The Second Saladin Read Online Free Page B

Bill.”
    “You’re lying, Paul. I’m looking
old
, which is what I am. You’re getting some gray yourself.”
    “It’s these kids. I look a hundred. These damned kids, they took my youth.” He laughed, and clapped Bill on the back.
    “Paul, we had some trouble finding you.”
    “You were supposed to. That was the point.”
    “Well, anyway. It’s some old business. Have you got a minute?”
    Chardy looked at his watch, a big Rolex. He still had it. All the Special Operations people wore them.
    “This is my most open period. They work you pretty hard in these joints. I’m off around five. Can it wait?”
    “Ah.” It couldn’t. Get to it, they’d told Speight. Don’t give him time to think about it, to nurse his furies. Plunge in.
    I know, Speight had answered bitterly. I’m not a kid at this game either, you know; thinking,
you bastards
.
    “Well,” Speight started, feeling outpositioned in his first move, “it’s only that—”
    But Chardy darted off—he still had that old quickness—shouting, “Hey, hey, Mahoney, Mahoney,” and leapt into some sort of ruckus, pulling apart two squalling, clawing boys. He shook the big one hard, once, and spoke to him in an earnest, deadly voice. Speight imagined Chardy speaking to
him
like that.
    Chardy came back. “That little prick thinks he’s tough. He likes to hit people,” he said. “His father’s a cop.”
    “Paul, I never would have imagined this kind of a life for you,” said Speight, stalling.
    “At the parochial schools,” Chardy said, looking at him squarely with those dark eyes, “you don’t need a degree in education. You just need to be willing to work like a horse for peanuts. A big-deal sports background helps. What about you, Bill? Still playing cowboy?”
    “They put me in a different section. Over in Central Reference.”
    “Siberia.”
    “Just perfect for a harmless old geezer like me.”
    “You show ’em, Bill.”
    “Paul, about the Melman hearings. You’re not mad? I just told them what I’d seen.”
    “Forget it. It doesn’t matter.”
    Bill licked his lips.
    “Thanks, Paul.”
    “Is that why you came?”
    “Well, it’s—”
    But Chardy darted off again. Speight stood helpless and watched him handle another crisis. Was that all these kids did, fight? But that’s all grown-ups did, wasn’t it?
    Presently Chardy returned. “They really keep you jumping,” he said.
    “They sure do.”
    “Well, Bill?”
    So this would be it then. On the playground, full of kids, no time to sit down and work it out in a civilized fashion. Chardy was playing him, he could tell. It was a no-win situation, all the noise, all the distraction. He wouldn’t handle it well. A presentiment of failure crossed his mind.
    We should have sent somebody younger, they would say, back at Langley. They would say it to his face. They could be so cold these days.
    “This,” Bill said, lurching ahead. He drew from his pocket and offered Chardy—who accepted it reluctantly—his treasure, the thing that had them running in circles at Langley.
    Chardy looked at it, rolling it in his palm.
    “A seven-six-five-millimeter Czech auto pistol shell. Must be ten million of these things floating around the world.”
    “Look at that scratch on the rim, where the ejector rod popped it out of the breach,” Bill said.
    “It’s a Skorpion shell. I can recognize a Skorpion shell. There’re Skorps all over the world. African generals love the goddamned things.”
    “Let me give you the rest of it.”
    Chardy looked at him. Bill could never read Chardy. The dark eyes squinted; the mouth now lost in beard seemed to tighten.
    “Go ahead.”
    “That particular shell is from a cache of stuff some boys from a battalion of the One-seventy-third Airborne liberated on a search-and-destroy in July ’sixty-seven, a big Charlie ammo dump out near Qui Nhon. Mostly AK-forty-sevens, and those mean-ass RPG rocket launchers. Some mortars, some light artillery. The usual.