“Two, I have him,” said the observer.
“Cool. I’ll roam a bit, then take up a tail position.”
“That’s good work,” said Bonson, over the net. “We’re going to lose you now. We’re going through the tunnel.”
“I’ll stay on him, Blue One.”
“Catch you when we get out of the tunnel.”
The first van maintained about a four hundred-foot gap between itself and Swagger’s truck, which now coursed down desolate South Clinton Street. Off to the right, a giant naval vessel, under construction, suddenly loomed, gray and arc-lit for drama and security. Bob passed it, passed a bank, a few small working men’s restaurants, then stopped by the side of the road.
“Goddammit,” said Two. “Burned. Goddammit.”
His own driver started to slow, but he was exceedingly professional.
“No, just keep driving. Just drive by him. Don’t eyeball him as you pass him, don’t even think about it; he’ll feel you paying attention. I’m dropping out of sight.”
The driver continued at the same speed, while the observer dropped into the seat well, knowing that a single driver was much less of a giveaway signature for a tail job. And he hit the send button.
“Blue Three, do you read?”
“Yeah, I’m past the Boston-South Clinton Street exchange, just pulled over.”
“Okay, he’s stopped. We’re going to pass him; you come on by and pull off a long way down. He’s on the right. Don’t use your lights. Go to night vision and monitor his moves.”
The lead vehicle sped around the curve, passed several mountains of coal ready for loading on the right.
He pulled off when he was out of sight of the parked man.
“TWO, this is Three. I’m in position and I’ve got him in my night lenses. He’s just sitting there, waiting. I think he’s turned off his engine. No, no, he’s turned off his lights, now he’s pulling ahead, he’s turning in—now I’ve lost him.”
“Okay, he’s gone to ground.”
“Sitrep, people,” came the voice of Bonson, who had just cleared the tunnel and was now on this side of the harbor.
“Sir, he just pulled into a yard or something in the warehouse district down by the docks. Just off Boston. We have him under observation.”
“I’m right at Boston Street here. Do we go east or west off of Ninety-five?”
“You go west. Go about a mile and turn left again, on South Clinton Street. I’m off by the side of the road just around that turn, lights off, left side of the road. Two is on the other side, around the curve. We’re both about a half mile away from where he’s gone to rest.”
“Okay, let’s meet one at a time in two-minute intervals two hundred yards this side, my side, of the location. You go first, Three, then you Two, from the other side, then I’ll join you. Keep your lights on in case he’s looking out. If he saw unlit vehicles, he could go ballistic.”
“Sir, I honestly don’t think he’s seen a damned thing. He was off in his own world. He wasn’t even looking around when he stopped. He’s just looking for some deserted place.”
“We’ll know in a few minutes,” said Bonson, just as his car turned left and pulled in behind one of the vans.
Bob parked to the left of the silent, corrugated-metal building, as far back and out of sight as he could. He paused, waiting. He heard no sounds; there was no night watchman. The place was some kind of grain storage facility, again for loading cargo ships, but no ship floated in the water. He could see the shimmering lights on the flat, calm water, and beyond that the skyline of the city, spangled in illumination. But here, there was nothing except the rush of cars from the tunnel exit nearby, a separate world sealed off by concrete abutments.
He got out, taking the wrapped painting, a powerful flashlight and a heavy pair of wire cutters with him, and headed to the warehouse. It was padlocked. But where the lock was strong, the metal fastener that secured door to wall was not, and the wire cutters made quick work of it. The lock fell, still secure, to the ground, wearing a little necklace of sheared steel. He pulled the door open, stepped into a space that in the darkness appeared to be cut by bins, now mostly empty. The dust of grains—wheat mostly, though he smelled soya beans too—filled the air.
He walked, his shoes echoing on the bricks, until at last he came to the center of the room. He stopped by a pillar and a drain, then turned on the light. The beam skipped across the empty building, finding nothing of interest but more emptiness, dramatic shadows, fire extinguishers, light switches, closets, crates. He went and got a crate, pulled it into the center and set it down. Finally, he set the light on the floor, aimed back toward where he had left the package. It cast a cold white eye on the painting.
He walked over, and leaned into the circle of light.
Slowly, he peeled the rags away, until at last the painting stood exposed. He examined it carefully, saw how the tacks held the canvas to the backing. He took out his Case pocketknife, and very slowly used its blade to scrape at the paint.
It was thick and cracked easily, falling to the ground in chunks and strips. He scraped, destroying the image of the eagle, pulling at the paint, watching it flake in colored chunks downward. In a minute or so, he came to a ridge under the paint, and ran the knife blade along it until he reached a corner. It was the top of a heavy piece of paper, and it had been literally buried under the heavy oil pigmentation of the image.
With the blade, he pried the corner loose enough to get a grip on, set the knife down and very carefully pulled the sheet of paper free. It cracked off the canvas. As he finally freed it, there was a kind of soft, slipping sound: paper, sliding loose, fluting down to land with a rattle on the dirty floor. He set the backing down and bent there in the harsh light to see what secrets he had unlocked.
It was the last few sketches from Trig’s book. Bob began to shuffle through them, finding images of a campus building in Madison, Wisconsin, portraits of people at parties in Washington, crowd scenes of big demonstrations. There was a portrait of Donny. It must have been made about the time he did the scene of Donny and Julie, which Bob had seen in Vietnam. He brought those days vividly to life, and Bob began to feel his passion—and his pain.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
One man had gone ahead and returned with a report.
“He’s in there with a flashlight, reading some pages or something. I can’t figure it out.”
“Okay,” said Bonson. “I think I know what he’s got. Let’s finish this, once and for all.”
The guns came out. The team consisted now of five men besides Bonson. They were large men in crew cuts in their late forties. They were tough-looking, exuding that alpha-male confidence that suggested no difficulty in doing violence if necessary. They looked like large policemen, soldiers, firemen, extremely well developed, extremely competent. They drew the guns from under their jackets, and there was a little ceremony of clicks and snaps, as safeties came off and slides were eased back to check chambers, just in case. Then the suppressors were screwed on.
Bonson led them along the road, into the lot and up to the old grain warehouse. Above, stars pinwheeled and blinked. Water sounds filled the night, the lapping of the tides against ancient docks. From somewhere came a low, steady roar of automobiles. He reached the metal door and through the gap between it and the building proper, he could see Bob in the center of the room, sitting on a crate he’d gotten from somewhere, reading by the light of a flashlight. The painting was on the floor, somehow standing straight, as if on display, and Bob was leaning against a thick pillar that supported the low ceiling. Bonson could see that the image had somehow been destroyed, yielding a large white square in its center.
What is wrong with this picture, he asked himself.
He studied it for a second.
No, nothing. The man is unaware. The man is lost. The man is unprepared. The man is defenseless. The man is the ultimate soft target.
He nodded.
“Okay,” he whispe
red.
One of the men opened the door and he walked in.
Bob looked up to see them as their lights flashed on him.
“Howdy,” he said.
“Lights,” said Bonson.
One of the men walked away, found an electrical junction and the place leaped into light, which showed the rawness of industrial space, a gravel floor, the air filled with dust and agricultural vapors.
“Hello, Swagger,” said Bonson. “My, my, what’s that?”
“It’s the last sketches from Trig Carter’s book. Real damn interesting,” said Bob, loudly.
“How’d you find it?” “What?”
What was wrong with his ears?
“I said, ‘How did you find it?’”
“When I thought about his last painting, I figured it, pretty close. The reason the painting was so different was his clue: his way of saying to those who came after him, ‘Look this over.’ But no one ever came. Not until me.”
“Nice work,” said Bonson. “What’s in it?”
“What?”
What was wrong with his ears?
“I said, ‘What’s in it?’ ”
“Oh. Just what you’d expect,” said Bob, still a bit loud. “People, places, things he ran into as he began to prepare his symbolic explosion of the math building. A couple of nice drawings of Donny.”
“Trig Carter was a traitor,” said Bonson.
“Yeah?” said Bob mildly. “Do tell.”
“Give it over here,” said Bonson.
“You don’t want to see the drawings, Bonson? They’re pretty damned interesting.”
“We’ll look at them. That’s enough.”
“Oh, it gits better. There’s a nice drawing of this Fitzpatrick. Damn, that boy could draw. It’s Pashin; everybody will be able to tell. That’s quite a find, eh? That’s proof, cold, solid dead-on proof the peace movement was infiltrated by elements of Soviet intelligence.”
“So what?” said Bonson. “That’s all gone and forgotten. It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, no?” said Bob. “See, there’s someone else in the drawing. Poor Trig must have grown extremely suspicious, so one day, late, right after the big May Day mess, he followed Fitzpatrick. He watched him meet somebody. He did. He watched them deep in conversation. And he recorded it.”
Bob held it up, a folded piece of paper, the lines that were Pashin brilliantly clear.
Bob unfolded the rest of the drawing.
“See, Bonson, here’s the funny part,” said Bob, loudly. “There’s someone else here. It’s you.”
There was a moment of silence. Bonson’s eyes narrowed tightly, and then he relaxed, turned to his team and smiled. He almost had to laugh.
“Who are you, Bonson?” Swagger asked, more quietly now. “Really, I’d like to know. I had some ideas. I just couldn’t make no sense of them. But just tell me. Who are you? What are you? Are you a traitor? Are you a professional Soviet agent masquerading as an American? Are you some kind of cynic playing the sides against each other? Are you in it for the money? Who are you, Bonson?”
“Kill him?” asked one of the men on the team, holding up a suppressed Beretta.
“No,” said Bonson. “No, not yet. I want to see how far he’s gotten.”
“Finally it makes sense,” Bob said. “The great CIA mole. The big one they’ve been hunting all these years. Who makes a better mole than the head mole hunter? Pretty goddamned smart. But what’s the deal? Why did no one ever suspect you?”
He could sense that Bonson wanted to tell him. He had probably never told anyone, had repressed his reality so deep and imposed such discipline on himself that it was almost not real to him, except when it needed to be. But now at last, he had a chance to explain.
“The reason I was never suspected,” he said finally, “was because they recruited me. I never went to them. They offered me a job when I left the Navy, but I said no. I went to law school, I spent three years on Wall Street, they came after me three more times, and I always said no. Finally—God, it took some discipline—finally I said yes.”
“Why did they want you so much?”
“Because of the NIS prosecutions. That was the plan. I sent fifty-seven young men to Vietnam, Marines, naval seaman, even a couple of junior officers. I reported on dozens more that I turned up in the other services, and many of them went, too. There was never a better secret policeman anywhere, one with less mercy and more ambition. They could see how fierce I was. I was so good. I was astonishing. They wanted me so bad it almost killed them, and I played so hard to get it still amazes me. But that was our plan from the beginning.”
His face gleamed with vanity and pride. This was his great triumph, the core of his life, what made him better than other men, his work of art.
“Who are you, Bonson? Who the fuck are you?”
“The only time I ever came out on a wet operation was that one night when that idiot Pashin showed up without a driver’s license. You needed a driver’s license to buy that much ammonium nitrate, even in Virginia! That idiot. GRU begged the committee for help, and I had the best identity running, so I drove down to Leesburg and bought it. I met him in the restaurant to tell him where it was secured. He was a brilliant operator, but in little practical things like that he was stupid.”
“And you were unlucky. Trig the human camera had followed him.”
“I always worried about that. That was my one moment of vulnerability. But now, you’ve taken care of that for me.”
“Who are you?” said Bob. “You have to tell me that.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything. I can kill you and I’m forever secure.”
“In seventy-one, you were the source of deployment intelligence, weren’t you?”
“You bet I was,” said Bonson. “I invented chaos. It was the best professional penetration in history, the way I orchestrated it.”
“You killed the little girl on the bridge, right? Amy Rosenzweig, seventeen. I looked it up. I saw how much trouble it caused.”
“Oh, Swagger, goddamn, you are smart. We picked her up, shot her up and dropped her into the crowd. It was a massive dose of LSD. She never knew what hit her. My friend Bill here”—he indicated a man on his team—“did it. She freaked and went over. God, what a stink it caused; it almost wrecked the credibility of the U.S. government in that one thing. The pressure it caused.”
“Those are your boys, aren’t they, your security team? Which of ’em killed poor Peter Farris?”
The five men in suits arrayed around Bonson glowered at him. They had hard eyes, glittering with pure aggression, and taut, professional faces. Their pistols were in their hands.
“That was Nick.”
“Who got the picture of Donny and my wife?”
“That was Michael. You’d like them, Swagger. They’re all ex-NCOs in the Black Sea Marines and SPETSNAZ. They’ve been with me for a long time.”
“Who blew the building in Wisconsin?”
“That was a team job.”
“And when you were running the mission against Solaratov, you were really running it against PAMYAT. Against Pashin, who was now a nationalist, and if he wins the presidency it sets you guys back even farther. You always knew Pashin was Fitzpatrick, but you had to find a way to get that information to us without compromising your position. You turned everything inside out, so that in the end, the American government was working in the interests of the communist party. The Cold War never ended for you, right?”
“It never will. History runs in cycles. We’re in retreat now, largely underground. But we’ve been underground before. We started underground. We have to eliminate our enemies in Russia. First Russia, then the world, as the great Stalin understood. We’ll be back. This great, rich, fat country of yours is about to explode at the seams; it’ll destroy itself and I’ll help it. I should get the directorship shortly. From there, politics. The very interesting part of my plan is just about to start happening.”
“Who are you
?” boomed Bob.
Why was he talking so loud?
“I’ll tell you. But first, you satisfy me: when did you know?”
“I began to suspect at the meeting when the kid wanted to let Solaratov take out Julie and nab him on the way out. That was the smart move; even I knew that. But you said no, you couldn’t do that to me. Fuck you, that was never you. You could send anybody down. I knew that about you from what you done to Donny. So when you say you could never do that, I knew you was lying. You had to stop Solaratov. That was your first mission.”
“Smart,” said Bonson. “Smart, smart, smart.”
“It gets me thinking. In seventy-two, you guys must have been shitting because you let the most important witness to Pashin and Trig get away. You couldn’t track him because a good officer gave him liberty and then he was on his way back to Vietnam. He has to be killed, not only to protect Pashin, but to protect you. So … how do the goddamn Russians know where he is and what he’s doing in Vietnam? How can they target him? That’s a very tough piece of info to come by, and their whole plan turns on it. They had to have someone inside. Someone had to get into naval personnel and figure out where the boy was. Somebody had to target him. Solaratov was only the technician. You was the shooter.”
Bonson stared at him.
“Funny, how when you make the breakthrough, it all kind of swings into shape,” Bob said. “It all makes some kind of sense. Your last mistake: how fast the information got to Moscow, got to higher parties in PAMYAT, to destroy Pashin’s presidential thing. Man, that was fast work. You’re telling me the Agency is that fast? No way. Had to be some inside thing, someone who just had to make a phone call. Damn! And everybody keeps saying, ‘Ain’t it funny the communist party really benefits from all this?’ Yeah, the real joke is, through you, the communist party is running all this. Who are you?”