The Trail to Buddha's Mirror - Don Winslow [58]
Then he heard a timid knock on the door. He opened to see an old Chinese man in servant’s livery. The man handed him a white short-sleeved shirt, some baggy black cotton trousers, and a pair of black cloth rubber-soled shoes, then shuffled away. Neal put the clothes on. The shoes were a little too large, but they would do. He padded down the hallway into the study.
Thick red drapes masked wall-to-ceiling windows, and a rich Oriental carpet covered the floor. The effect was one of tremendous quietude. An enormous black enameled desk took up most of one wall, and a smaller black enameled coffee table flanked by a sofa and two straight-backed chairs occupied another. The man was sitting in one of the chairs. His tie was unknotted, his shoes were off, and he was sipping from a nearly translucent cup.
“You want some tea?” he asked Neal.
“Fuck you and your tea. Who are you?”
“Sorry about the coolie clothing. It’s all we had around.”
Neal didn’t answer.
“My name is Simms,” the man said. He had thick blond hair cut very short, and blue eyes. He looked about thirty plus.
“Are you with Friends?”
“I’m not against them.”
“I’m not in the fucking mood—”
Simms set his cup down. “See, I really don’t care what you’re in the fucking mood for. I just had to kill someone because of you, because you just couldn’t do what you were told. So let’s forget about your mood, all right? Have some tea.”
Neal took the other chair. He poured himself a cup from the teapot that was set on the table.
“And please don’t trouble yourself to thank me for saving your ass. I’m just a public servant doing my job,” Simms said.
“Thank you.”
“You’re just barely welcome. Believe me, Carey, if I didn’t need you, I just might have let them chop you up, I’m that pissed off at you.”
The Book of Joe Graham, Chapter Eight, Verse Fifteen: Don’t give the bastards anything, not when you’re right, and especially not when you’re wrong.
“Boo-hoo, boo-hoo,” Neal said. “And by the way, fuck you. I’ve been doing this shit for half my life and I’ve never seen anyone killed before. Now I see a kid get his legs half hacked off and another get his face blown away and I’ve got blood all over me, literally and figuratively, and I figure you’re involved in all of it. So don’t give me this guilt trip, you preppie fuck. I have plenty already.”
Simms smiled and nodded his head.
“Can I have a real drink instead of this goddamned tea?” Neal asked.
Simms went to the sidebar and poured Neal a healthy scotch.
So you have a file on me, Neal thought. And you’re not with Friends. Which leaves alphabet soup.
“CIA?” Neal asked.
“If you say so.”
“So AgriTech is just a paper corporation.”
“AgriTech is real, all right. It has laboratories, offices, a lunchroom, company picnics, the whole nine yards.”
The whiskey burned pleasantly in Neal’s stomach. He wished he could just go out and get drunk.
Instead he said, “Yeah, AgriTech also has a treasurer named Paul Knox, who has a—how shall I put this—‘fantastic’ employment record.”
“Paul’s a good man.”
“Yeah, I’m sure he’s a credit to his race and a terrific fourth if you’re caught short at tee-off time, but I want to know why one AgriTech research scientist is worth all this killing.”
Simms held his teacup gently in both hands and inhaled the smell, as if the answer were in the tea’s aroma.
“AgriTech,” Simms explained in a slow, soft drawl, “is what we call a ‘bench company.’ It’s a place to put players you can’t use on the field at the moment but who you want around in case you need them. In the good old days before Watergate and Jimmy ‘I’ll never lie to you’ Carter, we had a lot more money to keep people on our full-time payroll. As it is now, anytime we want to hire a janitor, we have to appear before a Senate subcommittee and explain to some alcoholic wazoo why we can’t clean the toilets ourselves.
“So we took