Hard Rain

Mostly families
    enjoying a night out. A couple of tired-looking salary men avoiding an
    evening at home. Nobody out of place.
    We sat in a corner that offered me a nice view of the street scene
    below.
    I looked at him. "Go on," I said.
    He rubbed his hands together and looked around. "Oh man, if I get
    caught doing this ..."
    "Cut the dramatics," I told him. "Just tell me what you want."
    "I don't want you to think I had anything to do with your friend," he
    said. "And I want us to put our heads together."
    I'm listening."
    "Okay. To start with, I think ... I think I'm being set up."
    "What does this have to do with my friend?"
    "Just let me start at the beginning, and you'll see, okay?"
    I nodded. "Go ahead."
    He licked his lips. "You remember the program I told you about?
    Crepuscular?"
    A waitress came over and I realized I was starving. Without checking
    the menu I ordered a roast beef sandoichi and their soup of the day.
    Kanezaki asked for a coffee.
    "I remember it," I told him.
    "Well, Crepuscular was formally terminated six months ago."
    "So?"
    "So it's still going on anyway, and I'm still running it, even though
    the funding has been cut off. Why hasn't anyone said anything to me?
    And where is the money coming from?"
    "Wait a minute," I said. "Slow down. How did you find out about
    this?"
    "A few days ago my boss, the Chief of Station, told me he wanted to see
    all the receipts I've collected from the program's assets."
    "Biddle?"
    He looked at me. "Yes. You know him?"
    "I know of him. Tell me about the receipts."
    "Agency policy. When we disburse funds, the asset has to sign a
    receipt. Without the receipt, it would be too easy for case officers
    to skim cash off the disbursements."
    You've been having these people ... sign for their payouts?" I asked,
    incredulous.
    "It's policy," he said again.
    "They're willing to do that?"
    He shrugged. "Not always, not at first. We're trained in how to get
    an asset comfortable with the notion. You don't even bring it up the
    first time. The second time, you tell him it's a new USG policy,
    designed to ensure that all the recipients of our funding are getting
    their full allotments. If he still balks, you tell him all right,
    you're going out on a limb but you'll see what you can do on his
    behalf. By the fifth time he's addicted to the money and you tell him
    your superiors have reprimanded you for not getting the receipts, that
    they've told you they're going to cut you off if you don't get the
    paperwork signed. You hand the guy the receipt and ask him to just
    scrawl something. The first one is illegible. Later, they get more
    readable."
    Amazing, I thought. "All right. Biddle asks for the receipts."
    "Right. So I gave them to him, but it felt weird to me."
    "Why?"
    He rubbed the back of his neck. "When the program got started, I was
    told that I would be responsible for maintaining all the receipts in my
    own safe. I was worried about why the Chief suddenly wanted them, even
    though he told me it was just routine. So I checked with some people I
    know at Langley obliquely, of course. And I learned that, for a
    program with this level of classification, no one would ask to see
    documentation unless someone had first filed a formal complaint with
    the Agency's Inspector General with specific allegations of case
    officer dishonesty."
    "How do you know that hasn't happened?"
    He flushed. "First, because there's no reason for it. I haven't done
    anything wrong. Second, if there had been a formal complaint, protocol
    would have been for the Chief to sit me down with the lawyers present.
    Embezzling funds is a serious accusation."
    "All right. So you give Biddle the receipts, but you feel weird about
    it."
    "Yes. So I started going through the Crepuscular cable traffic. The
    traffic is numbered sequentially, and I noticed a missing cable. I
    wouldn't have spotted it except that it occurred to me to check the
    numerical sequence. Ordinarily you wouldn't notice something like that
    because no one ever searches the files by cable number, it's too much
    trouble, and anyway, ordinarily the number isn't even relevant. I
    called someone at East Asia Division at Langley and had her read the
    cable to me over the phone. The cable said
    Crepuscular was being terminated and should be discontinued immediately
    because the funding was being applied elsewhere."
    "You think someone on this end pulled the cable so you wouldn't know
    the program had been terminated?" I asked.
    "Yes,"