"Were you scared?" Eskinewah would ask.
"You got to be kidding. Me? Scared?"
Fighting back tears, Doubting Thomas trembled on the dirt floor. If an animal had touched off the explosion below the fortress, how could the Apaches ever reach him?
Fact of the matter was he was half-scared out of his wits.
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praetorians were here to make certain it did —nobody who hadn't been cleared would get within shouting distance of the Jogger.
Smiling to himself, Parsifal kicked at a pigeon pecking at his shoe. To do what Prince Igor wanted him to do, he didn't need to get within shouting distance of the Jogger.
A white-haired woman wearing lace gloves and a pillbox hat with a dark veil draped over her eyes came limping up the street with the aid of a thin bamboo cane. She had on an ankle-length overcoat despite the heat, and sturdy lace-up shoes, one with a corrective heel. Drawing abreast of Parsifal, she paused to chase away the birds with the tip of her cane. "Pigeons are filthy creatures," she remarked. She spoke English with a middle European accent. "I read somewhere that they spread disease and death."
Parsifal had arranged to meet La Gioconda next to the river across the street from the Inn on the Alameda, but he had expected someone younger to turn up; on the telephone her voice had sounded as if it belonged to a woman in her forties. He delivered his half of the recognition cryptogram.
"Death is a debt one owes to nature."
The woman's painted lips stretched into a bitter smile. "Le Juif has paid."
She hobbled over and settled with an effort onto the bench next to Parsifal. Her right leg was stretched out stiffly in front of her; Parsifal noticed the tip of a metal brace around her bare ankle.
"So you are the legendary Parsifal."
He laughed under his breath.
Lowering her voice, she switched into Russian. "You were with Le Juif before he died?" she asked.
He nodded.
"Are you aware that he killed himself?"
"No, but it doesn't surprise me. Le Juif was a man of great integrity. There is a certain dignity in dictating terms to death when you reach the end of the quest."
With a flick of her head and a stab of her hand, La Gioconda raised the veil from her eyes. "Over the years Le Juif spoke highly of you. He said you had the most demanding job of all of us. He said you had to be mad to do what you did. Are you mad?"
"There are moments when I think I am searching for the Holy Grail. There are others when I think the quest is madness."
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"Tell me what Le Juif said to you when you saw him in the hospital."
"He said we had made mistakes. He said the mistakes didn't matter. He said if something is worth doing—"
La Gioconda turned her face toward the sun and closed her eyes. "It is worth doing badly. That was a refrain he repeated many times over the years. It was more or less his credo. Le Juif was not a perfectionist; quite the contrary, he assumed that perfection was not something Homo sapiens could aspire to. As a child, you must understand, he saw a side to the human race that marked him—some might say warped him —for life. He was imprisoned in Auschwitz. His mother and father and two older sisters were selected for the gas chambers. It was only the timely arrival of our Red Army that saved his life." She looked at Parsifal. "Did he say anything to you . . . about me? Did he send any message ... to me?"
Parsifal tossed another peanut to the pigeons milling around beyond the range of La Gioconda's cane. "When he told me how to find you, he instructed me to convey to you his. . . esteem."
"His esteem . . . yes. I can see him baring his tobacco-stained teeth in a twisted smile and saying that. I can tell you—where is the harm now? — that we were lovers once, Le Juif and I, a lifetime ago when people still made love, as opposed to the violent act of penetration that passes for love-making today. But love was not a word that could pass his lips. Yes, I can hear his voice in my ear. Esteem" She shook her head. "I am. . . ." She smiled to mask her grief. "I am pleased to have had his esteem. He was a great idealist, and in his way a great man." La Gioconda smiled again. "We met in a center for displaced persons after the Great Patriotic War. We dedicated our lives to the cause of Communism. Together we volunteered to work for the KGB, we trained together, we labored together in this abominable country for twenty-eight years. We grew old, but not together. Now and then I would receive in the mail picture postal cards from different places with innocuous sentences scrawled across them, and the words "Strive on" or "Victory is a foregone conclusion" written in minuscule letters under the stamp. Are you able to visualize it, Parsifal? There I was, striving on because I could not conceive of an alternative; I no longer understood what victory was, and I certainly did not believe it was a foregone conclusion. Still, I sucked at Le Juifs postal cards the way a bee sucks at a sunflower."
Moved by her own story, she fell silent for a moment. Then she said, "In the beginning we would meet two or three times a year in cheap ho-
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tels in out-of-the-way cities. I would slip a ring on my finger and we would register as man and wife. We would eat dinner and leave a generous gratuity for the proletarians who waited on the tables and washed the dishes. We would sleep in the same bed. We continued to sleep in the same bed on these rare meetings long after Le Juif ceased to function as a man."
La Gioconda's tone turned professional. "How is it that you knew where to find Le Juif? How is it that you were able to talk him into giving you my coordinates? Le Juif was a stickler for craft. There was a method to our madness. Prince Igor contacted me, I contacted Le Juif, Le Juif contacted you."
Parsifal looked the old woman in the eye. "We have been betrayed," he announced. He saw her wince, as if she had been struck across the face. "The traitor had to be either you or Prince Igor. Le Juif vouched for you, which left Prince Igor." He went on to explain the sequence of events that had led him to this conclusion: how a rogue group of former CIA agents, working out of New Mexico and calling itself the consortium, had engineered the defection of a deputy to the chief of the First Department of the KGB's First Chief Directorate; how the man who ran the consortium, a former CIA Medici who went by the code name Swan Song, had turned up in Germany, along with an agent named de Wey, alias Dewey, to take possession of the female defector; how Dewey had debriefed her in a safe house in Dallas; how Prince Igor had surfaced to reactivate Le Juif's KGB network, which had gone into hibernation at the start of the Gorbachev era; how Swan Song's consortium had milked the Apache casino for operating funds; how he, Parsifal, had been called in every time one of the Indians threatened to take the matter to the police.
La Gioconda drummed the sidewalk with her cane. "You can prove what you say?" she demanded harshly.
Parsifal explained how two members of the consortium named Early and Lahr had planted marker messages with Le Juif every time they wanted to contact each other.
"Prince Igor told me they were subcontractors — "
"I interrogated both of them. They were at the bottom end of the consortium's ladder. Both had worked for something called Special Projects at the CIA, Early on a freelance basis, Lahr on staff, before signing on to the consortium."
"This could be explained in various ways . . ."
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"That's only the beginning. When Swan Song and the consortium had gotten everything they needed from the Russian female defector, they decided to eliminate her. At which point Prince Igor relayed the order to you . . ."
La Gioconda was reliving events. "I passed it on to Le Juif, who passed it on to you."
"It was the perfect plot. The consortium got access to a KGB network, and then used us to do their dirty work for them."
"There was a young man . . ."
Parsifal nodded. "The Indians told him about the consortium milking the Apache casino. He went t
o Early with the story. Early passed word up the consortium's chain of command to Swan Song. Swan Song—who spoke perfect Russian, remember—had to eliminate the young man, so he put on his Prince Igor hat and passed word down our chain of command to you. You told Le Juif, who instructed me to kill him." Parsifal took hold of La Gioconda's elbow. "Something the young man said made me suspect that the order to eliminate him had not originated with the KGB. He and I both wanted to know who was behind the order, so we began to walk back the cat. We started with Early, who led us to Lahr. Lahr led us to the one named Dewey. When I was questioning him, he suddenly understood who I was. He said, Tou must be the Jew's Parsifal.' How could Dewey have known about the existence of Le Juif or Parsifal unless the consortium controlled our network? Unless Swan Song and Prince Igor were the same person?"
Across the street, two police cars pulled up to the hotel entrance. Squinting into the sun, La Gioconda watched as six high-ranking uniformed officers, each carrying an attache case, filed into the Inn.
"Now Prince Igor wants you to eliminate the Jogger," she said. She regarded Parsifal. "Pczc/nmo?" she whispered.
"I'm not sure why. The consortium may be doing the CIA's dirty work for them. Or the consortium may be a group of renegades who have decided they know what's best for their country and for the world. And what's best is to assassinate the Jogger."
"Le Juif used to say that there were seven levels to any intrigue," La Gioconda remembered. "You are only scratching the surface. Work through the problem from their point of view. If the only thing they wanted to do was assassinate the Jogger, they could do it themselves. Or they could hire professionals. God knows there are enough of them
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around if the price is right. They didn't have to go to all the trouble of gaining control of a KGB network. No. I tell you, the death of the Jogger is not an end, but a means to an end."
They talked in undertones for another twenty minutes, sorting probabilities, threading their way through plausible scenarios. Several times they started down avenues that looked promising; each time they came to a dead end and had to double back. As she listened intently, her lips parted, her eyes wide and brilliant, La Gioconda's face shed a decade, and Parsifal caught a glimpse of what she must have looked like, twenty-eight years earlier, when she and Le Juif arrived in America to do battle against capitalism.
Trying out one scenario, La Gioconda suddenly plucked at Parsifal's sleeve. "That may be it."
Parsifal nodded carefully. "All the pieces fit."
"What incredible arrogance! They think history is a river that can be diverted by explosives into a new channel!"
"They are aiming high," Parsifal agreed.
"They are aiming low," La Gioconda corrected him.
Parsifal didn't hear her; his mind had wandered into the rarefied world of wetwork tradecraft. "Pass word up the line to Prince Igor that, with the death of Le Juif, you have taken over operational control of Parsifal. Tell him I have figured out how to park an automobile filled with plastic explosives and a nitric-acid detonator along the Jogger's route."
La Gioconda saw where he was going. "You want to lure Prince Igor to the scene of the crime."
Parsifal spelled out the solution. "When you describe the parking of the car, specify which hill I will be on to activate the explosives."
By now La Gioconda was one jump ahead. "I will inform Prince Igor that you are ready to carry out his instructions, but given the gravity of the assignment, you must receive those instructions directly from his lips."
"If we are right, he will leap at the chance to meet me."
"I will provide him with the recognition cryptogram."
Parsifal recalled something else. "When Le Juif announced that we had a new Resident, he said you had actually encountered him."
"We met in the balcony of a darkened movie theater. He was just a silhouette—thin, tall, stooped shoulders. He wore sunglasses even in the dark and spoke Russian without an accent." She remembered something else. "When he was delivering to me the cryptogram that proved he came
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from Moscow, I became aware of something only a woman is likely to notice—the new Resident smelled. It was an unpleasant blend of something sweet and something tart—the kind of scent someone excretes when he tries to mask a strong body odor with a strong perfume."
Parsifal's nostrils twitched. "When Prince Igor turns up, I won't need a recognition cryptogram —I will smell him!"
La Gioconda lowered the veil over her eyes and, leaning on the cane, climbed to her feet. "We shall not meet again," she said, gazing down at him through the veil.
"What will you do now?"
"I have some money set aside. I shall return to Prague, where I lived as a child. I shall sit on a small balcony in the Mala Strana and close my eyes and imagine Le Juif when he was young and beautiful and thought he was more than a match for a windmill. And you, my knight of the Round Table, what will you do?"
Parsifal gazed across the street at the hotel, where another stretch limousine filled with young men in tan suits had pulled up to the entrance. "When I have reached the end of the quest, I shall attempt to follow in Le Juif's footsteps. I shall dictate terms to death."
Walking Back the Cat
"I see that Parsifal is his usual creative self," Swan Song remarked. Click, click. "You are instructed to give him the green light."
"There is one thing more," La Gioconda noted. "Parsifal says that on an operation of this gravity, he will need to be pointed in the right direction by Prince Igor himself. Receiving his marching orders from an intermediary will not suffice."
Swan Song exchanged glances with Lefler and Knopf, who were monitoring the conversation through earphones. Lefler shook his head in disgust; what Parsifal was suggesting broke every rule in the book.
Swan Song let La Gioconda stew while he considered the request. Click, click, click. Then, barely able to contain a smirk of pleasure, he came back on the line. "Tell him I agree."
La Gioconda described the hill from which Parsifal planned to detonate the plastic stuffed into the trunk of a car parked on the access road. She mentioned a shopping mall, a supermarket. "You may leave your automobile in the employees' section behind the store. You will find a small hole in the link fence behind the garbage bins. A path winds up through a woods to the top of the hill." She passed on the recognition cryptogram and specified fifteen minutes before a particular hour.
Swan Song repeated the cryptogram and time and severed the connection.
J. J. Knopf, Adobe Palace's security chief, peeled off the earphones and swiveled in his chair. "I don't like it, Boss. This is a crazy idea. When it comes to wetwork, you build walls, you don't tear them down."
Swan Song turned to stare out over the killing field. From the very beginning, when he and Dewey had conceived the consortium and the operation that would make wetwork history, he had planned to be present at the denouement—he needed to be present at the denouement—but in his wildest dreams he never thought Parsifal himself would invite him.
Massaging a single worry bead between his thumb and forefinger, he permitted a rare smile to work its way onto his thin lips. He had devoted a lifetime to planning and executing wetwork operations, but his swan song was going to eclipse them all.
Walking Back the Cat
of the three Apaches were streaked with ash. Petwawwenin handed up Finn's pump shotgun, two Ml6s, Alchise's vicious-looking double-edged bone-handled knife and a Kellogg's Corn Flakes carton filled with ammunition.
A late-afternoon sun was flitting behind the trees. Shenandoah shaded her eyes with her hand for a moment. Her face contorted, she caught up with Finn in the street and grabbed his arm. "If Skelt's right, you'll never get near that Adobe Palace. For God's sake, wait for the goddamn police or the goddamn army or the goddamn government."
"The people up in the Adobe Palace are the polic
e," Finn said. "They are the army. They are the government. The thing to do is get Doubting Thomas out safe and sound. Then we'll worry about the police and the army and the government."
From the thick of the scrub oaks came the distant whine of a siren as an ambulance made its way up the unpaved road toward Watershed. Shenandoah sucked in her breath. "Oh, sweet Jesus," she murmured, "who looks after the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, look after Skelt and Doubting Thomas and Saint Louis, and forget about your suffering servant, me."
Parsifal emerged from the shadow of a building. He was dragging on a cigarette as he watched the Apaches wrestle a single propane canister into the pickup and strap it to the back of the cab. "Whoever said the world would end in a whimper got it wrong," he remarked.
"Who's he?" Shenandoah demanded.
"A guy I met," Finn said. He looked at Parsifal. "A friend."
"How come he's not going with you if he's such a friend?"
Parsifal answered for himself. "I have a previous engagement," he said. He pulled Finn off a few paces. "We set out to discover who wanted you dead and expected me to kill you. Now we know. Launch the balloon so that it arrives just before first light. If I've figured right, our Medici will have left for Santa Fe by then and you'll have one less warm body to deal with." He flashed a cold smile. "If I've miscalculated and he's still on the premises, he's all yours."
Alchise and Nahtanh waved impatiently from the back of the pickup. Petwawwenin climbed in behind the wheel and gunned the engine. Finn went over to Shenandoah. His face was flushed, his eyes feverish. "I love the kid," he declared. "I love you."
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Shenandoah stared deep into Finn's eyes. What she saw frightened her. "I don't know you!" she said fiercely. "You oughta go and smear your face with ashes like them. You're in love with war." She lowered her voice to a whisper. "What did you lose turnin' in squares back there in the desert, Saint Louis?"
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