The Zurich Numbers

by Bill Granger

  “You cannot understand anything,” she said. What did they know, playing with her, even using her, arguing over her in this great kitchen of a great house? Did she seem like a stupid animal to them? Her hand brushed at her sweater. She felt they were examining her. “My husband was Michael Kolaki. He is a great man, intelligent, very handsome. He has trouble at the university because… this was at the beginning of Solidarity. He joins the workers, he argues with me about the cause. And I am afraid. Of him and for him. And one day he is run down in a street by a car, just like Karol. But this is no accident, surely. And I am a widow now and I cannot teach at the school, and one day I meet a man who tells me there is a chance still. If I do this one thing, hard thing, then there is a chance for me. In America. Do you know what that means to me? My life is over and I am twenty-three years old and then a man tells me, no, there is still a new life if you want it. My husband’s brother is Stefan, he lives in Chicago, he can take care of me, of my little Stefan, after… after this is over for me. I want to go to America because there are many jobs here. Not too hard for Polish immigrants but too hard for you.” She looked at him sharply. “But if I can get visa, Stefan cannot get visa. Always the same. So this man in Polonia, for the government, he tells me what I must do. A little thing. I don’t trust them. But he tells me of Mr. Krueger, and when Mr. Krueger speaks to us he gives us many names. Write to them, says Mr. Krueger. I am a man of business, I do not break my word, he says. And it is so. A contract. He gives a contract. Two years I work, I do for them, then Stefan is free. It is so; it is written down.”

  “Until Karol was killed,” Devereaux said.

  “My God,” Melvina said. “Red, this is monstrous. This is horrible.”

  Devereaux said nothing. He saw all the horror of it from the moment Teresa decided to believe he could save her, save Stefan. He saw the horror was just beginning for Teresa. And for himself.

  10

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Across the street, the FBI watchers stood at the window. The 250-millimeter lens attached to the black body of the Nikon on a tripod focused sharply on the figure turning into the grounds of the Soviet Embassy. Once Malenkov half turned to speak to the Red Army guard near the door and that is the picture the camera caught—a man in shadows, his face large and rubbery, his eyes hidden beneath dark brows. He might have been one of a hundred such men who slipped into the embassy every week. Malenkov knew he was watched; the watchers knew that he knew; it was all part of the game, piecing together this bit of information with a thousand random bits of other information, hoping that it all would mean something.

  Four minutes later Malenkov entered the bare, fluorescent-lit room in the second subbasement of the embassy and sat down at a plastic-topped table. The room contained two chairs. The walls were smooth white plaster. No windows or photographs adorned them. Even the light switch was outside the room.

  The Soviets believed that the room was totally shielded from even the most sophisticated listening device trained on the building. The FBI had given up trying to penetrate the lower floors of the embassy. Shieldings of lead along with layers of white noise between the walls and the earth outside—the earth had no worms or other insects, the grass did not grow well—defeated the agency’s best efforts.

  Six blocks from the embassy, a recording machine automatically started up inside a small office in a six-story building that contained quarters for dentists and not very successful lawyers. The machine was programmed to record the moment any sound was detected inside the safe room in the subbasement of the Soviet Embassy. The machine, the people who tended it, and the office were all part of Synetronics, Inc., a dummy corporation owned by the National Security Agency.

  This was the translated transcript (the conversation was in Russian, Standard Moscow dialect) delivered twelve hours after the conversation to Assistant Director of Security Operations Henry L. Craypool inside the NSA complex at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland:

  MALENKOV: Nothing except routine. Here. (Sounds of paper rustling.) The two from NSA took an unauthorized lunch at six P.M. yesterday. I suspect they missed the telephone call.

  OTHER: Was it of interest?

  MALENKOV: I don’t know. Here. (More paper rustling.) Something’s up. She asked for a week’s vacation yesterday, it was granted. Now she tells her caller—this “Tom”—that she has an assignment in Paris, she’ll be gone for two weeks.

  OTHER: (Laugh.) You don’t understand. Women always lie. It is probably nothing. She doesn’t wish to see this one. This is the one who always calls at the last moment?

  MALENKOV: Yes. I suppose you’re right. But where would she go on vacation? She hasn’t taken time for a year. Since Helsinki. She knows the risks, as long as November is undergoing reprocessing.

  OTHER: Umm.

  MALENKOV: If I may, Major?

  OTHER: Of course.

  MALENKOV: Korsoff is in Chicago. I’d like him to go back to that old woman again. Without the Bulgarian this time. Talk to her alone, out of the house, away from the blackie.

  OTHER: She rarely leaves the house. Korsoff says she is a sort of invalid.

  MALENKOV: We wait for her. It would be no less frustrating than waiting for Rita to make contact with November. It is nearly a year.

  OTHER: Patience. I realize you call her “Rita” now. I understand. One becomes intimate after a while with the subject. You hear her every day. You see her in the building. You hear her make love, wash, you hear her sing. She is like a wife to you. I think you’re becoming jealous of “Tom.”

  MALENKOV: I am frustrated, Major. The separation has been total. Eleven months now. KGB looks foolish.

  OTHER: To whom?

  MALENKOV: The Americans. We made a contract, a commitment. To take out one of their agents. And we haven’t done it.

  OTHER: But we’ve forced them into a neutral position. They can’t use him because it will expose him. They know we’re still waiting.

  MALENKOV: They guess it. Put up the pressure, Major. Tell Korsoff to get the woman alone. She must have had some contact.

  OTHER: It was useless before. They are not a close family, apparently.

  MALENKOV: He’s close to no one. (Pause.) I don’t think I understand him, even now. I’ve read all the profiles, the operations he took part in. What is his motivation? He chafes under command. His best work is brilliant but idiosyncratic. It is as though he courts disaster—from us, from his masters. Why?

  OTHER: I had a theory once.

  MALENKOV: (Garbled.)

  OTHER: Well. I think he is bored.

  MALENKOV: Bored?

  OTHER: It would explain some things.

  MALENKOV: No. I can’t accept it, with all respect, Major.

  OTHER: Her motivation is obvious.

  MALENKOV: That she loves him? Yes. I suppose. Remember the recording?

  OTHER: Yes. It was affecting. I’ve never seen her but when she cried that night. It was—

  MALENKOV: January. Right after Helsinki. Affecting. As you said. She even said his name in sleep. She woke up, quite afraid. She had a nightmare.

  OTHER: She saw him kill two men. The Bulgarians. The Americans knocked down that house, leveled the ground so the bodies wouldn’t be found. Sometimes I think they are barbarians. Perhaps I’ve been here too long. Tanya watches television all night. Her English is proficient. I wish it wasn’t. She fills her mind with such trash, I can’t get her to read a book anymore.

  MALENKOV: Forbid—

  OTHER: (Laughs.) Dear Malenkov. This is America. Children are not forbidden. Even the Second Secretary has problems. His son threatens to run away if he can’t have a motorcycle. Remember what happened the other time? I tell you, this country is the serpent.

  MALENKOV: We need to put on pressure. I feel something is happening.

  OTHER: Why?

  MALENKOV: The old woman. In Chicago. She must be a key. She knew what Korsoff was. She wasn’t so stupid. I saw the report but I talked to Korsoff as well. He
had an instinct about her. I think we should try Chicago again.

  OTHER: (Sigh.) All right. Anything to shift this away from Washington for a while. I wish the new man would simply drop this—

  MALENKOV: I know. Bureaucrats. They’ve made an execution order in some subagency of the Third Directorate and no one has gotten around to rescinding it. So it falls to you and me, Major, to carry on, spend our lives if need be, for something that may not even be so important.

  OTHER: Well. We’re both in service. That is what it means to us, eh?

  MALENKOV: (Garbled.)

  (Sound of chairs scraping. Footsteps. A door closes. Ten seconds of silence. The tape ends.)

  “Do you always eat here?” Mrs. Neumann said. Her plain face was merry with mischief.

  “Yes,” Hanley replied. His face was dour, his nearly bald head glittered under the harsh lamp hanging over the table from the tin ceiling.

  “Wonderful. I didn’t think official Washington still permitted such places.”

  “The owner is talking about selling. Someone wants the land for an office building. They raised his taxes again.” Hanley mournfully bit into the cheeseburger.

  The little bar and grill on Fourteenth Street was a relic. Land costs had risen to drive out other, similar enterprises that had once littered this section of official Washington. The Greek immigrant named Sianis who owned the bar and grill still resisted all blandishments to sell and move on. He had a mysterious belief that he would certainly fail in the same enterprise if he had to locate it in any other building, on any other street. The bar section was dark, filled with the nodding presence of regular customers drinking their lunches. On a back wall, the television set was turned on but the sound was turned off. Photographs filled a second wall. Yellowed clippings from the old Washington Star and the old News and even the Herald were preserved in dime-store frames along with photographs of families, weddings, old-timers. None of the photos carried identification; they were more icons for Sianis, warding off evil spirits and rapacious landlords. Hanley had taken a solitary lunch here for nearly thirty years.

  His lunch menu was always the same: one cheeseburger well done with a raw onion, and one perfect martini straight up in a chilled glass.

  Lydia Neumann’s company here was not usual. She was a large woman with spiky hair and a raspy voice and a plain way of speaking. She was also director of computer analysis of R Section. Hanley had invited her to lunch out of desperation; nothing that he wanted to say could be said in the Section. Nothing could compromise the situation. He had worked this way, secretly, with Neumann before, during the business in Paris. He knew she would help, could be trusted.

  Hanley was second man in the Section, chief of operations, a dry and punctilious bureaucrat who had survived changes of administration and policy for three decades simply because he knew where the bodies were buried. But now a buried body had returned to life.

  “Devereaux,” he said to Lydia Neumann now, putting down the remains of his burger. He picked up the martini and sipped it.

  Lydia Neumann thoughtfully spooned her chili. “It isn’t spicy enough.”

  “Are you a gourmet?” Hanley’s pinched face matched his flat, pinched Nebraska voice.

  Mrs. Neumann smiled. “Spice, Hanley, is the spice of life.” She took a small bottle of Tabasco sauce and shook it into the chili. “That’s better,” she said.

  “Devereaux,” he repeated.

  “Our November man. Is he still an unperson?”

  “No. Not quite. Not quite anything. Except we have problems. I need your help.”

  “But we couldn’t talk in the Section.”

  “No.”

  “I see.” She did. She put down her spoon and waited.

  “Three weeks ago he dropped out. He was in an apartment in New York. The Puzzle Factory uses it, places like it, for stashing ghosts until a new identity is made for them.”

  “And he wouldn’t stay dead.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “You’ve talked to him.”

  “Yes.”

  “You haven’t told anyone.”

  “No.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “Because I need help. A special sort of job, getting around without anyone knowing that you’re getting around.”

  “Damn you, Hanley. I have four years to go before pension—”

  “It isn’t like that,” Hanley said. It was a lie. It was exactly like that. “Nine weeks ago, two men visited his great-aunt. She lives in Chicago. She raised him.”

  “Really? I never thought of November as having been a child.”

  “Everyone is a child once.”

  “Even you, Hanley?”

  He ignored the needling. “Melvina Devereaux.”

  “I like that name.”

  “The two men identified themselves as Immigration and Naturalization. They weren’t. Opposition.”

  “So they’re still after him.”

  “Stubborn bastards. But that isn’t the real problem. He’s stumbled by chance on an operation by the other side.”

  “In Chicago?”

  “Part of it is there. But it must be very large. There is a lot at stake; a lot of people are involved. Very low level but the effort expended is enormous. What I can’t understand is how an operation this big has been going on and not a word of it. At least, that’s what makes me curious. Makes November curious.”

  “He’s still November then? I thought we were getting rid of the old nomenclature.”

  “He’s nothing, Mrs. Neumann. Neither fish nor fowl. He isn’t even assigned back to us by the Director of Central Intelligence. He’s in the incapable hands of the people at the Puzzle Factory. Except they’ve fucked up and now this other matter. I’m in the middle.”

  “What about him?”

  “November. Yes. I suppose he’s in the middle as well. There’s a flight tonight. Czech Airlines. To Prague. A woman is going to be put on the plane. She’s drugged; her name is Mary Krakowski—”

  “And she’s part of this… what is this thing you find so ‘curious’?”

  “Part of a scavenger sort of operation. Polish immigrants, others, they work for a dummy company; it’s an espionage operation. In this case, going through certain laboratories, computer rooms, at the University of Chicago. A cryptography project, sections of it all over the country.”

  “They steal garbage.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because nobody sees the cleaning women, right?”

  “How did you know?”

  “I’m a woman, Hanley. I see what you don’t see.”

  “I don’t believe in the myth of female superiority.”

  Lydia Neumann smiled. “Neither do I. Not as a myth at least. He wants you to stop the flight?”

  “Yes. For starters.”

  “He’s got a scenario planned?”

  “I doubt it. He says Rita Macklin is in danger.”

  “Is she?”

  “He made contact yesterday, again this morning early, and then later in the morning—”

  “He should use Sprint. Or MCI.”

  Hanley didn’t even respond to the sally. He was staring at a point on the table, frustrated, trying to see his way out of a problem that seemed more complicated in the last twenty-four hours. “I put a casual watcher on her. Yesterday. He reported this morning. The woman is in a fishbowl. There are at least two, possibly four men monitoring her at her apartment. I don’t even think they’re aware of each other. And he checked the roof. He says there’s listening equipment inside, outside, everywhere. His beeper went crazy; it was like walking into a uranium mine. So what the hell is going on? Who’s spying on whom? Why are they wasting all this time, all these people?”

  “Because they have them. A bureaucrat like you ought to understand that.” She sipped her soda. “The question is: Who are they? And is this Macklin lady in danger?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anythin
g. Except there is something wrong with this espionage business in Chicago. It’s a clumsy arrangement. It had to have broken apart before now. Someone has to know about it.”

  “You want me to tickle FBI?”

  There. Hanley nodded glumly.

  “And if they don’t laugh, tickle the Competition?” The Competition usually referred to “Langley,” slang for the Central Intelligence Agency.

  “They’ll find out.”

  “How long can you keep it secret?”

  “It depends on their safeguards, how deep the file is buried. The deeper you go, the more you run the risk of tripping alarms. Can you do it?”

  “I can do anything,” Lydia Neumann said. “I am woman.”

  Hanley stared at her.

  She smiled again. “Poor old Hanley.” She patted his hand in a motherly way. “I can do it, but what are you going to do? Stop the flight?”

  “I told him I would.”

  “But you’re not going to do it.”

  “No.”

  “He’s dangling out there.”

  “It’s his own fault.”

  “Not this time,” Lydia Neumann said. “It’s the goddam Puzzle Factory. Why do you suppose they blew the assignment?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they wanted him hit. But they took their sweet time about it. Who are all those people waiting around for Rita Macklin to make contact? I mean, the Opposition simply doesn’t know where Devereaux is. For now, at least. But he’s probed one of their operations. Somebody is going to tell them. Soon.”

  “And they won’t need to hang around Rita Macklin’s door anymore. Which means what?”

  “They kill her. Or they don’t kill her.”

  Mrs. Neumann nodded. “And they kill November.”

  “And we are in the middle of uncovering some operation that is too fantastic. There has to be something wrong with it.”

  “How do they induce the immigrants to—”

  “He said it’s a form of bondage. They want relatives out—”

  “My God, Hanley. That’s so crude.”

  “I know. There’s nothing sophisticated in any of this. I don’t like it.”