Ah, Treachery!

Chapter 4

The Colonel and the Major General met at midnight in room 517 of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. They met in a room registered to Jerome Able, which was Colonel Ralph Millwed’s occasional nom de guerre and one he could document with a counterfeit Virginia driver’s license, a real VISA card and a spurious Social Security number.

If more identification were needed, and it almost never was during normal commercial transactions, the Colonel would simply change his mind and walk away. Virtually all hotels, motels and car rental agencies readily accepted the VISA card. Once done with the rooms and cars, the Colonel paid for them with cash discreetly peeled from the $3,000 roll he always carried in $50 and $100 bills.

The $3,000 roll was replenished from a permanent cash hoard of $100,000 kept in the pseudonymous Jerome Able’s safe-deposit box at a K Street branch of the Riggs National Bank. Whenever the hoard needed topping up, a fat wax-sealed brown envelope, stuffed with used hundreds and fifties, was delivered to the Colonel’s apartment on Wisconsin Avenue just south of the National Cathedral. The delivery man was always the same silent morose cabdriver who seldom spoke and never asked for a receipt.

At first glance the 49-year-old Major General, Walker L. Hudson, seemed completely bald. But closer inspection revealed a faint gray-blond band of stubble that went up and over one ear, spread down to and across the nape of the neck, then climbed back up and over the other ear.

Tall and lean, almost skinny, the General was a wedgehead with a curiously small thin mouth that snapped itself shut into a short mean line after each utterance. At the end of the yard-long arms were huge hands that, even in repose, managed to look restless. The General sat quietly in the small room’s only comfortable chair as his hands busied themselves with cigar, bourbon and water.

Neither the Colonel nor the General was in uniform. Instead, both wore dull suits, white shirts, muted ties and black shoes. Their topcoats were on the bed. Neither had worn a hat. After the General tasted his drink for the second time, he sighed and said, “Okay. Let’s have it.”

“He’s in L.A.,” Colonel Millwed said as he sat down on the room’s lone bed and tasted his own drink.

“And?”

“Somebody hired him.”

“Who?”

“Millicent Altford.”

“Jesus,” the General said. “What’s she want with Twodees?”

“Guess.”

Instead of guessing, the General said, “Draw me Twodees.”

“Sure. For two years now he’s been clerking in a gun store called Wanda Lou’s Weaponry—”

“I gave you all that, for Christ sake.”

“Yes, sir. I was merely setting the fucking scene.”

“Let’s stipulate it’s Christmas Eve in Sheridan and the snow lies all about, cold and crisp and even. Poor Twodees, sad and lonely, is by himself in the gun shop when all of a sudden you waltz in. Then what?”

“I told him that some bad shit from our time together in El Salvador was due out from the U.N. in early spring. But it wasn’t the really bad shit. Then I urged him to stay buttoned up and gave him a verbal nudge or two.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Except for a crack about my being a colonel, he seemed indifferent. Even passive.”

General Hudson grunted his disbelief. “Twodees is a bunch of things, but passive’s not one of them. He’s half Mexican and maybe even part Apache. If he’s passive, so was Cochise.”

“You want the rest of my Christmas carol?”

“Fast-forward it.”

“After giving Twodees the hard nudge, I went calling on his boss, a lovely widow of thirty-nine summers by the name of Alice Ann Sutterfield.”

“Slow it down a little.”

“I told Alice Ann how unstable Twodees is and informed her of the horrible crimes against humanity he’d committed in El Salvador. Alice Ann somehow got it all mixed up with Nicaragua and Ollie North, who she still thinks is real cute. But after I sort of straightened that out, she asked me what she should do about Twodees.”

“And you said?”

“I said that to protect not only herself but her community, she should fire Twodees first thing Christmas morning and pay him off in cash. She started bleating about how she couldn’t fire him because it didn’t seem fair and, besides, she owed him three weeks’ pay, including two weeks’ vacation.”

“How much, all in all?”

“A gross of $1,548. Less Federal withholding and Social Security, a net of $1,022.30.”

“What about state income tax?”

“Wyoming doesn’t have any.”

“I think I’ll retire there,” the General said and asked, “Then what?”

“Then she said there was no way in God’s world she could come up with that much cash on Christmas Eve with the banks closed. So I told her that since this was, in essence, a matter of national security, it was also her beloved nation’s responsibility. Whereupon—”

“By God, I do like the occasional ‘whereupon,’ ” the General said.

“Whereupon, I gave her two thousand cash money, eased her back into her bedroom and fucked her cross-eyed.”

The General chuckled. “And Twodees?”

“He’d cleared out of Sheridan by noon Christmas Day.”

The General’s expression went from merry to grim. “That, I don’t like. He didn’t set up a howl. He didn’t lose his temper. He didn’t even beat the shit out of you the way he did me that time. He just packed his bags and caught the noon bus.”

“He flew out,” Colonel Millwed said. “He flew to Denver and disappeared for about a week until he surfaced in L.A.”

“How’d you find out Altford might’ve hired him?”

“Our guy in VOMIT.”

“Ah,” the General said contentedly, finished his drink, put the glass on a table and leaned forward, forearms on thighs, cigar now in his right hand. “What we need, Ralphie, is a direct line to Ms. Altford. Any notions?”

“Maybe.”

“I don’t want maybes, goddamnit. I want specificity and hope.”

“It’s better you don’t know just yet. Sir.”

“Since ignorance is not only bliss but also an alibi?”

The Colonel nodded.

“What else?”

“Comes now General Vernon Winfield. Class of ’forty-eight. DSC from Korea. He was in Vietnam when you were.”

“The deserter.”

“He didn’t desert.”

“Might as well have,” the General said. “The son of a bitch said it was a dumb war and unwinnable. He was right, of course, but he shouldn’t have said it. Not then. Not in ’sixty-eight with the whole fucking country about to explode. And who does he say it to? To that pissant wire service guy and zap, out it goes all over the world. Looking back, that’s when I think we really lost it. Right then and there.”

“It was lost in ’fifty-four at Dien Bien Phu.”

“Shit, Ralphie, you weren’t even born then.” The General sighed, drew on his cigar, blew smoke at the ceiling and said, “So what about General Winfield?”

“He’s close to Millicent Altford.”

“How close is close?”

“They were sweeties back in the early ’fifties and I hear they still hold hands now and then — or whatever it is they do at sixty-five or thereabouts.”

“I don’t know about you, kid,” General Hudson said, “but at sixty-five I plan to be fucking good-looking women.”

“I’m sure you will be, sir.”

“So what’ve we got on Winfield other than that he lost Vietnam and cofounded VOMIT?”

“Nothing.”

“Another wrong answer.”

“I can try to dig up something,” Colonel Millwed said. “But if nothing’s buried, I’ll have to fabricate it and that can get expensive.”

“Tell me something, Ralphie,” the General said. “You really want that star by the time you’re forty?”

The Colonel only nodded.

“And do you want to retire at fifty, like I’m planning to, with a nice little pension and maybe a useful contact or two in whatever’s left by then of our military-industrial complex?”

“That very thought has occurred to me.”

“Then you’d better listen carefully to your orders, Colonel. One: You will remain on TDY until further notice. Two: You will get us some nasty on Vernon Winfield, even if you have to fabricate said nasty. Three: You will then coerce Winfield into using his liaison with Millicent Altford to feed us a running line on Twodees. And four, you will, at the appropriate time, fix Twodees.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why fix him now? He was more of a threat to us last year than now.”

“You apparently haven’t yet noticed, Colonel, that in two weeks or so we’ll have a new administration. In less than a year this new administration will find itself in deep political shit. New administrations always do. It will then cast about for a suitable diversion. What Twodees knows and possibly can prove could serve this new White House bunch as just such a diversion of the minor witch-hunt variety. Unfortunately, Colonel, it’ll be you and me they burn at the stake.”

After ten seconds of thought, the Colonel finally agreed with a reluctant nod.

“But with Twodees fixed,” the General continued, “this new bunch need never hear of you or me except, of course, in a most salutary manner. And when it does find itself in need of a scapegoat or two, it can go hunt up somebody far more deserving.”

There was a lengthy silence until Colonel Millwed said, “I think,” then paused and began again. “I think I’ll farm out the fix on Twodees.”