12

Trenton, New Jersey

In the early 1950s the facility had been an active USAF airfield but now it was used solely for training pilots and mechanics. Three vast hangars, located nineteen miles from downtown Trenton, contained a variety of aircraft in different stages of dismemberment. Young men worked under the guidance of their instructors, welding, soldering, exploring the mysteries of electronic circuitry.

Some distance from the three main hangars a fourth was situated at the place where the field was surrounded by barbed-wire. This construction, smaller than the others, contained an F-16 simulator. Andres Kiss stood with his hands on his hips and a certain arrogant expression on his face – though the look was less one of arrogance than of supreme confidence, that of a man so sure of his abilities he is contemptuous of any attempt to test them. He swept a strand of blond hair from his forehead and smiled at Gary Iverson, who produced a length of black cloth from his pocket and dangled it in the air. He knew Kiss would pass the blindfold test without difficulty, but Galbraith, whom Andres Kiss had never heard of, had to be reassured because the fat man’s eye for detail was like that of an eagle for its food supply. Galbraith could spot an overlooked detail or a sloppy piece of business with uncanny accuracy.

Andres Kiss climbed inside the simulator, which was a working cockpit of an F-16 fighter plane. He studied the panel layout, but it was all so familiar he could have sketched it from memory. He took the blindfold from Iverson’s hand and pulled it over his eyes, knotting it at the back of his skull. Because there wasn’t enough room in the cockpit for two, Iverson had to stand on the platform attached to the simulator, from which position he could verify the results of the blindfold test.

“We don’t need to go through this,” Kiss said.

“Do it for me, Andres.”

Andres Kiss adjusted the blindfold. He perceived Iverson as a necessary conduit for the Brotherhood’s plan. Without Iverson, the scheme would have been nothing more than the sentimental yearnings of old men. What Iverson brought to the plan was reality in the shape of an aircraft, which might have been otherwise impossible to obtain.

Kiss and Iverson went back some years together to a time when Andres had first learned how to fly a fighter plane and Gary Iverson had been his instructor. Kiss was the most willing student Iverson had ever had, the most adept. The young man’s affinity for flight was unnatural. Earthbound, Andres Kiss wasn’t the kind of man you’d want to spend an evening with. Pub-crawling with Kiss became an exercise in profound tedium even for somebody like Gary Iverson, whose own social graces were tepid at best. But when you put Kiss inside an aircraft he was transformed, some miracle of transmutation took place, and Kiss was touched by a radiance, an ease he otherwise didn’t have.

Now Kiss rubbed his fingers together like a man about to shuffle a deck of cards. “Go,” he said.

“Manual pitch override switch,” Iverson said.

Kiss moved a hand to the left console, touched the switch. He did this without hesitation.

“Antenna select panel,” Iverson said.

Kiss smiled and reached for the right console, his fingers passing over the engine anti-ice switch to the place Iverson had requested.

“Master caution light.”

Andres Kiss reached forward to the instrument panel. With blindness imposed upon him like this, he relied on an inner vision which in its own way was even more clear than ordinary eyesight. It was as if there existed in his brain an illuminated map of the cockpit. He touched the master caution light in the centre of the instrument panel.

“Oil pressure indicator,” Iverson commanded.

Kiss found it to the right of the panel. It was all so goddam easy. Iverson asked for the ejection mode handle and Kiss went to the right auxiliary console without thinking. He did the same for the fuel master switch on the left console, the autopilot switch, the cockpit pressure altimeter – everything Iverson asked for Andres Kiss found without hesitation.

“Can I take this goddam thing off now?” Kiss asked.

Iverson said he could. Kiss undid the blindfold, crumpled it in his hand, passed it back to Iverson. Then he climbed out of the simulator. Both men stood in silence for a time, dwarfed by the height of the hangar. There was a very small skylight set in the roof and morning sun shone through. Andres Kiss experienced the same kind of awesome sensation in a hangar that a devout Christian might in a vast cathedral.

Iverson made a fist of his right hand and glanced at the antique Air Force ring he wore on his fourth finger. He’d bought it twenty years ago in a pawn shop. It was at least a half a century old and it gave Iverson a sense of continuity, of belonging to an exclusive club. Now he remembered Galbraith’s instruction to probe Andres about Sundbach, to feel him out. He relaxed the fist and smiled at the younger man. “When I saw your uncle last night I got the impression of … I want to say uneasiness, Andres.”

“He’s getting old, Gary. That’s all. Old men are apprehensive.”

Iverson thought of the meeting yesterday in the house in Glen Cove and the way Carl Sundbach had walked out. “It wasn’t apprehension. I got the feeling he was keeping something back from me. I mean, you guys aren’t having problems, are you? Is there anything I’m not being told, Andres?”

Andres Kiss said he couldn’t think of a thing. He’d never understood how much Iverson knew about the Brotherhood, or how much research he’d done into the nature of the plan. He assumed Iverson wouldn’t have made a plane available without doing a deep background check – but how deep was deep? Did he know about Romanenko and the whole Soviet side of the affair? Did he know about the undelivered message? There was guardedness on both sides, and secrecy, and that was only correct. Security sometimes depended on areas of mutual ignorance. But every now and then there was tension because of this need for secrecy. For instance – who did Iverson work for? Kiss knew he’d gone to work at the Pentagon somewhere along the way, but he didn’t know if he was still employed there. And why was he so keen to make an F-16 available? There were old loyalties at work, of course, and a shared past in the Air Force, but these were not enough to make somebody give you a present of a very expensive aircraft. Andres Kiss might have pursued these questions if he’d been a different kind of man. Somebody more reflective, somebody more widely focused, might have explored and probed for satisfactory answers. But Kiss didn’t have that kind of scope. On the bottom line, Iverson was supplying a plane that Kiss was desperate to fly – did anything else matter?

Kiss recalled now how Iverson had first entered the plan, how a chance encounter with Gary Iverson at an air show in Atlantic City two years ago had revitalised an old friendship, one Iverson pursued with an enthusiasm that surprised Kiss, an ardour that even flattered the younger man. Iverson issued dinner invitations, or asked Kiss to join him for cocktails in midtown hotels, or sometimes even invited him to make up a foursome at which the women were invariably handsome and silent and eager to please. The friendship turned eventually, as friendships do, on an axis of mutual trust. On one inebriated night Kiss had talked openly about Mikhail, about the men of the Brotherhood, of lost causes and resurrections – not in a specific vocabulary but in a general one that caused Iverson to be intrigued. It began like this, in vague ways, and it grew until Iverson’s F-16 had become a pivotal piece in the jigsaw, and Iverson himself a mysterious force behind the success of things.

“Let me be straight with you, Andres,” Gary Iverson said. “Some of my people – and I can’t name names, you know that – are concerned about one of your personnel.”

“Who?”

Iverson admired Kiss’s cool, his smoothness, his way of failing to mention such major incidents as the rupture at yesterday’s meeting in Glen Cove and the assassination of Aleksis Romanenko. “It’s Sundbach. We worry about him.”

“Sundbach?” Andres Kiss felt a sense of relief. For a moment he imagined Iverson was going to bring up the matter of Romanenko’s murder, and say that it was an obstacle, an incident that had made his people unhappy, that support for the mission was beginning to evaporate. But if he hadn’t mentioned Romanenko, then it was because he hadn’t learned of Aleksis’s role in the scheme. Therefore Iverson’s knowledge of the plan’s groundwork was limited.

“I wasn’t aware you’d ever heard of Sundbach, Gary. You’ve been doing some digging.”

“I didn’t leap into this business without doing some research, Andres.”

“If you’d dug a little deeper, you’d have learned that Sundbach’s out.”

“Out?”

“As of yesterday.”

“Out? Like how?”

“He quit.”

“Let me get a handle on this. He just walked away. Just left the room? So long, it’s been good to know you?”

Kiss was silent for a long time before he said, “That’s right.”

Iverson examined a slick of oil on the floor. From another hangar came the roar of a plane’s engine being pushed through its paces by enthusiastic apprentice mechanics. “I’m a little surprised, Andres. I’m surprised he walked. There’s a lot at stake here, friend, and an old guy like Sundbach …” Iverson paused. “Let me be right up front with you, Andres. Point one, Sundbach’s a little too fond of his drink. Point two, an old guy who drinks can be indiscreet. Point three, we don’t need indiscretion at this stage of the game. Point four, he knows a lot…”

“Mikhail says he isn’t a threat.”

“Maybe Mikhail’s right. Who knows? Maybe Mikhail knows Sundbach better than anyone else. All I can tell you is some of my people don’t like the notion of this old character having so much information, no matter what Mikhail thinks. Some of my people have this affliction called high blood pressure.”

Kiss studied the other man’s face carefully, wondering if he were meant to read something into the absence of expression, something that couldn’t be uttered aloud but was to be understood, between friends, in silence. Was he being tested? Was this mention of Sundbach meant to be some kind of examination of his feelings, the way the simulator had been a test of his knowledge? More than feelings, though. Was he being asked to demonstrate some initiative, to carry out a task Iverson didn’t want to spell out directly? It was subtle, and quiet, and the nuances of the situation troubled Kiss. He felt like a man looking into a fogged mirror.

“People who outlive their usefulness can be damned tricky,” Iverson remarked. “Sometimes, though, they just don’t do diddley. They potter in their gardens and grow things they can’t eat. Is Sundbach like that?”

Kiss said, “He doesn’t have a garden.”

“Doesn’t have a garden,” Iverson said, more a private little echo than anything meaningful. He moved towards the hangar doors and pushed them open, looking out across the concrete expanse of old runways, cracked now and weeded. “Well, maybe he’ll find something else to pass the time.”

“Maybe,” Andres Kiss said, and some of the fog began to clear from the face of the mirror.

Manhattan

It was one o’clock in the afternoon when Frank Pagan arrived at John F. Kennedy Airport. He had expected to be met by somebody from the New York City Police Department, because Martin Burr had arranged a liaison, but nobody turned up. It was an insufferably humid afternoon. As he rode in a cab towards Manhattan, Pagan sat with his eyes shut and the window open, feeling a feeble little breeze blow upon his sweating face. You could drown in this kind of weather, he thought. Even the prospect of Manhattan, a city he adored, a city whose electricity sent people scurrying around like galvanised particles, didn’t take the edge off his sense of brooding isolation – a condition exaggerated by four scotches on the plane and the absence of Kristina Vaska who, stuck with a ticket she hadn’t been able to exchange, wasn’t scheduled to arrive in New York until tomorrow.

Kristina Vaska. He could still see that uneasy juxtaposition of images, wet-haired Kristina in the old paisley robe and the two dead cops in the street below, and he was caught between the erotic and the dismal, a place that had all the appeal of an occupied mousetrap. He’ opened his eyes, stared out at suburban streets beyond the highway, neat boxed dwellings surrounded by neat boxed shrubs. And he remembered the horror he’d felt when he’d looked inside the squad car, when he’d put his face to the window and was about to ask something simple like Anything happening? and he’d realised that both occupants were dead, one with his face on the other’s chest, the driver with his mouth wide open and blood around his lips.

The two dead cops had caused Martin Burr an apoplectic depression. Pagan couldn’t remember ever having seen the Commissioner look so grim, all colour drained from his face and all mischief gone from his one good eye. The cops were hurriedly removed, the car towed, but not before the scandalmongers of Fleet Street, alerted by neighbours, had come upon the scene. Martin Burr had been obliged to hold an impromptu press-conference in the course of which his voice had quivered once and he’d gone silent, holding his emotions in check. No, he told the reporters, he had no idea of the identity of the killer. And no, he had no idea why they were parked opposite Frank Pagan’s apartment nor what their nightly routine might be – lies, of course, lies that wouldn’t slake the scribblers’ voracious appetites for too long.

Later, in the privacy of his office, Burr had said Don’t feel bad about it, Frank. Don’t blame yourself for those two coppers. It was a struggle, and Pagan didn’t think he’d win it, because obviously the two young men would still be alive if it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d called the local police station for a couple of watchdogs. They’d still be alive, and married, and raising their kids. He stared from the window of the cab, feeling as grim now as Martin Burr had looked in London only a few hours ago. Resentful too, because he was being pitched out of the centre of the action, expelled like some truant schoolboy.

I want you on the first available plane, Frank. I want you out of here and far away from this lunatic. Leave him to MI6. Get what you can on Kiviranna and come home again.

Pagan had been unable to resist saying that he was being shuttled off to do something any responsible cop in New York could do. It would’ve been simpler to use some local cop and have him talk to the woman who’d scorned Jake Kiviranna – a lady, according to information supplied at the last minute by the ever helpful Ted Gunther, called Rose Alexander who lived in Brooklyn. Simpler and cheaper. Telexes, Commissioner, don’t cost much. Burr had chosen to ignore him.

Pagan looked up into the cloudy sky. He was thinking of Brooklyn, a place he’d visited before and had no real desire to see again. Martin Burr had wanted him to rent a hotel room there, but Pagan had firmly drawn a line of his own when it came to his place of residence. The Commissioner might be the great architect, he might be the one who sent men hurtling across oceans in accordance with his own designs, but there was no way he was going to impose a Brooklyn hotel on Frank Pagan. Pagan had booked a room in the Warwick, which wasn’t exactly top-notch, but his per diem covered it. Barely. Very well, Frank. I don’t care where you stay, so long as it’s out of trouble.

He thought of Kristina. Before leaving London he’d booked her into a room in a quiet hotel in Kensington, far from his apartment. He’d driven her to the place by a circuitous route, then made certain she went to her room, which was chintzy in a very English way, cosy, guaranteed to soothe. Look at those curtains, he’d said. How could anything bad happen in a room with curtains that look like they’d been designed by Pollyanna? She’d laughed, but there was a tension in her, and she was just as depressed as Pagan by the deaths of the policemen. She’d be safe in the Stafford Arms Hotel in Kensington for one night, Pagan thought now. Tomorrow she’d be back in New York. He was missing her already – a new sensation in his life. Previously, he’d missed only the dead. Missing the living was filled with all kinds of possibilities.

He escaped from the cab outside the Warwick on West 54th Street, plunging into the air-conditioned lobby, where he checked in smoothly and went up to his room on the sixth floor. He stood for a time at the window, watching the sky above Manhattan. He went over the puzzles again, seeking connections, trying to pull together various conjectures.

He sat on the edge of the bed and scribbled words on a notepad. Kiviranna. Epishev. The Brotherhood of the Forest. Romanenko. Then he drew a series of connecting arrows, linking each name with the other, until the sheet was covered in a maze of lines resembling a complex spiderweb. Faction was the word he came back to, the idea that within the KGB there was some kind of support for Aleksis’s Brotherhood, that a group of individuals – large, small, he couldn’t possibly know – was actively encouraging the Brotherhood’s scheme. The death in Edinburgh and the failure of Aleksis to play the role of postman, these things had created sudden detours for the supporters of the Brotherhood and their plan … whatever it was. A rush went through Pagan, the familiar feeling he got when he had a flash, an insight, when he saw hitherto unmapped terrain from a point above. All right, he thought, there’s a power struggle inside the KGB, even within the Politburo itself – but so what? If it were true, it provided only a context for those events that touched him personally. Political realities within the Soviet Union were as distant as Mars and had nothing to do with him. It was as if somebody had shaken the tree of the Kremlin and a couple of strangely-marked leaves had fallen in Pagan’s lap, that was all. He could examine the leaves, and dissect them, but he could never see the larger picture, the architecture of the tree.

He sighed, pulled the sheet from the pad, tossed it inside the wastebasket. Which was when he heard a sharp knock and he rose, opening the door. The man who appeared in the doorway was about five feet seven inches tall and wore a polka-dot bow-tie that drooped from his collar. He had on a light tweed jacket, the elbows of which were patched in leather. He resembled a scholar, Pagan thought, the kind of gnome you saw behind a stack of books in a library, eyes glazed over with that shellshocked look of too much knowledge. He had uncontrollable feathery red hair which seemed to rise, like puffs of thin, gingery smoke, from his skull.

“Frank Pagan? I’m Klein,” the man said. “Max Klein. NYPD.”

Pagan closed the door after Max Klein had entered the room. The bow-tie was all wrong, Pagan thought. What kind of NYPD cop wore such a thing for God’s sake? And the green leather patches didn’t complement the brown material of the jacket. Pagan noticed the leather sandals in which Klein’s bony feet were bare. The word eccentric floated into Frank Pagan’s head. How did this character, with his odd appearance and scholarly face, fit into the macho scheme of things in the NYPD? Did Klein belong to some special department? The Office of Misfits? Pagan had an image of a large room in which sat cops like Max Klein, men who didn’t look and feel like policemen, outcasts and dwarves and innocents, errors of recruitment, who had somehow lost their way in the political labyrinth of the police department.

Pagan shook Max Klein’s hand. “Glad you could come,” he said.

“I was going to meet you at the airport,” Klein said. “But things got away from me. Story of my life.”

Pagan sat on the edge of the bed, looking at Klein, who was scratching his foot through the strap of a sandal.

Klein said, “I’ve got an address for you somewhere,” and he dipped into the pocket of his jacket, pulling out an assortment of paper, slips, creased notes, a couple of dollar bills, matchbooks, lint. He placed his collection on the floor, then he got down on his knees and started to sift through it.

Organised man, Pagan thought.

Klein said, “I’m filled with good intentions. I keep meaning to buy a wallet and put things inside it in an orderly fashion. I never quite get round to it.”

There was a certain childlike quality about Max Klein as he sorted through the detritus on the rug, a niceness that showed on his good-natured face.

“Here it is,” and Klein brandished a slip of paper. “Rose Alexander.”

Pagan took the piece of paper and looked at it. There was an address in Brooklyn and a telephone number. The paper had other scribbles on it, truncated words, dates, a variety of doodles, some of them in the shape of noses, mouths, eyes, all rather skilfully rendered.

Pagan asked, “What do you do in the Department?”

Max Klein stuffed everything into a pocket, then climbed back up into his armchair. “I don’t exactly fit any category with ease. Right now I work Fraud in Brooklyn. But I joined the force as an artist –”

“An artist?” They send me an artist, Pagan thought.

“I draw faces,” Max Klein said and blinked his gingery eyelashes. “I put together drawings from witness descriptions.”

Frank Pagan was quiet a moment.

Klein said, “Yeah, I know. I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself you’ve been fobbed off with a guy whose basic skills aren’t especially useful.”

“Well.” Pagan shrugged.

Max Klein fidgeted with his bow-tie. “If it puts your mind at rest, I do know my way around Brooklyn. I was raised there, went to school there. It’s my territory. So don’t write me off just because I’m not some hot-shot investigator who’s seven feet three inches in his bare feet.”

Pagan smiled. “How much did they tell you?”

“They said a Communist official was killed in Scotland by a guy from Brooklyn. That you were here to check on the assassin’s background, which they said was kind of shadowy.”

Shadowy, Pagan thought. Max Klein said, “I’ve got a Department car outside, if you’re ready.”

Pagan pulled on his jacket, slipped into his shoes. “I’m ready,” he said.

Carl Sundbach clutched his grocery sack to his chest and crossed Third Avenue in the direction of Twenty-Ninth Street, where his apartment was located. He skipped nimbly through traffic, thinking he might evade the man following him. He wasn’t supposed to know he was being tracked, but the guy wasn’t exactly hot-shot at his trade and besides Carl had a nose for such things. His years in the hills and forests of Estonia had honed certain skills he’d never altogether lost, and one of these was an instinct, rather like a small alarm, that told him when he was being watched. He’d turned once, glimpsed the fellow, a medium-sized anonymity in a dark blue suit, then he’d reached the sidewalk and hurried towards Twenty-Ninth Street.

When he unlocked the front door of his building he shut it quickly behind him, peering through glass at the street. But the man was nowhere to be seen. Sundbach climbed the stairs to his apartment, four rooms on the second floor. Out of breath, he let himself in, bolted the door behind him, slumped into a chair in the kitchen and let his groceries – veal, pig’s knuckles, celery stalks, onions, all the ingredients for the dish called sult, jellied meat – roll from the paper bag in his lap to the floor. He tilted his head back, breathed through his open mouth, shut his eyes.

He’d first seen the man only that morning when he’d gone for his newspaper. Then, minutes ago, he’d been conscious of the same face in the aisles of the supermarket. Kurat! The man looked so out of place among the shoppers that Sundbach spotted him at once. He looked like a lurjas, a sneak. He’d pretended an interest in the produce section, fingering leeks and pressing zucchini, but it was an unconvincing performance. Sundbach opened his eyes. Who was having him followed? That was the big question.

He rose, a little shakily, and walked into the large living-room of the apartment. It was furnished in what one might have called emigré chic, stuffed with chairs and sofas Sundbach had bought from Baltic dealers in New York, old sepia prints of Estonia that depicted the University at Tartu, the steeple of the Oleviste Church, and an aquatint of Tallinn done in 1816 by an artist called A. Schuch. There were also shelves of china, some of it family heirlooms Sundbach had managed to salvage from the old country. There were tea kettles and brass plaques and a collection of Estonian books and underground literature smuggled out of the Baltic over the years. On one wall there hung a gallery of American photographs, each of which showed Carl Sundbach in the company of influential Americans – Sundbach shaking hands with Robert Kennedy during that doomed Presidential campaign to which Sundbach had contributed a small fortune (Carl recalled Kennedy saying he’d make room on his agenda for the whole Baltic issue, only a madman’s bullet had put an end to that little dream), Sundbach with then Governor Rockefeller during the groundbreaking for a new Sundbach hotel in Albany, Sundbach with an unhappy-looking Ramsey Clark during the Democratic primary in 1973. There were photographs of Carl in the company of entertainers like Wayne Newton, Liza Minelli, and Robert Goulet, taken at charity luncheons or dedications of hospital wings to which Carl had donated large sums of money. The whole gallery was an immigrant’s dream of making good in America, of making not only large sums of money but also of moving in the company of the blessed. Carl was proud of what he’d achieved in his new homeland. By sheer hard work, and equal measures of guts and cold determination, he’d shaped his own dream.

He picked up the telephone that sat on his old roll-top desk. The receiver was an ancient black one, and heavy. He dialled the number of Mikhail Kiss in Glen Cove. Kiss came on the line after the fifth ring.

Carl Sundbach said, “You having me followed, Mikhail?”

“Followed?” Kiss sounded incredulous.

“A man in a blue suit. Everywhere I go, he goes.”

Kiss laughed softly. “Why would I send somebody to watch you, Carl?”

Sundbach opened the middle drawer of his desk. Inside lay an old revolver and a photograph album with an ornate leather cover. He flicked the album open, gazed absently at pictures, many of them old black and white shots that belonged in another lifetime. He said, “You want to keep an eye on me. Make sure I give nothing away. Make sure I don’t speak to the wrong people or go to the wrong places.”

Kiss laughed again. “Take my word for it. I haven’t sent anybody to keep an eye on you, Carl. I’m insulted by the suggestion.”

“Then who is he? Who sent him?”

Kiss was quiet for a time. “I can only think of the Russian Mission.”

“No,” Sundbach answered quickly. “A vanya I’d smell at five miles. He doesn’t dress like a man from the Mission, Carl. He’s not Russian, unless the Soviets are starting to wear better suits. So who is he? Who sent him if it wasn’t you?”

“Perhaps you’re imagining it,” Kiss said.

“Kuradi perse!” Sundbach slipped into an Estonian curse with the ease of a man who has never left his native country, and who thinks all his thoughts in his native tongue. “I’m imagining nothing, Mikhail.”

“Listen to me. You just bought a nice place in Key West, go down there for a few weeks, relax.”

“Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll keep it in mind,” Sundbach said. He hung up and sat for a while with his hand on the receiver. Then he rose, walked to the window, looked down at the street. Across the way a group of teenagers sat on a stoop, passing back and forth a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag. But there was no sign of the man in the blue suit. Florida, for God’s sake! He’d bought the Key West condo for tax reasons, he wasn’t going to fly down there and sit in the bright sunlight with people who’d lived their lives and had nothing better to do than grow fat and brown.

He was about to turn from the window when he saw the man in the blue suit pass the stoop where the kids sat drinking. The man said something to the kids, then turned his face up in the general direction of Sundbach’s apartment. Carl dropped the lace curtain and moved back from the glass, catching his breath in his throat. If Kiss hadn’t sent the man in the blue suit, then who the hell had?

Sundbach sat down, opened the desk drawer, took out the old revolver, weighed it in the palm of his hand. It was a good, secure feeling, the connection of flesh with cold metal. He stuck the gun back, shut the drawer, stood up, looked absently around his living-room.

The thought struck him then, it came out of nowhere like lightning on a calm summery night – the man on the street, the man who was watching him, might have some connection with the murder in Edinburgh. But how could that be?

He pressed his fingertips upon his eyelids and sighed and felt just a little scared. He’d have to sit very still and think it all through, step by step, searching for any small thing he might have overlooked.

Brooklyn

Klein’s car was a late-model Dodge, bruised and dented, a sponge on four wheels. Klein drove like a man afraid for his life, his hands tight on the wheel. He had none of the average New Yorker’s contempt for pedestrian life-forms and traffic signals, because he slowed at crosswalks and observed the lights cautiously.

It was after six by the time he parked in Brooklyn, and there was a clouded sun hanging in the sky over Sheepshead Bay.

“This is the place, Frank,” Klein said. It was a street of old grey tenements. “This used to be an okay neighbourhood, which is hard to believe now. I grew up a couple blocks from here. I used to think this neighbourhood was for very rich people. I always felt dirt poor when I came down this street.”

Pagan realised he was disoriented, that he had absolutely no idea of his location because he hadn’t been able to follow Klein’s route to this place. He stepped out of the car and stood on the sidewalk, watching the small man ease himself from behind the steering-wheel.

“Number 643, apartment seven,” Klein said. “That’s the joint we want.”

Pagan moved toward the entranceway of a tenement. Klein followed nimbly, with a motion that was close to skipping, as if his sandalled feet never quite made contact with the sidewalk.

The hallway smelled of fried food. Two bicycles were elaborately chained to a radiator. Pagan stepped around them, pausing at the foot of the stairs which stretched up through gloom to the next floor. Then he started to climb, and Max Klein followed.

Apartment seven was on the second floor. Pagan waited for Klein to reach the landing, then he knocked on the door. The woman who opened it was about forty, rather appealing, dressed in blue jeans and a peasant blouse. There was a slightly spaced-out expression on her face, as if she’d been interrupted in the lonely act of contemplating her inner landscape. She wore her long brown hair parted in the centre and a metal charm bracelet dangled from her wrist. Pagan had an impression of zodiac signs, Celtic crosses, peace symbols, a whole series of miniatures that shivered as she moved her hand.

Klein flashed his badge and asked, “Rose Alexander?”

The woman nodded, pushing a strand of hair out of her face. “Last time I looked,” she said.

“This man” – and here Klein nodded at Pagan – “this man has some questions to ask you.”

The woman turned her face to Pagan. “Who are you?”

Pagan told her. He showed her his ID, which she stared at for a long time. She touched the laminated surface of the card and Pagan had the distinct impression she was either stoned or else had done so much dope in her time she’d failed to return from one of her trips. She was caressing Pagan’s ID as if it were a lover’s poem. Pagan thought there was something anachronistic about a doper caught in middle-age. Rose Alexander was a prisoner of a time-warp, a fugitive from the late ’sixties, the peasant blouse, the blue jeans that he saw now had been patched with little squares of rainbow-coloured material, the peace-symbols hanging from her wrist.

“Scotland Yard,” she said. “You’ve come a long way.”

“Mind if we come inside?” Klein asked.

“Be my guest.” She held the door open for them.

There were posters on the wall that belonged to the purple age of psychedelia – Jimmi Hendrix in neon three-D, Bob Dylan in an art-nouveau rendering, The Beatles in their Sergeant Pepper finery. Pagan, remembering these times, was plunged back into a world of Nehru jackets, incandescent gurus, scented hand-made candles, and blissed-out songs by Donovan.

On a table in front of an electric fire the inevitable stick of incense smoked in its own little Nepalese brass container, throwing the sickening scent of patchouli into the room. Rose Alexander sat down cross-legged on the floor. She struck a match, lit a cigarette, held the smoke in her lungs a long time in a doper’s manner, her small mouth tense.

“Lemme guess,” she said. “Since I haven’t broken any laws I’m aware of, you must be here to talk about Jake Kiviranna.”

Pagan wondered if events in Waverley Station had made it into the newspapers over here. Even if they had, it was doubtful that Rose, ensconced in her own little universe, kept abreast of world affairs. Rose, it appeared, had been expecting news of Kiviranna to surface at some time or other in her life – the bad penny that keeps turning up, as brightly abrasive as ever, no matter how many times you toss it away.

“He shot a man in Scotland,” Pagan said.

“It figures.”

“You don’t seem surprised.” Remarkable calm, Pagan thought.

Rose Alexander stared at Pagan coolly. He caught a glimpse of her as she might once have been, young and carefree, even beautiful, strutting the crowded streets of the Haight in San Francisco or getting high at Woodstock, her long hair hanging over her shoulders and her jeans flared above bare feet and zodiac signs painted on her cheeks and forehead.

She said, “If I don’t seem surprised it’s because I’m not. Do you know Jake?”

“I met him briefly …” And here Pagan hesitated. He had half of a sentence still to complete and he was reluctant to do it. “I don’t know if you’re aware of the fact he committed suicide.”

Perhaps a vague flicker crossed her face, Pagan wasn’t sure. But she still looked unperturbed. “Don’t get the impression I’m a cold bitch. But nothing you’ve told me so far surprises me at all. I’m not amazed he killed somebody and I’m not exactly blown away by news of his suicide either.”

Pagan glanced at Klein, who was fiddling with one of those lamps with a transparent base filled with expanding liquid. Great pink bubbles rose up hypnotically. Rose Alexander lit another cigarette. Pagan sat down in a beanbag chair, which immediately reassembled itself around him like a loose fist.

Rose Alexander said, “I had to get a court order restraining Jake from coming near me. Not once, but twice. He forced his attentions on me when I didn’t need them and I didn’t ask for them. Jake became a nightmare for me.”

Pagan, who wasn’t interested in Jake’s obsession with this woman, wanted to steer the conversation in the direction of anything Rose might know about Kiviranna’s trip to the United Kingdom and the identity of the man who sent him on that fatal voyage. But Rose had other ideas and she wanted to talk about Kiviranna no matter what Frank Pagan desired.

“When I met him first I felt sorry for him,” she said. “It was in some bar on Brighton Beach Avenue. He had a lost look. And I’ve got a thing for lost creatures. I got drunk and Jake got infatuated. For most people, this would be no big deal. Like a slight cold. You sweat it out, it goes away. Not to Jake Kiviranna. Jake’s thing for me was colossal. Flowers. Cards. Gifts. Poems. I couldn’t turn around without finding Jake in my shadow. It’s nice at the beginning. But it gets old real fast, man. I tried to point this out to Jake, I tried to let him down gently, I was kind – but there are some people you can’t get through to and Jake Kiviranna was one of them. They hear only what they want to hear. Nothing else makes a dent.”

Pagan glanced at Klein, who was going through Rose’s collection of record albums. Familiar old names flicked past. The Grateful Dead. Jefferson Airplane. Big Brother and the Holding Company. Names out of a history that seemed more distant than a mere twenty years.

“Jake wouldn’t go away. I figured if I couldn’t let him down gently, I’d try some reality therapy, so I dated a couple of guys, and I hoped Jake would get the message, but the only message he ever got was the desire to beat me up. Which he did. Two, maybe three times. A couple of broken ribs. Three teeth. A split lip. It might have been worse. He’d beat me, then he’d shower me with flowers. That gets pretty fucking stale. I had to go to court to get a restraining order. The next thing, Jake slashes his wrists. He was a sick sonofabitch. He sent me a poem written in his own blood. Think about that one. Slits his wrists and still finds the time to write verse. Bad verse.”

Pagan was quiet for a time, wondering if Rose Alexander had run her course. She stubbed her cigarette out and looked at the rings adorning her fingers, then she tipped back her head and looked at the ceiling and said, “I never wanted to hurt him, you understand.”

“I believe you,” Pagan said. He struggled up out of the beanbag chair, which made a rasping sound as he rose. “When did you last see Jake?”

“Couple of months ago.”

“In what circumstances?”

“He was waiting for me in the street one night. Standard stuff for Jake. He liked to spy on me. He liked to find me with other guys.”

“Did he say anything about how he was going away? Did he mention anything about leaving the country?”

Rose Alexander smiled. “One of the problems with Jake was how you could never tell when he was talking bullshit or when he was being on the level. Sometimes he’d talk in this real wild way, sometimes he’d be calm. But you couldn’t tell from his manner if he was into fantasy or reality. I don’t think I listened, Mr Pagan. I didn’t want him around. Even after I got the restraining order, he’d still call me or try to see me. The bottom line is, Jake scared me.”

Pagan was quiet for a time. He had a mental image of the way he’d seen Kiviranna in the cell in London. The scorchmarks, the elaborate electrocution carried out with a madman’s patience, a death that was both simple and ugly. “What did he talk about the last time you saw him?”

“He was completely out of it,” she answered. “He said he was going to make some kind of statement against international Communism – he had this thing about how the Russians had murdered his parents and grandparents in one of those stupid little countries that don’t exist any more and how he had to do something about it. I wasn’t exactly happy to see him, Mr Pagan. Forgive me if I’m forgetting anything – I wasn’t a captive audience. He was talking crazy. I just wanted to get the hell away from him.”

“Did he say anything else? Did he talk about friends?”

The woman laughed. “Friends? Jake didn’t have any, Mr Pagan. Friendships were off limits to him. How could anybody befriend a guy who was sweet one day, then out of his tree the next? Would you want Charlie Manson for a friend?”

Pagan was frustrated. If this proved to be a dead-end, if Rose Alexander knew nothing about any accomplice, he might as well fold his tent and go home. He said, “Think. Anything at all might be useful.”

She was pensive for a time. “Okay. Here’s something. The last night I saw him he asked me to give him a ride. He had to be in a certain place at a certain time. The guy he was meeting had a thing about punctuality. Remember, I wanted him out of my life in a hurry, Mr Pagan. So I said I’d drive him where he had to go. Which is exactly what I did. And that was the last I saw of him.”

“Where did you take him?”

“To the boardwalk at Brighton Beach.” Rose Alexander lit another cigarette, which she held in a hand that fluttered like a small injured bird. It was obvious that any conversation about Kiviranna agitated her.

“Did he say who he was going to meet?”

She shook her head slowly. “He didn’t say. It was just somebody he had to meet on the boardwalk, that’s all.”

Pagan noticed for the first time that she had a collection of freckles around her nose and cheeks. “But no names.”

“No names,” she said.

Pagan looked across the room at Klein, who had an expression on his face of frustration. “Did he give you any kind of impression of the person he was supposed to meet?”

The woman blew a long stream of smoke and for a moment her face was lost to Pagan. She said, “Sorry. I draw a blank. I guess if he told me anything I must have suppressed it. Or else I never really heard it in the first place.”

Pagan was disappointed. He stood very still a moment, looking at a picture on the wall, a sepia-tinted mushroom, a doper’s picture, and rather ominous. “If I need to ask anything more, I’ll be in touch,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”

She smiled in an insipid way. “Yeah, sure.”

Pagan stepped out of the apartment with Klein. Then he started to go down the stairs. He was aware of Rose Alexander watching from the open doorway.

“I just remembered something,” she said, and her voice echoed in the stairwell. “It’s not very much, but you never know.”

Pagan stopped, turned around, climbed back up to the landing. The woman had her hands in the pockets of her jeans and was leaning against the door frame, her hips thrust forward in a way Pagan found mildly provocative, all the more so for the lack of self-consciousness in her manner.

“Like I said, it might not be much, but here it is.” She smiled at Pagan, perhaps a little sadly, as if all she were throwing him was a scrap. “Jake was going to meet the guy in some kind of old shop on the boardwalk. He mentioned that in passing. Maybe it amused him, I don’t know. It just came back to me. I didn’t ask any questions about it, because I didn’t want to know.”

Pagan thanked the woman again. Outside in the street he walked toward Klein’s car. He got in on the passenger side and Klein climbed behind the wheel. Pagan said, “Suddenly I’m overcome by an urge to get some good sea air into my lungs.”

“You got it,” Klein said.

Klein drove the Dodge in the direction of Brighton Beach Avenue and the boardwalk. Neither he nor Pagan noticed the pea-green Buick that moved half a block behind them, a stealthy vehicle, the kind of car nobody ever wanted except for people whose need for total anonymity overwhelmed their desire for attention and their good taste. It followed, always half a block behind, all the way to Brighton Beach.

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Galbraith dined in a moody way alone on the roof, consuming a simple Indian meal prepared for him by the chef of a famous Washington restaurant and sent to Virginia by fast car. He ate spinach rice coloured with saffron, tandoori prawns, cucumber raita and mariel mimosas, those delightful little puff pastries that contain grated coconut, sultanas and cardamom seeds. He pushed his plate away, sat back, belched delicately into his napkin, then gazed across the roof at the satellite dishes. He stared beyond, into the mysterious sky the dishes scanned and analysed. He dropped his napkin on his empty plate, rose, crossed the roof and re-entered the house, climbing down and down into the basement.

His digestive juices made rumbling sounds. The Indian meal lay uneasily inside him. He ought never to have eaten in his present mood. And the spicy food he’d just consumed – well, really, he ought to have known better. He moaned as he settled down before the consoles, which he regarded with impatience.

When Iverson came into the room Galbraith didn’t turn his face to look. He drummed his stubby fingers on his knees in a gesture Gary Iverson took to be one of exasperation. Iverson also knew, from long experience of Galbraith’s behaviour, that the fat man would be the first to speak, that any question on Iverson’s part would be utterly ignored.

Galbraith made a plump little fist, misleadingly cherubic in appearance. He spoke in a very flat tone of voice. “I am an anxious man, Gary. Do you want to know why I’m such an anxious man, Gary?”

Iverson mumbled something meaningless.

Galbraith smacked the coffee-table with his fist and an ashtray jumped. “Where do I begin? Ah, yes, let’s deal with the home front first, shall we? Let’s discuss our own shortcomings. A telephone conversation between Carl Sundbach and Mikhail Kiss was logged here two hours ago. It appears that Sundbach has spotted our man. A man of ours, presumably a professional, has been rumbled by an old fellow whose eyesight isn’t the best and whose reflexes are arguably threadbare – and yet he made our man, Gary.”

Iverson looked up briefly at one of the consoles, absently noticing a NATO message, white letters on a black background, a detailed outline of the next day’s strategic naval manoeuvres.

“Incompetence, Gary,” Galbraith said. “I will not stand for that kind of thing. Now we have Sundbach worrying about who in the name of God is watching him. Do I overreact, Gary? Do I hear you think that? Consider. Sundbach knows he’s under surveillance. He can’t figure out who’s doing the watching. He’s an old guy, maybe he gets scared, what does he do?”

Iverson shook his head.

Galbraith hopped up from the sofa, causing vibrations and making motes of dust rise. “I am dealing in possibilities, Gary, which is what I always do. And here’s one to stick in your throat. Sundbach, a terrified old man, a man with a gun licence, decides to shoot his pursuer. It’s not beyond feasibility, Gary. The mess! One of our operatives dead in the street! I am speaking here of shame, Gary. The involvement of the local police. Homicide detectives. Newspapermen. Horror!”

Iverson considered this scenario unlikely, but didn’t say so. He had seen Galbraith react this way before in situations where he thought the professional reputation of the agency was endangered or where the threat of exposure lurked. He was more than normally sensitive, it seemed, when it came to his beloved White Light project.

There was a silence in the basement. Galbraith, who had the kind of vision that enabled him to see around corners, who had the sort of imagination that allowed him to explore possibilities even as he juggled them, who liked to predict human behaviour as if his brain were a series of actuarial tables or psychological logarithms, returned to the sofa and sat down and his monk’s robe flopped open, revealing enormous hairy white thighs.

“Take that useless surveyor out of the street, Gary, and send in the Clowns.” Clowns was the in-house term for those highly-skilled and expensively-trained employees whose functions within the Agency were many and various, but always clandestine. Sometimes the Clowns were called upon to erect smokescreens or manufacture diversions when such strategies were needed. They staged car wrecks, set alarm bells off, lit fires, fucked up telephone lines, forged documents, tampered with computer networks, pretended to be insurance salesmen or window-cleaners or Swiss bankers or Italian lawyers or whatever role was required in a given situation. When specialised surveillance was needed, when the ordinary watcher in the street had been exposed, the Clowns were the people you sent for. They were inventive men and sometimes just a little arrogant in the way of all specialists. Galbraith had introduced the concept of the Clowns years ago – a budgetary secret concealed under the vague rubric of Miscellaneous – and they’d been useful on many occasions. They prided themselves on the fact that only rarely had they resorted to real violence. Theirs was a pantomime world, a place of appearances and illusions, flash and noise when needed, or quiet play-acting if that was preferred.

“Did you probe young Andres?” Galbraith asked.

Iverson nodded. “I did.”

“And?”

“He quotes Mikhail. Mikhail trusts Sundbach to behave himself.”

“And Andres goes along with that?”

“To some extent,” Iverson said.

“But not all the way?”

Iverson shrugged. “It’s hard to say. He defers to Mikhail, at least on the surface, but I get the feeling he might do something different if Mikhail wasn’t around.”

“How different? Would he do violence to Carl Sundbach?”

“Maybe. It’s hard to tell with Andres. He’s like a man completely covered in very tight Saranwrap. You look at his face and you think Prince Charming, and then a kind of glaze goes across his eyes and you know you’ve lost him. And you don’t know where he’s gone.”

“I want him to stay out of mischief, Gary. That’s the only thing that matters. He’s got to be on board that plane to Norway at ten o’clock tomorrow night, and it’s too close to the end to have a royal fuck-up now.” Galbraith rubbed his acupuncture stud. It was said to relieve stress, which so far it hadn’t done. “I move now to another matter, perhaps even a little more disconcerting. And that is dear old London, Gary. It appears that Colonel Viktor Epishev of the KGB is running around causing havoc over there, having shot two young policemen on duty. His real target is none other than Frank Pagan, who arrived in New York this very day. (I am having Pagan watched, of course. Let us pray for competence in this instance.) I want to keep Pagan busy diddling round with Kiviranna and out of harm’s way, but I really can’t have Epishev causing all this grief over in London.”

Galbraith paused. He was suddenly conscious of the delicate balance of things, the wheels spinning within wheels, the equilibrium so finely calibrated that even the light touch of a spring breeze might blow it all to kingdom come. He had been given a heavy responsibility, and he was determined to carry it out. The future of mankind, even if mankind were a class among which he found a thousand things despicable, a thousand things grubby, was no small affair. He cleared his throat and surveyed the consoles a moment.

“I really don’t know what Vladimir Greshko thinks he’s up to by sending his man to London,” Galbraith said. “But I believe it’s time we found out. Agree?”

“Yes,” Iverson said.

Galbraith made a steeple of his fingertips and held it under his lower lip in a contemplative gesture. “I love smooth surfaces, Gary. Porcelains. Silks. Certain kinds of stones. Glass. Mirrors. I like surfaces so smooth you can’t feel any kind of seam. What I hate is sandpaper. And what I’m beginning to feel right now is a certain amount of grit forming beneath my fingernails. I don’t like the sensation, Gary.”

Galbraith dropped his hands to his side. “It’s time to make Ted Gunther earn his salary, don’t you think?”