CHAPTER SEVEN
The intruders came just before dusk on the Fourth of July, driving through the tiny town of Princess Falls with its one main street decked out for the holiday in bunting and banners, the street alive and the sparklers and pinwheels already blazing bravely. They drove the length of the street, in and out of town in minutes, the black Camaro cruising slowly and the two men in the front seat slouched and staring straight ahead. Once out of town, they took the road that would lead them out to the Emerson house, but less than a mile down that road the driver checked a penciled map that was taped to the dashboard, slowed for a turn, and made it onto a rutted stretch of dirt track that bordered the edge of a field of corn. The track ran straight and true for more than a mile before it began to curve to the west in a broad arc that would pass by the rear of the Emerson property. The car bounced and bucked on the ugly road, and the driver cursed as he wrestled the wheel.
"How much more to go?" asked the second intruder, the one in the passenger seat.
"We should be close."
The driver checked the map again, then peered down the road in the waning light. Off to the right the land sloped up to a gentle ridge, and just above the ridge line he could see the dormer windows and the white-painted shingles of the second story of the Emerson house. He cut the engine and let the car roll up on a grassy verge and under the spread of a set of trees. He sat back and lit a cigarette.
"Close enough," he said. "Now we wait."
"It's almost eight," the other pointed out.
"I want it dark, real dark."
The driver's name was Georgie Silk, a name not his own but one he had taken because he felt that it suited his image. He thought of himself as being smooth as silk, a top-line operator adept in a wide range of firearms and sharp instruments, who did his work with a minimum of fuss and a maximum of efficiency. In another age he would have chosen to be known as Silky or Slick, but in a time when men of his occupation could shuffle and deal identity cards like a river- boat gambler flashing aces, he preferred the more formal, if temporary, surname of Silk. He was comfortable with the name. It suited his style of life, his style of work, and anybody who killed for a living knew it well.
In fact, Georgie Silk knew that he was kidding himself and had been for some time. He simply wasn't all that good. Back in the days, just a few years before, when the Agency had operated a truly professional and sophisticated extraction squad, Georgie had been very definitely second string, a junior-varsity killer used only for routine assignments, and then only when top men were unavailable. The Freedom of Information Act had changed all that. In the general disintegration of the extraction squad that followed the public disclosures of Agency activities, the best men moved out and men like Georgie moved up. Now he drew the bonus-money hits that made the work so much sweeter. The promotion changed only his pay scale, not his ability. He was still unquestionably second rate, a capable but unimaginative operator.
"We do this one strictly by the numbers," he said as they waited. "Nothing fancy. First we push in, and then we immobilize them."
"Immobilize?" said Pico.
Georgie shook his head. "Tie them up, schmuck. Then we go through the house and boost a few top pieces. Some jewelry, maybe a painting, something like that. Anything to make it look good. Then we whack 'em."
"Why don't we whack 'em first? Makes it easier."
Georgie looked at him pityingly. "Because you don't do it that way. It isn't professional."
"I don't get it. You whack 'em first, or you whack 'em later, what's the difference?"
"You ever work a job like this before?" Georgie's voice was generous, but patronizing. "It's supposed to look like a regular break-in, a couple of guys out boosting a house.
But the people are home and they get whacked. Sort of accidental, almost. So you gotta do it like it was real. Couple of guys break into a place and the people are home, what do they do? Do they whack 'em out right away? Shit, no. They tie 'em up while they figure out what to do. I mean, they're no hit men, they're a couple of boosters. So they go through the house and they take what they want, and then they figure, son of a bitch, we gotta waste these people because they seen us and everything. That's when they whack 'em, you see? Not before. And we do it the same way. You gotta do it like it was real. That's the right way, the professional way, understand?"
"Yeah, yeah." Pico, who had been listening carefully, nodded his understanding. He was new to the work, eager to learn, and he considered himself lucky to be working a job with Georgie Silk. Georgie was top line, the real goods, the straight jack, and he knew he could learn from him. Pico, unfortunately, was too young ever to have worked with a truly top-line operator. A city dweller who has never eaten a farm-fresh egg thinks that the cold-storage product that he buys at the supermarket is the real thing. Pico didn't know much about eggs, and he knew less about first-class work.
"Professional," he said admiringly. "Yeah, I get what you mean. Very professional."
"We give it ten more minutes and then we move," said Georgie. Having delivered his lecture, he sat back contented.
He would have been less contented and pleased with himself if he had known that the black Camaro had been under surveillance ever since leaving Princess Falls. One of Sasha Ignatiev's watchers had checked out the car on the edge of town; a second, posted near the cornfield turn, had reported it there; and a third, in the fields to the rear of the Emerson property, had it under observation now. All three watchers reported the presence of the car to Sasha, who was in position at the front of the house. He spoke softly into the radio link connecting the watchers.
"Nikolai, what do you think of them?"
Nikolai, the embassy man posted behind the house, answered slowly, "It could be nothing. Maybe neighbors."
"Possibly, but it's an odd place to park. Keep me informed."
"What do I do if they start for the house?"
"Notify me."
"I don't stop them?"
Sasha cursed softly under his breath. This was the worst part of using embassy people. They were generally clumsy and unused to fieldwork, but they had to be treated with deference. Keeping a mild tone, he said, "Sweetie pie, you're thinking again. Please don't. If those people make a move, you just call me up on the dingaling and then follow discreetly."
"Discreetly?"
"On tiptoe, darling. Like a little elf."
He clicked off and reached into the glove compartment for a bottle of aspirin. The sharp edge of a headache cut him just above his left ear. The pain came as an old, unwelcome friend. It was the kind of headache he had lived with, on and off, for years, and he was not surprised by its onset. The old friend often came to visit at times like these. He swallowed two aspirins dry and kept his eyes on the front of the house. His car was parked in a deserted lane concealed from the road by a high hedge grown wild and thorny. He could see the front of the house through a gap in the hedge, the Georgian facade gleaming whitely in the fading sunset.
That house would go up like a torch, he thought. It would burn like a dream.
In his mind's eye he saw the flicker of orange in a lower window, the ball of oily smoke as the flames burst free and climbed the walls in jagged streaks to the roof, the walls split open now i n gaping wounds of cherry red as the inferno roared inside and raced from room to room destroying, blasting, burning; and then he was out of the car and into the house beating his way through the smoke and flames toward the sound of his father's voice calling for help; seeking, finding, saving, holding him safely and leading him out of the fiery hell, gasping for air as they reached the lawn and pitched forward to lie on the grass all covered with sweat and soot and gratitude.
He shook his head sharply and reached again for the aspirin. He took two more tablets, this time swallowing them with difficulty, and resumed his watch on the front of the house.
Inside the house the three members of the Emerson family occupied the second sitting room overlooking the back lawn. Emerson pa
ced nervously, Rusty sat tense and coiled in an easy chair, and Ginger reclined on a wicker couch, listening. Eddie had been asked to twiddle his thumbs elsewhere for an hour or two.
"They're going to give me a hard time about you, sweetie," Ginger had told him. "I can smell it a mile away."
"What's the big deal?" Eddie asked. "You're grown up, aren't you?"
"You know it, and I know it, but they've still got to be convinced. I'm their only daughter. You're the big bad wolf from the big city."
"Give me a deck of cards so I can play solitaire." Eddie sighed. "If you can survive it, I suppose I can."
But Ginger had been wrong. They hadn't asked her questions and they hadn't lectured her. Her father had done all the talking. He had told her that for the past thirty-five years - and of course that included all of her life - he had been a serving officer in the KGB and, before that, its predecessor, the NKVD. He had not been born in Point Balboa, California, but in a suburb of Moscow in the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.
"I know it's not a joke," Ginger said quietly when James Emerson had finished his confession. "No one could make up such a story as a joke . . . least of all you, Daddy. But - it's - it is a little hard for me to swallow all in one gulp ..."
"I understand," her father said.
Ginger turned to her mother. "Did you know?"
"Yes," Rusty said.
"Always?"
"Not too long after we were married, he told me. It wasn't easy. I learned to live with it."
"Well. Well, well, well." Ginger began to chuckle, then laugh, and finally there were tears that blurred her eyes even through the laughter. "Sorry," she managed. "It's
just a little hard for me to swallow . . . oh, I said that, didn't I? It's just . . . well, it isn't every day a girl finds out she's half Russian. And that her father's a Russian spy." She hugged herself, as though she were cold.
"No." Emerson said. "I'm not a Soviet spy - that's what I've been trying to tell you. I'm meant to be one, I was trained to be one, and I've just been ordered to act as one - to defect to the Soviet Union as part of a massive propaganda coup. But I'm not going to do it, Ginger. That's the point. And I've never in my entire life, since I came to this country at the age of nineteen, acted against the interest of the United States. I've never been contacted before this by the NKVD or the KGB or any Soviet citizen or Soviet agent. Do you understand? I was living a lie, but it became the truth. I'm an American, Ginger. My loyalty is here. I'm not going back there. And," he finished, his voice trembling a bit now, too, "I need your help and your loyalty to do what I have to do - for my own sake, for your mother's sake, for your sake, and for the sake of this country."
"Wow," Ginger said.
Rusty tapped her fingers impatiently. "Is that all you can say?"
Emerson said softly, "Take it easy. Rusty. Maybe wow says it all."
"I don't think so," Rusty shot back. "It's not exactly a bedtime story you've told her, and we need her help. We certainly need something a little more explicit than wow." She turned on Ginger. "Would you mind?"
Ginger's eyes met Rusty's and held them. In a quiet, precise voice, she said, "Mother, I'd be infinitely grateful if you wouldn't adopt that tone of voice with me, as if I'd spilled ink on the carpet and you wanted to know if I were really contrite. You two have just dropped an absolute shit storm into my life, and I'm trying with great difficulty to keep from screaming, crying, and climbing up the wall. Snapping at me doesn't improve the situation." She turned to her father. "I can tell you one thing. Daddy. For better or for worse, this makes you the most fascinating man I know. You now lead the parade."
Emerson smiled thinly. "I don't care whether you find me fascinating or not. I care that you believe what I've told you and that you don't turn your back on me."
"You're my father," Ginger said. "I love you no matter what you've done. And I respect what you've told me about what you intend to do." Her voice shook again. "I'd bust out crying now if I said any more, and I don't want to do that. Just tell me this-what happens now?"
"Edwin Swan is going to make arrangements for your mother and me to drop out of sight. For a long, long while."
"And me?"
"I don't know yet. We certainly won't be in contact for a time. Edwin will arrange all that. Whatever happens, you can't breathe a word of what I've told you. Not to anybody."
"I understand."
"We'll talk again," he said. "Meanwhile, you'd better go rescue Eddie. Assure him that we haven't bitten your head off because you brought him down here for my birthday. Under the circumstances, I'd rather he wasn't here . . . but what's done is done. We'll make the best of it."
They watched her go out through the screen doors, across the veranda, and down the successive levels of the back lawn toward the stand of trees near the creek where Eddie had parked the Overlander camper. The last rays of the late-afternoon sun slanted through the trees and marked the grass with golden ovals, and from somewhere to the west the recurring crackle of exploding fireworks built and diminished like the roar of surf on the shore.
"Odd," said Emerson. "I thought she'd be more angry. I thought she'd feel in some sense betrayed."
"But she wasn't."
"Not really. She wasn't even frightened. She was shocked, of course, but then she got over it. I got the feeling, by the time she left us, that she'd accepted everything as the normal course of events."
"I suppose," Rusty said, "there's tribute to be paid to television and those James Bond movies . . . and even Vietnam, and Watergate. In our time the unthinkable has become quite ordinary."
James Emerson sighed. He went outside to look at the fieldstone barbecue pit set in the turf near the edge of the lawn. He checked the glowing of the oak-chip embers, the rows of shell steaks neatly arranged, and the ears of corn wrapped in aluminum foil; then he came back inside to wander aimlessly around the room. He stopped in front of a table piled high with his birthday gifts: a stack of shirts and a new Omega from Rusty, who always insisted that he had everything; a hand-tooled alligator wallet from Ginger, who had been giving him wallets ever since she was old enough to go shopping; and a fifteen-inch astronomical globe from Eddie, who, in this area at least, seemed to have more good sense than the others combined. He spun the globe idly, feeling very unbirthdaylike, and for the second time in two days reminded himself that it really wasn't his birthday at all.
"Is she going to tell him?" he asked.
"Eddie? Of course." Rusty's eyes were still on her daughter as she strode across the lowest level of the lawn toward the camper.
"Why do you say of course? She promised that she wouldn't. She won't break her word."
Rusty sniffed. "If you're so sure of that, then why bother asking me?"
Excluded by request from the family conference, Eddie spent the late-afternoon hours playing with his toys. His toys were poisons and explosives, firing mechanisms and delayed-action fuses, charges and propellants, and all the other esoterica that once had been his stock in trade. The toy closet itself had been built into a recess in the forward wall of the camper. Only exhaustive scrutiny would have revealed the sliding door that locked with a fingertip- pressure combination, and no one had ever looked that closely, not even Ginger. The closet was a laboratory in miniature, the breakable vials and flasks, the carboys of acids and venoms, all craftily stored in padded niches. The space above was a storage area for metal equipment and the disassembled components of various firearms; and above that a shelf pulled out to form a work area large enough to accommodate a microscope, a Bunsen burner, a small vise, and an electric drill that could double as a makeshift lathe. The laboratory itself was makeshift, nothing like the elaborate facilities that had been his pride in the days when he worked for the Agency. It wasn't even on a level with the Jerry-built lab that he had shared with Vasily in Mexico. It was basic equipment, nothing more, but it was all that he had to work with these days, and whenever he could he played with his toys to keep his fingers nimble an
d his brain awake. Since it was the Fourth of July, his fingers worked idly with a mixture of sulphur, charcoal, niter, and gunpowder to form a Roman candle that he would never use.
They're giving her hell over there on account of me, he thought as he worked, and there's nothing I can do to help her. There are so many things I can't explain to her. Simple things, like why did we have to drive down here, why didn't we fly? How do I tell her about the rotating stakeouts at the airports and the bus terminals, and when you're laying low like me you drive whenever you can? How can I tell her anything? How can I tell her about the crazy business I used to be in? I could never talk about that, not to anybody until I met Vasily, and he was different. He was in the business himself, so we could talk. But even then, we never talked about it plainly. We always talked around it. You have to do it that way. You don't say, "Who-eee, this here little gadget'll take that sucker out quicker'n hell could singe a feather . . . goddamn, his head's gonna hit concrete before his feet stop moving." No, you look very dignified and professional, and you say, "Now, if its done right, the introduction of the substance into the bloodstream of the target should result in immediate local edema, followed by neural inflammation, followed by cardiac arrest within five minutes." That's the way you do it. Nobody wants to talk about death; it's built into us not to, and I guess that people like me are no exceptions.
He finished off the Roman candle he was working on, looked at it critically, and set it aside.
A good piece of work, he thought. Clean and simple, and it won't kill anybody. She wants me to work, but what could I do for a living now? Sell real estate or insurance? Get a job in a lab? Not after all those years of making gadgets. That's all I was ever good at, making those gadgets, and there I was the best. Sui generis, that's what they told me. There I am, Christ, only eighteen years old doing contract work for the Agency, and my control tells me that I'm sui generis, and of course I have to ask him what it means. Old Dick Wilenski, he says, "You're one of a kind, kid. You're some kind of a scientific freak, right up close to the genius level in what you know, but you only know one thing." And then he asks me if I want to go to college.
The Sleeping Spy Page 10
