WHEN CHARLOTTE GRAHAM SPOTTED DAVID PATCHEN AND THE LOVELY young blonde having lunch together at the Age of Enlightenment, it did not occur to her that it was anything but an innocent encounter—Patchen obliging some old war horse of the Outfit’s (probably a European, judging by the clothes and manners of the glorious being who sat next to him on the banquette) by taking his daughter to a trendy restaurant and paying the bill with secret funds. How, she wondered, had Patchen even known about this place? Had Martha told him? Was this tête à tête between beauty and beast her reward? Charlotte’s eyes met the blonde’s; they exchanged brief strangers’ smiles. She decided to stop by Patchen’s table on her way out; it never did any harm to have a warm little chat on the fly with the head of the secret service in full view of a room filled with Washington climbers.
“She knows we’re here,” Zarah said to Patchen. “We’d better look like we’re in love.”
“Don’t you think she’ll guess we’re acting?” Patchen said.
“Not if our faces register emotion.”
“Which one?”
“They all look alike from a distance.” She leaned against him and took his hand. “Tell me, why do you believe that my father saved your life in the war?”
Patchen’s arctic face seemed to break up into a number of floes and then reassemble itself into a slightly different surface—refrozen but subtly fretted and fractured beneath the surface.
“Who told you about that?”
“Barney. Father says he’s never been sure whether you were the one he rescued or not,” Zarah said. “What about you? This is our chance to clear up the mystery. I’ll be the detective.”
Charlotte watched while Patchen talked and the beauty listened. It was clear from the expressions on both their faces that this was no casual meeting of strangers. Once or twice Patchen seemed to be on the point of tears. The girl took his hand, the useless one, and warmed it between both of hers. Then she whispered something into his ear and they left, arm in arm, before Charlotte could approach them.
“I must say it was very odd, seeing that creature being fondled by a girl like that,” Charlotte told Patrick Graham that evening as they changed for dinner. “It was altogether too Frankenstein-meets-Snow White. D’you suppose old David is having a bit of that delicious stuff on the side? It must be very dear.”
Patrick boomed out his reply; they were conversing across the length of the bedroom through the open doors of their dressing rooms. “You think he’d cheat on that sweet little wife of his? Come on.”
“He’s quite alone and fancy-free, you know. Martha’s gone back to Guatemala or wherever it is to rejoin her drunken Indians. She called me to say goodbye; I thought that was rather sweet.”
“Who is this sexy girl?”
“I have no idea. They’d never seen her before at the Age, and I’m quite sure they would have remembered if they had. To give you an idea of the type, the waiters all thought she was the ghost of Madeleine Carroll; they’re old movie fans, it’s part of their customer chat.”
Patrick Graham appeared in the doorway of his wife’s dressing room, tying the silk polka-dot tie from Sulka that was his trademark. “I’ll cause inquiries to be made,” he said.
They dined that night at Ristorante Cerruti, an unfashionable little place in Alexandria, because the people they were entertaining, a propagandist for the Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) guerrilla movement in Peru and her live-in collaborator, an unkempt National Geographic staff writer, were not interesting enough to invite home. Also, Graham adored the many kinds of peppery sausages that were the specialty of the chef, his old friend Giacomo Pazzo. He preferred soft food; early in his television career one of his capped teeth had broken off as he chewed a steak sandwich an hour before going on the air, and he had been cautious ever since. To their surprise, Patchen and the blonde arrived soon after the Grahams were seated and were shown to a corner table.
“I see what you mean,” Graham said.
Charlotte’s eyes sparkled with the joy of the born gossip. The couple’s behavior was as she had described it. They were utterly absorbed in each other. The Grahams could not, of course, hear what Patchen and Zarah were saying on the other side of the babbling crowd, but in fact they were discussing the way in which Ja’wab and Zarah had slaughtered the terrorists.
“Why did just the two of you go?” Patchen asked.
“The rest were needed to defend Tifawt in case it was attacked.”
“Yeho says you decapitated the guards after you killed them.”
“Not really. Ja’wab used a strangling wire. It cuts through everything but the bone. Even that if you saw a little.”
“How did he manage to get behind them?”
“It was a problem because the moon was full. We used a pincers movement. I went in front, he went behind. Then I rose up out of the desert, practically at their feet, and while they were distracted, he attacked.”
“Why didn’t they shoot you?”
“I think it was the element of surprise. When the Ibal Iden enter an enemy camp at night they always take off all their clothes. They used to believe that a naked person was invisible to his enemies.”
“Is that true, on the basis of your experience?”
“No.”
Graham watched them closely while avoiding the eyes of the chattering Peruvian, who had renounced her Spanish names because they had originally belonged to imperialist rapists and insisted on simply being called “La Senderista”; her boyfriend called her “Sendy.”
“The ultimate objective of the Shining Path movement is to eradicate all stains of the colonial experience, including the existing bourgeoisie, thus restoring Peru’s original and unique culture and people,” La Senderista said.
Graham did not hear her.
“Sounds rather like what the Khmers Rouges did in Cambodia,” Charlotte said.
“Except that we will steadfastly carry out our program to the logical end,” said La Senderista.
“You mean you plan to kill everybody!” Charlotte said. “I bope you’re in touch with the IRA; it sounds just the thing for Ireland.”
No one thought that she was joking. The National Geographic man, stirring his third Negroni with a stiff forefinger, nodded judiciously. La Senderista, eyes blazing with conviction, drew breath and continued with the indoctrination. Graham continued to stare across the room like a man hypnotized. It seemed to him that Patchen’s blonde emitted a post-coital glow; it reminded him of the sensuous, half-contemptuous, half-inviting look of an expensive cat after stretching.
“She looks like somebody we know,” Graham said to his wife.
“But it’s not Madeleine Carroll.”
He sent a bottle of fifteen-year-old Vino Nobile de Montepulciano, the most expensive Italian wine on the list, to Patchen’s table. On the way out, quite soon afterward, he stopped to chat, sending La Senderista and her slow-witted boyfriend (“Who’s that?” he had asked when Graham and Patchen lifted their glasses to each other, causing La Senderista to snarl like a jaguar) outside under Charlotte’s care.
“Patrick Graham,” he said heartily, extending his hand, as if the wholly superfluous gesture of identifying himself were proof of his democratic modesty.
“Hello, Patrick,” Patchen replied.
The girl said nothing and Patchen made no move to introduce her.
“I didn’t quite catch your name,” Graham said.
Patchen remained silent. Zarah said, “Zarah Christopher.”
“That’s who you look like—Paul Christopher. My wife and I have been racking our brains. What’s the relationship?”
“He’s my father.”
“You’re Christopher’s daughter?” Graham was genuinely surprised and let it show. “I didn’t know you existed.”
Zarah smiled up at him with Paul Christopher’s aloof, well-bred smile, as if, Graham thought, she were being polite to the Invisible Man.
“Well, now that you do know, I do exist, obviously,” she said.
DORCAS HAD SOME DIFFICULTY IN ARRANGING AN APPOINTMENT between Patrick Graham and Stephanie Christopher. Finally, after refusing invitations to breakfast at the Hay-Adams Hotel and luncheon at the Lion d’Or, Stephanie agreed to drinks after work at Joe and Mo’s. They sat in a front corner, beneath the framed and autographed dust jackets of Graham’s books. He and Stephanie had known each other before he was famous; he had recruited her for his Maoist cell in the East Village after the original small black-haired girl, the one he had loved, defected from it in order to marry Julian Hubbard. He admired Stephanie. Of all the look-alike diminutive brunettes Graham had collected over the years to service his obsession, Stephanie was the only one he had been unable to get into bed. She was also the brightest and toughest and most skeptical. In the Maoist cell he had believed that she refused him because she was a lesbian, but he subsequently learned that she had known Emily at school, where they were sometimes mistaken for sisters, and understood what he was up to. Now, however, it was his secret opinion that she had never slept with anyone except Christopher, that she had been waiting for him even then. It was certainly true that she had pounced on Christopher, despite the difference in their ages and political sentiments, almost as soon as he stepped off the plane from China.
They both ordered carbonated mineral water. Graham lifted his glass, and said, “Power to the people,” their toast from the old days. Then, after swallowing, he came directly to the point. “I didn’t know that your husband had a grown-up daughter,” he said.
“Really?”
“Really. She looks just like him. What’s the story?”
“The usual, Patrick. Her mother got pregnant and nine months later out came Zarah.”
“Who was her mother?”
“Someone Paul married and divorced when I was a child. She’s dead.”
“Did you know her?”
“Very slightly.”
“Was she a German, too?”
“She was a Southern belle. I’m in a hurry, Patrick. What’s this all about?”
“So is her daughter. Belle, I mean.” Graham smiled and batted his eyes in mocking imitation of the flirtatious unliberated females of a bygone age. “Unless I’m reading you wrong, old friend, and I don’t think I am, you didn’t like wifey número uno one little bit. Or is this retroactive jealousy? What was her name?”
“What difference does it make? What are you up to, Patrick?”
“Why should I be up to anything? I’m sure Paul has forgotten all about this kid’s mother even if she was as big a knockout as the daughter. I would if I were in his shoes. The greatest regret of my life is that you and I never …”
Stephanie started to slide along the banquette. Graham seized the strap of her shoulder bag to stop her from leaving.
“Don’t go yet,” he said. “Stay and talk. You of all people know how good it is for the lovelorn to get it all out. Come on, tell the nice doctor—what was she like?”
“Cathy was just a normal, old-fashioned American girl,” Stephanie said. “All she wanted was twenty-one orgasms a week, a hundred thousand dollars a year in spending money, and total and unquestioned control over the actions, speech, and thoughts of the lucky man who was providing these things for her.”
“Sounds like a pretty good deal. Which part of it did Christopher fail to live up to?”
“Goodbye, Patrick.”
He let go of her purse. “You’re really pissed off about something, aren’t you?” he said. “It can’t be me you’re mad at because I’ve never done anything to you. Literally. So it must be Zarah. Let me tell you what I think. I think your stepdaughter is fucking David Patchen.”
By now Stephanie was standing up. “I’m practically sure of it,” Graham continued in a voice audible in every corner of the restaurant. “What does it all mean? That is the question.”
Stephanie tossed her hair from her face and stared at him with withering contempt. Graham, smiling amiably in return, felt a pang of nostalgia. She didn’t look a day older than she had looked as a Movement chick. She still wore her hair in a mop, she still dressed with no regard to bourgeois style, she still peered through her tresses with those burning hostile eyes. Sixties eyes. And she was sleeping her life away with an old spy. What a waste. Well, her life wasn’t yet over and neither was his. Graham lifted his glass of sparkling water in a toast.
“Here’s to dangerous liaisons,” he said.
“Patrick,” she said. “You really are an asshole, do you know that?”
STEPHANIE, SITTING CROSS-LEGGED ON THE RUMPLED SHEETS, SWITCHED on the bedside lamp and looked down into Christopher’s face. She was naked; nudity seemed somehow to complete the atmosphere of total frankness she strove for. Her face was troubled and angry.
“Something’s happened to you,” she said. “You’re not the same.”
Christopher said, “Yes, we’ve just got through discussing that.”
They had just made love, but before that they had talked for hours. She knew every detail of Christopher’s conversations with Lla Kahina and Sir Richard Shaw-Condon. Their revelations had horrified Stephanie, not in and of themselves, because descriptions of human behavior never shocked her out of her clinical detachment, but because of what she feared they might do to Christopher. She had always thought that he needed professional help to come to terms with the disappearance of his mother; he had always refused to talk about it to anyone but her.
“I’m not talking about your mother,” Stephanie said. “This has to do with you and me. You’ve changed. You were like a stranger when we were making love just now. You were evading me; I could feel it. Something is going on with you. I know it.”
She was right. Christopher did not know how to explain it to her. In the middle of the act he had suddenly realized that his wife’s body was not the one he had imagined himself making love to. The feeling was so strong that he drew back to look at her. He had expected to see Cathy, or Molly, or even Lê—anyone but the familiar woman whose face he recognized on the pillow. Stephanie, the physical Stephanie, was an intruder in this fantasy, and he forced himself to remember who she was and where in time he was. This strange, faintly pornographic trick of the mind surprised him as much as it distressed Stephanie. Only once before, shortly after his return from China, had anything like it happened to him. The first time he made love to Stephanie (or, more accurately, the first time she had made love to him; he had done little more than acquiesce in what she obviously regarded as an act of healing), Molly had hidden in Stephanie’s body and he had believed—only for a moment, but with every nerve in his own body—that she was with him again even though she had been dead for more than ten years. But always after that he had kept her ghost at bay.
Stephanie had been watching Christopher’s face as it registered these thoughts. “Is there someone else?” she said. “If there is, tell me. We can deal with it.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” Christopher said. “It’s a whole roomful of others.”
“What?”
He told her what had been in his mind. Relief, then sympathy, then reassurance flooded into her face.
“There’s nothing so bizarre about that,” she said. “People fantasize all the time.”
“I wouldn’t call this a fantasy. It was involuntary.”
“Whatever you want to call it, you suppressed it. Why?”
“Because thinking about one woman while making love to another is a betrayal of both.”
Stephanie raised her eyebrows. “Double infidelity?”
“You could call it that.”
“Oh, Paul!” Stephanie smiled for the first time that evening, wagging her tousled head. “Who but you would invent a scruple like that?” Now she did giggle. “Is fighting off the memory of all these ex-wives and lovers a constant struggle for you?”
“No. No more so than any other form of fidelity is a struggle. You just put temptation out of your mind.”
“It’s impossible to put anything out of your mind, as you’ve just found out. All you do is repress it.”
It was Christopher’s turn to be amused; psychology was a religion to Stephanie, and her certitude always entertained him. He said, “And then one night when you open the closet door, there it is among the clothes-hangers, grinning at you out of horrible empty eye sockets.”
“Exactly,” Stephanie said. “Go ahead and make fun—that’s just another form of repression. The question is, why is this happening to you? Do you have any idea?”
“I think I do, yes. But let me hear what you think.”
“All right,” Stephanie said. “I’ll tell you what I think. You haven’t left me, you’ve left the man you are now and gone in search of the one you used to be. You’ve gone back to the past, to a time when I wasn’t in your life. That’s why you didn’t know who I was just now.”
She was right. Christopher knew it. He said, “Go on.”
“Prison was like the grave for you. You died in China because you were sure they were going to kill you, and then David Patchen brought you back to life. And now the past has come for you again—first Zarah, materializing out of thin air, then these revelations about your mother. It’s no wonder you’re disoriented.”
Christopher was amused again. “Doctor Webster-Christopher explains it all.”
“Go ahead and scoff,” Stephanie said. “But this is not the next world, Paul, even if you have found more happiness in it than you think you have coming to you. I’ll tell you something else I suspect: You’ve gotten yourself mixed up with the Outfit again. True or false?”
“True.”
He told her everything he knew about the Beautiful Dreamers operation. She understood each nuance of the plan. Stephanie had been born into the Outfit. She knew how the game was played, and what motivated the players.
“Why, for God’s sake?” Stephanie asked.
“Old debts,” Christopher replied.
“Bullshit. You don’t owe David or the O. G. or the Outfit anything. Remember what happened to you; the Outfit did that. Remember the facts of the case.”
“I do remember. This is something else.”
“How can you say that? It’s always the same. It’s always crazy. David will be tortured and killed. So will all the rest of them, probably. They’ll never get away with it.”
“Probably not,” Christopher said.
“Then why are you helping them?”
“You know why.”
“Because you think you can take care of Zarah?”
“In a word, yes.”
Stephanie snorted. “You actually think she needs you? I’d say that anybody who goes around cutting off people’s heads in the Sahara Desert doesn’t need her daddy’s protection.”
“I’m going to be there anyway.”
“Why, for God’s sake? Isn’t knowing what these psychopaths did to your mother and you and your father enough for you?”
“You think that Zarah is a psychopath?”
“I’m not even going to respond to that,” Stephanie said. “If you want to behave like a father, then forbid Zarah to go on this mad expedition. Lock her in her room. But don’t give her the keys to the car and then drive off the cliff with her.” Stephanie’s tone was reasonable, even conversational. She was no longer angry. She said, “You won’t be able to control what happens to Zarah any more than you could control what happened to your mother.”
“Maybe not,” Christopher said. “But this time at least I’ll be with her to the end.”
“Be with her or die with her? Are you sure which you mean? Which you want?”
“Come on, Stephanie.”
“Then what do you want? What about me? What about your other child? Is knowing the dead all that matters to you?”
“Not the dead. The truth.”
“You think there’s a difference in your case? It is all that matters to you. It always has been.”
Christopher was smiling no longer. “You’re entitled to your theories. But what if it were Lori? Would you say the same things then as you say to me now about Zarah?”
It was not like Stephanie to cry, but when Christopher spoke these words, first one tear and then another coursed down her cheek.
“That’s not fair,” she said.
“I know,” Christopher replied. “But let me tell you something. You say I died in some symbolic way in China, but China came twenty years too late.”
“You mean your life stopped when the Gestapo led your mother away. I know that. That’s why you can’t admit she’s dead forty years later.”
“Longer,” Christopher said.
“Because if she’s dead,” Stephanie said, “then you are too.”
Christopher was so silent that Stephanie was not sure that he had heard what she said. Finally he said, “Molly used to say that the dead know everything. All I can say is, I hope not.”
TO ANALYZE THE DRUG SAMPLE COLLECTED BY YEHO’S TEAM, PATCHEN called on a retired Outfit scientist who now worked in a private medical laboratory in the suburbs.
“It appears to be a drug called Versed,” he told Patchen.
“ ‘Appears to be’ or is?” Patchen said.
“Is. Chemical name, midazolam hydrochloride. It’s a benzodiazepine from the same family of tranquilizers as Valium, but much more powerful.”
“What are the effects?”
“It depresses the central nervous system. When administered in sufficiently large doses it induces euphoria, suggestibility, and a tremendous sense of cooperativeness. The subject will do anything. Anything. The beauty part is, it’s hangover free. The subject doesn’t remember a thing that he did or said afterward or have the slightest feelings of guilt or remorse.”
“Is there an antidote?”
“In an unscientific manner of speaking, Versed in big doses is an antidote to the natural responses of the brain. It turns off the conscience.”
“Can it be overcome with another drug?”
“In theory, yes. Amphetamines might work. But no sane person would administer them for that purpose.”
“Why?”
“Because you’d probably kill the patient. Or worse. You could stop the heart or damage the brain and turn the patient into a vegetable.”
“But if you accept the risk, how would you do it?”
“Ideally, by intravenous drip, being super-careful to balance the two drugs against each other in minute, scrupulously measured doses.”
“That’s impossible if you’re trying to conceal what you’re doing from the people who are administering the Versed. How else?” Patchen had already been considering this problem. “What about an implant,” he said, “one of those things they put under the skin of diabetics to release timed doses of insulin?”
“If, as I say, you’re willing to take the chance of killing the subject, it might work,” the scientist replied. “But it would be imprecise—and I say again, very, very dangerous.”
“How is the dosage of Versed decided?”
“Like everything else. By body weight and the effects desired.”
“Then you could calculate that dosage and balance it with an anti-dosage of amphetamine in the implant.”
“In theory, yes. But as far as I know, no one has ever tried anything resembling this on a human subject.”
“That’s not a problem,” Patchen said. “We’re dealing with a volunteer. How long would it take to run a test on an animal and prepare an implant on the basis of the results?”
“Not long. But I wouldn’t do it, David. Really I wouldn’t.” “The subject weighs a hundred and seventy-three pounds,” Patchen said. “I need the implant, fully loaded, by this time tomorrow.”
Patchen went to New York and took the elevator to the top floor of a building on Park Avenue. It was Saturday morning, and most of the offices were closed. He walked down the corridor until he found the number he was looking for on a door marked PRIVATE, then knocked. Red Conaghan opened the door at once. He was white-haired now and fleshier than he had been as a Navy surgeon. He was dressed for golf in bright pastels.
“Cary Grant,” he said. “I’d have known you anywhere.”
“You haven’t changed all that much, either, Doc,” Patchen replied.
They sat down, Conaghan behind a desk crowded with photographs of his many children and grandchildren, Patchen in the patient’s chair. The office was brilliantly lighted—an aid, Patchen supposed, to Conaghan’s first impression of candidates for cosmetic surgery. According to Patchen’s research, he specialized in breasts, backsides, and bellies. They had made him rich.
“I’ve read about you in the papers over the years,” Conaghan said. “Christopher, too. Even I was young in those days. ‘That is no country for old men. The young/In one another’s arms, birds in the trees …’ Christopher knew his Yeats. Does he still read poetry?”
“Writes it, even.”
“I suspected him of something like that way back in Hawaii. However, I didn’t foresee the exciting careers the two of you have had. You never can tell about the future. What can I do for you?”
“Some minor surgery.”
Patchen told him what he wanted, displaying the implant as he spoke. It was designed to dispense medication on a timed basis, and could be activated by breaking a glass ampule.
“What are you going to do, bang yourself on the chest, mea culpa?” Conaghan asked.
Patchen explained; Conaghan listened without expression. When Patchen was through he asked a question.
“How’s your health? As a kid you had an amazing heart. It just wouldn’t stop. Otherwise you’d be dead and buried on Okinawa. Is it still pumping away like old times?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’re going to need it if you go through with this.”
Patchen handed him an envelope. “I’ve brought you this. It’s a complete medical history.”
Conaghan put on reading glasses and scanned it. It was many pages long. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Go through that door. Take off your shirt and lie down on the table. I’ll be in as soon as I finish reading.”
In the examining room, he looked Patchen over at length, listening to his heart, taking his blood pressure, fingering his scars. No one had touched them since the last time Conaghan himself had done so, more than thirty years before.
“Funny, I remember the whole topography,” Conaghan said. “I wish you’d come to see me after the war. We could have done something about this. You say you want the squirter in your chest about there?” He touched Patchen.
“That’s right,” Patchen said. “Can you hide it under an old scar?”
“In your case, that’s no problem.”
“Do you have any other problem with all this?”
“No. It’s your body. But don’t you guys have your own secret doctors?”
“I’d rather have this done by an outsider. Will you do it?”
Conaghan looked down at Patchen’s ruined face and torso. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? It’s the least I can do, considering what I wasn’t able to do for you forty years ago in Hawaii.”
“You understand that lives depend on your taking this secret to the grave with you?”
“To the grave?” Conaghan, filling a hypodermic needle, glanced toward Patchen and grinned delightedly. “Jesus, is that the way you guys talk?” he said. “This is better than the movies.” He jabbed Patchen with the needle. “The answer is, you don’t exist,” he said, in Jimmy Cagney accents. “You never come here; I never seen you. Relax, copper. You won’t feel a thing.”
The procedure took only a few minutes. Patchen, wide awake and lucid, watched in a mirror.
“I’ve never seen anything like this rig before,” Conaghan said, examining the implant. His eyes danced behind the goggles. “Diabolically clever,” he said, slipping the device through a tiny incision.
ON THAT SAME SATURDAY MORNING, LESS THAN EIGHT HOURS BEfore air time for his show, Patrick Graham received another Beautiful Dreamers tape. The network refused to let him use it on the air.
“Why the hell not?” he asked the vice president in charge of the news division.
“Because we’ve been burned once.”
“That’s Outfit disinformation and you know it.”
“I know we’ve got a hundred million dollar lawsuit to settle with a one-armed Mormon war hero. Besides, it’s boring.”
“Boring? It’s a trip through the belly of the beast.”
“Beast? What beast?”
“The Outfit. The whole rotten Establishment.”
The vice president sighed theatrically over the car phone. They were talking Mercedes to Mercedes while Graham raced to the studio on the outskirts of Washington and the vice president drove to his tennis game in Westport, Connecticut. “Patrick,” he said, ‘the Cold War is over; it’s yesterday’s news.”
“You may think so. I don’t.”
“I know you don’t. The audience knows it, too. Once in a while you should ask yourself if that’s good.”
“Until a minute ago nobody ever said it was bad.”
“They pay me to be impolite. Even your audience doesn’t like terrorists who kidnap Americans. Neither do sponsors. This is not ratings-positive material. The answer is ‘no.’ No more mysterious tapes. No more one-armed Mormons. No more heroic Arabs. No. No. Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”
“Clear as a bell. You’re saying you’re afraid of the popularity of that dim-witted Republican in the White House. You’re asking me to sell out. I won’t do it. Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”
“Oh, Patrick, spare me. You’ll do what you’re told. Have a nice day.”
The vice president broke the connection. Dorcas, who had been listening in and making notes, said, “What will you do?”
“Say ‘too bad’ and bide my time,” Graham said. “Like the Russian general in For Whom the Bell Tolls. La guerre n’est pas finie until we say so.”
THE O.G. CAUSED DISCREET INQUIRIES TO BE MADE UNTIL HE DISCOVered someone who had invited the Grahams to a cocktail party on Sunday afternoon. The hostess was happy to invite the O. G., too, when a mutual friend called and asked for the favor.
At the party, held in a plywood-and-stone-veneer facsimile of a French manor house in McLean, Virginia, the O. G. sipped his usual plain tomato juice and chatted easily with any number of strangers while confidently waiting for Patrick Graham to approach him.
“Patrick Graham.” The firm handshake.
“By golly, so it is,” said the O. G. “I thought that looked like you talking to Justice Corash over in the corner. Splendid fellow, Corash; fine American.”
Corash was a conservative member of the Supreme Court who consistently voted against Graham’s beliefs.
“If you like pterodactyls,” Graham said.
The O. G. went on as if he had not heard this witticism. “How are you?” he asked. “How is your lady wife?”
“Charlotte will be disappointed to have missed you,” Graham replied.” She’s got a touch of the flu tonight.”
“Bad luck. What does an announcer do when he gets flu? How do you keep from coughing and sneezing on the air?”
“The network has vets who fix us up with shots before we go on, like race horses or professional football players.”
“ ‘Vets?’ That’s a bitter one, my lad.”
“It’s a bitter world when it comes to bosses and workers,” Graham said. “Loyalty up and loyalty down are things of the past. Even your man David Patchen was telling me that he’d swap the crew he has for the staff of the Washington Post anytime.”
“Did he? Jehoshaphat! That’s quite a statement.”
“I don’t think he’d have too many takers. What about you? Would you have made a trade like that if life were baseball?”
“In my day? No, I don’t think so. Back then, of course, we were getting most of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed types out of the best schools that now apply to places like the Post. As you say, times change.”
“So do perceptions of what constitutes honorable employment.”
“How true. When did you last catch sight of David?”
“Not long ago. Right after I broke the story about the Outfit kidnappings. There’s been more than one. Did you know that?”
“More than one of those tapes? By George, I hope not. One was enough. David was pretty upset, but I suppose he told you that.”
“Upset? Really? He didn’t say anything to me about that.”
“He didn’t?” the O. G. said. “That’s funny. You drove him right out of town with that broadcast of yours.”
“I did?”
“Yes. Poor fellow went on vacation. Shocked them out of their socks over at the Outfit. It’s the first time he’s taken a day of annual leave since he came to work more than thirty years ago.”
“Good Lord, I had no idea. Where did he go?”
“What? I have a hard time hearing at these things with everybody chattering in the background. Can’t smell or taste or feel a pretty knee at full power anymore, either. That’s what they mean when they say you’re losing your senses. Don’t grow old, Patrick, that’s my advice. But I guess you don’t have to worry. One of those vets can fix you up with an elixir. Nice to see you.”
The O. G. started to turn away. Graham caught at his sleeve. “I said, ‘Where did he go?’ “
“Who?”
“David Patchen.”
“Oh, David. He went to the south of France. Borrowed a house up in the hills near Grasse. Lovely country. The French eat larks in country restaurants at this time of year.”
“Do you know where, exactly? Clive Wilmot has a place in that neck of the woods, in a great little village perché called Spéracèdes. Did he borrow Clive’s place?”
“Clive’s place? No, I don’t think he’d do that.”
Graham looked to left and right to make sure others weren’t listening; there were other journalists in the room.
He leaned closer to the O. G. “Did he take Christopher’s daughter with him?”
The O. G., visibly shocked by the question, took a step backward. “Well,” Graham said. “Did he or didn’t he?”
The O. G. shook his head. “You’re a rum fellow, Patrick,” he said. “Very rum. Got to go. It’s been a treat talking to you.”
GRAHAM, KNOWING THAT HE HAD HIT HOME WITH THESE UNANSWERED questions, left the party, too. He called Dorcas on the car phone.
“It says on your resume that you speak French,” he said. “Do you?”
“Sort of.”
“Do you or don’t you?”
“Yes, but not like a native. I took four years of it at Dartmouth and spent half my junior year in Grenoble.”
“Good. Pack a bag for a week. Bring your passport. Bring them with you to the house. We’ve got work to do. And then you’re going traveling.”
Four days later, after many frustrating interviews with locals who spoke French with what sounded to Dorcas like an impenetrable Italian accent, she wandered by chance into the market place in Grasse and saw David Patchen and Zarah Christopher shopping. They bought twelve spéciales de portugaises oysters, a small sea bass, string beans, strawberries, a whole goat cheese, and half a dozen bottles of ordinary Provençal wine. They behaved like lovers, holding hands and making jokes.
Dorcas, while pretending to take pictures of the market scene, recorded their every action with the small video camera Graham had given her. She then followed their car over winding country roads to a secluded house below a town called Saint Vallier. Dorcas could see Zarah kissing Patchen through the rear window, and when the two of them got out of the car, they kissed again, passionately, with the groceries crushed between them. Dorcas taped this, too, panning to the sign on the driveway, “LA CADÈNIÈRE,” to the house itself, and all around the horizon to show the magnificent view of the Mediterranean below and the quaint hilltop village above; she even photographed the red-and-white milestone showing the rural route number and the number of kilometers to Grasse.
All this took some time. While she photographed, Dorcas blocked the narrow road with her car, but the people in the car behind her, a handsome man about her own age accompanied by two girls, all of them small and dark and exotic looking, did not seem to mind. She waved an apology; the others smiled forgivingly as if to say, “How charming! A pretty American madcap with a video camera, recording the beauties of Provence!” She almost photographed them: the man had the most startling green eyes set in a hawk’s face.
Two nights later Patrick Graham ran Dorcas’s footage, edited and enhanced, on his Saturday show. It was, he said, taken by a tourist with a home video camera who happened to recognize Patchen in the market of this small French city named for the counts and marquises of Grasse-Tilly, one of whom had commanded the French fleet at the Battle of Yorktown. (This historical reference, he thought, provided an almost subliminal patriotic note, in case the vice president for news had anything to say on that subject.) In order to explain who Zarah was Graham had to rerun some film from an old show about the Christophers. With excerpts from the Beautiful Dreamers tape spliced in, a couple of interviews with academics who specialized in intelligence matters, and a chat with a former Outfit clerk who had written an exposé of his old organization and then taken up residence in a Scandinavian country that Graham did not identify, it made an interesting twelve-minute segment.
That night Graham brought a magnum of Dom Perignon champagne with him when he got into bed with Dorcas. They replayed the show on tape while they drank the wine.
“How do you like being a spy of the people?” Graham asked. He poured a full glass of Dom Perignon, which cost a hundred dollars a magnum, between her breasts.
“It’s not boring,” Dorcas replied. “Definitely not boring.”
BECAUSE THE CLOCK WAS SIX HOURS LATER IN THE MARITIME ALPS than in Washington, “Patrick Graham Live” came on the satellite at two o’clock in the morning. Christopher taped the show in the farmhouse in the Préalpes de Grasse that he was using as a command post. Half a mile down the mountain, Zarah and Patchen were asleep inside another farmhouse. Chistopher stepped onto the terrace and whirled the child’s noisemaker that Yeho had provided; the Ibal Iden who were guarding the house replied in the same manner. The others were deployed in cars along the Route Napoleon to watch the highway approaches. He went back inside, leaving the door open, and waited in the dark. Patchen’s Doberman slept contentedly at Christopher’s feet. He knew the animal, and in the last week it had been trained to obey him—up to a point. It would come, stay, find, sit, and lie down at his command, but it would only attack on Patchen’s orders, or to protect Patchen if he was unconscious. After a moment it lifted its head and growled. Ja’wab, smiling as usual, stepped through the open door.
“They should have no trouble finding us,” he said, after watching the tape.
“No,” Christopher said. “I want to talk to Patchen and Zarah tomorrow morning in Nice. Keep up your watch on the house until morning. Then get everybody in the cars and string them out to cover their car. Make sure everybody has a full tank and ten liters extra in a can. You know the rules.”
The cars, six of them, were changed every other day at rental agencies in Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo. On the following morning, Monday, Christopher drove to the Nice Airport and turned in his car, then took the bus along the beachfront and rented another with one of the false driver’s licenses and national identity cards Yeho had provided; one of his Geneva retirees was a forger. A mile from the rental agency, Christopher parked the car at a meter, walked through narrow streets for fifteen minutes, and, finally, dialed a number in Annecy from a pay phone on the street. Yeho answered on the first ring, speaking German. They exchanged the false names and the meaningless phrases which were that day’s recognition code. Christopher had not gone through these motions in more than twenty years, and like a victim of seasickness stepping aboard a docked vessel, he tasted the acid memory of other voyages.
“I’m in a terrible mood,” Yeho said. “Last night the man in the next apartment was watching television so I couldn’t sleep. You could hear it through the wall.”
“What a pity,” Christopher said, knowing that one of Yeho’s team in Geneva had managed to plant a listening device in Hassan Abdallah’s apartment, a tiny transmitter that slipped into one of the holes in an electrical outlet but was powerful enough to pick up conversations two rooms away. Yeho’s collaborator inside the laboratory had been induced to plant another transmitter in the wall plug in Hassan’s office.
“So,” Yeho said. “How would it be if I come down for the weekend?”
“We can accommodate you easily. Just you, or will you bring friends?”
“My friends are still making up their minds, but I’ll keep you informed of their plans. Oh, I almost forgot. I’ll bring the pictures from the beach. Some of them came out very well.”
They repeated the code words to signal that all was well:
“Wunderschön!”
“Lebe wohl!”
BEFORE LUNCH, CHRISTOPHER MET PATCHEN AND ZARAH IN THE archeological museum at Cimiez, the site of a Roman settlement at Nice. As he arrived Christopher saw Ja’wab and Dimya drive by in opposite directions; another pair of Ibal Iden, too far away to identify, wandered through the ruins of a Roman arena. Inside the museum, at this hour and season, the three Americans were quite alone with a single elderly guard and the dusty displays of Roman pottery, coins, and jewelry. They paused before a marble statue said to be that of Antonia, a niece of Augustus.
Christopher told them about “Patrick Graham Live” and his telephone conversation with Yeho Stern.
“Where is Hassan Abdallah?”
“According to Yeho, still in Geneva. Of course he may have helpers, coming from someplace else, that we don’t know about.”
“When is Yeho estimating contact?”
“He isn’t. Not yet. But if the pattern holds it will happen Thursday or Friday.”
“Do you think the pattern will hold?”
“No. I think it will happen very soon, and very suddenly.”
“Why do you think that?”
“I have a feeling.”
“A feeling?” Patchen said. “This does seem like old times.” He had always made fun of Christopher’s intuition.
Christopher shrugged. “Be logical, then. They won’t want to take a chance on missing you. If you know what was on the Graham show, you’ll leave the country immediately. That’s what any sane man in your position would do. And then there are the French. If they saw the show, with that shot of the milestone at the end of your driveway, they’re going to flood the neighborhood with cops. That means they can’t afford to wait.”
“You don’t think they’re going to spot Zarah’s schoolmates and suspect a trap?”
“That won’t stop them.”
“You have the Ibal Iden scattered one to a car. They’re vulnerable.”
“That’s true. On the other hand, if the opposition decides to attack they’ll have to catch them and kill them one at a time, and I doubt that they’ve got the manpower or the time for that. They’ll snatch and run. We have to observe the snatch, follow you to your destination, watch the place where they take you, and wait for Hassan to show up. Then all we have to do is get you back.”
“Good summation,” Patchen said. “Good luck.” He uttered a short laugh and walked to the other side of the room, leaving Zarah and Christopher in privacy.
Zarah linked arms with her father. He could feel the life in her body. They could see their reflections in the glass of the showcase, and Patchen’s charcoal figure in the background.
“How strong is this feeling of yours?” she asked.
“Very strong,” Christopher said, tasting nausea again. “I don’t like it.”
“I think we’d better trust it anyway,” she said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”
“You’re sure of that?”
She looked directly into his eyes and smiled. “Absolutely,” she said. “As sure as if I’d seen it all happen before.”
She kissed him, something she had never done before in real life.
THE EYE OF GAZA TOOK PATCHEN AND ZARAH THIRTY MINUTES LATER just beyond Vence, where the road descends through the gorges of the River Loup in a series of sharp switchbacks. It was very professionally done, with one car pulling out in front of Patchen, causing him to brake, and another, proceeding in the opposite direction, swerving wildly to avoid a collision and ending up crosswise to the road so that Patchen was blocked front and rear. The drivers of the other two cars leaped out, shouting excitedly in the fashion of outraged French motorists. As they approached, Patchen punched himself in the chest, breaking the ampule of amphetamine inside the implant. Less than a second later the terrorists smashed the windows and injected them, painlessly, at the base of the skull with what they knew must be Versed. The terrorists stepped back and smiled, waiting for the drugs to take effect. Patchen and Zarah, awash in chemical happiness, smiled back cheerfully and opened the doors themselves.
Christopher, in position behind Patchen’s car, observed all this from the next higher switchback. By the time he reached the scene, Patchen and Zarah were already in the other cars and one of the terrorists was driving off in their car. Both wore the same look of wonder and delight as all the other Beautiful Dreamers. The road was still half-blocked; Christopher blew his horm impatiently while glaring at the terrorists from behind his rolled-up window. Above them, Kbira took advantage of the diversion to photograph the scene with a miniature Japanese video camera identical to the one Dorcas had used. Christopher drove on.
The Ibal Iden, strung out along ten kilometers of mountain road at all the key intersections, had no difficulty in following the kidnappers through the Clues Haute de Provence and the gorges along the River Var to a stone mas built into a mountainside at the end of a gravel track far back in the Maritime Alps. As soon as it was dark Ja’wab and the other males drifted down the mountain and surrounded the house, keeping watch while Kbira and Dimya rigged radio-controlled bombs and homing devices on each of the terrorists’ cars. Then the girls sank into the ground, too. They had no trouble operating in this steep, parched country with its snowcooled winds. It reminded them of the Idáren Dráren.