“Mary’s in the other room,” Garth said. “Come in.
Garth led the agent into the music room. Its walls of glass looked out over the Hudson; in the distance, sail and power boats glided over the rippled surface of the river. Baker nodded to Mary, who was sitting with one bare foot under her in a canvas director’s chair, and said, “The man’s real name is Gunther Francke.” He looked back and forth between Garth and Mary. “As you guessed, Frederickson, he’s a former member of East Germany’s Staatsicherheit. And, as you noted, these people are not exactly beloved by their fellow citizens in that unhappy land. Thousands of them went into hiding after the collapse of the Communist regime there and many are now being actively recruited by various Intelligence agencies around the world.” He paused and smiled ruefully. “I’m told we are most fortunate to have acquired the services of Herr Francke.”
Garth said, “It sounds like the province of the C.I.A.”
“It most definitely is.” The evenness of Baker’s tone was belied by the expression of distaste on his face.
“Then what are you doing with him?”
“The C.I.A. doesn’t have a good track record in dealing with would-be defectors—and that’s how Francke is classified, even though his country no longer officially exists. We’re acting at the specific bequest of the State Department. One of the demands Francke made when he approached the embassy official that recruited him was that he would not have to undergo C.I.A. interrogation. The State Department asked us to put him in our Witness Protection Program while he is gradually debriefed and the information evaluated. That’s proving to be a lengthy process. The CIA’s laughing at us. They think we’re fools, and they’ve washed their hands of him. In effect, we’re acting as well paid babysitters. He’s not a prisoner and we’re under orders to protect him. Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out a way to protect others from him.”
“You mean to tell me,” Garth asked incredulously, “that he killed somebody in Orlando and you simply moved him?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss Mr. Francke’s movements. I don’t know where you got that information.”
“Why is this one man considered so important?”
East Germany was a notorious haven and financial backer for any number of individual terrorists and their parent groups. As a result, the Stasi possessed an enormous amount of information about these people and the groups’ infrastructures, including the names of dummy companies in this country specifically set up to aid terrorist movements in the United States. East Germany may no longer exist, but the terrorists and their infrastructures certainly do.”
Garth shook his head impatiently. “Am I about to hear the same rationale that was used for bringing ex-Nazis, including known war criminals, into this country after the Second World War?”
“The analogy wouldn’t be inaccurate,” Baker said in a flat tone.
“Again, what’s so special about Francke? The man is obviously unstable and proven dangerous. Throw him back and get yourself another fish. Like you said, there are thousands of them out there.”
“Apparently not like this one. In the last days before the Communist regime crumbled, the Stasi destroyed or hid most of their files. The information we need now exists only in the heads of some of these men.”
Garth grunted. “What evidence do you have that this guy knows anything?”
“The State Department says he was one of Markus Wolf’s top aides. He had access to all the records, and they think there’s a good chance he’s telling the truth when he claims to have memorized information about terrorist networks and front groups in this country.”
“Claims? I take it he’s not being exactly forthcoming with all this valuable information he supposedly committed to memory.”
Baker shrugged. “We’ve been ordered to adopt a strictly custodial posture. The State Department says he’s just trying to negotiate the best terms for staying in this country, and we’re supposed to show him how good things could be if he fully cooperates. Do you see the dilemma?”
Mary, who had been listening to the conversation with growing incredulity, said, “Move him to another part of the country, far away from us! Garth says you’ve moved him once already!”
Baker slowly shook his head. “I haven’t confirmed that information. Even if it were true, it would be irrelevant. Francke’s decided he likes it here. The way he sees it, Mr. Frederickson, it was you who accosted him, and he was only preparing to defend himself. He is, of course, quite right when he points out that there are many people who would love to get their hands on him, or see him dead.”
“He has a sexual fixation on my wife.”
“Your wife is a beautiful, world-famous artist, sir. Writing letters—even obscene letters—is something I’m sure a good number of other people have done. Apparently Francke became a fan while listening to bootleg albums and tapes he’d confiscated from East German youths, and at border crossings. He began writing letters to her, but hung onto them for the obvious reason that it wouldn’t have boded well for him to be caught writing fan letters to an artist of Ms. Tree’s political leanings. In any case, he has made it clear that if we were to try to force him to move from here, the State Department will lose his trust and good will.”
The F.B.I. agent glanced back and forth at Mary and Garth. He seemed slightly embarrassed. Finally he continued, “The State Department and the Bureau think you should move, or at least go away for a time, if his presence in the community bothers you. Without admitting in any way that this man might pose a threat to the two of you, or anybody else, we’re prepared to pay all reasonable expenses for up to a period of one year if Ms. Tree will stop giving concerts and the two of you go to another section of the country for an extended vacation, under the auspices of the Witness Protection Program.”
“I think not, Mr. Baker,” Mary said dryly.
They talked late into the night, discussing the intolerable impact it would have on their lives to wait indefinitely, anxiously wondering if and when the German would strike, descending on one or both of them without warning, at a time and place of his choosing. Not willing to accept that situation, they agreed that their best option was to test the man’s intentions and freedom of movement. They had to lure him to them at a time and place of their choosing.
It was Mary who came up with a plan. Although Garth was initially opposed to it, the logic of her proposal was unassailable and she finally won him over by pointing out that any risk couldn’t be greater than the one that already existed, for Gunther Francke certainly knew where to find them already.
On the afternoon of the day when the first posters announcing Mary’s benefit concert for the Clearwater appeared in the riverfront communities, Garth received a second warning from the anonymous caller with the flat, muffled voice.
“The concert is a mistake that could prove fatal. Make sure you see him before he sees you.”
On the night of the open-air concert, Garth waited forty-five minutes in the shadows of a copse of trees on a hill in Cairn’s riverside park, scanning the faces in the crowd that had gathered. When he had satisfied himself that Francke was not on the field in front of the stage where Mary was performing, he went searching in the darkness of the park’s perimeter. There he found Francke, sitting atop a large outcropping of rock where he had a clear view of the brightly lighted concert stage a hundred and fifty yards below. Beside him, barely visible in the shadows cast by the moon through the trees, were binoculars and a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight and homemade silencer. Garth put a hand on his shoulder, and when Francke started to turn he hit him hard on the point of the jaw. He lifted the unconscious man, flung him across his shoulder, and carried him down toward the river.
Gunther Francke heard the water close by when, half an hour later, he awoke to find himself in a chair across from his enemy. Their left wrists were strapped together with duct tape.
“Are you crazy?!” he screamed. “What are you doing?!”
&
nbsp; “Getting to know you.”
Francke looked around at the walls of weathered wood, the windows looking out over the river. His gaze came to rest on a shelf built into the north wall where a Colt revolver rested between a tape recorder and a telephone. “Where are we?” he asked in a hoarse voice.
“A boathouse on my property,” Garth replied. “You can try shouting if you’d like, but I doubt anyone’s going to hear you. You know, half the Nazis the C.I.A. and State Department slipped into this country in nineteen forty-five weren’t even college graduates, much less the rocket scientists they claimed to be. I’m just wondering if you’re really all your hosts believe you to be. I think it’s time someone pressed you a bit to establish your bona fides.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Exactly. I’m probably even crazier than you are, or than you think I am. You may want to bear that in mind as the days pass. I’m certainly crazy enough to kill you out of hand and dump you in the river before I let you harm my wife.
“Now that we’ve established that, we can get on with our other business. You’ve harassed my wife and threatened to kill me. I sensed you were a killer before you ever opened your mouth. The only reason I haven’t put you out of everybody’s misery already is because I have a nagging suspicion that’s exactly what certain people would like me to do, and I don’t care to do somebody else’s dirty business—or to give up my life and freedom if I don’t have to. Consequently, before we leave here, we’re going to reach an accommodation. You’re going to tell me everything you supposedly know that your keepers are so anxious to hear. I don’t have much of a taste for torture or I’d just beat it out of you. So I’m going to share your misery—no food, water, or sleep for either of us until you give me what I want. Then we’re going to call your keepers, you’re going to gladly accept new placement as far away from Cairn as they can take you, and neither my wife nor I are ever going to see or hear from you again. That’s the deal.”
Garth paused and motioned toward the revolver on the shelf. “If that all seems too complicated for you, you always have the option of going for the gun. But in that case—”
The man loosed a string of curses in German and jumped out of his chair. He lurched to the side, trying to drag Garth after him as he stretched out his right hand for the gun. Garth braced himself, and then swung his left arm in a counter-clockwise motion. The German screamed as his left arm broke at the wrist and just above the elbow. With pain swimming in his pale-green eyes, he sank to his knees, and then slumped on the floor as Garth used a pocketknife to cut the tape joining their wrists.
“You should have let me finish,” Garth said evenly. “I told you I was willing to suffer with you for as long as it took, but I was about to warn you that all bets were off if you went for the gun.”
Francke rolled back and forth on the splintered wood floor, cradling his shattered arm. “I need a doctor!”
“You were ready to kill me, and maybe my wife, too. I’ll get you a doctor when you tell me what I want to know. Don’t bother lying. You’ll find out that my craziness includes a pretty good sense of when people are lying. Tell me the truth, and I’ll know it.”
“I don’t know anything!” the German screamed in agony. “I’m not Gunther Francke! The papers are forged! Call a doctor! I can’t stand the pain!”
Garth stood over the man for a few moments, studying him carefully. Finally he nodded. “I believe you,” he said as he walked over to the shelf and turned on the tape recorder. “Now all you have to do is provide enough detail about who you really are and how you managed to assume another identity.”
When the man had finished supplying information to his satisfaction, Garth braced his broken arm with a crude splint, and then called the house. Mary answered in the middle of the first ring.
“The man’s ex-Stasi, all right,” Garth told her, “but he was just a minor functionary, a prison guard in charge of interrogation who beat up enough political prisoners to know he was going to be in big trouble in the post-Honneker regime. He killed the man whose papers he’s holding, went to our embassy in West Germany, and offered his services. Once he got over here, he got carried away and made the mistake of overplaying his hand. Then he couldn’t stop. Now maybe they’ll send him back to Germany and get him out of our hair. I’ve got it all on tape. Call an ambulance, and then the FBI office in—”
“Baker and Walker are here, Garth.”
He found he wasn’t surprised.
“They didn’t know where you were, and I didn’t tell them, but they’re certain you have the German. Where do you want to meet them?”
“Tell them to come down here.”
“There’s another man with them, Garth.”
“Who?”
“He didn’t introduce himself. He’s waiting outside the house.”
“He’ll be coming down whether we want him to or not,” Garth said.
He headed up the path leading to the house as the three men approached. The unidentified man was tall and lean, with cold black eyes and gray stubble on his cheeks. He was wearing khaki chinos, sneakers, and a bulky green windbreaker with a Chicago Bears logo. As they met halfway, the man in the windbreaker brushed past Garth without looking at him or saying a word.
“Here’s the tape.” Garth said as he handed the cassette to Avery Baker. “His real name is Wolfgang Ingwers, and you already know more about terrorist networks than he does.”
“Your wife told us,” Baker said, meeting Garth’s gaze as he accepted the cassette and dropped it in his pocket. “We’ll check it out. If what you say is true, he’s out of here.”
There was a soft, almost imperceptible chugging sound from the direction of the boathouse. Baker and Walker exchanged startled glances, and Garth realized that it hadn’t occurred to the two FBI agents that the unshaven man who had been sent to them was a CIA assassin. Garth had known as soon as he’d seen the man that the German was indeed about to be out of there.
The younger agent started toward the boathouse. Baker started after him, but Garth grabbed his arm. “You tell the Company man down there to clean up his goddamn mess,” he said in a low voice. “I mean that literally. I don’t want any sign of the body—not a drop of blood on the floor. You understand?”
“I’ll make sure he gets the message. My guess is that a disposal service is waiting nearby. Take your wife out for a drink, Frederickson. When you get back, your lives will be the same as they were before.”
“No, they won’t,” Garth replied tersely. He glanced toward the boathouse to make sure there was no one within earshot. “Thanks for the calls, Baker.”
The agent responded with a curt smile and Garth continued on up the path toward Mary.
THE WHITE BEAR
Grizzlies and brown bears were really the same creature, Mary Tree learned from the man who had appeared unannounced at their front door, and both smelled like the rotting meat that was their preferred diet.
Half of Jacob Andover’s face was a wasteland of scar tissue, and his surviving eye seemed too bright, as if there were fever smoldering in him. He appeared emaciated, but somehow still projected an aura of strength; he was a feral creature of gristle and bone, with permanently tanned skin and a Seattle Seahawks cap pulled tightly onto his head. Although she had met him for the first time less than an hour before, Mary already considered him perhaps the second most remarkable man she had ever known, the first being Garth Frederickson, her husband, who sat next to her on the beige couch in the music room of their home overlooking the Hudson River, listening as Jacob Andover talked, telling tales of ice and cold and bears, moose, caribou, wolves and wolverines, of pink living rivers of salmon, and the beluga and killer whales that came to feed on them.
So much of her husband remained hidden from her, Mary thought; there were secrets in his past shared, if at all, only with his brother, and so she was impressed but hardly surprised to find that, before their marriage, Garth had frequently spent summers in the Alaskan bush pr
ospecting for gold in a particularly dangerous area known as the “forty-acre tract,” near a town named Chicken. Nor was she surprised to learn from Andover that one summer Garth had camped on a sandbar which he shared with a grizzly sow and her two cubs; her husband certainly had a most unusual effect on people, including strange men like Jacob Andover, and so it seemed only natural to her that the grizzly sow wouldn’t have been bothered by his presence. Finally, she wasn’t surprised that Andover, when he knew he was dying, had traveled six thousand miles to seek out Garth.
“It’s just the damndest thing,” the scar-faced man with the bright green eye said with an air of almost childlike wonder in the face of something so awesome he was still unable to fully comprehend it. He grinned, revealing a set of even, white teeth that were apparently his own and which seemed at odds with the rest of his appearance. “I hadn’t seen no color for months. I was running low on funds and getting real tired of the bush, and I figured I needed a change of scenery. I used a contact I got and went up on the North Slope to work the pipeline and make me some money. Big mistake. Garth, you know how I feel about keeping a clean camp, because if you leave stuff lying around, sooner or later some bear’s gonna’ pay you a visit when you ain’t expectin’ it. You get in the habit of tidying up. I was at the airport in Anchorage waiting to catch one of the commuter flights to the Slope. I go into the men’s room to take care of my business, and I notice one of the trashcans is full to overflowing with paper towels. I go to push it down and stick myself in the hand with this hypodermic needle somebody tossed in there. Didn’t think nothing of it at the time. If I’d known then that that little needle prick was going to be the end of old Jacob, I guess I wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to catch my plane. Hell, I probably wouldn’t have believed it would kill me anyway. It took this last bout with that funny kind of pneumonia and a collapsed lung to convince me I’d better start taking care of my last bits of business.”
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