The Falconer’s Tale. Gordon Kent

need waders, he thought. But he didn’t have money for waders. And they couldn’t be bought anywhere short of Reykjavik.

      He made several lackluster casts. The wind had changed and developed flaws; the combination made casting tricky. He moved to his left along the rocky shore and cast again. As his eye followed the fall of the fly, another dot of color caught his attention. The bus passenger had donned a yellow slicker and was coming down the hillside. Piat had climbed that hillside himself, and he wished the late-season hiker luck in negotiating the steep, sodden marsh that passed for a trail, with grass tussocks surrounded by ankle-twisting holes you could go into to the knee. He noted that the hiker did not have a rod.

      Piat fished automatically until he focused again to discover that he had moved to a place with no weed and no wind—and no fish. The casting was easy, but to little purpose, and he reeled up and started back to the beach. The pale sun became stronger at his back. Out in the river, a fish rose noisily. Piat looked up to see the size of the ring, checked on the hiker’s progress with the same glance, and was startled by how fast the hiker was moving. He was almost down to the base of the hill, walking purposefully.

      Piat went to his pack and took out binoculars. He took a careful look. Then he carefully dried the lenses with a cloth, replaced the binoculars in their case, and put them in his pack with his thermos and the fish wrapped in a plastic sack. He broke down his rod, stowed it, pocketed his reel, and started back down the valley. No one watching him would have thought him hurried or panicked.

      The streams really were full, and Piat remembered having crossed four on his way up from Horgsa. He crossed the second one that he came to with trepidation; the third was running so heavily that he turned and followed it rather than crossing. He knew that the stream should bring him down the glen to Horgsa. A narrow track ran along the side, cut so deep into the turf by rivulets of water that he had to catch himself constantly to keep from falling. Patches of gravel were like rest stops. Even a few steps on solid ground felt like a holiday.

      Piat pushed on, crossing a boulder field and passing over the last crest before all the land fell away to the sea three miles distant.

      He did not look back.

      The stream he had followed roared along to his right, sometimes close beside him and sometimes more distant as he followed the gentlest contours. He had a sense that he was too far to the east and might have a long walk on the road once he reached it, but he relished the thought of a walk on the shoulder of a paved road, no matter how narrow, and his unease was growing.

      The hillside suddenly became steeper and the stream fell into falls, straight to the plain more than a hundred feet below. Piat stood at the top for several minutes, watching the falls and trying to gauge his chances of either crossing the stream above the fall or making his way down the cliff. He didn’t like either, but neither did he relish the notion of backtracking up the long hillside behind him. He felt that he was being watched.

      He started down the cliff, following another deep-cut track. Luck revealed an old road that seemed to spring from nowhere and ran along a hedge of boulders for a hundred meters. Piat couldn’t imagine what conveyance could have climbed a road so steep, or how much effort it must have taken to hew the road. Just as suddenly, the road vanished into steep rock fall, but he was around the very worst of the cliff and he began to move cautiously straight down, grasping handfuls of grass at every step.

      The last of the climb down took twenty minutes. When he at last reached the base of the cliff, he jumped across a feeder of the waterfall stream into the backyard of a local farmer. He crossed the yard into a farm road and walked down the hill past an old byre full of Icelandic sheep. In half a mile he was on the main road, and in fifteen minutes he was waiting at the bus stop.

      Only then did he look down his back trail. Even with binoculars he couldn’t find the yellow slicker, or the man who had been wearing it—a man he had seen several times through various lenses, and never met. Nor did he wish to. He cursed the loss of his fishing.

      The bus arrived on time. Piat climbed wearily aboard, paid his fare, and settled into one of the high-backed seats after placing his backpack in the rack.

      He was just opening his book when a voice said, “Hello, Jerry.” It was a voice he knew, and it belonged to a man he didn’t want to see just then. Mike Dukas.

      “Hello, Mike,” he said.

      “Good to see you, Jerry.”

      It was a day to see people he didn’t want to see. Piat had been walked, gently but firmly, from the bus to a private car, and from the car to the lobby of the Kirkjubaejarklaustur Hotel, and from thence to the bar. In the bar, a bright, modern, Nordic bar with good Norwegian wood counters and clean glasses hung from wooden racks, sat Clyde Partlow. Piat knew a great deal about Partlow, and he didn’t like him much.

      “I wish I could say the same, Clyde.” Piat shook hands, not quite ready to cross the social line and refuse.

      “Sun is over the yardarm, Jerry. Want a drink?” Partlow indicated the bar and the bottles with a proprietary hand that indicated that Piat could help himself—and that Partlow had complete control of the hotel.

      Piat walked over to the bar, feeling his wet socks inside his wellies and the weight of the fish in the bag on his shoulder. He’d cleaned it—it’d keep for a few hours. Odd thing to worry about. He knew he was rattled—rattled by the men who had picked him up, rattled by Partlow, who looked prosperous and well groomed, rattled that they had taken him so easily. It was unlikely he was even going to eat the fish. He poured himself a stiff shot—more like two shots—of twenty-five-year-old Laphroaig. It looked to be the most expensive scotch on the bar.

      Partlow raised his glass. “Old friends,” he said.

      “They’re all dead,” said Piat. He drank anyway, a little more than he had intended. “Okay, cut the soft crap, Clyde. What do you want?”

      “As you will, Jerry.” Partlow reached into an expensive leather bag and retrieved a file. “A project has resurfaced one of your old agents, Jerry. We’d like you to bring him in.”

      Piat struggled with the scotch and the adrenaline to hide his relief. It could still be a trap—they could still arrest him or turn him over to Icelandic immigration or any number of other things. But the file looked real, and it all seemed a little elaborate for an arrest. In fact, now that his hour-long panic was beginning to subside, it had all been too elaborate for an arrest. He hit his panic with a little more scotch.

      He circled to the chair that had been placed opposite Partlow, slipped his fishing bag over his shoulder to land on the floor, removed his rain jacket, and sat. “Who?”

      “Not so fast, Jerry. You are aware, I think, of your status with us—nil. In fact, you are a wanted man, aren’t you? So try to keep your usual greed in check, Jerry. First, I want your agreement that you’ll go and fetch this fellow for us. Then there will be some documents to sign. Then we’ll talk about who it is.”

      Piat looked at Partlow for a few seconds, and his hand holding his scotch began to shake. Piat took the plunge anyway. “If I’m a wanted man, Clyde, then you’d better arrest me, hadn’t you? Because otherwise you’ll be in defiance of an executive order about dealing with known felons, won’t you, Clyde?”

      The two men glared at each other for seconds. Partlow shook his head. “Really, Jerry, you are wasting my time.”

      “I’m not the one who just got kidnapped, old boy. So thanks for the scotch. I’ll be going now. I paid a mint for the fishing that Mike Dukas interrupted.” Piat rose to his feet and started to don his jacket, thinking—now we’ll see what cards he really has. Fuck, my hands are shaking.

      Partlow took a deep breath, sucked in his cheeks, and blew it out in a little explosion of petulance. Rain came against the big plate glass windows in rhythmic surges. “You know, Jerry, whole years pass when I don’t see you and I almost forget how much we dislike each other.”

      Piat zipped up his coat. Partlow looked sleek