The Falconer’s Tale. Gordon Kent

“Five thousand each when Hackbutt agrees. Ten thousand each when Hackbutt completes the cosmetic part to my satisfaction. The balance when we’re done. Either way, success or failure—but not until we’re done.”

      She looked at the photographs and then at the front door, as if she were looking for an escape, and said, “You have ten thousand dollars on you?” she babbled. “This is all happening too fast—my God, we just met you—really, I think you’re moving us too fast—”

      So.

      Piat opened his blazer and took out four envelopes. He laid them out on the old trunk. Two said “Irene.” Two said “Hackbutt.” He pointed. “Five thou.” He moved his hand. “Tickets to London. For shopping.” He waved at the other two. “Ditto, for you.”

      “I don’t get all giggly at the prospect of shopping.”

      He knew he had to push. “Deal, Irene?”

      She rose to her feet. “More tea?”

      He drove away from the farm without having seen Hackbutt but with a sense of release from danger. And a little elation. The next part—making up with Hackbutt—would be messy and difficult and emotional, but that was life in the business.

      From a roadside phone kiosk, Piat dialed the number he and Partlow had arranged to use for routine communications and left an eight-digit code that he typed out on the stainless steel keypad. Then he spent three hours counting his remaining money and renting a room in Tobermory. The woman at the front desk of the Mishnish remembered him. He told her he was back for the fishing.

      “Oh, aye,” she said.

      Piat believed in living his cover. He spent the rest of the evening on the estuary of the Aros River, fishing.

      In the morning, he didn’t go straight to the farm. Instead, he put on his boots and first drove, then climbed to his loch. He took a rod, but he didn’t set it up. Instead he took a cheap digital camera. Then, from the pub in Craignure, he accessed his “Furman” account online. Furman was the identity he used in Athens to sell antiquities. He uploaded three digital images of the crannog from the cheap camera and sent them to three different addresses; one in Sri Lanka, one in Florida, and one in Ireland. He wasn’t sure just what he was meaning to do yet. So he was testing the water.

      * * *

      As he drove back down the gravel road to the farm, he caught a flash of Hackbutt among the cages behind the house. His stomach rolled over. He pulled around the house, parked, and took a deep breath.

      As he got out of the car, Hackbutt came around the house and waved. Hackbutt’s wave said it all, he hoped. Piat gave up the idea of trying to make contact with the dog and faced him.

      “You really pissed me off,” Hackbutt said from thirty feet away. His tone was high, almost falsetto. As he walked toward Piat, he said, “It’s not that I can’t be your friend. Not that I’m angry—really angry. But it wasn’t decent, leaving me like that.” He looked like shit. He looked like a beggar in the wilderness—beard uncombed, hair wild.

      “No, Digger. No. I abandoned you. It’s not the way I meant it to be, but I did it. I’m sorry.”

      Hackbutt’s hands were trembling. He rubbed them together. “Why? Irene says I should forget it. That it’s not our business. But I can’t—I think you have to tell me.”

      Piat had forgotten how Hackbutt really was—the pile of insecurities and grandiosities. Piat put an arm on the other man’s shoulders. Lies that he might have told other agents wouldn’t work on Hackbutt—lies that he had been busy, that he had had to use Dave, that he’d been somewhere else saving the world. Waste of breath. To Hackbutt, there was only Hackbutt—and maybe Irene. Instead, he said, “I needed to get you guys the money. That’s all I can say, okay?”

      Hackbutt’s face was blotchy. “Dave said you weren’t coming back. That you didn’t give a shit about me or Irene. That you only worked for money and that he was my real friend.” He was almost crying. He was very much the Hackbutt that Piat had run in Malaysia.

      Piat nodded, hugged Hackbutt a little harder. He could imagine the vitriol that Dave must have spewed. He could see how a fool like Dave would think that he could achieve control that way.

      “But I came back, Digger.” Piat didn’t care that he could see Irene at the window, that he was practically hugging her man on the driveway. “I came back. I should never have left.”

      “And you won’t leave again?”

      “Not until the end.” Piat believed in being prepared for the end, right from the beginning. “And then we’ll just go back to being friends.”

      Hackbutt was crying now. But he was returning the hug. Piat was patient, almost tender.

      “Irene will think we’re making out,” Hackbutt said after a full minute. He giggled.

      That laugh’s got to go, Piat thought.

      Irene had made tea. The door to her studio was still closed, but a third of the photographs had been taken down, and some lay in untidy piles on the furniture. Irene was taciturn, seemingly nervous. Regretting it?

      Piat cleared a space on the couch and sat, opening his backpack.

      “Okay, folks. Today we start working. First, anybody have something on their schedule for the next two months? Weddings? Funerals? Spill it now, because the moment I’m paying, you’re on my calendar. Okay?”

      “He’s always like this at the start,” Hackbutt said to Irene.

      Irene stared at him.

      “Good. Digger, you remember these forms?” The forms themselves were creations from Piat’s laptop, but they were enough like CIA documents to pass muster with an agent. “You pay US taxes?”

      “No,” they said together.

      “Then we don’t need this one.” Piat crumpled a W-2 invoice form he’d downloaded. He’d always thought it funny that US agents paid income tax on black ops money, but they did. “Contract. Security agreement. Confidentiality. These don’t constitute a security clearance, just an arrangement. Okay?”

      “We have to sign,” Hackbutt said to Irene. “It’s okay.” He was reassuring her from his years of experience as an agent, and he sounded fatuous. She, however, was reading the whole document and not listening to him. Looking for a reason not to sign, he thought, but there was a resignation about her that suggested that she was simply going through the motions. If the idea of actually putting her art on display frightened her, another part of her very much wanted to do it. That part, he guessed, had already won.

      Piat had looked at her website. She actually had a small reputation, had done “installations” in Auckland and Ontario and Eastern Europe. But the website hadn’t been updated in three years, and he wondered if she really was an “artist”—he couldn’t think of the word without the quotation marks—who’d run out of ideas. Or whatever it was that “artists” had in their heads.

      At any rate, she signed. Looking unhappy. But sexually interesting.

      When they had both signed, Piat handed out envelopes. “Five thousand each. Okay?”

      He’d made a mistake, and he saw it too late. Hackbutt’s face froze and his skin got blotchy again. He followed Hackbutt’s eyes and saw that Hackbutt only now realized that Piat was paying both of them, and that as much as that made sense to him and to Partlow, it wasn’t the right move for Hackbutt, who wanted to give her the money himself. Without much of a pause, he turned to Irene. “Hackbutt wanted you to have this money for yourself. The contract’s with him—but he wouldn’t do it without you. And I’m sorry to be so crass with both of you but, Digger, you remember that we have to play for the bureaucrats with money. I can get you more for both than I can get just for you, Digger.” He said it all so smoothly that Hackbutt’s face was calm again before he