“Sure,” I said. “More than a sec, whatever you need.”
“Just wanted to see how you’re doing with the Internet. Got any more questions for me?”
I did at that, and we talked techno speak for a while, him using phrases like HTML and links and hypertext with practiced ease, while I struggled along like a backwoodsman who’s entered sixth grade at the age of forty. Eric had helped introduce me to the joys of cyberspace and was my own personal tech help line. I asked him a few questions and he gave me more than a few answers.
Then he nodded back toward the store. “I heard most of what went on back there, though I wish I hadn’t.”
“I wish I hadn’t taken part in it, so don’t worry.”
Quick nod as he smoothed down the front of his store apron. “Mom gets like this, around this time every year. This is when dad died, and it bothers her still, though she never says a word.”
“Does it bother you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Not like it bothers her.
“I don’t remember him that well. He spent most of his time either out in the woods or in a bar. Best memory I have is him lying on the couch, trying to balance a Coors can on his forehead and yelling at mom when she didn’t move fast enough to get him another one. That’s about it.”
I started up the truck and he said, “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine in a bit.”
“Honest?”
A wide smile. “Gosh, I don’t know, Owen. I just thought that would make you feel better.”
“Thanks,” I said. “It did, just for a moment.”
I then drove home, where I packed up and left the next morning to murder an old Soviet spy.
* * *
—
The day was warm, and I drove with the windows open, enjoying the wet smell of spring, of hidden whispers of trees and grass and crops ready to grow, ready to get back to life. As I drove out of town, I felt a tingle along my hands, as an old and deep part of me appreciated that I was leaving the reservation. Mysterious Mr. Smith had been correct. There were certain things I could not do as part of my agreement with the Department of Justice, and one of them was to cross the boundaries of the township of Pinette. Even thinking of the bad business ahead of me, I couldn’t help grinning as I watched the miles roll up on the odometer. For at least this day, I was free to go where I wanted. It was a heady feeling, and if I had found the right tune, I would have been singing. But the only thing on the radio was a syndicated pop psychologist who seemed to gauge her success by seeing how many of her callers burst into tears.
About halfway to Cardiff, I pulled over at a mini-mall and bought a strawberry ice cream cone. I strolled inside, checking out the stores and the people moving about, young and old, families and single men and women of all ages and sizes. I sat on a bench and finished my cone, thinking about the pundits who carped about the “malling” of America. A serious problem, I’m sure, but on this spring day I was happy to be here, free to go into any one of half a dozen stores.
Which I did. I bought a dozen new hardcover books and put them in the truck, went into a computer store and picked up some software, and then went over to an electronics store where I acquired a digital camera and a nice cassette tape recorder. Elsewhere, I spent an obscene amount of money on clothes, and when I left the mini-mall, my credit card was almost smoldering at the unfamiliarity of so much use.
I continued north and came to a tiny county airport. A sign outside said FEARLESS FERN’S FLYING SERVICE and I had a neat little thought of renting Fern and his Flying Service and heading out to British Columbia. Instead, I kept on the job.
* * *
—
While the day had been warm, the night was cold indeed, and lying on the dirt and leaves in a copse of birch trees outside a Cardiff farmhouse was making my bones ache to the point where I wondered if they’d ache forever, or if a long hot bath would set things straight. I was wearing a “ghillie suit,” a camouflage outfit with such varied colors and strips of netting and cloth that even in daytime I would melt against the backdrop of the forest. With a good ghillie suit and the patience to keep still, a hunter can be damn near invisible, even with the target standing next to him.
My target wasn’t standing next to me, though. He was walking around in his old farmhouse about 100 feet from my hiding spot, alone except for an old collie dog that cowered whenever Len Molowski—or Leonid Malenkov—approached. The man appeared to be in his mid-sixties, with thick white hair combed to one side and black-rimmed glasses. His face was red and fleshy, and he wore a checked flannel shirt and brand-new blue jeans. I had been watching him since dusk, watching him cook and eat dinner by himself, toss a bag of trash on the porch, kick the dog when it got in his way, and then sit on a couch to pass a few hours in the ghastly blue light of the television.
There were some things I did not see.
I didn’t see him cleaning a Kalashnikov AK-47 by lamplight. I didn’t see a flag of the old Soviet Union flapping in the breeze from a flagpole. And I didn’t see an Order of Lenin pinned to his thick chest.
I lifted my binoculars so I could scan the property. The farmhouse was larger than mine, with two stories and a wraparound porch that went around three sides of the house. There was a barn off to the right—also larger than mine, but I didn’t have barn envy—and then what looked like a few dozen acres of fields beyond to the east. The nearest neighbor’s house was about a half mile away. Everything on the property was neat but shabby, like he was doing all right but didn’t want to show up the local populace.
I put the binoculars down, exchanging them for a handheld nightscope. The scenery flashed into pale green as I scanned. Two pickup trucks—one on cement blocks—and a tractor and other equipment in the barn. Nothing out of the ordinary—nothing, of course, except for me in the backyard, lying on the cold ground, 9mm Smith & Wesson Model 915 holstered to my side, water bottle, binoculars, nightscope, and some hard candies all within easy reach. If I had been younger and more eager, I suppose I could have handled this job immediately and been back home by morning.
But, among other things, I wasn’t that person anymore. So I waited. The night air was still and it was so quiet that I could hear the drone of engines far off in the distance, and the murmuring of Len’s television set. Eventually, Len got up from the couch and went upstairs. An upstairs light went on and I heard the flush of a toilet, and then all the lights went off and I stayed in the cold woods for another hour. Something rustled behind me, but I ignored it. I listened to the frantic hoo-hoo-hoo of an owl and heard a crash of wings and a squeaking noise as something was killed just a few yards from me.
And then I crept away, moving slowly.
Getting out is as important as getting in.
* * *
—
For the next couple of nights and days I kept watch on Len’s house and discovered he had a pattern. He worked in the barn in the mornings or went out into the fields with a tractor, turning up the earth. At noon, he finished and went into town for lunch at the Cardiff Cafe. In the late afternoon, he spent his time around the house, and by the time evening rolled around it was the same routine: make dinner, kick the dog, watch television, and go upstairs.
I envied his bed and his home. I was living out of the back of my truck, for I wanted no record of my stay at any hotel or motel in the area. After my nights of surveillance outside his house, I slowly and carefully trekked my way back through the woods to my truck and drove to a place I’d picked out earlier. In these woods were many dirt paths and logging roads, and from one of these, a different one each night, I backed into the woods until I was sure I couldn’t be spotted. Then I slept poorly in the rear of the truck on a foam mattress wrapped in a sleeping bag, and while Len had a cozy hot breakfast, I made do with coffee from a little camp stove and cold cereal. Fires mean smoke and smoke in the woods gets noticed, which is not what I pla
nned for this little adventure.
His midday journeys into town, which I timed, each lasted more than an hour. On day three I waited till after he drove off and then I rose from my hiding spot. I shed the ghillie suit for what would pass for a disguise in these woods: a pullover jacket (the better to hide my holstered 9mm), a long-billed cap, binoculars around my neck and a Roger Tory Peterson bird book in my hand. I sauntered into Len’s backyard as if I belonged there, went up to the rear door and in a few seconds I was inside. Len hadn’t even bothered to lock the door.
Inside and off to the left was a large kitchen. The collie looked up from the kitchen floor, eyes curious, and thumped his tail as I murmured softly and rubbed his head. The tail thumped a few more times and he licked my hand and rolled over as I scratched his belly. Poor guy. Based on his treatment, I’m sure the collie would have helped me shift the furnishings into a moving van, but I had other plans.
I moved quickly, starting in the basement. It took just a few minutes to peg Len as a neat freak, his basement tidier than my kitchen. Boxes of clothing and canned food were stacked on the shelves, and there was an oil furnace that looked as if it had powered the 1939 World’s Fair. Upstairs, the collie wagged his tail again as I went through the kitchen, the living room and the downstairs bathroom. Len had a few books, recent bestsellers, in the living room, and the usual news and sports magazines and newspapers. No Khrushchev Remembers. No Gulag Archipelago. No History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
On the second floor, I found his bedroom and a spare room, and, besides neatly made beds, bureaus and closets filled with clothes, and a few more magazines, nothing else. I checked the time. I had been in the house about half an hour. Time to leave.
Downstairs, I gave the collie another belly scratch and went back to the woods to put on the ghillie suit. Forty-five minutes later, Len came home. As I waited for him, I thought about what I had not seen in the house. Quite a lot.
There were no family pictures on the walls or the bureaus.
No collections of letters or scrapbooks of photos.
No framed certificates of achievement from 4-H or the Grange or the Future Farmers of America.
In short, the things that should have been there, if Len were a usual Maine farmer.
From inside the house came the yelp of the collie, and I refocused my binoculars.
* * *
—
The next day I picked up a few groceries and made a quick phone call from a pay phone at a combination gas station and convenience store, a new one. I had not shopped at the same store twice, because I didn’t want to be remembered, not even for a moment. When Miriam picked up the phone, she said, “Owen, I apologize.”
“Oh,” I said. “Very well. Apology accepted.”
A sigh from the other end. “Don’t you even want to know what I’m apologizing for?”
I turned and looked at a large AgriMark dairy truck rumbling by. “You’re right. I should have asked.”
Another sigh, but lighter than the first one. “Look, I was having a bad time the other day. Some old memories.”
“I hear you.”
“Of course you hear me, but I don’t think you understand. When you said you were leaving and you couldn’t tell me much—well, I don’t like being left high and dry twice in the same decade.”
“I understand.”
I could hear voices in the background.
“Maybe you do, Owen. All right?”
“Absolutely, Miriam,” and I was going to say something else when I heard a few more voices and then hers, saying, “Gotta go—bye” all in one breath as she hung up.
* * *
—
When Len next went back into town, I wandered around the reaches of his property in my bird-watcher’s disguise. He had enough acreage for one man to farm, if he hired help in the spring and fall. Beyond the edge of one of the fields, I found a dump, where he had trashed a few appliances, a box spring, and some worn truck tires. When I walked up to investigate, a chipmunk jumped on a rusting washing machine and chattered at me.
“Oh, hush up,” I said. “Don’t you see I’m trying to uncover a dangerous Soviet spy?”
And I laughed.
* * *
—
Heading back, I saw something behind the barn that I hadn’t noticed before, a worn path leading into the woods. I followed it, looking for a stream or a fishing hole, but instead it went deeper into the pine forest and then up a slight incline. The trail was old and well maintained, with branches and brush cleared away from the tree trunks. Last year’s leaves crackled under my feet as I made my way. I stopped for a moment to note a red driveway reflector light nailed into a tree trunk. The nails were rust-red from being outside a long time. Farther up the trail were more reflectors. The trail was marked for someone traveling through here at night.
The climb got steeper and I rested for a few minutes, taking a swig of water from my bottle, before following the path through a series of switchbacks. After a few minutes of climbing that made my thighs twitch, I was on the top of the hill, breathing hard.
“Excelsior,” I muttered, as I sat down on a fallen tree log.
The view was not what I expected. An airport was down there, with a long concrete runway that ran at an angle to the hill. A control tower and a number of hangars were in the distance, together with enough buildings for a small town. It was a much bigger airport than the one I had passed on the drive out, and also much bigger than such a remote and rural area would seem to need.
From the knapsack, I pulled out my binoculars and a map of the county. I scanned the few small private planes parked near the hangars. Those hangars were scaled for aircraft much bigger and faster than these Cessnas and Piper Cubs.
On the map, the marker for the town of Cardiff had a stylized aircraft symbol nearby. Below the cartoon plane were the words:
Raymond Air Force Base Strategic Air Command
(Closed and now available for civilian use)
Looking down at the old Air Force base as I sat there, the damn spring sun didn’t warm me a bit.
* * *
—
That night in my ghillie suit, I watched Len go through his routine. Tonight was a bit different. At the kitchen table, he tossed down shot glass after shot glass of something from a clear bottle. Vodka was my guess. Then he started singing, a morose tune that I couldn’t make out. It could have been in a foreign language, or it could have been that the breeze was blowing away from me, softening the sounds from the house. I waited for long hours as he gently placed his head on the kitchen table and fell asleep, and my hands and feet were trembling from cold before he woke to stagger upstairs.
* * *
—
The night after the drinking bout, after Len left for town, I stepped right up in my bird-watcher’s outfit. I whistled as I walked through his yard and through the open sliding barn door. Ain’t rural life grand, where people keep their outbuildings wide open for the benefit of would-be assassins?
A John Deere tractor was parked in the center of the barn, along with a collection of tills, spreaders, and harvesters. Everything looked to be in good working condition. There were a few bags of fertilizer and seed, and a ladder going up to the loft. I climbed it—wincing as a splinter dug into my hand—and on the second level found a collection of tools, leather harnesses, rolled blankets, and more bags of fertilizer. I went back down and outside past the tractor. Something was wrong, something was quite wrong.
I looked around, picking at the splinter on my hand. My internal alarm bells were jangling and everything felt odd, as though my inner ear balance had gone haywire. I squinted at the barn. It was bigger outside than it was inside.
I went back inside and paced the interior, counting off my steps, and then I came outside and repeated the process.
The dimensions were wrong. Something was hidden inside.
* * *
—
And it didn’t take long to find. To the left as I went back in was an empty stable. I ran my fingers around the wood of its far wall and quickly located an eyebolt and heavy iron ring. I twisted and tugged and something went click, and I was able to swing the door open. Inside was a room with some boxes and a low table.
A faint light flickered from overhead, and I looked up to see a wire running from the fixture down to a car battery. A light that automatically came on whenever the door was opened. How convenient. The wooden table was built right up against the wall, and an old kitchen chair was slid underneath. On the wall were thumbtacked photos, old black-and-white pictures that were curling at the edges, of Air Force aircraft: KC-135 and KC-10 tankers, and B-47 and B-52 bombers.
Squatting in the middle of the table was a dusty shortwave radio and receiver, about twenty or thirty years old, it looked like. Beside it was a desk calendar from 1979. Next to that was a small collection of books, cheap drugstore paperbacks. I opened one and saw rows of numbers, line after line. There were a few books in Russian, the Cyrillic writing looking odd in this place. There was also a small leatherbound notebook, which I scanned. The first brief entry was dated to 1959 and the last to 1981. The handwriting was in Cyrillic, tight and nearly illegible.
Maybe it was the dust or the flickering light, but a headache, a powerful one, started throbbing at the base of my skull. To the left, leaning against the wall, was a large pack frame with webbed straps that looked as if it were designed to carry a heavy load, and next to the frame were four wooden boxes, about two feet deep, three feet wide and five feet long. The covers weren’t nailed shut; they had fasteners that allowed the boxes to be opened quickly. I had a pretty good sense of what I would find when I opened the first box.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 123
