For a long while, neither spoke.
“I have to go to Paris, Laurel,” he finally said.
“Flight or pursuit?” It was both a question and a challenge.
“I’m not sure. Burrowing in, maybe. I’ve got to follow the thread wherever it goes.”
“I accept that.”
“But, Laurel, we need to be prepared. At the end of it, maybe I find out that I’m not who I think I am. That I’m someone else. Someone who’s a stranger to us both.”
“You’re frightening me,” Laurel said quietly.
“Maybe you should be frightened,” Ambler said. He held both her hands in his, gently. “Maybe we both should be.”
Sleep was a long time coming, and when it came, it brought unbidden images of a past he still believed to be his own.
His mother’s face, foundation covering the livid bruises, pain and confusion in her voice.
“Did Daddy tell you that? Did he say he was leaving?”
“No. He didn’t say anything . . . .”
“I swear the Devil’s in you. Why would you say such a thing?”
His unspoken reply: But isn’t it obvious? Don’t you see it, too?
The pain and bewilderment in his mother’s face dissolved into the intense look of awe and calculation on Paul Fenton’s.
You’re a goddamn wizard. A magician. . . . Poof —the magician’s gone, cape and wand and everything. How the hell did you manage that?
How indeed?
Another face came into focus—first just the eyes, eyes of comprehension and serenity. They belonged to Wai-Chan Leung.
Recall the man, of ancient times, who set up shop in a village selling both a spear he said would penetrate anything and a shield he claimed nothing could penetrate.
He had returned to Changhua, hurtled back to the innermost recesses of his mind. Memories that had disappeared from his awareness now flooded him, like a geyser from a hidden spring.
He did not know why he couldn’t remember before; he did not know why he could remember now. The memories seared as they returned, the pain awakening earlier memories of pain. . . .
He had witnessed carnage and, holding the gaze of the dying man, experienced none of his spiritual serenity. Instead, what possessed him was rage, a rage greater than any he had ever experienced. He and his colleagues had been manipulated—that was plain to him. The dossier: a tapestry of lies, hundreds of weak threads that became strong when woven together.
You’d started to see through something you weren’t meant to see through.
By the day’s end, the Taiwan government announced that it had taken into custody members of a left-wing radical cell, which, it claimed, was behind the assassination; the cell was placed on an official list of terrorist organizations. Tarquin was familiar with the so-called cell: a dozen or so superannuated graduate students who got up to little more than distributing photocopies of Maoist pamphlets from the 1950s and debating obscure doctrinal points over cups of weak green tea.
For the next four days, as the others in his team had dispersed to be redeployed to their next assignments, Tarquin went on a controlled rampage, determined to expose the truth. The pieces of the puzzle were not difficult to locate. As he raced among the island’s various power centers, Taiwan itself was reduced to a blur of pagodas, intricately painted and incised temple roofs, and densely sprawling cityscapes, cramped with markets and shops. The island was dense, most of all, with people, on family-sized motorbikes and in tiny cars and buses, and betel-nut chewers noisily expectorating bloody-looking spit onto the sidewalk. He met with “assets” in the Taiwanese military who scarcely disguised their glee at Leung’s murder. He paid a visit to the henchmen and confederates of the corrupt politicos, courtiers, and businessmen who held the true reins of power, sometimes inveigling information by means of feigned sympathy—sometimes extracting it by sheer terror and a measure of brutality he had not realized he possessed. He knew their type, too well. Even when their words were carefully chosen, their faces expressed their furtive agendas plainly. Yes, he knew these people.
Now they were coming to know him.
On the third day, the Metropolitan Rapid Transit system took him to Peitou. Ten miles north of central Taipei, Peitou was once a hot-springs resort. Later it became a seedy red-light district. Now it was something in between. Past a teahouse and a hostel, he found a hot-springs “museum,” a sort of upscale bathhouse. On the fourth floor, he caught up with the chubby young man he was looking for—a nephew of a powerful general who was involved in the drug trade, helping to arrange transshipments of heroin from Burma to Thailand, to Taiwan, and thereupon to Tokyo, Honolulu, Los Angeles. A year earlier, the chubby young man had decided to run for a seat in Parliament, and though the playboy was better acquainted with the varieties of cognac than with the political issues of his prospective constituents, the seat had looked safe for a KMT-backed candidate. Then he learned that Leung had been in talks with another candidate for the seat. He did not take the news well: if Leung endorsed his rival, his political fortunes would be imperiled. For that matter, if Leung’s anticorruption campaign succeeded on a national level—or even inspired another government to adopt one in defensive emulation—his uncle was in danger of being destroyed.
The man was lounging in steamy water up to his nipples, watching KTV—karaoke television—with a narcotized expression. He grew more alert when Tarquin walked over to him, fully dressed, and pulled a six-inch titanium serrated-edge combat knife from its Hytrel sheath. The nephew proved more communicative after a few incisions were made along his scalp, and blood from that highly vascular region began to drench his face. Tarquin knew the peculiar terror induced when a man was blinded by his own blood running into his eyes.
It was as Tarquin had begun to suspect. The “intelligence” in the dossier had been manufactured by Leung’s political rivals—cunningly weaving enough accurate detail about other malefactors to garner a superficial plausibility. But that left a larger mystery. How did this crude disinformation find its way into the Consular Operations intelligence network? How had the Political Stabilization Unit been tricked into vetting this farrago of deception?
No intelligence pitfall was more familiar to professionals: a man’s enemies were always willing to say anything that would bring misfortune upon him. In the absence of confirmation from disinterested parties, no such claim had a claim to truth. It was almost to be expected that those threatened by a reformist political figure should seek to undermine him by spreading lies. What was not expected—what was not explicable—was the Stab unit’s analytic failure.
The emotions he was experiencing were molten and dangerous. Dangerous to others, dangerous, he dimly realized, to himself.
When Ambler awoke, he felt, if anything, even less rested than when he lay down, and it had nothing to do with the muffled roar of jet planes from the nearby airport. He felt he had come close to uncovering something, something of great portent; the thought hovered in his mind like morning fog and then dissipated just as quickly. His eyes were inflamed, and his head pulsed as if he were suffering a hangover, although he had had nothing to drink.
Laurel was already up and dressed; she was wearing khaki trousers and a softly pleated pale blue shirt. He looked at the bedside clock, reassuring himself that he remained on schedule.
“You’ve got plenty of time—we won’t miss our flight,” she said when he finally staggered to the bathroom.
“Our flight?”
“I’m going with you.”
“I can’t let you,” he said. “I don’t know what the dangers are, and I can’t expose you to—”
“I accept that there are dangers,” Laurel interjected. “That’s why I need you. That’s why you need me. I can help. I can watch your back. Be an extra pair of eyes.”
“It’s out of the question, Laurel.”
“I’m an amateur, I get that. But that makes me the one thing they won’t be looking for. Besides, you’re not frightened o
f them. You’re frightened of yourself. And that’s where maybe I can make things easier, not harder.”
“How would I live with myself if anything were to happen to you over there?”
“How would you feel if something were to happen to me here and you weren’t around?”
He gave her a sharp look. “I did this to you,” Ambler said once more, with muted horror. He did not voice the silently insistent question within him: When will it stop?
Laurel spoke quietly but with steel. “Don’t leave me, OK?”
Ambler cupped her face with his hands. It was madness, what she was proposing. But it might well save him from another form of madness. And what she said was true: on another continent, he would not be able to protect her from those who threatened her on this one.
“If anything should happen to you . . .” he began. It wasn’t a sentence he had to finish.
Her gaze was steady and unafraid. “I’ll pick up another toothbrush at the airport,” she said.
FIFTEEN
PARIS
As the train pulled into the Gare du Nord, Ambler felt both a pulsing current of anxious vigilance and a wave of nostalgia. The smell of the place—he remembered every city by its distinctive odors—brought him back with full force to the nine months he had spent there as a youth, nine months in which he had matured faster, so it seemed, than in the preceding five years. He deposited his suitcase at the left-luggage office and entered the City of Light through the grand portals of the railroad station.
As a safety precaution, they had traveled separately. He had flown to Brussels, using identity papers Fenton provided in the name of one “Robert Mulvaney,” and arrived here via the hourly Thalys train. She was using a passport he had altered from one he’d hurriedly purchased on Tremont Avenue in the Bronx: the name, Lourdes Esquivel, wasn’t the perfect match for the amber-eyed American, but he knew it would pass muster in a busy airport. Now he glanced at his watch and walked through the crowd at the station. Laurel was seated in a waiting area, just as they had arranged, and her eyes lit up when she saw him.
His heart swelled. She was obviously tired from the trip and yet as beautiful as he had ever seen her.
As they walked together out into the Place Napoléon III, he watched as Laurel stared in wonder at the magnificent facade with its Corinthian columns.
“Those nine statues represent the major cities of northern France,” Ambler said in his best tourist-guide mode. “This station was built to be the gateway to the North: northern France, Belgium, Holland, even Scandinavia.”
“It’s amazing,” Laurel breathed. Such words were often spoken. Yet in her mouth they were not formulaic or perfunctory; they expressed her heart. As he saw the familiar sights through her own fresh eyes, they became new again.
The symbolic gateways before him—they were the perfect distillation of human history. There were always those who sought to open the gates; there were always those who sought to shut them tight. Ambler, in his day, had done both.
An hour later, he left Laurel at his favorite café, the Deux Magots, with a large cappuccino, a Blue Guide, and a view, as he told her, of the oldest church in Paris. He explained that he had some business to do and would return before long.
Ambler walked west at a steady pace into the Seventh Arrondissement. He made a few detours, checking in windows to see if he could identify anyone following him, scanned the faces he encountered. There was no sign of surveillance. Until he made his contact with Fenton’s people in Paris, he could hope that no one would know he and Laurel were here. Finally, he made his way to an elegant nineteenth-century building on the rue St. Dominique and rang the bell.
The Strategic Services Group logo was incised on a rectangular brass plaque on the door. He caught a momentary glimpse of a strange man reflected in it and felt a squirt of adrenaline; the next moment, he realized that the man was himself.
He straightened himself and took a second look at the door. Mounted on the door frame was a glass square that had the glazed, dark look of an unpowered television screen. Ambler knew it was part of a new-generation audiovisual entry system; embedded in the silicate plane were hundreds of microlenses that captured fractional light feeds from a radial array of nearly 180 degrees. The result was a sort of compound eye, like that formed by the ommatidia of an insect. The feeds from hundreds of separate visual receptors were integrated by computer into a single mobile image, one that could be rotated and viewed from a wide range of angles.
“Est-ce que vous avez un rendezvous?” A man’s voice sounded from the speaker.
“My name is Robert Mulvaney,” Ambler said. It was almost more comforting to have a name he knew was fake than one he could only hope was real.
After a few moments, during which a computer no doubt compared his image to the digital image with which Fenton would have supplied them, Ambler was buzzed into a bland institutional-looking foyer. A large plastic display, at eye level, was emblazoned with the Strategic Services Group logo, a larger version of what had been incised on the brass plaque. To a balding factotum Ambler itemized the equipment and documents he would need—including a passport, dated from a year ago, with the appropriate stamps, in the name of Mary Mulvaney. The page with the photograph would be left blank, with the security film unattached. Ambler would provide the photograph himself and heat-seal it in place. Half an hour later, he was presented with a hard-sided briefcase. Ambler did not bother to inspect its contents. He had no doubts about the efficiency of Fenton’s outfit. While his “order” was being filled, he had studied the updated dossier on Benoit Deschesnes. He mulled over its contents as he walked back to the Deux Magots.
Three high-resolution pictures showed a grizzled, sharp-featured man in his mid-fifties. His hair was long and lustrous, and in one of the pictures he was wearing pince-nez that made him look mildly pretentious. There were also a few pages that summarized the man’s life.
Deschesnes, whose current address was an apartment on rue Rambuteau, was clearly a brilliant man. He had studied nuclear physics at the Ecole Polytechnique, the most elite scientific university in this most elitist of countries, and gone on to work at a nuclear research lab at CERN, the European nuclear research center in Geneva. Then, in his early thirties, about fifteen years ago, he had moved back to France and joined the faculty at Paris VII, where he became increasingly interested in nuclear policy. When a slot opened for a nuclear arms inspector at the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, he applied and was immediately accepted. Soon he showed himself to be unusually savvy at navigating a course through the UN’s bureaucratic shoals and to have a genuine gift for administration and internal diplomacy. His rise was swift, and when he was proposed for the director-general of the IAEA, he worked hard to make sure that the members of the French mission were solidly behind him.
There had been some concerns, especially among senior members of the French Ministry of Defense, arising from Deschesnes’ youthful involvement with the Actions des Français pour le Désarmement Nucléaire, an NGO that argued for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. When he had first joined the IAEA, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs had questioned what they called the “objectivity of his judgment.” It was, evidently, a storm that Deschesnes had weathered. Without the backing of his country, Deschesnes would not have been considered for so illustrious and powerful a position.
He was generally deemed a success. Though the IAEA Secretariat was headquartered at the Vienna International Center, on Wagramer Strasse, where the agency’s top career staffers were clustered, few were surprised that the Frenchman spent nearly half the year at the IAEA’s Paris offices. That was the way with Frenchmen; everyone at the UN knew that. His trips to Vienna were frequent, and he even took care to make regular appearances at the IAEA laboratories in Seibersdorf, Austria, and in Trieste, Italy. In his three years as director-general, Deschesnes had shown a gift for sidestepping unnecessary controversy while carefully husbanding the agency’s prestige and credibility
. A brief article in Time, reproduced in the dossier, called him “Dr. Watchdog.” According to the news-magazine, he was “no mere Brie-eating bureaucrat” but rather a “cerebral Frenchman with a heart as big as his brains,” who was “bringing new brio to bear on the most important threat to global security: loose nukes.”
Yet the public had no idea about the real story: that about a year ago the CIA had observed the IAEA director-general meeting secretly with a renegade Libyan nuclear scientist. The agency had captured enough of the conversation to deduce that Deschesnes’ high-profile role as the world’s leading antiproliferation officer seemed to be a cover for a profitable sideline in helping nonnuclear states acquire nuclear weapons technologies. Deschesnes’ antiproliferation work was a front; the anti-American invective in his early AFDN speeches was not.
From Fenton, Ambler knew that the source of the information was someone senior in the American intelligence community. Certainly the analysis had all the hallmarks of a CIA analytical report, down to the starchy phrasings, the careful qualifications and weasel words. Evidence never “proved” that a conclusion was true. Rather, it “raised the concern that,” “made plausible the supposition that,” or “provided additional support for” the hypothesis advanced. None of that worried Fenton. The CIA, captive to the legalistic culture of Washington, was not defending the country, but that was where Fenton figured he came in. He could do for his country what its official defenders were too cautious to do.
Three-quarters of an hour after he had left, Ambler was back at the Deux Magots. Inside, the warm air was fragrant with coffee and cigarettes, the café’s kitchen not yet geared up for the evening meal. Laurel was visibly relieved when she caught sight of him. She summoned a waiter and smiled at Ambler. He seated himself at her table, stood his briefcase by his chair, and took her hand in his, feeling its warmth.
He explained about the document work. Laminating her photograph into the passport would be the work of a minute. “Now that Mr. and Mrs. Mulvaney have their papers in order, we can behave like a married couple.”