by Bill Granger
She got up from the table and poured herself a cup of coffee. She began to refill the pot with water.
“What are we, little one?”
“What?”
“What are we? If the Americans wish to make use of us, would they tell us? Are we important writers, dancers, poets? We are unwilling defectors. The man with two countries has none. What is your country, Alexa?”
She shook her head. “That is philosophy, I don’t have anything to do with it.”
“Your country is that place where they tell you to reside. It is nothing more. Do the Americans manipulate their own program to convince us to act? For what purpose? Was Karpov a Soviet agent—or merely an American agent who spoke Russian? What is the point of this if it is to get us to act in some manner?”
“You make me dizzy.”
“Alexa, Alexa,” he said. He got up suddenly and put the pistol in his right front pocket. He went to her in the small kitchen and put his large hands on her shoulders and pressed her back against the kitchen counter and stared into her deep, wet eyes. He stood close to her but he did not hold her, only resting his hands on her shoulders.
“I thought to come to kill you,” she said. “But I did not understand this thing. I will tell you something I would not tell you ten minutes ago. I get a telephone call this morning, very early, before it was dawn.”
He waited.
“A woman from the program. She asks me if I am all right. Is this not strange? She knows my program name. I do not know what she wishes. Then I think of you and I am afraid that this is more of you, that you are testing me. That I will have to kill you to have any peace. I just do not understand.”
“I do not understand, either. Except the danger. Except we are now the fugitives again, you and I. The problem is to understand where we must run and who we must run from.”
“Moscow,” she said.
“Or not,” he said.
“I don’t understand it,” she said again.
“So we wait for understanding. You had your passport in your purse.”
“I am always afraid not to have it. It is a habit from… from what we were.”
“We have to go now. If you wish to go with me. If we are together, the danger is lessened.”
Her eyes narrowed again and she shrugged herself away from him and turned at the entry hall. “You propose one answer which may be true, that the Americans have done this thing for some purpose we do not know. Or perhaps it is Moscow. Perhaps, Ivan Ilyich, it is you and you wish to manipulate me for some reason.”
He did not smile but he let admiration shine in his eyes. She was not so stupid, he thought. She understood just enough to make him careful.
“Yes, that is a possibility as well, though I cannot have expected you to come to see me on this miserable morning. And I would have been gone in two hours in any case.”
She glanced around the room. “You leave this.”
“This is nothing,” he said. “I sent my recordings yesterday to a drop that I have used from time to time. They are the only things I wish to save. There is a small bag in the bedroom and you are free to see it. I leave because I am summoned and if I cannot understand which side to flee, then I must do as I am told until I can understand. The child is a student at school until the day he understands the ignorance of the teacher.”
For the first time, Alexa smiled. She did not smile very often because it is the Slavic nature not to smile, even when pleased. The smiling face is one of weakness or deceit. Laughter is more natural to the Slav than smiles.
Denisov said, “You are right, little one. I made up the aphorism but believe it in any case. I must know which way to jump and who to trust.”
“You cannot trust me,” she said.
“No. Certainly not.”
She considered it. “I brought a bag as well. In the car. I can leave the car at the airport and let Roger know where to find it.”
“Roger does not need to know,” he said. “You simply disappear.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“I have enough.”
“What will I do?” she said.
He gazed at her with astonishment in his eyes. “My dear little one, you will succeed in any world, you must believe that.”
She understood. Her face resumed the stoic calm she had learned by nature and training.
“What we must understand, Alexa Natasha, is what world it is we are going to,” Denisov said.
The decisions came between two and three P.M., central daylight time, which was still late morning, Alaska time. The decisions were made by only a dozen people in two cities: Dallas and Chicago.
The Chicago people agreed to the transfer and the Dallas people agreed, somewhat more reluctantly. There was no question of using the Justice Department or the FBI. The federal agencies would just screw it up. In case it was true.
The people in Chicago and Dallas were convinced it was true because their contact in Anchorage, an ex–U.S. senator named Malcolm Crowder, believed it was true and so did a ranking minority member of the U.S. Senate Select Oversight Committee on Terrorism and Intelligence named Patricia Heath.
The point was: Would a bomb on the pipeline help or hurt?
Clay Ashley in Chicago made the majority point. He was a large man with large appetites and $900 suits. His office took a corner of the sixty-seventh floor of the white marble building on Wacker Drive, just west of Michigan Avenue. Clay Ashley had started life as a driller in Texas; that was three wives ago. Clay Ashley said Chicago and Dallas might as well pay up, it was only money. He was one of the few men in the world who could get away with calling it “only money.” He pointed out that oil conglomerates were accustomed to baksheesh, the ritual payment of bribes to governments in the Third World. It was the way business was done. So what was a little more baksheesh in the Arctic North but a change of geography? He carried the majority with his argument.
A minority in Chicago said it was irrelevant, that the pipeline would never be allowed to shut down.
A majority in Dallas, meeting inside the glittering blue skin of a glass skyscraper, argued over Cokes and Perrier that it was all too tricky to calculate, even if they had time to set up computer models. Nobody needed the oil at the moment—the world was awash for the time being in cheap oil. But if the eco-creeps got agitated, the whole thing—in the words of one very tall, very thin Texan—“would make acid rain look like a Disney movie.”
At four P.M., the world’s seventeenth largest bank—located on LaSalle Street in the financial district of Chicago’s Loop—sent four million dollars to two accounts registered by the Hong Kong Bank of Commerce. The money, literally, did not change hands. It merely was an accounting entry that transferred funds from Wednesday in Chicago to Thursday in Hong Kong. It was money in the bank, in any case.
Because it was raining at Los Angeles International Airport, the Delta flight for Anchorage was delayed by twenty-five minutes as the line of planes lumbered up the taxiway to the working runway. Rain panics Angelenos the way a blizzard frightens Washingtonians.
The Boeing 757 finally began the long runway leap into the air at five fifteen P.M., Pacific daylight time, one hour ahead of Alaska time. The plane groaned under its full weight of fuel and became airborne as it pushed out over the spit of land at the end of the runway and over the gray, churning ocean. The lights of Catalina in the distance were being turned on as the plane began a slow turn to the north and west. Anchorage was two thousand four hundred miles away, and Denisov, as always, sighed at the fact of flight. Alexa sat in the window seat and turned to look at the ocean and the clouds above. The plane passed through the clouds with a few bumps, and a baby in the back began to cry. Finally, the plane broke through the clouds and sunlight filled the world.
She had asked him only one question more: “Is it necessary?”
He had taken a long time to answer because he was searching his own conscience.
When he answered, he did it with all hones
ty: “Perhaps.”
It was all he said.
20
THE LISTENER AND THE WATCHER
Security buzzed Hanley at 5:35 P.M., eastern daylight time, at approximately the moment cash was being transferred from a Chicago bank to one in Hong Kong. “Well,” Hanley said, very annoyed. “Send her up with a runner and I’ll meet you at the elevator bank.”
The R Section offices were in parts of two Department of Agriculture buildings: The intelligence section had been first funded under subparagraph R of a funding bill for agriculture. The funds that established R Section were vaguely labeled as money for “agricultural crop estimates and international grain reportage,” clumps of words intended to make legislative eyes glaze over.
Hanley was a small pale man with almost no hair and the annoyed look of a constipated rabbit. He rarely spoke and then only in the clichés of his trade and of the bureaucracy. He was director of Operations for Section, which meant he oversaw the lives of the agents “in the field” and was most directly concerned with both intelligence and counterespionage. Counterespionage, of course, did not exist because it was not part of the mission of Section. It was as intangible as the money sent that afternoon to a bank in Hong Kong.
Reality was in the form of the persistent intrusion of this person who was riding up to the eighth floor now in a special secure elevator. Reality was in the form of her delusions and fantasies and her persistence. Her damned persistence, Hanley thought. She had been ragging at him by telephone, computer, and now in person for nearly two days.
The elevator door opened with a heavy whoosh and the runner was next to her, his badge and his large pistol on his belt. She seemed very small next to him and, for a moment, Hanley felt a wave of sympathy for her. He was the hidden bureaucrat, always behind closed doors, always out of reach. She was—what was she now exactly?
“Miss O’Hare, you are extremely… well… persistent,” Hanley said. He did not offer his hand. He nodded to the runner, who retreated into the elevator. He took her down the immense corridor to the warren of offices in the back of the building that afforded a view of Fourteenth Street. It was early May in Washington and the smell of flowers was carried on every breath of wind from Maryland and Virginia. The cherry blossoms had bloomed on the trees around the Tidal Basin and the smell of the earth was sensuous.
“I know that I’m out of channels,” she said.
He made a face as he led her past his outer office to the inner sanctum. It was his place and yet there was no sign that it had ever had a human occupant. There was a leather couch on one wall where he slept during the tense times of critical operations; a standard government-issue gunmetal desk sat in the middle of the room; two gunmetal chairs with vinyl gray seats and backs completed the furnishings.
Karen O’Hare looked very brave because she was frightened about everything she was doing. She had telephoned in sick this morning and taken the nine A.M. flight to Chicago, transferring at O’Hare to a plane to Washington National Airport. She was exhausted and looked depressed by a day in the sky. Her face was white and even her cold blue eyes were rimmed with exhaustion.
She put the manila envelope on the desk but did not open it.
Hanley sat down and let his right hand grasp his left on the desk in front of him.
“We received a call from Redbird at 9:43 A.M., Pacific coast time, Monday morning and—”
“You have gone into all this, about this man, Wagner, relieving you and all that. What I want to know is what you have—”
“Mr. Wagner said he was sent down to take over the matter by R Section. I scarcely know R Section—”
“You’re not supposed to,” Hanley snapped.
“I’m sorry.”
“Proceed.”
“But how do you call down? Everything is recorded in the program. It’s a double check on us to keep the thing secure. Wagner said he was contacted by R Section. By someone in R Section. To take the matter over. That’s what he told me that morning in the motel in Santa Barbara.”
“I am intrigued enough to listen to you. To see your bona fides.” He gave nothing away.
She opened the envelope and took out the telephone contact sheet. The automatic device recorded incoming and outgoing calls but listed them only by telephone numbers and minutes of conversation. The actual transcripts were Code Ultra Secret and not available in any case to an employee of a witness field office.
Hanley barely glanced at the list.
“Do you suppose any call from Section, if Section made a call, would turn up on a contact sheet?”
“You have to call from somewhere,” she said.
“We have safe places to make our calls.”
“So you would logically call from Maryland or Virginia, from the area codes just over the district line or from Washington itself.” Her voice was flat, automatic, relaying information like a computer screen. “There are sixteen calls registered in the three area codes here. Do you want to know those numbers?”
“If I must,” Hanley said.
She read from a second list. She had called back every number. One was a woman named Millie Sangmeister who was the aunt of Sally Anne Sangmeister in the office. Millie lived in Alexandria and talked for six minutes with her niece. There were six calls from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“The FBI, I am happy to see, has nothing to hide,” Hanley said.
Karen finished her lists and looked up. Her eyes were wide and she knew she looked too young to be taken seriously but she was getting angry. Did the old man across the desk understand what she was saying?
“None of these was R Section,” she said.
“So you say.”
“None of them.”
“So you say.”
“This is your man. Redbird was your witness. So was Nightingale, the woman in Los Angeles. They’ve both disappeared.”
“Is that correct?”
“Did I waste my time?” Karen said.
“Tell me what else you know.”
“Redbird.”
“What about him?”
She had a third sheet of paper that contained handwritten notes. “I didn’t have any authorization. Wagner came down and took over and it was so phony. I mean, he’s phony—”
“I don’t care about your particular bureaucratic infighting.”
“We have a slush fund, you can hide some expenses for up to six weeks before accounting takes over. I had six hundred dollars with me. It was money from the program. I left Santa Barbara and hired a man to watch Redbird for three days, it was all the money I had.”
“You hired a man? Do you mean a private investigator? You mean you hired a private investigator to watch someone in the program?” Hanley knew his voice was rising and he didn’t care. “Didn’t you breach security?”
“I said he was my uncle, I wanted—”
“Miss O’Hare, you are a fool,” Hanley said. His face was pale. “You have compromised one of our clients. What do you know about private investigators? Did you pick him out of a phone book? Did he wear a trench coat?”
“His name was Orville C. Prendergast and he worked on divorce cases and he was fifty years old or so and he must have weighed two hundred fifty pounds. He wheezed a lot and chewed Life Savers.”
Hanley stared at her. The room was white, lit with fluorescent lighting. The room was cold because Hanley wanted it cold.
“I called him when I got into National Airport this afternoon. He had left a message on my answering machine. He said my uncle left the apartment with a tall, dark, foreign-looking woman in the afternoon and they drove to Los Angeles Airport and they both booked on a Delta Airlines flight for Anchorage, Alaska. The plane is probably taking off about now. And the woman who was with Redbird—it has to be Nightingale. Both of them are your witnesses, sent into the program by R Section.”
For a moment, Hanley only stared at her. She might have been a madwoman who had wandered into his office. He stared
at her because the single word—Alaska—had triggered a sudden dread in him.
“This was Redbird,” he repeated.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt of it, Mr. Hanley. My man is respected in the business. He knows how to identify people.”
Hanley drummed his fingers slowly on the edge of his desk. The fingers went from left to right. The fingers made a small, almost unnoticeable rhythm.
“What are you going to do, Mr. Hanley?”
Hanley, for the first time, felt the chill of the room. He stopped drumming and stared at Miss Karen O’Hare, a civil servant in the San Francisco office of the Witness Protection Program. She had persistence. Now she had something else. If any of it was true, Denisov was going to a most unlikely place in the world, a place momentarily occupied by the least likely agent in R Section. And he was in the company of Alexa, a former assassin for the KGB. Hanley did not believe in coincidence because the normal paranoia of the intelligence officer is compounded by intense logic. Some agents saw the poetry of the trade; some saw the prosaic and numbing prose in the day-to-day task; but all saw the overriding logic of deception. Denisov had been spotted by someone he feared one morning in Santa Barbara and turned to the program for help; when none came—when too little came—he proceeded to his next place of refuge. And it had to involve the agent called November.
“Was the tap kept on Redbird’s phone?” he said.
“No.”
“At whose direction?”
“I suppose it was Mr. Wagner’s.”
“All right,” Hanley surrendered. His voice was almost a sigh. “All right. Can you give me the name of the plane and the number and when it departed?”
“Are you going to do something?”
He glared at her.
She gave him the flight number. The plane made an intermediate stop in Seattle on the leg north. It wouldn’t arrive in Anchorage for nearly seven hours.
