by Bill Granger
He crossed the street to the abandoned Saab and opened the door. He saw the keys in the ignition. He reached in the glove compartment and took out a rental agreement between a M. Pelletier and a Swiss rental car company at the airport at Geneva. So they had flown into Geneva, picked up a car with Bern registration, and gone directly to Lausanne. They had arrived yesterday.
They had known exactly where to find him. He had eluded them. But it had been much too easy.
He felt the vague chill that he had learned to live with in the years in the old trade. He had the feeling of watching and being watched. He looked around. A policeman approached with a sour look and told him to move the car.
Devereaux started the engine. Devereaux turned left on the east side of the station, went under the viaduct and down the road that parallels the Metro to Ouchy at the bottom of the hill. It would be better to get out of the tangle of Lausanne, to find an open road and see who might be on it.
A gray Renault pulled from its parking spot in front of the McDonald’s and followed the Saab down the steep hill toward Ouchy and the lakeshore.
Devereaux drove quickly enough to see if anyone kept up with him.
The gray Renault leaped ahead of a slow-moving bus and pushed between a dull limousine and a truck turning into a service drive. There was no one between Devereaux and the Renault.
They wanted him to flee.
They wanted him to leave Switzerland. They wanted to isolate him, he thought. There had to be a killing field where he could be hunted in the open. Switzerland was never a good place to trap a spy.
He turned at Ouchy and followed the line of the highway toward Vevey and Chillon. The highway rose into the hills above these coastal towns, suspended on pilings driven deep into the rocky hillside. All along the highways were disguised pillboxes, arms depots and rocks set in such a way as to cause a rockslide across the roadway at a signal. The Swiss perpetually booby-trap their country in preparation for a war that has not come in five centuries.
Devereaux pushed the Saab now, screaming through the gears, pushing the tachometer to the red line with each gear, shifting down hard, driving the engine to its limits. He was pushing 150 kilometers and the Renault was keeping pace.
The midday traffic was thin. Travelers were taking their dinner breaks. The countryside was empty and full of peace. The road was rising into the hills above the lake. Down on the lake, the ferry boats plowed through the waters.
Devereaux thought there might be two men in the Renault but the light was so brilliant that it made a mirror of the windshield behind him.
The light blinded both drivers. He thought of what he would do then.
He had no weapon but the car and his own knowledge of the roads around the lake.
There was a small road that tumbled down the mountain from the main highway toward Chillon. The road was made for slower transport in a slower age. He tried to remember exactly what he knew of the road. And then he remembered.
If they wanted him to flee, they would expect him to be running as fast as he could.
The Saab growled and whined as he pulled off the main road and onto the smaller road down the mountain. He pushed the gears down, taming the engine, feeling the tires catch at the asphalt and hold it despite the sway of centrifugal force. He pushed into a slow slide around a long and lazy curve and then pushed the car into a screaming acceleration down a short stretch of straight ground. He glanced behind him once in the rear-view mirror and saw the Renault. Was it ten seconds behind? Was there enough time?
The Saab whined through a second, sharp turn around a boulder and Devereaux slammed the brakes with brutal force, so that the rear end of the car bucked and the tires squealed as the car lurched sideways toward the edge of a cliff at the margin of the road. The car nearly turned around. Below was a farmer’s field with the earth waiting for a plow.
Devereaux was out of the car in a moment and across the road to the rocks.
Two seconds later, the Renault surged around the blind turn and slammed into the left side and rear end of the Saab.
There had been two men.
One hurtled through the windshield, over the Saab, and over the cliff to the broken field below.
The second hit his head hard against the crumpled steering post.
The Saab and Renault ground into each other in slow motion. There was no fire.
Bits of metal exploded against the rocks around Devereaux where he crouched in a ditch. Below the road was the old castle sitting in the waters of Lac Leman. It was the place where Byron had come and meditated on the prisoner held there twelve years and written a poem. It was peaceful and of another world.
Devereaux ran to the door of the Renault. The driver was unconscious or dead. He could not open the crumpled door. The window was broken. Devereaux used his elbow to break more glass, to get a way into the car. Devereaux reached through the window and felt into the pocket of the driver. He pulled out the pistol. It was an ordinary Walther PPK with a short barrel and six hollow-point bullets seated in the clip. He shoved the pistol in his pocket.
The wallet was inside the vest pocket.
He opened the wallet and found a sheaf of French banknotes and a photograph of a young man and a young woman and an American Express card made out to Jonathan DeVole.
And a second card.
Devereaux stared at the second card.
It was plastic, cut hard and brittle exactly like an ordinary credit card.
Except it was gray. Without numbers or letters on it. The card was perfectly smooth and unmarked.
Devereaux saw that his hand was closing over the card as though to swallow it and make it disappear. It was as though his hand were separate from his body.
Devereaux knew the card.
It was familiar to him when he had worked for the R Section in a life he had abandoned.
The card was accepted at 120 machines located throughout the world, identifying the cardholder as a member of the operations division of R Section, a very secret intelligence agency of the United States.
Hanley’s division.
9
ALEXA BENEATH THE STARS
Alexa waited until dark to enter the apartment building. It was small and there was a concierge but Alexa had taken care of that—the concierge was distracted from her apartment on the ground floor by a boy who threw a brick through one of the ground-floor windows and then ran down the Rue de la Concorde Suisse. It was not so difficult to find vandals, even in Lausanne, if they were well paid.
She climbed to the third floor and went to the apartment at the end of the hall. She had waited outside the building all day, sitting in the Volkswagen at the end of the block, watching for any sign of life at all.
The information had come with unexpected precision and it was timely.
The agent named November—the second moon of November—had been observed twenty-four hours previously in this apartment, in this building. It had been determined by the resident extra at Geneva that he had been living there for nearly two years.
Why was everything so precise, so exact? And yet, Alexa had a strange feeling that this was all too easy. What was it about, exactly?
She wore a black sweater that had a high collar; she wore black cotton trousers and black running shoes. Her jacket was a variation of a sailor’s pea coat. Her long black hair was tied up. She wore no makeup at all and her pale features were small and frail.
The lock was not so simple but she found the way in after a few moments with a pick and tumbler setter which electronically felt for the tumblers and tripped them.
The apartment was dark as it had been all day. It was still, save for the ticking of an electronic clock on the wall of the kitchen. The clock was quartz, the ticking was added to fake the sound of a real clock.
She went into all the rooms. She opened the closets. They did not have many clothes, the agent and his mistress.
There were no photographs. There was a sense of impermanence to the apartment.
She saw that the Panasonic answering machine was on but that there had been no calls. The red call button was not blinking.
She found a chair near the window where she could watch in the shadows down the length of the Rue de la Concorde Suisse.
He did not own a car but rented them often from the Avis garage next to the Lausanne train station.
He had not rented a car in a week. He was usually back in the apartment by eight. The mistress was gone, the resident extra in Geneva had no information on her. But he had so much other information that it amazed Alexa.
Alexa frowned in the darkness. This was not usual. She had spent two days in Zurich waiting for contact. She had not expected to be given much information—but when the contact was made she had received a cornucopia of detail. If they knew so much about this man, why had they not taken care of the matter before this, before the bungled business on the Finlandia?
Alexa removed the Uzi from her purse. It was made in France, fitted with a silencer, and it had eighteen shots. It was sufficient to tear a living man’s body in half.
The final arrangements were her own. It was a form of self-protection. After all, if she were to survive, it must be on her own terms. KGB ran her on a very loose leash; it was necessary to the business at hand.
The quartz clock in the kitchen ticked with a false sound. The bright day had turned to clear night. There was a full moon and she could see the street clearly.
When she had been a child, living in the flats along the Lenin Prospekt in Moscow with her mother, her brother, and her youngest sister—her father had been a colonel in the Soviet army and had spent long periods in command of troops on the Sino-Soviet border seven thousand miles to the east—she had thought once to count all the stars and end the mystery about the endless number of stars in the heavens. She was nine or ten and had a very precise mind and nature, however naïve. She reasoned with her mother this way:
The stars we see cannot be infinite because the scope of heaven we see is not infinite. So it is possible to count all the stars you can see from Moscow.
Her mother, who was intelligent and who had been beautiful when she was young, said it was impossible because the sky changed each night as the earth revolved around the sun.
Alexa had said it was still possible. On one night, a determined person in Moscow (such as herself) could count all the stars visible from an apartment on the Lenin Prospekt. It could be done in winter, on a clear, cold night, when the night stretched from the middle of the afternoon to the middle of the next morning.
Her mother had seemed amused and would not argue with her. She was a child.
Alexa thought of a child growing inside her body. It would be a splendid idea. But not now. Not for a while yet. The child would be magnificent. It would be a boy.
She had waited until winter to count the stars and when winter came she was older and wiser and she knew it was foolish to want to limit the number of stars by counting them. It was better to ignore them. Or accept the word of the scientists who did such things.
Still.
What if she had counted all the stars on a clear winter’s night in Moscow, from horizon to horizon? What would the number have been, all the stars seen with the naked eye? Would it have been possible at all?
She saw both men at the same time.
They approached from opposite corners, where the Rue de la Concorde Suisse ends in a terraced wall above the streets below that lead to the Cathedral.
They were on foot and there could be no car behind them because the walkway along the wall was a mere pedestrian path.
She watched them approach the building from opposite sides of the street.
She knew they were coming to this place and she felt trapped. Why had she been trapped?
For the first time, she felt a sense of guilt. Was there something in the past, something she had done or said that would have forced her Committee to list her for a “wet contract”? A contract to be carried out as far away from Moscow Center as possible?
But she had made no mistake. The careful child who wanted to count all the stars above Moscow had made no mistake. What had Alexei said in Helsinki? The mistakes had to be blamed on someone.
She rose from the chair and looked down at the two men on opposite sides of the street. They were staring up at the darkened window where Alexa stood. They glanced at each other and she thought one of them shrugged.
They entered the building, one at a time.
The street was nearly fifty feet below. There was a balcony outside the window. At the end of the hall, there was a fire escape. She hesitated. She felt terribly confused.
When she decided, it was too late.
She went to the door and reached for the handle and heard steps in the hall.
She waited at the door, the length of the Uzi pistol extended away from her body.
There were no voices, only steps in the hall. Then one of them knocked on the door.
The three waited, two outside, Alexa inside.
The dark made all sounds more intense. The clock in the kitchen seemed to reverberate with sound.
They had trouble with the lock, just as she had. They opened the door cautiously.
Alexa fired through the door. The Uzi thumped and bucked in her hand. The door splintered and she heard them cry in pain and surprise. She expected them to push into the room. Instead, the second one retreated back into the hall.
That would be messy.
She sprayed six shots into the hall, firing from right to left as she filled the frame of the door, straddling the man on the floor dying between her legs.
The flash of her pistol was met with the whump of another pistol, fitted with a silencer.
They’ve killed the concierge, she thought dreamily in that moment of action. It was so messy and they didn’t care, as though they wanted this to be done quickly or not at all. She thought they must be in a hurry and that puzzled her. All these thoughts crammed the moment needed to spray the darkened hallway with death from the Uzi.
The second one fell heavily and then she realized the first one was alive because he stirred against her feet. She lowered the pistol to finish him off—and stopped.
She knelt and turned him over.
The bullet had grazed his head, he was bleeding heavily, he might even live. His eyes were open wide but he did not seem to be conscious.
She reached into his pocket and found money. She pushed the bills into her own pocket. She stared at him in the moonlight and saw a man completely bald. He didn’t even have eyebrows. She knelt and cradled his head and spoke to him harshly in the voice of the Moscow agent, the voice of death that is without sex or promise—only a threat:
“Why do you come to kill me?”
But the hairless one only stared wildly at her, frightened into unconsciousness or mere inability to speak.
She went through his pockets, all of them, turning over his body roughly to go through his pants. Nothing at all.
She went to the second one in the hall. One of the shots had caught him full in the face and now there was no face left. Brains were splattered against the wall behind the body.
Without distaste, she knelt again and pushed her hands patiently through his clothing.
There was a wallet at least.
She opened the wallet and saw the bills.
There was nothing else.
Two contractors, she thought. Not even someone from Moscow Center but contractors hired on the broad assassins’ market in Europe. They might even be Swiss.
But Switzerland was a dangerous country to act so boldly in. They had not been careful at all. They had come into a peaceful neighborhood in the old city and they had surely killed the concierge to gain access to this apartment.
It occurred to Alexa then they had not come to kill her at all. But to kill the same man she had been sent to kill. She felt anxious. She smelled the beginning of death in the hall. It was the warm and sweet smell of the slaughterhouse and k
illing ground.
She stepped over the body in the hall and went back into the apartment. She looked around her, took her purse from the chair and glanced down again at Rue de la Concorde Suisse. The lights of Lausanne, low and few, spread down the hill. The sky was full of stars, too many to count because one no longer could believe in counting stars.
10
BREACH OF SECURITY
The Assistant National Security Adviser was the less formal contact between the executive branch and the various intelligence agencies that operated under the umbrella of the Director of Central Intelligence. These included R Section.
Yackley had not been kept waiting. The assistant adviser was not a rude man. His name was Weinstein and he was more intelligent than most of the people he had to deal with.
His office on the sixth floor of the Executive Office Building—the ornate hunk of Victorian architecture that squats between Seventeenth Avenue and West Executive Place, just off the White House lawn—was the office of a transient. There were no photographs on the rather plain government-issue metal desk; there was not the requisite couch or even two upholstered chairs set off to the side for informal tête-à-têtes. Everything in the office seemed careless and temporary. There were cardboard boxes and a battered Selectric II typewriter on a rickety metal typing stand. The assistant adviser might have been his own aide-de-camp. He projected a sense of energy, of wearing shirts two days in a row, and of being a bachelor who probably did not eat very well. He wore horn-rimmed glasses that made his thin face seem thinner. He was forty-one years old and looked thirty.
“Hi, Frank,” he said, as his secretary led Yackley into the office. “Get you something? Coke or coffee or something?”
“No thanks, Perry,” Yackley said. He felt uncomfortable with the informality yet thrilled by the intimacy. Everyone did. The administration projected a sense of order, tuxedos and gray business suits. Perry Weinstein might have been a holdover from the Carter administration. Save that his accent was West Coast and his politics were the kind satisfying to readers of National Review.
