With the darkness of night to obscure the litter and the other less photogenic aspects of the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. looked just like a picture postcard. The air was heavy with moisture. Around Ben Slayton, the traffic strobed into abstract blurs of red and yellow light. He was thinking about a man named Barney Kaufman. Elfin-faced, bright-eyed, with a perpetual grin that could light up a room, Barney Kaufman had been the man who introduced Slayton to what he termed “the sleazy delights of Tangier.” Slayton had been through Morocco only once before in his life, a fly-by through the capital city of Rabat that did not really count as a visit, and so had taken up Barney’s jovial offer of an interesting place to dispense with some accumulated leave-time back in November of 1978. Barney Kaufman was an ex-CIA agent. International applications and troubleshooting. Barney Kaufman, jovial, smiling Barney, had killed maybe fifty people in his lifetime, one at a time, with garrotes, karate, point-blank dum-dum shells, long-range sniping, broken beer bottles, and arranged accidents.
