The Man Who Heard Too Much

by Bill Granger

  “Why Rome?”

  “The Catholic church is the financial mule for the CIA money into Lithuania. They take their… what is the Americanism, the slang word?”

  “They take their skim,” Henry McGee said. He was grinning to show how relaxed he was with all this knowledge. He was studying the window right behind Skarda.

  “So,” Skarda said. “Why did you kill Viktor Rusinov?”

  “Who is he?”

  “Are you working for the Americans?”

  “He someone the Americans want to kill?”

  “You were seen.”

  Henry said, “Why set me up? Why put me in charge of hustling after Michael Hampton when it was all just a day late and a dollar short. Hell, you knew he was going to Rome in the first place.”

  “We knew.”

  “And you had your hitters set in Rome from day one. What was all this garbage about hitters in Brussels, putting them on that girl Rena, setting up in Berlin.”

  “Berlin was an honest effort meant to retrieve the tape,” Skarda said. “Our target disappeared, only to resurface in twenty-four hours in East Berlin with a girl. A West German girl with a passport. Marie Dreiser. She was not expected; everything else was expected.”

  “Including me fumbling along, chasing after someone I was not going to be allowed to catch.”

  “We did not trust you, Henry. Your trail was dirty. We had reports from Washington from the time of your trial, about how you betrayed our secrets to R Section, how you betrayed Skarda, or what you believed Skarda was.”

  “Devereaux. R Section. They dirtied the trail. You people should have been smart enough to see that I never betrayed you, and you let me rot in prison.”

  “The dirty trail was genuine.”

  “Genuine horseshit,” Henry said.

  Skarda shrugged. “It doesn’t matter, Henry. Whatever you said then or say now. You were seen in Stockholm, and you killed Viktor Rusinov. Believe me, we know this. We had observed Viktor from the first day. He was useful to us. And you will be useful to us as well, when we return you to Moscow and when you explain to us in painful, even excruciating detail, how much you betrayed during your American captivity and how they managed to drag it out of you. It is always useful to examine a traitor, however odious the task, rather as a doctor examines stools.”

  Henry McGee smiled.

  Skarda frowned. “There is no joke here. Everything has been cleaned and examined. This Marie Dreiser is in a Roman hospital. She is of no importance to us. The last important thing is the American agent, this Devereaux, who has the tape. He is in Brussels and he will be dealt with, and the tape will be retrieved before the Americans can have one of their famous, unpredictable debates about returning it and change their minds.”

  “And I’ll be tagged as the hit man,” Henry McGee said.

  “Of course. Everything legal and logical. We and the Americans must not engage in mistrust. Let them look for you, not for us.”

  “Glasnost,” Henry McGee said.

  “It is quite genuine, I assure you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Lithuania. It is a concession to us. It shows how genuine we are in the bargain—we cannot give them too much, or they will be overly suspicious.”

  “You gave away the program called Skarda.”

  “And Skarda is genuine, believe me. I devised it.”

  “So why give them secrets?”

  “When you have a healthy man, a man with a strong heart and lungs, and you see his perfect health in every way, in his confidence and his smile, you cannot believe for a moment that he is dying from a cancer.”

  “Skarda is a healthy man.”

  The wizened man nodded. “And Skarda is a cancer.”

  “What is the cancer?”

  Skarda couldn’t help himself. He was so clever.

  “Skarda works at one level in programming, but the program itself is encoded to work at the level of the American programs to rewrite a program. Do you understand that?”

  “Vaguely. Sounds like a lot of shit, but if you believe it, fine.”

  Skarda glared. “A lot of shit. Let me tell you about a lot of shit. Glasnost and perestroika are genuine. We must reduce our arms, our mutual wariness. But the Americans are so unpredictable and so suspicious. They still push too hard. They put too much money into research, into their ridiculous concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative. What can we do when we have so many problems? The Americans must convince themselves of their dangerousness.”

  “And you’re going to convince them?”

  “They must convince themselves.”

  “How do they do that?”

  “What if a missile, an ordinary nuclear missile with a nonnuclear warhead, were being tested next month in Utah?”

  “Utah?”

  “Next month,” Skarda said. “On December twentieth. Five days before Christmas.”

  “Sentimental time,” Henry said.

  Skarda grinned now, and it was as ghastly as his frown. “What if this missile changed course at the command of its own computer network and landed on a place like Quebec City?”

  Henry thought about it. “An American missile.”

  “That lands on a Canadian city.”

  “That cannot be explained except for a system malfunction. Some malfunction in computer command. But steps and steps away from Skarda and your simple little computer defense shield. My, my. You are a genius, no doubt about it.”

  The compliment pleased the old man. He nodded at the bright pupil and did not see the gleam in the small, black eyes. The gleam had not been there a moment before, but it was heating up now.

  Henry said, “The Americans suddenly get into one of their numbing debates about weapons systems and who pulls the trigger and all that other horseshit. And the Canadians are mad and probably even the Frenchies, because there’s so many Frenchies in Quebec. Well, it sure sounds wonderful to me, Skarda, really wonderful.”

  Skarda reached for the button under his desk. The interview was over.

  Henry saw it was over. No trade, no getting out of it, no yin-and-yanging anymore.

  He leaped across the fragile desk, breaking it, and put his hands around Skarda’s neck and broke it as if Skarda were a bird.

  Skarda’s eyes bulged as he felt the hands, heard for one moment the snap of bones, heard nothing after that.

  The crash brought clatter on the stairs. Henry ran to the door just as the fat spy opened it, and kicked him in the groin. The fat leather spy went down with a strangled moan, and the pistol fell on the bare wooden floor. Henry picked it up as the next one came into the room. He fired point-blank, and the second man’s nose widened into a bloody clot before it disappeared. He fell back against a third man coming up the stairs.

  Grandmother had her Uzi at the bottom of the stairs, and the bullets sprayed the neatly patterned walls.

  Henry ran to the window he had measured a moment before, and broke the glass and jumped. He cushioned his fall on the snow-covered lawn by bending both knees and rolling with the fall.

  Grandmother poked the Uzi out the broken window and fired. Her rounds made the snow dance.

  Henry kept rolling and then was on his feet, crashing through a wooden gate that led into a connected garden. The machine gun chattered behind him, but he didn’t think about it, thought about running and making his feet fall smoothly on the snow and not slipping and not making a mistake like running into a dead end.

  The dit-dit-dit of the machine gun was lost in the heaviness of snow on the quiet neighborhood.

  Henry leaped to catch the top of a nine-foot brick wall. He pulled himself up against the bricks and reached the top of the wall. He looked down into yet another snowy garden and saw the face of a growling German shepherd. He stared at the dog. The dog took a step back and then forward again.

  Henry leaped down into the garden.

  He bared his teeth and raised his hand. “Get the fuck outta my way,” Henry said to the dog as
though it might be a reasoning animal. The dog unexpectedly wagged its tail and took two steps back, growling all the way.

  Henry opened a wooden gate in the wall opposite and then the dog charged, but it was too late. It slammed into the gate as it closed.

  He ran from yard to yard. The chatter of the machine gun had ceased, and they were probably running around, trying to find their cars, organize a search.… Henry smiled at the thought.

  When he reached Norrebrogade with its wide road and pedestrian crowds, he slowed down.

  He had left the tape at the airport, the tape with the last words of Viktor Rusinov and the recorded voice of the radio man aboard the Leo Tolstoy.

  Too bad he couldn’t tape Skarda, but that was unexpected. He had in mind all along just to buy himself insurance with the tape, maybe make a trade, maybe not, see what way the wind was blowing. It had smelled bad to Henry from the first, from the moment they had set him up with the fat leather spy and the booga-booga stuff on the Leo Tolstoy. They had wanted him to dangle out there for some reason and now he knew what it was. They believed all along that Henry had betrayed them, and they wanted to use Henry to make the chase after Michael seem genuine. But they had known Michael would go to Rome with the tape, and they had expected him.

  Smart Skarda.

  Henry grinned so hard that a passing girl stared at him, but he didn’t see her.

  He was inside himself. Trying to see what kind of a deal he could finally make with Devereaux. Thinking about the girl, the German girl, down in Rome, thinking about how he could maybe use her in this.

  40

  ROME

  Evelyn Jaynes was uncomfortably sober—no more than three or four tots of Famous Grouse whiskey had crossed his lips since breakfast—but the story was enough to keep him that way.

  Cardinal Ludovico led him through the intricacies of it.

  The journalist took Pitman notes, and his hand danced across the pages of his notebook. Usually, his hands would be shaking by now, but there was the reserve strength in him that all the old pro newspapermen share, to get on with the story with the reckless abandon of football linemen.

  On and on, unfolding the intimate agreement between the Americans and the Soviets, presenting the unique moral dilemma—he loved it!—of trading the future of a lot of Soviet Jews for the future of the whole liberal movement in Lithuania. And some other stuff about a computer defense system. It was tedious, and he wrote it down as well, but it was clear to him that was not at the heart of the deal. The deal was to sell out Lithuania for a cheap political triumph by the corrupt American administration. That’s the way Evelyn Jaynes saw it, strictly another cynical American maneuver.… And what sort of debate would this story inspire? Ah, Evelyn Jaynes, journalist of the year, perhaps now it was time to seek regular employment. But why think small? Britain was a little country, and there was America just over there and the great British press lords who were now recolonizing the land with their splashy newspapers and magazines and publishing empires.… Of course there would be a place for Evelyn Jaynes in such a world. He cut too great a figure to stay on the provincial stage. Evelyn saw the headlines, saw the bylines, saw the photographs of famous people called upon to decorate his revelations.

  He licked his lips as he wrote, and felt the dryness of his tongue. Perhaps just a celebratory glass or two after he left the dear old Cardinal of the Secrets?

  “You understand, my son, the implications of all that I have told you?”

  “I understand perfectly, Eminence. You should have told me at the beginning, perhaps it would have—”

  “I knew nothing at the beginning.” He held up his hands. “My dear Michael Hampton was our agent of intelligence to see if the church would be harmed by whatever agreement came from the Malmö conference—”

  “Then you suspected the conference was about other things.”

  “We had our suspicions.” He put on the guise of wisdom. He nodded his head. “The church has eyes and ears in many places. Alas, it is the price we must pay for our survival.”

  “I understand perfectly, Eminence.” Evelyn Jaynes had taken the first flight from London after receiving the astonishing phone call from Cardinal Ludovico. The previous story—the story about the pope reaching out to the Anglican communion—had gone over well, and they joshed him in the Pig and Whistle about turning religious in his declining years. But what the hell, it was a good enough story to earn a Sunday banner.

  “You must keep this matter in secret until you are safely back in London.”

  “I’ll go to the airport directly.”

  “This is very, very grave material, Mr. Jaynes. I shall not rest easy until the truth is published. For a long time, we have observed the American operations in Lithuania. It is a disgrace that the Lithuanian movement would be traded in such a callous way.” He said this to see how the Englishman would take it, to see if the Englishman would put the correct spin on it. But it was going over very well, the cardinal saw.

  “I will—”

  “Do not seek out the Americans, they will deny everything. I stand behind you—”

  “Eminence, I am humbly grateful for all you have done for me.” It was true. Evelyn was grateful in that moment, so grateful for this second chance at a new career that he might have kissed the cardinal’s ring or done whatever bit of papishness the old man would have demanded. But the old man, the dear old man, demanded nothing but the truth, and Evelyn Jaynes would let the truth make him free.

  The gratitude poured out of him as he shook the hand of the cardinal at the portico of the great house on Borgo Santo Spirito. The gratitude continued as he waved down a taxi to take him to the airport. But it was the time of day when taxis were occupied and the whole world needed to go to Michelangelo Airport, and there was nothing to do about it. He stood on the avenue with the best of intentions for ten minutes, but every bloody dago in Rome was queuing for cabs at this time of day—not queuing, mind you, but bloody running into the street and flinging down old ladies to get a cab—and what the hell was he doing but standing here like a bloody fool? There was nothing to be done.…

  Except have a drink.

  He popped into the bar near the bridge and had a whiskey down before the bottle was put away. He had another with a glass of Peroni beer. Better, much better.

  Evening. Lights along the Tiber.

  Not far from the place of Michael Hampton’s murder, Evelyn Jaynes walked out into the night air to find a taxi. The lights along the river were festive, because the time of Christmas was coming. The wind was cold but not demanding, and Evelyn felt very warm with a belly full of whiskey. He was sated with the story, puffed up with an expansiveness he had not felt for some time.

  Across the river, in a little black Fiat, two men sat. The third man came down the embankment and got into the car.

  “Well, there’s some kind of a mess in Copenhagen,” said the first man. “Skarda has been replaced as number one on this. They said to go ahead and make sure we clean the body in case he has the tape or notes. They said to wait on the old priest—that would have to be cleared. Probably back to Moscow.”

  “What about the American agent?”

  “They said he went back to Brussels. They said they’d watch him in Brussels to see if he jumps one way or the other. Someone’s got to have the goddamn tape.”

  “Yes,” said the driver. “That girl—she just disappeared. You notice that? Both of the women disappeared. The girl disappeared in Rome. The gray man—he iced our men in Brussels. He killed Mikhail. I knew Mikhail, we were in Kabul together.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s true. Mikhail was all right. He would have liked to get that girl in Brussels. You should have seen him.”

  “Well, all the girls are disappeared.”

  “Well, you know how it is.” And the third man related a bawdy story that was very popular in Moscow those days. The other two men had heard it before, but they laughed in any case. It eased the
tension of their job.

  “He’s on the street, looking for a cab.” The laughter of a moment before was gone. They were all steel again, flat and dulled by use, waiting on the time of the dead.

  “Yes,” said the driver. “Well, we might as well do it here instead of at the airport.”

  They thought about that.

  “Yes. We might as well,” said the third man. And the car began across the bridge.

  41

  BRUSSELS

  “Who is it?”

  “Me.”

  She opened the door on the chain. She saw him and closed the door and reopened it. They stood apart for a moment. It was done, she thought, whatever it was. She saw the coldness, saw it in eyes and the pale color of his face, saw it in the slump of his shoulders. What would warm him?

  She embraced him. Was there anything else she could do? There was no power in her to resist him, not for a moment, not from the moment he had come to her rooms in the rue du Lavois, when he opened her case, not from the moment he had ordered her to embrace him in the courtyard at the moment of dawn. I love you. But did she love him, or was it that he was only life? She could not obliterate dead Michael from her mind. Not Michael. She had betrayed Michael from the beginning; she had helped kill him as surely as if she had been the one shooting at him on the bridge in Rome.… All for a cause.

  She stood apart from him when his arms no longer pressed against her back and when she felt the coldness of him.

  She looked at him in the half darkness.

  He said, “I got the tape.”

  She understood then. The tape cassette was between them; it would always be between them. Because she had made a small betrayal of Michael’s trust in her, and it had cost him his life. She took a step back and folded her arms across her chest. Her beautiful face was now cold and stoic. She would not be hurt by him; he could not do it.

  “What will you do now?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Give me the tape.”

  “What would you do for me then?”