How slow Ambler had been to see what was before his very eyes! Yet now, with dizzying immediacy, he saw what would ensue. The shots would come from almost the precise area where Ambler was standing. Security would tackle him: his adversaries would have found that part easy to arrange. Circumstantial evidence would suggest that he was an American—but it would be impossible to prove. Nothing would connect him with any identity.
Because his identity had been erased.
Suspicion without proof would be the most explosive thing of all. Beijing had broken out in riots when the United States accidentally bombed a Chinese embassy in Belgrade, as Ashton Palmer had noted. The loss of the beloved Liu Ang to a suspected U.S. agent would produce an instant conflagration. And the United States could not apologize, could not acknowledge what the rest of the world would suspect: because Harrison Ambler did not exist.
As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.
Riots—on a scale without precedent—would overrun the People’s Republic; the PLA would be forced to step in. But the sleeping giant would not return to its slumbers: not before wreaking havoc on a sleeping world.
The thoughts filled his mind like a deepening shadow, yet all the while he and Laurel maintained eye contact. I know that you know that I know that you know . . . the childish regress came to mind now, too.
Time slowed to syrup.
Yes, security had no doubt already been primed to look for him; his enemies were more than capable of that.
He had been wrong about so much but right about some things as well. Liu Ang would die; fire would sweep a nation; the PLA would step in, cracking down, imposing the yoke of an old-style Maoist regime. But the sequence of events would not come to a halt there: fanaticism had blinded the conspirators to the true consequences of their machinations. Once the clamor mounted and the outrage spread, the world would be plunged into war. Events of this sort could never be contained. The puppet masters never understand that. They played with fire and were consumed by it, too, in the end.
What Ambler felt was anguish and rage and regret, twined together like strands of a steel cable.
All of it—starting with his “escape,” and everything that followed—was according to plan. Their plan. Like a child in possession of a treasure map, he had been following the course laid out for him. A course that led to Davos, and to death.
For a moment, shock rendered him insensate, made him feel like a thing of wood and cloth—and why not?
He had been nothing more than a puppet.
On a small closed-circuit monitor in the bilateral room, the Chinese leader was shown speaking, captioned with an English translation. Neither Palmer nor Whitfield paid more than casual attention. It was as if, having rehearsed the event thoroughly in their heads, they found its realization was of only secondary interest.
Caston flipped his cell phone shut. “Sorry. I need to pop out for a sec.” He stood up, shakily, and started for the door. It was locked—from the inside. Impossible!
Now Ellen Whitfield flipped off her own cell phone. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Given the delicacy of our conversation, I just thought it would be best if we weren’t disturbed. You’d been worrying about our precautions. As I’ve been explaining, they’re far more extensive than you seem to have realized.”
“I see.” Caston felt winded.
Her mouth formed a small moue. “Mr. Caston, you worry too much. What we’ve arranged is a tidy little bank shot, strategically speaking. Liu Ang is assassinated. The U.S. government, inevitably, is suspected. And yet plausible deniability is maintained.”
“Because, after all, the assassin doesn’t exist.” Palmer’s expression remained self-amused.
“You’re talking about . . . Tarquin.” Caston watched them carefully as he said the name. “You’re talking about . . . Harrison Ambler.”
“Harrison who?” Whitfield asked lightly.
The auditor stared straight ahead. “You programmed him.”
“Someone had to.” There was no trace of self-doubt in Whitfield’s dark blue eyes. “Let’s give the man his due, though. He’s done a magnificent job. We’d set a difficult course for him. Few could have navigated it. Though we did think it prudent to give him a heads-up about the Cons Ops sanction. I’d asked our principal to commission Tarquin to take out one Harrison Ambler. I’m almost sorry I wasn’t around for that conversation. But that’s a detail.”
“How did you set Ambler up, then?” Caston asked, his voice neutral.
“That’s the beauty part,” Ashton Palmer said sagely. “So to speak. ‘Und es neigen die Weisen / Oft am Ende zu Schönem sich,’ as Hölderlin once wrote. ‘And in the end, the wise often succumb to the beautiful.’ ”
Caston tilted his head. “I’ve seen the payment records,” he bluffed, “but they don’t tell me how you found her. Laurel Holland.”
Whitfield’s countenance remained sunny. “Yes, that’s how Tarquin knows her. And she really played her part to perfection. She’s a true prodigy, Lorna Sanderson is. I suppose you could say it was really a matter of matching one extraordinary talent with another, reciprocal one. As you probably know, there isn’t a person in ten thousand who could fool a man like Harrison Ambler.”
Caston’s eyes narrowed. “But Lorna Sanderson is one in a million.”
“You got it. A hugely talented actress. Won the top drama prizes in college. She was the star protégée of a disciple of Stanislavsky, who said he’d never seen such raw talent.”
“Stanislavsky?”
“Legendary acting coach—devised the concept of the Method. Method actors train themselves to experience the very emotions they’re projecting. That way they’re not, in a sense, really acting. Quite a skill, if you can master it. And she did. She was extremely well trained, extremely promising. Right after she left Juilliard, she played the lead in an off-Broadway production of Hedda Gabler, got raves for her performance. Truth is, if she’d caught the right breaks, she could have been another Meryl Streep.”
“So what happened?” And what was happening outside the door? As sturdy as it was, Caston was seated close enough to it that he could detect the vibrations from some sort of—well, scuffle.
“Unfortunately for her, she had a problem. Lorna was a junkie. Speed, then heroin. Then she started to deal, mainly to be sure of having a steady supply for her own use. When she was arrested, well, her life was effectively over. New York has those Rockefeller drug laws, of course. Sell two ounces of heroin, and it’s a Class A felony, a sentence of fifteen to life. And fifteen’s the minimum. That’s where we stepped in. Because a talent like that doesn’t come along every day. Through a PSU liaison officer, we had a federal prosecutor broker a deal with the local DA’s office. After that, we owned her. She was a special project of ours—and she proved an awfully apt pupil. Really grasped the vision.”
“And so everything has unfolded according to plan,” Caston said heavily; his eyes darted from one to the other. Two infuriatingly smug faces, one shared vision. Madness! What frightened him most, he realized, was how unfrightened they were.
Abruptly the door burst open. A burly, barrel-chested man loomed in the door frame; others were crowded immediately behind him.
Caston turned and looked at the man. “Don’t you ever knock?”
“Evening, Clay.” His hands on his hips, the ADDI stared at Whitfield and Palmer with recognition but without surprise. “Wondering how I figured out what you were up to?” he asked the auditor.
“What I’m actually wondering, Cal,” said Caston mirthlessly, “is what side you’re on.”
Norris nodded gravely. “I guess you’re about to find out.”
Time and space, the here and now, all seemed transformed to Ambler. The Congress Hall felt as airless and as cold as outer space, and time ticked by in slow, thudding seconds, keeping rhythm with his own pumping heart
.
Harrison Ambler. How hard he had worked to reclaim that name—a name that would soon be nothing other than a byword for infamy. He felt sickened, battered by nausea and self-disgust, and still he would not stand down.
She must have seen that in him, for while eye contact between them remained unbroken, he detected—saw or sensed—the faintest movement, some muscle contraction preparatory to the squeezing of a trigger, or perhaps he simply knew it without seeing or sensing at all, because for just that split second he was she and she was he, the two sharing an instant of transparency that was an instant of identity, a connection no longer of love but of loathing, and—
Ambler threw himself at her even before he realized what he had done, threw himself at her at the very moment she squeezed the trigger.
The weapon’s loud report pulled him back into himself. An explosion overhead a microsecond later—a popping noise, the shattering of brilliant, tiny fragments of glass, a faint but perceptible diminishment of illumination—told him that the bullet had gone awry, had struck one of the tank lamps racked at the ceiling. Even as that thought sunk in, he felt a searing pain at his midriff, felt the pain even before he registered the flashing motion of her hand, the shiny steel of the blade it held. Some part of his mind reeled, baffled—it made no sense. It took another split second before he realized that she was stabbing him now for a second time, that she had slashed at him first unseen, was slashing at him—yes, slashing and plunging, again and again, penetrating him in a spasmodic frenzy.
Blood poured from him, like wine from an overfilled goblet, and none of it mattered, for he had to stop her or he would lose everything—his name, his soul, his being. With all his remaining strength, he lunged at her, even as the long blade plunged once more into his entrails. His hands formed grappling hooks that wrested her arms up and to her sides, pinning them to the floor. The screams and shrieks around him sounded as if they were coming from miles away. He was conscious of nothing other than her, the woman he had loved—the killer he had never known at all—thrashing and struggling beneath him, a grotesque parody of lovemaking that was fueled by the opposite of love. Her face, inches from his, showed nothing other than fury and the pure vicious determination of a jungle predator. The loss of blood began to cloud his mind, even as he relied on his own body weight to supplement his ebbing strength and prevent her escape.
A distant voice, emerging from the hiss of white noise like an AM radio station bounced by sunspots from another continent. 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.
The spear. The shield.
A man who saw through everybody. A woman whom nobody could see through.
The spear. The shield.
Fragments of time past flashed through his head, dimly, as through a malfunctioning slide projector. In Parrish Island, the quietly murmured words of encouragement: it was she who had planted the notion of his escaping in the first place, even the exact date—he realized that now. It was Laurel who, at every juncture, had kept him both off balance and on track. Tarquin, the Menschenkenner, had met his match. It was Laurel all along.
The realization pierced and transfixed him, opened a wound more painful than those she had inflicted with her blade.
He closed his eyes briefly and then opened them, and the opening of them felt as arduous as any physical task he had ever done.
He peered into her eyes, searching out the woman he had thought he knew. Before he lost consciousness, he saw only blackness and defeat and a snarling antagonism, and, then, in that blackness—faintly, flickeringly reflected—he saw himself.
EPILOGUE
Harrison Ambler closed his eyes and felt the gentle glow of the March sun. Lying on the deck-top chaise lounge, he could hear sounds. Soothing ones. The water lapping gently against the hull of the fishing boat. The sound of a spinning reel, as a fishing line was cast. Other sounds, too.
He finally knew what it felt like to be a family man, and contentment welled up within him. On the other side of the boat, the son and daughter, bickering playfully as they baited a fishing hook. The mother, reading the newspaper, casting a rod of her own, and intervening with a wry, loving look when the kids got too rambunctious.
He yawned, felt a slight twinge of pain, and adjusted his loose-fitting T-shirt. Bandages still ridged his midriff, but after two operations he was healing up; he could feel it, could feel his strength starting to return. The sun glittered off the lake, a small one in the Shenandoah Valley region, and though it was not yet spring, the weather was balmy, in the mid-fifties. He decided that he would probably never return to the Sourlands, but he still loved boats, and lakes, and fishing, and he was glad to be with others with whom he could share his expertise. The scene was not as tranquil as it looked, to be sure: not with the demons that still chased themselves inside him. Not with two rambunctious teenagers and their tart-tongued, attractive mother. But somehow it was better this way. More real.
“Hey, daddy-o,” the boy said. At seventeen, he was already broad shouldered and deep chested. “Got you a ginger ale from the cooler. It’s still cold.” He handed Ambler the can.
Ambler opened his eyes and smiled at him. “Thanks,” he said.
“You sure you don’t want a beer?” asked the woman—not young but elegant and very funny. “There’s a Guinness somewhere. Breakfast of Champions.”
“Nah,” Ambler said. “Got to start slow.”
Yes, it felt good being a family man. He could get used to this.
Not that it was his family, exactly.
As a gentle, barely detectable ripple moved the boat ever so slightly, Clayton Caston clambered up from below deck, sweating and green at the gills. He leveled a baleful, reproachful gaze at Ambler and dry-swallowed another Dramamine.
Linda, anyway, knew a thing or two about fishing, and the kids were an easy sell. Getting Clay to come along was more of a struggle. Clay was right to have been skeptical of the promised tranquility, though only a high-grade hypochondriac like him could have convinced himself that he was suffering from seasickness on the nearly motionless lake.
“How I ever allowed myself to be talked into coming aboard this vomit-inducing vessel . . . ” Caston began.
“I envy you, Clay,” Ambler said simply.
“Do you realize that the actuarial odds of drowning in a domestic body of fresh water are actually greater than the odds of drowning while at sea?”
“Aw, come on. Fishing is one of the great American leisure time activities. Like I told you, it’s the most fun you can have without a spreadsheet. Just give it a chance. You might even turn out to be good at it.”
“I know what I’m good at,” Caston groused.
“You’re full of surprises—bet you even surprise yourself sometimes. Who knew you were such an ace with the AV equipment?”
“I told you,” Caston said. “My assistant walked me through all that stuff. All I know about coaxial cables otherwise is their purchase price per meter and the recommended amortization table.” But from the self-satisfied look on Caston’s face, Ambler could tell he was remembering what happened after Whitfield and Palmer discovered that the bilateral room had discreetly been turned into a closed-circuit TV studio and that their entire conversation had been fed to the Congress Center’s media center. Both the scholar and the political official were mesmerizing in their sheer fanaticism—hundreds of Davos participants could agree about that as they watched their faces on the video monitors that were mounted throughout the conference center.
It took Palmer and his protégée little time to realize the implications—not merely for their own futures but for their plan. Like many a dark venture, the one thing it could not survive was exposure to light.
As Caston recounted to Ambler during one of a number of hospital visits, Caleb Norris was the one who directed the Swiss military policemen to the bilateral room and made sure that the conspi
rators were taken into joint-service custody. He had been alerted, as it turned out, by an emergency message that a Chinese spymaster named Chao Tang had arranged to have delivered to him personally. It was an unusual step, to say the least, but top-level spy officials often made a study of their opposite numbers. The two men had never met, but each had a distinct sense of the other. In a situation of extremity, Chao decided to enlist the personal assistance of an American. Then, too, the fact that the Chinese spymaster was reported dead soon thereafter served as powerful authentication. As a heavily sedated Ambler had drifted in and out of consciousness during the first weeks he spent in the hospital, Caston had to tell him what happened several times before he understood it wasn’t just a dream, an artifact of the narcotics.
Later, when he was mentally alert, if still physically debilitated, other visitors arrived, some visits organized by Caston, some not. A fellow from State named Ethan Zackheim dropped by twice, with lots of questions. There were a couple of visits from Caston’s assistant—who thought Ambler was super and kept making comparisons to Derek somebody or other. There was even a visit from Dylan Sutcliffe—the real Dylan Sutcliffe, although, given the fifty pounds he’d put on since Carlyle College, it took Ambler a moment to recognize him—and as they paged through the college yearbook, he had lots of fun stories about college hijinks, most of which Ambler remembered just a little differently. Caston himself had spent a fair amount of time figuring out the methods by which calls had been rerouted and the aberrations in service billings that resulted.
“Well,” Ambler said after a while, shifting slightly on the deck-top chaise lounge, “your broadcast career might have been brief, but it was mighty effective. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, right?”
Caston suddenly blinked. “Did the kids put on sunblock?” he asked his wife.
“It’s March, Clay,” Linda replied, amused. “March. Nobody’s exactly sunbathing here.”
The Ambler Warning Page 48