“Who is it?” Sauer asked through the panel.
“Brewer. It’s eight o’clock.”
“Just a minute.” There was a long pause. Then Sauer called through the door, “I’ll be right with you, Brewer.” After another wait, the door swung open. Sauer stood there, feet bare, his shirttails out.
“Sorry,” he said. “I thought you said nine o’clock. Come on in.” He shut the door behind Brewer.
The shoulder strap of a woman’s slip dangled from under a seat cushion. A woman’s high-heel shoe lay on its side under a chair. On a kitchen chair on a pile of newspapers lay a red umbrella. The door to the bedroom was closed.
“I want to ask you some questions about the Vienna affair,” Brewer said. “I won’t stay long.”
“That’s okay,” Sauer replied. “There’s something I want to go over with you too.” He had been drinking, and spoke in a loud voice.
“What is it?” Brewer asked.
“Something personal. ’Kay?”
“Go ahead,” Brewer said.
“Have a drink.”
“No.”
“One. Just one.”
Brewer nodded. He watched Sauer walk into the kitchen. A quick bob of Sauer’s head: a quick pop of booze for the bartender. Then he made the drinks. Was it the eye or the hand that announced it?—a man in free fall, out of control. Blaming others, blaming the world, blaming anyone but himself—a man about to crack. Who did this?
On a table, framed photos of children. Young people holding babies. A youthful, smiling Sauer with a youthful, smiling wife—a studio portrait. When our hearts were young and gay.
Sauer handed him a drink—scotch on the rocks.
“Cheers,” Sauer said.
“God bless all in this house,” Brewer said, glancing at the bedroom door.
“I want to talk about a deal with you,” Sauer said.
“Okay,” Brewer said. “Shoot.”
“I want in. You see what I’m saying? I want to be part of the operation.”
“What part do you want?”
“Any part I can get. A good part. I want to be in for some of the credit if it comes off.” He watched Brewer’s face. “Suppose I said please?”
Brewer considered that. Finally he said, “Sauer, you don’t want any part of what I’m working on. Bet the rent money on it.”
“I don’t care what it is—whatever it is, it’s the road back for me. See what I’m saying?”
“I’m not sure I can talk about this now, Sauer.”
“Why not?”
Brewer stood up and walked over to the bedroom door.
“What are you doing?” Sauer demanded, jumping to his feet.
Brewer opened the door and looked into the bedroom. A woman was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, nude except for the pillow she was clutching.
“Hello,” Brewer said. “Nice to see you again.” He pulled the door shut.
Sauer shrugged at him. “A friend of mine.”
“I see.” Brewer picked up the red umbrella.
“Okay. She’s the one who followed you to New York. It was Limoges’s doing. You weren’t coming around fast enough, so he put a tail on you. He didn’t give her any notice at all. She didn’t even have time to get some warm clothes. In the middle of a snowstorm he yanked her out of the office as is and stuck her on the train.”
Brewer silently studied Sauer’s face.
“She’s the best we’ve got, Brewer. They say she’s the best tracker in the business. She sure stayed glued to your ass.” He took a long pull on his drink. “’Kay? She’s a tracker, she’s a friend of mine, and that’s the whole story.”
Brewer nodded. “Okay.”
“What about me joining you?”
Brewer shook his head. “You won’t want any part of it. What I’m working on is all off the books. You know what that means—really means?”
“Being off the books?” Sauer asked.
“Yes.”
“Yeah. I guess I do. No cover. No protection. No net.”
“Have you ever been off the books?”
“No.” Sauer shifted in his seat.
“Then you don’t know what it means. What it means is you’re a renegade. You’re outside the legal system.”
“I know that.”
“You’re on the run and you’re absolutely all alone—fair game for anyone who wants to take a pot shot at you.”
“I know that too,” Sauer said.
“If you get caught, all those people who promised to help will look the other way, and you can go to prison for a big number.”
“But—”
“Your name gets in the paper. Congressional committees will demand an investigation. The entire intelligence system gets a bad name. So every intelligence officer—all your friends and associates—everybody you ever knew marks you down as a criminal and a traitor. Even your old kindergarten teacher puts you on her shit list. You’re a rogue agent, free-lancing with America’s safety. A sellout. And do you know what’s the worst part?”
“What?” Sauer asked with great patience.
“All the smilers and promisers who put you up to it—the ones who make vows to help you—walk away clean. None of them ever heard of you. They have complete deniability and total amnesia. You’re the goat for their mess. You do the time for their crime. Got it? It’s called the Washington Walk Away.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
“You want the best advice you ever got in your whole life, Sauer? Withdraw your request. Go back to your desk and the bureaucracy and make your mark on the world in some other way.”
“I can’t,” Sauer said. “This is the last chance for me.”
Brewer shrugged.
“You’re a deep one, Brewer,” Sauer said. “No one gets inside, do they?”
“Drop it.”
“I can’t. It’s the last train out of town for me. I told you—I screwed up my marriage, I screwed up my career, I screwed up my own emotional life, and if I don’t get things straightened out, no one will want to work with me. Who wants to work with a loser dogged by bad luck?”
“Are you sure it’s your mess you’re cleaning up, Sauer?”
“If I want to get back in,” Sauer said, “I have to climb back out of the pit. And I can’t do that sitting at my desk waiting for the phone to ring. I have to be part of this. See what I’m saying? I understand the chance I’m taking if I join you. But I’m taking a bigger chance doing nothing. You have a reputation. You’re a golden boy. You live a charmed life. That’s what I need. Break the jinx. Beat the bad luck. You’re going to be my lucky penny. See what I’m saying? A career has momentum. And I’ve lost mine. I’ll do anything I have to, to get back on the track. ’Kay?”
“It can’t be that bad, Sauer.”
Sauer nodded. “Back to the wall. Cornered rat. Last chance with the team.” He looked levelly at Brewer. “And last chance with myself.”
“What do you mean—yourself?”
“With myself,” Sauer said. “Maybe it’s too late already.” He raised his chin and looked defiantly at Brewer with his frightening eyes. “’Kay?”
“’Kay,” Brewer said.
“Am I in?”
‘I’ll think about it.”
“How long do you need?”
“Not long.”
Sauer nodded angrily at him. “It’s a turndown, then.”
“No, it isn’t,” Brewer said.
“Uh-huh.” Sauer averted an angry face. “’Kay. What did you want to see me about?”
“Vienna.”
“What about it?”
“What made you check the cartons?”
“I knew you were going to ask me that sometime.” Sauer stood up and opened a drawer in the small table. The framed photographs rocked on their stands. He pulled out an envelope. Then he hesitated. “When can I know if I’m in or not?”
Brewer looked at him appraisingly. Who did this? A pariah, a penitent seeking r
edemption, filled with guilt, quaking with anger against himself and the world. Who put that desperate expression there, who put those terrible eyes in that flogged face?
“Soon,” Brewer said.
Sauer took another long pull on his drink. He drained it. “Here. This was put in my mailbox at the Kaiserin Elisabeth Hotel in Vienna.”
Brewer opened the envelope and slipped out a white sheet of folded paper. One word was written on it. In Russian. Cpaceeba. In the folds was a Russian ruble note.
“You know what cpaceeba means in Russian?” Sauer asked. “It means thanks.”
So there it was: the winning ticket to the Irish Sweepstakes, an unexpected legacy from an unknown aunt, a fat gold nugget in the pan. A ruble note to go with the one that had been tucked into Bobby English’s pocket in Los Angeles. A ruble note at the beginning of the line and another at the end. Moscow’s high-wire star performer couldn’t resist: he had taken several little bows. Moscow’s star was an exhibitionist. A grandstander. A hot dog.
Gotcha.
Brewer called Chernie in New York.
“You don’t have to get into the code room,” he said. “I have an easier way for you.”
“Tell me. I’ll do anything to get out of this nightmare.”
“The guy we’re looking for is an exhibitionist. His bosses in Directorate T have a tough time keeping this guy in line. They’re putting up with a lot they wouldn’t put up with in ordinary team members. So this guy is someone special. Chances are no one knows exactly what his assignment is or what he’s doing. He’s something of a man of mystery with secret assignments. He operates outside Russia, mainly in Europe. I would say a lot of his superiors can’t stand his guts, but none of them makes a move against him. What you need to do, Igor, is listen in on the gossip in Directorate T. If you get his name, I can get you the whole package you’re after. One more clue: the word ‘Cassandra.’”
Chapter 29
Tolenko sat in the chair in Revin’s office in Cologne, one fat leg cocked over the other, the roll of fat at the back of his neck making him thrust his pugnacious head forward as he talked. He was so angry, he said everything in an indiscreetly loud voice.
“The committee says you must not miss,” Tolenko boomed.
Revin waved a hand at Tolenko to signal him to lower his voice—his words could carry down the corridor and into who knows whose ears. But Tolenko took no notice.
“This must be a flawless piece of work,” Tolenko went on.
“I understand,” Revin said in a low voice. Almost a whisper.
But the fool still did not get the message. He boomed out another ukase. “The committee doesn’t want this traceable back to the Directorate or to the Soviet Union. They don’t want to start a game of reprisals with the Americans. So they want this to look like a death unrelated to the intelligence world or to Russia.” He shook his head scornfully at his own words. “Reprisals, bah!”
Sitting in that chair far inside Germany, Tolenko the hammer, who had no fear of the Americans and their reprisals, in a voice loud enough to be heard back in Moscow was telling the committee what he thought. He was being forced to deliver this absurd message to Revin. No reprisals. Absurd. Absurd. Absurd.
“Brewer,” Tolenko said. “I would like to untwist his head.” His two huge hands untwisted air.
But after two failures Tolenko was obviously being superseded by Bronowski, who was much more prudent. Cautious. Timid, even. And Bronowski did what he always did with a hot potato. He threw it—this time to Cologne and Revin.
No reprisals. Revin wondered why the committee didn’t think of that before they let this human battering ram send those two animals from the Bosphorus to Washington and then order that inept bomb attempt in Paris that killed Matters, the British journalist.
After a few more shouted orders, the angry Tolenko strode down the hall to the elevator, his bulk threatening to split the seams in his badly cut and wrinkled suit.
Revin watched with dismay as the man left. He had never handled an assassination before.
Yes, he had been involved in several—as a hand-off man, or occasionally a deliverer of messages. As he had been with the two from the Bosphorus. But he had never been assigned the job of finding a killer and aiming him at a target. Brewer would be his first direct murder.
Revin considered his assignment. The committee had said, Here, clean up this Tolenko mess. Kill Brewer. Kill him now. Don’t miss. And make it look like someone else did it.
But this Brewer was not only a particularly dangerous target; with Tolenko’s two botched attempts, Brewer was also now fully on the alert—and that was going to make him infinitely more difficult to kill.
Revin drew the palms of his hands down the sides of his face in agitation. Obviously the first thing he had to do was find a killer.
Revin went about this new assignment as he did every other one. Systematically. Step one was to gather information about assassins. He allowed himself three days for this.
He conferred with six fellow espionage officers. Klusak was the most helpful. Always discreet, he adopted a academic tone, as if their conversation were between two professors having an intellectual discussion. He never once asked a direct question.
He came to Revin’s office and drank tea and for three hours, hands folded calmly in his lap, stared absently at the ceiling and delivered a learned dissertation on the art and craft of killing a fellow human being, copiously illustrated with anecdote and specific details.
“First,” he said, “the capo will state the purpose of the action. Is it to punish? To make an example of? To eliminate an obstacle? Second is the methodology. How is it to be done? Third is the agent. Who is to do it? Then the planning. Before the hit. The hit itself. And most important, after the hit.”
New words entered Revin’s vocabulary. Wet jobs. Bounce backs. Executive action. Deniability. Soft landing. Hard landing. Open-ended contracts. Closed-loop contracts. Bird dogs. Setups. Pay outs: money, drugs, new identities, manumission of sins. And most important: deniability. Brick-ups. Daisy chains.
The key part of Klusak’s discourse was the list he uttered of known killers and their techniques. There was an amazing quantity and diversity of killers looking for work. Revin sedulously made notes.
So-and-so uses a twenty-two-caliber handgun—a modified Brestin with suppressor. A single shot in the base of the skull—the signature of the paid professional. So-and-so uses a garrote. There’s a husband and wife team; she’s called the black widow because the assassination takes place during seduction in the boudoir. Another choice: an acrobat—a former circus performer—is singularly adroit in entering secure buildings, usually from the top. Another uses karate. Another specializes in untraceable murders.
The list of available terrorists who would car-bomb, strafe, and torch was too long to write down: casual slaughterers they were, strolling players who free-lanced for anyone. Another had a diplomatic status with a Mideast country, and guaranteed that he could kill anywhere, anytime, because with diplomatic immunity, he could not be arrested or tried.
“In Rome,” Klusak said, “there is a man—Adolphus is one of his names—who is a talent agent for the crème de la crème of world-class killers. As part of his sales presentation, he shows a videotape of a training camp somewhere that turns out proficient killers in all types of mayhem. On this same tape he also shows several actual killings as they took place—graduation exercise, I suppose. His killers are totally anonymous. No previous history. No criminal record. Not one of them has ever been caught, he claims. Not one has ever been seen by a witness. He even reeled off a long list of successful hits. I must admit I was slightly sickened by him and his videotape. But he can get the job done.” For the first time Klusak looked pointedly at Revin.
Klusak’s list seemed endless. He mentioned the names of several men who specialized in killing with overdoses of heroin, so it looked like a drug addict’s death. “Many many people in high places are addicts,” Klus
ak assured Revin. “These specialists provide pure heroin to unwary addicts who are used to street heroin that has been cut down to twenty to thirty percent of pure. The hundred-percent dosage almost always proves lethal. Of course, the target has to be known to be a user.”
Klusak knew of four men who specialized in untraceable poisons—particularly valuable in insurance cases. Another man killed with an ice pick in the ear, untraceable to all but the most diligent medical examiners.
As a finale, Klusak handed him a catalog of assassination devices. It was incredible the many ways man had devised to kill his fellow man. Explosive devices containing actuators, switches, sensors, or fuses. Devices that could be detonated by telephone, by light, by voice or noise, by doorknob, by laser beam, even by mail. One device, called Dawn Patrol, was designed to explode at sunrise. “Guaranteed to work even on stormy days,” the brochure promised. Included were the standard props of the trade: sniper’s rifles with scopes, assassin’s pistols with suppressors, knives, and pages of other weapons.
Revin felt like a man who had wandered into a slaughterhouse.
What’s a suitable place for a meeting between a spy and an assassin? Revin didn’t know; no place seemed appropriate, because it was essential that the two of them not be seen together. So in the end Revin set the date for Thursday in London, and under a false name reserved a room for the meeting in the old Gascoigne-Sandford Hotel.
He had the hotel set up a small table with two chairs in the middle of the room. When he arrived, he set up a metal frame that screwed to the edges of the table. Into the frame he slipped a nylon screen. The whole conversation was to be conducted without Revin showing his face. Revin regretted the arrangement. He would like to have looked into the eyes of a man who makes a lucrative career from killing people.
A few minutes before two-thirty that Thursday afternoon, he sat waiting for his visitor. He took a folded piece of paper from his inner coat pocket and studied the schedule of events he had set up for arranging Brewer’s murder. He was a day ahead of his schedule. So far so good. The next move depended upon Chessmann’s time availability.
At two-thirty—you could have set your watch by it—there was a soft, firm knock on the door.
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