by Craig Thomas
‘John Lock! This still your favourite watering-hole?’ The man was taller than Lock, even when he hitched himself onto the adjacent barstool. Thicker-set and somehow more loosely arranged. Or designed for activity no longer undertaken. ‘I haven’t seen you around here lately.’
‘Bob. Good to see you, man!’ The lobby bar was beginning to crowd with office workers and government people. Bob Kauffman was Company — the other government. ‘How’re things on the farm?’
‘I’m still working.’ A shrug. Bob Kauffman had been a senior case officer in the field. Reagan, Gorbachev and Thatcher lately, Yeltsin and Clinton and Major — had foreclosed on him like realtors, just as on most of his breed. ‘Jeez, I wish State would take me on like they did you. Lucky sonofabitch.’ It was said entirely without resentment. ‘Maybe then I could get away from the sour smell of guys waiting and wondering, kicking their heels … This administration’s gonna dump the Company, man, like it was politically non-correct!’ He clicked his fingers and a bourbon on the rocks appeared magically. ‘Unless you’re a desk-jock, an image analyser or a computer whizz — or you recommend we da nothing about the world — forget it!’ He swallowed at his drink.
Lock, smiling, murmured: ‘I guess things are tight all round.
I’ve just been confined to my desk myself, though I’m not complaining.
What have they gotten you doing. Bob?’
‘When I’m not being bored out of my skull in meetings and committees, I ride shotgun on a bunch of college kids and their computers. Middle East stuff mainly — the ayatollahs and the rest of the bandits. You know the kind of thing-‘ He shrugged dismissively. ‘I’m like their grandfathers. A dinosaur.
You?’
Lock studied their images in the mirror. Kauffman seemed, at that moment, like an unwelcome drunk narrating his history.
And, as he had described himself, out of time and place. Lock’s own slimmer, dark-haired, more youthful form stared back at him, looking like the future, just as Kauffman represented the past gone to seed. Loose-jowled, disgruntled, grey-eyed, while he appeared sleeker, more tanned, like a business executive watching the world from behind sharp blue eyes.
‘It’s mainly trade, investment, that kind of thing.’
‘But you’re still hanging around the old places, the old crowd.’
Kauffman made the Cold War seem like a college fraternity, viewed all the more romantically with twenty-twenty hindsight.
‘The nearest I get to the old action is when my college boys discover our old friends have sold a bunch of tanks or missiles to the ayatollahs. Or a scientist-‘ He grinned sourly. A second bourbon had appeared in front of him, another martini near Lock’s hand.
‘Sell a scientist?’ he murmured to humour Kauffman. He’d heard other, more substantiated rumours echoing around State, and during his own travels in Russia. Scientists were going south and east, a few west. The poorly paid bastards were dribbling out of the former Soviet Union. Bui it wasn’t wholesale, they weren’t shipping them out like books or machine parts.
‘Some crazy theory. College boys! They think our old friends are selling brains now, to whoever will buy. People. All those redundant atom guys, germ warfare experts, you know. Jeez, you wonder why I get nostalgic for Afghanistan or Europe even
‘Nam?’ His glass was empty again. ‘Let me buy you another, John — very dry martini, right?’ Lock paused, his eyes halfway to his watch, listening to the warmth of two dozen conversations on the eternally fascinating subject — power. Hillary’s latest dressing-down of a senior insider, the snub of a meagre Clinton working lunch, the President’s ratings slump, the situation in obliterated Bosnia, those asshole Europeans … The politics of power and the power of politics. It would be churlish to reject Bob Kauffman’s offer. He was the kid with his nose pressed up against this most wonderful of candy-stores. It would be arrogant to demonstrate to him how far outside he was.
Thanks, Bob. Though I must watch the time.’
Kauffman ordered the drinks. The occasional tourist conversation was hemmed in securely by the political gossip. Lock felt comfortable within those verbal walls, just as Kauffman felt shut out.
‘Your college boys are exaggerating. There have been some disappearances — a trickle, no more. The Russians have a very real interest in keeping their top guys at home, and happy.’ He grinned. ‘Look, Bob, a job at State these days is just as much out of the old line. I get to study Russian economics.’
‘Is there Russian economics?’
They both laughed at the joke.
‘What have they turned you into — a salesman or an insurance assessor?’
‘A little of both.’
‘Some brave new world order, uh? Like letting the Bosnian Moslems go down the tubes. The old guy with the Grecian 2000 wouldn’t have done that. Cheers.’ Their conversation rapidly became desultory, as if they were both misplaced among the political chatterers. Lock occasionally waved to people he knew from State and other departments of government. Kauffman evidently wanted to enlist his aid, solicit information and maybe introductions; yet knowing all the time that the State Department would have no interest in a semiredundant CIA case officer. Meanwhile, the names of the great and the good, their deeds and misdeeds, flew about them like paper missiles.
Kauffman became progressively maudlin. Instead of Yanks Go Home, the walls of the world told the spies of the world they were surplus to requirements. Not wanted on voyage. And the Clinton administration told them, with equal certainty, that the w6rld was no longer their playground or their policeman’s beat.
The rest of the planet was not America’s 111th Precinct, and Langley its Precinct House. Instead, the CIA headquarters was a slaveship full of bitter, displaced and betrayed men; a factory making the wrong goods in the wrong age.
Suddenly, he tired oft Kauffman and the scents of their professional past, eager to be at Beth’s birthday party. The memories of other birthdays, mostly spent apart, were easier to shrug off now. His own uncelebrated days — always bleak and snowbound, it seemed, with himself occupying an icy corridor, staring through tall windows at the white fields of the expensive private school. Their years of separation had now thankfully come to an end. Unheated dormitories and the glad escape of sportsfields and music from the brusque, suspicious indifference of boys who were not orphaned. He had found basketball and a singing voice and a fascination with musical scores rather than the printed pages into which Beth, in her isolation, had retreated. She’d discovered books — any books, all books.
He smiled to himself. He had always suspected that her own horror stories of lonely birthdays were fictitious, invented to give him sympathy. She had always generated a strong magnetic field that attracted other people, bound them in orbits of friendship.
She’d never have been alone on any of her birthdays. Just like this one.
He quickly finished his drink, ordered another for Kauffman, and announced:
‘It’s my sister’s birthday, Bob. I’m running late. I still haven’t wrapped her present. Great to see you ‘
He was shrugging himself into his topcoat as he spoke, already a few yards from the bar. Kauffman watched him with a gored bull’s distrustful, enraged eyes. Lock waved his hand and Kauffman returned the gesture, his glance softening.
Lock shook off the man’s infectious world-weariness. He’d never known Kauffman well, he had never been a friend. They’d come into contact in Afghanistan in the ‘80s and hardly ever since. Kauffman was a ‘Nam veteran of the Company, an intelligence field officer who still moved through an imaginary world of inferior races and ideologies.
He was blithely recovered by the time the doors slid back and the street’s cold air struck him. He moved into the lamplit cold, turning up the collar of his topcoat. Leaves rattled like tin along the sidewalk. Gas was sharp on the air. He began to hurry, grinning with childlike anticipation.
Alexei Vorontsycv put down the telephone and announced:
‘T
hey’re sending someone over to the hospital to identify the body. The shock-horror sounded genuine enough. From the description, it sounds like it is Rawls.’
Dmitri, licking his fingers and putting down a second receiver, nodded then said: ‘You’re going to love this.’ He shook his head in the direction of the telephone.
‘What?’
‘By the time Forensic — your pal Lensky — got to the morgue, someone had had the shoes off the corpse. The body must have unfrozen just enough to’
‘Deliberately?’ Vorontsyev snapped.
‘What?’ Dmitri was chewing on another huge bit of something that approximated to pizza. As a breakfast, its prospect made
Vorontsyev queasy. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. No, it looks like opportunism. Probably one of our uniformed buggers taking advantage.’ The office smelt powerfully of pungent, burned herbs, anchovies, tomato. And of their wet boots standing forlornly near the single radiator. The snow flew past the large window. The
‘It’s my sister’s birthday. Bob. I’m running late. I still haven’t wrapped her present. Great to see you ‘
He was shrugging himself into his topcoat as he spoke, already a few yards from the bar. Kauffman watched him with a gored bull’s distrustful, enraged eyes. Lock waved his hand and Kauffman returned the gesture, his glance softening.
Lock shook off the man’s infectious world-weariness. He’d never known Kauffman well, he had never been a friend. They’d come into contact in Afghanistan in the ‘80s and hardly ever since. Kauffman was a ‘Nam veteran of the Company, an intelligence field officer who still moved through an imaginary world of inferior races and ideologies.
He was blithely recovered by the time the doors slid back and the street’s cold air struck him. He moved into the lamplit cold, turning up the collar of his topcoat. Leaves rattled like tin along the sidewalk. Gas was sharp on the air. He began to hurry, grinning with childlike anticipation.
Alexei Vorontsycv put down the telephone and announced:
‘They’re sending someone over to the hospital to identify the body. The shock-horror sounded genuine enough. From the description, it sounds like it is Rawls.’
Dmitri, licking his fingers and putting down a second receiver, nodded then said: ‘You’re going to love this.’ He shook his head in the direction of the telephone.
‘What?’
‘By the time Forensic — your pal Lensky — got to the morgue, someone had had the shoes off the corpse. The body must have unfrozen just enough to’
Deliberately?’ Vorontsyev snapped.
‘What?’ Dmitri was chewing on another huge bit of something that approximated to pizza. As a breakfast, its prospect made Vorontsyev queasy. ‘Oh, 1 see what you mean. No, it looks like opportunism. Probably one of our uniformed buggers taking advantage.’
The office smelt powerfully of pungent, burned herbs, anchovies, tomato. And of their wet boots standing forlornly near the single radiator. The snow flew past the large window. The morning was all but obscured. The frontier town had, for a thankful moment, vanished behind the onset of winter. As had its drugs and gangster epidemic. He heard a truck skid, then collide with something four floors below.
‘OK, let’s assume it was Rawls. Why did someone have him turned off?’
Dmitri hunched his shoulders, wiping his mouth with a large, grey handkerchief. He did his own washing now — not very successfully. Vorontsyev’s laundry was much neater; fastidiously so. Arctic white and aseptic as the flat he occupied. Dmitri’s home was untidy and grimy with grief and neglect. He couldn’t take his washing along to the Foundation Hospital and ask his mad wife to do it for him. He went there just to sit beside her.
Not with her; she wasn’t with anyone any more.
‘Do you think he might have been involved with the local crap — the biznizmen and the mafia?’ There was a tone of fervent, reawakened hope in Dmitri Gorov’s voice, it was a sign of obsession rather than anticipation; everything, for him, had to be to do with drugs and the local mafia.
Vorontsyev shook his head and rubbed his unshaven cheeks with both hands, as if they still retained the chill of the copse beside the highway.
‘There’s never been any hint of an American connection.
Rawls was a senior executive of Grainger Technologies, not even part of the GraingerTurgenev set-up. I can’t see him dabbling in cocaine or heroin as a bit of private enterprise. Seriously, Dmitri — can you?’ Reluctantly, Dmitri shook his head, an intense disappointment on his features. He rubbed one big hand through his thinning, lank dark hair, then around his big-jowled face.
‘I suppose you’re right. Look, Alexei, this murder isn’t going to get in the way of our drugs bust, is it?’ He was all but pleading.
Vorontsyev shook his head.
‘I don’t know why Bakunin didn’t grab it straight away. He will do, though. There’s kudos in dealing with the Yankees, with Turgenev. Security is bound to take it over. After Bakunin’s had his breakfast — and maybe masturbated himself into a better mood.’ Dmitri laughed explosively. ‘No, we’ll concentrate on the drugs — as always.’
Dmitri seemed pleased. He picked up a report sheet from his side of the desk and passed it to Vorontsyev.
‘The Aeroflot flight up from Islamabad arrives at eight tonight.
Nothing’s changed. Hussain is booked onto it.’ Dmitri fidgeted with excitement.
‘The apartment block stakeout’s all set?’
‘All in place. There’s nothing much happening at the moment
— but that’s not unusual.’
‘OK. Tonight, then. The stuff will be on the flight?’
‘That’s what I’ve been told. It’s the usual method of transport, and Hussain’s the carrier — for the Pakistani connection, that is.’
‘The Pakistanis are all we have. We know it comes in from Tehran and from Kashmir, but we don’t have any leads. Hussain from Rawalpindi is all we’ve got.’ Vorontsyev realised he had begun to sound hectoring, a distributor of blame. He added:
‘Yours is the best lead we’ve had so far. We have a flight number and a name — at last. We know it’s coming from down there, the Moslem Triangle, and we guessed it was coming in by air, brought by casual workers on the gas rigs. But we never had a name and a precise flight. Now we have both.’ Suddenly, he banged his fist down on the desk. ‘Christ, the number of shipments that have been brought in under our noses! We’re not going to lose this one, Dmitri.’ He saw Dmitri’s features darken with what might have been some obscene hunger. ‘I promise. This time we’ll gut the bastards, sweat it out of this Hussain, follow the trail we persuade him to give us, pick up the distributors …’ He knew, to his own embarrassment, that he was feeding a sickness in Dmitri. Revenge. But, Christ, the man deserved his revenge if anyone ever did! ‘Planeloads of workers coming back off holiday, and every time a new consignment of heroin. Simple — when you know how.’ He studied Dmitri’s face. He had successfully lightened the atmosphere. Two years ago, Dmitri’s only beloved daughter had overdosed on heroin that hadn’t been sufficiently cut. Revenge might never compensate him for her death, nor make up for the post-breakdown, vegetable state of his wife in the hospital.
But it might help. Two years ago, some of the local pushers hadn’t had the expertise to cut the heroin for maximum profit while leaving their customers alive for more. Now, they did.
The drugs had followed hard on the heels of the Germans, the Yankees, the Japs and the market economy. The local gangsters had discovered distinctly Western ways of making money.
The bad old days might have been bad, but now…? Vorontsyev rubbed his face. The bad old days had been bad. Always remember that, and what you’re supposed to be doing about the new days … despite a corrupt police force, seniors on the take or in the pockets of the biznizmen or the remnants of the KGB and the GRU and the local powerbrokers and the gas companies. Just remember, you’re holding the line.
They had to strike lucky tonight. They’d
waited so long for a break. They needed a success — the arrest of Hussain and whoever would be at the flat they had under surveillance, where some of Hussain’s relatives lived. A whole shipment of Pakistani heroin suddenly taken off the streets would dry up supplies temporarily.
By which time, they might have begun to make inroads on the smuggling and distribution organisation. Begun climbing the greasy pole towards whoever ran things.
‘You stay here and monitor the surveillance,’ he announced.
‘I’ll take Marfa over to the Gogol and search Rawls’ suite. We ought to appear to be doing our best when Bakunin takes over.’
He smiled. The answer might be sitting on the bedside table you never know.’
He tugged on his boots, then thrust his arms into the sleeves of his topcoat. Wound his scarf around his neck, donned his fur hat, and opened the door of his office. At once, it seemed, the barnlike space of the Criminal Investigation Department became a scene of noisy indolence; as if a schoolmaster with a Party card had arrived. The duty detectives glanced furtively at him as if he were likely to ask some of them for his cut of their black incomes.” Or simply ask for results; a greater coronary threat than their drinking and their fatty diets. The air was heavy with cigarette smoke, but the place didn’t even smell Russian any more, the dark, pungent tobacco having been abandoned in favour of American cigarettes. The only real Russians remaining in the room were a kid who needed a fix and couldn’t pay for one, a whining old peasant woman in black, her face like an eroded rock formation, and the drab, youngish woman being interviewed by Marfa. The younger woman had a black eye and split lip.
The other suspects and complainants in the echoing, smoky, littered room were mostly well-dressed and either relaxed or demanding. One padded neck wore a vivid silk tie, and Vorontsyev noticed an astrakhan collar on a dark coat. He smelt cigar smoke.
He looked momentarily at the beaten, drawn woman, her hands twisting like strangers suspiciously circling each other, then studied the intensity of comfort in Detective Second-Class Marfa Tostyeva’s face. She was leaning her narrow body forward across her desk; her hands seemed engaged in some constant series of military forays of sympathy towards the other woman’s hands. Her cheeks were pale, her eyes glittered. Vorontsyev tapped her on the shoulder. Her reaction was that of someone woken from a deep sleep.