Tool of the Trade (21 page)

“I don’t speak Russian,” Harriet said coldly.

“Just amplifying my sentiments,” Jefferson said, still staring at Shilkov.

Shilkov stared back. “I will not talk with this black man in the room.”

“Suits me.” He reached inside his jacket, and I tensed. He took out a miniature tape recorder and set it on Harriet’s desk. “—Speak clearly, comrade.” He turned and stomped out, remembering to open the door.

“You can go, too,” Harriet said to Coleman.

“He’s very dangerous, mam,” Coleman said.

“This
room
is dangerous. Don’t worry.” He left.

“He asked for you specifically,” Stratton said. “He knew from someone that you were the person who’d been involved with Foley the longest.”

“Your Roberta Bender is a double agent,” Shilkov said. “I give you that for free. I have much more to give you.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know. She’s flown the coop. You must be out of touch with your own people.”

“Yes. Since the day of the… unpleasantness.”

There was an empty chair a couple of paces away. I dropped into it. “Unpleasantness. Sometimes this business makes me sick.”

“He wants to trade,” Stratton said. “He cited the Witness Protection Program.”

“So he spills his guts and we give him a new identity,” I said. “Relocate him in some small town somewhere.”

“Exactly,” Stratton said. Shilkov’s English, his American English, probably wasn’t good enough to catch the grace note in that one word—the inflection that implied “exactly
not
”—but it reassured me.

“Okay. Sounds like a fair trade. If he does know more about Foley than we do.”

“I know a great deal more. I saw him at the factory in Cabin John. He doesn’t look at all like his pictures. I can identify him for you. I may be the only person living who can.”

“Back up,” Stratton said. “Weren’t you
here
to find him?”

“Yes. Find him and kill him.”

“But you let him go,” I said.

“This is where the story gets fantastic,” he said.

“But I swear that it is true. You may verify this with a polygraph.

“It was his strange power, but he used it at
second hand
! I overheard him, by listening device, telling another person that he was not Foley, but rather a private detective in Foley’s hire. And I believed it without question. I even captured him, and interrogated him as if he were this detective. But not for long, of course. He started giving me orders, and I had to obey.”

He held up his left wrist, showing an ugly ridge of keloid tissue. “He made me do this, try to kill myself. After I’d…taken care of the others.” He sat up squarely. “Your black man accused me of being evil. I have done some extreme things in service to my country. But nothing like Foley. Foley is a madman.”

Maybe it takes one to know one. “All right,” I said, “but what we’re really interested in is exactly where Foley is, and how we can safely approach him. Can you tell us those two things?”

He swung those eyes on me. “I think I can tell you where he is. How to approach him safely… I would have an expert sniper shoot him dead from no closer than a hundred meters. And have another sniper covering the first.”

“So where do we find him?” Stratton said.

“I will tell you once I am convinced that your Witness Protection Program will hide me from my own people. Not until.”

Harriet picked up the phone and punched four numbers. “Eric, it’s me. Have you cleared that FBI package?” Pause. “Okay, bring it on up.” She looked at Shilkov. “This will give you a start. But you have to cooperate; you have to keep a low profile. You start tearing small animals apart and we don’t know you.
Or you’ll wish we didn’t know you.”

“There is no need to be insulting—”

“I’m just trying
to
be
clear
. If you break any civil law, you’re in very grave danger. And not from the KGB. We and the FBI have our own processes and resources to protect and the last thing we need is publicity about them. Is that
clear?”

“Don’t worry. Even if I was not afraid of you, I would be afraid of my own people.”

“You’d best be afraid of us as well.” There was a knock at the door. “Eric? Come in.”

A bespectacled apparition about seven feet tall and weighing half as much as me pushed open the door and slipped in. He had a manila envelope in one hand and a regular business envelope in the other. “Shilkov,” he said softly.

“I am Shilkov.”

“Not anymore.” He walked across the floor with no sound. He handed Shilkov the manila envelope, and when he grasped it, the dry, crumpling noise was loud. “I don’t want to repeat myself, so listen carefully. You are Harold Samuelson.”

“Harold Samuelson.”

“Your New England accent is much more pro nounced than the residue of Slavic. So your documents say you came from Boston. You were born and raised there. We’re dropping you in Indianapolis. You have two years of college and have most recently worked as a truck driver, chauffeur, and taxi driver. All in New England. You will seek employment as a taxi driver once you know your way around Indianapolis. Your Boston references in that regard are safe.” He looked at me. “Mr. Bailey will cover them for you.”

“That sail in here?”

“Yes. Papers and cards. All of the cards in that envelope are what we call flash… alias… documentation.”

“Flash alias documentation,”

“That means they’re only good for identification. There are two MasterCards and a Visa in there, and two gasoline cards. Don’t try to use them. If you charge anything on them, we will come kill you.”

“All right”

“That was a joke. But don’t use them. In this envelope,” he handed over the small one, holding it by the corner, “there are two cards that are ‘backstopped,’ as we say. The Visa card has a prepaid credit line of three thousand dollars. Once you have used that, you’re on your own. The Gulf card is over-paid by two hundred dollars and registered to your Indianapolis address. It would be smart to use these to get more plastic in your own name.”

“I know. Americans swim in a sea of credit.”

“Yes. And you are an American. If you forget that, you may die.” He stared at Shilkov, as still as a stalking bird. “That is not a joke.”

Shilkov stared back. “I’m a Yankee Doodle dandy,” he chanted in a monotone. “Yankee Doodle do or die. A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam. Born on the Fourth of July.”

“Very good.” He looked at Leusner. “May I go?” She nodded and he slipped out, looking carefully neutral.

Leusner opened a drawer and took out two fat letter-sized envelopes. “This is your walking-around money for Indianapolis. Twenty thousand dollars in fifties and twenties, in each,. You get one when we catch Foley. The other, you can earn today.”

“I’m at your service.”

From the same drawer, she produced a yellow pad and a mechanical pencil. Standing, she pushed them over toward him. “Names. All those names you claim to have. Name, function, location, cover. Addresses would be nice.”

He picked up the pencil and clicked it a few times. “With forty names, that's only five hundred dollars per name. Surely I’m saving you—”

“We’re saving your life. Any more complaints and I’ll just send you downstairs to the torture chamber.”

“Come now. You don’t—”

“We built it just for you.”

“Yes, of course.” He picked up the pad. “Is there a room where I can be alone?”

She nodded and stood up. “Follow me.” They walked out, and Stratton and I sat in silence for a few seconds.

“I don’t like this at all,” I said. “We shouldn’t give that man anything but the electric chair.”

“Not to worry,” Stratton said. “Harriet will fill you in.”

“What is it?”

He chuckled. “It’s Harriet’s game. It’s sweet. She’ll want to tell you herself.”

Leusner came back in, looking satisfied. “So what is it?” I said.

“That guy Eric.” She sat down and spun around in her chair. “We’ve known for
three years
that he was working for the KGB. Feeding him stuff that’s neutral or false. Sometimes important stuff that’s true, when we know it was compromised by someone else, or it’s about to go public.

“The timing is great. He really has outlived his usefulness; we know from another double agent that the KGB has tumbled to the pattern. So the last thing he
does will be a favor to both of his employers. Finger that bastard.”

“So we’d better find out all we can before he goes to Indianapolis.”

“That’s right,” she said, smiling broadly. “Cab drivers have accidents.”

It would be good to visit Leningrad when I didn’t have so much to worry about. They had put together a sort of “wives’ tour” with an unrelentingly cheerful Intourist woman and a kamikaze bus driver. So we learned all about the
Aurora
and the October Revolution and the Summer Palace and we saw the mammoth in the deep freeze and tried to absorb all the art in the Hermitage in three hours, paintings flickering by like the frames of a Saturday-morning cartoon.

It’s hitting Nick hard. Not the tension of the upcoming confrontation. He lives for that kind of stress, though he’d never admit it. It’s this country or this city, his childhood memories. Well, nine hundred days of absolute terror and deprivation. After almost ninety days of it myself, I had some inkling of how they feel. Everyone you meet over fifty seems to radiate memories, the permanent existential bruise of having survived the war. Everyone under thirty radiates impatience.

Sometimes it feels like the whole country is a monument to the Great Patriotic War, and the old men in charge use it as a guilt trip on the young. Waiting in line at a cafeteria, I met a woman who was studying English at the university, who was bitterly sarcastic, whispering, about the new war memorial being constructed out in the suburbs. She and her boyfriend had been trying to get an apartment for three years, so that they could get married and not have to live with parents. But no, there had to be another granite slab of Socialist Realism, in the middle of dignified acres that should be holding up apartment buildings.

It’s like a person who survived having a cancer cut out and keeps the damned thing in a jar, showing it constantly to his children and neighbors. Don’t smoke. Eat lots of fiber. This could happen to you.

And yet you can’t criticize it, not from the outside, no more than you can tell a widow to stop grieving. We went to the Piskarevsky Cemetery, on the out-skirts of the city, where most of the people who died in the Siege are buried. Symbolic gravestones and marble plaques on the ground, not identifying individuals. No one knows how many lie there. More than a million. Acres of rolling fields with carefully spaced trees. A memorial building full of terrible photographs: piles of bodies, buildings exploding, fires and ice. A crying woman pulling a child’s sled with the child lying on top, rigid in death. When we left, it was raining and the sky was almost black.

Back at the hotel, Nick was sitting at the window, staring out over the Neva. He asked me where I’d been, and I told him, and he burst into tears, silent tears.

He tried to laugh it off, through the tears, saying he’d had too much vodka with lunch, and the sadness
of the city was getting to him. Maybe that was for the benefit of the microphones. Maybe it was for me. But he should know that after twenty-five years a woman can tell when her man has had a drink.

Something is gnawing away at him, and we can’t talk about it. Not just because of microphones.

I had tested the watch against President Fitzpatrick while we were “alone,” carefully; asking him direct questions that would normally generate indirect answers, and it had worked. It also worked well with the translator, Menenkov, and his two KGB men. Today I would find out whether Vardanyan was hard of hearing.

We were taking over the swank Petrovksy Restaurant on the tenth floor of the hotel, all of the
apparat-chiki
from both countries who had to make their importance known by bending elbows with the most powerful. Premier Dr. Vardanyan would be there, since he happened to be in the neighborhood, on his way back from meeting Fitzpatrick for their symbolic reunion in Germany. Fitzpatrick couldn’t make it, of course, but Vice President Aldrich appeared as if by magic.

I was beginning to recognize in myself an unreasoning
prejudice against people in rumpled dark suits with thin black ties and smirks. They were much in evidence. There was always one in the elevator. Always one in the men’s room. Always in the bar, in the lobby, in the tearoom. Somebody hand me the Raid.

When the vice president and his entourage showed up, I was waiting in the lobby, as requested; I was to be his translator. It was surprisingly easy to get him alone; his Secret Service guard had to go upstairs to report to someone. (You could tell that Aldrich was miffed at that. I could have been a dangerous spy.)

It was easy to test the watch on Aldrich because he was a smoker. With smokers, I’d just say, “Give me a cigarette,”—not “please do you have…”—and when they held it out, I’d say, “No, take it back.” If they did both without reaction, I could be pretty sure the watch was working; if they did react, I could cover myself by saying, “Sorry, I’m trying to quit. Not quite myself.” Aldrich handed me a cigarette out of a tooled leather case and put it back without comment.

“Who’s minding the store?” I said. “You here and the president in France.”

“Spain. Actually, Fitz is still running things. Wonders of modern science. Briefing by satellite every morning, Cabinet meeting before dinner. All unclassified, of course; walls have ears. After lunch he usually gets in touch with me and Seales.” Peter Seales was the press secretary.

That he called the president Fitz was revealing. That was his “political” nickname, I’d found out with the watch; his friends called him Gid.

Valerie was waiting for us at the head table, along with Menenkov and a few Special Assistants for This and That, American and Russian. I introduced her,
my Linda, and Menenkov, and we joined everybody else in waiting for Vardanyan.