Bannerman's Promise

by John R. Maxim

  “Can I tell you both at dinner?” he asked. “At dinner it will be easier.”

  She understood, she thought. A restaurant. The more crowded the better. So that Lesko might think twice before reaching across the table to him.

  “Dinner will be fine, Leo.”

  “You'll say nothing until then?”

  “I'll try. I'll ask him to wait.”

  “But say nothing in your room, Elena. Not even with the shower running and the radio turned up loud. Not even—”

  “Leo. I know all that.”

  He took a breath. “At dinner, then.”

  He would tell them, he thought. He would even show them. At the restaurant, if all goes well, they will see for themselves.

  23

  Barca.

  Sailboat.

  Irwin Kaplan said nothing at first.

  His mind turned to his youngest daughter. This morning she had asked him to bag tennis just this once and take her out for an Egg McMuffin instead. The kid, he thought, must be psychic.

  He knew whose line it was. He was supposed to say, Aha! Sailboat! Carlo's boyfriend must be Barca. He signals Moscow while he 's out on his boat, which is why you had trouble triangulating him. His KGB control moved from Karlhorst to Moscow, which explains why Aldo switched his cover operations from Eastern Europe where there's money to Russia where there 's colored paper.

  “If Aldo is Barca,” he asked Roger instead, “what's it to you?”

  “To State, you mean? As opposed to the CIA?”

  Kaplan nodded.

  “The State Department is the instrument of the President's foreign policy. Don't read too much into this, Irwin, but that is not necessarily true of the Central Intelligence Agency just as the KGB is not necessarily an instrument of Soviet reform.”

  “Okay, you want this guy for yourself. What's so important about Barca all of a sudden?”

  “He might be part of a bigger picture. Something we've been trying to get a handle on. That's all I can tell you for now.”

  “In the meantime, you're going to let Carla Benedict marry a suspected .KGB-agent?”

  Clew shook his head. “We'll intervene if it comes to that. And we'll explain to Paul why we were circumspect about sharing what is, as you point out, only a suspicion.”

  Kaplan could hear that conversation already. Gee, Paul . . . even Irwin-the-straight-arrow-Kaplan said we should make sure before we said anything. But that would cut very little ice if Carla got hurt because she had her guard down or if...

  “Assume Aldo is Barca,” he said. “What does he want with Carla Benedict?”

  “Beyond the obvious?” Fuller tossed a hand. “We simply don't know.”

  ”I guess I'm slow. Aside from sex, what's the obvious?”

  “What he's achieved already, I suppose. Potentially exploitable connections with the Brugg family, with Paul Ban-nerman's network, and with virtually everyone else he met at that wedding.”

  Kaplan didn't buy this. If Aldo's an agent, his instructions would have been specific. A possibility, if Kaplan had to guess, was that the guy's interest in penetrating that bunch had to do with Elena's war against the Zurich druggies. But Aldo doesn't work for the traffickers. If Clew is right, he works for ... Oh shit.

  “Tell me straight out,” Kaplan leaned forward. “Whatever you've got going here, are Lesko and Elena in on it?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Could they find themselves in the middle of it? Being in Moscow, I mean?”

  “It's crossed our minds. But we don't think so.”

  “Are we talking drugs here, or aren't we?”

  Fuller hesitated, .choosing his words. “If we're right, there are drugs in the ·equation but they're not central to it. I'll tell you this much. It involves the smuggling of a number of ... commodities . . . into and out of several of the Russian republics.”

  Kaplan waited. Then, ‘That's all you're going to tell me?”

  “Need to know, Irwin,” Fuller reminded him. “Having said that, we're not even sure how much we know.”

  Kaplan cocked his head toward the terrace where the Post columnist, their fourth, was talking to one of Fuller's dogs. “Why would he know more about this than I do?”

  Clew affected surprise. “Aylward? Who says he does?”

  “Don't fuck with me, Roger.”

  Fuller cleared his throat. He grimaced, his face registering several different reactions in rapid succession. The first was annoyance, then dismay, and then something akin to admiration, this last directed at Irwin Kaplan.

  “Kevin is a source,” he said finally. “He heard some whispers. He investigated, picked up a piece here, another there. He came to Roger a few weeks ago, laid out his conclusions, and said that he was going to publish them. That would have been premature.”

  “So you made a deal.” Kaplan nodded. “He sits tight in return for an exclusive.”

  A wan smile. “That, and getting to come here for tennis.”

  Irwin Kaplan grunted. He took a breath and blew it out slowly, taking time to think. Other questions were forming in his mind. He was not sure, now, that he wanted to ask them.

  Why, to pick the most obvious one, did Barton Fuller give a rat's ass about smuggling in Russia? The answer? It depends. It depends on what they're smuggling.

  Next question. Why doesn't Barton Fuller just call in the appropriate ambassador, tell him what he knows, and suggest that the ambassador call it to the attention of the KGB? The answer? The KGB, or someone within it, is probably involved. Who is that someone? It has to be Barca's control. Do we know who that person is? No. Which is why we`re now probably going to put a serious surveillance team on Carla's boyfriend—if they haven't had one on him right along—establish that he is in fact Barca—if they don't know damned well already—and, if so, try to identify his KGB control through him.

  But surveillance on the boyfriend, assuming that he and Carla are playing house, is also surveillance on Carla. What happens if she spots it? Carla, likely as not, might carve the spook up just on general principles. And how do you surveil Carla without, at the very least as a courtesy, clearing it with Bannerman? And yet, so far, they clearly intend to leave Bannerman in the dark.

  “I'm going to make a prediction,” he said to Fuller. “No. First I'm going to make a judgment.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What I think is going on here, is that the KGB, or a faction within it, is involved in large-scale smuggling. They're supposed to be controlling it, but instead they're grabbing a piece of it. How'm I doing?”

  Blank faces. Clew asked, “Why would you think that?”

  The DEA man curled his lip. “This takes a rocket scientist? What have we been talking about here?”

  He could have gone further. He could have asked, for example, What else is new? Show me a law-enforcement agency in the whole world that doesn't have a problem with sticky fingers. We have cops and DEA agents who pocket confiscated cash and sell confiscated drugs. We have a CIA which, for years has been protecting the traffickers in return for intelligence while skimming drug profits to build up a war chest they don't have to tell Congress about. We have ...

  Kaplan stopped himself. ”A KGB war chest?” he asked Fuller. “Is that where your head is?”

  The secretary hesitated. “Partly. Perhaps.”

  “You're going to worry about the KGB building up a stash? That's your big rumor? Of course they're building up a stash.”

  Fuller's expression was thoughtful. Clew's bordered on petulance. He asked, “Does your omniscience suggest a reason why, Irwin?”

  “Why? Because they can. Why does a dog lick his ass?”

  Another hard stare from Clew.

  “Okay.” Kaplan threw up his hands. “You want a conspiracy? It's a religious thing. The stash is for the second coming of Lenin and to buy new statues for all those empty pedestals. Any money left over, they'll buy retirement dachas in Palm Beach.”

  Barton Fuller's mouth showed the hi
nt of a smile. It quickly faded. “It might be a bit more serious than that, Irwin.”

  “So you keep hinting. I don't want to know.”

  Fuller held his gaze. “Fair enough,” he said finally. “You mentioned a prediction. What is it?”

  “Predictions are fallible. This is more like a prophecy.”

  Fuller waited.

  “Whatever Roger here wants to do, it's going to go wrong.” He turned to Clew. “This is no offense, Roger. You're a smart guy and your heart's mostly in the right place. But you want to know what your problem is?”

  Clew's eyes were cold. “Some other time, Irwin.”

  “You're so fucking . . . circuitous. You got a mind like a corkscrew. You hatch these plans that are so goddamned complex, they're like Murphy's Law waiting to happen.”

  Clew reddened. He started to speak. Kaplan waved him off.

  “And I'll tell you something else. You have learned absolutely nothing from the last two times you tried to diddle Bannerman. I'd watch out for that third strike if I were you.”

  Fuller frowned. “Explain that, Irwin.”

  Kaplan sat back. “It's all I have to say.”

  ”I, Barton Fuller, am telling you straight that we've gone out of our way not to involve Paul. Why do you think otherwise?”

  ”I don't know. Past experience.”

  “We've made mistakes. We've learned from them. What else?”

  “You can't not involve Carla Benedict. Your best hope is that Bannerman will decide she's a big girl and that he has better things to do than wonder about this Corsini guy.”

  Fuller nodded thoughtfully. He reached for his racquet but made no move to rise. He tapped it against his knee.

  “Good advice, Irwin,” he said. “And with your usual candor.”

  “Like I said, no offense.”

  “Well ... on that score, you might owe Roger an apology. The fact is ... the subject at hand happens to be fairly straightforward. A particular thing is happening or it isn't.”

  Kaplan's lips moved. He seemed to be struggling with himself.

  “The phrase you're trying to think of,” said Clew icily, “is I'm sorry.”

  Kaplan blinked, then shook his head. That was not where his head was. Then, to Fuller, very softly, reluctantly, “Is it nukes?”

  ”I beg your pardon?”

  He hated asking. Repeating was even worse. ‘Tactical nuclear weapons,” he said at last. “Is that the commodity? Is that what you think someone's peddling?”

  “In for a penny, Irwin.”

  “Forget I asked.”

  But he had asked. And he realized what had put the thought in his head. Kevin Aylward's column. Aylward, maybe three weeks before, had done a series dealing with the redeployment of the Soviet nuclear arsenal after the breakup of the old Soviet Union. He said, basically, that we'd never get a reliable accounting of the Soviet weapons inventory because many were hidden after the START treaty was signed and more disappeared during the chaos that followed the Gorbachev coup.

  He also ran a story about a mini-Chernobyl that's supposed to have happened in the past two or three months. Something, he thinks maybe radioactivity, got into the air and wiped out a couple of villages in the Urals. The source was a truck driver who was brought in to help bury the dead and then realized he was worm food if he hung around. The truck driver, bloody, his face all blistered, staggered into the next village where he told someone who told someone else. Then the truck driver stole a bike and took off. But one witness, according to Aylward, claimed to have snuck back to the guy's burned-out truck where he says armed men were winching it onto a flatbed. He says he counted dozens of bullet holes in both trucks.

  The Russians hit the ceiling. Said the whole thing was nonsense. If this truck driver exists, produce him. If others claim to have spoken to him, produce them. If the villages you name have become radioactive wastelands, why are they now fully occupied and their citizens busy with spring planting? Come see, they told the American ambassador. We invite you. We invite even this xenophobic, red-bashing drunk of a columnist and ask him finally to put up or shut up.

  The ambassador sent a couple of aides, but the trip wasn't necessary. Satellite photographs had already showed normal activity, normal occupancy. The NSA said its sensors picked up no evidence of nuclear contamination. This cut no ice with Aylward, who now claimed a massive cover-up. Everyone's in on it. Even the NSA.

  This, however, was typical Kevin Aylward. The voice of doom. Someone pointed out that Aylward has accurately predicted ten of the last three recessions. For twenty years now, the guy's been predicting the imminent collapse of the American economy, mass cancer due to ozone depletion, not to mention nuclear winter. Once, just before he checked into Betty Ford, he was telling anyone who'd listen that Ronald Wilson Reagan, six letters in each name, translated to 666, which is the symbol of the Antichrist.

  For all that—and not that Kaplan believed the story—he hoped that truck driver made it. The guy, if he existed, had a lot of heart.

  “Irwin?”

  “I'm not playing tennis here anymore, either. Not with that wacko.”

  “That wacko has sources. They've been reliable in the past.”

  “And he won't reveal them, right? That's because they're probably on Venus.”

  Kaplan pushed to his feet. He turned away, one hand in his pocket, fingering his car keys again.

  “Is it nukes?” he asked again.

  Fuller wet his lips. “No.”

  Kaplan stared out over the tennis court. “Okay. What?”

  ”A question first. If I should ever ask you, as a personal favor, to sit down with Paul Bannerman on my behalf, would you do it?”

  “What for?”

  “To keep him out of this. I thought Roger had. Now you've caused me to wonder.”

  “Why me?”

  “You won't lie to him. He knows that.”

  “Anyway, no.”

  “With Lesko, then. The two of you could see Bannerman together.”

  “Maybe. If I can know I'm not lying.”

  “You won't be. How much do you know about nerve gas, Irwin?”

  24

  At the Russian embassy in Bern, ten minutes from his flat, Yuri Rykov signed in and made his way to the KGB communications center on the top floor, rear.

  He pushed his ID card into a slot and waited. A recording asked him to give his name and rank. He did so, waiting again as a machine verified his voiceprint. After several seconds, the door clicked open electronically.

  He would not be alone, as he had hoped. Another officer, a woman, was seated at one of the computer consoles. Her presence made him uncomfortable.

  This discomfort, he realized, was in part reactionary.

  Until the reforms, there had been no female officers in the KGB except for bookkeepers and archivists. Otherwise, all KGB officers were male, strictly Russian, and were members of the Communist party. Now, he thought, it is like affirmative action in America. Recruitment is from both sexes, and you can come from any republic as long as you are not a Moslem or a Jew. Party membership, of course, is no longer a requirement, but a respect for Socialist ideals remains an unwritten prerequisite. Better, as General Belkin says, to believe in something than to believe in nothing. It is why the CIA recruits so many Mormons and the FBI so many Catholics.

  There were two other reasons why he wished that this woman was not there. The first was that they had briefly been lovers. For just one night, and regretted even before breakfast. The second was that she would smell Carla on him. All women have that gift. Even Susan Lesko, from three thousand miles away, heard in his voice that he had done more than put Carla to bed.

  “She is better now,” he had told her. “Even in her sleep she has a little smile.”

  ”Um . . . good work, Yuri,” was what she answered. In Susan's voice as well there was a smile.

  Perhaps he imagined it. Perhaps it was simply an expression of relief after he finished relating, in possi
bly excessive detail, Carla's account of her confrontation with Aldo Corsini.

  During that part of the call, all she could say was, “My God.” She said it many times. This and “Poor Carla.”

  Susan explained that they would be coming. She and Bannerman. There would probably be others, but that was not yet decided. They would come as if nothing were amiss. Bringing gifts as if to celebrate Carla's betrothal and as if to become better acquainted with Corsini.

  As she told him this, he thought he heard a measure of satisfaction in her voice, a level of enthusiasm that one would normally associate with the author of a plan. She might well have been. It seemed the sort of notion a woman might come up with, but a sensible way to proceed nonetheless. This made it all the more urgent, however, that he clean up Carla's boathouse.

  Yuri had also placed a call to General Belkin at the Savoy. His party had not yet arrived. It was just as well. In a few minutes, Yuri might have more to tell him.

  He took a seat at one of the consoles, turned on the power, and tapped into the mainframe. Next, he entered his identifier. A menu appeared. He called up the file on KGB field agents and assets.

  Yuri's clearance did not permit him full access to this file, but at least he could see if a file existed. He entered the name corsini, alðo, and hit a key.

  The machine chugged and mumbled as if considering his request. The words corsini, aldo—ref. barca—access restricted—02-4-238-4412 crept across the screen.

  Yuri grimaced in annoyance. There was a file. It was something. But it might mean very little. He had no idea what “Ref. Barca” meant, and that series of numbers did not look like any designator code he'd ever seen. He tried typing in barca. He hit a key. More chugging. A similar response, barca—ref.

  CORSINI, ALDO—ACCESS RESTRICTED—02-4-238-4412.

  Interesting, he thought. Corsini and Barca must be the same. Or, on second thought, Barca could be almost anything. A cable address for Corsini, the name of a group of which he was part, even a company name. Not very helpful.