Legends
Lincoln and Kiick walked over to where Daoud and his grandson lay. Medics were kneeling next to both of them, listening with stethoscopes for any signs of life. The medics looked up at the same moment and shook their heads. Someone illuminated the corpses with a klieg light and started taking photographs from different angles. Other agents covered the corpses with lengths of silver plastic. An agent wearing elastic surgeon’s gloves brought over the handgun that had been retrieved from under the corpse of the fat Egyptian boy. He held it out, grip first, so Kiick could get a better look at it.
“Holy mackerel,” Kiick said. He shook his head in disgust. “It sure looked like the real McCoy to me.”
Presiding over the formal postmortem in the DDO’s seventh floor bailiwick at Langley, Crystal Quest made no effort to tame the shrew in her. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, she seethed. The adults pretending to be FBI agents in the field behind the hangar had been spotted by a child—by a child!—before the raid was even underway. Daoud had walked into a hail of bullets so as not to be taken alive. Lincoln Dittmann’s legend was blown when he saved Kiick’s life. As an added extra bonus, the FBI clowns under Felix Kiick’s command had gunned down a juvenile armed with a plastic pistol. Holy Christ, it hadn’t even been loaded with water. Leroy Streeter Jr., who would get a life sentence for attempting to blow up a square mile of Wall Street, knew precious little about the al-Qa’ida cells and less about the Saudi who was organizing them; Streeter’s expertise was limited to a small group of nutty white supremacists in Texas that had already been infiltrated by so many state and Federal agents half the group’s dues came from the government. To add humiliation to embarrassment, any hope of nabbing the Saudi had evaporated the night before when the cretins from the Argentine State Intelligence had bungled the raid on Boa Vista. Talk about stealth, they had headed into the Brazilian mato graso in half a dozen giant army helicopters flying at treetop level with their running lights on, for God’s sake, and kicked up such a storm of sand when they touched down at the training camp that half the fedayeen managed to slip away in the confusion. Naturally the Saudi who had been presiding over the meeting in the low-roofed building was nowhere to be found when the SIDE agents, backed up by a handful of the Company’s paramilitary people who were currently hunting for new jobs, burst through the door. So what did the raid net? I’ll tell you what it netted. Are you ready for this, gentlemen and ladies? It netted two jokers from Hamas, two more from Hezbollah, seven from Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, a drunk Irishman from the IRA and two young females from the Basque ETA who listed fashion model under profession when they were interrogated. Fashion models my ass! One of them was so flat chested she put padding in her brassiere to break even, for Christ’s sake. No shit, we could have snared twice as many terrorists using fly paper tacked to the rafters of any bar on the main drag of Foz do Iguaçú.
Quest appeared to come up for air. In the several seconds of silence, Lincoln was able to get a word in. Well, he said, we did pin down the identity of the Saudi.
The speculation about the chronic kidney failure had been the starting point. On the theory that Leroy Streeter’s offhand remark about the Saudi’s wealth (“Thanks to Allah and his late father, he is very rich”) would suggest he’d been diagnosed and treated by an expensive private physician, Riyadh intelligence authorities had combed the clinics frequented by the royal family and affluent members of the business community. If they came up with anything, they kept it to themselves. Confronted with the Saudi foot dragging, the American secretary of state had been persuaded to take the matter up with his Saudi counterpart. Within days the intelligence authorities in Riyadh had pouched a thick dossier to Langley filled with hundreds of photographs and associated biographical information. Lincoln had sorted through the photos in the conference room next to the DDO’s office, with Quest peering anxiously over his shoulder. He came across several that gave him pause. No, no, that’s not him, he would finally say, our Saudi had incredibly intense eyes that seemed to look into you rather than at you. Going through the pouch a second time, Lincoln had used a magnifying glass to study the group photographs. Suddenly he had leaned over the table to get a closer look at one man.
I think maybe—
You think maybe what, for Christsake?
Maybe this is our Saudi. Yes, there’s no doubt about it. Look at those goddamn eyes.
The group photograph had been taken years before at the wedding of a seventeen-year-old Saudi to a Syrian girl who was a distant relative of his. The bridegroom’s name, according to the caption provided by the Riyadh intelligence people, was Osama bin Laden. He turned out to have a Central Registry file dating back to when he became involved in the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The son of the Yemeni-born construction tycoon Muhammad Awad bin Laden, who had made a fortune in Saudi Arabia, Osama, according to Riyadh, was considered to be the black sheep of the fifty-three siblings in the extremely wealthy bin Laden family, in part because of his disdain for the ruling Saudi royal family and their ties to the United States, in part because of his recent obsession with Islamic fundamentalism.
Okay, we have his name and a mug shot to go with it, Quest was conceding, the shrew in her only partly assuaged. A goddamn pity we don’t have his warm body also.
What we need to do, one of the staffers ventured from the sideline, is put pressure on the Sudanese to hand him over to us, or at least expel him from Sudan.
I’ve promoted bin Laden to the top of our wish list, Quest announced. We wish he were dead. Something tells me we had better get our paws on this Osama character before he gets his paws on radioactive waste and builds himself a dirty bomb.
Amen, said Lincoln.
Six weeks later Lincoln, in Rome for two weeks of R and R, hired a taxi to drive him out to Hadrian’s sprawling villa near Tivoli and spent the afternoon limping around the site in a light spring rain, trying to distinguish myth from reality. Which was the flesh and blood Publius Aelius Hadrianus, which the legend he had consigned to history? Was he the emperor who ruthlessly suppressed the Jewish revolt of 132 and paraded the survivors through Rome in chains? Or the patron of the arts who presided over the construction of the vast country villa outside of Rome, and most especially its entrancing circular library where he spent afternoons studying the manuscripts he accumulated? Or, as seemed likely, was there something of the real Hadrian present in both incarnations?
Didn’t truth provide the spinal column in every legend?
In early evening Lincoln had the driver drop him off across the Tiber on the Janicular. He checked the address scrawled on the slip of paper in his wallet and headed up hill, walking at a leisurely pace so as not to tire his leg, until he came to the luxurious four-story apartment house near the fountain where Romans lingered to inhale the negative ions from the cascading water. He settled onto the stone railing near the fountain, with Rome stretched out behind him, and breathed in some of the negative ions himself. It surely wouldn’t hurt him, he thought. These days he was walking without the aid of a cane, but his leg tired easily; the doctors at the Company clinic in Maryland had warned him the pain would never completely go away. He would learn to live with it, they promised; that’s what everyone did with pain.
The bells on a church uphill from the fountain tolled the hour and Lincoln checked his wristwatch. Either it or the bells were four minutes off, but what did it matter? In the end time was something you killed. Across the street a doorman in a long blue overcoat with gold piping removed his cap to salute the very elegantly dressed woman emerging from the building. She held the leash of a small dog in one gloved hand, in the other she clasped the small hand of a little boy dressed in short pants and a knee-length overcoat buttoned up to the neck. With the dog leading the way, the woman and the boy crossed the street to pass the fountain on their way downhill to the music school. Lincoln slipped off the stone rail as they came abreast of him.
“Hello,” he said.
The woman stopped. “Do I
know you?”
“Don’t you remember me?”
The woman, who spoke English with what Lincoln took to be an Italian accent, looked puzzled. “I’m sorry, no. Should I?”
Lincoln noticed a small silver crucifix hanging from the delicate silver chain around her neck. “My name’s Dittmann. Lincoln Dittmann. We met in Brazil, in a border town called Foz do Iguaçú. Your name—your daytime name was Lucia.”
“Mama, que dice?”
A nervous smile tugged at the corners of the woman’s mouth. “My daytime name happens to be the same as my nighttime name. It is Fiamma. Fiamma Segre.”
Lincoln found himself speaking with some urgency, as if a great deal depended on convincing her that daytime names were never the same as nighttime names. “I told you it would end. You said you would breed baby polyesters on a farm in Tuscany. I am elated to see you’ve found something more interesting to do with your life.”
The nervous smile worked its way up to the woman’s frightened eyes. “Polyester is a synthetic fabric,” she said softly. She pulled gently at the boy’s hand. “I am afraid we must be on our way. It was a pleasure talking to you, Lincoln Dittmann. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” Lincoln said. Although his heart wasn’t in it he forced himself to smile back at her.
1997: MARTIN ODUM IS MESMERIZED TO TEARS
THE JETLINER ELBOWED THROUGH THE TOWERING CLOUDS AND emerged into an airspace as cheerless as sky gets without sun. Dark pitted fields ribbed with irrigation gutters unfurled under the belly of the plane. From his window seat, Martin Odum watched Prague tilt up in its oval frame as if it were perched on the high end of a teeterboard. In his mind’s eye he imagined the buildings yielding to gravity and sliding downslope into the Vltava, the broad mud-colored river meandering through the center of the city that looked, to Martin’s jaundiced eye, like a beautiful woman who had been tempted by a face lift too many. The plane’s wing dipped and Prague leveled out and the hills rimming the bowl of the city swam into view on the horizon, with the prefabricated Communist-era high rise apartment boxes spilling over the crests into the bleak countryside. A moment later the tarmac rushed up to graze the wheels of the plane. “Welcome to Prague,” announced a recorded voice over the public-address system. “We hope your flight has been enjoyable. The captain and his crew thank you for flying Czech Airlines.”
“You’re definitely welcome,” Martin heard himself respond. The buxom English woman in the next seat must have heard him too, because she favored him with a look reserved for passengers having conversations with recorded announcements. Martin felt obliged to decipher his remark. “Any airline that gets me where I’m going in one piece has my unstinting gratitude,” he informed her.
“If you are frightened of flying,” she retorted, “you should entertain the idea of traveling by train.”
“Frightened of trains, too,” Martin said gloomily. He thought of the Italian girl Paura that Lincoln Dittmann had come across in Foz do Iguaçú, the one who was afraid of her shadow. He wondered what had become of her. To this day he wasn’t one-hundred percent sure the woman Lincoln had accosted on the Janicular and the call girl in Brazil were one and the same person. There had been a physical resemblance, so Lincoln had claimed, but the two women had been a world apart in mood and manner. “Frightened of arriving at places I haven’t been to before,” Martin told his neighbor now. “Frightened of motion and movement, frightened of the going and the getting there.”
The English woman was eager to put an end to the exchange and formulated a cutting remark that would accomplish it. But she decided she might be dealing with an authentic maniac after all and kept her mouth shut.
Making his way through the crowded terminal following the overhead signs with images of busses on them, a thin Beedie glued to his lower lip, Martin found his path blocked by a slight young man with an ironic grimace pasted on his fleshy lips. He was dressed in khaki jodhpurs that buttoned at the ankles and a green Tyrolean jacket with tarnished brass buttons. For an instant Martin thought he had been spotted by the local constabulary, but the young man quickly made it clear he was freelancing. “Mister, no difference if you are come to Praha for business or pleasure, in both conditions you will be requiring a fixer whose honorarium will be conspicuously less than what you would find yourself expending on hotels and transportation and meals if you do not accept to employ my services.” The young man, anxious to please, doffed his deerstalker and, pinching one of the two visors between a thumb and two fingers, held it over his solar plexus. “Radek at your beck and call for an insignificant thirty crowns an hour, which translates into one lousy U.S. dollar.”
Martin was tempted. “What made you pick me?” he wanted to know.
“You look reasonably U.S. and I need to varnish my English for the year-end examinations that must be passed with floating colors to arrive into medical school.”
“Flying colors, not floating colors.”
The young man beamed. “Flying colors it will be from this second in time until Alzheimer’s sets in.”
Martin knew himself to be a poor judge of age, but Radek looked a little old to be thinking of going to medical school, and he said so.
“I am a late blossomer,” the young man said with a disarming grin.
Martin wasn’t so much interested in saving money as time. His instinct told him that he had to get into and out of Prague before Crystal Quest, whose operatives would not be far behind, informed the local security people of his presence; before the Chechens who murdered Taletbek Rabbani caught up with him. He produced a ten dollar bill from his shirt pocket. “Fair enough, Radek—here are ten hours in advance. I want to take a bus into the city. I want to rent a room in a cheap hotel in the Vyshrad quarter that has a fire staircase leading to an employees’ entrance. Then I want to make a phone call from the central post office, after which I would like to eat a copious vegetarian meal in a cheap restaurant—”
“I know definitely the cheap hotel. It is former secret police dormitory turned into a student bed and breakfast when communism demised. When you are checkered in, I will pilot you to a mom and pop’s Yugoslav eatery, not much grander than a crackle in the wall, all vegetarian except for the meat.”
Martin had to laugh. “Sounds like just the ticket.”
Radek tried the phrase on his tongue. “Just the ticket. I see the meaning. And for after the meal, what about girls? I know a bar where university students in miniskirts wait on tables to supplement their stipends. Some of them are not against supplementing the supplements.”
“We’ll save the girls for my next trip to Prague, Radek.” Martin took a last drag on the Beedie and embedded the burning end in the sand of an ashtray. “After the mom and pop’s crackle in the wall, I want to go to”—he hauled out the envelope that Taletbek Rabbani had given him in London and looked at what the old man had written on the back of it—“to the Vyshrad Train Station on Svobodova street.”
“The Vyshrad Station was shut closed by the communists. Trains pass there but do not stop. For a while it was an abandoned building where you could buy drugs. I am hearing it was hired to Czech people who buy and sell.”
“Buy and sell what?”
Radek shrugged. “Only God knows and He has so far not shared the information with me.”
“I want to know, too. I want to find out what they buy and sell.”
Radek fitted his deerstalker back onto his head at a rakish angle. “Then please to follow me, Mister.”
The hotel in the Vyshrad quarter turned out to be spotlessly clean and inexpensive if you didn’t formally register and paid two nights in advance with American dollars, which Martin immediately agreed to do. And the narrow fire staircase led, four floors down, to the kitchen and a back door giving onto a courtyard that gave onto a side street. The central post office, reached after a short ride on a red-and-cream double trolley, had a window for international calls. Martin jotted the Crown Heights phone number on a pad and waited his turn and
squeezed into the empty booth that smelled of stale cologne when his ticket was called.
“Hello,” he cried into the phone when he heard Stella’s voice breasting the static on the other end.
“Why are you shouting?” she demanded.
He lowered his voice. “Because I’m farther away than the last time I called.”
“Don’t tell me where you are—there’s been a bizarre echo on my line the last few days.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Martin said. “They’ll take two or three minutes to figure out it’s an international call. Then they’ll need two or three days to find out which city it came from. And another week to get the local spooks to determine I’m calling from the central post office in Prague.”
“Now you’ve gone and told them.”
“They won’t believe me. They’ll think I’m planting phony clues to throw them off. What did you do with yourself today?”
“Just came back from the dentist—he’s making me a new front tooth.”
“Money down the drain. I liked the chipped tooth. Made you look …”
“Finish what you started to say, for God’s sake. Every time you get personal you let go of the end of the sentence and it drifts off like a hot air balloon.”
“Breakable. That’s the word that was on the tip of my tongue.”
“I’m not sure how to take that. What’s so great about looking breakable.”
“For starters, means you’re not already broken. People who are broken have several selves. Estelle is your real name, isn’t it?”
“The family name, Kastner, was assigned to us when we came to America. They wanted to change my first name, too, but I wouldn’t let them. Estelle is me.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “You still there?”