The Schoolboy (Agent Orange Book 2)

by Stephen Langford

“Stanislaw is a man of study,” Paszek said. “Of culture and of history.”

  “My older brother was a priest as well,” Dziedzic said quietly. “He was also killed at Katyn Forest, like your uncle, and pushed with him into a mass grave. The order was signed by Stalin himself. The Soviet secret police may deny this, but we both know the truth, don’t we?”

  The deputy stared through the window rather than answer. The unexpected connection to the episcopal secretary had touched a nerve in him that reached back two decades but remained raw. He had spent most of his party existence with a distaste for the paternity of the Soviets but kept the matter buried in his subconscious to get along. After several long moments he blinked and returned his attention to the priests.

  “Well, I have my orders and you have yours,” he said as he stood. “I expect full cooperation with our security detail.”

  “Of course, Eliasz,” Paszek said. “Let me see you out myself.”

  Two minutes later the bishop returned. Dziedzic had finished his tea and was collecting up the cups.

  “A very interesting visit, wouldn’t you say?” Paszek asked.

  “Your Excellency, interesting and concerning.”

  “In what way, Stanislaw?”

  “Just what the deputy said. He didn’t want you to go to Rome. There is no reason why the Polish government would want you to do so—you continue to publicly defy them at Nowa Huta and elsewhere. Your presence at the council in Rome can only lead to public scandal for those lined up against the church. And yet, the Russians have insisted you be there. Why?”

  Chapter 11. Contingency Plans

  The city of Rome has at turns been called Roma Aeterna and Caput Mundi—the Eternal City and Capital of the World, respectively—owing to its longevity and significance throughout the ages of Western civilization. Long before there were bustling European capitals or world wars or a Sistine Chapel or even a Christian Church the Roman state survived ebbs and flows of dominance throughout the Mediterranean world. From its imperial preeminence under Trajan it underwent sackings and disasters until at last, eighteen hundred years later, it finally reached one million citizens again under Benito Mussolini. That had been three decades before the man who today called himself John Hardy sat in the midst of over two and a half million people and sipped cheap wine at a little outdoor restaurant.

  “Here you are, signore,” the waiter said as he sat a plate of spinach ravioli down in front of Hardy, followed by a small bowl of steamed vegetables.

  “Gratzie tante,” Hardy said. The two of them had agreed earlier that Hardy would stick to the most basic Italian phrases, while the waiter—Enzo Donati, he had told Hardy as they had become familiar—had learned to speak very passable English right after the war in the midst of all those British and American soldiers. Hardy attacked the food and watched the traffic, the pretty flaunting girls, and the apartment building half a block away where his target should emerge at any minute. John Hardy—Ivan—had formed a plan.

  This target was unusual, not in that it was a girl—Ivan had long since given up his scruples about violence on the fairer sex. No, the difference was that this particular target was to be courted rather than killed, unless and until it became necessary to do so. Ivan genuinely hoped it would not come to that. At 12:34 p.m. the front door of the apartment building opened, and she emerged. Ivan quickly finished the tall glass of water that Enzo had brought around, dropped enough money on the table to pay for the modest meal with an immodest tip, and began following her.

  Francesca Palumbo was in her late twenties and attractive but not in the way that made the rude men on the street wolf-whistle or walk alongside and try to seduce her. She might have been likened to Rubens’s mirror-gazing Venus, in both countenance and figure, but with dark hair. She wore fine Italian fashions with a confident posture and demeanor, as if she had money. Whether she was an heiress or a self-made success or a kept woman did not really matter to Ivan. What did matter was his plan and its operational perfection as a way to accomplish his ultimate objective in Rome: kill Bishop Kazimierz Paszek of Poland.

  Just as she had done each day since Ivan had discovered her, Francesca walked south on the Via Merulana, carrying a small paper sack that contained a homemade sandwich of sliced salami and a small bunch of red grapes. She would walk to the Piazza Dante and sit on one of the stone benches and eat, basking in the warm sun. Twice she had then returned home, twice she had walked around the neighborhood and window-shopped, and four times she had continued down the Via Tasso to end up at the old Lateran Palace, which housed the Scala Santa, the Sacred Stairs purported to be the very steps climbed at the Passion. Ivan wondered whether this meant Francesca would resist his advances or at least pretend to for a time. Not that this possibility worried him much—he did not believe in either the Scala Santa or obsessing over failure. He would find a way into her apartment.

  Three blocks from her door Francesca turned left into a little alley that cut several minutes from her walk to the Piazza Dante. Up ahead of her a red van was pulled to one side with the hood up. Two men stepped out of the van and began arguing at the front of the vehicle about what might be wrong with the engine. As she approached them one of the men glanced up.

  She stopped. Something was wrong. Why was the hood already up before these men got out of the van?

  He stepped in front of her, his black eyes glowering and moving across her body. She turned back toward the Via Merulana, but in the next moment he was upon her, his hands around her waist, and his hot breath on her neck. She dropped the paper sack. He introduced himself as Antonio and added a few vulgar words in bad Italian, with an accent she did not recognize, then placed one hand across her mouth and spun her around. The second man grinned broadly at his mate and then shrugged and nodded at the van doors at the rear. Francesca’s muffled screams echoed in the little alleyway but no farther. Just as the doors were swung open Ivan stepped up behind them.

  “What the bloody hell are you up to?” he shouted. John Hardy’s English accent was unmistakable. Both of the thugs turned with convincing looks of surprise. Antonio barked something in Portuguese, and his partner took two quick steps toward Ivan and swung his fist. Ivan blocked the punch with one arm and drove his opposing elbow against the man’s temple, staggering him back against the adjacent wall and then sliding down to the ground in agony. Ivan hoped he did not actually knock him unconscious or worse—if so he would owe them at least another fifty pounds.

  Antonio then pushed Francesca roughly down and jumped at Ivan. After two judo flips Antonio rested on his back feigning pain and confusion.

  “Let’s get going, love,” Ivan said as he took her hand. She let him pull her to the Via Merulana at a fast walk and then another block north before they stopped. “I think we’ve left them behind. Are you all right?”

  Francesca nodded uncertainly. This man—this Englishman—was handsome and well dressed. He smiled sympathetically. She looked down at their hands and, reluctantly it seemed, they both slowly let go.

  “Are you all right?” Ivan repeated. Did the girl not understand English? That might be an advantage, the charming foreigner who needed help managing through the cluttered chaos of Italy’s capital.

  “Yes,” she said with a thick Italian accent. “Gratzie…thank you…you saved me.” Suddenly her eyes flared in anger, she uttered several derogatory Italian phrases in the direction of the alley, then spat on the ground.

  Back in the alley Antonio was helping his partner nurse the nasty lump on the side of his head, but they were both grinning at the relatively easy payday. They had done nastier assignments for the Englishman at the same rate. Antonio picked up the paper sack Francesca had dropped and they began bickering about who would eat the sandwich.

  Ivan was suddenly and genuinely thrilled by this girl whose pride and haughtiness had quickly returned. He began wondering if there could be a way to accomplish his mission, keep her in the dark about his actions, and take her as an occasional lover w
hen he was in Rome.

  He lifted her hand in a chivalrous posture and smiled broadly. “Hello, my name is Hardy. John Hardy.”

  ***

  Lionel Bridgewater unconsciously slipped his hand down to his side and traced the bumps along the length of the former wound on his abdomen. In London the blustery beginning to September had finally given way to sunnier days and warmer temperatures. Officially he was still on leave, a gesture from an English government grateful for his risk to life and limb. Unofficially a message he had received from an agent of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage—SDECE, the French intelligence service—had led him to Paris, and then onto trains pointed south through Lyon and finally to the small town of Vienne, France. Lionel awakened on the morning following his long journey lying comfortably within the soft sheets of a hotel room overlooking the river Rhône, right where it meets up with the Gere.

  His watch read seven twenty. A cool brisk south wind turned the cloth curtains of his room into twin flags and washed in the smell of bread baking from a nearby shop. Reluctantly he counted down from ten and pushed himself up and toward the en suite to get washed and ready for the day, whatever it was to bring. Twenty minutes later he emerged from the Hotel de Gere and for a quarter mile followed the sidewalk that threaded its way along the Rhône. He then cut left toward the town center for one block and sat down at the corner table of an outdoor café, facing the river as he had been instructed to do in the SDECE communique. He lit a cigarette and placed the lighter upright near the edge of the table and waited. The lighter had arrived to him along with the instructions.

  “You probably think I’ve been playing a bit of a joke on you, Lionel,” a deep voice behind him said happily in accented English.

  “I thought this might be your doing, Bleudot,” Lionel answered without turning. “It smells of your brand of pastiche.”

  The tall, bearded Frenchman walked around and sat across from him. He was dressed casually in thin cotton clothes and, like Lionel, sported the ubiquitous banded white fedora. He picked up the lighter and used it on his own cigarette, and after flicking closed the top he held it up and smiled. “You look quite well recovered from your ordeal in London back in June. Thank you for coming.”

  “I’m fine now physically,” Lionel said. “Still mad as hell that we don’t know anything else about the bloke who attacked me. Anyway, you knew I would come. That was our signal, after all, the last time we were all together—you, me, Keeton.”

  “Yes, when we were together,” Bleudot said thoughtfully. He then nodded in the direction of the café. A young man emerged and quickly set out a tray of coffees and bread and also two shot glasses of whiskey, and then disappeared again. “It seems to me like a decade, not just one year. I miss my English friends. Well, shouldn’t I think of both of you as English? British, American—what’s the difference? You share a language and if I may say so a history, good and bad as it might’ve been. To me, Anglos!”

  “I suppose that’s true from your point of view,” Lionel said with a smile that quickly faded. “But we all three share another language, it seems, or at least a word that sums it up. Sleeper.”

  “Provocateur, agent, spy, traitor, sleeper,” Bleudot said with a shrug. “Yes, we share many languages I think. You’ve heard the other news?”

  “About Keeton? Yes, of course. It bloody well happened under our noses. He came to see me the day before, while I was still in hospital. We’ve been developing assets in Poland. Keeton helped get a defector out through Gdansk while he was working there. In the meantime I found out about an American double agent based in Warsaw. I sent a warning to the Fort, but Keeton ended up tangling with the double anyway and dealing with him the way one should. Of course Keeton was there on Cavalry business in the first place—watching out for the bishop of Krakow.”

  “Paszek?”

  “That’s right. CIA thinks the Russians want the bishop out of way and might even be planning something big—in Rome and as soon as a couple of weeks from now. Keeton tracked down a Canadian who turned out to be a Russian plant who was mixed up with the Paszek business—and who also was the man who shot Keeton. By the way, how did you find out, about what happened to Keeton, I mean?”

  “Nothing dirty, I promise,” Bleudot said. “I got it from the Fort, from the chief, as a professional courtesy.”

  “Same here,” Lionel said. “I knew it was dangerous for Keeton, but I couldn’t help him myself, and I couldn’t pull anyone else in, not with the way things are. I even had to keep it secret from my own supervisor.”

  “Whom you suspect of being dirty,” Bleudot stated rather than asked.

  After a few moments Lionel nodded. “I hate to say it, but yes, perhaps.”

  “Of being Waypoint, perhaps?”

  “If dirty, why not filthy? But to be truthful I have no proof at all, of anything. It’s the damned tension that makes us all look at one another.” Lionel shook his head and looked out to the Rhône where a barge boat pushed a load of timber upriver.

  “I have something for you, Lionel.” From under the tray Bleudot pulled out a large envelope that the waiter had somehow managed to sneak to the table unnoticed. “Pictures, transcripts of voice recordings, and some litter he was careless about. All of it in France so it’s legal, so to speak, for me to have it.”

  Lionel carefully extracted a few of the pictures to see that the subject was Sir Thomas Baddeley, his MI-6 supervisor. In one of the photos Baddeley was sitting on a park bench next to an older man wearing a beret.

  “That man is Max Fournier,” Bleudot said. “Known to be a strong communist sympathizer. He was picked up and interrogated—excerpts that pertain to your man are in there. On several occasions there was information from Baddeley that Max was to pass along eastward.”

  Lionel found another photo of Baddeley, taken from a miniaturized hidden camera, of the MI-6 chief talking to a man on a Metro tram.

  Bleudot reached across and tapped the picture. “KGB operator. His name was Marcus when he operated in England. My superiors hid this information from me; it’s part of their way to deny there could be bad apples in our basket. I had to break into the archives to get this. Bleudot, the rogue! At any rate, Marcus was called back to Moscow and reassigned to France, but since this picture was taken, he’s disappeared. Almost certainly he has a new cover name. And I believe he was the contact for Ivan in London.”

  Lionel looked up sharply. There had been many changes to the MI-6 hierarchy since Lionel’s former boss—known by many simply as the Brit—had been assassinated. Lionel had only reported to Baddeley for the last four months, after all. Keeton had told them about his last minutes with the Brit and with Lynette as well as about Ivan, a KGB agent who had been Lynette’s lover and possibly her KGB controller. Traces of the Russian intelligence network had been detected since then but never really came together into a coherent picture.

  “I’m sorry to have to show this to you,” Bleudot said. “Thomas Baddeley is dirty, yes—but he’s not Waypoint.”

  “Of course not,” Lionel replied sarcastically. “That would be too easy. Just more MI-6 agents to suspect, then.”

  “In this case I have good news for MI-6,” Bleudot said. “Evidence pointing to SDECE as Waypoint’s home instead of your company. The leads are solid, and I’m following them to identify who it is. In the meantime…”

  Bleudot slid one of the shot glasses over to Lionel.

  “…a toast—to fallen friends. To Keeton.” With that the two men lifted their glasses, and each tossed back the early morning whiskey with a mixture of brotherly sentiment and angry determination.

  ***

  “Darling, may I ask you a question?” Ivan said softly as he and Francesca walked along the Tiber River near the Castel Sant’Angelo. “You might think it’s a silly question.”

  She smiled up at him and squeezed his hand. “I won’t, John; I promise. What’s your question?”

  “Would you ever con
sider leaving Italy?” he asked.

  “Do you mean a vacation or to live somewhere else?” The tone of her voice held the range of emotions he had expected—uncertainty, hope, and even fear.

  Ivan shrugged. “Either one. I’ll let you choose.”

  “Well, I’ve vacationed out of the country already, mostly in Europe. But with our family’s business it’s quite common to end up in Greece or even in Egypt or Israel.”

  “If you’re working for your father that’s not really a vacation, is it?” he asked.

  She laughed. “I’d call it a working vacation. My real vacation is here in Rome until he needs me in Naples.”

  “You’ve been a bit mysterious about this family business of yours,” he said. “Shipping? Shipping what?”

  “Anything at all, really,” she answered. “Italian goods—clothes, olives, even cars. Our company is quite small compared to most of them.”

  “It looks to me as if your father has done quite well.”

  “He has, but his work is his life. It’s because he lost Mama shortly after I was born. He raised me, yes. But his devotion is to the work.”

  “He’s done a fine job, with you, I mean,” Ivan said as he brought her hand up to his cheek.

  “You’re no less mysterious yourself,” she said. “And no less successful, I think. A banker?”

  “Just an accountant, really,” he answered. “But I suppose working for a large bank has its advantages.”

  They walked another one hundred yards in silence, then turned to cross the river on the thick stone pedestrian bridge that bore the same name as the castle. Ivan guided them to a stopping point where they could see the dome at Saint Peter’s Basilica in the distance. He put his arms around her and kissed her.

  “I didn’t finish answering your question,” she said when their lips parted.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “John, the last two weeks have been wonderful. I like you very much. I don’t know if I’m ready to move to England if that’s what you were talking about. But I’ll visit there with you anytime.”