They never wrote each other, never called. She was passing through because she had a sister in Miami.
"Nice tan," she said. "You're looking good."
And you're shriveling like an old prune, he thought. Damn, she looked ancient and tired.
"How's life?" he asked, not really caring.
"Busy. I'm working too hard."
"That's good." Good that she was working and making a living, something she'd done off and on for many years. Finn had five years to go before he could shake Trumble's dust from his gnarled and bare feet. He had no intention of returning to her, or to California. If he survived, something he doubted every day, he'd leave at the age of sixty-five, and his dream was to find a land where the IRS and the FBI and all the rest of those alphabetized government thugs had no jurisdiction. Finn hated his own government so much he planned to renounce his citizenship and find another nationality.
"Are you still drinking?" he asked. He, of course, was not, though he did manage a little pot occasionally from one of the guards.
"I'm still sober, thanks for asking."
Every question was a barb, every reply a retort. He honestly wondered why she had stopped by Then he found out.
"I've decided to get a divorce," she said.
He shrugged as if to say, "Why bother?" Instead he said, "Probably not a bad idea."
"I've found someone else," she said.
"Male or female?" he asked, more curious than anything else. Nothing would surprise him.
"A younger man."
He shrugged again and almost said, "Go for it, old girl. ,.
"He's not the first," Finn said.
"Let's not go there." she said.
Fine with Finn. He had always admired her exuberant sexuality, her stamina, but it was difficult to imagine this old woman doing it with any regularity. "Show me the papers," he said. "I'll sign them."
"They'll be here in a week. It's a clean break, since we own so little these days."
At the height of his rise to power, JusticeYarber and Ms. Topolski-Yocoby had jointly applied for a mortgage on a home in the marina district of San Francisco. The application, properly sanitized to remove any hint of chauvinism or sexism or racism or ageism, blandly worded by spooked California lawyers terrified of being sued by some offended soul, showed a gap between assets and liabilities of almost a million dollars.
Not that a million dollars had mattered to either one of them. They were too busy fighting timber interests and ruthless farmers, etc. In fact, they'd taken pride in the scantness of their assets.
California was a community property state, which roughly meant an equal split. The divorce papers would be easy to sign, for many reasons.
And there was one reason Finn would never mention. The Angola scam was producing money, hidden and dirty, and off-limits to any and every greedy agency. Ms. Carmen would damned sure never know about it.
Finn wasn't certain how the tentacles of community property might reach a secret bank account in the Bahamas, but he had no plans to find out. Show him the papers, he'd be happy to sign.
They managed to chat a few minutes about old friends, a brief conversation indeed because most friends were gone. When they said good-bye, there was no sadness, no remorse. The marriage had been dead for a long time. They were relieved at its passing.
He wished her well; without so much as a hug, then went to the track, where he stripped to his boxers and walked an hour in the sun.
TEN
Lufkin was fishing his second day in Cairo with dinner at a sidewalk cafe on Shari' elCorniche, in the Garden City section of the city. He sipped strong black coffee and watched the merchants close their shops-sellers of rugs and brass pots and leather bags and linens from Pakistan, all for the tourists. Less than twenty feet away, an ancient vendor meticulously folded his tent, then left his spot without a trace.
Lufldn looked very much the part of a modern Arab-white slacks, light khaki jacket, a white vented fedora with the bill down close to his eyes. He watched the world from behind a hat and a pair of sunshades. He kept his face and arms tanned and his dark hair cut very short. He spoke perfect Arabic and moved with ease from Beirut to Damascus to Cairo.
His room was at the Hotel El-Nil on the edge of the Nile River, six crowded blocks away, and as he drifted through the city he was suddenly joined by a tall thin foreigner of some breed with only passable English. They knew each other well enough to trust each other, and continued their walk.
"We think tonight is the night," the contact said, his eyes also hidden.
"Go on."
"There's a party at the embassy"
"I know"
"Yes, a nice setting. Lots of traffic. The bomb will be in a van."
"What kind of van?"
"We don't know"
"Anything else?"
"No." he said, then vanished in a swarming crowd.
Lufkin drank a Pepsi in a hotel bar, alone, and thought about calling Teddy. But it had been four days since he'd seen him at Langley, and Teddy had made no contact. They'd been through this before. Teddy was not going to intervene. Cairo was a dangerous place for Westerners these days, and no one could effectively blame the CIA for not stopping an attack. There would be the usual grandstanding and finger pointing, but the terror would quickly be shoved into the recesses of the national memory, then forgotten. There was a campaign at hand, and the world moved fast anyway. With so many attacks, and assaults, and mindless violence both at home and abroad, the American people had become hardened. Twenty-fourhour news, nonstop flash points, the world always with a crisis somewhere. Late-breaking stories, a shock here and a shock there, and before long you couldn't keep up with events.
Lufkin left the bar and went to his room. From his window on the fourth floor the city rambled forever, built helter-skelter over the centuries. The roof of the American embassy was directly in front of him, a mile away.
He opened a paperback Louis L'Amour, and waited for the fireworks. .
The truck was a two-ton Volvo panel van, loaded from floor to ceiling with three thousand pounds of plastic explosives made in Romania. Its door happily advertised the services of a well-known caterer in the city, a company which made frequent visits to most of the Western embassies. It was parked near the service entrance, in the basement.
The driver of the truck had been a large, friendly Egyptian called Shake by the Marines who guarded the embassy. Shake passed through often, hauling food and supplies to and from social events. Shake was now dead on the floor of his truck, a bullet in his brain.
At twenty minutes after ten, the bomb was detonated by a remote device, operated by a terrorist hiding across the street. As soon as he pushed the right buttons, he ducked behind a car, afraid to look.
The explosion ripped out supporting columns deep in the basement, so the embassy fell to one side. Debris rained for blocks. Most of the nearby buildings suffered structural damage. Windows within a quarter of a mile were cracked.
Luflcin was napping in his chair when the quake came. He jumped to his feet, walked onto his narrow balcony, and watched the cloud of dust. The roof of the embassy was no longer visible. Within minutes flames were seen and the interminable sirens began. He propped his chair against the railing of the balcony, and settled in for the duration. There would be no sleep. Six minutes after the explosion, the electricity in Garden City went out, and Cairo was dark except for the orange glow of the American embassy.
He called Teddy.
When the technician, Teddy's sanitizer, assured Lufldn the line was secure, the old man's voice came through as clearly as if they were chatting from New York to Boston. "Yes, Maynard here."
"I'm in Cairo, Teddy. Watching our embassy go up in smoke."