The 4 Phase Man

by Richard Steinberg

“C’è qualcosa che non va?”

  Xenos looked around the busy diner before answering in a near whisper. “You gonna help or what?”

  “Where you at?”

  “South of Waterbury, Connecticut; on eighty-four. I got wheels, but strictly short-term.”

  A brief silence followed by a whispered conversation in Italian taking place in the background.

  “Conosci Bridgeport?” the Corsican facilitator finally asked.

  “I can find it.”

  “Prendi il Port Jefferson Ferry. Two-fifteen or 3:35. Any later you call us. You be met, okay?”

  Xenos hung up and casually walked away from the booth.

  After circling the diner twice, he stopped to check the cars in the parking lot. All Connecticut plates, none with casual couples eating or resting in them, none with the carefully concealed antenna that would indicate surveillance vehicles. But he couldn’t be sure.

  Xenos knew what Canvas knew and vice versa. Nothing could be taken for granted or left to chance.

  Swallowing a handful of the aspirin he’d bought earlier, he climbed a low fence, dashed across the main road, and disappeared into a grove of trees. For ten minutes he watched the diner, the comings and goings, then left the grove another way.

  Valerie sat behind the wheel of the car on a dirt road, engine running. She was more confused, more frightened, more drained than at any time in her life. The blood and tension of the last few hours now manifested as complete exhaustion and she fought to keep her eyes open.

  Easy, actually. Since every time they closed, her mind conjured up images of broken and bleeding children crying for their mother to save them.

  Cursing her for deserting them.

  She jumped when she heard the passenger door slam shut.

  “Let’s go,” Xenos said quietly as he slumped down in the seat. His wounds and injuries kept him perilously close to full collapse, only his will keeping him functioning. But for how much longer he wasn’t sure.

  “Where to?”

  “South on eighty-four to Bridgeport.”

  Valerie dropped the stolen car with the stolen plates in gear. “And then?”

  Xenos coughed up blood, his face paled, he began to sweat heavily. “They’re looking, so until we can get out of the country or they stop looking, we keep moving.”

  “God,” Valerie mumbled under her breath as she pulled onto the highway, “when does it stop?”

  Xenos exhaled deeply, then painfully turned toward her. “You committed yourself when you put the gun in the case,” he said flatly between coughs and blood bubbles forming at his nose and mouth. “No going back.” He closed his eyes as he tried to settle himself more comfortably on the seat. “Never any going back.”

  “But it can’t go on forever.” Valerie concentrated on changing lanes every few minutes as she’d previously been instructed. “I don’t think you realize what’s going on. You see…”

  “I don’t want to know!” He opened his eyes, fury and something else—despondency, maybe—firing there. “Goddammit, I said I’d help you. I’ll do that. But I do not want to get involved. I don’t do that shit anymore. I’ll get you safe and in contact with people who can help you, but beyond that, you’re on your own! I’m just not involved in this, right?”

  Not for the first time in the last few hours Valerie began to question the sanity of her companion. “How can you say that? How many people have you killed, have we killed? Do you really think that madman, that Canvas guy, is going to let you just be uninvolved?”

  “He’s not a madman.”

  She could barely hear him between the bloody coughs and his lifeless voice. “What?” She handed him a bottle of water.

  Xenos drank half the contents in one swallow, poured the remainder over his head. “He’s not a madman. Just a working stiff.”

  Valerie hoped the man wasn’t becoming delirious. “Hey! Stay with me!” she yelled as he seemed about to pass out.

  “Colin, er, Canvas,” he said as he blinked himself back, “is just a guy being paid to do a job. He doesn’t have any feelings about it. Won’t take things personally or get angry. He’s too good for that. He’ll just—” Another hacking fit silenced him for the moment. “He’ll just sit,” he continued after a minute, “think, analyze, plan for all contingencies.”

  “Jesus.”

  Xenos somehow managed a smile. “Less prone to accidents than he was.” He reached up and turned the rear-view toward him, carefully watching the following traffic as he continued. “I was an accident. A minor course correction. A thing he’ll make allowances for in the future that won’t essentially change his plans.” He studied the cars behind them. “Change lanes and speed up.”

  Valerie did as she was instructed while trying to comprehend what the man was explaining as though it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “If I stay out of his way in the future,” Xenos continued slowly, “he’ll stay out of mine.”

  “Why the Hell would he do that?”

  Xenos shrugged. “Call it professional courtesy.” “Who are you? How do you know all this? Christ! You talk about it like it’s a couple of lawyers on a civil divorce case! Like it’s all a goddamned walk in the woods!”

  Xenos smiled, painfully but fully. “I like that,” he mumbled as he began to lose consciousness again.

  The blood trail was strong, vibrant in the gray soil. Each droplet leaving an oval indentation, segregating a given footprint from all the others in the dirt.

  Jerry moved quickly but smoothly. Gliding through the brush alongside the trail, eyes searching for more of the traitorous gore, ears straining to pick up any sound; mind counting down the time he had left before he would have to give up the search.

  And fail.

  But failure was not allowed in the program. Nothing short of complete success was accepted, so he continued on.

  A pure predator on the scent.

  The drops led off the road, toward a small barn behind an abandoned farm. Calculating how much time he had left, the possibilities of being observed and interdicted, the possible countermoves of his, well, quarry, he moved.

  Kicking in a side door, he fired short bursts at every movement. His orders were completely clear: this traitor and his family were not to get back across the border into the deep East. The damage that they could then do, he’d been briefed, would be cataclysmic.

  Lives would be lost, he’d been assured.

  America, all America, was depending on him, he’d been conditioned.

  In his first series of volleys two dogs, a horse, and a middle-aged woman died. In the next … a running teenage boy.

  Then the father, the traitor, the hunted.

  The victim.

  Jerry felt nothing, was numbed—by a rapidly depleting energy reserve, the adrenaline of the action, by drill. By something else as well.

  These weren’t people—he’d been trained—they were the enemy. To feel anything for the enemy was, in and of itself, a treasonous act.

  Swallowing more of the Agency’s unofficially encouraged (but officially banned) nepenthe—a highly addictive Middle Eastern drug that “tranquilizes the soul”—he paused waiting to feel the effects of the latest dose take hold before the last wore off.

  Slowly he felt the drug—created in the time of the Pharaohs and improved by Nazi experimentation—crawl into his brain. He began to sweat and shiver, felt an erection grow then dissipate, felt the emotions of the moment slip away into a gray void that he was barely conscious of.

  Men under the influence of “black mooders” were said to be able to do anything—torture close family members, kill lovers, spouses, children, anyone—without ever feeling a moment’s guilt or psychic pain afterward.

  Ever. As if the event were not a memory, but something dimly recalled from a news article read decades before.

  But the body’s tolerance to nepenthe began almost with the first dose. So, on each occasion, more would be needed to guarantee what Herb
called “the freedoms of actions” necessary to “be a good soldier.”

  Some days, it seemed there would never be enough capsules in the bottle, Jerry thought as he waited for his body’s temperature to return to normal and his pulse to ease.

  With a deep breath, he quickly and thoroughly returned to the task at hand. He searched all three bodies, then began the next phase of the operation.

  Cyrillic writing was spray-painted above the man’s corpse, indicating that he was a traitor to the Soviet Union; his tongue was cut out and shoved in his pants. His dead wife’s skirt was pulled up above her waist, her underclothes ripped away, then she was turned over as if shot trying to escape a rape. Cocaine was planted on the boy.

  As the healing haze of the drug began to seep through him, Jerry surveyed his work, then turned to leave. A rustle behind and to his left caused him to throw himself to the ground. He quickly rolled to his knees, turned, and fired a burst… just over the head of a six-month-old baby hidden in the straw.

  For twenty minutes, narcotics, orders, conditioning, and frayed humanity fought for control of the man who had killed twenty-nine times before.

  Cleanly.

  Professionally.

  But never—completely—dispassionately.

  Eight hours later the Stasi—the East German secret police—raided the barn, quickly concluding that the KGB had killed one of their own … for what would undoubtedly be their own reasons. They would carefully search the scene, gather evidence, then set the old building alight, an improvised crematorium for the man, his wife, and his teenage son.

  The next day, an infant would be left at the gate of the Sisters of Hope mission in Toulon, France, with a note that read simply:

  I’m sorry.

  Valerie violently lurched the car side to side, forcing the man back up. “Goddammit, I can’t do this without you! Whoever the Hell you are. Talk to me, dammit!”

  More coughing, his features wincing from the pain. “You’re what he wants, what his employers want.” You stay loose and moving and dangerous, and they’ll have to negotiate. Canvas will make that clear to them. Another fleeting, spasmodic smile. “If he doesn’t kill you first.”

  Valerie shook her head in confusion and shock. “He sounds like a bloody robot to me. Put in your nickel and he kills,” kidnaps, whatever.

  Xenos nodded. “So long as you keep the nickels coming.” He pointed to the left fork of an interchange. “Bridgeport off ramp.”

  “Then?” Valerie was beginning to sound as washed-out as the wounded man beside her.

  “Just do what I say, every time I say it, exactly like I say it, and you and your children will be fine. I’ll get you out of the country, someplace safe. Get you in contact with people that can help you.”

  “People like this Canvas bastard?” She laughed bitterly. “How many more like him can there be?”

  “One, Xenos said as he closed his eyes.” He began to drift off. “Just one, and he was out.”

  “Left, left, left, left!”

  The attorney general of the United States was screaming to his personal aide as the man broke for the open spot on the field. He threw the football as hard as he could, his aide dived, but the ball bounced scant inches from his fingers.

  “Shit.”

  “Fourth down, Jeff,” Senator Buckley called from the middle linebacker position of his staff’s team. “You gonna throw another wounded duck, or get surgery on your shoulder first?”

  “Up yours.” DeWitt laughed back. “I’ve got you just where you want me.” His staff’s team gathered around him. “Quarterback draw on three,” he whispered.

  “Michael?”

  “Yeah.” His aide looked up at him in anticipation.

  “Think you can knock that fat-assed senator into next week?”

  The two men exchanged long, understanding looks. “Follow me, Mr. Attorney General, sir.” They broke the huddle.

  DeWitt’s and Buckley’s eyes remained locked as he called out the cadence, then the ball was snapped.

  Michael faked to his left, then cut back over the middle. Knowing that his boss was only a step or two behind, he lowered his shoulder, slamming into Buckley’s groin with the full force of his 190 pounds. The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee doubled over, as DeWitt sprinted past for a touchdown.

  “Some touch football game,” Kingston shouted from the sidelines where his team was stretching and preparing for their game against the Commerce Department.

  “Justice can be terrible swift,” Attorney General DeWitt called back.

  It was a typical fall afternoon in a suburban D.C. park. The usual mix of government workers, students, tourists, and military. The sun reflected off a nearby lake as it began its descent toward the woods on the other side. As the games—interagency or departmental—wound down, the barbecue pits were lit, and the smell of burgers slowly replaced the scent of sweat.

  As one of the players started off on his usual postgame jog through the woods before eating with the merged staffs.

  Halfway through the woods, the jogger stopped, falling into step alongside his weekly companion on walks through the Georgetown campus.

  “This is fucking dangerous, the jogger said after they’d finished with the security rituals.”

  “No more so than usual,” the older man replied calmly. “Just one of the president’s favorites with one of the president’s friends. What could be more natural?”

  “I don’t know, Old Man, fifty years to life in Leaven-worth?”

  The president’s friend and adviser winced. “A not likely scenario, if we all keep our heads.”

  The jogger shook his head. “I can tell you personally,” that’s not happening. Ever since word got out about last night s… The look on the Old Man’s face stopped him. “After last night, a lot of us in the Apple Blossom chain are having trouble staying calm.”

  “Have there been specific problems?”

  “Not yet,” the jogger said. “But my cell alone is already starting to think crazy thoughts.” He laughed bitterly. “And it’s the smallest goddamned cell in espionage history.”

  The Old Man nodded. “My reason for this meeting.” He checked his watch. “How much longer can you give me?”

  “I don’t know. Ten minutes maybe; then I have to get back. I’ll be missed.”

  “Very well, then, let me bring you up-to-date. The field controllers are dead. As are many support personnel. Canvas has begun search operations and expects to have the situation back under control within seventy-two hours.

  “There has been no direct exposure of you or any others in the chain. The only one at risk is me, and the sword over her children’s heads should keep the good woman silent.”

  “For the moment,” the jogger added.

  “For the moment,” the Old Man agreed. “The toothpaste will be back in the tube in short order, I assure you.”

  The jogger took then exhaled a deep breath. “Sure,” he said without confidence.

  “What we need from you,” the Old Man said carefully, “is to keep things on track, right? Keep everyone calm, everyone working, everyone on schedule. We are no more at risk than we have ever been. That is your message and must be your example.”

  The jogger bit his lips and nodded. “Okay. Just catch this bitch before anything else happens. I’d like my heart to start beating again in my lifetime.”

  The Old Man laughed openly. “As would we all.”

  The jogger began to stretch. “When do I meet the new field controllers?”

  “You already have.”

  “You? How? They trust you that much?”

  “Not really,” the Old Man replied. “But they do know me. Since a confused twenty-year-old fell into their hands in Korea, more than half a century before.” He hesitated, as if to reveal more would be to reveal too much. But the look of doubt on the jogger’s face convinced him.

  “I reached an accommodation with them then, and we have been very good to each othe
r since. They know that I care too much about my payoffs to jeopardize anything. They know they can destroy me quite easily, at a whim, and they know that I am painfully conscious of the fact.

  “More to the point, though, they have little choice.” He shook his head sadly. “This was a terrible time for this to happen, things are just too close. They can’t risk the delay of preparing new controls, then getting them into place. They are forced into using me, just as I am forced into taking ever greater risk.”

  He sighed deeply. “It’s a vicious circle that will one day immolate both sides, I expect,” he said with genuine sorrow. Then he brightened.

  “But not today, or in the immediate future, right?”

  The jogger studied the Old Man, paused, then started off down the trail that led back to the picnickers. “I’ll pass the word.” And he was off at a slow trot.

  The Old Man watched him go, then turned and watched the sunset until he was completely surrounded by the dark.

  As he had been for the last half century.

  The Grand Republic was a resplendent sight on its worst days.

  Gleaming white, rising over sixty feet out of the water, the ferry between Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Port Jefferson, New York, had two car decks, an inside observation deck, an elegant formal bar, and a weather deck that could hold over 150 people. It was the pride of the multiferry fleet that serviced Long Island and a virtual historical landmark.

  But to Xenos and Valerie, it was simply a place to get to. The world’s largest getaway car.

  After parking their car on the murky, gray streets of the industrial section of Bridgeport, they’d walked the last three blocks. Weaving through six lanes of cars waiting to board through the boat’s gaping raised bow, they made their way to the narrow gangway used for the few carless passengers that regularly fled Bridgeport for the fairyland resort of Port Jefferson.

  They immediately climbed to the top weather deck, where they both searched the oncoming cars and people that were seemingly devoured by the boat as they drove into its cavernous bowels. Only after the boat had backed away from the dock, made its tight turn around Bridgeport Granite Inc., and given its passengers a view of the fetid dying land around the harbor did they finally give up their watch and go belowdeck.