by Paul Moomaw
He had once asked Biven his secret.
“Simple,” Biven had replied. “I went to every movie Cary Grant ever made. Saw some of them two or three times. Then I graduated to Fred Astaire, and did the same thing.”
The new drinks arrived. Pray took a sip of his and settled more comfortably into his chair. “Nice party. Nice place, too. Thanks for the invitation.”
“It would have been a shame to get so close and miss a chance to see you. How is it, being an idle rich playboy, anyway?”
“It has it’s points.”
“I bet you get a lot of visitors.”
“Not really. I don’t exactly hang the welcome mat out. I did invite my folks, but they wouldn’t come. My father always wanted me to be something respectable, like a banker.”
“You got to wear suits and ties in the Company, anyway.” Biven looked over Pray’s attire—camel hair sports coat, faded jeans, noisy yellow and blue plaid shirt, and well-worn New Balance running shoes with argyle socks as bright as the shirt.
“Now I get to wear what I want,” Pray said. “That’s one difference the money has made, but it hasn’t changed my life as much as you might think. I still drink cheap brandy.”
“I’ve wondered if you wouldn’t get a little bored.”
Pray leaned forward with a grin, tapped the glass against the table. “Where I got bored was in the Company.”
Biven glanced at his hands. “I know the outfit has its faults, but I never thought of us as boring.”
“Come on, Larry. Look at it my way. There I was, with five languages, a black belt in karate, Vietnam combat experience—Special Forces, no less—not to mention my good looks, my charm, and the fact that I’m a whiz at the tango. And what does the Company do? It sticks me in a goddamn office, translating cable traffic.” Pray leaned back, spread his palms and smiled. “At the very least, you could have assigned me to seduce Raisa Gorbachev. I have very good Russian, you know.”
Biven didn’t respond. He stared at Pray, the smallest smile playing at his lips. Then he stood up.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
* * *
On the little bridge, the photographer was packing his gear. The model, wrapped in a long red coat, hurried along the marina walkway toward the hotel. Biven and Pray reached the top of the bridge’s high arch and leaned against the railing side by side. The wind had died, but the air carried an edge of ice, and they had the space to themselves.
“Somehow I had always pictured this lake surrounded by giant, snowcapped mountains,” Biven said. “You know, like Lake Louise, or the lakes in the Salzkammergut. Do you know the Salzkammergut, Adam?”
Here it comes, Pray thought. He waited silently for Biven to continue.
“Austria is awfully spectacular this time of year, come to think of it. Especially the Salzkammergut. Places like the Wolfgang-See. Ever been there?”
“Get to the point, Larry.”
“I think you’d like the Wolfgang-See a whole lot.” Biven swiveled his upper body to look at Pray. “How would you like to go to Austria?”
“Why?”
Biven turned back to face the lake again. “There’s a man who lives there.”
“Would I like him a whole lot, too?”
Biven smiled. “I suppose you might, in fact. But I would hope not. Not too much, anyway.” Biven paused for a long moment. “Everything from this point, you understand, is strictly confidential, whether you bite or not.”
“Of course. Go on.”
“Does that mean you might be interested?”
“It means I love a good story, and you always tell the best.”
Biven laughed. “Good enough. The man’s name is Meissner. Reinhardt Meissner. He’s a native Austrian, born in Vienna, minor nobility on his mother’s side of the family, major bucks on his father’s side, so he had the best of both worlds. Went to school as a boy at the Theresianum in Vienna—his father wanted him to be in civil service. But he bailed out of that and went to Argentina in time to miss World War Two. After the war, he went home to Austria and made out like a bandit. He got in tight with both the Russians and the Allies during the occupation, and was able to do important favors for old friends who hadn’t been lucky, or smart, enough to avoid the war. He’s in his late sixties, and supposedly retired, living in a village called St. Gilgens, just outside of Salzburg on the Wolfgang-See.”
“What does CIA want with him?”
“The problem is, he’s not retired. He still has all his connections, and he deals anything that comes along—arms, drugs, hot bonds.” Biven hugged himself and shivered. “Let’s walk. I’m not used to this mountain air.”
The two men left the bridge and ambled toward a small park near the hotel.
“The world is full of arms dealers,” Pray said. “Shit, CIA is full of arms dealers, for that matter. Why not just buy him?”
Biven stopped and looked at Pray with a laugh. “Buy him? We can’t buy a cup of coffee in most parts of the world, these days. People like Meissner don’t want to have to worry about seeing their names in the newspaper.” He turned and spit carefully downwind, then started walking again. “Anyway, he’s finally gone too far to be ignored. Last week, somebody stole close to sixty pounds of plutonium oxide powder from the Hanford Atomic Reservation.”
“That’s close to here.”
“Not far.” Biven stopped in front of a dusty wooden park bench, put a foot up on it. “Once again, this is all off the record.”
Pray leaned against the bench and gazed at the lake. “From what I hear, they lose enough plutonium at Hanford every day to make a bomb,” he said. “A friend of mine claims closing the N-Reactor down is the best thing that ever happened to the national security.”
“So maybe they don’t have to follow rules. Me, I have to follow rules. Your mouth is sealed, right?”
“I’ll take it to my grave.”
“Good.” Biven started walking again. “Actually, we think we almost had a chance to stop the shipment before it got out of the country. We have an asset in your home town. His name is Leo Draper. He lives in a houseboat on Hood Canal, and has a ketch. He makes a living chartering the ketch, and doing a little smuggling on the side, up and down Puget Sound. We grease some palms there for him, and in return for the protection and a little cash, he keeps in touch if he runs into anything unusual. Last week he tried to leave a message that he was carrying a load that may have been the plutonium.” Biven kicked at the bench and shook his head.
“You didn’t get the message.”
“Worse. It wound up with the FBI, and some asshole in the Seattle bureau decided to make points. Not only did they not relay the message to us, they tried to pull a raid on Draper’s houseboat.” Biven laughed. “Trouble is, they raided the wrong houseboat, and wound up rousting a wedding party that included a couple of judges and the president of the symphony association. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency wasn’t much better. They spent four days denying there had been a theft.” Biven spit downwind again. “So we all wasted a week chasing our tails, and in the meantime, Draper has vanished, along with his boat and the plutonium, if that’s what he had.”
“Where do I come into this?” Pray asked.
“We’re positive Meissner coordinated the theft, and we’re almost positive the shipment is headed for Libya.”
“Wonderful.”
“Exactly. Not even the Russians will sell Qhadaffi anything he could use to make a bomb. But Meissner will.”
“You can’t make a bomb out of plutonium oxide, can you?”
“No. But you can refine weapons grade plutonium from it. It isn’t that hard to do. Qhadaffi almost certainly has the facilities for that kind of job. And the stuff itself is dangerous as hell. If it got spilled somewhere, it could poison things for centuries. And if it got spilled all in one pile, it could blow up—not exactly a hydrogen bomb, but bad enough. I assume you know it was plutonium wastes that blew half the Caucasus all to hell in the Soviet Union.
That was in the Fifties, and it still isn’t safe to go in there. And the same thing almost happened at Hanford a few years ago, because the radioactive waste they were dumping was leaking and forming a giant pool.”
“And so you want me to have a talk with this Meissner fellow and charm him into giving the stuff back? How about sending me to work on Raisa Gorbachev after all?”
“Give me what I want this time, maybe I’ll think about it,” Biven said. “It’s a little late to do much about the plutonium. We’ll be trying to trace it, see if we can stop it. But Meissner has to be stopped no matter what else happens. The idea is to set up a sting. That’s where you come in. We need to get him caught red-handed in something so blatantly illegal and dangerous that his political connections can’t save him.”
Biven paused and gave Pray a look. “If we can’t do that, Meissner is going to be a candidate for executive action.”
Pray nodded thoughtfully. Murder was murder, no matter how neutral the euphemism you used to describe it. When the proposed victim was a wealthy European with powerful friends, it could be messy.
“Why me?” he asked. The two men had turned and were walking slowly back to the hotel. It was getting dark, and the park was deserted.
“You’re clean. You weren’t that well known when you were with the agency. You left very few tracks. And you have a couple of things in common with Meissner: you both have money, and you both collect jade.”
“How did you know I collect jade?”
“Give me a break, Adam. I’m a spy.”
“Why else do you want me?”
“Because you aren’t that well known in the Company, either.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Meissner has friends in a lot of places, I’m afraid.”
“You sound depressed.”
“I am. He’s been my project for three years, Adam. Every time I get close, something goes wrong. The wrong kinds of things go wrong, you know what I mean? Crucial people seem to develop precognitive abilities. I reach out and grab, but when I open my hands, nobody’s there.”
Biven stopped walking, grabbed Pray by the arm. “You can’t let anybody know you’re taking this on, Adam.”
“If I take it on.”
Biven dropped his hand and nodded. “Right.”
The two men started walking again.
“But why,” Pray asked, “Would anyone in the Company help Meissner stay in operation?”
“There’s a whole little coterie of officers, some of them high up, who have looked at the world and decided they don’t like the direction it’s taking. They see Europe becoming a stronger competitor with the United States. They see the Common Market and the EEC getting stronger. And they see signs that the unity is increasing. In a few years, anybody in Europe will be able to move between the countries freely, live where he wants, work where he wants. European corporations are merging like crazy; there’s hardly a firm that isn’t multinational. Germany and France are talking about joint military units. And it goes into Eastern Europe, too. Who would have thought to see Helmut Kohl and Erich Honecker standing side by side in Bonn while the band played the East German national anthem?”
They had reached the covered drive at the hotel entrance. They turned and walked back toward the marina.
“Some of our hyper-patriots are upset,” Biven said. They liked it when Europe was fragmented, and they’re willing to wage what amounts to covert war on our allies to keep it that way. Meissner is one of their weapons.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve ever thought of blowing the whistle?”
“Sure, I’ve thought of it. There’ve been a few occasions in my life when I’ve thought about more direct forms of suicide, too.”
“That bad?”
Biven nodded. “Some of the people I’m talking about are right up there in the inner circle. You remember Terry Parker?”
“Mr. Supergrade. Never takes his souvenir White House cufflinks off, not even to shower. If he’s the big danger, I’m not that worried.”
“Don’t kid yourself. He may wear his three-piece suit to bed, but he’s no wimp. He goes way back, and he’s been in some bad spots. In Korea, he sneaked into Inchon in a rubber dinghy and ran an underground unit that had at least as much to do with the success of the invasion there as MacArthur did.” Biven grinned sheepishly. “And anyway, I’m committed. I’m a company man, you know?” He shook his head. “Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”
Pray wasn’t sure what to say. He had learned in Vietnam that everyone has limits. When he finally spoke, it was to change the subject.
“Chet Tarbell is in Vienna, isn’t he? It would be fun to see him. We were in Vietnam together, you know? He was the CIA spook assigned to our Special Forces Unit.”
Biven didn’t respond at first. “It probably would be better if Tarbell doesn’t know you’re in Austria at all,” he finally said.
“Why the hell not?”
“Parker has a lock on him. He’s on the other side of this matter.”
“Bullshit, Larry. Chet is as straight as they come.”
Biven stared at Pray, his eyes betraying nothing. “I mean it, Adam,” he said. “If you go, you stay away from Tarbell.”
Pray jammed his hands into his pockets and bounced on the balls of his feet. “So if I take this job, I can’t trust anyone.”
“Right.”
Pray grinned. “Maybe not even you?”
Biven returned the grin, slapped Pray lightly on the shoulder.
“Welcome home,” he said, and led the way back into the hotel.
Chapter 11
Wind-driven rain drops slapped rhythmically against two, narrow dormer windows that allowed the dim light of a Vienna afternoon into the bedroom. Chet Tarbell lay on his back, hands under his head, on the window side of the brass bed that took up most of the room, and stared at the windows. He wondered, sometimes, if he would have fallen in love with Ilona had she lived in a high rise on the edge of town, instead of at the top of a century-old building, snug on a narrow gasse in the oldest part of the city.
“You have that look that says time to go.” Ilona Horthy raised herself on one elbow and gazed down at him, tugging at his chin, turning his face away from the window and toward her.
“Not quite yet,” he said.
She laughed, and pressed her short, curly hair into the curve of his neck, under his jaw. Her voice was Central European contralto, with an overtone of woodwinds—perhaps an oboe, he thought. It had touched a chord in him the first time he had heard it. It still held that power. It fit her, just as the room did—went with the dark curls that framed her face and formed a large triangle below her belly, the luminous brown eyes that seemed deep enough to vanish into, the heavy soft breasts with their small, tan nipples, and the impossibly smooth ivory skin.
Tarbell glanced down at his own body, at the wear of five decades, the soft spread around the middle that no amount of exercise seemed to defeat any more, and wondered again what she could see in it. He ruffled her hair, aware of the contrast between those dark curls and the thinning brown stuff that topped his own head.
Ilona ran her fingers lightly up and down his chest, then traced a spiraling course across his abdomen and around his genitals. She laughed again as his penis began to respond to her touch.
“Good,” she said, tapping it lightly with a dark-painted nail. “I am not sending you back to your wife unable to function.” She raised her head again. “How do you explain these times?”
Tarbell snorted. “All in a day’s work. Susan gave up expecting me to keep regular hours a long time ago.” He followed the line of Ilona’s jaw with his knuckles. “You’re just another asset.”
That was how it had begun. She was supposed to be his channel to Reinhardt Meissner—a mule to carry messages and, on occasion, well-laundered cash—someone who allowed the Agency to deal at a distance with an unsavory Austrian merchant of violence. For a long time Tarbell had labored to maintain, to himself,
the fiction that Ilona meant nothing more than that to him. Even after the first time he had confronted her across this bed, he had continued to tell himself it was just a little bit of poon, a minor fringe benefit, and certainly not the first time he had taken advantage of that kind of perk.
“Does Meissner know about us?” he asked.
“Of course not. He wouldn’t like it, not at all.” She sighed heavily and snuggled against him. “I wish, sometimes, there were no Reinhardt.”
“You could get a different job.”
“Doing what? I could do this, I suppose.” She giggled. “But even there, I’m getting too old to compete with the kids in the Prater Park.” She bit his chin lightly. “No, Chet. I have no skills. I am lucky Meissner can use me as his—how do you say it—Friday Girl.”
“Girl Friday.”
“Ah.” She nodded. “Girl Friday. Thank you. And, anyway, I owe him this much, do you know?”
“No, I don’t know. Why do you owe him?”
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you some time.” She rolled out of the bed and stood at one of the windows, her body luminous in the gray light. “It’s about to get dark.”
Tarbell sat up and put his feet on the floor. The wood was chilly. He rose and moved to Ilona’s side.
They stood together, staring down at the street that lay below the wet slate roof from which the dormer projected. Muted traffic sounds rose to them.
“I expect I’d better be going,” he said. She nodded. He pulled her against him, and she turned to face him, raised her lips for a kiss.
“When will I see you again?” she asked. “Next week?”
“I’m going to Salzburg day after tomorrow. Come with me?”
“You don’t take your wife?”
“She and my daughter will be going away for a couple of weeks.”
“Ah.” She stepped back and looked at him with a grin that approached a leer. “The bad boy that you are,” she said, shaking her head.
“So come with me.”
“I can’t, I’m afraid. Reinhardt has work for me.”