The Ambler Warning

by Robert Ludlum

  “I don’t understand,” the Slovak businessman, drably garbed in a suit of taupe gabardine, was repeating as Caston led him from the Congress Center. The heavy clouds transformed the street into a grisaille version of itself, a picture done in shades of gray.

  “It’s crazy, I know,” Caston was saying. “But the agency has already negotiated a deal with Slovakia Telecom, and it’s our last chance to reconsider. We’re almost out of the due diligence period. Otherwise, contractually it takes effect by the end of the day.”

  “But why were we never contacted about this? This is ridiculously last-minute.” The Slovak’s English was accented but fluent.

  “You’re surprised that the United States government mishandled an RFP? You’re asking how it could possibly be that our federal government could mishandle the bidding process?”

  The Slovak snorted. “When you put it that way . . .”

  Ambler, who had stationed himself across the street, strode swiftly toward him. “Mr. Vrabel? I’m Andy Halverson, with the U.S. General Services Administration. Clay here says we’re about to make a pretty costly mistake. I need to know if he’s right.”

  Caston cleared his throat. “The current offering costs out at a twenty percent premium over our existing telephony arrangement. Even with embedded security features, it seems to me that we’re not getting the best possible value for the annualized expenditures.”

  “That’s a preposterous deal!” the squat Slovak said. “You should have been talking to us.”

  Caston turned to Ambler with an elaborate I-told-you-so shrug.

  Ambler’s manner was that of a bureaucrat who was fearful of future reprisals but determined to avert a crisis while it was still possible. “We’ve got an office filled with people whose job that is,” he said steadily. “Guess they never bothered to learn their way around Bratislava. Thing is, we were told Slovakia Telecom had the market to themselves.”

  “Two years ago, maybe,” Caston said, as Vrabel started to splutter with disbelief. “You’re about to sign a two-hundred-million-dollar contract, Andy, and your guys are relying on two-year-old market analyses? Glad I’m not the one whose job it is to explain that to Congress.”

  Bit by bit, Ambler noticed, Vrabel began standing a little straighter; the human top was squaring his shoulders. His annoyance at being dragged from the “Two Economies, One Alliance” session gave way to a certain pleasure at witnessing the mutual recriminations between two powerful American officials, and the prospect of a highly lucrative American contract.

  The Slovak’s face relaxed into a genial smile. “Gentlemen—the hour is late, but it is not too late, I trust. I think we can do business together.”

  The two Americans brought him to a small second-floor conference room at the Belvedere, one they had ascertained would be unoccupied until an ASEAN “working group” arrived an hour from then. Ambler knew that the conference room would be theirs, if only briefly, so long as they simply looked as if they belonged. Hotel staffers, puzzled by their appearance, would assume the mistake was their own, and, given the density of VIPs in residence, their main priority would be to avoid causing offense.

  Laurel, dressed severely in a gray skirt and white blouse, met the two inside the small conference room and approached Jozef Vrabel with a black, wand-like device.

  Ambler made apologetic noises. “Just a formality. Technically, when we’re having an offsite discussion of what’s officially classified information, we’re got to do a scan for listening devices.”

  Laurel waved the device—a thing fashioned out of two television remote controls—along the man’s extremities, then his torso. When she approached the badge, she paused and said, “If you’ll let me remove that name tag, sir . . . I’m afraid the chip inside creates interference.”

  Vrabel did so with a complaisant nod, and she stepped behind him, pretending to scan his back. “All right,” she said presently. She replaced nylon rope around his neck, tucking the card inside his lapel; since nobody ever looked at his own badge while it was on, Vrabel would have no occasion to notice that his conference badge had been replaced by a Triple-A membership card.

  “Please, sit,” Ambler said, gesturing. “Can we get you some coffee?”

  “Tea, please,” the Slovak said.

  “Tea it is.” Then Ambler turned to Caston and said, “You’ve got the terms of offering?”

  “You mean here? We can download the encrypted files, but we’d have to use one of our machines.” Caston spoke his lines a little stiffly, but it passed as the awkwardness of embarrassment. “The station boys have the clear-connect.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Ambler said. “At the Schatzalp? You can’t expect Mr. Vrabel here to ride the funicular up the mountain to the Schatzalp. That’s just too far. He’s a busy man. We’re all busy. Forget about it. Just forget about it.”

  “But it’s a bad deal,” Caston said. “You can’t just—”

  “Then I’ll face the music.” He turned to the Slovak. “Sorry to waste your time.”

  Vrabel broke in with a tone of lordly magnanimity. “Gentlemen, please,” he said. “Your country deserves the highest consideration, not to be shaken down by a bunch of scheming zeks. My own shareholders have interests aligned with yours. Put me in the funicular. In truth, I was rather hoping for a chance to visit the Schatzalp. I’m told it’s not to be missed.”

  “Are you sure you want to take the time?”

  “Absolutely,” said the Slovak, with a $200 million smile. “Absolutely.”

  At the main entrance to the Congress Center, the fast-moving queue sluiced between two movable steel fences and a no less formidable human cordon of military policemen, their cheeks pink from the cold, their breath forming sfumato puffs of smoke in the chilled air. Immediately past the entrance, at the left, was a series of efficiently manned coat-check stations. Then came the security area, staffed by half a dozen guards. Ambler took his time removing his coat, patting himself down as if fearful of forgetting something in his coat. He wanted to time his entrance, to be certain there were plenty of people ahead of him and behind him. He now wore a blazer without a tie; the ID badge hung from his neck, near the shirt’s third button.

  Finally he saw a crowd of men and women pushing through the entrance and he nimbly stepped into line at the security desk.

  “Cold outside!” he said to the man seated by the computer monitor with what he told himself was a passable tinge of a Mitteleuropan accent. “But I guess you’re used to it!” He pressed his card to the card reader and patted his cheeks, as if they were frozen. The man at the monitor glanced at the screen and at him. A light at the turnstile pulsed green, and Ambler pushed his way through a gate bar.

  He was in.

  He felt something flutter inside him, something tiny and bird-like, and he realized that it was hope.

  Hope. Perhaps the most dangerous of all emotions, and perhaps the most necessary.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Inside felt like the outside; passing from the Davos gloom into the vast arena of the Congress Center was like walking from a darkened theater into blazing day. Every corner was brightly lit, the walls and floors all warm, glowing shades of cream, tan, ocher. Stenciled on the wall to the left of the first big atrium were various panels of the globe—continents or parts of continents—in shades of brown, crisscrossed with curved lines of latitude and longitude, as if projected from a globe. Ambler strolled farther into the buzzing space, almost preternaturally alert to his surroundings. The ceiling, twenty feet above, was a curving expanse of narrow wooden planks, giving the sense that one was inside an enormous ark. He paused at a seating area where coffee was served on small, round glass-topped tables. Banks of orchids in heavy brown planters were interspersed among them. Raised lettering on an umber wall declared the area to be a WORLD CAFÉ. The wall was decorated with the horizontal names of countries intersected by vertically arrayed capitals, like some sort of acrostic. The capitals were in white, the country names in dark br
own, except for the overlapping letter. The a in Poland provided the a in Warsaw; the o in Mozambique was the o in Maputo; the I in India held up the stacked letters of New Delhi. Ambler wondered about complaints from countries like Peru and Italy.

  Still, he could not help but be impressed with the amount of sheer attention that had gone into every incidental detail. The forum’s annual meeting took place during six days in January, and then all the walls would be repainted, all the sculptures and decorative elements would be warehoused—and yet the décor displayed a level of care and attention that even permanent structures rarely received. Maybe twenty people were at the World Café, mainly seated in clear Plexiglas chairs. There was the handsome, if slightly mannish, woman with a navy skirt-suit, a heavy ring on one finger, and what looked at first like a scarf around her neck; as he approached, he saw that her name card was not white, like the others, but blue, and that the scarf was in fact a Trimline headset in repose. Farther away, he saw a man with a friendly, square, soon-to-be-jowly face, heavy-framed glasses with amber-tinted lenses, a buttoned jacket strained by the convexity of his belly—a German or Austrian, Ambler guessed—speaking with a man whose back was to Ambler, a man with fluffy white hair and a dark blue suit. Investment bankers, a bit too pleased to be here: “guests,” rather than “participants,” in the ironclad hierarchy of the conference. At another table, a prosperous-looking man with spare, tidily combed salt-and-pepper hair was shuffling papers; his eyes were impassive behind his steel-rimmed glasses. He had the air of someone who knew the rules of the road and never broke them; a man with a lighter suit and graying brown hair was speaking to him with greater animation than was returned, obviously the conversational suitor. A third man with a spread collar and a pink-blue patterned shirt, a polka-dotted tie—a Brit, by nationality or aspiration—was leaning toward the other two, openly listening and reserving the right to contribute. There was unease beneath his beaming bonhomie: that of someone who was neither definitely part of a conversation nor yet definitely excluded from it.

  Nobody here was his man.

  At the end of a long corridor on the lower level of the Congress Center, Caston pressed his cell phone to his ear, straining to hear Adrian’s instructions. From time to time, the auditor glumly broke in with questions of his own.

  It wasn’t what Adrian had signed up for when he joined the Office of Internal Review, but somehow his dewy assistant did not seem to mind. Indeed, if Caston was not very much mistaken, Adrian seemed to be enjoying his turn as shifu.

  Ambler walked down a broad red-granite stairway to a sort of mezzanine, like the dress circle of an opera house. Along a corridor snaking off behind the stairs was a blue sign that read TV STUDIO; evidently it was reserved for broadcast journalists to conduct interviews with some of the luminaries in attendance. A sign at another alcove advertised BILATERAL ROOMS, presumably reserved for small private discussions. The main flow of traffic on the mezzanine was to the left, toward another gathering spot: an area with wicker chairs and a bar on which were arrayed various small bottles and cans, mainly sodas and fruit juices and beverages that were in-between. A couple of high-mounted television monitors displayed scheduling updates and what looked to be video excerpts from some of the high-profile “briefings.” As he got closer, he saw that the beverages came from around the world: Fruktsoda, a lemon-lime drink from Sweden; Appletiser, a fizzy apple juice from South Africa; Mazaa, a mango-flavored beverage from India; even Titán, a gooseberry-flavored soda from Mexico. It was a model UN of soft drinks, Ambler thought mordantly.

  Even more popular was the adjoining computer bay: radial clusters of chairs and intranet-linked computers, decoratively partitioned by thin rectangular tanks of clear liquid through which a slow and steady stream of bubbles rose. Dozens of fingers clicking at dozens of keyboards; visages of boredom, satisfaction, uncertainty, aggression. But nothing to detain him. He peered down from the balcony and saw the much larger space below, a terrarium of power. On a vast brick wall opposite him were enormous African and Polynesian sculptures, which consorted oddly with the array of World Economic Forum flags along the balcony’s five-foot inside rim.

  Ambler descended the flight of stairs to the babbling crowd beneath him, checked his watch, and pushed through the throngs. A midafternoon crowd of people, between sessions, grabbing canapés that were whisked through on silver trays, or crystal glasses of conference-approved beverages. The air was fragrant with expensive colognes, aftershave, and hair pomades, not to mention the trays of Bündnerfleisch on pumpernickel triangles, a regional specialty. Ambler slowed and began to take in his human surroundings.

  A youngish, thickset man in an unfashionable but well-tailored suit—its quality evidenced by the fact that his avoirdupois was well concealed at first glance—was surrounded by members of a slightly frumpy entourage; the man’s gaze swiveled around him, taking in everyone but those closest to him. Occasionally he murmured something Slavic-sounding to a waistless black-haired woman nearby. He was probably a new head of state from one of the Baltic republics, on the lookout for foreign investment. The man’s gaze paused at one point, and Ambler followed the sight line: a young, curvy blonde across the room, clearly the trophy wife of the small, withered plutocrat beside her. Ambler nodded at the Slav, and the man nodded back, half warmly, half warily: it was a look that said, Are you somebody? The look of someone who did not trust himself to know. Ambler sensed, too, that the man’s entourage was simultaneously a source of comfort and humiliation to him. He was used to being the most important man in the room. Here, at Davos, he was strictly minor-league—and there was some discomfiture to have his entourage witness the evident fact. A couple of yards away from him, an older, rangy American billionaire—someone whose “enterprise software” was an industry standard across the globe—was surrounded by people seeking a word with him, attempting, like whistling, chirping modems, to establish a connection. He was like a massive planet drawing in satellites. By contrast, few seemed interested in catching the Baltic politician’s eye. At Davos, the heads of small states were further down the pecking order than the heads of large multinationals. Globalization, like business-process reengineering, did not “flatten hierarchies,” as its boosters proclaimed; it merely established new ones.

  As Ambler continued his way, he noticed the pattern continuing: Some figures swelled, inflated by the attention they gathered; some shrank, deflated by the scarcity of it. Yet others seemed jubilant merely to breathe the same air as the giants among them. Tray after tray of canapés disappeared into yearning gullets, though Ambler doubted whether anyone really tasted them. Attention was elsewhere. The “social entrepreneurs”—as the savvier heads of charities and NGOs now styled themselves, effectively conceding that only the vocabulary of business had any traction in the new era—chatted energetically with one another and even more energetically with bona fide entrepreneurs, the sort whose checkbooks could underwrite their programs.

  A handsome young Indian man was speaking animatedly to a Western businessman with thatchy, shelflike white eyebrows and whiskered ears. “We’re all about figuring out what’s not working and then fixing it,” the young man was saying. “Find out what’s stuck and get it unstuck. You must do a lot of that at Royal Goldfields.”

  “In a sense,” the older man allowed in a rumble.

  “You know the saying: Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish—”

  “And he’ll just go into competition with you,” the old man—the head of some mining consortium, obviously—drawled in a voice buzzy with phlegm.

  A brief flash of teeth, white against the Indian’s dark brown skin; Ambler doubted whether the man’s interlocutor saw the annoyance that was so obvious to him. “But the real challenge is to transform the whole fishing industry. Put it on a rational footing. Make sure it pays for itself. Speaking metaphorically, of course. We’re all about sustainable solutions. Not the quick fix.”

  As Ambler zigzagged through the crowd, h
e picked up snatches of conversation—“Were you at the attorney general’s breakfast thing?”; “You could call us a mezzanine fund, sure, but we’ll go in earlier if we’re really confident about the risk metrics”; “I figured out why it’s always easier to understand the francophone African ministers than their French counterparts: they always speak slowly and clearly, just the way they were instructed to in grade school”—and glanced at dozens of faces, many glimpsed partially, crescents glinting through occluding bodies.

  From a cluster nearer the bar he saw a pair of eyes radiating malevolence, and decided to move in for a closer look. As he got there, he saw that the man was being badgered by another, someone in an off-the-rack worsted and a poorly knotted tie. An academic, no doubt, though probably one at a high-powered institution and with a high-powered reputation of his own. “With respect, I don’t think you really grasp what’s happening here,” the academic was saying. With respect was one of those phrases that signified the opposite of their literal meaning, rather like perfectly good, as when used of milk that had passed its expiration date. “I mean—with respect—maybe there’s a reason you haven’t been in government since the Carter administration, Stu!”

  The other man’s eyes narrowed; he smiled to suggest amusement and disguise his profound annoyance. “Nobody’s disputing that China’s growth rate has been impressive, but the question is whether that’s sustainable, and what the global consequences are, and whether we’re not seeing the beginnings of a bubble, as far as foreign investment goes.”

  “Wake up and smell the jasmine!” the academic retorted. “It’s not a bubble. It’s a big tidal wave and sooner than you think it’s gonna wash away your little sand castles.” The nasal hectoring tone was his default way of speaking, Ambler suspected. He probably prided himself on his candor and, cushioned by tenure, had little idea how grating others could find him.