Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Danny said, “My friends in the drug business? What are you talking about?”

  He was surprised and deeply disturbed by Street’s words. Drug money? This had never occurred to him.

  Later, when he delivered his report to Morgan, she snorted in amusement. “My God, that’s wonderful! He really thinks it was drug money?”

  “I certainly got that impression.”

  “Wonderful! Wonderful!” Morgan was laughing, positively bursting with merriment. She had been desperate for a diversion, something that would steer the world away from the truth about Jack’s sources of finance. Folding the bank was good. But drug money! Only a Republican could have imagined that he could penetrate Peter’s smoke screens, avoid Peter’s booby traps, and break through to the drug cartels, which would turn out to be a happy band of eager witnesses. F. Merriwether Street was off on a wild-goose chase that could last for years and was guaranteed to come to nothing!

  “Drug money!” Morgan said. “Manna from heaven.”

  Danny said, “I’m glad you’re pleased. But he’s coming after us. What now?”

  “Ignore the blockhead. Full speed ahead on closing the bank. File bankruptcy, whatever. You handle the details. The governor signs everything. And whenever Merriwether Street mentions drug money, look very, very nervous.”

  Danny said, “Morgan, I am nervous.”

  “We can fix that, baby.”

  She kissed him, long and wet. “My God, it’s been so long!”

  It had been three days. They were in Morgan’s room. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Morgan picked up the phone and said, “Muriel, I don’t want to be disturbed for any reason. That goes for the watchdogs.” She meant the Secret Service agents who now went everywhere with her, who stood guard outside the door. She was undressing as she spoke.

  After Danny left, Morgan opened her safe. After pulling on a pair of surgical gloves stored inside, she extracted a videotape. It was sealed in a padded envelope. She turned on her computer and, still wearing the gloves, typed F. Merriwether Street’s name and home address on a label and printed it out. She affixed the label to the envelope along with a priority mail stamp.

  Then, without a glance at the waiting Secret Service agents, she strode into the outer office and out the front door. The agents leaped to their feet and followed.

  At the curb, where her limousine waited, she dropped the envelope into a mailbox.

  One of the agents said, “We’d have been glad to take care of that for you, ma’am.”

  Morgan smiled, cold-eyed, with all thirty-two of her perfect teeth. “I like to do things for myself,” she replied.

  The agent opened the car door for her. She said, sharply, “You don’t listen, do you? Don’t ever do that again. I can open my own fucking doors.”

  9 F. Merriwether Street was revolted by the tape. As a puritan he was also fascinated by it. It confirmed so many of the things that he had always known, in the abstract, to be true of human females. It was plain from Cindy’s reactions that what was happening to her was new, shocking, totally unexpected. Yet she loved it; she could not help herself. This man had her running on all fours. There was no mistaking that what she felt was, in fact, ecstasy. But what must she have felt afterward?

  Only by sealing the tape as evidence and locking it in a safe was Street able to resist the urge to look at it again. At the same time, he recognized it as a blatant attempt to impeach his witness and intimidate him. And he knew where it had come from. That had been the whole point of sending it to him. It was a warning.

  He immediately called Cindy. She calmly acknowledged that the tape was genuine and described the circumstances in which it was made.

  “You were set up for blackmail against a contingency exactly like this one,” Street said.

  “A reasonable person could so conclude,” Cindy replied.

  “By whom?”

  “Who else could it be?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, this just reinforces the case. Do you want to go on?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t burn the tape. I may have to produce it on discovery.”

  “I know that.”

  “Cindy, I have to ask you this. Is the tape everything they have on you?”

  “Everything I know about, everything that’s true,” Cindy said. “But that doesn’t mean there won’t be more things coming in the mail. They’re going to do everything they can to distort this investigation and lead it down blind alleys. Accuse the accuser, that’s their first law.”

  Street didn’t quite know what she meant by that, and even when her prediction came true he did not see the connection.

  Three

  1 The honey-colored half-Chinese girl was Peter’s first disciple. Soon she became the bait of the fisherman. She was good—so good that I suspected prior training. She brought others to him. Only the brightest and most beautiful were invited to remain. There were parties on the houseboat, parties on the beach. As expected, Peter was staying in character, building a cadre. I watched, but with circumspection. Even assisted by amateurs, Peter was a formidable counterespionage service all by himself. The fact that he had trained me was both an advantage and a danger: He knew what to look for because he knew what I would be looking for. One evening by accident I found myself dining across the room from Peter in a trendy restaurant. I was alone; he was with the honey-colored girl and two or three other beauties of both sexes. Waiters (only slightly less beautiful) hovered. Peter was already a celebrity; I was a regular whom the headwaiter was happy to meet for the first time each time I tipped him twenty dollars for a good table. As wine was poured for him to taste, Peter’s eyes rested on me for a moment. Without recognition? Perhaps.

  A day or two later, while I read a newspaper and drank coffee at the News Café, the honey-colored girl swept down on me. She wore her usual street costume, string bikini and Rollerblades. The only part of her body completely concealed were her eyes, behind huge sunglasses. She leaned over my table, displaying even the nipples of her admirable breasts, and with a catlike smile said, in excellent Mandarin, “Love your face. Is it new?” She dipped a fingertip in my coffee and drew it lingeringly along one of the surgical scars behind my ears. Then she skated away, naked buttocks working for the tantalization of the invisible man who was myself, grinning and sticking out her tongue. Was this a message from Peter or cocaine? I assumed the former; it is always best to assume the worst.

  I watched my back. I never saw anyone behind me, but I began to hear familiar phenomena on my telephone—the sudden fading in volume that is sometimes, though not always, a sign that the phone is being tapped. When outdoors I began to wear an amplifier, also disguised as a Walkman, which permitted me to hear small sounds from a considerable distance. One day while sitting on my balcony, and then the next day as I walked along the beach, I heard what I was listening for, the snicker and hiss of a shutter on a camera with a long lens. I was being photographed. Or was I?

  I no longer appeared on my balcony in person, but set up a video camera inside an innocent-looking table and watched the door of Peter’s houseboat on the screen in my bedroom, while in the other room the television played soaps and movie reruns: Ingrid Bergman as a psychiatrist, Richard Burton as the disillusioned unwitting pawn of a diabolically clever British intelligence service; oh my. Early one morning, just at dawn, an hour at which I was especially vigilant because first light has always been Peter’s favorite moment to do the unexpected, a Lincoln Town Car with a liveried chauffeur arrived outside the houseboat. From the bedroom window I focused my most powerful optic, a night-vision telescope, on the interior of the car, and in the backseat I saw the wavering wormlike green figure of a small, slender person. Not a woman, judging by the body language. An Oriental, I decided. The person looked out the window—not in anxiety but in impatience. A Chinese. I recognized the face but could not put a name to it or remember how I knew it. I photographed it.

  Peter emerged from the houseboat, ca
rrying a hanger bag. He got into the Lincoln. It drove off immediately. I was already dressed, Florida fashion, in shorts and T-shirt and tennis shoes. I went down in the elevator, got into my car, and drove at high speed straight to the Miami airport.

  I caught a glimpse of Peter on the curb. He sauntered inside. I double-parked and dashed into the terminal in pursuit. Just inside the door I found Peter waiting for me to catch up. He smiled, winked broadly, sauntered away. I was in the trap. Beyond his tall and elegant figure—he wore white duck trousers that day and a pale blue blazer—I spotted three young Americans in dark suits hurrying toward me through the crowd. The two flankers split off left and right to envelop me, the center man made eye contact and came right at me. Almost surely CIA agents. I thought, He has told them I’m a KGB assassin.

  The thought of escape did not even cross my mind. I knew they would not kill me unless I pulled a gun. The CIA has no power of arrest—what a country!—and I had no intention of letting myself be kidnapped without a struggle. There was nothing to do but walk straight toward them, as if I were the honest American citizen my documentation said I was.

  They, too, kept coming. Now I saw who they really were: not CIA men, but three of Peter’s disciples. There was cause for anxiety after all. There is no telling what an amateur will do. I looked to either side for a way out. While my attention was distracted, a girl carrying a suitcase materialized in front of me. She dropped her bag—that’s how I knew she was there, I heard it hit the floor. Long legs apart, she bent over from the waist as if to pick it up.

  All this I saw in a flash a fraction of a second before I bumped into her. She shrieked, whirled, and slapped me hard on the face. In a voice churned by outrage and disgust she shouted, in a British accent, “Oh, you filthy swine! Police! Someone bring the police!”

  It was Peter’s honey-colored girl, now dressed—demurely, for her—in miniskirt and blouse instead of string bikini and Roll-erblades. An airport cop arrived in seconds. The girl filed a complaint of sexual battery against me, charging that I had thrust my hand between her legs and fondled her as she leaned over in all innocence to pick up her suitcase. Her startling beauty was more than enough to make the cops believe almost anything she said. The technique was so quintessentially Peter: a distraction inside a diversion wrapped up in a double cross, and the whole package tied up with a merry laugh.

  It took seven hours to be booked, briefly incarcerated, and then released on cash bond—I never leave home without my traveler’s checks. By then one of my two remaining false American identities, invented over years of careful planning, had been destroyed forever. No matter. My work in Miami Beach was done. I stopped at my apartment long enough to sweep it of all evidences of my presence—not a fingerprint survived. I packed a bag and bundled up my surveillance equipment and loaded it into the trunk of the car.

  On a laptop computer I called up the flights that left Miami in the hours following my arrest. I looked for matching connections for all passengers on all those planes. Within minutes I had made a match: two men, a Mr. N. Carlisle and a Mr. J. Yung, who had departed Miami at nine o’clock in the morning on the same flight for London, and then in London boarded a PIA flight for Karachi, with ongoing connections to Shanghai.

  A few hours later I was in the air myself. I had friends in Shanghai. But then, so did Peter.

  2 My Shanghai friend and I found each other in the throngs along the Bund, the famous promenade beside the Huang Po River. We used the old signals—a certain pin in her hair, a certain book in my hand. I asked for directions to the Chinese Seaman’s Club.

  “It is by a little bridge over a tributary of the river,” she replied. “Follow me.”

  On the bridge, she stared into my altered face.

  In Uighur, the language we had always spoken to each other, she said, “You have been to a doctor.”

  “Not you, my friend.”

  “Only Dr. Time.”

  And Dr. History. Twenty years before she had been a beauty, but what I saw now was a skull in which two well-remembered, fiercely intelligent eyes burned. No other traces remained of the girl she had been before the Red Guards did what they had done to her.

  Nothing of importance had changed. This woman was a pure-hearted Communist who knew that I was one, too. She also knew that she was alive because of me and might have died because of Peter, and that I had come for help—help for the revolution, to which we were both pledged and bound together. No explanations or appeals to the past were necessary. This was why she had wanted to go on living; it was why I had helped her to stay alive. In the old days she had been a junior officer in the Chinese foreign intelligence service. After the death of Mao and the rise of new Party leadership she was rehabilitated. She now held a high position in Chinese counterintelligence. That meant that what she was not trusted to know she found out by her own means.

  I told her what I wanted to know.

  She said, “Tomorrow, take the tour bus that arrives on the Bund at four in the afternoon.”

  The crowd at the bus stop was enormous—a sea of black eyes staring at the foreigners. I did not see my friend at once, but when I stepped off the bus I felt a sharp pain in my hip, and there she was, hatpin in hand, utterly expressionless. I stared into her eyes and waited for the poison to work. Nothing happened; I did not die. This was her message: She was still my friend, the pin was not tipped with poison.

  She led me—I followed at a discreet distance, eyes fixed on the ornament in her hair as she slipped ahead of me through the tangled crowd. She stepped aboard a sampan moored in the yellow water of the Huang Po. I followed. This was risky—a white man and a Chinese woman alone. It was impossible even for my friend to know which molecules of the great crowd-beast were watching for just such a lapse in tradecraft. She seemed unconcerned.

  In plain speech, using no pseudonyms or circumlocutions, she said, “Peter is in Shanghai. He is meeting in a safe house with a man called Ji De Lu. You know who that is?”

  “No.”

  “He is the famous Mr. Gee.”

  “Ah.”

  Of course. Until the most recent rearrangement of power, Mr. Gee had been a member of the counterintelligence directorate of the Chinese intelligence service. Under Mao Zedong he had been the head of the secret police in Shanghai, and therefore my friend’s persecutor. He had controlled the Red Guards in this city. He was a brute, a coarse-faced Manchu, a torturer. He may even have raped my friend himself. But now he was a member of the new class, a maker of money. He had become very, very rich off joint contracts with American and other foreign manufacturers looking for cheap labor. Mr. Gee was able to provide the labor because he controlled manufacturing in China’s archipelago of labor camps—ten million political prisoners who worked without wages.

  I said, “He is now a capitalist?”

  “Mr. Gee keeps up with the times.”

  “Does this mean that his connection with Chinese intelligence no longer exists?”

  “He has the same important friends as always, only they are richer now. It is he who brought Peter to us.”

  What? “Please explain,” I said.

  She said, “You do not know?”

  “No.”

  “That’s odd. Moscow knows.”

  “I haven’t been in Moscow for years. Peter has kept me away.”

  “I see,” said my friend. “Then I will tell you. After Afghanistan, but before the Berlin Wall came down, when Gorbachev was destroying the Communist Party of the USSR, Peter came to Mr. Gee and made an offer. They are old friends; it goes back to Vietnam—the anti-imperialist drugs operations.”

  “And?”

  “Peter sold us his memoirs.”

  I felt quite short of breath. I said, “When, exactly?”

  “Two years ago.”

  That was a year before he defected, if that was still the operative word, to the CIA. I said, “What was his price?”

  “Thirty million American dollars is the figure I’ve heard.”r />
  Now I knew where the twenty-seven million dollars in Escobar’s Banco Amazones had come from. Peter had kept three million in pocket change to tide him over while he waited for the real return on his investment.

  I said, “Is he here to sell more memoirs?”

  “He is negotiating,” my friend said. “But I am told that it is not information Peter is selling this time, but a more valuable item. They say that the price for this item is one hundred million American dollars, plus a percentage of future profits.”

  I said, “Future profits? What does that mean?”

  My friend paused, considering her words. Big rusty vessels churned the Huang Po, whose stagnant waters looked and smelled like the disgorged contents of China’s bowels.

  My friend said, “It is expected that business opportunities in America and other advantages will result from this deal,” she said. “For example, most-favored-nation status for China and official U.S. silence on Chinese human-rights questions. Also, Mr. Gee and partners would like their own port on the West Coast of the United States.”

  “Their own port?”

  “Yes. Exclusive rights to the docks and private storage of goods with no interference by U.S. customs. They speak also of a Chinese port at either end of the Panama Canal. Certain joint economic ventures. A certain consideration in matters of licensing military technology. Peter is asking two percent of profits from all such enterprises. He has been offered one percent.”

  “That’s it? That’s all there is to the deal?”

  She hesitated. I was afraid she might say no more, and I knew in my bones that there was more.

  Finally she said, “Perhaps not. There is a curious condition in the basic agreement. Thirty million dollars, broken down into smaller sums, will be paid at once, before the end of this week. But not to Peter. To a second party. Some of this money has already been transferred to many banks in the United States. The balance of seventy million will be paid directly to Peter, but not until the first Wednesday after the first Monday in November.”