“What about it?” The credit-report manager was a woman with an abrupt manner.
“It’s incomplete. We have come upon new and very sensitive information about the subject.”
“Like what?”
“He had a prison record.”
“I see.”
“He also smuggled arms into Iran.”
“I see.”
“There’s a lot more,” the bank manager said. “The whole thing was covered up and Brewer was pardoned, but I think your client would want to know all this.”
“Yes. I’m sure you’re right.”
“I’ll send it for overnight delivery.”
“Better wait until I check. I’ll call you back.”
Later she did call him back. “I have conferred with certain people here. It has been decided that you should have a special courier carry the new information to Dulles Airport in Washington, where he will be met.”
Brewer waited with Sauer at the airport for the courier to arrive from Chicago. A small group of people waited for passengers from that Chicago flight. One of them held a small handwritten cardboard sign, ELIOTT.
When the passengers debarked, the delivery was quickly made. The courier handed a small envelope to the contact, received a signed receipt, and then watched the contact throw the Eliott sign in a trash can and hurry toward the escalators.
By prearrangement Sauer followed the contact and Brewer followed Sauer. They were watching for a handoff.
The contact drove straight back toward the city, traveling fast, weaving in and out of traffic. It was difficult for Sauer to follow him without using the same highly visible maneuvering. Instead Sauer laid back more than a quarter of a mile. He was in danger of losing the contact in traffic.
The contact drove directly from Dulles to Georgetown, and there on M Street made the switch. Sauer was seven cars behind the contact’s car and pinned in the two-way traffic when the contact opened his window and extended his arm. A car passing from the opposite direction paused with his window open. The contact extended the envelope to him. Sauer watched the second car speed away right past him.
Brewer, farther back, was ready. He watched the second car turn at the intersection and head north. He turned against the light. There was the squealing of brakes and horns blowing as Brewer got through the intersection and hurried off after the second car.
The second car made a series of turns, crossed the Francis Scott Key bridge, and hurried back to the Beltway, traveling clockwise north. He drove fast, like the other driver, then abruptly dashed down an exit ramp. Brewer lost him, and at the bottom of the exit ramp paused to scan the streets for the car. His sense told him the car had not gone far. He continued to the right and slowly drove past several motels, some gas stations, and a large restaurant. He cruised by slowly, looking at cars.
Then, in his rearview mirror, he saw it. The car was emerging from a motel driveway. As Brewer made his U-turn, he saw the car go back up the ramp onto the Beltway.
Brewer drove to the motel and turned in. It was a U-shaped motel complex, two stories with a balcony around the entire perimeter. The center was filled with cars.
Was Gogol in there somewhere?
“Shit,” Brewer said. He went into the registration office and took a room.
“Four more inches tonight,” the deskman said when he gave Brewer his key. “It’s the second Ice Age.”
The motel was a hive.
Airport limousines and cars and taxis came and went. Drycleaners trucks, laundries, liquor vans, pizza trucks. Through an archway in the back was a health club with a swimming pool and a sauna.
As Brewer watched, he gradually got the rooms sorted out. He drew a diagram of both floors of the motel on several sheets of paper. Watching through the blinds, he studied the occupants of each room. He drew an X through each room on his diagram that clearly didn’t have Gogol in it.
Sauer arrived with Conyers a few hours later and they ordered a pizza and watched the busy motel.
“I’m in the wrong business,” Maida Conyers said. “I’ve seen that blonde go into three different rooms in the last hour and a half.”
“Those three rooms back there,” Sauer said. “I don’t think they’re occupied. And these two rooms were just rented to typical lobby types.” He drew X’s through the five rooms. “That still leaves these nine rooms.” He looked at Gogol’s photo graphs. “If he’s here, he’s not showing himself. Which room you think he’s in?” he asked Brewer.
Brewer shrugged. “I just hope he’s in one of them.”
When Conyers and Sauer left, Brewer sat in the darkened room with the blinds parted, holding a pair of binoculars in his lap. Two more X’s had been drawn in his floor plan. That left seven rooms to check out.
In the evening the tempo changed. Not as many new registrants, more call girls, more liquor and pizza deliveries—and a noticeable amount of drug traffic. Young men in sneakers and short zippered jackets, knuckling doors, slipping small envelopes inside, counting the cash that came back out and slipping it inside their jackets. Then a quick dash of the car back into the night.
At seven snow began.
By nine o’clock Brewer had eliminated three more rooms. He drew X’s in the appropriate squares. Four to go.
One of the four rooms was eliminated forty-five minutes later. A man and a woman emerged and drove off. Three to go.
Brewer felt his eyes grow heavy, and washed his face in cold water. In the back of his mind was a nagging thought: he was on a wild-goose chase. Gogol wasn’t here.
There was some brief activity just before eleven when an airport limousine arrived and the passengers registered then took their rooms. All the rooms in the motel were now occupied. Three of them were still in the unidentified column. If Gogol wasn’t in one of the three, Brewer had wasted his time—and lost his quarry.
He must have dozed. He raised his head and looked at his watch. It was quarter after one in the morning. There were several inches of new snow on the ground, and it was snowing thickly. He saw a figure on the second-floor balcony across from him walking toward the stairs. When he got to the head of the stairs, Brewer saw that it was a man, but it was too dark to see his face. The man looked down then raised his head and looked out at the quadrangle into a light.
It was Emil Gogol.
Chapter 49
One night, late, Brewer heard his front door open. He rolled off the bed and onto the floor, reaching under the mattress for his pistol. Then he crawled to the bedroom door and, lying prone, took aim at the front doorway.
A woman stood there, backlit by the hallway light, pulling a key from the door lock. Brewer stood up and turned on the light.
Margie held out an envelope. “Came for you today. I wasn’t going to bring it, but I felt so guilty, I couldn’t sleep.”
Brewer opened it. “I’m invited to a wedding,” he said.
“You never called her,” she said.
“No. Never did.”
“So I don’t feel like a poacher anymore.”
“You never were.”
“Do you miss me?”
“Yes,” he said.
She kissed him. “Your kisses still have sadness in them, Charlie.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Still haven’t gotten past prison?”
He shook his head. “No. Still haven’t gotten back to the good guys versus the bad guys.”
“Nothing’s changed,” she said.
He looked thoughtfully at her. “Yes, it has. Now I think it’s the bad guys versus the bad guys.”
She sighed. “Oh, Charlie,” she said sadly. “Remember that quotation you told me from Archimedes? Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world. Okay. Let me give you a place to stand. Next to me.”
He gazed at her hesitantly.
“Since you won’t join me, Charlie, I’m joining you. I even brought my evening attire.” She held up a toothbrush. “Entirely in blue.” She put her arms around him.
“I claim this land for Margie.”
“It’s not that easy,” he said. “I’m still a walking shooting gallery. That could have been anyone coming through that door.”
“It’s not easy,” she replied. “But it is simple.”
“After this case is over.”
“I can’t live that way,” Margie said. “There’ll always be a case. Everytime a car misfires, you’ll send me away until the case is over. I’m all grown-up. I can make my own decisions. And I told you what it is. No promises. No strings. It’s now or never for us.”
He touched her cheek with his fingers. If he hadn’t come to Limoges with that plan, Gogol would be dead and he’d be out of this. Instead—He thought of Margie under a police blanket in the park. For the first time he told himself the truth about himself: the game was the most important thing. It wasn’t fun anymore, but it was still the important thing. He was endangering her for the sake of the game. He hadn’t changed. He would never change. Could never change.
“You have to decide, Charlie. It has to be here and it has to be now. If I leave, I won’t be back. Okay? It’s your move.”
He sat down, scowling at her.
She watched him then nodded. “I understand.” She turned and left the apartment.
Brewer sat, staring at the door. Then he stood and hurried after her. At the bottom of the stairs he took her hand.
“Okay,” he said.
Chapter 50
Gogol called Sauer that night.
“How did you make out?”
“I got it. ’Kay? Just like you said
“I told you.”
“Someone ought to be shot,” Sauer said.
“Where did you find it?”
“I was in the mainframe room, next to the control room. Standing by a panel door. ’Kay?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“And the panel door to the memory storage unit is open. And there on the inside of the door someone has put these strips of masking tape, and on them he’s written the entire access code, including the challenges and responses.”
“It’s always the way,” Gogol said. It was just as he had seen it so many times before—access-code numbers inside a shoe, on the bottom of a wooden chair, scratched on the back of a wrist-watch. “So tell me. What is the access code?”
Sauer hesitated. “Listen. I don’t know whether I’m ready for this. See what I’m saying?”
“No.”
“This is my Rubicon. Once I cross the river, there’s no road back. The die is cast.”
“Your Rubicon has already been crossed for you, Sauer. There hasn’t been a road back for a long time. You’re a ruined man, a victim of office politics and the ambitions of losers. It’s the same the world over, Sauer. The unbelievable number of incompetents who have pushed past others and wiggled into high places. Why should you pay for that? Why should you end your days in a back room somewhere, waiting for a pittance of a pension check while these others parade themselves with your feathers?”
“Maybe that’s true but—”
“Sauer. You might not get an opportunity like this for the rest of your life.”
Sauer hesitated. “It’s so damned final.”
“What’s final, Sauer, is poverty. Being alone and sick and penniless … dependent on indifferent clerks in some public program to feed you and care for you. That’s what’s final. No no, Sauer. If you want to live well and enjoy the rewards of your labors, you have to take them yourself. Reach out and seize it before it flies away.”
“Yeah,” Sauer said doubtfully.
“Listen, Sauer. You know I can get that number myself, told you where to look for it. So what’s the big deal? If I get it, you’ll miss your payday. For no reason. You are just saving me some time and effort. And losing a fortune.”
He could hear Sauer breathing.
“I ask you, Sauer—if not you, then who? And if not now then when?”
Sauer sighed. Then he said softly the first digit of the number. Then the next. Then a pause.
“Go on, Sauer,” Gogol said. “I can hear you.”
“Shit,” Sauer said.
“Go on. You’re almost done.”
Sauer murmured another number, then another. Then he read off the challenges and responses. He’d crossed his Rubicon.
“Shit,” he said.
Gogol was able to buy all the computer equipment he needed unobtrusively, a piece at a time, from a variety of local computer-supply firms.
Once he connected it all together in his motel room, he set the correct modem configurations. He was ready to dial Coles’s computer.
“Don’t fail me,” he murmured as he dialed the number.
There was a pause, then the computer responded. It asked for an identity number. Gogol copied it from the sheet of paper. The computer issued a challenge.
Gogol wrote the word Cadiz.
The computer issued the second challenge.
Gogol wrote the word Babble.
The computer issued a third challenge.
Gogol wrote the word Three. Instantly he found himself in the very heart of the computer. In minutes he was scanning columns of test data and recording it on magnetic tape. Then he dialed a number in New York and pumped out his magnetic tape into a computer in New York. A short time later the first of the test data was being transmitted to Moscow. Hour after hour Coles’s computer was receiving test responses from mainframe terminals all over the country. It was a simulated Star Wars network.
Late that night Revin called him. There was a tremor of excitement in his voice.
“Our clients are very pleased with the sample you have sent them,” he said. “Evidently the product you drew your sample from is much more advanced than they thought. I would even say”—Revin hesitated, then spoke in a lower voice—“they’re stunned.”
It was the confirmation Gogol had been waiting for. One more step and he could issue his list of heads for the chopping block—the clients. The entire committee. The bone in his throat. He could hear the sharpening of the ax already.
“I have a message from the clients,” Revin said. “They want to know when they will get the product itself.”
Just one more step. Gogol found the phrase running through his mind over and over. Don’t try to rush it, he told himself. Patience. Everything has its own tempo. At night, when he could stand the pacing in his room no longer, he took long walks through the streets. The mantle of snow was like a thick block of dirty-gray ice, smoothed over periodically with another whitewash coating of clean flakes.
Washington was weary of shivering, weary of shoveling, weary of waiting for spring. Yet every few days winter sent another dismaying few inches of white.
He walked sometimes for hours, walked until his mind stopped racing, until his body was tired enough to let him sleep. And as he walked he went over his plan again and again. He rehearsed the next conversation with Sauer again and again. For this would be the most critical conversation of all. He had to maneuver Sauer into stealing Cassandra itself.
Gogol had become addicted to pizzas. He had watched the little pizza delivery truck arrive at all hours, had gotten a whiff of the odor of the pie and, idly, curiously, one night dialed the telephone number on the truck panel and ordered his first pizza. He quickly became a regular customer.
On Sunday evening at dusk he took a long walk, and when he came back, he decided that this was the night he would call Sauer. This was the night he would proposition him. This was the night he would sign Sauer up to steal Cassandra and bring it to him. If he were successful, he promised himself a gift—a pizza with double pepperoni and mushrooms and cheese. And a six-pack of cola. He picked up the phone.
“Ah!” he said to Sauer. “Did you receive the notice from your new banker in Switzerland?”
“Yes,” Sauer said. “I did.”
“You’re a rich man,” Gogol said. “A quarter of a million dollars rich. How do you feel?”
“First rate,” Sauer said.
<
br /> “I sent you a little package. Did you receive it?”
“About fifteen minutes ago. Very generous of you.”
“Not at all. You deserve much more. Disgraceful the way you have been treated. Frankly, I feel that the quarter of a million is hardly enough compensation. You should be much richer than that.”
“Ha,” Sauer said. “Sounds like another proposition coming up.”
“Seriously, Sauer,” Gogol said. “I’d like to see you really well fixed, and I have an idea.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a half a million dollar deal, on top of what you already have.”
“Half a million?”
“You’ll be set for life.”
“What’s the half million for?”
“Steal Cassandra.”
Sauer hung up.
Gogol promised himself he would augment the double pizza with vodka if he could sell Sauer. He waited an hour and dialed his number again.
“It’s nothing to scoff at,” he said. “You may never see another opportunity like this for the rest of your life. Think about it, Sauer. To go with your quarter million, a half million when you bring it out.”
“Stop. I don’t want to hear any more. If you want it, you go get it.”
“I want you to get it, Sauer.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“It should be easy. You told me yourself that Brewer is expecting me to steal the fake. While he waits, you can steal the real thing.”
“Impossible. It’s booby-trapped.”
Gogol hesitated. “Booby-trapped,” he said. “How interesting. How good of you to tell me. But you see, since you know that, it ought to be easy for you.”
“Nothing is easy for me. ’Kay?”
“Getting the access number was easy—after I showed you how. Suppose I showed you a way to get Cassandra that is absolutely safe, Sauer. No risk at all.”
“If there’s no risk, why don’t you go get it and save the half million?”
“Because you have clearance to be near it and I don’t.”
“It’s still too risky.”
“Not if it’s done right. Steal a page from Vienna.”
“What does that mean?”
Triple Trap Page 31