by Gregg Loomis
Whatever business a person of such elevated status might have with Papa Willet, it bode ill for someone. The Obea Man’s spells were rarely benign and he shared information about his clients with no one. In fact he shared very little, period. The prudent crossed the road on the rare occasions he left his abode, crossed the road and themselves as well as other anti-evil eye precautions.
The hut’s sole illumination came from a pair of candles on a rough altar shared by a human skull, a desiccated iguana, a wooden crucifix and a faded print of the Virgin Mary behind the cracked glass of a picture frame. In the flickering light, Papa Willet was more shadow than substance.
His visitor shifted weight uncomfortably. The place smelled of human sweat, rotting vegetation, candle wax and an odor not quite recognizable. There was a rustling in the darkness that could have been one of the geckos that darted across the walls like tiny specters. Or something else.
It was this latter possibility that was making the visitor increasingly nervous.
Best to get to the point, transact the business at hand and be gone.
“A spell?” the old man asked. “You wants pain so bad dot mon can’ git outta bed?”
The visitor’s head shook. “Not interested in pain, anything like that.”
Two gloved hands reached into the light, a hundred pound note stretched between them. There was a soft tearing sound as the bill was ripped in two.
One hand extended a half. “The other half is yours when he is dead, do you understand?”
Papa Willet emerged from the shadows long enough to accept the mutilated bill. “You care how?”
The visitor tried not to look at him. One eye socket was a shiny gray as though it contained something metallic. Can a person have a cataract in one eye only? There were more gaps in the mouth than teeth and those remaining had yellowed like fine ivory. The visitor’s head shook again. “Not as long as it is done quickly.”
“I gots some powder here. You just sprinkle. . .”
“No! I’m not interested in magic powders, potions or sticking pins in dolls. I came to you because I was told you did work like this. I understand you sometimes leave signs and things that warn off the local police.”
There was no answer, no affirmation or denial.
“You want the other half of that bill, you will use something more effective than powder.”
Again, no response
“Perhaps make it look like a ritual murder.”
“Ritual?”
“You know, voodoo, whatever.”
Papa Willet knew quite well.
45.
2 Palace Green
Kensington Palace Gardens
London
The Present
The redbrick house was one of the most tightly guarded places in all of the United Kingdom. Photographs were forbidden and pedestrians who lingered too long in this neighborhood of embassies were likely to be questioned by the officers of London’s Metropolitan Police Diplomatic Protection Group. After all, the building had survived three bomb attempts, one each in the decades of the ‘70’s, 80’s and 90’s.
Built in the mid-nineteenth century for William Makepeace Thackeray, the British writer and satirist, the edifice now flew the flag with the Star of David on it.
Jacob Annuluwitz had taken London’s Tube from his flat at South Bank, London’s phoenix neighborhood which had risen from the ashes of the Lufwaffe’s World War II urban renewal efforts to host a trendy collection of high rise apartments, offices and galleries. Twice he had switched lines, doubling back on himself to make sure he was not followed. He had no reason to think he had acquired a tail but after the incident at Cavanaugh House, he saw no reason not to be careful.
He approached the guard at the embassy’s gate.
“Akim Chazan,” he said. “He is expecting me.”
Jacob had first known him as Schneider. To eliminate the frictions inevitable among a largely immigrant population, Ben- Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, had insisted that a certain level of diplomat or public servant change their names to the Hebrew equivalent. The policy was still observed. The German word for tailor became the Hebrew one, Chazan.
Without reply, the guard punched numbers into the key pad of his cell phone. “A Jacob Annuluwitz to see Akim Chazan.”
In less than a minute, Jacob was standing in a short line to submit to a metal detector. He was removing his belt when a young man with embassy credentials around his neck approached him.
“No need, Mr. Annuluwitz,” he said in English, Come with me.”
Jacob followed him down a hallway to a bank of elevators. They rode down two floors, exiting into another hallway, this one featureless as a dial tone. There was a faint hum of machinery that seemed to come from all directions.
Jacob’s young guide stopped in front of a door indistinguishable from a dozen others and knocked. A voice responded and the door swung open.
Jacob was looking at a man somewhat younger than himself. His scalp was surrounded by a semicircle of what Jacob guessed was the last of what had been a head of red hair. Glasses perched dangerously near the tip of his nose. Wordlessly, he motioned Jacob to enter.
The room was as anonymous as the hallway outside: A metal desk with a computer monitor its sole adornment, a desk swivel chair and two steel folding chairs. The walls were an institutional bilious green on which hung no pictures, certificates or other indicia of human habitation.
When the door closed, he took Jacob’s hand in both of his. “It’s been a long time, Jacob!”
“Too long, Akim. In fact, I was surprised to learn you were still active.”
The other man slid into the swivel chair. “Retire and sit around the house? I’d rather be posted to a nice, comfortable war zone.”
Jacob smiled. The relationship between Akim and his wife Leah had been the subject of both discussion and jokes in the international intelligence community for years. The Jews and the Palestinians lived together more amicably.
One night at an overpriced Italian restaurant in Kinsington, Leah and Akim had been dining with two of his superiors and their wives. The subject of the marital spat had long been forgotten but what happened was legend in the agency. Leah had stood, announcing she was leaving. But not before tipping a plate of very hot pasta along with more than ample tomato sauce into her husband’s lap before making her departure.
Once asked why he endured the incessant fighting instead of getting a divorce, Akim had given the questioner a surprised look and said, “What? And give her the satisfaction?”
Akim produced a manila envelope and handed it across the desk. “Your flash drive and our translation.”
“Were you able to crack the code?”
Akim nodded enthusiastically. “You didn’t need a Mossad cryptanalyst. A reasonably perceptive sixth former could have figured out the St. Cyr. Slide. A cypher, really, rather than code.”
“The difference being that in a code every word is represented by another word, number of symbol, whereas a cypher substitutes a letter, number of symbol for every letter of the message.”
“Precisely. In the St. Cyr. One starts with the letter, say, ‘K’, standing for the letter ‘A’.”
“Then, ‘L’ would be ‘B’ and so on.”
Akim stood, the meeting over. “The only problem was ascertaining what letter the tipesh began with. It became quite easy when we noted that if your mamzer was using one letter, the reply would come in the next letter of the alphabet. His response would use the next and so on. Then he broke the message up into five letter groups, usually ending with a shorter block.”
Jacob folded the envelope, stuffing it into a jacket pocket. “I won’t get shot for a spy walking out with this?”
Akin chuckled. “No, no old boy. Had I put your business there on one of Mossad’s flash drives, you would have set off more alarms than the London fire of 1666. That’s why I went down the street and spent a couple of quid on one anyone could buy.”
&
nbsp; Jacob reached for the door. “Couple of quid? I’ll have to buy you a black and tan when we can get together for a pint or so. That is what you drink, right?”
The other man shook his head sadly. “Forget the pint. You owe me a favor.”
“Such as?”
“Such as, I may show upon your door step some evening seeking asylum from Leah.”
Jacob’s hand was on the door knob. “I suppose you had to read the material once you broke the cypher.”
“How else could I break it?”
“And?”
“And there were no names, none that I could recognize. The references were intentionally oblique. You want to tell me what this is all about?”
“Where ignorance is bliss. . .”
“’Tis folly to be wise . You’re not the only one to read Grey.”
Outside, Jacob walked past some of the world’s most expensive real estate, homes owned by Arab princes, Russian oligarchs and former African dictators who had managed to flee their homelands with both life and fortunes intact. The embassies of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nepal were also there.
What wasn’t were the old fashioned red phone booths. Although these British mainstays were still liberally scattered throughout the rural towns, they had disappeared from London streets as the availability of cell phones made them obsolete. The desirability of the old pay phones was that they were largely land lines, not susceptible to ECHELON or most other of the alphabet soup of eavesdropping agencies.
What, Jacob asked himself, made Alred James, a high ranking member of MI6, leave his country retreat protected by only locks obtainable in the smallest ironmonger’s or largest chain DIY? Had he, Jacob, missed something? Maybe not. The man chose what was almost a child’s code (or cypher, rather) for his communications. James thought he was, as the Americans say, bulletproof.
Simple arrogance.
Jacob reached back into his long-ago childhood in a displaced-persons camp just after the war, more dream than memory. His father had read from the Jewish scriptures, the Tanakh, every night, more an effort to hold the family together than for any religious purpose, Jacob now suspected. A passage from Isaiah, 13:11 came to mind “. . .I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible.”
Well, Jacob wasn’t going to make the same mistake. He needed to get the flash drive’s contents to Lang without the St. George’s society learning the information had, in fact, been stolen.
The haughtiness of the terrible laid low indeed.
46.
472 Lafayette Drive
Atlanta
9:22 pm
The Next Evening
Dinner dishes in the washer, the Braves idle tonight and Manfred presumably asleep despite his pleas to watch the zombies of The Walking Dead, Lang and Gurt settled into a comfortable silence to the muted background of Harry James trumpeting Honeysuckle Rose. She with one of her romance novels, he with Daniel Silva’s latest. Gabriel Alon was on the trail of the bad guys.
“You lived that life,” she had once observed. “Why do you read about it?”
“I never lived in Tel Aviv or put together a team of assassins to eliminate terrorist organizations. That was more your job except back then the enemy was different. All I did was read papers and watch TV across from the Frankfurt railroad station, pretty dull since the commies controlled the media. Sort of fun to fantasize what being a real spy might have been like.”
The phone rang.
He got up in annoyance. “Another damn telemarketer or robo call. The no-call list doesn’t do a bit of good.”
She peered over the top of her iPad. “I forget why we don’t get rid of the phone. We use only our cells.”
“We keep the land line because it is more difficult to monitor, can’t be swept up as easily as a cell without a direct tap. Far as I know, NASA hasn’t put a bug on all the landlines in America. . .yet.”
“And you would know if they had?”
If he heard, he didn’t answer.
The phone was in Lang’s office, the former broom closet under the stairs.
“Hello?”
“Lang, old boy! Good to hear your voice!”
Jacob’s expressed joy would have denied the fact he and Lang had been together only days ago but Lang played along. “Good to hear from you at this end, too. What’s up?”
“The book you sent me, smashing! Really enjoyed it!”
Prearranged signal Jacob had significant new information.
“So, I wanted to thank you and remind you Rachel’s big six-oh is upon us. Hope you can join us for the occasion.”
Jacob’s information was too sensitive to entrust to any communication other than face to face.
Either that or the man had taken his life in his hands by revealing his wife’s age.
“I’ll get back to you, let you know.”
The conversation had been cryptic and better, short. If somewhere in the transmission across the ocean a satellite had been involved making it subject to electronic snooping by ECHELON, it would be a very small needle in a very large haystack.
Lang stopped by the kitchen to fill the ice bucket before returning to the den. He was taking the scotch from the cabinet under the bar when Gurt asked, “Well?”
He topped a glass off, the whisky flowing over the ice like an amber mountain stream racing downhill. “Jacob. I need to go back to England.”
“Perhaps better I go.”
He turned, the drink in his hand untouched. “You? Why?”
“You have been there. They would not expect a woman.”
“They?”
Lang loathed the indefinite antecedent but in this case it was all too definite.
“The people who tried to kill you.”
Lang’s hand went to the angry red scar across his left cheek where the gunman had raked him with his weapon. The stitches were due to come out in a week but the doctor was less than optimistic anything short of plastic surgery would remove the disfigurement. Lang was debating with himself whether the mark was distinguished or just ugly.
Gurt’s opinion: “Schmissen, dueling scars, went out of fashion a long time ago and you didn’t even go to German university. That one makes you look like a criminal. Worse, it makes you stand out in a crowd.”
Almost the same words he had said to himself.
The latter comment was the most damning of all. Or would have been had Lang any intent of returning to some covert employment.
“Besides,” Gurt continued, “Your face . . .”
She needed to say no more about his face. Lang started to protest but she cut him off. “Manfred is now out school for the summer. You only have to take him to summer camp in the mornings at 9:00 and pick him up at 4:00. If all I have to do is see Jacob, I should return in no more than two days, three at the most.”
“But. . .”
Lang knew when a discussion had reached its end. Anything he said now would simply be the beginning of a new discussion.
The idea of send her was not exactly preposterous. While with the Agency, Gurt had not only won both men’s and women’s marksmanship competition, she had run through a series of partners in what was euphemistically called ‘close quarters combat’ training. In actuality, it was a no-holds-barred, eye gouging, ear-biting, below the belt hitting test of survival. Gurt had sent a number of her partners to the hospital, enough that she was exempted from further practice less the entire Frankfurt agency wind up in casts, slings and bandages. In real life conflict, she had demonstrated she could more than merely take care of herself. Had Rudyard Kipling lived long enough to encounter Gurt, she might have joined the she-bear, the female cobra and the Huron squaw as “deadlier than the male” in his The Female of the Species.
She put down her iPad and stood. “I can be packed in ten minutes.”
“Won’t do you a lot of good. Earliest flight is late afternoon tomorrow. You could, of course take the GulfStream.”
“And annou
nce my arrival? I’d rather be autonomous on Delta.”
“Hardly. Autonomous means self-ruling, independent. On a commercial airline, you’re a prisoner in an aluminum tube thirty thousand feet up. On your own aircraft, you command the people doing the flying. Better yet, the food is decidedly better. I think you mean anonymous.”
Gurt’s English could still use a little work.
“Whatever. I will take the first flight.”
47.
Terminal Three
Heathrow International Airport
06:40 Two Days Later
Gurt ducked under the sign with the silhouette of a woman in a skirt, the international sign for the women’s toilet. She counted to a hundred and went back out.
He was still there, the man in a leather jacket far too heavy even accounting for the terminal’s more than generous air conditioning. He lounged against the far wall, only his eyes visible between the brim of his cap and the top of the newspaper he pretended to read.
She had noticed him waiting at the gate the instant she exited the jet way from her Delta flight. In days gone by, she would have assumed he was waiting to meet an arriving passenger but with increased security, access to arrival/departure concourses was denied all but those holding boarding passes or security clearances.
Possible he was looking for one of the other three hundred plus people the Boeing triple seven dash two hundred was disgorging but she didn’t think so. Hence, the quick trip to the ladies’ loo.
She pretended not to notice as she passed between the immigration booths, having her passport stamped. Her unwanted companion breezed through the unmanned ‘UK Citizens and Arrivals from EU Countries’ stations.
At the terminal’s rail station, she pretended interest in papers stacked in the racks of a news stand, so much so she (intentionally) missed the first of the every fifteen minutes trains connecting the airport and Paddington Station in central London. When she boarded the next one, she thought perhaps she had been overly paranoid. The idea proved unduly optimistic when he stepped from the car behind hers.