Much later he went out and transferred Maggie’s car seat into Ebenezer’s car, and his grandfather gave them a ride home. Maggie woke up during the transfer and spent most of the ride fussing and crying, so they didn’t converse much. Clyde had Ebenezer swing by the sheriff’s department, which was only a block out of their way, not far from the brewery. Ebenezer orbited the block, singing fragments of forgotten lullabies in his hoarse voice—worn to leather from eight decades of shouting hymns—while Clyde ran inside and borrowed a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen from the duty officer. He scrawled out a two-sentence note to Kevin Mullowney, congratulating him on his victory, and giving him notice that Clyde would serve out the remainder of 1990, minus any accumulated vacation days, and then leave his job there for good. He folded it up and shoved it under Mullowney’s door before he could think better of it, then ran outside and waited for Ebenezer to swing by again.
Clyde got Maggie into the house and settled back in her crib. He listened to the messages on the hated answering machine, mostly from reporters asking him to comment on his failed campaign. When he’d got to the end of the new messages, he unplugged the machine and put it on a high, dusty shelf in the back corner of the garage. Then he went into the house, locked the doors, turned on CNN, and settled backinto the La-Z-Boy.
He had been awake for twenty-four hours and did not feel sleepy. He should have been thinking about the things Knightly had told him. Instead, though, his mind was stuck on one comment he thought he had heard from Marcus Berry. If memory served, Berry had said something like, “Come on, we know you’re more cosmopolitan than you let on.”
“Cosmopolitan” was not an adjective commonly used to describe Clyde or any other lifelong Forks County resident. It must have been a reference to the fact that Clyde had done some traveling around the world as a younger man. Or perhaps Berry was talking about Clyde’s relationship with Fazoul. Or even Desiree’s mysterious ancestry.
In any case Berry must have been referring to something that Clyde had never mentioned to the FBI. Which meant that the FBI had been learning about Clyde independently. Someone, probably Marcus Berry, had been checking Clyde out.
Which was to be expected if Clyde had actually applied for a job with them. But he hadn’t.
He remembered the job application in his pocket and took it out and tried to read it by the flickering light of the tube.
The next thing he knew, it was morning, and Maggie was crying upstairs in her crib. CNN was still running, going on and on about the Saudi women drivers, which meant nothing important had happened. The job application had fallen to the floor and remained there until Maggie went down for her nap, at which time Clyde sat down over it with a ballpoint pen and began to fill in the blanks with small, neat block letters. As he did, he could not help imagining that maybe, at this time next year, he’d be in Washington, D.C., where losers and incompetents like Mullowney were not tolerated, and where people really knew how to get things done.
Chapter Fourty-Two
Betsy was not surprised when, a week after returning to work from her long absence in Nampa, she was called out to Langley for a polygraph. When she’d entered the Agency, they had done a test to establish a baseline against which all subsequent tests were compared. An emotional shock could change the baseline, making a new polygraph necessary.
She didn’t care. She had come back to the Agency to discover that she was no longer interim branch chief—the position had been filled by one of her former officemates. This was not the career blow it might have seemed—she had given them notice that she was going to outprocess 12/31/90 in any event. In the meantime they had stripped her of virtually all access she’d once had, revoked her passwords and privileges and clearances. Now they assigned her meaningless scut work on a day-by-day basis and didn’t raise any eyebrows when she failed to turn it in. Instead she worked in the third-floor library filling out applications to graduate school on the West Coast, hoping to get in under the deadline for the spring semester.
So when she presented herself at Langley’s main entrance and went to the reception area staffed by the ever-so-nice-wives-of-spies, she was relaxed. The receptionist motioned for her to come inside to meet her polygraph operator. Kim McMurtry was fairly new in this position, but that didn’t mean she was unknown in the rumor mills of the Agency. She had come out of Texas A&M, where she had been a cheerleader. But she was no airhead. She had served in the Agency as a summer intern after her freshman, sophomore, and junior years, specializing in what was euphemistically called personnel work. She was now the ace of the poly staff, a sweet little five-foot-three blond beauty with a nice Texas twang, a tight ass, and a mind like a steel trap. She believed in the poly, and she loved to crack people, especially people like Betsy who never fluttered. Betsy knew all of these things just from listening to office scuttlebutt. Poly operators loomed very large in the careers of Agency employees, and if Agency people were good at anything, it was gathering and exchanging intelligence.
They went across the hall in front of the security guards to the row of poly rooms, and Kim cheerily asked Betsy to sit in the cunningly uncomfortable straight-backed chair. “You know the drill, I’m sure. But before we hook you up, you’ll have to sign this release.”
“What kind of release?” Betsy asked. This was a new wrinkle.
“We have reason to believe that you have committed a felony while pursuing your work with the Agency.”
“What?”