file for Gerhard Lenz, but that wasn’t the one he was interested in. It
was the thin file next to it the file for his widow that he wanted.
This one was tightly wedged in. He heard footsteps: Sonnenfeld was
returning, more quickly than Ben had expected! He tugged on the folder,
worried it from side to side until it was slowly released from the
others. Taking the trench coat he’d draped on an adjoining chair, he
quickly shoved the yellowed folders under it and returned to his seat
just as Sonnenfeld entered.
“It’s a dangerous thing to disturb the peace of old men,” Sonnenfeld
announced as he rejoined him. “Maybe you think they’re toothless,
wizened creatures. Indeed they are. But they have a powerful support
network, even now. Especially in South America, where they have
extensive loyalists. Thugs, like the Kamaradenwerk. They are protected
the way wild animals protect their enfeebled elders. They kill whenever
they must they never hesitate.”
“In Buenos Aires?”
“There more than anywhere else. Nowhere are they so powerful.” He
looked weary. “This is why you must never go there and ask about the
old Germans.”
Sonnenfeld got up unsteadily, and Ben rose, too. “Even today, you see,
I must have a security guard at all times. It is not much, but it is
what we can afford to pay for.”
“Yet you insist on living in a city where they don’t like questions
about the past,” Ben said.
Sonnenfeld put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Ah, well, you see, if you
are studying malaria, Mr. Hartman, you must live in the swamp, no?”
Julian Bennett, assistant deputy of operations at the National Security
Agency, sat facing Joel Skolnik, the deputy director of the Department
of Justice in the small executive dining room in the NSA’s Fort Mead
headquarters. Though Skolnik, lanky and balding, held a higher
bureaucratic rank, Bennett’s manner was peremptory. The National
Security Agency was structured in such as way as to insulate people like
Bennett from bureaucratic oversight outside of the agency. The effect
was to encourage a certain arrogance, and Bennett was not one to
disguise it.
An overdone lamb chop and a lump of steamed spinach, mostly uneaten, sat
on the plate in front of Skolnik. His appetite had long since
disappeared. Past a thin veneer of amiability, Bennett’s manner was
subtly hectoring, and his message frankly alarming.
“This doesn’t look good for you,” Bennett was telling him, not for the
first time. His small, wide-spaced eyes and light-colored eyebrows gave
him a vaguely porcine look.
“I realize this.”
“You’re supposed to be running a tight ship here,” Bennett said. His
own plate was clean; he had devoured his porterhouse in several swift
bites: plainly a man who ate simply for fuel. “And the stuff we’ve been
coming across is pretty damn disquieting.”
“You’ve been clear about that,” Skolnik said, hating the way it came out
deferential, even cowed. He knew it was always a mistake to show fear
to a man like Bennett. It was like blood in the water to a shark.
“The recklessness about matters of national security your people have
shown it compromises us all. I look at the way your staffers have
conducted themselves, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What’s
the use of bolting the front door when the back door is swinging in the
wind?”
“Let’s not exaggerate the possible exposure at issue,” Skolnik said.
Even to himself, the starchy words sounded defensive.
“I want you to assure me that the rot is contained with the Navarro
woman.” Bennett leaned over and patted Skolnik’s forearm in a gesture
that was half intimate and half menacing. “And that you’ll use all
means at your disposal to bring the woman in.”
“That much goes without saying,” the DOJ man said, swallowing hard.
“Now stand up,” the goa teed man said, waving the Makarov in his left
hand.
“It’ll do you no good, I won’t put my finger on the sensor,” said the
detective, Hans Hoffman. “Now get out of here, before something happens
that you’ll regret.”
“I never have regrets,” the man said blandly. “Stand up.”
Hoffman stood up reluctantly. “I tell you ”
The intruder rose too and approached him.
“I tell you again,” Hoffman said, “it will do you no good to kill me.”
“I don’t need to kill you,” the man said blandly. In one
lightning-swift movement he lunged.
Hoffman saw the glint of something metallic even before he felt the
unbelievable pain explode in his hand. He looked down. There was a
stump where his index finger had been. The cut had been perfect. At
the base of where his finger had been, right next to the fatty part of
the thumb, he could see a white circle of bone within a larger circle of
flesh. In the millisecond before he screamed, he saw the razor-sharp
hunting knife in the man’s hand, and then he noticed with dazed
fascination the dismembered finger lying on the carpet like a useless
discarded chicken part flung there by some careless butcher.
He bellowed, a high-pitched scream of disbelief and terror and
excruciating, incomprehensible pain. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my
God!”
Trevor picked up the dismembered finger and held it aloft. At the
severed end, blood still wept.
CHAPTER THIRTY.
Anna put in a call to David Denneen.
“Is that you, Anna?” he said tersely, his customary warmth crimped by
uncustomary wariness. “The shit’s flying.”
“Talk to me, David. Tell me what the hell’s going on.”
“Crazy stuff. They’re saying you’re…” His voice trailed off.
“What?”
“Crazy stuff. You on a sterile line?”
“Of course.”
There was a pause. “Listen, Anna. The department’s been ordered to
place a P-47 on you, Anna–full-out mail, wire, phone intercepts.”
“Jesus Christ!” Anna said. “I don’t believe it.”
“It gets worse. Since this morning, you’ve been a 12-44: apprehend on
sight- Bring in by any means necessary. Jesus, I don’t know what you’ve
been up to, but you’re being called a national security risk. They’re
saying you’ve been accepting money from hostiles for years. I shouldn’t
even be talking to you.”
“What?”
“Word is the FBI’s discovered all sorts of cash and jewelry in your
apartment. Expensive clothes. Offshore bank accounts.”
“Lies!” Anna exploded. “All goddamn lies.”
There was a long pause. “I knew they had to be, Anna. But I’m glad to
hear you say it, all the same. Someone’s messing with you in a very
serious way. Why?”
“Why?” Anna closed her eyes briefly. “So I don’t get in a position to
discover why. That’s my guess.” She rang off hurriedly.
What the hell was going on? Had “Yossi” or Phil Ostrow put poison in
Bartlett’s ear? She’d never called them; maybe Bartlett was angry that
they’d found out about her investigation in the first place, even though
she wasn’t the responsible party. Or maybe Bartlett was angry that she
hadn’t gone along with their request to bring Hartman in.
She suddenly realized that neither agency official had mentioned Hans
Vogler, the ex-Stasi assassin. Did that mean “Yossi” knew nothing about
it? If so, did that mean that the Mossad freelancers had nothing to do
with hiring Vogler? She retrieved Phil Ostrow’s card and dialed the
number. It went to automated voice mail; and she decided against
leaving a message.
Maybe lack Hampton would know something about it. She phoned him at
home, in Chevy Chase. “lack,” she began. “It’s–”
“Jesus Christ, tell me you’re not calling me,” Hampton said in a rush.
“Tell me you’re not jeopardizing the security clearance of your friends
by a misjudged phone call.”
“Is there an intercept on your end?”
“My end?” Hampton paused. “No. Never. I make sure of it myself.”
“Then you’re not in danger. I’m on a secure line on this end. I don’t
see any way by which a connection could be traced.”
“Let’s say you’re right, Anna,” he said dubiously. “You’re still
presenting me with a moral conundrum. Word has it you’re some primo
villain ness–the way I’ve heard you described, it’s like you’re a
combination of Ma Barker and Mata Hari. With the wardrobe of Imelda
Marcos.”
“It’s bullshit. You know that.”
“Maybe I do, Anna, and maybe I don’t. The kind of sums I’ve heard
bandied about would be awfully tempting. Buy yourself a nice spit of
land in Virgin Gorda. All that pink sand, blue sky. Go snorkeling
every day…”
“Goddamn it, Jack!”
“A word of advice. Don’t take any woolen kopeks and don’t whack any
more Swiss bankers.”
“Is that what they’re saying about me.”
“One of the things. One of the many things. Let’s just say it’s the
biggest pile-on I’ve heard of since well Ho Lee. It’s a bit overdone,
to tell you the truth. I keep asking myself, Who’s got that kind of
money to throw around? Russia’s so strapped for cash that most of its
nuclear scientists have left to drive taxicabs in New York. And what