Time to Hunt (54 page)

“Okay.”

“According to these guys, to both of ’em, he wasn’t in the First Directorate. That’s the KGB section that specializes in foreign operations, recruitments, penetrations, that sort of thing.”

“The straight-up spies.”

“Yeah, you know, hiring informants, getting pictures, running networks, working out of embassies, that sort of thing. The usual KGB deal.”

“So what was he?”

“According to these clerks, the work name ‘Robert Fitzpatrick’ was the property of GRU.”

“And what was that?”

“GRU is Russian military intelligence.”

“Hmmm,” said Bob again, unsure what this information could possibly mean. “He was army?” he finally asked.

“Well, yes and no. I asked Jim too. It seems GRU was uniquely tasked with penetration of strategic targets. That is, missiles, nuke delivery systems, satellite shit, that whole shebang. All the big atomic spies, like the Rosenbergs, like Klaus Fuchs, all them guys—they were GRU. This guy Fitzpatrick would be interested—I mean, if he existed, if he was Russian, if this, if that—he’d be doing something that was global, not local. He’d be trying to get inside our missile complexes, bomb plants, research facilities, the satellite program, anti-missile research.”

“Shit,” said Bob, seeing the thing just twist out of his control. “Man, I don’t know crap about that and I’m much too old to learn.”

“Plus you got your other problem; the Soviet Union broke up, all these guys went who-knows-where. Some are still working for Russian GRU, some are working for KGB or other competing organizations with different agendas, some for the Russian mafia, some for all these little republics. If it was hard to understand then, it don’t make no sense now.”

“Yeah. Anything else?”

“Gunny, that’s it. It ain’t much. A possible name, a suggestion of possible affiliation. Man, that’s all they got.”

“Christ,” said Bob. He searched his memory for anything that he had learned about Trig that touched on any issue of strategic warfare, but came up blank. It was all Vietnam, the war, that sort of thing.

“Sorry I wasn’t any help.”

“Jack, you were great. I’m much obliged.”

“Talk to you.”

“Out here.”

“Out.”

Bob put the phone down, more confused than ever. He felt everything was now hopelessly twisted out of his slender ability to grasp it. The “strategic” business had him buffaloed. Where the hell did
that
come from? What did it mean?

He called Trig’s mother and got her right away.

“Have you learned anything, Sergeant Swagger?”

“Well, maybe. It turns out the fellow’s name is Robert Fitzpatrick. The rower.”

“Yes. The Irishman.”

“Yeah, him. The British think he was a Russian agent, but not the sort that would be interested in the peace movement or anything like that. They think his mission would have been nuclear warfare, missiles, that sort of thing. Is there anything in Trig’s life that would touch on that?”

“Good heavens, no. I mean, I assume the conventional peace movement wisdom on strategic warfare was simply ‘Let’s ban the bomb and everything will be peachy,’ but it wasn’t an issue, not at all. They were fighting to stop the war that was going on, the war they saw on television, the war that threatened
them.”

“Your husband was in the State Department. Did he have any connection with any of this?”

“Not at all. He was in the counselor service. We served in a number of embassies abroad representing American interests but never had a thing to do with the missiles or that sort of thing. He finished up his career managing an economic research project.”

“A brother, a sister?”

“My brother is the famous Yale ornithologist; two of Jack’s are dead, one a doctor, the other a lawyer in New York; the third, a survivor, manages the family money; my
sister is three times divorced and lives in New York, spending money and trying to look younger.”

“All right.”

“You’ll get it. Eventually, Sergeant Swagger, you’ll figure it out.”

“I think I’m out of my league this time, ma’am. I will keep working on it, though.”

“Good luck.” “Thanks.”

He hung up, stumped. He opened the phone book, found a commercial shooting range called On Target over near the airport. There, he rented a stock .45 and spent an hour shooting holes in a target at twenty-five yards while his campers cooled their heels outside in the parking lot.

When he emerged, the food choices weren’t great: Popeyes Fried Chicken, a Pizza Hut, a Subway and, down the road a bit, a Hardee’s. He decided on Subway, and was walking toward it when he realized what it had to be and where he had to go next.

B
onson was flagged down after the 3
P.M
. meeting by his secretary, who said there was an urgent call from Team Cowboy. He took it in his office.

“He burned us.”

“Shit.”

“He knew we were there all along.”

“Where did he go?”

“He slipped us so easily it was pathetic. Went into a Subway bathroom, never came out.”

“Subway, where, in DC or Baltimore?”

“No, the sandwich shop. On Route 175 near Fort Meade. Went in, never came out. We waited and finally checked it out. He was long gone. His rental car was still there in the parking lot, but he was long gone.”

“Shit,” said Bonson.

Where has the cowboy gone? What does he know?

S
olaratov knew the one sound rule that held true the world over: to catch a professional, hire a professional.

This meant that in his time he had worked with criminals of all stripe and shape, including mujahideen skyjackers, Parisian strong-arm men, Angolese poachers and Russian mafioso. But never a seventeen-year-old boy, with dreadlocks, a baseball cap backward on his head and a pair of trousers so baggy they could contain three or four editions of his thin, wiry body. He wore a T-shirt that said: JUST DO IT.

They met in an alley in the dockside section of New Orleans. And why New Orleans? Because the origin of “Sally M’s” flight on the Post-It slip was that city.

The boy sashayed toward him with an abundance of style in his bopping walk that was astounding: he pulsed with rhythm and attitude, contrapuntal and primary, his eyes blank behind a pair of mirror-finish glasses.

“Yo, man, you got the change?”

“Yes,” said Solaratov. “You can do this?”

“Like fly, Jack,” said the boy, taking the envelope, which contained $10,000. “You come this way, my man.”

They walked down sweltering alleys, where the garbage, uncollected, stank. They passed sleeping men wrapped around bottles and now and then other crews of tough-looking youths dressed almost identically to Solaratov’s host, but with this young gangster in command, nobody assaulted them. Then they turned into a backyard and made their way into a decrepit slum dwelling, went up dark, urine-soaked stairs and reached a door. It was locked; the boy’s quick hands flew to his pockets and came out with a key. The lock was sprung; Solaratov followed him into a decrepit room, then through another
door to an inner office where possibly a million dollars’ worth of computer equipment blinked and hummed.

“Yo, Jimmy,” said another boy who was watching a bank of TV monitors that commanded all approaches to the computer room. He had a shorty CAR-15 with a thirty-round mag and a suppressor.

“Yo,” responded Jimmy, and the sentry moved aside, making room for the master.

Jimmy seated himself at a keyboard.

“Okay,” he said. “M. You said M, from New Orleans, receiving phone calls from Idaho, is that it?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Cool. Now what we do, see, we got to get into the phone company’s billing computer. All that takes is a code.”

“I have no code.”

“Not a problem. Not a problem,” said Jimmy. He called up a directory, and learned the code.

“How do you know?”

“My peoples regularly be going Dumpster diving, man. We hit the Dumpsters behind the phone company three times a week. A week don’t go by we don’t git their code memos. Yeah, here it is, a simple dial-in.”

The computer produced the mechanized tones of dialing, then announced LINKED and produced what Solaratov took to be the index of its billing system, with a blinking cursor requesting an order.

“This is the FAC,” said the boy, “Southern Bell’s facilities computer. Gitting into this one is easy. No problem. Kiddie shit.”

He asked the computer to search for calls received in the greater New Orleans area from Idaho’s 208 area code, and the machine obediently rifled its files and presented a list of several hundred possibilities over the past week.

“Memphis,” said Solaratov. “Our information says the husband once had a friendship with a New Orleans-area federal agent named Memphis. My guess is ‘Sally M.’ is this agent’s wife, come up to Idaho to take care of the
woman. She would call home from wherever she’s hiding. That is my thinking. She—”

“Don’t tell me too much, man. Don’t want to know too much. Just want to find you your buddy. Okay, Memphis.”

“Memphis,” said Solaratov, but by that time the boy had it up. A Nicholas C. Memphis, 2132 Terry Drive, Metarie, Louisiana, telephone 504-555-2389.

“Now we cooking,” said the boy. “I’ll just ask Mr. FACS to locate and—”

He did so; a new set of numbers popped onto the screen.

“—there’s your billing address and service records. Now let’s see.”

He looked.

“Yes, yes, yes. Your friend Mr. Memphis, he got calls from outside Boise beginning late afternoon May fourth—”

Solaratov knew this as the date of the shooting.

“Three, four calls from—”

“That number is not important. That is the ranch house number.”

“Hey, man, I done told you, I don’t want to know
nothing.”

“Go on, go on.”

“Then nothing, then the last three days, one call a night from 208-555-5430.”

“Can you locate the source of that call?”

“Well, let’s see, we can git the F-1, which is the primary distribution point and that turns out to be…”

He typed and waited.

“That turns out to be the Bell Substation at Custer County, in central Idaho, near a town called Mackay.”

“Mackay,” said Solaratov. “Custer County. Central Idaho. Is there an address?”

“No, but there’s an F-2: 459912.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the secondary distribution point. The pole.”

“The pole?”

“Yeah, the pole nearest wherever they are. That be the pole that the phone wire is directly wired to. It can’t be more than one hundred feet away from the house, probably closer than that. They got all the poles labeled, man. That’s how Ma Bell do it.”

“Can I get an address on that?”

“Not here. I don’t have access to their computer from here. What you got to do is go to that little phone substation and break in somehow. You got to get into their computer or their files and get an address for F-2 459912. That’ll put you there, no problem.”

“I can’t do computers. You come with me. You do it. Much money.”

“Yeah, me in Idaho, with the dreads and the ’tude. That’d be rich. Man, them whiteboy five-Os arrest me for how I be
looking
. No, man: you got to do it yourself. You want that address, you break in. It ain’t no big deal. You may even get it out of the Dumpster. But you break in, you check the files, you find the F-2 listings. You might even find a map with the F-2s designated, you dig? Ain’t no big thing, brother. I ain’t shitting you.”

“You could call, no? Bluff them into giving you information?”

“Here, no sweat. In any big city in America, no sweat. You can social engineer the shit out of these boys. But out there: they hear a brother in a place where there ain’t no brothers, I think you got problems. I don’t want to risk blowing your caper, man. What I’m telling you, it’s the best way, it really is. You’ll see; you be chilling in no time.”

Solaratov nodded grimly.

“You can do it, man. It ain’t a problem.”

“No problem,” Solaratov said.

I
n the graduate degree ceremony at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 132 men and women were awarded their Ph.D’s in assorted academic and scientific specialties. But only one received the Ball Prize as the Institute Scholar, for only one was the ranking member of the class.

He was a tall young man, prematurely bald, of surprising gravity and focus. He took his degree—“Certain Theories of Solar Generation As Applied to Celestial Navigation” was his dissertation—in quantum physics from the dean and was asked to speak some words, and when he assumed the podium, his remarks were short.

“I want to thank you,” he said, “for the chance you have given me. I have been a scholarship student since my undergraduate years and even before that. I came from a poor family; my mother worked hard, but there was never enough. But institutions such as this one—and Yale University and Harvard University and Madison High School—were kind to me and doors were opened. Without your generosity I could not be here and I am honored by that, and by your faith in me. I only wish my parents could be here to share this moment. They were good people, both of them. Thank you very much.”

He stepped down to polite applause and went back to his place in line as the ceremony—interminable to an uninvested outsider—went on hour after hour. It was a hot day and cloudless in Boston. The Charles River was smooth as blackened, ancient ivory; a thin veil of clouds filtered the sun, but did nothing to help the heat. The Orioles were in town, to play the Red Sox in a four-game series; the president had just announced a new attempt
to curb welfare growth; the international news was grave—the Russian election had the pundits worried, with everybody’s favorite bad guy leading by a seemingly unassailable margin—and the stock market was up four points. None of this meant anything to the tall man in the khaki suit who sat in the last row of the graduation ceremony.

He waited impassively as the minutes churned by until at last the crowd broke up and families rejoined, old friends embraced, the whole litany of human joy was re-enacted. He walked through the milling people toward the podium and at last he spotted his quarry, the young man who was the Ball Prize winner.