Atropos (22 page)

T
ROTTER REFLECTED AS HE
unplugged the miniscrambler and hung up the pay phone that he should have waited a few days before letting his father step back in as head of the Agency. When he was in charge, if he wanted to give permission for a semi-authorized personnel unit (as Rines insisted on referring to a human being) to blow his cover to a totally unauthorized unit, he could just do it. Now that he was back in the ranks, he had to sneak around.

Now it was up to Regina. She’d have to decide how much she trusted Murphy with her fiancé’s life. She’d do fine.

Trotter sighed. Stopped talking to her thirty seconds ago, and he missed her already. All right, he told himself. Forget about that now. An operation has started to break. Your audience awaits.

It was late enough in the year now that there was no more spring chill. Trotter walked the six blocks to Fenton Rines Investigations, Inc., and his legs hardly hurt at all.

“Well, son,” the Congressman said as Trotter entered the inner office, “it worked. You bagged a big one.”

“Save the congratulations.” Trotter did not like to be congratulated on the success of operations that ended in innocent people dying, something his father could never understand. Trotter hadn’t been a big fan of Helen Fraser’s during the few minutes they’d spoken. He’d thought her silly and not too bright. But she didn’t deserve to die. Nobody deserved to die for a reason she didn’t know and probably wouldn’t have understood. Trotter would have liked to be able to believe there was something to the young woman’s belief in reincarnation; that even now, she was being born smarter and wiser in some infant’s body. It would ease the guilt. But he couldn’t.

Even telling himself it was shockingly unprofessional for a kidnap squad to kill a witness in a situation like that didn’t get him off the hook.

Trotter had deliberately and consciously provoked one of the most dangerous men in the history of the planet into lashing out. He had
thought
the provocation to be relatively mild; he had
believed
that Borzov’s response would be measured.

He was wrong, and Helen Fraser was dead.

Rines was talking.

“What did you say?” Trotter asked.

“I was wondering if you suspected his target would be Van Horn when you set this up.”

“Not really. I mean, it was always a possibility, but after the party I discounted it.”

Rines nodded. It was almost a rule that when you had someone in deep cover, you never associated with him openly in any way.

“We’ll never get Borzov going by the book,” the Congressman said. “He wrote the goddam book.”

“We weren’t after Borzov, Congressman,” Trotter said. “We were out to flush his mole.”

Rines was shaking his head. “Van Horn. Well, at least they think big. I wonder what’s in it for him. It can’t be money. It can’t be a matter of principle. The Van Horns have never had any.”

The Congressman chuckled. “You can take the boy out of the Bureau, but you can’t take the Bureau out of the boy.”

Rines was stiff. “What’s that supposed to mean, Congressman?”

“Just that the Bureau never got along too well with that family.”

“There are excellent reasons for that going back to World War Two—”

Trotter cut in. “Can we stop playing ‘Be True to Your School’ for a minute and address the question? What is in it for Hank Van Horn?”

“Protection,” Rines said. “I was leading up to that.”

“Borzov’s got something on him,” the old man added. “You’ve been figuring that way all along, or you wouldn’t have sent Borzov that fake bomb.”

“Obviously. But what—”

Trotter stopped. Suddenly he knew what.

“Tapes,” he said. “They’ve got tapes of something bad.”

“The girlfriend barbecue,” the Congressman suggested.

“Of course! It fits, it all fits. When was that? Can you call that up on the computer, Rines?”

“I don’t need to. August 1974. The day before Nixon resigned. The Bureau may hold a grudge, Congressman, but sometimes it pays off.”

“Well, you’re not in the Bureau anymore.”

“Catch me forgetting
that,”
Rines said. He turned to Trotter. “Okay, I admit a tape of Senator Van Horn committing murder and arson is one of the few things I can think of that could put any Van Horn in the power of an outsider. And I think it’s hilarious that a Van Horn could be screwed by a wiretap, since for years the Bureau has known Ainley Masters has a better file of electronic security people than the secret services of half the world’s governments. But is this just an inspiration on your part, or do you have something?”

“I’ve got twelve dead electronic surveillance men. All active during the right period. All killed during the months before Borzov felt himself moved to visit America for the first time.”

“My God,” the Congressman said. “My God. That guy in Minneapolis. He was the youngest one, the last one who was in business soon enough to have planted a bug
on
the Senator.”

Rines looked sour. “Why would they kill
all
of them? If they wanted to shut up the one who did the job for them, why didn’t they just kill him?”

“Smoke screen,” Trotter said. “If they just killed one, somebody like us might dig into it and find something Borzov couldn’t afford to have found.”

“I’ll get people digging on all of them as soon as we’re done here,” Rines promised.

The Congressman scratched his jaw. “It could be, you know, that Borzov has had to kill all these guys because he doesn’t
know
who the right one is.”

Trotter nodded. It was embarrassing to admit it, but sometimes a supersecret operation could become
too
secret. An intermediary is told to hire someone to plant a bug. This is done, the tape is sent back to headquarters, and no one, not even the man at the top, knows any more than necessary.

But then, perhaps, the intermediary dies. That was something that happened with remarkable regularity in the spy business. If, after that, it became desirable to find the man who had planted the bug for you, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do it. The better agent the intermediary had been, the less chance there was that he had left any documents behind to help you trace his contacts.

That could leave you with the messy necessity of killing a dozen men to get the one you want.

Trotter shook his head. “What about Jake Feder?”

“What about him?” the old man said.

“He never did any work for the Russians. You know that, and I know that, and Borzov damned well knows that. He couldn’t have been on their list.”

“They were being subtle,” Rines offered. “They didn’t want to leave anyone out, or we might ask why, and the fact that Jake Feder worked only for the Congressman would stick out.”

“Does it bother you as much as it does me,” Trotter asked, “that we never did ask ourselves any of these questions Borzov is supposed to have been afraid we were going to ask?”

“He couldn’t take any chances,” the Congressman said.

“It also shows what a piss-poor Agency chief I was.”

“Rines and I were here, too, son,” the Congressman said softly. “We didn’t think of it either.” He cleared his throat. “Maybe that son of a bitch just decided, while he was at it, to cost us a good man.”

A good man, and, Trotter knew, the closest thing to a friend his father had ever had.

“I don’t know,” Trotter said. He scratched his chin. “I don’t like it. It doesn’t add up.”

He stared at the wood paneling for a second. Then he shook his head as if to clear it.

“Okay, what are we doing now? I assume we’ve got the Russian Embassy under surveillance.”

“We do, but it’s just a formality. Borzov isn’t there.”

“Oh? Where the hell is he?”

Rines was even more sour now. “I don’t know. He left the embassy right after he got your little gift. I figured he might be a little goosey, so I didn’t have him tailed. The idea at the time was to leave him free to tip off his partner, right?”

Trotter sighed. “Right, right.”

“Well, he just never came back.”

“You’ve got someone on Van Horn?”

“Five of them. There are so many reporters around him, we could have a dozen. I should be getting a report any minute. In the meantime, what are we going to do about this?”

Trotter had a few ideas. He lined them out for a while.

The computer on Rines’s desk beeped. He hit a few buttons and punched up the report.

“Son of” a fucking bitch,” said Rines, who never swore. “This clinches it, at least for me.”

“What happened?” Trotter demanded.

“The Senator climbed into a private helicopter that is whisking him off to the Virginia estate of Augustus Pickett.”

The Congressman laughed. It seemed to Trotter that his laugh had gotten stronger once the old man took his job back.

“Gus Pickett,” the Congressman said. “Another one of the Bureau’s old favorites.”

“A great American,” Rines said through his teeth.

“Borzov is playing this like a wild man,” Trotter said. “Let’s wait a little and see where he goes with it.”

“I
F YOU WANT YOUR
son back,” General Dudakov said severely, “you will listen carefully.”

Hank Van Horn took a long pull at his Gibson. He was still trying to figure out what the hell the General was doing here.

Things had been happening fast since the helicopter landed. Gus Pickett, all smiles and heartiness, had risked getting his silk smoking jacket drizzled on in order to meet Hank at the landing pad. Gus had put his arm around the Senator and led him inside the house, a big stone palace of a place some tobacco baron had built around the time Gus Pickett had been born.

Gus brought him to the drawing room, showed him to a seat, and asked Hank what he wanted to drink. Then the multibillionaire fixed a pitcher of Gibsons with his own hands and placed it, along with a crystal glass full of pearl onions, on a table at Hank’s elbow.

Still smiling, Gus had said, “See you in a minute,” and disappeared.

Hank sat and drank Gibsons and tried to decide how many times his library in the town house would fit in this room. A voice over his shoulder broke into his thoughts.

“Senator Van Horn!”

Hank spun around to see the Russian general bearing down on him. He looked a lot less friendly than he had at the party Hank had thrown for him.

Hank was no fool; after a slight start (and anybody would be startled to hear that voice suddenly barking behind him) he realized what was going on. Dudakov was one of the Russians who had something to do with his situation. And obviously, Gus Pickett worked for him. That was kind of funny, but Hank didn’t laugh. There had been rumors about Gus for years—he was so chummy with the Russians, he must be on their string s
omehow,
was the way the thinking usually went—but he had so much money, only a handful of fanatics really believed anything could be going on. Chalk one up for the fanatics.

And now Dudakov was throwing threats around about Mark.

Hank was thinking hard; when he did that, habits took over. The habit of a politician is to be affable.

“General,” he began heartily.

“I said
listen,”
Dudakov snapped.

Hank blinked as his brain jumped out of its groove. “What have you done with my son?” he demanded.

“Your son is safe.”

“Why did you kill the girl?”

“Your son may not always be safe. Now be quiet.”

Hank closed his mouth. When the general told him to sit, he sat.

Dudakov was calmer, now, but the menace in him was still obvious. “That’s better, Senator. Relax.”

Hank tried and failed.

“Look around you.”

Hank looked around. There was nothing to see but Gus Pickett’s enormous room.

“We are alone,” the General said. He began to cough, and it took him a long time to catch his breath. He’d done this, Hank remembered, at the party. This wasn’t quite as bad. Hank began to rise to help him, but Dudakov raised a hand for him to stop. The old man made his own way to an ornate love seat striped in gold and purple and plopped down on it. He wasn’t a good match for it—you might as well put a frog on a velvet cushion, Hank thought—but sitting down seemed to help him. Borzov took a couple of deep breaths and began again.

“We are alone. I am not going to have you beaten or shot. Besides—”

“You have my son.”

The General smiled. “I have your son. We must talk about what you have done and what you are going to do.”

Hank clasped his hands together in front of him, realized that was weak body language, and let them go. He wished uselessly that Ainley were here. Still, he wasn’t as worried as he might have been. As long as they were still talking, he knew everything would be all right.

Borzov looked at the Senator with disdain. It was an unfortunate fact of his calling that while the weak were the easiest tools to obtain, they were the most difficult to work with. With a whole man, a man with a mind and a soul and convictions (the General’s Presidential candidate, for instance), no task was too great. The Senator’s mind, if he had one, had been buried under a life of ease and unearned power. His soul contained only arrogance and lust. His only conviction was that the arrogance and lust should not be left unsatisfied.

Even the Senator’s concern for his son, the General could see, was a vestigial thing at best. Oh, he was willing to believe that the Senator would prefer that the boy live. But, Borzov believed, the Senator showed outrage because The Public would
expect
him to show outrage, and fear because it would
expect
him to show fear.

In truth, it was Borzov who was afraid. He was a dying man in a wearing business. His mind and soul and convictions had been devoted to the service of his country, and that service was incomplete. Its completion depended in large part on the Senator. The Senator had been saved for just this occasion. And now, on the eve of fruition, Van Horn had done something unexpected. Worse, hostile. To be sure, weak tools often twisted in the hands of the craftsman, but Borzov was the Guild Master of this art. He should not be taken by surprise by such a one as Senator Van Horn.