The End Game

When the woman left, Jarhead finally spoke again. “Please give me all of your weapons,” he said. Usually in a situation like this, I’d be concerned that Nate might do something stupid, like start shooting, but I’d made my calculations and felt somewhat secure that Jarhead was working on the level-or at least a level that allowed him to be threatening, but not outright murderous-so I immediately began disarming and handing everything over to one of Jarhead’s men, which caused Nate to do the same thing.

Jarhead hadn’t said another word directly to me, but I was certain now that when he said he knew me, he wasn’t speaking philosophically. Now I was trying to figure out how.

My first impression upon seeing him was that he’d been in Kabul. The truth, however, is that he could have been anywhere. We could have huddled against a berm together for five minutes in Iraq. We could have been in a classroom in Virginia. We could have sat next to each other on an Apache hovering over Malawi.

What was obvious, no matter the situation, was that he didn’t know Tommy the Ice Pick and wasn’t all that concerned by my deception. At least not to the point that he actually acted on his knowledge, which in and of itself was cause for concern.

There’s subversion and then there’s third-rail treachery. Jarhead was standing close enough to the latter to be putting off sparks, playing both sides without any visible recompense.

Which meant he had his own agenda, provided I didn’t try to choke Christopher Bonaventura to death.

“You ever do any time?” I said to Jarhead once all of the guns were collected. “Because you look like a guy I knew back in the day.”

“Worked in the post office for a little while,” Jarhead said flatly.

This was good.

We were now officially speaking in code.

When you’re a spy or an operative like Jarhead, working in the post office means you’ve been disseminating propaganda and doing incursions into foreign countries.

In the early days of Vietnam, this meant sending CIA operatives into the country as journalists and aid workers who could alter the news, ferment change via small-group discussions in hamlets and villages and salt any open wounds helpful to American concerns.

And occasionally executing people.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, it was more of the same, but a higher reliance on executing people and then altering the news, leafleting hamlets and then, if need be, engaging in blackmail, extortion and general malfeasance, all under the guise of democratic nation building.

Freedom has certain responsibilities, and very few of them are pretty if you happen to be standing on foreign soil and prefer a more totalitarian ruling technique.

“I don’t get a lot of mail,” I said. “I’m sort of an off-the-grid kinda guy, know what I’m saying? You ever live in the East?”

“Worked out there,” he said. “Went to school up North.”

Translation: was stationed in the Middle East, or at least dropped in a few times in the dead of night and took out Baath party members in advance of a Humvee line. Trained in North Africa, which meant we had similar skill sets.

Not a great development.

“You get to any clubs? Maybe I seen you at one?”

“Didn’t go out much after I stopped working at the post office,” he said. “Just wanted to stay home. And now I get to make my own hours. But who knows? Something interesting happens in the mail industry, maybe I’ll get back into it. I just love to work.”

Translation?

Covert Ops.

Decommissioned.

Freelance.

Loves to answer the phone at three a.m., put on black body armor and kill people.

Further translation:

No problem killing my entire family, if that’s what his orders were.

“Great,” I said. “Good you like your job.”

We stared at each other for a few seconds, each of us taking account.

There weren’t a lot of soft spots on Jarhead. My best chance with him would be to go for his eyes, try to get knuckle deep in one and see if he submitted, which was unlikely. Jarhead didn’t look like the kind of guy who submitted to anything.

Likewise, Jarhead was trying to calculate my soft spot. He looked me up and down slightly and then, almost imperceptibly, cut his gaze to Nate.

“Working with family is more rewarding,” he said. “I learned that from Mr. Bonaventura.”

He was good. And he knew it.

Happy with his progress in sussing out the threat level in the room, Jarhead told one of his men to get the boss, and a few moments later Christopher Bonaventura stepped into the room with a studied nonchalance.

In photos, Bonaventura looks dapper and collected, like he’s always about to sip a martini and smoke a cigar before engaging in a lively game of chance somewhere in Monaco, just prior to jumping on a Learjet bound for the Caymans.

Or ordering the murder of his father, because the truth is that he is a thug. Nothing more. Nothing less.