Since Bill still hasn’t arrived, at nine thirty I join the other three in Vick’s large-windowed office. There’s Leslie MacGovern, whose title, collection management officer, belies the fact that she’s the modest brains behind Vick’s rule. In her grandmother glasses, she laughs a lot, usually at Vick’s jokes but sometimes at herself. She’s been with him longer than any of us, and has mastered the art of feigning stupidity while passing on her real thoughts in secret. Of all of us, she’s the one who excels at making Vick look good.
Ernst Pul is our naturalized spy. Born in Graz, at age ten he was brought by his academic parents to Atlanta, Georgia, a move that twisted his accent into an odd blend: down-home Austrian. He wears Swiss banker’s suits and an Austrian haughtiness that three decades as a southerner haven’t shaken. His peculiarities work well here, charming our opposite numbers in the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, which is why he’s our direct go-between with the Austrians.
Off to the side, under a black raincloud, sits Owen Lassiter of codes and ciphers. Perpetually dismal, he blinks a lot, as if he’s just visiting from a dark world of ones and zeroes, or blips and beeps, like a raver stumbling into the morning light. I’d like to like Owen—I think most of us would—but he makes it difficult.
It’s not the kind of crowd I would choose on my own, and at moments like this I wish I were still on the street like Henry, who’s probably drinking coffee with a source, sharing a joke and a smoke. But no—I am by nature built for four walls and central heating. Both Henry and I are where we’re supposed to be.
Vick—Victor Wallinger—smiles gaudily from behind his too-clean desk. “You hear from Bill, Cee?”
I shake my head.
“Apparently Sally’s taken ill.”
I try to appear concerned. Leslie goes so far as to say, “Nothing serious, I hope?”
“Fainted, Bill said. Stress, maybe, but they’re checking her out at the Krankenhaus. We should expect him by eleven, latest.”
I nod at this, wishing Bill had phoned to warn me. Maybe, though, it really is something serious. Maybe Sally is at this moment in the throes of her final hours, and Bill is unable to see the joy that will soon be his.
“Our prayers,” Ernst mutters unconvincingly, nose in a folder.
“Of course,” Vick says before raising his eyebrows. “So? Aslim Taslam in our backyard. What’s our take?”
Ernst is ready with an unequivocal opinion. “In Germany, maybe. But Austria? Impossible.” When we look at him, waiting for more, he closes his folder. “It’s a question of what they want. Troops out of Afghanistan?” He shakes his head and continues professorially. “The Austrians have maybe a hundred there. The Germans have the third-largest presence in the ISAF—over four thousand. Maybe they want to get some comrades out of jail? Same thing. There’s only a handful of militants in Austrian prisons—which are, by the way, not unlike resorts—while Germany’s holding more than its fair share. Do they want money?” Again, the head shakes. “Not these days. They don’t need it, not with Tehran bankrolling them. What else?”
No one this morning seems up to standing against Ernst’s unflagging self-confidence, so I say, “We’re talking EU now. Not separate nations. Pick the softest target and then demand whatever you want from any of the Euro countries. You don’t need to land in Frankfurt or Berlin to speak to the Germans.”
Vick nods. “Good point. Ernst, you have to admit it’s a good point.”
Ernst shrugs, unwilling to admit anything this morning. He’s sometimes like that.
Unexpectedly, Owen speaks, though he does so through the hand covering his mouth, and we have to lean forward to understand. “The online chatter suggests something broader. By necessity, TRIPWIRE is only knowledgeable about a portion of the operation. It’s possible they’ll use both Austria and Germany in a coordinated attack. It wouldn’t be unprecedented.”
All of us, except for Ernst, nod our appreciation of this rare event: an opinion from Owen. Vick says, “More good points. Leslie?”
She grins and waves a hand. She looks like a jolly but eccentric aunt. “Don’t ask me, Vick. Until we have something more, I’d say we’re shooting in the dark.”
“The ability to admit ignorance,” Vick says philosophically, “is a rare and beautiful virtue.”
3
The world doesn’t wait for TRIPWIRE, nor does Langley, so I spend the rest of the morning finishing a lengthy report on the fallout from the Austrian legislative election back in October. The Social Democrats gained enough votes to break the ninety-two-seat majority coalition of the conservative People’s Party, the nationalist Freedom Party, and the Alliance for the Future of Austria that has in various forms ruled Austria since 1999. This has left the government without a ruling coalition.
For us, there’s the favorable result that Jörg Haider’s Alliance has been sidelined out of governance, but now all our efforts are focused on finding out what’s really going on in the negotiations between the Social Democrats and the People’s Party as they struggle to put together a functioning government. We receive daily reports from agents within both parties, but the intel, I note in an aside, lacks real substance, and as a result we’re unable to predict the outcome. Questions arise: Can this moment of indecision be used to our benefit? Or would an approach to President Heinz Fischer at this juncture be pointless, given Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel’s lame-duck status?
No, this is not the kind of work my lover does, and I don’t think he’d be any good at it. Henry abhors the alphabet soup of Austrian political parties. To him, the ÖVP, the SPÖ, the BZÖ, and the FPÖ are all “umlaut hoarders” who are no better than B-grade movie stars. And the Greens? “Sellouts.” I blame Moscow for his pessimism.
I’m about ready to send off my report when, a little before eleven, and just as Bill lumbers out of the elevator, we all receive a forwarded e-mail from Europol. I give it a quick read as I’m getting up, then give it a second look.
Bill looks as if he’s been badly ironed. Gutted eyes; slack, damp lips; wrists puffy as an old alcoholic’s, though he isn’t one. Not yet. I follow him into his office and close the door. “Tell me, Bill.”
He settles, groaning, behind his desk and runs a hand through his gray hair. “She’s going to kill me, you know.”
“Is she all right?”
“If you can call it that.” His hands settle on the desk. “I didn’t realize it at the time. Only now, driving to the embassy. It wasn’t real. The heart pains, the fainting, the weeping. It’s … well, I’m the victim of a long con. That’s what I’ve realized. That, or an extended Pavlovian experiment. Rewards and punishment growing more intense, and now she’s graduated to the next level. Before, she controlled my behavior by attacking me. Now, she’s discovered how to control me by attacking herself.”
I sit across from him, puzzling over this. “So she’s … not sick?”
“It’s a kind of sickness,” he replies, then hesitates. “The human body can make itself sick at the drop of a hat. For all kinds of reasons, including revenge.” He finally raises his eyes to meet mine. “I tried to leave her. Late last night. I told her I was going. Then she went on one of her rampages. At first she attacked me, and then, after she’d calmed down, there was the pain in her arm. She told me it was nothing. She told me to just go to sleep, seeing as I didn’t care about her anyway. So of course I didn’t sleep. I just lay there as she moaned in pain, wanting no help from me. Then this morning she went to make coffee and collapsed on the kitchen floor. Blood—she bled from her nose. Christ.”
“The doctors?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing. Nerves, maybe. Bed rest, they told her, and she’s staying the night for observation.”
I wonder how to answer this, but my mouth doesn’t bother wondering anything. It says, “Plenty of time for you to move out your stuff. Take my apartment.” I’m not even wondering if moving in with Henry is a good idea or not; I just want Bill to get away from that monster.
&
nbsp; By the time he raises his head again, though, I know I’ve pushed too far and too hard. He licks some of the moisture off his lips, but it does no good. He’s a wreck. “It’s not that simple.”
“Of course it is,” I say, heedless of the part of me that knows I’m not helping the situation. “Everybody claims it’s not, but it is. She’s a big girl. She can take care of herself. Visit her with flowers if you like. Pay her medical bills. But her being sick doesn’t make your marriage any more bearable.”
A long silence follows as he stares blindly at the screen of his computer. He sniffs twice, then says, “Enough self-absorption. What’s on our plate today?”
I walk him through the morning meeting, and he nods, beginning to look human again. “TRIPWIRE, you say?”
I nod.
“There was something…” He begins to type with determination, and I lean back, allowing him his moment of escape inside the job. He uses work that way, to sidestep the realities of his miserable life. The best of us do that. “Yes. Here. In ’04 TRIPWIRE gave us a load of shit about an al Qaeda cell in Salzburg. We wasted a lot of time with the Interior Ministry, trying to get them to storm a warehouse. Empty, of course.” He shakes his head. “We can keep an eye on this, but I’d say there’s an eighty percent chance he’s selling us another fairy tale.”
“Maybe,” I tell him, “but look at your in-box. From Europol.”
He goes back to his computer, scrolling until he finds the message I saw when he showed up. It’s a mention of the arrival of one Mashood Al-Fakeeh, on a Saudi passport, in Barcelona two days ago, arriving from Jordan. Mashood Al-Fakeeh, the analysts believe, is in fact Ilyas Shishani, a Chechen radical who reportedly joined forces with Ansar Al-Islam. It isn’t much of a leap to wonder if he’s one of the operational planners that Ansar Al-Islam has lent to Aslim Taslam for TRIPWIRE’s “airline-related event.”
Bill certainly doesn’t need any prodding. He reads the message, then raises his head to look hard at me. Without a word, he nods and stands up. He’s in command again, using work the way it should be used as he marches off to Vick’s office.
4
Maternal feelings are the only explanation for why I insist on taking Bill to lunch when I’m not even hungry. Maternal feelings, and pity. So a little after one o’clock I tap on his door frame and ask when he last ate. He’s hunched over his keyboard, gray hair scattered across his forehead. “Last night,” he says, looking surprised by his own admission.
“Pack your things. I’m treating you to the Golden Dragon.”
It takes some convincing, but the truth is that other than putting out an alert to watch for Ilyas Shishani and fretting about a rumor from Damascus, there’s not a lot to do. He says, “You’re not lunching with Mr. Right?”
“He’s on the other side of town. Shaking down networks. Following leads.”
“Aha,” Bill says, bobbing eyebrows, then gives in. “But I’m buying.”
“Yes, sir.”
Goldener Drachen is nearby, down steep stairs beneath a typical Viennese monstrosity at the southern end of Liechtenstein Park and its Garden Palace. Once we get downstairs, a disarmingly cheerful man brings us into the main dining room, full of civil servants of various nationalities eating cheaply off the Mittagsmenü, surrounded by twisty dragons and ornate Chinese characters adorned in red. The Dragon advertises itself as Austria’s first Chinese restaurant, and with its photos of famous personages over the decades, smiling with the owner, it’s not hard to believe this claim.
We’re in luck—a free table beside the aquarium. As we settle down Bill taps irreverently on the glass, scaring aquatic life. We ask for tea and go through the menu. Unlike the government workers around us, we’re unable to bend our tastes to their preset lunch menus, and we end up ordering a smorgasbord: spring rolls, mixed grill, wonton and egg-drop soups, Hou-You chicken in oyster sauce, and Szechuan duck. Tea comes, we place our order, and once we’re alone Bill returns to the aquarium and its strips of faux seaweed, through which exotic fish dart and hide. “You want to talk about it?” I ask.
I’m not sure he’s heard me. His gaze doesn’t shift. Then he says to the fish, “I’d rather hear about you and Henry. How is utopia?”
He wants to get his mind off of himself, and I see no reason to disappoint him. “It’s complicated. Neither of us is the committing type.”
He smiles, finally looking at me. “That’s spooks for you. Always thinking of the angles. Protecting themselves to the point of exclusion. I’m trying to remember one example of two field agents who ended up in a successful relationship—or as successful as any relationships are these days. I can’t.”
This, I realize, is a significant statement. He’s been in the business since I was in diapers.
“Don’t take it as criticism, Cee. It’s not like the rest do much better. Most couples just take longer to split up. That doesn’t make what everyone else has any richer or more rewarding. Just longer.”
He’s failing, as anyone overcome with self-pity does. His attempt to divert himself with my romantic life simply draws him back to himself. So I offer more. “We’ve been at it over a year, but I sometimes feel like I don’t know him any better than when we first met. Not that that’s a bad thing. The mystery is still there for both of us. But that’s the catch, isn’t it? You start to wonder if this false sense of mystery is the only thing keeping it going.”
He settles his chin on his hand and watches me with sympathy, so I go on.
“And I think—this is usually at night, when I’m depressed—that we’ve both become too jaded about the human race. We believe that once we get past the mystery, it’ll be the same drudgery and psychic scars and childhood storm clouds that everyone has. Nothing special. Nothing worth devoting your entire life to.”
“Well,” he says, leaning back. “That’s pretty bleak, isn’t it?”
“Is it? I thought it was pragmatic. I thought I was being an adult.”
A smile, then, which I realize is his first of the day, but before he can open his mouth to reply his cell phone bleeps for his attention. A full second later, mine does as well. We’ve received the same message, from the same source:
RED
The smile is gone now, and I suspect I won’t see it again for a long while. He waves for the waiter as I go to collect our coats from the front. When I look back, he’s shoveling euros into the waiter’s hands, then patting him on the shoulder, receiving genial nods in reply. “They’re going to deliver it,” he tells me as he takes his coat from me.
Keeping a brisk pace back to Boltzmanngasse, he says, “You should allow yourself to fail.”
“What?”
“People are defined less by their achievements than by the failures that brought them to where they are.”
“No risk, no gain.”
He shakes his head, then pauses at a streetlamp to give me his full attention. “No. No risk, no failure. And without failure you’re not really human. You’re just skating on the surface of life.”
I understand him, of course, but I still feel like I need a little more. The light changes, though, and he’s already walking briskly ahead. I have to jog to catch up.
5
Amman, just as TRIPWIRE said. Austria or Germany—Austria, it turns out. And, as announced in the hijackers’ calls to the control tower and to ORF, the national radio and television outlet, they are indeed members of Aslim Taslam. “They’ve already killed a stewardess,” Vick tells us. “Her name’s Raniyah Haddadin.”
It’s a Royal Jordanian flight, number 127. An Airbus 319, which seats a hundred and thirty-eight—this day, it carries a hundred and twenty passengers and crew. Departed Amman at 10:35 A.M. and landed in Vienna at 1:25 P.M. without a hitch. According to the Austrians—based on the passenger manifest and the pilot’s narrative before the cockpit was taken over—the four hijackers didn’t cause any problems during the three hours and fifty minutes in the air. Then, immediately after the plane touched down, th
ey stood up.
The first was Suleiman Wahed, a Pakistani national who sat near the rear of the plane. He unbuckled his belt and got to his feet, and when a stewardess rose and waved at him and told him to please sit, he took out a pistol and shot her in the chest. The Austrians have identified the hijackers, and have shared their names with us. Suleiman Wahed, Ibrahim Zahir (Saudi), Omar Samatar Ali (Somali), and Nadif Dalmar Guleed (Somali). We have passport photos, but not a lot more.
According to the pilot, and verified by Ibrahim Zahir’s statement to the control tower, their first statement to the passengers was in Arabic and English. In essence: “Be wary, but do not be afraid. We will kill anyone who disobeys us, but we are not suicidal. We have no intention of using this plane as a weapon. We are instead using it as a safe house until our demands have been met. After that point, we will fly somewhere, and everyone will be released.”
They’re organized. They very quickly moved the children—nine of them, between the ages of five and twelve—into the front of the cabin to act as human shields against any forced entry, as well as leverage against anyone who wants to be a hero. “Each time someone attempts to interfere with our work,” they explained to the passengers, “one of these children will die.”
“That’s brilliant,” I admit, realizing that they’ve now assured themselves a docile group of hostages.
“It’s inhuman,” says Leslie.
Bill’s hiding his face in his hands, a fresh wave of humiliation settling over him, for despite the Europol report on Ilyas Shishani’s arrival in Europe, he didn’t really believe TRIPWIRE’s intel. Ernst, being Ernst, remains defiant, and I wonder, as I often have, just how deeply his childhood in Georgia scarred him. Was he teased mercilessly for his foreign background? Did he despise those Bible Belt children and vow to be as different from them as he possibly could? It doesn’t matter, but I still wonder about it as he says with studied nonchalance, “It’s unexpected, but not completely.”
All the Old Knives Page 6
