“Proctor will help him ice it down,” said Vannoy. Something in his voice?
“Those two are amazing on the street,” said Nate. “Seriously, I never saw two guys work together like that.”
Vannoy shifted in his seat. “They’re good, maybe the best on the whole team,” said Vannoy. “They piss off everybody, but they get results.”
“It’s like they know what each other is thinking,” said Nate.
“They should; they’ve been together long enough,” said Vannoy.
“What, like roommates?” said Nate.
Vannoy looked to see if Nate was fucking with him, saw that he wasn’t. “Yeah, roommates,” said Vannoy.
Nate opened his mouth to say something, but the radio hissed with three squelch breaks—someone moving—and Vannoy started the car. Vikki Mayfield’s cherry-red Kia pulled out onto Benton Street. A woman wearing a hoodie was driving. A passenger sat tall in the passenger seat and wore a brimmed hat. Looking through binoculars, Nate could clearly see him—a man with a prominent nose—as he reached over to touch the driver on the shoulder. Vannoy let two cars slot in behind the Kia and took the third position. There would be no need for fancy tactics like handing off the eye or leapfrogging ahead of the rabbit. Just follow the Kia, period. Vannoy reported by radio as the team started rolling. Two minutes later, Nate’s cell phone rang. Benford. Pissed. Seriously pissed.
“Nash, put me on speaker; your team leader needs to hear this,” said Benford. “Special Agent Montgomery and I are sitting in the Ops Center of the Washington Field Office surrounded by a herd of wildebeests from the FBI’s Office of General Counsel. A like-minded herd of gnus is sitting in CIA Headquarters. We are, forgive the hyphenated word, video-conferencing in real time.”
“Coming through loud and clear, Chief,” said Nate, winking at Vannoy, who suppressed a chuckle. There was a brief hesitation. Benford’s agitation was palpable.
“It is our belief that the man in the park, and the passenger in the vehicle you are following, is Sebastian Angevine, CIA associate deputy director for Military Affairs. It is his registered license plate on a car at Mayfield’s building. We are reviewing Angevine’s internal computer-access profile as we speak. An audit of his finances and accounts will begin tomorrow morning. Mayfield is employed as an exotic dancer in Washington and is, presumably, his paramour.” Nate had a wisecrack in mind regarding “paramour” but wisely decided now was not the time.
“I am advised both by FBI and CIA counsels that at this time there is no proof that Angevine is guilty of espionage as described in either 18 U.S.C. 794 (a) or (b) or in 17 U.S.C. 794 (c). This may change if and when any compelling evidence surfaces. Accordingly, Nash, and listen carefully, there is no authority for stopping or detaining either Angevine or Mayfield. Please ensure that the team understands this. Special Agent Montgomery is telling me that ‘it’s an order,’ which in FBI culture must mean that it’s imperative.”
“Understood, Chief; we’ll make sure the team knows,” said Nate into the phone. “We’re leaving Glover Park and moving north on Wisconsin. She’s driving moderately through light traffic. It’s too early to predict direction. Maybe she’s taking him home. I’m assuming he lives in Virginia?”
Benford’s muffled voice asked a question to someone in the room. “Correct. He lives in Vienna, Virginia, off Beulah Road,” said Benford. “Nathaniel, that these two are moving on the street past midnight in the same evening of a busted clandestine meeting with the now-defunct Russian rezident is, for us sentient nonlawyers, a significant suggestion of guilt. We have no way to know how Angevine assesses his situation, especially in the context of proof. He may be confident or panicked. It is therefore your only job to stay close and not let him out of your sight. If they go to a bar at this late hour take a table beside them. If he goes to the men’s room, use the stall next door. If they go to his home, set up outside, making sure he cannot slip out the back door. Call it in and we’ll make sure the Vienna police do not shoot you. Am I clear?”
Vikki was muttering to herself as she followed Angevine’s directions on what turns to make. Wisconsin Avenue was nearly empty. Seb was sitting in the passenger seat with Agatha—a three-quarter-length dressmaker’s dummy—on the floor between his legs. Vikki used the padded torso to design stripper outfits and showgirl headdresses; Agatha had a featureless, smooth, white plastic head. A coat was buttoned around the torso, and a beige plastic bag stretched over the head had been taped tightly around the neck. Vikki had complained when Angevine wrenched and twisted the metal stand out of the bottom of the dummy, but he told her she wouldn’t be making dresses any longer—she would be wearing Chanel in Paris by Christmas, to which she replied “bullshit” but secretly hoped so.
He obviously knew where he wanted to go—he had cased this route ahead of time. An animated Angevine told her to go through Tenley Circle, then take Albermarle into American University Park, a neighborhood of streets in a tight grid square, with parallel alleys running behind houses. Vikki saw three sets of headlights follow at a respectful distance turn for turn. Angevine told her not to worry about them, and made her repeat exactly what she was to do when he exited the car. This was it. He barked at her to turn right, then quickly left onto Murdock Mill Road, a short oneway street that they entered the wrong way. As the following cars’ headlights disappeared for a second around the double corner, Angevine tapped Vikki on the arm and she pulled the emergency brake to slow the car. Angevine shouldered the door open, jumped out, and ran into the shadows of an alley, skidding to a stop behind a row of garbage cans. He crouched and held his breath.
For a terrified amateur on her first time, Vikki nailed it. She released the brake and kept going without a check in speed, steering straight while she reached over, pulled the door shut, grabbed Agatha off the floor, propped her up on the passenger seat, and clapped Angevine’s discarded hat on the dummy’s head. Who’s the dummy? thought Vikki, bitterly, now on her own and once again in the headlight glare of cars behind her. She continued east on Butterworth, around Westmoreland Circle to Dalecarlia, which would take her via Canal Road and Chain Bridge into suburban Virginia. Her instructions were to drive to Angevine’s town house and straight into the attached garage. Vikki was to spend the night in the house with all the curtains drawn. She was to undress and stash Agatha in a junk closet in the finished basement. In the morning she could return to her house, leaving the FBI to wonder how and exactly when Angevine had disappeared into thin air.
Three cars back, Nate’s instincts were jangling off the hook. The stair-step route through AU Park was bullshit, illogical. That prick was planning something and Nate asked Vannoy to tell the car with the eye to close up and watch out for a car escape. He didn’t know whether Angevine even knew how to bail out of a moving vehicle under surveillance, but it was important that the lead unit regularly verified that two people were in the car. Nate was on the phone to Benford passing updates. Fileppo and Proctor were in the second vehicle, giving the rest of the team unmitigated shit, and Vannoy told them to shut the fuck up and take the eye. They immediately reported that there were two people in the car—the woman and the tall man with a hat.
Angevine had seen four or five cars pass his alleyway, and none of the cars had slowed, no one looked to the side—they had missed his escape. Now he needed time. It was all up to Vikki (and Agatha) to keep the ball rolling. He checked his watch. Nearly 2:00 a.m. He would have to hike out of the neighborhood, but the metro would be running by 5:00 a.m. He’d get to Union Station and grab the MARC to BWI—if they discovered he was missing they’d shut down Dulles and National airports first, then think about Baltimore/Washington International later. By then he’d be on the first foreign flight to anywhere—Mexico City, Costa Rica, Toronto; he’d buy tickets to his first stop with his credit cards and true-name passport, leave a trail, then disappear after a second flight into the European Union. He could get to Paris without a trace. Paris was the place: He spoke the language, k
new the city, had relatives there. He had cash, and could eventually buy a black-market alias French identity document. And the Russian Embassy, a modern concrete-and-glass fortress near the Bois de Boulogne on the Boulevard Lannes in the sixteenth, would welcome him with open arms, especially if he arrived with the name of the CIA source inside the Russian Service. It was imprinted in his money-grubbing memory: Dominika Vasilyevna Egorova.
Angevine did not intend to retire in exile in some overheated defector’s apartment in Moscow, like Kim Philby, or Ed Howard, or Edward Snowden, minded by dour FSB watchdogs, cooked for by a headstrong battle-ax, and serviced every ten days by third-tier slatterns with acne between their breasts and skin tags on their necks. No, thank you. All he required of the Russians was a retirement payout and access to his foreign account, which, by his conservative estimate, was somewhere around five million dollars. Money in hand, he would then disappear: A little house with a terrace shaded by flowering vines on one of the Aeolian Islands; maybe a penthouse on Avenida Atlantica along Copacabana Beach; or maybe a stone mansion on a hill in Tuscany, surrounded by his own vineyard. A girlfriend or two—those Brazilians girls were blazingly hot—but Angevine couldn’t see Vikki fitting in. He wondered whether she would realize that when she tapped him on the arm to signal his rollout, it was the last time they’d touch. Well, she got the BMW.
As he walked down alleys, sticking to the shadows and thinking about the girls in his future, Angevine randomly and suddenly remembered how Gloria Bevacqua, the sow who had stolen the top operations job out from under him, had mocked him the morning of the announcement. Chicks dig you, Seb, she had smirked at him, and in his fury he had been launched on this, this utterly insane, this utterly destructive journey with the Russians, and now he was walking footsore and sick with worry in the night, a fugitive. He had narrowly escaped from those galloping night stalkers in the park, but there was no guarantee he’d even make it through the airport. He was not sorry for what he had done, but he felt sorry for himself. A sob caught in his throat and he cried silently as he walked. Chicks dig you, Seb, echoed in his head, the big spy, the big man. He wondered what Zarubina was reporting back to Moscow—probably that he was caught and arrested. They’d be amazed to see him surface in Paris. He brightened as he imagined how he’d coolly tell the Russian Embassy receptionist to telephone upstairs to the relevant office to inform them that TRITON was in the lobby.
Vikki had also been crying, gripping the wheel of her little car wondering whether she was going to jail for leading five ominous FBI cars behind her on a prolonged goose chase into the vastness of suburban Virginia, to give Seb time to get away. She might have been able to plead ignorance—he had lied to her, misled her, she didn’t have anything to do with anything—but the stiff-backed presence of the dressmaker’s dummy with the floppy hat propped on the seat next to her would be proof of her complicity. Vikki contemplated pulling into the next strip-mall parking lot and walking back to the cars and telling them everything she knew, which wasn’t much. She wasn’t guilty. With the instincts of a professional stripper, Vikki somehow knew Seb would never send for her to meet him in Paris. But she couldn’t hurt him. In any case, the decision quite unexpectedly was made for her.
A drunk pulling out of an all-night fast-food drive-thru crossed two lanes of Route 123 in Vienna and narrowly missed Vikki’s car, thanks partly to her violent swerving and locking of brakes. Behind her, Fileppo and Proctor likewise screeched to a stop, both of them braced for the thoracic thump of metal when cars collide. They slid to a stop inches from Vikki’s rear bumper, but the kettledrum crunch came when the G car in position two collided with the rear of Fileppo’s car, subsequently pushing them heavily into Vikki’s car. The chain-reaction shock wave was transmitted through bumper and frame, with the result that featherweight Agatha was catapulted forward into the windshield, then backward against the seat and headrest, snapping off her plastic head, now hatless, which bounced and landed on the rear window shelf, where it rocked back and forth, a Cold War commemorative bobblehead. Vikki put her face in her hands. This is all the time you’re going to get, Seb, she thought. Proctor and Fileppo walked up to Vikki’s car. Fileppo leaned into the window, asked if she was all right, and told her to turn off her engine. She put her forehead on the steering wheel and closed her eyes
She heard another voice talking into a phone. “Simon,” the voice said, “he used a JIB head, a goddamn homemade jack-in-the-box, and rolled out. Best guess is AU Park; no reason to have gone through there except for an escape. Probably forty minutes ago. Two cars are going back to sweep search the area, but if he’s in a cab or in the metro, he’s gone.” Vikki looked up from the steering wheel and saw a young man with dark hair with a phone to his ear. He was listening carefully. He thumbed the phone off and turned to the other two guys—all three of them younger than she would have expected, but with grim faces. The first young guy said, “Everyone stays put until a special agent gets here. None of us has arrest authority.” Nate leaned into Vikki’s window.
“You okay?” Nate smiled.
Vikki nodded.
“Just off-the-record, you have any idea where your boyfriend is headed?” Nate had just potentially violated Vikki’s rights.
“Dude, chill,” said Fileppo. Proctor nodded. They knew about this legal shit.
“We’ve fucked this up several times, man,” said Proctor. “Don’t do it this way.” Nate ignored them and looked at Vikki.
“I don’t know what you know, or what he told you, or what you think,” said Nate, “but if he gets away, a woman about your age is going to die by being fed alive, feet first, into a crematorium.”
Fileppo looked at Nate, surprised. “C’mon, miss,” he said, forgetting himself. “You can’t let that happen.”
“Not you too,” said Proctor. “Shut the fuck up, both of you.”
Vikki looked up at the three of them. “He said he’s going to Paris. That’s all I know,” Vikki said, contemplating for the first time in her career the irony of her stage name at the Good Guys Club—Felony.
FRENCH GARLIC SOUP (SOUPE A L’AIL)
* * *
Bring chicken stock to a boil. Sauté abundant minced garlic in duck fat (or olive oil), add to the stock along with a bouquet garni, and simmer. Remove the bouquet and add beaten egg whites to the soup, let them set, and remove from the heat. Temper egg yolks, add them to the soup, and season with salt and pepper. Put a slice of day-old country bread in a bowl, sprinkle with Parmesan, then pour soup over. Egg whites can be cut into smaller pieces.
40
The morning after his escape, Angevine stood on the sidewalk outside the Russian Embassy in Paris. Traffic on Boulevard Lannes was Gallic insanity: Two lanes of the broad and normally graceful avenue became, during pointe du matin—morning rush hour—an untidy, four-lane mass of blue exhaust, honking horns, and overwrought Parisians. His escape had gone off without a hitch: No alerts had arrived at Baltimore/Washington International. He had compulsively decided to risk a direct flight from BWI to Amsterdam, and immediately went to the Central Station and took the high-speed Thalys train to Paris Nord. In the borderless European Union—thanks to the Schengen Agreement of 1995—there were no internal passport controls anywhere. The only record of his travel would be his name on the flight manifest from the Baltimore flight, but after arrival in Amsterdam, he was gone, disappeared. And based on other defectors’ escapes over the decades, CIA moreover would assume he was already in Moscow.
Arriving in Paris, Angevine went directly to his aunt’s dormer apartment on the top floor of the building at 11 Quai de Bourbon on the Île Saint-Louis, the lozenge-shaped island in the River Seine upstream of and connected to the larger Île de la Cité. His widowed aunt was his late father’s sister, deaf and addled, but most important, the crone had a different last name. There would be no hotel-registration cards, no tracing him to this apartment. The apartment was cluttered but comfortable, bookshelves bursting with papers and ceramic fi
gures. It smelled like cats and cabbage. From the grimy windows of the spare bedroom he could look out onto the Right Bank and, just over the trees, see the mansard towers of l’Hôtel de ville, city hall. Angevine listened to the hourly bells in Notre Dame Cathedral: He was home again—at least it felt that way—and he could operate here. And he wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow the astonished Russians changed his cryptonym from TRITON to LAZARUS.
That’s what he had thought. Now he was on the sidewalk, nursing a bruised bicep, and looking back through the barred gate at a beefy embassy guard with no neck who had frog-marched him out of the consular section, past amused Frenchmen waiting for their visas, and out the gate with a shove. Angevine felt like screaming at the ape—they had no idea the mistake they were making—but people in a line outside the gate were staring, and he didn’t want to attract attention. He had bellowed at the startled receptionist inside too, repeating his last name, spelling it, demanding to see someone with authority, claiming to have a professional connection to Madame Zarubina in Washington, DC. This all meant nothing to the young receptionist—she was the wife of a junior vice consul—but she was familiar with the type of bezumtsy, the madmen who often appeared in the visa office, drawn by the allure of a foreign embassy and convinced they were engaged in undefined but important missions involving, typically, either outer-space travel or spy work. The receptionist pressed the button under the counter while taking down the man’s local telephone number to placate him until the guard appeared from a side door to throw him out.
The receptionist told her husband about this latest fruitcake over lunch of blanquette de veau, a silky, milk-white veal stew, at the nearby Brasserie Alaux on the Rue de la Faisanderie. The husband had heard the name Zarubina before, though he couldn’t recall what it had been about, except it had something to do with them upstairs. When dealing with them, it always paid to be careful. After lunch, the vice consul retrieved the fruitcake’s scrawled name and number from his wife’s notepad and went upstairs to the grilled day gate of the rezidentura and pressed the bell. There was no movement in the corridor for half a minute, then the sounds of footsteps. The clunky matron Zyuganova—it was whispered throughout the embassy that she had been a favorite of Andropov’s who had brought her with him from the KGB when he became general secretary of the Party—stood silently, looking at him through the screen. A real Bolshevik, this one, thought the young vice consul; not many of them left. In a brief sentence he explained what he was doing there, and handed her the scrap of paper through the mail slot.
Palace of Treason Page 51
