Free The Second Saladin by Stephen Hunter Page B

thought.
    And then he thought of her only contact with him, an answer to the fifteen-page letter he’d sent her when he returned from the Soviet prison. It had been a postcard with a cheesy picture of the Doral Hotel in Miami Beach on it, and it had said, “No, Paul. You know why.”
    “Paul?”
    “Sorry, I was—”
    “The question,” Yost said politely, “is: will he
approach
her? And, would she help him?”
    “She’d help
us
,” Chardy said.
    “Come on, Paul,” said Miles …
Lanahan!
That was it. “For Christ’s sakes, she was sold on the Kurds. If you look at her record the way we did, you cannot escape that conclusion. She went to Iran in ’sixty-nine with thePeace Corps. She came back in ’seventy-three to teach at the college in Rezā’iyeh. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Kirmanji, a Kurdish dialect. She made the pilgrimage to Mahābād, where they had their republic in ’forty-six, and one of her Peace Corps chums told us she wept at the Street of Four Lamps, where the Iranians hanged the Kurdish martyrs.”
    “That’s all true,” said Chardy. “But it’s also true she’s too smart to get involved in anything stupid like you’re talking about. This is a very smart woman. She’s brilliant. She just wouldn’t get mixed up in something goofy like this. Ulu Beg or no Ulu Beg.”
    “If he approached her, she’d help us?”
    “Yes. If we could tell her we wouldn’t hurt him.”
    “Paul, he’s already killed two police officers.”
    “A terrible accident. And the FBI and the Border Patrol haven’t made the connection to Ulu Beg yet. Because you want to play this thing low-profile. You wouldn’t have brought me in unless you wanted to play it low-profile, and I don’t think you want the FBI nosing through some old Agency business.”
    There was stifled silence in the room. Chardy had them, he knew he had them.
    “Let me tell her we’ll try and pick him up and let him walk on it. That’s the key. If you say, ‘We’re going to throw this guy in the slammer for two hundred years,’ then it’s all over. But if you say, ‘Look, it’s terrible, but we can still deal with it,’ then maybe you’ve got a chance.”
    “You love them. Both. Still.” It was the boy, Trewitt.
    “No matter,” said Yost Ver Steeg. “But I’m sure Paul understands”—he seemed to speak to the younger man but in reality talked by echo to Chardy—“no matter what his personal feelings are, just how potentially serious a problem this is. An Agency-trained Kurd with an Agency-providedautomatic weapon. Suppose he commits some terrible act of random violence—like the Japanese terrorists at Lod Airport. Or kills an important public figure. The Agency doesn’t need to be tied up in a scandal like that.”
    Chardy nodded. They
were
scared. He could see the headlines, one of the Agency’s secret little wars exploding in America’s own backyard, American blood on American pavement for the first time. They
were
terrified—of what it would do to the Agency.
    “You can see that, Paul, can’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “After all, it’s your past, too. It was your operation originally. You have some responsibility.”
    “Of course I do,” Chardy said.
    “What happened, in the end, to the Kurds was—well, you must take some responsibility for that, too.”
    “Of course,” said Chardy.
    “So if this woman is the key, we have to find out. We have to know. And if you want to tell her something to help, you go ahead and tell her. But remember what’s at stake.”
    “Yes.”
    The rest was unsaid, and would be represented on no paper: Ulu Beg must be stopped to spare the Agency grotesque embarrassment.
    “You’ll do it then? You’ll see her. You’ll bring her in, you’ll help us. You’ll work with us.”
    “Yes,” Chardy said. He wondered if he meant it, or if it mattered.
    After that it was a matter of details. Who would accompany Chardy to Boston as backup, what approach would he take, how