by John Lutz
He was short and bent over with age, and Laker towered over him. He poked Laker in the sternum with his forefinger as he continued his sotto-voiced tirade.
“You’re waking the whole camp and these folks have to be up before dawn! I told you on the phone—”
“Sorry, Mr. Bentley. But we didn’t talk on the phone.”
“No reservation?” The bearded face turned to Ava. “You can’t expect me to accommodate a female without a reservation.”
“That’s too bad. I was here, years ago. Enjoyed my stay.”
Bentley’s hairy chin was upturned, bristling against the starry sky, as he thrust his face closer to Laker’s. “I remember now. You caught that twelve-inch perch. Fine fish. Major Anders brought you. You’re Captain . . . somebody.”
Laker only nodded. Bentley did not inquire further. “Got one cabin left. It’ll be kinda rough and ready. We don’t get many ladies up here.”
Ava wanted to tell him she’d hiked the Appalachian Trail from Maine to New Jersey, but he was already asking Laker where their rods and creels were. His annoyance deepened at the news they weren’t here to fish. But he led them across the clearing and threw open the flimsy door of a cabin. It smelled as musty as if it was being opened up for the first time after a long winter. Bentley turned up the gas on a camping lantern, handed it to Laker, and left them with a gruff, “No more noise.”
“I guess the wild and crazy sex is out, then,” Ava blurted, then turned away, embarrassed by her own joke. In fact she was blushing like a schoolgirl. In the silence and seclusion, the close confines of the room, she was keenly aware of Laker’s tall, powerful body. She went into the bedroom. There was only one bed, piled high with blankets and comforters.
He hadn’t followed her. He called softly, “Good night.”
She returned to the other room. He was sitting on the lumpy sofa, untying his shoes. Aside from a rickety wooden table and chairs, that was it.
“Laker, you can’t sleep on that sofa. Unless you double your legs up under your chin.”
“It’s okay. ’Night.”
They were both too weary for more discussion. She retreated to the bedroom. Not bothering to undress or pull down the bedclothes, she lay down and fell instantly to sleep.
When she awakened, it was much colder in the room. She ought to get under the covers, but first she’d have to get up, and she was too sleepy. She lay motionless on her back. The crickets and tree frogs had gone quiet. She listened for the whisper of the river but couldn’t hear it. There was complete silence.
But not quite. A soft noise, but close. A whirring. Something was in the room with her. It circled the room. Then approached the bed. She felt the stirring of air as it passed over her face.
“Laker!”
The door flew open. He advanced into the room, both arms out-thrust. In his left hand was the lantern, in his right the gun. He turned in a circle, then looked at her.
“What is it?”
The light had shown her the room was empty.
“I’m sorry. I must have been dreaming. I thought there was—I don’t know—some kind of killer drone in here, circling, looking for me.”
He tucked the automatic into his pants and turned up the lamp. Then he smiled and said, “You weren’t dreaming.”
He pointed and she saw, clinging to the window curtain by its talons, a small gray bat. Its black eyes shone in the light.
“Oh, the poor thing. It’s frightened. Don’t shoot it, Laker.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“But we have to get it out of here.”
He nodded. He went around the cabin, pushing back curtains and opening windows, as well as the front door. Returning, he handed her a towel. He had one, too. They flapped them at the bat. It took off and circled the room. They kept flapping and it kept circling, scrupulously avoiding all doors and windows. Finally they gave up and stood panting. The bat returned to its perch on the curtain. It was panting, too.
“What the hell are you people doing?” It was the fierce whisper of Bentley. He was standing outside the front door. “If you’ve got to have lights on, at least keep the goddam curtains closed!”
Laker surreptitiously shifted the automatic to the small of his back and went out to talk to him. “There’s a bat in here.”
“Well, you better not hurt it.”
“What?”
“They’re a federally protected species.”
“I don’t think federal law requires us to turn our cabin over to it. Can you get it out of here?”
“And how do you expect me to do that?”
Ava came up beside Laker. “Mr. Bentley, I can’t sleep with a bat flying around the room.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you talked your husband into bringing you along. This is no place for ladies. Now I’ve got a campful of real fishermen who’ll expect their breakfast in an hour, so no more fuss from you two.” He stalked away, muttering.
Laker turned to her. “I suppose you won’t let me shoot him, either?”
She had to put a hand to her mouth to stifle a guffaw. Turning, she went back into the bedroom. Startled bats rose from all corners of the room and began to circle the ceiling. There were at least half a dozen.
“Hm,” said Laker behind her. “The light must have attracted them.”
“They’re holding the bats’ Indy 500 in my bedroom! What are we going to do?”
“You’re expecting another idea from me, as good as open the windows and turn up the lamp?”
This time there was no holding her laughter in. She stepped close to him, linked her fingers at the nape of his neck, and brought him down from his great height. Their lips met. He put his arms around her. I could stay like this forever, she thought.
A moment later she thought: No, I couldn’t. I want more of him. And to give him all of me.
She led him by the hand into the outer room and pulled the door closed, leaving the bedroom to the bats. Then she pushed him down on the sofa and stepped back, looking into his eyes.
“Have a seat, Laker. Relax and enjoy.”
There was another camping lantern resting on the table. She turned the flame down, but not too far. She was still wearing her Orthodox Jew disguise from the city. Her rabbi really wouldn’t like this next part, she thought. Unfastening the long skirt, she let it fall. She balanced on one foot, then the other to slip off the coarse knee-socks. Began to undo the buttons of the blouse, then lost patience and pulled it over her head. She could feel the soft golden light eddying around her breasts and hips as she cast off the last scraps of clothing. Laker’s gaze felt just as warm.
He gave a long, appreciative sigh. Stood up. “My turn,” he said.
The first thing he took off was the gun.
27
By the following afternoon, they were back in the Hudson Valley. They checked into a motel on the outskirts of the little town of Schuylerville. Laker showed his fake ID and paid in cash. Then he looked out the window while Ava explained to the clerk that they wanted a room with one large bed, not two small ones.
In the room, he put on a fresh shirt. They had acquired a change of clothes and a small suitcase.
“You’re going to see this defector?” she asked.
“Yes. He probably won’t be happy to see me. Best if you don’t come along.”
“Fine. I want to take another crack at Tillie’s coded message to me.”
“I thought you said you’d tried every possible key text. You were stymied.”
“True.”
“So what’s different today?”
“Laker. Everything’s different today.”
She sat on the bed and smiled at him. Laker figured that if he was going to see Ilya Berilov today, he’d better get going.
Route 9 in Schuylerville could have been any road, anywhere. He walked past fast-food franchises, a muffler shop, a supermarket. The road curved away from a high stone wall with an arched portal. He stepped through it into an
other world. Tree-lined paths crossed broad lawns, leading to noble old buildings of red brick and gray stone. Summer term was in session at Burtondale College. Under a spreading sycamore tree, a group of young men and women with suntanned limbs sat on the grass in a ring around their professor, a gray-haired woman who was holding forth on the metrical patterns of John Donne. Laker walked past the group and into a doorway. On its lintel was engraved: DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY.
He walked down a dim corridor, reading the names on doors. The door of Professor Ilya Berilov was open. He stepped in and said, “Hello, Ilya.”
The man sitting behind the desk looked up. Berilov hadn’t changed much, except that his abundant hair had gone from silver to white. He took the glasses from his bulbous nose and tossed them on the desk. His heavily bagged dark eyes looked at Laker.
Sort of looked at him. Berilov was almost comically shifty-eyed. Conversing with you, he seemed to be watching a tennis match that was going on behind you. He said nothing.
“You don’t remember me.”
“Of course I do, Thomas Laker.” Berilov spoke fluent English, but it seemed to cost him a lot of effort to produce the foreign sounds. His lips and jaws moved as if he were chewing stale black bread. “I was locked up in that safe house in Virginia for my first six weeks in the West. You were the seventeenth person to interrogate me.”
“You didn’t make it easy for me.”
Berilov’s white tufts of eyebrow bobbed once, indifferently. “The CIA had emptied me of everything I knew. By that point, I figured they were only using me to give young agents some experience. So I provided you with a challenge.”
Laker indicated the straight chair in front of the desk. “May I sit down?”
Berilov folded his hands upon his paunch, which strained the buttons of his woolen cardigan. There was a steaming cup of tea on the desk. The old building was unair-conditioned and stuffy, but the chill of Moscow winters was apparently still in his bones.
“You want a rematch? Laker, I know no more than I did last time. I’ve been out of the game for more than twenty years.”
Laker stepped forward and sat in the chair. “Not a rematch. Just some information. Let’s not make this difficult.”
Berilov kept silent while his eyes tracked side to side several times. “I have provided more than enough information to pay for my safe harbor in the West.”
“You think so? We pulled you out of Moscow when the Soviet Union was breaking up. Mobs were storming the Lubyanka. Tearing down Dzerzhinsky’s statue. As a longtime KGB apparatchik, your future was not bright.”
“So they told me. But I wonder. One of my former colleagues is now absolute ruler of the new Russia— which day by day looks more like the old one. If I had stayed, perhaps I would be at his right hand now.”
Laker swept a hand across the large office: the carpet with the college seal, the paneled walls and mullioned windows looking out on the green campus. “Things have turned out pretty comfortably for you, I’d say.”
“I don’t owe my professorship to you. There are few people alive who know as much about twentieth-century European history as I do.”
“That’s true. All we did was sanitize your CV. Burtondale College wouldn’t have hired you if they’d known you acquired your knowledge in the file room of the KGB.”
Berilov sighed. “What do you want to know about?”
“Hirochi Ryo.”
Berilov’s eyes measured the span of Laker’s shoulders a dozen times before he spoke. “So you finally found out about Ryo. How?”
“If you give me answers not questions, we can get this over with more quickly.”
“Very well. It was quite a coup, recruiting a source in the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo in 1942. Stalin was very worried about Hitler’s attempts to persuade the Japanese to invade Russia from the east, and—”
“Let’s try again, Ilya. Ryo was recruited in Chicago in the ’20s. By Charles Jordan.”
“Was he? I didn’t know.” Berilov actually managed to look surprised. He was a little rusty, but still a professional. “It makes sense, though. Jordan was a true believer, in the days when the Revolution was new. Communism would bring the world a bright future. Equality and brotherhood. No more war. Ryo was the same. Do you know, Laker? I envy them. I served my country, but I didn’t believe I was fighting for a bright future. If I had, maybe I’d have fought harder.”
“Ilya, you’re blowing smoke. Tell me what Ryo was doing for Moscow.”
“I told you. He—”
“Not in Tokyo. In Honolulu, before the war.”
Berilov sighed. “Do you know, Laker—”
“No more ruminations.”
“But this is hard. Other sins, they get easier as you go along. Lying. Adultery. Murder. But giving up the secrets of your service, betraying your country—”
“We’re talking about 1941. A long time ago.”
“True.” Berilov pulled himself out of his slouch. “You can probably work it out for yourself anyway. Ryo arranged to get the Japanese Foreign Service to post him to Honolulu because it was the perfect place to carry out his assignment from Moscow.”
“Which was? Come on, Ilya.”
“To build a network of agents in the American armed forces.”
“I see. Did he have any success?”
“You sound doubtful. I assure you he did. Ryo was a brilliant recruiter. He didn’t go in for the usual lures—bribery, blackmail, seduction. He was a true believer, as I said. He appealed to the idealism of these young officers, these graduates of Annapolis and West Point. He convinced them that only Communism could defeat Fascism.”
“Did he really?”
For a moment Berilov’s eyes ceased their shifting. They burned into Laker’s. “It was the Red Army that beat the Nazis, Laker. Drove them back from Moscow, all the way to Berlin. While you and the British staged little diversions on the sidelines.”
“You’re telling me that Ryo built his network. Double agents in the U.S. Army and Navy. What did Moscow do with them?”
Berilov sank back into his chair. Again his eyes were looking beyond Laker, searching for more trouble coming over the horizon. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“You’re a professional like me. You know how it goes. The winds of history blow, and the structures we have worked to build collapse. Pearl Harbor was attacked. Ryo was interned. By the time he got back to Tokyo, his agents were scattered all over the world. He was unable to communicate with them.”
“Moscow didn’t find someone else to run the net?”
“Soviet Russia and America were allies against the Axis. The network became unnecessary.”
“Stalin never trusted anybody, especially not his allies. What did he do with the net?”
Berilov was sinking deeper in his chair. He put one foot up on the edge of the desk. He was wearing plaid Bermuda shorts that revealed a knobby knee and hairless calf.
“What do you want from me, Laker? Stalin and I were not intimates. I was just a child growing up in the Urals in the 1940s. All I know is what’s in the file, and the file ends with Ryo’s arrest. In October 1943, he made a small mistake, and they caught him. They tortured him for a long time before they shot him, but as far as Moscow could work out, he didn’t tell them anything useful.”
“His network outlived him. Didn’t it?”
Berilov appeared not to have heard. “That must be the happiest death, don’t you think? The one at the end of torture, I mean. Not only are you released from pain, but you know you’ve won. They’re killing you because they couldn’t break you. I’m old. I’ll die within a few years, and it won’t be as happy.”
Laker’s patience was at an end. He stood, laid his hands flat on the desk, and leaned toward Berilov. “A network of officers in the American military. An incredibly valuable asset. What orders did Moscow give them?”
“The network was never activated.”
“Ilya—”
“If I knew any
more, I would tell you. You are a very scary person, Laker, and I’ve forgotten how to be brave. You can go on threatening me, if you want to make an old man wet his Bermuda shorts. But you won’t get any more information.”
Laker straightened up. Let out his breath in a long sigh, and turned away.
28
Ava perched on one corner of the bed in the motel room, eyes wide, watching Laker pace. She said, “A spy ring of American officers, working for Moscow. This is it, Laker. The big secret. This is what it’s all about. Now we know.”
He paused, stood looking out the big window at the cars parked in the lot. When he didn’t say anything, she continued.
“They were pledged to the Soviets, even if they were never activated. These men betrayed their country. If the secret comes out, even now, it will be enough to destroy reputations, send people to prison.”
“No. The Shapeshifter hasn’t killed five people just to keep a few old men from being dragged into court. Ryo’s network survived him. It went off the books, into the black. But somebody in Moscow gave orders to those agents. And they reported back. Maybe it’s still going on.”
“Still going on? But the Soviet Union no longer exists.”
“The current regime in the Kremlin isn’t what I’d call transparent. Or friendly.”
“Are you saying the Shapeshifter is a Russian agent? Trying to keep the lid on this ongoing operation, whatever it is?”
“That’s one possibility. I can think of others, equally bad. But we’re wasting time.” He turned to her. “We have to report what we’ve found out. To Sam Mason.”
“You mean crawl out from under our rock and go back to Washington.”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I know it will mean putting you in danger again.”
“I was put in danger when I was born with the name North. Let’s go.”
* * *
Laker rented a car with his own credit card—there didn’t seem to be any point in staying off the grid any longer—and pointed it south. Ava kept silent for the first hour of the drive, head back against the headrest, eyes shut. He assumed she was thinking about what awaited them in Washington. He was wrong.
