The Second Sight, page 47
“I’ll have all this-Xeroxed and sent over to you so you can read it for yourself,” Patchen said.
“Don’t bother. David …”
“No trouble at all.”
The line went dead, and when Dorcas called back a stern, grandmotherly voice told her that the Director had left for the day. When she called the Patchens’ home number she reached an answering service.
“Shall I keep trying?” she asked.
“Of course you should keep trying. Every ten minutes. In between, get me two bottles of 1961 Château Margaux—write that down: 1961, Château M-a-r-g-a-u-x—and have them delivered with my card to Patchen’s house.”
“Where do I get it?”
Graham threw up his arms with a roar of exasperation. “From a plumbers supply store! Where do you think you buy wine? Call the fucking wine shops here and in New York until you find one that has it!”
He stormed out of the room. Dorcas had always heard that this was the way geniuses behaved, and she was glad to find out that it was true. At college she had conducted brief affairs with a couple of disagreeable associate professors, but even before meeting Graham she had guessed that they were imitations of the ideal. All that was behind her. More had happened to her in this one week at Graham’s side than in all her previous life, and she realized with a pang of joy that she had escaped at last from the busy emptiness of the suburbs and the university into the real world.
7
THAT EVENING MARTHA COOKED ONE OF HER VEGETARIAN DINNERS for Patchen. Afterward they talked about her Indians and all the years she had spent among them with so little sign that her presence had made any difference.
“Have you ever regretted it?” Patchen asked.
“How could I regret my work?” she asked.
“You mean the Indians are your purpose on earth? The reason for your being here?”
“What is is what was meant to be. But thee is my purpose on earth.”
“Then why do you go away for half of every year to be with the Indians?”
“It is part of the purpose.”
“But you’re invisible to them.”
“The Inward Light is invisible to thee. But it exists, and one day thee will see it.”
“Will the Indians see thee in the same instant?”
“Thee called me thee.”
“I always do, in my mind. What is the answer?”
“Thee laughs at miracles. But when thee sees at last, thee will see what has always been real, and so will my Indians.”
She smiled with such particular sweetness and happiness that he remembered, as if it were happening to them now, the first time she had been a wife to him in Paris. They went upstairs with their arms around each other, and in the morning Martha went back to Guatemala.
8
YEARS BEFORE, WHEN THE O. G. HAD BEEN ORDERED BY ONE OF THE half-dozen Presidents who had come and gone during his long tenure as Director to build a new headquarters for the Outfit in the suburbs of Washington, he demurred. There were any number of reasons for a master spy of the old school to dislike centralization; to name only three, it encouraged the pesky weeds of bureaucracy, it made it easy for anyone to compile a roster of headquarters personnel merely by reading the license numbers of cars taking the Outfit exit off the main highway during rush hour, and it threatened to turn a broad natural savannah filled with exotic specimens into a rabbit warren where the ground trembled with the thump of the President’s big rubber boots on the sod overhead. “Dying institutions build monuments to themselves,” the O. G. argued, paraphrasing one of Parkinson’s propositions. “Let’s use all those millions of dollars this skyscraper would cost to raise hell with the opposition.” But his protests fell on deaf ears. The President laid a cornerstone containing an encrypted letter to future generations of spies (“intelligence specialists”), and in due course the imposing new glass-and-granite building went up on a densely wooded site, complete with a motto (“Out of darkness, light”) coined for the occasion by the O. G. himself. This inscription was rendered into English from the original Latin at the insistence of a different President, a fretful man who sensed a pun on the name ‘Caligula’ in the O. G.’s use of the noun caligo for ‘darkness’ instead of the more usual obscuritas. As the O. G. had feared and the two Presidents had intended, the new headquarters made the Outfit less adventurous by rendering it more visible.
New construction provided certan opportunities, however, and one of the ways in which the O. G. took advantage of these was by having a team of Seabees construct a tunnel leading from the shaft of the Director’s private elevator to a safe house some two miles away. No one knew about the existence of the tunnel except the Director and the retired Navy chief petty officer who maintained the ventilating system and the golf carts used to travel through the tunnel; the chief lived in the safe house. It was there, in the oversize garage into which the tunnel debouched, that Patchen rendezvoused with the O. G. after midnight of the day of his telephone conversation with Patrick Graham. Meeting openly for the purposes they had in mind was out of the question. Although the media crowd assigned to Patchen had thinned to a twenty-four-hour pool of half a dozen reporters and cameramen as the Beautiful Dreamers story cooled, he still found it difficult to move about freely.
Patchen and the O. G. did not speak to each other while they were inside the garage; the safe house was equipped with listening devices and other gear that only the chief petty officer fully understood. Instead they got into the four-wheel-drive Cherokee (registered in the name of a male child who had died in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, two days after his premature birth in July 1930) and drove southward into Virginia. Their destination was Camp Panchaea, named for the mythical island where, according to Euhemerus, the gods had lived as men before ascending Mount Olympus. It was a hunting and fishing reserve formerly located at the center of a five-thousand-acre private forest. The O. G.’s Uncle Snowden, a keen hunter and angler, bought this property when the Society of Euhemerus disbanded, and in his will gave the O. G. its exclusive enjoyment during his lifetime. When he died it would go to the Panchaea Foundation, a tax-exempt institution devoted to the rediscovery and propagation of original North American species of plants and animals, in whose name the deed was already registered.
It was a long drive, especially since the O.G., who was at the wheel, took only rural roads. Patchen, exhausted by eighteen uninterrupted hours of meetings, telephone conversations, and deep thought, fell asleep almost immediately. He did not wake up until the O, G. slammed on the brakes as the car was traveling along the rutted woodland road that led to the camp. He opened his eyes and saw a herd of whitetail deer bounding like rubber-band toys through the beams of the headlights.
“These woods are full of game,” the O. G. said. “The eastern cougar, thought to be extinct for two hundred years, has come back. So have black bear, wild turkey, egrets, otter, even coyotes. Wouldn’t surprise me if I saw a woodland bison crossing the road one of these times. The wild, wild East! Nature is a lot more resilient than these environmentalists who grew up in the suburbs think.”
The O. G. had spent his boyhood summers on his grandfather’s farm in the state of New York, milking cows by hand, making hay with scythe, hand rake, and pitchfork, and chopping down brush in an unceasing and ultimately hopeless attempt to keep the surrounding forest from taking over cultivated fields. He had a low regard for nature lovers who had never chopped down chokecherry bushes or had a chicken coop cleaned out by a weasel that killed a whole flock of Barred Rock pullets just for the merry hell of it. He often said so.
Patchen looked at his watch. It was four-thirty. “How close are we getting?” he asked.
“Should be there to see the sun rise over the lake,” the O. G. replied. “Speaking of weasels, do you think your man is spooked?”
“Graham? Yes. Which of those phone calls was genuine and which were Yeho’s?”
“You have no need to know that.” The O. G. grinned happily. He was back in the saddle, the case officer for this operation. Nobody before him had ever had the Director of the Outfit as an agent under discipline. The thought tickled him, but he resisted giving voice to it. He changed the subject back to Patrick Graham. “Is he sufficiently angry at you?”
“You could say that, I think. I may even have gone too far. I had no idea that baiting pinkos was so much fun.”
The O. G. laughed. “There’s nothing you can do while standing upright that’s more pleasurable,” he said. “Same thing applied to crypto-Nazis in their day. Used to kid the pants off them in Hitler’s Berlin. They were the same class of people as Graham—telling themselves they were doing good in the world by doing well by themselves and closing their eyes to horrors done unto others in the name of the cause. But you have to be careful. These make-believe revolutionaries are like virgin aunts—they’ve got all the standard equipment under their petticoats, but they’ve never had them lifted except in dreams. They live in their fevered imaginations, and if you tease ‘em too much about the real thing they go all to pieces.”
They arrived at the camp in the moment before sunrise. Patchen had never been here before and he was surprised by the size of it and its well-kept appearance. The log buildings—a large lodge and several smaller cabins distributed along the shore of a small lake—shone with varnish, and the network of white gravel walks that connected them were weeded and freshly raked. Mallard ducks and Canada geese bobbed in water dimpled by feeding fish. They were standing on the highest point for miles around, but to the west, beyond the lake, a range of blue mountains was visible. The O. G. sniffed the air.
“Somebody’s having a barbecue,” he said.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel behind them. “Welcome to paradise,” Yeho Stern said. Despite the weather—it was the first of November and the camp was fifteen hundred feet above sea level—he wore his usual khaki shorts, but with hiking shoes and an old canvas hunting jacket, stained with the blood of duck and pheasant, that was several sizes too large for him.
“What’s that aroma?” the O. G. asked.
“The Ibal Iden are burning a lamb,” Yeho said. “Zarah bought them a flock of sheep.”
“A flock of sheep? Isn’t that a little insecure?”
“Maybe. But they won’t eat anything they haven’t killed themselves.”
“Just the same, buying a whole flock of sheep.”
“Relax,” Yeho said. “She went a long way away to buy them—all the way to North Carolina. A very smart girl. You’re going to love her, David.”
9
ZARAH ATTENDED YEHO’S BRIEFING IN THE LODGE. EVERY SQUARE foot of wall space in the gathering room was hung with memorabilia contributed over many years by the Members: battle flags and school pennants, Revolutionary War muskets, Civil War cavalry sabers, spiked helmets and bayonets taken in Belleau Wood, footballs and baseball bats, yellowed posters of broad-hipped Floradora and Ziegfeld girls, mottoes (“LEAVE SWELLED HEADS BEHIND, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE”; “YALE 6 VASSAR 0”), and two whole walls of photographs of good fellows holding up strings of smallmouth bass or gazing at large dead bears. In its exuberant clutter it resembled an enormous boy’s bedroom into which no mother had ever been permitted to intrude.
“You must be the first member of your sex ever to set foot in here, my dear,” the O. G. said, sliding a stack of hot flapjacks onto Zarah’s plate. He was the cook for breakfast and he wore the red, white, and blue-striped apron and the tall chef’s hat required by Club rules.
“What happens if I’m caught trespassing?” Zarah asked.
“No chance of that.” The O. G. indicated the photographs with a wave of his spatula. “They’ve all gone West. Every one.”
But Zarah was looking down at her plate as if avoiding somebody’s eyes. Not the O. G.’s; she looked directly at him when he finished speaking and smiled. He gave her a quizzical look. She was nervous and spoke in a slightly tremulous voice. The reason was Patchen, who sat directly across the table from her. But why? They had not met before, but it had been clear from the moment the O. G. introduced them that Paul Christopher’s daughter had some reason to dislike and distrust his best friend. Wolkowicz’s work, the O. G. thought. He hadn’t gone West in the minds of those who had known him. Would he ever?
Yeho ate his pancakes and scrambled eggs smothered with onions and ketchup with great rapidity, then waited impatiently for the others to finish. He knew that the O. G., whose hearing was failing, could not hear while he was chewing his food. At last the O. G. cleared the dishes and took off his cook’s regalia. Yeho began.
“All right,” he said. “First, security. This is a private enterprise in which neither the Outfit nor any other service is or will be involved. They are not even aware of it. As agreed, all field work has been done with retired people. Will they be quiet when they see their old friends? Who knows? I’ve explained we are doing something that headquarters will not want to know about, so maybe they’ll spare people who are still inside the embarrassment. Anyway, they don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, or who they’re doing it for, so let them gossip after it’s over. Now, the target. They’ve reported some results.”
Yeho had activated a surveillance team of decommissioned agents in Switzerland. By methods he did not describe, they had located Hassan Abdallah. He now worked in his old specialty for a drug research laboratory in Geneva, where he was very highly regarded. He was married to a Swiss woman whose surname, Balmont, he had adopted, along with the forename Marcel. There was nothing unusual among Europeans in a man adopting his wife’s name if it was a better one than his own, and clearly it was more advantageous to have a Gallic name in French Switzerland than an Arab one. “In the next generation,” Yeho said, “no doubt it will be de Balmont.” Before he met his wife Hassan Abdallah’s appearance had been altered by plastic surgery, eliminating the more pronounced Semitic facial features. In Western clothes, with Western manners, accompanied by a Swiss wife, he could pass for a Mediterranean Frenchman; looking at him in a café you might think that he was a métis, half French and half something else, but that was all. According to his identity card he was thirty-six years old, born in Damascus, formerly the center of French civilization in the Middle East, so he could very well have had one French parent. Monsieur and Madame Balmont, who had no children, attended a Calvinist church in Plainpalais, and were active in one of Geneva’s innumerable patriotic organizations. He had marched in medieval costume in parades commemorating the Night of the Escalade.
“Ah-ha!” said the O. G. “Mere Royaume!”
Yeho looked annoyed. “What?”
“The heroine of Genevese history. Around 1600 she dropped a kettle of hot soup onto the head of a soldier of the Duke of Savoy who was about to scale the walls of Geneva and saved the city from sneak attack.”
“Very picturesque,” Yeho said. He sighed and went on. Although Balmont/Abdallah was not accepted in his own right as a Genevese, and never could be, his wife came from a long-established Huguenot family, and owing to his marriage to her he enjoyed all of the legal rights of a Swiss national and citizen of the Canton of Geneva. In the twelve years that had passed since he led the team of assassins that machine-gunned a Chinese intelligence officer in the Parc Mon Repos, he had managed to build a nearly perfect cover as a hardworking, frugal, punctual citizen. No suspicion of political activity, much less of terrorism, attached to him.
“You’re sure of that?” Patchen said.
“Ninety-nine percent sure. I realize it seems impossible, knowing the Swiss police, but it seems to be the case. This man is a born deceiver. He met his wife on a beach in Yugoslavia one August, took her skiing in February, and re-entered Switzerland as her husband in April. We think she has no knowledge whatsoever of his other life. He has a mistress, a Frenchwoman who was an auxiliary of the original Butterfly team, living in the countryside a short drive into France. This female is his only known link to the old Eye of Gaza. He never goes to the house where she lives. She works as a nurse in a surgical clinic in Annecy; they meet every second Thursday in the same small hotel at Aix-les-Bains, on the other end of the lake, pour faire l’amour, always in the same room. This cuckoo clock adultery is part of the cover. The innkeepers are quite fond of them; they’re like an old married couple, they play Scrabble afterward and always stay for dinner. They drink no alcohol. This is what we found under the floor of the bathroom of her house in the country while they were having their biweekly orgasm and game of Scrabble two Thursdays ago.”
Yeho handed Patchen an enlarged photograph of a cache of arms and ammunition and other supplies, including apparatus for intravenous administration of fluids.
“The handguns are nine-millimeter Jerichos, made by Israel Military Industries, and of course you recognize the Uzi machine pistols. They use the same ammunition. The clips shown here are loaded with unmodified production rounds. Very interesting that they’d choose Israeli equipment, but as you know, these weapons are available over the counter in the United States, and as we also know, they’ve been here recently. The serial numbers have been defaced with acid. There are three of each kind of weapon, which may mean that there are three members of the cell, or six, or some number in between. Obviously, it may not be the only cell.”
“What is this?” Zarah asked, pointing to a small pistol-like device attached to a length of tubing.
“I was getting to that,” Yeho said. “That is a device used to force fluids through the skin. They use it on children because it doesn’t hurt as much as a needle. The tube attaches to a small container of compressed air, like this one.” He pointed to a metal object about the size of a flashlight.
“Let me see that,” said the O. G. “By golly, that’s how they’ve been knocking our people out in the toilets!”
