Courier

  Terry Irving

  COURIER

  To Ann, for everything

  CHAPTER 1

  Tuesday, December 19, 1972

  It felt like the motorcycle had become a part of his body – a part that made him whole. The back tire of the BMW R50/2 had started to lose traction on the crusted ice – ice that had hung around for months in the shadowed parts of the alley, where the sun never reached. The wheel was spinning now and drifting left, the back end approaching a ninety-degree angle to the front, but Rick Putnam realized, with a bit of surprise, that he wasn’t concerned.

  He saw the patch of dry concrete coming up and blipped the throttle just a bit as he crossed it. Dropping his weight back on the bench seat made the rear wheel grab on the concrete and pop back into alignment. It was all reflex action – as automatic as walking.

  At the end of the alley he flicked his eyes to the right, saw an opening in the traffic, downshifted, and slammed across the sidewalk. Entering 19th Street, he locked the rear wheel, threw his body to break the big bike to the right, and skidded smoothly into the moving line of cars. He heard the screech of brakes, and an angry horn went off behind him, but the bike was already picking up speed, flicking past the two- and three-story brick-row houses.

  He liked Washington. It was as if the city had exploded during World War Two and then stopped, exhausted from the effort. The town houses were modest and usually a bit crooked, the brick painted every color imaginable, and the stores, restaurants, and bars on the ground floor varied and eccentric.

  The relatively few large office buildings stood out like Stalinist mistakes – square and featureless, built to the exact millimeter of the height limitations. Alleys cut through the center of most blocks, often just cobblestones or an uneven mixture of asphalt and concrete patches.

  A century ago, these alleys had held a separate city of poor whites and freed slaves. Rick had learned that from the same rider who’d showed him how they were the secret to the city – a way to evade traffic lights and bypass commuters. The alleys may not have held another city these days, but they were still more than just urban driveways. Hidden from view were bars, restaurants, nightclubs, and little food stores – a Washington that tourists would never see.

  He took the right onto K Street and all thoughts of the city­ – and everything else – were lost in the crystalline concentration of the dance.

  Fifteen miles ahead of the courier, a specialist in the restoration of silence began his latest assignment.

  In a quiet Virginia suburb, his black Chevy Impala was parked against the curb on Fairfield Street some fifty feet from where Fairfield met Fairmount in a T intersection. Taking off his hat to lower his profile, he sat perfectly still and watched the single-story brick Colonial straight ahead of him – the perfectly white shutters and clipped shrubbery indicating a precise, even obsessive, owner. A white AMC Jeep Wagoneer with a strip of simulated wood running down the side sat at the curb, partially blocking his view of the lawn but still revealing a carefully placed wooden Santa and a pair of wicker reindeers.

  Looking through the Wagoneer’s windows, he could see large, heavy-looking equipment cases that had obviously been pulled from the Jeep’s cargo area. One case was open, revealing shiny metal rods and bits of colored cellophane. He assumed it was lighting gear for the television crew now inside the house. They were probably filming their interview and almost certainly did not know they were being observed.

  He scanned the street in front of him, then, without moving his head, methodically checked behind him in the rearview mirror. Catching a glimpse of himself – something unusual since he never sought out mirrors – his startling blue eyes under deep brows stared back. Women might find them mesmerizing, but he regretted how they made him so easy to remember. Usually he wore dark sunglasses, but in today’s gray afternoon light, sunglasses might result in one of those curious second looks that sometimes proved so inconvenient.

  He had spent many years making sure he was neither noticed nor remembered. His name – which a long time ago had been Ed Jarvis – had faded under a succession of false identities, leaving him defined by his occupation: an operative, an agent, a useful tool to get things done, a restorer of silence. Stroking his mustache down, making it just a bit less noticeable, he resumed his watch.

  Fairfield Street was tree-lined, quiet. No one was walking a dog or scraping the last bits of ice off their driveways. It had begun to warm in the past few days, and there wasn’t much ice left, anyway. That was good; he’d seen enough ice for a lifetime. When he thought about it, which was far too often, he could feel the searing cold of a Korean winter still sleeping deep inside him.

  His careful scrutiny went on for a full fifteen minutes. Nothing set off his internal alarms. He got out of the car, took a beige parka from the backseat, and put it on over his gray suit. Then he began to walk down Fairfield Street, away from the T intersection. There were no sidewalks, so he walked in the road – just far enough away from the curb to stay out of the puddles of snowmelt. Keeping a steady pace gave him the appearance of a man out for a little exercise to break up an afternoon cooped up at home.

  He made three left turns, circling the block, and approached the Colonial from the opposite direction, his deliberate pace giving him time to verify that no one was in any of the backyards. Without changing his pace, he walked past the left side of the Wagoneer, reaching down slightly and placing a small box into the top of both wheel wells. He could hear the faint chunks as their magnets pulled them tight against the metal.

  He continued back to his car, feeling confident that – even if anyone were watching – no one would have noticed such a minor change in his stride. Back in his car, he sat for a long moment to be certain that no one had appeared on the street or come to look out of any nearby windows. Then he put the car in drive.

  Moving at a smooth, unhurried speed, he turned to the left on Fairmount, away from the house, and made three right turns to circle around the block behind the house. Now he was certain that there were no other surveillance teams watching the Colonial. He didn’t think any other team – even from the FBI or CIA – would be a problem, but it was always satisfying to know that he could work free of distractions.

  He came slowly down Fairmount from the same direction he had just approached on foot and stopped as soon as he had a good view of the Wagoneer. He was safely hidden behind a Dodge station wagon, and after looking up, he reversed a couple of feet into the deep shade of an oak tree. He knew the shadows would only deepen as the short December day waned.

  Then he sat and waited.

  Waited to do his work.

  To stop the voices.

  To restore silence.

  To kill.

  The left lane was clear, and Rick came up through the gears, hearing the solid ka-chunk each time the transmission engaged. The BMW might not be slick, but it was steady, dependable, and fast enough if you gave the engine the time and torque to reach full power. It didn’t have a tachometer, so he listened to the exhaust sound and shifted a couple of seconds after the engine’s normal throaty putter rose to a shout.

  By the time he hit the elevated freeway that cut past Georgetown, he was in top gear and running fast. The wide handlebars felt solid and secure under his thick gloves. Even the winter wind, which was numbing his face and slicing through the zipper of his leather jacket, felt good – a sharp, cold bite after the steam of the overheated news bureau.

  That would change in just a few miles, the zipper stream becoming a shard of ice impaling his heart, his face stiffening, hands cramping into claws, only his eyes behind the heavy glasses safe from the wind’s sharp whip.

  There were cars lined up at M Street, but hell, why ride a motorcycle if you couldn’t dance? He kicked down to se
cond, slid between cars on the centerline, cut in front of a Dodge waiting patiently for the light to turn, and swung up onto Key Bridge.

  Halfway across the Potomac River, he was back in top gear, and he cut the corner hard when he reached the Virginia side – almost grinding the big side-mounted cylinder on the asphalt – and let the bike fly down the entrance ramp to the George Washington Parkway.

  Traffic clotted the parkway – commuters and, undoubtedly, police cars up ahead. None of that mattered. He was dancing now, carving graceful curves right down the centerline in top gear with the throttle nailed. Cars flashed by as he wove between them.

  He couldn’t look at the speedometer, couldn’t take his eyes off the road, couldn’t spare a second of concentration from the delicate ballet of shifting weight, tire grip, and wide-open throttle, rejoicing in each deep dip into a turn and the swooping acceleration coming out.

  He jolted back to reality when the exit to Chain Bridge Road came up on the right. Unable to bleed off enough speed before the exit, he took the curve way too fast, jamming the bike down on its side, twisting the handgrips against the turn – fighting to keep his wheels from drifting into the treacherous gravel on the outside. He knew that if he touched the brakes, the tires would lose all adhesion and fly out from under him.

  He kept his gaze straight ahead – searching for the end of the turn – and the BMW held like it was locked on rails as it carved a perfect line through the curve. The rear end had just begun to drift slightly when he spotted the stop sign and straightened up. Now he could use the brakes, and he quickly wrestled the bike under control.

  As he stopped, he felt the strange upward lift that the old-fashioned Earles front suspension always gave when he put on the front brake. Any other bike would plunge the front down into the telescoping front forks; the triangular links of the BMW floated the stress up and forwards.

  For just a second, he kept the clean clarity of the dance in his mind, and then it was gone. Memories came flooding back. Blood, and stench, and screaming, the terrible beauty as napalm set the tall grass on fire and flowers of light burst from snipers in the trees. Only the dance could fill up his mind – speed and real danger frightening him enough to keep the phantom terrors away, if only for a few precious moments.

  Rick sighed, then kicked the gearshift down into first and turned right – heading for his next film pickup.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rick spotted the Wagoneer as he came up Fairmount, and swung the bike in a semicircle right in front of it. Then he stopped, released the brakes, and let it slide backward until it bumped against the curb just in front of the Jeep. He pushed forward just a bit and then yanked the heavy machine up onto the center stand. He took off the scratched helmet with the tattered ABN News stickers and set it on the adjustment knob that sat in the center post of the handlebars.

  It was about fifty degrees but dropping fast into the forties. Rick felt a bit of the loopy fog in his head that meant his core temperature had dropped, but it wasn’t too bad – certainly not severe enough to slow him down on the way back. He took off the heavy riding gloves and bent down to cup his hands over the twin opposed cylinders – the "jugs" that gave a BMW its perversely old-fashioned look. He took care not to touch the hot metal but got his hands close enough to absorb some of the intense radiant heat.

  He could feel sensation trickle back into his fingers, numbed even through the gloves’ triple layers of leather. As he waited, he looked at the scarred and twisted palms of the gloves and remembered the time in the snow when he was so cold that he’d put his hands right on the red-hot exhaust pipes. At least the heat had permanently seared the gloves into the right shape for holding handlebar grips – if for nothing else. He didn’t even want to think of what his bare palms would have looked like.

  As soon as his hands had warmed up enough to regain flexibility, he unzipped the chest pocket on the worn and cracked leather jacket, pulled out a pack of Winstons, and then dug into his jeans for a battered steel Zippo. It was so worn that the engraving on the front and back was almost invisible. He snapped the lighter down and then back up against his thigh, flipping back the top on the downstroke and spinning the wheel to light the wick on the way up. It was a trick that showed years of practice.

  Lighting his cigarette, he inhaled deeply, almost hungrily, and then pulled a paperback copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas out of the back pocket of his jeans. Settling backwards on the motorcycle seat with his back resting against his helmet and his Frye boots up on the metal radio bolted over the rear wheel, he began to read.

  Rick had only finished a couple of pages before the front door opened, and Joe Hadley came out and stood silhouetted in the light fanning out from the living room behind him. A small, neat man in a dark suit with a fat polyester tie and carefully combed hair, Hadley was the Associated Broadcast Network’s best investigative reporter. He was the best because he was always on the move, walking at a pace that kept taller men almost jogging to keep up, breaking off conversations to make a phone call whenever he passed a pay phone, or to consult the narrow reporter’s notebooks he carried in his coat pockets.

  Now, Hadley was writing furiously in one of those notebooks, face impassive as he worked. Suddenly, he jumped and spun around with a curse.

  "Damn it. I hate when you do that, Ed!"

  "Well, if you’d get out of the damn way, it wouldn’t happen." Ed Farr, the cameraman who had just goosed him, was a tall, thin, balding man in slacks and a dark blazer. He moved smoothly past Hadley and headed for the courier, carrying an enormous film magazine that looked like a pair of steel Mickey Mouse ears. Rick reluctantly turned over a corner of a page in his book to keep his place, returned it to his pocket, and swung his long legs off the bike.

  "That had better not be a twelve-hundred-foot mag," he said as the cameraman approached. "You know we’re not supposed to carry them anymore after Art got one caught in his rear wheel and damn near killed himself on the Beltway."

  "It’s twelve hundred feet of pure artistry, and if you think I’m going to get out the damn light bag and spend thirty minutes canning it for you, you’re dumber than the rest of the cycle monkeys." Trying not to show the effort, Farr tossed the magazine to Rick, who caught it with one hand as if it were made of plastic instead of at least thirty pounds of metal. Farr looked impressed.

  "Looks like you’re keeping up with the weights, kid."

  "Yeah, well, it’s that or let the North Vietnamese win. The doctors in Japan said I’d never use this arm again." As he spoke, Rick put his right hand at the center point between the magazine’s two round drums, balanced it, and then lifted it up and down in slow, lazy bicep curls. "But I’m still not sticking this monster in my bag. Are you trying to kill me?"

  "Fucking right I am, and even if I wasn’t, we don’t have the time. This guy wouldn’t stop talking, and you’ll have to hustle to hit the soup by the deadline."

  Tempting as it was to get into an argument with a cameraman, Rick knew Farr was right. One of the fixed facts about television news was that it took forty-two minutes for sixteen-millimeter color positive film to pass through "the soup" – the automatic film processor back at the bureau that developed, fixed, rinsed, dried, and spun the film onto edit reels.

  Checking his watch, Rick realized that he was indeed going to have to hurry if this story was going to make the first network broadcast at 6 o’clock. That was OK, since pushing his bike to the limits for a legitimate reason was even better than just dancing for fun.

  "All right, I’ll do it this time because I like you. Remember what happened to Walt last week? Next time it could be you."

  Ed’s face flushed with anger. "Listen, you stupid bastard. I find that you’ve ever screwed with one of my magazines, I’ll kick your ass! Simmons should have had that courier fired for that stunt."

  Rick reflected that the courier actually had been fired, but that it didn’t seem to bother him much. Evidently, taping the end of the raw, unexposed film t
o a stop sign and letting all twelve hundred feet spill out behind him to be irretrievably ruined by sunlight as he drove away was a sufficiently satisfying statement of how he felt about cameramen and their bullying ways. Good couriers could always get another job, anyway.

  Rick smiled at the memory of Walt Simmons’s reaction – he’d screamed and smashed things in the crew room for over an hour.

  Then, Rick nodded agreement to the cameraman and turned to pack the magazine securely into the battered canvas bag strung alongside the right rear wheel in an improvised web of bungee cords. The tough newspaper delivery bags a couple of the other couriers had swiped a few weeks ago would do the job, even if the bright red Washington Star logo looked a bit tacky.

  "Take good care of this." Hadley was scurrying over from the front porch. "This is a goddamn big story. It’ll make those jerks at the Post look like idiots and Watergate look like a cop taking an apple off a fruit stand."

  "Well, I was planning to drop it in the Potomac, but now that you’ve told me how important it is, I’ll try to restrain myself." Rick finished strapping the magazine down tight. "Now, if you gentlemen will stop bothering me, I’ll be on my way."

  "Wait!"

  Pete Moten, a young black man who was the sound tech and apprentice cameraman on the crew, ran out of the house carrying a small camera and a metal film canister with red adhesive tape around the edge.

  "Take the ‘B-roll’ with you. There’s some still in the camera, so take the Bolex, too." The Bolex was a small hand-wound camera used to record "B-roll", silent cutaway shots and exteriors that would be combined in the edit room with the "A-roll", the film with an optical audio track, which had been shot with the primary camera.

  "Shit," said the reporter, "I almost forgot about that. I don’t know if we need to send it in. This guy gave us the whole story in the interview."

  "Are you kidding? Talking is one thing." Pete patted the Bolex. "I got the real deal right in here. When you see what I shot while you were trying to get a straight answer out of that number cruncher, you’re going to make me a real shooter. I’m telling you, man, I’ve saved your ass. Remember how Smithson caved to the White House on your last piece? Well, this time we’ve got the goods."