Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

second rate didn’t matter to either man. If they wanted really good food, they abandoned Broome for Darwin or Kowloon or even Perth.
    Both men were silent. They had nothing useful to say to one another. McGarry’s death was old news. The missing rainbow pearls were old news. The fact that each man’s government was pressuring him to come up with the pearl prize was taken for granted, as was the fact that Flynn and Chang were in competition.
    They hadn’t come to the restaurant to socialize. They were here because a third player in the pearl game had “requested” it. Until the third representative arrived, there was nothing to do but smoke and eat and drink lukewarm beer.
    The door to the private room opened. Without a word of greeting, a third man walked in, sat down, and picked up a plate to help himself from the varied dishes at the center of the dark table. Whatever Maxmillian Barton thought of the food, he kept it to himself. He had been raised on Tex-Mex cuisine and had graduated to coconut milk and nuclear Thai curries while doing several duty tours for the U.S. State Department. No matter how hot the spice or how cold the company, Barton ate and listened, both eyes wide-open for the main chance.
    “Is Archer Donovan working for the U.S. on this?” Chang asked Barton without preamble.
    “Not so far as I can tell.”
    “How far is that?” Flynn asked.
    “Far enough to know that he has no official ties with the U.S. government.”
    Chang picked up a tree ear with his chopsticks, chewed the nutty fungus, and swallowed. “What about unofficial ties?”
    “He’s not ours off the books, if that’s what you mean.”
    Chang grunted. McGarry had been an off-the-books agent for the United States. Sometimes. Most of the time he had worked for himself. Chang wondered if anyone else at the table knew.
    “Archer Donovan’s a Yank through and through,” Flynn said. “He’ll help out his government.”
    Barton shrugged. “Maybe. He’s turned ’em down flat in the past.”
    Flynn’s blond eyebrows rose. “You let him get away with yanking your chain like that?”
    “It’s a free country,” Barton said blandly.
    “Balls.”
    “Len was a Yank, too,” Chang pointed out to Flynn. “He didn’t help anybody but himself, no matter who happened to be employing him.”
    Flynn made a disgusted sound. If there was anything that made a government crazy, it was foreign or domestic agents who wouldn’t stay bought. But it was a hazard of the business. “I still say Donovan somehow got McGarry killed.”
    “If he did,” Barton said, avoiding an opaque clot of tofu in favor of anonymous animal protein, “you better pray he never wants your pecker in his collection. We looked, and we looked hard, and we couldn’t find one single goddamn piece of evidence that Donovan had a hand in McGarry’s death.”
    Flynn started to object.
    Barton looked up, still chewing. His black eyes reminded the other men that he once had been a contract assassin. “We would love—just flat fucking love —to have a twist on Archer Donovan. He was about the shrewdest damn analyst we ever had, as well as one effective son of a bitch in the field. Having that kind of talent running around without a handler makes us nervous. So if you’re thinking we didn’t look hard enough, think again.”
    The palm of Flynn’s big hand came down on the table with enough force to make silverware jump. “Then who in Jesus and Mary’s name killed Len McGarry?”
    Barton smiled thinly. Beneath his thinning gray hair his scalp gleamed. So did his teeth. “We have two pools going. The first is betting on the Chinese triads, compliments of one of the Overseas Chinese’s foremost trading families.”
    Chang speared tofu, chewed once, and swallowed as though he didn’t understand that Barton was accusing his family.
    “The second pool,” Barton said, watching Flynn idly, “is on the Aussies doing the dirty. Specifically the marginally bright, no-longer-young Turk who needs a gold star in his file to go up in rank.”
    “Bugger yourself,” Flynn said without heat. “If I killed the wanker, you’ll never prove it.”
    Chuckling, using the chopsticks as deftly as Chang, Barton flicked a lump of noodles from his plate to his mouth. “What are you going to do about Donovan?”
    Flynn didn’t say a word.
    Neither did Chang.
    Barton sighed. “Listen up, boys. For the moment, the U.S. wants Archer Donovan alive and kicking ass.”
    Chang