He unsnapped the strap and slipped it from around his neck. Solemnly, he raised the weapon. Without haste, he pulled back the lever and cocked it. Then, with bent arms, he aimed it waist high at Brewer. The crowds shouted and ran in all directions.
Brewer shoved Margie to the ground then leaped and rolled in the snow, waiting for the shots. Nothing happened. The man checked the weapon. Then he tugged at the top-mounted cocking mechanism. Brewer clambered to his feet and ran.
The man struggled again with the mechanism, then saw Brewer crossing the snow, sprinting right at him. Still tugging at the weapon, he turned and trotted back toward the car, shouldering past people as he went. At the edge of the park he squared off to aim again as Brewer leaped at him. Again the weapon failed to fire. Brewer drove his head and shoulders into the man’s torso and flung him out on the roadway, face down. The Uzi went sliding across the ice, trailing its strap.
Brewer jumped up and leaped after the man. They both were trying to run on the rutted ice after the Uzi. They went slipping and sliding across the road, pushing each other, falling and entangling themselves in the legs of the pedestrians and knocking many down.
They struggled to their feet, wrestling each other, then fell again. Brewer seized the Uzi. The man fell on top of him, trying to punch him. Brewer brought the Uzi around and clouted him on the temple. Then again. As the man fell back, Brewer slammed him across the mouth with the weapon. He got to his feet. The man was on his knees, holding his hands to his bloody mouth. Brewer hit him once more on the side of the head then turned to the car.
The driver, holding a pistol in his upraised hand, was furiously cranking his car window down. As the window lowered, he extended his arm and took aim at Brewer. Brewer aimed the Uzi and they both fired. The Uzi blew holes in the door, and the driver fell away inside the car. Brewer ran across the road at the car and shoved the Uzi through the window. The man lay still on the front seat.
Back behind Brewer the other gunman lay sprawled in the street. He’d been shot through the head by the driver. The crowd, immobile, stared at Brewer in terrified silence while the crows, circling in a silent panic above, slowly settled again in the snow. In the middle of the park he saw Margie standing in her red boots, covered with snow, holding the empty red scoop at her side, staring back at him. At his feet lay a scarlet scarf.
Afterward he remembered all those eyes staring at him, and the profound silence.
Part Five
Chapter 25
Margie’s reaction was very simple and uncluttered. She did what her family in Boston always did when a relative died, a father lost his job, a daughter divorced. She made a pot of tea and sat in her kitchen holding the teacup in both hands and, staring at the wall, confronted the fact.
Brewer, sitting across from her, could see her mind working, explaining and accepting. A car veers off the road, a great dam bursts—a sparrow loses a feather. A trigger fails to fire. God’s will. When she put the cup down, the affair was over. She was ready to go to her office. God hadn’t called her this time.
But Brewer, in his chair, his tea untouched, was absorbed by a different vision—one that would haunt him: Margie lying under a red police blanket in the snow in the park while above her a congregation of crows crouched in the trees, observing. Only the jammed firing mechanism had saved her. Fortune. Luck. Chance.
If that trigger mechanism hadn’t jammed, the gunman would have killed them both. And if it hadn’t fired at the car when he’d pulled the trigger, the driver wouldn’t have died. Instead the driver would have killed him. He had missed death not once, not twice, but three or four times in a row. How contingent it all is. Incredible luck: a lifetime supply of luck used up in forty-five seconds. Would he be overdrawn tomorrow at the luck bank? In a business where luck was more important than skill, had his luck run out? Margie’s luck?
He’d violated his own rule, and she almost paid for it: he had let his private life get mixed in with his job.
It was time: he had to leave Margie or leave the job. But the only way to leave the job was finish the assignment. Find X before X finished him.
Brewer spent the day in a microfiche in the Library of Congress, going through microfilm reels of newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, then Aviation Age, Electronics, and Purchasing World. By four he’d filled the pages of a pad with notes on Russian industrial espionage and smuggling, but he hadn’t gotten one inch closer to X. The next step was a tour of European intelligence files.
That evening he watched Margie sewing. She and three other women were making cloth drapes for the church. She was needlepointing a multicolored crosier on a royal-blue field of silk. Behind her, draped over the couch, was another needlepoint—this one of a small lamb she had done in white on the same blue silk field. He watched the serene expression on her face as she watched her hands sewing.
She was stability, home, love. But where were the children, the husband, the fireplace? She sat, a childless widow, making a church pennant while her live-in scurried in the walls of the great rat wars.
How was he going to tell her that they had to separate—at least until his assignment was over?
“A penny for your thoughts,” she said.
He was thinking of Kipling’s couplet:
Down to Ghehenna, or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
If he’d told her, she would have asked: “What’s Ghehenna?”
“Hell,” he would have said.
What he did say was, “I have to go to Europe for a few days.”
In the morning, lying by his side, she confronted him. “Charlie?”
“I’m here.”
“I’m sorry about the park.”
“Yes.”
“I hope it doesn’t change anything between us,” she said. “Do you hear me?”
He nodded.
“I feel bad enough about your unfinished business with Madeline Hale,” she went on. “I don’t want this thing in the park to come between us too. Did you call her?”
“No. Not yet.”
“It’s my choice, you know,” she said. “To stay or leave. Not yours.” She grabbed a fistful of his hair. “Right?” She rocked his head in assent. In a deep voice she answered her own question: “Right, Margie.”
She sat up and looked at him. “If you decide to leave me, can I go with you?”
At noon he left for London.
London was buried in snow. Siberian winds rocketed through the streets and drove people inside. Everyone was talking about the tremendous snowfalls in the English midlands. “In the memory of the living,” an editorial noted, “there has never been a winter like this before. And, we fervently hope, never one like it again.”
But in the intelligence community in London the talk wasn’t about the weather. It was about the missile standdown. Brewer found things greatly changed: suddenly, Russian armies and not Russian rockets were the threat. Europe, expecting soon to have no nuclear missiles to protect it, now found it had no conventional defenses to replace the missiles.
After forty years the parameters of the cold war were changing. And the bureaucratic machinery was creaking. After forty years the most crucial problems have a way of becoming domesticated. They become a sort of solution in themselves. Necessary. After forty years habits of mind were reluctant to relinquish the comfortable old troubles. And reluctant to take on hard-edged new ones. Unknown ones. Unsettling ones. It takes so long to readjust. Bureaucracy hates change more than it hates democracy.
He found an air of foreboding everywhere. Even the amiable Mrs. Walmsley was in a mood to scold someone. As Brewer explained his mission, she kept twitching the loose green sweater across her shoulders. Up on a shelf behind her, her favorite cat watched her. Its marmalade tail twitched.
“There are three of our men you can talk to in particular,” she said. “But it won’t serve any purpose. You’ll find that the only Russian pattern for smuggling is jus
t smash and grab. Street tactics. What you ought to be worrying about is the new policies Washington has forced on us.”
Brewer shrugged. “Too bad for Europe. The old policy was a bargain for you all these years.”
“What did you expect Europe to do?” she demanded. “You and Russia wanted to play the mad game of outspending each other. Coming over here year after year insisting we spend more on a larger European defense budget. Absurd. Spend and spend and spend. Purse-proud Americans showing the poor old folks how. If we had done that, the European economy would be in the same pickle yours is in. The wisest thing we could have done was what we did—stand aside and let the two of you go at it. Do you know what Europe spent on defense last year? Eighty-three billion dollars. Do you know what your country spent on European defense last year? One hundred sixty-seven billion dollars. That’s a huge military welfare program to give to Europe’s middle class. You thought your money would never run out.”
“Then you’ve lost a very good deal,” Brewer said. “Now it’s you who are going to have to spend and spend and spend.”
“You people are gadget obsessed,” she told Brewer, pulling her sweater back over her shoulders. “It’s going to take more than a few stolen radar units for the Russians to beat us.” She pointed down the hall. “You can do your interviewing in the office next door. The first man I’m going to have you talk to has handled more than one hundred cases of Russian technological espionage during his career. He ought to be able to tell you something.”
“A hundred cases? Is this what you call a few stolen radar units?” he asked.
“What would you have us do?” Mrs. Walmsley demanded.
“For the last twenty years,” he said, “you’ve needed a public gadfly like Winston Churchill again. Someone crying up the streets, tolling his bell.”
He sat in the office late into the afternoon, listening to the three British intelligence men one at a time discuss Russian espionage. It was tailored, of course. They weren’t going to tell Brewer anything sensitive. Mrs. Walmsley brought him a cup of tea, twitched her green sweater back across her shoulders, and left with a sniff. Things were in a state, and someone had to be blamed.
Brewer did get some information. The matériel that Bobby English had purchased in Los Angeles had gone to Kansas City and then to Montreal. Some of it then transited through Britain as plumbing supplies, heaters, aircraft navigational equipment. From Britain it had gone to the Continent. And there he would follow it.
He looked eastward through the window, across London. Down in the streets, bundled Londoners clumped from their offices homeward at dusk, fleeing the iron bite of the evening air. Was there really a Mr. X at the end of the line? The three British intelligence men thought not.
Lord Spatfield administered corporate punishment to the body politic of America. “Russia and the U.S. have exhausted each other,” he told Brewer. “The wounds you’ve inflicted may be fatal. My intelligence group has just completed a study of Russia’s medical establishment. Medical services are in ruins in that country, cash starved because of military spending. People dying from bad medical practice and no drugs. Plenty of rubles for arms yet no money to install running water in their rural hospitals. Infant mortality rate climbing—one of the highest in the world, in fact. At the same time, America’s stunning trade deficits, according to many economists, are signaling the end of your economy. By the year 2000 Japan will have a larger gross national product than the U.S.”
That day a London journalist, Winston Matters, in his column, “Matters Military,” ran a cryptic note about espionage.
The Smuggling Commandos. It’s now quite clear that the West never achieved a significant edge over Moscow in the missile race. One of the reasons, it may not be so obvious, is the relentless technological espionage program Moscow always mounts. And a key reason within that reason may be Moscow’s secret intelligence commando team that specializes in difficult acquisitions. So effective is it that a recent defector from Russia values this commando team as worth five divisions in the field. Perhaps more. Perhaps much more. If there’s a war, it seems clear that the nation that wins on the battlefield must first win in the intelligence field. And the Russians are in a clear lead here.
Brewer tried to reach Matters by phone. “Mr. Matters is away on assignment,” he was told. “He is expected back the day after tomorrow.”
In the evening he took a cab to Chelsea and went to her pub. When she saw him, she never took her eyes off him as he walked up to the bar.
“Hello, Charlie,” she said.
She still had that splendid rosy color to her face and those marvelous eyes—delft blue with a sly mirthful expression. Plump pink arms. A feast of a woman nearing forty.
She served him a pint of lager. “Haven’t had one of those in a while, I’ll wager.”
“You’re looking fine,” he said.
She nodded. “I’m rid of him,” she said. “The army took him.” She scowled at his scowl. “Well, that’s what an army’s for, isn’t it, taking other people’s mistakes? But they sent him to Belfast, and him only nineteen. And now I’m feeling that guilty.”
“I wish him well,” Brewer said.
“I doubt it. He certainly doesn’t deserve your good wishes.” Her eyes watched her hands fill a pint glass with lager. “I’m sorry about it all. It was my fault. Letting Arthur break up a marriage like that. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, Charlie. Here, Stanley, for the two in the booth.”
“It wasn’t Arthur,” he said.
“He didn’t help. But I suppose you’re right. That night that Thomas came in here looking for you with those cold February eyes of his, I knew I’d lost you.” She smiled. “Truth be known, the pubkeeper’s life wasn’t the life for you. But any time you want to come back, Charlie, it’ll be no questions asked. Here, Stanley, clear that table and let them sit there.” She studied Brewer’s face. Nothing ever seemed to escape her gaze. “I cried for you more than once, Charlie, my love,” she said.
“Save your tears for Arthur in Belfast,” he said.
“You’re back into the same old game, is it?”
“I’m doing fine.”
“That’s not what your face says, Charlie.”
That night it snowed again in London. His flight for Frankfort the next morning took off an hour late.
Brewer moved carefully in Europe. Another attack on him could occur anywhere, anytime. In airports a man with a coat over one arm and a newspaper can conceal a pistol and a silencer. Step up, raise the pistol under a folded newspaper, fire. Target falls down with a hole in his back, assailant, in the confusion, passes the weapon in the folded newspaper to another, who quickly passes it to a third person while the assassin disappears in the crowd. A skilled man with a knife can kill in an elevator, on a seat on an airplane. A hotel bedroom is a Whitman’s Sampler of opportunities for a killer. Cabs, staircases, parks—the opportunities are abundant.
On the Continent he found the same foreboding: Russia without missiles seemed stronger and more threatening than Russia with missiles, conventional warfare more likely. Everyone was aware that there was a new game to be learned—and an old game to be laid aside, the worn playing board and counters so much impedimenta to be left in history’s storage bin. The Europeans now counted divisions, not warheads, and talked of troops and logistics, terrains and tactics. They weren’t interested in smugglers.
“What are you looking for?” agents in Frankfort asked him.
“Patterns,” he said. “Habitual strategies. The Russian way of doing things. I’m looking for the man behind it all.”
In Bonn Schneider made a skeptical mouth. There was no man behind it all. He blamed Russia’s great smuggling coup on European indifference—particularly CoCom.
“The Committee for East-West Trade failed to impose embargoes on vital strategic matériel,” he prated. “They just let it all flow across Europe into the Russian war machine. They still are. CoCom sat there in Paris an
d did nothing. How could it? What were there? A mere dozen political appointees, from as many different countries, against thousands of Russians. They met in Paris and agreed that nothing could be done.” He spanked the air with a beating forefinger. “The CoCom was a political do-nothing slapped up by diplomats. Its sole purpose, now it can be told, was to shut up the American caterwauling. We didn’t want embargoes. We wanted all that fat trade with Eastern Europe. Bonn has become very dependent on East-West trade.” He looked at Brewer. “Truth is, Mr. Brewer—American businessmen wanted that trade too. They sold as much to the Russians as we did.”
Schneider’s people were reassessing Russian conventional army strength, and everywhere they turned they found that strength immeasurably increased by stolen American technology.
Schneider told him not to bother checking CoCom records. “Every one of its moves are at least three years too late. Have you ever seen their embargo list? Absurd. Absolutely absurd.” He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “Now there’s a great cry to have CoCom put firm embargoes in place. Now. Isn’t that ironic? With the imminent missile standdown, Europe is suddenly regretting every last disk drive and radar unit that had been smuggled into Moscow. All of it is now ranged against us.”
“Meantime,” Brewer said, “the smuggling goes on—more than ever. Someone must be orchestrating it.”
Schneider shrugged. “I have no reason to believe in a Russian mastermind. Truth is, we really have no idea how much matériel has flowed into Russia. If we did, we would probably believe there are a hundred Russian masterminds. It was done on such a vast scale—as we now see.”
Brenier in Paris blamed it on American policy. “How many times did we adopt an American policy,” he demanded, “with great reluctance I might add, only to see Washington abruptly abandon it, most times without even advising us? Ha? How many times? If there was a mastermind, we gave him more help than he needed.”
Triple Trap Page 14
