Hard Fall

by Ridley Pearson

  “Me too.” She giggled. “I promised myself just this one pack, then I’m going to quit again.”

  “You’re stronger than I,” he said.

  “No. I doubt that,” she said softly. “I don’t feel very strong at the moment.”

  He might have kissed her then, he thought. She seemed to be inviting him to, but he feared if he tried and failed, not only would it spoil his plans, but it would destroy the peacefulness of the moment.

  And at this particular spot in time, on a bench in the cool shade, a bevy of colorful flowers saturating the grounds before them, sitting alone with a charming and sensitive woman, the moment was everything.

  18

  * * *

  Monique parked three blocks from the smoke shop on K Street. The first store she had tried had been out of Sobranie and the man behind the counter had recommended this shop. A bright sunny day threw her shadow down in front of her. She chased herself up the sidewalk.

  The store—half wineshop, half tobacco shop—smelled wonderful, even though she disliked smoke. It was perfumed with sweet pipe tobaccos, rich cigar tobaccos, and oiled wood.

  The man behind the counter seemed out of place for such a shop. He was thirtyish, strong, and very straight-looking. She had expected an old man, balding perhaps, glasses, with a cheery smile and stained teeth. If this salesman smoked, then she was Cleopatra. Probably a graduate student who paid the rent by hawking Turkish nonfilters.

  “A carton of Sobranie, please,” she said.

  “A carton? Sobranie we sell by the pack,” the salesman asked.

  “Ten packs then,” she said, annoyed at him. “You do have them, don’t you? Sobranie Black Russians?”

  “Sure. We’ve got ’em.” He bent down behind the counter, slid open a door, and retrieved ten packs.

  He scribbled onto a piece of paper and then switched on the calculator. “Fifty-four-fifty. And I can’t give change,” he said as she produced three twenties. My register’s down and it’s one of these friggin’ electronic kind, self-locking. I gotta have a credit card, if it’s all the same to you.”

  She stuffed the twenties back into her wallet, withdrew her credit card and handed it to him. He ran off the charge and when he returned the receipt said, “Local phone number.” She scribbled out the phone number hastily and signed the receipt, mumbling to herself. Everyone made everything so difficult. Intentionally, it seemed. Life was supposed to get tougher and so everyone made sure it did. He disconnected her portion of the receipt, although so clumsily that he tore it, apologized, and handed it over to her. Having placed the cigarettes into a sack, he handed her this as well. Don’t say it! she willed him silently.

  But he did. “Have a nice day.”

  “You as well,” she said, turning and hurrying to the door. At all costs, she had wanted to avoid thanking him.

  The light turned red. Daggett honked and ran it. “Are you sure?” he asked Levin, who was busy checking the traffic, fearing for his life.

  “He said the credit card was in the name of Maryanne Lyttle. He said that if you put her in dark glasses and a scarf and shot her in grainy black-and-white film, she could be the woman in the photo you passed around. He said she bought a bunch of Sobranie. He was going to follow her. She left on foot.”

  They drove another two blocks and Levin, eyes searching the pedestrians, said loudly, “There he is! Pull over.” Levin jumped from the car.

  Daggett watched as the two had a brief exchange of words. The other man pointed while reading aloud from a notebook. Levin jumped back into the car, pulled the door shut and said, “We’re two, maybe three minutes behind her. A red BMW, three hundred series. Washington plates. AJ-three-two-something-or-other. He didn’t get the full number. Lost her in traffic.”

  “Shit! Two or three minutes?” Daggett stepped on it. The car lurched into traffic. He drove frantically for several minutes, ran another light, was nearly struck by an ice-cream truck and resigned himself to a lost cause. “I screwed this up,” he said. “The plan was ill-conceived in the first place. They should have been two-man teams.”

  “Then I’m to blame, Michigan. Pullman wouldn’t give me that.”

  Stopped at a red light, Daggett closed his eyes in an attempt to calm himself. It didn’t work.

  Levin said, “We’ve got a local phone number. We’ve got a partial on a license plate on a very exclusive and unusual car.”

  “You think any of that will lead us to her, you’re crazy.”

  “Don’t be so sure, Michigan. Remember the earrings? This one may be an amateur.”

  Peter Drake’s well-ordered desk was typical of the counterintelligence boys. CI-3 was mostly Ivy Leaguers. They talked without moving their lips and they wore white button-down shirts and school ties. They wore suspenders and penny loafers. They drank their coffee black and their Scotch neat. On the weekends they played tennis or went sailing in thirty-five-foot boats their parents had once owned. Their wives were pretty and intelligent, with crisp, practical hairdos and clothes like Meryl Streep’s. Drake was the tall, dark, and handsome variety. He spoke nine languages and had three degrees, and everything about him reflected this. He rose from his chair, shook hands firmly, and, returning to his chair, said in a soft but clear voice, “Using some of the files confiscated in the bust of Der Grund, we think we’ve ID’d your mystery woman.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “If she is who we think she is, her name at birth was Monique de Margerie.”

  “Do we have background?”

  “We have everything. This Michael Sharpe kept dossiers on all his operatives. He was careful not to include anything that would lead to a positive ID. That’s why I can’t be certain she is who we think she is. But chances are that she is. Bottom line is a less-than-wonderful childhood in a wealthy French family. Her father was in publishing. She became a teenage runaway, a prostitute, a drug addict, and much later, a cash courier for a drug lord. She shows up as a regular on flights to and from major European markets and Switzerland.

  “De Margerie was ‘arrested,’” he continued, drawing the quotes, “by Sharpe, the leader of Der Grund, at that time a copa—a bad cop. Now, admittedly this is being pieced together on the fly, but Sharpe is believed to have kept the cash from this bust, a bust he never told his superiors about. He ‘turned’ her and began using her as his courier. He had a group of wealthy benefactors spread out over the continent. Some contributed to Der Grund willingly, others through blackmail. De Margerie carried this cash into Germany or Switzerland. Or both. We’re still unclear on that. There’s no telling exactly how much cash, but estimates go as high as several million dollars.

  “De Margerie left Germany two years ago and entered this country under the name Cheysson,” he continued. “Sharpe evidently planted her as a sleeper in a food service company based here in Washington, In-Flite Foods, which caters commercial airlines.” His formidable brow knit tightly as he seemed to consider whether or not to add anything. At the same time he slumped in his chair, as if the air were being let out of him. He looked back to Daggett.

  Daggett said, “What is it?”

  “The rest of this is just guesswork, nothing more. There is much to assimilate from what was recovered in the raid, but as I understand it you’re pressed for time.”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “She flew into Frankfurt two days before the downing of ten twenty-three.”

  Daggett’s breathing stopped, and not a muscle twitched, not a pore opened. He was frozen. If he hadn’t stayed alive, he would have sworn his heart had quit. “Is she Anthony Kort?”

  Drake shook his head slowly. “That’s why I call it guesswork. We may be able to piece together a profile of Kort from this same paperwork. But no, she’s clearly a flunkie. A driver maybe. A courier mostly.”

  “She delivered something to Los Angeles.”

  “It’s possible, yes.”

  “Bernard’s detonator.”

  “Could be
.”

  “But that doesn’t seem to interest you,” Daggett observed.

  “Of course it interests me, but the more pertinent connection that I’m trying to make is that she was a flunkie in Frankfurt. She was very likely Kort’s driver.” He offered a space, and Daggett would have gladly filled it if he could have slowed his thoughts to the point of being able to string a sentence together. But he took too long, and Drake filled it himself. “They’re a team. An operational team. She’s been over here two years waiting to be activated. Now you connect her in all likelihood to the crash of AmAirXpress sixty-four. She’s back in action. The Germans round up all of Der Grund, but Kort is missed in the sweep. So if you were in Intelligence, what conclusions would you draw from all of this? I’ll tell you what I think. I think this bomber you’re after is none other than—”

  Daggett interrupted, finally able to speak. “Anthony Kort.”

  Then he was certain his heart had stopped.

  He drove the streets for several hours, from one bar to the next, not sure who he was or why he was doing this. Anthony Kort. It filled him with both fear and excitement. Fear that he had but this one chance to get him; fear that Kort would prevail and whatever it was he had planned would be accomplished and he, Daggett, would come away empty-handed; fear that, if given the chance, he would not arrest him but kill him; fear that he might be caught.

  He was drunk by the time he headed home, driving all but deserted streets, trying to find his way across to Virginia without his wits about him. It was as he finally spotted a sign to the bridge that he felt his arms, as if disconnected, tug the wheel sharply right at the red light.

  A while later, engine running, windows down, the letter jacket in a heap on the seat beside him, he found his car parked outside Carrie’s Chevy Chase carriage house. Previously part of an enormous estate, the eighteenth-century stone carriage house was encircled by twenty-foot rhododendrons. The surrounding acreage—which technically did not fall under the parameters of her lease—was, for all practical purposes, hers, since the main house was separated from its former carriage house by a substantial distance. The grounds were shaded by several tall maples, a substantial oak, three extremely old dogwoods, and a small, stone-wall-enclosed orchard of fruit trees: cherry, crabapple, and peach. Moonlight illuminated the moss-covered cedar shake roof and ivy-entwined red brick chimney. The effect was magical. Daggett sat behind the wheel, dazed, even slightly afraid.

  She was a woman who had rescued him more times than he could remember. She knew how to listen, how to draw from him the things he feared to face, how to provide a safe environment in which he could unload without judgment or conditions. She was his confessor, his high priest, his therapist. But lately, he now remembered in the midst of his drunken fog, she had become his adversary.

  What if she lectured him at this hour? What if she were not in a forgiving mood, but found his unannounced arrival an intrusion? He could almost hear them arguing.

  Where, he asked himself, had this relationship gone, that he should find himself having a one-way conversation outside his lover’s home, working hard to convince himself not to go inside? He needed her. From where he sat in his car he could see her amber night light glowing through the bathroom’s leaded-glass window. He could smell the sensual perfume of her sleep, could feel the warmth of the spot where she lay in the bed sheets, could hear the peaceful sounds of her breathing as she slept. He wanted these things. But at what price?

  He placed the car in gear and drove away, aimless. A car steering itself. Narrow, twisting streets lined with million-dollar colonials. How unfair the world was. The moon beat down so strongly, he didn’t need the headlights. He switched them off and drove dangerously through the broken shadows, thrilled by the risk, only switching them on again as he reached a commercial stretch, and the Beltway beyond. He turned the radio on, and for once spun the dial away from WDCN news to a classical station. It was an Italian aria. A woman’s indescribably clear voice penetrated the hot night air with emotion so convincing that Cam Daggett wept as he drove.

  He knocked on the door several times. The small fish-eye lens winked and he could imagine her eye pressed to the peephole. He finger-combed his disheveled hair and ran a palm over a coarse chin of whisker stubble.

  Lynn Greene opened the hotel room door wearing a plain white T-shirt that barely covered her. She greeted him with an infinitely sympathetic look and nodded. He entered, feeling nervous and afraid. Once she had dead-bolted the door, she turned to face him and took him into her arms. Her tears of happiness warming his neck, she whispered softly and tenderly, “I’m glad you came.”

  19

  * * *

  The following Monday, Kort arrived at Caroline’s office anxious to see her. He had spent the weekend alone, resting and reshaping the events of the week to come—monitoring CNN. The Greek had told him that the meeting had been rescheduled, delayed at least a week, which meant it couldn’t possibly take place until Friday the twenty-first of September. He needed the information Daggett had—he needed the exact date. Hans Mosner—it had become his mantra.

  In the brief two-day period, Monique had become two-dimensional in his eyes, an overgrown child who wanted the damp spot between her legs tickled. She lacked depth. To her, a flower was little more than a means with which a man bought a woman’s favors. Caroline, on the other hand, understood balance, symmetry, and dimension, pattern repetition and the resource of texture. She understood the combination of fragrances as well as colors. Her face, which only a few days earlier had failed to impress him, now lingered in his memory, refusing to leave him. Beguiling. Alluring. Beautiful. Irresistible.

  He climbed the stairs to her office with a bounce to his step and two-dozen lavender irises clasped behind his back, boyish and bright. He announced himself to the receptionist, intervening before she could ring Caroline. When he turned around and heard the receptionist gasp at the sight of the bouquet, he knew Caroline was going to love them.

  She did.

  The second house she showed him was one not far from her own, the gatehouse of the former estate. It was terribly small, with a poor kitchen, but she thought it might be interesting to have this man for a neighbor, and it seemed suited for a bachelor. She didn’t mention its proximity to her place, but she did try to sell some of its high-tech features in order to compensate for its obvious drawbacks. Accentuate the positive.

  “One nice touch,” she said, stopping at the small study and pointing to the ceiling, “is that that smoke alarm system is connected by phone line to the fire station in the village. There’s also a satellite dish for the television. Over a hundred channels.”

  He gave the place a good looking over, but in the end declined with a polite “I don’t think so.”

  They reached the third house at half past one. Kort had persuaded her to stop at a Chinese restaurant, and he now produced paper pails of shrimp chow mein, pea pods and broccoli, crispy duck plus a bottle of Acacia Chardonnay. They unfolded the meal in the brick courtyard of a wonderful white colonial. By the second glass of wine Kort had nearly forgotten all about the keys, about shopping for a possible safe house. About Mosner and the meeting.

  She cracked her fortune cookie. “Tell me about your wife,” she said. “You said there was a child, too, didn’t you?”

  Where he should have hesitated, should have resisted, should have fabricated a story that could in no way compromise his operation, instead he sat back, poured them each a third and final glass of wine, and began talking, somehow liberated from the complexities and planning of his operation. So narrow had been his vision for so long that as the petals of his thoughts unfolded beneath her light he spread himself open to her. He gave himself to her, willingly and knowingly, all the while sensing the danger of such behavior. This was peace, this moment; he would allow nothing to spoil it.

  Carrie wondered how she could feel attracted to a man so quickly. She was experiencing sensations she hadn’t felt in years: flushes of
heat when he looked at her a certain way, an irregular quickness to her heart, sticky palms and sexual fantasies. Just what Anne had talked about. Was it his extreme self-confidence that did this to her? His accent? His curious glances? Or was it the keen attention with which he studied her every movement, hung on her every word? The flowers? The laughter? Or was it his haunting, inquisitive eyes?

  As he spoke of his late wife his voice became throaty and distant. He described a young student, pretty and eager for knowledge. That made Anthony some sort of professor, but she dared not interrupt him. He seemed in a trance. To disturb him might stop him, and she didn’t want him to stop. Not for anything. Now it was she who fell into a trance: another of her fantasies. Intimate images of the two of them coiled and entwined briefly obscured his words. She felt frightened. Was that what she wanted?

  When he paused, it was if a bomb had gone off, the silence deafening. “Our child …” he had begun. Now he finished, cigarette smoke flooding from his mouth with his words. He glanced at her. She felt him change his words at the last moment; she was certain of it. “… was … stillborn.” Again he paused. “It proved too much for my wife …”

  This was fiction. Why? She accepted it as a challenge. The explanation was hidden within him like paper fortunes hidden inside the cookies that lay on the napkins before them. This was the most stimulating possibility of all: She would help him to express his fears and he would be free of them. At that moment she knew they were to be lovers.

  At the fourth house she finally gathered the courage to ask. “It’s not that I mind,” she began. “In fact, I don’t mind at all. But do you really intend to lease a house, or is this about something else?”

  She studied him. They were in the kitchen. Of all the spots they had visited, this place had affected him the most. Where he had been talkative and slightly critical of all the other houses and grounds, he had not spoken a word here.