Checkpoint Charlie (20 page)

“Find Bertine,” Myerson said. “Leave Dortmunder alone, Charlie.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “Need-to-know.”

I was a little angry. “Bertine's just a gopher. Look, Dortmunder doesn't paint himself into corners. He's a broker, not an inventory dealer — he doesn't steal things on spec. He wouldn't have run this caper if he didn't have a prearranged buyer for the passports. They were stolen to order. Now the fastest way to find them is to pull him in and find out who he sold them to.”

“I'm sorry, Charlie. We're using Dortmunder at the moment. We need him.” He jabbed the cigar toward me. “Don't touch him. Find the passports but don't annoy Dortmunder.”

“If I nail Bertine does that come under the heading of annoying Dortmunder?”

“Yes. You can shadow him but don't touch him.”

“Tell me, how many more obstacles do you intend to toss in front of me?”

“Just get the passports back, Charlie.” I think it was his grin that infuriated me to the point where I resolved to do it — just to show him up.

*   *   *

D
ORTMUNDER WAS
a free-lance espionage middleman; he bought and sold secrets as well as international arms and various clandestine goods like bullion, slaves and narcotics. His stomping ground was the Mediterranean. Despite my anger I could understand Myerson's point; Dortmunder was a pill but he was a useful one. He sold information to us that we wouldn't otherwise get. Therefore we tolerated him and let him run. Such is the cynicism of the trade; such is the mechanism by which the Dortmunders survive. All his customers have a vested interest in his survival.

I didn't care about Dortmunder one way or the other but Myerson's stricture made the job much harder than it had to be — that was what annoyed me. It would have been a simpler matter to harass Dortmunder into selling out the passport buyer to us; it wouldn't have hurt Dortmunder to do so but Myerson didn't want to ruffle his feathers so I had to do it the hard way.

I ran a trace on Bertine and the computers sent me to a forty-two foot diesel cabin cruiser the registry of which drew me along a course from San Juan to Tortola to St. Maarten to Nassau. She was tied up in a marina in the Bahamas when I arrived there and I disassembled her bewildered captain in a hotel room on Paradise Island with the help of two Agency stringers.

The captain was a hired charter operator who ran the Matthews boat for a Swiss company that belonged to Gerard Bertine. After a few hours' defiance and ridicule he eventually saw the light and admitted the cartons of “ledgers” had been collected from him out at sea: a refurbished PBY Catalina flying boat had landed on the water and the transfer of cargo had been made by dinghy. Bertine had gone aboard the airplane with the cargo. A neat dodge, professional — it had the Dortmunder stamp. All this had taken place about 200 miles due east of Nassau four days ago.

Back to the computers. I dug up the registries of half a dozen boats and freighters that tied in with Dortmunder in one way or another. During that time-frame in question one of the boats had been in the Atlantic about halfway from Trinidad to Casablanca; another was a half day out of the Azores; and a third was off the Canaries. It suggested a possibility: midocean refueling for the flying boat. At low cruise a PBY has a range of nearly 2,000 miles. Plotting a course from ship to ship I found that it pointed toward the mouth of the Mediterranean. It persuaded me that the passports were somewhere between Gibraltar and Istanbul.

That was a bit of a help; it was a start. It still left a lot of ground to cover. A PBY can land anywhere on the open water; the passports could have been transferred to a fishing boat off any port in the Med — no customs inspections.

But I thought I knew where they'd gone.

Algiers is where the runaways go. Fugitives from politics and justice are drawn there because of a governmental no-questions-asked attitude. But it's a drab bureaucratic place with little romance or comfort; if you're not rich it's oppressive. After a while the exiles begin to hate it. The place becomes their prison. That's when they begin to inquire into sources of false passports. The trade in high-priced documents is brisk in Algiers.

Four thousand genuine U.S. passport blanks would be worth more than two million dollars on that market.

*   *   *

T
HE STATION STRINGER
in Algiers was a passed-over veteran named Atherton who had no image left to polish. He was contentedly serving out his last hitch before retirement.

In Atherton's travel-agency office I went through the station's files of known dealers in black-market documentation. After several hours of it Atherton gave me a bleak look. “Is this getting us anywhere, Charlie? There's just too damned many of them.”

“We can rule out the small ones. Whoever bought the shipment had to put up cash. Probably half a million dollars or more. It's got to be a big dealer.”

“That still leaves a dozen names or more. You want to pin the list on the wall and throw a dart at it?” He made a face and pushed the files aside. “It won't work. Hell, we'd do as well to canvass the fishing docks. The shipment had to come into Algeria somewhere — if it's here at all. It could just as easily be in Marseilles or Alexandria or —”

“If I don't tumble the goods here I'll go to Marseilles next and then Alexandria and then etcetera. But my nose tells me it's here. The odds are on Algiers.”

“If I had four thousand blanks to sell I'd bring 'em here,” he agreed. “But it would require an impossible amount of legwork to find them in this maze. The population of dealers is too big, Charlie. We haven't got a hundred investigators on this staff.”

“What about Bertine? Has the trace come up with anything?”

“Bertine flew out of Gibraltar two days ago. By now he's in Zurich.”

“Gibraltar — that's another clue in favor of Algiers,” I said.

He sighed. “Twelve, fourteen, maybe sixteen dealers big enough to handle it. Well, I guess we can go to the cops and start having them tossed.”

“Canvassing won't do it,” I said. “After we hit one or two of them the rest will get the word. They'll all go to ground. No — we've got to hit the right target with our first shot.”

“That calls for fancy shooting.”

I said, “We'll need a Judas goat.”

*   *   *

I
WENT
through all the station's Immigration Surveillance Reports for the past week and selected a card from the stack:

Andrew Grofield — entered Algiers 10/17 via GibAir #7415, carrying U.S. Passport #378916642393 in name of Alan Kelp. Passport presumed forgery. Inquiry forwarded to Washington to dip bag 10/18. Algeria authorities not informed. Ident Grofield made by Peter McKay, personal observation airport. File #78BV8
.

Atherton said, “Grofield. Yeah. Ran some small arms into the Philippines while I was on station there. We had to chase him out. He was supplying guerrillas with AK-47s. He's a petty crook, not a big shot.”

“Does he know your face?”

“We never met. I know him from photographs.”

“He ought to do,” I said.

*   *   *

A
THERTON SENT
four men out in two cars to look for Grofield. On the second day one of them found him. Atherton said, “It's a girl's flat in the casbah.”

“Has he got a hotel booking?”

“No. Staying with the girl. She's a professional. He'll be paying for the time. It suggests he doesn't plan an extended stay in town.”

“Good. If he's got appointments in another country he'll be anxious not to be delayed.”

“When do we hit him?”

“After I have my dinner.”

*   *   *

W
E SENT
the two stringers around to cover the rear and posted ourselves in a cramped 2CV at the curb across the street from the stucco warren in which the Turkish call girl had her flat. Lights burned in her windows and I was hoping they'd soon emerge to go somewhere for a late supper; it was about ten o'clock. The street was emptying of pedestrians: burnoused bedouins, besotted beggars, business-suited bwanas. We were on the edge of the casbah, its tortuous passages winding away over cobblestones. The smells were pungent, the air heavy. One wonders if the Arab cities attract miscreants and evildoers because of their rancid foetid atmospheres or whether it's the other way round.

They didn't come out that night. We wasted it in the car, talking about the old days. Another team took over during the day and we were back the next evening at sundown.

Finally the girl and our mark emerged from the narrow dark entrance. Atherton said, “That's him. Grofield.”

The man was burly in white seersucker; he walked like a sailor, a belligerent thrust to his shoulders. The girl had the opulence of a belly dancer: she'd soon be fat.

We gave them a lead and I got out to follow them on foot. Atherton trailed along at a distance in the car in case they snagged a taxi.

*   *   *

W
E WERE
at the bar when Grofield came away from his table to seek the men's room. He was a little drunk; that was an aid to me. I stepped back from the bar talking heartily to Atherton with wide gestures: “So would you believe the lousy crook tried to sell me Cianti for Bardolino?”

My gesticulating arms made Grofield hesitate and then Atherton stepped out from the bar toward me: “Come on, Joe, you're blocking traffic.” In reaching for my arm Atherton lost his balance and blundered against Grofield. I steadied Grofield and leered at him drunkenly, brushing him off. “S'all right, buddy, sorry, these freeways are murder, ain't they.”

Atherton blurted apologies to Grofield in French and English. Grofield brushed us off with a stony glare and squeezed past and went on toward the gents. I had my hand in my pocket; I turned and walked out of the place. A few minutes afterward, having paid the tab, Atherton followed me out. “Okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “I missed my calling. I should have been a dip.”

*   *   *

I
N THE
morning I went into Atherton's office and reclaimed the passport from his desk. “Did you get a report on it yet?”

“It's phony all right. But a good forgery.”

“Then he'll insist on the best when he goes to buy a replacement.”

Atherton and I exchanged smiles.

*   *   *

S
INCE HIS
original passport was a phony Grofield couldn't go to the Embassy for a replacement of the one I had stolen from his pocket. That was what we were counting on. He'd have to buy a replacement from an under-the-counter dealer. He wouldn't settle for the kind of counterfeit that most ignorant fugitives would buy; Grofield knew the ropes. We were counting on that.

Atherton's four operatives kept a tight tail on Grofield. He emerged that morning from the call-girl's flat with rage on his face and went around Algiers by taxi from one shop to another. All together he visited five of them. We kept records of all five addresses. Four of them were on Atherton's list of known dealers; the fifth was added to it.

“We hang back,” I said. “At the moment he's just shopping. Looking for the best paper. Keep the reins loose but don't lose him.” I wasn't interested in how many dealers he visited; the one who concerned me was the one to whom Grofield would return.

*   *   *

H
E GAVE US
a scare that night: he disappeared. He must have used the back door of the girl's building and slipped away into the shadows. When the girl emerged alone from the building in the morning one of Atherton's men went in wearing the guise of a municipal electric-service repairman and the flat was unoccupied. We did quite a bit of cursing but Grofield returned to the flat in the afternoon, using a key the girl must have given him. He was fairly well drunk by his walk. We sent the electrical repairman back in. He knocked at length and there was no reply so he got through the lock again and found Grofield happily passed out; he went through Grofield's clothes and found no passport and reported back to us.

Atherton said, “I don't like it.”

I said, “It's still running. Look, he didn't come to Algiers for fun. He's got business here, never mind what kind. He must have transacted it during his absence — that was the reason for the secrecy. He didn't think he was being followed but he made the standard moves anyway. A pro always does. He's probably bought a few cases of rifles and grenades from somebody. Now he'll be ready to leave the country — all he's got to do is wait until his new passport's ready.”

“Suppose you're wrong, Charlie?”

“Then I'm wrong and we start over again with another Judas goat. In the meantime we'd better beef up the surveillance on him. Can you spare another two men for a day or two?”

“I can scrape up a couple.”

“Stake him out front and back, then. Let's not lose him again.”

*   *   *

H
E LED
them a merry run that night; we thought we were onto something but it turned out to be a meeting with a Lebanese armaments smuggler in the back room of a country store about forty kilometres inland from Algiers. Our men watched with eight-power night glasses and had a glimpse of black steel, most of it crated: Kalashnikovs and, they guessed, Claymore mines. “That's what he's here for,” I told Atherton. “He's making a buy. The stuff will go out by boat. Eight weeks from now it'll turn up in Thailand or Indonesia.”

“We'll keep tabs on it,” he agreed, “find out where it goes. But this isn't getting us to the passports.” “You want to bet?”

*   *   *

O
NE OF
the paper dealers on Atherton's list was the proprietor of a half dozen curio shops, one of which was situated in the rue Darlan. At eleven in the morning Grofield left his flat, walked two blocks, flagged a taxi from a hotel rank, rode it to the waterfront, walked through an alley, picked up another taxi at a cruise-shop pier, got out of the second taxi at the western end of the casbah wall, almost lost our operatives in a network of passages, and finally led them back to the rue Darlan — his second visit to the curio shop in three days.