“But—” Pfefferkorn said.
He was talking to the air.
59.
The man had instructed him to go left, but Pfefferkorn turned right, toward the stairs, and went down to the first floor in search of a phone. There was movement in the window of the motel’s front office. He did not go in, concerned that the clerk might be in league with his abductors. He crossed the parking lot, hoping to get his bearings.
The motel was on the side of a freeway running through the desert. Baked earth kissed bleached sky. He could have been anywhere in the American Southwest. Setting out on foot was out of the question, so he waited, hoping to flag down a passing car. None came. He was left with two choices: solicit help from the clerk or obey the mysterious caller’s instructions.
A bell rang as he entered the office. A clock on the wall read six fifty-seven. Behind the desk, a small television set was tuned fuzzily to the morning news. Two well-formed people made light banter about a plane crash.
An obese young man emerged from a back room. “Can I help you.”
Pfefferkorn inferred from the clerk’s apathy that the fellow knew nothing of Pfefferkorn’s captivity. This was both encouraging and discouraging. On one hand, he could speak without fear of alerting the mysterious caller. On the other hand, everything he could think to say sounded insane.
“Would you mind please printing out a statement of charges?”
“Room number.”
Pfefferkorn told him. The clerk typed with two fingers. It looked as though the act required intense concentration. A graphic flashed on the television screen.
TOP STORIES
“Good morning,” the male anchor said. “I’m Grant Klinefelter.”
“And I’m Symphonia Gapp,” the female anchor said, “and these are our top stories. A renowned suspense novelist is sought by police.”
Pfefferkorn’s jacket photo appeared on the screen.
Pfefferkorn felt the blood leave his head. His knees began to jellify and he braced himself against the counter. Meanwhile the clerk was still typing, his tongue poking between his teeth.
“Following a daring jailbreak, best-selling author A. S. Peppers is wanted for questioning in connection with the brutal slaying of his Lambada instructor.”
Pfefferkorn listened as the news anchors cheerfully proceeded to implicate him in Jesús María de Lunchbox’s murder. The clerk finished typing and pressed a button. A printer whined. Pfefferkorn’s jacket photo was shown again, accompanied by the number for a tip hotline. A reward was being offered.
“Sad stuff,” Symphonia Gapp said.
“Indeed,” Grant Klinefelter said. “When we come back: more trouble on the Zlabian border.”
“And later: a local kitten does his part to win the war on terror.”
“Anything else?”
The clerk was holding out the statement. Pfefferkorn took it. The motel’s address was printed at the top of the statement. It listed a route number Pfefferkorn had never heard of, in a town he had never heard of, in a state adjacent to the one in which he had been abducted. The box marked NAME OF GUEST brought an unwelcome shock.
The room had been rented to Arthur Kowalczyk.
“Anything else,” the clerk said again.
Pfefferkorn shook his head absently.
The clerk lumbered out.
Pfefferkorn remained standing there, leaning against the counter, the jingle of the commercial fading away, the walls fading away, the dusty heat and the desert glare fading, fading away, everything canceling itself out. Only one sensation remained: a strange, nonphysical itch insinuating itself throughout his entire body, starting from his chest and spreading to the tips of his toes, the back of his throat, the hairs on the tops of his thighs. He was paranoid. It had happened that easily. Much like Harry Shagreen, or Dick Stapp, or any man ensnared in a tangled web of deception, treachery, lies, and intrigue, he did not know whom to trust. Unlike Harry Shagreen or Dick Stapp, Pfefferkorn had no experience upon which to draw. He headed back to the second floor.
60.
The vending machines were set in a nook around the bend in the hall. One sold snacks, another sold drinks, and a third dispensed ice. The sight of packaged food behind glass turned Pfefferkorn’s stomach. He fed the quarters into the drink machine and pressed the button for a grape soda.
The machine hummed.
A can banged into place.
Pfefferkorn waited. Was that it? He was now out of instructions, and he had spent all his money on a beverage he did not want.
He took the soda. The label read Mr. Grapey. The drink contained one hundred sixty calories, no fat, no cholesterol, fifty-three milligrams of sodium, forty-seven grams of sugar, no vitamins, look in your back pocket.
I’m hallucinating, he thought.
He rubbed his eyes.
The words remained.
He reached into his back pocket and removed a slip of paper the size and shape of a fortune-cookie fortune. On it were printed two words.
TURN AROUND
Pfefferkorn turned around.
Not three feet away, where ten seconds prior there had been nobody, a man now stood. Pfefferkorn could not fathom how he had gotten there so quickly and quietly. Yet there he was, a medium-sized man in a shapeless charcoal suit. Pfefferkorn could not tell his age, due to a full eighty percent of his face being hidden behind the largest, bushiest, most aggressively expansionist moustache Pfefferkorn had ever seen. It was a moustache with submoustaches that in turn had sub-submoustaches, each of which might be said to be deserving of its own area code. It was a moustache that vexed profoundly questions of waxing, a moustache the merest glimpse of which might spur female musk oxen to ovulate. It was a moustache that would have driven Nietzsche mad with envy, had he not been mad already. If the three most copiously flowing waterfalls in the world, Niagara, Victoria, and Iguazú Falls, were somehow united, and their combined outputs rendered in facial hair, this man’s moustache would not have been an inaccurate model, save that this man’s moustache also challenged traditional notions of gravity by growing outward, upward, and laterally. It was an impressive moustache and Pfefferkorn was impressed.
“I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed,” the man said.
61.
Moustaches or no moustaches, Pfefferkorn knew at once who he was talking to.
“Jameson?” Pfefferkorn asked. “Is that you?”
The moustaches moved in a disappointed way. “For the purposes of this operation,” Jameson said, “you should refer to me as Blueblood.”
Pfefferkorn followed him to a black coupe at the rear of the parking lot.
“Why are you wearing that ridiculous getup?”
“All information will be provided on a need-to-know basis.”
They peeled out onto the highway.
“Can I at least see some identification or something?” Pfefferkorn asked.
“Field agents don’t carry ID. My official picture wouldn’t match my face, anyhow.”
“I’m not sure why I’m supposed to trust you.”
“Have you seen the news? I cut you loose and you’ll either be in jail or dead by sundown. If not both. And sooner. So it’s in your interest to listen to me. But”—Jameson/Blueblood veered onto the shoulder and slammed on the brakes—“it’s your call.”
Pfefferkorn stared out at the shimmering blacktop. He had no food, no water, and no money. His clothes didn’t fit and he had a headache. He could run, but where? He could seek help, but from whom? There was a reward posted for his capture, and he was one of the most famous writers in the world. Not as high-profile as a movie star, perhaps, but still.
“Well?” Blueblood/Jameson said. “Do you accept?”
“Accept what.”
“Your mission.”
Blueblood rooted around under his seat. “This might help.”
He tossed a manila envelope in Pfefferkorn’s lap. Pfefferkorn opened it and withdrew a photo. It was pixelated and blurry, a still taken from a video. It was what they called a “proof of life” picture. It showed a newspaper with yesterday’s date. The newspaper was being held up by Carlotta de Vallée. She was dirty. Her makeup was smeared. Her left temple was matted down with dark crust. She looked petrified. She had a right to be. There was a gun to her head.
62.
The safe house was a four-story log cabin on a private lake. Pfefferkorn clambered out of the seaplane and took in a lungful of piney air.
“Go on ahead,” Blueblood said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
Pfefferkorn walked up the dock toward the house. The front door opened.
“Howdy doody,” Canola said. “Glad you could make it.”
He ushered Pfefferkorn to an elegant room appointed with bearskin rugs and Craftsman furniture. A stag’s head hung over a stone fireplace roomy enough to spit-roast a yak. There was a stately grandfather clock and a long conference table polished to a mirror shine. If not for the presence of a bulletin board tacked with a map of the Zlabias and a ceiling-mounted projection screen, it would have made an appropriate setting for a state dinner party, especially one whose menu called for yak.
“Take a load off,” Canola said. “Op com will be by soon to brief you. Hungry?”
Pfefferkorn nodded.
“Sit tight.”
Pfefferkorn fiddled with the knickknacks on the mantel. Muted voices drifted down the hall. He tried to eavesdrop but got nothing.
Canola returned with sandwiches and ice water. “Lunch is served,” he said.
Pfefferkorn bit into an egg salad on seven-grain.
“Sorry about all the rough stuff,” Canola said. “You understand.”
Pfefferkorn, chewing, nodded. He didn’t understand, but he was beginning to sense that it was better for him to pretend he did.
Canola grinned. “I gotta say: you looked real scared when we cuffed you.”
A voice in the hallway said, “Did someone say lunch?” Sockdolager entered and spied the food. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said. He stuffed half a sandwich into his mouth and spun around a chair to sit backward, grinning through crumbs at Pfefferkorn. “What’s new, puddytat?”
“Everything,” Pfefferkorn said.
The “detectives” chuckled.
Pfefferkorn set down his sandwich and went to study the map. Together, the two Zlabias made a shape akin to a misshapen root vegetable. That both fit onto a single sheet of paper while yet maintaining enough fineness of resolution to label the individual streets spoke to how tiny the countries were—neighborhoods, really. Why was it that violence always burned hottest in cramped, obscure places? The dividing line, Gyeznyuiy Boulevard, cut clean up the middle of the map, ending at the top of the page in a plaza labeled, on one side, Square of the Location of the Conclusion of the Parade of the Commemoration of the Remembrance of the Exalted Memory of the Greatness of the Sacrifices of the Magnificent Martyrs of the Glorious Revolution of the Zlabian People of the Twenty-sixth of May, and on the other side, Adam Smith Square. Along the bottom edge of the map bulged a blank space marked Dzhikhlishkh Nuclear Exclusion Zone.
“It’ll all be on the exam.”
Pfefferkorn turned. The speaker was a young man with ash-brown hair neatly parted along the right side. He wore a bland suit and an understated necktie held in place by an American flag pin.
“For the purposes of this operation,” he said, “you can call me whatever you’d like, Dad.”
63.
“We downloaded this from the de Vallées’ home security system,” Paul said.
Pfefferkorn watched the computer screen. It showed closed-circuit footage of the ballroom. Carlotta and Jesús María de Lunchbox were dancing the tango. The video had no sound. It made them look like they were having very well-coordinated seizures. A minute or so into the video, they pulled apart with identical expressions of terror. Eight masked men rushed into the frame. Four of them grabbed Carlotta. Pfefferkorn was proud to see her fight like a champion. She could have been an actress in a silent movie, exhibiting “The heroine struggles courageously.” The men carried her off screen. Meanwhile the other four men were busy with Jesús María. Three of them restrained him while the fourth took out a boning knife.
Paul pressed pause. “I think you know what happens next,” he said.
Pfefferkorn was shaken. “Where is she,” he asked.
In answer to this question Paul closed the file and clicked on another. A new window filled the computer screen. The video was the source for the still photograph Blueblood had shown him. Carlotta was sitting in front of the same blank, scarred concrete wall. The same gun was to her head. She was holding the newspaper. She sounded scared but in control of herself. She repeated the date. She said that she was fine and being treated well. She said that she had been taken captive by the Revolutionary Movement of the Twenty-sixth of May. She said that in order to secure her safe return, the U.S. government would need to hand over the workbench. She said a few more things Pfefferkorn couldn’t make heads or tails of, either. Then she said something that stood his hair on end.
“The delivery must be made by American novelist Arthur Pfefferkorn. He must come alone. If anyone else comes, or if he fails to deliver the workbench, I will be—”
The image froze. Paul closed the window.
“Let’s not worry about that part,” he said.
If Pfefferkorn was shaken before, he was really quite badly shaken now. He was like a martini inside a rock tumbler being held by a detoxing epileptic standing on stilts atop a trampoline inside the San Andreas Fault. He stared at the blank blue screen, the afterimage of Carlotta’s face dancing before him.
“Tell me everything you know,” Paul said.
64.
Pfefferkorn told him everything he knew, starting with the theft of the manuscript. When he came to the part about the note from Lucian Savory, Paul said, “He’s a double agent.”
“You say that like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Paul said. “We only just found out about it ourselves.”
He clicked another file. Up came a photo of two men greeting each other.
“This was taken three weeks ago at Khlapushniyuiyk Airport, East Zlabia. I’m sure you recognize Savory.”
The sight of that bulbous forehead caused Pfefferkorn’s blood pressure to rise.
“Three guesses who he’s shaking hands with.”
The second man was hugely tall and broad as a bear. An entire carton of Marlboros jutted from one pocket of his tentlike sportcoat. In the background was a contingent of expressionless men armed with machine guns as well as a squad of improbably buxom women wearing the uniforms of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.
“I have no idea,” Pfefferkorn said.
“East Zlabian Lord High President Kliment Thithyich,” Paul said.
“The guy I shot?”
“You didn’t shoot him.”
“I didn’t?”
Paul shook his head.
“Thank God,” Pfefferkorn said.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t start congratulating myself just yet. You did kill Dragomir Zhulk.”
“Oh.”
Paul minimized the photo of Savory and Thithyich. “A lot of what Savory told you was true. The books were coded. Bill did work for us. And you were his intended replacement. But the part about Blood Eyes causing Kliment Thithyich to get shot was bullshit.”
“Then who shot him?”
“He did.”
> “He shot himself? Why?”
“To create a pretext for invading West Zlabia,” Paul said. “He’s already filthy rich—casinos, mostly, plus some telecom and media—but control of the West Zlabian gas field would bump him up to the big leagues. He’s tried rallying international support for an invasion through more respectable channels. You might’ve noticed his campaign to promote awareness about West Zlabian human rights violations? It didn’t catch on. The opposite, in fact: Thithyich actually lost a few neutral-to-favorable percentage points, probably because, as our own polls indicate, ninety-six percent of people haven’t heard of either Zlabia, and eighty-one percent of those that have can’t tell them apart. You can imagine how antsy Thithyich must be getting if he’s willing to fake an assassination attempt. It hurts, getting shot in the ass.”
“Then why didn’t he invade?”
“Because he’s a chicken. Remember, before the Wall came down, we propped up guys like him as a bulwark against the Soviets. They have the most grotesque sense of entitlement. He was counting on our support as part of any offensive. We’ve since made it clear that we have no intention of getting involved in another war for the sake of lining his pockets.”
“So there was no code in Blood Eyes?”
“There was, but it was a dummy—a call-and-response code. We wanted to test whether your name brand would have sufficient penetrance to be useful for future operations. And did it ever. Perfect score.”
“But I mangled it,” Pfefferkorn said.
“Mangled—”
“The flag. ‘In one fluid motion.’”
“That wasn’t the flag.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No.”
“Then what was?”
“‘Sank to his knees, gasping for breath.’”
It depressed Pfefferkorn to realize that he had let such a wretched cliché slip through the cracks. “How did you know I would take the manuscript in the first place?” he asked.
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