Tool of the Trade Read online

  Goldman gave me a small office with an old word processor and a briefcase full of three-inch tapes to translate. It was absorbing work, entertaining the way crossword puzzles are, and for several days that’s all I did. Then I started to cultivate a social relationship with Goldman, who was a lonely man and grateful for friends.

  It was a cold-blooded thing to do, but necessary. I didn’t dare give him any orders while we were in the office. In a succession of restaurants and theater lobbies, though, I set him up.

  He’d been with the CIA for a long time and knew people in all parts of the organization. Through his casual conversations with people, I soon found out the main thing I wanted to know, which was that Valerie was being held by the KGB in some unknown place. Apparently, no one in the Agency had noticed the ads in the Times or the Globe.

  They knew more about my power than I thought they would. One of the damned Bulgarians lived long enough to tell a horror story. That was the main reason they still had people chasing after Valerie.

  The trail was growing cold. Two agents from the Boston regional office, Jacob Bailey and someone else, were following leads, but it had been some time since they’d come up with anything. At least one person on the case was sure Valerie was long dead.

  If she was, a lot of people would pay.

  Obviously, I had to go to the Boston office. But first there were various things I had to do at Langley.

  All those years of hacking with MIT’s Athena system paid off. I talked someone out of an A-Class clearance number and cautiously wormed my way into the CIA’s murky computer system. I got to the personnel file on me as Norwood and jazzed it completely, changing my age and appearance, background, assignments. I made up a new character named Anson Rafferty, and gave him my appearance and fingerprints instead, just in case I wanted to come back. Anson took a little bit of research. He did some good work for the Agency way back when and had glowing references from a number of higher-ups, all of whom happened to have since graduated to that Old Boy Network in the sky, or the ground.

  Not surprisingly, the system had a link to the FBI’s data banks. I made sure that both agencies had bogus fingerprint sets for both me and Valerie.

  I was startled, walking down a corridor one day, to run into Vladimir Borachev. I followed him and made up a pretext for getting him into conversation. I had the watch ready, but he didn’t recognize me. He also spoke English with almost no Russian accent, which I suspect would surprise a lot of his agents.

  From Goldman’s sources I found out that Borachev was here under protective custody, in the process of telling all in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Once he was wrung dry, the CIA would give him Canadian papers and a one-way ticket to Toronto.

  Would they make me a similar offer? I was not tempted to ask.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: JACOB

  I have never liked Chicago at all, which is not an unusual prejudice for a Bostonian. Any city you can’t walk across in a couple of hours is too big. Plus it’s too loud and smells bad and feels dangerous and the weather is like an alien planets. The people drive like maniacs. At least that’s a touch of home.

  Jefferson and I got to circle O’Hare for ninety minutes, bouncing above a blizzard, while the ground crew cleaned up what was left of a light plane that had come in sideways. Our own landing was too exciting for my taste. The plane slithering down the runway through driven snow so thick you couldn’t see any buildings. All for a wild goose chase, it turned out.

  The FBI had agreed to get in touch with us if its surveillance of routine bank transactions turned up anything that involved Foley. They were putting considerably more man-hours and computer time into the case than they normally would even for large bank crimes, I suppose because what Foley could do to a KGB agent he could presumably do to one from the FBI.

  So if he couldn’t resist cashing another “Porfiry Petrovitch” check, bells would ring from Washington to Los Angeles, and he wouldn’t get out the door of the bank. But he evidently had figured that out, and kept his sense of humor restrained.

  We wound up sliding down that runway because the same expert system that had identified Foley in Maine flagged the picture of a Chicago bank customer. Like Foley, he had cashed a number of traveler’s checks, so he seemed like a good prospect There was a day’s delay, of course, since the bank pictures go on a tape and the tape has to be fed through an “analog converter/modem interface” after the bank closes. Then someone in Washington has to look through all the day’s flagged images and decide which ones are interesting enough to warrant action. Then he contacts the proper department, and they contact the regional office, and the regional office wakes up a couple of agents and sends them out to wake up some bank personnel.

  At any rate, this man “Daniel Wintrobe” was an absolute ringer for Foley—white beard, paunch, rumpled but expensive clothes. The teller, suspicious about his appearance, had asked for a verifiable address, for which he gave the name of a cheap but not too seedy South Side hotel. By telephone they’d confirmed he was a guest, but when the agents showed up the next day, all they found was an irate manager. The guy had stayed for a week and then skipped out in the middle of the night.

  The FBI called it “bank fraud and suspicion of homicide” and told the Chicago police to find Wintrobe and put him under surveillance. Whoever had final responsibility evidently decided it would be easiest to keep him under surveillance inside a holding cell, a drunk tank. They slightly tenderized him in the process of moving him there.

  One look and I knew he wasn’t Foley. He was a middle-aged Skid Row denizen who belonged in some institution other than jail. He had a vague, confused gentleness that might have been alcoholic burnout or the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease; maybe both. Sometimes he said he had found the clothes and checks; sometimes he said they were a gift from his daughter.

  Through American Express the police had earlier found the real Daniel Wintrobe, who lived in Oak Park. He cautiously admitted that the checks were probably his. He didn’t know he had lost them. No, he wouldn’t press charges over the misappropriation of two hundred dollars; just have the remaining checks sent back to him. At the office address, please.

  The desk sergeant’s opinion was that the man was a “suburban faggot who don’t want his wife to find out” and that he was probably rolled by a chickenhawk. How this ineffectual old man wound up with the checks and clothes, he couldn’t explain. I suggested that maybe he mugged the chickenhawk. The sergeant asked if that was a joke.

  We knew O’Hare would still be a madhouse, with all the people piling up from delayed flights. We probably could have flashed IDs and muscled our way onto a late flight back to the East Coast, but Jefferson had a better idea. We split the cost of a bottle of decent Scotch and got an overnight room at the Airport Hilton. Unfortunately for the taxpayers, the only rooms left were suites.

  While I was calling the office, telling the answering machine where we were, Jefferson took a wedge-shaped lock out of his overnight bag and jammed it under the door. He checked it with all his considerable strength, and it held. Then he let me escape long enough to fill up the ice bucket.

  It had been a long day. I shucked jacket and tie and shoes with the speed of an undergraduate and poured us each a drink. It took Jefferson longer to get comfortable. He hung up his jacket. Unslung the Ingram, released its magazine, made sure there was no round in the chamber. Hung it on the door. Shrugged out of the shoulder-holster harness and hung it up. Unzipped the Kevlar vest and hung it up. Carried the.44 over to the bed and set it on the nightstand, protecting the room-service menu. Then he took a big swallow of Scotch and loosened his tie. Sitting ramrod-straight on the bed, he methodically rolled his sleeves up to midforearm. Then he tipped the glass in my direction. “Cheers.” He took a sip and lay back against the headboard, not too stiffly.

  With any other man, it might have been a time for the letting down of hair, recalling of jokes and stories. There was something about Jefferson’s thousan
d-yard stare that made it difficult to loosen up with him.

  He did get a little reflective, though. “I guess you know I’ve worked with the Company before,” he said, picking up the.44 Magnum.

  I called it the Agency, myself, but let that pass. “Well, you said you were hurt in Nicaragua. I assume you didn’t go there with the Salvation Army.”

  “Actually, that was a bunch of civilians, Texans. I got a leave of absence and went with them as an adviser.” He ejected the cartridges one at a time onto the bed beside him. “Caught hell when I got back, too. No, it was in Vietnam I worked for the CIA.”

  “Wet work?”

  “Huh-uh. Prisoner escort. It wasn’t in my dossier?”

  “I didn’t get a dossier as such. Just one page, telling what a wonderful guy you were.”

  He did smile. He was polishing each cartridge with a handkerchief and standing them up in a little row next to the telephone. An odd thing to do. “Maybe it was unofficial. Orders I got supposedly sent me to be aide-de-camp for some colonel, but I never got to meet him. All the guys I worked for were civilian spooks.”

  “Wonder why they didn’t use Agency personnel. For prisoner security, I mean.”

  “Nobody ever said. Keep their hands clean, I guess. Told me they’d asked for someone with a lot of confirmed kills.”

  “You killed prisoners? Like throwing them out of helicopters?”

  “No, I never did that. I wasn’t in helicopters much. Mostly Air America DC-3’s.” He clicked the cylinder around, squinting at it. “I heard of it, of course; everybody heard of it. But nobody ever ordered me to do it.”

  “Would you have done it if they’d ordered you to?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  I hesitated and tried to be honest. “I don’t think I could. But then I’ve never killed anybody.”

  “Yeah, you don’t know. Nobody knows till it happens.” He slid the shells methodically back into the cylinder. “If it was a direct order, I’d do it. Wouldn’t much like it, but I’d do it.”

  “What if you knew he was innocent?”

  “Innocent.” He sighted down the barrel at the TV set and tensed, about to deliver the ultimate Nielson rating. “Orders are orders. Besides, everybody’s innocent. Enemy soldiers are just innocent jerks who were too dumb to stay out of the army. Like most of us.”

  “Yet you don’t mind killing them?”

  He set the revolver down and smiled again. “It’s a living.”

  The phone rang, and I picked it up. It was Harriet Leusner, our de facto boss in the Foreign Resources Division, down at Langley. I got the scrambler out of my shaving kit and managed to get it working, then gave her a nonreport. She expressed no surprise and passed on a couple of tidbits of information.

  I hung up and left the scrambler in place for the time being. “Any news?” Jefferson asked.

  “That ‘cockroach’ the woman was talking to, they’ve come up with zilch. They have a tap and trace on the phone at the trade mission, of course, but the guy was talking from a pay phone in Port Authority.”

  “But she called him, not the other way around.”

  “Sometimes they use a series of pay phones, different ones for different times of day.”

  Jefferson nodded slowly. “Well, if this cockroach is able to hang around bus stations all day, waiting for the phone to ring, he can’t be no hotshot spy, right? Just some sort of messenger, a go-between.”

  “I guess. Anyhow, it seems like the day for funny code names…does ‘the Scalpel’ mean anything to you?”

  “You’re the spy.”

  “He’s an agent from Department Eight, Directorate S. Do you know what that—”

  “Yeah. Assassination and sabotage. The ones who used to be Department Thirteen.”

  “That’s right. He’s been in the country for a few days. He drove across from Mexico, they found out, and then flew to Boston. Leusner thinks the KGB might have imported him for the Foley thing.” “He’s really bad?”

  “I guess so. Been at it over twenty years; trained a lot of Bulgarians, Libyans, Lebanese, and so on. Evidently he’s the one who killed that Japanese ambassador last year. But Leusner says his specialty is getting information. Torture. Bad news for the Foley s.”

  “He doesn’t torture people with a scalpel.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Seriously.” He made a delicate gesture. “Like you don’t want a fighting knife to be razor-sharp; guy doesn’t even know he’s been cut. A scalpel wouldn’t hurt enough for torture. Lots of blood and shock. Guy you’re tryin’ to get to talk, he’d faint and then die.”

  “But suppose you could scare him enough. Lop off a finger or something.”

  “Nah. Somebody did that to me, I’d know he was goin’ to kill me sooner or later. I wouldn’t give him shit. Wouldn’t make any difference.”

  “Not everyone’s like you, Jefferson. I’d probably start thinking about the other nine fingers. Not to mention noses and ears and dicks and so forth.”

  “Yeah, and the Cavalry comin’ over the hill. It don’t happen, Bailey. Sooner or later your luck runs out and that’s it. That’s all she wrote.”

  “That’s a funny thing for you to say. You’ve got more lives than a cat.”

  He stared into his glass, swirling the ice around. “Still just a matter of time. Sooner or later she comes home.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: NICK

  It was trivially easy to give myself an assignment to Boston. Jacob Bailey was told that I was a Soviet Affairs psychologist from Langley who wanted to be briefed on the Foley case, to talk informally in hopes of cross-pollination; maybe open up a new approach toward catching Foley or tracking down his captive wife.

  I wanted to get a feeling for the overall operation there, since someone was obviously playing both sides. That was clear from what the Bulgarians revealed. I was sure it wasn’t Jacob, since I had asked him “under the influence”; likewise, I knew that he hadn’t suspected anyone at that time.

  Jacob and his bodyguard, Sergeant Jefferson, picked me up at the airport and installed me in a modest hotel next to the library downtown, saying we’d get together in a couple of hours for dinner. They said Tuesday would be better than today for meeting the staff; most of them were gone on a four-day weekend, taking advantage of a package deal at a New Hampshire ski lodge. So I walked around the library for a while, feeling nostalgic, and returned to the hotel restaurant one minute early. They were waiting.

  Jefferson turned out to be a more interesting man than one would expect from his profession. He’d been to a lot of the world and kept his eyes open. Those eyes had a sadness and hardness that I could identify with.

  I had enjoyed Jacob’s company in our previous incarnation, so perhaps I can be forgiven a large mistake. I excused myself to go to the men’s room and thought nothing of it when he followed me.

  We were the only ones in the facility. I was standing in a vulnerable position when I felt the cold circle of a gun muzzle against the back of my neck.

  “I know that you’re Foley,” he said.

  My heart stumbled, restarted. “Me? Foley?”

  “Come on, don’t be cute. Whatever you did to me in Paris, you’re not going to do here. At this range even I can’t miss.” Through the cool metal I could feel him trembling.

  “Look… let me take you to a doctor. The strain—”

  “It’s not gonna work, Foley. Your own mother wouldn’t recognize you, but I do. Put your hands up, slowly.”

  “Let me zip up first.” In the process I turned on the watch. “Give the pistol to me.” He handed it over, a pearl-handled chrome-plated .25-caliber Beretta Bantam; what we used to call a “ladies’ gun” in the bad old sexist days. I gave it back. “Put this away and don’t ever point a gun at me again.” He dropped it in the side pocket of his jacket. I wondered whether Jefferson had noticed he was armed.

  “Do you usually carry a gun?”

  “No, it stays in the desk drawer at home. I
was afraid that you would give me trouble.”

  “Is this conversation being recorded or monitored?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How could you remember who I was?”

  “It was study, not memory. There’s a lot less flesh on your face, but your bone structure’s the same. And your eyes, except for the colored contacts. The contacts are pretty obvious if you’re looking for them.”

  “Have you discussed this with anyone?”

  “No. It was my own little project. Besides, I’m afraid that my section has been compromised.”

  “Do you think anyone else is following your line of investigation?”

  “I doubt it. It takes an artist’s instinct—I’ve been an amateur artist since grade school. In the past couple of months I’ve drawn and painted dozens of pictures, trying to guess what you might look like without the beard, or with a trimmed one. Studied hundreds of photographs. Every picture Valerie kept in her scrapbooks.”

  “Are those photographs in your possession now, at home?”

  “No. The FBI loaned them to us; we have file copies that I borrow over the weekends.”

  “The paintings and drawings, are they all at home?”

  “Yes, in a file folder.”

  “Tonight I want you to throw them all away. Forget you ever did them… instead, you’ll remember having spent the time watching television. And you will never draw or paint a picture of me again.”

  “Okay.”

  “You will forget that you ever suspected I was Foley. If anyone else suspects that while I’m here, you will tell me immediately. And not let the other person know you’ve told me.” He nodded. “You will follow these commands without remembering that I gave them to you. You came to the men’s room because you had to urinate. After I count to three, you will use the urinal and then return to our table with me. You will remember nothing of our conversation. One… two…”

  “Wait.” He had a pained look.

  “Yes?”

  “I-I’m confused. It’s as if… it’s like I have to do anything you say.”