He opened the door and stepped in again. It was still dark. He let the door shut behind him softly, then cocked his ears. He held his breath to listen.
The flight of stairs down to the top floor was no more than twenty steps, with a turn halfway.
He sat down and, as quietly as he could, removed his shoes and tied them together by the laces. He draped them around his neck and stood up.
He listened again and heard only his own breathing. He stood there in complete darkness and slowly counted to 250 in his mind, listening, listening carefully. Concentrating on hearing. He heard the hum of the elevator moving in its shaft. Then it stopped.
He took a first step in his stocking feet. And waited. Then another. And waited. He’d crossed the upper landing. He took his first step down. Then another. He stood waiting.
Was that a sound—a sigh below him? He waited, listening. Then he took another step. And another. Then, slowly, several. He waited. He was at the turning of the stair. Silence all around him. He began the descent of the second half-flight. The door was a few short steps away.
The song of a faraway police siren grew stronger. McCall waited until it passed and faded.
He descended two more steps. Paused. Counting. Then two more. He knew he was only four or five steps away from the door. There was a faint line of light at its base. He descended two more. Then two more. Slowly he groped for the doorknob.
He touched something soft with his hand. It pressed against his forearm. Then it seized his wrist.
“Gotcha,” a voice whispered. Then there was an explosion of movement and shouting.
McCall was grabbed by two extraordinarily powerful hands; one seized his left wrist and the other gripped his calf.
“Get him,” said a voice.
More hands grabbed him. He was lifted out over the railing.
McCall went into a frenzy. He gripped an iron baluster and held on for his life. Arms and hands tried to raise him. He writhed and kicked and bellowed. They raised him higher.
“Get his hand! His hand, for Christ’s sake!”
Groping, McCall reached his other arm around a waist. His fingers seized a man’s belt.
“Higher. Goddammit. Higher.”
“He’s holding on to something.”
“That’s me! He’s got me, for Christ’s sake. Get his hands!”
Someone’s mouth was pressed against his ear. He felt the hot panting breath. He struggled more. He was over their heads and shoulders now, at arm’s length. Out over the stairwell.
“Drop him!”
McCall’s groping hand seized a necktie. He wrapped it around his hand.
“Drop him, for Christ’s sake!”
Out over the stairwell, they dropped him. He fell. And swung, dangling by the necktie. As the man pulled back, he pulled McCall with him.
Then the whole moving, struggling mass lurched and stumbled against a wall. Their hold on him was broken.
“Lift him, I told you.”
“Wait! Get his hands. That’s me you got.”
There was another violent lurch. One of the forms was elevated and McCall fell back.
“That’s me, godammit. Me! Wait! Stop!”
McCall got his legs free. Flat on his back, he placed both feet on the mass of entangled bodies. He concentrated all his strength in a great push. The railing shuddered and one voice shouted in terror: “No! It’s me!”
“Drop him.”
The terrified voice fell. It screamed all the way to the bottom of the stairwell in the darkness. The body hit with a muffled thud.
Amid the panting and wheezing, the two other men whispered to each other. Abruptly there was a square of light as they opened the stair door. The two of them stood there using the light to search the stairs. Their eyes found McCall.
In disbelief they stared at him, their mouths clearly agape. One took a step toward him. McCall tried to rise to meet him.
Then both the attackers turned and fled. The door swung shut and McCall was in darkness again. He lay back, feeling his panting breath burn his windpipe and lungs, telling himself to get up before they returned to finish the job. But he couldn’t move.
He barely remembered getting back to his office. On that dark landing, in a brief struggle, he’d spent all the strength in his body. He ached everywhere and his left wrist was wrenched. His shirt sleeve had been torn nearly off. There was a burning scrape along the left side of his face.
And in his mind he was still gazing down that stairwell. He should have been dead. It was just incredible luck. He knew he’d passed a watershed in his life. He could never be the same again. In terror he’d wanted to negotiate with those men. He understood now how easy it was to betray. He would have done anything to save himself. Anything.
And those two men, lit by the open door, gaping at him. He was so exhausted that, even without the help of the third man, those two could have come back up the stairs, picked him up, and easily thrown him over the railing. If ever he saw them again, he would recognize their faces instantly.
The three men had known where McCall was going beforehand. They must have tapped someone’s phone—his or Daniels’s in Rome. He’d suspected it all along. That’s why he’d used a pay phone down in the street. He requested a phone sweep.
The debugging team arrived at McCall’s office clanking. There were two of them, pushing a cart with black boxes and trailing wires. They didn’t speak to him. One put his finger to his lips. McCall nodded. And systematically, in silence, they proceeded to toss his office.
They removed the pictures from the walls and studied every centimeter of the frames, probing along the edges of the paper backing with small knives. Then they removed all his books from their shelves, riffling the pages of each volume.
As he left his office, one of them was examining the picture of McCall’s mother with her Main Line coiffure, holding her first grandchild.
The other one stepped into the hallway with him. “There could be a bug on your phone,” he said. “Or in the main phone exchange. Or on the box in the basement. Or anywhere in your office. I can drill a hole in a vase so small you can’t see it and slip a bug in there. Or it could be one of those harmonica bugs.” He held up an imaginary one between thumb and forefinger. “They can turn one of those things on and off whenever they want. By telephone. From anywhere in the world. Just by dialing a number. Selective eavesdropping, they call it. If it’s one of them, they’re very hard to detect.”
“Do what you can,” McCall said. “And check the pay phone across the street.”
McCall thought of his daughter. While she was doing her child’s rounds on that summer morning a few miles away in Alexandria, he was struggling for his life against three men: the Hanged Man, the Merchant with the Figs from Tyre and the Masked Tumbler who had flown through the air to his death.
If they’d succeeded in throwing McCall down, his daughter would have lived out her life believing she’d predicted her father’s death. He vowed he would never tell her how close the cards had come.
He thought of the tarot deck while waiting for the elevator. No, I don’t believe in them, he told himself. And I hope they leave me alone.
A half hour later, when he returned with a new shirt and tie, the phone man put a bug in his hand. “There may be others,” he said. “This city is a tapper’s paradise. If I told you that there are at least a quarter of a million illegal taps in Washington, would you believe me? No?”
“Where did you get it?”
“Across the street in the pay phone.”
McCall studied it, then went to the window and looked at the phone booth on the corner.
“It’s your fault,” the phone man said. “You and everyone else who hires these slope-heads. You put them on the payroll, teach them every dirty trick in the book, then lay them off. And what do they do? They set up for themselves, free-lancing for anyone who will hire them. They’re corrupting the whole country.”
McCall handed the bug to the man.<
br />
“Put it back.”
“Ha?”
“Put it back where you found it.”
“Oh. I get you. I see.”
The two men left a half hour later with their black boxes and trailing wires and rattling cart.
McCall sat down in his chair. He was still trembling, still clammy with perspiration. Every time he thought of his struggle on the dark stair, he felt the terror anew. Every muscle ached; he was becoming stiffer by the hour, and when he removed his shirt he saw that his torso was covered with angry red bruise marks. It would be a very long time before he could enter a dark building or sleep in a dark room. He would never forget the sound of the man’s terrified voice, falling. Or the thud of impact.
He looked at the CIA report he had gotten from Daniels. One of them—the dead man?—had left a heel mark on the cover. Operation Zealot: it had nearly cost him his life. But now it was his turn. He would use the report as bait to trap someone else.
He took an envelope from his desk drawer and put a stamp on it, then wrote out an address. On a piece of stationery he wrote two words: “You missed.”
He folded the paper, put it in the envelope, and sealed it.
The idea that occurred to McCall was insistent. It was like a little dog trailing a traveler, impervious to thrown stones and freezing pails of water. Its name was Assassination.
Probably the incident in the stairwell had fathered the thought. Assassination, of course, was counter to all of McCall’s training, his mind-set, his traditions. So he rejected it.
But no matter how many times he rejected it, the idea of assassination returned. Its appeal was seductive: a timely thrust of the blade through the arras, a push off the bridge, three shakes of a malevolent vial over a cup of tea. Whatever the form, history would change its direction.
More than that, the idea had sprung into his head complete in all its details, a whole scenario including the means, the planning, the target, the money, the motivation, even the consequences. All he needed to do was sell the idea to a sponsor who could provide the funds. The scenario even included the identity of that patron.
Selling an assassination was new to McCall. But he soon became so convinced of the need for it, he was eager to try. First he would have to get some sales aids. He had one of them: the Operation Zealot document he’d gotten from Daniels on the roof. The next piece he needed was a list of the military parts Iran needed; he got that from the file. He was all set. He put in a call to Martin Wainwright, probably the most unlikely man to sponsor assassination in all of Washington.
At one o’clock McCall hurried across the lobby to the front doors, headed for a crucial meeting with Wainwright. Through the glass door he could see the cab waiting.
“Any cooler, John?”
The security guard swung open the door for him. “Not a chance, Mr. McCall. It’s a hundred and six in the shade.”
McCall stepped out on the sidewalk. All about him he heard the wailing horns of the trapped Friday traffic. And now he would be part of it. All this effort to bring bad news to a man who hated bad news.
Wainwright was a son of a bitch. He’d flatly refused to answer McCall’s urgent message. McCall had had to phone Mrs. Woolman to intercede—the one person in Washington who could cow Wainwright. God bless you, Mrs. Woolman.
Less than a mile away the presidential helicopter rose from its pad and flew west. The Friday exodus from Washington had officially begun.
Waves of heat rising from the sidewalk embraced him. Hastily crossing the sidewalk he curled himself like a comma into the waiting cab.
The moment he sat back he realized the cab was not air-conditioned. Direct sunlight had turned the back seat into an oven.
“What happened to your air conditioning?”
“The heat wave. It broke.”
“Then take me to the nearest cab stand.”
“Forget it. There’s no cabs there. The whole town’s trying to get out of here. It’s either this cab or nothing.”
“Go on then. Make it fast.”
“Yeah. Sure. Fast.”
McCall sat on the edge of the sun-hot seat, feeling the perspiration start on his forehead and prickle down his back. Hot dusty air blew through the open windows. How he hated Washington. How he hated the melting heat. How he hated Martin Wainwright.
He was still trembling from the terrifying experience on the stairway. By now stiffness had settled in. His left arm ached where it had been seized. Every muscle in his body seemed to be throbbing. He’d been almost hobbled by the twisting of his leg. Tomorrow morning, he knew, he would be barely able to move. He was a mass of bruises. But he was alive. And at the right time he would have revenge for every bruise. Every single one.
At the very first intersection, the cab was captured by the monumental traffic jam. It was going to be a long ride.
The heat was like a tyrant who hated his subjects.
As the cab crept, McCall opened his attaché case and withdrew the manila dossier on Operation Zealot that he’d gotten from Daniels on the roof. After scanning it once more, he thumbed through a series of memos, conference summaries, and field reports, refreshing his memory on the case. He had a tough sale ahead of him.
From a clear acetate sleeve he took out a packet of black-and-white photographs, studying each one with attention. Many of them were very grainy blowups of telephoto shots taken by surveillance teams.
Next he examined a saddle-stitched report stamped SECRET, the linchpin of his story to Wainwright. It was titled:
A SUMMARY OF MILITARY PARTS NOW UNDER REQUISITION BY THE ARMS PROCUREMENT SECTION OF THE GOVERNMENT OF IRAN, WITH COMPARABLE U.S. ARMED FORCES STOCK AND INVENTORY CODE NUMBERS AND INCLUDING CURRENT INTERNATIONAL OPEN MARKET PRICES BEING QUOTED BY INDEPENDENT ARMS DEALERS.
He flipped through page after page of parts descriptions and catalogue numbers. On at least two thirds of the items, the price column contained N.O.—Not Offered. These were parts that Iran was not able to find in the open arms market, parts it would have to hire smugglers to steal. Every single item in the dossier was on the U.S. proscribed exports list.
McCall hefted the report. A gold mine—a smuggler’s dream list: hundreds of high-tech parts that no arms dealer could supply. A skillful smuggler could name his own price for any item and walk away with a fortune.
McCall’s eye selected an item at random: CRT 2374388/9. It was a part for a military computer, worth no more than $120. Iran might have to pay $12,000 to get it.
The last item in the dossier was a photograph of an olive-skinned man of about forty. McCall had seen that expression and those eyes on a number of faces in his career. Looking back at McCall were the eyes of a fanatic. A man who would kill every last soul on this lost star to achieve his goal.
This face was the reason McCall was slowly soaking with perspiration in a traffic jam in Washington in late September when he was supposed to have been sailing on a beam reach on a 36-foot Morgan on Chesapeake Bay with his son. The thought of the cool wind on the water made the heat seem worse.
“That’s one I owe you,” he said to the photo.
On the back of the photograph a label contained one typewritten word: ATTASHAH. Someone in the Arms Bureau had penciled The Unstoppable after it. Below that, with his pen, McCall wrote: The most dangerous man in the world.
In the old days a messenger bearing news like McCall’s would have been put to death by the emperor. After the last words had tumbled from his terrified lips—the army crushed in the field, the summer crops flooded in the northern provinces, an imperial city decimated by plague—bare hands would have strangled him in front of the throne. Wainwright would have been the kind of emperor who strangled bearers of bad news.
“Martin,” McCall practiced in his mind, “what we need to do is assassinate a few irritating people. Please sign the execution order here and here in triplicate.”
A drop of perspiration fell from McCall’s chin onto the dossier. He fanned his face with Atta
shah’s photograph.
Gratefully, McCall walked into the air-conditioned lobby and stepped into the elevator. Cool air began to dry his soaked skin.
On the sixth floor he walked the long corridor toward the muffled sound of contentious voices. In front of a closed door, on a golden oak stand, was a sign: NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL SUBCOMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL ARMS TRAFFIC CONTROL.
Through the door he heard Mrs. Woolman’s scolding voice. “Of course it can’t wait. This situation has become a real crisis now. We should have listened to McCall a year ago.”
McCall paused to adjust his tie and wipe his face. Under his suit jacket, the back of his shirt was drenched.
Mrs. Woolman was saying: “It seems perfectly preposterous to me to have that man spend hours explaining things to us, then not follow his advice. And you don’t even have the common courtesy to respond to his phone calls. Your behavior is disgraceful.”
McCall pushed open the committee room door and stood in the doorway, looking at them.
Mrs. Woolman was standing by the window staring out at the long traffic lines framing Constitution Mall.
Wainwright was sitting alone at that enormous conference table. Abandoned balls of paper and heaped ashtrays littered the top of it. The sour odor of pipe, cigar, and cigarette smoke. The committee meeting had ended and all the others had left—the legal counsels, the military advisers, the staff members, the secretaries: the spear carriers, cupbearers and scene swellèrs. Other than Mrs. Woolman, Wainwright was quite alone. Without the pageantry. Diminished in size. At bay.
If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Woolman, Wainwright would have already escaped for a long weekend.
“Good afternoon,” McCall said.
Wainwright quickly sat up and busied himself with papers. Mrs. Woolman dropped the end of the pull cord and went to her seat. But neither spoke.
Wainwright irritably watched McCall pull the dossier from the attaché case. Then he cast a glance at Mrs. Woolman. “Someone picked a hell of a time to call a meeting, McCall. A Friday afternoon in the worst goddam heat wave in living memory.”
“There’s no ideal time for this meeting, Martin.”
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