He plunged ahead, all illusion of finesse gone. “Say I needed one fast. I gotta circumvent the red tape. I got a big bust coming up but I’m afraid, say, there’s a leak, either in DEA or my own shop. I want ultrasophisticated listening technology and, just to make it worth somebody’s while, let’s say I liberated enough cash from a bad dealer to be able to pay the going tariff. So what’s my best move?”

“You ain’t wearing a wire, my friend? You’re not trying to bug a bugger or con a con man? You always seemed to me to be a pretty straight kind of guy.”

It was said of Tommy that he’d gone ashore with 2506 Brigade at the Bay of Pigs, and spent two years in Castro’s prisons – and that he had scars like star bursts on his back. He had that Latin thing – cajones, machismo, whatever – that lurid but nonneurotic willingness to do violence that radiated out of every pore of his ample body.

“No, I’m clean, man, that’s all. I just have to figure out how some guys got some powerful listening equipment into play out by the airport a couple of days ago. Where they got some stuff and got it quick, to set up a hit.”

“That guy had his insides cut to ribbons?”

“Yeah, that guy.”

“Ooooooo, Nicky, that’s a strange one. You know, you always hear things. Always. You know, the players, the teams, when something like this goes down. Except now. Nicky, my friend, would you believe, I ain’t heard nothing. It’s strictly from out of town. It’s got nothing to do with us, I’ll tell you.”

“Maybe not. Still, it’s kinda personal. Come on, Tommy. I’m just playing up the equipment angle. I have a source who swears the guy was some kind of Salvadoran spook, and I’m also hearing Agency on him, but the Agency won’t play ball with me and his records are so suspiciously clean it makes me wonder how come a guy could lead a whole life without ever getting a parking ticket.”

Tommy made a sour face, then with his tongue liberated another oyster. How such a thick man could do such an obscene thing with such quick delicacy really amazed Nick.

“I’m trying to figure how the hell the guys got in to whack the john. They heard him trying to reach me. With some gear. Now, where the hell you get stuff like that around here?”

“Well,” Tommy finally said, “what I think you want would be one of the Electrotek 5400 models. It’s a portable directional parabolic microphone, very state of the art, known for its capacity to penetrate even hardened rooms. We’re talking over a million the unit. Far as I know, only seven were built – four for DEA, two for the Agency, and one for a foreign client, very hush-hush.”

“What country?” asked Nick.

“Oh, I wouldn’t want to say, my friend. But they had themselves a nasty little war going on.”

“El Salvador! That’s it. Son of a bitch.”

He saw pattern before his eyes. It’s what he lived for: the magic connection between parts of a case.

He was thinking in great leaps: Electrotek goes to El Salvador in what year? Say, late eighties, when we’re pouring aid in. Okay, so this guy Eduardo Lanzman, he’s spook, but he learns something? Something big? Something dangerous? Scares his butt. So he thinks, who the fuck can I call? Obviously, it’s got spook business all over it, so he doesn’t want to go to his old pals in the Agency, right? Because he hasn’t shaken it out, doesn’t know quite who’s doing what to whom, who’s on which side – oh, I know how shadowy it gets – so he has to find someone outside – someone safe, someone he can trust – to tell. So he thinks of an old pal in DEA who might have some kind of perspective, except that guy is not in the life anymore. So, he then thinks of this FBI agent the DEA guy told him about. So he takes off. But now they know he’s gone. So he cools his heels somewhere, just to throw them off the track. But somehow they know he’s headed toward New Orleans, so that gets them time to get the unit up here and set up a surveillance at the airport. Where they spot him. They follow him. They’ve got the goddamn thing in play. They find the room; they penetrate it electronically, these Salvadorans. They get my name, they pop the room and turn poor Eduardo inside out.

Tommy looked at him.

“Nick, you look like you just had a religious experience. The Virgin, did she talk to you?”

“Somebody did,” Nick said. Not normally religious, he had a brief impulse to make the sign of the cross for Eduardo, who opened the door expecting to see dull old Nick but instead caught three bad hitters in the face and died the death only a Mandarin torturer could have invented…and yet who cared so much that even after the executioners had left and his guts were like dirty socks in the bed and the shock had worn off enough for the pain to be the fifth act of every opera ever written, this guy still had the machismo to crawl to the linoleum and pass on the message.

ROM DO.

ROM DO?

What did it mean? What was this clue, so tantalizing, so goddamn cute?

“I got another weird one for you. This guy, he left a message written in his own blood. ROM DO, in caps. What’s the words Rom, Do mean to you, Tommy. Anything? I spent thirteen hours in the library the other day, just going through books on crime and espionage, looking for something. I asked the big smart guys at Quantico in the Behavioral Science Department, you know, our intellectuals. They came up with nothing. Any idea?”

“Rom Do? Could be anything, man.” Then he laughed. “Funny, it reminds me of something.”

“Okay,” said Nick, “so sing. Tell me.”

“Oh, it’s crazy.”

“Crazier the better, my friend, that’s where I’m at.”

“You know I was on the island in sixty-one? Bahia de Cochinos, huh, my friend? The Bay with the Piggies?”

“Yeah, so it’s said.”

“Okay, my battalion was first ashore at Red Beach, you know, near Playa Larga. Okay, we used Army call signs, just like the American army, because we believed in America and we believed in that cocksucker JFK, man, we loved him and we loved our little invasion.” The bitterness spurted out and clouded his words. Then he caught himself.

“Anyway, later they changed it. Okay, they changed it and made it more jet age. The D, I mean.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The D became Delta. D for Delta. Not Dog no more, but Delta. You went on the radio and your call sign was a D, you were Delta. Delta Company, Delta Flight, Delta squadron, Delta Force, that sort of thing. But in the early sixties, they hadn’t changed. D was Dog. R was Romeo. It was call signs and I was in Second Battalion, 2506 Brigade, La Brigada, and we were Romeo Dog Two, there was a Romeo Dog Three, Four and Five, the guy running the show, the patron, out there on the ship, he was Romeo Dog Six. ‘Rom Do’? Your guy’s hurrying on that floor, his mind ain’t working right, he’s dying. He’s sending you a message from the past. Romeo Dog. Get it?”

“Romeo Dog? No, I don’t get it,” Nick said, turning the info over in his head.

What the hell was Romeo Dog?

Howdy Duty hadn’t changed; he was one of those men who couldn’t change. But then Nick hadn’t changed, either. Nick would never change: he’d always be a special agent, and never a supervisory agent. Maybe he didn’t really mind that, because in his own heart he knew he wasn’t cut out to give orders and he wasn’t interested in power and a fine home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. But having the no-promotion tag on his record would at least keep him off of the really interesting squads and out of Washington forever. He’d never get Anti-Terrorist, which was the crème de la crème in the eighties and probably would be well into the nineties; it was fast-reacting jungle gym stuff, guns and SWAT tactics, and interfacing with some extremely interesting other agencies, the fastest league of all. He’d never get a Hostage Rescue Team. Now those boys were the elite: HRTs kicked down doors and smoked bad guys when it came the time to walk the walk. And he’d never get Organized Crime either, and that was hot stuff, sinking through the membrane of the Mafia, entering that twisted, yet fascinating world; if you got that, you were doing something. It was true of counterespionage too, only the hard part of that was simply following Cubans around Washington and wiretapping embassies. But also interesting.