Snark

by William L. DeAndrea

  It had not, Leo told himself, been his fault, but he wasn’t naive enough to think it made any difference. Leo knew whose fault it was, and Leo could be vindictive, too. That’s why, even though he could offer the Russians something to make them forget the embarrassment of Cronus, make them forgive Leo—hell, even make them want to build him a statue in Red Square—he wouldn’t do it until he was ready.

  Which brings us back to Bulanin, Leo thought.

  Bulanin was ambitious. No surprise. He was also imaginative and flexible and willing to take a chance. Of all the Cultural or Agricultural Attachés Leo knew, Bulanin was least likely to shoot on sight.

  So, when Leo had fled his native land with a fraction of the fortune he’d accumulated during years of arranging things for Russians and Cubans, with the Americans after him like hillbillies after a Revenooer, it was Bulanin he’d thought of. The plan had been at the fill-in-the-blanks stage then, just a vague outline, but Leo had known that sooner or later he’d need to talk to a Russian who might just listen for fifteen seconds. Maybe even help him a little, if Leo could convince him it could be done without much risk. Now the time had come, and Bulanin hadn’t disappointed him. He had listened, and he had helped. He’d still kill Leo when he saw him, unless he saw him in order to complete the trade.

  No. Not yet.

  Leo reached through greasy water, found the chain, and let the water out of the sink. He washed away the last of the suds with the cold water tap, then pulled little particles of Mushy Peas from the trap. He rinsed his hands, turned off the tap, wiped them on the dishrag.

  He went and looked out the window, wishing he could see the ocean, and looked out at Brighton instead. Britain’s answer to Atlantic City, except the gambling casinos were older. Gray and deserted in the winter, probably loud with phony gaiety when summer brought the tourists.

  From the window, Leo could see part of the train station, a low-rise concrete gambling club, and more buildings like this one. The building directly across the street had flats over a defunct newsagent. Leo and Margaret and their guest were living over a bankrupt chemist.

  Leo wondered what Driscoll was looking at.

  Bellman. Leo had to remember to think of him as Bellman.

  He was in Britain now. He was within reach. That was probably why the itch was so bad. When he’d had the ocean between him and the man who’d ruined his cozy little life as a free-lance terrorist, it hadn’t been so bad. Part of the project of reclaiming his life. A little footnote. Revenge was a luxury, true, but what was a reclaimed life without a little luxury in it?

  It had taken most of his money and all of his remaining influence back in the States to maneuver Dris—Bellman into position. Setting up the British-American crisis (though that was an inevitable by-product of obtaining the trade bait); revealing just enough, through some remaining contacts back in the States, to let the right people in Washington know Leo Calvin was in Britain.

  That part had been the biggest gamble. Leo got it passed along by way of a Washington newsman whose impartiality was as thin as the surface of a TV screen. Sympathetic or not, though, he had cost Leo a young fortune. Leo could understand, he supposed. Not even a network paid enough to support that sort of cocaine habit.

  Leo had been sure that with the message passed, Driscoll—Bellman—would come looking for him sooner or later. Bellman wanted a showdown as badly as Leo did.

  Bulanin was willing to help. The Agricultural Attaché contacted one of his counterparts in Washington. The CIA man assigned to the British situation, the original Bellman, was killed and dumped in a parking lot. Just to whet their appetites.

  Two weeks later a new Bellman was booked for the flight to London. Leo had his own sources at the English end, so that part was easy. He spent more of his money arranging for the reception committee at the airport, but the party had been broken up by the tall redheaded woman.

  On consideration, Leo was just as glad. It had been a mistake to send others to kill Driscoll. Bellman. Whoever. It would be much more satisfying to attend to it in person.

  Because Bellman was something new, something Leo had not been aware America had. He was as ruthless and as skillful as Leo himself, as the best of the Russians. He had moved into the Cronus situation in Pennsylvania, grabbed it by the throat, twisted it, used it, exploited it, got people hurt, got people killed, and won in a rout. Americans didn’t work that way. Oh, sometimes they did, like in Chile, or Greece, but their hearts weren’t in it. If Bellman, on the other hand, the new one, the one who had nothing to do with the CIA, had wanted Castro dead, he wouldn’t try to hire the Mafia to do it for him. And if he wanted to embarrass Castro, he’d think of something a lot better than some half-assed plan to put something in his shoes to make his beard fall out.

  Bellman would take somebody of his own caliber to handle him. Leo, for instance. He deserved it. The last time they’d met, Leo hadn’t been ready for him. Now he was. It was going to be a pleasure to attend to this personally.

  A noise from the other room told him there was something else he had to attend to personally. He sighed, even though he was more than happy to have an excuse to leave the window.

  There was another rustle from the bedroom, another muffled grunt. Leo wanted to yell hold your horses, for Christ’s sake, but of course he didn’t. There was no way to know how nosy the neighbors might be, or how sound-resistant the walls were. He didn’t want anyone to hear him talking when he was supposed to be alone in the flat.

  Leo went to the refrigerator and opened the door. The compressor started up a whine of protest, which Leo ignored. He took a cabbage from the vegetable bin, pulled aside the outer leaves, and removed a rubber-topped bottle from a hollowed-out space within. In the bathroom he got a disposable plastic syringe. He filled a light dose, put the vial back in the cabbage and the cabbage back in the fridge, and went to the bedroom just in time to be greeted by another muffled noise from the bound and gagged figure on the bed.

  Leo smiled down at the eyes below the bald scalp. “Don’t try to fool me, Sir Lewis,” he said quietly, “I know you’re awake. We’re running low, and we’ve had to lighten your dose.”

  Angry noises came from behind the gag.

  Leo wiped the inside of Sir Lewis’s left arm with alcohol. “I gave it to you in the other arm last time, didn’t I?”

  No response. Anger and hatred flashed from the bald man’s gray eyes.

  “I must compliment you on your constitution, Sir Lewis. For a man your age, you throw off the effects of this drug very rapidly. The last person I gave it to was a strikebreaker up in Nottingham, and he died from it. Of course, he got a larger dose than I give you.”

  Leo wrapped a cloth noose around Sir Lewis’s upper arm and pulled it tight. “You’ve got great veins, too, for a man your age. It makes this easy. Don’t thrash around, you’ll only hurt yourself, and I want—I need you in perfect shape.”

  Leo dug a thumb into the joint, and the vein popped up even larger. Leo gave another wipe with the alcohol, jabbed the needle into the vein, pulled on the plunger to see the color of the blood, was satisfied. Then he depressed the plunger and fed the drug into the old man’s body.

  Leo saw the eyelids start to flutter. “We’ll feed you when this one wears off. Sweet dreams. Maybe I’ll get you some Russian-language tapes to listen to in your sleep. You don’t speak Russian, do you? It would make things so much more convenient when you’re in your new home.”

  6

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Felicity Grace asked.

  “Delicious,” Bellman said when he finished chewing. “English lamb is as good as I remembered it. Much better than what we get in the States.”

  She had taken him to The Cut Above, a restaurant on the seventh level of the Barbican Centre, a convention and entertainment complex in London’s Square Mile. The Barbican had been completed in the late 1970s, but the site had been cleared years before, courtesy of Hermann Goering’s airborne demolition company. Bellman had his
doubts about restaurants in big public buildings, but The Cut Above was a pleasant surprise. If they’d put it in a Victorian town house, it would be world famous.

  “I wasn’t talking about the lamb,” Felicity said, “I was talking about business.”

  Bellman turned his head and looked out the window across London to the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, and looked at it until the smile left his face.

  “Have I said something funny?”

  “No, not at all. Just a vagrant thought.” He smiled again.

  In a strange way, he really enjoyed being with her. Bellman had never, in all his life, under any of his names, had an honest relationship with a woman. Not that this was one, either, but it was refreshing not to have the pangs of conscience that usually troubled him when he was maneuvering some innocent into an impossible position.

  Felicity Grace was no innocent, and she was the one who was doing all the maneuvering.

  There was also the continuing kick of watching a fellow professional at work. Tonight, for instance, there was yet another version of Felicity Grace. She still had on the office uniform from this afternoon, but her voice and manner were different again. The West Country accent had been replaced by a London upper-middle accent that said one never travels north of Watford or west of Hounslow unless one is flying away for one’s holiday.

  It made sense. In the paranoid world they both inhabited, possible sources of trouble were everywhere, and the fact that a red-haired woman with a West Country accent had been to dinner with an American might sometime, somewhere, come back to haunt her. Much better to take no chances. Bellman was tempted to start talking Southern, like his Daddy, or put on a Down East Maine drawl (or even Liverpool scouse or a Scots burr—he’d been coached in all of them), but it was too late for it to do any good.

  Then there was the question about business. Another test. It’s easy enough for two spies to talk business in public, and not especially risky. The idea was to stick to one metaphor, and not to mention any names.

  “All right,” he said, “let’s talk business. I read the chairman’s report this afternoon.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  “Seems to me he might want to tone it down some before he presents it.”

  “Of course. My boss mentioned it was only a first draft, didn’t he?”

  “Your guvnor,” Bellman said, and they smiled. “Yes, he did. All right, allowing for the fact that it’s still in raw form, I’d say it’s a masterpiece of analysis for this particular business.”

  Felicity cut a piece of her Yorkshire pudding, pressed it down into the dripping from the slab of beef, and conveyed it to her mouth, remaining neat and ladylike throughout the operation.

  When she had swallowed she patted her lips with her napkin and said, “I mean it seriously.”

  “I’m serious. If you want an outsider’s opinion, that document sums up everything that’s gone wrong with this company, and how the history relates to the current problem. What do you think of it?”

  “I—I haven’t read it,” she said. “Yet.”

  “Oh. Well, when you do, you’ll see what I mean. I enjoyed the tour of the operation.”

  “We’re proud of it. In spite of the problems.”

  “Every operation has them. I’m sure you’ve heard of the screw-ups in my own corporation.”

  “Hasn’t everyone?”

  “Touche,” Bellman said. This could get to be fun, he thought. “That boy in the computer room, the one with the five different color earrings in each ear and the two-tone hair...”

  “Yes?”

  “Is he the one you got the job for?”

  “Yes, he is. How did you know?”

  “A guess. The way he greeted you. Is he being groomed for bigger things?”

  “I think so. He started doing typesetting. Now he makes most of our travel arrangements. He’s just beginning to learn the full scope of the company, but we do promote from within.”

  Just don’t use him for fieldwork, Bellman thought. Then he thought again. There were plenty of places Dave Hamilton could move unnoticed. It was the white shirt and tie that made him ridiculous when it was added to the black-on-the-sides platinum-on-top hairdo, the earrings, and the heavy, bulging bovver boots on his feet. Replace the slacks with black chinos and the shirt with a black leather jacket and chains, and not one Londoner out of a hundred could pick him out of a lineup, except maybe his mother or another punk.

  “He’s a brilliant boy,” Felicity said.

  “Polite, too,” Bellman said.

  Felicity nodded, as if she’d just come to the end of a paragraph. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “About your arrival party...”

  “Ah,” Bellman said through a broad grin.

  “Now I have said something funny.”

  “No. It’s just that I’ve been wondering when that was going to come up. If something like that had happened to you or one of your colleagues arriving in New York, or Washington, you’d be in a room somewhere at this moment with two guys blowing smoke in your face and asking you if you were sure you didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Know anything about it?”

  “Nothing but suspicions, and damned few of those.”

  “Do you think it might affect our...business project?”

  “Don’t know. I doubt it. I’ve notified the head office, and they’re working on it from that end.”

  “Well, that’s all right then,” she said. “I hope.”

  A small blond waitress with a movie-cliché French accent came by and asked if zey were ready for zeir dessert. Bellman said they were, and the waitress went off to get the sweets trolley.

  “There’s just one problem,” Bellman said. “How did they know I’d be on that plane? How did they know I was coming at all?”

  “There was a leak,” Felicity said. “From your people or from mine?”

  “Mine, I hope,” Bellman said. “If your people start to leak, who the hell are we going to trust over here?”

  That pretty much stifled conversation for the rest of the meal. Dessert was something with cream poured over it. The cream was rich and sweet enough to be dessert by itself. Coffee came with little square chocolate mints and demarara sugar.

  And a surprise. Bellman reached for a mint, and found one of Miss Grace’s soft hands clasping his. He looked at her.

  “You know, Mr. Bellman—”

  “What the hell, we’re holding hands, call me Jeff.”

  “Jeff. I—I’ve been more or less ordered to seduce you.”

  “They hand out some nasty jobs in this business.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Possibly,” Bellman conceded. “Is there a time limit on that part of your assignment?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Just keep working on it, and you’ll succeed before you know it. Not tonight, though, I have to work.”

  Felicity Grace laughed. It sounded like real humor, real warmth. “You bastard,” she said.

  “As a matter of fact...,” Bellman said. “But seriously. I haven’t been oblivious. It might even be fun.”

  Felicity looked up from her coffee cup with her eyebrows raised. “For you or for me?” she asked innocently.

  “We’ll just have to find out.”

  “That’s the idea,” she conceded. “To find out. But that part of it’s not going to work, is it?”

  “Never can tell. Let’s get the bill and get out of here. I want to go over that report again. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll have some idea of what I want us to do.”

  The eyebrows went up another notch.

  “On the project I mean.”

  Felicity Grace smiled and said nothing.

  7

  BELLMAN LEANED BACK AGAINST the padded headboard and wondered what the hell it was with these
guys. These brilliant and dedicated Hot and Cold Warriors like his father and Sir Lewis Alfot.

  Sir Lewis had fought the Germans, the Russians, and the Establishment with equal fervor. He’d spent his own fortune to assure that there was at least one outfit in British Intelligence who would do things right—i.e., his way. He fought for his ideas; he fought for his autonomy. Reading between the lines, Sir Lewis had fought retirement like a tiger with a toothache, and still resented being sidelined.

  The Congressman was much the same. Bellman’s father had had no personal fortune to use to ensure his vision of a safe America, but for the most part he hadn’t needed one. He’d built his unit during World War II, and postwar anticommunism had helped him make its autonomy damned near impregnable. Until Watergate. Watergate-related muckraking and reforms were the only things Bellman could ever remember scaring his father.

  As usual, the old man had taken steps. He’d found a safe district in his home state and got himself elected to Congress. Through a combination of favors, persuasion, and downright blackmail, he had gotten himself appointed Chairman of the House Intelligence Oversight Committee. He did a good job, too, riding herd on the FBI, the CIA, and everybody else he could think of—except his own people. This made the Congressman quite proud of himself. It enabled the reformers to have what they wanted, and it enabled the Congressman’s own Agency to go about its work unimpeded.

  Men like Bellman’s father, and Sir Lewis—and Borzov in the Soviet Union, and others—guarded their visions more zealously than prophets, using any means (as Bellman knew too well) to keep them alive.

  So, why? Patriotism? Paranoia? Egomania? Sheer bloody-mindedness? Probably, Bellman decided, it was a combination of all four.

  Bellman sighed and said a rude word, which he didn’t care if Robert Tipton heard a tape of or not. When he’d gotten back to the flat, he’d checked to see if Tipton had kept a promise he’d made to remove the cameras and microphones. When he didn’t find any he decided to take it as a gesture of good faith and be encouraged. He also decided not to do any thinking out loud or talking in his sleep, good faith or no good faith. It would take tearing up the walls to make sure there was nothing else planted here, and Bellman was too good a guest to go in for that.