Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (12 page)

“Yes,” George Kenneth said, “we know.”

“Then you also know that she is ravishing and saucy as hell and, well . . . I would have taken a real interest if her boyfriend hadn't turned up.”

“That would be Philip Frost?” George Kenneth pressed.

“It would,” Ty said.

“Frost is a good man,” Kenneth continued.

“What makes you say that?”

“I was at MIT with him. Actually, I was a few years ahead. I didn't know him all that well, but I always admired the way he comported himself, and it was obvious he didn't miss much.”

“Philip Frost, whom I've never met,” said Garland White, “would seem to be one of us. He's been fully vetted and worked as a diplomat, on our side. It was Mr. Frost, in fact, who led the team that decertified the last installation that was under Zhugov's command.”

“And apart from that being a very convenient coincidence?”

“He is dead certain there was nothing out of order there, which was in the Strait of Kerch, near the Sea of Azov, between Ukraine and Turkey.”

“But?” Ty continued.

“Naturally, he can't vouch for sites where he was not present.”

“And there are a number of those?”

“By definition.”

“You'll forgive me,” Ty asked, “but if Philip Frost is as unimpeachable as you suggest and if Santal is as dubious, why are the two in bed together? And if they aren't, why is he not your best route in?”

“The answer to your question is complicated,” George Kenneth said.

“Perhaps it needn't be,” Ty said.

“Do I detect jealousy?”

“Isabella Cavill is a lovely woman, if that's what you're referring to, but right now it couldn't be clearer that she's Philip Frost's lovely woman. The lady's made her mind up.
Call it jealousy if you insist, but I'd have to put aside my instinct and experience to accept your positive views of Mr. Frost. There was a lot of innuendo circulating.”

“What kind of innuendo?” the President inquired.

“Personal.”

“How would you rate the source?”

Ty laughed, conjuring the Russian whores whose conversation he had overheard. “Impeccable,” he replied, “although unlikely to be credited by any agency.”

“I see,” said Garland White.

Returning to his previous line of argument, George Kenneth said, “Philip Frost went to work for Santal after college, when Santal was running a financial house in London. That operation was scrutinized by everyone and his cousin and at the end of the day was found to be in perfect order. It certainly was when Frost left. After a few years there, he'd come to feel he lacked a sense of purpose, or that's the word. He'd made some dough, enough to free him, and decided he was better suited to diplomacy. He applied, was accepted . . .”

“But by then he'd also met Isabella?” Ty prodded.

“I suppose he must have,” Kenneth said.

“And you believe that Isabella is the tie that binds?”

“We can only operate on that assumption.”

“But you haven't quite convinced yourselves, have you? Or why would I be here?”

“If we're wrong about Mr. Frost,” the President said, “and we'd put all our eggs in that basket . . .”

“I'll tell you what the problem is,” Ty said. “I made a huge point of the fact that I couldn't wait to get home and take a break at last because I'd been working flat out for a couple of years. I told them about my house and all the work
it
needs and the plans I have for it and how much effort and how many people all that will require. I didn't realize it at the time, but I probably did so as much to convince myself as them. I liked Isabella, right away. I admit that. And I thought she'd come on to me. Then, when Philip appeared and she kissed him the way she did, I suddenly realized that she hadn't. She was just another flirt playing her game from the moment she picked me up in that harbor. Hell, I wasn't a movie star anymore, just a teenager who'd had his feelings hurt. So I decided it would be better to spurn the Riviera than have it spurn me. That's the truth, and I'm afraid it means there's no way I could go back there anytime soon. I'd have no credibility. They'd smell a rat.”

“Suppose your house were to burn down,” George Kenneth said.

“That's not funny,” Ty snapped.

“Nor did I mean it to be. Nor do I suggest a fire. I meant it only hypothetically, as a possible cover story.”

“We're straying from the point,” the President said. “Let's come back to it. Why don't you let
us
worry about surmounting such obstacles? If there are missing weapons and there is a connection between them and Ian Santal, we need to know what that is and soon. And no one but you is in a position to help us do so. That's the essential thing to keep in mind.”

“Me? I'm an actor.”

“Don't be disingenuous,” Kenneth said. “You're much more than an actor, and you know it.”

“When you were a mere second lieutenant in the army and attached to Task Force 508,” the President asked, “what were you then? You were a commando in an oiled-cotton sweater who possessed every martial-arts skill known to man.”

“Not
every,
” Ty said.

“You spoke Mandarin and Arabic and Spanish with a fluency that made you indistinguishable from any native.”

“My father's doing,” Ty said. “When I was seven and a half, we went to live in Venezuela. Then, from the time I was ten until I was almost thirteen, we lived in Kuwait and for a short time in Saudi Arabia. My father's company had contracts with oil companies in those days. He designed and managed their security systems.”

“Be that as it may, you were assigned to a team composed of Army Delta Force, Marine Special Ops, Navy SEALs, and British SBS, a team so secret it didn't have a name, only a number that would disappear the moment it was disbanded. And what was your role? Long before you found your way to Hollywood, it was to play a part, wasn't it? On that initial foray into Central America, you were not an American officer but a Canadian entrepreneur with a grievance sufficient to justify murder. Obviously you played it to the hilt and were scary enough that the
narcotraficante,
who was a Chinese Trinidadian, if I have my facts right, and spoke or would speak only Mandarin, talked at once, and so the contraband weapons, which were much less dangerous in that circumstance, were intercepted.”

Ty remained silent as the President spoke. On the screen of his imagination he saw the deck of the ship they had boarded, the faces of men he had killed.

“And in the South China Sea,” Garland White continued.

“Never mind,” Ty said. “You've made your point.”

“You're the man on the ground, Ty, the person we all agree we've been lacking. You're not what we call an ‘invisible' exactly. Rather, you're invisible precisely because you are so damned visible. You've a reason to be anywhere, everywhere.”

Ty could no longer contain his own laughter.

“What's so funny?” George Kenneth asked.

Ty inhaled a deep breath. “In my line of work, you get used to being pitched,” he said, “but not by the President of the United States.”

“There's a first time for everything,” Garland White replied. “Do you know what your last commanding officer wrote about you? He said Hunter will do ‘fifty percent more to make a thing five percent better.' That's it in a nutshell. You are a proven performer. And you're right: We have nowhere else to turn. If we're wrong, then it was all in a good cause. But if our suspicions prove not to be unfounded and the wild animals should get free of the zoo, if something does happen, what then, Ty? We would have no notion of what or where or when or who was behind it. Then again, at T plus one second will anyone be counting?”

“Granted, there's always the danger you'll turn out to be the cat we can't walk back,” George Kenneth added after a few seconds, letting his eyes drift upward as though he'd discovered his halo was askew, “but what other option do we have?”

Ty contained his smile. The metaphor was spook language for an action that, once committed to, could pose consequences that were not easily undone. Ty had first heard the phrase from his father's lips so long ago he couldn't recall the circumstances.

“You'll have to keep your eyes open,” the President said.

“When I was a kid, my father and I used to write detective stories,” Ty told him. “Well, he wrote them, of course, but we'd sit side by side at the table in our club basement and every few sentences he'd ask if I had any ideas, which usually I did. Sometimes, later on, long before I ever went into the army, much less acting, we'd talk about those days. They were my childhood. I loved them. But by then I knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to interest me in his business. ‘You don't know it yet,' he'd say, as if the eventual discovery would be one I'd cherish, ‘but you were born to do this kind of work.' I suppose that after my accident and so many lucky breaks I thought I'd finally escaped this sort of thing. I was wrong, wasn't I?”

President White nodded. “We can't escape the times we live in,” he said. “None of us can.” Then he began to stand, and Ty stood, too, and they shook hands.

Chapter Ten

The old house, in
which he had grown up and in which his father, without Ty's realizing what he was doing, had taught him the rudiments of tradecraft, looked better than ever. Far back on a wooded esplanade high above the Potomac, it had been recently repainted. A new shake roof had been put on the year before and new windows, where needed, installed the previous autumn. There was a new kitchen with wide pine floors, black granite countertops, and a Sub-Zero refrigerator. But they had not cost the house any of its mid-twentieth-century character. His mother had seen to that. To Dorothy it was not simply a house, but a place in which her dreams had finally come true, then vanished. It was the repository of the emotional relics of her life: her son's childhood and rehabilitation, her husband's love and death. Ty could never approach it without experiencing both joy and melancholy, never drive—much less walk—toward the eastern end of Rialto Way without seeing his father, a large, vital man unknowingly in the final moments of his life. There had been thunderstorms that August, lightning riving the sky. A fierce, slanting rain had descended with more insistent pressure than Ty had ever felt in any downpour before or since. An old oak no one had thought frail had been struck, its roots upended in a front yard several houses down the block. The top of the tree had smashed into the hood of a silver-blue Toyota Cressida. On the sidewalk, limbs of the same tree pinioned a small girl to the ground. She lay hurt yet still conscious when help had arrived. Will Hunter had fetched his gas-powered McCulloch chain saw, confident that he could manage to extricate her. “Thank God it wasn't the trunk that fell on you,” he'd told her. “You're going to be just fine—just fine—and in hardly any time. Hold on, now, dear.” He had been careful, as he always was, severing the limb far away from the girl. His work done, he'd handed the tool to his son, taken a step forward, then seemed to jump slightly before going quiet and falling backward. He had not seen the downed power line.

At seventeen Ty could grasp neither the magnitude nor the permanence of what had happened. He tried in vain to resuscitate Will, thrusting all his weight onto his father's chest, heaving, crying out as he did. Again and again he exhaled his own breath into his dad's unresponsive lungs, as if the hinge of fate could somehow be manipulated back. It would be more than six months before the finality of that afternoon became real to him, displacing dreams in which Will Hunter still spoke and moved as he had for all of Ty's life.

“Let's go over the whole thing one more time,” Ty's mother told him as they ate lunch at her kitchen table. The window beside it looked out on sloping woodland that from spring through fall could pass for country. Dorothy had fixed him his favorite, Maryland crab cakes, which she bound with a paste of egg whites and panko. “The girls will ask me about it, you know?”

“The girls?” Ty inquired. “Which girls are those?”

“At the hairdresser's.”

“Oh.”

“And at bridge.”

“Of course.”

“At the gym, in my aerobics group,
and
at yoga. They always ask about you. Sometimes they seem to know more about what you're doing and . . . well, especially who you're dating than I do.”

“Or than
I
do, probably,” Ty said. “You have a full life, don't you, Mom?”

“I fill it,” Dorothy Hunter said, then paused.

“Could you fit in a week in California? Actually, as long as you like.”

“When you have something to show me,” Dorothy said, “sure.”

Ty looked at her with complete understanding. What she was doing was giving him time, breathing space, as she always had, in childhood when he'd nearly broken under the weight of his father's expectations and his schools' curricula and even more so since his accident. “A man on the move needs a place where he can stop,” Dorothy said, “and just be who he is for a little while.”

Ty's thoughts hung suspended in the shaft of spring sunlight that lit his mother's kitchen.

“Ty, can I give you some advice?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Find someone to hold on to,” she said. Then, when enough time had passed and he'd responded only with a familiar expression that suggested he was far away and lost in contemplation, she adopted a lighter tone and added, “So you still haven't told me anything about Camp David. Was the President nice?”

“Very nice,” Ty told her, snapping back.

“And Daphne?”

“Sweet, and not in any way affected. Neither were her friends.”

“How many were there?”

“I didn't count. Half a dozen, maybe.”

“And that was all?”

“That was all,” Ty confirmed. “It's actually a very simple place—nice cabins, fantastic trails, a refuge. We had dinner. They screened Greg's film. Everyone seemed to like it. We bowled a few games. Then the kids went their way. The President and Mrs. White went theirs. And I went mine. What's the matter?”

“To be honest, I was hoping for more . . . glamour.”

Ty wondered if his mother sensed his evasions. “Sorry,” he said, “but that was the extent of it.”

“Well, never mind. Did you happen to notice those beautiful plates you sent me from Florence last year?” she went on, glancing toward the glass doors of her Early American hutch. “I think they look just so nice in there, don't you?”

On his flight to L.A. that evening, after two extra-dry martinis, Ty struggled to put the weekend into perspective. Adjusting the angle of his seat and footrest, he watched the G550's lengthened shadow skirt the cloudscape. It was hypnotic, especially as viewed through the plane's huge windows, and in no time, as he invariably did aloft, he began to see his life, both his past and recent events, with distance.

He had not thought as an intelligence officer for a long time, he realized, and yet he'd become an intelligence officer precisely because the way of thinking it required came naturally to him.

At Fort Huachuca—or Thunder Mountain, as he'd learned to call it during those months in Arizona—he had trained in detection and interrogation rather than code breaking. He had requested a branch transfer after four months of advanced infantry training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and been granted it, he believed, on the basis of his unusually precise and capacious memory (the same knack that helped him learn lines so easily), his instinctive ability to ingratiate himself and, most of all, his father—particularly his father's insistence that he be tutored in foreign languages, beginning with Mandarin as a child. The college-bound son of the local laundry owner had taught him for the first six years of his life. In adolescence Ty had let the language lapse, but in college, when he'd needed to raise his grade-point average, it had come back to him with surprising ease. The laundryman's son, it turned out, had given him perfect vowel sounds, a second tongue. The President was correct. Ty had soon discovered that on the telephone he could pass himself off as Chinese.

Through middle school he had taken lessons in tae kwon do, then judo and jujitsu. His father had called these sports “the final means of communication.” At the time Ty had resented Will Hunter's iron insistence upon their worth. Now, though, he had black belts in three martial arts as well as an inculcated fearlessness in the face of danger.

Suddenly he wondered if he might have use for those skills and that fearlessness again. In his army days, he had played his cards as they lay, done the best he could at each job, hoping that somehow effort and excellence would yield success and satisfaction. He did not have any specific future in mind, but the nearness of death had concentrated his energies and given him a determination to fulfill his dreams long before they'd become explicit.

After his armored personnel carrier had flipped over and caught fire, he'd come to feel that he had survived by chance and was alive on borrowed time, without any real right to be.

It had happened at night somewhere out in the middle of Texas, not too far from Fort Hood, where they were based. He'd been along for the ride. At the University of Virginia, he'd been a ROTC cadet, and that had been the deal for which he'd signed up: four years of his life for four years of college and a bachelor of science, which still didn't strike him as half bad when he thought about it. If people wanted to know more—because there was no one to whom he could even allude to the truth and because he'd been ordered to flush certain memories from his mind—he would ramble. “Say the word ‘infantry' and you think of boots on the ground,” he would tell them, “men marching and all that. But these days it's all mechanized. Oh, we marched, but not nearly as much as we drove around in APCs. Just to give you some idea, the Third Army now has a hundred and fifty
more
tanks than did the old First Armored.”

His whole time in the hospital and rehab, almost eighteen months when he added it up, he'd kept telling himself,
You're being tested, Ty.
The notion had taken root and fortified his spirit through some pretty dark days. Prior to that he'd been just another guy, not a cover boy. He'd been looking for the right woman, not a thousand of the wrong ones. He might have become any one of a hundred traveling salesmen or lawyers or midlevel executives flying in an economy section rather than privately. Or was his memory fooling him? He'd gotten knocked around plenty. He'd fallen for girls and been pushed away more often than he cared to remember. “Oh, I'm so flattered,
but . . .
”
they'd say. Yet he was far from the only one. The same thing had happened to 99 percent of the guys he'd hung out with. What choice had they had but to make a habit of unrequited love?

After the crash, of course, things changed. Right away it had been apparent that a lot of reconstruction would have to be done if he were ever going to do anything as basic as chew or smile. So, naturally, when the option had presented itself, he'd thought why not let them improve a few things, correct nature's flaws while they were at it?

As he sipped his gin and the juniper berry freed him from his inhibitions, he wondered once more what it was that, despite his astounding good fortune, still unnerved him. Ever since his recovery, he'd worn his face as a mask. He couldn't help it. It was this new face that had brought him into focus for Greg Logan and that had eventually brought him fame, then fortune. But was his public in love with someone who only appeared to be Ty Hunter? Would anyone—or could he even enable anyone to—see past the cut-out-and-keep boy from his original Abercrombie & Fitch ad, see beyond the man the world had come to know to the one only he did?

In a sense it no longer mattered. His life had taken yet another unexpected turn. Who knew where it would lead? He inhaled a deep breath, endeavoring to still the sudden conflict between his old training and fresh emotions. He was neither paranoid nor lacking a skeptical turn of mind. The imagination, which could be so useful to an actor finding his way into a character, could never be controlled completely, and as he contemplated the assignment the President had asked him to complete, he began to embroider one scenario after another, each more alarming than the one it replaced. The more he thought about it, the more inevitable it seemed. How could it ever have been otherwise? Despite the inordinate randomness and improbability of his own life, human nature remained what it was and always had been. This world remained this world. Simply because Ty Hunter had stepped aside from it for a delightful, carefree moment did not mean that the age-old tournament of good versus evil had ceased. For seconds, as he drifted off, stanzas of his father's favorite hymn moved yet again upon his lips:

 

Once to every man and nation

    Comes the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth with falsehood,

    For the good or evil side.

A man's past is part and parcel of his future, he reminded himself as he reawakened. The context of his or any life was inescapable.

It was dark by the time his plane put down at LAX. The driver from the car service, yet another once-hopeful actor fending off middle age, was waiting for him at baggage claim. They chatted until their abrupt amiability came to feel forced, then grew quiet again.

It was Saturday. The young were out in the warm and fragrant night. The soft tops of their convertibles had been retracted; their music pulsed and receded along the freeway, inducing Ty to put down his own window so that he could savor it more fully. The air, in which scents of the warming Pacific and lushly overgrown foothills collided, was ripe with the possibility of utter if temporary happiness that for a century had been the city's siren song.

They took the Sunset Boulevard exit from the 405, banked and wound round its curves for several miles until they turned left into a canyon past Bel Air, ascended Pinnacle Drive, and entered the gates of La Casa Encantada, which was now, improbably, Ty's home. La Encantada, as he had quickly come to call it
,
had been built in the twenties by one of the great stars of the silent screen who had failed in his attempt to transition to talkies. Far from the forbidding mansion Ty had expected when he'd first heard it was for sale, it was a cheerful, sprawling place, lamplit now but filled with sunlight from dawn through dusk. Its rooms were decorated without regard to its Spanish-Moorish exterior in a jolly pastiche of English and French styles of the last three centuries. He had bought the house with its furnishings, which had included low coffee tables and swiveling ottomans, three-legged chairs, lacquered Chinese commodes and other eccentric but socially practical pieces that had been designed by the well-known actor-decorator Billy Haines in the thirties and now gave the place a distinctly Old Hollywood air, the illusory depth of a high gloss.

He tipped the driver, turned off the alarms, left his cases in the front hall to be dealt with the next morning, and made his way immediately through the sitting room on the west side of the house and onto a terrace of hand-glazed tiles.