The Kingmaker (41 page)

She just nodded. The idea for the scheme was Katrina’s. That’s the problem with spending so much time around professional spies: After a while their deceitfulness rubs off and you begin thinking like they do.

Without saying anything, she pushed the button that killed the TV, then lay down and closed her eyes. I lay down on the bed next to her and was beginning to think about our next steps when my own exhaustion finally caught up. It’s damned hard work torturing suspects and blackmailing the CIA. Or extorting. Or whatever.

K
atrina and I drove through the gate to the CIA headquarters at seven the next morning. We’d been up since four, making copies of the two tapes, mailing one set to Imelda and the second to General Clapper, whom I trusted to do the right thing in the event anything happened to Katrina and me.

I called Clapper at home before we left the hotel room. I outlined what we’d discovered, and, as you might imagine, he wasn’t all that happy that the CIA had used one of his officers and a temporary civilian employee as decoys.

Which isn’t to say he was happy with me, either. He most definitely wasn’t.

I then asked Clapper to recuse me and assign a new counsel. I’d become so personally involved in the case, recusal was a foregone conclusion. If I didn’t voluntarily submit myself, some pissed-off judge would dismiss me, and I’d risk disbarment for malpractice. He said he’d take care of it. It was the only moment in the phone call that he sounded the least bit happy. Who could blame him?

I didn’t tell him how I kidnapped Martin and persuaded him to confess. Some things would be too stupid for words, and full disclosure on my part fell cleanly under that heading. As I said earlier, smart lawyers don’t lie; like clever moths around flames, they just don’t get too close to the truth.

Mary and Johnson were actually waiting for us at the front entrance of their big building. Johnson shook hands and tried to act warm and convivial, which showed he wasn’t stupid, because I held his fate in my hands. Mary leaned forward to give me a friendly peck on the cheek, and when I drew back she accepted it gracefully, like there was no harm in trying.

We went up in the elevator to a big conference room filled with men and women in crisp blue and gray suits. The room reeked of self-contentment, smugness, a clubby bonhomie. These were the same folks who’d spent ten years chasing a mole and were cocksure they’d nailed him and dragged him up to the altar of justice. The mood in that room was haughtiness. They had beartrapped the most elusive spy in history, the same squirrel who’d eluded so many of their predecessors.

That mood wasn’t going to last long.

There were seats reserved for Katrina and me, even down to name placards, which showed Johnson was going a bit over the top to treat us like visiting dignitaries.

He stood up and introduced us to everybody, then put on a melodramatically grim smile and said, “Major Drummond, please play your tape.”

I did. And the whole room sat spellbound, right to the end. Johnson let three or four pregnant seconds pass before he said, “That was the voice of Milt Martin, the former Assistant Secretary of State for the former Soviet republics.”

“Jesus Christ,” one guy muttered. “Oh shit,” a blonde girl at the end of the table erupted. One guy actually pounded the table with his fist. It took another moment for the emotional chaos to subside.

A silver-haired guy who looked like an aging movie star roared, “That goddamn tape is for real?”

A coy grin popped onto Johnson’s face. “Major Drummond, I’d like you to meet Richard Semblick, who was in charge of the team that nabbed General Morrison. He spent three years hunting for our mole, and it was on his recommendation that we focused on your client.”

Semblick’s face instantly turned pink, and I knew immediately what was going on here. Johnson and Mary were choreographing this meeting to cover their own butts. Johnson had that attitude like, Okay, all you putzes screwed up and made us bag the wrong guy, but thankfully I took care of matters myself, so all the rest of you inept idiots bow to my greatness.

I peeked at Mary’s face, and her eyes were fixed on me. Her expression was beseeching, like, Drummond, please, fight your self-righteous instincts . . . play along with us and we’ll play along with you, too.

I gave a fleeting thought to laying it all out, to explaining to everybody what lying phonies Mary and Johnson were, but that’s all it was: a fleeting thought. We had a deal, and although they hadn’t fully articulated their expectations, we were three-quarters of the way there and I couldn’t afford to jump back to go.

I smiled. “Mr. Johnson’s right. With his help, and Mary’s inducement, we found the real mole. I couldn’t have done it without them.”

From a reductionist’s standpoint, this was true—if they hadn’t turned us into sitting ducks, with deadly killers hunting us down, I wouldn’t have had the “inducement” to do it without them.

Johnson winked at me, like this was just so much fun, and he was just
so
damned glad I thought so too. He said, “We’ve initiated a nationwide manhunt for Martin, who was last seen near Garrison, New York. The FBI have notified all airports and seaports, and Martin’s photo has been distributed at all border
crossing points. Canada would be his obvious choice, but given that goddamn honker of his, he’ll be easy to recognize.”

This ignited loudly appreciative guffaws around the room, because every soul there was in overdrive, straining desperately hard to work themselves back into Johnson’s good graces. Most had that sheepish expression little kids get when they poop in their drawers and everybody’s looking at them like, Hey, what’s that awful stench.

The realization was sinking in that the arrest and public roasting of Bill Morrison had been a king-size goof. Somebody on the Russian side had played them for a fool, and heads were going to have to roll, because this was the CIA after all, and Agency-bashing is maybe the favorite sport of the national press and Congress.

A fair number of the quicker-witted folks around that table were eyeing one another, obviously trying to strike instant alliances and make someone else be the “Weakest-Link-good-bye” guy.

The moment was ripe for me to say, “You can at least recoup some face. We know who Martin’s controller was, right?”

“Yurichenko,” said Johnson, picking up on his line in this passion play.

“Right. So, what if we were to go get Yurichenko’s fair-haired boy? What if we were to bring Arbatov out for all the world to see?”

A roomful of people pondered that. At least half the folks here were going to spend the rest of their careers crammed into a janitor’s closet in the basement trying to figure out how many angels you can fit on the head of a pin. They were vulnerable to any suggestion that would make them look less stupid than they really were.

“Plus,” I quickly added, “you’ve obviously got a bigger problem.”

“And which one would that be?” asked Mary, reading from her script.

“If you listened closely to that tape, you heard Martin confess that he told Yurichenko that Alexi Arbatov was a traitor. Martin may have told him that as long as ten years ago, when Morrison first disclosed it to him.”

Katrina, who’d been struggling to disguise her disgust, suddenly said, “What Major Drummond is telling you is that you have to rescue Alexi. He has given you information for over a decade, and you therefore owe him a great deal.”

Johnson did not even pause. “Here’s the way I see it. We have a chance to repay Yurichenko. Okay, he turned one of our key people. Well, we turned one of his, too. In a zero-sum game everybody’s equal.”

This obviously was the deal we’d struck the night before—well, except for the fact that Katrina and I were going to be used as pawns by Mary and her boss to restore their own legitimacy. But hey, in the grand scheme, it’s no big thing, right? If the law has taught me one thing, it’s that there’s no such thing as full justice. Consider yourself lucky if the meter simply tilts in your direction.

You could swear we were at a neck-snapping convention, the heads were nodding so furiously. Then there were a few tentative smiles. Then actual guffaws. Then the pros took over. They began talking back and forth as they tried to come up with a plan.

M
oscow was pitch-dark and freezing when we landed. White snow covered the land and frost hung from the trees. We came in on a U.S. Air Force converted 747 carrying the Secretary of State, who was arriving for a swiftly arranged meeting with his Russian counterpart.

Katrina and I were dressed as U.S. Air Force enlisted troops and were described on the flight manifest as crewmen, Katrina as a steward, me as a radio-telephone operator. The Secretary of State was scheduled to be there only a few hours, which was tight, but coming and going under his diplomatic cover was the only way to get done what we needed to accomplish. Mary was along also, listed under an alias as a publicity aide to the Secretary, which was a thin cover, but she wasn’t leaving the plane, as the Russians knew her on sight.

It had to be us three. Alexi knew Katrina and me, and Mary had been his contact all those years. We were the only ones who knew how to contact him, who he’d talk to—the only three he’d conceivably entrust with his fate.

The instant the Secretary’s official welcoming ceremony was over and the cavalcades of black, official-looking cars had departed, we got to work. Another stream of cars began trickling in, and men and women camouflaged in workers’ coveralls began streaming up the steps and clustering in the lounge next to the Secretary’s sleeping suite. Within ten minutes, twenty CIA folks were packed in that compartment, and Mary began her briefing.

You’ll never guess who was in charge of the ground team. My old buddy Jackler, the grand inquisitor himself, and he had Mary’s former embassy crew working for him, since they were intimately familiar with Moscow and Russia’s security procedures, which was essential for our purposes.

Jackler had apparently been warned to be nice to me, and he was—to a point. You could see it really hurt him, but he was trying. He was like that pit bull you keep chained in the basement. Politeness had been bred out of his gene pool. When we were done with the operations briefing he barked at everybody to get moving, and bodies began slamming into one another as they raced for the exit.

As soon as the last of the common field hands were gone, Jackler and Mary sidled over to Katrina and me. He growled, “You two need to have your friggin’ heads examined. We don’t do shit this way. You’re flyin’ by the seats of your pants.”

Katrina said, “And is there another alternative?”

“Yeah. Send Arbatov a goddamned sympathy card. That’s how the code works in these things.”

“It isn’t an option,” Katrina said, eyeing him suspiciously.

“Lady, it’s your ass. If this thing goes south, we can’t help you. This is their country. You got any idea what Russian prisons are like?”

“I don’t care.”

Maybe she didn’t, but I did—I cared a lot. I mean, I was all for getting Alexi out of there, but it sure would suck if our plan was foiled and all three of us ended up in Yurichenko’s hands.

I gave Jackler my most badassed stare. “You better make sure it doesn’t go south. See, I left copies of some very embarrassing tapes with some friends back in the States. If I don’t come back, they’ve been told where to send those tapes, and trust me, that would be a disaster for you and all your buddies at Langley.”

Jackler’s eyes darted over at Mary. She simply shrugged, like, Yeah, I know it sucks, but that’s the way it is.

Then Mary looked at me. She put a hand on my arm and dragged me away, into a corner. With her hand still on my arm, she leaned so close that I could feel her hair against my face and her breasts pressed against my arm. “Sean, please, be very, very careful. Our people have the meeting site staked out. If they give you the signal to abort, you and Katrina get out immediately. You understand that, right?”

“I understand that.” Although I somehow suspected that that wasn’t what this was really about.

“Listen . . . I, well, uh . . . I know you’re disappointed in me.”

She paused for me to answer. I was supposed to say something like, “Uh, yeah, I’m not too happy about the way all this went down, but crap happens; I’m over it now, and my heart still goes pitter-patter when I’m around you.” I didn’t say anything. I used Eddie’s favorite stunt. I left the full onus of carrying this conversation on her shoulders.

“Anyway,” she finally said, “I’m still serious about divorcing Bill. I contacted a lawyer yesterday. He’s filing the papers.”

“Yeah, well,” I said.

She gave me that toe-tingling smile. “Open and shut, the lawyer said. He really loved those pictures of Bill slipping in and out of hotels with different women. There’ll have to be a year-long separation, but I’ll have freedom to see who I want.”

Those breasts pressed a little closer. Those blue eyes turned a little more imploring. “I don’t want to lose you at this point, Sean. I, uh, I . . . well, I hope we can . . . maybe . . . well, maybe recapture what we once had.”

I stared at her.

She pressed a forefinger against my lips, the way they do in those mushy movies. “Don’t say anything,” she murmured. Of course it was already evident I wasn’t about to anyway. “I know you’re confused right now. I don’t blame you. There’ll be plenty of time to sort things out later. Just come back safely, okay?”

“I plan to,” I said, which was as neutral a signal as I could offer under the circumstances.

She stepped away and I looked over at Katrina, who was gazing back at me curiously, wondering what in the hell was going on here. I shrugged, then walked over and joined her. We departed with Jackler and climbed into a windowless van parked right at the base of the steps.

You could tell by Jackler’s sour expression what he thought of this whole thing. Actually, his thoughts probably weren’t any different from mine. Katrina was a civilian. If I was glaringly short of field crafts, she was ten gallons past empty. We were going into a complex, high-risk operation with a couple of complete hacks who could clumsily trigger a huge international incident with the one country the United States didn’t want to piss off right at that pivot point in history.