Tool of the Trade (7 page)

North America’s a big place, though. By the time the plane landed, I’d made my decision. Unless Valerie was dead set against it, we’d just pull up stakes and start over in the United States. Screw the CIA, the KGB, the FBI, the American Association of Psychologists. We’d find something.

Having slept all the way, Jacob was ready to kick up his heels. He’d been to Paris only once for a few days as a student, and working for the CIA (popular conceptions to the contrary) restricted rather than expanded his opportunities for foreign travel. But I was exhausted; once we’d cleared Customs and found the hotel, and all I wanted was sleep. This presented an obvious dilemma, since he was not supposed to let me out of his sight. I turned on my watch and told him it was all right: I’d stay put; he could go out and enjoy himself. I hoped for his own sake his enthusiasm wasn’t being recorded.

(I suppose I should know more about these things. Could he be wired up with a recorder and yet not trigger the airport search alarm? Maybe it was in his briefcase, disguised as a tuna fish sandwich. Maybe it was implanted in his skull.)

So I put up my feet and went over the paper I was
going to deliver, hoping that its familiarity would put me to sleep. Perversely, it stimulated me into wakefulness. I wandered out to a
magasin
store and chose some good bread, cheese, and wine to keep in the room. My French did not meet with the merchant’s approval, but he did manage to find all the proper items.

I tried to summon up enthusiasm for being in Paris again, but it was rush hour; murderous traffic and poisonous air; so after walking around the block deciding not to do this and not to do that, I just picked up a newspaper and retreated to the room, and found it had been searched by an amateur.

Well, perhaps only by someone who didn’t care whether the search was discovered—or wanted me or Jacob to discover it, as a warning. I had aligned the typed page I was reading exactly along the first line of the page beneath it, an elementary precaution. The person who went through the pages had simply stacked them afterward and had not even put them back in quite the same position, squared with the corner of the table’s blotter. I wondered whether he’d found what he was after; he couldn’t have had more than ten or twelve minutes, even with a lookout posted downstairs to say, “Go.”

The lead bag with the gun was where I had hidden it, out of sight on top of the old-fashioned toilet tank. From now on I would take it with me when I left the room.

American, Russian, or French? Checking up on me, or Jacob? It could have been Jacob himself, actually, waiting for me to leave and then doubling back. But in that case I should think he’d be more likely to follow me. Rather than read through a speech he could see for the asking. I decided not to waste time worrying
about it Opened the box of dime-store Burgundy and drank off a fast, sour tumbler of it They hadn’t had wine in boxes the last time I was in France, and with luck they won’t have them the next time. Then I stretched out in the semidarkness and told my toes to relax, then ankles, shins, and so forth; old autohypnosis routine for falling asleep. Just as I reached the chin, which normally does it, a key rattled in the door, and it creaked open. “Jacob?”

“Nyet
.” I looked up, and there were two men in honest-to-God trench coats standing in the doorway. “Please, light?”

“Sure.” I switched on the light by the bed. “—Would you have wine?” I said in Russian, sitting up. “—It’s nothing extraordinary…”

“—Thank you, no. Come with us.” It took me a moment to place his accent: Bulgarian. That was a bad sign. You don’t have to know much about the trade to know who does wet work for the KGB in Europe.

I started to get my jacket. “—Not necessary. We’re not going outside.” They were a real Mutt-and-Jeff team. The one who was doing all the talking was a tall, blond, handsome fellow with a fixed, intense expression. Like the TV Russian spy who gave me so much secret amusement on
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
in my youth. His partner, from another division of Central Casting, was short and swarthy, with organ-grinder mustaches, carrying a large, shabby briefcase. He seemed to be concentrating on something else.

I turned on the watch and tried to think of some test that would be innocuous, in case we were being monitored. “—Do have a glass of wine while I use the bathroom.” This time they both nodded, and I poured two tumblers. Fairly strong evidence, if not really conclusive. I’d tested the machine on foreign
students and American students speaking second languages, but never on a Bulgarian who was speaking Russian.

In the bathroom I considered the pistol. It would look pretty obvious stuck under my shirt; I decided to do without. I replaced it over the tank and waited for a biologically reasonable length of time, then flushed the toilet.

They looked odd, standing there in trench coats with their water glasses of wine, their serious expressions. “—Did you search my room earlier?” I asked.

Jeff, the tall one, shook his head slowly. “—Search room?”

“—Guess I was mistaken.” I turned off the watch. “—Shall we go?”

The room they’d rented was obviously the cheapest available, a one-bed closet with bathroom down the hall. They evidently hadn’t seen it before; Mutt grumbled something in Bulgarian about the expense for how small it was. We had to do a kind of dance while they took off their trench coats.

“—Please sit.” There was only the bed and a hard chair. Jeff sat in the chair, after reversing it so he could prop his forearms on the back. The bed made a rusty squeak when I eased myself onto it. Mutt leaned against the door, looking lethal with an obvious shoulder-holster bulge. They both had an almost neutral, vaguely hostile stare. Probably part of the Bulgarian KGB uniform. Neither of them said anything for a long moment.

“—Who are you?” I said as a sort of icebreaker.

“—That is none of your concern.” He waited a long time, stroking his chin in a stylized gesture of thinking, then almost shouted. “—You are here with an agent of the American CIA.”

“—Yes, of course. This has been reported to my KGB section chief in America.”

Mutt addressed me for the first time. “—We know nothing of this.”

“—Is that true?” Jeff didn’t answer. He just stared. He was starting to annoy me. “—Then I suggest we go no further until you have had a chance to confer with your superiors.” I started to get up.

“—Sit!” they both said. “—We have no superiors here,” Jeff said. “—Does this CIA man know of your connection with the KGB?”

“—He does. He’s trying to recruit me as a double agent. I’m supposed to go along with it, to a point.”

“—So he takes you to Paris with him,” Mutt said.

“—It’s the other way around. I’m here on legitimate business, academic business. He’s tagging along to make sure I don’t defect.” Mutt nodded wisely at that, as if I couldn’t “defect” from the United States by buying a plane ticket out, but Jeff frowned.

“—Please do not joke with us. You claim that this man knows you are a KGB agent and yet he allows you to go to a foreign country, to be alone in a foreign country?”

“—That’s correct.”

“—It seems fantastic.”

“—I don’t believe him,” Mutt said. “—There is more to this. Otherwise we wouldn’t have been alerted.”

“—So go to the people who alerted you and ask for more information. I’m not going anywhere.”

“—Indeed you are not.” Mutt opened his briefcase and brought out a coil of about five yards of clothesline. “—Get in the chair.”

“—That’s not necessary,” I said.

Jeff stood up. “—I think perhaps it is. At least for now. We’ll be back by evening.”

“—I refuse.”

“—You may not,” Mutt said, smiling as he unbuttoned his jacket to expose the automatic pistol.

That was enough. I turned on the watch. “—Do you have a gun, too?” I asked Jeff.

“—No. Dobri’s is enough.”

“—Put on your coats. We’re going for a walk.” I got my own coat, and we walked to the nearest Metro stop. I escorted them to Gare Nord and put them on the first train out to nowhere—to Hautmont, actually, that being as far as their money would carry them, while staying within the French borders. I gave them specific instructions as to what to do when they got there and then returned to the hotel. Jacob was waiting in the room.

“I was worried about you. Where have you been?”

“Met a couple of friends.” I turned on the watch. “Let’s go down and get a drink.” We went to the noisy bar downstairs, and I told him what to do: first, let me have that nice diplomatic passport. Now, here’s five thousand francs. Live it up; stay drunk for at least three days. When you sober up, you will remember absolutely nothing about me.

Bridges burned, I picked up some more money on the way out to Orly. I used the diplomatic papers and my watch to rush through Customs and on to a waiting Concorde. In the air less than three hours after I’d put Mutt and Jeff aboard the train, I was sure I’d be home long before the shit hit the fan. I was wrong.

We drove out of Cambridge through increasingly heavy snow, but luckily it abated somewhat in an hour. Richard, the boy I’d abducted, was a good, careful driver, and his van had snow tires. We were able to maintain a steady forty-five miles per hour until about midnight. When he started to yawn and blink, I suggested that we take the next exit and nap for a bit. I didn’t feel I had enough driving experience to take over the wheel in this weather.

I let him sleep for ninety minutes while I read newspapers and drank coffee in an all-night truck stop. Certainly not enough rest for the boy, but I was nervous. It wasn’t likely we were being followed, having been off the interstate since the New Hampshire border, but I didn’t want to press my luck.

Some years ago an IRA terrorist told Margaret Thatcher, “We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky all the time.” That’s the way I was starting
to feel. The KGB would have only limited resources for tracking me down in this country. But as soon as Jacob woke up hung over in a Parisian drunk tank and claimed diplomatic immunity, the real hunt would be on. I wanted to be well camouflaged before the FBI blew the whistle.

I got two very large coffees to go, went out to the van, and shook Richard awake. His body didn’t want to cooperate, so I gave him the “suggestion” that he had just had eight hours of sleep and was full of energy. It worked, but of course it’s not something to be used too often. He chattered incessantly all the way to Bangor, Maine.

All I knew about Maine I learned from Stephen King novels, so it seemed a rather foreboding place. Bangor especially, with all the brooding, large Victorian houses, stark and seeming uninhabited in the early-morning snowscape. But it was a town well suited to my purposes and perhaps to my current mood as well.

If I were totally amoral, I would have taken the easiest and most prudent course and eliminated Richard. Bangor had a convenient river. Instead, I told him to drive to California, taking at least a week. Credit cards were out of the question, of course, so I had to go to a bank and ask for a couple of thousand in used twenties. Then I had to rent him a car (try doing
that
without a credit card!) and take care of his van. I told him to return the car in Los Angeles and then take the bus to Las Vegas; then fly back to Boston and phone home from the airport, remembering nothing since the night he walked into the Greek bar. They might just possibly link me with a convenient amnesia victim, but there was no way they could follow the trail back to Bangor. Especially since I arranged for
his van to be parked on a side street in upstate New York.

I began to put into motion a plan whose details I had been mulling over for several years. The greatest danger I faced was being recognized from a distance, too great a distance for the device to work. So I started a program that would radically and permanently change my physical appearance.

First I shaved off my beard, then cut my sixties-style long hair down to a crew and bleached it. I traded in my bifocals for blue-tinted contact lenses (which I had been carrying and using in secret for some years), and bought a shabby working-man’s wardrobe at Goodwill. Sunlamp for an outdoorsy look. Then I set about losing some of the fifty pounds of fat I’d collected at Cambridge. Fasting on fruit juice, vitamins, and phenylalanine, with some light exercise.

In a month or so I would be ready to head for Washington. Or Langley, Virginia, actually.

I had my arms full of groceries, the bags ready to spill, finally got both locks open, and stumbled into the apartment, and this big guy grabbed me from behind, I mean really crushed me, one leather-gloved hand over my mouth and big arm pinning me to his chest, groceries and all; door kicked shut behind me and he whispered, “
One sound and you die
” with a thick accent, only thing either of them ever said in English.

Started to struggle and he crushed me twice as tightly; moved his hand up to pinch off my nose. Suffocating, I nodded, and he eased off. A bald man stepped in front of me and pointed a gun at my heart, one of those little machinegun pistols the bad guys always have on television. The other one took my grocery bags, one in each paw, and carried them into the kitchen. Neither of them looked “Russian.” I started to say something, but the one with the gun shushed me.

The other came back and helped me off with my coat, then handcuffed me and gagged me with a piece of black cloth. I made urgent gestures in the direction of the bathroom; he escorted me there and took off the cuffs; left the door open but stood politely with his back to me. There was nothing obvious in the bathroom clutter that I could use as a weapon. A twin-blade Lady Gillette wouldn’t do much against a machine gun anyhow.

So these were some of Nick’s KGB buddies. I guessed they had found out about the CIA guy and wanted to put some pressure on Nick. But this wasn’t at all like the mundane spy stuff he had told me about. I was suddenly in the middle of a movie.

They sat me down at the dining room table and went back into the kitchen to whisper at each other in Russian, or some other Slavic language. The armed one returned after a few minutes and handed me a notepad with a message something like this: “You and I are going someplace else. Pick up whatever you need for a few days. We have a car downstairs. If you try to escape or cry out on the way I will kill you.”