Deceptions (11 page)

“Lovely.” Mary sighed and poured more champagne. “Now I can truly enjoy it.”

For different reasons, they were both in a better mood than they had been yesterday. Earlier, checking out each other’s newly
disguised appearance for the first time, they had laughed.

“I’d never recognize you,” Mary had said. “Would you know me?”

“I’m not sure I’d want to with all that scrambled hair.”

She had instantly snatched off her curly wig and disappeared into the bathroom. When she returned, her own hair was brushed
out, straight and shining against her face.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he had said.

“That shows how much you know about women.”

After dinner they found some brandy in the minibar and settled down with it.

“How did you spend your day?” Gianni asked.

“Like you told me to spend it. Taking care of my disguise, staying inconspicuous, and not contacting anyone I know.” She looked
at Gianni over her drink. “What about you? Were you able to do us any good?”

“I hope so,” he said and told her about his meeting with Angie and finally prying loose the fact that his father was alive
and living in Pittsburgh under another name.

“Which means what?”

“That I go to Pittsburgh tomorrow morning.”

“Me, too?”

“There’s no point. You can’t really help me there.”

“I just feel so darn useless.”

“You’ll get your turn,” Gianni said. He had no way of knowing she had already started on it.

For the second night in a row they lay in their separate beds in the dark. It was late but neither of them was asleep.

“Isn’t this kind of crazy?” she said.

Gianni didn’t have to ask
what
was crazy. He knew.

“How long ago did your wife die?”

“About six months.”

“Was she sick very long?”

“Yeah.”

“When are you going to bury her?”

Gianni stayed silent on that one. Was he doing something wrong? Suddenly feeling defensive, he resented Mary Yung’s intrusion.

“I’m not a dog in the street,” she said through the dark.

“I never said you were.”

“You don’t have to say it.”

He took a deep breath. “Leave it alone, Mary.”

“I can’t. I may have to die with you.”

“So?”

“I don’t want to die with someone who doesn’t even know who I am.”

“Then for God’s sake tell me who you are,” said Gianni. “Then, if we don’t die, maybe we can at least go to sleep.”

She allowed herself several moments to think it through. When she spoke, her voice was flat, toneless.

“I’m a liar and schemer with a soul of a drifter,” she said. “I’m an exiled alien who’s never had a home. My only friend is
a starving, dirty-faced, three-year-old gook with shitted pants who lives inside my chest. Someday, if I’m lucky enough and
find the courage, I’ll cut both our throats.”

The room enclosed them, silent and dark.

“Now you know me,” she said.

Gianni didn’t believe her for a minute.

P
ETER
W
ALTERS TOOK
a morning flight from Naples to the Spanish border city of Andorra, picked up a rental car, and drove high into the lush
summer green of the Pyrenees.

He parked at the edge of a fivc-thousand-foot elevation where he had a clear view of the road winding up toward him and any
traffic that might be approaching on it.

After about twenty minutes, a gray Mercedes rounded a curve a few hundred feet below and stopped at a turnoff. Peter sat there
another few minutes and watched a few cars and trucks pass in both directions. Then he slowly circled down and eased alongside
Tommy Cortlandt, his company connection.

Cortlandt slid into Peter’s car, a tall, slim man with fair hair that appeared to be leaving him by the hour.

He smiled. “Good to see you, Charlie.”

They met perhaps nine or ten times a year, and after eight years the brief exchange had become their standard greeting. Cortlandt
always addressed Peter as Charlie because that was his signature on coded communications, and his assorted aliases meant nothing.
As for Cortlandt’s name, that was old Boston and very much his own. It was his alleged duties as an embassy trade attache
in Brussels that was his cover for his real work there as CIA chief of station. Cortlandt was Peter’s only live contact with
the Company, but even he had no idea who Peter really was, where he lived, or what he did there.

“Nice clean job you did in Zagreb,” said Cortlandt, and handed Peter the plain, sealed envelope that contained his pay in
deutsche marks. “Congratulations.”

Peter stuffed the envelope into his pocket without opening it. “Not so clean. Sirens went off that I didn’t even know about
and never cut.”

“It didn’t hurt anything.”

“No? Try telling that to the poor bastards I had to waste just getting my ass out of there.”

Cortlandt was silent.

“The thing was, I should have known. It was nothing but carelessness.”

“It happens.”

“Not to me.”

Cortlandt looked at him with his pale New England eyes. “You can’t be that different from the rest of us. Even you are allowed
a mistake once in a while.”

“Not when nine or ten people end up dying of it.”

Peter stared off at the mountains fading into the distance. They started green, went blue-purple, then ended a misty gray
at the horizon.

Cortlandt touched his arm and brought him back.

“There’s some news,” he said. “We’re doing Abu Homaidi.”

Peter looked at the COS and waited. A small, cold action began somewhere inside him.

“That last horror in Amsterdam finally did it,” said Cortlandt. “Our consul’s whole family. His three little kids and his
wife. And not enough left to mop off the sidewalk.”

“That’s the fourth. I told you right after the first how it would be. You should have taken the sonofabitch out then.”

“It wasn’t that simple, Charlie. It still isn’t.”

“Bullshit! In the meantime, between the TWA flight and the other bombings, you’ve got almost three hundred dead that could
have still been walking around.”

“That’s unfair.”

Peter had to work to put down his anger. The effort alone made him sweat. And this sort of thing was getting worse, not better.

“We don’t operate in a vacuum,” said Tommy Cortlandt quietly. “Remember. At first we weren’t even sure it
was
Homaidi. Then the peace talks were going on and we couldn’t risk fouling them up. And after that there was some hope of Syria
handing him over for trial.”

“Does all this mean I’m getting him?” Peter asked.

“Do you want him?”

“You kidding? Someone like that, it’s why I’m in this shit to begin with.”

“As I said, it’s still not that simple. So before we decide, let’s talk.”

“What’s there to talk about? He needs to be hit, so I’ll hit him. The guy’s a real crazy.”

Cortlandt gazed at Peter Walters. He seemed to be way ahead somewhere and thinking of other things.

“That’s just the point,” he said. “Homaidi’s far from a crazy. He’s a brilliant fanatic with a cause he’s willing to kill
and die for. He’s never alone. He has better security than most heads of state. And he’s already cost us two good men who
were just as gung ho as you for a go at him.”

“You mean I’m the
third
choice for this?”

“You might not even be that. I haven’t decided yet.”

“You really know how to build up a guy’s confidence.”

“The first two weren’t mine. They came from other stations. You were my ace in the hole. I didn’t want to use you unless I
had to.”

“Why the devil not?”

“Pure self-interest. Homaidi’s such a dangerous longshot, I didn’t want to risk losing my best.”

Cortlandt leaned toward the gunman, studying him, intrud
ing into every corner with his eyes. “And also because I know you’ve got a wife and little boy who need you even more than
I do.”

Peter sat there with it, unmoving. A light breeze came off the Pyrenees and he breathed it in, but its scent was that of a
freshly opened grave.

When he spoke, his voice was flat. “How long have you known?”

“Almost as long as I’ve known you. Which makes it close to eight years. I could never entirely trust a man I knew nothing
about, a man who had no human ties. So I stuck a beeper on your car when we met one day near Rome, and followed you back to
Positano.”

Tommy paused. “You needn’t worry. That was solely for my own needs. No one else has ever known.”

Peter just stared at him, his eyes were cold, chipped glass.

“It’s been all these years,” said Cortlandt. “If I meant you harm, it would have happened a long time ago.”

“What else do you know?”

“Your real name.”

“Say it for me.”

“Vittorio Battaglia.”

Just hearing it from someone else’s mouth after nine years brought a chill.

“How did you find out?”

“I lifted a set of prints from a car door and checked them when I was in Washington. You don’t have to worry about that, either.
I hit the computer buttons myself. No one else saw.”

Peter’s automatic was suddenly in his hand, its muzzle against Cortlandt’s throat.

“If no one else saw it,” he said coldly, “why shouldn’t I do you right now and not have to worry at all?”

If Cortlandt showed any expression, it was one of total absorption in Peter Walters’ question. “You mean you want reasons?”

“Damn right.”

“Because for one thing,” said Cortlandt, “you know by now I’m your friend, and it’s not your nature to shoot friends.”

“If I feel my wife and son’s lives are threatened, I can change my nature and find another friend.”

“I don’t believe you really think I’d betray you and your family.”

“Maybe not willingly. But when our balls are in a wringer, we’d all happily sell our own mothers.” Peter’s gun was tight against
Tommy’s throat. “Go on.”

“Well, you do have to be wondering why I’d suddenly be idiot enough to tell you all this after eight years of silence. You
know there has to be a reason, and you’re certainly not going to do me without hearing what it is.”

Something stirred in the car, and Peter lowered his automatic. He had been watching Tommy’s eyes all the way, and they hadn’t
blinked once.

“I guess I’m ready to hear.”

“It happened the other day,” said Cortlandt. “It was in one of those bulletins Interpol is always circulating to consulates,
embassies, and police stations. It said Vittorio Battaglia was wanted by the FBI on assorted counts of murder and kidnapping.”

He paused, waiting for Peter Walters to react, to say something. But Peter just sat gazing off somewhere, with the automatic
in his lap.

“There was a picture, too,” said the COS. “But it didn’t look anything like the way you look now. No one could ever spot you
from it.”

Peter nodded slowly, somewhat tiredly. “Did it say why they suddenly wanted me after nine years?”

“No.”

Peter was silent. He was looking off at the mountains again, as if everything would be explained for him there if he just
stared long and hard enough.

“Understand,” said Thomas Cortlandt III. “I’m only telling you all this so you’ll know, be warned and forearmed. For me, it
doesn’t mean beans. There’s nothing new here for me. I’ve known your history, your work with
la famiglia,
from the day we met. Those were your credentials, as far as I was concerned. What gave you value to the Company. And you’ve
never failed or disappointed me.”

Tommy smiled. “I even liked what you said when I asked
why you wanted to get into all this hellish stuff for us. You remember that?”

Peter silently stayed with the mountains.

“You said it was to help your poor old Guinea grandpa finally make his claw marks on Mount Rushmore. Then you grinned like
it was some kind of joke. Only I knew it wasn’t.”

Peter turned, and he and Tommy considered each other in a curious way.

“My grandpa died about a year before I ever told you that.”

“My condolences. But Mount Rushmore’s still alive, and you’re still making some of the best claw marks I’ve ever seen.”

Peter felt himself off somewhere, watching them both from some distant, unfamiliar place.

“What about Abu Homaidi?” he asked.

“He’s yours, of course. He always was. But, for all our sakes, including God’s and grandpa’s… please. Be careful.”

Vittorio Battaglia’s grandfather, having been newly resurrected, flew all the way home with him.

Vincenzo Battaglia had been a broad, low man with thick eyebrows and a dark face burned brown by the sun and bruised by hurt.
Still, he’d had a softness in his eyes and an abiding love for America in his heart.

Young Vittorio saw him last in St. Vincent’s Hospital. His hands and face were yellow. He had cancer of the liver. He also
had a few dozen tiny American flags he had brought from home and arranged in plastic cups around his hospital room. He died
on a rainy day in autumn, and Vittorio planted six of the little flags on his grave. Sometimes, in his dreams, Peter Walters
was still planting them.

He touched his grandfather through the flags. They kept the old man alive for him. At times, it seemed, they kept him alive
as well.

He said nothing to Peggy about the Interpol bulletin.

She was living with enough fear.

T
HE BEST, THE
most erotic dreams were sometimes like that. Your hands going over soft, pliant flesh. A shadowy, sweetly scented body pressed
close. The sounds of her breathing a warm, whispered promise in your ear.

As she appeared to sleep.

Then she erupted against him and Henry Durning knew it was no dream. Nor did he want it to be. What he wanted was for it to
be exactly what it was, with every part of it real, with the fevers of his lust real, and the brandy in the maze of his stomach,
and the pressure in his chest, and the straining of her every fiber as she fought him… all real.

And Lord, how she did fight.