That was okay, then. O’Neill tried not to think of the gas running into the tank, the sound of liquid.
O’Neill leaned into the phone’s transparent shelter and heard the dial tone. Inserted the phonecard. The call was to another area code; the numbers seemed to go on and on. Then the ringing. Two rings, hang up. Good. Wait. Don’t think about pissing. Listen for the dial tone. Card. Area code. Number. Ringing. One, two, three, four—picked up. No voice.
“Seventeen,” O’Neill said. “Yes.” Oh, thank God! End of exercise.
He hung up, ready to run for the men’s room—and the old guy from the pickup truck was standing there, about five feet from him. The old guy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a card and held it up. The card was black, otherwise blank, but O’Neill knew what it meant.
“Oh, shit.”
“You left skid marks back at the turn,” the old guy said. “C-minus.”
O’Neill sagged. “You going to wash me out of the program?”
“That’s not my decision. I’ll say you did pretty good up to the last part.”
O’Neill started to say something, and then his bladder really pulsed, and he said, “If I don’t get to pee, I’ll wet my pants.”
“Oh, we would flunk you out for that.” The old guy grinned. “Got to learn to carry a bottle, son.” And, as if to prove that he was a mean old sonofabitch, he made a sound: “Pssssssss—”
O’Neill ran.
That evening, he learned that he had made the second cut, despite the low grade on the surveillance exercise. Three others hadn’t—two young civilians who hadn’t a clue and shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and a marine captain whose flunkout was a real surprise. He seemed tough and smart to O’Neill, but he was out and Harry was still in. And Richmond had left on his own hook three days before. The class was shrinking.
Why him and not me? he wondered, thinking of the marine captain. I stay, he goes. Makes no sense. He found he wasn’t entirely pleased that he hadn’t been bounced. Relieved, yes. Ego-relieved. But deeper, no. He wasn’t sure he belonged here.
After the posting of the flunk list, they’d put up for the first time a list of after-graduation assignments. The better you did, the better your chances of getting a good one two months from now when it was over. He had identified two he wanted, and he knew he would have a lot going for him in both because of his near-native French and his experience in-country. Paris and Marseille. Wow. You bet. Then all the others, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia … Jesus, Yugoslavia! Surely nobody would send a black man to Yugoslavia!
Would they?
Near Nice, France.
The man called Zulu was riding in the back seat of a chauffeured Daimler and enjoying it. He liked the idea that other people envied him without knowing who he was, some wealthy man made invisible by tinted glass. He was a little wound-up, not bad, nothing like before a fight or the other—a couple of black pills, pulling him up, then a silver to smooth him out. A civilian dose. He touched his sunglasses, which were very dark and very sleek, wrapped back around his temples like the windows of a jet (Bolle, expensive) and a further step toward invisibility. No, toward disguise. This made him smile, too. Zulu was forty and looked younger. A lot tougher than most men of forty. The disfigured nose was a badge of honor, and some women loved it.
The car purred through electronically operated gates that closed behind it, and it swung right and then curved widely left up a semi-circular drive. A man with a rake and a man with a two-way radio watched it; the man with the rake went back to work on a flowerbed, and the man with the radio murmured something and looked intensely serious.
Lascelles was waiting on a terrace. Lascelles was old, old enough that his face had started to show cross-furrows between other furrows, like the cracks in dried mud where a lake had once been. Lascelles had been a colonel, a mayor, a minister, and the real but invisible head of France’s security apparatus. Until he had been forced out. Now he was an angry old man. Not to be underestimated, however. A dangerous, angry old man.
Zulu got out of the big car quickly, his hands just touching the front of his trousers as if he expected the edges of the door to be dirty, swinging his hips out as a woman does, sliding. Erect, he touched the sunglasses and checked his inner self. Was he just a little too high? No, just right. Not nervous. Zulu had not been nervous since he had got big enough not to fear his father’s belt.
“You like the Daimler?” Lascelles said, shaking hands. Meaning nothing.
“Very nice.”
“You picked a pleasant day.” Lascelles’s eyes flicked over the almost fresh cuts on Zulu’s face, then flicked to his hands. Lascelles missed little. “Yesterday, we had rain. Cold!” Lascelles led him along the terrace, making these human sounds, although neither man was very human, smiling a little smile, as if it amused him to be leading this creature, this thing, this gorille manqué along his terrace. He had used all those terms to talk about the man they called Zulu. Not that he wasn’t something of a creature himself.
“Everything is working all right?”
Zulu used silence for his answer. If everything was not all right, he would speak.
They went in through a door to a big, pleasant room full of soft colors like those on the terrace, fabrics with a sheen, a couple of good but unassertive oil paintings. The room did not smell quite right. “I have a task for you,” Lascelles said once they were inside, as if in there it was safe to get serious.
“I need some things, too.” Zulu reached into his jacket, took out a folded paper and handed over a computer-printed list of weapons.
“Well—” Lascelles sat, motioned toward an armchair. “Tit for tat. I have something I want you to do, fairly big.” His face furrowed still more deeply. His head was round, bald, mottled brown. It drew back into his collar.
“My plate is full at home.”
“Nonsense. They have this ‘peace accord,’ NATO have drawn a wavy line on the ground, you are all at peace.” He laughed. “The Americans are putting their nose into something and I need to slice the end off. That will not offend your sensibilities, I think?”
“You know what I think of them.”
“Exactly.” Lascelles went off on a rant that Zulu had heard before, on and on—moral decay, the Jews, Brussels, NATO, the UN. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, Zulu said to himself, his thoughts invisible behind his tinted glasses, although he had his own reasons for hating NATO and the UN.
“I am an exile in my own country,” Lascelles was saying. “I! An honorable exile! A patriot!” His face was red. Like all the French of a certain kind, the ghost of Napoleon always hovered close by him. “The current government of France is deeply unpatriotic, completely subverted by the world state!”
“What do you want me to do?” Zulu said, letting his impatience show.
“Africa,” Lascelles said.
“Africa, oh, shit—Not again!”
Lascelles leaned forward. “The UN patched together some of their internationalist crap and stopped the Rwandan genocide before a satisfactory conclusion was reached. That’s how they work, to put their army in place. Now they are setting up subversion centers all over that part of Africa. The Americans have satellites up above there, too. Hand in glove.