The Spy in a Box

by Ralph Dennis

  A light powder snow was falling. He stood beside his BMW, hands in his pockets, back hunched. Two minutes later a tan Subaru station wagon plowed down the alley and wheeled and turned broadside to Hall. The window rolled down and Hall could see Franklin’s flushed face. He was a big man, thick in the shoulders and the body. Princeton had been his college and he’d played linebacker there.

  “Get in,” Franklin said.

  Hall got into the passenger seat and laughed. Franklin was almost folded up in his effort to fit into the small station wagon.

  “Helen’s,” Franklin explained. “It’s goes into four-wheel drive.”

  “You look like you’re wearing it rather than driving it.”

  There was a huge box of tissues on the dash. Franklin took two tissues and blew his nose. He dropped the wad of tissue into a bag next to his right leg. “You pick a fine time to pull a surprise visit.”

  “I didn’t exactly choose it.”

  “Anybody knows I’ve talked to you it’s my ass.”

  “Only Bilbo knows,” Hall said.

  Franklin looked at Hall with sad, watery eyes. “Heads are starting to roll down the hallways. Yours looks like the first. After that, the list hasn’t been filled out completely. I’m watching my back.”

  “Why you?”

  “The mess in Ottawa.” A few months back, Franklin led a crew across the border and set up a honeytrap with one of the lower echelon Soviets, one they’d been watching since his posting from the U.N. in New York to the Ottawa Embassy. There had been a feeling about the Soviet early and the pretty boy and the pictures had opened him like a tin of sardines. The product from the entrapment had been good, very good, until it leaked to the Canadians and they hadn’t liked the Company working in their backyard space. Questions were asked of the Prime Minister in the Parliament and the story broke in the papers. The Soviet, the object of the honeytrap, was hustled back to Russia and Franklin and his crew barely got over the border ahead of the Mounties. “I’ve been shuffling papers from one side of my desk to the other since then.”

  “The whistle. You think it was blown inside the Company?”

  Franklin shrugged his shoulders. The movement seemed to set off a loud sneeze. He clawed for a wad of Kleenex. He covered his face. He mumbled, “If it was, it was wasteful.”

  “And now the Costa Verde operation.”

  “Some people in the media were making guesses. Your article confirms the extent of the Company involvement there.”

  “Not my article,” Hall said. “It’s a ringer.”

  Franklin lowered the tissues and sniffed a couple of times. “Like I told Bilbo it didn’t seem your style.”

  “I’m thinking of a B and E.”

  “Where?”

  “New York. I want to see the article and I want to see the correspondance with whoever it was pretending to be me.”

  “I thought you failed breaking and entering at the Farm.”

  “I’ll have help.”

  “Have Bilbo contact me in a couple of days. I’ll be back at the office and I’ll see if I can check your file.”

  “Appreciate it.” Hall opened the door on the passenger side of the Subaru. “Watch yourself, pal.”

  “You can bet the house on that.”

  In the kitchen, the wine bottle was half empty now. The cook looked like he wanted to giggle. He flipped some strips of bacon on the grill and dropped half of them on the tile floor at his feet.

  Jackson saw him enter. He placed a glass on the bar in front of an empty bar stool. He waited with the Jack Daniels bottle in one hand while Hall stripped away his parka.

  “Well …”

  “Stranger and stranger,” Hall said.

  The kid must have believed, by God, that he really was a ninja. Dark warrior of death and all that crap.

  It was about an hour before first light. Will Hall had had a restless night. It might have been because he was chasing the tail of an idea again, the dangers of too much thinking, or it might have been the mushroom omelet the wino cook had whipped together for him late in the evening.

  It wasn’t that the kid who was playing ninja was bad at it. Maybe with another year of training, he might have had a fifty-fifty chance of living until lunchtime. As it was, he was good enough to get past the alarm system downstairs and then the locked door at the back of Bilbo’s office that led to the rooms upstairs, and then down the creaky hall and then through the locked door to Hall’s room without being heard. Hall had accepted the offer of the guest room down the hall from Bilbo’s suite above the Madison Hill Bar.

  The kid came dressed for the part. All in black and barefooted and even wearing the hood with only the slit for the eyes. All the trappings.

  After grading a hundred on the test so far, the kid stubbed his toe. Literally.

  What he banged his toe on was the result of Hall’s hurry to get into bed before the booze dissolved all his bones and muscle. He’d opened his suitcase on the floor at the foot of the bed and got out his kit and brushed the Jack Daniels from his teeth. The opened suitcase had remained there, to be ignored until morning and Hall had flopped into bed.

  By reflex, the .357 Python was in his hand, eased under one end of the pillow. After five hours of sleep, the alcohol had burned away and he was in his restless. Rolling this way and that.

  It was then the kid stubbed his toe. Something rattled in the suitcase. Hall was wide awake in the split instant that followed the sound. His hand knew where the Python was and gripped it, finger inside the trigger guard.

  The kid made his second mistake. That was more than a killer usually got. If he’d gone on and tried to do the piece of bloody work he might have made it. Clear-headed, now that the kid hadn’t moved, Hall decided the kid was still in training and he believed the Zen crap that was a part of the lessons. He froze with his toe still against the suitcase. Hall guessed the kid was trying to decide whether, in the Zen thinking, the would-be ninja wanted to become a tree or a boulder.

  A tree probably, Hall thought, standing straight and blending into a skyline. In his eye, Hall estimated where the kid’s chest would be, the broadest part of him. Then he whirled, cocking the Python as he turned and fired three times, as fast as he could pull the trigger. The roar deafened him and the Python had a kick like a jackhammer. Hall rolled off the side of the bed and clawed at the carpet.

  He clutched the Python and waited. Enough hearing returned so that he could hear running in the hallway. Bilbo yelled, “What the hell …?”

  “Stay there.” Silence for some seconds. Then Hall could hear again. He heard a kind of twitching. It didn’t sound coordinated. It wasn’t crawling or walking and that reassured Hall. He slipped a hand up the base of the table lamp and switched on the light.

  The kid was curled against the wall beside the door. The .357 rounds had messed up his brand-new outfit. He’d been hit once high in the chest and once in the throat. While Hall got to his feet and walked toward the kid. He was dead. Next to him, rammed into the carpet and the floor, was the 24-inch killing sword. Hall stopped beside the sword and touched the blade edge. It was the ninja design, dull on the blade edge. It was for stabbing, not for slicing and cutting.

  The door opened. Bilbo stood there in t-shirt and jockey shorts.

  “We had a visitor.”

  Jackson had his look and went downstairs to put on a pot of coffee. Hall showered and shaved and dressed. Then he repacked his suitcase and carried it down into the bar. He placed the suitcase next to the kitchen entrance and placed the Python on the bar next to his right hand.

  Bilbo poured strong black coffee into a large mug.

  “What was that about?”

  “Rivers. You know much about Rivers?”

  Bilbo shook his head.

  “About four years ago, Rivers got this thing about ninjas in his head. He sent a man to Japan to study with one of the last masters. The man stayed there one year and came back the Company an authority. Maybe like most Americans tr
ying to learn somebody else’s game, he only got the outline, the basic lessons. If that boy up there was his star pupil …” Hall let that hang in the air, sounding tougher than he really felt. “The Company decided there were times when silent, stealthy killing was better than handguns and sniper rifles and bombs.” Hall had a thought he didn’t like. He felt he had to pass it on to Bilbo. “And this stealthy killing, it can look like a lot of things. It can be misdirection. Like tonight. If the kid had got past me, he’d have gone down the hall and got you too. The kid would have taken whatever money there was in the place, anything valuable. The police, after they ran a check on me and found who I was, with some prompting from the Company, would have called it a double murder and robbery. We’d have been another crime statistic in Washington.”

  A sweat broke on Bilbo’s forehead. He turned and grabbed the Metaxa brandy bottle by its long neck and poured a shot in his coffee. He held the bottle toward Hall. Hall shook his head.

  “Miles to go before I sleep.”

  Bilbo sipped his spiked coffee. “What do I do with the guy upstairs?”

  “I’ll see what the Company wants done with their failures.” Hall carried his coffee to the other end of the bar. He turned the phone toward him and dialed the Farm Number.

  The duty watch officer answered. “Experimental farm number one.”

  “This is William Keith Hall. Delta two, delta four, bravo one, fox three.”

  “Hold a minute.” There was half a minute of waiting while the duty officer punched in the name and the identity code and watched the computer for the access. “Yes, Hall. The problem is that your status is vague.”

  Hall ignored that. “The Madison Hill Bar and Grill.” Hall gave him the address and instructions that would get him through the backlot maze and to the rear parking spaces. “I think one of yours … he was wearing a costume and must have been returning from a dance or something … well, he fell over a gun and shot himself a couple of times.”

  “Does he have a name?”

  “He’s hardly got a head right now. You want to send a housekeeping crew?”

  “I’ll have to take this higher. You’ll be there if housekeeping comes by?”

  “What do you mean if? The police and the F.B.I. will love this one.”

  “You’ll be there when housekeeping gets there?”

  That was better. “Sure.”

  The line went dead. Hall walked down the bar and Jackson got the coffee pot and refilled his cup. Unless the duty officer was being tricky, he’d said that it would take time to get a cleanup crew together. Hall wasn’t very sure how much truth a person got from the Farm.

  “You going to tell me where you’re going?”

  “Better you don’t know,” Hall said.

  “You’ll be in touch?”

  Hall thought about it for a minute. “Not here. I’ll call and ask you something. Say, do you cater and how much for spareribs for twelve.”

  “Spareribs for twelve.” Bilbo nodded.

  “Then I’ll give you an address. You meet me there in fifteen minutes.”

  Hall finished the coffee. He put on his parka and stuffed the Python in the right pocket. He lifted his suitcase and started through the kitchen; Jackson followed him. At the back door, Hall turned back to face him.

  “They might try to lean on you. I don’t think they will. Tell them as much truth as you can. The truth always confuses them. They’ll think you’re lying and they’ll spend a lot of energy going off in the wrong directions.”

  He scraped the windows and got the BMW turned around in the snowfield that the lot was now. The radio, as he drove through the ghost town of early morning Washington, said the highways were clear and the driving conditions good.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Hall reached New York early in the afternoon.

  The winter storm had passed through the city during the night and the cleanup crews were on the streets and the sidewalks as soon as the last snowflake fell. The air was brisk and blustery.

  Hall drove around for a time, heading to the east side, until he found a parking garage that suited him. He paid a month in advance and gave a false address and phone number. After the attendant wheeled the BMW away, Hall used the pay phone beside the garage office. This time he called the office number Ben Jacobi had given him.

  The woman who answered identified the offices as that of Acme Collections. Hall worked his way past her to the manager.

  “What’s your business with Mr. Jacobi?”

  “Friendly,” Hall said.

  “Huh?”

  “Tell him it’s Hall.”

  Jacobi came on the phone laughing. “You’d be surprised how many people say they’re pals of mine.”

  “What kind of collections do you do there?”

  “Easy ones and hard ones.”

  “Got you.” Hall hesitated. “You still need twenty-four hours?”

  “That’s in the best of all possible worlds,” Jacobi said. “Unless it’s the popcorn box you said it was.”

  “You’ll want to look it over.”

  “Not me. A boy of mine.”

  Hall gave him the address and said that it was the office of The Truth Seeker.

  “That makes it easy. My pal always wanted to subscribe to that particular paper.”

  “When will you know?”

  “Call me at four.”

  Hall said he would. He broke the connection and carried his suitcase and his suit bag to the street. He hailed a cab.

  The same doorman had worked at the apartment house for the past ten years. He recognized Will Hall as soon as he stepped from the cab. He rushed from the shelter of the lobby hallway and took the suitcase and the suit bag and carried them inside while Hall paid the fare.

  “A nasty day,” the doorman said.

  “Is Mr. Harker using the apartment?”

  “No, sir.”

  They stopped at the doorman’s office and Hall fumbled for a five-dollar bill while George Brown, the doorman, got the spare key to the apartment. They made the trade, the key for the five.

  “You need help with your bags?”

  “Not today.”

  George nodded. “I’ll leave a note for the night man that you’re using the apartment.”

  Hall thanked him and rode the elevator to the fifth floor. It was a corner apartment. On one side it looked down on Riverside Drive. After Hall dropped his bags in the bedroom, he found a bag of fresh coffee beans in the refrigerator and ground a hopper-full while the water boiled. While the water dripped through the filter, he crossed through the living room and opened the door to the balcony. He stood there, feeling the wind and looking down at the river.

  Joggers, breathing ragged jets of steam, ran along the walks beside the river. That was tiresome, Hall thought, and he reentered the apartment and closed the door and drew the curtains.

  By the time he had showered the coffee was ready. He drank two cups to warm himself. Then he got into the huge double bed and slept exactly two hours.

  “According to my man, it’s even less than a popcorn box.”

  “Tonight or tomorrow night?”

  “It might as well be tonight,” Ben Jacobi said.

  “When?”

  “Midnight.”

  Hall gave him the address and said he’d be waiting in the lobby.

  “See you then.”

  Down the street, half a block away from The Truth Seeker office, Ben Jacobi dialed the number and let it ring a dozen times or so. He left the phone booth, nodding, and he and Hall walked down the street, away from the blue Buick Fury and the driver. They passed the bar, then the doorway that led to the stairs, and stopped to look in the deli window. It was slow business in the deli. The bar was doing better. The noise of the juke box and the voices carried all the way to the street.

  “Me first,” Jacobi said. He stepped past Hall and ducked into the doorway that led upstairs.

  Hall gave him a thirty second head start. When the count was fini
shed in his mind, he climbed the stairs and stopped at the landing. The whole length of the hallway the offices were dark and deserted. Ben crouched over the lock of the doorway to The Truth Seeker. It was so quiet Hall could hear the faint scrape of the lock picks.

  Hall put his back to Jacobi. He watched the stairwell. No one followed them. When he turned, he didn’t see Ben. The door to The Truth Seeker was closed. Puzzled, Hall walked down the hall and stopped in front of the door. The door swung open from the inside and Ben waved him in.

  “Easier than we thought.” There was a click and Ben directed a beam of light toward the floor. “Where …?”

  “There.” Hall led the way into the private office that belonged to Enos Blackman.

  It was straightforward writing. What might be called American Standard Prose. It wasn’t Hall’s prose, his writing, but it wasn’t obviously unlike it. It was clean and lean and there was a minimum of window dressing.

  The article had been easy to find. It was in a folder on one side of the desk. While Hall read the article, Ben hunched over a file cabinet on one side of the office. It was locked but it was child’s play for Jacobi.

  The “I” person, the persona that was supposed to be Will Hall, took all the proper credit. In the step-by-step indictment of the Company, the “I” character detailed the tinder-box situation in Costa Verde and sketched the outlines of the three main conflicting elements. The solution, the writer said, was to support the moderate party led by Paul Marcos. It was a position the writer said he had argued with the Company. To prove this, there were quotations from cables and messages that had been sent to the Company.

  No, Hall thought. There was no way that he could have remembered the text of those. He’d have needed the messages in front of him. And all those were at the Company. That was the first mistake.

  The death of Paul Marcos. A mistake there as well. The writer of the article didn’t know that Hall had witnessed the killing from the alley that led to the Avenue San Martin. But the writer knew the sequence. The snipers, the Team, on the rooftop firing the first three shots. Then the smokescreen, the attempt at misdirection, with the use of the gunman on the street level. It was noted that any difference between the ballistics of the rounds fired by the sniper and the gunman would be clouded and lost in the medical service that was controlled by the state, the right wing. True, Hall thought.