The Old Boys

by Charles McCarry

  “Save him.”

  “Operate. But Mubarak wasn’t qualified to perform this kind of surgery. Besides, even when it’s successful, which is rarely, it only increases life expectancy by a few months.”

  “How long can Bücher live without surgery?”

  “With the latest drugs, which are being administered, somewhere between three and six months. He was diagnosed about three weeks ago.”

  “What happens now?”

  “He already has jaundice and itchy skin that can’t be treated,” Ben said. “Next come pain, sleeplessness, weight loss, deep fatigue, anemia.”

  “Amnesia?”

  Ben gave me one of his frigid Sherlock Holmes glances, up and down, as if he were the much taller man. What made me think that he would omit such an important detail?

  “Not inevitably,” he said. “But of course the pain and fatigue soon reach a point where the victim doesn’t care about remembering anything, or is so drugged that he can’t remember.”

  Ben rose to his feet. “Time for a walk,” he said.

  We strolled in a freezing mist along the gray beach beside the gray sluggish water of Lough Swilly. We had to shout to be heard over the rain drumming on our hats, the bottled-up sea sloshing in the lough, the moaning wind. We walked on in silence for a mile or so before turning back. Dark was falling and the whitecaps became less visible, then phosphorescent. We reached the path to the hotel. By now it was full dark and Ben and I could not see each other. I could smell him, though—wet tweed, tea and cakes on his breath, shaving soap.

  He said, “I suppose you’d like to talk to Bücher before he dies.”

  “That would be useful.”

  “You can hardly do it yourself,” Ben said. “So the question is, who can, without getting himself killed?”

  “Mubarak.”

  “The prime candidate, but unapproachable.”

  “He doesn’t seem to have all that many scruples about spilling secrets to his grandfather.”

  “True, but Mubarak doesn’t know what we need to know, i.e., exactly where Ibn Awad is, exactly where the bombs are.”

  “Exactly what we want to ask him.”

  “Bücher may not know, either,” Ben said. “There’s no reason why he should. For that matter, especially now that Bücher is dying and is of no medical use, there’s little or no reason why he and Ibn Awad should be in the same place at the same time.”

  Ben had always irritated me. “I’m not interested in what Bücher doesn’t know,” I said. “I’m interested in what he does know.”

  “Then all we have to do is snatch him from his deathbed or send him someone he trusts,” Ben said. “Someone he wants to confess to.”

  Elementary, my dear Watson.

  2

  It does focus the mind wonderfully to be the subject of a fatwa. Add to that the vengeful mood of the Russian mob, the homicidal impulses of a couple of Schutzstaffel golden-agers, the cheery ambiguity of Kevin and his Gray Force (if that’s what it was) and the arithmetic of being a frequent flyer in the age of terrorism, and you’ve got yourself an actuarial crossword puzzle. Paranoia was nothing new in my life. You can’t let it get in the way of work or spoil your leisure hours. The trick, as I was told as a trainee by what I then regarded as wise old instructors, is to avoid getting into situations from which there is no escape. Always case the joint before you go in, always sit with your back to the wall, always make sure there’s a back door. A majority of my classmates took this advice to heart and were not much good to themselves or anyone else thereafter. In practice, you have to walk right in and sit right down. Sometimes getting out the back door involves breaking somebody’s neck on a dark stairway.

  Actually, if I may lecture for a moment, the trick is to find a way to turn the threat back on the threatener. He has committed himself to an action, so it’s jujitsu time; you use your attacker’s energy to destroy him. This means getting close to the adversary, and that means overcoming the instinct to get as far away from the person who is trying to destroy you as you can, as quickly as you can. However, in operations the question is not, How do I get myself out of this? It is, What can I do to the other fellow next? One must always be the aggressor, never the defender. Always the joker, never the butt. Always the carefree American boy (think of Kevin) who is never suspected of guile until it’s too late. The odds are never what they seem. Your opponent, taking his three-point stance across the line of scrimmage, might have more hair on his knuckle than you have on your entire body, but you have the inestimable advantage of his belief that you’re going to be no trouble to him merely because you are less hairy than he is.

  However, theory is one thing, reality another. After saying good night to Ben I lay abed in Donegal, doing what I had done as a cross-country schoolboy runner, as an infantryman, as an operative, as a prisoner of my own government—counting a hundred reluctant footsteps, then another hundred and then another as a way to keep on advancing into an undesirable future. We had collected a lot of information, far more than I had expected, in a relatively short time. Time is supposed to fly for people with gray hair, but it seemed a long, long while since David and Harley and Jack and Ben and I had left Washington. My mind was in the future. Images of Simon Hawk in Manaus, Captain Zhang in Xinjiang, even the fresh recollections of Mikhail in Moscow were already fading in my memory. In fact the Old Boys had been in the field for scarcely a month. Nevertheless we were moving too slowly; we were behind schedule. We knew more now than we had known to begin with, but not enough to take action. We were still in a passive state, watching, listening, sniffing the wind. We did not yet know exactly where to go or exactly what to do when we got there. There was nothing unusual about this. Operations develop like the seduction of a woman who knows that she’s worth any amount of trouble—false hopes, faux pas, misunderstandings, rebuffs, zones of silence, long gazes into seemingly candid eyes that will not answer the simplest question. And then, when you have despaired of ever seizing the moment, it arrives.

  Although Ben Childress and Jack Philindros might differ with me on this point, it is not necessary to know everything, to tie up every conceivable loose end, before making the leap. At least we were beginning to sort things out. Choices had emerged. Philindros and Childress had provided excellent leads. Jack had reminded me that the quarry was Ibn Awad and the prize was his bombs. Ben had pointed out that finding Claus Bücher was not the same thing as finding Ibn Awad. But then, neither one of them understood that finding Paul Christopher might be the key to everything. And neither had mentioned something that was obvious to me—that wherever Ibn Awad was, he and the bombs were not necessarily in the same place. If he was moving from one place to another, he could hardly take twelve unshielded nuclear devices with him in his luggage. Finding the bombs without finding Ibn Awad, or vice versa, would be a good outcome, but the only acceptable outcome would be to find both. The bombs without Ibn Awad meant that whoever was guarding them for him would be free to use them as he saw fit. Better the madman you know, etc.

  What we wanted was the bombs and Ibn Awad’s head. No apocalypse, no more resurrections. And the way to achieve this— the only way, I truly thought—was to possess something that Ibn Awad wanted with all his twisted heart.

  The Amphora Scroll. But how to let him know I had it, even though I did not have it?

  After breakfast, the traditional Irish eggs-and-everythingincluding-black-pudding affair, Ben and I went for another walk in the misting rain. On the beach we saw the fresh hoofprints of two galloping horses and before long the horses themselves coming back, riders up, kicking up sand and sending pulses of sound through the porous ground beneath our feet. There was no other sign of life under the pewter sky, not even a gull.

  I said, “Tell me, Ben. Do you really think that finding a use for Mubarak is beyond our capabilities?”

  “As a witting asset, forget it,” Ben said. “But even if he didn’t know what was happening to him, the motivation to cooperate would have t
o be very strong.”

  “Like what?”

  “Time was when money was always in good taste in that part of the world, but money means nothing to a man like Mubarak. Even if we had enough of it to rent him for awhile, and I assume we don’t.”

  “Not enough to compete with Ibn Awad,” I said. “He’d have to be unwitting. The invitation would have to come from someone he trusts.”

  “If you mean his grandfather, forget that, too,” Ben said.

  “I mean Ibn Awad.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Ibn Awad is going to need a new doctor. It’s possible he’s put out a want ad on the terrorist Internet and Mubarak is the first candidate to be interviewed.”

  “That’s creative thinking, all right,” Ben said. “But what good would that do us?”

  “Mubarak could put Ibn Awad in our hands.”

  “How would we get close enough to induce him to do that?”

  “Suppose we had the item that Ibn Awad most wants in the world?”

  “A hydrogen bomb?”

  “Think smaller.”

  “The Amphora Scroll.”

  “Bingo.”

  He trudged on into the sodden wind, head down, unspeaking. Of course he knew perfectly well what I had in mind. I waited in vain for him to say so. In Lough Swilly a sail appeared, white against sky and water that were the same shade of gray. On the errands of mercy that had cost them their future, the Christophers had sailed the Mahican in waters like these and in the same kind of weather.

  “What’s needed is a messenger Ibn Awad can believe, like his doctor,” I said. “If Mubarak tells him who has the Amphora Scroll, that should do it.”

  Ben stopped in his tracks. “That’s what I was afraid you were going to suggest,” he said. “Horace, you’re crazy.”

  “You don’t think Ibn Awad wants the scroll?”

  “He wants your severed head.”

  “Not before I tell him what he’s dying to know.”

  Ben said, “But you don’t know where the Amphora Scroll is.”

  “Then I wouldn’t break down under questioning, would I?”

  Ben quickened his pace, leaving me behind. I didn’t try to keep up, though my legs were longer than his and it would have been easy enough to do. This went on for considerably more than a hundred paces. He was thinking, deducing. Ben didn’t like ideas that were not his own. This was a weakness that had preserved him from the inconvenience of senior leadership in the Outfit. The old Outfit’s lifeblood had been a combination of bright young men with freedom of speech and older men who listened to them because they had once been bright young men themselves. Ben had once been a bright young man. The problem was, he had remained a bright young man well into old age. Headstrong. Not a good listener. But a man who loved daring ideas as long as he thought they were his own.

  I watched the sailboat tacking in a twenty-knot wind—very good sailor at the helm and sheets. At last Ben stopped, turned around, and waited for me. When I reached him he said, “I see your point, but I also see big problems.”

  “I knew you would, Ben. That’s why I need your thoughts. After all, it was you who gave me the idea.”

  “Not me, pal.”

  “Really? You do remember saying I couldn’t do it myself—that is, get close enough to Ibn Awad to lay hands on him? That was what began the train of thought.”

  “I remember the words. But I don’t remember advising you to put your head in the lion’s mouth. You’re acting like Christopher.”

  “There are worse role models.”

  “Right. And look at all the happiness being Mr. Intrepid brought Paul,” Ben said. “Horace, this plan is pointless unless you can tell us exactly where you are and stay alive long enough for the cavalry to arrive.”

  “And if I could manage that?”

  “We still wouldn’t have any cavalry. Are Harley and Jack and David and me—combined ages roughly three centuries—supposed to drop from the sky, slay the evil-doers, and rescue you and the maiden?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’m not planning to be taken prisoner. I just want Ibn Awad to come closer or else give us a signal so that we can move closer to him.”

  We stayed where we were, shivering, the wind snatching our words as they were spoken, while I told him what I had in mind.

  At the end of the speech, he merely nodded.

  I said, “Does that mean you’re on board?”

  “I signed on for the whole voyage,” Ben said. “But you do realize that you’re shaking a coffee can full of old watch parts and hoping you’ll find a Rolex inside when you open the lid, don’t you?”

  “Maybe. Do you have a better idea?”

  “Any idea would be a better idea,” Ben said. “But I’ll pass the word that you have the Amphora Scroll, God help you.”

  3

  Technology is a friend to man. A case in point is caller ID. My satellite phone was equipped with it, and stored in its memory was the number of the telephone Kevin had used to call me on the stairway outside Mikhail’s Moscow flat. A dead giveaway of that kind is not so rare in clandestine circles as you might think. Long ago I had an asset in the bowels of the Chinese government who always wrote his true name and return address on the envelopes containing the reports he sent to me through the mail. A dyed-inthe-wool bureaucrat himself, he felt that the absence of a return address would be more likely to attract more attention from routine-addicted postal snoops than its unabashed presence in the upper left-hand corner of his treasonous communications. He must have been right, because he was never caught.

  When I called Kevin’s number I got voice mail—no surprise— that asked me in a chipper female voice, in Russian, to leave a name and number. I said, “This is Horace Hubbard calling Kevin Clark with a fabulous one-time offer. Please call me back at the number you already know. Bye!”

  I ate the dry sandwich and drank the bottled water that I had bought that morning at a gas station convenience store on the road to Belfast. I stood on a hilltop beside my tiny rental car on a tiny unpaved road in a place so lonely that it hardly seemed possible that it could be hidden away on an island as crowded as Ireland. Nothing so wild and unpeopled existed in Xinjiang or among Russian birches. Apart from the road, there was no sign that the human hand had ever disturbed anything in eyeshot. Hundreds of untended black-faced sheep, wool beaded with rainwater, grazed like wild game. Birds fed on their droppings. Both sheep and birds were mute; cottony silence reigned. Moist green turf, hue intensifying as the sun found a rift in the perpetual clouds, covered the earth from horizon to horizon.

  Satellite phone traffic among the Old Boys had dwindled as the novelty of the thing wore off. These were people whose life’s work had taught them not to trust telephones. Old spies like to work alone, in silence, watching the faces of their sources for telltale signs, such as greed and fright—sometimes even selfless idealism—that tell the practiced eye whether the all-believing ear is hearing truth or trash.

  My satellite telephone rang. I thought, That was fast, Kevin. The phone was in the car, inside my canvas briefcase. It kept ringing till I unzipped the briefcase and answered.

  Harley Waters said, “You’re still in Jerusalem?”

  “No, I’m tending my flocks elsewhere.”

  “Are you now?” said Harley. “Watch out you don’t get too lonesome. I think I’ve got somethin’ for you. Can you get to Budapest from where you are?”

  His tone of voice told me that he was dying to tell me something that he could not tell me over the phone.

  4

  Madame Károlyi, the little goldfinch of an old woman whom Harley took me to meet in Budapest, talked about dark days as we sipped coffee and ate pastries in her parlor. It was a small dusty room above a narrow street: fringed lampshades, fringed shawls draped over the furniture, dark oblongs on the faded wallpaper where paintings formerly hung. She wore what looked like a Chanel suit from the sixties; it was pink with large glassy buttons. The skirt was shor
t. Her stockings bagged at the knees.

  “It was quite curious how trusting people were in sexual matters under Communism,” she said. “One believed that the only escape into privacy from the secret police was to get into bed with somebody. A love affair is something everyone knows how to keep secret—maybe that was why God spit into the handful of dust— so we believed that we were safe if we were naked with a lover. The Soviet occupation may have been the most erotic period in Hungarian history, which is saying a lot.”

  She offered me another éclair. I regretted the interruption. It had been years, if ever, since I had encountered a woman who played the role of herself so beautifully. Every shift of tone, every gesture, her museum clothes, the coy angle of her ancient feet in their fetishist’s pink shoes, was a flashgun exposure of the beauty she used to be. You saw the invisible jewelry she once wore, the haughty faces in the missing paintings. No wonder Harley, who had run her as an agent for twenty years, looked at her like a man hopelessly in love. He must have collected his reports from her in a four-poster.

  “And the dénouement! ” she said. “A Molnár play! It turned out, when the secret police files were opened up after the Communists were overthrown, that everyone—everyone—had been reporting to the secret police every word of pillow talk, every shiver of ecstasy, every political joke whispered by their lovers. And it wasn’t just the cinq-à-sept adulterers. Wives were tattling on husbands, husbands on wives. That, of course, was only to be expected. But tender lovers? Quel chagrin! Mass forgiveness and forgetfulness were necessary when it all came out or no one in Hungary would have had sex ever again.”

  Madame Károlyi, Christian name Marie, bore one of the most ancient surnames in Hungary, though she married into the family after the arrival of the Red Army, too late to make much of a fuss about being a member of the highest aristocracy. In her own right, she was a remote descendant of Sigismund Bathory, who defeated the Turks at Walachia in 1595, and of the famous Blood Countess Elizabeth Bathory: “Of course you know about her; she bathed in the blood of virgin peasant girls as an aphrodisiac.” Madame Károlyi delivered this information in the same twitter of high amusement in which she had described the ménages à trois in which the AVH, the Hungarian secret police, was the one in the middle. As a young case officer in Budapest, Harley had been the third party in some of her affairs with prominent communists. Among these was a Soviet ambassador who went on to become head of the KGB. Also a puppet prime minister of Hungary who had been one of her lovers when she was a teenager and came back from Russia after the war in an altered state: the KGB had castrated him, a time-honored oriental technique designed to ensure his undying obedience. Madame Károlyi’s detailed eyewitness report to Harley on this man’s condition, delivered during the failed Hungarian revolt of 1956, had been regarded as one of the more titillating intelligence coups of the time. There were others, some illustrated with photographs. By the time she was no longer a sex object, Harley’s deposits into her Swiss bank account had made her a rich woman by the standards of ruined aristocracy. She lived as she lived now, shabbily, because she knew better than to draw attention to herself. Those newly in power in Hungary thought that she had been a collaborator with the Soviets. She could hardly defend herself by revealing that she had done it all for Western civilization and the Outfit’s money. For Madame Károlyi this was the final irony in a life that she seemed to regard as one long joke.