Checkpoint Charlie (12 page)

*   *   *

T
HE RESULTS
of his investigations seemed to satisfy Foran. His lawyers drew up the most ironclad contract I'd ever seen. Not a single item of Arizona Charter Company equipment was to be moved off its present airfield location until every penny of the loan had been paid back. The only thing the contract didn't include was the vigorish — the actual usurious interest rate: on paper we had an above-board agreement at 16% annual interest with a foreclosure date six weeks from the date of signatures.

The money was in the form of a bank cashier's check and I endorsed it over to the Government in exchange for the deed to all outstanding stock in the Arizona Charter Company. I flew back from Washington to Tucson with the deed and stock certificates in an attaché case chained to my wrist. Twelve hours later they were in a safe deposit box to which Foran had the second key, so that if I skipped out without paying, he would have possession of the documents and stock certificates. If I didn't repay him within forty days he would be the legal owner of the company and all its assets.

We shook hands at the bank and I departed for the airport, whence I flew to Phoenix and rented a car. By midnight I was on the desert airfield that belonged to me. I dismissed the night watchman and took over the premises. As soon as I was alone I began setting the demolition charges.

There was nobody to prevent my destroying my own property. I had canceled all the insurance policies the day before, so that I was perpetrating no fraud. It was my own property: I was free to do whatever I pleased with it.

The explosions would have thrilled any twelve-year-old war movie fan. When the debris settled I drove to the hospital to say goodbye to Eddie and Margaret.

Eddie's eyes twinkled. “Mainly I regret he'll never know I had anything to do with it.”

“Keep it that way. If he ever found out he'd finish you.”

“I know. I'm not that much of a twit — not any more.”

Margaret said, “What will happen to Foran?”

“Nothing pleasant,” I said. “It can't have been his own money, not all of it. He's not that rich. He must have laid off a good part of the loan on his Mob associates. At least a million dollars, I'd guess. When he doesn't pay them back they'll go after him the way he went after Eddie.”

Then I smiled. “And that, you know, is what they call justice.”

*   *   *

Challenge
for Charlie

T
HIS TOOK PLACE
several years ago; I must make that clear.

Normally Helsinki is one of my favorite towns but this time I was reluctant to return there because the job was the toughest one Myerson had yet put into my ample lap and the adversary was Mikhail Yaskov, who was — bar one — the best in the business.

Yaskov and I had crossed paths obliquely several times down through the Cold War desades but I had never been sent head-to-head against him before and the truth is I was not eager to face this assignment, although — vanity being what it is — I believed I probably could best him. “Probably” is not a word that gets much of a workout in my lexicon; usually I know I can win before I start playing the game; but with Yaskov I'd be dead if I became overconfident.

The job was simple on the face of it: straightforward. As usual the assignment had come to our section because of the odd politics of international espionage which sometimes can cause simple jobs to become sensitive ones. If it's a job that would embarrass anybody then it usually gets shoveled into our department.

In this case I was America's friendly right hand, extended to a country that needed assistance not because of any lack of skill or courage (the Finns excel in cleverness and toughness) but because of a fine delicacy of politics.

Finland is virtually the only country to have fought a war with Russia in modern times and not lost it. Finland is the only country in Europe that fought against the Red Army in World War II and did not get occupied by the Russians as a result. Finland is the only country in Europe that has repaid, to the penny, the postwar reconstruction loans proffered by the Western powers. Yes, I like the Finns.

They share a border with the Soviet Union. The world being what it is, they make a few concessions to the Russians by way of trade agreements and the like. Soviet-made cars are sold in Finland, for example, although few Finns choose to drive them; the Finns don't admit it loudly in public but they loathe the Russians and if you want a clout in the face a good way to earn one is to state within a Finn's earshot that Finland is within the Soviet sphere of influence. It emphatically is not; Finland is neither a Communist country nor an intimidated one. It is, however, a nation of realists and while it does not bow obsequiously to the Soviets, neither does it go out of its way rudely to offend them. It treads a middle ground between hostility and friendship, the object being the preservation of Finnish independence rather than the influencing of power blocs. Finland practices true and admirable neutrality.

Mikhail Yaskov was an old fashioned master spy. He had run strings of agents everywhere in the West — usually with brilliant success. The only American agents I knew of who'd come level against him were Miles Kendig, who was said to be dead now, and my colleague Joe Cutter, who by then was running our operations out in the Far East. I was the only one left in Langley who had a prayer of besting Yaskov so I was the one picked to fly to Finland.

The KGB had sent Yaskov into Helsinki because of chronic failures in the Soviet espionage network there. The Finns were too shrewd for most of the Russian colonels who showed up at the Soviet Embassy in ill-fitting Moscow serge disguised as chauffeurs of Second Secretaries or Trade Mission delegates. The apparatus was a shambles and the Organs in Moscow had dispatched Yaskov to take charge in Helsinki, as if the KGB network were a musical comedy having trouble in New Haven and Yaskov were Abe Burrows sent in to doctor it up.

Yaskov was too sharp to put his foot in anything and there was no likelihood of his giving the Finns sufficient legitimate reason to deport him. If they declared him
persona non grata
in the absence of clear evidence of his perfidy, it would provoke Moscow's wrath: this Helsinki preferred to avoid.

Therefore as a gesture of good will I was flown to Helsinki to find a way to get Yaskov out of the country and keep him out — without involving the Finnish government.

It was a bloody impossible job against a bloody brilliant opponent. But I wasn't really worried. I'm the best, bar none.

*   *   *

I
N MY TIME
I have pulled off a number of cute and sometimes complicated capers and I suppose, given my physique and age, I could aptly be called a confidence man rather than a man of action. But Yaskov was not susceptible to confidence games. He wasn't a man to be fooled by elaborate tricks — he knew them all; in fact he'd invented most of them.

There really was only one way to attack him: head-on and straight up. And I had only two weapons to employ against him — his own vanity and his awareness of mortality.

*   *   *

I
MADE
the call from a public coin phone in the cavernous Stockmann department store.

Comrade Yaskov could not come to the telephone immediately. Could the caller please leave a number to be called back?

No, I could not. I would call again in an hour. Please tell Comrade Mikhail Aleksandrovitch to expect my call. Thank you.

When I called again Yaskov came to the phone and chuckled at me in his suave avuncular fashion. He had a rich deep voice and spoke excellent English with an Oxford inflection. “How good to hear your voice, Charlie. I do hope we can get together and exchange notes about the Lapland scenery. Two foreigners in a strange land and all that. Perhaps we can meet informally.”

“By all means.”

It was elementary code, designed to set up a meeting without witnesses or seconds.

I said, “Do you happen to know a fellow named Tower?”

“The Senator from Texas?”

“No. Here in Finland.”

“I see. Yes, I know of him.”

“Perhaps we could meet him tomorrow.”

“Where?”

“I don't mind, Mikhail. You pick a spot.”

“Would Tavern Number Four suit you?”

“Fine, I'll see you there.” I smiled and cradled the phone.

There was a place called the Tavern #4 but we wouldn't be there. The conversation had been designed to mislead anyone who might be eavesdropping on the call — one could depend on the Soviet Embassy's lines being tapped, possibly by several different organizations. The fellow named Tower was in fact a place — the town of Lahti, within fair commuting distance of Helsinki; the town was known for its landmark, a great high water tower that loomed on stilts above the piney landscape. The number four established the time for the meeting.

I was there at three, an hour ahead of schedule, to inspect the area and insure it hadn't been primed with spies or ambushers. My eyes don't miss much; after forty minutes I felt secure and awaited Yaskov openly in the parking lot.

It was a pleasant sunny day with a touch of autumn chill creeping south from Lapland: Lahti is hardly 100 kilometres north of Helsinki and the forest cools the air.

Precisely at four Yaskov arrived. It might have been seemly and sensible for him to drive himself, in a Soviet-built Moskvitch or Pobeda, but Yaskov was fond of his comforts and he sailed elegantly into view in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven silver Mercedes limousine. Like me he was a man who stood out in crowds anyway — he was not the sort of executive who dwelt in anonymity — and I believe The Organs must have put up with his ostentatious eccentricities on account of the excellence of his performances.

The chauffeur was, so far as I could tell, simply a chauffeur; his face did not flash any mug photos against the screen of my mind. He could have been a recent recruit or an agent whose face had not been put on file in the West but I doubted it because if the man were of any importance Yaskov would not have exposed his face to me. The chauffeur trotted around to open the limousine's back door and Yaskov emerged smiling, uncoiling himself joint by joint, a very tall lean handsome figure in Saville Row pinstripes, a Homburg tipped askew across his silver hair. His pale intense blue eyes, illuminated from within, were at once the shrewdest and kindest eyes I'd ever known and I had always attributed part of his success to those extraordinary sighted organs: I suspected they had inspired more candor from his victims than had all the drugs and torture apparatus in the Arbat and Lubianka. Yaskov could charm the Sphinx out of its secrets.

As always he carried a cane. He owned an extensive collection of them. This one was a Malacca, suitably gnarled and gleaming. The excuse was an old leg injury of some kind but he walked as gracefully as an athlete and the cane was a prop, an affectation and I suppose if necessary a weapon.

He transferred it to his left hand and gave me his quick firm handshake. “Such a pleasure to see you again. When was our last meeting, do you recall?”

“Paris, two years ago. When we were all chasing Kendig.” He remembered it as well as I did but it was a harmless amenity and we both smiled. I said, “Why don't we take my car?” — drawling it with grave insouciance: I didn't want the chauffeur around.

“Why not indeed,” Yaskov said carelessly. He made a vague sign to the grey-uniformed man, instructing him to wait by the limo, and followed me to my hired Volvo.

We drove out of town along a country road that curled gently through the forest. I made a right here, a left there. After twenty minutes — small talk between us — I pulled onto the verge and we walked across a carpet of pine needles to the edge of a crystal blue lake. Central Finland has thousands of such lakes, each as postcard beautiful as the next; with a suitable net you can scoop up your supper from the bottom — fresh-water crayfish.

There was a log, strategically placed, and I sat down on one end of it. “I'm not bugged.”

“Nor am I. Shall we go through the wretched tedium of searching each other?”

“We're both a bit long in the tooth for that kind of nonsense.”

“I agree.”

We trusted each other to that extent mainly because we were such fossils. We antedated the computer boys with their electronic gadgetry; we were the last of the tool-making men: we'd had to polish our wits rather than our mathematical aptitudes. In our decrepitude we still preferred to walk without the crutches of microphones and long lenses and calculator-cyphers. To do so would have been a confession of weakness.

He said, “You seem heavier than you were.”

“Maybe. I rarely weigh myself.”

“Don't they have physical requirements in Myerson's section?”

“For everybody but me.” I said it with a measure of pride and he picked it up; his warm eyes laughed at me.

Then he said, “I too. You know I have a serious heart condition.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“I'd have been astonished if you didn't. It is a secret only from some of my own superiors.” He laughed again, silently, and settled on the log next to me, prodding the earth with his cane.

I studied the toes of his polished cordovan shoes. “This is a bit dicey, Mikhail. You may have guessed why I've been posted here.”

“May I assume the Company wishes me out of the Finn's hair?”

“You may.”

“Well then.” He smiled gently.

I said, “You've got a villa on the Black Sea, I hear.”

“For my retirement.”

“Nice place?”

“One of the largest of them. Magnificent view. Every room is wired with quadriphonic speakers for my collection of concert recordings. It's quite an imposing place. It belonged to a Romanov.”

“It's a wonder to me how your bourgeois conceits haven't got you in trouble with your superiors in the classless state.”