Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  The receiver was smudged with greasy fingerprints, I noted disapprovingly, and it smelled like pipe smoke. I punched in the number, and a sequence of strange tones followed. Presumably, the signal was gavotting somewhere around Europe, under the Atlantic Ocean, and perhaps even back to Europe, before it made its by-now-feeble way to Washington, D.C., where the Agency fiber-optic telecommunications system would enrich the signal and put it through its own electronic paces.

  I listened for the familiar clicks and hums, waited for the third ring.

  On the third ring the female voice announced, “Thirty-two hundred.” How could the same woman always answer the phone, no matter the time of day or night? Maybe it wasn’t even a human voice at all, but a high-quality synthesized one.

  I responded: “Extension nine eighty-seven, please.”

  Another click and then I heard Toby’s voice.

  “Ben? Thank God. I heard about Zurich. Are you—”

  “I know, Toby.”

  “You know—”

  “About Truslow and the Wise Men. And the Germans, Vogel and Stoessel. And the surprise witness.”

  “Jesus Christ, Ben, what the hell are you talking about? Where are you?”

  “Give it up, Toby,” I bluffed. “It’s all about to come out anyway. I’ve pieced enough of it together. Truslow tried to have me killed, which was a serious mistake.”

  There was a quiet whoosh of static faintly in the background.

  “Ben,” he said at last. “You’re mistaken.”

  I checked my watch and saw that the connection was ten seconds old by now, long enough to trace the call … to Amsterdam. They would pinpoint my location as Amsterdam, which would be useful misdirection.

  “Naturally,” I replied sardonically.

  “No, please, Ben. There are things going on that can’t be understood … without a full perspective. These are dangerous times. We need the help of people like you, and now with your ability, it’s all the more—”

  And I slowly hung up the receiver.

  Yes. Toby was involved.

  * * *

  I returned to our hotel and got quietly into bed next to Molly, who was sleeping soundly.

  Troubled and sleepless, I got out of bed, fetched the copy of Allen Dulles’s memoirs that Molly’s father had left to me, and began to leaf through it aimlessly. It isn’t even that great a book, but it was all I had in the hotel room, and I needed to run my eyes over something, needed to distract my whirling thoughts. I skimmed a passage about the Jedburghs, who were parachuted into France; and about Sir Francis Walsingham, who was Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster in the sixteenth century.

  I looked again over the codes that Hal Sinclair had left for us, for me, to find, and I thought about his cryptic note in the vault in Zurich that told of a safe-deposit box in a bank on the Boulevard Raspail.

  And I thought, for the millionth time, about Molly’s father and the secrets he had bequeathed us, the secrets within secrets. I wondered …

  It was a hunch more than anything else, certainly nothing well grounded, that inspired me to get out of bed a second time and retrieve a razor blade from my shaving kit.

  Publishers in America used to print books of a higher quality in the old days, and by the old days I mean as recently as 1963. Underneath the gray, red, and yellow jacket of The Craft of Intelligence, the heavy pasteboard case was covered with a fine-woven cloth and embossed with the publisher’s insignia. The binding was sewn, not glued, of black and white cloth. I examined the jacketless book, turning it over and over and inspecting it from all angles.

  Could it be? How clever was the old spymaster anyway?

  Carefully, I sliced open the binding with the razor blade. I lifted back the black cloth of the binding, peeled away the brown kraft paper liner, and there it was, glinting at me like a beacon, a signal from Harrison Sinclair’s grave.

  It was a small, oddly shaped brass key stamped with the number 322: the key to what I assumed was the explanation, the answer to the mystery, somewhere in a vault on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  We strode quickly along the rue de Grenelle the next morning toward the Boulevard Raspail and the Banque de Raspail.

  “An assassination is scheduled to occur in two days, Ben,” Molly said. “Two days! We don’t know who the victim will be; all we know is that unless the surprise witness testifies, we’re all as good as dead.”

  Two days: I knew it; I thought of the ticking clock virtually all the time. But I didn’t reply.

  A neatly dressed older man in a blue overcoat walked toward us, his short white hair slicked back, brown almond eyes behind rectangular glasses. He smiled politely. I glanced in the window of a storefront marked IMPRIMERIE, which featured a display of cartes de visite pinned on a corkboard, samples of their handiwork. In the glass I caught the reflection of a woman, admired her figure, and then realized it was Molly; and then saw the reflection of a small red and white Austin Mini Cooper moving along slowly behind us.

  I froze.

  I had seen that same car from our hotel window last night. How many other little red Austins were there with white tops?

  “Shit,” I exclaimed, slapping my hand against my forehead in a large, theatrical motion.

  “What?”

  “I forgot something.” I pointed in back of me without turning. “We’ve got to go back to the hotel. Do you mind?”

  “What’d you forget?”

  I took her arm. “Come on.”

  Shaking my head, I pulled her around and walked back up the street toward the hotel. The Austin, which I now saw in a quick, furtive glance was being driven by a young bespectacled man in a dark suit, sped up and disappeared down the street.

  * * *

  “You forget the documents or something?” Molly asked as I turned the key in the room door. I put a finger to my lips.

  She gave me a worried glance.

  I closed and locked the door, immediately tossing my leather portfolio on the bed. I emptied it of the sets of documents, then held it up to the light, unzipping each compartment, running my fingers along each fold, scrutinizing it closely.

  Molly mouthed one word: What?

  I said aloud, “We’re being followed.”

  She looked at me questioningly.

  “It’s okay, Molly. You can talk now.”

  “Of course we’re being followed,” she said, exasperated. “We’ve been followed since—”

  “Since when?”

  She stopped, frowned. “I don’t know.”

  “Think. Since when?”

  “Jesus, Ben, you’re—”

  “—the expert. I know. All right. There was someone waiting for me when I arrived in Rome. I was tailed pretty much constantly in Rome. Lost them in Tuscany, I assume.”

  “In Zurich—”

  “Right. We were followed in Zurich, to the bank and afterward. Probably in Munich, though it’s hard to tell. But I sure as hell wasn’t followed last night.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, the truth is, I don’t know for absolute certain. But I was pretty damned careful, and I walked around a bit after I met with the documents guy, and if there was any indication, I sure as hell didn’t see it. And I’m trained to look for this sort of thing. That skill doesn’t go away no matter how much patent law you practice.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “That you were followed.”

  “And that’s supposed to be my fault? We left the airport together, you had the taxi take a pretty circuitous route—you said you were sure we weren’t being followed. And I didn’t leave the hotel.”

  “Let me see your purse.”

  She handed it to me, and I dumped the contents onto the bed. She watched in dismay. I went through everything carefully, then inspected the purse and its lining. I examined, too, the heels of our shoes; unlikely, though, since they hadn’t been out of our sight. No.

  Nothing.

  “I
guess I’m like your black cat,” she said.

  “More like the bell on a sheep,” I said distractedly. “Ah.”

  “What?”

  I reached over and carefully lifted her locket and chain off her neck, pulling it up and over her head. I popped the round gold case open, and saw inside only the ivory cameo.

  “For God’s sake, Ben, what are you looking for? A bug or something?”

  “I figured it was worth a look, right?” I handed it back to her, and then a thought occurred to me, and I took it back.

  I popped the locket open again, then looked very closely at the inside of the lid. “What’s inscribed on the inside of this?” I asked.

  She closed her eyes, trying to recall. “Nothing. The inscription’s on the back.”

  “Right,” I said. “Which made it pretty easy.”

  “Easy for what?”

  I had a small jeweler’s tool attached to my key chain, which was on the bed, and I grabbed it and inserted the tiny beveled screwdriver into the lid. A gold disc, roughly the size of a quarter and about an eighth of an inch thick, popped out. Attached to it was a tiny coil of wire almost as thin as a human hair.

  “Not a bug,” I said. “A transmitter. A miniaturized homing device with a range of up to six or seven miles. Emits an RF signal.”

  Molly gaped at me.

  “When Truslow’s people captured you in Boston, you were wearing this, weren’t you?”

  She took a long while to respond. “Yes…”

  “And then, when they sent you to Italy, they returned this to you with the rest of your things.”

  “Yes…”

  “Well, then. Of course. Of course they wanted you with me. For all our precautions, they’ve known our location every second. At least, every second you’ve had the locket with you.”

  “Right now, too?”

  I answered slowly, wishing not to alarm her any more than necessary. “Yeah,” I said. “I’d say it’s a pretty fair guess they know where we are right now.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  The small, elegant, jewellike Banque de Raspail at 128 Boulevard Raspail in Paris’s seventh arrondissement was a small, private merchant bank that seemed to cater to an exclusive clientele of wealthy, discreet Parisians who desired excellent personal service they apparently believed they could not find in banks open to the unwashed masses.

  Its interior was an advertisement for its exclusivity: there wasn’t a customer in sight. And in fact it barely resembled a bank at all. Faded Aubusson carpets covered the floor; clustered here and there along the walls were Biedermeier chairs upholstered in Scalamandre silk, fragile-looking Italian busts and urn lamps perched atop Biedermeier side tables. Architectural engravings in gilt frames hung in precise quadrants on the walls, completing the effect of stately elegance and great solidity. I, of course, would not have placed my money in a bank that spent so much on overhead, but I’m not French.

  Both Molly and I knew we were operating under enormous time pressure. Two days remained before the assassination, and we still didn’t know who the target was.

  And now they—they being Truslow’s agents, perhaps in addition to agents working for Vogel and the German consortium behind him—had pinpointed our location. They knew we were in Paris. They might not know why; they might not know about Sinclair’s cryptic note concerning the Banque de Raspail; but they knew we were here for some reason.

  And though I hadn’t permitted myself to talk about this to Molly, I knew the odds were great that we would be killed.

  True, I was worth a great deal to American intelligence because of my psychic ability, but now I represented, more than anything, a threat. I knew about what Truslow’s people were doing in Germany, or at least I knew a piece of it. I had no documentary proof, no evidence, nothing solid; so even if I went public now—if I called, say, The New York Times—I simply wouldn’t be believed. I would be dismissed as a raving lunatic. Molly and I had to be eliminated. That was the only logical course for Truslow’s people.

  But if only we could make it—forge on ahead to determine who was to be assassinated two days from now in Washington, foil the assassination, make it public, let the sunlight in—we would be safe. Or so I believed.

  The clock was ticking.

  But who could it be? Who could the surprise witness be? Might it be an assistant of Orlov’s, a Russian, someone he had entrusted with the truth? Or perhaps it might be a friend of Hal Sinclair’s, someone in whom he had confided.

  I even briefly considered the most far-fetched possibility of all. Toby? Who else, after all, knew so much? Was it Toby who would be appearing suddenly before the Senate two days from now, testifying against Truslow, blowing the whole conspiracy sky-high?

  Ridiculous. For what possible reason?

  Frightened, strung out, and at our wit’s end, Molly and I had quarreled at the Duc de Saint-Simon, until finally we came up with a workable plan. We had to leave the hotel as soon as possible, in a matter of moments. Yet we had to go to the Boulevard Raspail; we had to see what it was that Molly’s father had left behind. We couldn’t take the chance of overlooking any piece of the puzzle. Maybe we’d turn up nothing; maybe the box would be empty; maybe there would no longer be a safe-deposit box in his name at the bank. But we had to know. Follow the gold, Orlov had urged. We had done so. And now the trail of the gold led inexorably to this small private bank in Paris.

  So, realizing there were few courses of action left to us, we had quickly packed our bags and had the bellboy send them on to the Crillon, tipping him generously for his discretion. Molly explained to him that we were doing advance work for a prominent foreign statesman, that it was vitally important that our whereabouts be kept a secret, that he disclose to no one where he had dispatched our luggage.

  The cameo locket, however, was a different matter. I had little doubt that the RF transmitter contained within the locket would in a matter of minutes draw the watchers to the Saint-Simon. Destroying it was one solution, but not the best. Diversion was always better. I took the locket with me and strolled aimlessly out of the hotel toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Across from the Rue du Bac Métro station is a café that is almost always crowded. I entered, sidled up to the bar, and ordered a demitasse. Jammed up next to me was a very soigné middle-aged woman with copper-colored hair up in a chignon, clutching an enormous, capacious handbag of green leather and reading a crisp new copy of Vogue. Ever so casually I slipped the locket into the woman’s handbag, finished my coffee, left a few francs, and returned to the hotel. Since these transmitters send the RF signal along the line of sight, our followers would be flummoxed, at least temporarily: as long as my Vogue-reading friend continued to circulate in crowds, they’d never be able to pinpoint the signal, never be able to determine where in the throngs it was coming from.

  We had left the hotel separately and by different means of egress—I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that it was highly unlikely we were followed—and from a rendezvous point at the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde, we made our way back, in a taxi, across the Seine on the Pont de la Concorde, down the Boulevard Saint-Germain, until it branched off onto the Boulevard Raspail.

  A few sultry, exquisitely dressed young women sat busily working at mahogany tables a good distance from the glass and mahogany doors through which Molly and I entered, and a couple of them looked up with pique, annoyed at this interruption. They radiated attitude, but with a particularly French patina. Then a young man rose from one of the tables and hastened toward us anxiously, as if we were there to rob the bank and take everyone hostage.

  “Oui?”

  He stood before us, blocking us with an awkward stance. The young banker wore a navy serge double-breasted suit of exaggerated cut, and perfectly round black-framed glasses of the sort the architect Le Corbusier used to wear (and, after him, generations of affected American architects).

  I deferred to Molly, who was the one with the official business there. She was wear
ing one of her odd but somehow stylish outfits, some sort of a black linen shift that would be equally appropriate on the beach or at a White House dinner. As usual, no one could carry off eccentricity the way she could. She began explaining, in her very good French, her situation: that she was the legal heir to her father’s estate, that as a matter of routine she sought access to his safe-deposit box. I watched the two of them speak, as if from a great distance, and pondered the strangeness of the situation. Her father’s estate. Here we were, tracking down her father’s assets, which seemed to include a vast fortune that didn’t belong to him.

  The silent spouse, I followed the two of them around the foyer to the banker’s table to conduct our business. Although this was only the second bank I had visited in the course of this drama that had overtaken Molly and me since I’d attained this freakish telepathic ability, it seemed as if I had done nothing but go into bank after bank in the last week or so. The ritual, the forms, everything was entirely, cloyingly familiar.

  And as we sat there, I found myself dipping into that particular recess of my brain with which I’d also become so familiar, that strange place into which floated words and phrases. Thoughts. I had some French, as they say, which is to say that I was reasonably conversant in the language, and I waited for the banker’s Gallic thoughts to voice themselves …

  … And nothing came.

  For a moment I was gripped by a familiar fear: had this peculiar talent, which had been visited upon me so suddenly, now vanished just as suddenly? Nothing was coming across. I thought of the afternoon walking around Boston, after leaving the Corporation, when I was overcome by the incredible profusion of the thoughts of others, the rush of phrases, the thoughts of others, giddy and angry and remorseful, those scraps that came at me without my really having to concentrate at all.

  And I wondered at that moment whether it might all be fading away to nothing.

  “Ben?” I suddenly heard Molly say.

  “Yes?”

  She looked at me curiously. “He says we can get into the box now if we’d like. All I have to do is fill out a form.”