“I don’t know how long I can hold out. I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you.”
The door opened, admitting a breath of air from the street, along with a middle-aged man. For a moment this newcomer looked around the bar, as if seeking someone particular, then he caught sight of Robyn and his eyes narrowed.
While David watched in mounting fear, the stranger made his way to their table, pulled up a chair and sat down. “Larry couldn’t come,” he said to Robyn. “Sends his apologies, and will I do instead?”
David stared at Robyn. “Who is this?”
“David. Oh, David …” He saw with amazement that tears were coursing down her cheeks. “I am so … so very sorry.”
Still he did not understand.
“I didn’t level with you. I told my FBI friend I was coming to meet you, and where. I was so scared. You have no idea. I was so scared.”
The man raised ironical eyebrows in David’s direction. “Tom Burroughs,” he said. “FBI. Glad to know you, Mr. Lescombe.”
CHAPTER
30
Shorrocks leaned back to rest his elbows on the arms of his chair, hands steepled in front of him “Run that past me again,” he said softly.
Hayes coughed, the kind of cough, Albert thought, a person uses when he’s nervous and wants to conceal it, not realizing that he only gives the game away. “Lescombe, ah, checked into a Washington hotel on Saturday afternoon around three o’clock and left a tape recorder in his room. It made noises like a guy eating, knives and forks, you know, and then taking a long shower. Fancy editing, acoustics.”
“Fancy my arse,” Albert said. “Anyone could do it. How long before you registered?”
“Say one hour.”
“An hour?”
“Tape lasted forty-five minutes. Then there was nothing for a while and our guys got suspicious.”
“And then,” Shorrocks said, “you lost him. This civil servant, this … amateur.”
Hayes said nothing.
It was just after dawn on Sunday morning, six days since Anna Lescombe had disappeared. Hayes, Redman, Shorrocks, and Albert occupied a barely decorated cubbyhole without a window on the top floor of the American Embassy in London. Redman’s offices were not deemed sufficiently secure for this meeting. A background hum was supposedly guaranteed to frustrate would-be eavesdroppers, but Albert mistrusted modem technology. He had seen it fall apart too often.
He could scarcely conceal his frustration. The precious contract was slipping away with him, along with the Lescombes, and Krysalis and every other goddamn thing. Even if he got clearance now, this minute, whom should he go after—David or Anna? And all because these stupid, so-called “experts” couldn’t stake out a hotel room.
He didn’t know what he wanted from this meeting. Suppose Redman had changed his mind, was now prepared to sanction Anna Lescombe’s death. Why should he assign the job to Albert, rather than his own side? Albert didn’t like the thought of competition.
On the other hand, if Redman was still wimpish and wielded his not inconsiderable influence, his attitude might yet discourage Shorrocks from sending Albert to Greece in pursuit of his prey. There was never anything in writing on these touchy occasions, the legendary “contracts” were purely gentlemen’s agreements. Albert wouldn’t be truly free to act at will until he’d left England.
He ground his teeth, and kept silent.
Redman and his two English guests sat in easy chairs placed around a coffee table. Each held a copy of Hayes’ report, they might have been actors at a read-in. Hayes alone occupied a stark metal and plastic chair. He was sitting higher than the others and this should have given him an edge but did not. Perched up there he looked more like a schoolboy on trial before his betters, Albert thought with barren satisfaction, monitors conducting an informal inquiry into misdemeanors among the lowest grade.
“I am sorry, Jeremy.” Redman’s voice was rich with melancholy. “No one’s infallible.”
“Funny.” Shorrocks, at least, was enjoying this, Albert could see. “Funny, I thought that was the point of your people, Louis. Infallibility. Or so we were given to believe.”
“Where is he now?” Albert did not expect a concrete answer, but he wanted the question written into the record. He knew he should have insisted on tracking Lescombe.
“We’ll pick him up, sure thing.” Hayes looked straight ahead as he spoke, not meeting anyone’s eye. “Just a matter of time. He must know people in the U.S.; we can trace them.”
“Then you’ll have better luck than we did,” Shorrocks said in a tone that undercut his polite smile.
“At least we know where we stand,” said Redman. “By running away, Lescombe proves he was in it from the start.” His face brightened. “As we did suggest to you earlier, I seem to remember.”
“You did,” Shorrocks acknowledged. “Although if someone attacked me in a Cornish backwater, I might be tempted to run, too.”
“Well, at least you’d agree it’s unlikely Lescombe wouldn’t have known his wife was consulting a psychiatrist over a long period?”
“He’s not a psychiatrist,” Albert put in, with tendentious appeal to accuracy. “He’s a psychotherapist and hypnotherapist, as well as being a qualified psychologist.”
“Thank you, Colonel.” Louis Redman’s most ambassadorial smile was Albert’s sole reward. “To resume, however, what we have to concentrate on now is, who’s he going to meet and where? His wife?”
“Don’t think so, Louis,” Shorrocks ventured. “She went east, he’s gone west. Ne’er the twain shall meet, I fear. Kipling, and so on. Looks like a marital double-cross, after all.”
“Well, okay, Jeremy.” Redman dusted an invisible piece of fluff from his right knee. He did it several times, peering closer with each sweep of the palm, but the fluff was evidently a resistant strain. “Do you have any suggestions, maybe?”
Shorrocks and Albert exchanged glances before simultaneously focusing on Hayes’s hunched figure. It was obvious that they could think of at least one.
“Kleist,” Shorrocks said, “appears to be the key. Albert, you’re a little more up on him …?”
“I went back to that restaurant with a photograph we dug out of his permanent-residence application, old, but they recognized him at once. So there’s a longstanding connection between him and Anna Lescombe. He’s disappeared, too. We’re wiring our photo to Athens, so that they can show it to the airfield people at that place, what was it called?”
“Igouminitsa.”
“Igouminitsa, right. We’ve also got our consul working on it, but we don’t expect much from him.”
“Why not?” Redman asked.
“First, because our consulate on Corfu isn’t geared to this kind of thing; second, because the holiday season’s just starting to build and the place is filling up with tourists. Greek organization isn’t the greatest, of course. Trying to interest the KYP in tracing what looks like an unhappily married woman running away with her lover requires more ingenuity than we possess. Sony.”
“Even if the woman in question has a NATO file stashed away in her luggage?”
“A joint English and American file, Louis.” Albert paused to let the message sink in. “I’m sure it won’t come as any surprise to learn that you’re not terribly popular in Athens at the best of times. In any event, you don’t want us to be too specific, remember? Keep the lid on, and all that?”
“Okay, okay.” Redman sighed. “Didn’t this guy Kleist leave a forwarding address? Contact phone number?”
“We have a problem there. We don’t want to ask too many questions up front.”
“Why?”
Shorrocks cleared his throat and Albert looked across at him, grateful to have the heat taken off. “Policy, Louis. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. Kleist could be heading up a cell. If, for the sake of example, his housekeeper—he has a housekeeper, by the way—is in cahoots with him, it would be bad tactics to march up to the fron
t door with a warrant.”
Redman essayed another of his famous diplomatic smiles. Somebody, perhaps a CIA charm expert, had schooled him in the need to reveal all the teeth back as far as the molars when you smiled. Albert wondered if he realized that, since his teeth were big and he suffered from receding gums, the effect could be disturbingly sharklike, the opposite of what he intended. Presumably not.
“Therefore?” Redman inquired.
“Therefore, we intend to enter by the, ah, back door. Which takes a little time to organize. As you know.”
Or should by now, Albert mentally added. Except that you CIA people all seem to possess the two-second memories associated with particularly slow-witted goldfish. My God, but if only I’d had the sense to stick with Lescombe …
“Time is something we do not have.”
“I know, Louis, but—”
“Excuse me, Jeremy, but I’d like to give you the one piece of good news. As far as our detectors on the ground can tell, the Soviets haven’t yet taken a single step that might be consistent with their knowing about Krysalis. State now accepts that the risk of their obtaining the file outweighs any short-term inconvenience factor in Europe from disclosing the Krysalis directives and options to our allies. If it will help obtain their cooperation, tell them what the file contains. As of now nothing, repeat nothing, is barred.”
“Thank you, Louis.”
Albert toyed briefly with the idea of telling Redman that this permission had already been anticipated, which would have given him great satisfaction. But then he caught sight of Shorrocks’ angelic expression and thought better of it. “Albert,” said Redman, “I’d like you to liaise—”
An electric bell set just below the ceiling in one corner of the airless little room suddenly sprang to life. Redman grunted in annoyance and jerked his thumb at Hayes, who went to open the door and returned carrying a sheet of paper.
While he was doing that, Albert’s mind busied itself trying to complete Redman’s sentence for him. Liaise with whom? About what? His eyes narrowed as he studied the American’s face. What did that man want?
What might he be persuaded to want?
Redman looked at the sheet of paper, then handed it back to Hayes with a lift of the eyebrows, but the other man shook his head.
“Jeremy, does this name mean anything to you?”
Shorrocks took the paper and shared it with Albert. “Russian?” queried the latter. “Polish, perhaps?”
“I mean, for Christ’s sake …” Hayes sounded relieved to have at last been presented with an outlet for his feelings, “what kind of a name is Melkiovicz?”
CHAPTER
31
The minute they arrived at JFK Robyn excused herself, saying she wanted to visit the women’s room. David shot her a quick glance, aware of what was really in her mind: to get to the nearest phone.
“Come,” Tom Burroughs said, taking his arm. “Let’s go bankrupt ourselves.”
Tom bought his own ticket first, careful not to look at David, before rejoining Robyn at their prearranged rendezvous in the cafeteria. When David gave the British Airways clerk his American Express card and her phone call verified his creditworthiness as meriting a ticket for the morning Concorde to London, he wondered if life would ever again revert to a semblance of normality.
Tom saw him coming a long way off and was on his feet by the time David arrived back at their table. “Take it easy,” he said softly, guiding him into a chair.
“I’m broke now, I suppose. More than broke.”
“Me too.” Tom glumly waved his own boarding pass. “But look at it this way. Do you want to find your wife or not? If so, how much is she worth to you?”
David made the effort to smile. “I really can’t thank you enough for offering to come with me. It makes me feel a whole lot safer.”
He glanced at Robyn. She shook her head and shrugged, minuscule movements scarcely visible to anyone who wasn’t looking for them.
“Something bothering you, Robyn?” Tom asked.
Robyn fidgeted, smiled wanly. “No.”
“Good,” Tom said. “Now drink some orange juice and relax.”
David couldn’t do that. He knew that Robyn had something to tell him, but not in front of Tom. Something important.
As he looked from Robyn’s concerned face to the genial countenance of her FBI contact, he felt only the tension of the past few hours. The gray-and-white boarding pass in his top pocket, evidence of a freedom that for the moment was being allowed to continue, merely heightened his sense of foreboding.
Last night, Tom Burroughs had shepherded him and Robyn to a Pontiac Sunbird parked near the bar where they’d been drinking. David, supposing this was the end of the line, got into the back without a protest. The first hint that he might still have a chance came when Tom parked the car under one of the approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge and switched license plates, a tactic he was to repeat twice more before dawn.
“What’s happening?” David asked Robyn. A little to his surprise, he found he did not resent the way she’d turned him in. If their roles had been reversed, he might well have done the same.
“I don’t know.” She was sitting in front. Now she turned sideways toward him and clutched the headrest of the driver’s seat, her fingers gripping it with nervous spasms. “I’ve met this guy, once, briefly. He’s something to do with Lawrence Pattmore, the friend I told you about. But I … he’s coming back.”
She released her hold on the headrest and turned away.
“Shouldn’t really be doing this,” Tom confided as he got back into the driver’s seat. “Though it seems like Robyn okays you … is that right, Robyn …?” She nodded. “And I don’t want anyone to know where you are for the time being. David—I’m going to call you David, if I may?”
“Yes.”
“We have some serious things to discuss.” He shifted into first gear and pulled away from the curb. “Depending on how it goes, I may make a report, I don’t know yet. The thing is, I feel we in the bureau ought to have some instructions concerning you, and yet we don’t. It bugs me. I tingle right down my backbone—you ever have that sensation?”
“Sometimes.”
“Okay. You listen to your tingling?”
“Sometimes.”
Tom laughed, a relaxed, country-club sound that David found reassuring. “For the record, you are officially clean as far as my office is concerned. We have no interest in you. Now you tell me, should I be interested in you?”
David hesitated. He felt drawn to this man, a handsome, middle-aged, just the right side of fat American, with a pleasing manner and homely voice that reminded him of the actor fames Stewart. But the thought of confiding in a stranger, even a friend of a friend of Robyn’s, gave him pause.
Robyn, sensing his doubts, turned around and said, “You’d better tell him. The harder you make it for the FBI, the harder they’ll have to be on you.”
David, still unsure, had replied lightly, “He can be hard?”
“Don’t be fooled. They’re all hard.” She paused. “Even Lawrence.”
They’d driven around New York while David, haltingly at first, and then with greater fluency, explained the situation. At one point Tom stopped in Chinatown to stock up on spare ribs and Coke, but mostly he just drove without speaking. When David at last had finished, he kept his thoughts to himself for a good few miles.
“One thing occurs to me,” he said at last, “and it’s this. We aren’t stopping off anyplace until we get to the airport tomorrow morning.” He checked his watch. “Correction, this morning.”
“You’re letting me go back to England?”
“I’ve no reason to hold you. But I sure as hell know one thing, my English friend: I ought to have a reason. If all you say is true, and I don’t doubt a word of it, the CIA should be breaking every back in Langley to finger you. There’s a procedure for that, well-worn and true. It involves briefing the FBI for what we call cooperative action. Yet yo
u don’t show up in that frame.”
“You’ve made inquiries about me?”
“Sure. Where the FBI and the CIA interface, there are gray areas. Give and take, you know? We hack their computer, they hack ours, nobody sweats. But sometimes the gray area turns into a big black hole. So much nothingness you can’t believe.”
“What does that tell you?”
Tom shrugged. “God knows. I plug in my computer and tap a few keys, and what my screen notifies me is that David Lescombe exists and is of relevance to the United States of America, but that at the same time he does not exist and is of no relevance to the United States of America. With me?”
“Enough to feel pretty sick.”
“Yeah. I need gas; you guys watch out for someplace open, will you?”
The found an all-night gas station. While Tom went inside to pay, David leaned forward across the front seat and said, “Do you trust him?”
She did not answer at once. When she did find words, they were not entirely reassuring. “I … think so.”
“What’s that meant to mean? He’s not who he says he is?”
“Oh, yes. But …”
“But what?”
“Remember what he said about … tingling sensations?”
David sat back slowly. “It seems odd that he should help me,” he admitted. “Isn’t he double-crossing his own side?”
“I just … don’t … know. Look, David, when we get to the airport, I’ll make some excuse to leave you and I’ll phone Lawrence. Ssh, he’s coming over.”
David waited until Tom had again settled himself in his seat. Then he said, “Why are you doing this?”
“Helping you, you mean?” Tom eased his Sunbird into the scant, small-hours traffic before he replied. “Robyn’s a part of it,” he said at last. “That’s a big plus. But the real answer to your question is that the CIA has been trashing us for too long. I think you’re a straight guy and the company’s using you. I’ve seen it before and it makes me want to puke. Call it idealism, if you like.” He gave one of his relaxed laughs. “In fact, I really wouldn’t mind if you accused me of being an idealist, no one ever has before.”
Krysalis: Krysalis Page 29