Tool of the Trade Read online

  So we had a chastized escort to the lieutenant colonel who was in charge of the operation. Jefferson was all deference with him, and he in turn deferred to the mystery of my three Agency initials. With his help, we pieced together most of the story.

  About half of these people had been out on a winter field exercise. At the request of the FBI, they mobilized the other two battalions, and they all converged on Bangor. All the officer knew was that there was a dangerous murderer inside the city limits, trying to get out. He was full of questions about the CIA involvement. I told him to keep it secret, and he assured me he would, but there was a gleam in his eye. I was going to be the bombshell he would drop at the officers’ mess tonight after dinner.

  We found my opposite number from the FBI, Donald Chang, at an improvised communications center in the sheriff’s dispatcher’s office. He was mortified about all the soldiers; it hadn’t been his idea. (We never did find out who was responsible for the excess.) He had asked for as much help as he could get from the state and local police, especially of the SWAT variety, but somewhere along the line his concern had been greatly amplified.

  The FBI and police had already checked every motel and rooming house, with the predictable result that nobody could remember anyone who looked like him ever checking in. Hell, I’d been to Europe with him, and I couldn’t remember what he looked like!

  We emptied all of the bank cameras, and again the FBI’s expert systems came to our aid. They pushed about a million pictures through an optical scanning device, and it returned forty-some pictures of people who looked like Foley. One was him. We checked the bank and found that he had cashed two thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, made out to Porfiry Petrovitch. That was the name of the detective in Crime and Punishment. Funny.

  But a few pieces were falling into place. The teller’s machine noted that all of the two thousand had been paid out in twenties. The boy who’d lost the van and gained a roll of twenties had complained that he felt “terminally tired.” No wonder; we found that he’d turned in a subcompact rental car in Los Angeles two days before he showed up in Boston. So he’d driven coast-to-coast in seven days of snowy weather, bent double in a sardine can.

  I’d been more than half afraid that we’d find a trail of bodies leading to Foley—or leading to the last place he’d been. That he’d gone to this kind of trouble with the boy was a good sign. He could have just told him to drive into a wall. Possibly those two Bulgarian agents had done something to deserve their fate.

  We did have a timetable. Foley got to Bangor the day after he came back from Paris. That afternoon he went to the bank. The next morning he rented the boy’s subcompact; within the next twenty-four hours he compelled the Albany woman to drive the van away and abandon it in New York. After that, he either stayed in Bangor or went someplace else. Maybe Portland. Maybe Portland, Oregon. Maybe Singapore.

  The FBI was diligently dusting and laser-beaming every motel and hotel room in Bangor. That’s a lot of rooms. Foley was evidently careful about fingerprints. I wasn’t sure it was worth the effort. They would come up with a print and the clerk would remember having rented the room to a six-foot-five Chinaman with an eyepatch and a parrot.

  CHAPTER TWELVE: NICK

  I didn’t catch as many fish as the other patrons staying at No Name Key, since I rarely used bait. I did row out every morning, not toward the Gulf, where the serious fishing was, but inland. There were quiet bayous where I could drift, reading, uninterrupted for hours. Baking in the sun and listening to my stomach growl.

  How long to wait? I didn’t have to starve myself to rail thinness. I did want to hold off my next move long enough for the initial enthusiasm of the CIA and KGB—and the FBI and whoever else was involved—to wear off; long enough for their energies to diffuse. Christmas passed by, and New Year’s. I started eating again and stabilized my weight at 160. The figure in the mirror looked gaunt to me, especially the face, which probably meant it looked about average to other people. That was what I wanted, of course. Clean-shaven with a fringe of white hair, I had little in common with my former appearance other than height. Any picture they might dig up of me without a beard would be more than a quarter century old. No doubt they did have computer programs and artists who could calculate or guess what I look like now, if they made the right assumptions. What would Nicholas Foley look like if he dropped forty pounds and got a tan, et cetera? I wasn’t worried.

  After erasing the memory of my stay from the minds of the fishing-camp landlord and the people who ran the 7-Eleven and the No Name Bar and Grill, I returned the car to Key West and took a bus up to Miami. Bought a complete wardrobe of quietly expensive businessman uniforms, some new, some used; some well-worn “favorites” that were almost shabby. Night flight to Washington, and by noon the next day I was comfortably established in a Georgetown efficiency.

  I spent all of that day making up a tentative past for the person I was going to be. Solid academic career in languages, steady industrial consultant work; service in Korea—gave myself a Purple Heart and slight disability, for federal employment preference—a Peace Corps posting in the sixties, extensive but ideologically safe foreign travel. Publications in conservative and neoconservative journals as well as the more technical linguistic outlets. Thinking of retiring from my academic position if something more interesting presents itself. Like the CIA.

  To document the career, at least after a fashion, I had to find a real person of approximately the right age and background, so that “I” would exist in reference books. Nobody with a career of any distinction can stay out of Who’s Who–type texts, at least the specialized ones. So I riffled through the Modern Language Association source book looking for somebody who was close to my manufactured profile.

  James Norwood filled the bill. Two years older than I was, brought up in the East but now tenured at the University of Nebraska, having been there since the early seventies. So I could wander the halls of the CIA with little risk of running into Norwood’s current lover. Or Norwood himself, though that was easily taken care of.

  Long ago I’d confirmed that the signal generator worked over the phone, as long as you turned the gain up pretty high. I called Norwood and told him to tell people he was going to Washington for a couple of weeks to “visit friends”—but to tell his wife and at least one close friend that he was going for a classified-job interview. Then go someplace not Washington and come back with a made-up story about not landing the job.

  He had written two books on Russian dialects. I spent the next morning reading through them in the Library of Congress. He writes well in Russian but has a tin ear for English.

  Of course I couldn’t expect my substitution to stand up to the rigorous security clearance a normal person would have to undergo before getting a job with the CIA. I was assuming that I could subvert someone fairly low in the chain of command and have my application taken out of the normal sequence of checks. Have to be most careful; assume hidden microphones everywhere. And cover my tracks when I leave. Jim Norwood? Oh, yeah, he went back to Lincoln a couple of weeks ago. Thought I had his address here somewhere…

  I didn’t plan on staying long. Just long enough to find out whether it was they or the KGB who had kidnapped Valerie, and perhaps find out where she was being held. Then get on my white horse and charge. Or perhaps sneak up and slip knockout gas into the air conditioning. Maybe someone in the CIA could tell me where to get the stuff.

  It was after midnight by the time I had everything completely mapped out. Couldn’t sleep. I went down by Seventh Street and watched a mugger in an alley slit his own throat.

  Then I could sleep, no dreams.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: VALERIE

  They held me for eighty-nine days before anyone said anything to me, though my guards did understand English. The first pair spoke Russian to each other; the second, a man and a woman, never talked at all.

  I was moved three times, drugged. The second move took all day, and I vagu
ely remember having been rolled into an airplane., so now I could be anywhere in the country. I never see a newspaper, of course, and there’s no clue from the food, which either comes out of a can or was excreted through the Golden Arches. (I went on a hunger strike for a couple of days, demanding real food, but they just watched me, setting out a fresh hamburger every few hours.) I had fantasies about bean curd and alfalfa sprouts.

  Six weeks in this long, dark room, most of the time handcuffed to a chair. I should have done isometric exercises from the start; now its too late. I couldn’t make it to the bathroom without an arm to lean on.

  One morning, the eighty-ninth, the woman cleaned up the cans from breakfast and left me alone for a minute. That was a curious sensation, being unattended, since I hadn’t even been allowed to bathe without an audience.

  It was a strange room, with the proportions of a bowling-alley lane, long and narrow. Black walls with light only at my end, except when the door at the other end was opened and dim light came in from the corridor. That happened, and a new man came in.

  He was short and chubby and dressed in a dark, cheap suit that was a size too small. A narrow tie many seasons out of date was cinched up so tight that the fat of his neck rolled over his collar. He looked like a small-town postmaster or some such minor self-important bureaucrat, but he was conspicuously armed, a heavy pistol dragging down his right coat pocket.

  There was one other chair at the small dining room table. He moved it three inches, so that it was directly across from me, brushed off the seat with a handkerchief, and carefully sat down. He planted both elbows on the table and folded his hands under his chin. “I want you to answer some questions,” he said with a Boston “awn-seh.” I just looked at him.

  “We’re having trouble locating your husband.”

  “Is that so?” My voice sounded strange to me.

  “He knows what number to call. Two numbers. Presumably he knows that not calling places you in danger.”

  That was something I’d had some time to think about. “Maybe not. Maybe he assumes that if he calls, you’ll make some threat concerning me, and he’ll have to—”

  “I would be careful with these ‘maybes,’” the man said testily, mocking. “Maybe he assumes that you’re dead. In which case you are simply a drain on our resources, and a risk.”

  “Whose resources?”

  “Don’t worry about that yet.”

  “I won’t tell you a thing unless I know who I’m talking to.”

  He smiled; small, pursed lips. “All right. If I say CIA, will you believe me? Or KGB? Would you like to see my Mafia identification card?”

  “Very funny.” I leaned forward. “But yes. My husband said he met a CIA man, who had a State Department ID card. Let’s see yours.”

  “Come now. Anyone can have a card printed up.”

  “That’s right. But you didn’t”

  He looked at me for a long moment “I don’t suppose it makes any difference. Yes, like your husband, I am a KGB agent”

  “Okay. Then answer the obvious question. Why are you—”

  “I may answer some questions if I’m satisfied with your own answers.” “No, you first.”

  “I have the gun.” Suddenly there was a small pistol in his left hand. Literally suddenly; no blur of motion, no noise. Just a sudden gun, and not the one still bulging his pocket.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Trick of the trade.” He rubbed his hands together and it was gone. “Your husband’s trade, I remind you.”

  “My husband was never involved in anything to do with guns. And you can’t make me—”

  He rose halfway out of his chair and slapped me on the lips, lightly, but with that snakelike speed. Then he held his hand out in front of me. There was a single-edged razor palmed between thumb and finger.

  “Think,” he said. “Pretty lips.” Then he slipped out of the chair and was too quickly standing by the door. “Next time we will discuss your husband… and his guns.”

  I felt the violating touch, almost a caress, for some time afterward.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: NICK

  How do you get a job as a spy? The location of the Langley, Virginia, headquarters of the CIA isn’t kept secret nowadays, but you would feel conspicuous driving to the end of the long, deserted road and asking the heavily armed guards for a job application. People probably do it. I thought I’d have better luck downtown on C Street, at the State Department Office of Intelligence and Research, Personnel Section.

  I took a senior clerk to lunch after convincing her I was a long-lost college chum. She wanted to eat in the cafeteria downstairs, but I insisted on something fancier. The State Department might or might not snoop on its employees while they were on home turf, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have any microphones hidden in a popular seafood restaurant a ten-dollar cab ride away.

  It was a long lunch and a productive one. She memorized the various data to be entered into the personnel system and explained how she could get around the hidden redundancy checks.

  She had been at the State Department for more than twenty-five years. I “suggested” that she start the paperwork for retirement. Her job wouldn’t be worth a handful of shredded memos once they traced my path back to her, as they inevitably would. The wheels of the gods grind slow, but they grind everybody.

  Washington was all cold slush and grime, so I was just as happy to have to stay home by the phone. Bought a bunch of books about the CIA. The reading was as much diversion as preparation. There was no point in planning ahead too carefully, since my course of action would be determined by what they knew about Valerie. But the more I knew about the Agency, the better I would be able to improvise.

  I was surprised to hear from Langley the very next morning. Indeed they did have an opening, a quite specific one, for someone with my background. Would I come talk with Richard Goldman at my earliest convenience?

  The cab driver was happy at the long fare and impressed by the destination. I tried to be suitably offhand and mysterious.

  I’d expected some sort of cloak-and-dagger business at the guards’ post, but they just waved us through. I made a joke about Iranian terrorists, and the driver laughed but looked around furtively.

  That truck-bombing epidemic a few years back may have had some effect on the way the plant was arranged. There were lots of widely spaced low white buildings with no numbers or other markings apparent; no one building seemed more important than any other. The main road ended in a circle, where a building was identified with a discreet INFORMATION/RECEPTION sign. I paid the cabbie and he drove off very slowly.

  I walked through an airpoirt-style metal detector and identified myself to an unsmiling receptionist. She handed me a visitor’s badge and a three-by-five card with terse typed directions. “Don’t get lost,” she said. “If you get lost, come right back here.” Sound advice.

  Goldman’s office was underground, as most of the plant evidently was. Energy efficient. I took an elevator to Level C and walked down four long corridors left-right-left-left to his room number. Goldman had his door open, waiting for me.

  He was a stocky, unkempt man with cowlicks and an easy smile. The office was plain government-gray, unadorned except for a reproduction of the old World War One poster “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” upon which was thumbtacked a picture of a person with loose lips indeed.

  He sat me down with coffee, emptied a half-full ashtray, and lit a new cigarette off the butt of his old one. “Wonderful coincidence, your application and clearance coming in just now. If I can talk you into taking the job.”

  “There’s something wrong with it?”

  “Just not very glamorous. Do you think espionage is glamorous?”

  “I understand that it usually isn’t.” Except for the odd Bulgarian assassin or two.

  “Listen to this.” There was an old-fashioned German tape recorder on his desk, obviously once the top of its line, but now a reel-to-reel dinosaur. He stabbed a bu
tton, and a man’s voice, distorted and blurred by noise, began speaking a truly weird brand of Russian. He let it go for about twenty seconds and turned it off. “You see the problem.”

  “Two problems. The bad recording I can’t help you with. The dialect, I can. It’s north Azerbaijanian. A rural accent, farmer.” I was glad I’d refreshed my memory with Norwood’s books, though of course I’d heard plenty of Azerbaijanian Russian spoken the years I was in Rivertown.

  “What’s he talking about?”

  “Let me hear it again.” It was fairly clear the second time. “It’s a long-distance phone call; he’s almost shouting. He’s talking to someone named Kahn or Con, maybe a nickname for Constantine. They seem to be friends. He says there’s an error in the projection figures for wheat production in his, Con’s, district as regards some five-year plan. The figure is too low, and he’s asking Con whom he bribed. From the inflection, though, he’s joking. Maybe that’s why it’s so loud; he wants the other people in the office to overhear. Some of that background noise might be laughter.”

  “That’s marvelous. You’re exactly what we need. Do you like doing this kind of work?”

  “Yes, indeed.” In fact, I did.

  “Well, we’ve got plenty of it, especially from around the Caucasus there. They seem to be assigning people with heavy and obscure accents to do telephone work in some sensitive areas, just to screw us up. Screws up their own operations, too, but”—he laughed and threw up his hands—“they’re Russians. What can you say?”

  I looked at him through the steam of the coffee and said in Russian, “—I think you like them.”

  “—I love them!” he said with a happy, atrocious American accent. “—I’m glad they’re our enemies!” A reasonable sentiment, rather Russian. I took the job.