The Double Game (22 page)

“So you still want to go?”

“From what your father says, it sounds like we’d better.”

“Probably.”

“But Prague won’t be enough, will it?”

“Budapest, too, most likely. After that, who knows?”

“Then I had better phone my office to clear enough time. I’ll have to come up with something good, I suppose.”

Dad returned to the table, so she took her phone off to a corner where we wouldn’t have to hear her lying to her bosses. He looked me over carefully, as if inspecting for damage.

“Everything all right between you?”

“Yes.”

“Glad to hear it. You’re a lucky man.”

“I suppose I am.”

“All the same, be careful.”

“I don’t intend to hurt her.”

“I meant for yourself.”

“I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take that.”

“Just as well. I’m not quite sure how I meant it.”

I was about to ask for an explanation when he held a finger in the air and reached into his pocket for a folded sheet of paper.

“Almost forgot,” he said, glancing around to make sure we weren’t overheard. He lowered his voice. “I talked to Lewis Dean at the embassy.”

“The ‘regional specialist’?”

“I asked about that Russian you described, the one you called the Hammerhead. He seemed to think it might be a fellow they used to keep tabs on years ago. They never knew his code name but called him Brass Tacks. They were pretty sure he worked for a Moscow hand named Oleg.”

Leo’s handler. And Leo, aka Vladimir, aka Trefimov, was now dead after having put some of his oldest secrets up for sale. I nodded and tried not to look alarmed.

“Lew checked some files for me. Dormant for ages on the subject of Brass Tacks, except for one item. They think that in the past year he went into business for himself with a bunch of other old hoods, calling themselves the Argus Consortium, which didn’t show up on anyone’s radar screens until this.” He unfolded the paper, a photocopy of a
New York Times
piece from two months ago. “Take a look.”

It was a brief story from the business section about new government contracts landed by Baron Consulting.

“Isn’t Baron Breece Preston’s company?”

“Keep reading.”

Baron had won two new U.S. contracts for intelligence services in Afghanistan and Colombia. Rough neighborhoods. Lucrative pay. The story estimated the total payout over the next six years would be $660 million, pending congressional approval. Then came the kicker. “The new contracts,” the
Times
said, “cap a busy summer of expansion in which Baron also won a security contract in the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, as part of a joint venture with the Moscow-based Argus Consortium.”

“Interesting,” I said, trying not to show how worried I was by this alliance of two such disagreeable fellows, both of them apparently connected in some way—but how?—to the trail of old clues Litzi and I were exploring.

“Lew also said Breece Preston has apparently gone walkabout in the past few weeks.”

“Walkabout?”

“Disappeared almost overnight from their Baghdad operations center. Some cover story about a health issue involving his family, but no one’s buying it, mostly because no one seems to know where he’s gone.”

“Wonderful.”

“It’s still not too late to get out, son.”

“Actually …” I handed back the paper “… it’s beginning to sound like it is.”

He grimaced and looked down at the table, but didn’t disagree. He was about to say more when he looked up and broke into a smile for Litzi, who had materialized at my shoulder holding her suitcase. Dad stood. I did the same, although I felt a little shaky.

“All clear,” she said brightly. “We’d better get going before they change their minds.”

We said our farewells on the sidewalk.

“Best of luck, son.” Dad gripped me fiercely. “I’m here if you need me. And don’t forget to keep David apprised of your movements.”

The three of us exchanged hugs. Then he went one way and we went the other. The weather was almost springlike, and to judge from her sunny smile, Litzi seemed to be shaking herself free of the ghosts that had been stalking her only minutes earlier.

I was the moody one now, not only worrying about who might be waiting around the next corner, but also wondering what Dad had meant by his cryptic warning about Litzi. I wondered, too, what both of them knew that I still didn’t.

21

Folly’s rule of thumb for safe traveling on the shadow side of the Iron Curtain was simple but maddening. Beware the Friendlies. This was especially true once you disappeared into the tumbledown gloom of the cities, where you were so easily observed, stalked, followed, every step measured and recorded for the daily tick-tock of the all-knowing watchlists and logbooks.

Your enemies, Folly reasoned, were far more reliable, predictably steadfast in their opposition. You knew where they stood, and planned accordingly. But Friendlies, especially the eager and daring ones who nonetheless managed to survive, well, how could you ever say for sure what accounted for their staying power? Was it their zeal to serve or their zeal to deceive? And, if you suspected the latter, how should you behave in their presence? How much weight should you give to their local rules of engagement? Folly took extra care never to turn his back on them, literally or figuratively, a caution he had lived by since his earliest days as a field man.

Yet, as with all such rules, there were painful exceptions, moments when his well-cultivated mistrust had nonetheless led to miscalculation, even heartbreak. He remembered in particular a Czech named Kohut, personally recruited, admirably rewarded. One fine October evening in Prague, Kohut lay dead at Folly’s feet, his face obliterated by a Russian soft-nosed bullet. This unshakable proof of Kohut’s loyalty had arrived just as Folly had become convinced of the man’s duplicity. Such were the wages of vigilant mistrust.

How, then, was Folly ever supposed to make progress on enemy territory while operating under such careful constraints? Answer: He didn’t. Not really. He only pretended to pick his way forward while in reality he was fighting a lifelong holding action against uncertainty and doubt.

As a field man, the pressures of this daily stalemate had finally driven him to a desk job. As a desk man, they were driving him to bedlam. So here he was, heading back into the field once again, bound for the deepest and oldest of the shadows from his past. And, like it or not, the old rules of caution were still in force.

Folly put down his newspaper and stared out the smudged window of the grumbling bus. The crossword lay unfinished in his lap, yet another set of enigmas beyond his capabilities. He saw that it was still raining, but the bus was at last approaching the outskirts of Prague, the very place where his formula had gone so utterly wrong.

Those lines of Lemaster’s click-clacked through my head to the rhythm of the train as we rolled across Bohemia. The haunting words now seemed as relevant as if my controller had circled them in black ink beneath another message in his now familiar handwriting.

Litzi, my friendliest of friendlies, had nodded off an hour ago as we glided past huddled villages and autumn pastures. As I watched her sleep, the train lurched and her eyes fluttered open. Her expression was blank, open to almost any interpretation, but I had already given up on the idea of operating under Folly’s rules. Bedlam, indeed. Even with what I’d learned about her past, trust was the only option if we were to continue traveling together, so I squeezed her hand and watched her smile.

“Will it be as beautiful as it was before?” she asked.

“The better question is if we’ll have time to notice.”

Although it wasn’t as if our Prague agenda was crowded. So far we had only two contacts—an aging bookseller and a boyhood friend. I was excited about seeing Karel Vitova. We’d tracked him down on Facebook, messaging him from Litzi’s smartphone just before we crossed the border into the Czech Republic. He answered almost immediately, with a happy-face emoticon and a string of exclamation points, plus an address for an apartment just around the corner from where he’d grown up.

I’d met Karel around the time my dad began weaning me from the crowd of embassy kids at the American school. We’d done our part for assimilation by moving into an apartment clear across the river from where the other diplomats lived. Prague was the city where, at age twelve, I first began to run, inspired by the local propaganda for national hero Emil Zátopek, who had won three gold medals at the ‘52 Olympics, beating all comers in a grueling combination of the 5K, the 10K, and the marathon. An entire fitness culture sprang up around his legend, and I met Karel at a “Zátopek Movement” cross-country race for boys, where we finished one-two in a hilly romp through Petrin Park.

Karel’s English was far better than my Czech, and he taught me the ways of the city. In return, I instructed him in American slang and pop music, which I might have had trouble mastering myself if not for my classmates at the American school, who’d spent far more time in the States.

It never occurred to me then that our friendship posed any risk for Karel’s family—not until we visited the machine shop where his dad worked to deliver a lunch pail. Just inside the door, next to a counter where the manager sat, there was a clock and a wooden box, where the workers punched their time cards. Posted above it was a sign with underlined words and an exclamation mark.

“What’s it say?” I asked. Karel laughed.

“It’s about you.” He translated: “Timely arrival to work strikes a decisive blow against the American aggressors!”

I didn’t think it was funny.

“Well, this aggressor’s hungry. Let’s get a sausage.”

The manager, hearing our English, scowled and muttered a curse. We burst out laughing and ran into the street. Probably not the sort of thing that showed up well in his father’s personnel file.

Litzi and I arrived at dusk with an hour to kill before meeting Karel for dinner, so we checked in to our hotel and walked through the Old Town. I kept an eye out for both Lothar and the Hammerhead, but as usual, Prague was mobbed.

The city’s refurbished beauty bowled me over even as it dismayed me. When I was a boy the buildings were sooty and tarnished, grandeur in decline. Now every surface looked scrubbed, every brick repointed. But city boosters had overlaid it with neon, corporate logos, and all these tourists, so many of them that the locals looked like infiltrators, as beleaguered as when the Soviets were in charge. To make matters worse, there was a soccer match that night between the Czech Republic and Scotland, so the streets were filled with the blue plaid soldiers of the Tartan Army, Scotland’s die-hard, drink-harder legion of fans.

We tried to take refuge in a
pivnice,
or beer pub, but all of them were thronged with Scots. Then Litzi spotted a promising oasis, a trim bar with red walls and enough bookshelves to furnish a small library.

“How wonderful,” she said. “And it’s called Bar and Books.”

We settled happily onto a leather bench, but a single overpriced drink was all it took for us to see that it was more of a cigar parlor for the trendy than a haven for literary types.

“This is the future for people like us,” she said. “Books as décor, something to put on the wall where you sip your whisky.”

A man over her shoulder caught my eye. He stood by the door, attempting to project a casual air. Was it my imagination, or was he the same fellow I’d spotted reading a Russian newspaper outside the train station?

“Don’t turn around,” I said, “but tell me if you recognize that man by the door.” I looked away to keep from making him suspicious. Litzi leaned back against the bench and idly scanned the room.

“Which one?” she whispered.

I turned. He was gone. An operative for the Hammerhead, or a product of my overactive imagination?

“Never mind. Let’s go. We’re due at Karel’s in another fifteen minutes anyway.”

The Old Town Square was pandemonium, an invasion not of tanks but of kilted drunks, peeing against the walls of sixteenth-century chapels and kicking soccer balls high in the air to land on the heads of the hordes below, like cannonballs from siege guns.

“Poor Prague,” Litzi said.

We threaded our way toward Karel’s.

“How many years has it been?” Litzi asked as I pressed the button for his apartment.

“Forty. We moved the year after the Russians rolled in. Haven’t seen him since.”

The buzzer sounded. No sooner had we pushed through the entrance than a door rattled open two stories above. A shaggy head loomed above the railing, and a big voice boomed down the stairwell.

“My friend Bill! You are most welcome!”

I laughed appreciatively. Litzi and I hustled up the steps to find him grinning hugely with his arms spread wide. Karel had grown into a woolly bear of a man. His brown-gray hair was clean but uncombed, in contrast to the Trotskyite beard that he’d trimmed to a point. He wore a folksy sweater of thick wool and a threadbare corduroy jacket that draped him like a horse blanket. His eyes were the same sparkling blue they’d been at age fourteen, with a gleam that said he was still up for anything.

I introduced Litzi and he ushered us inside. Books and magazines were everywhere. Dust coated the screen of a small rabbit-ear television that barely postdated our friendship. Abstract paintings covered every wall.

“First things first,” he said. He poured three amber shots of Becherovka, the local herbal liqueur, and passed them around.

“To Bill,” he said, raising his glass, “who taught me to sing like John Lennon, party like Keith Richards, and sneak around like James Bond.”

Litzi, who had never seen much of the Keith Richards side, seemed greatly amused. I grimaced at the medicinal bite of the Becherovka, but it released a flood of memory—two teen boys plotting their stratagems in alleyways and on riverbanks, with one eye out for parents and another for any available girl.

“To Karel,” I said, “who taught me to run like the great Zátopek. For a lap or two, anyway. And who helped engineer my first real kiss.”