by John Lutz
23
It was hot on the platform of the East 23rd Street subway station. Laker could feel the sweat beading on his forehead, trickling down his ribs. He was wearing a straw hat, oversize sunglasses that disguised the shape of his face, and a loose white guayabera that made him look fat around the middle.
Headlights glared in the tunnel. The northbound local was pulling into the station. The crash and bang of the subway took some getting used to when you were accustomed to the smooth, quiet Washington Metro. As did the heat of the unair-conditioned stations. But the train was so chilly that his sunglasses misted over. He grabbed the overhead bar as the train lurched forward.
It was necessary for Ava and him to drop out of sight, and one of the world’s best places for doing that was just 200 miles north of Washington: New York City. They had ditched their cell phones and boarded a city bus to Union Station. They weren’t encumbered with suitcases, which was just as well, because they switched from train to bus to taxi to ferry across the Hudson. They checked into a large, anonymous hotel near Penn Station, using a fake driver’s license that Laker had secured on his own, not one issued by the Gray Outfit.
But he wasn’t going to underestimate the Shapeshifter and the organization he served. He devoted the morning to anti-surveillance precautions, riding the subway far uptown, backtracking by bus, traveling crosstown by cab. By the time he went to meet Ava at the New York Public Library, he was sure he wasn’t being followed.
Almost sure, anyway.
He walked along the block-long Fifth Avenue frontage of double columns framing round-arched windows, mounted the broad steps between the lions crouching on their pedestals. It was noon, and the steps were occupied by office workers and tourists, sitting and eating lunch. He picked his way among them. Even though Ava was right where she’d said she’d be, leaning on the pedestal of the south lion, he did not recognize her until he was just a few steps away.
When they parted this morning, he’d suggested that she dress like an Orthodox Jew. He was pleased to see how well that had worked out. Flat shoes lowered her height, thick, dark knee-socks, long navy skirt and loose, long-sleeved white blouse disguised her willowy figure, and a plain headscarf covered her red hair.
“You blend right in,” he said as he came up to her.
“But I don’t think my rabbi would want me hanging out with you. You look like a Miami street hustler.”
“Thanks.”
“Really, Laker, I’m impressed. Your walk is completely different. And you’re not turning your good ear toward me the way you usually do.”
“That was a hard habit to break.”
“Well, sit down. I got you a hot dog from the cart. Guessed you were a sauerkraut and spicy mustard kind of guy.”
They sat side by side and she handed him the hot dog. She had only a small bottle of water. Noticing his look, she said, “My insides are all tied up in knots. You’re used to this, I’m not. Not being Ava anymore, I mean. Shut out of my own life.”
“It’s necessary for your safety.”
“I know.”
“And we can hope it won’t be for too long.”
She sighed and put the cold bottle to her forehead. “I wish I had some progress to report. But I’ve wasted the whole morning. The frustration’s driving me mad.”
“I realize it’s a big handicap, not being able to go on the Internet—”
“It’s okay, Laker. I understand. Everything a person does on a networked computer can be tracked. I’m using only books and periodicals. And I’m finding everything I’m looking for. Obviously I’m not looking for the right thing.”
“The key text.”
“I thought this was going to be easy. I can tell by the look of Tillie’s message, it’s in a simple substitution code. A mono-alphabetic cipher. Each letter is standing in for another letter. All you need is the key text to tell you c is really f and so on.”
“You thought you could guess what text she used.”
“I knew my grandmother well. I tried her favorite hymn, ‘A Mighty Fortress is Our God.’ Her favorite poem, Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach.’ The speech JFK gave at his inauguration, which she attended. The preamble to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which she and Ephraim had a behind-the-scenes role in passing . . .”
Her voice trailed off. Laker waited while she opened the bottle and took a long swallow. Then said, “Other possibilities will come to you.”
“I can sit in this library playing with texts for months. But I admit I’m losing hope. Tillie meant this message for me. How can it be so hard to decode? Maybe I’m not as smart as she thought.”
He touched her shoulder. “You’re plenty smart. Give it the rest of the day. Call me if anything happens that worries you. I’ve programmed my number in this phone.” He handed her one of the two cheap burners he’d bought at a Duane Reade.
“Where are you going?”
“Shea Stadium. There’s an afternoon game.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“As you said, we’re locked out of our lives. Might as well make the best of it.”
He rose and walked away. But only to the bottom of the steps. He watched Ava go back into the building, then followed her as far as the cool, echoing marble lobby, where he sat on a bench by the wall as she mounted the staircase. He didn’t want her to think he was worried about her. But he also wanted to be nearby if she called.
24
At the end of the day he climbed the stairs and entered the main reading room. It was a vast space. Chandeliers hung by long chains from a high, coffered ceiling with a central painting of blue sky and cottony clouds. Shelf upon shelf of books stretched around the room under the tall, round-arched windows. A couple of hundred people sat at the long wooden tables, reading books or working on computers.
Ava was sitting at the end of a table in a far corner of the room. Books and papers were stacked in front of her, higher than her head. She’d taken off the dowdy headscarf, and her hair shone coppery-red in a sunbeam that slanted through the window. Laker’s heart lifted. Then he sobered up and made a mental note to remind her to tie the scarf back on before they went outside.
She raised her head, saw him, and smiled. Her mood had improved since lunch.
He pulled a chair close, sat down and whispered, “You’ve found something?”
“Oh, yes.”
“The key text?”
“No. I put that aside and went back to the journal.”
Laker was puzzled.
“The only part of it we still have, I mean. My translations from the Japanese.” She tapped the lined papers in front of her, covered with her large, clear, looping handwriting. There were many marginal notes in different color inks. She’d been working hard.
“How come you went back to Ryo’s midnight mumblings?”
“You think I’m wasting my time.”
“Maybe not. The Shapeshifter must have thought there was something to them.”
“Exactly. We gave up on the journal too soon. Josh Milton’s Pearl Harbor red herring distracted us. Ryo’s sleep-talk doesn’t tell us anything about that. But it tells us about Hirochi Ryo. A person dreams about the things he manages to suppress when he’s awake.”
Laker glanced at the stack of stout books by her elbow. “Have you been consulting Jung and Freud?”
“No, Laker. I don’t practice psychoanalysis without a license. Especially on dead people. But Ryo’s memories are interesting. Want to hear?”
Chairs were scraping the floor as people pushed them back and rose. Books clunked on carts as librarians rounded them up for reshelving. Patrons were powering off their laptops, loading their briefcases and backpacks. It was almost closing time. Nobody seemed bothered by their conversation.
“There’s a lot of stuff about his childhood,” Ava went on. “He grew up poor, on a farm. His mother died young and his mean father beat him. But I won’t bore you with that. It’s this bit I’m interested in.”
She
pointed at the lined pad in front of her. Laker craned his neck and read:
“‘Girl . . . maiden with a rifle between her legs . . . man with a dog. Shiny nose.’”
“Pretty cryptic,” he said. “Who has the shiny nose, the man or the dog?”
“He makes clear elsewhere that it’s the dog. He talked about it four times, at intervals of weeks or months. The only other memory he goes back to that often is the time the daikon harvest was bad and his father beat him and cracked a rib.”
“Maiden with a rifle. Dog with a shiny nose. There’s no way of telling what he’s talking about.”
She picked up a large book and laid it open in front of him. He looked down at a color photograph: an arched portal, two larger-than-life size bronze statues in niches on either side of a marble corridor. One was of a slender girl in a thin shift, hair falling to her shoulders, holding a hunting rifle, resting the butt end of the stock on the ground between her bare feet. Across the corridor, a man crouched and looked at her. His own rifle was slung. He had his arm around a sitting German shepherd. Its muzzle was shinier than the rest of the bronze. The corridor seemed to run on endlessly. It had a high ceiling and chandeliers. “What is this?” he asked “Some palace in Europe?”
“It’s a station of the Moscow subway.”
Laker nodded. He’d read that Stalin had ordered that the stations be made palaces of the people, and spared no expense. “What’s with the nose?”
“Thousands of people pass every day. There’s a long tradition of rubbing the dog’s nose for luck.”
“Obviously it made a big impression on Hirochi Ryo.”
“Moscow was his first post abroad. He was a junior clerk in the trade section of the Japanese embassy. You wouldn’t believe how many microfilmed issues of Pravda I had to go through before I came across a mention of his name.”
“You speak Russian, too?”
“Read it, anyway.”
“Impressive. Where does this get us?”
She leaned close and dropped her voice. He noticed that while she’d changed everything else, she was still wearing her favorite perfume.
“Ryo was a double agent. Working for Moscow.”
Laker sat back in surprise. He stared at her.
“You’re skeptical. But the Soviets did have deep-cover agents in Tokyo, you know. Like Richard Sorge.”
“Sure. They were old enemies. The Japanese beat the Russians badly in a 1904 war. Tensions flared regularly after that. But just because Ryo was stationed in Moscow—”
“I’m not finished yet.”
“Go ahead.”
Ava tapped the color photo in front of her. “This station is Ploshchad Revolyutsii. It’s the nearest one to the office of the NKVD, a forerunner of the KGB.”
“Okay. Ryo must have traveled under NKVD headquarters. Along with several million other people.”
She pulled a photocopy of a microfiche out of a manila folder and laid it before him. It was the front page of Pravda. She pointed to a small headline near the bottom of the page.
“What does it say?” he asked.
“ ‘Japanese Businessman Killed in Accident.’”
“Accident?”
“He fell in front of a train. At Ploshchad Revolyutsii station. Only he wasn’t a businessman. He worked at the Japanese embassy. That only came out later, when the Moscow police wanted to investigate and the Japanese refused to cooperate, saying they were satisfied it was an accident. It was quite a little diplomatic storm.”
“What did he do in the Embassy?”
“The Japanese preferred not to say.”
“You think he was a spy.”
“A security man. He was tailing Ryo, who was on the way to or from a meeting at the NKVD. Ryo spotted the tail. Dealt with it. And obviously managed to evade suspicion. But he’d killed a man and it festered in his memory. Those statues are just down a flight of steps from the platform from which the man was pushed.”
“It’s ingenious, Ava. But it’s guesswork.”
She met his eye. Held it. “You’ve killed people, haven’t you, Laker?”
He looked down. “I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t.”
“And you still have nightmares about them. As Ryo did.”
Laker kept his head down for another moment. He said, “Okay.”
“There’s more. In 1939, Ryo, now stationed in Washington, takes leave to attend the funeral of Professor Charles Jordan at the University of Chicago. Jordan was a brilliant economist, and Ryo had been his student in the 1920s. Jordan was killed in Spain, fighting the fascists. He made no secret about being a member of the Communist party. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that a biographer found out he was an NKVD agent.”
“He recruited Ryo in the ’20s.”
“Yes.”
“Your theory’s firming up.”
“Then there’s the fact that Ryo met the end of a double agent. Suddenly vanished from his Tokyo ministry in 1943. Imprisoned, tortured, executed in secret, his family not even informed.”
“Yes,” said Laker. “That’s the way double agents end up, all right.”
25
Ava was sleeping, her head on Laker’s shoulder, as he gazed out the window. For two hours the train had been traveling north along the Hudson. The river had slowly narrowed as the train had emptied. The sun had dropped below the mountains on the far side of the river.
She stirred and sat upright. Blinked and smiled at him. “That was such a nice nap. You make a good pillow.”
“Thanks.”
The smile disappeared. “You haven’t slept at all, have you? You’ve been keeping watch. Every time the train stops at a station and people come in the car, you have your hand on your gun.”
“Don’t worry. I haven’t seen anybody suspicious.”
“You know what? I think I’d actually feel better if I knew what you were worried about. Specifically.”
“Cameras.”
“You mean spy satellites?”
“Not just those. CCTVs are everywhere. We probably passed through the field of view of a dozen of them, when we walked from the library to Grand Central Station. If the enemy can get access to the feed of those cameras and is analyzing it with facial recognition computers—”
“I was wrong. I don’t feel better.”
“Sorry. But I have to assume the worst, since I don’t know what kind of resources this organization has, or how deeply they’ve penetrated our agencies.”
“The organization the Shapeshifter works for?”
“Yes.”
“What if there is no organization? Suppose he’s on his own?”
“Sam Mason said he’s an agent of either an enemy nation or a terrorist organization. He serves a cause.”
“Maybe it’s his own cause.”
He turned his good ear. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
“I’m not sure where I’m leading.”
“It’s futile to speculate until we have a better idea what he’s after.”
“He’s achieved his first goal. He has the journal.”
“Yes. Although I don’t know if he’ll be able to get out of it all that you did.”
His tone was so calm and offhand—so Laker—that she didn’t register the compliment at first. Then she actually blushed. “Thanks. I’ve been wondering, did my grandmother ever know that Ryo was a double?”
“To tell her would have been to put his life in her hands.”
“Erlynne Bendix said they were in love.”
“Mrs. Bendix was—is—loyal to your grandmother.”
“You mean, you think she wasn’t telling us the truth?”
“She was, but maybe not the whole truth. I think there are some of Tillie’s secrets that she’s still guarding.”
They were silent as the train rumbled a few miles farther north. Then Ava said, “One thing we can be sure of. Those two master spies at Pearl Harbor, Captain Jenkins and Commander Mannion, they had no idea who Ryo was really working fo
r.”
“No idea.”
“It’s ironic, isn’t it? If Ryo had known anything about the Pearl Harbor attack, he would willingly have passed it on.”
“Moscow would have given the okay.”
“What a hopeless op they dragged poor Tillie into.”
“A lot of field agents have died for their case officers’ blunders. But this op, misconceived as it was, started something. I’m hoping to find out more about that.”
“We’re going to see someone, then?”
“Tomorrow. A defector I helped debrief when I was a very green CIA agent.”
“Where are we going tonight?”
“A place where I’m hoping to get some sleep.”
26
Everything was closed at the little station where they got off, and they had to wait a long time for the taxi that took them across the river and up into the hills. It was late when they reached their destination.
She stood up from the cab. There were no lights, but by the time Laker paid the driver and the cab was rumbling away down the dirt road, her eyes had adjusted. There was no moon but the stars were bright. They were in a clearing in the woods, with a circle of cabins with cars parked beside them. The only sounds were crickets and tree frogs.
“Laker, what is this?” she whispered.
“A fishing camp. I was here with some army guys, years ago. Doesn’t look like things have changed any. Just decayed a little more.”
He took her arm and helped her down a rutted path. The wooden handrail had so many gaps it was useless. The wooden walls of the cabins were all a few degrees off plumb, and their shingle roofs were sagging. The cabins looked as if they would collapse if they didn’t have stout stone chimneys to lean upon. Over the chirping of crickets she could hear water rushing.
“A stream?” she asked.
“Full of bass and perch. To the dedicated angler, it makes up for the rustic accommodations.”
“Congratulations, Laker, I think we’re truly off the grid now.”
The door of the nearest cabin opened and a man appeared, tugging on a cap. He approached them, whispering vehemently. “No headlights after 9 pm! Didn’t I tell you that on the phone?”