The Mark of the Assassin (39 page)
He ran down the hill to M Street and crossed Key Bridge. Wind gusted high on the bridge and made rippled patterns on the surface of the river below. It was like two different rivers. To Michael’s right a wild river stretched northward into the distance. To his left lay the waterfront of Washington: the Harbor Place complex, the Watergate, the Kennedy Center beyond. Reaching the Virginia side of the river, he looked over his shoulder for any sign of surveillance. A thinly built man in a Georgetown baseball hat was a hundred yards behind him.
Michael put his head down and ran faster, past Roosevelt Island, through the grass along the George Washington Parkway. He climbed up onto the Memorial Bridge and looked over his shoulder down the parkway. The man with the Georgetown cap was still there. Michael stopped and stretched, looking down from the bridge at the footpath below. The hatted man continued running south along the river, toward National Airport. Michael stood up and resumed running.
During the next twenty minutes he saw six men with caps and three men he thought might be October. He was jittery, he knew. He ran hard the rest of the way back to Georgetown. He stopped in Booeymongers, a sandwich shop popular with students from the university, and ordered a coffee to go. He sipped it as he walked along N Street and let himself into the house. He showered and changed and went out. He telephoned Elizabeth at the office from his car.
“I’m going to Langley,” he said. “I have a little housekeeping I need to take care of.” There were a few seconds of silence on the line, and Michael said, “Don’t worry, Elizabeth. I wouldn’t miss this afternoon for anything in the world.”
“Thank you, Michael.”
“See you in a couple of hours.”
Michael crossed Key Bridge once more and turned onto the George Washington Parkway. He had made this drive thousands of times before, but now, as he headed to Langley to clean out his desk, he saw it all as if for the first time. There were giant poplars, tributaries leaking from the rocky hills of Virginia, sheer bluffs overlooking the Potomac.
At the front entrance the guard punched in Michael’s identification, frowned, and told him to pass. Michael felt like a leper as he walked through the harshly lit corridors toward the CTC. No one said a word to him; no one looked in his direction. Intelligence services are nothing if not highly organized cliques. When one member contracts a disease, the others stay away, lest they catch it too.
The bull pen was quiet as Michael stepped through the door and walked to his desk. For an hour he picked through the contents of his drawers, separating the personal from the official. A week earlier he had been fêted because of his actions at Heathrow. Now he felt like the kicker who had just missed a game-winning field goal. Every once in a while someone would come forward, lay a hand on his shoulder, and move quickly away. But no one spoke to him.
As he was leaving, Adrian Carter poked his head into the bull pen and gestured for Michael to come into his office. He handed Michael a gift-wrapped box.
“I thought it was only a suspension pending an inquiry,” Michael said, accepting the package.
“It is, but I wanted to give you this anyway,” Carter said. His drooping eyes made him look more morose than ever. “Open it at home, though. Some people around here might not understand the humor.”
Michael shook his hand. “Thanks for everything, Adrian. See you around.”
“Yeah,” Carter said. “And Michael, take care of yourself.”
Michael walked outside and found his car in the parking lot. He tossed Carter’s gift in the trunk, climbed inside, and drove off. Passing through the gates, he wondered if he would ever be back again.
Michael met Elizabeth at the Georgetown University Medical Center. He left the Jaguar with the valet and took the elevator to the doctor’s office. When he walked into the waiting room there was no sign of Elizabeth. For an instant he had the sinking feeling that he had missed the appointment, but a moment later she walked through the door, clutching her briefcases, and kissed him on the cheek.
A nurse showed them to the examination room and left a gown on the table. Elizabeth unbuttoned her blouse and skirt. She looked up and noticed Michael staring at her.
“Close your eyes.”
“Actually, I was thinking about locking the door.”
“Animal.”
“Thank you.”
Elizabeth finished undressing, slipped into the gown, and sat down on the examination table. Michael was fooling with the knobs of the sonogram machine.
“Would you knock that off?”
“Sorry, just a little nervous.”
The doctor came into the room. He reminded Michael of Carter: sleepy, disheveled, a look of perpetual boredom on his face. He wrinkled his face as he read Elizabeth’s chart, as though torn between the mahi mahi and the grilled salmon.
“The beta count looks very good,” he said. “In fact, it’s a little high. Why don’t we have a look with the sonogram.”
He raised Elizabeth’s gown and covered her abdomen with a lubricating jelly. Then he pressed the wand of the sonogram against her skin and began moving it back and forth.
“There it is,” he said, smiling for the first time. “That, ladies and gentlemen, is a very nice-looking egg sac.”
Elizabeth was beaming. She reached out for Michael and grasped his hand tightly.
The doctor manipulated the wand for another moment. “And here is a second very nice-looking egg sac.”
Michael said, “Oh, God.”
The doctor shut down the machine. “Get dressed and meet me in my office. We need to talk about a few things. And by the way, congratulations.”
“At least we won’t need to buy a bigger house,” Michael said, trailing Elizabeth upstairs to the bedroom. “I always thought a six-bedroom Georgetown Federal was too big for just the two of us.”
“Michael, stop talking like that. I’m forty years old. I’m beyond high risk. A lot of things could go wrong.” She lay down on the bed. “I’m starving.”
Michael lay beside her. “I can’t get the image of you covered with lubricant out of my mind.”
She kissed him. “Go away. You heard the doctor. I need to stay off my feet and rest for a few days. I’m at my most vulnerable right now.”
He kissed her again. “I won’t argue with that.”
“Go downstairs and make me a sandwich.”
He climbed off the bed and went down to the kitchen. He made Elizabeth a sandwich of turkey and Swiss cheese and poured her a glass of orange juice. He placed the sandwich and drink on a tray and carried it upstairs to her.
“I think I could get used to this.” She took a bite of the sandwich. “How was it at work today?”
“I’ve obviously been declared an untouchable.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Who gave you that?” she asked, gesturing at the gift-wrapped box.
“Carter.”
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“I thought I could live without another set of Cross pens.”
“Gimme,” she said, tearing at the wrapping while she chewed an enormous bite of the sandwich. Beneath the wrapping paper was a rectangular box, and inside the box was a sheath of documents stamped MOST SECRET.
Elizabeth said, “Michael, I think you need to take a look at this.”
She thrust it at Michael, and he flipped through the pages quickly.
“What is it?”
He looked up at her.
“It’s the CIA case file on a KGB assassin code-named October.”
38
THE U.S.-CANADIAN BORDER
Delaroche waited for first light. He had found a secluded spot in the woods, well off the highway south of Montreal, about three miles from the border. Astrid slept next to him in the back of the Range Rover beneath a heavy woolen blanket, body hunched against the cold. She had begged Delaroche to run the heater from time to time, but he refused because he wanted silence. He touched her hands as she slept. They were like ice.
At six-thirty he rose, poured coffee from a thermos flask, and made a large bowl of oatmeal. Astrid came out ten minutes later, swaddled in a down parka and fleece hat. “Give me some of that coffee, Jean-Paul,” she said, taking the oatmeal and finishing the rest.
Delaroche placed their supplies into a pair of small backpacks. He gave the lighter one to Astrid and shouldered the other himself. He placed the Beretta in the front waistband of his trousers. He quickly went through the vehicle from end to end to make certain they had left nothing that might identify them. The Range Rover would be left behind; another was supposed to be waiting on the American side of the border.
They walked for an hour through the mountain ridges above Lake Champlain. They could have made the crossing by staying to the frozen lakeshore, but Delaroche deemed it too exposed. Two pairs of snowshoes had been left in the Range Rover, but Delaroche thought it was best to use only hiking boots since the ground lay beneath only a few inches of hard frozen snow. Astrid struggled up and down the hillsides and through the dense trees. She was slightly awkward and ungainly in the best of circumstances; her long body was thoroughly unsuited to the rigors of winter mountain hiking. Once, she slipped down a hillside and came to rest flat on her back with her legs propped against a tree.
Delaroche was not certain exactly when they left Canada and entered the United States. There was no border demarcation, no fence, no visible electronic surveillance of any kind. His employers had selected the spot well. Delaroche remembered a night a long time ago, when as a young boy he had crossed into the West from Czechoslovakia to Austria accompanied by two KGB agents. He remembered the warm night, arc lights and razor wire, the thick scent of manure on the air. He remembered raising his gun and shooting his escorts. Even now, walking through the freezing Vermont morning, he closed his eyes at the thought of it, his first assassinations.
He had been acting on orders from Vladimir. To describe Vladimir as his case officer would be an understatement. Vladimir was his world. Vladimir was everything to Delaroche—his teacher, his priest, his tormentor, his father. He taught him to read and to write. He taught him language and history. He taught him tradecraft and killing. When it was time to go to the West, Vladimir handed Delaroche to Arbatov the way a parent entrusts a child to a relative. Vladimir’s last order was to kill the escorts. The act instilled something very important in Delaroche: He would never trust anyone, especially someone from his own service. When he was older he realized that was exactly what Vladimir had intended.
The terrain softened as they came down from the ridge. Delaroche, using the map and a compass, guided them to the outskirts of a village called Highgate Springs, two miles south of the border. The second Range Rover was waiting for them, parked in a stand of pine bordering a snow-covered cornfield. Delaroche placed the gear in the back, and they climbed inside. This time the engine started on the first try.
Delaroche drove carefully along the icy two-lane road. Astrid, exhausted from the hike, immediately fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. Forty minutes later Delaroche came to Interstate 89 and headed south.
39
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Why would Adrian lie to you about the existence of October?”
Elizabeth’s question sounded strange to Michael. It was like a child asking about sex for the first time. Their new openness was alien to him, and he felt awkward discussing agency matters candidly with his wife. Still, he did enjoy it. Elizabeth, with her lawyer’s intellect and secretive nature, would have made a good intelligence officer if she had not chosen the law.
“All intelligence services run on the concept of need to know. The argument could be made that I had no need to know about October’s existence, and therefore I was never told of it.”
“But, Michael, he murdered Sarah in front of your eyes. If anyone should be allowed to see what the Agency had on him, it’s you.”
“Good point, but information is kept from intelligence officers all the time for all kinds of different reasons.”
“The Soviet Union has been dead and buried for ages. Why would his file still be so restricted?”
“We give up our dead slowly in the intelligence community, Elizabeth. There’s nothing an intelligence service likes more than a good pile of useless secrets.”
“Maybe someone wanted it restricted.”
“I’ve considered that possibility.”
Michael stopped in front of the
Washington Post
building on 15th Street. Tom Logan, Susanna Dayton’s editor, had asked to meet with Elizabeth. Michael had planned to wait in the car but now said, “Mind if I tag along?”
Washington Post
building on 15th Street. Tom Logan, Susanna Dayton’s editor, had asked to meet with Elizabeth. Michael had planned to wait in the car but now said, “Mind if I tag along?”
“Not at all, but we have to hurry. We’re late.”
“Where are you supposed to meet him?”
“In his office. Why?”
“I’m just not crazy about enclosed places, that’s all.”
“Michael, this isn’t East Berlin. Cut it out.”
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