“Trying to take it all in. Between your little bombshell last night and what we just learned, it’s been quite the day.”
“True.”
“At the moment my biggest question is this: Who are we supposed to be more worried about? This guy Robert, an aging Washington power broker who seemed to be trying to clear the way for his last hurrah? Or some ghost of a presence from a possibly dead, possibly live spy organization that I’d never even heard of until a few hours ago?”
“Don’t you figure that by now the Pond is gone for sure?”
“Mom didn’t seem to think so. Maybe she saw something in those papers that only she could understand.”
“Maybe. And it’s not as if private intelligence orgs have exactly gone out of vogue. The Pentagon was up to its elbows with one a few years ago in Afghanistan. But all those guys from ’55 would be dead or out of the biz by now.”
“Still…There’s one line from that last letter of CDG’s that has really stuck with me. I mean, apart from the whole sense of imminent danger.”
“ ‘The worst is true and the strands have crossed’?”
“Yes. You think she was talking about these two strands—Robert and the Pond?”
“No way to know unless we can find out what was in the parcel, or CDG herself. And without a name or a return address, the latter isn’t likely. At least for now, Merle is still the key. Find him and we find his controller, or his case officer—whatever the hell you want to call him—whether it’s Robert or some spy zombie who crawled out from the depths of the Pond.”
“One thing I could do right now is look up those two names from that first letter in the pile, the one that talked about Robert’s last two ops.”
“Go to it.”
She checked her notes and got out her phone.
“Okay. The first name was Muhammad al Farooq. Amman, in November of 2000.”
“Good luck with all the alternate Arab spellings.”
She clicked away for a few seconds and began cursing under her breath.
“You weren’t kidding. An ‘o’ instead of a ‘u’ in Muhammad. A ‘k’ instead of a ‘q’ in Farooq. Hold on…Found something. In Amman, too, and the date matches.”
“Source?”
“The Jordan Times?”
“Reputable. It’s an English-language daily.”
“If this is our Muhammad al Farooq, then he’s pretty hot stuff in the Palestinian hierarchy. Has a few links to Hamas, but also to more moderate elements. Definitely not a friend of U.S. interests, or so it says in this one piece…Well, now.”
“What?”
“He’s dead.”
“As of when?”
“November of 2000. The same month as Robert’s op.”
“Assassinated?”
“No. Freak accident. Took a fall while visiting some desert ruins.”
“Sure he did. Just happened to fall off a cliff right around the time Robert was in town.”
“I’m just quoting the story. It says there were multiple witnesses.”
“Sure there were.”
“Stop!”
“Try the second name.”
“I’m already on it. Dragan Jovovic, Novi Sad, in July of 1998.”
“Serbian?”
“And a little too proud of it, apparently. Implicated in Bosnian war crimes but never charged. Joined an ultranationalist political party that was on the rise back around ’97. Anti-EU, anti-Western.”
“Meaning anti-American.”
“Well, it’s from a British newspaper, but yes.”
“Anything happen in July of ’98?”
“Just found a story from that month. Three guesses.”
“He died?”
“Of a sudden illness. Bacterial infection. Happy as a clam one day, dead as a doornail the next. Leaving a vacuum of leadership in his anti-Western political party, which proceeded to disintegrate not long after his death.”
“Still think poor old Muhammad in Amman fell all by his lonesome?”
“What I’m thinking is that I’m no longer all that worried about some ghost creeping out from the slime of the Pond. My money’s back on a connection with Robert.”
It was past time for dinner when they got back, and they agreed that it would be best to go their separate ways for the rest of the evening. Henry dropped Anna off at the bed & breakfast. As he drove up Willow he couldn’t help but glance at the darkened Shoat house, and the image stuck with him as he pulled into the gravel drive of his rental house.
He’d been looking forward to finding Scooter waiting on the doorstep, but there was no sign. Maybe the old mutt also wanted some distance. With neither man nor beast to look over his shoulder, Henry switched on his phone. There were two more texts from Mitch, and the tone was angrier than ever. The second one said, “Last warning: Turn on your damn phone!”
He considered calling back. Then, in a rush of residual guilt still fresh from that morning, he decided to wait at least one more day. Feeling uneasy about it, he climbed onto a kitchen chair to retrieve the exiled bottle of rye and a juice tumbler. He downed two shots in rapid succession, and then nodded off on the couch as darkness fell, only to be awakened seemingly seconds later by the jolt of something slapping hard onto the front porch.
It had sounded like a fat Sunday newspaper, except it was the wrong time of day, and instead of the squeaky wheels of the paperboy’s bicycle he heard the roaring engine of a car, hightailing it onto the highway from the end of Willow.
Henry rose from the couch and looked out the screen door. Scooter lay waiting for him, which lifted his spirits until he saw that the dog was unnaturally still, and his head was matted and misshapen. He opened the door and stepped gingerly around the dog, his heart beating painfully hard as he stooped for a closer look.
Scooter was dead, with a smashed and bloodied skull. Had a car hit him? Henry doubted it. The blow looked more like something that had come from a tire iron, or a baseball bat. He listened for the noise of the departing car, but it had already moved beyond earshot.
“Fuck. You poor old mutt.”
He went back indoors for a towel from the bathroom, which he wrapped around Scooter’s body. Then he carried the dog around the side of the house across the dewy lawn in the dark. The body felt terribly bony and sad. He reached the back of the property, next to a small stand of pines, and laid the bundle on the ground. After retrieving a shovel from the shed where the lawnmower was stored, he dug a grave and buried Scooter. Then, while the crickets and katydids sawed away, he brushed some pine needles over the raw dirt. All the while, he wondered what he should do next. His stubbornness no longer seemed to be serving much of a purpose, except as a salve to his vanity, and he vowed that no one else was going to get hurt on behalf of his pride.
He washed his hands at the kitchen sink beneath the buzzing fluorescent light. Then he switched on his phone and dialed Mitch’s number. The voice that answered was the same as always—flat, businesslike.
“I take it you got my last message.”
“The one that was hand-delivered?”
“Yes. What do you have for me?” No gloating, no emotion at all. In a way, that made it worse. “I said, what do you have for me?”
“Hold on. I’ll get my notes.”
Henry told him about their discovery of the stashed letters, and their findings about Robert and Merle. He offered the four names from the Newsweek piece, half hoping that Mitch would cite one of them and say, “He’s your man,” so that he could at least salvage one positive thing from this call. Instead, Mitch listened in silence until Henry finished the story of Robert’s appearance on the week Anna went off to college. Maybe out of pride, maybe out of caution, he withheld the information from the final letter, with its dire warning that the strands had crossed.
“Go
od stuff. Exactly what we hired you for. See? It’s easy. Just do your job. Anything else?”
Henry numbly described their trip to the National Archives for research on the Pond. He was halfway through his summary of their findings when Mitch stopped him.
“That shit’s ancient history. Is this really the best use of your time?”
“By all indications, Helen Shoat was up to her neck in this right around the time she died.”
“It’s a blind alley. Cease and desist.”
“I’m guessing you know more than you’re saying or you wouldn’t be so sure.”
“What I’m saying is, don’t waste your time or mine.”
“Maybe if you could offer a clearer rationale.”
“For once in your life, Mattick, just do as you’re fucking told.”
“I plan to. But, per your instructions, I’m supposed to keep both clients happy, and the other one wants to pursue this. Hand in glove, right?”
A pregnant pause.
“Then you’d better find some way within the parameters of her assignment to steer her in another direction.”
“The parameters of her assignment? Mitch, you’ve been in Washington too long.”
“End this, Mattick. Right now. Unless, of course, you’d like all of my messages from this point forward to arrive hand-delivered. Understood?”
“Loud and clear.”
They hung up.
Henry waited a few seconds, feeling like he’d learned something important when he’d least expected it. He then dialed another number with a Washington area code, and instead of an answer there was a beep, which Henry responded to by punching in an access code. A male voice answered after the first ring.
“Go ahead.”
“Did you get all of that?”
“Affirmative. Stay on it, both tracks.”
“Will do.”
“And Henry.”
“Yes?”
“Be careful.”
“Too late for that, I’m afraid.”
They disconnected. Henry again retrieved the bottle of rye. He needed another two shots before he could sleep.
45
Paris, 1979
Helen switched on the bedside light, unable to sleep. What she needed was a nightcap, anything to calm her nerves so she could wake up rested for what promised to be a long and eventful tomorrow. It wasn’t yet midnight, so she threw back the sheets and got dressed.
Claire had booked her a spacious room on the third floor of a modest five-story hotel on a one-way street. French doors opened onto a narrow terrace with potted geraniums and a wrought iron railing, with a commanding view of the street below, although at the moment the wooden shutters were closed.
Helen had made a quick reconnaissance right after checking in. At one end of the hundred-yard block was the Canal de l’Ourcq, with a tree-lined roadway running alongside it and a pedestrian bridge that crossed to the other bank. At the other end was the Avenue de Flandre, where busy sidewalks were populated mostly by Parisians, just as Claire had said.
She was about to head out when she remembered the copy of Paris Match, with Claire’s report stapled inside. It sat on a console table, trying to look inconspicuous among a few tourist magazines, but Helen didn’t feel comfortable leaving it there. Figuring it was easier to hide the report than the magazine, she loosened the staples and removed the pages. Then she took down a framed Chagall print that hung above the bed, pried out the back panel, slid the folded pages between the backing and the poster, and hung the frame back on the wall.
Downstairs, the empty street felt a little spooky, although it saved her time by not having to decide whether any bystanders were there to keep an eye on her. She chose her destination by sound, turning in the direction of the noisier Avenue de Flandre, and within a few blocks she found a brasserie on a corner next to an entrance to the Metro. A few hardy customers sat at sidewalk tables in the October chill, but Helen opted for the smoky coziness within. An older man had just stood to leave a table by the door, so she took his place.
The brasserie was nearly empty, which suited her fine. Two tables down, a pair of backpacking young Germans—and, yes, it figured that any tourists in this neighborhood were bound to be backpacking young Germans—bent low over a massive Michelin map. They jabbed forefingers and made pencil marks, as if planning an assault on the Arc de Triomphe. Only her second night in Paris, and Helen was already viewing Germans as uncharitably as the locals. Or maybe she was just tired and on edge.
They, too, soon departed, just as Helen’s whiskey arrived in a cut-glass tumbler, borne aloft on a tray by a bored waiter in a smudged apron. The Germans folded their map but left behind a newspaper, which made Helen realize she hadn’t seen or read a shred of news in the past twenty-four hours. She had thought about buying an International Herald Tribune earlier that evening, but hadn’t been sure if that’s what a Canadian would do. Now she no longer cared.
She stepped over to the empty table and grabbed it before the waiter could clear it away. It was today’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a little conservative for her tastes, but written in a language she could understand. She sipped her whiskey and settled in for a nice, restorative read.
As had been the case for weeks, the big news was out of Iran, where student protesters and the new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, were freshly outraged because the deposed Shah had just landed in the United States. Yet another reason Berlin station wasn’t getting much attention, although she supposed her little escapade must have turned a few heads in Langley by now.
She flipped the page. More foreign news. A bit of domestic politics. Nothing about any CIA personnel going AWOL. Not that she’d expected it. The Agency did its best to keep these kinds of internal breaches quiet. She flipped another page. Some jerk in Bavaria had gotten himself arrested by making a Hitler salute on a subway car.
A story in the corner caught her eye: “Auto Accident Claims Life of SPD Policy Maker.” The victim was Werner Gerntholz, forty-five, “a prominent thinker in Social Democratic circles, known for outspoken views on relations with the United States, especially with regard to nuclear policy.”
The same fellow whose keys had been copied by Kathrin and Anneliese for Kevin Gilley and his young American helper, Kurt Delacroix. She recalled the details: a red key for a garage, and one that fit a BMW. The story said Gerntholz’s BMW had run through a guardrail on a high mountain pass. He was alone, and had apparently fallen asleep. His body showed signs of carbon monoxide poisoning, leading authorities to suspect he’d passed out due to a faulty exhaust system.
Helen dropped the newspaper, took a deep breath, and then gulped half the remaining whiskey. She gazed out the window onto the sidewalks of Paris. Sleep was no longer an option. She quietly paid her bill and left.
In the morning, rather than being rattled, she was surprised to find that the news of Gerntholz’s death had steeled her resolve. She hit the sidewalks with a swagger in her step, attuned to her surroundings. With the better part of a day to kill before her daily contact with Claire at 4 p.m., she decided to spend the next few hours plotting out escape and evasion routes in the blocks near her hotel, figuring that she might as well prepare for the worst.
She carried out her reconnaissance under the guise of shopping, all the while scouting for stores with rear exits, stairways, side doors, and other passages that she might employ to her advantage later. She also mulled the wide variety of quick changes she could make to her appearance with the help of the wig, scarf, sunglasses, and other items that Claire had assembled for her in the tote bag.
Confident that she was up to the task, she then amused herself by looking for the ugliest, tackiest item of tourist kitsch a bird-watching Canadian woman might want to take home. The pickings for such items were fairly slim on the Avenue de Flandre until she hit the jackpot at a small shop
that offered hundreds of replicas of the Eiffel Tower of almost every imaginable size and style. There were gold ones, ceramic ones, plastic ones, and they could be had as key chains, paperweights, refrigerator magnets, clocks, and tree ornaments. Then there were the snow globes. Some with an entire miniature Paris inside. Red, blue, yellow, and gold, from small to large.
Finally she settled on one of the larger snow globes—nearly six inches in diameter, with a gilded Eiffel Tower inside. It had a massive and heavy plastic base on which “Paris” was chiseled in blocky blue letters—to her eye, the single most tasteless item in the store. She carried it gleefully to the register, where the proprietor searched in vain for a price tag and then, sensing her eagerness, quoted the outrageous figure of thirty francs, or around six bucks.
“Done!” she answered in English, although the moment she left the store she knew she would have to take it back to her room rather than lug it around for the rest of the day. What a dreadnought it was! Two pounds, at least. She smiled to herself and hoped she would have a chance to show it to Claire, and then she checked her watch. Just after 1 p.m. Less than three hours before she would find out whether Marina was ready for a rendezvous.
46
Claire sat in her windowless office, wondering how Helen was faring, hunted and probably scared. It was already after 2 p.m. Less than two hours before the daily check-in, which Claire would have to do by telephone unless things changed in a hurry. If she hadn’t heard from Marina by then—which would be impossible unless she could sneak away long enough to check her Sisterhood mailbox—then she’d have to scout out a new hotel for tomorrow.
She rolled a clean sheet of paper into her typewriter and stared at it. Then she unrolled it and surveyed the sorry state of her career as symbolized by her current plot of Agency real estate. Hers was the smallest, bleakest office in a building that offered most of its residents splendid views of the gardens of the Champs-Élysées, the Place de la Concorde, and the splendid Hôtel de Crillon. The view from Claire’s desk was of a blank wall with thumbtack holes left by the previous occupant, a fidgety man named Bewley who’d posted family photos alongside nudie snaps from one of the tawdrier floor shows in Pigalle. He’d rated out so poorly that he now worked for a private security firm in Oslo that specialized in crowd control for touring rock bands. Maybe that was her next destination if things went poorly for Helen. Claire tried to imagine booking limos for Aerosmith in Trondheim and had to suppress a yawn.
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