Spy Dance

by Allan Topol

  “And you didn’t know about his affair with the Saudi princess?”

  “I knew that he was having marital problems.”

  “Well, I’m not telling you how to run your agency, but shouldn’t somebody have investigated this man’s personal life once you knew about his marital problems?”

  She winced. Ed had gotten right to the point, as she’d expected. Squirming in her chair, she made no effort to shift the blame. “In retrospect, of course the answer’s yes. We’ll bring him home now.”

  “Nothing like closing the barn door when the horse is out,” Simpson grumbled.

  They all sat in silence, waiting for the AG. Finally, he buzzed his secretary. “Call Kathy at the White House. Get me on the President’s calendar today as soon as possible. Tell her there will be three of us. I’m bringing Margaret Joyner and General Chambers with me.”

  Chambers could barely contain his feeling of triumph. It had been a long road to gain this sweet revenge. After Fox’s meeting with Joyner and Chambers in Washington, the general had instinctively felt Fox would lead him to Greg Nielsen, and putting a tail on Fox had done just that. He couldn’t believe the assassin he had hired had missed Nielsen in Green Park. Then there had been Paris. Rather than hiring someone himself, he had simply leaked to an Iranian unit operating in Europe the information that their old nemesis, the Shah’s friend, was staying at the Hotel Bristol. Again, the Houdini-like Nielsen had gotten away. Not this time, Chambers thought joyfully. Your luck has run out. You’ll be a very old man when they finally release you from a federal penitentiary.

  * * *

  From the back porch of the Hilltop, Sagit watched David trudging wearily back to the inn. He had started out running, but out of shape, he returned walking. Deep in thought, he didn’t even notice her. But she saw the clearly defined ridges in the forehead of his ruddy face—much deeper and longer than ever before.

  Heavy clouds were forming in the western sky. A squirrel cut quickly across the path in front of him, then disappeared into the woods. She cared for him so much, the way she had never thought it was possible to love. She was blaming herself for getting him into this quagmire in Washington.

  It wasn’t what Margaret had said but how she’d said it. The usual warmth had been missing in her voice. She was cold, professional, bureaucratic, as she had been when Sagit first met her last year, before their session in California. Sagit thought she had broken down that barrier. Now it was back up again. She blamed herself for believing—naively, she realized—that she could control what happened in this monster of a city that regularly destroyed people’s lives and their dreams.

  She walked down the steps and met him on the dirt path. “You look like you just lost your best friend,” he said.

  “Margaret called.”

  “And?” he asked apprehensively. She reported the entire conversation to him, almost verbatim. “Shit, he beat me,” he said, sighing.

  She didn’t respond. She knew he was right.

  He continued, “Last evening Margaret told me I was underestimating General Chambers.”

  “Yeah, but look at history. There are lots of generals like Chambers who thought they were omnipotent, and eventually they got their due.

  Look at Caesar... and Napoleon... and MacArthur... and even Saddam Hussein, who got devastated when he sent his troops into Kuwait, why...”

  Suddenly David’s eyes came to life. “What did you say?”

  “I said that even Saddam Hussein...”

  “No, I mean before that.”

  “Look at Caesar and Napoleon and...”

  “That’s it. Napoleon.”

  “What’s Napoleon have to do with this?”

  “Everything. When I was in Paris devising the plan for Madame Blanc to give to Khalid, I broke into the computer at PDF. The password was ‘Guillotine’ for this Saudi operation. Well, anyhow, I got a look at the finances for the operation. I learned that Madame Blanc had made two payments of fifteen million dollars each into an account at the Credit Suisse Bank on the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich. The payee was someone whose name or code name was Henri Napoleon.”

  She put her forehead into her hand, closed her eyes and shook her head in dismay. When she opened her eyes, she looked at him accusingly. “And you never told me?”

  He glanced down at the ground, feeling defensive. As their relationship had evolved, he should have dealt with her as an equal partner, but old habits die hard. “Look, I guess I’m not much of a team player. I’m sorry. Besides, I just assumed at the time that Henri Napoleon was the code name for the Saudi military officer in charge of the coup. Since we still had to find out who the Saudi officer was, I didn’t bother telling you about the code name.”

  “So once you found out that Khalid was the Saudi officer, you assumed that Napoleon was his code name?”

  “Yeah. Except that Khalid denied ever getting any money for himself from Madame Blanc, and I believed him. Then I concluded that Bill Fox was Henri Napoleon, but as I think about it some more, Madame Blanc would never make payments that large to somebody at such a low level. It has to be Chambers. It fits with everything else we know. She would also think it clever to give Chambers a general’s name for a code name.”

  Listening to him, she thought, My God, if you’d had told me what you knew earlier. I might have helped you avoid the quicksand you’re in now. There was no use chastising him. They had to go on from here. So Madame Blanc had paid off Chambers to the tune of thirty million dollars to that point.

  His face lit up with excitement, and he was gesticulating as he began speaking rapidly, his mouth trying to keep up with his thoughts. “Absolutely. That money, and perhaps more, has got to be the payoff for Chambers persuading the President not to intervene militarily when Khalid launches his attack. That’s why she told me the first time I met her that I shouldn’t worry about the American government intervening militarily. Chambers is in her pocket. She figures that she has Washington neutralized.”

  “Do you think General Chambers could ever deliver on a commitment like that?” he paused for a moment and squeezed his hands together trying to think about what Chambers would do to follow through on his commitment to Madame Blanc. “As chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he’s the president’s top military adviser. General Chambers is also someone who spent time in Saudi Arabia. And he has a close personal relationship with President Waltham. If he were to advise the president in the strongest terms that thousands of American lives would be lost in a bitter Saudi civil war, I don’t think that this President would intervene one month before he’s up for reelection.” He paused for a minute. “No, I think Madame Blanc had the right idea.”

  Sagit never heard David’s last sentence. Her mind was churning, trying to come up with a way to use this information to turn the tables on Chambers. “Then all we need are copies of the records from this Swiss bank account she set up for him.”

  “Be realistic, Sagit, you’re not going to get access to Chambers’ Swiss bank account. Swiss banks zealously guard information about their accounts. That’s why I opened one myself when I was on the run five years ago.”

  Now she was excited, confident that she was on the right track. She brushed aside his qualms. “What I need from you is to use that great memory of yours. Did you see an account number for Henri Napoleon at Credit Suisse in Zurich?”

  He closed his eyes, racking his brain. Finally, he said, “55XQ3. That’s the number.”

  “Fantastic.” She hugged him tightly. “Yes!”

  David brightened up, now beginning to share her enthusiasm. “Okay, you and I are going to get on the first plane to Zurich this evening.”

  “We can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Your deal was immunity for full cooperation. Chambers has probably convinced the attorney general to order your arrest. If you’re not here, they’ll cover the airports. If we’re together, they’ll stop me as well. I’ve got to go to Zurich myself.”

 
; “We’ll be able to get out in time. They’d never move that fast.”

  “You’re wrong. With Chambers driving the response, everything will move on a fast track.”

  “I will admit it’s a gamble.”

  “One that you can’t afford to lose. The safer bet’s for me to go alone.”

  He nodded, thinking about what she’d said, before he reluctantly agreed. “But I won’t stay here and let them take me. I had a good friend when I was with the Company. Tim Donnelly, who was deputy director. Tim had a house in St. Michaels on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I’ll lay low at Tim’s house, and that’ll give me flexibility.”

  She handed him her cell phone, and he punched in Donnelly’s number from memory. When the recording began, “You have reached the Donnellys. No one is here...” he hung up.

  “Tim had a guest house in back that I used a couple of times when I was in Washington for consultations. ‘Key’s in the can in back,’ he always said. ‘No need to call. Just come.’ All I need is an hour’s lead time to avoid the manhunt they’ll set up. So you should wait one hour. Then call Margaret and tell her I’ve disappeared in the woods. You’ve looked everywhere, and you can’t find me. You’re afraid I may have taken off again. Just like five years ago.”

  She nodded. “And then I go to Zurich to get the evidence we need.”

  “Wait until tomorrow evening. Give it a day to settle down. But don’t let Margaret know what you’re up to in Zurich until you get the evidence and you’ve hidden a copy. I don’t trust anyone except you.”

  He recited Donnelly’s number and said, “Call me when you have the evidence, and I’ll come running.”

  “What if I don’t get it?”

  “There are thousands of boats in St. Michaels. From the Chesapeake Bay, I could go anywhere in the world.”

  She was annoyed. All he was thinking about was himself. The Solo Runner was off again. “And what do you want me to do? Take over your kibbutz fur business and sneak off to meet you in Europe twice a year?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be.”

  Five minutes later, he packed some clothes in a small black duffel bag. He held her tight and kissed her. “Listen, Sagit,” he said. “One thing I want you to know, regardless of what happens, I don’t blame you for going to Washington in the first place. You got the immunity for me. I screwed up. It’s my fault for using that jerk Bill Fox.”

  Then he was gone.

  * * *

  Within fifteen minutes of Sagit’s phone call to Margaret, half a dozen unmarked navy blue cars descended on the Hilltop, their red bubble lights on the dashboards flashing, their sirens blasting. They used dogs to help search the woods, vicious dogs that tried to pick up the scent they had gotten from some of the clothes David left behind.

  Sagit was convinced that Margaret believed she was in on some plan with David, but Margaret didn’t press hard. The CIA director knew that they would never find David until he wanted to be found. Still not persuaded that the Fox affidavit was true, she was content to let events unfold.

  * * *

  Half a world away, Bill Fox had developed a plan to jump-start the rest of his life. Prince Faisel, Jameelah’s husband, was at home for five days before a trip to Beirut to gamble and to frolic in the reestablished fleshpot of the Middle East. Fox couldn’t see her during those five days and nights.

  By the time the prince left for Beirut, Fox would present Jameelah with a plan for her escape with him to Europe. His idea was to put her in a wooden crate with air holes, containing a battery-driven heater, and arrange for the crate to fly in the storage compartment of a C-130 cargo jet that the U.S. air force was flying to Frankfurt.

  There they would start their lives over. They’d go to the lake country of Italy—the most marvelous place in the world for lovers. And from there, all things were possible.

  The prince shouldn’t miss her. He had three other wives, two of whom were even younger than her twenty-three years. But that was five days from now.

  In the meantime, he had to think about that awful sixty-two-year-old fat husband of hers, sodomizing his wonderful Jameelah, because that’s the way the prince liked it—tearing that precious sensitive skin. God, it drove him crazy just thinking about her pain. Several times in the past he had been tempted to go to their mansion with a gun and shoot the bastard, but that would only lead to a death sentence for her and him. Better to wait the five days.

  He glanced at the phone, expecting it to ring any minute with Margaret Joyner or one of her assistants calling to summon him back to Washington. He was betting that the bureaucracy wouldn’t move that fast, but if it did, he’d find a place to hide in the Saudi desert for five days. He already had a couple of possibilities.

  As far as Greg Nielsen was concerned, Fox was sorry that he had to do in his old buddy, but General Chambers left him no alternative. It was a choice between Nielsen and Jameelah, and that was no choice at all.

  In self-justification, he asked himself, What did Nielsen ever do for me? He left me holding the bag five years ago to explain what happened with Azziz, while he hightailed it to God only knows where.

  Suddenly, Fox heard a knock at his front door. Surprised, he looked at the clock. It was almost midnight.

  “Who’s there?” he called through the closed door.

  “It’s Abdullah,” a familiar man’s voice replied. He was Jameelah’s servant, whom she had enlisted to assist in her clandestine liaison.

  Fox quickly opened the door. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Prince Faisel went to Beirut this evening. She wants you to come now, to see her.”

  It took Fox less than a minute to put on a white cotton thobe over his own clothes, and the standard red-and-white cotton headdress that he wore whenever he went to see her.

  He drove himself, following Abdullah. In the car, he turned on a CD of Sinatra singing “My Way.” He was trembling with excitement at the prospect of seeing Jameelah so soon. It had been a great bit of luck for him that the prince had left earlier—before the CIA could summon him back to Washington. He had a whole plan for the evening. He’d tell her about the plane for Frankfurt. They were leaving almost daily this week, as military supplies were being shuttled between Frankfurt and Saudi Arabia.

  But before they discussed that, he’d make love to her—long and slow, just the way she liked it. He could feel his penis stiffen in his pants as he thought about it. God, it was never like that for him with Alice. Not even when she was twenty-three.

  The prince’s palatial house had a long driveway. As Fox followed Abdullah, he turned off his headlights and the music. The house was dark and still.

  After parking his car in front of Abdullah’s, where it couldn’t be seen from the road, he took off his shoes. Outside, it was cool and pleasant. Treading softly, he followed Abdullah up to the front door. Without glancing back, the servant opened it and let himself in. Fox followed two steps behind.

  As soon as he was in the pink marble entrance hall, Fox looked around, trying to get his eyes accustomed to the dark.

  Suddenly from behind him, a heavy object crashed down on his head. He felt himself losing consciousness.

  Sometime later, and he had no idea how long, someone placed an awful-smelling substance under his nose to wake him up.

  A piece of heavy duct tape was wrapped across his mouth. His hands were tied tightly behind his back, and his feet were bound with heavy rope around the ankles. Then he was dragged by powerful arms to the back of the house.

  Outside, the swimming pool was bathed in floodlights.

  To his horror, he saw his princess, his beloved Jameelah, bound and gagged the same way, standing on the concrete pool deck near the shallow end. Two men held her tightly. All of the other members of the household except the prince—wives, children and servants—stood around the pool. They marched Fox past her, while the household members jeered. He saw that her eyes were red from crying. Her face was bru
ised and caked with blood where she had been beaten.

  He tried to move, to fight his way free, but the ropes were too tight, the arms pulling him were too strong. There was no possibility of resistance, as they led him around to the deep end of the pool.

  To his horror, he watched as her oldest brother came forward, holding a heavy stone in his hand. That was the cue for all of the others standing by the pool to go over to the pile of stones that had been deposited in a corner and pick one up. Her brother fired the first stone at Jameelah with all the force he could muster. This would avenge the disgrace that she had brought on his family. It struck her in the center of the forehead, knocking her down. In rapid fire, the others unleashed their stones at the prone Jameelah.

  Fox couldn’t bear to look. He knew that they would continue throwing until she was dead. As he closed his eyes, someone fastened black waterproof plastic bags containing large rocks to his feet. Then he was roughly dragged to the edge of the pool and tossed into the water.

  As Fox felt himself sink, the face of General Chambers popped into his mind. Chambers was responsible for Jameelah’s husband, the prince, finding out tonight. He was certain of it. God, what a fool he had been.

  * * *

  With the small black duffel in his hand and dressed in slacks and a shirt, David walked along the road ten minutes from the Hilltop to a main highway. At the intersection was a combination diner/truck stop on the side of the road heading west from Washington. He walked over to one of the diesel pumps, eyed the truckers who were filling up and settled on a big burly African-American whose company, Royal Trucking, was headquartered in Roanoke, according to the printing on the side of the truck.

  David said to the trucker, “My car just conked out on me. I have to get to Roanoke. I’m supposed to get married down there. If I don’t make it, she’ll never understand. Please, I’ll play you two hundred dollars in cash for a ride.”

  The driver, who looked like he’d played football in high school, stared at David. He didn’t believe a word of the bullshit story David had just told him. But he didn’t care. Hell, he could easily handle this city dude if he tried anything funny. “Three hundred,” the trucker said. “Payment up front.”