The Tristan Betrayal

  Metcalfe finished, then flushed. But the Russian man remained in the stall. Was it a coincidence? Likely, Metcalfe decided, that was all it was. He went to the sink next to where Hilliard was still soaping his hands and caught the diplomat’s eyes in the mirror, giving him a questioning look.

  Hilliard shrugged. They washed their hands in silence. Metcalfe’s heart pounded as he waited. If he and Hilliard happened to be arrested at this moment, they would be in serious trouble.

  He knew that Hilliard had on his person the first set of forged documents that had been prepared by Corky’s technical specialists and flown in to Moscow via the diplomatic pouch. If the documents were found on either one of them, both would disappear into the gulag, if not be executed. It was no wonder Hilliard looked haggard and sullen. He knew what the risks were.

  Finally a toilet flushed, and a Russian man emerged from the stall. He looked at the two sinks, which were occupied by Metcalfe and Hilliard, and glowered at the two men as he walked out of the rest room. Hilliard raced to the door, hands dripping, and locked it.

  Just as quickly he pulled a tightly wrapped package from his suit coat and handed it to Metcalfe.

  “This is only the first set,” Hilliard whispered. “More to come.”

  “Thank you,” Metcalfe said.

  “Ordinarily, my upbringing would require me to say ‘Don’t mention it,’ or ‘A pleasure,’ or ‘You’re welcome,’ but they’d all be lies,” Hilliard said. “I’m only here on Corky’s orders, you know that. If anyone else asked me to do this, I’d tell them to go take a flying leap. I don’t know what these documents are—they’re secure-sealed—but I’ll be happy when you’ve left Moscow.”

  “As will I.”

  “All right, listen up, before some other soused Russian with a bursting bladder tries to get in here. This is our last face-to-face. From now on, we use dead drops.”

  “Good.” That was safer anyway, Metcalfe reflected.

  “Corky says you’ve got a great memory. Use it. Don’t write any of this down, you hear me?”

  “I’m listening.”

  Fear and resentment seemed to have changed Hilliard. Outwardly he was the same diminutive, soft-fleshed, balding, bespectacled man. But inside the blunt-talking, charming Midwesterner, something had hardened. He was angry and deeply frightened, and seeing the transformation made Metcalfe all the more fearful.

  “On the corner of Pushkin Street and Proyezd Khudozhestvennovo Teatra you will find two stores almost next to each other, okay? One is Store Number 19, marked Myaso, or ‘Meat.’ ”

  “Thanks,” Metcalfe said, intending his sarcasm to be obvious. Hilliard surely knew he spoke Russian.

  “The other is called Zhenskaya Obuv.” Women’s Shoes. Hilliard didn’t translate this time; Metcalfe nodded.

  “The entrance to the building in between those two stores is unguarded, open twenty-four hours. On your right as you enter you’ll see a radiator that’s fastened to the wall by a metal bracket on one side. There’s a gap behind it of a few centimeters. The next set of documents will be behind it.”

  “Not a good idea,” Metcalfe said. “The documents are liable to catch fire when the radiator comes on.”

  Hilliard scowled. “This is Moscow, for Christ’s sake. Two-thirds of the radiators don’t even work, and this is one of those two-thirds. Believe me. And this is Moscow, so it won’t get fixed for five years.”

  Metcalfe nodded. “Signal?”

  “If I’m in the office, which I won’t always be, you’ll place a telephone call asking for me, telling me you’ve lost your passport. I’ll reply that you’ve called the wrong office. If I’ve loaded the drop, I’ll tell you to call back and ask for the consular division. If I haven’t, I’ll just hang up at that point.”

  “And if you’re not in the office?”

  “The fallback signal site will be a telephone at Kozitski Pereulok Number 2, Korpus 8, entry number 7. That’s between Gorky and Pushkin streets. Got that?”

  Metcalfe nodded again. “Kozitski Lane 2, Korpus 8, entry 7. That’s fairly close to Yeliseyevsky’s gastronom.”

  “I’ll recommend you to the folks at Baedeker when they get around to doing Moscow,” Hilliard said astringently. “Entry 7 is between the entrance to Polyclinic Number 18 and a store labeled ‘Ovoshchifrukty.’” He didn’t translate the Russian word for produce, fruits and vegetables. “This is four blocks from the drop site, by the way. When you enter the building, you’ll see a telephone on your left, mounted on a wooden board. The telephone’s numbered 746, but there’s only one phone there. On the lower right corner of the board, where the veneer has broken off, is a small area where you’ll see doodles and scrawls put there by people using the phone, so the marks you and I leave won’t attract undue attention. When I’ve loaded the drop, I’ll signal that by drawing a circle in red pencil. Red pencil, got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “When you’ve unloaded the drop, you’ll place a vertical line in that circle. Is this clear?”

  “Completely. The telephone’s accessible twenty-four hours as well?”

  “Right.”

  “Have you built in any fake DLBs?” Metcalfe referred to dead-letter box signals that were false, designed to mislead any who might be watching.

  “That’s my business.”

  “Operational security is my business as well.”

  Hilliard gave him a fierce glare.

  “Any emergency signal?”

  Hilliard continued to glare.

  “A capture signal—a signal warning me off, warning me the channels are dirty, you’ve been intercepted?”

  “If I’ve been intercepted, you won’t find a ready-to-pick-up sign. Simple as that. You won’t hear from me again. Neither will Corky nor any of my friends back home in Iowa or Washington, because I’ll be breaking rocks in Siberia, never to be heard from again. Or shot in the back of the neck. Are we clear? So do us both a favor. Dry-clean yourself. Don’t get blown.”

  He turned and, without another word, unlocked the restroom door and left.

  By the time Metcalfe returned to his table, his dinner—their dinner—had been set out. But still no Roger. The table was crowded with serving platters mounded with lamb shashlik and beef chashushuli, the meat dumplings called khinkali, the pheasant stew known as chakhokhbili. There were bottles of Tsinandali, a fine straw-colored Georgian white wine, and more bottles of Borzhomi mineral water. But Metcalfe was suddenly not hungry. He slipped a stack of bills under his plate and left the restaurant, trailing the headwaiter, who wanted to know if anything was wrong. Palming the waiter another twenty, he apologized, “Guess I filled up on bread.”

  He was tailed, of course, from the Aragvi back to the Metropole. He did not recognize the followers; the shift had changed, and the blond, pale-eyed expert was not among them. Or did not appear to be, anyway, for he might have been watching at a distance, undetected. The documents were in the breast pocket of his suit jacket, still sealed in their cellophane wrapper. It felt as if they were burning a hole in his chest. He tried not to think about what might happen if he was stopped by anyone and the documents were taken from him. Forged Soviet military documents—it would be impossible to explain them away.

  At the hotel desk, he was not stopped by any of the desk clerks; Roger had left no message with them. He couldn’t help but worry, but Roger was the least of his worries. He was a professional; he could take care of himself. There would be a reason for his absence. Lana was no professional; any number of things could befall her.

  The dezhurnaya on his floor, a gorgon he had not seen before, greeted him with customary ill humor. She refused to hand over his room key.

  “You took it already,” she said accusingly.

  “No,” Metcalfe replied. “There must be some mistake.” Unless Roger had taken his room key for some reason: perhaps to leave something in his room, whether a message or—

  A transmitter! He had been working all day to assemble the compon
ents, and knowing Scoop, he had already built one by now and was waiting in Metcalfe’s room to surprise him with it. Certainly he would not leave a transceiver unattended in a hotel room.

  But his room was locked, and his repeated knocking met with no response. There was no answer in Roger’s room, either. He returned to the dezhurnaya’s station. “My room is locked,” he said sternly. This was the only way to deal with the sour-tempered floor ladies: answering imperiousness with imperiousness. “I need the key, and if you’ve given it to any unauthorized person, I’ll have your job.” He produced his passport. “Have you given my room key to anyone else?”

  The dezhurnaya was stunned into silence. This was a woman who lived by the all-important Soviet notion of poryadok, order. There was a way to do things properly, and by giving out a room key to the wrong guest she had violated it. Scowling, she handed Metcalfe the key. “But bring it back!” she called out after him.

  It could have been anyone, of course, who had taken his room key: NKVD, though they presumably had access to master keys; even someone from the American embassy. Only when he reached the door to his room for the second time did he recall Ted Bishop’s words.

  A Kraut gentleman. . . . He said an old friend had asked him to look someone up. Said he didn’t remember the exact name. Someone who just arrived from Paris. . . . Something about his story emitted the faintest odor of fish.

  A Kraut gentleman. A Nazi. SD, from the look of him.

  Someone who had come from Paris to look someone up.

  The destruction of the Cave, Corky’s Paris station, had been only the beginning. Corky’s network was being unrolled. Somehow they had traced him to Moscow.

  What had happened to his friends at the Paris station could easily happen to him.

  Someone was waiting for him in his room. Metcalfe was sure of it.

  Waiting to finish the job of rolling up Corky’s network. Waiting to kill him.

  It was a trap, Metcalfe realized, a trap he would not step into. He did not have a weapon; entering the room was out of the question. There were other ways down to the lobby that did not necessitate passing by the foul-tempered dezhurnaya and engaging in time-wasting explanations. He raced down the service stairs, taking them two at a time. Crossing the lobby, he approached the front desk, a look of irritation on his face.

  “This damned key!” he exclaimed, holding it up. “It doesn’t work!”

  “Are you sure you have the right key, sir?” asked the clerk. He took it, examined it. The room number was stamped on the key tag, as plain as day. There was no mistake.

  “You turn it to the left, sir. Counterclockwise.”

  “I know that. How long have I been here? It’s not working. Now, will you please send someone up with me to get this door open? I’m in a hurry.”

  The clerk pounded a bell, and a valet appeared from the luggage room behind him. There was a perfunctory exchange in Russian, and then the valet, a kid still in his teens, came up to Metcalfe, bowing bashfully, and took the key. Metcalfe followed him into the elevator. On the fourth floor they got out, walked past the dezhurnaya, who stared but said nothing, and down the corridor to Metcalfe’s room.

  “This is the room, sir?” the bellman asked.

  “You try the lock. I’ve had no success.” As he spoke, Metcalfe stayed behind the bellman. If the unnamed German was lying in wait inside the room, he would restrain from firing—if indeed he intended to dispatch Metcalfe by means of a firearm—once he heard the young man’s voice. If a Nazi assassin was inside, he would be deterred not by any humanitarian considerations, such as the loss of an innocent life, but instead by practical ones. Unnecessary bloodshed was anathema to a professional killer, for it inevitably created far more problems than it solved. The young bellman would serve as Metcalfe’s shield.

  He drew back still farther as the bellman turned the key in the lock, beyond the line of sight of anyone stationed inside his room and thus outside of any firing line. He braced himself, coiled, prepared to leap out of the way, to run, the moment the firing began.

  But the bellman had unlocked the door easily. Glancing at Metcalfe in bafflement, he pulled the heavy door open. Metcalfe felt his heartbeat accelerate.

  “All right, sir?” the bellman asked. He hesitated at the open door, glancing into the room, then at Metcalfe. He obviously expected a tip, despite the official policy that frowned on gratuities as capitalist taint.

  “I appreciate it,” said Metcalfe. “I don’t know why I couldn’t get it to turn.” He took out a five-dollar bill and came up to the young man from behind, clapping a hand on his shoulder jovially as he stood in back of the bellman and looked into the room.

  It was empty. There was no one there.

  The bathroom.

  The bathroom door was ajar. He had left it open, and now it was nearly closed. That meant nothing, of course, because the room appeared to have been cleaned in his absence and the maid would have gone into the bathroom.

  “Listen, as long as you’re up here,” Metcalfe said, “would you mind helping me lift something heavy? My back’s killing me.”

  The bellman shrugged: Sure, why not.

  “My damned suitcase is in the bathroom, so if you wouldn’t mind getting it out of there, I’ve got another one of these for you.” He handed the bellman the bill. This was a giant tip to the young man, and the prospect of another five-dollar bill was irresistible. The bellman crossed the room to the bathroom. Metcalfe hung behind, again positioning himself out of the line of fire.

  The bellman pushed the bathroom door open, glanced into the bathroom, and said, “Sir? I don’t see a suitcase—”

  “Really? The maid must have moved it, then. Sorry.”

  But the young man was frozen in place, his eyes wide. He took a step forward into the bathroom and began to scream, “Bozhe moi! Bozhe moi!”

  Metcalfe raced toward the bathroom, and then he saw what the bellman was staring at, his screams growing steadily louder.

  The face that hung over the side of the bathtub was so purple and engorged, its eyeballs bulging and its purple tongue distended, that Metcalfe almost did not recognize it.

  A gasp escaped his mouth as he rushed to the tub, touched Roger Martin’s face, felt the clammy cold that told him that Roger was unquestionably dead and had been so for several hours. The serrated band that nearly bisected Roger’s throat was horribly familiar.

  Metcalfe had seen the exact same strangulation wound just a few days earlier, in Paris.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The bellman backed up out of the bathroom, his movements jerky, seeming involuntary. By now he had stopped screaming, but his face remained panicked.

  Metcalfe, however, barely noticed. He was in a state of profound shock. “My God,” he whispered. What he saw before him was a horror, a grotesquerie, a vision that was unbearable.

  Paris had happened again.

  They had murdered Scoop.

  There was no choice now, no question as to what to do. He had to get out of here before the bellman summoned help, before the Soviet authorities—read: the NKVD—were brought in and he was surely interrogated, locked up. Even in his stunned, grieved state, he could see the chain of consequences. The forged documents would be discovered, either on him or wherever he undertook to hide them, and no explanation he could come up with would satisfy the authorities.

  Yet there was no explanation that could satisfy him.

  Explanations, understanding of the horror, would have to wait. Swiftly he threw some clothes into the cheap cardboard suitcase he’d bought the day before. He turned and ran from the room.

  Without a transmitter, there was no way to reach Corcoran, or at least no quick way. Even the famous black channel wasn’t safe. The diplomatic pouch was probably not safe, either. The only remaining way to contact Corky was to ask Amos Hilliard to encode a message using the most secure cryptography available to him and dispatch a coded telegram. Hilliard would do it, though reluctantly.

>   Whichever way he did it, he had to get to Corky. The penetration of the network had now extended to Moscow, which indicated that the breach went alarmingly deep.

  A thought struck him then. He tried to dismiss it as the delusion of a mind made frantic by seeing the murder of an old and close friend. But he felt it in the pit of his stomach and could not dismiss it.

  Amos Hilliard?

  Was it possible that Corky’s own man in Moscow was rotten? Hilliard’s words came back to him in a rush: No one can be trusted.

  Was that an oblique reference to Amos Hilliard himself? Who else knew what Metcalfe was doing in Moscow, after all? If Hilliard was playing both sides, or several sides, as he accused his embassy colleagues of doing, then all he had to do was pass the word to . . .

  But Metcalfe shook his head, dismissing the idea. It was ludicrous; he was seeing duplicity everywhere. Once you began thinking like that, you became crippled, paralyzed.

  Still, the horrific reality remained: he had made Scoop Martin fly him to Moscow and had thereby gotten his old friend murdered just as surely as if he had done the deed himself. The fact that Roger had been in Metcalfe’s hotel room when he was murdered indicated that Metcalfe had been the intended target. They had meant to kill Metcalfe. They’d gotten Metcalfe’s hotel room number and had assumed that the person there was Metcalfe. Why Roger had been there was yet another mystery. If he’d been working on a transmitter and was planning either to surprise Metcalfe with it or to secrete it there . . . then where was it?

  And if Corky’s network had been penetrated and was being rolled up, agent by agent—first Paris, now Moscow—then it wasn’t just Metcalfe who was in danger.

  Lana was in danger as well.

  The more Metcalfe met with Lana, the more she became a target. And once he gave her the forged documents he was now carrying, she became, by extension, a member of Corky’s network, too, if an unwitting one. Now she was as much a potential victim as Roger or any of the men in the Paris Station.