Obviously there is good reason to doubt Kalash’s truthfulness or question his motives. You may wish to talk to him if you decide to look into this matter for yourself. He lives mostly in Paris, at 8-bis, avenue Wagram.
What aroused my own interest was the news of my mother. It is the first clue we have had that she might be alive since she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940. In the photograph of the Amphora Scroll, the scroll is held in a woman’s left hand. The ring on the woman’s third finger, a ruby set in diamonds, is the ring that my father gave my mother when I was born. And of course I remember the hand, and know that it can be no one’s but hers. This is hardly conclusive evidence that the hand belonged to my mother or that she is still alive. But the moment I saw this photograph, I was overcome with the hope that she still lived, that I would see her again, that I would find her. The evidence suggests—to me, at least—the probability that the manuscript she was holding was in Reinhard Heydrich’s possession. As you know, my father believed that Heydrich kidnapped my mother in 1940; it is certainly true that he was obsessed by her. If the hand in the photograph is my mother’s, as I know it must be, then she was, in fact, with him in Czechoslovakia. This photo is the only proof we have ever had that my mother was alive, a prisoner of Heydrich, long after she was arrested. If she lives, would by now be a very old woman. It is my conviction that she does live. I know that this is not rational. But if there is one chance in millions that she is the one who has the Amphora Scroll, I’ve got to know.
In case you decide to pursue the Ibn Awad matter, I hereby make you a gift of the Hicks painting you have always despised. Kalash quite liked it and made me a handsome offer for it. I am sure he would pay a million in cash—more than enough to cover your expenses as you look for, and find, Ibn Awad and his bombs. Or simply pass your remaining years in peace. Your choice. I enclose a letter of introduction to Kalash.
Watch your back, Cousin.
As ever,
Paul
6
Did I believe what Paul had written?
I certainly believed that he would go to the ends of the earth to find his lost mother, for whom he had been searching ever since Heydrich’s men took her off a train at the French frontier a few days before Germany invaded France in 1940. Paul, then about fourteen, was a witness to this, and to the beating the Gestapo gave his father. Heydrich had been fascinated by Lori Christopher, and what at the time appeared to be an arrest may well have been a kidnapping. I believed that Paul wanted to believe that his longlost mother was miraculously alive. I believed that if she did live, it was entirely possible that he might find her on the basis of a single clue. Paul was capable of remarkable leaps of intuition. It was his trademark.
Was the emir and holy man Ibn Awad alive despite my best efforts to kill him? Was he thirsting for revenge as only a wronged Arab can thirst for it? I believed—the world believed—that I had killed him years ago, but I had not done the deed with my own hands and there was no reason why he might not have survived, whatever I and the world had believed. The irony was delicious, but frankly I did not want to believe Paul’s information, at least the part about Ibn Awad. After all, I was the responsible party. As the Outfit’s man for covert action in the Middle East, I had planned his murder, recruited the assassin, and (as I had thought) destroyed the target. If in fact I had failed, the world was in trouble. I knew this man well. The pilgrimage into the desert, the slow preparation for cold-blooded mass murder were entirely in character. His immense wealth—he owned a small country that had vast oil deposits—and the impenetrable secrecy of his household made such a charade plausible. As to the bombs, he had acquired nuclear weapons before; that, and his madness, were the reasons we assassinated him in the first place, or thought we did.
Now it appeared that I had fumbled the ball and then made a fool of myself before the world by publicly defending the action as justifiable homicide. It was a wonder to me, the current age of terror being what it is, that I was not dead already. On the other hand, had I been Ibn Awad, I would not have been satisfied with a mere bullet in the head for Horace Hubbard. No, I would have demanded a more lingering death. It was quite obvious that I had not only made a fool of myself in the signature moment of my life but that I had always been a fool.
For years now, imagining that I was forgotten, that I had no enemies, I had lived without tradecraft. Nothing to conceal, nothing to fear. But now, commencing the moment I left Paul’s house, I began once again to be systematically careful. As a practical matter this did me about as much good as not stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. No matter how much of a professional you may be, there is no defense except luck against a stranger who wants to kill you and knows where you are. The Georgetown street with its row of grotesquely overpriced, cavelike houses was all but empty. It was too late for the women and children who lived in the houses to be outside, too early for the career folk to be coming home; it was the wrong night, Monday, for cocktail parties. I was the lone pedestrian, a puzzled old party wandering through the gloaming with a shopping bag full of secrets in my hand and a rolled-up million-dollar painting stuck under my arm like a baguette.
Inside the houses, figures moved in muted light. I remembered the tears in Paul Christopher’s eyes on the night he met with his friend from the Sudan. Spying on him from this same sidewalk, I must have caught him at the very moment he recognized his mother’s ring, remembered her hand. As I walked along O Street in the deepening shadows, knowing today what I had not even imagined yesterday, I glimpsed what was in store for me now that Paul, bless his soul, had made me curious enough and rich enough and, let’s face it, nervous enough, to go back to a life of folly. Because that was what I was going to do, what I “had” to do unless I wanted to wait for the knife, the bullet, the bomb that would cut me off from the answers to the last questions I considered worth asking. Where had Paul Christopher gone? What had he learned? What trail had he left for me?
Already I was through the looking glass. Yesterday I would have thought that I was alone as I walked along this genteel street. Now, with darting eyes, I saw figures in the shadows, heard them mutter into cell phones, saw them vanish, and wondered if I was being passed along a chain of enemies and what awaited me at the last link.
7
It was seven o’clock in the morning when, in theory, Paul was laid to rest. The troops, the riderless horse, the caisson bearing the coffin moved among tombstones through sunshot mist. A funeral at Arlington is the closest thing to pure patriotic pageantry that survives in twenty-first-century America. Troops in dress blues and white gloves, martial music, the nervous black horse with boots reversed in the stirrups, the curiously muffled sound of what General MacArthur called the mournful mutter of musketry, “Taps,” the endless muster of tombstones—all this stirs the memory and moves the heart. Dying for one’s country is, after all, a noble thing. Paul Christopher had not done that, exactly, but it was not for want of trying. The urn containing Paul’s ashes had been placed inside a gunmetal coffin. I wondered as the box was lowered into his grave whether Stephanie had transferred the ashes into a more appropriate container. If not, archeologists of the future would have something to wonder about when they unearthed a vermilion-and-gilt porcelain Chinese urn from the grave of an American hero. Christopher’s last mystery.
Stephanie had made the arrangements. Everyone present was an Outfit person; she knew them all because she was an Outfit brat—her late father had been Paul’s case officer and she claimed that she had fallen in love with Paul when she was still a child. Yet there was no mention of the Outfit. Paul was not being buried in hallowed ground because of any secret derring-do. The Outfit had never publicly acknowledged his existence or his decorations or his time in prison. His gravestone read Paul H. Christopher, First Lieutenant USMCR, Silver Star, Purple Heart, and the dates. The graveside ceremony had been preceded by a funeral service in the Navy chapel, conducted by a hearty Episcopalian chaplain who hadn’t the foggiest notion who or
what Paul had been. That would have suited Paul just fine, but as the purpose of a eulogy is to praise the deceased and list his accomplishments, I’m not so sure he would have liked what came afterward in the Fort Myer officers’ club. I made my speech as short and matter-of-fact as possible, but the Old Boys present had known Paul—many of them by reputation only, because his work had been so compartmented that he had operated in a kind of bureaucratic quarantine from Headquarters. As I spoke about his life, which could have been described (though I refrained) as a death of a thousand cuts, I could practically feel the audience responding in one weepy collective thought: They don’t make men like this any longer. Actually, with rare exceptions, they never had. But these were old men to whom a past that never really existed was more real than the lives they had actually led. A death in the family made them remember the old days, and if the deceased was someone like Paul, it made them proud of having touched such a hero. The fact that he seemed to have died an unnatural death in the field added to the poignancy of the loss. Most Outfit alumni his age were keeling over with heart attacks or liver failure.
Stephanie provided an open bar, which did a lot to lift the mood of the mourners. I worked my way through the crowd, saying hello to codgers with the faces of men who had been my senior officers when they were in their prime. Owing to my long vacation in Pennsylvania, and also because that’s just the way things are, I had not seen most of these people for years. I liked them all in the way you go on liking the members of your college fraternity, for the boys they used to be no matter how much they change. But few had been the stars they’d hoped to be.
Out of a crowd of sixty, I invited four white-haired old cutthroats to join David Wong and me for lunch that day. Taken as a group, they could be regarded as the all-time backfield of the old Outfit. Besides David, who had escorted the ashes from Beijing, they were Jack Philindros, who had been director of the Outfit during difficult times and before that a nerveless operative in Europe and elsewhere; Ben Childress, who knew Arabs and Arabia in the way a baseball fanatic knows batting averages; Harley Waters, who during the Cold War had recruited more Russians and other Soviet bloc types than there were snowflakes in Siberia; and Charley Hornblower, who knew a lot about codes and arcane languages and the mind of man.
In movies, master spies meet by dark of night in spooky abandoned factories or under elevated highways in a dangerous part of town. In real life they are far more likely to hold clandestine meetings in crowded restaurants. This is true not only of decadent Americans but also of everybody else, including the Russians and the Chinese and even terrorists, though the latter usually choose places run by their cousins, who are also terrorists. Desirable tables in fashionable restaurants are routinely bugged by counterespionage people in every country in the world, but even knowing this, operatives otherwise famed for their cunning are flattered to be escorted to the same high-visibility table every time they dine.
The Old Boys and I went to a very expensive steak house on K Street. As the rules of tradecraft dictated, I made the reservation in a false name and we arrived one by one as if we were honest citizens. The maître d’ recognized us for the nonentities we were and seated us at a table near the kitchen that no one had ever bugged. After martinis and oysters and rib steak on the bone and several bottles of pricey but mediocre wine, I told them all I knew about Paul’s disappearance and the reasons behind it. They soaked it all up like the blotters they were. Jack Philindros in particular was attentive. He had a personal interest in the matter. It was Jack who had passed me the presidential order to kill Ibn Awad, Jack who had taken the political fall when the operation came to light. He was the consummate bureaucrat and it must be said that he had good reason to think that I was a loose cannon. Everybody else at the table was a loose cannon too except him, and even Jack had his moments. One of the reasons I had chosen them was that each had a burning reason to resent hypocrisy? Philindros had been kicked out of the directorship for his sins and all the rest had been busted or humiliated over operations for which they should have been decorated or promoted. All these fellows had too much imagination to stay out of trouble, and in the bad old days when men were men and spies were spies, they had all been disciplined for it. In Helsinki, Harley Waters had run a profitable call-girl ring, mostly Scandinavian blondes specializing in visiting Soviet luminaries. The girls were inventive, and more than one Soviet bigwig became cooperative when he saw the talkies of their encounters. Long before it was popular, David Wong had given the Chinese and the Russians fits by organizing a self-financing secret network of Muslim zealots along the Sino-Soviet frontier. The others had been similarly off the wall, with comparably embarrassing results.
Jack is the only person I have ever known who has a softer voice than Paul Christopher. On this day somebody else had had to order his lunch for him because the waiter couldn’t hear him over the background chatter. In former times he was, of course, in a position that made people want to listen closely.
“What confirmation is there?” he murmured.
“None,” I replied, “apart from Kalash el Khatar’s report.”
“Which is worth what?” Jack asked.
“Finding that out is the point of the exercise.”
“And if you establish that Kalash is right about Paul and this Jesus scroll and Ibn Awad’s bombs?”
“Then we find Christopher, if he’s alive, and maybe save the world from Ibn Awad if he’s alive.”
“And if they’re both dead and there are no bombs?”
“Then the five of us will have had some fun.”
Ben Childress said, “This is a recruitment pitch?”
“Yes, if any of you are interested,” I said.
“You want us to act in this movie on the basis of what some Arab told Paul Christopher?”
I said, “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the five of us, taken together, used to know most of the people in the world worth knowing. The generation of assets you fellows recruited and worked with still live in all the right places. They still know all the right people and all the right buttons to push.”
“If they’re still speaking to us,” Jack said.
It was true that Americans were even less beloved by the righteous than they had been when we were young. Back then anti-Americanism had usually been skin-deep; everyone but the stomach-acid Left had liked us well enough in private, and even some of them had had a little bit of kindness for us. Nowadays it was a pathology, like anti-Semitism. The people who now ran the Outfit were crashing into stone walls all over the world in their attempts to penetrate Islamist terrorist cells composed of two brothers and a cousin. We knew the terrorists’ fathers, uncles, and grandfathers, and in theory at least we had the capability of making an end run because these elders knew they could trust us. Once in, never out, as the old saw has it. Believe it or not, the truth of that saying has nothing to do with fear, but is based on the peculiar and deep friendships that exist between handler and agent. Friendships of that kind are very durable.
“There are a lot of Ifs,” I said. “I’d like to take a vote. Is anyone at the table absolutely sure in his mind that Christopher is dead?”
In every case the answer was No.
“Does anyone think it’s impossible that Ibn Awad survived and is up to his old tricks?”
No one demurred.
“Does anyone think that the five of us can possibly do worse than the Outfit if we decide to go after the facts?”
Modesty prevailed. There were no shakes of the head, just secret smiles all around. Glances were exchanged. The deal was made. It was unnecessary to say so. We all knew it.
Harley Waters asked an old warhorse’s question: “Would we be traveling?”
“I should hope so. The world being what it is, it wouldn’t be enough to call up your old friends. You’d have to show yourself, show them the cards we hold.”
“Show them the cards?” asked Harley, who had spent his life dealin
g with Russians on Russian territory.
“If you want them to trust you, you have to trust them. This is not a USA versus USSR or a Great Satan versus Islam situation. It’s a matter of old friends trying to prevent a sad ending. That’s essentially what we were trying to do in the Cold War, and we did it, so why would anybody who was involved with us then think that we have an ulterior motive this time?”
By now the expense account lunch crowd had departed. We were the last people in the restaurant. The last waiter was becoming intensely interested in our conversation—not because he cared what a gaggle of senior citizens were saying to one another, but because he wanted his tip, meager as he expected it to be. I called him over and we all chipped in and paid the check in cash, again in obedience to the rules of clandestine behavior.
Before we rose from the table, I asked the question. “Who’s in and who’s out?”
Everybody was in.
“Let’s meet again tomorrow to task this thing in a little more detail,” I said. “My house at seventeen hundred hours.”
8
The next morning, I was making myself a toasted cheese sandwich for lunch when Zarah tapped on the kitchen window.
“How did you know I was in the kitchen?” I asked after letting her in.
“I smelled the toasted cheese sandwich,” she replied. “Have you got an extra one?”
I had made two. I gave her the extra sandwich along with a dill pickle and a glass of iced tea. We ate while seated at my tiny kitchen table. Zarah and I knew little of each other and we hardly talked as we ate, but the meal was companionable. She was a beautiful woman, maybe thirty years old—about the same age now as her grandmother had been when Reinhard Heydrich first fell for her. One could see the monster’s point.
The Old Boys Page 3