Tool of the Trade

by Joe Haldeman

  “—That’s not necessary,” I said.

  Jeff stood up. “—I think perhaps it is. At least for now. We’ll be back by evening.”

  “—I refuse.”

  “—You may not,” Mutt said, smiling as he unbuttoned his jacket to expose the automatic pistol.

  That was enough. I turned on the watch. “—Do you have a gun, too?” I asked Jeff.

  “—No. Dobri’s is enough.”

  “—Put on your coats. We’re going for a walk.” I got my own coat, and we walked to the nearest Metro stop. I escorted them to Gare Nord and put them on the first train out to nowhere—to Hautmont, actually, that being as far as their money would carry them, while staying within the French borders. I gave them specific instructions as to what to do when they got there and then returned to the hotel. Jacob was waiting in the room.

  “I was worried about you. Where have you been?”

  “Met a couple of friends.” I turned on the watch. “Let’s go down and get a drink.” We went to the noisy bar downstairs, and I told him what to do: first, let me have that nice diplomatic passport. Now, here’s five thousand francs. Live it up; stay drunk for at least three days. When you sober up, you will remember absolutely nothing about me.

  Bridges burned, I picked up some more money on the way out to Orly. I used the diplomatic papers and my watch to rush through Customs and on to a waiting Concorde. In the air less than three hours after I’d put Mutt and Jeff aboard the train, I was sure I’d be home long before the shit hit the fan. I was wrong.

  CHAPTER SEVEN: NICK

  We drove out of Cambridge through increasingly heavy snow, but luckily it abated somewhat in an hour. Richard, the boy I’d abducted, was a good, careful driver, and his van had snow tires. We were able to maintain a steady forty-five miles per hour until about midnight. When he started to yawn and blink, I suggested that we take the next exit and nap for a bit. I didn’t feel I had enough driving experience to take over the wheel in this weather.

  I let him sleep for ninety minutes while I read newspapers and drank coffee in an all-night truck stop. Certainly not enough rest for the boy, but I was nervous. It wasn’t likely we were being followed, having been off the interstate since the New Hampshire border, but I didn’t want to press my luck.

  Some years ago an IRA terrorist told Margaret Thatcher, “We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky all the time.” That’s the way I was starting to feel. The KGB would have only limited resources for tracking me down in this country. But as soon as Jacob woke up hung over in a Parisian drunk tank and claimed diplomatic immunity, the real hunt would be on. I wanted to be well camouflaged before the FBI blew the whistle.

  I got two very large coffees to go, went out to the van, and shook Richard awake. His body didn’t want to cooperate, so I gave him the “suggestion” that he had just had eight hours of sleep and was full of energy. It worked, but of course it’s not something to be used too often. He chattered incessantly all the way to Bangor, Maine.

  All I knew about Maine I learned from Stephen King novels, so it seemed a rather foreboding place. Bangor especially, with all the brooding, large Victorian houses, stark and seeming uninhabited in the early-morning snowscape. But it was a town well suited to my purposes and perhaps to my current mood as well.

  If I were totally amoral, I would have taken the easiest and most prudent course and eliminated Richard. Bangor had a convenient river. Instead, I told him to drive to California, taking at least a week. Credit cards were out of the question, of course, so I had to go to a bank and ask for a couple of thousand in used twenties. Then I had to rent him a car (try doing that without a credit card!) and take care of his van. I told him to return the car in Los Angeles and then take the bus to Las Vegas; then fly back to Boston and phone home from the airport, remembering nothing since the night he walked into the Greek bar. They might just possibly link me with a convenient amnesia victim, but there was no way they could follow the trail back to Bangor. Especially since I arranged for his van to be parked on a side street in upstate New York.

  I began to put into motion a plan whose details I had been mulling over for several years. The greatest danger I faced was being recognized from a distance, too great a distance for the device to work. So I started a program that would radically and permanently change my physical appearance.

  First I shaved off my beard, then cut my sixties-style long hair down to a crew and bleached it. I traded in my bifocals for blue-tinted contact lenses (which I had been carrying and using in secret for some years), and bought a shabby working-man’s wardrobe at Goodwill. Sunlamp for an outdoorsy look. Then I set about losing some of the fifty pounds of fat I’d collected at Cambridge. Fasting on fruit juice, vitamins, and phenylalanine, with some light exercise.

  In a month or so I would be ready to head for Washington. Or Langley, Virginia, actually.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: VALERIE

  I had my arms full of groceries, the bags ready to spill, finally got both locks open, and stumbled into the apartment, and this big guy grabbed me from behind, I mean really crushed me, one leather-gloved hand over my mouth and big arm pinning me to his chest, groceries and all; door kicked shut behind me and he whispered, “One sound and you die” with a thick accent, only thing either of them ever said in English.

  Started to struggle and he crushed me twice as tightly; moved his hand up to pinch off my nose. Suffocating, I nodded, and he eased off. A bald man stepped in front of me and pointed a gun at my heart, one of those little machinegun pistols the bad guys always have on television. The other one took my grocery bags, one in each paw, and carried them into the kitchen. Neither of them looked “Russian.” I started to say something, but the one with the gun shushed me.

  The other came back and helped me off with my coat, then handcuffed me and gagged me with a piece of black cloth. I made urgent gestures in the direction of the bathroom; he escorted me there and took off the cuffs; left the door open but stood politely with his back to me. There was nothing obvious in the bathroom clutter that I could use as a weapon. A twin-blade Lady Gillette wouldn’t do much against a machine gun anyhow.

  So these were some of Nick’s KGB buddies. I guessed they had found out about the CIA guy and wanted to put some pressure on Nick. But this wasn’t at all like the mundane spy stuff he had told me about. I was suddenly in the middle of a movie.

  They sat me down at the dining room table and went back into the kitchen to whisper at each other in Russian, or some other Slavic language. The armed one returned after a few minutes and handed me a notepad with a message something like this: “You and I are going someplace else. Pick up whatever you need for a few days. We have a car downstairs. If you try to escape or cry out on the way I will kill you.”

  I got my toothbrush and a paper bag of clothes and such. Several paperback books and a handful of mail that was sitting on the dining room table. My escort put his gun in an attaché case and went through the pockets of my coat. He found the Mace squirter, wiped his fingerprints off it, and tossed it under the couch. Then he handed me the coat, dropped the handcuffs into his pocket, and motioned for us to go.

  A part of my brain that I couldn’t make shut up was saying, This is deep shit. These guys are kidnapping you and they aren’t even bothering to wear masks. Either they are rank amateurs or they know that you’ll never live to identify them.

  There was a dark-green van waiting in front of the apartment building. Getting in, I contrived to drop a piece of mail on the sidewalk, but he saw me do it. Retrieved it and handed it back without comment.

  In the back of the van there were no windows, just a lumpy carpet and a pair of incongruous easy chairs, overstuffed and musty, and a picnic cooler. I sat down, and he handcuffed me to the cooler, then rummaged around in it and offered me a Coke. I said no, but he opened it and pressed it into my free hand. Then he shook a pill out of a bottle and held it out for me to take. I didn’t make an issue of it. It was a little yellow pil
l like aspirin for children, but very bitter.

  The van drove off down Harvard Street, away from the river and Boston. After a few blocks my vision started to blur and I felt a little sick. I drank some more of the Coke and then dropped the can, on the verge of vomiting, but then I went totally limp and couldn’t keep my head up or my eyes open. With my head vibrating against the cold window my last thought was Twenty years ago I would have paid good money for this shit.

  CHAPTER NINE: JACOB

  The feeling is like déjà vu inside out: You should know something, remember something, but you don’t There’s just a hole there. Whatever kind of magicking Foley pulled on me, it worked absolutely. They show me his picture, and it means nothing to me. Yet I spent dozens of hours talking to the man, hundreds of hours studying him, and even went to Europe with him.

  Europe is the horror. Not his erasing my memory—no, he was gentle with me. It was the videotape we got from the French police, through the Sûreté: the Bulgarian secret agent who, after shooting his companion four times in the heart, had shot himself in the head; his skull on the left shattered and dribbling brains, his eyeball extruded and lolling on his cheek—but still he was miraculously alive. In a rambling mélange of French, Russian, Turkish, and Bulgarian he told how Foley had ordered him and the other agent to go on a long train ride, as far as their money would take them, and then walk out of town to where they would not be seen, and die. For seven hours they knew they were riding to self-inflicted death, and they could do nothing to prevent it. Perhaps not “nothing.” A bullet to the brain evidently broke the spell.

  The agent died during the filming, while the doctors were working on him. Langley has sent out a team of forensic specialists to assist in the autopsy. Maybe they’ll find a drug.

  What Foley did to me was comic by comparison. I woke up in Orsay, a suburb of Paris, in bed with a strange woman, with a red-wine hangover beyond epic proportions. I had been drinking—guzzling, actually—for three days, singlehandedly killing a case of a Burgundy that I find here in Boston runs eighty dollars a bottle. The woman said we had met in a Left Bank bistro, and one thing had led to another. She was worried about me, barely able to stand up but flashing a fat roll of francs, and brought me home with her; I evidently drank compulsively from dawn till dark until the three days were up. She said it was a hilarious time. I wish I could remember something of what went on. I don’t suppose Foley was entirely responsible for that particular amnesia.

  By this time the grotesque videotape had made its way to Washington, and the proper connections had been made, and the police all over France were on the lookout for my body. (My passport had wound up in a mailbox at Dulles International, with Foley’s fingerprints all over it.) When I staggered into the gendarmerie in Orsay, the police quite properly acted as if they’d seen a ghost, and unfortunately repaid my benefactress by throwing her in le slammer for several hours, over my protests. I had written down her address, though, and mailed her all my leftover francs, about five hundred dollars’ worth—God knows where and how Foley got them; my own traveler’s checks were untouched.

  The Sûreté had also sent copies of the tape to the Bulgarian and Soviet authorities. The Russians made an initial loud noise and then said nothing. “Someone”—the French did not give their sources—had seen Foley leave the hotel with the two Bulgarians and then return an hour or so later, alone. Then he spent some time with me in the hotel bar, where he was seen to slip me some cash. Then he walked out of the hotel, into the Metro, and was never seen again.

  From this side, all we know is that he landed in Dulles November 16, having booked first-class passage on the Concorde in my name. Paid cash. He set off the metal detector but convinced the guard that he had a pacemaker, which is not true. A Peacemaker is more likely; we know he’s an Expert pistol shot and has at least two unregistered weapons. From Dulles he might have taken the subway straight to National and stepped on the shuttle to Boston—no ID required with cash, of course—or to anyplace on the East Coast. Or he could have rented a car and driven to Akron or Tulsa. We know he did call home, but not necessarily from a local phone.

  That’s where it gets complicated in an especially ugly way. When the videotape finally found its way to Washington and the computer identified Foley as being my section’s responsibility, somebody ran back the tapes of the phone tap and their apartment bugs. Silence for the past day and a half. The afternoon of the sixteenth, though, we could hear the apartment being broken into. The “burglars” said nothing; just waited in place until Mrs. Foley came home. There was a brief struggle; they evidently tied her up and gagged her. That night, Foley called, and one of them answered the phone with “We have your wife,” in Russian. Foley hung up and has not called since. The two agents evidently kidnapped Mrs. Foley.

  Which is remarkable. The KGB rarely indulges in serious crime outside of Communist countries. They must be as scared as we are over Foley. But more efficient: From the time the videotape was turned over to the Soviet embassy in Paris to the apartment break-in, slightly more than four hours elapsed.

  My obvious first move was to pay a visit to Vladimir Borachev, Foley’s ultimate superior here, and ask whether he had committed any capital crimes lately. I was on my way out the door when I literally ran into David Jefferson.

  He was a formidable-looking man, a black Charles Atlas. Handsome features modified by a webbed scar that ran from cheekbone to ear. He asked if I was John Jacob Bailey and handed me an envelope.

  The letter inside informed me that Jefferson had been “attached” to my section for an indefinite period. The verb was to become too literally true.

  “You’re a Marine sergeant major?”

  “That is correct, sir.” He had a voice like a bass buzz saw.

  “And this one hundred ninety-ninth Brigade is…”

  “Special antiterrorism unit, sir.”

  “Please don’t call me ‘sir.’ We aren’t being hijacked or held hostage. Why were you attached to us?”

  “The kidnapping, Mr. Bailey. The murders in France.”

  “You’ve been well briefed, then.”

  “Not that well, actually. The fact of the crimes; the KGB connection.”

  “Well, have George get you the folder, George Simpson. When he gets back from lunch. I have a shuttle to catch.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “Not necessary. In fact, you’d be in the way. Unless you speak Russian.”

  “—I’m reasonably fluent,” he said in Russian, with an odd accent that might have been Vietnamese. “Also Spanish and a bit of a few other languages. But that’s immaterial at the moment. I’m to accompany you everywhere, regardless.”

  “Bodyguard?”

  “Yes, but more than that. A plain bodyguard wouldn’t be enough. What they say about this Foley, he might be the most dangerous man alive, and you’re his most logical next victim.”

  “Nonsense. If he wanted to do me in, he could have done it in Paris.”

  “That may be so. Nevertheless, I have my orders. As have you.” The letter was from Langley.

  “Oh, all right. Let’s go.” I barely had time to worry about how to handle the red tape—how to bill the Marines for his shuttle flight—when Jefferson solved the problem by suggesting that we “manifest ourselves on a special flight,” i.e., commandeer a military aircraft. I could see that he might sometimes be handy to have around.

  Sitting by ourselves in the back of a twenty-passenger turboprop, we got to know each other a little. Jefferson was a few years younger than I; started at West Point but dropped out to join the Marines, so he could make it to Vietnam before the war was over. He served fourteen months’ duty there and was not happy when we pulled out. Later he was an “adviser” in El Salvador and, temporarily out of the Marines, did some wet work in Nicaragua. Wounded eleven times; the scar on his face was from a bayonet (he had taken the weapon away and “fed it” to its owner). He was obviously on amiable terms with mayhem, but was matte
r-of-fact about it. Unnervingly so.

  When he unbuttoned his Harris Tweed tent of a jacket, you could see he was actually a fraction smaller than he appeared, bulked out on the right by an Ingram machine pistol Velcro-ed to his side, and on the left by a crossdraw.44 Magnum. He was also wearing body armor and advised me to requisition same. Said it had saved his life twice. I suspected that bullets would bounce off him anyhow.

  I told him in a blunt but, I hope, friendly way that I considered him a liability. An agent has to fade into the background, look like a bank clerk or a schoolmarm. He can’t have a Sherman tank for a pet.

  Surprisingly, he agreed. But he pointed out that this was no normal intelligence operation; everyone involved would know that I was CIA anyhow. His presence might make people think twice before trying anything dramatic.

  We got to the Soviet trade mission by two o’clock. The outer office was large and severe, a few faded Intourist posters not livening things up. The receptionist also was large and severe. She told us that Comrade Borachev saw people by appointment only. I showed her my State Department identification. She said Comrade Borachev wasn’t in today. Maybe on vacation.

  It was a good thing we’d seen a file photo of him; he walked in at just that moment, brushing snow off his shoulders and looking expectantly friendly.

  “Mr. Borachev,” I began.

  “—He’s from the State Department,” she snapped in Russian.

  “—Actually, the CIA,” I said. “—This is a matter of great urgency. No time for games.”

  “We can speak English,” he said slowly. He looked at Jefferson. “You are also from…”

  “U.S. Marines, sir. Security.”

  “You don’t expect violence.”

  “We don’t know what to expect,” I said. “Is there someplace we could talk?”

  “My office.” He walked toward the door, and we followed. He cut off Jefferson. “Actual spies only, please.” I nodded, feeling a little apprehensive, and Jefferson reluctantly eased onto a small chair.