“My father’s,” Halloway said.
Similar colorful paintings hung on the other walls.
Icicle nodded. “I’d heard he was talented. I’ve never seen his work.”
“Of course not. His early paintings were either stolen or destroyed. For precaution’s sake, even though no one saw his later work outside this house, he changed from watercolor to acrylic, and just as important, he altered his style.” Halloway’s tone changed from reverence to dismay. “What did you plan to do? Attack me?”
“I had to make sure I could trust you,” Icicle said.
“Trust me? Right now, Seth and I are the only ones you can trust.”
“I had to find out about Kessler.”
“He went to see you in Australia.”
“I know that! I met him there!” Icicle said. “But after I saw him, he disappeared. So did my father. Did Kessler set me up? Was Kessler a way to separate my father and me, to make it easier for someone to grab him?”
Halloway spread his hands. “He never returned from Australia. He was reliable. If you’d been here at the meeting, you’d have realized that once he committed himself to a purpose, he wouldn’t back out. So when he didn’t return … when he disappeared …”
“You assume he’s dead?”
“Yes.” Halloway thought about it. “In all probability, yes.”
“So either your meeting was bugged or one of the group betrayed you.”
“No. I took precautions,” Halloway insisted. “Believe me, this house has never been bugged. And I can’t imagine why one of us would betray his own best interests. But there are other considerations.”
Icicle raised his eyebrows.
“At the time of the meeting, your father and Seth’s were the only members of the original group who hadn’t yet disappeared,” Halloway said. “We sent messengers to each—to emphasize the danger, to convince them … and yourselves … to join us. Unfortunately, Seth’s father disappeared before the messenger could reach him. That left only your father.”
Icicle stared. “Go on.”
“If our enemies were in place to attack your father, if they discovered Kessler in the area, they might have given in to temptation and taken Kessler as well, hoping he hadn’t yet warned your father and yourself.”
Icicle shook his head. “But Kessler disappeared at almost exactly the same time my father did. If they wanted to stop him from warning my father, they’d have taken Kessler first and only then have set up the trap for my father. No, they must have had another reason for picking up Kessler.”
“Several explanations occur to me. They may have wanted to make you suspect—as you did—that Kessler was responsible for your father’s disappearance. To turn you against us. Or they may have wanted to make you realize that no one, not even the children of the fathers, was safe. To instill fear in you. For yourself.”
“We think they’re bringing back the Night and Fog,” Seth said.
Barbed wire seemed to bind Icicle’s chest.
“Yes, the ultimate terror,” Halloway said. “Not only to punish the heads of each family but to imply a threat to us, their children, and to torture our imaginations because we don’t know what was done to them and what might be done to ourselves.”
“From one generation to the next.” Icicle grimaced. “It never ends.”
“Oh, but it will,” Seth said. “I guarantee it.” Despite the anger in his words, his voice remained flat.
The contrast made Icicle tingle. He stared at Seth’s red hair, his pale, gaunt, expressionless face, the effect so hypnotic he had to force himself to turn toward Halloway. “What made you sure I’d come, so sure that you waited for me?”
“We felt you had no other choice. When Kessler didn’t return, it was obvious his mission had gone terribly wrong. Neither he nor you responded to our further messages. We concluded, reluctantly, that your father too had vanished. Perhaps you’d been taken as well. But if you were free, we knew you wouldn’t stop until you found your father. Your logical destination? Here. To the site of the meeting you didn’t attend, to the group who sent Kessler to find you. What other lead did you have?”
“I hope,” Seth added, his voice dry and inflectionless, “you don’t mind working with me.”
No explanation was necessary. Icicle knew very well what he meant.
Seth’s father and Icicle’s father had once been two of the most feared men in Europe. Though linked by a common purpose, they’d nonetheless been rivals, as close to enemies as cohorts could be. What one achieved, the other fought to surpass, for the rewards of success, the advantages of being favored by their leader, were considerable. Both men had loved the same woman, and when Icicle’s father had been chosen instead of Seth’s, professional differences became personal. Jealousy—at least on Seth’s father’s part—turned to hate. Their conflict worsened after the failure of the cause to which they’d pledged their lives. As subsequent freelance specialists, they often found themselves on opposite sides, an extra incentive for Seth’s father. Eventually retired, they’d put the world between them, one living in Australia, the other in South America. At Bondi Beach in Sydney, Icicle’s father had always worn a T-shirt, to hide the two bullet scars on his chest. From his rival.
4
Now Icicle faced the son of his father’s lifelong enemy. The sight of the lean, pale, severe-faced man in the gray suit made his stomach swarm with spiders. Even the cryptonym “Seth” implied the unnatural. Seth, the Egyptian god of the desert, of barrenness, drought, and chaos, of darkness and destruction. The red god, red like this man’s hair. When depicted in human guise, Seth was always pale, as this man’s skin was pale. But most often, the god was a monstrous animal, its body that of a greyhound, its snout an anteater’s, its ears square, its tail inexplicably forked.
The god of death.
Seth. The perfect cryptonym for an assassin.
And what about my cryptonym? Icicle?
Seth reached out his hand. “My father loved your mother very much.”
Icicle nodded. “My father always regretted that he and your father couldn’t be friends.”
“But you and I can be friends. Or if not friends, then allies. Joined by a common purpose.”
Icicle sensed that Seth could never be a friend to anyone. It didn’t matter. No conflict existed between them directly, and they had the best of reasons to join forces. The combination of their considerable talents couldn’t be matched by their opponents. They would triumph, either finding their fathers or gaining revenge.
Icicle shook his dry, cold hand. He turned again to Halloway. “Where do you suggest we start?”
“Go after the common denominator. Our fathers never associated with each other. True, they kept in touch, so they could help each other if they sensed danger, but they carefully separated their past lives from their present ones. They lived thousands of miles away from each other. Yet their enemies found out where they were.”
“It’s not surprising,” Icicle said. “All the enemy had to do was locate one of our fathers. Under chemicals, he’d have told how to find the rest. My father always felt uncomfortable about that flaw in the pact.”
“But the pact had a limitation,” Halloway said. “Precisely to guard against that danger, each member of the group knew the location of only one other member. Your father and Seth’s remained ignorant of each other, for example. If the enemy tracked down one father and made him tell what he knew, the enemy would then have to go to the next man, and the next, in sequence, till all of the group had been discovered.”
“But it didn’t happen like that,” Seth said.
Halloway resumed. “Some members of the group disappeared simultaneously. Besides, that still leaves the question, how did the enemy find the first man who disappeared? No.” Halloway’s voice became hoarse. “Our fathers didn’t unwillingly betray each other. The information about them came from outside the group.”
“How?”
“I told you—the
common denominator. The one man who knew about all of them. A different kind of father. A priest. Cardinal Pavelic.”
Icicle suddenly remembered the last thing Kessler had said to him in Sydney. “Cardinal Pavelic! He disappeared as well.”
“Find out what happened to the cardinal, and you’ll find out what happened to my father,” Halloway said, “and yours and—”
“Mine,” Seth said. “And everyone else’s.”
“THE HORROR, THE HORROR”
1
Vienna. Saul stood respectfully in the background, holding Christopher’s hand, as Erika morosely surveyed her father’s living room. It occupied the second level of a three-story rowhouse on a quiet tree-lined street three blocks from the Danube. Outside, a heavy rain made the day so drab, the room so glum, that even in early afternoon Misha Pletz had been forced to turn on the lights when they entered.
The room was simply furnished, a rocking chair, a sofa, a coffee table, a plain dark rug, a hutch with photographs of Erika, Christopher, and Saul. No radio or television, Saul noticed, but he did see a crammed bookshelf—mostly histories and biographies—and several reading lamps. From studying the austere room, a stranger would not have guessed that Erika’s father, retired from the Mossad, received an adequate pension from Israel. With supplementary dividends from a few modest investments, her father could have surrounded himself with more belongings and better ones. But after disposing of his wife’s possessions when she died five years ago, Joseph Bernstein had preferred to live ascetically. The sole luxuries he allowed himself were morning and evening cups of hot chocolate at a small café that bordered the Danube. And pipe tobacco, the fragrance of which permeated the furniture and walls of the apartment. Saul himself had never smoked—another legacy from Eliot. But the sweet lingering odor pleasantly widened his nostrils.
Though he didn’t see any photographs of Erika’s father, Saul remembered him as a tall stocky man in his late sixties, slightly stooped, with thick white hair that never stayed in place, dense white eyebrows, and a thin inch-long scar along the right ridge of his narrow jaw. On his own initiative, the man had never commented on the scar, and when asked, he’d never explained what had caused it. “The past,” was the most he’d ever allowed himself to murmur, and the expression in his gray eyes, behind his glasses, would grow sad.
Occasionally rubbing his son’s back to reassure him, Saul watched Erika turn her gaze slowly around the room.
“Tell me again,” she said to Misha.
“Four days ago”—Misha sighed—“Joseph didn’t come to the café for his morning cup of hot chocolate. The owner didn’t think much about it till your father failed to show up that evening as well. Even if your father wasn’t feeling well, if he had a cold for example, he always went twice daily to that café.”
“And my father seldom even had a cold.”
“A strong constitution.”
“A man of habit,” Saul interrupted.
Misha studied him.
“I’m assuming the café owner is one of you,” Saul said. “Mossad.”
Misha didn’t respond.
“Joseph’s visits to the café weren’t just for hot chocolate, were they?” Saul asked. “Despite his retirement, he still kept a schedule, a customary routine that made it easy for a contact to reach him without attracting attention.”
Misha stayed silent.
“Not that his skills would probably ever be needed,” Saul said. “But who can tell? Sometimes a knowledgeable old man, no longer officially a member of his network, to all appearances divorced from intelligence work, is exactly what a mission requires. And this way, it made Joseph feel he still had a purpose, was being held in reserve as it were. Even if you didn’t have a use for him, you were kind enough to make him feel he hadn’t been discarded.”
Misha raised his eyebrows slightly, either a question or a shrug.
“Plus … and this was probably your network’s principal motive … his schedule, dropping in twice a day, was a subtle way for you to make sure he was doing all right, wasn’t helpless at home, hadn’t suffered a stroke or a heart attack, for example. You also made sure he wasn’t being victimized by an old enemy. In a way that didn’t jeopardize his pride, you protected him.”
Erika stepped close to Misha. “Is that true?”
“You married a good man.”
“I knew that already,” she said. “Is Saul right?”
“What harm was done? We took care of our own and made him feel he had worth.”
“No harm at all,” she said. “Unless …”
“He wasn’t working on anything for us, if that’s what you mean,” Misha said. “Though I’d have welcomed him on an assignment. Nothing violent, of course. But for stakeouts or routine intelligence gathering, he was still a first-rate operative. You have to remember, Erika. Your father’s retirement was his choice, not ours.”
“What?”
“You mean you didn’t know?”
She shook her head.
“Despite his age, I could have bent some rules and kept him,” Misha said. “We’re not so rich with talent we can afford to throw away a seasoned specialist. But he asked for retirement. He demanded it.”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “His work meant everything to him. He loved it.”
“No question. He loved his work and his country.”
“But if he loved his country so much,” Saul asked, “why did he choose to live here? In Vienna? Why not in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem or … ?”
Erika agreed. “That bothered us. Saul’s arrangement with his network was if he stayed out of sight they’d leave him alone, and the other networks would leave him alone as well. In exchange for the information he gave them, they agreed to ignore the rules he’d broken. As long as he lived where we did, in a village on the edge of the world. But my father didn’t need to live here. Repeatedly we asked him to join us, to add to our family, to watch his grandson grow up. And he repeatedly refused. It didn’t make sense to me. The comforts of civilization weren’t important to him. As long as he had hot chocolate and tobacco, he’d have been content anywhere.”
“Perhaps,” Misha said.
Erika watched his eyes. “Is there something you haven’t told us?”
“You asked me to explain it again, so I will. After your father missed his morning schedule and didn’t complete the evening rendezvous, the café owner—Saul’s right, he is one of ours—sent an operative who works for him to bring some sandwiches and hot chocolate as if your father had ordered them over the phone. The operative knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again. He tested the doorknob. The lock had not been secured. When the operative unholstered his weapon and entered, he found the apartment deserted. The sheets”—Misha pointed toward the door to the bedroom—“were tucked in, stretched taut, in military fashion.”
“The way my father always makes his bed,” Erika said. “He’s addicted to order. He tucks in the sheets as soon as he wakes up.”
“Correct,” Misha said. “Which meant that whatever had happened, your father either didn’t go to bed the night before, when he came back from the café, or else he made his bed the morning of his disappearance and for some reason didn’t go to the café again as he normally would have.”
“So the time frame is twenty-four hours,” Saul said.
“And Joseph wasn’t sick at home. The operative briefly concluded that something had happened to Joseph while he was coming to or from his apartment. A traffic accident, let’s imagine. But the police and the hospitals had no information about him.”
“A moment ago, you used the word ‘briefly,’ ” Saul said.
Misha squinted.
“You said, the operative briefly suspected Joseph had left the apartment and something happened to him. What made the operative change his mind?”
Misha grimaced, as if in pain. He reached in a jacket pocket and pulled out two objects. “The operative found these on the coffee table.”
&nb
sp; Erika moaned.
Saul turned, alarmed by her sudden pallor.
“My father’s two favorite pipes,” Erika said. “He never went anywhere without at least one of them.”
“So whatever happened, it happened here,” Misha said.
“And he didn’t leave willingly.”
2
The room became silent. The rain lashed harder against the window.
“Our people are searching for him,” Misha said. “We’re about to ask friendly networks to help us. It’s difficult to focus our efforts. We don’t know who’d want to take him or why. If the motive was revenge for something Joseph did while he still worked for us, why didn’t the enemy merely kill him?”
“Unless the enemy wanted”—Erika swallowed—“to torture him.”
“As a means of revenge? But that would make it personal, not professional,” Misha said. “In my twenty years of intelligence work, I’ve never heard of an operative allowing his emotions to control him so much he violated protocol and used torture to get even with someone. Assassination? Of course—on occasion. But sadism?” Misha shook his head. “If other operatives found out, the violator would be shunned, despised, forever mistrusted, judged undependable. Even you, Saul, with all the reason you had to hate Eliot, you killed him but didn’t torture him.”
The memory filled Saul with bitterness. “But we all know there’s one circumstance in which torture is acceptable.”
“Yes, for information,” Misha said, “though chemicals are more effective. But that brings us back to my earlier questions. What network would want him? What would they want to know? We’re searching for him. That’s the best I can tell you for now… . Of course, as soon as our local people understood how serious the situation was, they contacted our headquarters. Because of my relationship with Joseph and you—remember, he was one of my teachers—I decided to take charge of the assignment rather than delegate it. I also decided to bring you the bad news in person, rather than give it to you coldly in a message. But I would have come to you anyhow, as soon as I heard about the raid on your village. The coincidence can’t be ignored. I don’t like my premonition.”