The Sisters (25 page)

G. Sprowls ate cold sandwiches in his office that evening, and worked late into the night. Seeing the light through his transom, the night security officer knocked on the door to make sure he had authorization.

G. Sprowls, irritated at the interruption, showed him a chit signed by none other than the Director himself.

The thing that was baffling G. Sprowls as he pored over the printouts, notched with numbers to indicate what question was being asked at any given moment, was how Francis and Carroll, who worked together, could be telling completely different stories, with no trace that either one was lying. Had Carroll gone off on a tangent of his own? The routine tape recordings of their office chitchat made this seem unlikely. Whatever they were doing, they were obviously doing together. Yet Carroll had admitted they were up to something. And Francis had denied it.

And they were both telling the truth.

G. Sprowls removed his eyeglasses and massaged his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. His lids felt inflamed, his eyes more comfortable closed than open. He was tempted to lean his head on the desk, to doze off, dreaming, no doubt, of styluses scratching away on paper and a dwarflike figure pinned, like a gypsy moth, to a piece of cork in a collector's case. As usual, G. Sprowls resisted. With a determined gesture he fitted his eyeglasses back over his rather oversized ears and started where lie always started when he couldn't put his finger on something he suspected was there: at the beginning. "We'll begin with some control questions, if you don't mind, the transcript read. "Would you be so kind as to state your full name as it appears on your birth certificate."

G. S prowls glanced across at the stylus traces that corresponded to the answer. There wasn't a waver in them. "Francis Augustus," Francis had replied, adding his family name.

His name!

C. Sprowls's brow furrowed thoughtfully. A conversation in the lunchroom some four or five years before came hack to him. Several middle-echelon ex-field hands responsible for tunneling money to friendly trade-union people in Latin America had been talking about a wild scheme that had circulated in the form of a lemon-colored Op Proposal, only to be shot out of the sky by a prudent department head. The scheme called for bribing the captain of a supertanker to run his ship onto some rocks of?

Cuba, causing an enormous oil spill that would pollute the coastline, ruin Cuba's fishing and tourist industry, and in general divert economic resources away from Castro's military and industrial buildup. "Sounds like something the Sisters might have thought up," one of the ex-field hands had said, and when C. S prowls, just back from an overseas tour and new to Washington, had asked who the Sisters were, he had gotten the full description. There was Carroll with his three-piece suits and red welts around his neck from the starched collars which, so it was said, he wore to atone for unspecified sins; and there was Francis, who sported outrageous bow ties, an expression on his face midway between curious and reluctant and a Cheshire cat s innocent smile-so innocent, in fact, that he regularly lied about his name during the annual lie-detector tests and managed to fool the black box.

G. S prowls reached into a drawer and took out Francis service file. He thumbed through the sheets in it until he came to the one he was looking for-a photocopy of Francis' birth certificate. The name listed on it was Francis Algernon. Not Francis Augustus.

So he had lied, while hooked up to the black box, about his name.

G. Sprowls gazed up from Francis' service file, the hall-smile warped into a grimace of satisfaction. He had heard about people who could beat the black box, but he had never come across one before. The box registered stress that someone would feel when he didn't tell the truth-moisture on the palms, a slight change in pulse rate or respiration. But Francis was obviously one of those extremely rare individuals who didn't feel stress of any kind when he lied. And if Francis was able to lie about his name, he would have been able to lie about the Potter and the Sleeper.

Almost everything the Sleeper knew about tradecraft he had learned from the Potter. During the first months at the Moscow sleeper school, the Potter had concentrated on sharpening his student's powers of observation. Piotr Borisovich would be dispatched to spend an afternoon in the lobby of a large tourist hotel, with instructions to note everything that happened and report back to the Potter. "You omitted the arrival of the fat American woman carrying a shopping bag from a Paris department store,' the Potter would say after debriefing the Sleeper.

"Also the Intourist woman who had a dispute with someone on the phone and burst into tears when she hung up. Also the man in the wheelchair who asked you for a match. The man in the wheelchair, in case you are curious, works for me. He was there to watch you."

So it went. One day Piotr Borisovich would be assigned to follow a junior diplomat from a junior country-but always from in front, since people seldom suspected anyone in front of following them. Another time the Sleeper would be sent across the city and back, and then asked if anyone had been following him. At the beginning, there might be no one, but his imagination would get the best of him and he would think there had been someone. On still another occasion there might be someone, but the Sleeper would not spot him and would report back that his wake had been

clean. Slowly, however, he began to get the hang of it. He had a natural instinct for the streets, a good memory for faces, sharp eyes and a knack for improvisation, which in the end is the hallmark of a good agent. As the Potter drummed into his head: there were no rules. He himself, he explained by way of giving an example, had once hobbled after an Israeli agent in New York for the better part of an afternoon, on the theory that the agent would never suspect a crippled man of following him.

In time the Sleeper's tradecraft became as good as the Potter's. He too learned how to take advantage of the reflecting surfaces in the street to keep track of everything that was going on around him; not just store windows, but doors of cars, windows of buses, distant mirrors on the walls of department stores. It was a rare event when he couldn't pick out of a crowd the man or woman, and once, a teenager on roller skates, whom the Potter had put on his tail. (One tip the Sleeper never forgot: if you spot someone following you and don't want him to know he's been spotted, pick your nose.) It became a standing joke between them that once the Sleeper had identified the tail, he bought him a vodka if he was a man, and seduced her if it turned out to be a woman.

Now, whiling away two and a half days between buses in a small town in Ohio, the Sleeper, without consciously thinking about it, found himself scanning the rush-hour crowd for that telltale jerk of a head that turned away when he looked at it; for the glimpse of someone who didn't move through the streets tit the rhythm of the crowd around him, but seemed to linger at store windows studying objects that, judging from appearances, he seemed unlikely to buy. The last thing the Sleeper expected was to spot anyone-which is why he felt shaken when he spotted two shadows. The first one, in his middle forties, balding, bloated, effeminate, was in a telephone booth, dialling as if his life depended on it. What gave him away was that the Sleeper remembered seeing him twice before earlier in the afternoon, both times in telephone booths dialling like mad. The second man, rail-thin, with wavy hair and lips that seemed to be pursed and producing sounds, the Sleeper noticed because every time he saw him he was gazing up at street signs as if he were lost.

The Sleeper immediately dismissed the possibility that they were two local hoodlums who had spotted a stranger in town and were planning to roll him. If they had followed him for any length of time, they would be aware that he had arrived by Greyhound bus and was staying in a not very luxurious hotel near the station- hardly the mark of someone who might be carrying a good deal of cash on him. (Ironically, the Sleeper did have more than six thousand dollars in small bills, most of which he had stuffed into the top half of the viola-da-gamba case in which the rifle, broken down into component parts, fitted.) Which narrowed it down to people who were in the same business he was in.

But on which side was the irritating question. Forcing himself to act as if nothing unusual had happened, the Sleeper caught his bus early the next morning and, following his itinerary to the letter, headed farther west. The two men-he had nicknamed the one with the pursed lips Whistler, and the effeminate one Whistler's Mother-weren't in the bus with him, nor did he spot them trailing after him in automobiles, nor were they around when he touched down that night in a motel on the outskirts of Indianapolis. Walking through the city the next morning, the Sleeper used every reflecting surface he could find, but the two men were nowhere to be seen. He was beginning to think he might have imagined the whole thing when, thirty-six hours after he had left the small town in Ohio, he saw them again. When he turned to look over his shoulder, he spotted Whistler gazing up at a street sign at an intersection. Halt an hour later he saw Whistler's Mother squeezed into a phone booth in a drugstore, dialling away as if he were reporting a tire.

The Sleeper thought he could perceive a time pattern in the movements of Whistler and Whistlers Mother. Like him, they would have taken roughly twelve hours to get from the small town in Ohio to Indianapolis. Yet he hadn't spotted them for thirty-six hours. Which meant that they had not bothered to tail him for twenty-four hours. And that little detail told the Sleeper two things: they were most likely professional sweepers who lingered for a day after he moved on to ensure that nobody else was following him; and they obviously had a duplicate of his itinerary.

The theory was easy enough to verify. The next day the Sleeper boarded a bus that would take him across Illinois to St. Louis. Two blocks from the Greyhound terminal he let out a cry of panic and went racing up the aisle to the driver with a story about having forgotten the valise that had all his music in it. The driver shrugged a pair of fat shoulders, swung the bus over to the curb, opened the doors with a rush of air and let the Sleeper off. "You can catch another bus around noon," the driver shouted down, "but you'll have to buy another ticket cause this one's been punched, and there ain't no way in the world I can unpunch it.

Doubling back on his tracks, the Sleeper returned to the motel on the outskirts of Indianapolis. He made his way down a long, narrow alley past several overflowing garbage cans to the kitchen door. The only person in the kitchen was a black dishwasher wearing pink rubber gloves that reached to his elbows. He was finishing up the breakfast dishes.

Depositing his viola-da-gamba case and his worn leather valise under a table, the Sleeper walked over to the swinging doors and looked through the small porthole into the dining room. An elderly waiter was setting the tables for lunch. Beyond the dining room was the bar. Two men sat on stools in front of it, sipping drinks, glancing occasionally at the check-in desk, which they could see in the mirror behind the bar. . The two men were Whistler and Whistler s Mother.

Which meant that they were sweepers: literally ours, sent by the people who had drawn up his itinerary, his masters in Moscow.

But why did his masters in Moscow feel he needed sweepers trailing after him? What did they know that he didn't know? Had there been a leak that could compromise his mission, not to mention his life? Were they afraid that he would lose his nerve? Had they sent the sweepers after him to make sure he went through with it? He was tempted to stop them on the street, invite them-in Russian; would they be embarrassed!- to a bar for a glass of vodka, the way he did in Moscow when he spotted the man whom the Potter had put on his tail.

But this wasn't Moscow, and he wasn't a neophyte sleeper learning the fundamentals of tradecraft. This was America. And he was on a mission that would end, if he was successful, in someone else's death; in his own death if he was not.

Mulling over the various possibilities, the Sleeper retraced his steps and caught the noon bus to St. Louis. There was a half-hour holdover at Terre Haute. When be got back to the bus, he found a woman sitting in his seat. She was wearing blue jeans and white ankle-length socks and high heels. She was chewing gum and reading an old issue of Vogue and shaking her head in despair, activating long pendulum earrings that the Sleeper expected to chime the hour. "Hey, you don't mind none if I take the window?" she asked, looking up with a faint smile. "Buses give me claustro-whatever."

Depositing his viola-da-gamba case in the rack overhead, the Sleeper slid wordlessly into the aisle seat next to her. "That's very gentlemanly of you," the woman said. "There are not many gentlemen around these days. Say, what did you say your name was?'

"I didn't say what my name was," the Sleeper answered. "But I will be glad to tell you." He gave her the name he was travelling under.

"My name is Orr," she said, "with two R's. Geraldine Orr. My friends call me Jerry."

"I am extremely happy to make your acquaintance," the Sleeper told her, his appetite whetted by the curve of her breasts inside her black turtleneck sweater.

"Likewise, I'm sure," said Jerry Orr.

It came out in conversation that she had been offered a job checking hats and selling cigarettes in a nightclub in St. Louis. She had worked there several years before, but had left to live with a garage mechanic in Terre Haute. That had ended badly when he went off with his childhood sweetheart, a Wave stationed in Norfolk. "Couples are basically collisions," Jerry Orr said with a sigh, and the Sleeper agreed heartily. Couples, in his experience, were unnatural combinations, something people created for economic or logistical reasons. But when you came right down to it, after the newness wore off, living as a couple was like condemning yourself to permanent house arrest; you limited your possibilities, and hence your potential. Even Millie's

"triple," which at least had the saving grace of offering variety, had begun to feel like a prison of sorts. The Sleeper thought of Kaat. There had been something unusual about her, he had to admit it. If you had to be trapped in a couple, it was better to be trapped with someone like Kaat in the end.