The screams were still audible when Ambler scrambled out of the car, and he felt a curious sense of relief: it meant she was still breathing, still safe from the glistening syringe. He charged to the rear of the van where Laurel, trussed up in canvas straps, was kicking and thrashing with all her might, struggling with her hugely muscled captor. Now Ambler stepped behind the front door of the van, which had opened from the force of the collision.
“Step away from her or you die, you son of a bitch,” Ambler bellowed. “One head shot, one gut shot.” The specificity would cinch it, he knew. In these shadows, a weapon would be assumed, even without visual verification. These men were professionals, but they were not zealots: they were doing a job for pay. “Now!” Ambler roared.
The man did as instructed. Holding his hands up in a posture of submission, he began to walk slowly around the van. As he rounded the front, he did what Ambler expected: he suddenly dived inside and, keeping his head ducked down, gunned the motor. Survival was his sole concern now. Ambler vaulted around the van and made sure that Laurel was safely outside of it as the man raced the engine of the powerful van, nosing aside the sideways Pontiac and lurching across the lawn and to the safety of the street.
He had fled the scene, but there would soon be others.
“Laurel,” Ambler called out as, with swift, deft movements, he undid the canvas straps that bound her.
“Are they gone?” she asked in a voice tremulous with fear.
“We need to get out of here,” was all he said.
Suddenly she fell on him, clutching him with quivering arms. “I knew you’d come for me,” she kept repeating, her breath warm against his throat. “I knew you’d come for me.”
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Ambler interjected urgently. “Is there someplace you can stay—someplace you’d be safe?”
“My brother lives in Richmond.”
“No! They’ll have a record of it, they’ll track you down in an instant. Someone else, someone they won’t have on file.”
Laurel’s face was drawn. “There’s a woman who’s like an aunt to me—was my mom’s best friend when I was growing up. She lives in West Virginia now. A place outside Clarksburg.”
“That’ll do,” Ambler said.
“Please . . .” she began, and he saw the desperation and fear etched on her face. She did not want to be left alone.
“I’ll take you there,” Ambler said.
The ride to Clarksburg took a few hours, mainly on the interstates 68 and 79; they were driving her car, an old Mercury, and Ambler remained alert to any sign of pursuit or surveillance. Laurel spent some of the time weeping, some of the time in stony silence. She was processing something that was alien to her range of experience, was responding to trauma, ultimately, with rage and resolve. Ambler, meanwhile, was silently berating himself. In a moment of weakness, a nurse had helped him: now her life was imperiled because of it—would, perhaps, never be the same. The woman seated beside him looked at him, he could tell, as if he were her savior, a bulwark of safety. If anything, the opposite was true. But she would never be persuaded of that. It was a logical truth that held no emotional truth for her.
When they parted—he had arranged for a taxicab to wait by an intersection near Laurel’s destination—she almost flinched, as ifa bandage was being ripped from a wound. He felt something of the same.
“I brought this on you,” Ambler murmured, as much to himself as to her. “I’m to blame.”
“No,” she said fiercely. “Don’t you ever say that. They’re the ones, dammit. They’re the ones. People like that—” She broke off.
“Will you be all right?”
She nodded slowly. “You get the bastards,” she told him through gritted teeth, before she turned and walked toward “Aunt Jill’s” gingerbready Victorian. A porch light cast a warm yellow glow. It seemed like another world that Laurel was entering—one of safety. A world he did not inhabit.
He dared not expose her further to his own dire predicament. Somewhere in the maze, the monster lurked. Theseus had to slay the Minotaur, or neither of them would ever be safe.
That night, in an inexpensive motel near Morgan-town, West Virginia, sleep came only with difficulty. Old memories began to seep through the chambers of his mind like basement radon. His father, appearing to him in shards and splinters: a handsome, square face, less handsome on close inspection, for the years of boozing took a price in broken capillaries and coarsened skin. The licorice scent of Sen-Sen, the candy he would dissolve in his mouth to try to conceal the alcohol on his breath. His mother’s characteristic expression of wounded passivity—it took him a while to detect the anger that underlay it like an organ bass line. Her face was always powdery with foundation makeup; it was part of her daily maquillage, so that nobody would look twice when that foundation served to cover a bruise.
It was a few weeks shy of his seventh birthday. “Why is Daddy leaving?” Hal was asking. He and his mother were in the darkened space off the kitchen that they called the family room, despite the fact that they had seldom gathered there as a family. She had been seated, knitting a muffler she must have known nobody would ever wear, heavy needles clacking through a ball of blood-red yarn. Now she looked up and paled beneath her heavy foundation. “What are you talking about?” There was pain and bewilderment in her voice.
“Isn’t Daddy leaving?”
“Did Daddy tell you that? Did he say he was leaving?”
“No,” said the almost-seven-year-old boy. “He didn’t say anything.”
“Then—I just don’t understand what’s gotten into you.” Anger bloomed in her voice.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” the boy said quickly.
“I swear the Devil’s in you. Why would you say such a thing?”
But isn’t it obvious? he wanted to tell her. Don’t you see it, too?
“I’m sorry,” the boy repeated.
But sorry wasn’t good enough—not when, a week later, Daddy had indeed decamped. His closets were cleaned out, his little knickknacks—tie tacks, brass lighter, cigars—gone from the cupboards, his Chevy gone from the garage: Daddy gone from their lives.
Hal’s mother had picked him up from some after-school event, having been out in the Camden mall to shop for birthday presents. When they got home and realized what had happened, Hal’s mother started to keen.
Despite his own tears, he had tried, fumblingly, to comfort her, and she had recoiled, shuddering, from his childish touch. He would always remember the look she gave him. She was calling to mind what he had said a few days earlier, and her countenance was stretched tight with horror.
In time she tried to put on a bright face, as she did during his birthday. But things were never the same between them. She felt herself unnerved by his gaze and started to avoid it. For Hal, it was the first in a long series of such moments. All of which bore the same lesson: that it was better to be alone than to be abandoned.
Then the seven-year-old was a thirty-seven-year-old, and this time the penetrative gaze belonged to another. To a Taiwanese candidate—from another time, another place.
You’d started to see through something you weren’t meant to see through.
He was in Changhua again, positioned in the dense crowd of supporters, waiting for the candidate to reach the optimal position before signaling the munitions tech to detonate the explosive device.
Such neutral diction for an act of carnage. Perhaps it was what enabled them to do what they did.
Wai-Chan Leung was smaller than he had expected, slender in build and rather short. Yet to the crowd there was nothing diminutive about his stature and, as he started to speak, Tarquin, too, could no longer experience him as small.
“My friends,” the politician began. He had a wireless lavalier microphone clipped to his lapel and walked freely, not reading from a printed speech. “May I call you my friends? I think I may. And my greatest hope is that you may call me your friend. For too many years, in the Republic of C
hina, our leaders have not truly been our friends. They have been the friends of foreign capital, perhaps. The friends of wealthy dynasts. The friends of other rulers. The friends of the International Monetary Fund. But I do not feel that they have always been your friends.”
He paused as a round of applause momentarily interrupted his words. “You know the old Chinese story about the three abstemious fellows walking past the wine house. The first one says, ‘I’m so sensitive, if I have just one glass of wine, my face turns red and I pass out.’ The second one says, ‘That’s nothing. If I even smell wine, I turn red and stagger about until I collapse.’ And the third one says, ‘As for me, if I even see someone who has smelled wine . . .’ ” The crowd responded to the familiar anecdote with appreciative chuckles. “In an era of globalization, there are some countries that are more vulnerable than others. Taiwan is that third man. When there is capital flight, when the American dollar spirals up or down, when we witness such things happening elsewhere in the world, our economic and our political systems grow red-faced and begin to stagger.” He paused and moved toward the podium.
Tarquin—he was Tarquin now—watched him intently, mesmerized. Nothing about the human being twenty yards in front of him matched the Stab dossier given to him and his team. Tarquin had no facts on his side, merely intuition, but for him the intuition had the force of truth. The dossier described someone who was furled with cunning and calculation, prone to vengeful, deadly wrath, hollowed out with cynicism and resentments. Someone whose public display of compassion was a disingenuous performance. Tarquin detected none of these traits: not a trace of artifice or cynicism, not a flicker of the deceiver’s self-consciousness. The man who was speaking took satisfaction in his eloquence, but he also believed what he was saying—in its import, in its urgency.
You’d started to see through something you weren’t meant to see through.
“They call Taiwan the little tiger,” Wai-Chan Leung was saying, in an almost prayerful voice. “What worries me is not that we are little. What worries me is that tigers are an endangered species.” He paused once more. “Self-sufficiency is a fine ideal. But is it a realistic ideal? We need both things—we need ideals, and we need realism. Some people will tell you that you must choose between them. Yet they are the same people who insist that you can enjoy democracy so long as you let them tell you what to do. Do you know who they remind me of? Recall the man, of ancient times, who set up shop in a village selling both a spear he said would penetrate anything and a shield he claimed nothing could penetrate.”
A rumble of applause and laughter.
“The people of Taiwan—all the Chinese people—have a wonderful future ahead of them, if they choose it. A future that we ourselves will create. So let us choose wisely. The mainland is changing. Shall we alone stand still?” He was now just a foot or two from the dark-stained wooden podium. A foot or two from death, and Tarquin felt his heart speeding. Every nerve in his body told him that the operation was wrong. Wrongly conceived. Wrongly initiated. Wrongly targeted. Wai-Chan Leung was not their enemy.
The candidate held his forearms before him, at right angles to his body, his hands forming fists. He moved them together, knuckles pressing against knuckles. “Do you see? Simply to oppose—like this—leads to immobility. Paralysis. Should this really be our relation to our cousins across the strait?” Now he interlaced the fingers of both hands, illustrating his vision of how sovereignty might coexist with regional integration. “In cooperation—in togetherness—we can find our strength. In integration, we can regain our integrity.”
Tarquin’s earbud crackled: “I don’t have your sight line, but seems to me that the target’s in position, no? Awaiting your signal.”
Tarquin did not speak. It was time to activate the device, to bring the young man’s role in the world to an end—but Tarquin’s every instinct fought against it. He was in a condition of total awareness, standing in a crowd of thousands of Taiwanese citizens, wearing polo shirts or button-down shirts, invariably with a white T-shirt beneath, in the national manner. If he saw the faintest clue that the dossier was correct . . . But nothing.
The cricket-like noise in the earbud: “Tarquin, you dozing? Homeroom period’s over. I’m going to click—”
“No,” Tarquin whispered into the fiber-optic mike concealed in his collar. “Don’t do it.”
But the ordnance tech was impatient, fed up, and he would not be deterred. When the tech replied, Tarquin could hear the jaundiced cynicism of a man who had been in the field a few years too long: “One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go, cat, go . . . .”
The explosion, when it came, was far softer than Tarquin had been expecting. It was the sound of a paper bag that a child had inflated with air and eagerly popped. The inner sides of the podium had been reinforced with steel in order to minimize collateral injuries, and the cladding helped both to muffle the sound and to focus the force of the explosion toward the figure standing behind it.
As if in slow motion, Tarquin watched Wai-Chan Leung, the great hope of so many Taiwanese—reform-minded urbanites and peasant farmers, college students and shopkeepers—stiffen abruptly and then topple forward on the dais, his body outlined with the spray of his own viscera. The blackened wreckage of the podium now lay in a heap to his left, a small wisp of smoke rising from it.
For a few moments, the man’s prone body was still. And then Tarquin could see him lifting his head from the floor and looking at the crowd before him. What happened next transfixed Tarquin and changed him: the eyes of the dying man, in his agonized final throes, came to rest on Tarquin’s.
It was a warm, humid day in subtropical Taiwan, and Tarquin’s skin felt arid and chilled; he somehow knew that every moment of what he saw would be forever etched in his memory and in his dreams.
He had come to Changhua to kill a man, and the man had duly been killed. A man who, through the intensity of his gaze, was, in a spell of eerie intimacy, sharing with Tarquin the remaining moments of his life.
Even now, the dying man’s face was devoid of hatred or anger. There was bewilderment in it, and sadness. It was the face of a man suffused with gentle idealism. A man who knew he was dying and wondered why.
As Tarquin, too, now wondered why.
The crowd was roaring, wailing, screaming, and, amid it all, he somehow made out the sound of a bird. He wrenched his eyes from the human destruction before him toward a palm tree, where an oriole was trilling loudly. Ceaselessly.
Across the earth, across the years, Ambler now stirred in his bed, suddenly conscious of the stale motel air. He opened his eyes: the trilling continued.
The Nokia he had taken from the stalker in the Sourlands.
He pressed the ON button and brought it to his ear. “Yes?”
“Tarquin,” a hearty voice brayed.
“Who is this?” said Ambler, suddenly wary. A cold fear washed over him.
“I’m Osiris’s controller,” said the hearty voice.
“That’s not much of a recommendation,” Ambler replied.
“You’re telling me. We’ve been terribly concerned about the security breach.”
“Someone opens your mail, that’s a breach. Somebody shoots your operatives dead, that’s something a little more serious.”
“Damn straight. And we’ve got some ideas about what happened. Point being, we need you, and we need you now.”
“I don’t know who the hell you are,” Ambler said. “You say Osiris worked for you. For all I know, the guy who works for you is the one who killed him.”
“Tarquin, listen to me. Osiris was an extraordinary asset. I mourn his loss—we all do.”
“And you expect me to take your word for it.”
“Yes, I do,” the man said. “I know your abilities.”
Ambler paused. Like Arkady, like Osiris, the man had confidence in Ambler’s ability to detect deception. Honesty was no guarantee of ultimate truth, he reminded himself. The man himself could
be deceived. But Tarquin—Ambler—had no choice but to play along. The further he could burrow into the organization, the greater his chance of reaching the truth about what had happened to him—and who he truly was.
A thought nagged at him. During his career Ambler had sometimes been involved in what was known as a sequence operation: one piece of information leading to another, each more critical than the one before, designed to draw in and ensnare an adversary. Every sequence operation, he knew, depended on the utmost air of credibility; the more skilled the adversary, the higher the level of credibility required. The more sophisticated subjects, however, were wary; they would employ blind intermediaries, equipping them with questions that had to be answered on the spot. The answers did not have to be faultless—the subject of the operation might be suspicious if they were—but they had to pass a gut check; a single misstep, and the game was blown.
The wiliest subjects of all, however, would set about reversing the sequence operation, like a tail wagging the dog. Decoys would be programmed with information specially crafted to tantalize U.S. intelligence; the sequence operation would work, but backward. A new-found zeal for an unexpected windfall would obscure original objectives; the hunter would become the quarry.
What Ambler could not determine was whether he was, in fact, being ensnared within a sequence operation and, if so, whether he would be able to exploit it for his own ends. There was no more dangerous game. Yet what was his alternative?
“All right,” Ambler said. “I’m listening.”
“We’re going to meet tomorrow in Montreal,” the man said. “Use whatever ID you’ve got—the one Osiris gave you should work fine. But your choice.” The man went on to give him more detailed instructions: he was to fly to Montréal Dorval that very morning.
Shortly before he set out, the phone rang in his motel room: Laurel. She sounded calmer, more whole, and yet there was concern in her voice—concern for him, not for herself. He explained quickly that he had an appointment to keep, that he had received a call from Osiris’s controller.
The Ambler Warning Page 17