Brewer sat in his car in the Georgetown U. parking lot and looked thoughtfully at the photograph of Emil Gogol, aged twelve. A seventeen-year-old photograph of a Russian boy who liked American baseball and now was a Soviet clerk somewhere without the connections to get ahead. Maybe this was the wrong Emil Gogol. Brewer put the picture back in his pocket.
Tommy Allen called Brewer that night to ask him if he could meet with her in the photographic van to go over a collection of contact prints—prints from a number of sessions: Brewer at lunch with Bobby Burns in the Basford Club, Brewer in the corridors of the Pentagon, Brewer in the lobby of a hotel in Crystal City, Brewer driving on the Beltway around Washington, Brewer at Langley.
He met her in the parking lot at Langley late that night. They worked together in the photographic van until after two A.M. before they had all the prints assembled and roughly sorted. The two of them sat hunched over the tables, going from batch to batch, looking from photo to photo. Brewer kept shuffling them, eliminating the duplicates, winnowing the piles down, then poring over them with the magnifying glass.
After several hours Tommy Allen sat back and gazed patiently at him. “What do you think?” she asked. Brewer sat back and shook his head at the pictures. Nothing, he said to himself. They had found nothing.
“What a wild-goose chase,” she said. “We must have looked at thousands of faces. I don’t want to see another face for a year.” She stood up and stretched. “It’s nearly four o’clock,” she said.
Brewer pushed his chair back and stood up. Every avenue had led to a dead end. Sauer and Conyers had come up empty. The European name search had come up empty. The U.S. Embassy visa file in Moscow had come empty. The lead from Burns had led nowhere. And these pictures surrounding him revealed nothing. All they had for their troubles was a pile of contact prints and a picture of a twelve-year-old boy taken more than seventeen years ago.
He hated to call Limoges. “A flop,” he’d have to say. “A wild-goose chase. We’re right back at the bottom of the hill.”
He passed his eyes over the photographs on the walls. He could shut his eyes and call forth many dozen faces from memory. Gogol wasn’t in any of those photographs on the walls, not in any of the crowded scenes in airports and luncheons. Emil Gogol, where are you?
Tommy Allen went to the lavatory and stayed in there a long time. When she came out, she said, “Oh, shit.”
“What’s the matter?” Brewer asked.
“I just tossed my cookies.” She scowled at Brewer. “I think I’m pregnant. Oh, Bobby, I could kill you.”
She picked up the phone. “Wake up, Bobby,” she said. “Do I have your attention? I have good news and I have bad news. The good news? Okay. The good news is you’re not sterile. Damn it.” She listened for a moment and whispered something. Then she said, “Are you really pleased, Bobby. I mean are you really really pleased? You don’t sound pleased. Really? Are you sure? Say you’re pleased.”
Brewer pulled on his parka and strolled up and down the parking area. Bureaucrats, equal rights, and pregnancies in the spy craft. As he walked, he remembered something about two of the photographs.
When he got back into the van, she said, “We decided it must have been that weekend in Chincoteague. It sleeted and we were stuck in this motel room. Turned out to be a great weekend after all.” She patted her hair. “I put Bobby right up the wall. I’m a real handful when I get going.” She smirked at him. “Am I embarrassing you?”
“Terribly.”
“You know, you’re quaint … not fooling with married women. Right? Victorian morals. Very proper. Don’t discuss sex with the opposite sex. Is that it?”
“Talk’s cheap.”
“Oh-ho! I see. Talk’s cheap, and no action while on duty—so that’s that, hey?” She leaned over and kissed him on the lips slowly. “And that’s that, buster.” She touched his cheek. “If I’d met you before Bobby—well, that’s for you to wonder about.”
Brewer quickly shuffled a pile of prints. He scanned the pictures on the wall, his eyes stopping at one of them. He pulled it down and studied it, scratching his throat. He pointed at a pile of brown envelopes. “Hand me that pile of prints, Tommy,” he said.
She handed him the large brown, flapless envelope from the stand-up rack. “See something?”
“I don’t know. It’s a scarf someone’s wearing.” Brewer reached for other sets of prints and spread them on the light table. He adjusted a lamp over the prints and sat looking at them. He selected several sheets of prints and pushed them back into the envelope. Then he studied another batch.
She leaned on her elbows next to Brewer and stared at the two pictures, “You’re right—same scarf,“ she said. “But a different face. Do you know, it’s getting close to five in the morning?”
Brewer assembled all the photographs of the two men wearing the plaid scarf.
“See?” she said. “He’s wearing glasses. And he’s wearing a moustache. Different guys.”
Brewer asked her, “Can you operate that computer and the scanner?”
“Of course.”
“Then put these two photographs in the scanner,” Brewer told her.
She turned on the computer and put the two photos in the scanner. A short time later both photos appeared on the screen of the computer.
“Take the moustache off that guy. And the glasses off that guy.”
She magnified the moustache in one photo until it was a series of dots. She then wiped away the dots. When she reduced the photo again, the moustache was gone. Then she magnified the other photo and dot by dot removed the glasses. She placed the two photos side by side again. “Not the same,” she said. “Completely different hairline.”
“One may be a wig,” Brewer said. “Put one of those pictures on top of the other.”
Slowly, on the computer screen, she drew one photo over on top of the other. Then she adjusted them to make them the same size. With the exception of the hairline, it was the same face.
Tommy Allen was delighted. “It’s the same man.”
“Yes,” Brewer said. “And I just realized I know him.”
Brewer ordered enlargements of a dozen photos just to make sure. But there was little doubt. The man was about thirty, with a broad, flat face and bland eyes. An all-purpose anyface.
In one photograph he was standing about ten feet away from Brewer in Dulles Airport, unwittingly looking right at the camera. In the Crystal City hotel photo he was standing to the left of Brewer, staring right at him. In both photographs he was wearing the same scarf.
There was no doubt about it. The man in the two photos was Limoges’s chauffeur. Nevans.
Chapter 37
Brewer discussed the situation with Sauer and Conyers. He wanted to form a daisy chain—Sauer and Conyers to follow Nevans, who was following Brewer.
“We want to know everything about Nevans,” Brewer said to Sauer and Conyers. “He’s tailing me, and we need to find out why. So get on him but don’t let him know it. And don’t let Limoges know it.”
Nevans’s job entailed long hours, but also long periods of free time. Limoges used his limousine as an office because it was his only place in Washington that was virtually impregnable to electronic eavesdropping. Nevans was on duty from early morning, frequently to late at night. But Limoges was often out of town or embedded in meetings in the Pentagon or several other places, during which time Nevans was dismissed for the day or even the week.
For Sauer and Conyers, following Nevans was cold, boring work. First there was the time he spent chauffeuring Limoges around. Nevans had an infinite capacity for waiting—at curbside, in public garages, in open parking lots. He carried a pocket chess set and a book of master games that he simulated while bathed in the warmth of the automobile heater as the winter wind chased rooster tails of loose snow skyward. He also studied the racing form by the hour and placed bets by phone. He placed at least one bet every day.
“I wonder,” Sauer said to Conyers, �
�if he wins.”
Then there was the girlfriend. Whole evenings of that. She worked as a typist/word processor for the Department of Agriculture, and she was married to a State Department limousine chauffeur who worked usually in the evenings.
Nevans was quite at home in his fellow chauffeur’s apartment with his fellow chauffeur’s wife. Sauer and Conyers took turns sitting in a car or standing in doorways while Nevans and the girlfriend spent their evenings in bed with bowls of pretzels under a winking television set. The nights he visited her seemed to be determined by the television schedule.
“I suspect that Nevans isn’t much in the love department,” Conyers said. “She has a husband and a lover, and she still looks bored.”
Sauer suffered from the cold. He wore thermal underwear, wool socks, rubber overshoes, a heavy, pile-lined blizzard coat, two scarves, a ski patrol cap, and skiing mittens. Even so, when he and Conyers met with Brewer, his teeth chattered on the rim of his hot coffee cup and he talked endlessly about Panama. He carried a hip flask with brandy to lace his coffee.
“I just hope that bloody bastard is as cold as I am,” he would say.
Nevans was a solitary. Except for the girlfriend, he rarely spent any time with anyone. When he could, he went in the late afternoon to a cafeteria to settle with his bookie. He often ate an early dinner there or ate with the girlfriend.
He spent little time in his own apartment, and then mostly to watch television.
Nevans followed Brewer on a random available-time basis. He sometimes waited during the morning rush hour for Brewer to come out of his apartment, then followed him for a while. In the evening he would cruise by Brewer’s apartment to see if he was home. In his own apartment Nevans had a wiretap tape deck that recorded Brewer’s phone conversations. Sauer put a wiretap on Nevans’s phone which would play back the phone messages on Brewer’s answering machine.
“Maybe he’s trying to set you up for another park episode,” Sauer said to Brewer. “Or else he’s hoping you’ll lead him to the prize, whatever it is.”
“I think,” Conyers said to Brewer, “he’s sending routine reports to someone on your activities.”
“That’s what we need to uncover,” Brewer said. “Who he’s reporting to. And how.”
Whenever they met, Brewer studied Sauer with attention. The man’s behavior was often spiritless. He was frequently pensive—even cast down. And his breath was heavy with brandy. Brewer wondered if he were also on something else.
In Zurich Gogol received a phone call from his electronics specialist.
“Can you come now?” he asked Gogol. Gogol went immediately to the man’s workshop.
“I think I may have found something,” the specialist said. He opened a case and took out a small carton. He pulled the flap and slipped out a thin U-shaped metal component. He went over to the worktable holding the collection of anti-listening devices favored by Limoges and slipped it into the tape deck.
“This little frame clips inside the cavity of the tape deck of the limousine. Like so. See? You can’t see it once it’s in place. And it doesn’t affect normal play of ordinary tapes. But what it does is turn the tape deck into a voice-activated tape recorder. So when you’re out of the limousine, the tape deck will record conversations that take place inside. It has astonishing sound resolution.”
He pushed the rewind button on the tape deck then pushed play. “This little frame,” said his voice from the tape deck, “clips inside the cavity of the tape deck of the limousine. Like so. See?” He erased and rewound the tape.
Gogol tried it. He asked the specialist a number of questions. He walked up and down past the anti-listening devices. Then he asked more questions. And he tried the little unit in the tape deck again.
Even after the specialist answered all his questions, he was still skeptical. “What about all that detecting equipment in the limousine trunk?”
“It can’t detect this,” the specialist answered patiently, “because once you clip it in place, it becomes part of the same system as the equipment in the trunk.”
“How do I know it’s going to work?” Gogol demanded.
“Because it has been extensively tested and proven under the most challenging circumstances by its inventor, who also happens to be the world’s leading expert on sound equipment.” He held it out to Gogol. “Compliments of its inventor—the United States Navy.”
One night Sauer followed Nevans to a motel down by the Potomac. He summoned Conyers, and while she covered the front of the motel, Sauer walked along the boat promenade to look in Nevans’s window. The drapes were only partially drawn, and Sauer could see Nevans in his room talking to another man. Conyers summoned Tommy Allen.
Sauer approached the window of Nevans’s room and fitted the suction cup of a bug on the glass of a window. From their car Conyers was able to tape the conversation in the motel room.
When Tommy Allen arrived in her photo van, she and Sauer tried to position the van so that she could shoot pictures of Nevans’s visitor through the partially open drapes.
“I doubt it,” she kept saying.
“What’s the problem?” Sauer asked.
“His back is turned and all I’m getting is his shoulder and the back of his head.”
Several hours later the man left. And Nevans left. Sauer followed Nevans. Conyers in her car and Allen in her van followed the visitor, who drove to Dulles Airport. After he turned in his car and entered the terminal, Conyers went to the auto rental to get his name and address.
“Marten,” the desk clerk told her. “Eric Marten. He’s Swiss.”
“Did you get his passport number?” Conyers asked.
“And his driver’s license number, and home address, and credit card number, and a lot more.” The clerk showed Conyers the application.
When Brewer arrived, he found Tommy Allen in the photography van.
“Get anything?” Brewer asked.
“Yes. Gorgeous stuff,” she said. “Very handsome man. I love the beard. And those blue eyes. Yum.”
Brewer and Conyers waited while she developed the film. The prints were excellent. Then they shuffled through all the previous contact prints. There was no match up.
“That face is too distinctive,” she said. “I would have remembered it if I had seen it in any of these other pictures. Handsome man like that.”
Brewer held out several of the close-ups. “Can you put these in the scanner? And this?”
She studied the third print. “Old picture. Grainy. What is it you want? The man or the boy or both?”
“Just the boy. A close-up of his face. Sorry about the graininess. It was taken sixteen, seventeen years ago in Iran.”
“They’re not the same,” Allen said. She put the photos in the scanner then watched them appear on the computer screen. “See. He has a full, fleshy face with a thick beard. And the boy’s face is skinny. It’s all cheekbones and teeth.”
“Take away the beard,” Brewer said. He and Conyers watched as Tommy Allen selected then eliminated the beard on Marten’s face.
“I want you to select the boy’s eyes and the ears. That band from the middle of his face.” They watched her select a broad oblong from the boy’s face.
“Now,” Brewer said, “make them the same size as the eyes and ears on the man’s face.” Allen increased the size of the oblong.
“Okay,” Allen said. “Now you want me to put the boy’s eyes over the man’s face?”
“Yes.”
She moved the strip and placed it over Marten’s face. It was too small. She increased the size in the computer.
“Perfect fit,” Conyers said. “The eyes and ears are identical.”
Brewer nodded. “Eric Marten is Emil Gogol.”
Chapter 38
Conyers played the tape recording she made of Nevans’s meeting with Gogol in the motel.
Nevans’s voice fit his face: it was soft and bland, with faint inflections. Gogol had a rich speaking voice which he used w
ith dramatic effect.
“Wait until you see this,” Gogol’s voice said.
“What is it?” Nevans asked.
“A way to get around Limoges’s toys,” Gogol said. “This is a listening device that will bypass all that junk in Limoges’s trunk. See how thin it is? Just stick it inside the tape deck with a cassette and it makes the tape deck a voice-activated tape recorder. Every time Limoges sends you out of the limousine, you push this into the tape-deck cavity. When you come back, you have a tape recording of the conversation.”
Nevans wasn’t delighted. He was afraid it would be discovered. “They check that equipment in the trunk every morning,” he said. “Two experts go through every unit.”
“So? They won’t find this. It’ll be in your pocket.”
“How do I know it won’t set off one of the sensors in the trunk?”
“Because we tested it over and over. Trust me, Nevans. Do you know how important this is? All the major business dealings concerning Cassandra take place in that limousine. We’ll be listening in on every major conversation, thanks to you. We’ll learn the inmost secrets about Cassandra, thanks to you.” “Brewer is still alive,” Nevans lamented.
Brewer called Limoges. “I have some information.”
“Will it keep until morning?” Limoges asked.
“Meet me by the Jefferson Memorial,” Brewer said.
“I prefer to meet in my car.”
“Behind the Jefferson Memorial,” Brewer said. “In half an hour.”
“It’s freezing cold out there.”
“Wear a very warm coat,” Brewer said.
Around the Jefferson Memorial the pedestrian walks were scraped to the paving, wide paths through the deep snow. In the sharply cold air the walkways were empty. A red winter twilight was fading to rose.
Limoges clambered out of his car, out of his element, walking awkwardly, coat collar up, homburg hat pulled tightly down against the chilly night air, puffing a cigar. He didn’t belong there.
“Why are we meeting here, of all places?” he complained. “No one in his right mind is out here in this weather.”
Triple Trap Page 23
