“Twenty-five minutes.”
“Ten minutes to wash yourself and get dressed. That still leaves …”
Five minutes. They were enough.
3
Rosenberg told his three bodyguards to wait outside in the car, entered a dilapidated building, hurried up its creaky stairs, and unlocked a room on the second floor.
The room was little more than a closet with a window. Except for a phone on the floor and an ashtray on the windowsill, it was empty. He rented it and paid the phone bill under the name of José Fernandez. The arrangement existed for one reason only—to provide a secure location where he could make and receive delicate long-distance phone calls without fear of leaving a trail.
In southern Ontario, he knew, Halloway had a similar safe phone in a similar office. As soon as Halloway had instructed his conduit to warn Rosenberg about the impending call, Halloway would have set out toward that office, just as Rosenberg had set out toward his. Rosenberg knew this because, if Halloway had been in place, he wouldn’t have needed a conduit; he’d have made the call directly. So circumstances had now changed sufficiently that Halloway refused to waste time calling Rosenberg from the safe phone, then waiting for Rosenberg to get to his. By using the conduit, Halloway was signaling that even the forty minutes it took him to reach his own safe phone were critical.
He opened his briefcase and removed an electronic device the size of a portable radio. He plugged it into a wall socket, checked its dial, and scanned it around the room. The device emitted a hum. If a microphone had been hidden in the room, the device would not only send but receive the hum that the microphone was relaying. The resultant feedback would register on the dial. But the dial remained constant. No hidden microphones.
Not satisfied, Rosenberg removed a second electronic device from his briefcase and used a clip to attach it to an eighth-inch section of exposed wires on the telephone cord. The device monitored the strength of electrical current in the telephone line. Because a tap would drain power, the strength of the current would automatically increase to compensate for the drain. The dial Rosenberg watched indicated no such increase in power. The phone wasn’t tapped.
He hastily lit a cigarette—a Gauloise; he hated Mexican tobacco—then checked his watch, the mate to his wife’s. The call should come through in the next two minutes. If it didn’t, if he or Halloway had been detained, the agreement was to wait another thirty minutes and, if necessary, another thirty minutes after that.
He inhaled and stared at the telephone. When it finally rang, he grabbed it. “Aztec.”
“Eskimo.”
“I expected your call this morning. What took you so long to get in touch with me?”
“I had to wait till they left,” Halloway said, his acquired Canadian accent convincing. “It’s started. They’ll get there tomorrow morning.”
“Europe?”
“Rome. Everything points to Cardinal Pavelic. If they find out why he disappeared—”
“How long will it take them?” Rosenberg interrupted.
“How long? They’re the best. Their fathers were the best. It’s impossible to predict. The most I can say is they won’t take longer than necessary.”
“The least I can say is if we fail to honor our business agreement …”
“You don’t need to tell me,” Halloway said. “As if the Night and Fog isn’t bad enough, we have to worry about our clients.”
“Who insist upon delivery.”
“Our guarantees remain valid,” Halloway’s voice said. “I have confidence in Seth alone. But now that Icicle’s joined him, nothing can stop them.”
“I hope, for everyone’s sake, that you’re right.”
“If I’m wrong, we’ll face two different kinds of enemies. Call our contact in Brazil. Tell him to arrange for delivery. Our clients are desperate enough to ignore the delay, provided we can assure them it’s safe to accept delivery, and I think we can do that now. If the enemy knew what we were doing, they’d have used that knowledge as a weapon against us weeks ago.”
“Or maybe the Night and Fog operatives are waiting for us to trap ourselves.”
“Soon the Night and Fog won’t exist.”
“I want to believe that,” Rosenberg said.
“We have to believe it. If Icicle and Seth can’t stop them, no one can—and in that case, we’re as damned if we go ahead with the shipment as if we don’t. So do it. Give the order. Send the merchandise.”
4
Rome. The bored American, his back sore from slumping too many hours on an unpadded chair, gagged on a mouthful of bread, salami, and cheese when he realized what he’d just seen on the monitor. “Holy … !”
He dropped the remnant of his sandwich beside the can of diet Coke on the metal table before him and leaned abruptly ahead to stop the videotape machine.
“Come here! You’ve gotta see this!”
Two operatives, a man and a woman, turned in his direction, their features haggard from too many hours of watching their own monitors.
“See what?” the man asked. “All I’ve been doing is seeing—”
“Nothing,” the woman said. “These damned faces all blur together till they’re just dots on the screen, and then they’re—”
“Hey, I’m telling you. Come here and see this.”
The man and woman crossed the spartan office and flanked him.
“Show us,” the woman said.
The first man rewound thirty seconds of videotape and pressed the play button.
Dots on the screen became images.
“Faces,” the woman sighed. “More damned faces.”
“Just watch,” the first man said. He pointed toward airline passengers coming out of an exit tunnel into Rome’s airport. “There.” He pressed the pause button.
Minuscule lines furrowed over the face and chest of a man suspended in midstride about to enter the concourse. The man wore a loose-fitting sports coat, an open-collared shirt, but his muscular chest and shoulders were nonetheless evident. His face was square and tanned, his eyes intelligent, his hair bleached by the sun.
“I wouldn’t kick him out of my sleeping bag,” the woman said.
“But would you still be alive after he’d screwed you?” the first man asked.
“What?”
“Just watch.” The first man released the pause button on the tape machine and pushed the play button. Other faces moved past the camera. Italy’s intelligence service had installed the system at every exit ramp in Rome’s airport, an attempt to improve security, specifically to guard against terrorists. After Italian specialists had watched, the tapes were released to other networks of various sorts, civilian, military, and political.
“Okay, who else should I notice?” the second male operative asked.
“Him. Right here,” the first man said and again pressed the pause button.
Another exiting male passenger froze in place, lines across his face and chest. Tall, thin, pale, red-haired, bleak eyes.
“Holy … !” the woman said.
“What a coincidence. Exactly what I said.” The first man straightened, his pulse speeding. “If you’ll check the mug shots of—”
“That guy’s—!”
“Cryptonym Seth,” the first man said. “As assassins go, they don’t get more scary. Except for …” He stopped the tape, rewound, and expertly stopped it again. “Take another look at …” Excited, he pressed play.
Again the blond muscular man stepped out of the passenger tunnel toward the camera.
“Yes … !” the second man breathed.
“It’s Icicle,” the first man said. “Fans, what we’ve got here is—”
“A reminder to pay attention,” the second man admitted. “Those bastards do show up, even if we get too bored to expect them.”
“And not just that,” the woman said. “We watch for days and days. Now suddenly we get two of them, together, trying to appear as if they’re traveling separately.”
&n
bsp; “Or maybe each didn’t know the other was on the plane,” the second man said.
“Give me a break,” the woman said. “These guys are state of the art.”
“Okay, all right, I grant the point.”
“Which raises the question,” the first man said. “Did they know beforehand, or did they find out after the plane took off?”
“What’s the city of origin for their flight?” the woman said.
“Toronto,” the first man said. “So what went down in Toronto?”
“Nothing recently, so far as we know. Not even a rumor,” the woman said.
“So if they weren’t on a job there—”
“They must have met there, been sent from there.”
“Unless they both just happened to catch the same flight,” the second man said.
“With these guys, nothing’s accidental.”
“Maybe they’re working for opposite sides,” the second man said. “No, that’s no good. They didn’t look nervous getting off the plane.”
“Of course not. They’re professionals,” the woman said. “Unlike some of us.” She glanced at the second man, then turned to the first. “But the feeling I get—”
“Is they’re traveling together,” the first man said.
“They’re being discreet, but they didn’t try to disguise themselves; they don’t care if we notice. Something big’s going down, and they’re giving us a signal. It isn’t business.”
“Personal?” the woman asked.
“My guess is, extremely personal. They’re telling us, ‘we’re here, we’re playing it open, we’re cool, so you be cool, this doesn’t concern you.’”
“Maybe,” the woman said. “But if you’re right, God help the target they’re after.”
5
St. Paul, Minnesota. William Miller stomped the accelerator of the Audi that had been left behind when his father disappeared four months ago. Despite his polarized glasses, the afternoon sun stabbed his eyes. His head throbbed, but not from the sun. He skidded around a corner, raced along his tree-lined street, and veered up his driveway, stopping so abruptly he jolted against his seat belt.
As he scrambled out, his wife ran frantically from the house and across the lawn.
“I had to meet with the city engineer,” he said. “When I checked in with my secretary …” Anger strained his voice. “Where is the damned thing?”
“The swimming pool.”
“What?”
“I didn’t see it when I had coffee on the patio this morning. Whoever did this must have waited till I left to play tennis this afternoon.”
She followed as Miller hurried past the flower beds at the side of the house. He reached the back and stood at the edge of the swimming pool, staring apprehensively down.
The swimming pool was empty. He’d been planning to have one of his construction crews come over this weekend and reline it before he filled it for the summer.
At the bottom, someone had used black paint, drawing a grotesque symbol whose borders stretched from end to end, from side to side of the pool.
His throat felt sandy. He swallowed before he could talk. “They wanted to give us time to think they’d gone away, to make us believe they were satisfied just to have taken my father.”
He made a choking sound as he stared at the symbol—large, black, obscene.
A death’s head.
“What the hell do they want?” his wife said.
He answered with a more insistent question. “And what the hell are we going to do?”
SHADOW GAME
1
Vienna. Again it was raining, though compared to yesterday’s storm this was only a drizzle. Saul had to remind himself that this was June and not March as he put his hands in his overcoat pockets and continued along a concrete walkway next to the Danube.
But then, he admitted, it wasn’t hard to feel chilled after the heat of Israel’s desert. He remembered the irrigation ditches he’d worked so hard to complete. These two days of Austrian rain would have turned his meager cropland into an oasis. Imagining that wondrous possibility, he ached to go back home but wondered if he’d have the chance to do so.
Barges chugged along the river, hazy in the drizzle. He passed beneath dripping trees, entered a wooded park, and reached a gloomy covered bandstand. Its wooden floor rumbled hollowly as he crossed it.
A man sat with one hip on the railing, angled sideways, smoking a cigarette, peering out toward the rain. He wore a pale brown nylon slicker, its metal fasteners open, a darker brown suit beneath it. In profile, his chin protruded. His cheeks showed sporadic pockmarks. As he exhaled smoke from his cigarette, he seemed unaware of Saul’s footsteps coming toward him.
For his part, Saul was aware of another man in an identical brown nylon slicker who waited beneath a nearby chestnut tree and looked with unusual interest at birds huddling in the branches above him.
Saul stopped at a careful distance from the man on the railing. The drizzle on the bandstand’s roof seeped through a few cracks and pattered next to him.
“So, Romulus,” the pockmarked man said, then turned, “how are you?”
“Obviously out of bounds.”
“No kidding. You were spotted as soon as you showed up at the airport. We’ve been watching you ever since.”
“I didn’t try to sneak in. The first thing I did was go to a phone and contact the bakery. This meeting was my idea, remember?”
“And that, my friend, is the only reason you’re walking around.” The pockmarked man threw his cigarette into the rain. “You’ve got a bad habit of breaking rules.”
“My foster brother’s the one who broke the rules.”
“Sure. But you helped him escape instead of turning him in.”
“I guess you don’t have any brothers.”
“Three of them.”
“In my place, would you have helped them or sided against them?”
The man with the pockmarks didn’t reply.
“Besides, my foster brother was eventually killed.” Saul’s voice became thick. After almost three years, his grief for Chris still hurt him terribly.
“We’re here to talk about you, not him.”
“I admit I made a bargain with Langley. Exile. To stay in the desert. But things have happened.”
“What things?”
“The settlement where I live was attacked. My wife and son were nearly killed.”
“In Israel”—the man shrugged—“attacks can happen.”
“But this was personal! My son, my wife, and I were the targets!”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“A day before that, my wife’s father disappeared! Here in Vienna! That’s why I left Israel—to find out what was—!”
“Okay, I get your point. Take it easy.” The man with the pockmarks gave a reassuring gesture to his partner beneath the nearby chestnut tree, who’d started approaching when he heard Saul shout.
“What you’re saying”—the pockmarked man studied Saul—“is you’re not back in business? You haven’t signed on with another firm?”
“Business? You think that’s why I’m here? Business? It makes me want to throw up.”
“Graphic, Romulus, but evasive. When I give my report, my superiors will want direct statements.”
“You’re giving your report right now. I assume you’re wired. That blue van at the entrance to the park is recording every word we say. Am I right?”
The man with the pockmarks didn’t bother turning toward the van.
“All right, for the record,” Saul said, “I’m not on anybody’s payroll. This is a family matter. I’m asking for a dispensation from the bargain I made. Temporary. Till I settle my problem. The minute I do, I’ll be on a plane back to Israel.”
The pockmarked man’s gaze became calculating. “My superiors will want to know why they should make the dispensation.”
“As a favor.”
“Oh?”
“In exchange, I’ll
do them a favor.”
The man slowly stood from the railing. “Let’s be clear. A favor? You want to put it on that formal a basis? You’re invoking professional courtesy?”
“A favor for a favor. I don’t have any other choice.”
“You’ll do anything they ask?”
“With reservations.”
“Ah, then your offer isn’t serious.”
“Wrong. It’s very serious. But I’d need to know the assignment. The risk factor’s not as important as the ultimate objective. It can’t be suicidal. But it mustn’t be morally repugnant.”
“Morals? Don’t tell me you’ve acquired morals, Romulus.”
“The desert can do that to you. In case your superiors haven’t thought of this, I remind them that an operative publicly exiled from the network but secretly affiliated with it can have great value. I wouldn’t be linked with it.”
The pockmarked man’s gaze became more calculating. “You’re that determined to find out what happened to your father-in-law?”
“And protect my family from another attack. I told you this isn’t business—it’s personal.”
The pockmarked man shrugged. “My superiors will have to assess the tape of our conversation.”
“Of course.”
“We’ll get back to you.” The man crossed the bandstand, his footsteps echoing.
“I’m staying at my father-in-law’s apartment. I’d give you the address and phone number, but I assume you already know them.”
The man turned, studied Saul, and nodded. His nod was ambiguous, either in farewell or out of respect.
2
In a bookstore across the street from the park, Erika watched the van pull away. She waited until it disappeared around a corner, then turned her attention back toward the park. In the rain, the bandstand was barely visible. She and Saul had assumed that his contact would have a backup. As a consequence, she had come here earlier, prepared to act as backup for Saul.
She stepped from the bookstore, pulled up the hood on her nylon jacket, and hurried through the downpour.