The Talbot Odyssey

by Nelson DeMille

  The bartender, Donald, approached. “Hey, Mr. Thorpe. Shindig over already?”

  “Right.”

  “How’d the President look?”

  “Terrific. Catch it on the eleven o’clock news. Donald, this group needs alcohol. Stolichnaya, and buy yourself one. My friend drinks Scotch.”

  Donald said to Abrams, “What do you want with that Scotch?”

  “A glass.”

  Donald moved off.

  Thorpe lit another cigarette. “My stomach is starting to ache.”

  “Must have been the fish.”

  Thorpe smiled. “You’re good, Abrams. I’ll give you that.”

  Neither spoke for some time, then Thorpe said, “So what do you think of the old boys?”

  Abrams answered in measured tones. “Harmless enough old duffers. Like to talk power and politics. They’re out of it, though.”

  “That’s what I used to think. Fact is, they’re not. I use them in my business.”

  Abrams thought that O’Brien would say he used Thorpe. “What is your business?”

  “Something called the Domestic Contact Service. . . . What kind of clearance do you have, Abrams?”

  “Six feet two inches.”

  Thorpe laughed. “I like you. I’m sorry about before, at dinner.”

  “Thank you.” Abrams regarded Thorpe closely. When Thorpe had been baiting him, Abrams knew he wasn’t in any personal danger. Now he knew he was in extreme danger.

  The drinks came. Thorpe held up his glass. “Death to the enemies of my country.”

  “Shalom.”

  Both men fell silent. The bartender leaned over and spoke quietly to Thorpe. “That guy got your message.”

  Thorpe nodded and winked.

  Donald said in a normal voice, “Hey, I’ve been thinking . . . that thing you said about the Fourth of July—”

  “Right. We need a good bartender. Long Island estate. Can you make it?”

  Donald seemed momentarily confused. “Yeah . . . sure . . .”

  Thorpe turned to Abrams. “Can you keep a secret? I’m going to ask Kate to marry me. Plan on a July Fourth wedding.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” Thorpe absently trailed his stirrer through a puddle on the bar. Abrams looked around the room. Very clubby. Horse prints on the walls. Green-shaded lamps. A few men stood at an oyster bar in the corner. Abrams straightened up and buttoned his raincoat. “Let’s go.”

  Thorpe held his arm. “Have you discussed any of this with anyone outside of the firm?”

  Abrams thought that was the required question before the bullet in the head. He pulled away from Thorpe and walked to the door. Thorpe followed. They descended the stairs, and Abrams went into a phone booth. He came out a few minutes later.

  Thorpe said, “Did you alert the police?”

  Abrams nodded. “Might as well. Make O’Brien happy.” They walked outside and stood under the gray awning. The rain was still falling on the dark streets. Thorpe finally spoke. “Are you staying in town tonight?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you want to go back to the armory?”

  “If that’s where you’re going.”

  A doorman hailed a passing taxi, and they both climbed in. Thorpe pulled two long cedar-wrapped cigars from his pocket. “Ramon Allones. Hand-rolled in old Habana. I get them from a Canadian businessman who does work for me.” He passed one to Abrams. Thorpe said, “Russian vodka and Cuban cigars. What would the internal security people say to that?”

  Abrams examined the cigar. “I don’t know, but my Uncle Bernie would say shtick.”

  “Stick?”

  “Shtick. That’s Yiddish for affectation. Like that raincape you’re wearing. Or the gold Dunhill lighter.”

  Thorpe looked annoyed. “No. That’s panache. Flair.”

  “Shtick.”

  “I don’t think I like Yiddish.” He lit his cigar, then offered Abrams a light.

  Abrams shook his head. “I’ll save it for an occasion.” He slipped the cigar in his coat and said, “You never suggested we look in the club safe.”

  “What? Oh . . . for the diary . . . Christ.” He leaned toward the driver.

  Abrams reached out and pulled him back in his seat. “Don’t waste my time.”

  Thorpe smiled. “At least play the game. We have to tell O’Brien we checked the safe.”

  “You’re sloppy, Thorpe. No attention to detail. If you want to play the game, at least remember what you’re supposed to do and say.”

  Thorpe nodded. “I insulted your intelligence. I apologize.” He flipped his ash on the floor.

  Abrams said, “Was the diary worth it?”

  “Worth what?” Thorpe thought a moment, then said, “Believe me when I tell you, this is a matter of extreme national security. Carbury was going to turn over a very sensitive piece of evidence to a bunch of amateurs, several of whom are high security risks, though we couldn’t make him understand that.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No. Of course not. He’ll be fine.”

  Abrams nodded. Dead.

  Thorpe said, “Is this getting you dizzy, sport? Wish you’d stayed home?”

  “No, it was a nice evening.”

  Thorpe smiled. “The night is yet young and still fraught with adventure.”

  Abrams lit a cigarette. “Is it?”

  “Count on it.”

  Abrams sat back. A man, he thought, might be known by the company he keeps, but a woman can’t always be judged by the lovers she takes.

  21

  Katherine Kimberly glanced anxiously toward the doors at the far end of the Colonel’s Reception Room.

  Nicholas West came across the room with two brandy glasses. “Here. Relax.”

  She sipped the brandy. The reception room, on the ground floor of the armory, looked out over Park Avenue. It was stuffy and noisy, filled with men, women, and tobacco smoke. An array of after-dinner cordials sat on a long sideboard. The furniture was French black walnut, the paneling oak, and the rug a pastel Oriental. A huge portrait of George Washington by Rembrandt Peale hung over the marble fireplace. On the opposite wall hung a portrait of George VI, which seemed, Katherine noticed, to have drawn the Britishers to that side of the room.

  One of them, Marc Pembroke, caught her eye and approached. She hadn’t seen him since the May Day party at Van Dorn’s estate. There’d been some trouble, she’d heard, over Pembroke and Tom Grenville’s wife, Joan. But that was probably more Joan’s fault than Pembroke’s.

  Pembroke greeted Katherine and West. He asked, “Have you any news of Carbury?”

  Katherine shook her head. She was not sure of Pembroke, but O’Brien had once indicated that it was all right to speak to him, within limits. Pembroke had access to the dead files, and he was tight with Arnold.

  Pembroke also shook his head. “This is rather distressing.”

  Pembroke, Katherine knew, had lived and worked in New York for a very long time. He had an office in the British Building in Rockefeller Center, a short walk from Katherine’s building. The sign on his door said BRITISH TECHNOLOGIES, but neither she nor anyone seemed to know for whom he worked. She remembered the shoulder holster she’d seen on the drive out to Van Dorn’s.

  Pembroke asked, “Where’s Peter?”

  Katherine replied, “He left, but he’ll be back shortly.”

  “I’d like to speak to him later.”

  “I’ll tell him.” Marc Pembroke and Peter had a business relationship. In some ways, she thought, Pembroke reminded her of Peter, but this did not inspire confidence or closeness. Marc Pembroke was the kind of man whom women noticed and men avoided. There was something incredibly hard about him, and she had not been at all surprised at the gun holster. She would have been surprised if he didn’t have one; she would have bet heavily that he’d used the gun.

  Pembroke and West were speaking, and Katherine excused herself and walked over to Patrick O’Brien. He was standing by the rain-s
plashed window, looking out onto Park Avenue. She came up beside him. O’Brien said, “Regarding Tony Abrams, I think he’d be helpful. Did you speak to him?”

  “Yes. He’s reluctant. A bit confused about who we are, but we need someone with his credentials. Someone with no personal bonds to any of us, who will evaluate the evidence objectively. Someone,” she added, “who could not possibly be on the other side.” She smiled suddenly. “I think he’d actually enjoy exposing one of us as a traitor.”

  O’Brien glanced at her but said nothing.

  Katherine recalled the day she had graduated from Harvard Law School, her father’s alma mater. Patrick O’Brien had unexpectedly shown up and offered her a position in her father’s old firm. She had accepted and moved to New York.

  She had married a client, Paul Howell, and lived in his apartment on Sutton Place. Patrick O’Brien had been polite to him but did not like him. Eventually, Katherine discovered she did not like him either. He said he would fight a divorce. Patrick O’Brien spoke to him. Paul Howell became more obstinate. Subsequently, a series of misfortunes befell Howell, including an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock fraud. Then there was a computer malfunction in his brokerage house that wiped out a day’s worth of trading records. A short time later several of his best brokers left and took their accounts with them. There were other misfortunes, much like a series of divine plagues. One day Paul called her at the office and shouted, “They won’t renew the lease on my apartment! Make him stop this.”

  “Who?” She thought he’d lost his mind.

  “O’Brien! Who the hell do you think?”

  She was stunned and said nothing.

  He’d shouted again, “You can have your goddamned divorce!”

  And within a few months she’d gotten it. Paul Howell had moved to Toronto, and she’d never heard from him again.

  Katherine looked at O’Brien, who was sipping on a cup of coffee. “If Tony Abrams refuses to work with us, I don’t think we should hold it against him.”

  O’Brien smiled in that fatherly way and patted her arm. “As long as you didn’t reveal too much of the Company business to him.”

  “I didn’t.” She remembered, too, that day, nearly five years ago, when she’d walked into O’Brien’s office unannounced, her heart beating and her mouth dry, and spoken the words that had led her to this time and place: “Can I belong, or do you have to be an OSS veteran?”

  O’Brien had replied without hesitation, “You can belong. We need young people.”

  She had asked him, “Are you in charge?”

  His features had remained impassive, inscrutable, very unlike his usually expressive face. “We are equals among equals.”

  “What are the objectives?”

  “To bring the chickens home to roost. To repay the stab in the back. To avenge the dead, including your father. To find the traitors still in our midst. To find the worst traitor, a man code-named Talbot, and kill him. And ultimately to complete the larger mission we were assigned in 1942—to put an end to any power that is dedicated to our destruction.”

  “That assignment was terminated by Truman in 1945.” She pointed to a framed document on the wall, signed by Harry S Truman.

  “We don’t recognize that termination order. We were born of necessity, we live of necessity, we are immortal. Not in the physical sense, of course, but in the context of the immortal corporation. We may have to reorganize from time to time, take on partners, hire and fire, but we don’t go out of business. Not until we’ve finished what we set out to do.”

  Her mind had reeled under the impact of what he was saying, though she had suspected it for some years. He had let her see small glimpses of it and had waited patiently until she had made the right conclusions and the right decision. She had asked him something of the logistics, the how, why, and where of it all.

  O’Brien had replied, “Do you think we couldn’t see what was going to happen after the war? When they were through with us, like all governments who use people, they intended to throw us back on the scrap heap. But they miscalculated. They didn’t fully understand what talent they’d assembled. The war acted as a catalyst, brought us together within one organization.

  “We saw them sharpening their knives to finish us after we’d finished the Nazis. So we took precautions. We began to go underground. We kept files and records in various places. Some are right here in these offices. We formed close contacts with the British intelligence services, which, we knew, would survive into the postwar world. And we stole money. Yes, we stole. We had a section called Special Funds. We had a worldwide banking system of more than eighty different currencies. There was over seventy-five million dollars of those funds, a huge fortune in those days. Congress and the President gave us this money grudgingly, with no strings and without regard, as they said, ‘to the provisions of law and regulations relating to the expenditure of government funds.’ They had no choice, really. You can’t run an outfit that is supposed to engage in assassinations, kidnappings, sabotage, economic warfare, and other unsavory pursuits, without unvouchered funds. Also”—a small smile broke across his face—“we actually made money on some of our operations. We were, after all, mostly businessmen and lawyers.”

  He had stepped closer to her and said quietly, “Over the last thirty-five years we’ve accomplished a good deal of what we set out to do, though I can’t give you details. But I will tell you we’ve uncovered and eliminated a number of Americans and Britishers who were working for the other side.” He had put his hand on her shoulder. “Do you still want to belong?”

  “Do you know who killed my father? I mean . . . it wasn’t an accident, was it?”

  “It wasn’t an accident. The persons who arranged his death also arranged the deaths of other good men and women, including, I believe, the parents of your new friend, Peter Thorpe. They nearly got me, too. And they nearly got the Free World after the war. Eventually, we will know all there is to know about them.”

  She had stood and said, “I never knew my father. . . . I always felt cheated . . . but I consoled myself with the fact that he died in the war, the way others had. But this is different. I’m not vindictive by nature, but I’d like to—”

  O’Brien had nodded. “There are personal scores to settle as well as political scores. Either motivation is good. Are you with us?”

  “Yes.”

  That night she’d called her sister, Ann, who was in Bern at the time, and asked, “Do you belong?”

  After a brief hesitation, Ann replied, “Yes.”

  “Me too.”

  Katherine looked now at Patrick O’Brien standing at the window with a fixed stare on his face. There seemed to be some special quality to these men and women that had kept them mentally alert and physically sound. Yet they understood, as O’Brien said, that they were mortal, and so they’d begun to recruit. Nicholas West was one recruit. Somehow the fact that he belonged made it seem all right for her. Nick was level-headed, careful, not likely to get involved with something that was reckless or unsavory.

  Katherine thought of Peter. He belonged only in a peripheral way, and that, she knew instinctively, was a good decision on O’Brien’s part.

  An unbidden image of Tony Abrams flashed through her mind. Abrams didn’t really want in, and she liked that. O’Brien, too, preferred reluctant recruits.

  She thought of the Van Dorns. George Van Dorn was in the group, though by the nature of the group one never acknowledged such a fact except in the most oblique way. Katherine did not particularly like George Van Dorn, and she sensed that O’Brien found something peculiar about him. If she had to propose a candidate for a man who could have been a traitor for over forty years, it would be George Van Dorn.

  She thought of Tom Grenville, James Allerton, and all the people she’d become involved with over the years. In the conventional world, people were judged by certain accepted standards. In the shadow world, no one was who he or she seemed, and therefor
e no judgments could be made, except a final one.

  One thing Patrick O’Brien had told her from the beginning, which she thought about now: “You understand,” he’d said, “that we could not have eliminated so many of our enemies and caused them to suffer so many setbacks without incurring casualties of our own. You must be aware, Katherine, that there is an element of personal danger inherent in this game we are playing. You’ve attended some funerals of men and women who did not die natural deaths.”

  She looked at O’Brien now and spoke. “Do you think Carbury is dead?”

  “Of course.”

  “Is this the beginning of something?”

  “Yes, I believe it is. Something very terrible is in the wind. We’ve sensed it for some time. Actually, we have some hard information that the Russians don’t expect us to be around after this summer.”

  She looked at him. “Don’t expect . . . who not to be around . . . ?”

  “Us. America. They seem to have discovered a way to do it—with minimal or no damage to themselves. It’s obviously some sort of technological breakthrough. Something so far advanced that we have no defense. It was inevitable that one side or the other should skip a few generations of technology. So far we’ve advanced side by side, one side or the other taking a short lead, like a long horse race. But we have reason to believe they’ve created a sort of time warp that will put them into the next century within a few months. It happens. History is full of such examples—the ironclad Monitor’s blowing the Confederates’ wooden ships out of the water at will. Our atomic bombs that obliterated two great cities in a few seconds. . . .”

  She tried to formulate several questions, but no words came out.

  O’Brien said, “We know their plan depends on a person or persons who will open the gates of the city in the night, a sergeant of the guard. Someone with a key.”