The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  Chardy agreed by inserting the magazine into the grip housing of the Ingram. He’d already checked that the bulky silencer was screwed on tight. He unfolded the metal stock, then folded it again, purely to familiarize himself. The entire weapon weighed less than six pounds, yet it could spit its load of thirty-two .380s in four seconds in almost absolute silence. The Bureau people loved it; Chardy hated it and would have given anything for an AK-47 or an M-16, a piece he could trust.

  “There are really only two possibilities,” Leo said tonelessly. “Either Danzig just flipped out and bolted on his own, in which case he’s walking the streets like a madman and will be picked up by morning; or, more likely, the man inside got to him somehow and has lured him out. In which case we’ll find out soon too—find the body.”

  “How does the safety work?”

  “There’s two. A lever in the trigger guard, just in front of the trigger. And the bolt handle: by twisting it a quarter turn you put the piece on safe.”

  Chardy cocked the weapon.

  “Be careful with that thing,” Leo said.

  “They kick much on you?” he asked.

  “Not hardly. There’s not enough powder in that pistol slug. Paul, I think you’re going to have to re-join the operation. You tell ’em you’re out of the hospital, you’re okay. You go back to Danzig’s and see what the hell is going on. You could put some questions to the Security people. Sam’ll probably be there too. Shit, it just occurs to me they’re going to raise hell looking for Lanahan. We can—”

  “What’s the trigger? About fifteen pounds?”

  “No, it’s much lighter. They vary: some of ’em go off if you look at them. That’s why I said to go easy with it. But it should be about ten pounds unless some hotdog has messed with the spring. I wonder how long he’s been gone? He could have been gone hours and they only noticed forty-five minutes ago. Paul, I’ll head back—”

  A Pontiac jumped into the lane ahead, then careened to a halt at the light and Leo had to pump his own brake hard.

  “Jerk. Goddammit! Look at this terrible traffic. You can’t drive in this city anymore.”

  “It’s okay, Leo,” Chardy said. He opened the door. “Paul!”

  “See you, Leo.” He hung in the door as a car swooped by them.

  “Paul, they need us back there, they—”

  “They want you back, Leo,” Chardy said. “You work for them. I don’t.” He smiled, and stepped into the dark, the machine pistol and a radio unit hidden in his gathered coat.

  54

  After a long drive they dropped Ulu Beg at a Metro station in a suburb of Washington. It had been a silent trip, through twilight across farm fields, then over a great American engineering marvel, a huge bridge, and then into the city, but now Speshnev turned to him from the front seat.

  “You remember it all?”

  “I do.”

  “It will be easy. The killing is the easiest of all. He’ll be alone this time. You’ll shoot for the head?”

  “The face. From very close. I will see brains.”

  “May I tell you a joke?”

  The Russian and his jokes! A strange fellow, stranger than any of them. Even the young man who’d done the driving turned to listen.

  “The man he expects to meet,” Speshnev said, “is Chardy. Delicious, isn’t it? This war criminal flees his own protection to meet the one man in the world he trusts; instead he meets the one man in the world who has willed his death.”

  These ironies held little interest to Ulu Beg; he nodded curtly.

  The driver climbed out and walked around the car and opened Ulu Beg’s door.

  “AH right,” said Speshnev.

  Ulu Beg stepped into light rain. The street teemed with Americans. Globular lamps stood about, radiating brown light to illuminate the slant of the falling water. They were at a plaza, near a circle of buses. People streamed toward the station; he could see the trains on a bridge above the entrance. It was all very modern.

  “You must not fail,” said the colonel.

  “As God wills it,” said Ulu Beg.

  The door closed and the car rushed off through the rain. He stood by the curb for a second, watching it melt into the traffic, then pushed his way through the crowd to the station. With the exact change he bought a fare card from a machine and went through turnstiles to be admitted to the trains. He carried his pack in his left hand; inside it was the Skorpion.

  Danzig left the theater at 11:30. His brain reeled from the imagery: organs, gigantic and absurd, abstract openings. He thought of wet doorways, of plumbing, of open heart surgery. It had given him a tremendous headache. He’d had to sit through the feature three times. As a narrative the film had an inanity that was almost beyond description: things just occurred in an offhand, casual way, contrived feebly so that the actresses could drop to their knees and suck off the actors every four or five minutes. The acting was amateurish—organ size was evidently the only criterion for casting on this production—and film technique nonexistent. The music was banal; only the photography had been first-rate.

  At last he breathed in the air, cool, made clean by the rain which had now stopped. He cut quickly across M Street and headed down a street that he knew would take him to the river’s edge. Then, really, he had but to walk a mile along the river—away from the police, who surely sought him now, away from prying eyes. It could be dangerous, the bleak streets of the city down by the river. Still, what choice had he? He loved the sense of danger in one respect: he approached it rather than letting it approach him, like an animal in a slaughterhouse pen. He walked on, a pudgy figure, pushing into the night.

  At last Lanahan was alone with the machine. In its unlit screen he could see the outline of his own figure, shadowy, imprecise, bent forward with monk’s devotion. Around him he could hear the hum of the fans and the strokes of the other operators.

  The Model 1750 Harris Video Display Terminal was twice the size of the earlier model he’d worked with in the pit. It looked to the uninformed eye like a cross between a television set and an electric typewriter, clunky and graceless. But it was his access to the brain, the memory, of Langley.

  If he had the codes.

  He flicked the machine—curious, in the jargon they’d never become known by their proper designation, VDT, or by anything reasonable. Rather, to them all, atavistically, they were simply Machines.

  The machine warmed for twenty seconds; then a green streak—the first stirring of creation—flashed at light-speed across the screen; then a blip, a bright square called a cursor, arrived in the lower left corner: it was the machine operator’s hand, the expression of his will.

  Miles stared at the rectangle of light gleaming at him in the half-dark. His fingers fell to a familiar pose and he felt the keys beneath them.

  He typed:

  Fe Hsu, meaning, fetch the directory coded HSU.

  Immediately the machine answered.

  Directory Inactive

  All right then, you bastard.

  He thought for a moment. He’d taken the easy shot, and lost. But let’s not panic. Let’s dope this thing out. We are looking for something hidden years ago. Hidden, but meant to be found if you knew you were looking for it. And meant to be found if you were Paul Chardy. This guy Frenchy Short was said to be smart. And he must have known the machines, the system, if he’d been able to tuck something away.

  A play on shoe. The shoe fits. Chinese spelling. He’d tried it, it hadn’t worked. But let’s not forget shoes altogether; perhaps one still fits.

  Fe Shu, Miles tried.

  The machine paused. No answer.

  Christ, suppose it was a secret directory, and when tapped it signaled a security monitor? Such directories were rumored to exist, yet no analyst had ever found one.

  The screen was blank.

  Then:

  Improper Code Prefix

  Damn, wrong number.

  He had a headache now, and an eruption on his forehead throbbed. Miles
rubbed at it with a small finger. Already his back ached; it had been a long time since he’d made his living in a machine cubicle. He’d been in daylight too long, ruining his machine vision.

  Think, damn you, think.

  FE SHU, he tried again, making certain to leave only one space between the command and the code, for in a moment of rush or confusion he thought he might have left two—or none—the first time through, and the machines—this is why he loved them so—were monstrously petty and literal and absolutely unbending and would forgive no breach of etiquette.

  The directory began to scroll up across the screen.

  Danzig could see it now—ahead, along the water, beyond the neo-baroque mass of the Watergate buildings. He was alone on an esplanade at the riverbank. Across the flat calm water lay Theodore Roosevelt Island; above its trees he could see Rosslyn skyscrapers. He looked ahead; could he see a flicker on a hill that would be Kennedy’s grave site, a memento mori for the evening? Or was it his imagination? He hurried through the night, on a walk by the water, among trees.

  The rain had stopped and back where the river was wider, near the arches of the Key Bridge, the lights from a boat winked. Danzig could not but wonder who was out there. He’d patrolled the Potomac occasionally with a neurotic chief executive—much liquor and endless, aimless, righteous monologues, lasting almost until dawn. But Danzig’s thoughts turned quickly from history to—for the first time in many weeks—sex. He had an image of a beautiful blond woman, elegant, a Georgetowner of statuesque proportions and great enthusiasms—just the two of them alone aboard a mahogany yacht in the Potomac, setting the boat to rocking with their exertions. He paused; from behind a shredding of the clouds came the moon, its satiny light playing on the river. A scene of astonishing allure for Danzig: black bank, black sky, silver moon on the water—a Hollywood scene. He paused, then halted.

  He had many years ago abandoned all belief in the unearthly. Man was too venal, too evil. Reality demanded fealty only to the here and now. Yet this sudden image of sheer, painful beauty, coming as it did immediately after visions of the sexual and the historical, placed before him at the ultimate moment of his life: surely now, this meant something.

  But even as he paused to absorb it, it began to fall apart. The clouds reclaimed the moon; the glinting sea returned to a more authentic identity as a sluggish river; the yacht under the bridge resolved itself, as he studied it, into a houseboat.

  Danzig checked his watch. He had plenty of time. Chardy was probably already there.

  He rushed through the night. On the other side of Rock Creek Parkway he could see the white edifice looming up, something on the Egyptian scale, arc-lit for drama, like a monument. Its balcony hung almost to the river, over the road. He hurried along, amazed at how dark and silent it all was.

  He passed under the balcony, and felt indoors. He continued to the midpoint of the building where a door had been cut in the blank brick of the foundation, recessed in a notch in the wall. Danzig crossed the parkway and climbed three steps to the door. He paused.

  Suppose it was locked?

  No, Chardy said it was open.

  Danzig’s hand checked the handle.

  He pulled it open and stepped inside.

  Their efficiency never astonished Ulu Beg. They could do so much; they knew so much. He took it by now as second nature, simply accepted it. It was as if he were operating in their country, not in America.

  He had gotten off at the Foggy Bottom stop. But he had not left the platform, hurried up the steps to the way out with the other passengers. He paused, on a stone bench. He was in a huge, honeycombed vault that curved over his head. It blazed with the drama of lights and shadows. Shortly, another train came along. A few people got out; a few got on. That was the 11:45 from Rosslyn; it was the last train. Ulu Beg took a quick look through the vaulted space. People paraded out. Nobody paid him attention.

  He walked quickly to the end of the chamber, to the sheer wall into which the tunnels were cut. He looked back and saw nothing. A few people lingered on the balcony above, but they were a hundred feet away and moving out toward the door.

  In the train tunnel there was a walkway, gated off from the platform with a No TRESPASSING sign. Ulu Beg climbed quickly over it and began to walk the catwalk along the tracks into the tunnel. The darkness swallowed him. A few lights blinked ahead. He reached a metal door set in the wall. It said, 102 ELEVATOR.

  It was padlocked. He removed the key from his pocket and opened the lock. He stepped into the corridor, found the ladder, and began to climb down to the tunnel.

  Keeping the Ingram securely wrapped in his jacket, Chardy walked for a block or two until he was sure he had lost Leo Bennis. Then, certain, he stepped again into the busy street to snag a cab. He stood in the brown light until one at last halted for him.

  He climbed in.

  “Where to?”

  Chardy had a great advantage over Leo Bennis and the others of the Bureau in the matter of Danzig’s destination. He knew now the secret of it. Since the object of the Russian operation was to protect the identity of a highly placed CIA officer working for them, it followed that the Russians operating in Washington did so with the special benefit of this man’s knowledge. In short, they would be aware of and could take advantage of CIA arrangements.

  So Chardy did not have to penetrate the Russian mind, on which he was no expert, but only to consult his own memory. He knew, for example, of five crash safe-houses, in the jargon, where an agent in trouble might head for safety if a D.C.-based operation went badly wrong. He reasoned that if the Russians wanted to lure Danzig into circumstances where the killing could be accomplished with a minimum of interference, a maximum of control, then certainly they would select one of the five.

  But which?

  Two were houses—old estates out in NW, spots private enough, except that both were heavily wired with recording devices so that nothing could transpire without leaving its traces. Clearly no good here.

  Of the remaining three sites, one again was a sure no-go: the basement of a strip bar in the smutty Fourteenth Street area—its purpose was to offer refuge to an agent should some sex-related burn blow up in his face and necessitate a place to hide from the cops fast. But Fourteenth Street would be jammed with Johns and hustlers this time of night.

  This left, really, only two choices.

  The first was an apartment on Capitol Hill—but chancy, chancy: the Hill always had lots of people roaring around, and this was a Saturday night anyway, party night up there, with horny aides and pretty women and drunken congressmen all over the place.

  It was a possibility. The apartment was on an out-of-the-way street and had a separate entrance—but …

  “Where to, mister?” the cabby said again.

  The last possibility was the fourth level, the lowest, of the parking lot under Kennedy Center. It was a deserted arena, unwired, with three or four no-visibility approaches, reserved for VIPs so they wouldn’t have to mingle with the common people. He knew that even six years ago when they were building the Metro system there’d been a plan to run a tunnel from the Foggy Bottom Station a half-mile down New Hampshire Avenue through to the fourth level.

  Chardy looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. “Kennedy Center,” he said.

  “You must be wrong, mister,” said the cabby. “It’s dark by now. The shows are all over. It’s all closed down.”

  “I think I’ll go anyway, if you don’t mind,” said Chardy. He could feel the cool grip of the machine pistol under the coat. His show was just about to begin.

  It was a short directory. The codes fled by Miles’s eyes in a green blur. Suddenly he hit an end.

  No Mo, the machine said: no more.

  He went uneasily up through what he’d already slid down through. It was all nonsense, random letter groupings.

  ABR………2395873

  TYW………3478230

  Codes, all codes, letters and numbers, in all maybe fifty of th
em. He could call each one up and see what it said, but that would take hours.

  One of them meant something.

  Twice, security monitors had wandered by to peer at him.

  Miles stared at the letters. It was gibberish. He was guessing.

  He hunted for a shoe of some sort in the three letter groupings—a SHO or a SHU or even another HSU.

  Yet there wasn’t any.

  He stared blankly at the letters.

  Come on, think, he told himself. Frenchy wants it found, wants Paul to find it. He tried to guess how Frenchy might have gamed it out. Frenchy was off on a job that involved the betrayal of his oldest friend, his brother of a hundred narrow scrapes. Frenchy for some reason felt he had to do it; the offer was too good to say no to. Frenchy was getting old; he was worried about losing his job, about ending up on the outside at fifty with no marketable skills, no resume, no anything. So, yes, he’d sell Chardy out. But the loathing, the guilt, must have chewed him up. So he decides to hedge his bet. Chardy at least deserves that. He passes to Chardy the clue that will bring him here, to this chair, to look at this directory. It’s a funny thing to do, isn’t it? Or is it? Chardy had said only, “It’s a thing an old agent would do.” What did he mean? Then Lanahan knew what he meant: if Frenchy got fouled up on this job, if the job came apart, and Frenchy with it, knowing that he’d left his message back home for Paul would be helpful. To Paul? Not really. To Frenchy. It would help him die.

  Lanahan saw now how Frenchy had doped it out. It was a way to face the chopper with some measure of peace.

  He wants you to find it! He wants you to find it!

  His eyes scanned the letters.

  BDY………578309

  BBB………580093

  REQ………230958

  Come on, Miles thought, come on! He felt his limbs boil with a tremendous restlessness. He wanted to walk, to run. If only he could get a drink of water.

  Shoe? Would Frenchy stick with the shoe gimmick? It had gotten him this far, hadn’t it? Or would Frenchy have switched to something else?

  Think, think!

  Frenchy wants it found. Frenchy Short, all those years ago, sick with grief at what he’s about to do, probably not understanding it all himself, but imagining reaching out to Chardy with this last gift, this expiation.