The Old Boys (5 page)

Jack is the only person I have ever known who has a softer voice than Paul Christopher. On this day somebody else had had to order his lunch for him because the waiter couldn’t hear him over the background chatter. In former times he was, of course, in a position that made people want to listen closely.

“What confirmation is there?” he murmured.

“None,” I replied, “apart from Kalash el Khatar’s report.”

“Which is worth what?” Jack asked.

“Finding that out is the point of the exercise.”

“And if you establish that Kalash is right about Paul and this Jesus scroll and Ibn Awad’s bombs?”

“Then we find Christopher, if he’s alive, and maybe save the world from Ibn Awad if
he
’s alive.”

“And if they’re both dead and there are no bombs?”

“Then
the five of us will have had some fun.”

Ben Childress said, “This is a recruitment pitch?”

“Yes, if any of you are interested,” I said.

“You want us to act in this movie on the basis of what some Arab told Paul Christopher?”

I said, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because the five of us, taken together, used to know most of the people in the world worth knowing. The generation of assets you fellows recruited and worked with still live in all the right places. They still know all the right people and all the right buttons to push.”

“If they’re still speaking to us,” Jack said.

It was true that Americans were even less beloved by the righteous than they had been when we were young. Back then anti-Americanism had usually been skin-deep; everyone but the stomach-acid Left had liked us well enough in private, and even some of them had had a little bit of kindness for us. Nowadays it was a pathology, like anti-Semitism. The people who now ran the Outfit were crashing into stone walls all over the world in their attempts to penetrate Islamist terrorist cells composed of two brothers and a cousin. We knew the terrorists’ fathers, uncles, and grandfathers, and in theory at least we had the capability of making an end run because these elders knew they could trust us. Once in, never out, as the old saw has it. Believe it or not, the truth of that saying has nothing to do with fear, but is based on the peculiar and deep friendships that exist between handler and agent. Friendships of that kind are very durable.

“There are a lot of Ifs,” I said. “I’d like to take a vote. Is anyone at the table absolutely sure in his mind that Christopher is dead?”

In every case the answer was No.

“Does anyone think it’s impossible that Ibn Awad survived and is up to his old tricks?”

No one demurred.

“Does
anyone think that the five of us can possibly do worse than the Outfit if we decide to go after the facts?”

Modesty prevailed. There were no shakes of the head, just secret smiles all around. Glances were exchanged. The deal was made. It was unnecessary to say so. We all knew it.

Harley Waters asked an old warhorse’s question: “Would we be traveling?”

“I should hope so. The world being what it is, it wouldn’t be enough to call up your old friends. You’d have to show yourself, show them the cards we hold.”

“Show them the cards?” asked Harley, who had spent his life dealing with Russians on Russian territory.

“If you want them to trust you, you have to trust them. This is not a USA versus USSR or a Great Satan versus Islam situation. It’s a matter of old friends trying to prevent a sad ending. That’s essentially what we were trying to do in the Cold War, and we did it, so why would anybody who was involved with us then think that we have an ulterior motive this time?”

By now the expense account lunch crowd had departed. We were the last people in the restaurant. The last waiter was becoming intensely interested in our conversation—not because he cared what a gaggle of senior citizens were saying to one another, but because he wanted his tip, meager as he expected it to be. I called him over and we all chipped in and paid the check in cash, again in obedience to the rules of clandestine behavior.

Before we rose from the table, I asked the question. “Who’s in and who’s out?”

Everybody was in.

“Let’s meet again tomorrow to task this thing in a little more detail,” I said. “My house at seventeen hundred hours.”

The next morning, I was making myself a toasted cheese sandwich for lunch when Zarah tapped on the kitchen window.

“How did you know I was in the kitchen?” I asked after letting her in.

“I smelled the toasted cheese sandwich,” she replied. “Have you got an extra one?”

I had made two. I gave her the extra sandwich along with a dill pickle and a glass of iced tea. We ate while seated at my tiny kitchen table. Zarah and I knew little of each other and we hardly talked as we ate, but the meal was companionable. She was a beautiful woman, maybe thirty years old—about the same age now as her grandmother had been when Reinhard Heydrich first fell for her. One could see the monster’s point.

I felt a certain awkwardness, but that had nothing to do with her looks. Zarah had not attended her father’s funeral. Needless to say this had done nothing to intensify Stephanie’s love for her stepdaughter, and I had been hauled off into a corner to make sure I was fully aware of just how outrageous Zarah’s conduct was. I tended to agree, but what did I know about Zarah or her reasons?

I said, “You were missed yesterday.”

“So Stephanie has told me.”

She
was impassive, controlled. It was remarkable how many glimpses of Paul one saw in Zarah, considering that she had known her father personally for only five or six years. Although I don’t know the details, arithmetic suggests that she was conceived sometime around the last day of her parents’ marriage. Her late mother, who was as neurotic as she was gorgeous—had she been born a rung or two further down the Kentucky social ladder, she might well have become Miss America—took revenge on Paul by concealing their child’s existence from him. He knew nothing about Zarah until, as Stephanie put it, Helen of Troy knocked on the door one day and identified herself as his child. DNA tests confirmed this, but looking at her and remembering her father were enough of a paternity test.

“That’s why I’ve come to see you,” Zarah said. “I didn’t go to the funeral because I think it was a sham. If my father is dead— and there is no evidence that he is—those were not his ashes that were buried at Arlington.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“No. But if he were dead, I would know it and believe it.”

“But you don’t.”

She shook her head.

I said, “Neither do I. I’m no soothsayer, but I don’t believe that Paul’s death has been proved.”

“Why?”

“Because the man I know is too adroit to let himself be killed before he had the answer he was looking for.”

I paused for a moment to give her a chance to reply or ask a question, but she seemed to sense that I had more to say and she waited for me to say it.

“However,” I said, since the floor seemed to be mine, “I think you should be careful. Your father has spent his life in pursuit of a mother whom the rest of the world has believed to be dead for almost sixty years.”

“But who may be alive after all.”

“So your father believed, and for all we know he was right. But
there’s no more evidence that Lori Christopher is living at ninetyfour or whatever than that Paul is dead.”

Zarah changed the subject. “May I ask you something?”

“Certainly.”

“If Ibn Awad is alive and is threatening the same kind of action for which you were ordered to kill him before, how does that make you feel?”

“Incompetent.”

“You want to correct the mistake.”

“I suppose so.”

“Why?”

“I made this mess. I should clean it up.”

“Alone? Without help?”

“Your father has helped me. He gave me information and something I can sell to finance the operation.”

“Yes, the Hicks. He told me.”

“He told you?”

“He left a letter for me.”

She handed me a sheet of paper, one page from a longer letter. There it was, in Paul’s handwriting.

What to say to all this? What did she want?

She said, “I’d like to help you. I speak Arabic. I know you do, too, but not the way I do. I grew up with Arabs. I don’t always understand them, but I know them, and I have a lot of friends among them. And I know things that you might not know about my father.”

I doubted this. This must have shown on my face, because after an icy moment she decided to explain herself. “My father made a project of telling me everything he remembers about his life.”

This amazed me. Paul opening his emotional files, even to his own daughter? “Paul never seemed the oral history type to me,” I said.

“He’s not,” Zarah replied. “But for whatever reason, he wanted to make this transfer of knowledge to me, and he did. In theory, at least, I know everything and everyone my father ever knew.”

“Everything?”

“Wouldn’t
it be out of character for him to leave anything out after he said he wasn’t going to do that?”

“Yes.”

They must have spent days locked up together. No wonder Stephanie hated this young woman.

I said, “You took notes?”

“That wasn’t necessary. The material is impossible to forget.” “And you’d share all this with me?”

“All of it? No. The parts you need to know, yes. For example, I know the name of a man who worked in the Vatican in the thirties and forties. He was a friend of my father’s. This man’s assignment was to deal with Nazi officials during World War II.”

“And?”

“He’s still alive,” Zarah said. “At least he was three days ago, when I checked. Very old, but lucid. He’s in Salvator Mundi hospital in Rome.”

“Okay. But how does he fit in?”

“He saw my grandmother in Prague in 1942,” Zarah said.

The Old Boys arrived at my house precisely at five in the afternoon. This may sound like an insecure meeting place, but the fact is we were pretty much alone on my block. This was a street on which the near-mighty lived, and at five in the afternoon our privacy was protected by the triage of Washington existence. As twilight fell, my neighbors were all in meetings or having a drink with somebody or stuck in traffic, and my guests would melt into the darkness before they got home. Jack Philindros, dressed like the secretary of state, resembled the time-warp Hellene that he was—olive skin, dense hair slicked back, thick eyebrows that grew together. Charley Hornblower, hearty and long-boned and in need of a shave, was a Falstaff who for many years had been working on his red nose and his connections to people who knew things. Ben Childress and Harley Waters might have been cousins—Yankee faces, Yankee economy; both wore frayed blazers, faded polo shirts and rumpled khakis and drugstore watches. David Wong was his usual self, oldest of the Marx Brothers—bodhisattva smile, quick tongue, quicker brain. He was the only one among us who showed no sign of being the worse for wear. Philindros, a teetotaler, refused the Laphroaig I was offering, but the others did it justice. It was a treat to hear the voices of men and to smell
whisky in the house where I had been all by myself for such a long time.

That afternoon I had bought five satellite phones at $498 each, including one year’s access for each to communications satellites in 130 different countries. I distributed the phones. Everybody got an index card listing the others’ satellite phone numbers. No code names necessary; we would recognize one another’s voices.

Philindros, always the security nut, said, “Do you think these phones are secure?”

“No, but they’re the best way to keep in touch.”

“You don’t mind having half the world on the party line with us?”

“What difference does it make?” I asked. “This operation will either succeed within the month or fail miserably in less time than that. If it succeeds we go off the air forever. If it fails and Ibn Awad’s bombs go off, our little group will be the least of the world’s worries.”

“If we’re found out by the wrong people, they’ll roll us up.”

“Not in this time frame they won’t,” I said. “Our advantage is that we can move fast because nobody can say no to us.”