Brewer nodded.
“I wonder if you do,” Coles said. “How would you feel if a missile guidance system you invented to defend your country is on a Russian missile outside Moscow aimed right back at your granddaughter’s crib?” Coles waited for a reply. “You don’t say much, do you?”
“The answer to your question is obvious,” Brewer said.
“No matter,” Coles said. “My biggest complaint is against my own government. American scientists have dumped into Washington’s lap the greatest cornucopia of technology in history. Hundreds and hundreds of technological treasures. Any one of them would have given the U.S. a commanding military lead for decades to come. And these idiot politicians have let Moscow come in here and steal it all.”
Coles frowned at the snow that filled the windows. “These people in Moscow shouldn’t be the power they are in the world. They should still be trying to figure out how to make garden rakes. It’s absurd. Are you aware that a number of our best scientific minds now won’t work on weaponry or any military equipment?”
“Tell me about this new item,” Brewer said.
“You don’t like sermons, hey? Fair enough. Cassandra may be our last chance to get so far in front of the Soviets they won’t be able to catch up. Does that get your attention?”
“Yes.”
“I have finally drawn the line,” Coles said. “I told Limoges that I’m not releasing this item until he comes up with an ironclad defense. I want assurances that I won’t see Cassandra in the next May Day parade in Moscow.”
“Nobody can give you that,” Brewer said.
“Then the impasse continues. This has been going on for months. They’ve come to me with one absurd plan after another. They’ve suggested everything from underground manufacturing capabilities in the middle of the desert to a floating factory in orbit. None of them are feasible. Have you heard any of them?”
“No,” Brewer said.
“Okay. I’ve told Limoges I’m out of patience and he’s out of time. If I don’t hear a plan from you that makes sense, I’m going to destroy Cassandra. Neither side will get it. So, weigh every word before you speak.”
Brewer studied Coles. “How do I know you can recognize a good idea when you hear it?”
“That’s a fresh wrinkle,” Coles said. “You’re the first one to ask about my credentials. Am I detecting a glimmer of intelligence in you?”
“Maybe you’ve already heard a good idea and didn’t recognize it,” Brewer said. “Maybe you’re not qualified to judge. What kind of a background do you have in intelligence?”
“That’s not the issue here.”
“Before I tell you about my idea,” Brewer said, “I want to be sure you know a good idea when you hear one and that you’re ready to accept it.”
“Okay, Brewer. I’ve got good native intelligence and a good dose of common sense. I can assure you I have the equipment to evaluate your idea. I may even be as smart as you are.”
“I’m not smart,” Brewer said. “I’m experienced. And you’re not.”
“Okay.”
“You shouldn’t be deciding on the plan to protect Cassandra.”
“Neither should the U.S. government.”
“How much do you know about Russian high-tech espionage, Coles?”
“Too much,” Coles said. “I’m a victim of it.”
“That hardly makes you an expert.”
“Brewer, if you want to put your idea into practice, you have to deal with me. Tell me what it is.”
Brewer nodded at last. “Okay. What you need to know is, the Russians have a time-lag problem. After they steal innovations from us, it takes a while for them to digest them.”
“Go on.”
“If they get Cassandra, it will take them a year or so to make it operational.”
“So.”
“So—if they get a defective item, it will take them a year to discover it.”
“So?”
“So there’s our chance to give them indigestion.”
“You’d better explain that, Brewer.”
“Right now there’s only one plan on the table. Limoges wants to assassinate their top thief. In fact he almost did.”
“Yes yes.”
“My idea is not to kill him but to use him.”
“Go on.”
“I’m not sure I want to go on at this point,” Brewer said. “This is not an ironclad, foolproof plan. It can backfire.”
“You have to sell it to me, Brewer. Or there’s no game.”
Brewer studied Coles’s face then nodded. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe you should destroy Cassandra.”
“That’s one way to make the Russians happy,” Coles said.
“It’s certainly one way to make mankind happy.”
“Okay. I must admit you’ve got me really intrigued. How about telling me your idea?”
“The idea is very simple,” Brewer said. “This smuggler wants Cassandra. So let him steal it. Let him carry it back to Moscow. Let Moscow install it.”
“Go on.”
“It takes Moscow a year to discover they’ve stolen a fake Cassandra.”
“A fake?” Coles looked at him with astonishment. “A fake?
Are you …” He paused. “I think you’d better spell this out for me.”
“A fake,” Brewer said. “With a very serious flaw or two in it. While they’re preoccupied with the fake Cassandra, we’ll have the year you need to get everything in place. When the Russians wake up, we’ll be confronting them with a completely operational system, and they’ll be confronting us with a system that’s so full of flaws they won’t dare use it.”
Coles chewed on a knuckle. “Huh. A fake.”
Brewer asked him, “Can you make a fake Cassandra that the Soviets will have to chew on for a year or so?”
Coles looked at the floor then twisted his coffee cup. He turned his eyes to Brewer. “Sure I can. Can you make the thief swipe it?”
Brewer nodded. “That’s likely.”
Coles snorted. “Likely. Yes or no. Can you manage to slip the mickey to him?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“By telling him I’m going to slip him a mickey.”
Coles smiled. “Are you crazy or are you kidding me?”
“I’m crazy.”
“Brewer, you’d better explain this to me.”
“Okay. The problem is, if we make it easy for Gogol to swipe Cassandra, he’ll be suspicious. We have to make it tough on him. Challenging. So he’ll be convinced that he eluded our trap with the fake in it and swiped the real McCoy.”
“Go on.”
“To set things up, we’ll let him discover that we’ve set a fake out for him and that we’re waiting for him to come and take it. He’ll ignore it, go around the back door and steal what he thinks is the real Cassandra.”
“But what if he doesn’t come in the back door, but the side door or a window?”
“That’s the risk,” Brewer said.
“He could wind up stealing the real Cassandra?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s the very catastrophe we’re trying to avoid.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t like it.” Coles turned away and chewed again on his knuckle. “You’re asking me to take an incredible risk here, Brewer.”
“Any plan involves a risk.”
The two waiters in their aprons and vests, and the counterman in his whites, stood cross-armed at the restaurant window, looking out at the blizzard, murmuring to each other, then looking at the empty booths. Windblown snow rushed furiously at the window, and the day seemed to have grown darker.
Coles signaled for more coffee. He looked very unhappy. He asked more questions. He listened. He nodded. Then he asked still more questions.
“This Russian,” Coles said. “He’s supposed to be one of the smartest men in the business. Brilliant, is the word Limoges used. And we’re supposed to outsmart him?”
&nb
sp; “Yes.”
“That means you think you’re smarter than he is.”
“I told you. I’m not smart. I’m experienced.”
Coles brooded over his coffee.
“I understand you like to fly,” Brewer said.
“Yes.”
“You do stunt flying.”
“Yes.”
“That’s when you feel fully alive. When you’re looking things right in the eye. When you’re balanced right on the edge. You hold everything in your own two hands. Hit or miss. Then you bring it off and walk away. Got away with it again.”
Coles looked with renewed attention at Brewer. “You’ve been there too.”
“Yes,” Brewer said. “I’ve been there.”
“Go on.”
“This Gogol,” Brewer said. “He never goes near the edge. He uses other people. He’s a puppeteer. He’s very gifted at it. But he never puts himself on the high wire. Now he’s going to have to. For the first time he’s going to have to come out in the open and bet the farm on one pass of the dice. He’s going to have to put his own butt on the line.”
“And you’re betting he doesn’t have the stomach for it.”
Coles sat in thought. Then he asked more questions. One of the waiters hung up his apron and, heavily bundled in a down parka, left the delicatessen. The other waiter looked at his watch. He shrugged at the counterman. Three more inches of snow were on the ground. The waiter put out a bank of lights while the counterman went into the back for his overcoat.
“Okay,” Coles said at last. “If we’re going to try this, there’s one condition, I don’t want that idiot Limoges involved. Understood?”
“That’s none of my affair. I don’t even know why he accepted this idea of mine.”
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“He’s afraid of you.” Coles watched Brewer’s face. “Don’t turn your back on him. Are we agreed? We’ll keep Limoges out as much as possible.”
“You tell that to Limoges.”
“With pleasure,” Coles said. “I just want to know one thing. How sure are you that this Russian will go for this trap? How do you know he’ll do what you want him to do?”
“Because I went to great lengths to learn how he thinks. The real Cassandra trap is inside his own mind.”
Chapter 41
Revin found a parking space on the third deck of the parking building of the Zurich airport. He turned off the engine and looked at Gogol.
“The committee isn’t going to give you much time,” Revin said. “They want results quickly.”
“Results?” Gogol smiled. “That committee is not in a position to demand anything from me. After they failed, I located Cassandra! Me! While that army of idiots was stumbling all over each other. I found it. The only thing that committee is good for is issuing absurd orders.”
“If you ask my opinion, Emil, I think your ego is leading you into a blind alley. You want to beat one of the top U.S. agents more than you want to get Cassandra.”
“But they’re the same thing, Viktor,” Gogol said with the wave of a hand.
“Emil, I warn you, if you fail, you are a dead man. All your brilliant work to date won’t count. You don’t have one friend on the committee. Not one. They’re all sitting there just waiting for you to slip once. You’ve rubbed their noses in the shit too often. If you fail, they won’t let you go live on your Swiss mountaintop and spend the rest of your fat capitalist life enjoying all your money. They’ll want your head on a pike staff.”
“And if I succeed,” Gogol said, “when I succeed—I will be the one handing out the pike staffs. It will be the biggest number of heads since Genghis Khan made his mountain of skulls at Lake Baikal.”
“The fly in your ointment, Emil, is Brewer. You will have to kill him. I’ve warned you. The committee has warned you. Nevans has warned you. He’s too dangerous.”
Gogol shook his head. “No.”
“You should make killing Brewer your first priority,” Revin insisted. “Before you do anything else.”
“No,” Gogol said again. “The time is past for killing Brewer. Now that I’ve located Cassandra, I need him to get it for me.”
Revin looked at him with wonder. “You think you can get Brewer to deliver Cassandra to you?” He shook his head. “This can only end in disaster.”
“Wish me luck, Viktor,” Gogol said.
“I give you the Spartan mother’s salute.”
“Which is?” Gogol asked.
“When she handed her son his shield for battle, she said: ‘Come back, my son, with it—or on it.’”
Just before Gogol’s flight took off, a late passenger boarded his plane. She carried a red umbrella.
Gogol used three different passports. He flew from Zurich to London, checked into an executive suite in the Hotel Bringhurst with a number of pieces of handmade leather luggage, and with great ostentation dispensed excessively large tips. In the morning, after breakfast, he went for a chilly stroll along the rows of expensive shops. Then quickly he descended the steps to the underground and rode it in a aimless pattern, making abrupt changes as he went. Without returning for his baggage, he took a taxi to Heathrow.
In the corridors of the airport he was sure he’d had a glimpse of the woman with the red umbrella.
From London he flew to Amsterdam. He stayed overnight in a small hotel on a side street up from the War Memorial, purchasing a few toilet articles and a change of clothes. He bought an airline ticket for the ten o’clock morning flight to Rome, but at seven A.M., with no baggage, he slipped out of his hotel and took the train from Amsterdam to Brussels. Again, as he boarded his train, he felt he’d glimpsed the woman with the red umbrella. The next morning he flew from Brussels to Paris.
That evening, very late, he walked through the lobby of his hotel and out on the street. Without a glance in any direction, he walked directly to the metro steps and descended. He took the metro to Avenue de Clichy and walked up to street level.
The streets were cold and dark, and he felt his feet growing cold as he stood in a doorway and watched the metro steps. No one had followed him. He decided to make sure. He stepped out of the doorway and walked away from the metro.
The odor of garlic and curry wafted from the fronts of the darkened shops. A woman fed cats in a doorway. A dog had knocked over a garbage bucket, and with his head thrust inside, was noisily chewing a bone.
As he walked, Gogol saw men sitting in darkened cars. Ahead he saw a group of men walking toward him. Five of them. They slowed their pace when they saw him, murmuring to each other. Then they stopped and waited for him.
When he reached them, one of them spoke to him. “Money,” he said.
The other four circled him. From his coat pocket Gogol pulled out a pistol and watched the five of them fall back, letting him pass on.
A half block later he turned and looked back. He was astonished to see, beyond the five men, a woman walking the streets. She was carrying an umbrella, and Gogol bet it was red.
He would have liked to have met her, to ask how she had tracked him so brilliantly—so invisibly. He could learn a great deal from her. But now she wouldn’t be able to tell him anything. And she wouldn’t be able to follow him anymore. He turned the corner and hurried in a circle back to the metro.
Maida Conyers saw the five men ahead of her. And she saw one of them cross the street and hurry past her and behind her. She was trapped.
She continued to walk purposefully toward the four men. When she reached them, one blocked her way and held up his hand. The others murmured to him and laughed. She raised her umbrella and thrust the point of it past his hand and into the base of his throat. As he stumbled back, she felt an arm reach around her neck. She pulled the handle from the umbrella, aimed it at the man’s face and squirted mace into his mouth and eyes. She turned and squirted it at another face. The fourth man, trying to seize her by the hair, never saw the thumb she jammed into his eye, never saw the r
igid hand that jammed into his gut just below the rib cage into his diaphragm and left him doubled over on the sidewalk.
The fifth man came running up behind her, and she waited until the last possible moment before turning and kicking him. She left him lying on the sidewalk with the others as she walked away, back toward the metro. In her hand, visibly, she carried a small pistol.
As usual, Gogol had gotten others to do his laundry for him while he ducked into a rat’s hole and escaped. She knew that she’d lost him.
The next morning, Gogol rented a car and drove back to Brussels. There he took a long evening walk to be sure he’d shaken her, and the next morning he flew to New York.
He stayed overnight in a cut-rate tourist hotel in the Thirties off Lexington, then bought some clothes and luggage at Macy’s before taking the Amtrak train from New York to Washington. He rented an economy car at Union Station then drove to Crystal City, just across the river from Washington, where he checked into a housekeeping motel room. He had spent nearly five days in evasive action.
Chapter 42
It was Coles who called the meeting. The fake was ready; the trap was set; and to plan the next step, Brewer and Limoges were invited to Mobius, his research laboratories.
When Brewer arrived, Limoges was waiting for him in the parking lot. He stepped from his limousine, waving a cane, and walked with stamping feet and stamping cane in anger up to Brewer.
“You lost him,” he said accusingly to Brewer.
“Afraid so,” Brewer replied.
“You have no idea how this complicates matters,” Limoges said.
“It happens,” Brewer said. “All the time. Don’t you know that?”
Limoges swayed on his cane irritably. “You have no idea where he is?”
“No.”
“What do you do now?”
“Wait.”
“Wait.”
“Yes. He’ll turn up,” Brewer said.
“He’ll turn up.” Limoges stood, leaning on his cane, gazing unhappily into Brewer’s eyes. “My. How casual we are. Insouciant. Has it occurred to you that he might just turn up with Cassandra under his arm, heading for the nearest exit? What do you think we should do while waiting for Gogol to”—he flipped a hand in air—“turn up?”
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