The Ransom of Black Stealth One

SEVEN

Two thousand miles to the northeast of the aircraft buzzing toward Aguascalientes, the blue vintage Javelin of Dar Weston thrummed onto the Connecticut Turnpike at roughly half of its potential speed. Dar enjoyed the old brute but would have denied he loved it, with its firm ride, whopping semirace engine and fat tires to match. Weston had thought auto racing a singularly senseless pastime until his sister Andrea married Philip Leigh.

Who would have thought a no-nonsense New Haven stockbroker like Phil, with more serious money than the Westons, would take up such a sport? Dar had turned over the family portfolio to Philip Leigh, his sister’s husband, in 1960 after returning from a Turkish U-2 base. Now that had been a fiasco! A sweet bird of high passage, the U-2 had scanned millions of square miles of Soviet turf before the Sovs, with an SA-2 missile the size of a telephone pole, managed to shoot one down— on May Day, of all days. Dar, dividing his time between base personnel and the handling of the U-2’s crucial spy equipment, had listened to the vacillations of his own leadership, including Dwight Eisenhower, with growing disappointment and then alarm. You didn’t offer transparent lies to the Sovs, let alone switch stories in public, if you wanted the bastards to respect you. If they didn’t respect you, sooner or later they would eat you alive. The trick to living with a murderous paranoid, Dar’s father used to say, was to keep him respectfully worried but not terrified. Old Farley Weston had made a lot of mistakes with his stony conservatism, but Dar had found that particular adage more apt with every passing year.

Reposted to Langley after the U-2 incident, Dar had found that he’d lost a pile of Weston money because you couldn’t simultaneously watch a stock portfolio and fight a cold war from an outpost. As executor of his father’s estate, Dar took his responsibilities as seriously as Farley Weston had expected. His mother, already in failing health then, needed expensive care until her death some years later. His sister, Andrea, would never go hungry so long as young Philip earned a six-figure income; but even if Andrea did not feel her paper losses, Dar had felt them deeply. The solution was simple: turn the Weston portfolio over to Phil, then pursue his career. It had been Farley Weston’s assumption that his son Dar could do both: husband the family fortune, and become the kind of cold warrior who protected and served his country in important ways.

Dar apologized to his father’s memory, relinquished the portfolio, and pursued his career with the kind of quiet, balanced zeal that marked him as a comer. Inside the Company, top posts were reserved for people who managed a fine balance between stolid conservatism and a willingness to consider the new, the offbeat, and the unthinkable. Dar Weston, year after year, worked to improve the delicate sense of balance that marked him as a cold warrior.

Still, he had learned when to hold another warrior’s coat, and it was Kyle Corbett and Phil Leigh who’d taught him. When Phil’s tiny roll-caged Cooper sedan showed up in 1966 at the Leigh estate in Old Lyme, Connecticut, Dar thought it was a joke. When he heard that Phil was racing the damned thing, he thought the joke had gone far enough. It was not until after the birth of Petra Leigh, when Phil graduated to a bellowing Mustang racer, that Dar tried to talk sense into his sister’s husband.

And through two tours in Southeast Asia, overseeing the hardware security of U-2’s and the prodigious “Blackbird” SR-71’s, Dar Weston had continued to try talking sense to Phil.

Corbett, one of the Blackbird pilots, had become one of Dar’s few close friends by 1968. Nursing their third round of San Miguel—“MacArthur specimens,” as Corbett called them—on Luzon one night, Corbett had put the challenge to his friend. “Okay, your brother-in-law could buy a plot some Sunday, but this isn’t exactly safe shit we’re doing, Dar. Go on, tell me you didn’t get a taste for living on the edge behind German lines in Greece. Or in Israel in the fifties, to hear you tell it.”

“It’s not the same,” Dar had said. “I had a profession.”

“Oh bullshit. You had an excuse.” The brown burr haircut bobbed as Corbett nodded to himself, hunching thick shoulders as he crossed those short, heavy forearms. “Leigh just doesn’t have the excuses they gave you in Lipton Prep and Yale. What you’ve never done, and what you ought to do when you’re stateside again, is go with Leigh some weekend. Check it out.”

“Bloody likely,” said Dar, pulling on his beer.

“Until you do, you’ll never know what it is that he’s really doing. For all you know the guy is just cruising around, keeping out of the way. Or maybe he’s hanging it all out. Like we do.”

“He doesn’t have to. He’s got a family,” Dar countered.

“Your family. You’ve got to let go, you know,” Corbett said. Dar had shared more of his history with Corbett than he had with anyone except, possibly, Phil Leigh. But while Phil said little until he had decided on a course of action, Kyle Corbett came at you straight ahead, right out of the starting gate. “Anyway, if he wasn’t goosing Mustangs around he might be whoring or embezzling. It’s an outlet, Dar, and you don’t know as much about it as that year-old baby girl. Find out. Then at least you’ll have a little credibility.”

Dar had snorted at that, but he’d thought about it. And a year later, permanently posted to Langley, he had made his first appearance on Phil’s pit crew, and by 1971 he could recognize Roger Penske’s silver thatch from behind, or Mario Andretti’s footprint in mud. And the tooth-loosening hammer of Mark Donohue’s Javelin, a red-white-and-blue meteor, from any point on a track.

Dar Weston had known Donohue only as a nodding acquaintance in the pits, but as Phil often said, “There’s nothing like him. He’s not like the pointy-shoe Europeans or the playboys or the Foyt types. I bet the CIA could use fifty of him. He’s a graduate engineer out of Brown, right here in New England, says ‘sir,’ and ‘thank you’—and then he gets in that Javelin with the patriot’s paint job and runs away and hides from the best. And waves every time he passes you.”

Maybe it was that all-American paint job that did it for Dar. By 1971, Andrea Leigh was bringing tiny Petra along to northeastern tracks like Lime Rock and Watkins Glen to watch Daddy race, and Dar Weston no longer donned coveralls for credibility. He did it for fun, knowing Phil Leigh was enough the cautious broker to keep out of trouble, and not enough warrior to beat the likes of Jones or Revson—or Donohue.

Perhaps the death of Donohue, later and in a monstrous Porsche that related to a Javelin as an SR-71 relates to a lawn chair, motivated Phil to quit the sport. Phil never said. He just bought a blue Javelin with a few limited racing options, had it painted so that its red and white trim was subdued enough to be overlooked in New Haven, and drove it for a year. After that he slid into more comfortable ways, and Dar bought the Javelin.

Kyle Corbett, between tours, had been a house-guest in New Haven, then Old Lyme; had brought forbidden fireworks to the Leigh estate, had kidded Dar about that All-American Javelin. Something turned over in Dar’s heart when he found that little Petra considered such jokes an affront to her daddy, to Uncle Dar, and to Mark Donohue, a legend she could not have remembered with any detail. What Petra could do, with Dar’s support, was to take violin lessons and woodworking, to float wooden boats in New Haven’s East Rock Park and, as she grew older, to rebel against her private school because it was long on etiquette and short on science.

A headmistress, citing Petra’s “distressing tendencies,” told Philip Leigh, “Petra seems always driven to do things, not content to be someone.”

Dar had driven up for the family discussion on it because Petra, then fourteen, had begged him to. Phil had largely allowed the argument to eddy and swirl around him, saying little until he had thought it out. Andrea, grown soft but too proud to let herself gain weight, nibbled cress sandwiches and wondered aloud why Petra was not content to just be somebody.

“That’s pointless,” Petra had cried, reddening so that her freckles disappeared, her short honey-blonde hair bouncing. “Any idiot can do that, Mother! God, I wish I had some sisters who’d make you happy.” It was the cruel outburst of a child; Petra knew her mother was unable to bear more children.

“I wish you had, too,” Andrea had said, biting her lip, suddenly near tears.

From Dar: “Low blow, Petra.”

“You want to do ‘special’ things,” Andrea had said acidly.

“She wants to make a difference,” Dar had said quietly.

Petra, impassioned: “Is that a crime?”

“It can be addictive,” said Andrea, with a look that impaled both her husband and her brother.

“Evidently, you inherited it from your uncle,” said Phil, patting the girl’s hand. “No, it’s not a crime, Pets, but it’s a pain in our backsides. Tell you what: go ahead, finish high school in New Haven, take all the science courses you like. Then try, oh, Bryn Mawr or one of the others for a year.” He saw the girl’s mouth open, perhaps to negotiate on that year, and added, “For your mother. Deal?”

Petra knew that tone. It said she wasn’t going to get a better deal; not from Phil, certainly not from Andrea. And not from Dar Weston, no matter what he felt, because Uncle Dar knew his place in these family arguments. But she saw Dar’s almost infinitesimal nod. “Deal,” she said, and hugged her mother first before Andrea could renege on an agreement she had never meant to allow.

The girl had done wonderfully well; even fidgeted through that obligatory year in a very posh school before announcing that it was either Brown or Cal Berkeley.

Dar felt the Javelin’s steering grow heavy as he slowed, departing Route 95 near Old Lyme. Just mentioning Berkeley to Dar or either of the Leighs had been a stroke of genius on Petra’s part. Dar grinned, remembering; hindsight told him it had been Brown she really wanted, with its safe traditions and solid engineering sciences, even though she had to start over as a freshman. Brown had been the carrot, Berkeley the stick, still tainted with its radical politics and lotusland mystique.

Dar could have kept tabs on her by then—the Company frowned on it officially, but the Old Boy net kept its avenues of recourse and CIA had developed a domestic presence to watch foreign students in Berkeley and elsewhere, including Brown. FBI complained that CIA should leave all domestic surveillance to the Feebs. No dice, Dar had argued in policy meetings. Dar’s view was that CIA was needed as a balance against some excesses the FBI maintained, a legacy from America’s own paranoid, Edgar Hoover. Dar had championed that view long before Petra’s ultimatum; had been amused to find it might benefit his own family. James Darlington Weston considered himself simply incapable of subordinating the welfare of his country to his private interests. Not even family; not even Petra, wherever she went.

But Petra had gone to Brown, made her mistakes with the ponytailed playwright and the narcissist jock, and was nearly through her Junior year without getting drug-zonked or pregnant, and neither of the elder Leighs felt more throat-tightening pride in her progress than her Uncle Dar. This was the last weekend of the month when, by unspoken agreement, Petra usually drove the eighty miles from the campus in Providence to Old Lyme. Reason enough for Dar Weston to do the same from Langley. The Company’s pace in the Black Stealth One matter was limited on one hand by progress in Elmira, and on the other by tentative and cagy responses to Medina from the other side. Had Weston felt any guilt about leaving Langley that weekend, he would not have budged.

He drove under a familiar canopy of sycamore and maple, now a dappled green summer sunshade that would become a palette of sweet-sad color in the fall, and turned left at the Leigh escutcheon on a stone wall. They would recognize the Javelin on sight, but on impulse he gunned its engine because even if she and Phil were playing tennis in back, Petra would know that exhaust rap. The loving camaraderie she shared with her Uncle Dar was something special, something with no sinister overtones, yet a thing to be brought off lightly because, as he grew middle-aged, Philip Leigh showed signs of resenting Dar.

He parked the Javelin near the carriage entrance, then crossed the pass-through into the quiet of a formal garden on the cusp of summer. He saw them then, sharing the gazebo swing as they often did on summer evenings, and tried not to show his disappointment.

“Heard your old honker,” Philip Leigh called, getting up carefully to avoid spilling his martini. “We figured you’d be here about now.”

Andrea did not rise, but waved as befitted a Weston and a Leigh who was content to be someone. It was unnecessary for her to be more specific when she called, “She’s not coming, Dar.”

Weston made himself smile and shrug as he took the proffered hand. “Fine with me. Who needs the little whippersnapper underfoot anyhow?” He bent to kiss Andrea, noting the fine squint lines, the good Weston bones that would photograph well through any number of wrinkles.

Phil picked up a third glass—evidently they had, indeed, been expecting him—and raised the pitcher from its bed of ice. “Dar: one lump or two?”

“No doubles, thanks. Just let me unwind,” he said, choosing a woven rattan chair that fairly hissed aloud as he settled into it.

He took the martini gratefully, stretching his long legs, sighing in contentment that was half real. “So what’s the kid up to that’s more important than us,” he said at last.

“Finals project,” said Phil. “Sends her love, as always.”

“Ah, well,” Dar said, and sipped again, conscious of the fact that a man should not feel depressed in such a lovely New England setting.

After a silence of perhaps two minutes, which seemed much longer, Andrea said, “I’ve been making out my will, Dar.”

“What? What? Are you—?”

“Oh, I’m not sick or anything, but I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. And I didn’t want to do it without you.”

“I’d think Phil could handle it as well as,” Dar began.

Her glance, not her words, cut him short. “Dar, I have only one reason to make out a will, and she’s on a campus in Providence this weekend—or at least she’d better be. It’s not what goods I leave her. It’s what I’ll have to tell her.”

Phil Leigh nodded over his glass. “And I told Andrea that what she says just might be up to you, Dar.”