Free Tool of the Trade by Joe Haldeman

there. Whatever kind of magicking Foley pulled on me, it worked absolutely. They show me his picture, and it means nothing to me. Yet I spent dozens of hours talking to the man, hundreds of hours studying him, and even went to Europe with him.
    Europe is the horror. Not his erasing my memory—no, he was gentle with me. It was the videotape we got from the French police, through the
Sûreté
: the Bulgarian secret agent who, after shooting his companion four times in the heart, had shot himself in the head; his skull on the left shattered and dribbling brains, his eyeball extruded and lolling on his cheek—but still he was miraculously alive. In a rambling mélange of French, Russian, Turkish, and Bulgarian he told how Foley had ordered him and the otheragent to go on a long train ride, as far as their money would take them, and then walk out of town to where they would not be seen, and die. For seven hours they knew they were riding to self-inflicted death, and they could do nothing to prevent it. Perhaps not “nothing.” A bullet to the brain evidently broke the spell.
    The agent died during the filming, while the doctors were working on him. Langley has sent out a team of forensic specialists to assist in the autopsy. Maybe they’ll find a drug.
    What Foley did to me was comic by comparison. I woke up in Orsay, a suburb of Paris, in bed with a strange woman, with a red-wine hangover beyond epic proportions. I had been drinking—guzzling, actually—for three days, singlehandedly killing a case of a Burgundy that I find here in Boston runs eighty dollars a bottle. The woman said we had met in a Left Bank bistro, and one thing had led to another. She was worried about me, barely able to stand up but flashing a fat roll of francs, and brought me home with her; I evidently drank compulsively from dawn till dark until the three days were up. She said it was a hilarious time. I wish I could remember something of what went on. I don’t suppose Foley was entirely responsible for that particular amnesia.
    By this time the grotesque videotape had made its way to Washington, and the proper connections had been made, and the police all over France were on the lookout for my body. (My passport had wound up in a mailbox at Dulles International, with Foley’s fingerprints all over it.) When I staggered into the
gendarmerie
in Orsay, the police quite properly acted as if they’d seen a ghost, and unfortunately repaid my benefactress by throwing her in le slammer for severalhours, over my protests. I had written down her address, though, and mailed her all my leftover francs, about five hundred dollars’ worth—God knows where and how Foley got them; my own traveler’s checks were untouched.
    The
Sûreté
had also sent copies of the tape to the Bulgarian and Soviet authorities. The Russians made an initial loud noise and then said nothing. “Someone”—the French did not give their sources—had seen Foley leave the hotel with the two Bulgarians and then return an hour or so later, alone. Then he spent some time with me in the hotel bar, where he was seen to slip me some cash. Then he walked out of the hotel, into the Metro, and was never seen again.
    From this side, all we know is that he landed in Dulles November 16, having booked first-class passage on the Concorde in my name. Paid cash. He set off the metal detector but convinced the guard that he had a pacemaker, which is not true. A
Peacemaker
is more likely; we know he’s an Expert pistol shot and has at least two unregistered weapons. From Dulles he might have taken the subway straight to National and stepped on the shuttle to Boston—no ID required with cash, of course—or to anyplace on the East Coast. Or he could have rented a car and driven to Akron or Tulsa. We know he did call home, but not necessarily from a local phone.
    That’s where it gets complicated in an especially ugly way. When the videotape finally found its way to Washington and the computer