Legends

by Robert Littell

  The security arrangements were clearly casual; the bodyguards were going through the motions but there was no urgency to their gestures, which is what often happened when the individual being protected has been squirreled away and the people responsible for his safety assumed that potential enemies wouldn’t be able to find his hole. Back at the BMW, the two bodyguards and the driver were making small talk. One of the bodyguards must have detected a signal on his walkie-talkie because he hauled it from a pocket and, looking up at the closed venetian blinds, muttered something into it. Several minutes went by. Then the front door of 621 swung open again and another bodyguard appeared. He was straining to hold back two Borzois attached to long leashes. To the amusement of the men waiting near the BMW, the dogs practically dragged the man into the gutter. Behind him a stubby hunch-shouldered man with a shock of silver hair and dark glasses materialized at the front door. He had a cigar clamped between his teeth and walked with the aid of two aluminum crutches, thrusting one hip forward and dragging the leg after it, then repeating the movement with the other hip. He paused for breath when he reached the end of the walkway in front of the building’s entrance. One of the bodyguards opened the back door of the car. In the corner room across the street, Lincoln rose to his feet and in one flowing motion jammed his left elbow into his rib cage as he steadied the rifle on a window sash. Closing his left eye, he pressed his right eye to the telescopic sight and walked up the muzzle of the Whitworth until the cross-hairs were fixed on the target’s forehead immediately above the bridge of his nose. He squeezed the trigger with such painstaking deliberation that the eruption of flame at the breech’s nipple and the bullet rifling out of the barrel and the satisfying recoil of the stock into his shoulder blade all caught him by surprise. Sighting again on the target, he saw blood oozing from a ragged-edged tear in the middle of the man’s forehead. The bodyguards had heard a sound but not yet associated it with gunfire. The one holding open the back door of the car was the first to notice that their charge was collapsing onto the pavement. He leapt forward to catch him under the armpits and, shouting for help, lowered him to the ground.

  By the time the bodyguards realized that the man they were protecting had been shot dead, Lincoln, oblivious to the spasms in his game leg, was well on his way to the breach in the chainlink fence.

  1997: CRYSTAL QUEST COMES TO BELIEVE IN DANTE’S TRINITY

  DANTE PIPPEN, A MAESTRO OF TRADECRAFT, HAD POSITIONED himself in a booth at the rear of Xing’s Mandarin Restaurant with his back to the tables, facing a mirror in which he could keep track of who came and went. He sized up the two figures in trenchcoats who entered the restaurant at the stroke of noon. Both had the deadpan eyes that marked them as flunkies for the CIA’s Office of Security. The one with the cauliflower ears of a prize-fighter ducked behind the bar to make sure that Tsou Xing, who was holding fort on his high stool in front of the cash register, didn’t have a sawed-off shotgun stashed under the counter. Ignoring Dante, the second man, who had the shoulders and neck of a weight lifter, pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Moments later he reappeared and planted himself in front of the doors, his arms folded across his barrel chest.

  It wasn’t long before Crystal Quest turned up at the door of the restaurant. Coming into the murky interior from the dazzling sunlight of Albany Avenue, she was momentarily blinded. When she could see again, she spotted Dante and started toward him, the thick heels of her sensible shoes drumming on the linoleum floor. “Long time no see,” she said as she slid onto the banquette opposite him. “As usual you look fit as a flea, Dante. Still working out on that rowing machine?”

  Dante managed a half-hearted laugh. “You’re confusing me with Martin Odum, Fred. He’s the one with a rowing machine.”

  Quest, who knew a joke when she heard one, grinned nervously.

  Dante said, “How about treating your bloodstream to a shot of alcohol?”

  “Alcohol’s just what the doctor ordered. Something with a lot of ice, thank you.”

  Dante called for a whiskey, neat, and a frozen daiquiri, heavy on the ice. Tsou waved his good arm in acknowledgment. Waiting for the drinks, Dante watched Quest toying absently with the frills down the front of her dress shirt. He noticed that the jacket of her pantsuit, like the skin around her eyes, was wrinkled; that the rust-colored dye was washing out of her hair, revealing soot-gray roots. “You look the worse for wear, Fred. Job getting you down?”

  “Being DDO of an intelligence entity that has recast itself as a risk-averse high-tech social club is not a cake walk,” she said. “There are people at Langley who do nothing but stare at satellite downloads from morning to night, as if a photograph could tell you what an adversary intends to do with what he has. Hell of a way to run an espionage agency. They’ve slashed our budget, the president doesn’t have the time or the curiosity to read the overnight briefing book we prepare for him, the liberal press climbs all over us for our occasional fumbles. It goes without saying we can’t gloat about our occasional successes—”

  The Chinese waitress wearing a tight skirt slit up one thigh set the drinks on the table. Watching the girl slink away in the mirror reminded Dante of Martin’s late lamented Chinese girlfriend, Minh. “Do you have any?” he asked Quest.

  Crunching on chips of ice, she’d lost the thread of the conversation. “Have any what?” she inquired.

  “Successes.”

  “One or two or three.”

  “Like the Prigorodnaia business,” Dante murmured.

  Quest’s eyes hardened. “What Prigorodnaia business are you talking about?”

  “Christsake, Fred, don’t play the innocent,” Dante snapped. “We know what happened to Jozef Kafkor. We know the DDO provided seed money to the Armenian used-car dealer so he could corner the Russian aluminum market. We know how Ugor-Zhilov, a.k.a the Oligarkh, ingratiated himself with Yeltsin, arranging for the publication of his book, organizing his personal bodyguard, replenishing his bank account. Once installed in Yeltsin’s inner circle, the Oligarkh nudged him into freeing up prices and privatizing the industrial base of the defunct Soviet Union. We know he lured Yeltsin into attacking Chechnya just when the Red Army was recovering from the Afghanistan debacle. We know that for a period of years in the early nineties the individual running Russia from behind the scene was none other than … Fred Astaire. We know she was running it into the ground so that the new Russia rising from the ashes of the Soviet Union couldn’t compete with America.”

  The blood seemed to seep from Quest’s cheeks until the only color remaining came from the smears of blush she’d applied during the shuttle flight from Washington. She spooned another chunk of ice into her mouth. “Who’s we?” she demanded.

  “Why, I would have thought that was obvious. There’s Martin Odum, the one-time CIA field agent turned detective who specializes in collecting mahjongg debts. There’s Lincoln Dittmann, the Civil War buff who actually met the poet Whitman. And last but certainly not least, there’s yours truly, Dante Pippen, the Irish dynamiter from Castletownbere.”

  Quest snickered bitterly. “That business of Lincoln claiming to have been at the battle of Fredericksburg—it was a brilliant piece of theater. It had us all fooled—the shrink, me, the committee that met from time to time to review the situation, to decide whether to terminate your contract or your life. We all assumed that Martin Odum was off his rocker. Teach me to give someone the benefit of the doubt.”

  Nursing his whisky, Dante shrugged a shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, Lincoln was at the battle of Fredericksburg.”

  Quest raised an eyebrow; she didn’t appreciate having her leg pulled. “Why’d you need to see me, Dante? What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until you had a chance to come down to Langley?”

  “We’ve taken out life insurance, we’ve taped what you don’t want the world to know—the Prigorodnaia operation; how you provided the keys to Kastner’s safe house so the Oligarkh’s people could break in and murder him
; how you told them about Martin’s beehives, which led to the death of the Chinese girl, Minh. Add to that the sniper who tried to kill Martin in Hebron. Not to mention the Czechs who gave Martin a car and a pistol in Prague and told him to run for it. These attempts on Martin’s life had your prints all over them.”

  “That’s nonsense. Knowing what I know, the last thing I would have done is charge a pistol with dummy Parabellums.”

  Dante said, “How did you know the handgun was loaded with dummy Parabellums?”

  Quest smudged a fingertip dabbing at the mascara on an eyelid. Dante took her failure to answer for an answer. “Listen up, Fred, if any one of us dies of anything but old age, the tapes will be duplicated and distributed to every member of the Congressional Oversight Subcommittee, also to selected journalists in the liberal press who report on your occasional fumbles.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  Dante raised his chin and looked Quest in the eye. “If you think that, all you need to do is call our bluff.”

  “Listen, Dante, we all came of age in the cold war. We all fought the good fight. I’m sure we can work something out.”

  “There’s one more item on our agenda. We held a meeting to decide whether to terminate your life or your career. Career won, two to one. Within one week we want to read in the newspapers that the legendary Crystal Quest, the first woman Deputy Director of Operations, a veteran of thirty-two years of loyal and masterful service to the Central Intelligence Agency, has been put out to pasture.”

  Sucked against her will into Dante’s trinity, Quest asked, “Who was the one who voted to terminate my life?”

  “Why, Martin, of course, though being the more squeamish of the three, he wanted me or Lincoln to make the hit.” Dante smiled pleasantly. “Some people forgive but don’t forget. Martin’s the opposite—he forgets but doesn’t forgive.”

  “What does he forget?”

  “Whether Martin Odum is a legend or the real him.”

  “It’s the original him, the first legend. You worked for Army Intelligence—”

  “You mean, Martin worked for Army Intelligence.”

  Quest nodded carefully. “Martin’s specialty was East European dissidents. I stumbled across a paper he published in the Army Intelligence Quarterly identifying two veins of dissidence: the anticommunists, who wanted to do away with communism altogether, and the pro-communists, who wanted to purge communism of Stalinism and reform the system. His article, which turned out to be far sighted, predicted that in the end the pro-communists were more likely to have an impact on East Europe and, ultimately, the Soviet Union itself, than the anticommunists. I remember … Martin citing the trial of Pavel Slansky in Prague, claiming he was the precursor of the reformers who came after him, Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, eventually Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.”

  “And you lured him away from Army Intelligence into the CIA?”

  “The Legend Committee worked up a cover for him using his real name and as much of his actual background as they could. He’d lived in Pennsylvania until his father moved the family to Brooklyn. Martin was something like eight at the time. He was raised on Eastern Parkway, he went to PS 167, Crown Heights was his stamping ground, he even had a school chum whose father owned a Chinese restaurant on Albany Avenue. When we discovered he could handle explosives, for a while we had him making letter bombs or rigging portable phones to explode from a distance. Martin was the last agent I personally ran before they kicked me upstairs to run the officers who run the agents. The Odum we concocted wasn’t a detective. That’s something you … that’s something Martin added to the cover story when his Company career came to an end.” Quest, shaken, began gnawing on a chip of ice.

  Dante tucked a ten dollar bill under the ashtray and stood up. “I’ll pass all this on to Martin if I see him. I suspect he’ll be relieved.”

  Quest looked up at Dante. “It was you who shot the Oligarkh.”

  “Christsake, Fred.”

  “I know it was you, Dante. The kill had your M.O. on it.”

  Dante laughed lightly, his shoulders shuddering with pleasure. “You’re losing your touch, Fred. I have nothing to gain by lying to you—it was Lincoln who made the hit on the Oligarkh. Newspaper accounts said the police couldn’t identify the bullet or the murder weapon, which means Lincoln must have used that old Civil War sniper rifle you found for him when you were working up the Dittmann legend. Jesus, that’s really humorous. Martin or I wouldn’t know how to load the damn thing.”

  Snickering in satisfaction, Dante headed for the front of the restaurant. The weight lifter came off the kitchen doors and started after him. The prize-fighter edged around the bar to block his path. Tsou Xing called in a high pitched voice, “No violence inside, all-light.”

  Dante’s Irish temper flared. Glancing over his shoulder at Quest, he said, very softly, “Am I to understand that you’ll be calling our bluff, Fred?”

  Quest locked eyes with Dante, then looked away and took a deep breath and wagged a forefinger once. The two flunkies from the Office of Security stopped in their tracks. Dante nodded as if he were digesting a momentous piece of information, something that could transform his legend and add to its longevity. Humming under his breath one of Lincoln’s favorite tunes, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, he pushed through the door into the blinding sunlight.