The Old Boys Read Online Free PDF Page B

waiter couldn’t hear him over the background chatter. In former times he was, of course, in a position that made people want to listen closely.
    “What confirmation is there?” he murmured.
    “None,” I replied, “apart from Kalash el Khatar’s report.”
    “Which is worth what?” Jack asked.
    “Finding that out is the point of the exercise.”
    “And if you establish that Kalash is right about Paul and this Jesus scroll and Ibn Awad’s bombs?”
    “Then we find Christopher, if he’s alive, and maybe save the world from Ibn Awad if
he
’s alive.”
    “And if they’re both dead and there are no bombs?”
    “Thenthe five of us will have had some fun.”
    Ben Childress said, “This is a recruitment pitch?”
    “Yes, if any of you are interested,” I said.
    “You want us to act in this movie on the basis of what some Arab told Paul Christopher?”
    I said, “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    “Because the five of us, taken together, used to know most of the people in the world worth knowing. The generation of assets you fellows recruited and worked with still live in all the right places. They still know all the right people and all the right buttons to push.”
    “If they’re still speaking to us,” Jack said.
    It was true that Americans were even less beloved by the righteous than they had been when we were young. Back then anti-Americanism had usually been skin-deep; everyone but the stomach-acid Left had liked us well enough in private, and even some of them had had a little bit of kindness for us. Nowadays it was a pathology, like anti-Semitism. The people who now ran the Outfit were crashing into stone walls all over the world in their attempts to penetrate Islamist terrorist cells composed of two brothers and a cousin. We knew the terrorists’ fathers, uncles, and grandfathers, and in theory at least we had the capability of making an end run because these elders knew they could trust us. Once in, never out, as the old saw has it. Believe it or not, the truth of that saying has nothing to do with fear, but is based on the peculiar and deep friendships that exist between handler and agent. Friendships of that kind are very durable.
    “There are a lot of Ifs,” I said. “I’d like to take a vote. Is anyone at the table absolutely sure in his mind that Christopher is dead?”
    In every case the answer was No.
    “Does anyone think it’s impossible that Ibn Awad survived and is up to his old tricks?”
    No one demurred.
    “Doesanyone think that the five of us can possibly do worse than the Outfit if we decide to go after the facts?”
    Modesty prevailed. There were no shakes of the head, just secret smiles all around. Glances were exchanged. The deal was made. It was unnecessary to say so. We all knew it.
    Harley Waters asked an old warhorse’s question: “Would we be traveling?”
    “I should hope so. The world being what it is, it wouldn’t be enough to call up your old friends. You’d have to show yourself, show them the cards we hold.”
    “Show them the cards?” asked Harley, who had spent his life dealing with Russians on Russian territory.
    “If you want them to trust you, you have to trust them. This is not a USA versus USSR or a Great Satan versus Islam situation. It’s a matter of old friends trying to prevent a sad ending. That’s essentially what we were trying to do in the Cold War, and we did it, so why would anybody who was involved with us then think that we have an ulterior motive this time?”
    By now the expense account lunch crowd had departed. We were the last people in the restaurant. The last waiter was becoming intensely interested in our conversation—not because he cared what a gaggle of senior citizens were saying to one another, but because he wanted his tip, meager as he expected it to be. I called him over and we all chipped in and paid the check in cash, again in obedience to the rules of clandestine behavior.
    Before we rose from the table, I asked the question.