Legends (55 page)

Quest snickered bitterly. “That business of Lincoln claiming to have been at the battle of Fredericksburg it was a brilliant piece of theater. It had us all fooled the shrink, me, the committee that met from time to time to review the situation, to decide whether to terminate your contract or your life. We all assumed that Martin Odum was off his rocker. Teach me to give someone the benefit of the doubt.”

Nursing his whisky, Dante shrugged a shoulder. “If it’s any consolation, Lincoln was ax the battle of Fredericksburg.”

Quest raised an eyebrow; she didn’t appreciate having her leg pulled. “Why’d you need to see me, Dante? What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until you had a chance to come down to Langley?”

“We’ve taken out life insurance, we’ve taped what you don’t want the world to know the Prigorodnaia operation; how you provided the keys to Kastners safe house so the Oligarktis people could break in and murder him; how you told them about Martin’s beehives, which led to the death of the Chinese girl, Minh. Add to that the sniper who tried to kill Martin in Hebron. Not to mention the Czechs who gave Martin a car and a pistol in Prague and told him to run for it. These attempts on Martin’s life had your prints all over them.”

“That’s nonsense. Knowing what I know, the last thing I would have done is charge a pistol with dummy Parabellums.”

Dante said, “How did you know the handgun was loaded with dummy Parabellums?”

Quest smudged a fingertip dabbing at the mascara on an eyelid. Dante took her failure to answer for an answer. “Listen up, Fred, if any one of us dies of anything but old age, the tapes will be duplicated and distributed to every member of the Congressional Oversight Subcommittee, also to selected journalists in the liberal press who report on your occasional fumbles.”

“You’re bluffing.”

Dante raised his chin and looked Quest in the eye. “If you think that, all you need to do is call our bluff.”

“Listen, Dante, we all came of age in the cold war. We all fought the good fight. I’m sure we can work something out.”

“There’s one more item on our agenda. We held a meeting to decide whether to terminate your life or your career. Career won, two to one. Within one week we want to read in the newspapers that the legendary Crystal Quest, the first woman Deputy Director of Operations, a veteran of thirty-two years of loyal and masterful service to the Central Intelligence Agency, has been put out to pasture.”

Sucked against her will into Dante’s trinity, Quest asked, “Who was the one who voted to terminate my life?”

“Why, Martin, of course, though being the more squeamish of the three, he wanted me or Lincoln to make the hit.” Dante smiled pleasantly. “Some people forgive but don’t forget. Martin’s the opposite he forgets but doesn’t forgive.”

“What does he forget?”

“Whether Martin Odum is a legend or the real him.”

“It’s the original him, the first legend. You worked for Army Intelligence “

“You mean, Martin worked for Army Intelligence.”

Quest nodded carefully. “Martin’s specialty was East European dissidents. I stumbled across a paper he published in the Army

Intelligence Quarterly identifying two veins of dissidence: the anticommunists, who wanted to do away with communism altogether, and the pro-communists, who wanted to purge communism of Stalinism and reform the system. His article, which turned out to be far sighted, predicted that in the end the pro-communists were more likely to have an impact on East Europe and, ultimately, the Soviet Union itself, than the anticommunists. I remember… Martin citing the trial of Pavel Slansky in Prague, claiming he was the precursor of the reformers who came after him, Dubcek in Czechoslovakia, eventually Gorbachev in the Soviet Union.”

“And you lured him away from Army Intelligence into the CIA?”

“The Legend Committee worked up a cover for him using his real name and as much of his actual background as they could. He’d lived in Pennsylvania until his father moved the family to Brooklyn. Martin was something like eight at the time. He was raised on Eastern Parkway, he went to PS 167, Crown Heights was his stamping ground, he even had a school chum whose father owned a Chinese restaurant on Albany Avenue. When we discovered he could handle explosives, for a while we had him making letter bombs or rigging portable phones to explode from a distance. Martin was the last agent I personally ran before they kicked me upstairs to run the officers who run the agents. The Odum we concocted wasn’t a detective. That’s something you… that’s something Martin added to the cover story when his Company career came to an end.” Quest, shaken, began gnawing on a chip of ice.

Dante tucked a ten dollar bill under the ashtray and stood up. “I’ll pass all this on to Martin if I see him. I suspect he’ll be relieved.”

Quest looked up at Dante. “It was you who shot the Oligarkb.”

“Christsake, Fred.”

“I know it was you, Dante. The kill had your M.O. on it.”

Dante laughed lightly, his shoulders shuddering with pleasure. “You’re losing your touch, Fred. I have nothing to gain by lying to you it was Lincoln who made the hit on the Oligarkh. Newspaper accounts said the police couldn’t identify the bullet or the murder weapon, which means Lincoln must have used that old Civil War sniper rifle you found for him when you were working up the Dittmann legend. Jesus, that’s really humorous. Martin or I wouldn’t know how to load the damn thing.”

Snickering in satisfaction, Dante headed for the front of the restaurant. The weight lifter came off the kitchen doors and started after him. The prize-fighter edged around the bar to block his path. Tsou Xing called in a high pitched voice, “No violence inside, all-light.”

Dante’s Irish temper flared. Glancing over his shoulder at Quest, he said, very softly, “Am I to understand that you’ll be calling our bluff, Fred?”

Quest locked eyes with Dante, then looked away and took a deep breath and wagged a forefinger once. The two flunkies from the Office of Security stopped in their tracks. Dante nodded as if he were digesting a momentous piece of information, something that could transform his legend and add to its longevity. Humming under his breath one of Lincoln’s favorite tunes, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, he pushed through the door into the blinding sunlight.

Connoisseurs of the literary spy novel have elevated Robert Littell to the genre’s highest ranks, and Tom Clancy wrote that “if Robert Littell didn’t invent the spy novel, he should have.” Littell’s novels include the New York Times bestseller The Company (film rights sold to Sony-Columbia), The Defection ofA.J. Lewinter, The Once and Future Spy, The Amateur, The Sisters, The Debriefing, and An Agent in Place. A former Newsweek journalist, Littell is an American who makes his home in France.