12 Drummers Drumming

by Diana Deverell

  “No, Kathryn.”

  If he said more, his warning was lost in the wind.

  I hurried down the pathway and back around the outer wall of Kronborg Castle. The darkness outside was as complete as in the ingenious dungeon beneath my feet. It featured a shrinking cell that was reduced in size each day until any turncoat Dane who’d collaborated with the invading Swedes was crushed by his own refusal to confess.

  Above me, a pennant snapped with a cracking noise. The keening wind blew in off the Øresund, the sound as haunting as the ghostly voice of Hamlet’s father demanding revenge. I was running over the cobblestones. My Opel was parked in the public lot on the far side of the castle moat. Once behind the wheel, shivering, I picked my way through the seaport town of Helsingør, then out onto the motorway southbound toward Copenhagen.

  I’d been driving for fifteen minutes when I saw a sign announcing that it was a thousand meters to the highway exit that would take me to Farum. The Danish Defense Intelligence Service—DDIS—had a safe house there. Stefan and I had stayed in it for six months after we fled from Poland.

  Cold War Poland was where we’d met. In 1986, I was a junior officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, assigned to work at our embassy in Warsaw. Stefan Krajewski was a local hire, tutoring new arrivals like me in the Polish language. He was six and a half feet tall with well-defined chest muscles under his black turtleneck, his belly as flat as an athlete’s. He wasn’t handsome—his nose was too large and bony, his mouth too wide, his lips too full—but he was in far better shape than most language teachers. During duller lessons, I diverted myself by imagining him naked.

  But never did I imagine that he worked for the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, the SB, Communist Poland’s clone of the KGB. Not until he approached me with an offer of intelligence data the U.S. badly needed.

  The Abu Nidal Organization had recently massacred Christmas travelers in Rome and Vienna, bombed a TWA flight over Greece and trumpeted its intention to do worse. Stefan was the liaison officer between the SB and the Abu Nidal Organization’s band in Warsaw. In that role, he picked up information about the terrorists’ plans. He offered to pass whatever he learned to the U.S. government, using me as the conduit.

  An attractive offer. But there was a catch. Stefan needed a reason for meeting with me—one both the SB and the Abu Nidal Organization would find legitimate. It had to appear that he’d recruited me to spy for him.

  Of course, I reported Stefan’s approach. My security officer immediately notified the Department. In another time and place, that would have been the end of it. Jaded spy-watchers would have dismissed Stefan’s offer as a sophisticated version of the honey trap and I’d have been warned against further contact.

  But in 1986, we were desperate for a way to stop Abu Nidal. Washington told me to play along with Stefan to see if he’d pass me anything useful. Very likely, Stefan would tell me nothing while he tried to turn my imitation recruitment into the real thing. I was to proceed with extreme caution. My security officer was more succinct: “Don’t let him get in your pants.”

  To protect myself, I reported every meeting I had with Stefan and got approval in advance to hand over the documents he demanded—a list of home telephone numbers of embassy staff, a floor plan of the chancery, duty rosters for the communicators. All of it innocuous stuff that the SB could get from a dozen sources.

  But that’s how recruitment works when it’s real. Minor treason becomes major. Entrapment is a cumulative process, each compromising act leading to something more serious. No one in the Polish SB doubted that Stefan had turned me into a traitor, not until the very end.

  And it wasn’t until the end that I discovered that Stefan was not a loyal agent of the Polish SB. He’d joined forces with Holger Sorensen. He was working under cover for Danish intelligence. Lucky for me, because I was beyond rescue. Before I’d known Stefan a month, I was crazy in love with him. I struggled against my feelings. I made all the logical arguments. But logic wasn’t worth a damn when it came to Stefan. In some primitive corner of my soul, I knew—I knew—I belonged with him.

  That spring the U.S. bombed Libya. Terrorist groups struck back in Europe and the Middle East. Authorities were able to prevent attacks planned for London, Ankara and Paris, because of information Stefan passed to me. Enraged, Abu Nidal ordered us killed. We escaped to safety in Denmark. The Department granted me emergency leave. And I spent six precious months in the Farum safe house with Stefan.

  Ahead of me, the brightly lit exit sign reflected off the mistslick asphalt, gilding the ramp so that it beckoned like a honeyed road to the past. I smelled again the gunpowder on my hand, lingering from target practice at the military range. I breathed in the fragrance of healthy sweat, mine mixed with Stefan’s, the odor as fresh as if we’d come from a vigorous workout. The air around me thickened with the haze of tobacco smoke. For a second I saw Stefan in the passenger seat, the burning end of his cigarette accenting the strong bones of his face.

  If I exited, in another minute Stefan’s left hand would find my leg. I’d feel his warmth through my jeans, the heat of his touch spreading through me as we drew closer to home. The instant I parked in our driveway, I’d bring his face to mine, feel the softness of his lips, taste again the mingled flavors of desire.

  The exit sign flashed past and darkness stretched out before me. I opened the window to let in the winter air, struggling to fill my lungs before another wave of sorrow pulled me under.

  2

  At Kastrup, I managed to get on an SAS flight to Kennedy. Its departure was delayed for ninety minutes of baggage searches and the frisking of all passengers. When the beverage cart stopped beside me, the cans of Carlsberg glistened invitingly. But I needed a stronger anesthetic. My lips parted to form the initial sound in “Chivas.” I was struck by a sudden memory, an image of a distillery warehouse turned into a morgue. Sheet-covered shapes on the cold floor. Was Stefan in that long line of corpses? Or did his body still drift in the icy waters? Anguish closed my throat, and I couldn’t speak.

  Concerned, the motherly stewardess asked again, “Cocktail?”

  My eyes on her hands, I croaked out a request for bourbon. Three Wild Turkeys formed a liquid armor between me and my pain. The agony of Stefan’s loss and with it the torment of Holger’s betrayal.

  In Poland, Holger, Stefan and I had worked together against terror. Now, when things had turned personal, Holger was forcing me out.

  When it was his help I needed most.

  In 1985, the Danish Defense Intelligence Service had shunted Reserve Army Major Holger Sorensen off to a minor desk job with a limited mandate to gather information from Danes who traveled in the Middle East. Holger’s lack of experience in the Arab-speaking world was seen there as proof that the Danes weren’t serious about this new effort. Plus, DDIS headquarters personnel showed no interest in Holger’s reports. Holger Sorensen was dismissed as no threat to terrorist action.

  But Holger’s “irrelevant” experience was key to his strategy. During the first fifteen years of his military career, he had specialized in Poland and Eastern Europe. In 1978, the year he was promoted to the rank of captain, he also started a two-year stint as guest professor of Danish language and literature at the University of Warsaw. He was there at the height of the Solidarity movement and allied himself with Poles who’d lost their faith in Communism. He returned to Copenhagen, and by 1983, he was running agents into Poland, gathering data on the terrorist organizations operating freely on that side of the Berlin Wall.

  Soon after he got his “minor desk job” in 1985, Holger realized that by inspiring well-placed East Bloc nationals to work covertly for him, he could track—and prevent—terrorist actions. Stefan and I gave him his first big success against the Abu Nidal Organization in Europe. By 1987, Abu Nidal had closed down his activities in Poland and established his base in Libya.

  After Communism fell in Eastern Europe, Holger shifted his focus from state-sponsored terrorism to the flow of ar
ms and technology from the private sector to radical groups. He and his people painstakingly traced illegal sales by German companies to Libya. He blew the whistle on Qadhafi’s construction of a chemical weapons plant in Rabta. In an era of satellite surveillance, high-frequency eavesdropping and cybernetic data interception, Holger concentrated his assets on the ground. He stretched his limited resources to sustain a network of fiercely loyal agents in the-field. It was a loyalty Holger returned ten-fold.

  The results were impressive, in large part because the Father-Major’s analysis of terrorist strategy was brilliant.

  His analysis of me wasn’t.

  He’d ordered me to keep my distance from the wreckage of Global Flight 500. But I couldn’t leave that investigation to others. Why didn’t Holger understand that? Stefan would have. In my place, he’d have acted exactly the same.

  Once, during that bleak Warsaw spring of 1986, I’d asked him if what I’d heard was true, that both his grandfather and his father had fought the Nazis. He’d made a joke and changed the subject. Not satisfied, I pressed him about his “legacy of resistance.” He accused me of being romantic—a condition he claimed he’d outgrown. As a boy he’d felt cheated because he knew the Nazis would never return to Poland. So how would he discover if he could fight Fascism with unflagging courage? Endure torture? Go to his death with the names of his comrades unspoken? He’d laughed, gently mocking both me and his childhood self.

  But beneath the musical banter I heard the perfect pitch of truth, and the sound resonated in me. As a girl, I’d wished for a cause to test my bravery. We were postwar children, yearning to be like our heroic fathers. We’d both grown up and into that desire—not out of it.

  I was euphoric after we escaped from Poland, halfway convinced I should quit the State Department and join up with Stefan and Holger. Good idea, they both said, but don’t rush into it. Stefan was being debriefed by Danish intelligence, I was on leave, we had six months to figure out what to do next. Stefan and Holger took turns teaching me basic tradecraft so I’d understand what fieldwork entailed. They both agreed I’d do well.

  But not well enough, I concluded. In the long run, I’d accomplish more from behind a desk in Washington. Like the heroine of a corny movie, I left the man I loved in order to serve my cause. Probably the single most romantic notion I’d ever had. Stefan understood that. And he insisted that the Atlantic Ocean wouldn’t keep us apart. For more than a decade, he’d been right.

  By May of 1987, I was back in Washington, working in EUR, State’s Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs. I analyzed threats against U.S. government property and personnel. In a typical case, the Admin Officer at our embassy in Stockholm might find a bootleg copy of the Ambassador’s itinerary in the possession of a local employee. The employee, he’d discover, had done her university studies in Beirut and still traveled often to the Middle East. The Swedish police would interrogate the employee and staffers from Diplomatic Security would interview her co-workers.

  From my windowless cubicle on the fifth floor of the State Department, I’d make huge arcs through the data. I’d pull everything that related, from press reports to satellite imagery. Talk to my contacts at Langley and DIA. Make charts, sketch diagrams, draw up lists. I’d work through the connections and outline the most likely scenario. Refine my analysis, come to a conclusion: These are incidents that have similar characteristics. These are the terrorist organizations of interest. These are the individuals you should watch.

  I spotted connections other people missed. Maybe my experience in Poland was the reason. My stuff got read by the people who needed it—not everyone in the Department can say that.

  I stayed in EUR until December 21, 1988—the day Pan Am 103 exploded. I was detailed to the office of State’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, S/CT, where I continued doing the same kind of analysis, but on a larger scale. The physical evidence from Lockerbie was inconclusive, the range of suspects broad. For two and a half years I tracked three hundred members of at least twenty different sects, painstakingly eliminating the individuals who could not have been involved. Tedious and time-consuming, but ultimately useful.

  By then I’d run up against State’s five-year limitation on domestic assignments. They sent me to do administrative work at the consulate in Toronto—as far “overseas” as the security office would approve. I got pulled back abruptly in 1993, assigned as a staff assistant in the counterterrorism office to do follow-up after the World Trade Center bombing. My focus was terrorist groups operating in Europe, but I worked on the big cases no matter where the perpetrators came from. We all did. You see something like the Oklahoma City bombing, you feel such a terrible urgency. You can’t work on anything else.

  Since 1986, defeating terrorism had been the focus of my professional life. For just as long, loving Stefan had been at the heart of my emotional life. Two weeks after I left Denmark in 1987, Stefan came to me in D.C. If I needed proof he loved me, I had it then. He was doing contract work for Holger, under cover of a sales-rep job for a Danish shipping conglomerate. It was still too dangerous for me to travel openly in Europe, so he showed up every few months to spend a week, a weekend—once, only six hours. We made love, we fought, we laughed, we argued. There was never enough time. In the past few years I took three furtive trips to see him. The first time, he’d been tied up for five months in Belgium, couldn’t get away. I slipped into Antwerp to be with him for a week. One Christmas after that, I made a clandestine visit to Copenhagen. Feeling safer, we conspired to steal time together the next fall at a secluded resort in Marbella. Spain was the only European country where I spoke the native language better than he did. Pretending outrage, he insisted we make a covert hydrofoil dash to Tangier so he could dazzle me with his Arabic.

  All those romantic trysts, rustic or exotic—they didn’t add up to four hundred days together. He would’ve been with me more—much more—after he quit fieldwork. A cord tightened around my heart, old longing grown so painful it would cripple me if I gave in to it. The numbing effect of the bourbon was wearing off.

  The airliner video display predicted we’d land in another fifteen minutes. I’d be back in the U.S., where Holger Sorensen had sent me. He’d banned me from the investigation. He knew my history, yet he gave me that impossible order. Terrorists had taken someone precious from me. I was a counterterrorist by profession. I had to work on this. The Lockerbie investigation had dragged on for more than two years. It ended only when a clever analyst at the CIA thought to compare a key piece of physical evidence to computer data about other bombings. By then the prime suspects were in Libya, unreachable by American and Scottish law enforcement.

  I knew too much about the investigation of airliner bombings to stand aside from this one. I had to find out who’d blown up Global Flight 500. It was the only means I had to avenge Stefan’s death.

  I got the benefit of the time change, arriving at Kennedy only an hour later than I’d left Denmark. I was as surly with Immigration as they were with me. I caught a flight to the D.C. airport I still thought of only as “National,” then took the Metro to Rosslyn. It was ten o’clock on Sunday night, December 27, when I rang the bell for Harry Martin’s condo.

  He buzzed me inside. When I got to the top of the staircase, he was waiting in the doorway, his sandy hair tousled as if he hadn’t bothered to comb it. He was taller than me but he slouched, putting our eyes on the same level. I glimpsed my reflection in the thick lenses of his glasses. My blond hair was messy, too. For the same reason, I realized.

  He stepped aside to let me in. “Aren’t you supposed to be holed up in some mountain inn someplace?” he asked.

  I dropped my jacket and my carry-on bag inside the door. “Didn’t work out.”

  “You look like hell. What happened, you two have a fight?”

  “He never showed.”

  “Stood you up? On Christmas Eve? Nice guy.”

  “Knock it off, Harry.”

  “Oh? Is the love affair of
the century suddenly in the past tense?”

  I didn’t answer. Put my hand over my face instead.

  Harry watched me for a second. Then he said, “I was thinking I could use a hot drink.”

  He crossed the living area to a galley kitchen. I followed and lowered myself into one of the chrome-and-rattan chairs at the glass-topped table. A few steps away from me, Harry was heating water, getting out cups, measuring whiskey, spooning brown sugar. I stared out the sliding-glass doors. A fog-shrouded Key Bridge crossed the black waters of the Potomac. Spotlights illuminated Georgetown University’s classic buildings perched atop the far bank like a Jesuit beacon.

  A mug clunked onto the tabletop in front of me. I inhaled coffee steam and whiskey vapors.

  Harry waited until I had lifted the cup and taken a sip before saying, “Your dad called me this morning, asking about you.”

  “Damn. Forgot to phone and wish him a Merry Christmas.” My father worried. He’d made me give him not only my work phone number but also Harry’s number—someone he could call in an emergency. I raised my eyes to meet Harry’s. “Anything wrong?”

  “Not with him. But he said it wasn’t like you to forget a holiday. Wanted me to check, see if you were all right.”

  I set my cup on the table. “I have to call him.”

  “No rush,” Harry said. “We chatted. He calmed down. Invited me out for a visit. Promised to take me up in some ancient two-seater he owns with some other old codger. His words, by the way.” He grinned. “Must be a great guy.”

  “He is.” I tried to smile but my lip quivered, ruining the effect. I used both hands, got the cup back to my mouth, took another swallow.

  Harry ran a hand over his hair. “Want to tell me about it?”

  I wiped cream off my upper lip with the back of my hand and shook my head.