Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “And then, eight years later, it turned out that the guy was still alive. The whole thing had been an elaborate Soviet counterintelligence operation, in effect, a sting. Complicated stuff. Evidently they’d made a life mask from the double agent—whom they’d turned into a triple in the meantime—and somehow put it on a corpse they happened to have handy. In those days, the good old Brezhnev years, the top brass thought nothing of having a guy shot if they needed to, so maybe they sent out an order for the body of a guy who looked like the mole, I don’t know.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been simpler,” I asked, “to just say you were so badly burned in the crash that nothing was left to identify?”

  “Simpler,” Sinclair said, “but in the end riskier. An unidentifiable body raises all manner of suspicions.”

  “And the photograph?” Molly asked. “Of you with—your throat slit?”

  “These days,” Sinclair said wearily, “even that’s not impossible. A contact who was once affiliated with the Media Lab at MIT—”

  “Sure,” I said. “Digital retouching of photographs.”

  He nodded; Molly looked puzzled.

  I explained: “You remember a couple of years ago when National Geographic ran a photograph on its cover, where they moved the Giza pyramid over a bit so it would fit?”

  She shook her head.

  “A big controversy in certain circles,” I said. “Anyway, they’re now able to retouch photographs in such a sophisticated way that it’s pretty much undetectable.”

  “That’s right,” Sinclair said.

  I continued: “So that the focus would be not on whether you’d really been killed, but how.”

  “Well,” Molly said to her father, “you fooled me. I thought you’d been murdered, I thought your throat had been slit before the car crash, my own father had been murdered! And here you were all the time, sailing in a lake in Canada.” Her voice grew steadily louder, angrier. “Was that the point? Was the point to make me think you’d been killed? Was the point to do that to your own goddamned daughter?”

  “Molly—” her father tried to interject.

  “To terrify and traumatize your own daughter? For what?”

  “Molly!” he said almost desperately. “Listen to me! Please, hear me out. The point was to save my life.”

  He took a deep breath, and then began.

  SIXTY-FIVE

  The room in which we sat—all picture windows and spare, plain wooden furniture—was steadily darkening as dusk approached. Gradually our eyes became used to the darkness. Sinclair did not get up to switch on lights; neither did we. Instead, we sat, transfixed, watching his shadowed form, listening.

  “One of the first things I did after moving into the director’s office, Ben, was to order up from the archives the sealed transcript of your court-martial fifteen years ago. I’d always had my suspicions about it, and even if you wanted to put the whole thing behind you and never hear another word about it, I wanted to know the truth of what happened that day.

  “Had this been the bad old days, the matter would have died there. But the Soviet Union had dissolved, and former Soviet agents were suddenly accessible to us. The trial transcript listed the true identity of the fellow who’d tried to defect—Berzin—and through a complicated channel I won’t go into, I managed to contact him.

  “Somehow, his own side had learned that he had tried to defect. I assume Toby had informed them. So Berzin was imprisoned—fortunately, they pretty much stopped shooting their own people when Khrushchev came to power—and later released, sent to live in some one-horse town about seventy-five miles north of Moscow.

  “Well, the new, post-Soviet government had no interest in him. Therefore, I was able to strike a deal with the guy. I arranged safe passage for him and his wife. In exchange, he gave me the file he’d been trying to sell in Paris—proving that Toby was, or rather, had been, a Soviet asset code-named MAGPIE.”

  Molly interrupted, “But what does that mean, a Soviet ‘asset’?”

  “MAGPIE was no ideological sympathizer of Communism,” Sinclair explained. “That sort of thing went out in 1956, if not before. Apparently Toby had been caught by a sharp-eyed KGB type embezzling Agency funds. He was given an ultimatum: Either you cooperate with us, or we tell Langley what we know, and face the consequences. Toby chose to cooperate.

  “Anyway, this Berzin fellow told me he had a tape of his meeting with you and Toby, and he played it for me. It confirmed everything. You’d been set up. I allowed Berzin to keep the original of the tape—I made a copy—if he would give it directly to you when the time came, when you asked for it.

  “I checked, and learned that Toby was not in a sensitive position any longer. He was in charge of certain outside projects that seemed marginal to me—extrasensory perception and the like—and stood no chance of ever coming to fruition.”

  “Why didn’t you arrest him?” I asked.

  “It would have been a mistake,” Sinclair said, “to arrest him until I had the others. I couldn’t risk alerting them.”

  “But if Toby was one of the conspirators,” Molly asked me, “why was he willing to be in such physical proximity to you in Tuscany?”

  “Because he knew I was way too drugged to do anything,” I explained.

  “What are you talking about?” Sinclair said.

  Here Molly turned and gave me a significant glance. I turned away: what was the point of telling him, even if he did believe us?

  I said: “Your letter explained about the gold, about how you helped Orlov get it out. Apparently you wrote that letter right after you met with him in Zurich. What happened after that?”

  “I knew the appearance of all that gold in Zurich would set off all kinds of alarms,” he said, “but I had no idea what that would mean. I sent Sheila over to meet with Orlov, to conduct a second round of negotiations, make final arrangements. Hours after she returned from Zurich, walking near her apartment in Georgetown, she was killed.

  “I was heartbroken and terrified. I knew I had gotten in over my head. And I was sure I’d be next. I was witnessing a war over this gold, probably being waged by the Wise Men. I barely could think—I was in a state of shock, grieving for Sheila.

  Although I could barely see Hal’s face, I could see from his silhouette that his face was drawn, though whether from deep concentration or great tension, I couldn’t tell. I focused my mind, trying to pick up any thoughts I could, but there was nothing; he wasn’t close enough.

  “And then they came after me. It was a matter of hours after Sheila’s death—two men broke into my house. I was keeping a gun by my bed, naturally, and I killed one of the attackers. The other one—well, it was a standoff. But obviously he didn’t want simply to knock me off; he had more elaborate plans. It had to look like an accident. So he was constrained somewhat.”

  “You suborned him,” I said.

  Molly said, “What?”

  “Correct,” Hal replied. “I suborned him. I struck a deal with him. After all, the head of the CIA has his resources, does he not? In essence, I turned him, exactly as I had been taught to do in my tradecraft-training days. I have my discretionary budgets. I could pay him handsomely—and more important, I could provide him with protection.

  “I learned from him that Truslow had sent him to kill me, as he had had Sheila killed. And the gold would be out of my hands, out of American and Russian government hands—and into the hands of the Wise Men. Truslow had already begun his preparations to set me up, having false photos made that showed me in the Cayman Islands, dummied-up computer travel records, and whatnot. He was going to have me killed and then have me take the fall for the missing money.

  “I knew then that Truslow was rotten. That he was one of the Wise Men. That he wouldn’t stop until he had gained full possession of the gold. And that I would have to disappear.

  “So, I had a photograph created—one that showed me quite convincingly dead. It was all the evidence he needed to take to Truslow to collect h
is half-million dollars. And once I had ‘died’—once my lookalike had burned in the car crash—he was safe. For him it was a great deal. As it was for me.”

  “Where is he?” Molly asked.

  “Somewhere in South America, I believe. Probably Ecuador.”

  And for the first time, I heard one of Hal’s thoughts, clear as a bell: I had him killed.

  * * *

  By now the pieces had begun to fall into place, and I interrupted Sinclair’s tale.

  “What do you know,” I asked, “about a German assassin code-named Max?”

  “Describe him.”

  I did.

  “The Albino,” Sinclair replied immediately. “That’s what we used to call him. Real name is Johannes Hesse. Hesse was the Stasi’s leading wet-work specialist until the day the Berlin Wall came down.”

  “And then?”

  “Then he disappeared. Somewhere in Catalonia, en route to Burma, where a number of his Stasi comrades had secured refuge. Went private, we figured.”

  “Hired by Truslow,” I said. “Another question: You expected the Wise Men to search out the gold?”

  “Naturally. I wasn’t disappointed.”

  “How—”

  He smiled. “I hid the account number in several places, places I knew they’d look. The safes in my office and at home. My executive files. Encrypted, of course.”

  “To make it plausible,” I said. “But couldn’t someone clever enough find a way to transfer the money out at a great remove? Undetectably?”

  “Not the way the account was set up. Once I—or my legal heirs—accessed the account, it became active, and Truslow could transfer the money. But Truslow would have to go to Zurich personally—and thereby leave his fingerprints.”

  “Which is why Truslow needed us to go to Zurich!” I said. “And why—once we’d activated the account—Truslow’s people tried to have me killed. But you must have had a reliable contact in the Bank of Zurich.”

  Sinclair nodded wearily. “I need to get to bed. I need my sleep.”

  But I continued: “And so you had him. You had his ‘fingerprints,’ as you put it.”

  “Why did you leave the photograph for me in Paris?” Molly asked.

  “Simple,” her father replied. “If I were tracked down and killed here, I wanted to make sure someone—preferably you—showed up here and found the documents I’ve concealed in the house.”

  “So you have the proof?” I asked.

  “I have Truslow’s signature. It wasn’t so bold of him—his people were watching Orlov, and as far as he knew, I was dead.”

  “The old woman—Berzin’s wife—told me to find Toby. She said he’d cooperate.”

  Sinclair had begun to slow down, his eyelids drooping. His head began to nod. “A possibility,” he said. “But Toby Thompson tumbled down a steep flight of stairs at his home two days ago. The report is that his wheelchair caught on a corner of a rug. I seriously doubt it was an accident. But in any case, he’s dead.”

  Molly and I were speechless for a good twenty or thirty seconds. I didn’t know what to feel: do you grieve for a man who killed your wife?

  Sinclair broke the silence. “I’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning with Pierre La Fontaine to make some rather pressing financial arrangements in Montreal.” He smiled. “Incidentally, the Bank of Zurich has no idea how much gold is in the vault. Five billion dollars’ worth was deposited. But a few gold bars are missing—thirty-eight, to be exact.”

  “What happened to them?” Molly asked.

  “I stole them. Had them removed and sold. At the going gold rate, I netted a little over five million dollars. Given how much gold is in that vault, no one’s going to notice what’s missing. And I think the Russian government owes it to me—to us—as a commission.”

  “How could you?” Molly whispered, aghast.

  “It’s only a tiny fraction, Snoops. Five million bucks. You’ve always said you wanted to open a clinic for poor kids, right? So here’s the money to do it. Anyway, what’s a paltry five million compared with ten billion, right?”

  * * *

  We were all exhausted, and before long Molly and I had fallen asleep in one of the spare bedrooms. The linen closet held bedsheets that were clean and crisply ironed, if somewhat mildew-smelling.

  I lay down beside her for a brief nap, after which I planned to draw up a plan of action for the next day. But instead, I slept for several hours, and I was awakened from a dream that had something vaguely to do with some sort of machinery that thumped rhythmically, like a perpetual-motion machine, and by the time I bolted upright in the moonlight that streamed in through the dusty windows, I knew that my dreams had been shaped by a noise from outside. A noise that began faintly grew steadily louder.

  A regular thumping. A whump-whump-whump sound that was somehow familiar.

  The sound of chopper blades.

  A helicopter.

  It sounded as if it had landed somewhere very near. Was there a helicopter pad on the property? I hadn’t seen one. I turned to look out the window, but it faced out onto the lake, and the helicopter sounded as if it were off to one side of the lodge.

  Racing out of the bedroom to a window in the hallway, I spied what was unmistakably a helicopter lifting up off a small bluff on the property. It was, I could just barely see, an asphalt-paved helicopter pad, which I hadn’t noticed earlier in the day. Was someone arriving?

  Had someone arrived?

  Or—and the thought jolted me—had someone just left?

  Hal.

  Flinging open the door to Hal’s bedroom, I saw that the bed was empty. It was, in fact, made: either he had made it before he left (unlikely) or he hadn’t slept at all (far more likely). Next to his closet was a small, neat pile of clothes, as if he had left in some haste.

  He was gone. He had obviously arranged this surreptitious middle-of-the-night departure, deliberately without telling us.

  But where had he gone?

  I felt someone’s presence in the room. I turned: Molly stood there, rubbing her eyes with one hand, pulling idly at her hair with another.

  She said: “Where is he, Ben? Where’d he go?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “But that was him in the helicopter?”

  “I assume so.”

  “He said he was going to meet with Pierre La Fontaine.”

  “In the middle of the night?” I said, running to the telephone. In a few moments I had Pierre La Fontaine’s telephone number. I dialed it; it rang for a long time before it was answered, by La Fontaine, in a sleepy voice. I handed the phone to Molly.

  “I need to talk to my father,” she said.

  A pause.

  “He said he was meeting you in Montreal later this morning.”

  Another pause.

  “Oh, God,” she said, and hung up.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He says he’s supposed to come here to see Hal in three days. They had no plan to meet in Montreal, today or any other day.”

  “Why was he lying to us?” I asked.

  “Ben!”

  Molly held up an envelope addressed to her, which she’d found under the pile of clothes.

  Inside was a hastily scrawled note:

  Snoops—forgive me and understand please—I couldn’t tell you two—knew you’d try with all your might to stop me, since you’d already lost me once—later you’ll understand—I love you—

  Dad

  It was Molly who, knowing her father’s idiosyncrasies so well—his scrupulous record keeping—eventually found the thin brown accordion file in a drawer in the room Hal had been using as his study. Among miscellaneous personal documents he’d evidently needed in his seclusion—records of bank accounts, false identity papers, and so on—was a slender sheaf of papers that, taken together, told the entire story:

  Apparently, Sinclair had rented a post office box in St.-Agathe under a false name, and in the past two weeks or so he had received a number of documen
ts.

  One of them was a photocopied schedule of a public, nationally televised hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The hearing was to take place tonight, in Room 216 of the Hart Office Building, the United States Senate, in Washington.

  One item on the schedule was circled in red ink: an appearance at seven this evening—barely fifteen hours from now—by an unspecified “Witness.”

  I knew then.

  “The surprise witness,” I murmured aloud.

  SIXTY-SIX

  Molly let out a cry.

  “No!” she said. “God, no! He’s—”

  “We’ve got to stop him,” I interrupted.

  Everything fit together now; everything made terrible sense. Harrison Sinclair—the surprise witness—was the one scheduled to be assassinated. A terrible irony occurred to me: Sinclair, whom we thought we’d buried, was all of a sudden discovered to be alive, and now he would be killed in a matter of hours.

  Molly (who must have been struck with this same thought) clasped her hands, held them to her mouth. She bit the knuckle of her index finger, as if to keep from screaming. She began pacing around the study in tight, frantic circles.

  “My God,” she whispered. “My God. What can we do?”

  I found myself pacing as well. The last thing I wanted to do now was to further terrify Molly. We both needed to remain calm, think clearly.

  “Who can we call?” she said.

  I kept pacing.

  “Washington,” she said. “Someone on the Senate committee.”

  I shook my head. “Too dangerous. We don’t know who we can trust.”

  “Someone in the Agency—”

  “That’s preposterous!”

  She resumed chewing on her knuckle. “Someone else, then. A friend. Someone who can show up at the hearing—”

  “And do what? Go up against a trained assassin? No; we have to catch up with him.”

  “But where?”

  I began to think aloud. “There’s no way he’s taking the helicopter to Washington.”