"Running Dog" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)

II Radial Matrix

1

She parked at the very limit of a dead-end street overlooking Rock Creek. It was a warm evening, kids chasing each other in a playground just yards away. The house was red brick, fairly large, attached (how strange, she thought) to a common brown frame house that seemed totally out of place here. How strange and interesting. She approached the brick house, noting that the door-knocker was a bronze eagle.

Lloyd Percival made flattering remarks. He remembered what she'd been wearing on their previous encounter in the corridors of the Senate wing. And commented on the reduced frizz-content of her hair. They sat around a cherrywood cocktail table in a large room filled mostly with period furniture and decorated in spruce green Colonial wallpaper. The first hour was boring, at least for Moll.

"And Mrs. Percival?"

"Spends most of her time back home. Doesn't like Washington. Never has. We've grown apart, I'm afraid. Divorce in progress."

"What does she do?"

"She curls up with the Warren Report. She's been reading the Warren Report for eight or nine years. Nine years, I make it. The full set. Twenty-six volumes. She wears a bed jacket."

"You have two married daughters."

It went on like this. Percival had a second drink. He sat stoop-shouldered in a wing sofa, his deep friendly voice droning on. Even with his beady eyes and his small and somewhat flat-top head, Moll found his presence genial and even serene. He was the kind of man people feel at ease with. Large, shaggy and quietly ironic. She curled up in her chair, enveloped by the room's cozy mood.

"I still don't understand why I didn't have you screened. We screen people like you."

"My fried hair. Disarmed you."

"I know what you really want to talk about."

"Do you?" she said.

"You don't want to talk about my family, or my views on world affairs."

"Don't I?"

"Let me do something to that drink."

"No, it's fine."

"You want to talk about the hearings."

"Actually, no, you're wrong."

"You want to talk about PAC/ORD."

"You're so wrong, Senator."

"Not that I blame you," he said. "They've got mechanisms. Undercover channeling operations. They've got offshoots. It's damn shocking. At this late date, you'd think I'd be impervious to what those people dream up. Not so."

"Senator, the truth is I wouldn't think of asking you to divulge what goes on in closed-door hearings."

"What about this boss of yours?"

"Yes?"

"Grace Delaney," he said. "I hear unflattering reports. She's had dealings with radical groups, among other things."

"A woman with a past. Isn't that what makes us interesting? For men, it's lack of a recorded past that proves so fascinating. Women, no. It's the shadows behind us that do the trick."

"Your own, for instance, I would dearly love to hear about."

"I used to live with Gary Penner. Dial-a-Bomb?"

"I do recall, yes. The name's familiar."

"It should be, Senator. He blew up half your goddamn state about ten years ago."

They shared a laugh over that. Unfolding slowly, Percival's long body rose from the sofa. He shuffled to the liquor cabinet, bringing a bottle of Jack Daniel's back to the cocktail table with him.

"You understand nothing I tell you is to be attributed. It is not only unattributed. It is undocumented, unfounded and unreal. I deny everything in advance. Whoever leaked this stuff to you, whichever committee counsel, is not only breaking the law; he's totally misrepresenting the facts."

"What you're saying, really, Senator, is that you decided at some point that _Running Dog_ is precisely the publication this kind of story cries out for. No one else would touch it since you've no intention of providing the slightest clue to its authenticity."

"None of it ever happened. I repeat. It's all lies. I find it utterly inconceivable that such things could find their way into the pages, so on, so on, so on."

He told her that PAC/ORD-the Personnel Advisory Committee, Office of Records and Disbursements-had been set up, on the surface, as the principal unit of budgetary operations for the whole U.S. intelligence community. Dealing strictly in unclassified areas, the agency had been established in response to criticism of soaring intelligence expenditures.

Covert operations were beyond its scope. Hiring, firing, paying, promoting, budgeting. This was PAC/ORD territory, on the surface, and it did not extend beyond the legal, administrative and clerical areas. Thousands of people in a number of agencies. PAC/ORD was not unlike the personnel department of a large corporation.

On the surface.

Beyond that, however, the Senator's investigating committee had learned that PAC/ORD had a secret arm, the kind of cover setup known as a proprietary. This was Radial Matrix, a legally incorporated firm with headquarters in Fairfax County, Virginia. Radial Matrix-the term itself was meaningless-was a systems planning outfit. They advised on, and installed, manufacturing and shipping systems. Their clients included firms across the U.S. and in a number of other countries. In the last three years they'd become a huge success, with several spin-off operations and activities. The only overt connection between PAC/ORD and Radial Matrix was a contract the latter had to install a new computerized wage system on behalf of the former.

The only overt connection.

Radial Matrix was in fact a centralized funding mechanism for covert operations directed against foreign governments, against elements within foreign governments, and against political parties trying to gain power contrary to the interests of U.S. corporations abroad. It was responsible for channeling and laundering funds for unlisted station personnel, indigenous agents, terrorist operations, defector recruitment, political contributions, penetration of foreign communications networks and postal agencies.

So on, so on, so on.

"If you study the history of reform," Percival said, "you'll see there's always a counteraction built in. A low-lying surly passion. Always people ready to invent new secrets, new bureaucracies of terror."

"Don't get carried away on my behalf."

"It's only fair to point out that these PAC/ORD activities are fairly small-scale, as far as I can tell, compared to the CIA extravaganzas that brought on the thirst for reform in the first place, and of course they're being run by some of the same people. My point is that these activities satisfy the historical counterfunction. They fill those small dark places. And they're illegal. Run counter to the spirit and letter of every law, every intelligence directive, that pertains to such matters."

One of the marvels of all this, the Senator continued, was that Radial Matrix, strictly as a business enterprise, was enjoying such enormous success. Surely this was an unexpected development to the folks at PAC/ORD, who couldn't have expected their modest creation to become such a world-beater.

Moll told the Senator she didn't think any of this was very startling, considering past developments and revelations. Percival had an answer for that.

One final level of operations.

Radial Matrix was currently run by a man named Earl Mudger. Handpicked by PAC/ORD, he was former commander of a fighter-bomber squadron (Korea) and long-term contract employee (Saigon desk, Air America) of the CIA. He'd had civilian experience, briefly, in the late fifties, with a firm specializing in production flow systems and automation.

Mudger turned out to be the right man for the job-too much so, it seemed. He fell in love with profits. The profit motive became more interesting to him at this stage of his career than pay records or secret bank accounts or whatever fancy paperwork is necessary to maintain agents in the field and deliver money into the hands of favored political leaders in this or that country.

The Senator poured himself another drink and put his feet up on the cocktail table. First traces of slurred speech.

"What's happened is that PAC/ORD has lost control of its own operation. Radial Matrix has become a breakaway unit of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. Nobody knows what to do about it. Mudger's completely autonomous. They're afraid to move against him. Public scrutiny of the funding mechanism is unacceptable. And it could happen if they try to remove him. Anything could happen. Including disclosures of how Radial Matrix has managed to be so successful."

"I'd like to hear."

"Mudger hasn't forgotten his field training. He uses the same methods in business he used in espionage activities. In actual combat. That's why the firm's a whopping success. The man's made his own set of rules and won't allow anyone else to use them. He's got all kinds of links, organized crime and so on. And he's just sitting out there in the countryside running up profits. Recent scheme is diversification. Systems planning has apparently begun to seem dull, He wants to diversify."

There was a silence as they pondered this.

"What you have in Mudger," the Senator said, "is the combination of business drives and lusts and impulses with police techniques, with ultrasophisticated skills of detection, surveillance, extortion, terror and the rest of it."

"It's like what Chaplin said in connection with _Monsieur Verdoux_. The logical extension of business is murder."

Percival shuddered, a bit theatrically, to indicate his feelings on the subject. He leaned forward to freshen her drink. She waved him off, smiling politely. He got some ice cubes from the bucket on the liquor cabinet and carried them back in his left hand, watching them slide into his glass one by one. Streetlights were on outside. No further sound of children playing. Moll watched him drink quietly. He finished one, started another.

"I like tall women," the Senator said.

"So he wants to diversify."

"Let me ask you something."

"Sure."

"Did you ever smoke grass?"

"Did I ever smoke grass? Yes, Senator, in my time."

"I guess you must have."

"Being a woman with a past," she said.

"What I wanted to know. Do you have any with you?"

"Sorry."

"It's something, candidly, I would have liked to have done. Some years ago with my youngest daughter, when she was about twenty or so, I thought we should do this because I knew she smoked, I knew she smoked."

"You thought it would bring you two closer together."

"I really wanted to," he said.

"Where, in the Capitol rotunda?"

He finished his drink and poured another.

"I like tall women."

"I'd be interested in hearing more about this Earl Mudger person. If you want this thing to see print, you ought to tell me everything you know. He wants to diversify, you say."

"I wonder this."

"Yes?"

"What can I call you?" he said. "Candidly."

"Molt will do."

"Moll, can you keep a secret?"

"Sure, try me."

"I was in contact with a man. Never mind details, like name and such. We met at a party. First there was a party. New York gallery opening followed by a party. You know the agenda. The talk: politics, sex, movies and dog shit. You know the kind of thing. Then a second party that branched off from this. A small, small gathering of like-minded people. Very small. We had interests in common."

"Like what?"

"That's not part of the secret. That's a different secret."

"Please go on," she said.

"This man I met. The second party. I found out later he was a systems engineer. Did contract work for Radial Matrix. Strictly on the up-and-up. Not connected with their covert function. But this was learned later. At the party he had something to sell. Something I was interested in buying. We were like-minded people there. Conversation flowed mostly in one direction. And I learned about this man's proposal to sell. So we talked and made arrangements to talk again. In my position, being the position I hold, this was done discreetly, taking enormous precautions. But I did give him a certain phone number where he could reach me. This was done because he refused to be contacted himself. There was total insistence on this. What I also later learned was that in his work for Radial Matrix, strictly on the up-and-up, he and Earl Mudger struck up an acquaintanceship. See, Mudger was interested in making the same buy I was. Diversification. His plan to diversify. So then before we could even talk again the man I talked to is found stone cold dead in some condemned building in New York. But this is just between us. Deep background. Because I trust you."

"I understand."

"So now, I'd be willing to bet, there are two investigations going on. I'm investigating them. And I'd be willing to bet they're investigating me. Blackmail in mind. Purposes of blackmail. So we must tread lightly. Everything we do is subject to extreme cautionary procedures."

She watched his head fall forward. Two minutes later he snapped awake.

"I'm curious about the house, Senator."

"Do you have any grass or not?"

"I love looking at other people's houses."

"I want to smoke grass with a tall woman."

"Show me around, why don't you?"

"If I show you around, we have to go to the bedroom. You have to be shown the bedroom just as much as other rooms. All rooms count the same in a house when it's being shown."

"Show me the bedroom, Senator."

"Call me Lloyd," he said.

He struggled to his feet and held out his right hand. She took it and allowed him to lead her up a short staircase. At the top of the stairs he fell down. He got up, with her help, and then headed into the bedroom, where he fell again. She watched him crawl toward the king-size canopy bed.

"Where's your housekeeper? Don't senators have housekeepers? Some little old granny to button the trap door in your pajamas."

"Gave her the night off."

"Part of your seduction scheme, was it? Jesus, Lloyd, too bad. All that trouble for nothing."

"It's all lies. I repeat. We never had this talk."

She helped him up on the bed and waited until his breathing grew steady and he passed beyond the outer edges of sleep. Then she went down the hail and turned left, interested in finding the easternmost end of the house, the surface that abutted the brown frame structure next door.

The walls here were lined with antique sconces and turn-of-the-century handbills and steamship prints. She examined three small rooms. In the last of these were two banister-back chairs, a spinning wheel and a Queen Anne writing table. Moli noted the position of the fireplace. East wall. The screen was not in place before the open recess. It was leaning against one of the chairs.

Cleanest fireplace she'd ever seen. She moved closer, bending to inspect. It wasn't a working fireplace. No flue. Nothing but solid brick above. She leaned further into the recess. The back section was hardwood. Probing in the dimness, she touched a small latch. When she lifted it and applied pressure, the section swung open. A priest's hole. She moved through hunched way over, not actually crawling. Immediate sense of confinement. Near-total darkness.

This constricting space ended after she'd moved forward fifteen feet. Standing full length she felt along the walls on either side. Her hand found a dimmer-switch and she eased it out and turned it about ninety degrees.

She found she was standing on a grillwork balcony overlooking an enormous room of Mediterranean design. She walked down a closed staircase lined with stained glass panels, abstract. The floor below was parquet with a centered rectangle of peacock tiles. There were large tropical plants.

On the walls were perhaps fifty-five paintings. Pieces of sculpture stood among the plants. There were small displays of pottery, jewelry and china. A stone fountain depicted a woman on her knees before an aroused warrior. Mounted in a tempered glass segment of one wall was a bronze medallion scene of Greek courtesans. There was a large bronze on the tiled rectangle: two men, a woman.

Moll moved first along the walls, looking at the paintings and drawings. Very nice, most of them, all labeled. Icart. Hokusai. Picasso. Baithus. Dali. The Kangra school. Botero with his neckless immensities. Egon Schiele with his unloved nudes. Hans Beilmer. Tom Wesselmann. Clara Tice.

She crossed the floor several times, studying the sculptures, the pottery, the section of hand-carved choir stall-naked woman with gargoyles. She realized there were no doors or windows. He'd had the whole house sealed from the inside, all openings bricked and plastered over. Portable humidifiers for the plants. Elaborate lighting system. The only way in or out was through the fireplace in the "real" house.

Her camera case was in the car. She debated getting it. Now that she'd found the collection she didn't know what to do about it. Maybe Grace Delaney was right. It lacked ramifications. It wasn't political. It was strictly private, isolated from the schemes and intricacies. She was inclined to let the Senator win his point. Radial Matrix was the story here.

On another level she was curiously indifferent to the objects around her. This was despite their high quality, the dramatic space, the secrecy of the whole setup, the handsome trappings, the subject matter itself. The strongest thing she felt was a sense of the work's innate limitations. She recalled what Lightborne had said about old and new forms. The modern sensibility had been instructed by a different kind of code. Movement. The image had to move.

From his window Selvy could see a colorless strip of the Anacostia River. He hadn't shaved in two and a half days, the first time this had happened since his counterinsurgency stint at Marathon Mines in southwest Texas, a training base for paramilitary elements of various intelligence units and for the secret police of friendly foreign governments.

Shaving was an emblem of rigor, the severity of the double life. Shaving. Proper maintenance of old combat gear. Seats on the aisle in planes and trains. Sex with married women only. These were personal quirks mostly, aspects of his psychic guide to survival.

He'd broken the sex rule and now he had nearly three days' growth. But the routine still applied. The routine in one sense was his physical movement between New York and Washington, and the set pieces of procedure, the subroutines, that were part of this travel. In a larger context the routine was a mind set, all those mechanically performed operations of the intellect that accompanied this line of work. You made connection-A but allowed connection-B to elude you. You felt free to question phase-i of a given operation but deadened yourself to the implications of phase-2. You used expressions that contained interchangeable words.

The routine was how your mind had come to work; which areas you avoided; the person you'd become.

He'd known from the beginning that Christoph Ludecke was a systems engineer. When the break developed-Senator linked to transvestite-the dead man's occupation was among the first things looked into.

He'd also known that systems planning was the cover Radial Matrix used in its role as funding mechanism for covert operations. Obviously. Radial Matrix-an abstraction personified by Lomax, his sole contact-was the entity he worked for.

The connection was unexpected. It didn't fit the known world as recently constructed. It was a peculiar element in a series of events otherwise joined in explainable ways.

This was where the routine was important. He stuck to the routine. The routine enabled him mentally to bury this queer bit of intelligence, Ludecke and Radial Matrix, a conjunction of interests that could only lead to areas he wasn't privileged, or competent, to enter. He wasn't a detective, after all. He didn't build models of theoretical events surrounding a criminal act. Nor did he concern himself with policy.

Ludecke was linked to the Senator. It wasn't within Selvy's purview to meditate on additional links, even when they might pertain to his own ultimate sustenance. Especially then. This was why the routine existed.

In his right hand, as he stood looking out the window at nothing in particular, was the.41 magnum, loaded with expandable bullets. Selvy's regard for the implements of an operational mode became a virtual passion where handguns were involved. He went regularly to the range to work on sight alignment and trigger control. He dry-fired, he used live rounds. He practiced grip and finger positions. He worked on various steadying exercises.

This, too, was the routine.

He kept the chambers clean. He took precautions against fouled bores and corrosion. He owned any number of lubricants, brushes, swabs, preservers, conditioners, degreasers and removers.

To Selvy, guns and their parts amounted to an inventory of personal worth. He controlled the weapon, his reflexes and judgment. Maintaining the parts and knowing the gun's special characteristics were ways of demonstrating involvement in his own well-being.

These pieces, laid out at his fingertips, resembled nothing more than routine hardware. Still, there was order in this grouping; distinct precision. He could see how each surface was designed to adapt to at least one other surface. The interrelationships accumulated and spread. Things fit.

Where the routine prevented Selvy from seeking human links, it prompted him to study the interactions within mechanisms.

At the range he worked on stance, breath control, eye focus. The idea was to build almost a second self. Someone smarter and more detached. Do this perfectly and you've developed a new standard for times of danger and stress. He stood at a forty-five-degree angle to the proposed line of fire. He tried to avoid locking his elbow. He fired, focusing his master eye, the right eye in his case, on the gun's front sight.

The handgun is intimate. A functional accessory. You wear it. It fits you or doesn't, and vice versa.

He found it reassuring to handle the parts, to know their names and understand their functions. Attention to detail is a form of vigilance. There were no shadings in his willingness to use the stopping power at his disposal. This was very clear, this resolve. It affirmed his bond to the weapon itself.

Evening. The room was dark. He didn't move from the window to turn on a light.

Sex with an unmarried woman. Two and a half days without a shave. Minor lapses. He saw the humor in his idiosyncrasies. The routine still applied. That's what mattered most. The routine applied to the extent where he didn't actively speculate on who that might have been who was standing in the doorway of that run-down bar directing automatic fire across the room, or what the reasoning behind it was, or who was supposed to get hit.

In a storeroom on H Street, Moll Robbins went through _Running Dog's_ files, such as they were, on Earl Mudger.

From bases in Japan he led strikes by F-84Es against selected enemy targets in Korea. These strikes were operational tests of refueling procedures as much as combat missions. He also coached the football team, 116th Fighter-Bomber Wing.

Still in Korea he resigned his commission and spent a year in special paramilitary programs run by Air Force Intelligence, an open-ended term of duty.

He left to return to civilian life as Vice-President, Distribution, Process Management Systems, a firm with headquarters in Oklahoma City.

Three years later he appeared as chief training officer at Marathon Mines, an abandoned silver mining site in rough country north of the Rio Grande, where antiguerrilla specialists taught survival techniques and conducted war games.

In Laos he was a contract officer attached to Air America during operations secretly directed by the CIA.

In Vietnam, still on a contract basis, he recruited and directed CT teams against the Vietcong. Later he helped set up a network of provincial interrogation centers, where Vietcong suspects were tortured. Then he ran a cover operation in Saigon, hiring mercenaries for special operations.

It was while Mudger was on loan to Special Forces for unknown duties that he became something of a legend in Vietnam. Apparently he established a feudal barony complete with loyal ARVN soldiers (loyal to him, not the government) as well as pimps, black marketeers, shoeshine boys, war refugees, bar girls, deserters, pickpockets and others. It was suspected to be a drug operation with a thriving sideline in blackmarket piasters. As head, Mudger dispensed land, money, food and other favors.

He also set up a private zoo in the jungle outside a village called Tha Binh. He managed to stock it with tigers, wolves, elephants, peacocks, snakes, leopards, apes, zebras, monkeys, hyenas and hippos.

Virtually all this information Moll found in a single clipping, mdst of it color background for an AP dispatch that detailed Mudger's exploits during the fall of Saigon. Waving a Browning automatic he commandeered a C-123 transport, rigged for defoliation, and crammed most of his people aboard, along with seventeen of his animals, on the day before the city fell.

Lomax put his feet up on the jump seat. He opened his briefcase and took out a red folder.

THE DORISH REPORT

A confidential reporting service

He turned to the first page and began reading.

Sir:

An investigation has been conducted pursuant to your request and authorization concerning Grace B. Delaney, Managing Editor, Running Dog magazine, a property of RD Publications, which person resides at 116 East 61st Street, New York, N.Y. 10021, in order to ascertain Grace B. Delaney's background, reputation and responsibility. The results of our investigation are set forth below under headings designed to facilitate your perusal and analysis.

The headings were: Identification, Background, Personal Relations, Credit, Litigation and Finances. Lomax scanned Personal Relations before any of the others but eventually found Finances to be more to the point. Tax matters in particular.

At the bottom of the last page was a statement in italics:

_This report is made available to you at your express request, as you have employed us for that purpose. It is a privileged and confidential communication, and the in form.ation contained herein is not to be disclosed to others, verbally or otherwise_.

It concluded: The Dorish Report, Investigative Confidentiality for the Special Needs of the Seventies.

Trying to hail a cab on H Street, Moll watched the black limousine gradually come to a stop in front of her. The driver was square-jawed, dark suit and cap. The man sitting in the rear, opening the door toward her, was wearing sports clothes and moccasins. He smiled pleasantly.

"Come on, I'll take you."

"Where?"

Shrug.

"To the Senator," she said. "That it?"

Smile.

"The Senator wants to apologize, does he?"

Smile.

"I'll have to take a raincheck," she said. "Tell him next time."

"No rainchecks. We don't give rainchecks."

"Tell him thanks anyway."

"It's urgent," the man said.

His face didn't quite indicate that. The smile was still there but only technically, no longer bearing traces of pleasantness. But it wasn't urgency that had replaced it. Just impatience, she thought. Still, the strangeness of it kept her from walking away. She was feeling a little disassociated. Limousine, driver, Senate aide. If Percival wanted to talk to her, it would be foolish, considering the revelations of the night before, to put him off.

She got into the car, sorting a number of thoughts at once. She noticed they were heading west on K Street. The man in sports clothes lit a cigarette.

"He's at his Georgetown place, is he?"

The man patted his sideburns, one at a time.

"Taking some time off, is he, from his onerous duties on the Hill?"

They passed Washington Circle and were on a freeway skirting the channel. They turned onto a bridge approach and Moll twisted in her seat and looked out the back window, realizing that was Georgetown they'd just left behind.

She began reading road signs aloud, not knowing quite why. At a certain bend in the road, sunlight filled the interior of the car and when she glanced down at the material covering the back seat she saw it was covered with dog hair.

Soon they were passing Falls Church and heading into intermittent countryside, fields of black Angus grazing. The car slowed occasionally for extended stretches of motels, plant nurseries, supermarkets, auto and truck dealerships. Streams and brooks were called runs here. Roadside shops advertised Civil War relics.