“Not at all, Albert,” Janet said encouragingly. “Your wisdom and world knowledge is truly fascinating. And frankly, I’m thankful for the distraction.”
“And to think that up until tonight I blamed all of our global upsets and human cruelties on United Airlines.” Everyone chuckled politely at Sand’s dry jest.
“Yes,” Brecht replied, “United Airlines and every other corporation that uses or manufactures advanced technology. Who made the jets that took down the World Trade Center? Who made the world a global village? Remember the USS Cole? Before that happened, who would have thought untrained men in a rubber raft could cripple a US Navy destroyer? Throughout the Cold War, the media and our government portrayed the USSR as a terrible menace, a threat to the future of mankind, but our friends in the Kremlin never actually attacked us on the scale of a modern terrorist.”
“Are you saying they’re our friends?” Janet asked.
“In some ways they are, and in other ways they’re our foes,” Brecht answered. “But they’ve never killed our civilians on our own soil. People often say we hung at the brink of nuclear war with them for more than half a century, but we enjoyed what military analysts call ‘strategic peace’ that entire time. That means there were no overt military hostilities of magnitude. By the end of World War II, we saw Pearl Harbor as something that would never happen again. Yet here we sit, wondering what will happen next.
“No, Janet, we are not the only superpower. There are no superpowers anymore, at least not in the definitions we used when the word was coined. Or perhaps another way to put it would be to say everybody is a superpower these days. Now every Tom, Dick and Harry can get his hands on a piece of military hardware.” Brecht winked at Jensen. “Not that an L-39 in the hands of a trial lawyer is necessarily a threat to mankind,” he said, in reference to Jensen’s restored Soviet jet fighter.
Jensen knew better than to be surprised. The Old Man knows everything. “You sound like you miss the good old days,” he offered.
“Not at all, Mark. There is no time like the present. I merely submit that those were very different times.”
“I was just a boy then.”
“We were all children. Even me.”
“But you were an adult,” Janet countered, “doing a tough job behind the Iron Curtain.”
“In those days we thought we were fighting for the survival of mankind, or at least the ‘American way of life.’”
“And what did you do in those days?”
“I was a spy, Janet. And I recruited other spies, from the Soviet military politic.” As he said this, Brecht pointed to the bright red star on the side of the green bottle of mineral water that lay planted in ice in the bucket next to the table, as if the bottle were a product of the communist party rather than a town in Italy.
Janet had another question. “Did you ever have to kill anyone?”
Brecht chuckled at the abruptness of the question; then his mirth subsided, and he stared at his unlit cigar for a moment before answering. When he spoke, he gazed directly into her eyes. “Janet, you may think me a monster, but I rarely had to kill, at least not in self-defense or to save my own life. But kill I did.”
“Why?” Janet’s eyes were wide.
“Honey, I don’t think—”
Brecht interrupted Jensen’s protestations. “Mark, hers is a fair question. It was a long time ago. I don’t mind talking about it, not to the family of Conrad Jensen.”
“Albert, please forget I asked. It just—I overstepped my bounds. It was terribly rude of me. The question just slipped out.” Janet was clearly flustered.
“Not to worry,” Brecht placated her. “It is a perfectly natural question. Most of it is still classified, but I can tell you that I was absolutely sure that every time I took a life, it saved more lives.”
“American lives?”
“American, British and Russian. Possibly more.”
Janet nodded, lowering her eyes. “There are many evil men in the world,” she whispered.
“You see,” Brecht plowed on, “we were fighting to understand a mysterious and dangerous enemy. It was much more than merely a war of ideologies, a clash of political beliefs. We were on the brink of nuclear war for generations, or so we thought at the time, and the information our espionage operations generated included not only data relating to the military capabilities and readiness of the Soviet Union. We were desperate to learn how deeply the communists had infiltrated our own political system, our government and our military. We feared a cancerous ideology that could end our way of life, our great traditions.”
Janet nodded. “I read a book once that suggested our own CIA assassinated JFK because the Russians had blackmailed him to become a spy. The idea was that someone had filmed him when he was young doing something so embarrassing that he had no choice but to cooperate with the Russians to avoid a scandal that could bring down the US government. They manipulated our political system to get him into the White House, and in a way, the whole country was susceptible to blackmail. He became the ultimate mole, so we had no choice but to engineer his assassination.”
Brecht picked up the ball and carried it forward. “It was exactly that kind of paranoia that led to the draconian measures of the McCarthy era as we struggled to root out communism from the fabric of American society.”
“Was there any truth to that theory about JFK?”
“I thought you wanted to hear about me killing people or Mark’s heroic father saving me.”
Janet Jensen had been married to a trial lawyer for more than two decades. “So my question is off limits?”
“Your question about JFK?”
“Yes.” Janet smiled.
“Let us table that for another time. I have a tale to tell that is much closer to home for you and your husband.”
“Let’s hear it,” Sand prompted, smiling and gesturing with his finger, as if to reel in a fish on a rod.
At that moment the waiter reappeared, this time with two assistants, to begin serving their first course. They arranged the plates and refilled glasses. The waiter and his minions departed. For a few minutes no one spoke as they started into their dinners. No one wanted to prompt Brecht or open a new subject, so they waited patiently. After he had taken a few bites of his steak, Brecht took a gulp of mineral water and cleared his throat.
“I told Dave about this a few days ago, but you will find this interesting, and I’ll add some details he doesn’t know yet.” Brecht said. Thomas nodded encouragingly, clearly interested to hear more about Brecht’s history with Conrad Jensen.
“I learned much of what I know long after it happened. I had to piece this together with scraps from various sources because my own memory was less than complete.
“During the late fifties, I was working under non-official cover in Moscow. I was a spy with no official cover, no diplomatic status. My role, as I’ve said, was to recruit Soviet agents. Our best prospects were often the ministerial employees at government offices and factories—people who had no power but who lived in the shadows of those who did, and who had access to sensitive information. On occasion, however, we sought to recruit the bigger fish, the people who were within the Russian Bear’s inner cave.
“I’ll omit the trivial details of my assignment. Suffice to say that I was betrayed, shot in the head and in the belly and left to die.
“Through some quirk of ballistics, I survived. One bullet lodged at the occipital lobe of my brain.” He pointed to a spot behind his right ear. “The slug passed through the bone but stopped just inside my skull, doing minor damage to my brain. I was bleeding intracranially; pressure was building within my skull. The other slug ruptured my spleen, and I was also bleeding internally. I was alive but in a coma. Time wasn’t on my side.
“The operation was blown, but we had to find out what had gone wrong. Had the subject I was trying to recruit shot me? Had the KGB or the GRU learned of our operations, our methods? Were others at risk of assassination? Was it tim
e to roll up our team and exfiltrate? We had to get those answers, and I was the only one who might have them. We could have a leak, a mole, a double agent—the questions went on and on. If we had a spy in the upper echelon of our service, we had to root him out. If they kept me alive long enough, details I might provide could be important to our national security. But I was dying, in the subbasement of an ancient Russian ministry building.
“It just so happened that the best brain surgeon on earth—an American by the name of Conrad Jensen—was visiting Moscow with a diplomatic medical delegation when I was shot. They actually dragged your father from dinner with the American ambassador and spirited him away to where he performed surgery on me under the light of a bare bulb with limited surgical tools.
“Conrad got the bullets out and stabilized me. A month after that I was in a British hospital and eventually made a full recovery.
“But the real story is what happened to your father, whom the KGB detained the next day. They’d singled him out from the American delegation and taken him into custody for questioning. The KGB was putting things together very quickly.
“They took him to a small room and sat him in a chair next to a steam radiator. KGB officers stared at him in silence for hours, waiting for the tension to break him. They didn’t have enough information to justify a brutal interrogation or charge him with espionage, and because he was there as a diplomat, a guest of the ambassador, they had to use some restraint. What they did to him was very psychologically distressing. The unspoken threat of torture and execution—standard punishments for espionage against the motherland or at least long-term imprisonment in a Soviet labor camp—was very real. He lived in terror for two long days. They answered none of his questions. They fed him little, let him have no sleep, and the room got hotter and hotter.
“Remember that he had not eaten or slept in twenty-four hours by the time the ordeal with the KGB first began. He was exhausted and had no training for that kind of thing.
“Your father never cracked. He just sat there and stared down trained KGB interrogators for more than forty hours.”
Stunned, Janet blinked away tears. Jensen showed no expression. Sand shook his head slowly.
“So, what happened?” Janet asked at length.
“They eventually let him go, put him on a flight to Norway. They ‘lost’ his luggage and all of his belongings.”
Mark chuckled. “Dad used to chide my mom about the fun she missed because she stayed home for that trip. She was pregnant with my brother, Johnny.” After clearing his throat, he added, “He made the trip sound like it was nothing dramatic. He said he helped you with some kind of medical procedure, but he downplayed it. I thought maybe he stitched up a cut or something. I didn’t know you’d been shot on hostile soil. Years afterward, when he mentioned your intelligence background and the work you do now, I should have pieced it together.”
Brecht nodded. “Here was a civilian doctor with a wife and child and another on the way, and he risked everything to save a complete stranger in the service of his country. He could have declined without dishonor or repercussion, but he rose to the occasion and did what only a hero—” Brecht’s voice faltered.
After several seconds of silence, Sand’s soft baritone voice carried across the table. “I’m lucky,” he said. “I get to benefit from that.”
Brecht took the opportunity to move to a new subject. “Tell us more about Jackie. And if you’re of a mind, tell us about yourself.”
With a sad smile, Sand shrugged. “That’s a tough act to follow, Albert.”
“Not so. I know something of your background, sir. In your younger years, you could have been a star player on our team.”
Once again, Janet would not stand for mystery. “What are you talking about, Albert?”
“Robert Sand is a very interesting man, Janet. His own history is more impressive—and I mean this quite sincerely—than my own. He has done many good and heroic deeds over the years, facing danger all the way. He’s a force of nature.”
“Care to fill us in?” asked Mark.
Brecht tipped his head. “I’ll leave that to Mr. Sand.”
“Hey,” said Sand, “I’m just an old reprobate trying to find my gal, so I don’t have to spend the rest of my days pining away alone watching reruns of Sanford & Son.”
Brecht’s bushy eyebrows rose a notch. At that moment, a cell phone chirped from inside his jacket. He pulled it out, tapped the glass and held it to his ear. “Brecht,” he said crisply. After listening for a moment, he spoke a few words. “Well done. Where are they now? … Alright, thanks.” He ended the call and returned the phone to his jacket.
“Well?” Jensen asked.
“The rest of my team is here. We’ve recovered some surveillance video from the other side of the river; it’s poor quality, but we’re hoping to enhance it. This may give us a lead; we’ll know more in the morning.”
No one spoke, but all stared.
“Would anyone care for dessert?”
Still no one spoke.
“In that case, would anyone object if I were to light my cigar?”
Chapter 30
While Antonio plowed through a juicy steak, sipping eighteen-year-old Oban, Beeman went upstairs. Kitten was touching up her hair and makeup. Her hands were shaking, but she tried to work with care, doing her best to make her eyes pretty—so she could keep them.
When she finished with her mascara, she put down the brush and said simply, “I’m ready.”
Beeman escorted her down the stairs and into the kitchen.
He hadn’t miscalculated. Antonio’s response to Kitten appearing as she did—dolled up nicely in the white dress that accentuated her figure—was exactly what Beeman expected. The shoes were a fine touch; Antonio liked women in high heel shoes.
Beeman had her dressed up like a virgin at a summer wedding to commence Antonio’s journey, his crossing, in his native state: civilized, inhibited, helpless and sexually frustrated. When he completed his metamorphosis, he’d become the God of Lust and Mayhem.
Now Beeman would steer Antonio’s infantile mind down a psychic spiral staircase, sinking through the strata of his troubled soul to the subbasement where his most primal impulses festered and grew, far from the sunlight, like poison fungus. Beeman would be Antonio’s tour guide, showing him the way. One step would lead to another, and another, until Antonio’s inner beast was free, loosed upon the world. Beeman expected Antonio eventually to devour himself; his plush fantasy life had not prepared him for the ghastly realities he would soon experience at his own hand. His conscience would ultimately circle back and ambush him.
If not, then perhaps he could call upon Dove to extinguish the misfit. Beeman trusted that his sense about that woman was right—beneath her graceful demeanor lurked an iron serpent, which if awakened might empower her to use her finely manicured nails to tear away Antonio’s face.
Antonio was still filling himself with beef and booze, a look of intense pleasure on his face.
A good sign. His inhibitions are relaxed.
When he saw Kitten standing demurely before him in her sultry bride-like accoutrements, Antonio’s jaw literally dropped open. His pupils dilated; a reddish shimmer began to emerge along the outer edges of his large ears, signaling an endorphin dump. His breath caught in his chest; then he began to pant.
Beeman wondered if he might hyperventilate.
At this point things departed unsettlingly from his script.
Antonio’s behavior made Beeman’s stomach twist. Instead of the displaying the cruel, lascivious grin Beeman expected, Antonio swallowed hard and stood up, to be chivalrous, pulling out her chair for her.
“Are you hungry?”
No! Antonio was rising to the occasion in the wrong way, trying to charm the girl. Beeman had considered but discounted this possibility, believing that the danger of such a response would be greater with Dove than with Kitten, which was why he’d selected the seductive, voluptuous brunette
for this first phase of the drama.
He’d thought she would strike the right chord; she was well on the way to breaking completely. She radiated submissive obedience, invoking the primitive urges that coursed through Antonio’s reptilian mind.
Antonio had spent most of his adult life suffering from the cumulative frustration of women he coveted rejecting and ignoring him. A girl who had meant the world to him had spurned him as a teen, cutting him deeply; many similar failures had followed, each one deepening and widening the gaping wound. Year after year, unremitting pain, loneliness and incessant pent-up libido had eventually taken their toll and bent his mind permanently.
Or so Beeman had thought.
Antonio was not a fundamentally unattractive man—he was trim and tall with jet-black hair and square shoulders. Yes, his nose was oversized and hatchet-like, his dark eyes were too closely-set and his mustache was absurdly vain. But if he’d been convincingly able to project in the presence of beautiful women the cocky confidence he pretended to have when he was alone with Beeman, he’d likely not have suffered the burning sexual isolation Beeman had painstakingly exploited through months of control and manipulation. He had brought Antonio to a boil night after night in strip clubs and topless bars, cultivating his resentment with booze, shimmering flesh, twisted fantasies—and no happy endings.
He’d slipped large bills to the exotic dancers Antonio found most alluring, telling them to keep Antonio turned on but never to give him more than teasing attention. Whatever they would have charged to have gone home with Antonio, Beeman had matched and more, with instructions never to offer him relief.
The hateful whores had loved it.
So now, just when the Doberman was about to slip away from its chain, it became a gentle puppy.
Disaster.
Jackie asked, “Can I have some food?”
Before Antonio could speak, Beeman took one step closer to her and whispered very softly into her ear. “Slap him as hard as you can, right now, or this is the end for you.”
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