In the diner three uniformed security guards were sitting in a booth drinking coffee. A fourth was making a telephone call. Brewer sat at the counter with a cup of coffee and watched the door. He waited for ten minutes. No one came. He stepped out once again onto Ninth Avenue then retraced his steps along Thirty-third. He found a second set of footprints, smaller, with a narrow heel—a woman’s shoe.
He slipped and slid in the narrow tire tracks, following the two sets of footprints back to Penn Station, and took the escalator down to the crowded waiting room.
A few moments later the woman arrived, caked with snow, her head wrapped in a plastic shawl tied under her chin. She was wearing a short leather jacket, a pair of black slacks, and low heeled shoes which were soaked. Under her arm she carried the same furled red umbrella.
She made a phone call, nodding and waving a hand. An argument. Brewer guessed at it. She was telling someone that Brewer had spotted her. And the other person was saying they didn’t have a replacement for her. Then she joined the group and stood, smoking a cigarette and shivering.
He looked at the umbrella again. Imagine fighting a snowstorm with a small round disk of red plastic. And wet feet. She’d had a tough day.
Brewer looked at her bleakly. If she’d uncovered Chernie, she had done some real damage. When the station man opened the gate, Brewer descended the stair to the Washington train. She followed him and sat five rows behind him. But when the train pulled out, he looked back. She was gone.
Later, between Newark and Trenton, he took a stroll the entire length of the train. He never found her.
At midnight he was standing in Margie’s kitchen, drinking a can of beer, when he noticed three cup-sized depressions in the carpeting in front of the three front legs of her couch. Someone had moved Margie’s furniture.
He checked her telephone for bugs, then took the elevator down to the phone junction box in the basement.
Brewer once estimated that he had installed over a hundred wiretaps in his career, most of them in Washington. Yet when he opened the door to the telephone junction box in the basement of the apartment building, he was surprised to find not one, but two taps on Margie’s line. He had the eager attention of several people.
He left both of them in place and went to bed.
Chapter 21
In Mehtma’s, meals were served in a basement dining room; and, throughout the house, the odor of curry was so pervasive, it was said the bricks could be cooked and eaten. Most of the patrons, Orientals newly arrived from the airport, preferred to dine with chopsticks.
The two of them waited for the telegram to come.
The stout one slept much of the day on his bed under the eaves, wrapped in two white blankets. Often he just stared at the streaked white wall and thoughtfully tongued the gaps in his upper row of teeth.
Before his trip to Cologne he had rarely seen snow, and whenever the white flakes flurried out of the dead white sky, he would go to the window to watch. Sometimes he would open the window and stick his tongue out to catch them.
The tall one, wearing his round black hat, sat all day down in the entry hall in a creaking wooden chair under a ticking clock, waiting; he rarely moved and never spoke, never wore any kind of an expression on his famine face. In the afternoon he took a long solitary walk through the streets of London with that slow, stiltlike stalking gait, his black hat cocked back, his black coattails swaying behind him, the crimson scarf around his neck.
Each day they waited expectantly for the telegram to come.
Chapter 22
Brewer waited in the dark parking lot of the Pentagon. The pyramidal mounds of snow piled by the plows had gotten higher with each successive snowstorm. Under the streetlamps they hulked like icebergs.
The approach of Limoges’s limousine and the escort car reminded Brewer of an Al Capone movie. He shook his head as they reenacted the ritual: the two cars circling Brewer’s car, the chauffeur getting into the backseat of the escort car, Brewer getting into the front seat of the limousine.
“Well?” Limoges asked.
“Nothing,” Brewer said. “Lots of warnings.”
Limoges pumped cigar smoke and waited, watching Brewer with calculating eyes.
“This Mr. X is buried too deep,” Brewer said. “I can’t dig him out with the usual tools.”
“So? I told you go to any lengths you have to. Maybe I haven’t made myself clear, Brewer. We’re going all the way on this one. If we go down, we take the Reds with us. We all burn together.”
“Have you consulted the rest of mankind about that scenario?”
“We mustn’t stop now, Brewer.”
“You can’t stop. What you do was decided in your mother’s womb.”
Limoges sighed. “What do you want to do?”
“I’m going to try to follow one of his smuggling operations like a piece of string—from the U.S., across Europe, and even into Russia if need be. At the end of the string I should find Mr. X.”
“Which one?” Limoges asked. “Which smuggling operation?”
“The most recent,” Brewer answered. “Vienna.”
In the morning Brewer went over to see McMasters in Export Control, a section of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of East-West Trade which was charged with issuing export licenses.
McMasters was sitting exactly the way he was the last time Brewer had seen him—feet on his desk, arms folded, phone cradled between ear and shoulder, talking. He reached out his right hand to Brewer, still talking on the phone.
“Okay, okay,” he said into the phone. “Call me back.” He put the phone down and stood up. “Look, Brewer. I understand what you’re after. But how the hell am I going to help you? These Russians are everywhere. We’re beset with bees. And nobody cares. Congress says we’re exaggerating. And the rest of Washington has its own problems. As for the Europeans, forget it. They don’t care that Russia is stealing U.S. technology.”
Brewer asked him, “What can you tell me about the way the Russians operate? Tell me about the Vienna thing.”
McMasters sat down and put his feet back on his desk. He pointed at his phone. “You know what that phone call was all about? They just picked up a Russian touring a microchip plant in California. Imagine a Russian in California. In a microchip plant. God knows how he got inside, but there he was, taking pictures of everything with a miniature camera. As they were escorting him by the elbows to the door, he was still trying to take pictures. And when they took the film from his camera, he tried to get physical. Here he is, breaking ten or twelve federal laws, he can be sentenced to five years in the pen, or at least kicked out of the country, and he stands there and yells his head off as though we were depriving him of his rights to spy on us. What do you do with people like that?”
“What can you tell me about Vienna?”
“Got a week?” McMasters answered. “That Vienna thing is so goddamned tangled—with wheels within wheels—we don’t even know where to begin. Maybe you ought to talk to Kane over in Customs. He’s supposed to be doing the workup on it.”
“What have you got?”
“Me? Couple of forged documents. Some stray pieces. We’re pretty sure there was a group of men—three of them in Kansas City, but the primary one was in L.A.”
“Are you going to do any follow-up?”
McMasters shrugged. “Come on, Brewer. We don’t have the manpower to check into every potential supplier who might have sold stuff to this group. And if we did, we’d find borderline infractions. Nothing to get your teeth into. Go see Kane in Customs.”
Brewer made a lunch date with Ted Kane, who worked for the Strategic Investigation Division of the U.S. Customs Service, Treasury Department.
Kane liked Chinese food, and he met Brewer at a Chinese restaurant in Georgetown.
He told Brewer, “I don’t think there’s any way to stop the Russians. Once they set their sights on a piece of equipment or a design, they use every trick in the book. They do credit checks and fi
nancial studies on the target companies to find out if they’re underfinanced and in need of cash. They dig into the private lives of executives. They find out who’s in debt over his head, who’s a closet gay, who’s black and facing an invisible wall of discrimination. They pry out your deepest secrets. And they use them to force you to give them what they want. Nothing is sacred to them. No crime is too low for them to stoop to. And they always get what they want sooner or later. They never miss. Never.”
“You ever hear of a master smuggler in Directorate T?”
Kane shrugged. “Who needs a mastermind? With the way we work, children could do the smuggling. It’s as easy as stealing pencils from the blind.”
“Then how come the Russians miss the target so often?”
Kane shrugged. “I just read where six times out of ten the cheetah misses his target.”
“But what if there’s one cheetah who never misses?” Brewer asked.
“Brewer, I don’t think there’s a Russian mastermind. But if you’re going to look for him, I have two words for you. Good luck. Why don’t you try chopsticks? It’s very easy. See? Hold one stick like so, and the other—”
“Tell me about Vienna.”
“We haven’t completed our report yet,” Kane said. “Maybe we never will. The trail is cold. We’re short of manpower, and current cases take precedence. You know how it is, Brewer. So far we’re pretty sure that Vienna thing started in Los Angeles. In fact we’re pretty sure it was a guy named Bobby English, who has since skipped with a suitcase full of money. And I’m personally pretty sure he had at least one contact here in Customs. I mean, I think someone right in my office warned him to get out of town. How do you like this moo goo gaipan?”
“Were there others?”
“In Kansas City. Three others. Aren’t you going to eat your fried rice? Give it to me.”
“But you haven’t checked?”
“Right. I haven’t checked. And I’m probably not going to.”
“What do you have on Bobby English?”
“He scamped long ago. He’s a very small fry, anyway. We’re convinced he was directed by someone else, probably from Europe, maybe from Moscow. He’s not worth all the paperwork and trouble to extradite him. Besides, he’s dropped out of sight. After he left L.A. he was in Vegas, kited a bunch of bad checks there. Then he was in Germany, then we heard he was in Athens, heading east. Now we’ve lost track of him.”
“You and McMasters have been a big help.”
“Come on, Brewer. We’re buried. The fort is besieged. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Find Bobby English.”
Kane shrugged. “I can put it in my weekly bulletin. Okay? It’s an in-house memo that gets pretty wide circulation.”
“Will it do any good?”
“I doubt it.”
After lunch Kane brought Brewer back to his office for conversations with the Customs people in Kane’s division.
Customs specialists, eagerly rooting through their files, showed him case after case of stolen technology. Everywhere, tales tumbled from their lips about the swarming, insatiable Russians.
After an hour of recitation one of the Customs men said, “If the shoe had been on the other foot, the Russians would never have let us do this to them. We wouldn’t have gotten one screw head. We just never took what they were doing seriously enough. They’re much better at this game than we’ll ever be.”
“It’s that bad?”
“Brewer, if we’d stopped the Russians from stealing all our technology, they would have fallen so far behind us, I’m convinced they would have had to come to the bargaining table ten years ago. The cold war would be over. And we wouldn’t have spent—what is it?—trillions of dollars in defense. They’ve helped push the American economy to the brink of collapse.”
Late in the afternoon Brewer took the Blue Bird out to the CIA at Langley and poked through their library. Crawley found him there in the biography stacks. Stooped, with cigarette stains on the fingers of his left hand, Crawley looked at Brewer with his exhausted hound’s eyes while his deep, gravelly voice murmured tales of Russian depredations.
“When the history of this century is written, it’s going to say that Russia conquered the world in back alleys, in the dark, by stealth, by breaking and entering, by mugging, by murder, torture, beatings, blackmail, and psychological violence, without a major battle, without ever firing a shot, while we spent ourselves into poverty preparing to fight a war that never came.”
“Don’t bet on the wrong horse, Andy,” Brewer said. “Maybe neither of us will come out ahead on this one.”
Three nights later, while he was sound asleep, the phone on the night table rang. He pulled the whole phone in bed with him and put the headpiece to his ear.
“Hello,” he said.
“Is this Brewer?”
“Who’s this?”
“My name is Bobby English.”
Brewer took the red-eye late the next night to L.A., where he went to meet Bobby English’s flight from Hong Kong.
He waited by the exit doors from customs. In the shuffling crowd, he recognized English immediately: tall, thin, pale blond, about thirty-five and anxious, his brown eyes quickly skimming the faces around him.
His eyes had just found Brewer’s when four men stepped from the crowd. One of them stopped English with a pointing finger. Holding out a badge, he spoke briefly to English. Then the four of them formed up and quickly walked English away.
Brewer followed them along the main concourse to a side corridor. They walked English down the corridor to the men’s room and pulled him inside. One of them remained outside and waved people away.
“There’s a men’s room in the next corridor,” Brewer heard him say.
Brewer walked briskly toward him.
“Use another men’s room,” the man was saying. Brewer strode past him to a fire extinguisher, unsnapped the straps and pulled it down. Making a quick half turn, he slammed the end of the extinguisher tank into the man’s belly. When the man doubled over, Brewer brought the end of the tank down on the back of his head. Then he used his shoulder to push open the door.
They had English in one of the toilet stalls. All the doors and partitions were shaking as they pounded at him. One of them raised a club and swung it inside the stall. Another was using brass knuckles.
Brewer upended the fire extinguisher and aimed the long blank nozzle. A cloud of vapor rushed out. He held it up to their faces and watched them rolling and ducking to get away, shouting and covering their faces with their hands.
Brewer used the extinguisher as a battering ram, aiming for their heads and their kneecaps. Two of them broke and ran. The third retrieved the club and swung it. It just missed Brewer’s head and dented the door to the stall. Brewer swung the extinguisher and caught him full in the face. The man turned stumbling and ran with a bloody hand covering his nose.
Brewer ran out into the corridor and threw the extinguisher after them. Then he went back inside.
English was jammed down between the toilet seat and the wall, panting. His face was weeping blood from a number of contusions, more blood flowed thickly from his scalp, and his raincoat was covered with large circular red stains. One lapel was torn almost off.
“Oh my God,” English murmured. “Oh my God.” Brewer gripped the front of his raincoat and pulled him up and away from the wedge. He let him settle to the floor.
Two airport security men pushed open the door and entered. “What’s going on?”
“I came in here to pee and there’s four guys working this one over. With that bat.”
The two of them looked down at English writhing on the floor, then at the wooden billy. One of them put a two-way radio to his mouth. “Got a four-two-two here,” he said. “Men’s room, corridor four. Call an ambulance.”
In the waiting room of the emergency ward, the doctor read aloud to Brewer from a form on a clipboard. “Most of the pain he’s feeling is from mas
sive contusions to the major muscle groups. They’ll heal. The three cracked ribs will take care of themselves, but he won’t be able to take a deep breath for a while. There’s trauma to his right kidney, causing some impairment to renal function, but we think that will heal. We hope so. There are a total of five broken fingers on both hands … the splints will take care of them. He’s got bone fragments in his left wrist. It’s too soon to talk about the ligaments. Some were nearly torn from their moorings. Permanent damage there, we think. As for the kneecap, he’s going to be on crutches until he has an operation to make it function again. Even then it’s in the doubtful column. He’s got a jaw fracture, but amazingly enough, no broken teeth. He’s got a hairline fracture over his left eye. The whole eye is shut and we’re not sure how much damage there is to it. He’s very lucky to be alive. One more shot with that fungo bat would have scrambled his eggs for him. And that would have been the end of that. He’s probably going to walk away from this one. Not tomorrow morning. But he’s going to walk away.” The doctor laid aside the clipboard. “A man was brought in here three o’clock yesterday morning. His car had gone over a guardrail and fallen two stories down. The list of things wrong with him filled two pages—and he was in better shape than Mister”—he referred to his clipboard—“English.”
Brewer nodded and waited.
The doctor said, “This laundry list of damages isn’t the real problem. People who are beaten like this go into severe depression—sometimes for life. And this man is severely depressed. I suspect he was depressed even before this attack, which makes the problem infinitely worse. Anyway, the resident shrink will have to figure that out. Now—Mr. English says it’s urgent that he talk to you. He’s nearly frantic. You can have ten minutes with him. I don’t want him talking for more than that. And if he gets more upset than he is, you have to leave immediately. He’s very close to the end of his rope.”
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