Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  Although we had taken circuitous routes, miraculously we were able to land within two and a half hours of each other.

  I’d rented a car from Avis, picked Molly up, and began our 130-kilometer journey up 15 North. The highway could have been anywhere in the world, the industrial and then suburban outskirts of Milan or Rome or Paris or, for that matter, Boston. But by the time 15 became 117—the Autoroute des Laurentides—the broad, well-paved road cut a handsome swath through the magisterial Laurentian mountains, through Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts and then Saint-Jovite.

  And we sat there, over our uneaten plates of escargots Florentine and pan-fried trout, like a couple of dazed prizefighters, barely talking. We hadn’t talked on the way either.

  Partly it was because we were both so exhausted, and jet-lagged on top of it. But partly we were silent, I think, because we had been through so much in the last days, together and separately, that there was far too much to talk about.

  We’d gone through the looking glass: everything was getting curiouser and curiouser. Molly’s father was a victim, then a villain, and … now what? Toby had been a victim, then a savior, then a villain, and … now what?

  And Alex Truslow, my friend and confidant, the crusading new director of the CIA—was in fact the leader of the faction that for years had profited illegally off the Agency.

  As assassin code-named Max had tried to kill me in Boston and in Zurich and in Paris.

  Who was he, really?

  The answer had come in the last, amazing few moments of my telepathic ability, as the assassin and I struggled on the tracks of the Paris Métro. With one last burst of concentration I had tuned in; I had read his thoughts.

  Who are you? I had demanded.

  His real name was Johannes Hesse. “Max” was only his code name.

  Who hired you?

  Alex Truslow.

  Why?

  A hit.

  Who was the target?

  His employers didn’t know. All they knew was that the victim-to-be was the surprise witness before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

  Tomorrow.

  Who was it? Who could it be?

  Twenty-four hours or so remained.

  Who was it?

  * * *

  So why were we here, in this isolated and remote place in Quebec? What had we expected to find? A hollow tree containing documents? A jack-o’-lantern with microfilm inside?

  I had my theories now, theories that would explain everything, but the final piece of the puzzle still remained. And I was convinced that we were about to find it buried in an abandoned stone lodge on the shores of Lac Tremblant.

  * * *

  The registry of deeds for the village of Mont-Tremblant was located in the nearby larger town of St.-Jerome. But it turned out to be of little assistance. The stolid Frenchman who kept the records and issued licenses and did sundry other bureaucratic tasks, a man named Pierre La Fontaine, curtly informed us that all of Mont-Tremblant’s records had been entirely destroyed in a fire in the early 1970s. All that remained were deeds registered since then, and he was unable to turn up any record of the sale or purchase of a house on the lake involving the names Sinclair or Hale. Molly and I spent a good three hours combing through the records with him, to no avail.

  Then we took a drive around as much of Lac Tremblant as we could, past the Tremblant Club and the other new resorts, the Mont-Tremblant Lodge, with its clay tennis courts and sandy lakefront beach, the Manoir Pinoteau, the Chalet des Chutes, and houses both elegant and rustic.

  The idea, I suppose, was that either or both of us might recognize the lodge, whether (in Molly’s case) from memory or from the photograph. But no luck there either. Most of the houses were not visible from the dirt road that abutted the lake. All we could see were names on signposts, some hand-lettered, some professionally drafted. Even if we’d had the time to drive off the road, down each path to every lakefront house—and that would have certainly taken days—it would have been in fact impossible, for a number of the driveways were rather persuasively blocked to incoming traffic. And then, quite a few houses were located on the lake’s secluded northern part, which could be reached only by boat.

  At the end of our little reconnaissance mission, discouraged, I pulled the car up in front of the Tremblant Club and parked.

  “Now what?” Molly asked.

  “We rent a boat,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Here, I imagine.”

  But it was not to be. There were no boat-rental places to be seen, and none of the hotels we stopped into rented boats. Evidently the town made it as difficult for tourists as possible.

  Then the buzz of an outboard motor broke the silence of the beautiful, glassy lake from a distance, which gave me an idea. At Lac-Tremblant-Nord (which was in fact not at the northernmost tip of the lake, but the end of the road, beyond which there was no access) we found several deserted gray-painted aluminum and wood boat sheds. They were padlocked, of course. This seemed to be a docking area for residents of the lake who had no waterfront access.

  Picking the padlocks was a matter of a few minutes. Inside was an array of small crafts, mostly fishing boats. I spotted a yellow Sunray with a seventy-horsepower outboard motor—a good, fast boat, but more important, its keys had been left in the ignition. The motor kicked right in, and a few minutes later, amid clouds of blue smoke, we were zipping along the lake.

  The houses were various: modern ersatz Swiss chalets and rustic cabins, some right up on the water, some barely visible through the trees, some perched prominently on the mountainside. There was a false alarm, a stone and mortar house that at first looked right and then turned out to be a modern architect’s pun on an old lodge.

  And then it appeared without warning, the old stone-fronted lodge on a gently rising hill maybe a hundred meters from the shore. A veranda faced the lake, and on the veranda were two white Adirondack chairs. It was unmistakably the house in which Molly had spent a summer. In fact, it appeared not to have changed one whit since the picture had been taken decades before.

  Molly stared at it, stricken and entranced. The color drained from her cheeks.

  “That’s it,” she said.

  I killed the motor as close to the shore as I dared, and let it drift the rest of the way in, and then I tied it up to the rickety wooden pier.

  “My God,” Molly whispered. “This is it. This is the place.”

  I helped her up to the dock, then clambered out myself.

  “My God, Ben, I remember this place!” Her voice was a high-pitched, excited whisper. She pointed toward a white-painted wooden boathouse. “Dad taught me how to fish there.”

  She began walking down the pier toward the boathouse, lost in her nostalgic reverie, when I grabbed her.

  “What—?”

  “Quiet!” I commanded.

  The sound was barely audible at first, a rustling of grass from somewhere near the house.

  A thup thup thup.

  “What is it?” Molly whispered.

  I froze.

  The dark shape seemed almost to fly toward us over the overgrown lawn, down the hill, the thup thup thup mingling now with a whine.

  A low growl.

  The growl became a loud, terrifying, warning bark, as the creature—a Doberman pinscher, I realized—bounded toward us, teeth bared.

  Moving so fast it was virtually a blur.

  “No!” Molly shrieked, running toward the boathouse.

  My stomach turned inside out as the Doberman leapt into the air, bounding over a distance that seemed inconceivable, and just as I reached for my pistol, I heard a man’s voice commanding: “Halt!”

  I heard a splash from the water behind us and whirled around.

  “You could hurt yourself that way. He doesn’t like surprises.”

  A tall man in a boxy navy bathing suit emerged from the water. The water cascaded from his gray beard as he rose to his full height, a deeply tanned if aging Neptune come
out of the underworld.

  A sight that was so illogical it failed to register in my brain.

  Molly and I both gaped, eyes wide, unable to speak.

  Molly rushed to embrace her father.

  PART

  VII

  WASHINGTON

  SIXTY-FOUR

  So what do you say at such a moment?

  For what seemed an eternity, no one spoke.

  The lake was still, the water glassy and opaque. There was no buzz of motorboats, no shouts, not even the call of birds. Absolute silence. The world stood still.

  Weeping, Molly squeezed her arms around her father’s chest hard enough, it seemed, to crush him. She is tall, but he is taller still, and so he had to hunch forward to allow the two of them to hug.

  I watched in dull shock.

  Finally, I said: “I barely recognized you with the beard.”

  “Isn’t that the point?” Harrison Sinclair said solemnly, his voice raspy. Then he cracked a wrinkled, lopsided smile. “I assume you made sure you weren’t followed here.”

  “Best I could.”

  “I knew I could count on you.”

  Suddenly Molly broke her embrace, drew back, and slapped her father across the face. He winced.

  “Damn you,” she said, her voice breaking.

  * * *

  The lodge was dark and still. It had the distinctive odor of a house that has long been closed up: of countless crackling fires over the years that have permeated the floors and walls; of camphor and mothballs; of mildew and paint and rancid cooking oil.

  We sat together on a love seat whose muslin upholstery was discolored with years of dust, watching her father as he spoke. He sat in a canvas chair that was suspended from the high ceiling on a cable.

  He had changed into a pair of baggy khaki shorts and a loose navy blue pullover sweater. With his legs sprawled in front of him, casually crossed at the ankles, he looked as relaxed as could be, the amiable host settling down for a martini with his weekend houseguests.

  Sinclair’s beard was full and untrimmed; it appeared to be the result of several months’ growth, which made perfect sense. He had gotten a lot of sun, probably swimming and boating on the lake, and his face looked tough and leathery, the skin of an old mariner.

  “I had a feeling you’d find me here,” he said. “But not this quickly. Then Pierre La Fontaine called me a few hours ago and told me a couple had been asking questions in St.-Jerome about me and the house.”

  Molly looked baffled, so he explained: “Pierre’s the keeper of the records, the mayor of Lac Tremblant, the chief of police, and the general chief factotum. He’s also the caretaker for a number of summer residents. An old and trusted friend of mine. He’s looked after this house for quite some time now—years, in fact. Back in the fifties he arranged the sale of this place—quite cleverly, I must say—so that it passed out of Grandma Hale’s hands and basically disappeared, its ownership tangled and impossible to trace.

  “Wasn’t my idea, by the way. It was Jim Angleton’s. Back when I began to get involved with covert stuff, Jim felt strongly I should always have a place to disappear to if things ever got too hot. Canada seemed to make as good sense as any place, since it’s outside of U.S. borders. Anyway, Pierre rented it out during the summers occasionally, more often during ski season. And always on behalf of a fictional Canadian investor named Strombolian. The rental income more than paid for the upkeep and his fee. The rest Pierre kept in trust.” He gave his crinkled smile again. “He’s an honest guy.”

  Without warning, Molly erupted in anger. She had been sitting next to me in silence, contemplatively I thought, no doubt in an advanced state of shock. But as it turned out, she had been smoldering, seething.

  “How … could … you do this to me? How could you put me through this?”

  “Snoops—” her father began.

  “Goddammit! Have you any idea—”

  “Molly!” he shouted hoarsely. “Hold on! I didn’t have a choice, don’t you see that?” He drew in his lanky legs until he was sitting upright, then hunched forward toward his daughter, his eyes beseeching, glistening.

  “When they killed my dear Sheila, my love—yes, Molly, we were lovers, but I’m sure you knew that—I realized it was only a matter of hours before they got to me. I knew I had to hide.”

  “From the Wise Men,” I said. “From Truslow and Toby—”

  “And half a dozen others. And their security forces, which aren’t exactly small-time.”

  I said: “This all concerns what’s happening in Germany, isn’t that right?”

  “It’s complicated, Ben. I don’t really have—”

  “I knew you were alive,” Molly interrupted. “I’ve known it since Paris.”

  There was something steely in her tone, a quiet assurance, and I turned to look at her.

  “It was his letter,” she continued, looking at me. “He mentioned an emergency appendectomy that forced him to spend an entire summer with us here, at Lac Tremblant.”

  “And?” I prompted her.

  “And—it sounds trivial now, but I didn’t remember seeing an appendix scar. The face was pretty much destroyed, but the body wasn’t, and I guess I would have remembered, would have registered it on some subconscious level. I mean, it might have been there, but I wasn’t certain. You understand? And you remember I tried to get the autopsy a while back, but it was sealed? Order of the Fairfax County district attorney. So I pulled some strings.”

  “Which is why you wanted the fax machine in Paris,” I said. At the time, she had told me only that she had a thought about her father’s murder, an idea, a way to prove something.

  She nodded “Every pathologist—at least, every pathologist I know—keeps a copy of his work in his own locked drawers. You do that in case you ever run into trouble later on, so you can turn to your notes and all that. So I’m not without resources. I called a friend at Mass. General, a pathologist, who called a colleague at Sibley in Washington, where the autopsy was done. Routine inquiry, right? Bureaucratic? It’s incredibly easy to circumvent security channels in a hospital if you know where to pull the strings.”

  “And?” I prompted her again.

  “I had the autopsy report faxed to me. And sure enough, it listed the presence of an appendix. And at that point I knew that wherever Dad was, it wasn’t beneath that gravestone in Columbia County in upstate New York.” She turned back to her father. “So whose body was it?”

  “No one who’ll be missed,” he replied. “I’m not without my own resources.” Then he added, quietly: “It’s a lousy business.”

  “My God,” Molly said under her breath, her head bowed.

  “Not quite as evil as you must be thinking,” he said. “A fairly thorough sweep of John Does—unidentified cadavers in hospital morgues—netted us someone of approximately the right build, age, and—toughest of all—good health. Most homeless people are afflicted with a dozen different ailments.”

  Molly nodded, smiled fiercely. Bitterly, she said: “And what’s one less vagrant?”

  “The face wasn’t important,” I said, “since it was to be mostly destroyed in the crash anyway, right?”

  “Right,” Sinclair replied. “Actually, it was destroyed before the crash, if you must know. The restorative artists at the mortuary, who had no idea they weren’t laboring away on the real Harrison Sinclair, were given my photograph to work from. Whether there’s to be a public viewing or not, they generally like to make the body as presentable as possible.”

  “The tattoo on the shoulder,” I said. “The mole on the chin—”

  “Easily done.”

  Molly had been silently observing this matter-of-fact exchange between her father and her husband, and at this point she began to speak again, her voice tinged with bitterness. “Ah, yes. The body was in terrible shape after the car crash. Plus which some decompositional bloating had set in.”

  She nodded, flashed a broad smile that was not pleasant. Her eyes sh
one with ferocity. “It looked like Dad, sure, but how closely did either of us look, really? How closely could we bear to look at such a time, under such circumstances?” She was staring at me, but at the same time she wasn’t seeing me; she was looking through me. There was something awful in her tone now: a monotone with underpinnings of steel, anger, sarcasm. “They bring you into the morgue, they slide open a drawer and unzip the body bag. You see a face, partially destroyed in an explosion, but you see enough of it to say, yeah, sure, that’s my own father, that’s his nose as far as I can tell, as far as I want to look, that’s part of his mouth, for Christ’s sake! You say to yourself, I’m seeing my own flesh and blood, the man who helped bring me into the world, the guy who gave me piggyback rides, and I never want to remember that I ever saw him this way, but they want me to look, so I’ll give a perfunctory look, there, now take it away!”

  Her father had put one hand up to his craggy face. His eyes were sad. He waited, didn’t speak.

  I watched my dear Molly, saw she couldn’t go on. She was right, of course. It wasn’t terribly difficult, I knew, using face masks and what is called the “restorative art,” to make a cadaver resemble that of another.

  “Brilliant,” I said, genuinely impressed, if still thoroughly befuddled.

  “Don’t credit me,” Sinclair said. “The idea came from our old enemies in Moscow. You remember that bizarre case they lecture on during training at the Farm, Ben? About the time in the mid-sixties when the Russians had an open-coffin funeral in Moscow of a high-ranking Red Army intelligence officer?”

  I nodded.

  But he continued, addressing his daughter. “We sent our spooks ostensibly to pay their respects, but actually to see who turned up at the funeral, take clandestine snapshots, and so on. Apparently this Red Army officer had been a significant American asset for a dozen years.