Deep Cover

by Brian Garfield

  “Make a stab at a figure.”

  “I’d have to sit down and work it out.”

  “Will you do that?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Chandler and Spode returned from their separate errands at almost the same moment and Top Spode’s face was closed up tight. “Let’s get out of here—something’s come up.”

  Forrester asked the question with his eyebrows but Spode only shook his head, mute.

  The Professor got into the back seat and on the sun-blasted concrete in front of the admin block Forrester saw Major Chandler, who had just bade them good-bye with cool civility, stop to remove his big sunglasses and polish them. Forrester was amazed to see that behind the great mirrored shields the eyes were little buttons, too small for the rest of Chandler’s face.

  Spode put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking slot. Forrester said, “All right, what’s up?”

  “Later.”

  They were in Spode’s car because Forrester’s two-seater wouldn’t have accommodated them. Spode drove through the gate and accelerated past the ugly parasitical traps that had sprung up to milk the airmen: SALES & SERVICE, DISCOUNT, AIR-CONDITIONED, LOW DOWN PAYMENT TO SERVICEMEN, TOP VALUE, ALL CARDS HONORED. Past a hamburger stand and a beer joint and a retread tire shop, dust hanging in the un-paved parking lots. The sun was molten brass. Forrester said, “All right, Top, what’d you spot?”

  “Hard to say right off. But I tried to case it as if those pushbuttons were the crown jewels. I think it could be done.”

  Moskowitz snorted. “Of course it could be done. Any group of crackpots with a little scientific training could think of a dozen ways to beat the fail-safe systems. All it takes is the instincts of a safecracker.”

  “And the organization of a Gestapo,” Forrester said. “I still don’t put too much credence in it—it’s a far-fetched notion but it’s worth exposing if there’s any risk at all.”

  Spode said, “It would take more than a handful of crazies. You’d need fifty or a hundred people and they’d have to be in the right places with the right training and a hell of a lot of preparation. But there’s no single security point I could see that’s so foolproof it couldn’t be breached. Take those KMS identification systems—those visitors’ cards for the three of us got prepared fast enough, and that means they could be fixed up for anybody. All it takes is one insider. Maybe you could do it without an insider for that matter—pick an airman’s pocket and make copies of his card, slip the original back into his wallet and nobody’s the wiser. Just leave blanks for your own people’s thumbprints to be filled in, and get uniforms for your people. I don’t see how any of it’s beyond the reach of some of these fascist outfits that have passwords and code names and keep bazookas in their basements. Half of them are Air Force people or retired Air Force people.”

  Spode crowded the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit down Twenty-second Street. “You’d have to get your hands on copies of the codes they use and that might be tricky; they keep changing the codes. But it could still be done. Each one of those blockhouses down there has a phone and a microwave radio—I had a look. That’s the key point, communications. Every system has to have a bottleneck here and there and if you can take Over those bottlenecks you can control all the incoming and outgoing messages. Once you do that the rest’s no problem. We’ll need to tap a few sources and work up a complete chart of the communications they’d use in case of a nuclear attack.”

  Moskowitz said, “You sound like you’re plotting to do it yourself.”

  “Only way to figure it out, Professor. Put yourself in the other guy’s shoes and decide how you’d do it if you were him.”

  Forrester said, “The point is, it can be done. That’s what terrifies me. Fifty or a hundred fanatics with Nazi minds—if that’s all it would take, it’s fantastic.”

  Spode turned up Cherry Avenue past Bear Down football stadium and north into the campus—stolid brick buildings on incongruous palm-tree-studded lawns. Spode pulled up by the administration building. Kids walked by in bunches and Moskowitz’ glance swiveled to follow girls’ legs. “When will you want me in Washington to testify?”

  “Guest set the hearings for three weeks from Monday—the twenty-fourth,” Forrester said.

  “I’ll be there.” Moskowitz extended his knobby hand across the back of the seat to grip Forrester’s. “The odds still stink, but I’ve got a little hope—for the first time. Don’t bail out on me, Senator. Pleasure to’ve met you, Mr. Spode.” Moskowitz got out of the car and trailed after a trio of long-haired girls as if attached to them by a leash. Spode’s eyes didn’t dally on the girls at all; Forrester couldn’t remember having seen Spode this tense.

  “All right, Top, what’s the matter?”

  “Not sure. Wait till I get to a phone. That call I had, it was important but we couldn’t talk on that line.”

  Spode drove onto a gas-station apron and Forrester watched him put through his call in the glass booth. When Spode came back he said, “Okay, we’ve got to talk.”

  Spode handed him five photographs and talked while he drove. “His name’s Leon Belsky. He’s Russian KGB, one of their good ones. I took the pictures last night because I bumped into him at Trumble’s—he was doing the same thing I was but he was looking for bigger game. I took the pictures and his gun to somebody last night to find out who he was.”

  “The Agency?”

  “Aeah. Look, follow this because it all gets to a point. I left the gun and the negatives with Art Miller—he’s the guy who developed them for me. I gave you the Phaeton specs this morning but I held out on the rest because at that point you didn’t need to be involved in it. But now there’s two dead guys and a third guy missing and they’re all tied into it, and you need to know about it because I think they’re after you and me now.”

  Forrester’s scalp contracted. “Then you’d better spell it out. Who’s dead and who’s missing?”

  “Ross Trumble’s dead, for one.”

  Forrester stared at him.

  Spode turned the wheel to take a corner. His jaw had crept forward to lie in a hard line. “In his bathroom on a pile of broken glass with his wrists cut open. They made it look like suicide, but it wasn’t. I was the one who broke that glass and Trumble wasn’t there at the time. So now we know what Belsky was looking for—he was looking for Trumble, to kill him. But we still don’t know why. The letter Trumble wrote you from Phoenix—maybe that will have some answers.”

  It was a quiet street, cottonwoods and elms throwing pools of shade. Spode pulled to the curb and switched the engine off. “The other dead one’s Art Miller. The guy who had your negatives and Belsky’s gun. Remember I left the stuff with Miller last night. It was a stupid mistake and you see what it cost Miller. If you want to plant a bug on somebody a gun’s a good place to put it—bug your gun and then let somebody take it away from you. There must have been a beeper in Belsky’s Smith and Wesson, and Belsky must have followed the signal right to Miller’s house. They found Miller dead a few hours ago. The gun and the negatives are gone so Belsky must have taken them with him.

  “The missing guy is one of Orozco’s private operatives—the one Trumble was trying to reach when he called Orozco’s office, remember? Sawed-off guy called Craig. He had some hook-up with Trumble and now he’s missing too and possibly dead. Whatever it is, it’s big, and we’re in it, you and me. Belsky traced back as far as Miller and if he was scared enough to kill Miller then he’s scared enough to kill both of us if he gets a chance at us; he knows I can identify him, and he’s got to assume I’ve told you all this since I work for you. He’s got no way of knowing Miller was an Agency man—he’ll assume Miller was just a pal with a darkroom who developed my pictures for me. So he may figure if he knocks off the two of us fast enough he’s safe.”

  “I see.” Forrester was pawing his big jaw; things were going by very fast and he was trying to keep focus. It was as if they had leaped back more than twenty years to Korea: m
ilitary counterintelligence, all the training and the months of experience in the lines, drifted through his mind in flashes and he sorted out the useless questions and narrowed his attention like a cone toward the significances. In the end he said, “Then the question is why this man Belsky came here and killed Ross Trumble. I assume the Agency must be in high gear by now looking for him.”

  “Sure. Not that they’ve got much chance of finding him. He’d checked into a motel under the name of Meldon Kemp and they’ve got a man on the place but there’s no chance at all he’ll show up back there. Nobody even knows where to start looking because nobody knows what he’s after. If he only came here to kill Trumble then he’d be halfway back to Moscow by now, but I don’t think that was it. If they’d wanted an assassin they wouldn’t have had to use a man as important as Belsky. Anyhow if it was hit-and-run why’d he go out of his way to trace his gun back to Miller and kill him? He’d have run for it instead. No, Belsky’s still around here and he’s still worrying about me. And you.”

  “It’s hard to grasp, Top.”

  “It might be easier to understand if it made any sense.” Spode looked at his watch. “They’ve put tracers on Ross Trumble to see if they can come up with something at that end. Right now we can’t see any connection between him and Belsky outside of the Phaeton thing, and why the hell should Belsky kill him over that?”

  Forrester shook his head.

  Spode reached for the key. “They told me I could call back and find out if they’ve dug up anything that helps. I may as well try.”

  When Spode came back to the car from the telephone kiosk his eyes were busy—like an animal that knew it was being stalked. He started the car and headed into the back streets. “The Agency sent a man to cover my place in case Belsky showed up looking for me but it looks like Belsky beat them to it. The place has been searched—quick but thorough. Maybe looking to see if he could find any indications whether I’m still working for the Agency. He’s got to be hoping like mad I’m free-lancing now and didn’t call in the troops.”

  This Belsky was a professional but that wouldn’t make him immune to the seductiveness of hope. He would tend to believe what he wanted to believe—that Spode was independent and that Washington wasn’t onto him. It would make Belsky a little less careful but it would put Spode’s life in jeopardy and Forrester found himself worrying about that at the expense of wider concerns. He was a man to whom friendships had always been as sparse and infrequent as they were profound. He had nothing much in common with Top Spode other than shared experiences that went back twenty-odd years but Top was one of the finest men he had ever known and in a personal sense Top’s individual safety was of more importance to him than a truckload of state secrets.

  Spode found a place to park where there was nothing in sight but a few houses and two sleepy mongrels on a lawn. “A few developments. I left voice-activated bugs at Trumble’s house and the Agency retrieved the tapes a while ago when the cops were taking the body away. There were a couple of voices, just fragments, one guy calling another guy ‘Sarge’ and telling him to take it easy with the knife. My ex-boss figures they must have killed Trumble somewhere else and snuck the body back into the house, and one of them had to cut him to pour some blood over the floor and make it look like Trumble killed himself in the bathroom. Incidentally the local cops aren’t in on this; they bought it as a suicide.”

  “But that’s not the main point,” Forrester said. His brain was beginning to work. “The main point is, Belsky isn’t alone.”

  “Aeah. He’s got at least two guys working for him.”

  “One of whom may be Police or Air Force. ‘Sarge’—Sergeant.”

  “It could be a nickname too. But anyhow he’s got local help.” Spode locked his fists around the steering-wheel rim and stared at them. “Damn it I hate working blind. We’re peeling back corners but we don’t even know what to look for.”

  “What did they find out about Trumble?”

  “They’re still working on it. So far most of what they got checks out with what we know about him. County Attorney’s staff, FBI stint, lobbyist for Shattuck, running for Congress—nothing new there. But the records on Trumble only go back about twenty years. Before that it’s zero. Trumble had an Army discharge certificate but the military-records people in St. Louis have no record he was ever in the service. He had a bachelor’s and a law diploma from Northwestern but Northwestern’s never heard of him. He came to Arizona in fifty-five with an Illinois driver’s license but the Illinois highway department doesn’t show any license was ever issued to him. He had a birth certificate too and a lot of other documentation and so far none of it seems to check out.”

  Forrester stared at him. “That’s insane.”

  “It doesn’t prove anything about who he was but it proves who he wasn’t. He wasn’t Ross Trumble. There never was a Ross Trumble.”

  In the end Spode said, “I’m not holding out on you. That’s all I know. You know the choices as well as I do and it’s up to you.”

  “You never like to make decisions, do you, Top?”

  “That’s neither here nor there. It’s your choice, not mine—I take your bread, I sing your songs.”

  “The Agency wants you to make a target out of yourself to draw Belsky into the open, is that it?”

  “Aeah.”

  If Belsky had running dogs then he might not do it himself but that didn’t matter in principle: if you could draw the running dogs into a trap it was the same as drawing Belsky into the trap since the running dogs would lead you back to him if you knew how to handle it.

  “If you’re going to be the bait in the Agency’s trap you don’t want to be too obvious about it, Top. If they think you’re advertising for attention they’ll pull back.”

  “Quit talking about me. Talk about you. I see the way you’re thinking but this an’t Korea and it ain’t 1953. You’re a United States Senator, you’ve got no business playing cops and robbers. Belsky’s got two goons we know about and he may have more—it could be a big organization for all we know.”

  “I’ve never subscribed to the conspiracy theory of history. I can’t believe the Russians have recruited very many people here.”

  “Christ, you can hire thugs by the dozen for pay—all they care about is the money, they don’t need to know who’s giving the orders or why.”

  When Forrester made no immediate answer Spode turned to look at him. The dark strong face was troubled—a very personal concern. “It’s getting too hairy. Not for me, maybe, but for you. I think you ought to dig a hole.”

  “Hide out?”

  “Just until they run Belsky down.”

  “He can’t hire very many thugs who’d be willing to risk harming a United States Senator.”

  “Nuts. All the thugs have to do is find you for him. Belsky can take care of the messy details himself.”

  Forrester said slowly, “It might take too much time, Top.”

  “It might. But you’re a long time dead.”

  “We’re just starting to get momentum. If I hole up now this Phaeton fight will lose steam and we may never get it rolling again.”

  “I didn’t say it was easy. You could lose your crack at the White House too.”

  “You too, Top?”

  “Hell I’m all for it. You’d find a slot for me and the Indians would have access to the President’s ear for the first time since Teddy Roosevelt.”

  “You’re getting off the subject.”

  “I talk a lot when I’m nervous. Listen, you’ve got to decide right now—if you decide to dig a hole you can’t go back to the office from here.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  “And you can’t go to your hotel or the ranch and you can’t communicate with Ronnie because if Belsky’s serious about silencing us all those things may be watched.”

  Forrester’s chin dipped toward his chest and he dragged a big hand down his face. Spode’s head swiveled, indicating his wary interest in a passin
g car. Forrester said, “There’s only one subject of interest to a Soviet agent here.”

  “The missiles.”

  “The missiles,” Forrester agreed. “Trumble was involved with them, you and I are involved with them. Belsky must have some interest in them. I think we have to find out.”

  “And maybe blow your whole case. It could mean the Russians are scared to death of the Phaeton and right now anything that scares a Russian to death is something the public’s likely to vote for.”

  “But we’ve still got to find out, haven’t we?”

  “You mean you feel a duty to find out, even if it does wreck your case. You know I think maybe you’re the first honest politician I ever met? Here you’re already way out on a limb and you want to try hanging from twigs. These people are killers.”

  “If I drop out of sight Belsky will know why.”

  “What difference does that make? If he can’t find you he can’t hurt you.”

  “I just can’t afford to have my hands tied right now, Top. The balance is too delicate. Without a leader the whole fight will disintegrate. But I’m not inclined toward heroics; you know that. I’ll take every precaution I can—I want a fair chance to survive it if Belsky comes after me.”

  Spode drew a breath into his wide chest and let it out slowly. “If you won’t pull in your horns all the way at least let me check you into the Ramada under a phony name—one of those rooms in back where you can use the side entrance and not be seen going through the lobby.”

  “Fair enough. But I’ve got public appearances to make starting Monday, and I’m not going to cancel them.”