Azrael (5 page)

Trotter looked at them now, yellow-and-black signs streaked with red-brown rust, following the forgotten arrows to the basement, to a dirty, white-painted fire door. Around the thick edge of the door was a small button. There always was. Trotter pushed it, three shorts and a long. Trotter knew it was ridiculous, since it was certain he was being monitored by a hidden camera at this very second, but as his father frequently told him, a big part of the reason anybody was in this business was because of the game.

Or rather, The Game. Prisoner’s Base with real prisoners. Capture the Flag with real flags. The Game his father assured him was in his blood, no matter how loudly he claimed he hated it. The one he’d never be able to turn his back on, no matter how hard he tried.

Trotter preferred not to think about it. But then, here he was.

The door slid open. Trotter stepped in. Fenton Rines was there to greet him, offering a handshake but no smile.

Looking at him, Trotter doubted Rines ever smiled anymore. He was like one of the people in fairy tales whose wish coming true was the worst thing that ever happened to them.

Rines was a veteran FBI man, ex-Marine, legal and business education. Trotter had always thought he resembled the president of a small-town bank. He still did, but in a town that the economic recovery had passed by. He had always been a skilled and dedicated agent, but now his rugged, handsome face was harried, and his steel-gray hair was going white along the sides of his head.

He met Trotter with his jacket off, another first. His tie was loose and his sleeves were rolled up. This was a man with more on his mind than a dress code.

Because Rines had made a wish. Over the course of years, he had become aware of strange happenings in areas the FBI had some interest in. Convenient appearances and disappearances. Unlooked-for luck in the counterespionage business. Crimes and other sorts of mysterious operations that were obviously the work of top pros but made no sense. Phenomena, in short, his instinct told him were intelligence operations but which his connections showed to be attributable to no known intelligence agency.

Then, two years before, a young girl had been kidnapped and a truckload of dead bodies had been stolen. These events turned out to be tied together, as part of a Russian operation known as Cronus, and Trotter’s (successful) attempt to stop it.

And that led to Trotter—or Driscoll, as he was calling himself then. Trotter/Driscoll was the Congressman’s son, and suddenly, Rines’s wish had come true. He knew now about the Agency. But he wasn’t through with it. Rines had been caught between the Congressman and his son—he was the only person Trotter would trust with knowledge of his whereabouts.

Trotter supposed it wasn’t fair. The old man was as persuasive as Satan; it was inevitable he’d be using Rines as another operative, this one with access to, and a certain amount of control over, the facilities of the FBI.

“Anything to stretch the budget,” Trotter said.

Rines thought he meant the sparse furnishings. The place still looked like a fallout shelter, albeit one with a couple of desks, a telephone and fluorescent lighting. “Oh, he’s practically all moved out, here. The canned water will be back in by tomorrow.”

“I figured that was what was going on. I had Albright bring me to the door.”

Rines nodded. The Agency didn’t have much use for a fancy physical plant—a secure switchboard, storage for various electronic equipment, some filing cabinets and a comfortable chair for the Congressman to sit on and think, on those rare occasions he wasn’t sitting and thinking in his apartment or in his office on the Hill. The Agency parasited (the Congressman’s word) more than money from other government agencies. Computer time, background reports, satellite photographs, statistics. If anyone anywhere in the government knew something, the Congressman could get hold of the information without leaving a trace. If no one knew, and learning it was a matter of routine, he could have someone find out. Not the least of his resources was the staff of the Library of Congress, sort of a fringe benefit of his new cover.

Not having much to move, the Agency moved frequently. Granted, nobody in this particular building might check into the “fallout shelter” for another ten years, but why be there when they felt the urge to look if you owned another dozen buildings just like it in the Greater Washington area?

“What do you think of Albright?” Rines asked.

“Going to be a good one, I think. He’s tense because he doesn’t know what to make of me, and that makes him overcautious. And apprehensive, when I talk him out of it. If I were in his place, I’d be quietly checking out the building.”

“He is,” Rines assured him. “Electronic security is the last thing to be moved.”

“Yeah,” Trotter said. “I know how the old man works. Is he here?”

“Of course he is.” For a second it looked as if Rines was going to say something else—“he misses you,” Trotter thought absurdly—but he closed his mouth before anything got out.

“What should we do about Albright?” Rines asked.

“What the hell, he’s your man. Make up a story for him. Tell him the truth.”

“You sure you want him to know the truth?”

“If I decide I don’t like it, I can always kill him.”

Rines looked at him. “I never know when you’re kidding.”

“That’s right. I’m here to be briefed. Something about Cronus.”

“Yeah,” Rines said. “Let’s go talk to your father.”

T
HE CONGRESSMAN WAS SITTING
in a half-darkened room watching television. He seemed absorbed, half hypnotized, like a man watching a fireplace, but Trotter knew better. When the old man looked most detached was when his brain was working the fastest.

“Hello, Congressman,” Trotter said.

“ ’Lo, son,” his father murmured. So much for the fatted calf.

“Well,” Trotter said, “if that’s what you flew me three thousand miles to tell me, I’ll be off.”

“Don’t be foolish, son.” The Congressman’s eyes never left the set. “What are you calling yourself these days?”

As if he didn’t know. As if he didn’t know everything. It was a test. If Trotter made an issue of it, the old man would draw this out until his son wanted to scream. Trotter had outgrown that kind of foolishness. Maybe someday the old man would too.

“Trotter. Allan Trotter.”

“I liked Clifford Driscoll better.” Trotter said nothing. “All right,” the old man said, “all right. Allan, come over here and take a look at this tape, would you?”

Trotter complied. A plump man in a dark blue suit was preaching. He had been taught how to use his voice. He was immaculately groomed. He was flanked by a cross and an American flag.

“You ever seen this boy before?” the old man asked.

“Nobody who owns a TV set can avoid him. What about him?”

“Well, son, this has nothin’ to do with what you’re interested in, but as long as you’re here, I thought I’d get the benefit of your opinion.”

“I think you’re wasting my time.”

“Maybe not, son. I’ve been watchin’ a lot of these boys lately—”

“If you tell me you’ve been born again, I’m going to throw up.”

“No, son. These boys have got me worried. They got it right about Russia, or mostly right. The thing wrong with Godless Communism isn’t that it’s Godless. But they got it wrong about America. What’s the sense of fightin’ the Russians when you want to tell people what to think and how to dress and how to act?”

It didn’t seem strange to Trotter that his father, who, to his certain knowledge, had ordered the deaths of hundreds of people, Americans and foreigners, who had been convicted of no crimes, would come out so staunchly for the Constitution. The Congressman loved America, and the Constitution was the soul of the country. But the Congressman had proclaimed one Truth that let him—forced him, really—to do what he did. “Anybody who is not willing to get down in the mud and fight dirty is at the mercy of anybody who is.”

“You trust yourself messing around with the Bill of Rights, but you don’t trust these guys,” Trotter said.

“You say you don’t like me, boy, but by God, you know me. Have I ever stopped anybody from doin’ somethin’ he had a right to do?”

“Go to trial? Die a natural death?”

“Besides that.”

“No. Of course, these guys have a right to preach.”

“I know that. That’s what has me worried. They’re tellin’ everybody that if you can convince yourself you found it in the Bible, you can force other people to do it, or not do it, or whatever. They have a right to feel that way, but the Bible ain’t what runs the country. That’s the goddam Ayatollah’s kind of talk.”

The old man switched off the TV and turned to face his son. “That’s what’s got me worried, boy. I sit here and get to thinkin’ they ought to be stopped. One of those boys is talking about running for president. Then I think I’m doing the same kind of thing they’re doing.”

“Yeah,” Trotter said, suddenly impatient. “What are you trying to pull, Father?”

“What do you mean, son?”

“I mean you have never, ever admitted to anybody, least of all me, that you were worried about anything. Let alone whether a doubt could cross your mind to stop you from doing something you thought ought to be done.”

“Maybe I’m getting old, son.”

Trotter looked at him. He did look older, more sag, more wrinkles. But the eyes still burned.

“Or maybe,” Trotter said, “you’re trying to soften me up.”

The old man’s look got hard. “You’ll have to decide that for yourself, then.” A lot of the Congressman’s Southern accent had dropped away, a sign that they were getting down to business.

Rines pulled the evangelists from a VCR on the shelf below the TV set and replaced it with another cassette.

“You’re about to see a young woman named Regina Hudson,” Rines said. “She’s the daughter—”

“I know who she is,” Trotter said. The Congressman made everyone in the Agency learn to recognize the faces of the most powerful people in the media and their families. This was not only in the interest of knowing whom to avoid, but also to be on the lookout for things these people might not want the public to exercise its famous Right to Know on. In trying to run an effective operation in a (mostly) free country, leverage with the press was vital.

“Good,” Rines said. He pressed a button. The screen showed five seconds of electric confetti, then came in with a picture of a young woman in basic black and pearls. The outfit seemed too old for her, but she wore it with confidence.

The camera had a fish-eye lens and was placed at what has come to be known as the ABSCAM angle, above the top of everybody’s head. The last time he had committed Regina Hudson’s picture to memory, she’d been a pretty teenager, but the angle and the distortion made it impossible to tell.

The scene, judging from the nice carpets and the antique walnut desk, was Rines’s official FBI office. It was certainly Rines who was talking to her.

“You realize how unusual this is, Miss Hudson.”

“I wouldn’t think it would be unusual for people in trouble to come to you.”

“People in trouble in Upstate New York tend to go to our office there. They don’t make up a story to slip away to Washington.”

“And talk to someone at your level, I suppose.” She was trying to sound like nothing more than a member of a powerful family taking advantage of one of the perks of power, but Trotter could hear the tension in her voice, see it in the way she held her head.

“I came to see you, Mr. Rines, because I wanted to talk to someone honest—”

Trotter shot a look at Rines, but the FBI man had his eyes firmly on the screen.

“—and I also wanted someone better than competent, with enough imagination to understand what I’m talking about. I asked around, and every reporter and source I spoke to told me that was you.”

The Rines on tape grunted noncommittally.

“Of course, I’ve heard of you on my own, too. I used to know Liz Fane slightly. We were at the same school for a while, and I know that when she was kidnapped, you were the one who got her back.”

This time the Rines in the room grunted. Rines had gotten the credit for that one, and as far as Trotter was concerned, he was welcome to it. It might not have been modesty, acknowledging that Trotter and some other of his father’s agents had done most of the work in that case, that had caused Rines to make the noise. It might have been the knowledge that if he hadn’t been assigned to the Liz Fane case and learned everything there had been to learn, he might not now be in the Congressman’s clutches.

The tape rolled on. Regina Hudson told of the series of deaths in her town and how the phone call had come at the end of the third one. The telegram read over the line, signed Cronus.

T
ROTTER SAID, “AH.”

“Ah is right,” Rines said. “You can’t see it on the tape, and she didn’t notice, but I have just turned purple.”

“I can imagine. But tell me later, she’s still talking.”

“Of course,” the young woman went on, “when I saw how Mother took it, I checked with Western Union, trying to see who this Cronus was. They had no record of any such telegram.”

“Anybody can pick up a phone and say they’re from Western Union,” the recorded Rines said. He did sound a bit distracted.

Regina Hudson was nodding. “That’s why I checked.”

“Well,” Rines told her. “It seems as if someone has pulled a hoax on you, or on your mother through you. What makes you think it’s a matter for the FBI?”

“The way my mother has taken this. I mean, she started acting strange about seven months or so ago, hiring a bodyguard, trying to get me to move back home. Now she’s positively paranoid. One night I thought I was followed home from work and later saw someone watching the house. I called the police, and the man turned out to be a private detective hired by my mother to ‘watch out’ for me.”

“Your mother is afraid.”

She leaned forward in her chair, dropping for a second the pose of sophistication. “She’s
petrified,
Mr. Rines. No pun intended. I think that fake telegram was a threat—and not the first one, either—something only my mother would understand.”