no other was even possible.

Well, he thought, that won't happen to me. God knows what will, but that won't.

And suddenly he was out of things to do.

He looked down at his meager cardboard box of belongings. Then he looked around for a friend, a colleague, someone to embrace or to give him a look or to signify that he was still loved, or, hell, that he was still alive. But everywhere in the office the other agents seemed preoccupied. A kind of hush had fallen over them.

Yeah, sure, I get it, he thought.

He went to find Doris Drabney, sitting stiffly at her desk.

"Yes, yes, you've got, let's see, you've got to sign this and this and...oh, yes, this."

Numbly he signed the forms. One had to do with his Government Credit Union account, one had to do with his GEICO insurance policy, which would cease to be in effect thirty days from today, and one required a formal acknowledgment that he was being placed on indefinite leave without pay pending a meeting of the review board in re his case blah blah blah.

"Is that it?"

"That's it. You'll be notified of the hearing."

I'm history, he thought.

"And your last paycheck is being held until you return the pistol."

"What?"

"Nick, that Smith & Wesson Model 1076 you lost during the incident of the speech. That was government property. Remember, you filed a lost-line-of-duty item report. And it was turned down? I sent the response to you in Arkansas. You're being billed for the pistol. It's four hundred fifty-five dollars."

He just looked at her.

It's probably an ingot mulched in with Bob Swagger's bones, he thought. Or somewhere in a soggy swamp, or in some ocean somewhere, wherever Bob had been before he died.

He turned to leave.

"Oh, and you're supposed to see Sally Ellion in Records, too."

Ach! Sally! She was a slight, pretty, very Southern girl with what people all called "personality"; she'd had a hundred boyfriends in her time, and was always dumping one for another and then the new one. He'd always liked her somehow, even if she scared him a little bit. What on earth could she want now?

"What for?"

"I haven't the slightest."

So, it came down to this last thing. He went to find the young woman, who of course was on break, and had to wait for half an hour feeling stupid and preposterous until she came back from the cafeteria. At last she hove into sight, beaming pep, with a small roll in her shoulders as she walked. She'd probably had a date every night in her life, Nick thought; her Saturday nights were one long festival. She probably dated quarterbacks and shortstops. Looking at her, he sank a bit deeper into his depression.

"Hi, uh, Sally, uh, someone said -- "

"Nick, hi! Did I keep you waiting? Gosh, I'm sorry. Those fingerprint techs; they just wouldn't let me get out of the cafeteria."

Great. He'd been hung up here like a fish on a line, Howard's newest trophy, for the office to admire, while those lazy clowns were trying to make time with Sal.

"Well, anyway," she went on. "I have this thing for you. It just came in today. Where have you been? I called out to Arkansas yesterday and they said you'd gone, but you didn't check in last night."

"Uh, I sort of awarded myself a night off. You know, a little R and R, for a job well done."

"Shhhhh," she said. "Don't say that out loud. Someone might hear you and not realize you were joking."

"I'm beyond hurt at this point. Anyway, what's up, I really have to -- "

"Well, it's only partially official. I wanted to say something to you. I just wanted to tell you how much I admired what you did with your wife. How you stuck with her. I think that's neat. Not many men would have done such a thing."

"Oh," said Nick, taken aback. "Oh, well, it seemed like the kind of thing you sort of had to do, that's all. You know, I don't like to quit on things. I like to stick with them. That's all. Stubborn. Stupid, but stubborn, just like a mule."

She laughed.

"Well," she said, "that's neat. Not many like that. Lots of people just quit on you."

"Ummm," Nick grunted, having run into a conversational brick wall and splatted against it. "Yeah. Ummm."

"Anyhow," she said, after a minute when it became obvious first of all that she wanted him to say something like, "Gee, why don't we go out for lunch or a drink sometime?" and second of all that he didn't begin to possess the vocabulary for such a thing, "anyhow, I thought you might want to know, it came."

Her eyes were bright and sweet. She was so pretty. It angered him that she should be so pretty on the last day of his career and she was just prattling on about things he didn't understand.

Nick blinked.

"Huh?"

"You know. Don't you remember the last time I talked to you?"

He couldn't begin to put it together again in his head.

"You wanted that file from Washington, but they wouldn't send it because you weren't cleared."

He remembered asking her about it in the hallway at some point or other.

"Yeah?"

"Well, I put you in for the clearance."

"You put me in?" he asked, incredulously. "But that needs a supervisor's signature and, uh, I mean -- "

"Oh, Mr. Utey signed it. He wasn't sure what it was, and anyway he was so busy I don't think he cared and you were his right-hand man and everything."

It suddenly occurred to him with a stupendous flash that Sally Ellion was so busy being the office's favorite girl that she hadn't caught on quite yet to the fact that he'd gotten the sack.

She smiled again.

"And you got it. The clearance."

"Uh huh," he said, not quite sure where this was going.

"And so they just authorized a printout. I just got it from the printing room."

She handed him a thick sheaf of computer-printed paper.

It was marked TOP SECRET/SENIOR SUPERVISORY PERSONNEL ONLY.

Nick looked at it.

It was the RamDyne file.

Chapter TWENTY-FOUR.

Shreck, alone in his office now, was surprised how little elation he felt. It reminded him of the way it was when he came off a hill in Korea in 1953, when he was seventeen years old. Not relief, not guilt, just simple numbness. He knew it was classic postcombat stress syndrome; depletion, emotional and physical, and as you recharged you went into a kind of torpid state.

But it had only happened to him that one time in Korea, because he was so new to it. In all his other operations, as they wound into the triumph or bitterness but always survival, he'd felt incredibly lightened, charged, made whole again. This fucker Swagger had really gotten under his skin; a tough guy, a dangerous guy, just the sort of guy who could bring it all down.

When the phone call finally came, it was something of an anticlimax. Dobbler had managed to meet the Bureau contact without difficulty and was handed the actual forensic lab report, complete with X rays. From then on, Dobbler just babbled to Shreck, couldn't control himself, spoke too plainly, dithered and yammered too much. But the gist got through. The X rays checked. Everything was fine. Bob was dead. It was over.

Shreck felt some lightening of feeling, but not much. He was not a man of many pleasures; only duty and mission were pleasures. But this really was his finest triumph. He thought maybe he'd go shoot sporting clays this weekend. Maybe he'd buy a new car. But mainly he wanted to -- The secure phone rang.

He looked at it for a long second, before picking it up.

"Shreck."

It was Hugh Meachum.

"Colonel, we have a problem."

LANCER CLEARANCE NECESSARY.

IF YOU ARE NOT LANCER CLEARED, IMMEDIATELY RETURN THIS FILE TO ITS JACKET, SECURE IT, AND RETURN IT TO ITS POINT OF ORIGIN. YOU MUST NOTIFY THE LANCER COMMITTEE IF YOU HAVE ENCOUNTERED THIS FILE IN AN UNAUTHORIZED METHOD.

Nick looked at it dumbly. In his years in the Bureau he'd bumped into a few strange commands, but he'd never hit this one before. He blinked, but the warning would not go away; there it was, big as life, all caps, booming out at him. He felt extremely guilty. Practically from birth, Nick had obeyed rules, signs, orders, directions, speed limits, legal technicalities, everything. Yet at the same time the illicit thrill of what he was about to do was giddy and sweet, even if it brought his breath from his lungs and made his head ache where he'd smashed it against the truck door.

He sat in his basement. It was well past nine, and after waiting all afternoon he'd at last come down the stairs, turned on the overhead light and settled into an old lawn chair. The air smelled of moisture and wood and oil. The bare bulb wobbled slightly. There was no other sound.

Lancer, he thought, taking one more deep breath.

Lancer? He knew that in their many years of uneasy operational coexistence, the Bureau and the Agency had many times bumbled into each other. And sometimes, under strict control (at least in theory) the Agency would do something that was technically in violation of the law; thus the Lancer Committee had to be that elite group in high Bureau quarters that was kept informed of these transgressions and made certain that no Bureau operatives moved forward aggressively to apprehend the perpetrator, thereby blowing an Agency scam or endangering Agency personnel.

That's what he guessed the Lancer Committee to be.

And as he looked at the early documents before him, he could see that the Lancer Committee had quite early on declared its power.

LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY INTERESTS ARE AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B) was one of the first such decrees, dating from 1964, when agents in Los Angeles had uncovered a warehouse full of fifteen hundred Armalite rifles headed for the presidential guard of the then obscure country of South Vietnam. Perusing the material, Nick saw that the warehouse was owned by something called RamDyne Security, with an address in Miami. He whistled. He knew the Armalite was the early name for the rifle that was later called the M-16 when it was adopted by the United States Army and Marine Corps. Whoever could get Armalites in such numbers before they were officially adopted a) knew they were going to be adopted and b) put some big money up front. Who would that be? Only one answer.

So that meant RamDyne was CIA.

Or did it?

As he paged through the documents, LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B) suddenly began happening all over the place. RamDyne Security and Lancer Committee had a very busy time of it in the late sixties and early seventies; the imprimatur was showing up on Air America shipments from Bangkok to Manila -- and not for envelopes, Nick guessed. RamDyne Security had a contract to import Swedish K's to something called the Special Operations Group -- SOG -- up near the Laotian border. RamDyne Security bought ten thousand surplus M-1 carbines from the Republic of Taiwan and shipped them to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for unspecified use. RamDyne Security imported two thousand pairs of Hiatt's handcuffs to the Saigon police force. RamDyne Security shipped fifty obsolete T-28 trainers to the Cambodian Air Force. RamDyne grew and grew and prospered as the war expanded.

But by the mid to late seventies, the action had moved elsewhere. Riffling through the material, Nick was fascinated to see that RamDyne had connections in the Middle East. For example it served as a conduit for the shorty M-16's that showed up in the hands of Israeli commandos at Entebbe and for much of the sophisticated electronics that was the specialty of the Israeli air force.

Who are they? Nick wondered. Because he saw at a glance that although just about everything that RamDyne did was conceived in such a way as to advance American interests, it also involved large sums of money for equipment, training or expertise in...

...in war?

Well, not exactly. What RamDyne sold was something that, although it was the essence of war, wasn't war itself, and it certainly wasn't standard military doctrine. No, it was something different, a purer distillation of a government's role on earth.

RamDyne sold force.

That was it: guns, torture, interrogation, police methods, financial transfers, avionics, whatever...always, force. The way in which an unpopular government stays in power or a shaky one consolidates its power or an isolated one fights off enemies several times its size. RamDyne had no neurosis about the use of force.

But who was RamDyne? It couldn't quite be the Agency. Too much money, too shady. Nick could see how RamDyne could help the Agency in its aims, without ever truly becoming the Agency; there would be a strange relationship between them. One would feed on the other. But who was RamDyne?

The only clue Lancer ever offered was tantalizing: RAMDYNE INFO CONTAINED IN ANNEX B, Lancer told one Bureau request, WHICH IS MOST TOP SECRET AND FOR DISPERSAL ON A NEEDTOKNOW BASIS ONLY.

Annex B again, thought Nick. Damn, would I like to get my hands on Annex B.

RamDyne began to move into Central America in the early eighties.

LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B). It appeared on a shipment of flechette munitions on the way to Guatemala City, presumably for use by Contras in the war against the Sandinistas. A crate full of flechette bombs had accidentally broken open at Kennedy Airport in New York. It was at that time illegal to export flechette munitions, as they were one of the best-kept secrets of the war: the plastic darts didn't show up on X rays, so doctors couldn't operate to remove the shrapnel, so the wounded didn't heal, so the Sandinista medical infrastructure was theoretically stressed out. The box, under the guise of Medical Shipments, was being exported by RamDyne Security.

Next was a shipment of interrogation electrodes, cattle prods, whips, truncheons, and PR-24 batons for Pakistan; but Customs had intercepted the material in New York and alerted the Bureau.

LANCER ADVISES NO FURTHER ACTION IN THIS MATTER. NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE (REFER TO ANNEX B).

The shipment was being sent by RamDyne Security of St. Paul, Minnesota.

Nick Memphis turned the page. And then he came up against RamDyne at its classic and at last he understood.

It was RamDyne's involvement with the elite hunter battalion of the Salvadoran airborne rangers nicknamed Los Gatos Negros.

And so it was that Nick Memphis saw what RamDyne was selling. It was, he realized, something more than force; or if it had just been force in the beginning, it had transmuted into something else.

He read about Panther Battalion, and he began to cry.

It was a fine, gay day. Dobbler hadn't been out in ages, in decades. He'd been a hermit, a vampire living only on artificial light and information.