‘That’s a veneer, Mallory. I wouldn’t trust it. Speak to me.’
Mallory shut his eyes. He had the thought that his life was a disaster area, ripped through by typhoons and twisters, whole streets of his world swept away on a rancid foaming tide. His inner landscape depressed him completely. He licked his dry lips and opened his eyes and looked up into Pagan’s face.
‘Speak to me,’ Pagan said again.
43
WASHINGTON
Max Skidelsky said, ‘I don’t like to ask, Larry.’
Larry Quinn said, ‘I know that.’
‘I wouldn’t ask if I had another alternative.’
‘I know that too.’
‘I like the man personally,’ Skidelsky said. He spread his hands in a gesture of futility. ‘He’s a nice guy.’
‘I’ve always thought so,’ Quinn said.
‘But sometimes you need to do a little house-cleaning. Sometimes you need to change the water in the flower vase because it’s starting to offend you,’ Skidelsky said. ‘Are you up for it, Larry?’
‘Do I look like a hitman? No, I’m not really up for it.’
‘I understand that. I sympathize. You have reservations.’
Larry Quinn, his black hair glossy under the spotlights recessed in the ceiling, shrugged his shoulders slightly. ‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it, Max. I’ll do it. I just wanted you to know how I feel about it, that’s all.’
Skidelsky laid a hand on Quinn’s shoulder and squeezed it. ‘I think he’s going to be a burden over the long haul, Larry. A nice guy, like you say. I’d be the last to dispute that. But soft-centred.’
‘Like a chocolate liqueur,’ Quinn remarked.
Skidelsky smiled. ‘I asked too much of him, Larry. I put him through a big test and I don’t like the results. Maybe it’s better to find these things out now, instead of further down the road.’
‘Yeah. OK. I’ll go, I’ll go.’ Quinn looked reluctant. When he turned to move, he did so sluggishly.
‘You know where he lives?’ Max asked.
Quinn said, ‘Glastonbury Street. I’ve been in his apartment. The place depresses me.’
He listened to Larry Quinn leave the apartment and then turned his face back to the telephone on his kitchen table and willed the thing to ring. But he had long ago learned that when you were waiting for your phone to ring, time assumed an elastic quality, seconds stretched slowly into minutes, minutes expanded laboriously into hours. He had about seventy men and women rummaging through the city looking for a Buick with a certain licence-plate number and so far none of them had called in to say they’d seen it. He could have done with more people at his disposal, but the others that might have been available to him were already in Roanoke, waiting in hotel rooms for his call.
He bit on a fingernail, an uncharacteristic gesture of tension. As long as Pagan was out there, the chance existed that he’d locate the woman, especially if she took it into her head to find a way to contact him because she just happened to be in a mood to play some of her weird mind games. And that couldn’t be allowed to happen.
The phone suddenly rang – at last, he thought – and he reached for it immediately. The man on the other end of the line was Jacob Turk, a disaffected black Skidelsky had recruited from the Office of Logistics at Langley.
‘I see him, Max.’
‘Where is he?’
‘He’s headed for Interstate 95.’ There was a measure of fuzz on Jacob Turk’s mobile phone.
‘Great. Keep in touch. I’m leaving now.’
44
WASHINGTON
She stepped out of her car and moved toward the shrubs that grew in the forecourt of the apartment complex. The night was wild and a wind blew bloated rain-clouds across an intermittent moon. She crossed the forecourt, paused under the branches of a cherry tree. She waited, checked the area for human presence, saw nothing. Apartment windows were lit here and there – it was a shabby place, twenty years old or more, and without a security guard. Easy for her.
She moved out from under the cherry tree and headed toward the building and found the door she was looking for. A rusted iron FOUR hung askew upon the wall. She touched the door handle, laying her hand on it gently, fully expecting it to be locked. But it wasn’t. In a world of electronic security systems and deadbolt locks, a world of paranoia, she was immediately suspicious. She hesitated.
She could step inside, Chico’s gun in her hand, and she could confront Mallory and make him explain the one thing that still rang an unharmonious chord in her – and that was Pasco’s insistence that she strike at the camp in the southern part of Virginia. If you asked me to single any one thing out, I’d have to say the training-camp near Roanoke would be my number one priority. That’s the one I’d really like to get. I’d like to see that place demolished. I’d like to see it just blown sky fucking high. She understood his hatred of the place, sure – but it was the manner of his delivery that had triggered uneasiness inside her. He’d been too strident, too eager. He’d pushed the idea with just a little too much effort. She wondered if she was supposed to walk into something there. Was that the reason for Pasco’s pushiness? If there was a set-up, was that the place for it?
The idea that somebody was trying to manipulate her didn’t spook her; it had a contrary effect – it elated her, excited her. But there was a definite advantage in being forewarned, in knowing what you might expect to find when you reached your destination.
She felt rain fall against her blouse, soak through the cotton to her skin. It was warm rain and the dark was cloying with humidity. She had to move. She went forward toward the door and twisted the handle and entered the room with the gun in her hand.
A young black-haired man in a long blue raincoat stood in the middle of the room, bent over something he was reading on the table. He turned at once, his expression one of surprise. She fired her gun as soon as she saw the weapon in his fist. Without thinking. Without hesitation. He went clattering backward into a liquor cabinet and it toppled under his weight and bottles crashed on the floor around him. He fell with a stricken look. He lay amongst broken glass.
She immediately stepped over him and went through the rest of the apartment – an empty bathroom, a fastidiously clean kitchen, then a bedroom where a lamp burned in a feeble manner beside the bed. The figure who lay on the bed was a middle-aged man fully dressed in a grey suit. His silver hair was neatly combed, parted to one side.
The gunshot wound had been inflicted in his chest. Blood soaked his shirt. Pulpy pieces of his shattered heart were visible through the untidy gash in his chest and she saw the discoloured pinkness of an exposed rib-bone. She didn’t pause, she searched his pockets, found a wallet. The wallet contained a Central Intelligence Agency ID card with the dead man’s name: James Mallory.
Mallory. He was beyond her reach now. He was beyond speech. She kept the card, tossed the wallet aside – they’d find her fingerprints when they investigated the murder, but what did that matter? It was only fuel to her reputation – and then she returned to the room where the other man lay. He smelled of spilled booze and fresh blood.
She frisked him hastily. His wallet contained a raft of credit cards, Diner’s, Amex Platinum, Visa, Mastercard, each imprisoned inside a plastic window. She also found his ID. CIA. Lawrence F. Quinn. She studied his picture a second – long-jawed, thin lips, stern features. She picked up his gun, a Mitchell 45 Signature with a custom-made silencer. She’d keep the gun.
Lawrence Quinn had come here and killed Mallory, because—
Because of what? She pondered this question a moment. What had Galkin said? One faction wants the power that another faction has. An internecine war. A struggle for control. Was that why Mallory had been killed – because he was on the opposing side to Lawrence F. Quinn? She remembered Quinn’s position as she’d entered the room, the way he’d been inclined over a table, reading. She walked to the table and saw several sheets of quality paper, some of them crumpled into ba
lls. An uncapped fountain-pen lay nearby.
The sheets were drafts of a letter that the writer had been composing with difficulty. Words were crossed out, sentences abandoned. She started to read, found it muddled, but it was apparently the work of a man contemplating suicide and trying to leave behind him a few phrases of farewell. He’d obviously laboured hard over what he’d written; too hard, she thought. Certainly hard enough to give himself time to reconsider the feasibility of suicide. And the handwriting was wild and uneven, as if the pen had been held by a drunk.
My dear friend, I have come to the realization that – and the rest of this phrase was obliterated and a revision inserted. I have come to the conclusion I don’t belong … And again: I don’t see any other way out, I’ve betrayed you, betrayed myself … She scanned the self-pitying phrases and read: I have had a visit from our English friend and I told him …
Our English friend, she thought. Her interest quickened.
The remainder of the sentence had been scrawled over with furious energy and was illegible. She picked up another sheet and read: I couldn’t keep it to myself, try to understand that. I was never the correct material for you. I know you tried to make me feel I belonged, and I appreciate that, but I don’t have the stomach for it, the heart, whatever you call it. She saw Mallory’s signature at the bottom of this page. It was spidery and slanted downward, and surrounded by ink-blots.
She picked up one of the crumpled sheets and smoothed it out. Another unfinished draft. I never intended to sell you, try to understand that, but I had no choice. I suppose from the very beginning I was playing out of my league, and when Pagan came, I told him about Roanoke, he didn’t have to push me too hard …
Pagan.
She stood very still. She listened to the rain rattle against the windows. The night had a random quality about it, a recklessness. Pagan had been here. How long ago? An hour? Less? She tried to imagine him in this room, perhaps standing where she now stood herself.
He’d come here, and he’d talked to Mallory, and Mallory had mentioned Roanoke, and then sat down to compose a suicide note, scribble his farewells to some unnamed friend because he felt – what – the weight of a treachery? Then he’d abandoned his letter writing and, perhaps drunk and indecisive and panicked by the chilly idea of self-elimination, perhaps undergoing a change of heart, had stumbled through to his bed – where Lawrence Quinn had found and killed him. It was as much of a reconstruction as she could make.
Pagan, she thought.
He’d come here. He’d sifted through the dross and found his way to Mallory. She thought: I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me in the end, Frank.
45
VIRGINIA
Pagan couldn’t see more than a few yards in front of the car. The rain had increased and the night sky collapsed. Along the freeway cars and trucks had pulled over to the side, drivers blinded by the relentless downpour. Pagan sat hunched forward, concentrating on the road, which he saw only in brief glimpses. The deluge was beyond the capacity of the wipers. You didn’t need a car in this kind of weather. What you needed was an ark.
He kept going, feeling every so often the effect of aquaplaning, the car skidding over the slick surface of road. He struggled with the wheel when the vehicle slithered in the direction of an exit ramp. He pulled over at a filling-station and studied his map. The last sign he’d seen was for Charlottesville. He had a long way to go.
Once, when the tumult became impossible, he pulled over to the hard shoulder, listening to the rain sizzle like sleet on the roof. He rolled his window down an inch because the inside of the car was stuffy, and he smelled the sharp acidic scent of dry land suddenly saturated. He heard water fluming violently down inclines in the earth. Out of the western sky came an eruption of lightning followed by the deep bass of thunder. He was impatient with the elements and with himself. He had to keep moving.
The rain kept battering at his windshield. At one point he felt he was driving through a very narrow funnel of darkness. He thought of Mallory – that whole pathetic situation, the way Mallory had collapsed under the weight of his own dilemma. I believed it was the right thing, Pagan.
The right thing, Pagan thought. The so-called Artichoke Club and its devious scheme for correcting what it perceived as social wrongs, all the corruptions and erosions within the system – a solution that involved treachery and violence and murder. You couldn’t construct a secure society on the basis of bloodshed. You couldn’t construct a secure society period. The whole world, in Pagan’s view, was in disorder.
By his own admission, Mallory had been sucked in by the man he called Max Skidelsky, who seemed to Pagan a major piece of nasty work – Assistant to Christopher Poole, plotting away below the surface of the Agency, hiding in the cracks, gathering together his private army of foot soldiers and informers and assassins, like Donovan. Skidelsky held Mallory in thrall. Even when James Mallory had finally broken down in wet-eyed inebriation and told Pagan what he wanted to know, he’d talked about Skidelsky as if the man were some kind of visionary. I still want to believe, Pagan, that’s the worst of it. Even now, when I know it’s totally wrong, I still want to believe. Max is right, you understand, only his methods are fucked. And Mallory had wiped his face with the cuff of his jacket, and hung his head in the fashion of a man who has betrayed something he believes precious. Only his methods are fucked, Pagan thought. More than his methods, Mallory. Start with his basic premise and take it from there.
She goes down to Roanoke and that’s where she gets it, Mallory had said.
Just like that? Pagan asked.
Place is going to be crawling, she can’t get away. There are people down there with orders to shoot on sight if they have to. Dead or alive, it doesn’t matter. The Agency gets the credit.
She can get away, believe me, Mallory.
Not this time. She gets in easily enough, she gets just enough space to do the job, and then she finds she can’t get out again.
The job? Pagan had asked.
The job, the demolition work.
Pagan peered out into the streaming wet night. He was doing fifteen miles an hour, sometimes ten. The rain came harder and he had to pull once again to the side of the freeway. Mallory’s voice echoed inside his head, as persistent as the rain. The demolition work, the job, he thought. And he wondered if Carlotta was even now making her way through this aquatic landscape toward the ultimate destination.
He thought, I want her. The sheer force of this unexpected thought, which struck him as almost childish in its wilfulness, astonished him. I want her. I deserve to get her. I’ve been after her too long to let anyone else have her. And all the rest, as she’d once said to him, was background noise.
The helicopter came in over the trees and dropped toward a circle of light in the grass. Christopher Poole, who sat up front with the pilot, said, ‘Admirable how you can fly in this awful weather.’
The pilot said, ‘You can fly a machine like this in most kinds of weather, sir. Discounting hurricanes, of course.’ He smiled.
‘Of course,’ Poole said, and turned his face rather stiffly to look at Bob Naderson in the back. ‘Are you holding up, Bob?’
‘Fine, just fine,’ Naderson said. He was uncomfortable, very much so. His stomach couldn’t take this kind of trip.
‘Choppy,’ Poole said.
‘Just a little.’
The helicopter descended through thrashing rain. It struck the ground with only a slight shudder. The blades began to slow.
Poole said, ‘It’s going to be pleasant to see some familiar old faces, Bob.’
Naderson agreed.
‘I’m looking forward to it,’ Poole went on. ‘It’ll be something of a tonic. Take our minds off this, this recent unpleasantness …’ He gestured loosely with his hand.
‘Yes,’ Naderson said. He thought about the two secretaries who were presently under suspicion. Each had denied giving anyone information from the Executive Director’s private files. Naderson wa
s inclined to believe them. He was inclined to think that the culprit was somebody closer to Christopher Poole’s heart. But he couldn’t say so, because that was tantamount to questioning the old man’s judgement – territory into which Naderson wasn’t prepared to go. Besides, he owed Poole for a ten-year-old favour. He owed his freedom, possibly his life, to Poole.
Both men climbed down from the chopper. A woman in a heavy wax coat of the kind favoured in equestrian circles stood under an umbrella just beyond the light. Poole ducked his face beneath the spokes of the umbrella and kissed the woman on the side of her face and said, ‘Joan. It’s been months.’
‘Months? Your memory’s slipping. More like a year, Christopher,’ Joan Dunne said. ‘And here’s Bob.’ She offered her plump little cheek to Naderson, who kissed it, but only briefly, because he’d never much cared for the woman.
She said, ‘Let’s get inside out of this horrible rain. There’s hot punch waiting.’
They entered a wooden building that was commonly called The Lodge. Joan Dunne, a tiny woman with a face Bob Naderson had once referred to as resembling a bloated chihuahua, shook drips from the umbrella. ‘Come into the lounge, both of you. Put your bags down. I’ll have somebody take them up to your rooms. Follow me.’
Joan Dunne was bossy. She’d spent her life being bossy. She’d bossed hundreds of young trainees who’d passed through this place, instilling fear in them – fear of sexually-transmitted diseases, foreign agents, blackmail, compromising situations.
‘This way, come along,’ she said. ‘Don’t dilly-dally. The punch will get cold.’
The lounge was large, wood-panelled. The heads of stuffed animals peered down into the room. Around a fire, which had been lit despite the clamminess of the air, sat a large group of men and women. Poole made his way into the group, shaking hands, bussing and being bussed, his head held at that characteristic stiff angle.
Naderson, who lingered on the fringes, recognized most of the others. Guy Backus, Assistant Director of Training. Marge Habbs, Director of Foreign Broadcast Information Service. The red beefy face of Ted Hollander, Chief of Special Operations Division. Angus Scott, Director of the Office of European Analysis. Billy Dearkins the Third, no less, Chief of Staff Evaluation. Alex Schwab, with his ill-fitting toupee, Chief of Management and Analysis Support Staff. A gathering of chiefs, Naderson thought. There were about fifty in all, senior people drawn from different sections of the Agency. The Office of Security. The Office of Imagery Analysis. Communications. Central Reference. Global Issues. Development and Engineering. SIGINT Operations. These people wouldn’t encounter one another often in the normal course of things – and so Poole had brought them together for this series of seminars to bounce around constructive ideas concerning the Agency’s destiny.
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