The Emergency Medical Service helicopter was lowered into its threshold; the rotors were cut and the blades thumped to a stop. Following EMS procedure when disembarking ambulatory patients, only then did the exit door open and the metal steps slap down to the ground. A uniformed paramedic preceded Panov, turning and assisting the doctor to the tarmac, where a second man in civilian clothes escorted him to a waiting limousine. Inside were Peter Holland, director of the CIA, and Alex Conklin, the latter in the right jump seat, obviously for conversational purposes. The psychiatrist climbed in beside Holland; he took several deep breaths, sighed audibly and fell back into the seat.
“I am a maniac,” he stated, emphasizing each word. “Certifiably insane and I’ll sign the papers of commitment myself.”
“You’re safe, that’s all that matters, Doctor,” said Holland.
“Good to see you, Crazy Mo,” added Conklin.
“Have you any idea what I did?… I purposely crashed a car into a tree with me in it! Then after walking at least half the distance to the Bronx, I was picked up by the only person I know who may have more loose bananas in her head than I do. Her libido is unhinged and she’s running away from her trucker husband—hot on her French heels—who I subsequently learned has the cuddly name of the Bronk. My hooker chauffeur proceeds to hold me hostage with such wiles as threatening to yell ‘Rape!’ in a diner filled with a collection of the NFL’s most carnivorous linebackers—except for one who got me out.” Panov abruptly stopped and reached into his pocket. “Here,” he continued, thrusting the five driver’s licenses and the roughly six thousand dollars into Conklin’s hands.
“What’s this?” asked the bewildered Alex.
“I robbed a bank and decided to become a professional driver!… What do you think it is? I took it from the man who was guarding me. I described as best I could to the chopper’s crew where the crash took place. They’re flying back to find him. They will; he’s not walking anywhere.”
Peter Holland reached for the limousine’s telephone, pushing three buttons. In less than two seconds, he spoke. “Get word to EMS-Arlington, Equipment Fifty-seven. The man they’re picking up is to be brought directly to Langley. To the infirmary. And keep me informed as to their progress.… Sorry, Doctor. Go on.”
“Go on? What’s to go on to? I was kidnapped and held in some farmhouse and injected with enough sodium pentothal, if I’m not mistaken, to make me a resident of—of La La Land, which I was recently accused of being by Madame Scylla Charybdis.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Holland flatly.
“Nothing, Admiral, or Mr. Director or—”
“Peter’s fine, Mo,” completed Holland. “I simply didn’t understand you.”
“There’s nothing to understand but the facts. My allusions are compulsive attempts at false erudition. It’s called posttraumatic stress.”
“Of course, now you’re perfectly clear.”
Panov turned to the DCI with a nervous smile. “It’s my turn to be sorry, Peter. I’m still wound up. This last day or so hasn’t exactly been representative of my normal life-style.”
“I don’t think it’s anybody’s,” concurred Holland. “I’ve seen my share of rotten stuff, but nothing like this, nothing that tampers with the mind. I missed all that.”
“There’s no hurry, Mo,” added Conklin. “Don’t press yourself; you’ve taken a lot of punishment. If you like, we can postpone the briefing for a few hours so you can rest, calm down.”
“Don’t be a damn fool, Alex!” protested the psychiatrist sharply. “For the second time I’ve put David’s life in jeopardy. The knowledge of that is far worse punishment. There’s not a minute to lose.… Forget Langley, Peter. Take me to one of your clinics. Free-floating, I want to get out everything I can recall, consciously or unconsciously. Hurry. I’ll tell the doctors what to do.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” said Holland, staring at Panov.
“I’m not joking for an instant. You both have to know what I know—whether I realize I know it or not. Can’t you understand that?”
The director again reached for the telephone and pressed a single button. In the front seat, beyond the glass partition, the driver picked up the phone recessed in the seat beside him. “There’s been a change of plans,” said Holland. “Head for Sterile Five.”
The limousine slowed down, and at the next intersection turned right toward the rolling hills and verdant fields of the Virginia hunt country. Morris Panov closed his eyes, as if in a trance or as a man might do facing some appalling ordeal—his own execution perhaps. Alex looked at Peter Holland; they both glanced at Mo, then back at each other. Whatever Panov was doing, there was a reason for it. Until they reached the gates of the estate that was Sterile House Five thirty minutes later, no one spoke.
“DCI and company,” announced the driver to the guard wearing the uniform of a private security firm, in reality a CIA proprietary. The limousine proceeded down the long tree-lined entrance.
“Thanks,” said Mo, opening his eyes and blinking. “As I’m sure you gathered, I’m trying to clear my head and with any luck bring down my blood pressure.”
“You don’t have to do this,” insisted Holland.
“Yes, I do,” said Panov. “Maybe with time I could piece things together with a degree of clarity, but I can’t now and we don’t have the time.” Mo turned to Conklin. “How much can you tell me?”
“Peter knows everything. For the sake of that blood pressure of yours, I won’t fill you in on all the details, but the bottom line is that David’s all right. At least we haven’t heard otherwise.”
“Marie? The children?”
“On the island,” replied Alex, avoiding Holland’s eyes.
“What about this Sterile Five?” asked Panov, now looking at Holland. “I assume there’s a specialist, or specialists, the kind I need.”
“In relays and around the clock. You probably know a few of them.”
“I’d rather not.” The long dark vehicle swung around the circular drive and stopped in front of the stone steps of the pillared Georgian mansion that was the focal point of the estate. “Let’s go,” said Mo quietly, stepping outside.
The sculptured white doors, the rose-colored marble floors and the elegant winding staircase in the great hall all combined to furnish a superb cover for the work done at Sterile Five. Defectors, double and triple agents, and field officers returned from complex assignments for rest and debriefing were continuously processed through its various agendas. The staff, each with a Four Zero clearance, consisted of two doctors and three nurses in relay units, cooks and domestic attendants recruited from the foreign service—in the main, overseas embassies—and guards, all with Ranger training or its equivalent. They moved about the house and grounds unobtrusively, eyes constantly alert, each with either a concealed or an unconcealed weapon, except for the medical personnel. Visitors without exception were given small lapel pins by the well-spoken, dark-suited house steward, who admitted them and directed them to the locations of their scheduled appointments. The man was a retired gray-haired interpreter for the Central Intelligence Agency, but he suited his position so well in appearance he might have come from Central Casting.
Naturally, at the sight of Peter Holland, the steward was astonished. He prided himself on committing to memory every schedule at Sterile Five. “A surprise visit, sir?”
“Good to see you, Frank.” The DCI shook hands with the former interpreter. “You may remember Alex Conklin—”
“Good Lord, is that you, Alex? It’s been years!” Again hands were shaken. “When was the last time?… That crazy woman from Warsaw, wasn’t it?”
“The KGB’s been chuckling ever since,” laughed Conklin. “The only secret she had was the recipe for the worst golumpki I’ve ever tasted.… Still keeping your hand in, Frank?”
“Every now and then,” replied the steward, grimacing in mock disapproval. “These young translators don’t know a quiche from a kluski.”
“Since I don’t either,” said Holland, “may I have a word with you, Frank?” The two older men walked off to the side speaking quietly as Alex and Mo Panov held their places, the latter frowning and sporadically breathing deeply. The director returned, handing lapel pins to his colleagues. “I know where to go now,” he said. “Frank will call ahead.”
The three of them walked up the curving ornate staircase, Conklin limping, and down a lushly carpeted hallway on the left to the rear of the enormous house. On the right wall was a door unlike any of the doors they had passed; it was made of thick varnished oak with four small windows in the upper recessed panels and two black buttons set in an outlet casing beside the knob. Holland inserted a key, twisted it and pressed the lower button; instantly a red light appeared in the small stationary camera mounted on the ceiling. Twenty seconds later there was the familiar muffled metallic clanking of an elevator coming to a stop. “Inside, gentlemen,” ordered the DCI. The door closed and the elevator began its descent.
“We walked up to go down?” asked Conklin.
“Security,” answered the director. “It’s the only way to get where we’re going. There’s no elevator on the first floor.”
“Why not, may the man with one foot missing ask?” said Alex.
“I’d think you’d be able to answer that better than me,” retorted the DCI. “Apparently all accesses to the cellars are sealed off except for two elevators that bypass the first floor and for which you need a key. This one and another on the other side; this takes us to where we want to go, the other leads to the furnaces, air-conditioning units and all the rest of the normal basement equipment. Frank gave me the key, incidentally. If it doesn’t return to its slot within a given period of time, another alarm goes off.”
“It all strikes me as unnecessarily complicated,” said Panov curtly, nervously. “Expensive games.”
“Not necessarily, Mo,” interrupted Conklin gently. “Explosives can be concealed pretty easily in heating pipes and ducts. And did you know that during the last days of Hitler’s bunker a few of his saner aides tried to insert poison gas into the air-filtering machinery? These are just precautions.”
The elevator stopped and the door opened. “To your left, Doctor,” Holland said. The hallway was a glistening pristine white, antiseptic in its way, which was altogether proper, as this underground complex was a highly sophisticated medical center. It was devoted not only to the healing of men and women, but also to the process of breaking them down, crippling their resistance so that information might be revealed, truths learned that could prevent the penetration of high-risk operations, frequently saving lives as a result.
They entered a room that was in stark contrast to the antiseptic quality of the fluorescent-lit hallway. There were heavy armchairs and soft indirect lighting, a coffee urn on a table with cups and saucers; newspapers and magazines were folded neatly on other tables, all the comforts of a lounge designed for those waiting for someone or something. From an inner door a man in a white medical jacket appeared; he was frowning, looking uncertain.
“Director Holland?” he said, approaching Peter, extending his hand. “I’m Dr. Walsh, second shift. Needless to say, we didn’t expect you.”
“I’m afraid it’s an emergency and hardly one of my choosing. May I introduce you to Dr. Morris Panov—unless you know him?”
“Of him, of course.” Walsh again extended his hand. “A pleasure, Doctor, also a privilege.”
“You may take both back before we’re finished, Doctor. May we talk privately?”
“Certainly. My office is inside.” The two men disappeared through the inner door.
“Shouldn’t you go with them?” asked Conklin, looking at Peter.
“Why not you?”
“Goddamn it, you’re the director. You should insist!”
“You’re his closest friend. So should you.”
“I don’t have any clout here.”
“Mine disappeared when Mo dismissed us. Come on, let’s have some coffee. This place gives me the proverbial creeps.” Holland went to the table with the coffee urn and poured two cups. “How do you like it?”
“With more milk and sugar than I’m supposed to have. I’ll do it.”
“I still take it black,” said the director, moving away from the table and removing a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. “My wife says the acid will kill me one day.”
“Other people say tobacco will.”
“What?”
“Look.” Alex pointed at the sign on the opposite wall. It read: THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING.
“That I’ve got enough clout for,” announced Holland quietly as he snapped his lighter and lit a cigarette.
Nearly twenty minutes passed. Every now and then one or the other of them picked up a magazine or a newspaper only to put it down moments later and look up at the inner door. Finally, twenty-eight minutes after he had disappeared with Panov, the doctor named Walsh reappeared.
“He tells me you know what he’s requesting and that you have no objections, Director Holland.”
“I’ve got plenty of objections, but it seems he’s overruled them.… Oh, excuse me, Doctor, this is Alex Conklin. He’s one of us and a close friend of Panov.”
“How do you feel, Mr. Conklin?” asked Walsh, nodding at Alex as he returned the greeting.
“I hate what he’s doing—what he wants to do—but he says it makes sense. If it does, it’s right for him and I understand why he insists on doing it. If it doesn’t make sense, I’ll pull him out of there myself, one foot and all. Does it make sense, Doctor? And what’s the risk of damage?”
“There’s always a risk where drugs are concerned, especially in terms of chemical balance, and he knows that. It’s why he’s designed an intravenous flow that prolongs his own psychological pain but somewhat reduces the potential damage.”
“Somewhat?” cried Alex.
“I’m being honest. So is he.”
“Bottom line, Doctor,” said Holland.
“If things go wrong, two or three months of therapy, not permanent.”
“And the sense?” insisted Conklin. “Does it make sense?”
“Yes,” replied Walsh. “What happened to him is not only recent, it’s consumed him. It’s obsessed his conscious, which can only mean that it’s inflamed his subconscious. He’s right. His unreachable recall is on the cutting edge.… I came in here as a courtesy. He’s insisted we proceed, and from what he’s told me, I’d do the same thing. Each of us would.”
“What’s the security?” asked Alex.
“The nurse will be dismissed and stay outside the door. There’ll be only a single battery-operated tape recorder and me … and one or both of you.” The doctor turned to the door, then glanced back. “I’ll send for you at the proper time,” he added, again disappearing inside.
Conklin and Peter Holland looked at each other. The second period of waiting began.
To their astonishment, it ended barely ten minutes later. A nurse came out into the lounge and asked them to follow her. They walked through what appeared to be a maze of antiseptic white walls broken up only by recessed white panels with glass knobs that denoted doors. Only once on their brief journey did they see another human being; it was a man in a white smock, wearing a white surgical mask, who walked out of yet another white door, his sharp, intense eyes above the white cloth somehow accusing, determining them to be aliens from some different world that had not been cleared for Sterile House Five.
The nurse opened a door; there was a blinking red light above its top frame. She put her index finger to her lips, indicating silence. Holland and Conklin walked quietly inside a dark room and confronted a drawn white curtain concealing a bed or an examining table beyond, a small circle of intense light shining through the cloth. They heard the softly spoken words of Dr. Walsh.
“You are going back, Doctor, not far back, just a day or so, just when you began to feel the dull, constant pain in your arm … your arm, Doctor. Why are they inflicting pain on your arm? You were in a farmhouse, a small farmhouse with fields outside your window, and then they put a blindfold on you and began hurting your arm. Your arm, Doctor.”
Suddenly, there was a muted flashing of green light reflected on the ceiling. The curtain parted electronically several feet, revealing the bed, the patient and the doctor. Walsh took his finger off a bedside button and looked at them, gesturing slowly with his hands as if to say, There’s no one else here. Confirmed?
Both witnesses nodded, at first mesmerized, then repelled at the sight of Panov’s grimacing pale face and the tears that began to flow from his wide-open eyes. Then, as one, they saw the white straps that emerged from under the white sheet, holding Mo in place; the order had to be his.
“The arm, Doctor. We have to begin with the physically invasive procedure, don’t we? Because you know what it does, Doctor, don’t you? It leads to another invasive procedure that you cannot permit. You must stop its progression.”
The ear-shattering scream was a prolonged shriek of defiance and horror. “No, no! I won’t tell you! I killed him once, I won’t kill him again! Get away from meeeee …!”
Alex slumped, falling to the floor. Peter Holland grabbed him and gently the strong, broad-shouldered admiral, a veteran of the darkest operations in the Far East, led Conklin silently through the door to the nurse. “Get him away from here, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Peter,” coughed Alex, trying to stand, collapsing on his false foot. “I’m sorry, Christ, I’m sorry!”
“What for?” whispered Holland.
“I should watch but I can’t watch!”
“I understand. It’s all too close. If I were you, I probably couldn’t either.”
“No, you don’t understand! Mo said he killed David, but of course he didn’t. But I meant to, I really wanted to kill him! I was wrong, but I tried with all the expertise in my bones to kill him! And now I’ve done it again. I sent him to Paris.… It’s not Mo, it’s me!”
“Put him against the wall, miss. Let him sink to the floor and leave us alone.”
“Yes, sir!” The nurse did as she was ordered and fled, leaving Holland and Alex alone in the antiseptic maze.
“Now, you listen to me, Field Man,” whispered the gray-haired director of the Central Intelligence Agency, kneeling in front of Conklin. “This fucking merry-go-round of guilt had better stop—has got to stop—or nobody’s going to be any good to anybody. I don’t give a good goddamn what you or Panov did thirteen years ago, or five years ago, or now! We’re all reasonably bright people, and we did what each of us did because we thought they were the right moves at the time.… Guess what, Saint Alex? Yes, I’ve heard the term. We make mistakes. Fucking inconvenient, isn’t it? Maybe we’re not so brilliant after all. Maybe Panov isn’t the greatest behavioral whatever-the-hell-it-is; maybe you’re not the shrewdest son of a bitch in the field, the one who got canonized, and maybe I’m not the superjock behind-the-lines strategist they’ve made me out to be. So what? We take our baggage and go where we have to go.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, shut up!” yelled Conklin, struggling against the wall.
“Shhh!”
“Oh, shit! The last thing I need is a sermon from you! If I had a foot, I’d take you.”
“Now we’re physical?”
“I was Black Belt. First class, Admiral.”
“Golly, gee. I don’t even know how to wrestle.”
Their eyes met and Alex was the first to laugh quietly. “You’re too much, Peter. I got your message. Help me up, will you? I’ll go back to the lounge and wait for you. Come on, give me a hand.”
“The hell I will,” said Holland, getting to his feet and standing over Conklin. “Help yourself. Someone told me that the Saint made it back through a hundred and forty miles in enemy territory, through rivers and streams and jungle, and arrived at the Foxtrot base camp asking if anybody had a bottle of bourbon.”
“Yeah, well, that was different. I was a hell of a lot younger and I had another foot.”
“Pretend you got one now, Saint Alex.” Holland winked. “I’m going back inside. One of us has to be there.”
“Bastard!”
For an hour and forty-seven minutes Conklin sat in the lounge. His attachable footless foot never throbbed, but it was throbbing now. He did not know what the impossible feeling meant, but he could not dismiss the beat that surged through his leg. If nothing else, it was something to think about, and he thought wistfully of the younger days, when he had both feet, and before. Oh, how he had wanted to change the world! And how he had felt so right in a destiny that forced him to become the youngest valedictorian in his high school’s history, the youngest freshman ever accepted at Georgetown, a bright, bright light that shimmered at the end of the tunnels of academe. His decline started when someone, somewhere, found out that his name at birth was not Alexander Conklin but Aleksei Nikolae Konsolikov. That now faceless man had casually asked him a question, the answer to which had changed Conklin’s life.
“Do you by any chance speak Russian?”
“Of course,” he had replied, amused that his visitor would even think he might not. “As you obviously know, my parents were immigrants. I grew up not only in a Russian home but in a Russian neighborhood—at least in the early years. You couldn’t buy a loaf of bread at the ovoshchnoi otdel if you didn’t. And at church school the older priests and nuns, like the Poles, held ferociously on to the language.… I’m sure it contributed to my leaving the faith.”
“Those were the early years, however, as I believe you mentioned.”
“Yes.”
“What changed?”
“I’m sure it’s in your government report somewhere and will hardly satisfy your iniquitous Senator McCarthy.”
The face came back to Alex with the memory of those words. It was a middle-aged face and it had suddenly become expressionless, the eyes clouded but with suppressed anger in them. “I assure you, Mr. Conklin, I am in no way associated with the senator. You call him iniquitous, I have other terms, but they’re not pertinent here.… What changed?”
“Quite late in his life my father became what he had been in Russia, a highly successful merchant, a capitalist. At last count he owned seven supermarkets in upscale malls. They’re called Conklin’s Corners. He’s over eighty now, and although I love him dearly, I regret to say he’s an ardent supporter of the senator. I simply consider his years, his struggles, his hatred of the Soviets, and avoid the subject.”
“You’re very bright and very diplomatic.”
“Bright and diplomatic,” Alex had agreed.
“I’ve shopped at a couple of Conklin’s Corners. Kind of expensive.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Where did the ‘Conklin’ come from?”
“My father. My mother says he saw it on a billboard advertising motor oil, she thinks, about four or five years after they got here. And, of course, the Konsolikov had to go. As my considerably bigoted father once said, ‘Only the Jews with Russian names can make money over here.’ Again, I avoid the subject.”
“Very diplomatic.”
“It’s not difficult. He has his share of good points as well.”
“Even if he didn’t, I’m sure you could be convincing in your diplomacy, in the concealment of your feelings.”
“Why do I think that’s a leading statement?”
“Because it is, Mr. Conklin. I represent a government agency that’s extremely interested in you, and one in which your future would be as unlimited as that of any potential recruit I’ve spoken to in a decade.…”
That conversation had taken place nearly thirty years ago, mused Alex, his eyes drifting up once again to the inner door of Sterile Five’s waiting lounge in its own private medical center. And how crazy the intervening years had been. In a stress-defying bid for unrealistic expansion, his father had overextended himself, committing enormous sums of money that existed only in his imagination and in the minds of avaricious bankers. He lost six of his seven supermarkets, the smallest and last supporting a life-style that he found unacceptable, so he conveniently had a massive stroke and died as Alex’s own adult life was about to begin.
Berlin—East and West. Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent and Kamchatka. Vienna, Paris, Lisbon and Istanbul. Then back across the world to stations in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Cambodia, Laos, and finally Saigon and the tragedy that was Vietnam. Over the years, with his facile mastery of languages and the expertise that came with survival, he had become the Agency’s point man in clandestine operations, its primary scout and often the on-scene strategist for covert activities. Then one morning with the mists hanging over the Mekong Delta, a land mine shattered his life as well as his foot. There was little left for a field man who depended on mobility in his chosen work; the rest was downhill and out of the field. His excessive drinking he accepted, and excused as genetic. The Russian’s winter of depression carried over into spring, summer and autumn. The skeletal, trembling wreck of a man who was about to go under was given a reprieve. David Webb—Jason Bourne—came back into his life.
The door opened, mercifully cutting short his reverie, and Peter Holland walked slowly into the lounge. His face was pale and drawn, his eyes glazed, and in his left hand were two small plastic containers, each presumably holding a cassette tape.
“As long as I live,” said Peter, his voice low and hollow, barely above a whisper, “I hope to Christ I never go through anything like this again, never witness anything like this again.”
“How’s Mo?”
“I didn’t think he’d live.… I thought he’d kill himself. Every now and then Walsh would stop. Let me tell you, he was one frightened doctor.”
“Why didn’t he call it off, for God’s sake?”
“I asked him that. He said Panov’s instructions were not only explicit but that he’d written them out and signed them and expected them to be followed to the letter. Maybe there’s some kind of unwritten code of ethics between doctors, I don’t know, but I do know Walsh hooked him up to an EKG, which he rarely took his eyes off. Neither did I; it was easier than looking at Mo. Jesus, let’s get out of here!”
“Wait a minute. What about Panov?”
“He’s not ready for a welcome-home party. He’ll stay here for a couple of days under observation. Walsh will call me in the morning.”
“I’d like to see him. I want to see him.”
“There’s nothing to see but a human dishrag. Believe me, you don’t and he wouldn’t want you to. Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Your place in Vienna—our place in Vienna. I assume you’ve got a cassette machine.”
“I’ve got everything but a moon rocket, most of which I can’t operate.”
“I want to stop and get a bottle of whisky.”
“There’s whatever you want at the apartment.”
“It doesn’t bother you?” asked Holland, studying Alex.
“Would it matter if it did?”
“Not a bit.… If I remember, there’s an extra bedroom, isn’t there?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We may be up most of the night listening to these.” The director held up the cassettes. “The first couple of times won’t mean anything. All we’ll hear is the pain, not the information.”
It was shortly past five o’clock in the afternoon when they left the estate known within the Agency as Sterile House Five. The days were growing shorter, September on the cusp, the descending sun announcing the forthcoming change with an intensity of color that was the death of one season and the birth of another.
“The light’s always brightest before we die,” said Conklin, leaning back in the seat beside Holland in the limousine, staring out the window.
“I find that not only inappropriate but quite possibly sophomoric,” declared Peter wearily. “I won’t commit to the latter until I know who said it. Who was it?”
“Jesus, I think.”
“The Scriptures were never edited. Too many campfires, no on-scene confirmation.”
Alex laughed softly, reflectively. “Did you ever actually read them? The Scriptures, I mean.”
“Most of it—most of them.”
“Because you had to?”
“Hell, no. My father and mother were as agnostic as any two people could be without being branded godless pariahs. They shut up about it and sent me and my two sisters to a Protestant service one week, a Catholic mass on another, and a synagogue after that. Never with any regularity, but I guess they figured we should catch the whole scene. That’s what makes kids want to read. Natural curiosity wrapped in mysticism.”
“Irresistible,” agreed Conklin. “I lost my faith, and now after years of proclaiming my spiritual independence, I wonder if I’m missing something.”
“Comfort, Peter. I have no comfort.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Things I can’t control, maybe.”
“You mean you don’t have the comfort of an excuse, a metaphysical excuse. Sorry, Alex, we part company. We’re accountable for what we do, and no confessional absolution can change that.”
Conklin turned his head, his eyes wide open, and looked at Holland. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For sounding like me, even using a variation of the words I’ve used.… I came back from Hong Kong five years ago with the banner of Accountability on my lance.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Forget it. I’m back on track.… ‘Beware the pitfalls of ecclesiastical presumption and self-absorbed thought.’ ”
“Who the hell said that?”
“Either Savonarola or Salvador Dalí, I can’t remember who.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, cut the crap!” laughed Holland.
“Why should I? It’s the first chuckle we’ve had. And what about your two sisters? What happened to them?”
“It’s a better joke,” replied Peter, his head angled down into his chin, a mischievous smile on his lips. “One’s a nun in New Delhi, and the other’s president of her own public relations firm in New York and uses better Yiddish than most of her colleagues in the profession. A couple of years ago she told me they stopped calling her shiksa. She loves her life; so does my other sister in India.”
“Yet you chose the military.”
“Not ‘yet,’ Alex.… And I chose it. I was an angry young man who really believed this country was being dumped on. I came from a privileged family—money, influence, an expensive prep school—that guaranteed me—me, not the black kid on the streets of Philadelphia or Harlem—automatic admittance to Annapolis. I simply figured I had to somehow earn that privilege. I had to show that people like me didn’t just use our advantages to avoid, but instead to extend, our responsibilities.”
“Aristocracy reborn,” said Conklin. “Noblesse oblige—nobility imposes obligations.”
“That’s not fair,” protested Holland.
“Yes, it is, in a very real sense. In Greek, aristo means the ‘best,’ and kratia is the word for ‘rule.’ In ancient Athens such young men led armies, their swords up front, not behind, if only to prove to the troops that they would sacrifice with the lowliest of them, for the lowliest were under their commands, the commands of the finest.”
Peter Holland’s head arched back into the top of the velvet seat, his eyes half closed. “Maybe that was part of it, I’m not sure—I’m not sure at all. We were asking so much … for what? Pork Chop Hill? Unidentifiable, useless terrain in the Mekong? Why? For Christ’s sake, why? Men shot, their stomachs and chests blown away by an enemy two feet in front of them, by a ’Cong who knew jungles they didn’t know? What kind of war was that?… If guys like me didn’t go up with the kids and say, ‘Look, here I am, I’m with you,’ how the hell do you think we could have lasted as long as we did? There might have been mass revolts and maybe there should have been. Those kids were what some people call niggers, and spics and the foul-ups who couldn’t read or write beyond a third-grade level. The privileged had deferments—deferments from getting soiled—or service that damn near guaranteed no combat. The others didn’t. And if my being with them—this privileged son of a bitch—meant anything, it was the best gig I ever did in my life.” Holland suddenly stopped talking and shut his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Peter. I didn’t mean to rough up past roads, I really didn’t. Actually, I started with my guilt, not yours.… It’s crazy how it all dovetails and feeds upon itself, isn’t it? What did you call it? The merry-go-round of guilt. Where does it stop?”
“Now,” said Holland, sitting up in the seat, straightening his back and shoulders. He picked up the limousine telephone, punched two numbers and spoke. “Drop us off in Vienna, please. And when you’ve done that, go find a Chinese restaurant and bring us back the best they’ve got.… Frankly, I’m partial to spare ribs and lemon chicken.”
Holland proved to be half right. The first hearing of Panov’s session under the serum was agonizing to listen to, the voice devastating, the emotional content blurring the information, especially for anyone who knew the psychiatrist. The second hearing, however, produced instantaneous concentration, engendered without question by the very pain they heard. There was no time to indulge in personal feelings; the information was suddenly everything. Both men began taking copious notes on legal pads, frequently stopping and replaying numerous sections for clarity and understanding. The third hearing refined the salient points further; by the end of the fourth, both Alex and Peter Holland had thirty to forty pages of notes apiece. They spent an additional hour in silence, each going over his own analysis.
“Are you ready?” asked the CIA’s director from the couch, a pencil in his hand.
“Sure,” said Conklin, seated at the desk with his various electronic equipment, the tape machine at his elbow.
“Any opening remarks?”
“Yes,” replied Alex. “Ninety-nine point forty-four percent of what we listened to gives us nothing, except to tell us what a terrific prober this Walsh is. He hopscotched around picking up cues faster than I could find them, and I wasn’t exactly an amateur when it came to interrogations.”
“Agreed,” said Holland. “I wasn’t so bad either, especially with a blunt instrument. Walsh is good.”
“Better than that, but that doesn’t concern us. What he pulled out of Mo does—again with a ‘but.’ It’s not in Panov’s recapturing what he revealed because we have to assume he revealed almost everything I told him. Instead, it’s in what he repeated having heard.” Conklin separated several pages. “Here’s an example. ‘The family will be pleased … our supreme will give us his blessing.’ He’s repeating someone else’s words, not his own. Now, Mo isn’t familiar with criminal jargon, certainly not to the point where he would automatically make a connection, but the connection’s there. Take the word ‘supreme’ and change it by removing one vowel and inserting another. ‘Supremo’—capo supremo, hardly a heavenly supreme being. Suddenly, ‘the family’ is light years away from Norman Rockwell, and ‘blessing’ is interchangeable with a reward or a bonus.”
“Mafia,” said Peter, his eyes steady and clear despite a number of drinks that had obviously been burned out of his system. “I hadn’t thought that one through, but I marked it instinctively.… Okay, here’s something else along the same lines, the same lines because I also picked up on the unlike-Panov phrases.” Holland flipped through his legal pad and stopped at a specific page. “Here. ‘New York wants it all.’ ” Peter continued slapping over the pages. “Again here. ‘That Wall Street is something.’ ” Once more the DCI progressed through his legal pad. “And this one. ‘Blondie fruits’—the rest is garbled.”
“I missed that. I heard it, but it didn’t make any sense to me.”
“Why should it, Mr. Aleksei Konsolikov?” Holland smiled. “Underneath that Anglo-Saxon exterior, education and all, beats the heart of a Russian. You’re not sensitive to what some of us have to endure.”
“Huh?”
“I’m a WASP, and ‘blondie fruits’ is but one more pejorative description given us by, I must admit, other trampled-upon minorities. Think about it. Armbruster, Swayne, Atkinson, Burton, Teagarten—‘blondies’ all. And Wall Street, certain firms in that originally WASP financial bastion, at any rate.”
“Medusa,” said Alex, nodding. “Medusa and the Mafia.… Holy Christ.”
“We’ve got a telephone number!” Peter leaned forward on the couch. “It was in the ledger Bourne brought out of Swayne’s house.”
“I’ve tried it, remember? It’s an answering machine, that’s all it is.”
“And that’s enough. We can get a location.”
“To what end? Whoever picks up the messages does it by remote, and if he or she has half a brain, it’s done from a public phone. The relay is not only untraceable but capable of erasing all other messages, so we can’t tap in.”
“You’re not very into high tech, are you, Field Man?”
“Let’s put it this way,” replied Conklin. “I bought one of those VCRs so I could watch old movies, and I can’t figure out how to turn off the goddamn blinking clock. I called the dealer and he said, ‘Read the instructions on the interior panel.’ I can’t find the interior panel.”
“Then let me explain what we can do to an answering machine.… We can jam it externally.”
“Gee willikers, Sandy, what’s next for Orphan Annie? What the hell is that going to do? Other than kill the source.”
“You’re forgetting. We have the location from the numbers.”
“Oh?”
“Someone has to come and repair the machine.”
“Oh.”
“We take him and find out who sent him there.”
“You know, Peter, you’ve got possibilities. For a neophyte, you understand, your current outrageously undeserved position notwithstanding.”
“Sorry I can’t offer you a drink.”
Bryce Ogilvie, of the law firm Ogilvie, Spofford, Crawford and Cohen, was dictating a highly complex reply to the Justice Department’s antitrust division when his very private telephone line rang; it rang only at his desk. He picked up the phone, pressed the green button and spoke rapidly. “Hold on,” he ordered, looking up at his secretary. “Would you excuse me, please?”
“Certainly, sir.” The secretary got out of her chair, walked across the large impressive office and disappeared beyond the door.
“Yes, what is it?” asked Ogilvie, returning to the phone.
“The machine isn’t working,” said the voice on the sacrosanct line.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. All I get is a busy signal.”
“That’s the best equipment available. Perhaps someone was calling in when you called.”
“I’ve been trying for the past two hours. There’s a glitch. Even the best machines break down.”
“All right, send someone up to check it out. Use one of the niggers.”
“Naturally. No white man would go up there.”