Summit (7 page)

It occurred to her that she hadn't asked if she had been successful, if the killing effort had been worthwhile. But it didn't really matter; she didn't really care. They were letting her sleep and listen to music. She would take what she could get.

Chapter 6

Outside: bird-twitter and sunshine.
Inside: silence.

Daniel Fulton sat on his sofa and tried to read a book, but his mind kept drifting off into the silence. He closed his eyes, not knowing, as usual, what to do about it. Finally he tossed the book onto the sofa, walked over to the sliding glass doors, and looked outside.

There was a new bird in a bush next to the feeder. He found his
Peterson Guide
and tried to look it up. It was a brown thrasher, he decided tentatively. He listened to it. Short, staccato phrases, interspersed with whistles and
chacks.
The sounds were beautiful—beautiful especially because they were mindless. The bird had an urge to sing, and this was what came out. And if it needed food, the food was there, a short flight away, provided by some benevolent higher power. What a wonderful way to live.

Fulton turned his head slightly and caught sight of his reflection in the glass door—the higher power looming above the brown thrasher. He looked at the dark, curly hair, the penetrating brown eyes, the strong, unshaven chin—and he turned again, quickly, to make the face disappear.

Silence.

After a while he noticed his hands were moving—mindlessly. He watched the patterns they made against his faded jeans—the thumb of the left hand silently reaching across his thigh, index finger of the right hand rapidly alternating with the middle finger. Liszt:
St. Francois d'Assise: la Predication aux Oiseaux.
He sighed and glanced at the Steinway across the room.

He had taken a step toward it when a sound shattered the silence. The doorbell. He instinctively retreated, but then he forced himself to think normally. There was someone at the door. He would go to the door and open it. Some form of social interaction would take place, and life would go on. What could be easier?

Listening to a brown thrasher.

The bell rang again. He looked down at his bare feet, jeans, and T-shirt. Not very presentable. And he hadn't shaved. Oh well, it was probably a friend. No one but friends knew where he lived.

But friends knew better than to come uninvited.

He took a deep breath and padded across the wall-to-wall carpeting to the front door. He opened it without pausing.

"Hello, Mr. Fulton. I'm terribly sorry to disturb you at home, but it's vitally important that I speak to you."

It was the man from Carnegie Hall. He was still wearing a gray suit, but this time he was holding out an ID. It said that his name was Lawrence Hill, and that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Fulton studied the ID and the man holding it. He was probably somewhat older than Fulton (the reverse of the way things had appeared at Carnegie Hall), with narrow, sleepy eyes, and jowls that made him look a little like a beagle. His hair was dark, but his short sideburns were going gray. He looked—well, forgettable. "What do you want?" Fulton said.

"To talk to you, Mr. Fulton. To ask you a favor."

The CIA wanted a favor from him? Absurd. And how did he know this guy was from the CIA? The ID could have been forged, and Fulton wouldn't have known the difference. "How did you find out where I lived?" he demanded.

Hill shrugged. "It's one of those things we do well. You're not hiding exactly, am I right? Just—what? Staying out of the public eye?"

Hill continued to stand in the doorway, looking pleasant and unthreatening. So what was Fulton supposed to do? He figured it was normal to feel a little paranoid when someone from the CIA comes looking for you. And perhaps even more normal for someone like him, who had made occasional statements that probably displeased people in the CIA. All right. But it looked as if there was nothing to be done, now that he had been found for the second time. They were obviously determined to talk to him.

So it was time to perform. Fulton opened the door wide. "Won't you come in, then."

Hill smiled. "Thank you very much."

"Please excuse the mess," Fulton said as he led Hill into the large living area that contained the piano. And it
was
a mess, he realized, seeing it with a visitor's eyes: books and magazines piled high in the corners, stacks of sheet music by the Steinway, an empty orange-juice carton next to the sofa. Well, too bad. He hadn't asked for a visitor. "Can I get you some coffee?"

"No, thank you."

Fulton was relieved; he made lousy coffee. Hill sat on the sofa. Fulton sat on the piano bench. "Now, what's this favor, Mr. Hill?"

"Well, you see, Mr. Fulton, this favor is important enough that I'd like to ask you to come to CIA headquarters with me and hear about it from some of the top people in the agency."

"You want me to go to—where? Washington?—with you? Now?"

"We can go now if you like—I'd just have to make a couple of phone calls. We could be at headquarters in—"

"Does this have anything to do with those disarmament petitions and so forth I used to sign?" Fulton asked. "I mean, this seems—"

"No, no, not at all," Hill interrupted in turn. "It has nothing to do with any of that. A... situation has come up where we feel you might be able to do a great service to your country. I wish I could be more specific, but I'm afraid there is a need for absolute secrecy here."

Fulton considered. He should have been scared, but he wasn't, at least not very. Hill's words were frightening, but his attitude was matter-of-fact and rather calming. He seemed to be simply doing his job, rather than trying to talk Fulton into something. Still, it wasn't a situation that made Fulton very comfortable. "I think I should call my lawyer," he said.

"That's entirely understandable," Hill replied. "But I'll tell you what he'll say. He'll say: 'Don't do anything unless I'm with you.' Which is also entirely understandable. But the problem is, we're dealing with very sensitive national security information here, and we have to restrict access to it. Please hear us out first, Mr. Fulton. If you want to talk to your lawyer afterward, well, we won't be able to stop you. But we think that, if you do hear us out, you'll agree to help us."

"What makes you think so, Mr. Hill?"

"Come to headquarters with me, and then you'll understand."

"And if I refuse to go?"

Hill shrugged. He didn't seem distressed by the prospect. "It's a free country. We'll leave you alone. But we hope you'll at least listen to what we have to say."

It would be easy enough to turn him down, Fulton realized. They might continue to badger him, but his lawyer could probably take care of that. The lawyer would protect him, the way other people protected him, and he could go back to his unread books, to the birds, to the silence.

But suddenly he didn't feel like it. He was bored. He was lonely. And now he was intrigued. Now he was ready to take a leap into the unknown. "I'll have to go upstairs and change," he said.

Hill didn't react for a moment; perhaps he couldn't quite believe what he had heard. Then his face lit up. "Do you mean it?"

Fulton shrugged. "Sure. Why not?"

"No reason why not. No reason at all. We certainly appreciate this, Mr. Fulton."

"It had better be worth it."

Fulton went upstairs. He shaved and changed, and then thought for a moment. No sounds from downstairs. He closed the bedroom door and stared at the phone. He didn't like phones. He picked it up finally and punched a number.

"Hershohn Associates," a voice answered after the second ring.

"Let me speak to Hershohn, please. This is Fulton."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Fulton, Mr. Hershohn is out of town today. Can I have him call you back?"

Fulton cursed silently. "Is this Marcia?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. Can I help you?"

"Listen, Marcia. I'm going off with a man named Lawrence Hill who says he's from the CIA. He says he's taking me to their headquarters for some meeting. I don't know if he's telling the truth or not, but I figured I should tell someone what was going on in case I don't come back."

"Um, all right, Mr. Fulton. You're being kidnapped by the CIA. I'll be sure to tell Mr. Hershohn."

Fulton closed his eyes. Marcia had always suspected he was insane. Now he had proved it. Well, he wasn't going to worry about that. "Thank you, Marcia," he said softly.

"You're very welcome, sir."

He hung up and went back downstairs.

"Let me make a couple of calls, and then we can go," Hill said.

This suddenly felt as absurd as it must have sounded to Marcia. But he had made the decision. "All right," he murmured. And he sat by the piano while Hill made his calls. Then the two of them walked out to Hill's gray Toyota.

* * *

He was less scared in the airplane than he had been in the Toyota. He didn't like cars any more than he liked phones, and his most recent attempt at driving lessons had ended in failure, like all the others. Hill was a pleasant, if colorless, companion. He had nothing further to say about the purpose of the meeting, however, and that meant there was virtually nothing to say.

A limousine was waiting for them at the suburban airfield where they landed, and they sped through the countryside toward their destination. Fulton felt more comfortable in a limousine; he had ridden in plenty of them in his time.

His first view of CIA headquarters was a little surprising. Not because it was so large—he expected that—but because it was so ordinary. It looked like just another office building, surrounded by parking lots, and probably inhabited by secretaries and bureaucrats as colorless as Hill. Well, this was the way the world worked, he supposed. He had just never thought about it before.

They went inside, and he was taken into a small room where he had to sign some things and someone gave him some kind of badge to wear. Then they got in an elevator that took them to the seventh floor. Hill smiled at him as they ascended. "I think you'll find this quite interesting," he said.

"It had better be," Fulton replied. But it was already more interesting than the way he would have spent his day otherwise.

The sign on the door said:

~~~

RODERICK WILLIAMS

Deputy Director of Intelligence

~~~

Hill went inside without knocking, nodded to a pair of secretaries and a security person, and continued on into the inner office.

It was large and impressive, with big picture windows on the far wall and an American flag in the corner. Three men were seated at a gleaming mahogany table on the left side of the room. They stood up when Hill and Fulton entered. A white-haired man with rosy cheeks advanced toward them.

"Mr. Fulton, it's so good of you to come, especially on such short notice," he said in a deep voice. "We're most grateful." He pumped Fulton's hand and led him over to the table. The man's grip was strong. Fulton's hands were valuable; he didn't like having one of them pumped. "Coffee?"

Fulton shook his head. The white-haired man looked a bit pixieish, like a favorite bachelor uncle, but his manner suggested that he was used to being in charge. Fulton wondered if the man had ever killed anyone—or was that just another misconception he had?

"Mr. Fulton, my name is Roderick Williams. As the sign on the door says, I am the deputy director around here. The gentleman to your left is Bertram Culpepper."

Fulton looked at a short man in a three-piece suit. He was bald and overweight, and his tiny eyes were a little bloodshot. He was smoking a cigarette, which he waved in greeting. "Mind if I smoke?" he asked.

Fulton considered. "Yes, I do."

A look of absolute anguish passed over Bertram Culpepper's face, but he obediently stubbed out the cigarette. "I'm deputy director of operations at the CIA, Mr. Fulton," Culpepper said. "That means I'm in charge of all the spies."

"I thought the CIA was nothing
but
spies."

Culpepper laughed a polite little laugh, and seemed to have difficulty keeping it from turning into a cough. "Not at all, not at all, Mr. Fulton. Most of the CIA's work is much less exciting—reading up about grain harvests in Albania, you know, or doing a computer analysis of thousands of satellite photographs. That's Jim Houghton's area." Culpepper motioned to a black-haired man across the table, who nodded to Fulton. Strangely, Houghton looked more like Fulton's image of a spy than did Culpepper or Hill—handsome, suave, self-assured.