The Mulberry Bush

by Charles McCarry

He handed me a flash drive.

  I said, “Who are these people?”

  “Americans who are betraying their country by working for us.”

  “Are any of them inside Headquarters or involved with someone who is?”

  “Their handlers don’t think so.”

  “Are any of them connected to terrorism?”

  Boris said, “They are mostly of the type we have been discussing, so probably they are sympathetic to suicide bombers. But as far as we know none of them makes bombs.”

  I handed the flash drive back to him. “Send this to the FBI,” I said. “It would be easier for you to do that, no?”

  “Not without telling them the source. You are none of their business.”

  Boris shook his head. Americans! He put his hands behind his back, refusing to accept the flash drive. It was an incongruously peevish gesture.

  I said, “Boris, hear me. This list is useless to Headquarters, which has no police powers and is prohibited by law from investigating U. S. citizens or running operations against them on American soil.”

  “Ha! No exceptions?”

  He already knew, or thought he knew, the answer to that question.

  Boris said, “But you can recruit your fellow Americans, turn them, give us a reason to punish them.”

  “It’s seldom worth the bother. And wooing them only makes them feel important.”

  Boris and I were speaking Russian now, but softly, and for the benefit of anyone who might be watching we wore jovial expressions and sometimes for effect, Boris laughed loudly.

  I handed the flash drive back to him. Again he refused it.

  He said, “Why are you doing this?”

  I said, “I came for product. This is not product.”

  “Then tell me, please, what would you call product?”

  “Paté de foie gras is product. This stuff is the same color but it comes from the other end of the goose.”

  “You look like a nice boy, but you are very uncultured. Again, why are you here if not to receive information?”

  “To begin the work we agreed to do together,” I said. “I want the names and the current locations of your service’s most effective officers who are targeted on the United States.”

  After taking this body punch, Boris closed his eyes—no movement, no sign of life. He didn’t seem even to be breathing. Then he held out his hand, palm upward. I put the flash drive on his palm. He made a fist.

  He said, “What would you do with this list of our most valued officers?”

  “Find a way to make it look like I have turned them and they work for us.”

  “To what end?”

  “Then your service will kill them all. You want to damage the system. I want to do the same. Your side will think it is penetrated. My side will think the same. Panic will lift its ugly head. They will start to destroy themselves.”

  “The dog will bite itself, is that the objective?”

  “Dogs, plural.”

  “Then both of us will die.”

  “What if we do?”

  Boris said, “How much goose liver do I get in return?”

  “Payment in kind. The names of our most effective people.”

  “Your service has no effective people where Russia is concerned. Every single source your service has ever had in the USSR or the Russian Federation has not been recruited. He has been a traitor who volunteered.”

  Just like Boris.

  I said, “True enough. Another good reason to save the American taxpayer a hundred billion dollars a year.”

  Boris went on the alert. “That’s Headquarters’s budget?”

  “No, a figure of speech. I have no idea what it costs to breed dinosaurs. Boris, if you want to go on with this, I need to take something useful home with me. For now it doesn’t have to be one of the crown jewels, merely a sign of good faith.”

  He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a different flash drive. This one had a tiny red dot on it. The other had not.

  Gazing at a long-legged young woman in athletic garb who all of a sudden was running in place within earshot, he said, in barely audible tones, “We must be very careful. The next time I’m available I will mail you a postcard of a city. Prague means Sofia, Budapest means Bucharest, Trieste means Berlin. Date is fourteen days after the date written on the postcard, not the postmark. Same time as today, place is always in front of the local parliament building. Opposite sidewalks, you on the parliament side, me across the street. From there you will follow me to the place where we will do business.”

  “Fallback?”

  “No fallback. Be there the first time, on time.”

  Another girl caught up to the one who had been running in place and they took off together.

  Boris had nothing more to report or demand. Without so much as a nod, he stood up and took his leave.

  On the morning I got back to Washington, a Saturday, I slept until noon, then read the mail at the breakfast table while Luz showered and decided what to wear for the weekend outing she had planned. She had made arrangements to go to colonial Williamsburg, dine, and spend the night making the bed squeak at the Williamsburg Inn. Williamsburg was not far from the Plantation, so the weekend would give me an opportunity to meditate about Father.

  Among the junk mail and the bills on the kitchen counter I found a letter with an actual postage stamp on it from a lawyer in Eugene, Oregon, advising me that my mother had died two months earlier of pancreatic cancer and bequeathed me her entire estate. For details, call the following number.

  This was the first word of her I had had for ten years. I told myself I felt nothing. I lied. I stopped breathing. I smothered the sob that rose from my chest.

  The picture that came into my mind at this moment was not Mother the cool beauty but Father the jaunty hobo, smiling wryly as he welcomed her to eternity or wherever it was that people like them went to shun each other after death.

  21

  At Headquarters, the flash drive Boris had given me was treated with the utmost caution. The computer techs assumed, as they were conditioned to do, that the drive had been loaded with an undetectable virus or worm or some other as yet unnamed thing designed to infect the entire Headquarters system. The fact that they were unable to detect any such virus or worm in this particular flash drive only intensified their suspicions: If it was undetectable, it must exist. While waiting for them to think of just inserting the flash drive in a cheap laptop off-premises and then dissolving the hard drive in a bucket of acid, I summarized the meeting in Helsinki to a noncommittal Tom Terhune.

  He said, “I guess it’s a start. Amzi wants to talk to you. But not till he’s read the material.”

  Finally the flash drive was deemed to be free of viruses and worms or any other insidious threat. I had taken it for granted that Boris was not stupid enough for it to be otherwise, but as Amzi always said, you can’t assume a fucking thing. On Thursday he summoned me to his office, with Tom tagging along as usual—why he tolerated these humiliations I don’t know—and delivered an Amzi-style précis of the contents.

  The information on the flash drive, he said, had turned out to be interesting. One of the secretaries in the Bogotá embassy had been photographing cables and dispatches and the officers of the station and the license plates of their cars with her cell phone and handing the images over to a Russian case officer who was her lover. She had been driven into the Russian’s arms by what she now regarded as the sexual harassment by the political officer she worked.

  “She was the PO’s Monica and his wife found out,” Amzi said. “Lucky break for her. According to your friend Boris’s report, this Russian’s got a twelve-inch dick—he’s famous for it. Early in his career, so as to maximize his capabilities, he underwent intensive training in its use on a TDY at a sparrow school.”

  Tom said, “So what now?”

  “Dirty Harry, here, goes to Bogotá after the meeting on Friday.”

  Tom said, “How soon after w
hat meeting?”

  Amzi said, “How about Monday?” He didn’t answer the rest of Tom’s question.

  I said, “We’re meeting with who on Friday?”

  “The Director,” Amzi said. “He wants to give you a token of appreciation for your good work. Eleven o’clock in his reception room. Be there ten minutes early. We’re done.”

  That evening, on the drive home, I called the lawyer in Oregon. He said he would rather not discuss details over the phone. Could I come to Eugene to sign papers and discuss arrangements?

  “Why is that necessary?”

  “Your mother had certain wishes, so it is not just a simple will,” he said. “Your expenses would of course be covered by the estate.”

  “You can’t put this in a letter?”

  “It was one of your mother’s wishes that we not do that.”

  In other words, how about a few billable hours at your inconvenience?

  I said, “Then you’ll have to ignore her wishes.”

  I told him I would not be free to travel for weeks, perhaps longer, and to overnight the documents before the end of the day to the lawyer in McLean my parents had always used.

  The meeting on Friday in the Director’s reception room was short and to the point.

  He said, “Good to see you again. And once again, brilliant work and sincere congratulations. On behalf of the president and all your colleagues, thank you.”

  The short man materialized at the Director’s elbow and handed him a leather box. It was a lot larger than the medal case had been.

  Using my first name, the Director said, “I present this to you as a token of this agency’s appreciation and admiration for your outstanding work.”

  He opened the box and handed it to me. Inside, nestled in velvet, was an exact duplicate of the anthracite-black, custom-made .45-caliber snub-nosed pistol I had left in the trash can in the men’s room of the Sana’a airport after using it to kill three human beings—four if you counted Faraj.

  I said, “Thank you, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  He shook hands with me again, very firm grip, and vanished.

  “The world’s second-most powerful handgun,” Amzi said. “I told you he likes you.”

  The short man reappeared and handed me a sealed, blank manila envelope. I opened it when I returned to my office and found a document granting Luz citizenship and a U. S. passport in her name.

  I waited until morning to present Luz with her new identity. I didn’t mention the .45. It was not a festive moment. She tapped her Certificate of Naturalization, a document that looked something like an enlarged dollar bill that bore her passport photo instead of the picture of a dead president.

  She said, “Ugh.”

  She struggled to prevent whatever it was she was feeling from showing on her face and lost the contest: disgust, resentment. As far as she was concerned, she was living behind enemy lines.

  What else would you expect? She was the daughter of Alejandro and Felicia Aguilar, who in her mind were victims of U. S. imperialism who had died for their political virtue.

  She never forgot that, but she did not really remember her heroic parents. Early in our affair she had told me that she could not summon their faces, their voices, the way they smelled. When she thought about them, what she remembered was their absence after they chose revolution over their only child. Tangible proofs of their existence escaped her.

  She left the room, leaving the passport and naturalization certificate lying among dirty dishes.

  What with the accolades and satisfying Luz’s appetites I had not had time to tell her about my forthcoming trip to Bogotá. This did not seem to be the right moment to break the news, and anyway I knew none of the details she would expect to be told.

  I had no idea how long I would be in Colombia or what I was expected to accomplish after I arrived—try out my brand-new .45 on the stupid little spy in the typing pool? Order her to break up with her Russian and promise never again to violate the espionage laws? Nail the Russian?

  That evening Luz and I dined with one of her Wellesley sorority sisters and the latter’s wife in a posh house on Kalorama Circle. Luz and her classmate, a Department of Justice prosecutor, talked about little besides their reunion, scheduled—this had slipped my mind—for the following weekend. The wife, a very tall black woman who had gone to the University of Connecticut on a basketball scholarship, feared that she would be walking into a den of mean girls who would look down on her school and her student aid.

  Luz and Portia reassured her—“Oh, no, never at Wellesley!”

  But how right she probably was.

  On my way to the office on Monday morning I visited the family lawyer in McLean at the unusual hour of 7:45 A.M. His name was Lester Briggs. He was alone in his firm’s movie set of an office suite: polished mahogany desks and leather chairs, shelves of leather-bound law books, Persian carpets, portraits of dead partners who looked in the pictures as if they, the partners, were the work of a taxidermist.

  Lester Briggs—surprise—was yet another classmate of Father’s. They had lived in the same college. As I began to notice when I was about twelve, Briggs’s wife had showgirl legs and cleavage and a high giddy laugh, a silly combination that drove Mother to distraction. I hadn’t seen him or his sexy wife in twenty years. In those days he had worn the tiny perpetual smirk of the man who had everything and knew he was entitled to it.

  He was almost elderly now—mane of white hair, horn-rimmed reading glasses perched on the bulb of his nose. He had learned to suppress the smirk.

  He looked me up and down and in a mellifluous voice said, “Amazing resemblance. Have a chair.”

  A large loose-leaf binder lay on his desk blotter. He lifted it an inch or two, then dropped it with a thump.

  “This is the documentation of the Stanford J. Lucketts Revocable Trust established by your mother’s second husband. I am given to understand by her lawyer in Oregon that control of the trust passed to her when Mr. Lucketts died two years after they were married. Just before she died she amended the trust, naming you her successor as trustee. Therefore, complete control of the assets of the trust passed to you at the moment of her death.”

  “Why did it take two years for me to find out about it?”

  “The lawyer in Oregon couldn’t locate you, though he conducted a diligent search which will cost the trust about ten thousand dollars in legal fees. My advice is to pay the bill and be done with it. I don’t much care for the way this firm practices law.”

  “Can you handle that?”

  “It would be simpler if you just wrote a check. We can send the check to the lawyer. The checkbooks for the trust are in this binder.”

  Briggs went on. “You have the same powers over the assets as your mother had when she was alive,” he said. “The trust eliminates the need for a will and avoids probate. It is a well-drawn document. It spares the estate the inconvenience and expense of probate. It is as tidy an arrangement as an inheritance can be. There is nothing else you need to sign except signature forms, which we will notarize and forward to the banks and brokerages that hold its assets. They already know that you are the successor trustee, so you have only to register your signature to do whatever you wish to do with those assets. The total in cash, stocks, and bonds is just under two million dollars.”

  I was startled. I said, “How can that be? My mother had no money of her own.”

  “Actually, she did,” Briggs said. “Her government pension, of course, and your father gave her the equity in their house and practically everything else they jointly owned as part of the divorce settlement. She liquidated those assets before she went west and invested the proceeds, about two hundred thousand, in U. S. Treasury bonds. She hadn’t touched this nest egg. Mr. Lucketts seems to have been pretty well off. The initial value of the trust was well over three million, but she had been drawing down on capital for ten years before she passed away.”

  “Lucketts had no children o
f his own?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway it’s immaterial. They are not mentioned in the trust and have no claim on it.”

  “Do you know anything about this man Lucketts?”

  “Apart from what I’ve just told you, no.”

  “So what do I do now?”

  “Sign the paperwork I’ve mentioned.”

  “That’s all?”

  “For the moment, yes.” He handed me the notebook. “Read this and follow the instructions. If you have any problems, call me. Are you married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “No.”

  “You may want to amend the trust to make your wife or someone else your successor as trustee. Otherwise the residue will go to the IRS when you die. If you need help, feel free to call on me.”

  Briggs paused, steepled his fingers, weighed words.

  At last he said, “I think often about your father. After the debacle I tried to locate him, I wanted to help, but he had covered his tracks and the investigators could find no trace of him. Of course, he was a professional who knew how to disappear, so that came as no surprise.”

  A pause.

  After a moment Briggs said, “His life, the way it went, as if there actually is such a thing as malign fate, was a surprise. It baffles me. It baffles everyone who knew him before whatever went wrong, went wrong ….”

  I made a gesture.

  Briggs said, “Am I upsetting you?”

  “There are other subjects I prefer, Mr. Briggs.”

  “‘Lester,’ please. I can understand that, but I must ask you this. Did you see him before the end? Did you communicate?”

  I said, “I saw him. As for communication, not really.”

  “Too bad,” said Mr. Briggs. “Damned shame, all of it.”

  Wasn’t it, though?

  I didn’t tell Luz about the Stanford J. Lucketts Revocable Trust. Three days later I flew to Bogotá. She stayed behind for the Wellesley reunion. I didn’t ask whether or when she might be joining me, but on my last night in Washington we made love from midnight to dawn and she was as enthusiastic as ever.

  “Every time,” she whispered afterward, in Spanish.