“Santal’s been on our radar for quite some time now,” Garland White continued. “Originally as a trafficker in ideas, wistful ones for the most part, and for many years now, although our people were never able to pin it on him, we’re pretty sure in weapons.”
“Ever more nasty ones,” George Kenneth said, stirring cream and sugar into a cup of steaming black coffee. “High-end stuff by now, even perhaps of the ultimately catastrophic sort.”
“You won’t be surprised to learn he didn’t mention that,” Ty said.
“I’ll come right to the point,” Garland White said. “Over the years Professor Santal maintained many friendships in Russia. No doubt these were born during his days on the Left, but when circumstances made it desirable to do so, he adjusted to market forces just as they did. The most intense of these friendships was with a Colonel Zhugov, who had responsibility for some of the Soviet Union’s most advanced nuclear weapons. We have picked up chatter suggesting that recently an unspecified number of those may have gone astray and may now be on their way to market.”
“What kind of chatter?” Ty asked.
“Neither reliable nor unreliable,” George Kenneth answered. “It might be a rumor pure and simple. Or it could be a rumor based in fact. We have very little to go on, but what we do have suggests that some sort of deal’s afoot. Buzz among the competition, you might call it—questions without answers, jealousy and curiosity, the usual vain search for an angle in.”
“None of it from Zhugov, I assume.”
“Not from his grave,” George Kenneth replied.
“Forgive me. You hadn’t mentioned that. When did he die?”
“What is today—Friday?” the President asked. “He would have died on Sunday, isn’t that correct, George?”
“Of natural causes?” Ty inquired.
“Ostensibly,” said Garland White. “He was sixty-three years old, retired. It’s said he suffered an acute myocardial infarction, which he may well have done. Equally, he may not. Our Colonel Zhugov, it turns out, was a bit of a hypochondriac. For any number of years now, he’s had all of his medical checkups done in Germany. None, other than simple chronological age, ever turned up any risk factor for heart disease, not elevated cholesterol or triglycerides or blood pressure, nada. Of course, anything’s possible.”
“And he did die.”
“Thirty-four years before the age at which his father did,” George Kenneth clarified. “Thirty-six years before his mother’s age at the time of her demise. He hailed from hearty stock.”
“I don’t mind telling you I’m a bit confused,” Ty said.
“When the Soviet Union fell, chaos, if it did not exactly reign, was more prevalent than many reports would have suggested.”
Ty hesitated. “Are you suggesting there were loose nukes after all?”
“No. I am suggesting that we don’t know, with one hundred percent certainty, that there were not. Very likely we will never know—unless one goes off.”
“If the chatter isn’t baseless, you suspect that Ian Santal may be implicated. And given that he lives on a ship and is very selective about whom he invites aboard, you think I might be your way in. Obviously you have no one inside, and as improbable as it might strike some people, you’ve concluded that I’m your best candidate.”
“Ah, the fog lifts,” George Kenneth exclaimed, not unpleasantly.
Now Ty remembered where and when he had previously encountered Dr. Kenneth. It had been a few years before. They’d been guests in separate segments on Charlie Rose. George Kenneth had been in Washington that day, Ty in New York, promoting his latest film on the eve of its opening weekend. They hadn’t actually met, but Ty recalled that the onetime Harvard professor had been hawking his book, Cooperation and Cooption. Somehow the dryly academic title had stuck in Ty’s mind, and he had judged it a distant long shot for the bestseller lists. Yet, to his astonishment, it had grown, gradually by word of mouth, into a cult favorite. A banner on the cover of the last edition Ty had seen in an airport bookshop had boasted, “Over One Million Copies in Print.”
Garland White gave his aide a taming glance, then turned back to Ty. “Will you do it?” he asked.
“It would be difficult, sir.”
“Is that because of your other commitments?”
“It’s because there aren’t any, actually,” Ty replied. “A little more than forty-eight hours ago, as you know, I was aboard Surpass. I was asked there because my friend Greg Logan had been invited by Sidney Thrall, who heads the studio that released Something to Look Forward To. Sid knows everyone everywhere. I suppose it’s his business to. Anyway, the party had nothing to do with any movie—or with the festival, officially. It’s just that there were a lot of us in town, and apparently Santal thought we’d be a good audience for his goddaughter’s jewelry. She’s a designer.”
“Yes,” George Kenneth said, “we know.”
“Then you also know that she is ravishing and saucy as hell and, well . . . I would have taken a real interest if her boyfriend hadn’t turned up.”
“That would be Philip Frost?” George Kenneth pressed.
“It would,” Ty said.
“Frost is a good man,” Kenneth continued.
“What makes you say that?”
“I was at MIT with him. Actually, I was a few years ahead. I didn’t know him all that well, but I always admired the way he comported himself, and it was obvious he didn’t miss much.”
“Philip Frost, whom I’ve never met,” said Garland White, “would seem to be one of us. He’s been fully vetted and worked as a diplomat, on our side. It was Mr. Frost, in fact, who led the team that decertified the last installation that was under Zhugov’s command.”
“And apart from that being a very convenient coincidence?”
“He is dead certain there was nothing out of order there, which was in the Strait of Kerch, near the Sea of Azov, between Ukraine and Turkey.”
“But?” Ty continued.
“Naturally, he can’t vouch for sites where he was not present.”
“And there are a number of those?”
“By definition.”
“You’ll forgive me,” Ty asked, “but if Philip Frost is as unimpeachable as you suggest and if Santal is as dubious, why are the two in bed together? And if they aren’t, why is he not your best route in?”
“The answer to your question is complicated,” George Kenneth said.
“Perhaps it needn’t be,” Ty said.
“Do I detect jealousy?”
“Isabella Cavill is a lovely woman, if that’s what you’re referring to, but right now it couldn’t be clearer that she’s Philip Frost’s lovely woman. The lady’s made her mind up. Call it jealousy if you insist, but I’d have to put aside my instinct and experience to accept your positive views of Mr. Frost. There was a lot of innuendo circulating.”
“What kind of innuendo?” the President inquired.
“Personal.”
“How would you rate the source?”
Ty laughed, conjuring the Russian whores whose conversation he had overheard. “Impeccable,” he replied, “although unlikely to be credited by any agency.”
“I see,” said Garland White.
Returning to his previous line of argument, George Kenneth said, “Philip Frost went to work for Santal after college, when Santal was running a financial house in London. That operation was scrutinized by everyone and his cousin and at the end of the day was found to be in perfect order. It certainly was when Frost left. After a few years there, he’d come to feel he lacked a sense of purpose, or that’s the word. He’d made some dough, enough to free him, and decided he was better suited to diplomacy. He applied, was accepted . . .”
“But by then he’d also met Isabella?” Ty prodded.
�
��I suppose he must have,” Kenneth said.
“And you believe that Isabella is the tie that binds?”
“We can only operate on that assumption.”
“But you haven’t quite convinced yourselves, have you? Or why would I be here?”
“If we’re wrong about Mr. Frost,” the President said, “and we’d put all our eggs in that basket . . .”
“I’ll tell you what the problem is,” Ty said. “I made a huge point of the fact that I couldn’t wait to get home and take a break at last because I’d been working flat out for a couple of years. I told them about my house and all the work it needs and the plans I have for it and how much effort and how many people all that will require. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I probably did so as much to convince myself as them. I liked Isabella, right away. I admit that. And I thought she’d come on to me. Then, when Philip appeared and she kissed him the way she did, I suddenly realized that she hadn’t. She was just another flirt playing her game from the moment she picked me up in that harbor. Hell, I wasn’t a movie star anymore, just a teenager who’d had his feelings hurt. So I decided it would be better to spurn the Riviera than have it spurn me. That’s the truth, and I’m afraid it means there’s no way I could go back there anytime soon. I’d have no credibility. They’d smell a rat.”
“Suppose your house were to burn down,” George Kenneth said.
“That’s not funny,” Ty snapped.
“Nor did I mean it to be. Nor do I suggest a fire. I meant it only hypothetically, as a possible cover story.”
“We’re straying from the point,” the President said. “Let’s come back to it. Why don’t you let us worry about surmounting such obstacles? If there are missing weapons and there is a connection between them and Ian Santal, we need to know what that is and soon. And no one but you is in a position to help us do so. That’s the essential thing to keep in mind.”
“Me? I’m an actor.”
“Don’t be disingenuous,” Kenneth said. “You’re much more than an actor, and you know it.”
“When you were a mere second lieutenant in the army and attached to Task Force 508,” the President asked, “what were you then? You were a commando in an oiled-cotton sweater who possessed every martial-arts skill known to man.”
“Not every,” Ty said.
“You spoke Mandarin and Arabic and Spanish with a fluency that made you indistinguishable from any native.”
“My father’s doing,” Ty said. “When I was seven and a half, we went to live in Venezuela. Then, from the time I was ten until I was almost thirteen, we lived in Kuwait and for a short time in Saudi Arabia. My father’s company had contracts with oil companies in those days. He designed and managed their security systems.”
“Be that as it may, you were assigned to a team composed of Army Delta Force, Marine Special Ops, Navy SEALs, and British SBS, a team so secret it didn’t have a name, only a number that would disappear the moment it was disbanded. And what was your role? Long before you found your way to Hollywood, it was to play a part, wasn’t it? On that initial foray into Central America, you were not an American officer but a Canadian entrepreneur with a grievance sufficient to justify murder. Obviously you played it to the hilt and were scary enough that the narcotraficante, who was a Chinese Trinidadian, if I have my facts right, and spoke or would speak only Mandarin, talked at once, and so the contraband weapons, which were much less dangerous in that circumstance, were intercepted.”
Ty remained silent as the President spoke. On the screen of his imagination he saw the deck of the ship they had boarded, the faces of men he had killed.
“And in the South China Sea,” Garland White continued.
“Never mind,” Ty said. “You’ve made your point.”
“You’re the man on the ground, Ty, the person we all agree we’ve been lacking. You’re not what we call an ‘invisible’ exactly. Rather, you’re invisible precisely because you are so damned visible. You’ve a reason to be anywhere, everywhere.”
Ty could no longer contain his own laughter.
“What’s so funny?” George Kenneth asked.
Ty inhaled a deep breath. “In my line of work, you get used to being pitched,” he said, “but not by the President of the United States.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Garland White replied. “Do you know what your last commanding officer wrote about you? He said Hunter will do ‘fifty percent more to make a thing five percent better.’ That’s it in a nutshell. You are a proven performer. And you’re right: We have nowhere else to turn. If we’re wrong, then it was all in a good cause. But if our suspicions prove not to be unfounded and the wild animals should get free of the zoo, if something does happen, what then, Ty? We would have no notion of what or where or when or who was behind it. Then again, at T plus one second will anyone be counting?”
“Granted, there’s always the danger you’ll turn out to be the cat we can’t walk back,” George Kenneth added after a few seconds, letting his eyes drift upward as though he’d discovered his halo was askew, “but what other option do we have?”
Ty contained his smile. The metaphor was spook language for an action that, once committed to, could pose consequences that were not easily undone. Ty had first heard the phrase from his father’s lips so long ago he couldn’t recall the circumstances.
“You’ll have to keep your eyes open,” the President said.
“When I was a kid, my father and I used to write detective stories,” Ty told him. “Well, he wrote them, of course, but we’d sit side by side at the table in our club basement and every few sentences he’d ask if I had any ideas, which usually I did. Sometimes, later on, long before I ever went into the army, much less acting, we’d talk about those days. They were my childhood. I loved them. But by then I knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to interest me in his business. ‘You don’t know it yet,’ he’d say, as if the eventual discovery would be one I’d cherish, ‘but you were born to do this kind of work.’ I suppose that after my accident and so many lucky breaks I thought I’d finally escaped this sort of thing. I was wrong, wasn’t I?”
President White nodded. “We can’t escape the times we live in,” he said. “None of us can.” Then he began to stand, and Ty stood, too, and they shook hands.
Chapter Ten
The old house, in which he had grown up and in which his father, without Ty’s realizing what he was doing, had taught him the rudiments of tradecraft, looked better than ever. Far back on a wooded esplanade high above the Potomac, it had been recently repainted. A new shake roof had been put on the year before and new windows, where needed, installed the previous autumn. There was a new kitchen with wide pine floors, black granite countertops, and a Sub-Zero refrigerator. But they had not cost the house any of its mid-twentieth-century character. His mother had seen to that. To Dorothy it was not simply a house, but a place in which her dreams had finally come true, then vanished. It was the repository of the emotional relics of her life: her son’s childhood and rehabilitation, her husband’s love and death. Ty could never approach it without experiencing both joy and melancholy, never drive—much less walk—toward the eastern end of Rialto Way without seeing his father, a large, vital man unknowingly in the final moments of his life. There had been thunderstorms that August, lightning riving the sky. A fierce, slanting rain had descended with more insistent pressure than Ty had ever felt in any downpour before or since. An old oak no one had thought frail had been struck, its roots upended in a front yard several houses down the block. The top of the tree had smashed into the hood of a silver-blue Toyota Cressida. On the sidewalk, limbs of the same tree pinioned a small girl to the ground. She lay hurt yet still conscious when help had arrived. Will Hunter had fetched his gas-powered McCulloch chain saw, confident that he could manage to extricate her. “Thank God it wasn’t the trunk
that fell on you,” he’d told her. “You’re going to be just fine—just fine—and in hardly any time. Hold on, now, dear.” He had been careful, as he always was, severing the limb far away from the girl. His work done, he’d handed the tool to his son, taken a step forward, then seemed to jump slightly before going quiet and falling backward. He had not seen the downed power line.
At seventeen Ty could grasp neither the magnitude nor the permanence of what had happened. He tried in vain to resuscitate Will, thrusting all his weight onto his father’s chest, heaving, crying out as he did. Again and again he exhaled his own breath into his dad’s unresponsive lungs, as if the hinge of fate could somehow be manipulated back. It would be more than six months before the finality of that afternoon became real to him, displacing dreams in which Will Hunter still spoke and moved as he had for all of Ty’s life.
“Let’s go over the whole thing one more time,” Ty’s mother told him as they ate lunch at her kitchen table. The window beside it looked out on sloping woodland that from spring through fall could pass for country. Dorothy had fixed him his favorite, Maryland crab cakes, which she bound with a paste of egg whites and panko. “The girls will ask me about it, you know?”
“The girls?” Ty inquired. “Which girls are those?”
“At the hairdresser’s.”
“Oh.”
“And at bridge.”
“Of course.”
“At the gym, in my aerobics group, and at yoga. They always ask about you. Sometimes they seem to know more about what you’re doing and . . . well, especially who you’re dating than I do.”
“Or than I do, probably,” Ty said. “You have a full life, don’t you, Mom?”
“I fill it,” Dorothy Hunter said, then paused.
“Could you fit in a week in California? Actually, as long as you like.”
“When you have something to show me,” Dorothy said, “sure.”
Ty looked at her with complete understanding. What she was doing was giving him time, breathing space, as she always had, in childhood when he’d nearly broken under the weight of his father’s expectations and his schools’ curricula and even more so since his accident. “A man on the move needs a place where he can stop,” Dorothy said, “and just be who he is for a little while.”
Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) Page 11
