The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [4]
Neal could see it coming and he didn’t want this job. Maybe Robert Pendleton didn’t want to finish his research, he thought, but I want to finish mine. Get my master’s and go on for the old Ph.D. Find a job in some little state college somewhere and spend the rest of my life reading books instead of running dirty errands for the Man.
“Have the cops pick him up for theft, then. The notes are AgriTech’s property,” Neal said.
Graham shook his head. “Then maybe he’d be too unhappy to play with his test tubes anymore. The AgriTech people don’t want their professor in the slammer; they want their chickenshit in the pot.”
Graham took the bottle off the table and poured himself another drink. He was enjoying himself immensely. Aggravating Neal was almost worth the terrifying flight over, the endless trip to Yorkshire, and the hike up that damn hill. It was good to see the little shit again.
“If he doesn’t want to come back, he doesn’t want to come back,” Neal said.
Graham tossed back the whiskey.
“You have to make him want to,” he said.
“You mean ‘you’ in the collective sense, right? As in ‘one would have to make him want to.’”
“I mean ‘you’ in the sense of you, Neal Carey.”
All of a sudden, Neal Carey felt a lot of sympathy for Dr. Robert Pendleton. Each of them was shacked up with something he loved—Pendleton with his woman and Neal with his books—and now they were each being pulled back, kicking and screaming, to the chickenshit.
Because of him, they get me, Neal thought, and because of me they’ll get him. It’s all done with mirrors. He reached for the bottle and poured a healthy drink into his coffee cup.
“What if I don’t want to?” he asked.
Graham started rubbing his fake hand into his real one. It was a habit he had when he was worried or had something unpleasant to say.
Neal saved him the trouble. “Then you’ll have to make me want to?”
Graham was really working on the hand now. Pissing Neal off was fun, but extorting him wasn’t. However, the Man, Levine, and Graham had agreed that Neal had been shut up with his books too long, and if they didn’t get him back into some kind of action, they would lose him. That happened sometimes; a first-class UC—an undercover guy—would be put on R-and-R after a tough job and never come back. Or, worse, the guy would come back dull and rusty and do something stupid and get hurt. Happened all the time, but Graham wasn’t going to let it happen to Neal. So he had come to fetch him for this dumb, chicken-shit job.
“You been away from Columbia for what, a year now?” Graham asked.
“About that. You sent me on a job, remember?”
Neal sure as hell remembered. They had sent him to London on a hopeless search for the runaway daughter of a big-time politico—just to keep his wife content and quiet—and he had screwed up and actually found her. She was hooking and hooked, and he had wrenched her off her pimp and the junk and delivered her to her mother. Which was what the Man wanted him to do, but the politician was sure as hell pissed off, so Friends had to pretend that Neal had screwed them over, too. And so he had “disappeared.” Happily.
“Can you do that?” Graham asked. “Just take off from gradu-ass school like that?”
“No, Graham, you can’t. Friends of the Family fixed it. What am I telling you for? You’re the one who fixed it.”
Graham smiled. “And now we’re asking you for a little favor.”
“Or you’ll unfix it?”
Graham shrugged a that’s-life shrug.
“Why me?” Neal whined. “Why not you? Or Levine?”
“The Man wants you.”
“Why?”
Because, Graham thought, we ain’t going to sit around with our hooters in our hands while you turn yourself into a hermit. I know you, son. You like to be alone so you can brood on things and get happily miserable. You need to get back to work and back to school—back with some people. Get your feet back on concrete.
“You and Pendleton are both eggheads,” Graham said. “The Man figures he’s been paying for your expensive education for jobs just like this one.”
Neal took a hit of scotch. He could feel Graham