“The Times reporter?”

“Yeah, him. You remember he said he thought he recognized something familiar about the big guy with the beard—the terrorist leader.”

“We sat him through two days with the mug books. He didn’t come up with anything.”

“You didn’t ask him the right questions,” Crobey said quietly.

“And you did?”

“Yes. I know who the bearded guy is now.”

It extracted Anders’ slow smile. “That’s quite a teaser.”

“Isn’t it.”

“And you’ll give me the name if I’ll divulge what I know.”

“That’s the idea, Glenn.”

“If Ortega remembered something for you he can remember it for me. What if I just ask him?”

“He doesn’t know the name. He only knows the face.” Crobey lifted his glass, an ironic toast. “Ask him. He’s probably home, you’ve got his number. You want me to order you something while you’re on the phone?”

It couldn’t be a bluff; too easy to call. Anders subsided in the seat. “You’re cute, Harry. All right. Who is he?”

“Scratch my back first. Then I’ll scratch yours.”

“Who are you working for?”

“That would be telling.”

“Then we haven’t got much to talk about.”

“You don’t want the name of the terrorist, then?”

“Look at it from my point of view. I have to calculate the possibility that you’re working for the terrorists. Maybe they sent you here to find out how close I am to getting my hands on them. Maybe you’re supposed to send me on a wild goose chase?”

Crobey said, “Give me a minute, I’ll think out a way around that.”

“Do that.”

Crobey tipped his head back and closed his eyes.

Crobey was getting a bit long in the tooth, Anders thought. How old was Crobey now? Late forties anyhow; Crobey had flown combat in Korea.

Crobey had flown P-51 Mustangs. He had peculiarly rigid prejudices—he hated jets and when they’d transferred him to Sabers he’d turned in a wretched performance, a kind of protest, cracking up two planes on the runway. The Air Force had yanked him out of the combat zone and set him to training young pilots on piston-engine planes at Edwards Air Force Base. Crobey, fuming, had served out the rest of the Korean War there.

At the first opportunity he’d resigned his commission and gone mercenary, flying any kind of old crate so long as it had propellers. He wouldn’t touch jets. But that was all right because most of the Third World air forces were too poor to equip themselves with jets. Whole generations of African and Latin American military pilots had been trained by Harry Crobey. Most of them probably still remembered the first time he had sent them out to find a skyhook or a bucket of prop-wash. Crobey’s pranks were like the bad jokes of vaudeville comedians.

Anders’ first meeting with Crobey had been on a field in Alabama, the property of one of the Agency’s innumerable civil-air front companies; Crobey had been brought in to teach Cuban exile pilots how to avoid flying their B-26 bombers into chimneys, mountains and power lines. That had been 1961; Crobey already trailed a legend—the Congo, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic. He didn’t limp then and his hair was a bit darker and his face had been almost cherubically naïve. Those who knew him insisted he had an aging portrait in his attic but in truth Crobey was only in his thirties then and it was pre-Bay of Pigs and pre-Kennedy assassination—life was still a wild sort of fun for men like Crobey: The world is my whorehouse.

In Djakarta they said Crobey had screwed his way systematically through every brothel, working north to south, until the government had tied a can to his tail: Everybody knew that half the whores in Djakarta were Communist spies. Crobey’s retort made its way into the Agency’s folklore. He said it wasn’t his mouth he exercised in bed. Anders had never found the story particularly uproarious but the line—“Don’t exercise your mouth on her”—had worked its way into company jargon until it became a shorthand notation of the fact that a woman didn’t have a security clearance.

The Crobey myth was Bunyonesque among the young Turks in the Agency, of whom in those days Anders had been one. Crobey was a free-lance and didn’t have to take jobs he didn’t like—that alone made him the envy of every civil servant but beyond that was Crobey’s panache, his Scarlet Pimpernel insouciance, his way of greeting the world with a distended middle finger and a cheerful “Merde.”

Anders had met him fairly frequently during the late 1960s and early ’70s; their paths had crossed at intervals in Laos and Chile and Viet Nam, Crobey flying surplus Spitfires or rattling DC-3s or worn-out B-24 Liberators; as long as it wasn’t a jet Crobey would fly it. Anders had formed an acquaintance with him, something short of friendship; it had lasted with a reasonable lack of abrasion over a decade but he’d lost touch with Crobey after the fall of Saigon. At first he had enjoyed Crobey’s cut-ups; they’d got drunk together and wasted several bars in their time but Anders had outgrown that. After a while it had begun to occur to him that Crobey wasn’t dashing; his jokes were crude and sometimes cruel, his personality often offensive—he had a rude way of rebuffing ordinary politeness, a contempt for normal people. “There are only three hundred real people in the world,” Crobey used to say, “and we all know each other. The rest are farmers and shopkeepers and politicians—otherwise known as the gutless rabble.”

Crobey opened his eyes and fixed them on Anders. A waitress, unbidden, took their empties and placed a second round of drinks on the table; it was that kind of bar—you spent money or you left.

In the depths of Crobey’s glance was something Anders hadn’t found there before. Maybe it was the birth of maturity or a belated sense of mortality or the beginnings of the hangover from twenty-five years’ irreverence; maybe it was simply sham—Crobey was something of an actor.

“Phomh Penh,” Crobey said. “Remember? Those Cambode MPs wanted to put some welts in our skulls.”

“We had it coming.”

“If I hadn’t dragged you out of there—”

Anders had to smile. “I owe you that one.”

“Then there was the time you tried to decapitate yourself on that chopper’s rotor blades because you forgot to duck going in—”

Anders nodded; he’d forgotten that one. Now it came back—the shock of being tackled from behind, Crobey’s weight slamming him down.

Crobey said, “Beirut, now, that was interesting, too. Kalashnikov slugs going every which way.” Then his brazen smile. “But there’s no need to keep books on it, is there?”

“Are you fishing for references?”

Crobey tapped a finger on the tabletop. “I’m not asking you to fall on a grenade. I’m only asking you to trust me with information. I’m asking you to go first because I’m not bound by oaths of secrecy and you are—you’ve got orders to keep your trap shut and you’re a fairly good German; I need the leverage to shake you loose from that position. That’s why you have to go first. You can refuse me—it depends how much you want the name of this joker.”

“I could haul you in for interrogation.”

“Debriefing with scopalomine and rubber hoses? No, you won’t do that. I came to you voluntarily.”

“Who are you working for?”

“No signatures. I get paid in cash. But I’ll go this far—you and I are on the same side. We both want to nail these guys.”

There was a glint of forlorn doubt in Crobey’s eyes as if he saw he’d shot his bolt. Anders felt disquieted. He studied it briefly but there was no need to dissect it; the impasse was still there. He squeezed his lips together and shook his head back and forth just slightly. “Can’t do it,” he said. “If I knew who your clients were—”

“The client is no threat to you.”

“I don’t know that, do I?”

“You do now. I just told you.”

“Come off it, Harry. I was born a little earlier than that.” Anders began to slide over. “I’m going to assume you’re bluffing. If I assume you don’t really know anything then I don’t have to file a report that would get you hauled in for questioning.”