Azrael (13 page)

Trotter showed a guard, a nurse, an orderly, and a doctor a sheet of letterhead from a psychiatrist’s office. Between the address and the signature were a few innocuous words constituting a coded message, instructing the staff to let him see the patient.

They led him into a small white room. He sat on one of two wooden chairs and admired the white-painted metal filigree grating over the window. So much more attractive than bars, and every bit as effective.

A few seconds later they brought Jane Peterson to him.

She was very different from the fashionable suburban matron she’d been before. Now she was gray. Hair, face, everything. She was dressed in a gray sweatsuit and sneakers. She looked washed out, like a bad photocopy of herself.

Until she saw Trotter. Then her eyes flashed and her spine straightened. If she had claws, she would have unsheathed them.

“You,” she said.

Trotter told her to sit down, then dismissed the attendant, who looked disappointed. Trotter made a mental note to tell his father—curiosity was not a trait to be encouraged in that kind of job.

Trotter looked at the woman. She hadn’t taken her eyes off him. “I’ll call you Mrs. Fane,” he said. “I’m used to it.”

“This is it, then,” she said.

“This is what?”

“I’m glad it’s finally here.”

“Glad what’s finally here?”

“The end. You’ve come to kill me, haven’t you? You’ve taken everything else.”

“No,” Trotter said. “We’re not going to kill you. Not yet, anyway. You’ve been very valuable. Very cooperative.”

“Do you know what they’ve done to me here? The drugs, the indignities?”

“I could guess. Anyway, after what you did, you have no claim to any kind of dignity.”

She flinched as though she’d been struck. Trotter, to his own surprise, felt a twinge of sympathy. He suppressed it. It wasn’t hard. All he had to do was call up the image of this woman’s daughter after she’d been raped, tortured, drugged, brainwashed, and left to die, all with her mother’s connivance.

“Hypocrite! You are as bad as I am. You have no claim to human dignity, either!”

Trotter smiled. “And I make none. But you’re wasting my time. I have some questions. Are you going to cooperate?”

“You know I will. I have no choice. If I refuse, they’ll take my mind away from me again. Anyway, I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t have to believe me.”

“Why is it you? Many people have asked me questions, but never you. Why are you here now, if not to kill me?”

“I haven’t needed you.”

“You owe it to me!
I gave up everything—my homeland, my language, my name. I had a family I dared not love. All I had was my mission, and you took it away from me. You took the purpose of my life, and you even took the lie that surrounded it. You owe it to me to kill me now.”

Trotter took an envelope from his inside pocket. “I have some photographs here. They’re all of the same woman. I want you to tell me if you recognize her.”

He held out the pictures. The woman he had known as Sheila Fane took them from him without a word. Tears ran down her face, but she refused to acknowledge them, even to wipe them away.

Trotter waited. Finally, she began shuffling the photos. After one or two, she said, “This is Petra Hudson, the publisher.”

“Keep looking,” Trotter said.

There were a lot of photos; the media tend to cover themselves fairly thoroughly, and Trotter had been able to find at least two photos of Petra Hudson a year in the morgue of the Kirkester
Chronicle,
going back to her wedding picture. There were no childhood pictures—at least, Regina had never seen any. It made sense, of course—if the theory held up, all the childhood photographs of Petra Hudson would be in the hands of the KGB, or more likely, a pile of ashes long since scattered to the winds.

Trotter had stacked the pictures most recent to oldest, with the wedding picture last. One of his father’s experts had cropped James Hudson, Sr., from the picture, leaving only a young Petra, looking pretty and virginal in her white veil.

Sheila Fane held up the bottom picture. “We called her Nina,” she said.

“Where did you call her Nina?”

“At the village. Centerville.”

“The American village. In Soviet Georgia. Where you trained for Cronus.”

“Why do you ask about the obvious?”

“Just making sure,” Trotter told her. “Tell me about Nina.”

“I’ve told you. We trained together. I didn’t
know
her. We weren’t encouraged to become friends.”

“Tell me what you know about her.”

“She was brilliant. The best at everything, the quickest to catch on. Borzov himself came one day and spoke to us. He singled her out; he said a commendation would be placed in her record, since the nature of the mission ruled out any direct presentation.

“He said—he said he was proud of all of us, but if there was to be only one of us who would succeed, it would be Nina.”

She looked at him. The tears had dried to salty streaks on her face.

“Have you been helped?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

“I curse you,” she said tonelessly. “May you live a life of total emptiness, as I do. And may it be a long one.”

Trotter smiled at her and rang for the attendant.

T
HE NEXT DAY, TROTTER
went to visit Grigori Illyich Bulanin, formerly of the KGB. Bulanin had defected to Trotter in person, in a Chamber of Horrors in London. He was one of the loose ends that had had to be tied up in the aftermath of the Russians’ first attempt at a Cronus operation.

Bulanin’s defection had been one of practicality, not of conviction. In a move to gather enough glory to propel him to the Politburo, he had gone far beyond his authority as “agricultural attaché,” and had mixed himself up in the kidnapping of a former top British Intelligence man. When it all fell apart on him, Bulanin had been wise enough to know that ambition should come a distant second to survival. He’d cast his lot with the Congressman and the Agency.

It was possible (though unlikely) that once out of his immediate peril, Bulanin might devote his time to gathering enough information to make himself valuable to Borzov once again.

To guard against this possibility, Bulanin was kept in a safe house. The Congressman chose safe houses for this kind of thing on two criteria: one, the safest house is the most inaccessible; two, the safest house was the one that could summon the most armed men to guard it.

Therefore, Trotter had not been surprised to learn that Bulanin was being kept in a cabin in the Maryland mountains, not far from Camp David. His father had offered to have him helicoptered out to it, but Trotter said he preferred to drive. He checked out a four-wheel-drive car, because it rained a lot in that part of the country at that time of year.

It was a small compound, and the guards were unobtrusive but definitely present. They were armed to the teeth under their plaid hunters’ coats. Trotter could see the lumps and bulges under the wool. They pulled Trotter over and took him into a small log cabin that turned out to be lined with tile and fluorescent lighting and contained communications and security equipment. They patted him down, found nothing, walked him through an X-ray machine, and finally pulled a set of fingerprints, which a computer compared and said were okay.

Trotter was glad to see a human being cross-check the results before they let him through—the computer was the weak link in the security. Someone who knew what he was doing could probably reprogram that thing to let in Pol Pot.

Then they took him in to see Bulanin, who was watching a tape of
E.T.
on a big-screen TV.

One of the men in the plaid jackets said, “Mr. Trotter to see you. Top clearance.” He and his companion withdrew, but not out of sight. Probably not out of earshot, either, but it didn’t make that much difference. Trotter had once worked with one of these guys during an assassination attempt, ex-Israeli army captain who had no curiosity whatever—he lived solely to contemplate the beauty of proper security procedure, and to go into action when someone tried to penetrate it. He told Trotter, “Shooting is my food,” and he was fairly typical of the breed.

Bulanin looked up at Trotter. A warm smile lit up the Russian’s movie-star-handsome face. “Welcome, welcome,” he said. “So you are Trotter now.”

“Names come and go,” Trotter told him.

“As do the men who bear them, no?”

“We’re still here,” Trotter said.

Bulanin laughed. Trotter had never seen him laugh before. He reached out and switched off the television and the tape player. “I’ve seen the film before,” he said. “A wonderful fantasy. Let us hope it never comes true.”

“Why is that?”

“Because if a visitor ever did come from another world and landed in one of our countries, the other would learn of it and immediately launch the missiles before the visitor could give the first secrets that would shift the balance of power. They would have to. Don’t you agree?”

It was too obvious even to acknowledge. If the kind of work Trotter did, and Bulanin had done, could be reduced to one commandment, it would be Think the Worst.

Trotter asked his question instead. “Who kills for Borzov?”

Bulanin looked at him in surprise, then laughed again. “Dozens. Hundreds. Russians. Bulgarians. Poles. East Germans. Arabs. Irish. Italians ... How many nations are there in the world? You may recall a certain countryman of yours named Leo Calvin.”

“This is different. This is an American, or someone who can pass for an American for a long time. He’s done four so far, maybe, with at least a month between each.”

“Maybe?”

“He makes them look like accidents,” Trotter said. “He’s very good.”

“So some of the deaths you’re wondering about might have indeed been accidents.”

“It’s possible.”

“He must be very good indeed if he has you, of all people, as worried as this.”

“I’ll admit I’m worried,” Trotter admitted. “He’s someone we never heard of.”

Bulanin nodded sagely. “Or you have heard of him, and you are asking me in order to check your information. Or this is just a fishing expedition, because it is always good to know if the enemy has come up with a new approach before you have thought of it.”

Trotter smiled. “Grigori Illyich, please don’t teach me interrogation techniques. It so happens that now I’m telling the truth.”

“What harm can there be? My life is a restricted one, if pleasant, and the only people I ever talk to are these robot guards or visitors handpicked by your father. He’s offered me a woman.”

“Big of him,” Trotter said. “You’re stalling, my friend. It makes me think you have something to tell me.”

Bulanin sighed. “You know, the only man I ever killed was Leo Calvin, whom I shot to keep him from shooting you.”

“And to keep yourself from being sent back to Moscow so Borzov could have a go at you.”

“There was that,” Bulanin conceded.

“Anyway,” Trotter went on, “how many deaths did you order? You lose points for ordering them, too, you know.”

“Then I
am
in trouble,” Bulanin said with a smile. “Not only did I order many, but most of them were carried out. Not all, though. I ordered your death three times in the space of two weeks, and look where it got me.”

“I am not the person to come to for sympathy,” Trotter told him. “Are we through wasting time?”

“I have no facts to give you,” Bulanin warned. “I can’t even dignify it as rumor. I spent most of my career in the West; Bonn, Washington, London. Perhaps if my work had kept me more in Moscow, I might know better—”

“You’re doing it again. If it’s not fact, and not rumor, what is it?”

“Legend.”

Trotter looked at him. To a spy, a legend was the network of false documentation that supported him (or her) on a clandestine mission.

Bulanin saw the question on Trotter’s face. “I don’t mean the word in the professional sense,” he said. “I mean a legend, like the Flying Dutchman. I don’t suppose anyone knows the truth of it but Borzov, but word filtered out.”

“Word filtered out,” Trotter echoed.

“It always does. You know as well as I that the largest risk in a security agency is not that your people will tell outsiders, but, like workers at a tire factory, will gather and talk shop. So word inevitably filters out.”

“I understand that. What I want you to tell me is, what did the word
say?”

“Azrael,” Bulanin said.

“Azrael.” It irritated Trotter to be repeating the other man so often. “Sounds like a Borzov special.”

Bulanin looked surprised. “You are aware of the man’s idiosyncrasy, then?”

For the first time, Trotter really believed Bulanin would be content to spend the rest of his life in this cabin, or in similar lodgings arranged by the Congressman.

Because it was true. Borzov’s one weakness was his poetic streak. The man found it literally impossible to resist giving an operation an appropriate mythological name. Intercepted Russian communications with mythic connotations had already helped lead to an understanding of the workings of two operations. Vulcan, which was a plan to destroy a nuclear plant in France, and the fateful Cronus.

In five words, Trotter had made two unforgivable mistakes. He had revealed that the Agency had the means of learning the code names of Russian operations, and that they were aware of their significance.

And Bulanin had made his own mistake by showing he had spotted Trotter’s. If he ever left the Congressman’s custody now, it could only be by death. He couldn’t be allowed to have even a
chance
of taking or sending that information back to the Kremlin. Trotter would make sure everyone knew that, despite the fact that it would show him up to be the idiot he was. If he didn’t, the men who watched the wiretaps in this room would.

“Tell me about Azrael,” Trotter said.

“The legend, you mean.”

“Tell me the legend.”

“It’s the legend of the perfect assassin. Skilled, secret, fearless.”

“An American?”

“Apparently. A free-lance. He’d work for us, the Mafia, big business, anyone. No ideology at all.”