“Then don’t tell them,” Ritter suggested. “It is, as you say, a complication. I assure you that your allies don’t know.”
“How can that be?” the Russian demanded.
“Sergey, do you reveal methods?” Ritter replied, ending that phase of the discussion. This part of the game had to be played very carefully indeed, and for more than one reason. “Look, General, you don’t like the little bastards any more than we do, right?”
“They are our fraternal socialist allies.”
“Yes, and we have bulwarks of democracy all over Latin America, too. Did you come here for a quick course in political philosophy?”
“The nice thing about enemies is that you know where they stand. This is not always true of friends,” Voloshin admitted. That also explained the comfort level of his government with the current American president. A bastard, perhaps, but a known bastard. And, no, Voloshin admitted—to himself—he had little use for the Vietnamese. The real action was in Europe. Always had been. Always would be. That was where the course of history had been set for centuries, and nothing was going to change that.
“Call it an unconfirmed report, check up on it, maybe? Delay? Please, General, the stakes here are too high for that. If anything happens to those men, I promise you, we will produce your officer. The Pentagon knows. Sergey, and they want those men back, and they don’t care a rat-fuck about détente. ” The profanity showed what Ritter really thought.
“Do you? Does your Directorate?”
“It sure will make life a lot more predictable. Where were you in ’62, Sergey?” Ritter asked—knowing and wondering what he’d say.
“In Bonn, as you know, watching your forces go on alert because Nikita Sergeyevich decided to play his foolish game.” Which had been contrary to KGB and Foreign Ministry advice, as both men knew.
“We’re never going to be friends, but even enemies can agree to rules for the game. Isn’t that what this is about?”
A judicious man, Voloshin thought, which pleased him. It made for predictable behavior, and that above all things was what the Russians wanted of the Americans. “You are persuasive. Bob. You assure me that our allies do not know their man is missing?”
“Positive. My offer for you to meet your man is still open,” he added.
“Without reciprocal rights’?” Voloshin tried.
“For that I need permission from upstairs. I can try if you ask me to, but that also would be something of a complication.” He dumped his empty drink cup in a bin.
“I ask.” Voloshin wanted that made clear.
“Very well. I’ll call you. And in return?”
“In return I will consider your request.” Voloshin walked off without another word.
Gotcha! Ritter thought, heading towards where his car was parked. He’d played a careful but inventive game. There were three possible leaks on BOXWOOD GREEN. He’d visited each of them. To one he’d said that they actually had gotten a prisoner out, who had died of wounds. To another, that the Russian was badly wounded and might not survive. But Ritter had saved his best piece of bait for the most likely leak. Now he knew. That narrowed it to four suspects. Roger Mac Kenzie, that prep-school-reject aide, and two secretaries. This was really an FBI job, but he didn’t want any additional complications, and an espionage investigation of the Office of the President of the United States was about as complicated as things could be. Back in his car, he decided to meet with a friend in the Directorate of Science and Technology. Ritter had a great deal of respect for Voloshin. A clever man, a very careful, methodical man, he’d run agents all over Western Europe before being assigned to the Washington rezidentura. He’d keep his word, and to make sure he didn’t get into any trouble about it, he’d play everything strictly by the exacting rules of his parent agency. Ritter was gambling big on that. Pull this one off in addition to the other coup in the works, and how much higher might he rise? Better yet, he’d be earning his way up, not some fair-haired political payoff, but the son of a Texas Ranger who’d waited tables to get his degree at Baylor. Something Sergey would have appreciated, in good Marxist-Leninist fashion, Ritter told himself, pulling onto Connecticut Avenue. Working-class kid makes good.
It was an unusual way to gather information, something he’d never done before, and pleasant enough that he might even get used to it. He sat at a corner booth in Mama Maria’s, working slowly through his second course—thank you, no wine, I’m driving. Dressed in his CIA suit, well-groomed and sporting a new businesslike haircut, he enjoyed the looks of a few unattached women, and a waitress who positively doted on him, especially with his good manners. The excellence of the food explained the crowded room, and the crowding explained why it was a convenient place for Tony Piaggi and Henry Tucker to meet here. Mike Aiello had been very forthcoming about that. Mama Maria’s was, in fact, owned by the Piaggi family, now in its third generation of providing food and other, less legal, services to the local community, dating back to Prohibition. The owner was a bon vivant, greeting favored customers, guiding them to their places with Old World hospitality. Snappy dresser, too, Kelly saw, recording his face and build, gestures and mannerisms, as he ate through his calamari. A black man came in, dressed in a nicely cut suit. He looked like he knew the place, smiling at the hostess and waiting a few seconds for his reward, and Kelly’s.
Piaggi looked up and headed to the front, stopping only briefly to shake hands with someone on the way. He did the same with the black man, then led him back past Kelly’s table, and up the back stairs to where the private rooms were. No particular notice was taken. There were other black couples in the restaurant, treated the same as everyone else. But those others did honest work, Kelly was sure. He turned his thoughts away from the distraction. So that’s Henry Tucker. That’s the one who killed Pam. He didn’t look like a monster. Monsters rarely did. To Kelly he looked like a target, and his particulars went into Kelly’s memory, alongside Tony Piaggi’s. He was surprised when he looked down and saw that the fork in his hands was bent.
“What’s the problem?” Piaggi asked upstairs. He poured each of them a glass of Chianti, good host that he was, but as soon as the door had closed, Henry’s face started telling him something.
“They haven’t come back.”
“Phil, Mike, and Burt’?”
“Yes!” Henry snarled, meaning, no.
“Okay, settle down. How much stuff did they have?”
“Twenty kees of pure, man. This was supposed to take care of me and Philly, and New York for a while.”
“Lot of stuff, Henry.” Tony nodded. “Maybe it just took them a while, okay?”
“Shoulda been back by now.”
“Look, Phil and Mike are new, probably clumsy, like Eddie and me were our first time—hell, Henry, that was only five kees, remember?”
“I allowed for that,” he said, wondering if he’d really be right about that or not.
“Henry,” Tony said, sipping his wine and trying to appear calm and reasonable, “look, okay? Why are you getting excited? We’ve taken care of all the problems, right?”
“Something’s wrong, man.”
“What?”
“1 don’t know.”
“Want to get a boat and go down there to see?”
Tucker shook his head. “Takes too long.”
“The meet with the other guys isn’t for three days. Be cool. They’re probably on their way here now.”
Piaggi thought he understood Tucker’s sudden case of the shakes. Now it was big-time. Twenty kilograms of pure translated into a huge quantity of street drugs, and selling it already diluted and packaged made for sufficient convenience to their customers that they were for the first time paying top dollar. This was the really big score that Tucker had been working towards for several years. Just assembling all the cash to pay for it was a major undertaking. It was an understandable case of nerves.
“Tony, what if it wasn’t Eddie at all?”
Exasperation: “You’re the
one who said it had to be, remember?”
Tucker couldn’t pursue that. He’d merely wanted an excuse to eliminate the man as an unnecessary complication. His anxiety was partly what Tony thought it was, but something else, too. The things that had happened earlier in the summer, the things that had just started for no reason, then stopped with no reason—he had told himself that they were Eddie Morello’s doing. He’d managed to convince himself of that, but only because he had wanted to believe it. Somewhere else the little voice that had brought him this far had told him otherwise, and now the voice was back, and there was no Eddie to be the focus for his anxiety and anger. A streetwise man who’d gotten this far through the complex equation of brain and guts and instinct, he trusted that last quality most. Now it was telling him things that he didn’t understand, couldn’t reason out. Tony was right. It could just be a matter of clumsiness in the processing. That was one reason they were setting their lab up in east Baltimore. They could afford that now, with experience behind them and a viable front business setting up in the coming week. So he drank his wine and settled down, the rich, red alcohol soothing his abraded instincts.
“Give ’em until tomorrow.”
“So how was it?” the man at the wheel asked. An hour north of Bloodsworth Island, he figured he’d waited long enough to ask the silent petty officer who stood beside him. After all, they just stood by and waited.
“They fed a guy to the fuckin’ crabs!” Oreza told them. “They took like two square yards of net and weighted it down with blocks, and just sunk his ass—practically nothing left but the damned bones!” The police lab people were still discussing how to recover the body, for all he knew. Oreza was certain it was a sight he’d take years to forget, the skull just lying there, the bones still dressed, moving because of the water currents ... or maybe some crabs inside. He hadn’t cared to look that closely.
“Heavy shit, man,” the helmsman agreed.
“You know who it is?”
“What d’ya mean, Portagee?”
“Back in May, when we had that Charon guy aboard—the day-sailer with the candystripe main, that’s who it was. I’ll bet ya.”
“Oh, yeah. You could be right on that one, boss.”
They’d let him see it all, just as a courtesy that in retrospect he would as soon have done without, but which at the time had been impossible to avoid. He could not have chickened out in front of cops, since he, too, was a cop of sorts. And so he’d climbed up the ladder after reporting on the body he’d found only fifty yards from the derelict, and seen three more, all lying facedown on the deck of what had probably been the freighter’s wardroom, all dead, all shot in the back of the neck, the wounds having been picked at by birds. He’d almost lost control of himself at that realization. The birds had been sensible enough not to pick at the drugs, however.
“I’m talking twenty kilograms—forty-some pounds of the shit—that’s what the cops said, anyway. Like, millions of bucks,” Oreza related.
“Always said I was in the wrong business.”
“Jesus, the cops look like they all had hard-ons, ’specially that captain. They’ll probably be there all night, way it sounded.”
“Hey, Wally?”
The tape was disappointingly scratchy. That was due to the old phone lines, the technician explained. Nothing he could do about that. The switch box in the building dated back to when Alexander Graham Bell was doing hearing aids.
“Yeah, what is it?” the somewhat uneven voice replied.
“The deal with the Vietnamese officer they got. You sure about that?”
“That’s what Roger told me.” Bingo! Ritter thought.
“Where they have him?”
“I guess out at Winchester with the Russian.”
“You’re sure?”
“Damned right. It surprised me, too.”
“I wanted to check up on that before—well, you know.”
“Sure thing, man.” With that the line went dead.
“Who is he?” Greer asked.
“Walter Hicks. All the best schools, James—Andover and Brown. Father’s a big-time investment banker who pulled a few well-tuned political strings, and look where little Wally ends up.” Ritter tightened his hand into a fist. “You want to know why those people are still in SENDER GREEN? That’s it, my friend.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know.” But it won’t be legal. The tape wasn’t. The tap had been set up without a court order.
“Think it over carefully, Bob,” Greer warned. “I was there, too, remember?”
“What if Sergey can’t get it done fast enough? Then this little fuck gets away with ending the lives of twenty men!”
“I don’t like that very much either.”
“I don’t like it at all!”
“Treason is still a capital crime, Bob.”
Ritter looked up. “It’s supposed to be.”
Another long day. Oreza found himself envying the first-class who was tending Cove Point Light. At least he had his family with him all the time. Here Oreza was with the brightest little girl in kindergarten and he hardly ever saw her. Maybe he’d take that teaching job at New London after all, Portagee thought, just so that he could have a family life for a year or two. It meant hanging out with children who would someday be officers, but at least they’d learn seamanship the right way.
Mainly he was lonely with his thoughts. His crew was bedding down now in the bunkroom that he should have gone to, but the images haunted him. The crabman, and the three bird-feeders would deny him sleep for hours unless he got it off his conscience... and he had an excuse, didn’t he? Oreza rummaged around his desk, finding the card.
“Hello?”
“Lieutenant Charon? This is Quartermaster First Class Oreza, down at Thomas Point.”
“It’s kinda late, you know,” Charon pointed out. He’d been caught on his way to bed.
“Remember back in May, looking for that sailboat?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I think maybe we found your man, sir.” Oreza thought he could hear eyeballs click.
“Tell me about it?”
Portagee did, leaving nothing out, and he could feel the horror leaving him, almost as though he were transmitting it over the phone wire. He didn’t know that was precisely what he was doing.
“Who’s the captain running the case for the troopers?”
“Name’s Joy, sir. Somerset County. Know him?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Oh, yeah, something else,” Oreza remembered.
“Yeah?” Charon was taking lots of notes.
“You know a Lieutenant Ryan?”
“Yeah, he works downtown, too.”
“He wanted me to check up a guy for him, fellow named Kelly. Oh, yeah! You’ve seen him, remember?”
“What do you mean?”
“The night we were out after the day-sailer, the guy in the cruiser we saw just before dawn. Lives on an island, not far from Bloodsworth. Anyway, this Ryan guy wanted me to find him for him, okay? He’s back, sir, probably up in Baltimore right now. I tried calling, sir, but he was out, and I’ve been running my ass off all day. Could you pass that one along, please?”
“Sure,” Charon replied, and his brain was working very quickly indeed now.
35
Rite of Passage
Mark Charon found himself in rather a difficult position. That he was a corrupted cop did not make him a stupid one. In fact, his was a careful and thoroughly analytical mind, and while he made mistakes, he was not blind to them. That was precisely the case as he lay alone in bed, hanging up the phone after his conversation with the Coast Guard. The first order of business was that Henry would not be pleased to learn that his lab was gone, and three of his people with it. Worse still, it sounded as though a vast quantity of drugs had been lost, and even Henry’s supply was finite. Worst of all. the person or persons who had accomplished that feat was unknown, at large,
and doing—what?
He knew who Kelly was. He’d even reconstructed matters to the rather stunning coincidence that Kelly had been the one who’d picked Pam Madden off the street quite by accident the day Angelo Vorano had been eliminated, and that she’d actually been aboard his boat, not twenty feet from the Coast Guard cutter after that stormy and vomitous night. Now Em Ryan and Tom Douglas wanted to know about him, and had taken the extraordinary step of having the Coast Guard check up on him. Why? A follow-up interview with an out-of-town witness was something for the telephone more often than not. Em and Tom were working the Fountain Case, along with all the other ones that had started a few weeks later. “Rich beach bum” was what he’d told Henry, but the department’s number-one homicide team was interested in him, and he’d been directly involved with one of the defectors from Henry’s organization, and he had a boat, and he lived not too far from the processing lab that Henry was still foolish enough to use. That was a singularly long and unlikely string of coincidences made all the more troubling by the realization that Charon was no longer a policeman investigating a crime, but rather a criminal himself who was part of the crimes being checked out.
That realization struck surprisingly hard at the Lieutenant lying in his bed. Somehow he didn’t think of himself in those terms. Charon actually had believed himself above it all, watching, taking an occasional part, but not being part of what unfolded below him. After all, he had the longest string of successes in the history of the narcotics unit, capped off with his personal elimination of Eddie Morello, perhaps the most artful action of his professional life—doubly so in that he had eliminated a genuine dealer by premeditated murder in front of no less than six other officers, then had it pronounced a clean shooting on the spot, which had given him a paid vacation in addition to what Henry had paid him for the event. Somehow it had seemed like a particularly entertaining game, and one not too far distanced from the job the citizens of his city paid him to do. Men live by their illusions, and Charon was no different from the rest. It wasn’t so much that he’d told himself what he’d been doing was all right as that he’d simply allowed himself to concentrate on the breaks that Henry had been feeding him, thus taking off the street every supplier who’d threatened the man’s market standing. Able to control which of his detectives investigated what, he’d actually been able to give the entire local market to the one supplier about whom he had no real information in his files. That had enabled Henry to expand his own operation, attracting the attention of Tony Piaggi and his own East Coast connections. Soon, and he’d told Henry this. he would be forced to allow his people to nibble at the edges of the operation. Henry had understood, doubtless after counseling from Piaggi, who was sophisticated enough to grasp the finer points of the game.