The Last Spymaster (45 page)

His cell phone lit up. He noted the number and answered. “Yes, Jay?”

Jay’s voice was taut. “What’s the latest about Ghranditti? Are you getting close to finding out where the shipment’s going to change hands?”

Frank frowned. He had not made nearly the progress he wanted. “Ghranditti’s done a damn good job of hiding himself. I’ve got nothing new about the shipment. For a while I thought I was getting close to finding at least one of those shell companies Palmer thought Ghranditti had, but it turned out to be just a realty firm in Northern Virginia he’s done business with. But through it, I was able to track two residences. He owns one in Miami Beach with so much security it could be a bank vault. The other’s here in D.C., a penthouse. It’s up for sale in one of those quiet, hoity-toity arrangements where there’s no sign on the door, and any parties interested in purchasing it have to prove they’ve got a million bucks in the bank even to view it.”

“Sounds as if Ghranditti’s planning to disappear after the deal closes. If we don’t get him now, we may lose him forever.”

“That’s my guess, Jay.”

There was a pause, and Frank could almost hear the wheels in Jay’s brain spinning with ideas. “You’ve got a suggestion?” he prompted hopefully.

“Get me a key to that penthouse. Maybe I can find something there about the shipment.”

Frank smiled to himself. “I’ll give you a call when I have it, and we can arrange for you to pick it up. Bye, Jay.”

“We’re not finished.” Another pause, and Jay’s tone grew heavy with warning: “I’m going to say something that might not make a lot of sense, Frank, so you’ll have to trust me. Something’s brewing, and Palmer or Elijah might be part of it. Don’t breathe a word to either of them that we’ve talked.”

The minutes passed slowly where Elaine hid nervously beneath the dresses in Harper’s clothing shop. Her sweat dried, and her skin itched. The man continued to lurk in the doorway. Finally his feet shifted more and more frequently. He was restless. When he called a thank-you to the clerk and stalked off, Elaine sighed with relief.

After five minutes she crawled under the clothes toward the door. Evening shoppers passed intermittently in the corridor. But there was also a man’s shadow, cast by the underground mall’s strange illumination. He was still on guard but positioned on the other side of the door from the store window.

Cursing silently, she scuttled to another rack, where she grabbed brown trousers and a matching jacket and a black T-shirt. Still hidden, she changed, then crab-walked down the aisle and pulled a black slouch hat from a display pole and tucked her hair up underneath. She removed the paper funnel she had zipped into a side pocket of her purse and carefully unfurled it on the floor, wary of the tips of the darts inside. It seemed incredible that it was only yesterday afternoon in Franklin Park that the Whippet operative had shot the darts at her, trying to scrub her.

Holding one of the darts by its flight, she rose until her eyes were above the dresses. The clerk had moved to another area and was helping a mother and daughter.

Elaine stared then dropped down and crawled toward the door. The shadow was still there. She eased out. He was a man of medium height with an almost boneless face and a look of intense boredom, but the tension in his body told her he was also on high alert. Suddenly he noticed her.

As he looked straight at her, she rammed the tip of the dart into his calf. He grunted. In an instant, his arms uncrossed. His weapon, with its long
sound suppressor, pointed at her. As she fell back inside the doorway, he pulled the trigger. The
pop
was loud in the quiet mall, reverberating from tiled and concrete surfaces.

“Get down!” Elaine yelled at the women in the shop.

She rolled under the clothes and ripped her Walther from her purse. Then rolled back toward the door in time to see the man stagger inside. His eyes were crazed with fury and poison; his skin gray. But as soon as he spotted her, he aimed again. She sprang forward and crashed her shoulder into his knees. She heard one snap. He grunted and went down like a tower of blocks, his finger reflexively pulling the trigger. The shot splintered the floor next to her. Within seconds she was up and out the door. She looked both ways and ran.

Near the Mall, Jay Tice trudged through yellow pools of lamplight toward a concrete sidewalk planter, limping slightly. His shoulders were rounded, his lips downturned in a grimace, emphasizing the elderly age he pretended. Pedestrians flooded past as he sank onto the planter’s wall. He checked around carefully then slid his hand back under the decorative rock Frank had described. His fingers probed. At last he found the freshly made elevator key to Martin Ghranditti’s penthouse and retrieved it. Staying in character, he limped away.

The Mustang stopped at the curb. He climbed inside.

“It was there?” Raina asked anxiously as she drove back into the traffic.

“Exactly where Frank said.” He pulled out his SIG Sauer and handed it to her. “You may need this. It’s loaded.”

She glanced at it and slid it inside her waistband. A neutral mask settled over her face, a mask that reminded him of his own.

As she turned the corner, heading toward Ghranditti’s place, he studied her. Her eyes were cool and intelligent in the shadowy interior, completely professional. Still, the undercurrent of towering sorrow and rage was also there, tangible.

He might never have another chance. “You’re still very angry with me.”

Her brows shot up. Her wide-set eyes were the color of lapis lazuli—and now flaming with fury. But her voice was controlled as she said, “Of course I’m angry. You broke our agreement. You stayed CIA, and not only wouldn’t you let me out, you turned me into a sleeper. I was trapped. Kristoph was trapped.”

“Langley came to me—”

“I don’t want to hear it. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Yes, it does, or you wouldn’t be so damn mad. If it’s any comfort, I was just doing my duty—”

“Kristoph’s
dead
. In effect, you killed him! Was that your duty?”

Pain knifed through him. In a way, she was right. He gathered himself. Then: “We both know you’re here for Kristoph, not for me or you, although I wish you were. This Ghranditti and Litchfield situation is too big for either of us, but together we have a chance.” When she started to object, he shook his head hard. “We’ve got to settle things between us.”

And he stopped talking. Waited. Felt her peer at him a moment. He looked just in time to see it was not at him she stared but off through the cocoon of the car, past the hum of the engine and the clotted street and Washington’s grand buildings and into the distance, as if searching for another time, a better world, another chance.

“The past isn’t sacred,” he said. “Don’t let it dictate the future.”

Like a gun, her gaze homed in on him. “You’re doing it again.
Words.
‘The past isn’t sacred.’ Of course it is—to
you
. You’ve always been so noble. The great spymaster. The man of a thousand faces, a thousand eyes, a thousand wiles. Trusted, honored, revered. But you broke our agreement without consulting me. You dictated our future and put Kristoph and me in a position neither of us ever wanted!”

A queasy feeling slid through him.

“You talked me into being a mole for you,” she continued more calmly. “Then you talked me into being a BND mole, but it wasn’t just so I could work for democracy, for the future of Germany. You’d studied the economic intelligence of the Soviet Union and realized it was collapsing. So you prepared. You maneuvered and manipulated me as only you could do. Your real goal was to make sure I’d be taken care of later, in case you couldn’t.”

“I don’t understand why you’re so upset—”

“Be quiet and listen! Yes, that meant after the Wall fell I’d have a job, a place in the New Germany, while everyone else in the Stasi would never be able to find legitimate work. But that set me up for Erich Eisner to turn me into a national symbol. I hated it because it was a lie. Kristoph hated it because he was young, and the glare of my celebrity was so blinding he couldn’t see who he was. He had to take my mother’s name to try to make his own way. You even denied him his own name! And now it’s led to this. He’s dead, and I can’t go home if I want to live.”

He started to speak.

She waved a hand dismissively, silencing him. “All you had to do was keep our agreement.” Her voice brimmed with disgust. “All you had to do was quit. It was that simple.
Retire.
”

“I couldn’t.” He was holding the car’s armrest in a death grip. The only thing he had left was the truth, but it was a truth he did not want to tell.

“Langley needed me. No, wait. Let me finish. Just because the Cold War was over didn’t mean my work was. The world was heading into un-charted political territory, and I had institutional memory. I had experience and expertise and the sort of reputation that reminded the Oval Office of Langley’s tremendous value. So of course the seventh floor came to me. By then the DCI and DDO knew about you. I told them you wanted out. When their silence stretched, I flew back to Langley to convince them to release both of us. That’s how I discovered they planned to turn you into a mole, spying against Germany, and if you resisted, they’d expose your Cold War work for us.”

As she continued to drive, her eyebrows shot up with shock. “They’d blackmail me? Use the help I gave . . . the terrifying risks I took . . . to
blackmail
me?”

He could not look at her. “The only way to protect both of you was to bargain them into making you a sleeper. That was the best I could do, and that’s why I pursued the promotion to DDO. I needed to be right there at Langley to make sure you were allowed to continue to sleep.”

“Oh, dear Lord. I had no idea.”

A hush filled the dark car, and an ocean of regret.

“And Moscow?” she said. “Why did you turn? How could you go against everything we worked for? Everything we believed in!”

He hesitated. He pressed a fist against his chest, felt the beat of his heart. His mouth was dry as he said, “I didn’t turn.” He looked at her.

She blinked several times as if unable to comprehend. “What happened?” she asked softly.

“Bobbye Johnson got a call from Moses that he had a client who was going to expose you. He was going to tell the media you’d worked for us
during the Cold War and were sleeping for us with the BND now—and that you were behind Pavel Abendroth’s assassination. Plus he’d give details to the Mossad.” As a renowned dissident and Jewish refusenik, Dr. Abendroth had been a particular hero in Israel.

“Mossad never forgets or forgives.” She breathed shallowly. “It would’ve been my death sentence.”

He nodded. “That’s why I had to give Moses what his client wanted.” His mind touched gingerly the cold edge of that moment Bobbye had delivered Moses’s message. “The offer was that I could buy his silence if I’d set myself up as a traitor and go to prison for life. The client didn’t want me to be executed but instead to live in a limbo of nonexistence, essentially erasing my past and whatever pleasure I took from it, and guaranteeing me no future.” His voice sounded matter-of-fact, surreal. “So that’s what I did. I fabricated evidence to justify arrest and conviction. Obviously the Kremlin knew it was a lie, but it made them look good, so they never disputed it. Bobbye did the best she could to make sure I was comfortable in the penitentiary. I had a few more privileges than the other inmates.”

Raina stared at him. Her voice crackled with revulsion. “I don’t believe you agreed to that.”

He was stunned. “It was my duty to take care of you and Kristoph. There were risks to you that—”

“Your damn duty!” she snapped. “I never wanted nobility.
You
did—it was all for you, always about you.
Your
duty.
Your
choices.
Your
noble causes. Duty is blind, Jay. Duty’s only loyalty is to the concept of duty. Any fool can be dutiful. If someone asks why you’re doing this or that, and you say, ‘It’s my duty,’ you haven’t really thought it through, have you? You’re lazy! You’re fulfilling others’ expectations. You’re doing what you’ve been told to do. Here’s something that’s tough: Do you really think I’m so incompetent and stupid that I was incapable of participating in all of those crucial decisions that were life-changing not just for you but for me?”

“No, of course not. I was protecting—”

“Protecting?
Bullshit.
We both know how well that’s worked out. Talk about the pornography of power. You had the power, and because you had
it, you thought it gave you the right to use it however you damn well thought best. You and your stupid, stupid ideas and games. You owed Kristoph and me because you loved us—and we loved you. You owed yourself. That was your
real
duty!”

Yearning swept through him, followed instantly by a sense of great loss. He wondered what their lives would have been if he had vanished with them as she had wanted. He had seldom allowed himself to really think about that after Langley had convinced him he was irreplaceable and must stay. Then Langley had decided he
was
replaceable—by Raina.

“You’re right,” he said simply. “I was wrong. Very wrong. I just didn’t see it.” He let the admission hang there, naked, raw. When she still said nothing, he nodded to himself. “It’s inadequate, but I want you to know I’m sorry. Truly sorry.”