Tool of the Trade

“I don’t know. He was going to contact me in Boston, next week.” I pinned it down then. Nick always had a talent for mimicry; he was using the voice of Larry Martino, his department head. “He didn’t tell me anything else.”

  “I don’t believe that. Second, what is the origin of this power you and he can use?”

  “A drug. Foley told me the name; I can’t pronounce it. Or remember it, actually. Poly something. Maybe he ordered me not to be able to remember the name.”

  “I don’t believe that, either. Do you have any of the drug with you?”

  “No, I used it all on the man from Watergate.”

  “How did you get him to swallow it?”

  “I didn’t. It’s an aerosol.”

  “So many things I don’t believe. We’re going to start over. Try to visualize this. The woman you were sent to rescue is handcuffed to the chair you’re sitting in. I have a razor blade in my hand. The next time I don’t believe an answer, I will slash her face. Where is Foley?”

  “He’s bluffing,” I said desperately. He kneeled down and pinned my shoulder with his crushing left-hand grip and waved the blade inches over my face. I gasped.

  “Don’t harm her!” Nick said in his real voice, thick with emotion. The Scalpel eased back and looked at the razor blade with a strange expression.

  “So that’s all… you just… Sam—”

  “Get between me and the rifleman,” Nick said quickly, too quietly for Sam to hear. The Scalpel did as he said. “Now take the razor and slash your own wrist.” He did, and stared openmouthed at the rush of blood.

  “What’s going on there, Misha?” Sam said. “I can’t—”

  “Drop the razor and shoot the rifleman. Kill him.” The Scalpel jerked a pistol out of his pocket and spun around. A dart hit him in the shoulder, and at the same time he fired two fast, loud shots. Sam flung the rifle away, and his chair tipped over. “Valerie, stay calm.” The involuntary scream that was gathering disappeared.

  “Now give the gun to Valerie and then pick up the razor and cut your own throat. You bastard.” But he was beyond obeying, staggering from the drug. He dropped the gun and fell on top of it.

  “He got hit by a dart,” I said. “I guess you won’t get anything more out of him.”

  “Can you reach the gun?”

  “No; its underneath him.”

  “Damn. What about the rifleman?”

  “I think he’s dead. He’s not moving.”

  “Okay.” He thought for a moment. “Can you stand up far enough to use your teeth to get this thing off my head?”.

  “I’ll try.” He leaned over as far as he could, and I was able to slide the pillowcase off. “What…” At first I didn’t recognize him; clean-shaven, gaunt, suntanned. “No wonder they thought you were someone else.”

  “Overhearing helped. The car must have been bugged.” He made a familiar head gesture, and we kissed. It felt strange. Then he studied the Scalpel’s body. “He must have keys. Let me see.” He stretched as far as he could, but his toe stopped a few inches short. “See if you can reach him. If we could get the pistol…”

  I could just get a toe under his hip. But I couldn’t budge his heavy body. “I’m too weak,” I said, tears starting. “I’ve been sitting in that chair forever—”

  “Listen. You can do it. Use your toe and flip him over.” Incredibly, I did. His left arm, flopping, trailed an arc of bright-red drops. My calf immediately seized up with a cramp, and I cried out.

  “Sorry, dear. Ignore the pain.” It went away. “Now slide the pistol over to where you can pick it up.” I did. “Now shoot away the chain on this right handcuff. Aim down the room and look away when you pull the trigger. Good.” The shot made my ears ring and intensified the smell of gunsmoke. I looked back, and it had worked, after a fashion. Nick was grimacing, holding his wrist against his chest. The side of his hand was bleeding. “Chain bounced up,” he said. “Let me have the gun.” He pulled the other chain tight, told me to look away, and blasted it. Then he jumped out of the chair and knelt by the Scalpel. He put the pistol to the man’s head.

  “Please don’t,” I said weakly. “Enough is enough.”

  “He may live.”

  “Please.”

  “All right.” He went through the Scalpel’s pockets and came up with another pistol, which he tucked into his shoulder holster, and a ring of keys. He unlocked me and then I undid the shot-off vestiges of his ’cuffs.

  “I thought there were two other guards,” he said.

  “I guess the Scalpel sent them away. They had an argument, in Russian, and then I heard a car leave.”

  “Just as soon be gone before they get back.” He looked through the keys and held out one with a Volkswagen symbol. “This must belong to the Rabbit out front. You up to driving through the snow?”

  “Nicky, I couldn’t drive across a parking lot. I can’t even hold my arms up.” I demonstrated. “Can you do the rest of me like the leg?”

  “Don’t like to overdo it Sooner or later you pay for it” He chewed on a nail. “We’d better, though. You’ve got so much more experience driving.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Listen: You’re plenty strong enough to drive and to walk unassisted. When we sit down on the airplane, you’ll fall asleep and your body will recuperate.” He opened his eyes and looked at me expectantly.

  I tried to lift my arms again; the muscles were still water. “I don’t know. Doesn’t feel any different”

  “That’s funny.” He looked at his watch. “Oh no. Oh shit The handcuff, the chain, must’ve…” He held his wrist out to me. So his watch was broken, big deal.

  A car door slammed outside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: NICK

  I checked the clip in the Browning and worked a round into the chamber. “Stay here,” I said to Valerie and then realized that she probably couldn’t walk without help. I was moving slowly, too, because of the drugs, and feeling dizzy and nauseated. I got to the anteroom just as the door to the outside was opening and held the pistol in a shaky two-handed “combat” grip. A woman stepped through the door, quietly talking to a man close behind her.

  “Freeze!” I shouted, and added in Russian, “—Come forward slowly with your hands high.” Neither of them tried anything aggressive. They stared at the carnage for a moment and obeyed.

  The Watergate man had been hit in the chest and the head, leaving a colorful mess on the white door. They had to step over him and into a pool of blood. They walked into the long room and stopped. The rifleman had been shot twice in the chest; a purple stain of blood the size of a bedsheet spread down toward a drain in the floor. It seemed like more than one persons worth of blood. “—Your Misha did all this,” I said.

  “—Our Misha,” the woman said. “—Misha belongs only to himself. And his work.” Misha, or Shilkov, or the Scalpel, was still adding his own contribution of blood to the gruesome scene, now a slow trickle. “—He is dead?”

  “—I don’t think so, not yet We can hope.” I motioned them toward the chair.

  “—You are Foley’s detective?” she asked.

  “—That’s correct.”

  “—Tell him that most of us regret these… developments. The wrong people were empowered to make decisions, we think, and once implemented, they could not be undone.”

  “These two are all right,” Valerie said. “Please don’t hurt them.”

  “Spasibo,” the man said. “Thank you.”

  “—Take off your coats and empty your pockets onto the table.” Be silly to handcuff them if they could just pull out keys. “—Now sit on either side of the chair.” I kept them covered while Valerie joined them wrist-to-wrist through the chair’s legs.

  I had to help Valerie to her feet I draped the woman’s coat around her and half-carried her out to the car. The sight of the anteroom gave her a minute of dry heaves.

  She looked around at the swirling snow and the strange landscape. “Is this Boston?”

  I told her where w
e were. “Strangely enough, I’ve been within a few miles of here for a month, trying to track you down. Working with the CIA across the river.”

  “You’ve come over to their side, then? Our side.”

  “No, it’s not like that. They thought I was someone else.” I helped her into the car. “I infiltrated, to find out whether it was them or the KGB who had kidnapped you.”

  “The CIA kidnaps people?”

  “God knows.” I went around to the driver’s side and got in. The car started with difficulty and stalled as soon as I let out the clutch. I started to pump the accelerator.

  “Don’t flood it, Nicky. We don’t want to spend all day here.” I followed her directions, got it going, and slithered away.

  Our lives were probably in as much danger from my driving as they had been from the Scalpel’s razor blade. The road crews hadn’t come out this far, and although the rear-engined car was able to keep moving through the mess, it fishtailed constantly, and three times it turned completely around in slow, lazy circles. The third time ended with a bone-rattling collision, crashing my side against an abandoned car. It did a lot of damage to the other one. I left the scene of the accident rather than face a traffic cop with no license, no registration, and various people’s fresh blood spattered all over my clothes.

  It got a little easier once we crossed the District Line. Salt and sand on the roads. A lot of snarled traffic, though; it took over an hour to get to Georgetown. I double-parked in front of my apartment. Since my door wouldn’t open, Valerie had to get out by herself, which was painful for both of us and excruciatingly slow. I got her into the apartment and onto the couch, then went out and parked the car in the closest illegal space I could find. I hadn’t thought to change clothes and didn’t want to be in public any longer than necessary, looking like an assassin in need of dry-cleaning.

  We couldn’t stay in the apartment for very long either, of course. Just gather resources and make plans. I put out some sardines and crackers; Valerie finished the whole plate while I was fixing tea. We switched to peanut butter, which nearly exhausted the pantry. (Valerie was surprised there was so little, since I’m a fanatic cook at home. But I’d found out that with no one else to cook for, I either ate out or just grabbed a handful of something.)

  I’d fortunately stashed away a wad of twenties, emergency money. It came to four hundred dollars, and I had about fifty in my wallet. That would get us pretty far away. I cursed my stupidity at not gathering the money of the dead men and captives—but then I was used to simply asking people to hand over their wallets.

  I left Valerie to look over the travel section of the paper I’d bought on the train down, to find out how far we could get for the least money, while I went into the bedroom to pack a suitcase. It was mostly a matter of indiscriminately emptying out the closet and drawers, since I had come here with one large suitcase of clothes and hadn’t added much. I wrapped both pistols and their ammunition in the lead film bag and set them in the middle of the nondescript suitcase. They sometimes would conduct spot-check X-ray inspections of luggage that’s checked through, I’d been told.

  The tea and food had given Valerie some color. She was sitting up straight, studying the paper. “So where will it be?” I asked her.

  She folded the paper and set it beside her. “First explain to me why we don’t just go across the river.

  Go to the CIA with everything. Take them to that place while the blood’s still fresh.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. Just because the KGB are bad guys doesn’t mean the CIA are good guys.”

  “Torture, Nicky! Bloody murder. The CIA doesn’t do that routinely.”

  “Neither do…does the KGB. Routinely. But there’s something going on here that’s even more important. More dangerous.”

  “Your power. That watch.”

  I shushed her. “Once we’re someplace where I know we can’t possibly be bugged, I’ll tell you everything.”

  She tossed the newspaper onto the coffee table. “Miami, then. Two-week special; it’d cost us more to fly to Boston. I assume we want to be far away from there.”

  “That’s right. They have a whole team on the lookout there.”

  She stretched and made a face. “God, I hate Florida.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: JACOB

  Foley was right here. He was in this office. Jefferson and I took him to dinner. How can we fight someone like this?

  Roberta Bender was the key. I mentioned the guy from Langley, James Norwood, and she drew a complete blank. I knew she’d met him; the only time she hadn’t been in the office during his visit was the half-day sick leave she took the day after he supposedly left. She couldn’t remember anything that happened between leaving for lunch and calling in sick, a gap of a couple of hours. So she was probably with him and was told to forget. Did she witness the murder?

  I asked that she volunteer for deep hypnosis, with drugs, to try to recapture as much as possible. She agreed, but wanted to rest up for a while, since besides being under the weather from flu, she still felt rattled and apprehensive over having been so eerily manipulated and was in no hurry to duplicate the experience.

  After three days of not hearing from her, we went to her apartment and broke in. I’d half-expected to find her body, the result of an injunction to commit suicide rather than betray Foley. Instead we found an apartment that was more than empty: It looked as if no one had ever lived there. A salesman’s model.

  We brought in the FBI, and they confirmed that the place had been “cleaned” by experts. Not a fingerprint, not a hair. No human skin had ever touched the sheets or pillowcases.

  They said it was unlikely that one person without special equipment and training could have done so thorough a job. They suggested that if we really wanted to get in touch with Roberta Bender, we should inquire through the Soviet embassy.

  So we have to assume that everything we know about Foley, the KGB knows as well. Plus whatever they’ve managed to extract from Mrs. Foley.

  I gathered all the staff into the meeting room, and we compared notes. It wasn’t very helpful. We all agreed he had looked exactly like Robert Redford, and that was about all anybody remembered.

  I called Langley and talked to his section chief, who also recalled that he looked exactly like Robert Redford. Of course they had a photograph on file; he would call Personnel and have them send a copy to us. Then he called back a few minutes later to say that the photograph was missing from their records. Somehow that didn’t surprise me.

  I called the Society for Ethical Hypnotism and got the name of the best forensic hypnotist in New England, Laura Wentworth. We pushed through a Secret clearance for her and told her enough so that she could appreciate the need for absolute silence on the matter. Then she put me into a hypnotic state and interrogated me.

  She said I was a good subject; I could recall events of the past days and months with remarkable accuracy and completeness. But when it came to Nicholas Foley, a.k.a. James Norwood, we got nowhere.

  She went through the same questions while my hypnotic state was deepened with drugs, and the answers were essentially the same, if harder to understand. About all I could remember was that we had had dinner together, the conversation being mostly small talk about Boston, and he stayed in the office the next day studying the Foley files and talking with the staff. And he looked just like Robert Redford.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: VALERIE

  Nick wanted to drive us to the airport, because it would take forever to get a cab. If we waited too long, the place would be bristling with armed spies of every stripe. I vetoed him. We hadn’t gone through all that just to die in a pileup in Washington traffic. Besides, all the really dangerous spies were incapacitated—handcuffed or unconscious or dead. The cab only took twenty minutes to get to us, anyhow.

  At National, Nick managed to find me a skycap with a wheelchair, and we got aboard the plane without incident. He was doubly nervous in the airport for not being able to re
ach his guns, but he relaxed once the plane started moving. I couldn’t. I alternated between fitful sleep and nauseated wakefulness all the way. Somehow I managed to keep down the sardines he had fed me and even ate the inside out of a ghastly Eastern Airlines mystery-meat sandwich. Hunger is the best sauce.

  The main trick was to try not to think about the recent past. House plans and decorating ideas, course outlines and old erotic fantasies—anything but that evil man and his handcuffs and razor blade, the constant pain and weariness and anxiety, the sudden explosions of blood and… think about anything else. I read the first paragraphs of many magazine articles.

  My vision of Florida was a mosaic of gaudy commercialism, rapacious overdevelopment, adolescent sexuality, senescence, crime, racism, sunburn, and cheap orange-blossom perfume. I’d been there once and wasn’t happy about the prospect of a second time.

  This time, though, the weather contrast was almost enough to make me glad to be there. To go in a couple of hours from a slushy blizzard nightmare, cars playing Dodg’em for keeps, to palm fronds swaying in a warm breeze against a cobalt sky, can make up at least for orange-blossom perfume.

  Nick installed me in a coffee shop with a pile of carbohydrates and went off in search of a paper. I was starting to get some strength back; didn’t need a wheelchair so long as I could hold his arm.

  It was good to be able to hold him again. But he had a lot of explaining to do.

  “Here you go.” He handed me the classified section of the Herald and sat down with a tabloid advertiser. “See who can find the cheapest room.”

  “And a job for me.”

  “When you’re up to it. I can chance a job where I don’t come in contact with the public.”

  “Or need identification. A police check would be interesting.”

  We read in silence for a minute. “Here’s a job for you,” he said, smiling. “God, there must be thirty of them. ‘Girls wanted, no experience necessary. Escort service. Twelve dollars per hour guaranteed.’ Blow jobs extra.”