Tool of the Trade (11 page)

She had been at the State Department for more than twenty-five years. I “suggested” that she start the paperwork for retirement. Her job wouldn’t be worth a handful of shredded memos once they traced my path back to her, as they inevitably would. The wheels of the gods grind slow, but they grind everybody.

Washington was all cold slush and grime, so I was just as happy to have to stay home by the phone. Bought a bunch of books about the CIA. The reading was as much diversion as preparation. There was no point in planning ahead too carefully, since my course of action would be determined by what they knew about Valerie. But the more I knew about the Agency, the better I would be able to improvise.

I was surprised to hear from Langley the very next morning. Indeed they did have an opening, a quite specific one, for someone with my background. Would I come talk with Richard Goldman at my earliest convenience?

The cab driver was happy at the long fare and impressed by the destination. I tried to be suitably offhand and mysterious.

I’d expected some sort of cloak-and-dagger business at the guards’ post, but they just waved us through. I made a joke about Iranian terrorists, and the driver laughed but looked around furtively.

That truck-bombing epidemic a few years back may have had some effect on the way the plant was arranged. There were lots of widely spaced low white buildings with no numbers or other markings apparent; no one building seemed more important than any other. The main road ended in a circle, where a
building was identified with a discreet
INFORMATION/RECEPTION
sign. I paid the cabbie and he drove off very slowly.

I walked through an airpoirt-style metal detector and identified myself to an unsmiling receptionist. She handed me a visitor’s badge and a three-by-five card with terse typed directions. “Don’t get lost,” she said. “If you get lost, come right back here.” Sound advice.

Goldman’s office was underground, as most of the plant evidently was. Energy efficient. I took an elevator to Level C and walked down four long corridors left-right-left-left to his room number. Goldman had his door open, waiting for me.

He was a stocky, unkempt man with cowlicks and an easy smile. The office was plain government-gray, unadorned except for a reproduction of the old World War One poster “Loose Lips Sink Ships,” upon which was thumbtacked a picture of a person with loose lips indeed.

He sat me down with coffee, emptied a half-full ashtray, and lit a new cigarette off the butt of his old one. “Wonderful coincidence, your application and clearance coming in just now. If I can talk you into taking the job.”

“There’s something wrong with it?”

“Just not very glamorous. Do you think espionage is glamorous?”

“I understand that it usually isn’t.” Except for the odd Bulgarian assassin or two.

“Listen to this.” There was an old-fashioned German tape recorder on his desk, obviously once the top of its line, but now a reel-to-reel dinosaur. He stabbed a button, and a man’s voice, distorted and blurred by noise, began speaking a truly weird brand
of Russian. He let it go for about twenty seconds and turned it off. “You see the problem.”

“Two problems. The bad recording I can’t help you with. The dialect, I can. It’s north Azerbaijanian. A rural accent, farmer.” I was glad I’d refreshed my memory with Norwood’s books, though of course I’d heard plenty of Azerbaijanian Russian spoken the years I was in Rivertown.

“What’s he talking about?”

“Let me hear it again.” It was fairly clear the second time. “It’s a long-distance phone call; he’s almost shouting. He’s talking to someone named Kahn or Con, maybe a nickname for Constantine. They seem to be friends. He says there’s an error in the projection figures for wheat production in his, Con’s, district as regards some five-year plan. The figure is too low, and he’s asking Con whom he bribed. From the inflection, though, he’s joking. Maybe that’s why it’s so loud; he wants the other people in the office to overhear. Some of that background noise might be laughter.”

“That’s marvelous. You’re exactly what we need. Do you like doing this kind of work?”

“Yes, indeed.” In fact, I did.

“Well, we’ve got plenty of it, especially from around the Caucasus there. They seem to be assigning people with heavy and obscure accents to do telephone work in some sensitive areas, just to screw us up. Screws up their own operations, too, but”—he laughed and threw up his hands—“they’re Russians. What can you say?”

I looked at him through the steam of the coffee and said in Russian, “—I think you like them.”

“—
I
love
them!” he said with a happy, atrocious American accent. “—I’m glad they’re our enemies!” A
reasonable sentiment, rather Russian. I took the job.

Goldman gave me a small office with an old word processor and a briefcase full of three-inch tapes to translate. It was absorbing work, entertaining the way crossword puzzles are, and for several days that’s all I did. Then I started to cultivate a social relationship with Goldman, who was a lonely man and grateful for friends.

It was a cold-blooded thing to do, but necessary. I didn’t dare give him any orders while we were in the office. In a succession of restaurants and theater lobbies, though, I set him up.

He’d been with the CIA for a long time and knew people in all parts of the organization. Through his casual conversations with people, I soon found out the main thing I wanted to know, which was that Valerie was being held by the KGB in some unknown place. Apparently, no one in the Agency had noticed the ads in the
Times
or the
Globe
.

They knew more about my power than I thought they would. One of the damned Bulgarians lived long enough to tell a horror story. That was the main reason they still had people chasing after Valerie.

The trail was growing cold. Two agents from the Boston regional office, Jacob Bailey and someone else, were following leads, but it had been some time since they’d come up with anything. At least one person on the case was sure Valerie was long dead.

If she was, a lot of people would pay.

Obviously, I had to go to the Boston office. But first there were various things I had to do at Langley.

All those years of hacking with MIT’s Athena system paid off. I talked someone out of an A-Class clearance number and cautiously wormed my way
into the CIA’s murky computer system. I got to the personnel file on me as Norwood and jazzed it completely, changing my age and appearance, background, assignments. I made up a new character named Anson Rafferty, and gave
him
my appearance and fingerprints instead, just in case I wanted to come back. Anson took a little bit of research. He did some good work for the Agency way back when and had glowing references from a number of higher-ups, all of whom happened to have since graduated to that Old Boy Network in the sky, or the ground.

Not surprisingly, the system had a link to the FBI’s data banks. I made sure that both agencies had bogus fingerprint sets for both me and Valerie.

I was startled, walking down a corridor one day, to run into Vladimir Borachev. I followed him and made up a pretext for getting him into conversation. I had the watch ready, but he didn’t recognize me. He also spoke English with almost no Russian accent, which I suspect would surprise a lot of his agents.

From Goldman’s sources I found out that Borachev was here under protective custody, in the process of telling all in exchange for immunity from prosecution. Once he was wrung dry, the CIA would give him Canadian papers and a one-way ticket to Toronto.

Would they make me a similar offer? I was not tempted to ask.

I have never liked Chicago at all, which is not an unusual prejudice for a Bostonian. Any city you can’t walk across in a couple of hours is too big. Plus it’s too loud and smells bad and feels dangerous and the weather is like an alien planets. The people drive like maniacs. At least that’s a touch of home.

Jefferson and I got to circle O’Hare for ninety minutes, bouncing above a blizzard, while the ground crew cleaned up what was left of a light plane that had come in sideways. Our own landing was too exciting for my taste. The plane slithering down the runway through driven snow so thick you couldn’t see any buildings. All for a wild goose chase, it turned out.

The FBI had agreed to get in touch with us if its surveillance of routine bank transactions turned up anything that involved Foley. They were putting considerably more man-hours and computer time into
the case than they normally would even for large bank crimes, I suppose because what Foley could do to a KGB agent he could presumably do to one from the FBI.

So if he couldn’t resist cashing another “Porfiry Petrovitch” check, bells would ring from Washington to Los Angeles, and he wouldn’t get out the door of the bank. But he evidently had figured that out, and kept his sense of humor restrained.

We wound up sliding down that runway because the same expert system that had identified Foley in Maine flagged the picture of a Chicago bank customer. Like Foley, he had cashed a number of traveler’s checks, so he seemed like a good prospect There was a day’s delay, of course, since the bank pictures go on a tape and the tape has to be fed through an “analog converter/modem interface” after the bank closes. Then someone in Washington has to look through all the day’s flagged images and decide which ones are interesting enough to warrant action. Then he contacts the proper department, and they contact the regional office, and the regional office wakes up a couple of agents and sends them out to wake up some bank personnel.

At any rate, this man “Daniel Wintrobe” was an absolute ringer for Foley—white beard, paunch, rumpled but expensive clothes. The teller, suspicious about his appearance, had asked for a verifiable address, for which he gave the name of a cheap but not too seedy South Side hotel. By telephone they’d confirmed he was a guest, but when the agents showed up the next day, all they found was an irate manager. The guy had stayed for a week and then skipped out in the middle of the night.

The FBI called it “bank fraud and suspicion of
homicide” and told the Chicago police to find Wintrobe and put him under surveillance. Whoever had final responsibility evidently decided it would be easiest to keep him under surveillance inside a holding cell, a drunk tank. They slightly tenderized him in the process of moving him there.

One look and I knew he wasn’t Foley. He was a middle-aged Skid Row denizen who belonged in some institution other than jail. He had a vague, confused gentleness that might have been alcoholic burnout or the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease; maybe both. Sometimes he said he had found the clothes and checks; sometimes he said they were a gift from his daughter.

Through American Express the police had earlier found the real Daniel Wintrobe, who lived in Oak Park. He cautiously admitted that the checks were probably his. He didn’t know he had lost them. No, he wouldn’t press charges over the misappropriation of two hundred dollars; just have the remaining checks sent back to him. At the office address, please.

The desk sergeant’s opinion was that the man was a “suburban faggot who don’t want his wife to find out” and that he was probably rolled by a chickenhawk. How this ineffectual old man wound up with the checks and clothes, he couldn’t explain. I suggested that maybe he mugged the chickenhawk. The sergeant asked if that was a joke.

We knew O’Hare would still be a madhouse, with all the people piling up from delayed flights. We probably could have flashed IDs and muscled our way onto a late flight back to the East Coast, but Jefferson had a better idea. We split the cost of a bottle of decent Scotch and got an overnight room at the Airport Hilton. Unfortunately for the taxpayers, the only rooms left were suites.

While I was calling the office, telling the answering machine where we were, Jefferson took a wedge-shaped lock out of his overnight bag and jammed it under the door. He checked it with all his considerable strength, and it held. Then he let me escape long enough to fill up the ice bucket.

It had been a long day. I shucked jacket and tie and shoes with the speed of an undergraduate and poured us each a drink. It took Jefferson longer to get comfortable. He hung up his jacket. Unslung the Ingram, released its magazine, made sure there was no round in the chamber. Hung it on the door. Shrugged out of the shoulder-holster harness and hung it up. Unzipped the Kevlar vest and hung it up. Carried the.44 over to the bed and set it on the nightstand, protecting the room-service menu. Then he took a big swallow of Scotch and loosened his tie. Sitting ramrod-straight on the bed, he methodically rolled his sleeves up to midforearm. Then he tipped the glass in my direction. “Cheers.” He took a sip and lay back against the headboard, not too stiffly.

With any other man, it might have been a time for the letting down of hair, recalling of jokes and stories. There was something about Jefferson’s thousand-yard stare that made it difficult to loosen up with him.

He did get a little reflective, though. “I guess you know I’ve worked with the Company before,” he said, picking up the.44 Magnum.

I called it the Agency, myself, but let that pass. “Well, you said you were hurt in Nicaragua. I assume you didn’t go there with the Salvation Army.”

“Actually, that was a bunch of civilians, Texans. I got a leave of absence and went with them as an adviser.” He ejected the cartridges one at a time onto the bed beside him. “Caught hell when I got back, too. No, it was in Vietnam I worked for the CIA.”

“Wet work?”

“Huh-uh. Prisoner escort. It wasn’t in my dossier?”

“I didn’t get a dossier as such. Just one page, telling what a wonderful guy you were.”

He did smile. He was polishing each cartridge with a handkerchief and standing them up in a little row next to the telephone. An odd thing to do. “Maybe it was unofficial. Orders I got supposedly sent me to be aide-de-camp for some colonel, but I never got to meet him. All the guys I worked for were civilian spooks.”

“Wonder why they didn’t use Agency personnel. For prisoner security, I mean.”