The Ambler Warning

by Robert Ludlum

  “A good many people have been unable to read the writing on the wall,” Palmer said. “Especially when it’s in Chinese.”

  “And you explained to these sleepy-eyed kids how for the past several centuries, China—the Middle Empire—had never posed a threat to Western hegemony, even though, in principle, it could have been its greatest rival. Chairman Mao was the real paper tiger. In China, the more totalitarian the regime, the more cautious, purely defensive, and inward looking its military posture. It was powerful material, powerfully delivered. The smart kids weren’t sleepy eyed anymore, once they realized the implications of what you were saying. I remember getting goose bumps.”

  “Yet some things don’t change. Your colleagues in the State Department still refuse to see the plain truth: that as China has become more Western in its governance, it has also become more of a menace—militarily as well as economically. The president of China has a pleasant face, and that face has blinded our government to the reality: that he, more than anyone, is determined to awake a slumbering dragon.” He glanced at his slim, elegant Patek Philippe wristwatch. Whitfield noticed that it displayed sidereal time as well as the Eastern Standard and Beijing times.

  “Even when I was a student, you seemed to understand so much more than anyone else. The seminar on international relations I took in my first year of graduate school—there was a sense of being one of the illuminati.”

  “Fifty students applied; I admitted only twelve.”

  “An amazing bunch. I couldn’t have been the most brilliant of them.”

  “No,” he allowed, “but you were the most . . .capable.”

  She remembered the first day of the grad seminar. Professor Palmer had talked about how the world looked from the perspective of the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli in the late nineteenth century, at the helm of a mighty Pax Britannica. Disraeli must have assumed that his empire was imperishable, that the next century would belong to the British and their powerful navy. A few decades into the next century, Britain had been reduced to a second-rate power. It was a transformation, Palmer said, akin to the Roman Empire turning into Italy.

  The twentieth century was the American century; America’s industrial and economic supremacy was unchallenged in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the elaborate mechanisms of its military command posts projected its power to the farthest reaches of the globe. But it would be a mistake to assume, Palmer warned, that the next century was America’s by right. Indeed, if the Middle Kingdom was fully to rouse itself, the next century could belong to it; the center of global preeminence could move east. And policies of “constructive engagement” were exactly the sort of thing that would strengthen the Chinese and speed their ascendancy.

  Echoing Marx’s repudiation of the French “Marxists” of the 1870s, Ashton Palmer had once quipped that he was “not a Palmerite.” He was disavowing vulgar misconceptions of his core doctrines—the people who inferred historical inevitabilities from his work. Palmer’s method brought together the grand history of long duree—the history of centuries-long epochs—with the micro-history of the very near term. It could not be reduced to slogans, saws, formulas. And nothing was inevitable: that was a crucial point. To believe in historical determinism was to embrace passivity. The history of the world was a history of actions taken by human beings. Such actions made human history. Such actions could remake it.

  The liveried manservant cleared his throat.

  “Professor Palmer,” he said. “You’ve received a transmission.”

  Palmer turned to Whitfield with an apologetic look. “If you’ll excuse me.”

  He disappeared down a long hallway. When he returned, a few minutes later, he looked both anxious and energized.

  “Everything is falling into place,” he told Whitfield. “Which raises the pressure.”

  “I understand.”

  “What about Tarquin?”

  “As I said, everything is falling into place.”

  “And his newfound ‘companion’—any concerns on that front?”

  “No cause for concern. We’re keeping an eye on things.”

  “I can’t impress this upon you enough: seventy-two hours remain. Everyone must play his role to perfection.”

  “So far,” Undersecretary Whitfield assured him, “everybody has.”

  “Including Tarquin?” Palmer demanded, his slate eyes flashing.

  Whitfield nodded, with a trace of a smile. “Especially Tarquin.”

  Ambler’s eyes were fixed straight ahead as he left 2 rue St. Florentin; he wanted to look like a man with no time to waste. That was not a great challenge, for he was a man with no time to waste. Once he was out on the street and away from the consulate, he adjusted his gait, adopting the air of an aimless stroller as he walked past the red awnings and glittering shop windows. He was walking away from the Place de la Concord, toward the rue Saint Honoré—from peace to honor, he supposed—acutely aware of his surroundings while affecting to be lost in his own world.

  Environmental alertness was more than a matter of seeing. It was also a matter of listening: one always had to listen for the footfalls of someone, out of view, hurrying and then slowing down in an effort to maintain a constant distance from the one he was following.

  Someone was following him, Ambler realized—but not in accordance with any clandestine mode of operating. Ambler heard the sound of someone hurrying in his direction, someone with legs significantly shorter than his and, to judge from the faint panting sounds, someone in poor physical condition.

  Ambler knew he should feel alarm, yet the man scurrying after him was moving with all the subtlety of a waiter chasing a customer who had forgotten to pay his check. Perhaps that was the very point of the ruse—to overcome a seasoned operative’s suspicions by an excess of obviousness?

  Ambler lengthened his stride and turned left at the end of the block, onto the narrower rue Cambon, and then, after a short jaunt, onto the rue du Mont Thabor. Fifty feet ahead of him was an alleyway, serving some of the adjoining boutiques. He paused before it and pretended to check his wristwatch. Reflected on its dial he saw the man who had been pursuing him. With a swift, sudden movement, he whirled around and grabbed the stranger, wresting him into the alley and against a graffiti-strewn cinder-block wall.

  The man was a singularly unimpressive specimen of humanity: pasty-faced, out of breath, with thinning black hair, faint hollows beneath his eyes, and a bit of a paunch. His forehead was gleaming with sweat. He was perhaps five foot six and looked entirely out of his element. His clothing—a cheap tan raincoat, a poly-blend white shirt, some sort of nondescript, boxy gray suit—was American, sold there if not manufactured there. Ambler watched his hands to see whether he would make a move toward a concealed weapon or device.

  “You’re Tarquin, right?” the pallid stranger asked, breathing hard.

  Ambler slammed him against the wall—“Ow,” the man protested—and ran his hands over his clothes, his fingertips alert to any kind of weapon: the pen that was a little too thick, a little too long, the wallet that seemed just a bit too bulky for a payload of paper and plastic.

  Nothing.

  Now Ambler stared at him hard, searchingly, looking for any flicker of guile. “Who wants to know?”

  “Take your hands off me, you piece of shit,” the man spat. There was a trace of Brooklyn in his voice, though just a trace.

  “I said, who wants to know?”

  The man drew himself up, a look of affronted dignity on his face. “The name’s Clayton Caston.” He did not offer to shake hands.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Don’t tell me,” Ambler said with unconcealed scorn and suspicion. “You’re a friend. You’re here to help me.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” the pallid man replied testily. “I’m no friend of yours. And I’m here to help myself.”

  “Who are you with?” Ambler demanded. The man was hopeless: his ineptness at basic field maneuvers was not the kind that cou
ld be faked. But he could be useful indeed as a part of a team, drawing Ambler out, lulling him into a sense of false confidence while others moved in for the kill.

  “You mean my place of employment?”

  “I mean right now, right here. Who else is out there? And where, goddammit? Tell me now, or I can promise that you’ll never speak again.”

  “And I was wondering why you don’t seem to have any friends.”

  Ambler formed a rigid-fingered spear hand and cocked his arm back. He wanted it to be clear that he could deliver a crushing blow to the man’s neck at any moment.

  “Who else is out there?” the man went on. “About eleven million Frenchmen, if you’re counting the whole metropolitan area.”

  “You’re telling me you’re operating alone?”

  “Well, for the moment,” the man said, reluctance in his voice.

  Ambler found himself starting to relax; there was no hint of dissembling in the man’s face. He was operating alone. In saying so, he was not reassuring an anxious subject, Ambler sensed; he was admitting an awkward truth.

  “But you should know I’m with the CIA,” the man cautioned, sounding nettled. “So don’t get any ideas. If you hurt me, it would be bad for you. The Company hates paying medical bills. They wouldn’t take it sitting down. So just put that . . . hand away. That’s a real bad move for you. Could be bad for me, come to think of it. Definitely a lose–lose scenario.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “A frequent surmise, and frequently erroneous,” he said. “Listen, there’s a McDonald’s near the Paris Opéra. Maybe we could talk there.”

  Ambler stared at him.

  “What?”

  “McDonald’s?” Ambler shook his head. “This some new agency rendezvous point?”

  “I really wouldn’t know. It’s just that I’m not sure I can stomach the local grub. If you haven’t guessed already, I’m not really into the”—he wriggled his fingers—“ ‘cloak-and-dagger’ stuff. That’s not my thing.”

  Ambler’s eyes darted regularly to scan the streetscape. So far he had detected none of the subtle alterations in foot traffic that indicated that a pedestrian patrol—a squad of “walkers”—was in place. “Fine, we’ll talk at a McDonald’s.” You never agree to a rendezvous chosen by the other party. “But not that one.” Tarquin plunged his hand in the suited man’s breast pocket and pulled out his cell phone. An Ericsson multistandard cell phone. A cursory inspection revealed that it had a prepaid French SIM card. Probably he had rented the device at Charles de Gaulle. Tarquin pressed a few keys, and the phone displayed its number, which he promptly committed to memory.

  “I’ll give you a call in fifteen minutes with an address.”

  The man glanced at his watch, a digital-display Casio. “Fine,” he said, with a slight harrumphing sound.

  Twelve minutes later, Ambler got out of the Pigalle metro. The McDonald’s was opposite the station; the milling crowds would make it easy for Ambler to maintain a discreet scrutiny of the venue. He phoned the man who called himself Caston and gave him the address.

  Then Ambler waited. There were hundreds of methods by which walkers could discreetly insert themselves in position. The laughing couple by the newspaper kiosk, the solitary, sallow man looking dourly at the windows of a store for erotic “aids” of latex and leather, the young, apple-cheeked man clad in a fleece-collared denim jacket, with a camera hanging from a strap around his neck—all would move along momentarily, and all could be replaced by people of a similar profile, who would avoid eye contact with one another but would be invisibly connected by a common coordinator.

  Yet such an insertion always produced subtle disturbances, which an alert observer could detect. Human beings spaced themselves from one another in accordance with laws they were unconscious of but that patterned their behavior all the same.

  Two people in an elevator divided the space between them; if there were more than three, eye contact would be scrupulously avoided. When an additional passenger entered the cabin, the current occupants would reposition themselves to maximize the distances among them. It was a small dance, repeated hour after hour, day after day, in elevators around the world: people acting as if they had been trained in the maneuver yet entirely unconscious of what impelled them to move a little farther to the back, a little farther to the left, a little farther to the right, a little farther to the front. Yet the patterns were obvious once you were attuned to them. There were similar patterns—elastic and amorphous but real—to be found on the sidewalk, in the way people clustered around a shop window or lined up at a newsstand. The presence of someone who was stationed at a position where one usually stood out of mere human velleity subtly upset the natural order. A sufficiently receptive observer would be aware of disturbances just on the verge of consciousness. To spell out what was wrong, Ambler knew, was more difficult than simply, instantaneously, to feel it. Conscious thought was logical and slow. Intuition was fleet, unreflective, and usually more accurate. Within a few minutes, Ambler had satisfied himself that no surveillance team, no patrol, had arrived.

  The pasty-faced man arrived via taxicab, stopping at the corner just before the McDonald’s. When he got out, he swiftly craned his head around, squinting above him, a useless gesture that was more likely to identify himself to anyone following him than it was to identify the followers.

  After the CIA man entered the restaurant, Ambler watched until the cab had disappeared down the road and around the corner. Then he waited another five minutes. Still nothing.

  Now he crossed the busy street and walked into the McDonald’s. It was dark inside and illuminated with reddish lights, which struck Ambler as apt for a red-light district. Caston was seated at a corner booth, nursing a coffee.

  Ambler bought a couple of Royals with bacon and sat down at a table that was in the rear third of the restaurant but afforded a clear view of the door. Then he caught Caston’s eye and gestured for him to join him. Caston had evidently selected his booth because it was the least visible. It was the sort of defensive mistake that no field agent would have made. If hostiles entered your arena, it was because they knew you were present. Far better to be aware of their presence as soon as possible—to maximize your own state of awareness. Only amateurs blinded themselves to stay out of sight.

  Caston sat down opposite Ambler at the small blond-wood table. He looked unhappy.

  Ambler kept scanning the room. He could not eliminate the possibility that Caston was an inadvertent cat’s-paw; if there were a transponder in the heel of his shoe, for example, it would be easy to assemble a team out of sight; visual surveillance would be unnecessary.

  “You’re bigger than your photograph,” Caston said. “Then again, your photograph was only three by five inches.”

  Ambler ignored him. “Who knows you’re here with me?” he asked impatiently.

  “Just you,” the man replied. There was a grumble in his voice but, again, not a trace of dissembling or guile. Liars frequently looked at you attentively after they spoke; they wanted to see whether you went for the lie or they needed to do more in order to persuade you. Those who told the truth, in ordinary conversation, just assumed they would be believed. Caston’s eyes settled on the hamburgers on the tray in front of Ambler. “You going to eat both of those?”

  Tarquin shook his head.

  The American picked up a hamburger and started to wolf it down. “Sorry,” he said after a while. “Haven’t eaten for a while.”

  “Hard to get a good meal in France, huh?”

  “Tell me about it,” the man said earnestly, oblivious to Tarquin’s sarcasm.

  “No, you tell me. Who are you really? You don’t look like a CIA agent. You don’t look like any kind of field agent or law enforcement officer.” He regarded the stoop-shouldered, soft-bellied man before him. The man was obviously out of shape. And out of place. “You look like an accountant.”

  “That’s right,” the man said. He took out a mechanical penci
l and pointed it at Ambler. “So don’t mess with me.” He smiled. “Actually, I was a CIA before I joined the CIA. Certified Internal Auditor, you know. But I’ve been with the agency for thirty years. It’s just that I’m the kind who don’t usually get out.”

  “Back office?”

  “That’s what you front-office types would say.”

  “How did you end up at the Company?”

  “Do we really have time for this?”

  “Tell me,” Ambler said, an insistent note in his tone that was not far from a threat.

  The man nodded; he understood that the man he knew as Tarquin was not asking out of idle curiosity but as a measure of verification. “The quick story is that I started out working on corporate fraud at the SEC. Then I did a stint at Ernst & Young, except somehow that seemed too much like doing corporate fraud. Meantime, some bright spark in Washington figured that the Company really was a company, on some basic level. Decided they needed to bring in someone with my peculiar skill set.” He drained his coffee. “And they did mean peculiar.”

  Ambler studied the man as he spoke and, again, detected no deceit. “So I was found by a rank amateur in the field,” Ambler said. “A complete desk jockey. I don’t know whether to be amused or mortified.”

  “I may be a complete desk jockey, Tarquin. That doesn’t make me a complete idiot.”

  “Quite the contrary, I’m sure,” the operative said. “Tell me how you found me, and tell me why.”

  A smile flicked at the corner of the man’s mouth, a moment of suppressed vanity. “It was simple, really—once I heard you were Paris bound.”

  “As you pointed out, that’s an area with a population of eleven million.”

  “Well, I started to think about the probabilities. Paris isn’t a good place to hide out: it’s still a major sector for the intelligence communities of several nations. In fact, it’s pretty much the last place you should be. So you weren’t here to go to ground. Maybe you had a job to do—but then why wouldn’t you decamp at your earliest opportunity? Left decent odds that you were here because you were in pursuit of something—of information. Now, what would be the last place in the world that a former Consular Operations employee, one now classified as ‘rogue,’ should make an appearance? Obviously, the Paris offices of Consular Operations—at least, that’s the way my colleagues would figure it. Last place you should be.”