Always looking backward, thought Natalia. “We’ve got a name and a date. It shouldn’t be too difficult to locate, if anything exists. She could even still be alive!”
“All we need to understand it all is someone living, not dead,” agreed Lestov.
“I’m station chief!” yelled Saul Freeman.
“And I’m the person you were happy to assign to this because you were too fucking frightened of all the political implications to get involved yourself!” Miriam shouted back. She was red-faced, sweating, needing to support herself as she leaned across his desk to confront him, which was what she’d been waiting to do when he’d entered the office that day. Her overnight cable to Washington and its response lay between them.
“I don’t remember you putting up much of a fight.”
“I’m putting one up now. It’s totally political, isn’t it?” She put a flat hand close to her chin. “Right up to here? And I’m the fall guy if anything goes wrong—so fucking anxious to get there, fight for everything, that I didn’t see the curve. You bastard!”
Freeman picked up the cables. Miriam’s read, Demand immediate OSS identification of American victim, which understand British already have. Further understand London about to go public.
Freeman said, “You should have cleared this with me.”
“If I’d known what the fuck was going on, I would have. And that’s what I’m going to tell each and every inquiry when I get back to Washington, as ordered.”
Freeman made a warding off movement toward Miriam. “Ignoring all the rules, first cabling, then calling Kenton Peters direct at the State Department instead of going through headquarters, was unforgivable! You know that! What else did you expect?”
“What I expected—but sure as hell didn’t get—was to be properly treated as a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And told the true reason for monitoring an investigation by Britain and Russia which I was not intended in any way to contribute to. And obstructed as much as possible so that I couldn’t.”
“What did Peters tell you?” sighed Freeman.
“That I didn’t have to bother. That Russia would never find out and if they did, would admit nothing. And that whatever Charlie Muffin and his department came up with would stay as buried as it had been for the last fifty years and that they were fall guys, too. And then he realized what he’d said—including me as a fall guy—and said he hadn’t meant it the way it had sounded and that I was to forget that, too.”
Freeman indicated Miriam’s just-replaced telephone. “And then you called him a son-of-a-bitch and to kiss your ass.”
“And enjoyed doing it: he qualifies.”
“He might. It was still the worst career move you ever made.”
“You going to tell me what it’s really about—not some shit about saving the current president?”
“I don’t know! Peters said it would embarrass the president now, although it was a long time ago. That it was all I needed to know—that anyone needed to know.”
“You feel good about this, about screwing me like this?”
Freeman lifted and let drop Miriam’s cable. “You sent it. I wouldn’t have let you.”
“Conscience clear, right?”
“Conscience clear. Say hello to Washington for me.”
“You can kiss my ass, too!”
“I did, remember?”
“All I remember is that you were a lousy fuck. At the time it was just a physical judgment. Not now.” The bastard would shit himself if he knew what she had, but she wanted a bigger reaction than the one she’d get from Saul Freeman.
Directly after the war and the control division of Berlin between the four Allied powers, America created the most comprehensive archive of the taking of the city and its postwar history right up to the bringing down of the Wall in 1991. It was called simply the Document Center and after 1991 America made a gift of it to Germany. There were more than a million photographs included in the material.
The hair of the archivist who greeted Charlie appeared to have receded in equal proportion to his beard, as if it had simply slipped from the top to the bottom of his face. His English was faultless but sibilant. He said, “We’ve had researchers come for a month work for more than a year, there’s so much here.”
“I’ve got quite a narrow time frame,” said Charlie. “And a positive direction.”
“That should certainly help,” agreed the man.
“I hope it will,” said Charlie. It would be good not having to work in the rain, although not for more than a year.
“We understand each other?” demanded Kenton Peters, who had come personally to Pennsylvania Avenue rather than have the FBI director come to him at Foggy Bottom, which was unprecedented.
“Yes sir,” said the director.
“It’s totally unforgivable.”
“I agree.”
“And you understand about the investigation?”
“Yes.”
“I want this to be the last I hear about it from this Bureau.”
“It will be,” assured the other man.
26
There was still too much fury-fueled adrenaline for Miriam Bell to feel tired, although she would have liked to shower, but the car was waiting at Dulles, as she’d been told it would be, so the strip-down in the aircraft toilet would have to do. She hadn’t slept at all during the flight, using the time, and was glad. She was thinking very differently now, much surer of herself, than she had been during the initial confrontation with Saul Freeman. Wished, indeed, she could turn the clock back for a rerun: she’d thought of a lot of better answers after it was too late. To rebuff Saul-the-Shithead, that was: there was still the confrontation to which she was going, where the in-flight rehearsal—and what she’d brought with her from Moscow—could hopefully be put to better and more effective use. At least she’d been thinking more clearly—leaving things as they should have been left—when she’d spoken to Lestov.
Washington seemed oddly colder than Moscow, although there was a pale sun, but there was a lot more color from the trees on the Parkway and once they crossed the Potomac by the Key Bridge everything appeared much cleaner and people on the sidewalk seemed to move with much more purpose. When she said so to the driver, he remarked that Moscow must be a god-awful place to live. Miriam said it had its moments.
There was an escort waiting for her at the reception desk of the FBI headquarters, which was completely unnecessary because she probably knew the building as well as he did, but she guessed it was part of the disapproval she was supposed to be aware of from the beginning. Which she was, but she was not intimidated by it. There was, in fact, still a lot of anger, but well controlled now. She was ready and believed herself prepared to fight back.
Nathaniel Brindsley, the Bureau deputy director in charge of overseas personnel, was a balding fat man whose cheeks puffed when he breathed because of emphysema. He’d transferred to the Bureau after ten years with the CIA, which permanently tagged him an outsider despite his working twice that long at Pennsylvania Avenue. Considering his official title and position, it was also considered unusual that Brindsley had never served outside Washington, not even in a local FBI office within America. Brindsley so snugly fit his chair that Miriam thought the man would have brought it up with him, like a permanent appendage, if he’d politely risen at her entry. But he didn’t. Instead, as she sat in the chair he indicated with an impatient head jerk, he said, “As foul-ups go, you’re scoring ten. And rising.”
“You—and whoever’s pulling the strings—are way ahead. With ten as crisis meltdown, you’re at twenty.” With some irony Miriam estimated she’d been roughly over Yakutsk, crossing Siberia, before she’d properly acknowledged she was flying into a put-up-or-shut-up survival situation, with no second chance. And decided to put up.
“You’re forgetting our respective positions and authority here!”
Committed now, Miriam determined, “Question for question. You’ve forgotte
n how you were staking me out in the sun: leaving me to sweat with a totally inadequate briefing!”
“You were briefed to the extent you needed to be.”
“Bullshit, Nat! Which you know it is! We got a long-ago secret to keep that way, I need to know what it is. Need to know what I have to hide, if one of the others—too many of the others—come up with it. You sent me blindfolded and naked into the ring, with a target on my fanny. Which makes you a bastard.”
“You swear at me, it’s insubornation. I swear at you, it’s sexual harassment.”
“You try and drop me because I offended some sphincter-stricken cocksucker who considered I was a disposal item, then you—and he—are looking at a lot more than a complaint of sexual harassment.” Hardly any of this was part of the rehearsed script. She might not have anything more to lose, but this wasn’t put up. It was personal put down, a suicide jump.
Brindsley was initially speechless. When he did speak, he said, “You have any idea just how far out of line you are?”
“You tell me—tell me honestly for the first time.”
“You’ve broken every protocol in the book. And then some. Kenton Peters is the State Department; doesn’t matter who the secretary is or who’s in the White House. And you told him to kiss your ass. Used those very words!”
“And you know what he told me! He told me I was a fall guy. Used those very words!”
The sigh puffed Brindsley’s cheeks more fully than usual. “He doesn’t remember saying that.”
“He knows official telephone conversations to and from the Moscow office are recorded, as a matter of routine?”
The only sound in the room for several moments was the rasping of the deputy director’s heavy breathing.
“I’m going to forget you said that—along with its implications. And remind you whose property any tape is, recorded on FBI material on FBI premises.”
Miriam took the tiny cassette from her handbag and tossed it onto the man’s desk. “Just thought you’d like to hear the conversation for yourself.”
The speed with which the man grabbed the recording was surprising for someone of his size, his hand snatching out to enclose it like a lizard’s tongue plucking an insect in midflight. “This the only copy?”
“With two messages. One that’s on it, one that isn’t.”
“I don’t think I want to hear the second.”
“You do,” insisted Miriam. “And so does Peters and anyone else who thinks they’ve got the lid on whatever it is that has to be locked away forever. There’s too many people—too many chances for the smallest fuckup”—she nodded in the direction of the desk drawer into which Brindsley was putting the tape—“like an ill-considered remark being recorded—for anyone to believe they can control things from a distance of eight or ten thousand miles. This way, the way Peters wants to work and how you’ve been telling me to work, there’s going to be something that someone doesn’t know they’re saying or doing and all the demons are going to come out of Pandora’s box and land right in your laps!”
“Peters is sure he’s emptied the box.”
“How can he be?” demanded Miriam, careless of the exasperation.
“It’s his job to be.”
“You going to tell me what it’s really all about?”
“I don’t know!” protested the man. “That’s how tight it’s being kept. I pass everything you send to the director, the director liaises with Peters, Peters tells the director how to respond, I tell you. And I don’t like it any more than you do, but I’m five years from pension, so I don’t tell Peters to kiss my ass.”
“He want me fired?”
“Yes.”
Miriam felt the stir of apprehension, a hollowness. “You going to?”
“You got a good argument against it?”
“Peters sure he’s got the British under control?”
“Totally. Seems they’ve got as much to hide as we have.”
“But he can’t have the Russians …” She extended a cupped hand, closing her fingers. “But I have. Colonel Vadim Leonidovich Lestov, right here in the palm of my hand. You can’t afford to put anyone else on the case, not at this stage. It would be even greater madness than the way it’s being run at the moment.”
Brindsley’s smile was of resignation. “That’s what I told the director, even without knowing about Lestov.”
“What did he say?”
“That we didn’t have a choice but that your future with the Bureau, after this, hangs on the thinnest thread you ever saw. And that you had to be brought all the way from Moscow to be told that in person, so you’d believe it. So tell me you believe it.”
“I believe it.” She was going to survive!
“And don’t you ever again foul-mouth me like you have today.”
“I’m sorry. And I won’t.” It wasn’t Nathaniel Brindsley who was the cocksucker; it was Kenton Peters.
“Another thing you won’t ever do again is communicate outside this Bureau to anyone about anything.”
“I won’t,” promised Miriam. “But Nat, I need more than I’m getting, for all the reasons we’re talking about. It is OSS and their art-looting investigation unit, isn’t it?”
“That seemed to ring the alarm bell,” agreed Brindsley. “And because the OSS became the CIA after the war, that’s where the records are. Or were. And why Peters is sure everything’s either gone or locked away forever.”
“Who was Henry Packer?”
“Agency,” said Brindsley. “And was is the word. He’s out. Any idea how he was blown?”
Miriam shook her head. “None.”
“Could it have been the Brit, Muffin?”
“I don’t see how. As far as I was aware, Packer was Peters’s bodyguard. What was he really supposed to do?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Miriam felt a sudden coldness. “You’re kidding!”
“I didn’t say anything. Don’t know anything.”
“It’s got to be a hell of a thing they want to stay covered up.”
“You still need me to tell you that?”
“Does Peters know who the guy is in the Yakutsk grave?”
“I guess so. I don’t.”
“And what he was doing in Yakutsk?”
Brindsley shrugged. “I don’t know!”
Miriam extended her hands again, a gesture of helplessness this time. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Exactly what you have been doing. Passing back everything. Giving away nothing.”
“Monitoring, not investigating? I could have been told that in the beginning.”
“Now you have been. What about the Englishman?”
“Maybe you should tell Peters he was withdrawn to London the day before me. Left without telling me …” She made a vague gesture again toward the drawer containing the tape cassette. “I don’t understand how Peters’s remark about the British being fall guys squares with your telling me they’ve got as much to hide as us and are cooperating.”
“Neither do I,” admitted the man, miserably. “Like I said, I don’t enjoy working like this any more than you do.”
She was safe, Miriam abruptly realized. She might have gotten the thin-thread lecture, but after today she couldn’t be blamed for the failure of an investigation that had been intended to fail from the very beginning. As the awareness settled, she said, “How’s this going to be marked on my file?”
“I’m not sure that it is going to be marked,” said the department chief. He hesitated. “Is there another copy of the tape?”
“No,” lied Miriam. Altogether, she decided, everything had turned out very satisfactorily indeed. It would still be nice to have Peters kiss her ass; something, in fact, to look forward to with the tape she’d copied. It would be good to have more. To get which she needed to go on poking around, despite what she had been officially ordered to do. Do a Charlie Muffin, in fact. There was no way she could try to access the old OSS files without
the Bureau finding out, but there were the Nazi prisoners at Yakutsk and New York was only an hour away from Washington on the shuttle.
Before her transfer to the overseas division, Miriam Bell had been attached to the FBI’s New York office and had twice found the records of the World Jewish Congress on Madison Avenue a mine of information about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust during war crime inquiries.
She was directed to the desk of a man whose nameplate said E. Ray Lewis. He was a small, balding, bearded man whose vaguely distracted ambience of an academic changed at once to obvious daydreams at her approach. Miriam was glad she’d worn the sweater that accentuated her cleavage. He promised to do whatever he could to help her when she showed him her Bureau shield and Miriam knew how he would have liked her to help him.
His fantasies went abruptly the moment she produced her list. He said, “I know without checking who most of them are. The others would be the same. You know what happened to them!”
“I think so. Can you tell me what they did?”
“Immediately,” said Lewis. And he did.
The afternoon sessions had become routine, an examination and often reexamination of everything from the previous twenty-four hours unless there was something Lestov considered more urgent, which he did the recall of Miriam Bell so soon after Charlie Muffin’s departure.
“You think there’s a connection?” demanded Natalia, who knew well enough from Charlie’s Berlin calls there wasn’t. Would Charlie have come up with anything by the time they next spoke?
“It’s too much of a coincidence,” insisted Lestov.
“What did she say?”
“That she’d been summoned to a reevaluation conference in Washington.”
“How good has her cooperation been, until now?”
“She wants more than she gives. I’d guess we’re holding back in equal measure.”
“What do you think about this?”
“The most obvious is that they’ve identified their victim. Maybe even know why he was there,” suggested the man.
Dead Men Living Page 27
