“You aren’t exactly the flavor of the month yourself. The CIA burned you, too.”
“There’s no shoot-on-sight directive against me. You were the one they really fucked over.”
“Still, how they framed you was wrong, Maurice. You were one of the honest ones. They should have left your reputation intact.”
Maurice said nothing.
“What are you doing these days?” Court asked.
“Finance. Private sector stuff. No more spook work.”
Court’s eyes scanned the expensive real estate around him. “You look like you are doing okay.”
“There is money in money, or haven’t you heard?”
Court detected a little defensiveness. He swigged his beer and rotated his arm to spread the cold around his swollen wrist. “You remember a guy at Langley named Lloyd?”
“Sure. Sharp-dressed little fag, law degree from London. King’s College, I think. He got in the way of a finance operation I worked in the Caymans not long before I got shit-canned. Smart kid, but a prick.”
“He’s at the center of all this stuff I’m dealing with now.”
“No kidding? He was like twenty-eight at the time. Must be only thirty-two or so now. He left Langley about a year ago, I heard.”
“What happened to all the good guys?” asked Court rhetorically.
“Before 9/11, we were a basket with a few bad apples. After 9/11, we grew into an orchard. Now there are enough bad apples to fill baskets. Same shit, different scale. No surprise.”
They both sipped beer for a minute in silence, relaxing in each other’s company, as if they spent every Saturday afternoon together. Maurice started to cough, and his coughing morphed into a violent hack.
When it ended, Gentry asked, “What’s wrong with you?”
Maurice looked away a moment, answered without emotion. “Lungs and liver, take your pick.”
“Bad?”
“The good news is I may not die from the lung cancer because the liver disease may get me first. Conversely, I maybe buried with a working liver if I can only die from lung cancer. Drinking and smoking fifty-some-odd years.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. If I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t change a thing.” He laughed, and this turned into a raspy coughing fit as well.
“How much time do you have?”
“There’s an old Henny Youngman bit. Doc says I’ve got six months to live. I tell him, ‘I can’t pay your bill.’ He tells me he’ll give me another six months.” Maurice’s laugh turned into a wheeze and then a violent hack.
“So six months, then?”
“That’s what they said. Seven months ago.”
“Don’t pay ’em,” quipped Court. It was gallows humor, though Gentry wasn’t comfortable joking with his mentor about impending death.
“Let’s get back to you. What have you gotten yourself mixed up in?”
“It’s related to a job I did last week. I pissed someone off, I guess.”
“The colored guy who got it in Syria. Ali Baba, whatever his name was. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“Abubaker,” Court corrected, but he neither confirmed nor denied his involvement.
