Silas's Choice Expanded

As I lifted my head in gut response to a cock entering my gut, I noticed movement in my peripheral vision. A green shirt over cutoff jeans. That was Ward, if I wasn't mistaken. I have no idea what he saw of Silas mounting me, if anything, but there wasn't anything I could do about that. Whatever was going on between Ward and Silas was their thing, not mine.

Of course our "broken down" and "limping" little fishing boat only made it to the prearranged landing on the coast of Baja California, where Silas's friends in Mexican intelligence were delighted to receive the drug cartel chief they too had been hunting for years and who they believed was responsible for several bloody operations against Mexican antidrug government officials in Mexico City. Silas was more than happy to let them have a go at Emilio before what was left of him was turned over to the Americans.

Once again Silas had made his own choice.

Chapter Six

It seemed like only yesterday we were here in the Delgado's southern Colombia compound, snatching Emilio Delgado. That had gone smoothly, with the only feathers being ruffled being those back at Langley. But that was more than a year ago, and this was now. And this time it hadn't gone smoothly at all.

No, not at all.

I stood there, in the spotlights up in the trees on a moonless night next to the swimming pool in the Delgado compound, listening for the last few shots of what had been a prolonged gun battle to gain entrance to the compound. And I was staring down at the body of Antoine Johnson floating face down in Delgado's pool. He was naked, but as far as I could tell there were no bullet holes in his brown little swimmer's body.

He'd gotten his wish, gone out where he'd loved best, in a swimming pool. But whether this was his choice or Delgado's choice, I didn't know. I'd probably never know. But, just for the hell of it, I'd assume it was Delgado. And not just Delgado. Some of my own folks had a hand in it too. Sam Winterberry, head of the candy store unit, of course, and then there was Ted Talbot, chief of South American Division. But then, there was me too. If it hadn't been for me, Antoine wouldn't be here. Well, that wasn't true. He might have been here anyway. If I hadn't recruited him, Winterberry may have found someone else to do it. But the truth is that I did do it. And not just to him.

The sound on my handheld was crackling, and I lifted it to my ear.

"Speak!"

"Silas? That you, Silas? What the hell are you doing in the Delgado compound? Get out of there and like now!"

"We weren't after him, Ted," I answered, having recognized Ted Talbot's voice. He no doubt was in his Langley office with his feet up on the desk. "Johnson gave us the extraction call; we were doing what we told him we'd do when he couldn't take it in here anymore. But we were too late. Johnson is dead."

"Johnson? We sent in a candy store agent? Who in the hell approved that? I sure didn't. What in Hades are you doing out of Bogotá at all. You had strict orders."

"How did you even know we were in the Delgado compound, Ted?" I said. I was gripping the handheld so hard, I was afraid it would crumble. A lot of things were beginning to crumble. "Why are you calling me and not chief of station Bogotá calling me?" I continued. And just for good measure I added, "The plan two years ago was to close down the Delgados completely, Ted. Why this sudden interest in why I'm working on doing just that? COS Bogotá seems to think it's a good idea. I didn't get the memo on the change on that, Ted."

"Get your ass back to Bogotá and report to the COS, Silas," Ted growled down the line. "And you'd better be out of that compound when Estaban Delgado returns. Oh, and bring Johnson's body out too. Don't want that left there."

"How did you know Estaban wasn't here?" I screamed back into the phone. But it was already dead. Just the way he referred to Antoine's body—like he was no more than a nuisance—just about sent me over the edge.

It's true. This operation hadn't been cleared up to Langley, but the COS Bogotá had given me his blessing under the table. He couldn't understand any more than I did why we weren't taking Estaban Delgado out. We'd grabbed his brother Emilio, who, unfortunately for the question askers in Langley, had died in Mexico before he could be handed over to the Americans. But the Mexicans did deliver a lot of good intelligence they'd wrung out of him on huge-scale movements of drugs from South America into North America.

So, why weren't we taking down Estaban, his brother, and successor as Delgado drug cartel kingpin? Why the pussyfooting around Estaban?

And this operation hadn't been about Estaban anyway. It had been about extracting one of our own from his compound. We'd sent Antoine Johnson in there as candy—as a sex object for Estaban to play with while Antoine was picking up all of the intelligence on the Delgado operation that he could. And Johnson had signaled, as arranged, that he had to get out. And that's all I was doing. We had owed Johnson that. I owed him so much more.

We even waited until we saw Estaban and some of his goons drive out for a night on the town in Florencia in an Escalade. All I wanted was to do what was right, what was agreed, for Johnson.

And there he was, floating face down in the Delgados' swimming pool.

After Ted had cut me off on the handheld, I had a pretty good idea where everything stood. I knew what the choices were, and none of them was good.

I turned to the young man beside me.

"You got the gist of that, Ward," I asked. My voice was choking up. The one man I wanted in my bed, and the one man I did not have the nerve to try to seduce. I could try, but it would destroy me if he turned me down. There was no evidence that he liked men at all. I just couldn't take it if he turned me down. I'd only continued working this shitty job for the past year to be near him. And now I had to send him away.

"Yes," he answered grimly. "I think I get it. What do we do now?"

"We don't do anything now, Ward. Nobody, including COS Bogotá knows you were on this raid. You need to return to Mexico City, and I mean right now. You need to turn around and go out into the clearing and take one of the jeeps and drive in the opposite direction of Bogotá and get your ass out of this operation altogether. This operation is poison now. I'm poison."

"But, I don't—"

"Not another word, Ward. Get out of here. Get out of my life. I'm screwed. And standing here and looking down at the floating body of a young man who I started on the road to this swimming pool death, I could do almost anything from this point. I don't want to take anyone down with me."

Ward gave me a look, the first look he'd ever given me that showed that there might, at one time, have been something going for us. But that was then and this was now.

I had made my choice.

I turned away and when I turned back, Ward was gone.

And then I gathered my men about me and we started the bumpy-road journey back to the capital and to the office of chief of station Bogotá.

Chapter Seven

"Silas's Choice."

"Say what?" Rocky Hansan asked.

"Silas's Choice," I repeated. "You are offering me the same options you offered Silas Collins three years ago. Did you realize that?"

"Of course not," the chief of the Near East Division said. "Farthest thing from our minds." But he looked out of his fifth-floor window at the unexpected April snow falling on his view of the Northern Virginia countryside, marred by an expanse of parking lot and a water tower, but being made less institutional by the quickly building blanket of white. He couldn't look at me. He was lying. Certainly he knew. And there was no coincidence at all in the offer. Silas and I had been too close. I'd done nothing, but Silas had angered them with his choice, and they were going to systematically deep six all of his friends in the organization. This was what they did.

On appearances, they were both cushy assignments, and there was nothing in my record that would disqualify me for a cushy assignment. I'd been working for them for ten years now, following graduate school and the most rigorous boot camp training course you could imagine. And I had laid my life on the line repeatedly and always brought home the goods.

I could either take Amman station or stay here in Langley and head up the personality files for the terrorism center. The latter would even come with a promotion. The promotion was window dressing, though. The files job was a pasture assignment, a dead end, a signal to all that I was no longer a player or needed to know much of anything. And the Amman station was open because the man who took the job because Silas wouldn't was dead. The public story was that he'd been killed in a stray robbery while taking a couple of visitors to the ancient cliff-city ruins of Petra. But the truth was that he had come out in the open and had been recognized by the opposition and had been eliminated.

So, these were my choices—the same choice they had given Silas—either be neutralized and sidelined for the remainder of the eighteen years I'd have to serve before qualifying for early retirement at fifty, or roll the dice in the Mideast. And, like Silas, my expertise was in South America. I could tell when a Colombian was ready to pull a pin by the look of his eyes. I'd been trained to do that. I had no idea how to read an Arab. The last, departed Amman station chief had been transferred from South America too.

For the thousandth time since Silas had made his choice I wondered why he had chosen to do what he did. Maybe it was time to find out.

"How soon would I have to decide, Rocky?" I asked as I rose from the supergrade upholstered chair in front of his supergrade wooden desk and edged toward the door of his supergrade sixteen-by-sixteen office, with its two supergrade windows and partitions that went all of the way to the ceiling. That was the real perk—partitions that were actually walls. I'd get one just like it if I took the files job, but my door would empty out into the corridor, whereas his was connected to that of a deputy director. Of course, if I took Amman, maybe all I'd get was a magazine of Uzi bullets, delivered one by one.

"You've got some time coming to you from the Asuncion operation," Rocky said. "Done very well, I understand, by the way. That's what Ted tells me. Say two weeks. Come on back in, in say, a month from today. I'm sure you will want some time with your wife. If you take the terrorism center job, of course, you can settle down here."

Sharon. Right, I thought. Sharon would be just pleased as punch to have me home in Oakton again and riding a nine-to-five job. She'd be just as thrilled as Ted would be, especially since he sent me to Asuncion in the first place to ease him into getting his dick inside Sharon. Sharon and the Oakton house were history, either way.

* * * *

It took me three days to track down Silas's whereabouts, using all of the connections I had, which didn't include those of my employers. I didn't want them to know I was doing this. If they found out, even those two choices would evaporate. And then it took four days of talking through intermediaries to get Silas to agree to see me and to arrange a connection point. This, even though we had been like lips and teeth in Brazil and Colombia for five years. We had covered each other's backs and squared off against the world so many times and in such trying conditions that I had been more married to Silas than to Sharon. And yet he had just told me to walk away and leave him, in the middle of an Op going sour—when he should have needed me most if he respected me as an agent. It was time for some explanations regardless of the "Silas's choices" I'd been offered.

Silas was fifteen years my senior. He was already a specialist in staying alive and getting the job done in South America when I was assigned to his operations, trained in everything including suicide, but with absolutely no notion of bringing all of the training off in the real world. He had been a Marine before joining the outfit, and he'd probably always be a tightly wound Marine. But he was something rare as well. He was a Renaissance man. He had a photographic memory and a brilliant mind, and he could have made a success of himself as either a fine artist or a concert pianist. He was equally at home in the drug-producing hidden farms of the Amazon basin and the diplomatic drawing rooms, and, by the way the diplomatic wives fell all over him, it was obvious that he wore a tuxedo extremely well.

His memory and artistry were of particular help to our operations. We didn't have to fool with cameras—or with explaining why we brought cameras to a drug buy. We could return to the embassy weeks after a meeting, and Silas could still provide a sketch of everyone he'd met, no matter how briefly, that identified the person better than a photograph would have. Silas had taught me everything I knew about the business, but I'd never know half of what he did on the day he walked away from it all.

So, I went looking for Silas. I was surprised, but not totally surprised, when I got directions to fly into Seville, Spain, and then to book a car from there and drive to a resort on the Mediterranean near Barcelona. I knew that Silas loved the sea and beaches. I could picture him stretched out on the sand of a Costa Dorada beach. I only gave brief thought to why I wasn't just flying into Barcelona—but I knew that Silas never did anything directly. That might be why he was still alive.

Still, I was surprised when I was met at the Seville airport. Silas himself didn't meet me. I was pulled out of the arrivals line just beyond passport control by a young, dark, and handsome man of slight stature and big, engaging, white-toothed smile. He was holding a sketch of me that made me look like a blond movie star stud and that only could have been drawn by Silas. The young man also had a letter from Silas introducing him and telling me to go with him—and the letter contained a code of authenticity that Silas and I had used in the past. So, I went with the man in an elegant, if old, Mercedes sedan, accepting that he had already taken care of the reservations I'd made for a car and hotel room.

Three years and Silas could still do a sketch that a nice young Spanish guy could recognize as me. Except he wasn't a Spanish guy at all—and that surprised me as well, but I should have been able to figure it out. He spoke to me in Portuguese, knowing full well, apparently, that I was conversant in that language, as I had to be to operate in Brazil. And he warned me when we were about to leave the airport that it was almost a four-hour drive to where we were going, and he headed due west—for Portugal. Everyone I had talked to who seemed to have any inkling of where Silas had landed thought he was in Spain. But, of course, with his background in Brazil and Portuguese—and the care that he took to protect himself—it made sense that he was in Portugal instead.

It clicked that even his annuity paymasters would believe he was in Spain. He was smart enough to know that you didn't just walk away from the outfit as he had and not expect to be facing open season—from vengeful enemies and jilted friends alike. As we drove into Portugal, my anger at the difficulty to get him to see me dissipated. Under the circumstances, I guess it was significant that he would agree to see me at all, since I was still—at least for now—with the outfit.

Whatever secrecy Silas was living under, though, didn't transfer to the young man he had sent to pick me up at the airport. He affably told me his name was Marcello, that he was barely twenty, and that he was Silas's houseboy. He also told me, even though I didn't ask, that we were headed toward a seaside village in Portugal's southern coastal Algarve district, where Silas had a cliffside villa; that Silas was reclusive and had become a famous artist in the region, although no one knew who he was; and that he was the best, most generous employer in all of the Algarve. That did sound like the Silas I knew. Marcello was a particularly winsome lad, olive skinned and handsome figured. He was not more than five and a half feet tall, but he was lithe and well proportioned, and that smile of his and his open good humor were winners.

I barely realized we were at Silas's place before we were on top of it—almost literally on top of it. As we approached the Portuguese coast, we were riding along the top of a cliff, where I occasionally could see paths going down to isolated, pristine beaches tucked away between sheer cliffs tumbling down to the Gulf of Cadiz. I saw a sign saying it was seven kilometers to Albufeira, but within two kilometers, Marcello turned the old Mercedes hard to the left in the middle of a stretch of sheer stuccoed rock wall with razor wire running along the top of it and we were sitting in the front of a set of massive iron gates. Marcello activated a remote control on his dashboard and the gates swung open and brought us to a second set of gates in yet another wall. Silas apparently wasn't leaving his past to chance.

Then we were gliding along the top of the cliffs again, rolling toward the sea. And when it looked like he would just drive right over the edge, Marcello pulled the Mercedes to a stop, popped the trunk, hopped out, and started to carry my suitcase down a path leading below the cliff edge that I wouldn't even have known was there before he approached it.

We were looking down on the villa as we descended the path. It was u-shaped around a stone-floored terrace that hung out over yet another cliff edge suspended over a fairly wide and white-sand beach. The calm, sky-blue of the small pool in the center of the courtyard contrasted with the pounding of the azure surf far below at the base of the cliff that had spurs coming down at the corners of the property on each side that isolated the beach area.

"Mr. Salazar regrets that he isn't home at present," Marcello was merrily saying as he led me down to a small forecourt in front of what proved to be a two-story house that was only attached to the land side by this small entrance court, which was, in fact a stone bridge that crossed a moated area. The only windows on this side of the building were set high and had strong iron bars on them. "He says that you'll want to sleep for several hours after your plane ride. He'll see you at dinner on the terrace at 8:00 PM."

"Mr. Salazar?" I asked. And then I figured it out. That obviously was who Silas Collins was here in his Portuguese hideout. But perhaps he had not been Silas Collins originally either. Maybe the Silas I knew was just one phase of a multichambered life set off in chunks by bars just like these windows were, or like the measures were set off in that music he played on the piano.

Marcello gave me a brief tour of the villa. It didn't take long. We entered a large foyer at the western corner of the arm of the building that ran parallel to the edge of the cliff. I could tell at a glance that the building was constructed for defense. The walls were thick, the windows here were small and high on the northern and western walls, and the two doors leading from the foyer on the first floor, one on the eastern wall and the other one on the southern wall, were heavy wood reinforced with iron mountings and studs. A graceful iron winding staircase went up to the second floor. Marcello told me the door on the southern wall went into Silas's private rooms, but I wasn't shown those. The first room beyond the door on the western wall was a long living room-dining room area, with a kitchen beyond that in the northeast corner of this arm. All of these rooms had large, French doors that opened onto the central courtyard. The western arm of the building, Marcello told me, was where store rooms and the servants' quarters were located.