forty

“George Paperas is dead.” She let Vaslik have the worst news first. It would prepare him best for what came next; after that anything might seem possible.

“You’d better sit down.” He pointed to a chair and handed her a coffee. She thought she noticed a tiny tremor on the surface of the drink. “Tell me what happened.”

She relayed what her father had told her, certain that Slik would check the details for himself. He listened carefully, a frown clouding his face when she mentioned the two men he’d seen following Paperas from the pub.

“I know the CIA doesn’t get great press,” he murmured, “but it doesn’t make them responsible for every unexplained death.”

“Maybe not. But there are other pointers.”

“Really? Like what?”

She hesitated, using the coffee to gain time, organise her thoughts. Now she was here, facing him, nothing seemed as certain or as compelling as it had back at the pub. What if Vaslik laughed her back out onto the street? As an experienced investigator he’d have every right, because from his viewpoint the few scrappy bits of “evidence“ she’d assembled were at best lame, at worst, pathetic.

She put down the coffee and started talking, laying out everything she knew or suspected. She began with Helen Stephenson’s appearance, her possible nationality and her part in making Tiggi Sgornik’s effects disappear; the obvious professionalism of the bugging exercise carried out on the Hardman house; the surveillance and failed snatch on Nancy near the supermarket—both involving Stephenson; the interest in George Paperas which had probably begun with her own meeting with the charity consultant. That brought her to Aron’s comments about Tiggi, her thoughts about the language of the kidnap note and the napkin from the Mount Street Deli.

All through her talk, Vaslik had remained expressionless, letting her speak. Even the American-sounding connection hadn’t raised a glimmer of movement. But the last one brought a look of incredulity to his face. “You’re serious? You think a napkin points to this being …what—a CIA plot?” He gave a bark of laughter. “Jesus, Ruth—can you hear yourself? Next you’ll be saying they’re running this out of Grosvenor Square and Tiggi is actually a Polish graduate and CIA officer! That’s a hell of a stretch.”

She stared at him, surprised by the passion in his voice. Slik the obelisk, the unemotional, reserved former cop, who took a slap in the face from a furious Nancy without a flinch, suddenly transformed.

“Hey—I know it’s shaky, OK?” she countered with just as much passion, but feeling the colour rise in her cheeks at the possibility that he might be right, that she had slipped into the realm of fantasy. “If you have anything better, let me have it.”

It was a weak gambit, but it was all she had left. If Slik didn’t go with her on this, at least enough to consider it as a possibility, she was lost. She might as well shut up shop and go home.

To her surprise he sighed and shook his head. “No. I don’t.” It seemed to deflate him, and she recognised how difficult it must have been for him to admit it. It gave her the confidence to tell him about the results of her talk with Mr. Khouri at the Mamoun restaurant.

“Christ,” he ventured, when she finished. “That’s something else she never told us.”

“I know. But I’m wondering if she even knew, like so much else in this case. It explains how Hardman managed to move around such a wide region. Arabic’s not the only language, but coupled with English it would certainly help in a lot of the areas he visited.”

“I guess.”

“So where do we go from here?”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “About the Arabic thing, I don’t know. It’s not my field. But about the CIA connection, I guess I can make a phone call … ask a couple of questions. It might not get me anywhere, though.”

“Ask who—the CIA?”

“No, not them. I don’t know anybody at Langley and I doubt they’d even talk to me. But I can ask around, see if anybody has heard anything.”

“Won’t that be risky?”

“Not if I’m careful.”

She waited, but he said nothing else. She stood up suddenly feeling the length of the day. Or maybe it was the wine earlier. “Thanks for the coffee. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Vaslik saw Ruth out, then turned and thought about the theory she had laid out. It was wild, he knew that; it was a scenario off the silver screen, full of imagination and colour, with exotic women and shadowy followers and a kidnapped child.

And a voice on the phone that he couldn’t get out of his head. A voice that shouldn’t have been there.

He took a short walk to clear his mind, one eye on his back-trail to check if he was being followed. Ingrained habits didn’t die out that easy. If anything, you made damned sure that you didn’t get careless even if you had a lot on your mind.

Half an hour later he was back inside.

And that worried him.

Because if Ruth was right and George Paperas had been targeted for surveillance, whether by the CIA or an outside organisation, it followed that Ruth would be on the watch list, too. He knew the way these things worked, probably better than she did. Just because she hadn’t seen anybody didn’t mean they weren’t there. The old paranoia joke was closer to the truth than people knew.

He worked it through, knocking aside his own objections with cool logic. Surveillance and monitoring of activities was all about discovering connections; find a person of interest, and that person would lead to another and another, like links in a long chain. You checked each link to see where the next connection lay, because that was the way these things worked out. Degrees of separation wasn’t simply a wild notion first proposed by a twentieth century Hungarian author, or later given colour by a Hollywood actor; it was real and it worked.

All you had to do was find the links. Simple.

The trouble was, pros in the intelligence and security world knew the theory of old; they had polished it, improved on it and made it their life’s work to isolate themselves from such connections wherever they could. It was their key to survival. And they were very good at it.

He just had to hope he could be better.