6 - The Eye of the Virgin: Ike Schwartz Mystery 6

by Frederick Ramsay

  Yeah, yeah, do it again anyway. He hung up.

  Next, someone had to find out who had outed Wainwright and to whom. Tommy was dead and the question before the house, who or what group pulled the trigger? Charlie did not want to believe it was done by friends, but he couldn’t rule out that possibility either.

  There were days when he hated his job. Today was one of them.

  ***

  Shmuel Gold’s eyebrows came together in an exclamation mark. He hung up the phone. He didn’t like this. It wasn’t a matter of public dissembling. After all, that was the nature of all politics and especially international politics, and among intelligence professionals it was habitual. No, he understood that this particular book needed to stay closed. He’d been part of the team that wrote it in the first place you could say, and well, enough already. But to put into place the suggested sanctions? Overkill, certainly. Yes, the documents had to be found and destroyed. Yes, the person or persons who’d generated them needed to be permanently silenced. All this certainly, but to authorize such an operation in a foreign country, and not just any foreign country but the United States, our strongest and oldest ally? Shmuel remembered May 14, 1948, and the declaration by the Truman administration earlier in the UN to support the founding of a Jewish nation. No, it was as the Americans would say, over the top, a dangerous over-reaction with possibly tragic consequences, and what about Isaac Schwartz? No, it was too much. He no longer worked for SHABAK. It had been years, many years, since he sat disguised as one of them, drinking coffee and listening, waiting. No more. It was not his problem to solve.

  He would have to smoke his pipe and think this through.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Ike looked at the two people seated across the room from him. Man and wife, well, they were man and wife once, but no more. Is this how it ends? These two had and then lost the thing that so many people sought but never found and would die to have themselves. Marriages are like Humpty Dumpty. Once they fell, they were difficult if not impossible to put back together again, all the King’s horses and men from Marriage Encounter not withstanding. Was there enough crazy glue available to ever repair it? He did notice the man had come to his estranged wife’s defense. Perhaps there was still hope for them. Were they the victims of too much familiarity? What had Ruth asked? So, do you think I will pale eventually, become an object of contempt? It was a conundrum and Ike wasn’t sure he wanted to unravel it. He caught sight of Essie on the phone, probably yammering away at Billy. Would that relationship degrade into the familiar, would the two of them take one another for granted, create yet another hum-drum existence?

  He pictured Ruth again. He realized she was a person who never ceased to surprise him day after day. But would it last? Would the surprises become expectations? And if they did, what then? Engagements were more than a statement about commitment, they were a move toward permanency. Was he, or was she, ready to go there?

  Someone was asking him a question.

  “Sheriff,” Louis Dakis said, “What about our icon?”

  Ike noted the plural possessive. So there was hope.

  “I will need to hold it as evidence until we clear this up. It is safe enough here, I promise. Tomorrow I’d like you to come by and bring the one you were making for me, if it’s ready.”

  “I have it here.” Dakis lifted the flat package he’d leaned against the desk earlier. Ike had seen him carry in the package but its significance had somehow escaped him.

  “Ah, good. Tomorrow I will want you to do something with it, but I will need to explain that later.” He turned to Lorraine Dakis. “Mrs. Dakis, I know this won’t be easy for you, but I must ask you to go over to the Coroner’s Office and formally identify Franco Sacci.”

  “I thought you said his name was…whoever you said he was. I don’t see how that can be. I want to know how he was killed. I want to know who…” She gulped and tears began to run down her cheeks. “I am so confused. What do I do now?”

  Frank stepped forward and took her elbow. “Suppose we drop in on the coroner before he closes.” He glanced at his watch, “which will be in twenty minutes. We will have to hurry. Then you can book into a motel, or not. I don’t think you should try to drive back to Washington now.”

  “She can stay with me,” her husband said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know,” She sobbed uncontrollably. “I just don’t know.”

  Frank led her from the room.

  “Tomorrow,” Ike said to Dakis who took the hint and followed his wife out the door.

  When the room had cleared Ike moved one of the many piles of paper on his desk aside and put his feet up. TMI. No, TDMI, too damned much information, not enough connection. That the murder of Sacci and the break-in at Dakis’ house were part of a whole was no longer in doubt. That there were four men in the Dogwood Motel the night of the murder was certain. That one of those people was Thomas Wainwright posing as Avi Kolb, and the second was Farouk Zaki as Franco Sacci was also a fact. Whatever connected these two dead men to one another had to be the key. The remaining two men, Brown and Wentz, their real names unknown, could be anywhere and anybody by now. He had to hope they’d remain on task, that they would return for the icon, and that when they did he would nail them. But what came next? If he could find them, he had a circumstantial case to hang the murder on them, but he wasn’t naive enough to believe he could make it stick. He needed something more, and he guessed that something lay buried in the funny farm up in Langley. What was on that microchip? Would Charlie talk? He’d have to find out.

  But first he needed some time with Sam and her wonder machine. He needed some answers, and he guessed they were buried deep in some electronic archive somewhere.

  ***

  Shmuel Gold watched the clock and calculated the time when it would be seventeen hundred in America. He assumed, rather he hoped, that Isaac Schwartz kept the office hours he associated with Americans, nine to five. When the second hand of his battered watch swept past twelve, he lifted the phone from its cradle and engaged the number he’d written on a scrap of paper. He glanced across the room to the Colonel seated behind the table. Only a small lamp lighted the desk’s surface, the colonel’s face barely discernable, lost in the shadows. Shmuel drew on his pipe and he, too, disappeared from view behind a cloud of smoke. Three rings. Four.

  “Hello, Sheriff’s office.” A woman had answered. Shmuel lifted his eyes to the colonel again. He raised an eyebrow. The colonel nodded.

  “Shmuel Gold here,” He said. “I wish to speak to Isaac Schwartz, please.”

  “Who? Who did you say you were and you want to speak to who?”

  “Gold, Shmuel.” He spelled it slowly as the voice on the other end repeated after him.

  “Okay, that’s Shoomel Gold and you want to talk to Isaac…oh, you must mean Ike.”

  “Ike, yes, Ike Schwartz. Tell him Shmuel Gold returns his call.”

  He listened as the woman shouted to someone else and then the click as a receiver was taken from its hook.

  “Hang up, Essie and go home,” he heard Ike say. “Hold on, Shmuel, I need to clear the room and I don’t have the luxury of a secure phone. Yes, I said go home. See you tomorrow. Take care of baby. Who? Never mind…an old friend. Good night. Okay, Shmuel, I’m here.”

  Shmuel waved to the colonel who pressed a button and put the phone on speaker.

  “You left me a message, Isaac. You wanted to know something and you thought I could help?”

  “I did. Perhaps you can, perhaps you can’t. If you can, perhaps you will and perhaps you won’t. It’s the times we live in. It all depends on whether you know the answers to the questions I ask, and whether the Mossad agent monitoring the call will let you if you do.”

  Shmuel smiled at the colonel and shrugged. “What are you doing playing wild-West policeman, Isaac? Sheriff, what is that?”

  “It’s a living. It’s something I do now. What about you, old man, still s
moking that rotten pipe?”

  “No, this is a new one. The one you gave me finally cracked and broke. I took it as a symbol.”

  “What can you tell me about a man who might have been called Avi Kolb or you might have known him as Thomas Wainwright?”

  Shmuel took a breath and straightened the paper in front of him. “I am in a position to say only we know nothing about either Kolb or…” He saw the colonel nod yet again. “Wainwright. I am to assure you that the position of this government has been, is, and remains that we do not have any intelligence interests in the United States. We are allies.”

  He heard Ike laugh and had to smile himself. The colonel did not seem amused.

  “You did that very well, Shmuel. You haven’t lost your touch. Now, if I could figure out what you all were after I would…” Shmuel heard what he took to be a hand slapping a desk surface. “Shmuel, you are on an open phone, I take it.”

  Shmuel grimaced at the colonel and shrugged again.

  “Major, Colonel, whoever you are, you should know that the microchip is now in the hands of the CIA. Sorry about that. I cannot tell you what they will do with it, as I no longer collect my paycheck from them. I would not be surprised, however, if, in a day or two, there are not urgent communications between our State Department and your Foreign Affairs Ministry. But here’s the immediate problem: one of ours was killed by someone, perhaps one of yours, perhaps not. No way for me to know. I sincerely hope it was not one of yours. As we both know, keeping a lid on something like that is difficult and will require some complex explaining to be done, by us and by you. In the meantime, I have a small murder of my own here which I intend to clear up. I hope the perpetrators are not connected to you. If they should be, I want to assure you I intend to lock them up and throw away the key, as we say over here. It was good to hear from you, Shmuel, and thanks.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Ike replaced the receiver and drummed his fingers on his desk. That cagey old coot. Now, if he could con Charlie into telling him what was on the microchip…No, wait, international intrigue and snooping was no longer Ike’s bailiwick. He didn’t need to know. He didn’t want to know. His job was to collar a couple of killers and arrest them. That’s it, period. If the State Department made him cut them loose later, well, that would be too bad, but he wasn’t going to push this. That’s it. That’s final. No more spooking.

  He had one more piece to his puzzle, though. The Israelis were in this somehow. Now, if Sam could figure a way to read the replacement chip before he put it on the newly minted icon, then maybe he’d have an answer or two. What the content didn’t reveal might tell him what was on the original. Surely they would not put gibberish on the new one. The people who were after the chip would know immediately that they’d been duped and order up another. No, what had been placed on it would be similar to the Agency’s database’s backdoor, full of official sounding disinformation, but enough like what had been there originally to convince them they had the real thing. He’d call Sam.

  He became aware of Essie standing in the door.

  “Did you get all that, Essie?”

  Essie squinted at the note book she held in her lap. “I wrote down what you all said, but it don’t sound like much to me.”

  “Good. I didn’t want it to, if you must know. Leave the notes on my desk.”

  “You had me sort of mixed up, there, Ike. You said I should go even though Darcie wasn’t here to relieve me and then you’re wig-wagging for me to stay and take notes. So, what’s up with you and this Shmoo-ell Gold guy?”

  “He’s an old acquaintance from the bad old days. Among other roles he played in the past, he spent some time in the SHAMAK, that’s the Israeli Security Service—spooks to you. I wanted to ask him a question.”

  “But you didn’t. Ask him a question, I mean.”

  “No, that’s the interesting part. He answered a question I never asked, you see?”

  “Sorry, too deep for me. Here’s Darcie. I’m off.”

  Darcie Billingsley dropped her purse on the floor next to the Dispatcher’s desk and traded places with Essie, who waved and left.

  “Evening, Ike,” Darcie said. She swiveled her chair around and began to contact each of the deputies on duty. They needed to know the second shift in the office was in place.

  “There’s a note here for you,” she said. “Essie must have forgotten to tell you.”

  “What’s it say?”

  “Amos took down a license number of a car that had been parked near the Dakis stakeout. He said the car followed Mr. Dakis when he left to come here.”

  “Check out the registration with the motor vehicle people and then call Harvey at the Dogwood Motel and see if it’s the same one that was there last Friday.”

  “Will do. Where you going to be this evening?”

  “I’m going to get something to eat and then see if I can convince Sam to put in some overtime.”

  ***

  In return for the comp time she needed for a long weekend in Washington, Sam agreed to meet Ike early the next morning and try to unscramble the microchip when it finally arrived. She didn’t ask why Ike wanted to see the contents of the chip, contents he had to know would be adulterated at best. But she also knew that Ike worked in ways that frequently defied logic. At least until he solved the problem. Then they seemed supremely logical. She realized that Ike wasn’t wired like ordinary people. He would have been a great hacker if he’d taken the trouble to learn computers. But he remained determinedly ignorant of the field. Not a Luddite exactly, but certainly not an enthusiast, either.

  “When I looked at it, it reminded me of one of the micro-SD card inserts.” She said and settled into her desk chair, a modern bit of ergonomic bent teak and leather that Ike could never believe was comfortable. Ike’s ensuing silence meant he needed an explanation. “The memory cards for cameras and other electronic devices have been miniaturized so that they are very small but the card slots remain relatively large. The micro-SD slips into a carrier the size and shape of the older, conventional card and then it acts like a regular memory card. The advantage of the new system is you can put the same micro-memory device into a variety of carriers. Swap them in and out, you could say. One of them would be as small as that chip your friend Charlie picked off the icon. I can’t be sure if it was one or not. I didn’t recognize it, but the technology is changing so fast it might have been.”

  “All I need to know, Sam, is whether you can read it before we stick it on the substitute icon.”

  “I can, if the contacts line up with one of the receiver sleeves. I won’t know until I see it up close.”

  “Could you modify either the sleeve thing or the chip to work?”

  Ah ha, she thought, not wired like ordinary people. “Possibly, yes. It will depend on how much time I have and…like that.”

  “We’ll make the time. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. These guys are getting desperate, I’m thinking, but they’ll wait. As long as we keep that car in front of Dakis’ house, that is.”

  Sam hung up and rooted through her desk drawer for memory cards and micro tools and then spent the rest of the evening on the Internet. She needed at least one manual. When she found what she was looking for she downloaded and printed it out. She would need to take a trip to the computer store or a Radio Shack early tomorrow. The rest of her waking time she divided between reading the twenty pages of technical information and e-mailing Karl who, she knew was on assignment and out of reach. He was working to build up comp time as well. It was after midnight when he finally called and she could tell him her good news. Karl did not like the idea of her tinkering with the CIA’s microchip, but he was happy with the compensation.

  “A long weekend. That’ll be great. Be careful with this thing, though. I don’t want Ike to get you thrown into federal prison for one of his brainstorms. I swear—”

  “It’ll be fine, you’ll see. Ike wouldn’t do anything like t
hat. He’d have my back. You know that.”

  “Yeah, well be careful.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Ike was about to tuck into his hash browns when his cell phone chirped in his pocket.

  “Where you at?” Essie sounded frantic. It had become her standard mode lately. Ike hoped maternity and a return to hormonal equilibrium would also restore her normal cheerful presence.

  “Across the street enjoying my usual heart attack breakfast and listening to Flora, who has been telling me all about you. That is, all about you back when. She watched you grow up, she says.”

  “Well, you can’t believe everything that old bat says. You want to know about me, you ask me personal-like.”

  “Did you really pour maple syrup on your third-grade teacher’s chair?”

  “Ike, I ain’t got time for this. There’s a snooty woman here who has a package for you and she won’t leave it with me. You got to sign for it or something.” Essie lowered her voice and, Ike guessed, cupped the phone. “She looks like one of them spies or something like the woman who came by here once to pick up that old telephone you had. Slick and sassy is what she is. You better get over here.”

  “I’m on my way. Give her coffee and regale her with your tales of morning sickness, cravings for pickles and ice cream, and the unreasonableness of husbands considering your condition.”

  “She don’t look the type to go into that with. How’d you know about Billy and me? Did he say something? I’ll kill him.”

  Ike paid for his half-eaten breakfast, refused Flora Blevin’s offer to box up the remains, received a dirty look from her because of it, and left. He expected but did not hear her say something about starving children in Biafra.