by Jake Needham
The back of the house was composed of a much smaller group, perhaps six or eight people, although exactly how many there were even August wasn’t certain. He recognized most of those people when he saw them, which was seldom, but he couldn’t really say that he knew any of them. He had spoken a few times to a woman who said her name was Sally on those occasions when he had tried to reach the Conductor and he hadn’t been available. She sounded like a woman in late middle age, but there were three or four women there who met that description. Maybe Sally was one of them, maybe she wasn’t.
August and his people in Pattaya were more or less completely isolated from Red River, which naturally was the whole idea. He knew there were other operators out there who worked the same way, but he wasn’t even certain where they were and he was pretty sure they didn’t know where he was. Secret was a word tossed around in all sorts of ways to describe various government operations that really weren’t. To call a government operation secret usually meant little more than that it hadn’t been on the front page of The New York Times. At least, not yet. The Band really was secret.
So, what the hell was that set-up in Hong Kong all about?
August had been thinking about that for the last thirty-six hours while he sat on airplanes, on trains, and in a succession of motor vehicles. He had run through the possibilities backward and forward, but he was no closer to an explanation now than when he had been standing on Reclamation Street in those first moments staring up at that gaping hole in the side of the Cordis Hotel.
Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make him dead and to take two members of his operating team down with him. The question was why?
Maybe some foreign intelligence service had a mole in the Band, it had of course occurred to August. But even if they did, what would be the point of blowing their penetration just to kill him and a couple of people who worked with him? He wasn’t overly modest about his skills and his accomplishments, but surely a successful penetration of an organization as secret as the Band was worth far too much to trade it for the death of any operator, no matter who he was. Penetrations like that took years, sometimes decades to build. They were gold. You didn’t throw them away unless it was for something big, really big. August knew he had made some important contributions, but he wasn’t worth that. Not even close.
Then what did that leave? It left the decidedly nasty possibility, that the source of the action was domestic, not foreign. Perhaps the Band was being shut down and the pink slips being sent out were of the permanent variety. August didn’t see how that could be done without the consent and the participation of the Conductor so that was why he had traveled from Hong Kong to Washington and was now driving toward Alexandria.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the Conductor, he always had, but part of the business he was in was understanding that your trust could still sometimes be misused.
Trust your friends, but cut the cards.
Either the Conductor knew what had happened in Hong Kong or he didn’t. August had to be certain which it was.
Time to cut the cards.
Chapter Nineteen
The Conductor lived in a three-story brick row house that was built around the time of the Revolutionary War and had somehow survived ever since. It was on a cobblestoned block shaded by huge trees that was a pleasant stroll from the office building that housed the Band. August had never been to the Conductor’s house, but the Conductor had once pointed it out to him when they were taking a walk through Alexandria during a break from a long and frustrating operational planning session, back in the days when he did visit the office on occasion. He had told August that the plot on which the house was built had been originally surveyed by George Washington. It was a story that seemed far too fanciful to August to be true, so he had only nodded, passed on by, and not asked any questions.
August had a way of filing away facts that had no immediate value to him but might somehow have value in the future, and now he had two facts that would make it possible for him to do what he needed to do.
Take the Conductor by surprise and read his reaction to August’s sudden appearance right in front of him.
He would probably see only a fleeting moment of truth before the Conductor was able to adjust his reaction to whatever he thought it should be, but taking him completely unaware ought to give him that moment. If he thought August was dead, August was certain he would see it in his eyes.
Setting up the surprise wouldn’t be difficult. He knew where the Conductor lived, and he knew that he usually walked back and forth between his house and Red River’s offices. He didn’t know if the Conductor was even in town, of course, or had perhaps left the office early to meet his mistress — well, probably not that — but he could hardly telephone that nice middle-aged woman who took the Conductor’s messages and ask, could he? Sometimes there were things that just had to be left to fortune.
August drove through Alexandria passing within a block of Red River’s office, then he circled around and passed by a block on the other side going in the opposite direction. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular other than some reassurance that nothing big had changed. He was pleased to see that everything looked exactly as it had the last time he had been there. It was what he expected, of course. Alexandria didn’t change much in a year. A lot of it hadn’t changed much in two hundred years.
He parked the Accord in a public garage just off King Street, the major commercial artery that bisects Alexandria from east to west. King Street is Bourbon Street without the Dixieland bands. It’s lined with bars and restaurants and thronged year-round with tourists who come to Alexandria in search of America’s past. August thought every passing year was making it harder and harder for anybody to find even the slightest trace of America’s past, but the tourists keep coming anyway.
August walked a couple of blocks down King toward the river and sat at a sidewalk table in front of an Italian restaurant where he vaguely remembered eating once or twice. From there, he had a clear view along King to the two cross streets that offered the Conductor the most direct route to walk from Red River’s offices to his house. There were fifty different routes the Conductor could choose to walk through the blocks of this small-scale neighborhood of historic homes, cobblestone streets, and big trees, but August couldn’t cover them all so he chose to cover the most likely ones. It was that fortune thing again. Sometimes August thought the most important element in the success of every operation was having a little good luck.
He asked the waiter for a beer and put him off about ordering dinner. He glanced at his watch. A little after five. Who ate dinner at a little after five anyway? Obviously middle-aged and elderly tourists in Alexandria did because all up and down King he could see them seated at tables doing exactly that. August wondered briefly whether he would ever be old enough to seriously consider ordering dinner at five o’clock. That seemed extraordinarily unlikely.
August ignored the glass the waiter brought with the beer and sipped it straight from the bottle. He liked the feel of a beer bottle in his hands. It felt solid, substantial, and given the shaky underpinnings of his hastily organized operation in Alexandria, a little feeling of solid and substantial was particularly welcome right then.
August had finished most of the beer when, about half an hour later, he had some of that good luck he had been banking on. The Conductor crossed King Street about half a block down from where he was sitting. He was an unremarkable looking man of somewhere around seventy. He was of average height and average weight, and he dressed and cut his hair in an entirely average way. He looked like everybody. No one who encountered him would be able to give you a description five minutes after he had gone. August supposed that was one thing that had made him such a good spy.
The Conductor was walking south at a relaxed pace. August was certain he was on his way home.
August stood up and dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table. Beer was expensive in Alexandria. He walked quickly up King aw
ay from the intersection where the Conductor had just crossed and turned left at the next street to circle the block. That would put him in position to walk directly toward the Conductor as he approached his house. August needed to see the Conductor’s face when he realized it was August coming toward him.
Would the Conductor merely be surprised to see August here in Alexandria, ten thousand miles away from where he was supposed to be? Or would he be surprised in the way someone would if they suddenly found a dead man walking toward them?
Whatever the Conductor’s reaction, it would only be there for a moment before he covered it with the professionally unruffled façade he had practiced for nearly half a century. August was betting he could catch the real reaction. If he didn’t, he wasn’t sure where that left him.
August moved fast. He turned the corner and walked east at almost exactly the same moment the Conductor turned the corner a block down and walked west.
It was a quiet and distinguished residential block. No one else was on the brick-paved sidewalks that ran between the cobblestone streets and the three and four-story row houses that had been standing there for hundreds of years.
August and the Conductor walked directly toward each other there on that empty sidewalk. They drew closer and closer and August could almost believe he heard their footsteps echoing hollowly on those brick pavers, but he knew that was just his imagination. He felt like he and the Conductor were reenacting the climactic gunfight scene from High Noon. When August thought about it that way, it occurred to him that maybe that was exactly what they were doing.
At first the Conductor didn’t appear to pay any particular attention to the man walking toward him. Then, as the distance between them closed, August saw the Conductor’s eyes sweep over him, stop, and immediately come back.
The Conductor slowed his pace and tilted his head slightly to one side.
And then something happened that August hadn’t anticipated.
The Conductor’s face lit up in an enormous smile.
“Damn, it is you, isn’t it, John? What in God’s name are you doing here?”
August said nothing until he got within an arm’s length of the Conductor. When he did, they both lifted their hands by reflex and they shook.
“There’s something we need to talk about.”
“Uh-oh.” The Conductor looked to August to be more bemused than alarmed. “Sounds ominous.”
“It is. Somebody tried to kill me.”
The Conductor stopped smiling.
“You’re being serious?”
August nodded. “Together with two of my people. Claire and Woods.”
“Well.” The Conductor thought about that for a moment. “Maybe it would be better if we took this inside.”
He pointed to his house which was only a couple of doors up from where they were standing. August nodded and followed the Conductor as he walked to his front door, opened it, and ushered him inside.
August was certain now that the Conductor knew nothing about what had happened in Hong Kong. He had watched the movement of every muscle in the Conductor’s face, every shift of his eyes when he had realized August was walking toward him there on the sidewalk. And he saw… nothing. Nothing at all.
Nobody who thought August was dead could disguise his shock that completely. Nobody was that good. The Conductor didn’t know what had happened in Hong Kong. August would bet his life on it.
Which, he supposed when he thought about it as he walked through the Conductor’s front door, was exactly what he was about to do.
August had never been inside the Conductor’s house before this and he had never really thought about what it might look like. Since the exterior was a brick row house with small-paned, shuttered windows that was a couple of hundred years old, he had naturally assumed the interior would reflect the same general sensibility. Probably a lot of dark-framed period furniture, perhaps shelves of leather-bound books, and maybe a few portraits of presidents that looked like they had been painted by Gilbert Stuart but probably hadn’t been.
Looking around as the Conductor closed the door behind them, August reminded himself, not for the first time, that assumptions were dangerous things. He and the Conductor weren’t exactly drinking buddies, not the kind of men who headed for a bar together after a long day of work and downed a few beers while they talked football, but August still thought he knew his boss reasonably well. At least he had assumed he did. There was that word again.
The Conductor hit the lights and crossed the room to a narrow Plexiglas table that held a collection of bottles and glasses. August looked around while the Conductor poured drinks.
The room was a gallery of contemporary art. The furniture was minimalist. Four black-leather Corbusier armchairs were grouped in the middle with a low round table that looked like marble. The table was so white that it appeared almost luminescent, as if it was lighted from within by some otherworldly source of power. On the wall directly in front of him was a single giant canvas lighted by hidden spots in the ceiling. The painting was comprised of a series of rough red and orange bands shot through with streaks of yellow that looked like heat lightning dancing across a summer afternoon. It must have been at least ten feet long and eight feet high and it made August think of Robert Rauschenberg. But he immediately dismissed the idea. If it was really a Rauschenberg it would have to be worth enough to clear a significant chunk of the national debt. On another wall were two paintings that August was pretty sure he did recognize. They were Warhol’s, one from his series of Marilyn Monroe portraits and one from his series of portraits of Mao.
“Single malt okay?” the Conductor asked as he handed August a glass.
“Fine, sir.” August took the glass and tipped it toward the large painting that looked like Rauschenberg. “Is that—”
“Let’s talk out in the garden,” the Conductor interrupted. “It’s too nice an afternoon to stay inside.”
And there was more privacy out there, August thought to himself, in the event there was some form of surveillance operating inside the Conductor’s house.
The Conductor led August down a short hallway and into a smaller room that looked less like a gallery and more like a space in which someone actually lived. A comfortable looking brown leather couch flanked by two matching chairs faced a large flat screen television mounted on one wall. The Conductor took a small ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked a glass-paned door which led outside to a small bricked garden surrounded by a high wall.
As August followed, he glanced at a collection of pictures in silver frames arranged on a console table behind the couch. Most of the pictures were of an attractive blond woman in different places and at what appeared to be different ages and periods in her life. In some of the pictures she was with small children and in others she was alone. Was she the Conductor’s wife? His former wife? August had no idea. The Conductor did not live in a world in which you shared domestic details with your acquaintances. And August did not live in the sort of world in which you showed any interest in such things.
Out in the garden several high-backed rattan chairs with bright orange cushions were arranged around a square black metal table. The Conductor settled himself in one chair and gestured August toward another. It was remarkably quiet, August thought, particularly when you realized they were in the middle of the city and only a few miles from the White House. They sat in silence for a moment and sipped at their drinks. August listened to the birds and waited for the Conductor to speak first.
“Tell me,” the Conductor eventually said.
So, August did.
Chapter Twenty
August finished the story of their assignment and the bomb that had been waiting for them in Billy Fang’s room at the Cordis Hotel in Hong Kong about the same time he and the Conductor both finished the last sips of their whiskeys.
“You have a leak somewhere in the Band, sir. There’s no other way this could have been set up. Whoever laid this trap for us must have known w
e were going to that room before we knew. There’s no other way they would have been able to make the preparations that were required.”
The Conductor kept his face empty and said nothing, then after a moment he rose slowly from his chair and reached for August’s glass.
“No more for me, sir.”
The Conductor took August’s glass anyway.
“You’ll change your mind when you hear what I’m about to tell you,” he said.
He disappeared back inside the house and August listened to the birds some more and wondered if he had made a mistake with his absolute faith that the Conductor was not responsible for what had happened. Perhaps the Conductor was inside right at that moment making a telephone call and arranging for people to come and take August down. He didn’t really believe that was true, but the thought occurred to him nevertheless. How could it not?
The Conductor returned almost immediately and handed August’s refreshed drink to him, then settled heavily into the chair where he had been sitting before and took a long pull from his own drink. He cleared his throat and pretty much put an end to any lingering doubts August might have had.
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I never heard of Billy Fang.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“Neither do I. I don’t know who Billy Fang is or even if he really exists. There was no leak at the Band. There was nothing to leak. I didn’t give you an assignment. I didn’t send a messenger to you.”
August thought about that for a moment.
“Ah shit,” he said.
“Exactly,” the Conductor agreed.
