Would you take this, please?” Michaelson said to the med-tech, tendering a plastic oxygen mask. “I’m not sure where it goes.”
“It goes over your nose and mouth till we get to the ER,” the man said. “And lie back down. I’m in for beaucoup paperwork if you kick off before I wheel you out.”
“No danger of that. I’m perfectly all right, really.”
He pulled Marjorie’s cell phone from beneath the blanket covering him and punched in one of the numbers he carried in his head.
“It’s four miles of undiluted oxygen makes you think you’re all right,” the med-tech said. “But they’ll want to hold you overnight for observation.”
“I’m a competent adult with minimum insurance and I decline to be observed.”
Before the med-tech could offer any rebuttal a breathless female voice informed Michaelson that he had reached Cavalier Books.
“Ah, Carrie, there you are,” he said into the phone. “Two things. First, Ms. Randolph will be delayed. Second, would you do me the immense favor of calling a taxi to meet me at MRTC?…Nothing has happened to her except that she’s gotten a bit chilly, but she’s probably going to have to spend several more hours out at Calvert Manor answering rather tiresome questions.…There’s a girl, thank you, Carrie.”
He looked back toward the med-tech as he replaced the phone.
“I notice you haven’t devoted much attention to my quiet friend here,” he said.
“Can’t help him,” the med-tech said. “Never made it to the seminary. And I can’t help you much, ‘cause they don’t let med-techs practice psychiatry in Maryland.”
Siren wailing and lights flashing, the ambulance still needed another twelve minutes to negotiate the snow-snarled way to the Maryland Regional Trauma Center. As it backed up to the receiving dock, the med-tech glanced out a side window.
“Your cab is just pulling in,” he said, shaking his head. “You know, I do believe that was about the most high-handed performance I’ve ever seen.”
“You’ve led a sheltered life,” Michaelson said with a brief smile as he exited the ambulance. “You ought to see an ambassador’s wife in action sometime.”
The twenty bone-jolting minutes that it took the taxi to reach Demarest’s address were just enough for the cabbie’s explanation, in precise but heavily accented English, of the fatal shortsightedness infecting America’s attitude toward NATO expansion. A growing sense of urgency doing more damage to his arteries than smoke inhalation ever could have, Michaelson barely refrained from pointing out that Riga wasn’t crawling with cabbies who discussed foreign policy in American-accented Latvian.
Cloaking his hurry-up-dammit impulses behind a mask of measured serenity, he deliberately slowed his pace as he approached the door of the flat above Demarest’s. Its no-nonsense denizen had had ample time to spot him as he walked from curbside to porch, and to recall his suspicious visit of a few days before. He was pleasantly surprised when she answered his buzz not with a warning shot but by asking him over the speaker what he wanted.
“I’m afraid I have some unpleasant news,” he said. “May I come in?”
“No. Spill it.”
“There’s been a fire at Calvert Manor. Mr. Demarest has been taken to Maryland Regional Trauma Center.”
Almost instantly he heard hurrying steps clomping down the stairway inside the door. The expression on the face that thrust itself at him when the door flew open was simultaneously stricken and accusing.
“How bad?” she demanded.
“I can’t be certain,” he said. “Smoke inhalation.”
She looked at Michaelson with intense concentration for a moment, as if trying to decipher from his eyes truth that she wasn’t hearing in his words.
“You’re his mother, aren’t you?” Michaelson said gently. “I’m very sorry.”
“How did you know?”
“Not many tenants guard their landlords’ property with Horatian intensity,” Michaelson said. “And once I got the idea that you were more than a tenant, the family resemblance seemed plain. Then I indirectly confirmed it through him.”
“I have to go there,” she said brusquely, pushing past him and closing the door tightly behind her.
“By all means. Before you do, though, there’s something you should know.”
“What’s that?” she asked, turning back toward Michaelson.
“Some men are going to come to search his apartment. Soon. If there’s anything in there that you don’t want these men to find, now would be an excellent time to remove it.”
“Police?”
“Eventually,” Michaelson said, “but the men I’m talking about definitely aren’t police, and they’ll be here a lot sooner.”
“How do you know they’ll be coming?” she asked.
“Because I saw one of them take Mr. Demarest’s keys out of his pocket before he was put in the ambulance.”
Agonizing indecision etched eloquently across her features, the woman gazed in baleful suspicion at Michaelson. If only she could figure out some way to blame all this on him, her expression seemed to say, everything would be much clearer. Finally her eyes snapped twice and her face took on a decisive cast. She scampered across the porch to Demarest’s door.
Michaelson moved to the far end of the porch and waited. He crossed his arms, then unabashedly promoted the arm cross to a full-scale hug while he stamped his feet. Stoicism was fine to a point, but he was getting cold. In a perverse way, he supposed, this was apropos; for the thought of what he was about to do chilled his belly as much as the boreal wind did his fingers and toes.
The woman was inside Demarest’s apartment for seven minutes—long enough to get selected things she knew were there, but not to search the place. Michaelson moved toward the sound of the opening door and gallantly held it open for her as she came out, awkwardly laden with a grocery sack pressed against her chest. He braced his free hand against the inside door.
“I don’t want the money or the drugs,” Michaelson said quietly when he saw that he had her attention. “But I have to have the envelopes.”
“What envelopes?” she demanded.
“Please,” he sighed. “Your son took deliveries at a New York Avenue club from people who arrived on foot without handcarts. Hence drugs, therefore money. But the men coming here don’t care about that either. They’re interested in something else. So am I. Now, it’s getting late. I’m cold and you’re in a hurry. Let’s get it done.”
This decision she made quickly. Carefully concealing the remaining contents of the sack from Michaelson, she extracted a pale yellow civil service routing envelope.
“There was only one,” she said as he took it from her.
Michaelson thanked her, but she had already turned away and moved off.
Michaelson stepped into Demarest’s apartment, closed the door firmly, and made himself comfortable in a leather armchair near a heating register before he opened the envelope. The first thing he found was a strip of tiny negatives looped repeatedly around a long, narrow rectangle of white cardboard.
Lord, he mused, I thought Minoxes went out with Nehru jackets. He unlooped the strip and held it up to the pale white sunlight infiltrating the room through the window behind his chair. He couldn’t begin to make out any detail, but he saw enough to satisfy him that the first sixteen shots were of one document laid at a slight angle on top of another—just like the documents in the photograph Halliburton had sent him.
The other thing in the envelope was a carbon copy of a three-page document headed desk memo. From Lancer to File, according to the heading, Re: Assorted Debriefings. Dated July 1, 1987. Andrew Shepherd showed up at the top of page two. The memo called him Professor, but the details reported left no doubt about his identity: “In-country 12–20 June. No significant contact GOY. Main visit = Jessenice. Incredibly crowded (locals—‘some religious crap’), every decent hotel booked, had to share room at Peace & Friendship Hostel (‘total fleabag’). Aus/Czech goods readily available street markets.”
Michaelson had no trouble sorting through the telegraphic data. “GOY” was Government of Yugoslavia, whose representatives had avoided Andrew Shepherd on this particular trip. Shepherd had come to Jessenice and stayed at a world-class hotel with all the amenities and a price tag to match. Then he had come back to the United States and told Lancer that an influx of Yugoslav religious enthusiasts had forced him to put up with squalid student accommodations.
“Lancer” was one of the trade names used at the Central Intelligence Agency by Aldrich Ames. Michaelson happened to know that, but even if he hadn’t, he could have figured it out. Josh Logan had gotten Halliburton’s document to Michaelson the evening of February 23, 1994, and the next morning The New York Times had reported the FBI’s arrest of Aldrich Ames for espionage. That had begun the public exposure of Ames as the CIA’s now-notorious Soviet mole, who soon afterward cut a deal to save his neck and began serving life in prison for selling his country’s secrets.
Michaelson roused himself sternly from his reverie, for company was coming and there was work to do before it arrived. Even with a flurry of activity, however, he couldn’t entirely avoid a moment’s introspection.
“What a pathetic thing to die for,” he muttered as he searched for a fresh envelope.