The windshield was partially fogged. As I approached, I considered whether I should insist that I drive, whether that would offend Van Aver’s overendowed ego. I slipped into the car and found myself automatically straining to hear his thoughts, or at least those fragments I’d found I could perceive when someone is sleeping.
But there was nothing. A complete silence. I found it peculiar, illogical—
—and in a moment I was seized by a dizzy, vertiginous rush of adrenaline.
I could see Van Aver’s long white hair curling at the back of his neck, against his navy blue turtleneck sweater, mouth open in what appeared to be a snore, and beneath it the old man’s throat gaped grotesquely wide open. A terrible deep red stain crept down his jacket lapels, down his sweater, his pale, wrinkled neck a steaming, still-flowing lake of blood that my eyes at first refused to accept. I could see at once that Van Aver was dead, and I bolted from the car.
THIRTY-TWO
I ran out into the via del Trullo, my heart pounding, and found the rented car. I fumbled for a few moments with the key until I was finally able to unlock the door and sank into the front seat. Exhaling and inhaling slowly, measuredly, I managed to get a grip on myself.
You see, I had all of a sudden been plunged back into that nightmarish time in Paris, I found myself flashing back persistently, almost kaleidoscopically, on that hallway in the rue Jacob, on the sight of the two bodies, one of them my beloved Laura …
Whatever the mystique of clandestine intelligence work, it usually does not include murder and mayhem. That is by far the exception, not the rule, and although we were all trained to deal with the eventualities of bloodshed in the theater of the Cold War, rarely did such a thing actually intrude upon one’s life.
Most clandestine operatives in fact see very little violence during their careers—a great deal of stress and anxiety, but very little outright violence. And when they encounter carnage, they customarily react the way anyone would: they are repelled and sickened; a fight-or-flight instinct takes over. Most operatives who are unlucky enough to face much bloodshed in their work will burn out early and retire.
But with me, something different happened. Exposure to blood and mayhem deadened me, tamped something down inside me. It switched something off: the essential human horror of violence. Instead, I became enraged, focused, tranquil. It was as if I’d been injected intravenously with a sedative.
* * *
As I struggled to make sense of what had just happened, I methodically ran down a list of possibilities. Who else had known that I was meeting with Van Aver? Who had Van Aver told? Who, that is, had he told—and would order him killed? And for what reason?
I would have liked to believe that Van Aver had been murdered by the same person or persons who had been following me since my arrival in Rome. Which begged the question of why I hadn’t been eliminated. Obviously whoever had cut Van Aver’s throat had preceded me by some time, so it was unlikely that he had been murdered by someone following me to this rendezvous (and in any case, I had taken elaborate precautions not to be followed leaving Pasqualucci’s).
That indicated that it was someone, or some group, within the CIA who had had Van Aver killed. Someone who knew he was going to meet me, someone who had intercepted whatever communication had taken place between Toby Thompson in Washington and Van Aver in Rome.
And yet, the more I thought it through, the more I had to concede the possibility that the culprits weren’t necessarily CIA at all—that they might have been ex-Stasi.
So that line of deduction didn’t help one bit.
Then what about motive? It couldn’t have been me they were after—Van Aver and I looked nothing alike; no one could have made that mistake. And presumably there had been other chances to get me, if that was the objective.
It wasn’t as if Van Aver possessed some fund of information that someone wanted me not to gain access to. His mission, I had been briefed by Toby, was to escort me to Tuscany once I had learned Orlov’s whereabouts, and to …
To get me in to see Orlov. I didn’t know the protocol; I didn’t know what would get me in to see the retired KGB chairman. Certainly I couldn’t just knock on the man’s door.
Could that be it? Could the motive for killing Van Aver have simply been to keep me from getting to Orlov? To “discourage” me, frustrate me, make it as difficult as possible? To keep me from learning about the “Wise Men”?
Suddenly I jolted upright.
My reasoning had been faulty. I had been late for my meeting with the CIA man. Deliberately, tactically so; but late all the same.
Like most field agents, Van Aver was probably impeccably precise in his timing. Whoever had surprised him there, knife in hand …
Had expected him to be meeting someone.
Me.
Whether they knew whom Van Aver was meeting … They knew he was meeting someone.
Had I been on time, might I now be slumped in the front seat beside Van Aver with a severed carotid?
I leaned back against the seat cushion and exhaled slowly.
Possible? Yes, of course.
Anything was possible.
* * *
By the time I had checked out of the Hassler and loaded my belongings in the trunk of the Lancia, it was well after midnight. The A-1 autostrada was fairly free of traffic, except for the occasional thundering delivery truck.
From the Hassler’s concierge I had secured a very good map of Tuscany, a Touring Club Italiano map that appeared both comprehensive and accurate. It was a simple matter for me to commit it to memory. And then I had located a small town called Volte-Basse, not far outside of Siena, three hours to the north.
It took some time to acclimate to Italian drivers, who are not really reckless—compared to Boston drivers, the rest of the world is tame—but just elegantly aggressive. For a time concentrating on the amber-lit road calmed me, enabled me to think clearly.
So I watched the road and thought. I drove in the left lane at around 120 kilometers an hour. Twice I pulled off the road suddenly and waited with the engine and lights off, to make sure no one was following me. Elemental tradecraft, but it works. No one appeared to be following me, although I couldn’t be sure.
A car approached from behind, drew closer, flashed its high beams, and my stomach tensed. Now it was almost upon me, and I floored the accelerator and swung the wheel to the right.
The other car was trying to pass, that was all.
My nerves were frayed. This is the way they pass in Italy, I told myself. You’re losing it. Get a grip.
I found myself talking aloud to myself. “Stay with it, Ben,” I said. And, “You’re there.” And, “You’ll make it.”
The thing was, by attaining this … talent … I had become a freak. I had no idea how much longer I would have it, but it had already changed my life forever, and had come close several times to getting me killed. And most disturbingly, the talent, and everything it brought with it, had transformed me into the very thing I never wanted to be again, the ruthless, fearless automaton created by my CIA work.
This form of ESP I had was, I now believed, a terrible thing. Not fantastic and wonderful, but in truth horrible. One should not be able to penetrate the protective walls that surround others.
So now I had been plunged into the middle of something that had taken my wife away from me and turned me back into the ice man and threatened to kill me as well.
Who were the bad guys? Some faction of CIA?
No doubt I would know soon. In the town of Volte-Basse, in Tuscany.
* * *
It was, I discovered, the tiniest of villages, a mere blip on the map. A cluster of ancient dun-colored stone buildings crowded together on either side of a narrow road. Number 71, which led directly into Siena. There was a bar, a small grocer/butcher, and not much else.
And at three-thirty in the morning the town was utterly still, shrouded in silence and darkness. The map I’d memorized, comprehensive as it was, in
dicated nothing called “Castelbianco,” and there was no one around to ask at this time of the morning, or, really, night.
I was exhausted, badly in need of a rest, but the road was far too exposed. My instincts told me to pull off somewhere concealed. I headed away from Siena on 71, through the modern town of Rosia, and up into the wooded hills beyond. Immediately past a stonecutting yard I spotted a turnoff for a private estate, an immense tract of Tuscan forest with a castle planted quite a ways into it. The road was tiny and dark, its surface a treacherous paving of gravel and large stones. The Lancia bumped and scraped its way over the path. Soon I located a copse, and pulled the car into it so that I was invisible, at least as long as it remained dark.
I shut off the engine, retrieved from the trunk one of the blankets that I had guiltily stolen from the Hassler, and threw it over me. I reclined the front seat as far back as it would go and listened to the engine tick as it cooled, feeling very alone, until I was fast asleep.
THIRTY-THREE
Bruised and groggy, I awoke at sunrise and experienced a momentary sense of dislocation. Where was I? Not at home in my comfortable bed, snuggled up against Molly, I remembered with a sinking feeling, but in the front seat of a rented car somewhere in a forest in Tuscany.
Tilting the seat back upright, I started the car up, backed out of the copse, and drove a few miles into the town of Rosia. The air was chilly, and the sun, which was just edging over the horizon, cast golden beams against the terra-cotta buildings. Everything was still, utterly quiet until a broken-down delivery truck thundered by, through the town center, then groaning, whining as the driver downshifted to take it up the winding hill to the stone quarry I’d passed the night before.
Rosia seemed to consist of two main streets, the rows of buildings low-slung and red-roofed, evidently built in the middle of this century. Most of the buildings contained small shops—a bakery, a hardware store, a few fruit and vegetable places (FRUTTA & VERDURA), a newsstand. At this time of the morning they were all closed except for a Jolly Caffè Bar-Alimentari bar-cum-delicatessen down the quiet street, from which I could hear male voices. I walked up to it. Workers were having their coffee, reading sports papers, sparring verbally. They looked up as I entered, fell silent, looked me over curiously. I picked up scattered thoughts in Italian, of course, and not of any consequence.
Dressed as I was in a pair of somewhat rumpled pants and a heavy woolen sweater, they probably didn’t know what to make of me. If I were one of the foreigners (most often British) who owned or rented the nearby Tuscan villas at exorbitant rates, why hadn’t they seen me before? And what was this crazy foreigner doing awake at six o’clock in the morning?
I ordered an espresso and sat down at one of the small round plastic tables. The workers’ conversations slowly resumed, and when my coffee arrived, a small Illy-Caffè cup filled with steaming dark espresso topped with a golden-tan layer of crèma, I took a long, appreciative sip and felt the caffeine do its work in my bloodstream.
Thus fortified, I got up and approached what appeared to be the most senior of the workers, a potbellied, round-faced, balding man whose face was covered with gray stubble. He was wearing a grimy white apron over a navy blue work uniform.
“Buon giorno,” I said.
“Buon giorno,” he replied, regarding me with suspicion. He spoke with the soft, gentle accents of Tuscany, in which a hard C becomes an H, a hard ch becomes a soft sh.
In my rudimentary Italian, I managed to say: “Sto cercando Castelbianco, in Volte-Basse.” I’m looking for Castelbianco.
He shrugged, turned to the others.
“Che pensi, che questo sta cercando di vendere l’assicurazione al Tedesco, o cosa?” he muttered: Think this guy’s trying to sell the German guy insurance, or what?
The German: Is that what they thought Orlov was? Was that his cover legend here, a German émigré?
Laughter all round. The youngest of them, a dark-skinned, gangly man in his early twenties who looked like an Arab, said: “Digli che vogliamo una parte della sua percentuale.” Tell him we want part of his commission. There was more laughter.
Another one said, “Pensi che questo sta cercando di entrare nella professione del muratore?” You think this guy’s trying to get into the rock business?
I laughed companionably along with them. “Voi lavorate in una cava?” I asked. You guys work in the quarry?
“No, è il sindaco di Rosia,” the youngest one said, slapping the oldest on the shoulder. “Io sono il vice-sindaco.” No, he’s the mayor of Rosia, he was saying, and I’m the deputy mayor.
“Allora, Sua Eccellenza,” I said to the balding man, and asked whether they were doing stonework for the “German.” “Che state lavorando le pietre per il … tedesco … a Castelbianco?”
He waved his hand at me dismissively, and they all laughed again. The youngest one said, Se fosse vero, pensi che staremmo qua perdendo il nostro tempo? Il tedesco sta pagando i muratori tredici mille lire all’ora!” If we were, you think we’d be wasting our time here? The German’s paying stonemasons thirteen thousand lire an hour!
“You want veal, this is the guy to see,” another said of the older man, who got up, brushed his hands against his apron (which I now realized was spattered with animal blood), and walked toward the door. He was followed by the man who’d just spoken.
After the butcher and his assistant had left, I said to the swarthy young man: “So where’s Castelbianco anyway?”
“Volte-Basse,” he said. “A few kilometers up the road toward Siena.”
“Is Castelbianco a town?”
“A town?” he said with an incredulous laugh. “It’s big enough to be a town, but no. It’s a tenuta—an estate. Most of us kids used to play at Castelbianco years ago, before they sold it.”
“Sold?”
“Some rich German just moved in there. They say he’s German, I don’t know, maybe he’s Swiss or something. Very secretive, very private.”
He described for me where Castelbianco was located, and I thanked him and left.
* * *
An hour later I found the estate on which Vladimir Orlov had gone into hiding.
If, indeed, the information I had “gotten” from the cardiologist was right. At that point I didn’t know for certain. But the talk at the bar about a reclusive “German” seemed to confirm it. Did the townspeople think Orlov was some East German grandee who had gone into hiding when the Wall came down? The best covers follow the contours of reality.
Set on a hill overlooking Siena, Castelbianco was a magnificent ancient villa built in the Romanesque style. It was large and somewhat shambling; restoration was obviously being done on one wing. The villa was surrounded by gardens that were probably once beautiful but were now overgrown and in disarray. I found it at the end of a winding road in the hills above Volte-Basse.
Castelbianco had no doubt been a Tuscan family’s ancestral home, and centuries before that had probably been a fortified bastion of one of the many Etruscan city-states. The forest that surrounded the disheveled gardens overflowed with silvery-green olive trees, fields of enormous sunflowers, and grapevines, great cypresses. I realized quickly why Orlov had chosen this particular villa. Its location, the way it was set high upon a hill, made it easy to secure. A high stone fence surrounded the estate, topped, I saw, with electrified wire. Not impenetrable—virtually nothing was impermeable to someone skilled in black-bag jobs—but it did a fairly good job at keeping out the unwanted. From a tiny stone booth, recently constructed, at the only entrance, an armed guard checked all visitors. The only visitors seemed to be, just as I’d learned that morning, workers from Rosia and the area, stonemasons and carpenters who arrived in dusty old trucks, were carefully looked over, and proceeded in to do their day’s work.
Probably Orlov had brought this guard with him from Moscow. And if one got past this guard, there would certainly be others within. So crashing the gates seemed like an eminently bad idea.
Aft
er a few minutes of surveillance, from the car and on foot, I devised a plan.
* * *
A few minutes’ drive away was the sprawling town of Sovicille, the capital of this area, this commune west of Siena, but as unassuming a capital city as I had ever seen. I parked in the center of town, in the Piazza G. Marconi, in front of a church, next to a San Pellegrino bottled-water truck. The square was peaceful, disturbed only by the lewd whistling of a bird in a cage in front of a Jolly Caffè, the chatter of a few middle-aged women. There I spotted the yellow rotary-dial sign of a public telephone, and as I walked toward it, the peace was broken by the loud ringing of the town bell.
I entered the café and ordered a coffee and a sandwich. For some reason, there is no coffee in the world like Italian coffee. They don’t grow it, but they know how to brew it, and in any truck stop or cheap dive in Italy you can get better cappuccino than you can in the finest so-called “Northern Italian” restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
I sipped, and I thought, which is something I had done quite a bit of since leaving Washington. Yet for all my cogitation, I still had no idea where things stood.
I was in possession of the most extraordinary talent, but what had I been able to do with it? I had tracked down a former head of Soviet intelligence—a neat bit of espionage that, frankly, the CIA would certainly have been able to accomplish, given more time and a little ingenuity.
And now what?
Now I would, if everything went as planned, find myself in proximity with the old KGB spymaster. Perhaps I’d learn why he had met with my late father-in-law. Perhaps not.
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