The Seventh Floor, page 35
When she’d moved on to a bar seat and a beer, the unknown number called again. This time she answered. It was Debs.
“Well, holy hell,” Procter said. “This a butt-dial?”
“That would be impossible. I’ve deleted your number from all my phones.”
“Well, if you’re calling to apologize for everything, let me just say I humbly and readily accept. You, Deborah Fraser Sweet, are hereby forgiven.”
“Where are you, Artemis?”
“That,” Procter said, with a long swig of her beer, “is super-classified.”
“It’s super-loud in the background, is what it is.”
“I am out with the general public, for a change. They make my skin crawl, and I’m working on that. I can hear you, though. Loud and clear.”
Debs said, “Hey, Artemis, this call didn’t happen. Okay?”
“Course.”
“The Feebs have stopped the FISA surveillance on you. Investigation’s done. Same for Sam.”
“Are they looking at Mac anymore?”
“You found the line, Artemis.”
“I always do.”
A dog barked in the background. “Tell her Artemis says hello,” Procter said, taking a few sips of beer because the barking carried on for a while. When it stopped, because she was so far from Langley, or perhaps it was the altitude, Procter said: “Was it ipecac in the muffin, Debs? I’ve wondered.”
There was a pause. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Then Debs laughed, and Procter laughed, and she looked around the bar, and an old guy drinking a dark beer raised his glass to her and smiled. She put back a good bit of beer, until Debs had stopped laughing.
“Thanks for letting me know, Debs. And it was good to hear your voice. For once.”
“You, too, Artemis. Be good.”
“I won’t.” Then she hung up.
Procter unplugged and disappeared into the Rockies. A week later, on a Tuesday morning, she trudged out of the wilderness, and by nightfall the headlamps of her RAV4 were painting the slats of her rented cabin.
Much later, Procter would come to believe that she had felt it then, the moment she stepped out of her car. There was a new dent in her universe, and darkness filled her like a can of oil.
In the moment Procter chalked it up to paranoia from her smokes and a couple mushroom experiments out in the mountains, and maybe also fatigue: she’d been on the move since dawn. Her back ached from her rucksack, her legs were stiff from sitting immobile behind the wheel. Too tired to heat anything in the microwave, for dinner she picked at surviving bags of trail mix and beef jerky. Collecting her phone from the closet to briefly reconnect with the world, she sat on the edge of the bed. It went berserk soon as it powered up, a cacophony of dings and beeps and a notification that her voice mail was full.
There are moments that, even while living through them, you understand to be dividing lines: End of an era, beginning of another. From here on out, there will be a before and an after, marked by this slash of time. Afghanistan had been one such day. And this night, for Artemis Aphrodite Procter, would be another.
The first sensations were oddly dull, arriving at the ten-second mark of a long voice mail from Theo, like rocks shaking around in the jar of her head. Then pure agony came. At first it felt painfully concentrated, like the tip of a glowing needle jammed into her neck—a shock, searing and immobilizing. With each word the hot needle twisted and jerked, dialing up her temperature, fraying the edges of her vision, and shivering the skin around her eyes, which were now blinking frantically.
Procter retained sufficient command of her faculties that, by the time the message was done, the phone had not been flung through a window, smashed against a wall, or pulverized in her grip. Instead it was gently returned to its shelf in the closet. She stood there in the darkness for some time—how much of it, she was not sure. She moved only because it became unbearably hot: her skin was scorching, though not a drop of sweat had seeped through her pores.
Procter wandered into the living room. The world beyond the immediate searchlight of her eyes had slipped into a dreamy haze. There were a few glorious moments in which, while languidly twirling fingers through the curls of her hair, she wondered if this might be a dream, and she desperately tried to soak in the relief that comes upon waking. That fantasy was cut to ribbons with the shrieking pain that arrived when she punched a hole clean through the drywall and into the unforgiving pine of a stud beam.
The paroxysm of anger and despair and guilt would run, end to end, for nearly an hour, and it would consume much of the cabin. Drywall was pockmarked by knees and elbows and feet and her operable hand. Mantels and desks were swept of knickknacks, which were then loaded up as ammunition into the cannons of her rage and fired off in all directions, against glassware and windows, appliances and walls.
Lulls—breathless, ragged, desperate—were quickly drowned by swells of panic and anger that only sowed more destruction. This was the kind of unnatural fire that could only be doused with alcohol. The type of drinking only possible when no one was watching. She drank. In a quantity shocking for even Artemis Aphrodite Procter, she drank.
When Procter woke, the sun was high and she was sprawled on a bed of pine needles. A painting lay in tatters next to her on the forest floor. The microwave, flung through a window, had come to rest at the foot of a fir tree. A faint sound of music floated through the open front door of the cabin. Procter tried to sit up but found she could not. A squirrel bolted across the lawn. She began to cry.
59
THE ROAD HOME
Irene slid from the sheets and pulled fresh clothes from her backpack and changed and left Sam sprawled in bed, a few hours before first light. By dawn she was deep into Iowa. On the backseat floor of her Kia was a backpack. Inside was the precious little box, the tapes, a knife, and half the cash in neat stacks. The remainder she’d hidden around in her car. Next to the backpack was a duffel: a few changes of clothes, her .38 Special handgun, boxes of ammunition, and the laptop. She wore diapers to limit her stops, popped caffeine pills and Adderall to ward off sleep.
Through her windshield America unrolled like a nightmare she was at last escaping. In Kansas City the buildings were scarred with graffiti. In Tulsa they crumbled like dry cakes. In Austin a litter of children mewled and stomped for Slurpees at a gas station while obese parents scrolled on their phones. Approaching San Antonio, she watched a deranged man hurl obscenities at passerby, all of whom looked away. The light flicked green. She drove on.
This was the last days of an empire, its decline marked not by some great battle but by the slow and gouty death of decadence. She was hurtling through a tunnel on the verge of collapse. But she would not perish. She was a soldier on the march.
The SVR’s Mexico City rezident clanked open the door of the consular interview room and returned to his seat in front of the American woman, who had insisted on addressing him in broken Russian. “The names,” he said, sliding her pen and paper. “Write them for me once more. From memory. And in English. No more attempts at Cyrillic.” She did, returning the paper with a shove and an air of haughty indifference. The rezident was not so much bothered as intrigued. Who was she? He fixed himself a smoke and offered her one.
“No, thank you. You have what you need.” Her chin nudged at the paper. “You make your calls.”
The presumptuousness took him aback, but he did have calls to make, so, after a few more questions—all unequivocally dodged—about her journey here, and the pack she was clutching but would not relinquish, and the laptop she insisted that “representatives of your intelligence service examine” (though he’d not told her he was SVR), he rode the elevator to the sixth floor rezidentura and placed a call on the secure line to Moscow. After a few minutes he was patched through.
“Gennady Arkadyavich,” he said at the sound of his old friend’s voice, and they exchanged greetings. “I have a walk-in here, an American, who claims to be working for us. She has written down the name of one of ours as her bona fides . . . Yes . . . Yes . . . Dominguez, precisely. She claims he handled her in the States, and I was wondering . . . I see. Yes. Okay.” He listened to Gennady for a few minutes, then hung up.
The rezident’s men sent the photos and video of her interview to Moscow. Were he in charge, he would have opted to quietly shoot her, but, alas, he was not. Gennady’s department sent over the woman’s file. The rezident reviewed the documents while he smoked. A cursory review made him even more certain that his approach was the sensible one: they should shoot her.
That evening the rezident returned to the interview room and sat across from the woman. He introduced himself as the senior officer of the Russian SVR in Mexico, noted that he understood she had been of service to the state, and inquired whether she had information for him, or perhaps a request. He said that he had placed calls to Moscow. Her bona fides were not in question. She should speak freely.
“My work is done,” she said. “I was given a job and I’ve done what I can.” She thrust the backpack across the table, nodded, said: “Go ahead. Open it. I mean what I say.”
The rezident unzippered the bag and looked at a brick of American dollars. “A few thousand of that came from your man, the Spaniard,” she said. “I am sure somewhere you can match the serial numbers. But there is much more than that in there because what he provided was not sufficient. In the end I had to buy several cars and alias documents.” He let them sit in silence, until she nodded at the small cardboard box. “That one. Open that one.”
He opened it: small tapes from a recorder.
“Those,” she said, “are backups.”
“In case of what?”
“In case you don’t have his fingerprints.”
“I don’t follow.”
She leaned over the table to slide the last container his way. It looked to him like a modestly sized jewelry box. It was shrouded in cling wrap and entombed in a Ziploc bag. The rezident did not want to open it.
“You looked so different in the files,” he said. “Quite the transformation.”
“I’ve made adjustments to survive,” she replied. “Open it, please. I want them to know that I am done. This was all I could manage. I pray that it will be enough.”
The rezident opened the Ziploc bag. He sloughed off the plastic wrap. He popped the top off the box. There was another bag inside. He tugged at a corner for a look. He was not surprised by the sight of mangled flesh and dried blood congealing inside—only by the quantity. Like a pile of stubby sodden carrots. The faint trace of rot that reached his nostrils curdled instantly into nausea. He zippered the bag up, placed it back in the box. He lit himself another cigarette to smoke out the smell. “What do we have here?”
“Fingers,” she said.
“They all belong to Samuel Joseph?”
“They do.”
“When the papers covered the murder, they did not mention any missing fingers.”
“And why would they?”
“I understand from my colleagues in Moscow that there were two targets.”
A hangdog look contorted the woman’s face. She is ashamed, he thought, she thinks she is a bad girl. She went back to her stilted Russian: “I could not find her. I looked, believe me, I did. In Florida. In Washington. I had Sam’s parents’ address from the commo. It was sent to me before your people stopped responding. Before—”
He cut her off, in English: “You have come a long way. So tell me: Why you are here? What do you want, Irene?
“Irina.”
“Irina,” he said, and conceded to her Russian with a sigh. “What do you want, Irina?”
“I want to go home.”
60
PARIS MONTHS LATER
Mac Mason was painting again. The muscles had been slow to revive, the initial attempts as exhausting as they were embarrassing. He’d begun by treating it as a casual hobby, a way to burn a lovely afternoon in Paris. A landscape at the Luxembourg Gardens, Loulou at his side reading a novel or picnicking, or in the 3rd near Place des Vosges, brushing out a dramatic red door set under stone arches. The results were disappointing. No energy, no life. He heard the voice of his father while he worked.
But Paris, ah, Paris, the City of Light: Mac was anonymous, unburdened, free. He and Loulou had acquired an old gallery in the Marais, and by summer the long-atrophied muscles, unused since youth, began to strengthen and grow. He and Loulou visited the south on a painting holiday: Arles, Saint-Saturnin, Collioure near Spain, along the sea. The daily ten-milers soon shed fifteen pounds of flab. His desire for Loulou was rekindled. His hands were on her, always and everywhere.
Their gallery, christened LoulouMac, sat on a sidestreet in the Marais a few blocks north of the Place des Vosges. To the left was a green-awninged café, his first stop every morning.
During the pleasant springtime months, the surveillant noted, Mac Mason had become a creature of habit: an unwise decision for a man of his profession. A stop at the café in the morning—same route—out for lunch—typically at one of three cafés, all within walking distance—then out for painting, location variable here, no pattern, then back to the studio and home for aperitifs and intercourse by the dinner hour, like a good Parisian. Though in Mac’s case, the logs noted, he made love only to Loulou. He did not spot the surveillance.
Operationally unawares, she wrote. Hazards of old age.
On a bright Spring morning, café au lait and brioche in hand, Mac turned the key in the lock and pushed in the door to LoulouMac, heading straight for the studio in back. Loulou was down south with her mother for a run of shopping, leaving him with quality time to put the finishing touches on his current project: a reimagination of a cubist work he’d pursued before joining the Agency. He clicked open the studio door and turned on the lights.
The café au lait splattered onto the concrete, the brioche not far behind.
Artemis Aphrodite Procter stood in the middle of the studio. She wore a jacket, sweatshirt, jeans, and a beanie—all black. Her wild spray of hair was jammed in a hairnet. She wore gloves and booties over her shoes. She was pointing a Mossberg twelve-gauge semiautomatic shotgun at his head. A suppressor the size of a coffee can sat on the barrel.
She jerked the gun away from the door. “Two steps in, Macintosh. There’s a good boy.”
He was standing in front of a canvas that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. Bunch of red and black squares. She’d had to look at that damn thing all night, waiting in here. She fucking hated it.
“What are you doing?” he asked. “What do you want?” His eyes were flitting around, searching.
“Gonna make something clear up front, Mac,” she said. “If you try to run, if you try to fight, I am going to kill you, and then—and I don’t want to do this, Mac, god help me, I do not—but if you make me I am going to head to your apartment, wait for two days, and I’m going to kill Loulou when she returns from Avignon.”
“Don’t hurt Loulou,” Mac said.
“Don’t give me a reason.”
“What do you want, Artemis?”
“You’re going to confess to me, right now. In return, I spare Loulou, who’s in on this, of course.”
“You’ve got no proof of anything, Artemis,” he said. “This is dumb. Don’t be dumb.”
“But I know,” she said. “I fucking know. You were a double. I know it, and you know it. And you also know that I’m a woman of my word. I’ve walked this one to the end, which is why I’m here in your studio with a gun. You think that I won’t skip over to your apartment and wait for Loulou to get back? You think I’ll be merciful? Well, I’ve tossed restraint out the window since your freaks finally scored a direct hit and killed Sam. Loulou is your coconspirator here, as in all things. This I also know. She is fair game.”
“She doesn’t know anything.”
A quick step forward, and Procter thrust the shotgun barrel into his stomach; he let out a sad grunt, fell to his knees, then curled into himself on the floor.
Procter wagged the gun, said: “Get up. Now.”
He wiped his coffee-wet hands on his pants and stood slowly, clutching his stomach.
“I am going to try a theory on you,” Procter said, “and you’re going to answer me, truthfully and in the King’s fucking English, because you’re speaking for Loulou’s life. Understand?”
The mask of his face offered a slow, reluctant nod.
“REMORA was never recruited,” she said. “You and Theo were developing him in Paris, and he was developing you. He recruited you sometime at the tail end of that period, but ultimately you’re being handled by a cat in Moscow named Zhomov. That right?”
Something shone in his eyes, but he looked away, and did not answer.
She leveled the gun at his foot. “That was a question. I don’t get an answer, I give that foot the Finn Gosford special.”
“Zhomov is a genius,” Mac said.
“Groovy. So Zhomov’s got Macintosh Mason, hotshot recruiter of Russians, on the line and his star is rising. You’re the Chief of Ops in Russia House. I mean, the Russkies have never had someone so high up. And this is where, frankly, you and Zhomov blow my fucking mind, Macintosh. The patience. Restraining yourself from burning the entire Russia House stable. Sticks-and-bricks commo, I’d wager. No devices. Have that right?”
“Yes.”
“And the Singapore debacle, when Sam was taken. Try on this version. You hear about Golikov from Gus. He calls you with the news on vacation, right? And immediately you’re worried about what Golikov could be primed to share, so you leave Lou in the Adirondacks and hustle down to New York Station, where Gus is prepping Debs. You want to see with your own eyes what’s come in. And it spooks the hell out of you. So you send a crash signal to Zhomov that results in REMORA asking for a meet, creating operational cover so you can get to France to talk it all through. But you’ve got a problem: Theo is coming to France, and lo and behold so is Debs. Debs you can kick to the end of the meeting, she doesn’t want to do the work anyway. But Theo? Well, officially he’s REMORA’s handler now. But you need him away for a bit so you can speak freely with REMORA. What did you put in Theo’s way to distract him, make him late to the meet and unwilling to tell me why? A Russian girl?”
