The Sisters (21 page)

The man in question had published details of the sexual dalliances of members of Bucharest's ruling circle. Marriages had broken up. Careers had been ruined. The Canadians had been contacted. They had gone to London, tracked their victim until they had become familiar with his routines, then dispatched him at high noon in Piccadilly Circus by jabbing him in the groin with the poisoned tip of an umbrella as he waited impatiently for a bus.

The Canadians had completed three assignments since the first of the year and complained openly of "metal fatigue," but their Merchant, thinking they were referring to the aluminum castings of their gyrojet pistols, promised to supply new ones. Left with no choice, the Canadians, posing as homosexuals, made their way to Niagara Falls, wandered arm in arm across the border as if they had nothing more on their minds than sightseeing, picked up the new gyrojet pistols, false identifications, a supply of cash and two valises full of clothing at a safe house in Buffalo, then rented a black Dodge and headed southeast toward Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The Canadian who wore a tiny woman's watch on his wrist and travelled under the name of Ourcq did most of the driving. He was in his middle forties, balding, bloated, effeminate, with the beginnings of a paunch that no amount of Canadian Air Force exercises could get rid of. The other Canadian, a rail-thin man with wavy hair who was using the name Appleyard, passed the time working on a crossword-puzzle paperback. He had spent several years as a soundman on radio soap operas, and could imitate almost anything. Whenever he was stumped over a word, he would purse his lips, fill his cheeks with air, produce a scrap of tinfoil or sandwich wrap, bring a palm up to his lips, stare off at some middle distance-and come out with noises: horses' hooves, a door opening, a kettle boiling, the whine of a jet engine starting up, static on a radio, fire in a chimney. He claimed he could do snow falling, smoke rising, the sun setting, the sound of someone dying; the last two, he said, were indistinguishable from each other. He was imitating a train pulling into a station when Ourcq glanced at him and said, "What the fuck's the name of the fucking place in Lancaster again?"

Appleyard reached into the inside pocket of his jacket for the itinerary they had picked up at the Buffalo safe house. "It's called 'Seventh Heaven,' " he replied presently, and puckering his lips, he produced a perfect imitation of surf lapping against a shore.

After a while Ourcq shook his head in despair. "It's a shit assignment,"

he decided. His brow wrinkled up in disgust. "Asking us to be fucking sweepers! There are fucking professional sweepers for fucking sweeping."

"Maybe the professional sweepers were off killing, so they sent the professional killers to sweep."

Ourcq was not amused. "What if the fucker who is following the other fucker isn't following the other fucker after all?" he moaned. "Then we come all this fucking way for nothing."

"Maybe he's not as much of a dwarf as they say he is and we wont recognize him," Appleyard added. "Maybe he is not accompanied by a woman with a pussycat."

"Me, I don't see why they couldn't let the fucker who is the fucker who's being followed take care of the fucker who is doing the following," Ourcq insisted,

Appleyard, who sometimes had trouble following Ourcq's sentence structure, clucked his tongue to imitate the sound of tumblers falling in a combination lock. "Maybe," he offered, "they didn't want the follower and the followee to meet."

"It is no fucking way," Ourcq muttered, "to run a fucking cold war."

Appleyard nodded in vague agreement and went back to his crossword puzzle.

The walls, it seems, did have ears.

"I'm just thinking out loud," Francis' voice came from the tape. "What if . . ."

"You bastard," Carroll spat at the interrogator without ever looking him in the eye. He brought several fingers to his cheek to deal with his twitching muscle, and arched his neck to take the pressure off the welt under his starched collar.

"What if what?" Carroll's voice on the tape prompted impatiently.

"What if we were to put our man Friday onto someone with Mafia connections?" Francis said on the tape recording.

The interrogator, whose name tag identified him as G. Sprowls, depressed the Stop button on the tape recorder. He had a conspiratorial half-smile installed on his otherwise impassive face-a half-smile which looked as if it had been recently taken from a deep freeze and not yet defrosted.

"Now, why," G. Sprowls inquired gently, trying as usual to imply that there was some sort of complicity between the questioner and the person he was questioning, "was Francis suggesting that your man Friday contact the Mafia?"

"In the course of any given day," Carroll replied loftily, "we throw around dozens of ideas. That's what we are paid to do, in case you don't know it. We think up angles, avenues of approach-"

"I am fully aware of what you are paid to do," G. Sprowls said. The half-smile glistened on his lips like dew on a petal. "But you haven't answered my question, have you? Why the Mafia?"

"I don't remember," Carroll maintained, a muscle twitching quietly in his cheek. He longed to plunge his hand into a box of candy, but decided the interrogator would interpret it as a sign of weakness if he asked for one. "We'd have to go over any jottings Francis or I made to see what we were onto at that moment."

"Francis shreds the notes at the end of each workday," the interrogator reminded Carroll. He smiled pleasantly. "You've already told me that."

He depressed the Fast Forward button until the tape reached number one-forty-eight, then put it on Play again. "What we will need"-it was Francis' voice again-"is someone who can carry out an assignment without knowing it came from us."

G. Sprowls pushed the Stop button. "Exactly what assignment were you talking about?"

The interrogation of the Sisters was in its fourth day. It began at the end of the first week of November on the express order of a very nervous Director of the Central Intelligence Agency when Thursday's indiscretions on the Man Friday network filtered up to the Athenaeum. G.

Sprowls, the Company's utility infielder who specialized in tying up loose ends, was summoned back from Mexico where he was finishing the interrogation of a junior code clerk who seemed to have an endless string of mistresses. (G. Sprowls's tentative conclusion was that the code clerk was nothing more sinister than an accomplished lover.) The first thing G. Sprowls did on arriving in Washington was to isolate the Sisters; they were installed in separate but equal apartments in a safe house in Wilmington, Delaware, and brought out, one at a time, into the Grill Room, as G. Sprowls liked to call it, for their daily four-hour sessions.

Another, less experienced interrogator might have started the ball rolling by hooking each of the Sisters up to a lie-detector machine and then confronting them with the discrepancies between their version of events, contained in the Sisters' formal Op Proposal updater, and Thursday's version, passed on to the Deputy Director's man Friday over a pool table. But G. Sprowls knew the discrepancies were too vague, too undefined, to get a handle on. Did Thursday really skim off some cream when the Potter came across in Vienna, for instance, or did Thursday, in his eagerness to appear important, merely convince himself that he had?

Did the Sisters set out to lure the Potter to the West in order to get access to someone who could carry out an assignment without knowing it came from them? If so, what assignment had they invented for him to carry out? Did they think they had authorization? Did they actually have the authorization they thought they had? If they had received orders, had they interpreted them correctly?

All of this, to G. Sprowls's jaundiced eye, represented the proverbial can of worms. What he needed to do was question the Sisters at great length in order to be able to compose the right questions. That was the process he had used to break the Soviet sleeper in the CIA ranks whom the Sisters themselves had unmasked not long before. The disadvantage of working this way was that it was slow. The advantage was that it was sure.

"What we need-" Carroll was saying on the tape.

"What we need," Francis' voice repeated eagerly on the tape.

"What we need-" Carroll, from the tape recorder, whined.

The tape continued to run through the playing head, but there was no sound for roughly three minutes. Then Carroll's voice, distant, hollow, could be heard saying, "He might just do it."

G. Sprowls stopped the tape recorder. "Who might do what?" he inquired.

Carroll shook his head. He didn't remember.

"What were you doing during the long silence?" G. Sprowls asked.

"Thinking."

"Not writing?"

"We may have been jotting notes to ourselves," Carroll conceded.

"If there were notes," G. Sprowls remarked, flashing his half-smile as if it were a storm warning, "Francis would have shredded them at the end of the workday?"

Carroll's cheek muscle twitched once. "That's correct," he said.

"What was it," G. Sprowls wondered out loud, "that was so important you couldn't say it-you had to write it?"

When his turn came, Francis took a slightly different tack. "Of course I understand you are going through the motions," he confided to G. Sprowls at one point. An angelic smile took up a defensive position on his face to deal with the conspiratorial half-smile confronting him. "The last thing in the world you really want is for me to tell you what we are up to."

To G. Sprowls, it seemed almost as if Francis were daring him, inviting him even, to discover it. "So you are up to something?" he inquired.

Francis spread his hands innocently. "Josef Stalin started out his professional life as a seminarian," he retorted, "which explains why he was obsessed with confessions. What is your excuse?"

"Assuming you are up to something," G. Sprowls persisted, ignoring the historical diversion, "do you have authorization?"

"As a general rule," Francis noted, "Carroll and I are pointed in the right direction by our betters."

"Then perhaps you can explain why the Director himself authorized this interrogation?"

"That is clearly a matter you will have to pursue with the Director."

G. Sprowls selected another tape from his collection and played it for Francis. His voice could be heard saying, "Shows he had bad taste.

Personally I never liked Whitman. All those unbuttoned shirts! All that hair on his chest! He was a poser. It follows that his poetry is a pose." There was a moment of silence, after which Francis asked on the tape, "Do we know exactly how the Potter knew that?" Then there was a very long stretch of tape without anything. Finally Francis' voice was heard again. "Having a great time. Wish you were here," he snickered.

Carroll's voice, faint, said, "We have gotten our hands on a perfect criminal." To which Francis, a bit awed judging from his tone, replied,

"I suppose we have."

G. Sprowls glanced at his wristwatch. They had been at it for more than three hours. Francis showed not the faintest sign of fraying at the edges. "Why," G. Sprowls tried, "were you discussing Whitman?"

In all his life Francis had never smiled more innocently. "Don't tell me, let me guess. You are one of those Whitman hysterics who can't put up with the slightest criticism of the master."

If G. Sprowls came equipped with one thing for the business of interrogation, it was a thick skin. "What could Carroll have meant," he went on as if Francis' response had not registered, "when he said that you had gotten your hands on a perfect criminal?"

"I would have to refresh my memory from my notes to answer you," Francis said.

"And the notes-"

"-were shredded," Francis finished the thought for him, "at the close of every workday."

"By you."

"By me."

"I see."

"Do you?"

The Sleeper was tired: of spending his evenings alone in his room; of taking his breakfast while it was still dark outside; of trudging off into the fields every morning with the rifle slung over his shoulder and two sandwiches (the Hunter's Special, prepared by the inn's chef) in the pocket of his brand-new Sears, Roebuck bush jacket; of working the bolt until his fingers blistered; of waiting; most of all, of waiting. But he had a fixed schedule, and a fixed itinerary, and there was no question of deviating from it. An order, the Potter had drummed into his head at the sleeper school, is to an agent as commandments one through ten are to an Orthodox priest. It was a matter of the Sleeper's being patient one more day. Tomorrow he would be off and running again, and anything, including a cramped, smoke-filled Greyhound bus, would be better than being cooped up in the phoney luxury of Seventh Heaven, an inn just outside Lancaster with its birds wheeling freely through the lobby and the corridors, the birdshit stains on the furniture, the traditional Pennsylvania Dutch meal with its seven sweet and seven sour courses at every dinner.

Again and again, the Sleeper's thoughts drifted, almost against his will, to the mission. If his father's well-being, and in a sense the Potter's too, didn't depend on his performing well, he doubted if he would go through with it. One prince more or less in the world wouldn't change anything as far as he could see. But he had been backed into a corner; the one luxury he no longer had was choice. He imagined the moment when he would reach his ultimate destination, and wondered what his chances were of succeeding; he guessed they were quite good, or he wouldn't have been sent out in the first place. He wondered too what would happen to him after the mission. He wouldn't be returning to his comfortable life in Brooklyn Heights, of that he was certain. If he managed to survive, his masters would surely repatriate him to some corner of the Soviet Union remarkable for its remoteness.

If he was suddenly lonely, if he ached above all for just one more night in the same bed as Kaat, he could take comfort from the fact that he had accomplished what he came for. On the first day, he had zeroed in the rifle, bracing it on the elbow of a dead maple tree, aiming through the four-power telescopic sight and firing at a homemade bull's-eye. The rifle had been firing low and to the left. Using a small screwdriver, the Sleeper gradually adjusted the sight. After that he went to work recapturing the talent he had had when he served as a sniper during the Great Patriotic War.