"Medici is the in-house nickname for the CIA's four princes —the lords and masters of the Company's four major directorates. Rudge Cleveland was a Medici; he ran Operations. He was a legend in his day. Nobody sneezed in the world of spooks without Rudge Cleveland getting a report on the person's health."
Finn said excitedly, "According to Harry Lahr, when Dewey ran Special Projects, he reported to someone Harry described as 'Egidio's Medici.' "
Pilgrim looked up at Finn. "Your friend de Wey, alias Dewey, ran the CIA's Italian desk during the years that Cleveland was ADDO and then DDO. Desk officers at the Agency report directly to the ADDO, which means that Dewey must have worked for Cleveland before he became a Medici. Which means Dewey and Cleveland already had a working relationship when Cleveland became the deputy director of operations. Then they both retire. Then they both get knocked off in a boating accident."
"Dewey didn't drown in any boating accident off the Florida Keys," Finn said. "He died when his heart stopped beating in an Anasazi ceremonial cave in Frijoles Canyon, New Mexico, two days ago."
"If what you say is true, if de Wey didn't drown, it raises the tantalizing possibility that Cleveland didn't drown either," Pilgrim said. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his stomach, which spilled over his belt, and stared at the ceiling. "I met Cleveland a bunch of times; he used to sit in the very seat you're sitting in, briefing the select committee on his specialty, which was the Cold War. He was what you'd call a Neanderthal when it came to current events. Which is why the Select Committee on Intelligence eventually pushed the director of Central Intelligence to push Cleveland to accept early retirement."
"What is a Neanderthal on current events?" Finn asked.
"In the early nineties, with twenty-five or so years of Soviet ops under his belt, Cleveland ran smack up against the conventional wisdom touted by the analysts' side of the CIA and almost everybody else in the
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Washington establishment—namely that perestroika was genuine; that the Soviet Union was confronting an economic and ultimately a political upheaval of cataclysmic proportions which would oblige the Soviet leadership to look at the world with new eyes. In short, the Cold War was over. Trouble was that Cleveland—who could name every member of the Politburo, who could describe their tastes in wine and women, who knew whose son had married whose daughter, who knew where the bodies were buried and who had buried them—this same Cleveland argued that perestroika was a passing fad, this season's skirt. He made the case that Russian history was littered with the wreckage of reform movements. For him, Russia was and would remain the archenemy of Western democracy. Anyone who didn't see this was blind or, worse, a traitor."
"So he was fired."
"He was eased out. The select committee can live with dissenting views, but the bottom line was that nobody trusted him. It's an old problem at the CIA, almost an occupational disease. Like a lot of folks over at the Agency, Cleveland spent most of his professional life breaking laws in foreign countries. We felt, given his strong views on the subject of Russia, that he'd have no qualms about breaking laws in the U.S."
Pilgrim pushed back his chair, walked over to the bank of telephones, switched the red one to a speakerphone so that Finn could hear the other end of the conversation and hit the button.
The eager voice of a young man came over the speaker. "Federal Bureau of Statistics, demographic section. Duty Officer Stillman speaking. What can we do for you?"
Pilgrim called into the tiny microphone, "This is Pilgrim over at the select committee."
"You don't have to shout," the duty officer said. "I can hear you real fine. You want to enter your identifying code number?"
Pilgrim punched in a series of numbers.
"Thank you, Mr. Pilgrim. How can I help you?"
Pilgrim said, "We want to check out something. You had a Medici name of Cleveland, as in the city of the same name, also a retired desk officer name of de Wey—I'm spelling that with a small d as in delta, then an e, new word, capital W as in whiskey, then an e and a y. Both men were reported to have died in a boating accident about two years ago. Can you dig out the file on the accident?"
Walking Back the Cat
"Wait one," the duty officer said. A minute later he came back on the line. "What exactly do you want to know?"
"My short biography says their sailboat was caught in a storm off the Florida Keys. Were their bodies autopsied to confirm the cause of death?"
"There were no bodies to autopsy," the duty officer reported. "A commercial trawler came across the abandoned boat floating upside down. The Coast Guard combed the area for forty-eight hours. All they found was a partially inflated life raft, also floating upside down."
Pilgrim said, "Thanks," and cut the connection. He looked across the room at Finn and laughed. "This story is getting curiouser and curiouser," he said.
Finn gestured toward the computer with his chin. "What other locks can you pick?"
"The sky's the limit."
"If I was to give you an unlisted phone number in Houston, could you come up with the address?" lry me.
Walking Back the Cat
laugh. "Mistakes don't matter. If something worth doing, worth doing badly."
"There is still a stretch of road ahead of us."
"Strive on alone," Le Juif said. "For me, quest ends here."
Parsifal glanced around to make sure nobody could overhear them. The old woman in the next bed appeared to be unconscious. In a windowed cubicle off the intensive-care unit, a nurse filed her nails as she monitored heartbeats on a computer screen. Parsifal bent over the rail. "We have been betrayed," he whispered.
Le Juifs eyes twitched open in their dark sockets.
Talking rapidly, Parsifal made his pitch. "Me, you, La Gioconda—we all toil for Prince Igor. But Prince Igor does not toil for the cause of Marx, of Engels, of Lenin, of Bukharin. He does not share our dream. If Prince Igor gets his way, greed will smother justice and generosity."
A wild look appeared in Le Juifs gaping eyes. He tried to raise his head off the pillow, but fell back weakly. "Let me die in peace," he muttered.
"Prince Igor is not one of us. Somewhere along the way he managed to take control of our cell. There's a nest of ex-CIA agents working out of New Mexico. They are organized into something they call the consortium. It is highly compartmented. When one of the agents wanted to get in touch with another, he planted a message with a cutout. You were the cutout. You passed it on."
"La Gioconda said they were subcontractors—"
"One of the middle-level consortium agents who goes by the name of Dewey debriefed a Russian woman defector hidden in a safe house in Dallas. When he had squeezed the lemon dry, he decided to get rid of her. Someone in the consortium passed the assignment on to you. You passed it on to me."
Le Juif gasped for words. "If she was Russian defector, logical Igor would want to silence her—"
"You passed on orders for me to eliminate a young man who lived on an Apache reservation near New Jerusalem. He had stepped on the consortium's toes; he had stumbled on how they got their hands on operating funds. It was the consortium, staffed by former CIA agents, that was annoyed with him, that wanted him out of the way. It was our network, staffed by KGB agents, that was called in to execute the death sentence."
White spittle appeared at the corner of Le Juifs mouth. "A life's work . . . ne vozmozhna!"
Robert Littell
"It is possible," Parsifal hissed under his breath. He stood up and leaned over the bed rail until his face was hovering above Le JuiPs. "I interrogated the man who goes by the name of Dewey. He used to run a unit called Special Projects at the CIA before he signed on with the consortium. Special Projects was rabidly anti-Russian; it took the line that Moscow was the eternal enemy, that the Cold War was only beginning. While I was questioning Dewey, it suddenly dawned on him who I was. Tou must be the Jew's Parsifal/ he said. How could he know I was the J
ew's Parsifal unless he and his CIA friends had penetrated our cell?"
The head nurse appeared at the door. "One more minute," she called. "Your friend needs peace and quiet."
Parsifal stared down at Le Juif. "Either La Gioconda or Prince Igor is a double agent."
"Ne vozmozhna" Le Juif repeated. "La Gioconda I have known my whole life. As for Prince Igor, La Gioconda passed on the identifying cryptogram known only to me and our masters in Moscow."
"The consortium had a Russian defector," Parsifal reminded Le Juif. "Dewey debriefed her for four months. She told me so herself. The time frame fits; four months after they installed her in the Dallas apartment, Prince Igor turned up to reactivate La Gioconda and you and me. And you handed me Prince Igor's first wetwork assignment; he wanted me to eliminate the woman in the Dallas apartment."
Le Juif's hand came up to his gaunt neck. "I feel death ... in my throat. What. . . taking him so long?"
Parsifal realized he was squeezing Le Juif's shoulder. Letting go, he saw that he had bruised his skin. "Who is Prince Igor?" he asked.
Le Juif shook his head. "Don't know . . ."
"How do I contact him?"
"The way I do . . . through Gioconda."
"How do I contact La Gioconda?"
"Against all rules . . ."
"You have to tell me." When Le Juif didn't respond, Parsifal grasped his bony shoulders and pulled him into a sitting position. "Mozhna minya gavorit"
The nurse monitoring the computer screen looked up from her fingernails. "Hey, what's going on?" she called through the window.
"Gavorit!" Parsifal cried.
Walking Back the Cat
Le Juif started to say something. Cradling the old man in his arms, Parsifal put his ear next to Le JuiPs mouth and listened.
The head nurse came charging into the ward. "What in God's name do you think you're doing?" she shouted.
Gently Parsifal lowered Le Juif back onto the bed. "Die in peace, old man," he murmured. Til set things right."
The nurse grabbed Parsifal's sleeve and pulled him roughly toward the door. "Get out of here," she said through clenched teeth. She turned back to the bed and felt for Le Juif's pulse.
Le Juif could make out Parsifal gazing at him for a long moment from the door before disappearing down the corridor. Then he pressed his eyes closed. Tears, squeezed out from under his lids, trickled down the furrows of his cheeks. The head nurse fluffed the pillow under his head and stroked his hair, which was damp with sweat and sticking to his scalp. "Rest now," she said soothingly. "Sleep."
When she had gone, Le Juif reached over and worked the intravenous tube out of the socket of the needle piercing his vein. He twisted his head and watched the syrupy liquid fall, drop by drop, onto the sheet whose whiteness dazzled his eyes. After a while objects blurred, a phenomenon he attributed to the onset of snow blindness. Then, with his eyes wide open, he ceased to see. At that instant everything became crystal clear, as if it had been brought into sharp focus with a sudden twist of a knob. Le Juif, stark naked, was standing on a shore washed by waves that tickled the sand out from under his toes when they receded. He could hear the wind whispering past his ear. He could feel the cool wetness of the sand under his bare feet and the warmth of the sun on his erect penis. He could make out the balloon soaring into the stratosphere, growing smaller and smaller until it was lost from sight.
His caked lips moving imperceptibly, Le Juif mouthed the last words generated by his dying brain. "Hang on to the dream . . ."
Walking Back the Cat
Swan Song presided over the controlled panic of the war room with his habitual coolness. "We need to look past the trees in order to see the woods," he said. "We need to perceive a pattern." He pulled his silver worry beads from the pocket of his windbreaker and began working them through his fingers. Click, click. "We appear to have lost three agents." Click, click. "One of them, Dewey, is known to have died servicing a dead drop he used with Harry Lahr. According to our logs, Dewey was servicing the dead drop at Lahr's initiative." Click, click. "But Lahr couldn't have summoned him there, at least not of his own free will, because he himself had previously been summoned to a rendezvous with Early from which neither man returned." Click, click. "From these slender threads we can construct a worst-case scenario: it is beginning to look as if someone is walking back the cat on the consortium."
"This someone, God knows how, became suspicious of Early," Miss Abescat said breathlessly.
"He talked Early into luring Lahr to the quarry," proposed Lefler, the long-haired computer whiz. "After which he prevailed upon Lahr to lure Dewey to the Anasazi ceremonial cave."
"He was hoping Dewey would lead him to you," said J. J. Knopf, the Adobe Palace's burly security chief. He absently ran a finger under the strap of his holster where it chafed the skin on his shoulder. "But Dewey died on him."
"Which brings us to the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question," said Swan Song. Click, click. "Did Dewey die before talking about the Adobe Palace, or after?"
"Clearly before" suggested Miss Abescat hopefully, "or else we would have had a big bad wolf knocking on our door by now."
Lefler swiveled three hundred and sixty degrees in his chair. "It could be the Apaches," he said.
J. J. Knopf agreed. "They knew Early. They also knew Lahr. Somehow they must have put two and two together."
"In which case," said Miss Abescat, "they'd have reason to be pissed re the situation, since it's the profits from their casino that's paying our phone bill."
"The Apaches are certainly prime suspects," Swan Song said thoughtfully. "The next logical step is take a careful look at Watershed Station."
He walked over to the window and watched the six off-duty contract employees playing volleyball on a makeshift court. There was a burst of
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gleeful bantering every time one of them spiked the ball. Near the Adobe Palace's great arched double doors, Gonzales could be seen topping off the Jeep from a jerry can. Swan Song caught his attention with a wave. "How soon can you put the show on the road?" he called down.
"Ready when you are, Boss," Gonzales shouted back.
Making his way through the station's barracks to a small office that doubled as a bedroom, Swan Song laced on a pair of lightweight hiking boots, then took the night binoculars and a shoulder holster with a long-barreled Smith & Wesson wedged in it from their pegs on the adobe wall. He removed his windbreaker, strapped on the shoulder holster and climbed back into the windbreaker. Walking toward the Jeep, he skirted the volleyball court. "Who's winning?" he asked.
A young lawyer who had been Swan Song's factotum in a previous incarnation said with a laugh, "Bolsheviks twelve, Mensheviks nine."
Minutes later Gonzales, with Swan Song next to him in the passenger seat, wheeled the Jeep through the double doors of the triangular fortress. Gonzales's cousin, a Brazilian contract employee armed with an Uzi submachine gun, guarded the narrow steel bridge spanning the arroyo over which cars had to pass to reach the fortress. He raised his hand in salute as the Jeep, kicking up a trail of dust on the unpaved road, sped past.
For half an hour the Jeep followed the trail snaking along the chalk cliffs until it came out on a bleak, arid no-man's-land swept by the wind and baked by the sun. Along an arroyo that filled with water in the rainy season but was passable now, the Jeep jolted down to the firebreak, which knifed through the thick forest of scrub oak. When the firebreak split, Swan Song waved the driver onto the right fork. Twice Gonzales had to pull up and haul away dead trees that had fallen across the break. The sun was sinking behind the hills by the time the Jeep reached the plateau above the oval lake.
Gonzales cut the motor and began to roll himself a cigarette. Swan Song took the night binoculars and, jumping down from boulder to boulder, made his way to a large overhang not far from where Rattlesnake Wash gushed out of the lake and ran down and around Watershed Station. Lying flat on the shelf of ro
ck, he removed his Ray-Bans, trained his binoculars on the Apache village and activated the infrared night vision. Starting on the western end of Sore Loser Road, he surveyed the ramshackle wooden houses one by one. He watched the Apache women wheeling Indians in wicker chairs up a ramp and into the old-age home.
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He observed several young Indians sitting around a small fire in a back lot, passing a pipe from one hand to the next. Half a dozen Indian women who had been weeding vegetable gardens on either side of Rattlesnake Wash could be seen trudging uphill carrying their hoes on their shoulders. Training his night glasses on the field behind the general store, he watched a heavyset Indian winch the motor out of a pickup.
A young woman with short-cropped hair appeared at the back door of the general store carrying a straw hamper covered with a dish towel. Leaving the motor hanging from the winch, the Indian met her halfway, took the basket and set out across Sore Loser Road and downhill. He crossed one of the wooden footbridges over the wash and waded through a field filled with shoulder-high corn. At the far edge of the field, he turned down a narrow path that ran parallel to a drainage ditch and wound up at the door of a two-room shack on an out-of-the-way rise above a curve in the river. A faint light glowed in one of the windows. The Indian with the basket stopped to talk to a thin Indian who materialized from behind some bushes. The thin Indian, who cradled a shotgun in his arms, melted back into the bushes. The Indian with the basket pushed through the door into the shack.
A few minutes later he and a younger one-armed Indian holding a pistol in his hand emerged from the shack. Sandwiched between them was a heavy man whose wrists appeared to be bound behind his back. The two Indians led him down to the river, where they untied his hands. The heavy man turned away and urinated into the bushes. Then he knelt down and splashed water onto his face and neck. The one-armed Indian pulled him to his feet. The other Indian bound his wrists behind his back again. Then the two Indians led him back up to the shack. Minutes later they came out with a second man, short, muscular, balding, with disheveled clothing and a bow tie hanging loose around his collar. He too was led to the river's edge and allowed to urinate and rinse before being led back to the shack.
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