Wag the Dog Read online

  Frank took out the ninety-seven-dollar silver fountain pen his wife had given him on their twenty-fifth anniversary and the embossed leather pocket case that held a small notepad which she had given him on their twenty-third anniversary. He placed them neatly, and with a sense of formality, in front of him. “The only thing that stands out at all is this business with Joseph Broz and Magdalena Lazlo. The way I understand it, she came in, she invited him out for a cup of coffee, she asked him to come to work for her as a bodyguard. You decided not to tell him that we have a watch on her?”

  “That was my decision,” Taylor said. There was no point in denying it or waffling. It was that way right there in the file he’d organized himself.

  “Why was that?” Sheehan said mildly. Although large, he looked mild too. Like so many CIA and ex-CIA types did. Thicker in the middle than around the chest, wider at the hips than at the shoulders. Barbershop hair. Given to checked shirts when he barbecued on summer Sundays. Mild and ordinary. Which didn’t mean he was incapable of giving the order to fire someone, or in other circumstances, to have them terminated. He’d done both.

  It was a decision that could destroy Taylor’s career. It violated several major corporate guidelines. Not Mickey Mouse rules either, but stuff that made very good sense. Still, any rule could be violated, if the reasons were good enough and the results were right.

  “Let me be straight with you,” Taylor said. “We have certain restrictions on this case. The main one is that nobody will tell me what it’s about. Anybody inquires too vigorously what John Lincoln Beagle is working on, we’re supposed to report it, to your office and to the client. Not to his secretary. Not to his assistant. Just to him, direct. If I knew what it was that has to be kept secret, I could separate the wheat from the chaff. But I don’t. If it turns out you want to tell me, it would be appreciated, but we will soldier on in either case.” Taylor meant If something goes wrong because we didn’t know what to watch out for, it’s your fault. “The second thing is that the whole job is NTK.” While not SOP at U. Sec, a certain portion of their work was handled on a Need-to-Know basis and employees were expected not to talk about those cases even to other employees. Management and Training felt it was good for esprit de corps, Sales said the practice was good for the company image. “I deduce that the number-one imperative on this job is secrecy.”

  “I haven’t looked at Joe’s file,” Sheehan said, “but if memory serves, he’s been with us a long time. That says something. Can we get his file up here? If there were a reason to fault or mistrust him, he wouldn’t be with us, would he? Seems like you could have used him as a double agent, as it were.”

  “Frank, I have to tell you, everything about this case just says maximum secrecy.” Mel called Ms. Sligo, his secretary, on the intercom. She was a very efficient woman with iron gray structured through her hair and, having cleared her desk of actual work, was deeply engrossed in Premiere magazine. “Broz, Joseph, personnel file, ASAP,” Mel ordered.

  “So the first thing he did was put in a request to have the house swept?”

  “Yes,” Taylor said. “Fortunately, he asked for the same man who’d put the LDs in. So we were fortunate, he was already in the loop.”

  “Quite a coincidence that.”

  “Not at all. I picked Ray to do the installation because he’s our best man. Broz knows that too.”

  “What if Broz somehow picks up on it, that Matusow misled him?”

  “What’s the downside?” Taylor said. “He can come in and say Ray screwed up. OK. Then we go back and take out a couple of mics.”

  There was a knock on the door. Taylor opened the door. It was Ms. Sligo, personnel file in hand. Taylor took it, closed the door, handed over the file to Sheehan.

  Sheehan said, “You seem to be saying that you expect Joe to step outside the fold. Do you?”

  “She’s a beautiful woman,” Taylor said flatly. “Beautiful women make men do all kinds of things. What about the initial interview? Where’s the tape? That story of batteries running down—that’s pretty thin, don’t you think?”

  The first thing Sheehan looked at was Joe’s war record. “The old man”—C. H. Bunker, a descendent of the Bunker Hill Bunkers and a distant cousin of Ellsworth Bunker, who’d been the ambassador to Vietnam during the war—“likes war heroes. He likes Marine war heroes even better. He’s always making a point of that with Rob Bloch.” Block was the executive VP of Sales. “ ‘Tell them we’ve got more war heroes than Wackenhut or Pinkerton. Tell them we’ve got more war heroes than anyone except Arlington National Cemetery. Tell them we will put a man on the job who won the Silver Star, fighting for his country. If they don’t sign on the dotted line, tell them you’ll assign a Congressional Medal of Honor winner. If they don’t sign then, they’re un-American and we don’t want them.’ I think I’ve heard him say that a hundred times or more. That’s for starters, Mel. Plus Broz, he’s been with the company longer than you have.”

  “I’m going to go out on a limb here,” Taylor said. What he meant was, I’m out on a limb already, so I might as well admit it. “I have my doubts about Joe Broz’s loyalty.” Taylor wondered if, for once, he had let a desire overcome his judgment. Desire did that. Had he let his private purpose, to let Broz have enough rope to hang himself, supersede the objectives of the job? In terms of going by the book, he had.

  Sheehan kept reading. He saw what Broz had done after his military service and frowned. He flipped ahead, skimming through Joe’s record with U. Sec., and saw what he expected. He stopped and looked up. “When I saw his name, I thought this was the guy we were talking about. He’s handled some work for my department.” A lot of work fell under the jurisdiction of Special Affairs simply because it was too broad or too narrow or too different to fit neatly in one of the regular service categories. Just because a job was Special Affairs did not necessarily mean that it had a political dimension or legal problems, that it required extreme discretion or had a particular element of danger. But it could. “Even if you’re upper management and he’s just an operative, you better be right.”

  “I know his file looks good, but that’s my feeling,” Taylor said.

  “Interesting.”

  “So maybe this is a little test for him. A little trap. Look, Frank, the way I saw it, the way I see it, we win both ways. If she asks him to go after Beagle, then he’s supposed to come in and report it. Form JO:C-l,13in triplicate—one for the office, one for the client, one for the operative. And if he doesn’t, the way that house is wired, we’ll know about it, guaranteed. I have a fallback plan to double-check them if for some damn reason I think we’re missing something with just the audio material. If he turns out to be loyal, everything is copacetic. If not, well then we kill two birds with one stone.”

  “Well,” said Frank, “it’s your show. I just wanted you to know that the job means a lot to C. H. You’re to do whatever it takes.”

  “You want me to put a couple of extra men on him? On them? Watch them?”

  “Mel, let me tell you this as a friend. Nothing better go wrong on this job. If you treat it as the most important job of your whole life, you’re on the right track. If something fucks up, you’re in deep shit. I say that as a friend.” Which meant, I’m not your friend at all. If you screw up, I’ll see that you fry, because I hope that will keep my ass out of the fire.

  Taylor understood exactly what Sheehan didn’t say. “I’ll double up on them. Nothing’s going to go wrong.” And if Broz turns out to be a traitor, he thought, I’ll ruin his ass. At this point Taylor just meant Broz’s career. Get him fired. Ace him out of his pension. In spite of the obsessive secrecy surrounding the job, there was no reason for Taylor to think that they were playing at a high-stakes table. Not yet.

  12 Not a real name. But the reader can assume, in this case, that the character is modeled on a very real person with a résumé that includes Yale, the OSS, and the CIA prior to starting an investigation and security company.

 
13 All job files at U. Sec. include a job-objective section, so everyone, especially the client, is clear about what they are trying to do. A JO:C-l is required to be filed if this objective changes. The form asks who requested the change, why, and how this will affect billing. There’s boilerplate legal language on the bottom that says that this is a binding financial agreement.

  Chapter

  TEN

  AFTER I FIND the wiretap on the phone, I find the rest of the microphones. Then I get Maggie out on the beach, down by the water, where I can tell her about them. Her first reaction is to call up U. Sec. and get her money back.

  “We can’t do that,” I say.

  “The man’s incompetent,” she says.

  “He’s not incompetent. That’s the point. If he misses one microphone, even if it’s Ray Matusow, then it’s a mistake. To miss at least eight IDs, that’s not a mistake. That’s deliberate. That tells us that he is one of them. Whoever is watching you, for whatever reason, Ray is working for them.

  “I know Ray. He and I have worked together off and on, eight years. He’s ex-FBI. He’s a widower with three children, one still in college, and he’s remarried to a woman with two kids in grade school. He has a house that has a lawn out front and a sprinkler. He has a summer house on a lake in the Sierras. He doesn’t spend more than he can afford, he counts on his longevity bonuses, and he needs his pension. He’s a company man.

  “He didn’t do this unless he was told to, by the company: By U. Sec.”

  “So we tell U. Sec. to go to hell,” Maggie says. “Fire them and get our money back, and if they don’t want to give it back, they can meet my lawyers.”

  “Take it the next step,” I say. “Something very unusual is happening here. This is a conflict of interest, for U. Sec. to agree to work for you while they’re maintaining surveillance on you.”

  “Of course it’s a conflict of interest,” she says.

  “We don’t do that,” I say.

  “Don’t be naive. You work for a corporation—they do whatever they’re paid for, not what’s ethical.”

  “I don’t say we won’t do that. I say it’s very bad business. If it comes out that we spy on our own clients, then our clients don’t trust us. Then we lose business. So there has to be a very strong reason to do it.

  “To have Ray Matusow and me working against each other, and him lying to me, that’s also bad business. We expect our backup to back us up. We expect our team to be on our side. If it gets out that one of the guys working with you just might be working against you, it destroys something. So we don’t do that. Unless there is a real strong reason.

  “Also, I’ve been a company man for a long time. I’ve done things for them that can’t be spoken of, and I never have spoken of them. To cut me out of the loop, there has to be a real strong reason.”

  “I told you it was serious,” she says.

  “Yes, you did.”

  “But you didn’t really believe me. You had to wait and see for yourself.”

  “That’s part of my job description.”

  “Your job description,” she says, “is that you work for me. And I think it’s time we cleared that up.”

  That brings me up short. “Yes, Ms. Lazlo, I do work for you. However, I am a professional. And I intend to handle this professionally, if at all. If you went to your attorney and asked him to bring a suit that you were certain to lose and which would damage your career, he would be correct to refuse to do it.”

  “And I would fire him, forthwith.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. If you went to your Porsche dealer and asked his maintenance staff to disconnect your brakes because you wanted to develop a brake-free driving technique, they would be obligated to refuse. If you went to your doctor and asked for morphine because it was the only thing that made you feel happy, he would refuse.” This sounds like I am quick on my feet and actually say the things people don’t say but afterward wish they had said. The truth is that clients frequently ask us to do things that are dangerous, illegal, or just plain foolish. It is so common that management has developed a variety of responses they teach us in client-relation seminars. These things I am saying I have more or less verbatim from handouts on prepunched pages suitable for inserting in our loose-leaf manuals.

  She stops and looks at me. Sincere, but not contrite, she says, “Forgive me, Joe. That was”—she searches for a word—“rude. Speaking to you like a servant.”

  I have the momentum, so I push it a little further. “What you have to understand, when I’m talking about Ray Matusow and longevity bonuses and pension funds, I’m talking about myself. The reason I figure he won’t go against the company is that I know how hard it is for me. I stand to lose a lot. If I go against them and stand by you.”

  “I guess you do. I should have thought more about that, shouldn’t I? But I figured you’re a man, an adult, and you could make your own decisions. I didn’t beg you or force you.”

  “Another thing you have to understand,” I say. “U. Sec. has a reputation for vindictiveness. They go after traitors.”

  “Traitors—that’s a little heavy-handed.”

  “Maggie, look at me,” and this is my turn. I put my hands on her shoulders and look her square in the eye. “You don’t understand who we are. We wear cheap suits, we act humble, and anybody with a couple of grand to spare can hire us. But damn near everybody in the company, they’re FBI, CIA, some city cops, some MPs. Almost all of us have been in the service. Those of us of a certain age, we did tours of duty in Nam. We were part of the meat grinder. We carried M-16s and grenades and set claymore mines. We watched friends die and get maimed. Don’t underestimate us. Serious people don’t often look like Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

  “Does that mean you’re backing out? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “No. I’m telling you that if we go ahead, we both have to take it seriously. Look, maybe I’m wrong about it, maybe this is some sort of bullshit, that you didn’t sleep with someone who has a lot of weight to throw around, or that someone’s wife thinks you did, maybe that’s what it’s about. But I don’t think so. I get the feeling that I’m putting at least my job on the line for you, at the very least. Now you may not think that’s much, at a million three a picture, but I have a lot of years in it and it’s what I do. So to me, that’s a lot. That’s what I figure.”

  “So what do you want, Joe? Go on, tell me what you want.” She’s breathing hard and so am I. The wind whips past us and the fine salt spray should be cooling, but there’s heat coming off both of us.

  Maybe I should have the guts to say it, say I want to lay you down, I want to plunge inside you, walk side by side with you with my hands upon you for all the honest world to see. What I say is, “I want you to take it seriously. And me seriously. We’re in this together. Or you can go hire someone else and I’ll go back to work and go investigate some stock fraud or an embezzlement or a cheating husband.”

  “I can say yes to that,” she says. I’m still holding her by the shoulders. The eye contact is electric and seems unbreakable. “Yes, I can take you seriously. I always did.” We stare at each other. She nudges the door open a little bit more: “Is that all?” she asks.

  “No. Of course it’s not,” I say.

  I pull her close. Slowly. Our eyes are locked. She’s saying neither yes nor no. I feel the heat of her body before it touches mine. The wind takes her hair, dashes it around, and that’s the next thing I feel, her hair touching my face. There’ve been women, I’ve been in their mouth, and not felt half so much as from the touch of Maggie’s windblown hair. My hands are still on her shoulders, slowly pulling us together—I got to tell you, when I was a kid and I went to the movies, cowboy movies, war movies, and they had these kissing scenes, I always hated them. Can we get back to the shooting, please? Even when I was grown, I didn’t get the romance stuff, even sex stuff, on-screen. But I thought, after this, because the thing with Maggie is so romantic, so cinematic, th
at I’m gonna change and when I see the kissy-face on-screen I’m going to finally get it. But after this, when I go to the movies, I still don’t get it. The hots, when you got ’em, is the greatest drama in the world next to dying, but it’s not a spectator sport. There we are, Trancas, Pacific Ocean, waves, wind, great light, beautiful woman. My hands are on her shoulders, our lips are so close that we can feel the charge coming off each other’s body. Subatomic particles, electrons, auric field, whatever that thing is. There’s that one paper-thin distance to cross.

  And we cross it. Her lips are on mine. This is the second kiss. The first time that I am bold enough to reach out and kiss her. I’m over forty and I’m counting kisses like when I was fourteen. The bodies follow the lips. Touching. I feel her nipples stiffen and her hips go soft. They press against me and I grow hard and I can feel her feeling that. Her mouth opens, just wide enough and perfectly soft.

  Then suddenly she just steps back. Not harshly, but definite about it.

  “No. I’m sorry. No. I can’t now.”

  “Why not?” It’s a growl. I want to behave like a teenage boy and call her the names we used to call girls who do that, offer us a glimpse of what we want, then leave us panting and pathetic.

  “I don’t know. We have to . . .”

  “Have to what?”

  “Find out what’s going on, Joe. With this thing hanging over me . . . I don’t want to decide anything.”

  “What are you going to do? Put your whole life on hold?”

  “You do something to me, Joe. You really do. There’s something about you. Something very real. But I don’t go to bed with any guy who turns me on or every time I get feeling hot I just don’t do it. And I do take you seriously, Joe. Very seriously, and if we do go to bed together, it’s going to get even more serious. You’re not the kind of guy who’s going to wake up a little before dawn and slip into his pants and walk out the door, with me pretending I’m still asleep and you never coming back anymore.”