Brewer didn’t find a single official on the Continent who knew anything about a supersmuggler. A war-matériel concertmeister? A pied piper of technology? Farfetched. None of them believed there was such a thing.
He tried others—people outside the intelligence services. In Holland, in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, he talked to freight-office managers, drivers, warehousemen. In spite of their silence and their furtive glances, he felt he glimpsed the truth: people had been bribed to push the American matériel down the road to Moscow. All done by telephone. A man would call. An envelope would arrive. And things were accomplished.
Brewer went to question the three smugglers in Germany who had received the shipment from Kansas City and pushed it on to Vienna.
His name was Ruskin and he was part English and part German, the issue of a British soldier and a German war bride. The German authorities were holding him on charges stemming from a serious and growing problem in Germany—drugs. Ruskin had been arrested trying to smuggle nearly a half-million dollars in cocaine through German customs.
No one was interested in Ruskin’s record of smuggling hightech matériel to Russia.
In prison Ruskin looked like a man accustomed to losing. He had a large beak of a nose and a bitter sunken mouth, gaps between crooked teeth, acne scars, and strands of long oily hair. A lifelong outsider.
“They’re going to throw the key away,” he told Brewer. “No deals. I’ve got all kinds of information on high-tech smuggling, but they’re interested in drugs only.”
“What about your two partners?”
“Who? Wolf and Muller? They walked. We all walked. We were hardly questioned about that high-tech stuff.”
“Where are they now?”
“Dunno. Not drug dealing, if they’re smart.”
He seemed glad of the company, reluctant to see Brewer go. He had been smuggling for years, driving across borders in trucks with false papers. Nothing sensitive. Stolen goods mainly—Japanese radios and tellies. Did a lot of it for a group of German businessmen. He got started on war matériel with one phone call.
“Never met him,” Ruskin said. “Just a voice. Tried to blackmail me. Said he had a lot of information on my smuggling. I didn’t care. Told him so. But the money he offered made me listen right enough. And I did know the ropes. So we did business. And money arrived in small envelopes.”
“Swiss francs?”
“Right. How’d you know?”
“So what did you do?”
“The shell game. You know—we shuffled the goods from place to place until no one could untangle it. We’d pack the shipments in different cartons and different papers. It was easy.” He smiled. “We even used the shipping containers of major German corporations and shipped it across borders in their own trucks with the customs seals wagging behind—without anyone knowing it. Safe as a baby in its mother’s arms. A few pounds here, some marks there—it accomplishes marvels. Easy money for people in shipping departments. Easiest way in the world to make lots of stuff just disappear.”
“How long were you doing this?”
Ruskin shrugged. “Couple of years. We moved a hell of a lot of matériel, to Switzerland and Holland, but most of it into Austria.”
“Vienna?”
“Mostly, I’d say.” He grinned. “These Germans are half mad about the drugs in their country. But if I were them, I’d be more worried about the military stuff we sent to Russia. Just the three of us alone must have armed several Russian divisions—and they can raise more hell in Germany than all the drug pushers in the world. Think of how many other groups the man on the phone was operating. Half of Europe must be smuggling for him.”
From memory, in a very bad handwriting full of misspellings, Ruskin wrote down pages of information on the history of those seventeen chameleon cartons from Kansas City. He laughed just once during the whole interview.
“He really pushed your face into the pie, didn’t he?” he said. “I heard about the empty cartons.” He twisted a hank of hair around a finger and laughed happily, like a small child. “Wish I had thought of that.”
“What was his nationality?”
“Hard to say. He spoke mostly German. Good educated German. But he often spoke English to me—although he knew I was raised in Germany. I’d say he had an American accent.” When Brewer was ready to leave, he took a long look at Ruskin. “Why don’t you give them what they want?” he asked.
“What?”
“Information about the drug ring.”
“Oh. I can’t. It’s the same man, isn’t it?”
“Who?”
“The man on the telephone. The same one who had us smuggling the high-tech equipment.”
“You mean the Russian smuggler is also a cocaine dealer?”
“That’s about the size of it. And there’s nothing I can tell them about who he is. I haven’t got the foggiest, do I?”
As Brewer was walking away, Ruskin called after him. “He’s much too smart for them, you know. They’ll never find him. Nor will you.”
In Munich Brewer tried to reach Winston Matters again at his London newspaper.
“Yes, he is back in London.” The speaker said she was Matters’s secretary. The day before, Brewer had been told Matters had no secretary. “But he’s out for most of the day,” she said. “He rarely stays in the office. Perhaps you’d like to leave your name and phone number. And what did you say it’s about?”
With Sauer’s documents and Ruskin’s notes, Brewer rented a car in Munich and continued his Easter-egg hunt. He followed the trail across Austria. The first stop was Salzburg.
It was the same story there. Labels on top of labels. Warehousemen conveniently looking the other way, indifferent or bribed. The voice on the phone was well known. Very friendly. Sometimes he sent envelopes with money for no reason. Mr. X had built and maintained his own well-greased underground transport system across Europe, and through it contraband poured into Russia. Brewer drove to Linz. He drove to Graz. And finally he drove to Vienna.
He stood in the warehouse with the owner, gazing at the spot where the seventeen cartons had stood. The owner was very distinguished-looking, with an aristocratic face. He could have been a stand-in for the old emperor, Franz Joseph. In his hands he held one of the empty cartons. He hefted it.
“The others are gone,” he said. “Thrown out, I suppose. They’re of no significance now, in any case. This one I’ve kept in my office.”
“How did he steal seventeen cartons?” Brewer asked him.
“Ah,” the owner said. “But he didn’t, don’t you see? He replaced them.”
“How did he replace them.”
The owner smiled at him. “One at a time.”
“Right in the middle of the floor?”
The owner pointed upward, at the double rows of skylights. “As you can see, the light is not the best. Especially on these snowy winter days. With a number of people and hand trucks and such going on—well, you can see. It would be easy.”
“How do you think it was accomplished?” Brewer asked. “Especially with a man up there in the offices doing nothing but watching.”
The owner shrugged. “Police. A boring job. And a cold one. Day after day. Time out for a trip to the toilet. A pause for coffee. You must remember they were waiting for someone to drive up with a truck and claim all seventeen cartons. Would a man notice that a full carton had been replaced with an empty one while he was in the toilet?”
Brewer walked the length of the great warehouse then stood by the main doorway. For the seventeen cartons the trip had started in Los Angeles, gone across the continent and up to Canada, then to Germany, then through Austria to here, then out this door to—where? He looked northeastward. Zeleenograd.
He took out Bobby English’s ruble note. The end of the string, and no Mr. X. The face no one had ever seen. The only tangible thing he had was this piece of worn currency pushed into Bobby English’s coat pocket in Los Angeles.
Back in his
hotel room Brewer dialed the German telephone number English had given him. A recording replied, “At the tone, please leave your message.” Brewer hung up.
He tried Winston Matters’s London newspaper again.
“Mr. Matters received your message. He has left a Paris number for you to call.”
Chapter 26
It was finally too much for Gogol’s patience: the botched assassination attempt meant that the next try against Brewer would be infinitely more difficult. And meantime, Brewer was moving closer to him while he was getting no closer to Cassandra.
The way home lay through Limoges’s automobile. That was obvious. The man conducted all his secret meetings about Cassandra in that limousine. Gogol had to find a way to listen in.
Over the objections of Nevans, the chauffeur, Gogol disobeyed expressed orders from the committee and flew to Washington. He arrived late on a bitter cold Sunday morning and went to their customary rendezvous—a quiet motel down by the Potomac. He had never before seen so much snow in Washington.
The motel overlooked a winterscape, the river banks deep in snow under pallid sunlight, ice along the edges, while above, flocks of small birds fluttered along the scribbled black lines of bare branches. This was not the Washington he liked to remember. He preferred the springtime Washington of his sixteenth year, when he first came to the city with his father from Teheran, en route to Moscow. Three months that now in memory seemed like a year. Three months that changed his life.
He made three raps on the door.
Nevans thrust his head out and glanced up and down the hallway. “Were you followed?” he demanded.
“Yes, by the President himself and his entire cabinet. You are getting far too nervous for this business.”
Two pillows were propped against the headboard of the bed, and sections of the Sunday paper were scattered over the counterpane. On the night table was a pot of coffee and a cup. How domestic. Sunday morning in Washington D.C., reading the newspaper.
Even in sweater and slacks Nevans looked like the perfect chauffeur. Quiet, reserved, with an obedient expression on an ordinary, forgettable face under thinning hair. It was a face that rarely smiled, never told a joke, never got into quarrels at traffic lights. But the eyes had changed since Gogol’s last visit. Bland calmness had been replaced by the furtive sidelong glances of a man under siege. Too long in the trenches. This was a face that said in the mirror each morning while shaving, “Today may be the day my luck runs out.” Each day a little more confidence slowly sifts away like the salt through a hole in the bag, until one day all the salt is spent, all the confidence gone. Nevans was living the old saying among agents: when the nerve fails, the luck runs out. He badly needed a good starching.
“That Brewer is unkillable,” Nevans said.
“I’ll take care of Brewer,” Gogol said. “All I want you to do is concentrate on Cassandra.”
“That’s all I ever think about,” Nevans said.
“Do you have the pictures I asked for?” Gogol asked.
Nevans walked over to his jacket and, from the inner pocket, slipped out an envelope. “There’s a close-up of every piece of equipment that’s in Limoges’s automobile trunk.”
The envelope contained a set of Polaroid photographs, and Gogol looked at them slowly one at a time, placing each in turn in a row on the bed. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything like this before,” he said. “Limoges has one of the biggest collections of anti-listening devices I’ve ever seen. It’s a miracle they were able to fit all this junk in that trunk.”
“It takes them an hour every morning to check it out,” Nevans replied. “You’ll never ever record one word in that limousine.”
Gogol resumed his study of the photographs. “Some of this stuff I’ve never seen before,” he said. “I could find a ready market for it.” He started through the photographs again, casting a smile at Nevans. “You’re right. This is going to be difficult.”
“Impossible,” Nevans said. “I told you that. The engineer who put that stuff in the trunk told Limoges that he didn’t know of any listening device that could penetrate that system.”
Something in Nevans’s voice made Gogol look at him. A man on the edge.
“Relax, Nevans,” he said. “You’re doing a fine job. Just keep it up, don’t take any risks, and let me do the worrying. Your position is perfectly safe.”
“I want a reassignment.”
“Soon, Nevans. Soon.”
Gogol spent the next hour trying to reassure Nevans. A little while longer, he told him. Things were coming to a head. Nevans was safe. There was no chance of exposure. This was his last assignment. Medals and kudos were waiting for him.
But Nevans was hard to prop up. Gogol finally identified the problem: Nevans was afraid of Brewer.
“He’s already tracked that job from Los Angeles to Vienna,” Nevans said. “He talked to Bobby English. He talked to that British smuggler in prison—I told you to take care of him. This Brewer is like some kind of a fiend. He’s already learned more in a few days than they had learned in two years. He could find you at any moment. And when he does, he’ll find the rest of us. He should be taken care of now. Today.”
“Brewer’s probably very good,” Gogol said. “But he’s just another human being. Not a fiend. He has no special powers. And I’ll take care of him. Trust me.”
“I won’t trust anyone until Brewer’s in his grave.”
“He will be. Soon.”
When they were finished, Gogol said he wanted to see the park where the failed assassination took place. Nevans was reluctant.
“A brief look,” Gogol said.
Nevans carried the Sunday paper in an untidy pile down the corridor of the motel with him to the parking lot and threw it in the backseat of his car.
“How are the Orioles doing?” Gogol asked.
“What Orioles?”
“The baseball team. I heard they were dealing for a new left-handed relief pitcher.”
“I don’t know,” Nevans said. “I don’t follow baseball.” He frowned at Gogol. “What do you know about baseball?”
“You haven’t seen anything until you’ve watched a really great relief pitcher at work in the ninth inning with the bases loaded and a .300 hitter at the plate. Where is this park?”
“Just follow me.”
Gogol’s eyes took in the park terrain. A frigid wind was soughing in the trees, rocking the branches and ruffling the feathers of the perching crows. A weak sun was dodging in and out of thin clouds. The streets that framed the little square were covered with old snow, bracketed by icy crosswalks.
“He stood here and Brewer there?” he asked. “That’s twenty meters, wouldn’t you say? No more than thirty. Point-blank range with an automatic weapon. And the firing mechanism jammed?”
“Jammed,” the chauffeur agreed. “It was an early model nine-millimeter Uzi. Very old and in very bad condition. He would have gotten better results if he’d beaten Brewer to death with it.”
Cut-rate Russian assassination all over again, Gogol thought. Everything on price. It cost a fortune to set this up: the surveillance teams that followed Brewer; Nevans’s selection of the site and the timing; the transporting of two killers from halfway around the world, then getting them within twenty meters of the target; and Directorate T caps it off with a worn-out weapon that misfires.
“Your choice was excellent,” he said to Nevans.
“The firing mechanism may have been stiff from the cold,” Nevans said. “If they’d let me provide the weapon, Brewer would be dead.”
Only a worn-out, bargain-basement weapon misfires, Gogol thought. And the consequences were fearsome. Brewer, instead of being killed in this park, flies out to Los Angeles, where he gets valuable information from a man who is also supposed to be in his grave, not once but four times—in Munich, then in Athens, then in Hong Kong, then in Los Angeles. And who saves his life there? Brewer—the man who is supposed to be dead in this park. Gogol
felt haunted by the living dead.
Nevans looked unhappily at the frozen footprints in the snow of the park. “Brewer is the one who can track you down,” he said quietly.
“I hear you.”
“He’s very dangerous,” the chauffeur said.
Gogol flapped a hand at the park. “He’s very lucky,” he answered.
To the chauffeur’s intense relief, Gogol parted from him at the park.
“Brewer is the one who can track you down,” he said again to the departing Gogol.
Periodically on the flight back, Gogol studied the Polaroid photographs Nevans had given him. Then he studied a brochure, Surveillance Equipment: A Catalog of New Industrial Technology. Somewhere in those pages there had to be a device that would penetrate Limoges’s defenses. A device that would enable him to listen in on Limoges’s conversations about Cassandra.
From his case Gogol withdrew tear sheets of Matters’s London newspaper columns. Another problem. The meeting between Matters and Brewer had to be stopped. They simply could not be allowed to match notes.
Gogol had never had the feeling of being stalked before. For the first time he had a momentary sense of vulnerability. He heard the chauffeur’s words ringing in his ears. “Brewer is the one who can track you down.”
Brewer called Matters in Paris. He was in Berlin. Then Matters called Brewer from Rotterdam.
“Yes, yes,” Matters agreed. “Russian smuggling is just not that efficient. Someone very gifted is orchestrating a smuggling program of the most sensitive matériel from America, across Europe to Zeleenograd. Don’t you see?”
“Do you know who it is?”
“Someone brilliant, Mr. Brewer. Directorate T couldn’t do it. They’re too bureaucratic and musclebound. This program is being conducted by a virtuoso.”
“Do you have a name?”
“I’d rather not say any more on the telephone.”
“Where can we meet?”
“Paris. Got a pencil? I’ll give you the address.”
Triple Trap Page 15
