Montezuma’s Revenge

Eighteen

“You will get a commendation,” Sones said.

“I don’t want a commendation,” Tony answered. “I just want out. No, sonny, the big gold FBI badges are a dollar ninety-eight. For your two bits all you can get is a chocolate hand grenade.”

“That is not an easy thing to do, Hawkin, you should realize that. You know a lot about the workings of the FBI, you are an experienced field agent, and besides that He thinks that you did a great job.”

“Wonderful, then why can’t He get me out.”

“Quiet!” Sones hissed out of the corner of his mouth. “Don’t let her hear you.”

“And that’s another reason I want out. Well, Sophie, a nice long lunch hour that runs fifteen minutes late?”

“Would you believe the service was so awful, I could hardly get waited on, you can’t blame me, can you?”

“I don’t blame anyone. Take over here, I’ll be in my office.” As they walked down the hall he shook his thumb back at the sturdy laboring figure of Sophie Feinberg now industriously selling tinted portraits, fingerprint kits, candy bullets, “Let her have my job so I can go back to the National Gallery. She knows as much about it as I do by now. More maybe, since she reads my mail even before I do.”

“She cannot do it, Sophie is a plant, a double agent whom we are keeping an eye on.”

“I knew it! I bet she works for the CIA?”

“She wants you to think that, but she reports to Treasury first.

They are still upset over that hundred dollars you know, I’ve seen their orders to her.”

“I bet she’s not even Jewish.”

“You have an agent’s eye, Hawkin. I told Him that. Her real name, we think, is Mary O’Brien, the other is a cover she took when she was penetrating the B’nai Brith.”

“Where are we going? We just passed my office.”

“Security. Impossible to tell you until we get to a secure part of the building.”

“Can’t you even hint? Am I going to be shot?”

“Usually a sense of humor is a handicap in an agent, but I do appreciate yours. I can tell you this much. Your civil service grade will be increased one rank ...”

“With pay to match?”

“Naturally. And you are going to be personally congratulated for the work you did on Operation Buttercup. Even though we lost Davidson the operation is graded a success, his killer is in custody in Mexico and the CIA is still smarting over the way they bungled the disposal job on Davidson’s body. Higginson has been transferred. He is opening a new branch of Coronel Glanders in Santiago, Chile. Very cold there.”

“All of which is very nice, but what is so secret about that that you couldn’t tell me downstairs?” They emerged from a top security elevator and walked swiftly down the sound-proofed hall.

“What I could not tell you there were all the details and, my boy, I do envy you. I said personally congratulated, did you hear that? Personally. You are really part of the family now.”

They stopped before large, golden, double doors, which slowly opened before them, moved by unseen hands. A beam of golden light shone through and wrapped them in its radiance.

They stepped forward, heads high, to the sound of distant bugles.