The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels. Michael Marshall
terrible things, I should add. Just the kind of things they put you in prison for. The CIA may not be the world’s most straightforward organization, but they prefer their employees to avoid actual felonies most of the time. I’d used a few contacts to make a little money, bled a little cash out from between the cracks. There were some incidents. A guy got killed. That was all.
Though he now lived in Arizona, Bobby still worked for the Company on and off, and was in contact with a few old mutual friends. Two of them were now working to infiltrate militia groups, and hearing this made me glad all over again that I’d left the firm. That’s not the kind of work you want to get into. Not if you value your life. One of these guys, a skinny nutcase called Johnny Claire, was actually living in one of the groups, a collection of ineffectively socialized gun fanatics holed up in a forest in Oklahoma. Better him than me, though Johnny was weird enough to hold his own in any company.
‘Okay,’ Bobby said, when armed with another beer, ‘are you now going to explain how come you’re out here in the sticks and suddenly conceive of a need to digitize some home-video footage?’
‘Maybe,’ I said, admiring the way he was pumping me without revealing what was on his own mind. A trick of the trade, now evidently habitual. When we met he was spending a lot of time in interrogation rooms with citizens of Middle Eastern countries. They all talked in the end. From that he’d sidestepped into surveillance. ‘Not definitely. And certainly not until you finally reveal why you hopped on a plane and flew across three states to buy me a beer.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay. Let me ask you something first. Where were you born?’
‘Bobby …’
‘Just tell me, Ward.’
‘You know where I was born. County Hospital, Hunter’s Rock, California.’ The place name rolled off my tongue as easily as my name would have done. It’s one of the first things you learn.
‘Indeed. I remember you telling me. You got all upset about the fact that nobody uses the apostrophe in “Hunter’s” any more.’
‘It pisses me off.’
‘Right. It’s a scandal. Now. When we spoke earlier today you told me about your folks, and you said something about the video having something to do with your childhood. So there I am, when we’ve done talking. I’ve got nothing to do. I’m surrounded by computers and I’ve surfed the Web all I can bear and I’ve already had my handjob for the day.’
‘Nice thought,’ I said. ‘I’m hoping that wasn’t while you were on the phone to me.’
‘Keep hoping,’ he said, with a sly little smile. ‘So I think, what the hey, maybe I’ll poke around in Ward’s life a little.’
I stared at him, knowing that he was my friend and that this was okay, but still feeling like he’d intruded.
‘I know, I know,’ he said, holding up a placating hand. ‘I was bored, what can I tell you? I’m sorry. So anyway, I get the computers buzzing and hit a few databases. I should say straight away that I didn’t find anything I didn’t know about already. Held for questioning over a few matters over the years, blah, released through lack of evidence. Plus a witness who recanted. And the one who disappeared. The drug-dealing bust in the Big Apple in 1985, quashed when you agreed to inform on a certain student group at Columbia.’
‘They were assholes,’ I said, defensively. ‘Racist assholes. Plus one of them was sleeping with my girlfriend.’
‘Come on, man. You already told me about it and I don’t give a shit either way. You hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t have wound up in the Agency and I wouldn’t know you, which I’d regard as a bad thing. Like I say, either there’s nothing in the files that I don’t already know about, or you’ve got it hidden well. Real well. Kind of like to know which, just as a matter of interest.’
‘Not telling,’ I said. ‘A guy’s got to have some secrets.’
‘Well, Ward, you got them. I’ll give you that much.’
‘Meaning?’
‘After an hour or so I’m kind of annoyed not to have turned anything up, so I come down to checking stuff in Hunter’s Rock – and I said that with an apostrophe. Got the street address of your parents’ house, plus when they moved in and out. They took up residence there on July 9th 1956, which I believe was a Monday. Paid their taxes, did their thing. Your father earned a wage at Golson Realty, mother worked part-time in a store. Little over a decade later you were born there. Right?’
‘Right,’ I said, wondering where this was going. He shook his head.
‘Wrong. The County Hospital in Hunter’s Rock has no record of a Ward Hopkins having been born on that date.’
The world seemed to take a little sidestep. ‘Excuse me?’
‘There is also no such record at the General in Bonville, or at the James B. Nolan, or at any other hospital within a two-hundred-mile radius.’
‘There wouldn’t be. I was born in the County. In Hunter’s.’
He shook his head again, firmly. ‘No, you weren’t.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Not only am I sure, but I checked five years either side, just in case you’d misled people on your age for some reason, like vanity or not being able to count. No Ward Hopkins. No Hopkins under any name. I don’t know where you were born, my friend, but it sure as hell wasn’t Hunter’s Rock or its environs.’
I opened my mouth. Shut it again.
‘Maybe it’s no big deal,’ he said, and then looked at me shrewdly. ‘But has this got any bearing on your digitizing needs?’
‘Play it again,’ he said.
‘I honestly don’t think I can bear to, Bobby.’
He looked up at me. He was sitting in one of the hotel room’s two chairs, hunched over my laptop. I’d just played him the MPEGs, and strongly believed I’d seen them enough times for one day. Perhaps for one lifetime. ‘Trust me. What you see the first time is all there is.’
‘Okay. So play me the audio file.’
I reached across, navigated to the file and doubleclicked it.
He listened to the filtered version a few times, then stopped it himself. He nodded. ‘Sounds like “The Straw Men” all right. And you got no idea what that might mean?’
‘Only in the sense of “surrogate”, which doesn’t seem to go anywhere. You?’
He reached for his glass. We were in possession of a half-bottle of Jack Daniel’s by then. ‘Only other thing I can think of is straw purchases.’
I nodded, thought about it. He was referring to the process by which those who shouldn’t be able to buy guns – either through youth, previous convictions, or lack of a licence – are able to get hold of them. What you do is go in the gun store with a friend who has the requisite qualities. You negotiate with the dealer, find what you want. When the time comes to pay, then your friend – the straw purchaser – is the one who actually hands over the cash, who makes the buy. Of course the dealer isn’t supposed to let this happen, when he knows it’s you who’s going to wind up having the gun, but a lot of them will. A sale is a sale. Once you’re out of his store, what does he care what you’re going to do? As long as you don’t go around and shoot his mother he isn’t likely to give a damn. There are, of course, a great many honest and upstanding people who sell guns. But there are also many who feel in their hearts that every American, every man jack of us and the little ladies, too, should be equipped with a firearm at birth. Who are at ease with the fact that these small, heavy pieces of machinery are a simple means by which to halt someone’s life, who trust that guns are morally uninflected and that it’s only their users who have the power to make them bad. Users with black skins, mainly, or no-good white trash punks