The Mulberry Bush (20 page)

In Berlin at the appointed time I walked across the open space in front of the Reichstag and at the precise minute he had specified, saw Boris jog by. I followed him. He slowed down enough, timing the stoplights and running in place, so that I could keep him in sight. After a few blocks he came to a Burger King and went inside. I sauntered around the block and entered. He was still in line. I got into a different line and by the time I bought a cup of coffee and sat down with him at a tiny table for two he was halfway through a King Sundae.

We didn't exchange a word or so much as a nod. He ignored me while he finished his ice cream, wiped his lips on a napkin, and bussed his debris except for a second, clean napkin, rolled into a cylinder, which he left on the table. He left. I finished my coffee, palmed the napkin, and went outside. There I unrolled the napkin and found a flash drive. In violation of good sense and Headquarters regulations and probably the National Security Act, I went to an Internet café and read it on a public computer. It contained a list of three Cheka officers—true names and official aliases and résumés, mug shots, home addresses and cell phone numbers and
past and current foreign postings with dates. Appended were the complete texts of contact reports filed by each of the subjects after meetings with their American case officers and a sampler of the secrets they had sold to the suckers. One of the names on the list was Kirill Sergeivich Burkov.

Boris had given me what I had asked for in Helsinki—maybe. It was a fine opening move. Absent the ability to read Boris's mind there was no way to be certain and there never would be.

I booked a morning SAS flight to Washington and got home in time for dinner. As if a spell had been broken, Luz was once again the woman she used to be. When she was in the mood she was a good cook, and while we drank prosecco she cut tomatoes and mozzarella and basil for caprese and made a new kind of pasta from a recipe she had found on epicurious. com. It was delicious.

We went to bed without doing the dishes. After the lovemaking, I couldn't fall asleep. Luz had no such problem; she never did after the fifth orgasm. I went downstairs and watched
Casablanca
with the sound turned off. I wondered, as I always did, what a woman like Ilsa saw in a funnylooking dimwit like Rick. Soon after Sam played “As Time Goes By,” I switched off the TV and looked around at the paintings and sculptures and wondered again if money the friends of Alejandro had robbed from banks and collected in ransoms had been used to pay for them, and then executed them anyway. I knew the answer:
What else could it possibly be
?

At four o'clock on the dot, my cell phone vibrated. It was Tom Terhune. Amzi wanted to see me in his office at five-thirty.

On the way upstairs Tom warned me to step carefully. Amzi was in a foul mood. I took this advice seriously, though it was hard to imagine how Amzi could contrive to be any more foul than the Komodo dragon we all knew so well. I soon found out.

Rosemary pointed to Amzi's office door. Tom knocked. Amzi said “Come!” Tom opened the door and made an after-you gesture, and then withdrew.

The chairs in which Amzi's supplicants usually sat had been removed, just as they had been on that long-ago day in Moscow when he sentenced my father to the death of a thousand cuts.

Amzi said, “Thanks for the turd soup, you fucking idiot.”

I held up a traffic cop palm and said, “Hold it right there.”

He blinked. “What? Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?”

“You, you fucking bully. If you want to talk to me, keep a civil tongue in your head. If you can't do that, we're done.”

Amzi looked me up and down. “Gee willikers,” he said, “don't we got balls.”

He pressed the intercom button on his phone and said, “One chair. Tell Terhune to go back to bed.”

The secretary brought the chair.

“Please sit,” Amzi said. “With due regard to your wounded feelings and watching my language, I want to discuss this material you brought back from Berlin. Would you find the word
bizarre
objectionable?”

“No. Puzzling.”

“You are familiar with the contents of this particular flash drive?”

“I read it. But all that's in the contact report.”

“So it is. That's why we're having this chat. If I may, I just want to confirm that you actually inserted the flash drive into a computer in an Internet café in Berlin and read its classified contents on that screen while a roomful of strangers in a strange land read it over your shoulder. Have I got that right?”

“Yes, just as I reported.”

“Ah-ha. May I ask why the obscenity you did a thing like that?”

“Curiosity.”

“You're aware what curiosity did for the cat?”

I said, “Amzi, I'm just guessing here, but I suspect you've got a problem with my report. Maybe if you come right out and tell me what it is, I might be able to help you.”

Amzi said, “Let me explain. There are two complementary problems. The first is that you made an obscenity shambles of mandatory procedure by doing the stupid obscenity thing you did in an Internet café, and number two, by carrying the flash drive home in the toe of your obscenity shoe or you concealed it instead of securely pouching it home and cabling your contact report from the Berlin station. As a result I had to wait an entire weekend to know how completely you had obscenitied up. Does that answer your question?”

I nodded.

He said, “Do you have anything to say to me that might make me feel better?”

“I doubt it.”

“Do you and your Russian friend the modern major general expect us to believe this fairy tale?”

I said, “It's usually a good idea to take everything that comes out of Moscow with a grain of salt. But there is a chance this information is authentic.”

“Did you recognize any of the names on the list?”

“One name I recognized. The others, no.”

“Did it occur to you that they might be telling us who supposedly works for us because they want to get rid of the people named?”

“Why wouldn't they just get rid of them?”

“Maybe because they want us to think these guys are ringers.”

“
What
?” I said. “Amzi, you've lost me.”

He studied my face as if he saw in it something only he could see, then spun around in his desk chair and looked out the window. The sun was coming up. He watched the pinks and golds deepen.

“Nice sunrise,” he said. “What I want you to do, if you're still working for us …”

Still working for us?

“… is go back to Bogotá and recruit Kirill the Well Hung.”

“That wouldn't be redundant if he already works for us?”

“If it's redundant he'll just think he knows something you don't.”

“And then?”

“Force some money on him and thumbprint him and develop the relationship as only you can. Find out what he knows about Boris and about the guys on the list.”

I said, “What about Dwayne?”

“Dwayne has been mollified. He understands the underlying reasons for what we're doing. He is now your best friend in Bogotá. If you need operational money or a Stinger missile or anything like that, he's your man. But make nice. He's still a little bruised.”

“When do I leave?”

“Yesterday would have been good. You'll be there for a while, so if you want to take your wife with you, that's fine. We'll even pay for her ticket.”

As he spoke he went on admiring the sunrise. It was even more dramatic now—J. M. W. Turner might have painted it.

Amzi said, “If you do take Luz I'd think twice before introducing her to the target. But that's up to you.”

He spun around in his chair and silently studied the sunrise.

“We're done,” he said, with his back still turned to me.

I had no idea what this encounter was all about. No doubt that was the whole idea.

That evening I broke the news of my imminent departure to Luz. Did she want to come with me? You bet she did. She was delighted with the prospect of a holiday in Colombia. She had always wanted to see the backcountry, travel up the Orinoco in a canoe. She longed to swim again in a warm and salty sea of Spanish. Diego knew people in Bogotá, friends of Alejandro. She would get on the phone with him and have him tell the right people she was coming. As for the Georgetown house, we could turn the key in the lock, set the burglar alarm, and walk away. It would be waiting for us when we returned.

When would we leave?

“Me, tomorrow,” I said. “You can follow whenever.”

“Oh, no. Whither thou goest, baby. I will not be left alone again in this hick town.”

“You'll have to use your U. S. passport. Argentineans need a visa to enter Colombia.”

Even that didn't faze her.

She spent the rest of the evening packing, cell phone at her ear all the while, talking to Diego. I stayed out of earshot by going for a long run along the C&O Canal. I tucked tubes of secret agent-strength knockout spray in both pockets of my shorts, so I could induce temporary blindness and several layers of pain in a would-be mugger. After dealing with Kirill Sergeivich and Boris and Amzi all in a single day, I was far enough gone to half hope I
would
be attacked. Maybe I could release my frustration along with the spray.

Outside customs at El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá we were met by a gray-haired man who held up a sign that read
luz.
He had intelligent eyes and from the look of him was a former athlete.

“I'm Damián, a friend of Diego's,” he said in English. “I have a car. I will drive you to your house.”

I didn't know him from Adam and neither did Luz. This was Colombia. If I had had the .45 on me I might have reached for it, but Luz put a hand on my arm. She was unconcerned. She had known what to expect. Diego again.

In English she said, “Hi, I'm Luz. Very kind of you to meet us like this. Thank you.”

“My pleasure. Really,” said Damián, drinking my wife in as if I were just some guy waiting for a taxi.

Damián, if that was his true name, looked as if he was in his fifties, the right age to have been a friend of Alejandro's. Waving me away, he picked up our bags and put them into the trunk of a gleaming black Audi S8, then held open the back door for Luz.

The house he drove us to was in Salitre, an upscale suburb where people with inherited wealth or serious drug money or both tended to live. Damián filled us in. This neighborhood was as safe as money and the right friends could make it, Damián himself lived just down the street, Simón Bolivar Park was not far away. It was a good place to run if we liked to run, or to just go for a walk and be in the presence of nature.
The house had a swimming pool and a tennis court. The owners were abroad, living in Europe for the time being, and they were happy to have someone enjoying the place and making it look occupied.

“Especially,” Damián said, looking at Luz in the rearview mirror, “the daughter of your parents. They knew your mother and father years ago, when all of us were young.”

The car in the garage, a spotless S500 Mercedes, was for our use. The wine in the wine cellar was for drinking and would be replenished by the wine merchant who came and counted the bottles once a month. A maid and a gardener, her husband, came in once a week and if we wished, would cook and serve dinner parties. Armed men from a very efficient security firm kept watch on the house at night and checked the property several times a day. The alarm system included a panic button in every room. Damián was just down the street. Call him day or night, regardless of the hour. He and his wife hoped we could join them soon for dinner.

He gave us his business card and scribbled his cell phone number on the back. He was a surgeon.

“Like Diego,” Luz said, speaking Spanish.

“We were together in medical school, and we had other interests in common.”

“Ah,” Luz said. “I thought so. You sound like a
porteño
.”

Damián smiled a sad smile. His quick eyes searched her face.

“You resemble your mother,” he said. “She was the most beautiful woman in Argentina.”

Luz touched the back of his hand with a forefinger.

While Luz unpacked I called Dwayne and left a message. Fifteen minutes later he called back and invited us to dinner that very night.

The Scogginses lived in another swank suburb called Chico. They were a study in contrasts. Dwayne was about six foot four and slow to smile. His wife, a sweet-faced smiling woman, was from Montevideo.
While Dwayne and I talked business as if listening devices had never been invented, the women went outside. They got along famously. Clearly Luz was not going to lack for chums in Bogotá.

Dwayne, too, made a friendly gesture. “Your friend Kirill Sergeivich looks like a lost soul since you vanished,” he said. “Good sign.”

Throughout dinner, eyeing Luz, he was the soul of geniality, telling comical stories about his tiny hometown in Kentucky where they hitched mules to the parking meters and played football without helmets and always married their cousins, so all the kids in town looked alike and no adulterous wife had to worry if her baby didn't resemble her husband.

After dinner Dwayne invited me into his study for a cognac—Peyrat XO. It was organic. I had never heard of it. Chiefs of station lived like pashas wherever they were and wherever they came from.

At last we talked a little business. During my absence Dwayne had kept an eye on Kirill Burkov. Naturally he had used Colombian sidewalk men. Burkov spotted them almost immediately, identifying each new team as it came on duty.

“He's good,” Dwayne said. “I called off the surveillance before we had exposed all our local gumshoes to him. By then we knew what we needed to know.”

“This guy
wants
us to know where he'll be at any given minute between nightfall and dawn,” Dwayne said. “His routine never varies. He only comes out at night. I guess he wants you to know where to look for him when you get back in town. The Russians watch the airport, so by now he probably knows you're back. So
buena suerta.
And this.”

He handed me my .45, and as a gift from the station, a new quickdraw holster—the latest gun-nut thing, Dwayne said. He used the same holster himself, but he preferred the compact 9 mm Sig Sauer P290 to my heavy revolver. I should give the Sig Sauer a try, the station could loan me one.

“I know you've had pretty good luck with the weapon you've got and I know John Wayne used it to win the West and all like that,” he said, “but technologically speaking, it's the bow and arrow of handguns.”

When we got home Luz and I blessed our new dwelling in the usual way and as usual she fell into a deep sleep immediately afterward. By the half-light that filtered into the huge master suite I watched her in the teeming country of her slumber. I was overcome by my love for her. The memory of her fingertip on the back of Damián's hand made me growl.

At three in the morning I rose from the bed, dressed, stuck the .45 in its new holster in the waistband of my pants, and drove the purring Mercedes to La Sombra. According to Dwayne's timetable, Kirill Burkov dropped in every Wednesday at 3:45
A.M
. and ordered vodka. He seemed to be waiting for someone, but no one ever showed up. At 3:50 my cell phone made the sound it makes when a text message is delivered. The message was a confirmation from a watcher in the shadows that Burkov had just shown up at La Sombra.

Ten minutes later I parked the Mercedes, an irresistible temptation to thieves in this dark neighborhood, and walked around the corner and went inside. The chilled recycled air reeked of raw perfume, liquor, and secondhand marijuana smoke. In a booth at the back of the room a cigarette lighter ignited, then went out for a few seconds, then flared again.
Burkov.

I walked toward the extinguished flame and sat down.

In English Burkov said, “I have already ordered your black Jack.”

He pushed the glass across the table.

I said, “Save the Kremlin's money. I don't drink whiskey.”

“So I noticed. What do you want?”

“Ginger ale.”

He knocked twice, loudly, on the table. The waiter appeared.

Burkov said, “So how was Mother?”

“A little forgetful but hale and hearty.”

“Did you tell her about me?”

“In passing. She has her doubts about your intentions.”

“Of course she does. Mothers are always suspicious.”

The glow from the tiny bulb was too feeble to make it possible to read Burkov's face. That was the point of La Sombra's perpetual midnight. No doubt it was also an asset to the not very tempting hookers of both genders who worked the place. This lack of visual clues turned the conversation into something like talking on the telephone to a person who has reason to lie to you.

Burkov switched to Russian and lowered his voice. The sound system, which had been switched off, came to life: Tonight, Willie Nelson sang “Red Headed Stranger.” Customers in adjoining booths raised their voices to be heard above Willie's reedy tenor. Burkov spoke two or three rapid sentences in a normal tone. I caught only half the words.

I said, “Speak up, Kirill Sergeivich. I can't hear you over the music and the panting.”

“Then follow me.”

He gulped his whiskey and walked out of the place. I followed him as instructed. The full moon was reflected like a very realistic photograph in the windshields of the parked cars. There was more light in the street than there had been inside.

Burkov was speaking up now—barking, actually.

He uttered the Russian equivalent of: “So are you going to shit or get off the pot?”

The vulgarism triggered something within me. I had heard enough insults without listening to more in Russian.

I said, “Good night to you, too.” And walked away.

Burkov took three rapid steps and grabbed my arm. He had a grip of iron.

In melodramatic tones, in English, he said, “I am in danger.”

I said, “Come on. This isn't the movies.”

Speaking Russian now, he said, “Please take me to your car. Mine is not secure. We must talk.”

“You want to talk to an American agent in an American car?”

“If there is a recording of what I say to you, so much the better.”

I said, “Kirill Sergeivich, you are a most unusual Russian spy.”

Now Burkov took me by both arms and squeezed. Speaking through his teeth he said, “Listen to me. Moscow thinks I work for you.”

“Really? Do you?”

“No, I do not. You already know that, of course you do, but what does it matter? It's what they think. That means it's as good as the truth even if it is false—better. They don't have to prove anything. All that's necessary is that they believe it. Do you know what they do to traitors in my service?”

“Live cremation is what I've heard.”

“That's right, but that's just the way it ends. By the time they nail down the coffin lid all you want to do is die. If you help me there is much I can tell you. But I have to go with you now—this minute.”

He looked around, as if a squad of Russians snipers was watching him through night-vision scopes. He was sweating, trembling. He was a little drunk.

I said, “Why should I believe this story?”

“I don't require that, only that you give me the benefit of the doubt. I am putting myself in your power. What more do you want? Are you working for Moscow? I don't understand you. I am offering jewels—
jewels
.”

“Like what?”

“Like who a certain important person in Headquarters belongs to Moscow.”

“Name?”

“First, you help me.”

I said, “This is not a good place to linger. Let's go back inside.”

Burkov didn't like this idea—clearly he wanted to get as far away from La Sombra as possible, as quickly as possible. But he followed me in.

Our glasses were still on our table. We sat down.

We heard a scampering sound. The other customers, all of them, were dashing for the exits as if the place was on fire. There was no smell of smoke. I drew my .45—it practically leaped out of its slick new holster—and held it under the table.

An instant later, I understood the panic. Two thugs with guns in their hands appeared at our table. Neither spoke. One of them, a scowling hulk, leveled his weapon at Birkov's head.

I shot this man in the foot. He screamed in pain. My Moonshine Manor firearms instructor had been right—a .45 caliber slug to the big toe is enough to immobilize anything that walks. The man dropped his cocked pistol on the table—miraculously it didn't go off—and still shrieking and writhing, sat down on the floor as if the tendons in his knees had been cut.

For a fraction of a second the other desperado took his eyes off Burkov. Burkov took advantage of this—hands across the Elbe—by delivering a karate chop to his Adam's apple. He, too, collapsed, choking and fighting for breath.

We stepped over our victims, the hulk still howling and rocking back and forth, the other fellow unconscious but fighting for breath and losing the battle, and went out the back door. We both held pistols in our hands.

We found ourselves in a dead-end alley that opened onto the street where the Mercedes was parked.

I said, “Who were those guys?”

Burkov, behind me, said, “Who knows? Where's your car?”

“Nearby. Will it blow up when I turn the key?”

“You'll find out when you turn the key. In case you are now willing to believe they are planning to kill me, I am formally asking for political asylum in the United States of America.”

He tapped me on the shoulder and when I turned around, handed me two pistols, the Makarov he held in his hand and a smaller hideout
weapon, also a fighting knife and a blackjack and aerosol tubes of knockout spray and—I'm serious—a strangling cord. In a way this was reassuring. He had been standing behind me in the dark for almost a minute and I was still breathing.