The Seventh Floor, page 36
“What else?” Mac said. “Budapest playbook. Zhomov took the initiative. Dropped a girl at a bar Theo frequents near Avignon and let his libido do the rest. Zhomov thought it would be helpful to have Theo in our debt.” Mac’s tone was cool and even; he was reciting dry facts from a history text.
“Whose idea was it to fuck with me in the months before I got fired? You put those pictures in my office, didn’t you? Ran a whisper campaign to rustle up all those ethics complaints? Were those your ideas or Zhomov’s? Did you convince Debs to fire me?”
“Don’t you think she was going to fire you anyway, Artemis? Come on.”
“Who did it?”
Mac looked away from her, looked down.
She continued: “Was it Zhomov’s idea to elevate you through the swap for Sam? Did he tap some goat officer in Vienna as bait for us, once the Russians had sweated Sam sufficiently and thought he didn’t know squat? You designed the op, led the charge on the trade. You’re a fucking hero. Zhomov’s put you in prime position for a Seventh Floor slot in the next few years. Long game, as I said. How am I doing?”
“You’re doing pretty well for a drunk, Artemis,” he said. “Bravo.”
Her laugh was a sad blend of hatred and genuine amusement. She went on, “So let’s go through it, shall we, the destruction you wrought? You gave up two Russian assets, yes? BUCCANEER is dead. Leaves behind a young daughter. CLAW is missing, probably dead. Our Moscow officer’s cats were butchered, and his wife, her name’s Molly by the way, has PTSD. There’s Golikov, of course: dismembered and carted home in a box. And then, when Sam and I started nipping at your heels, you called down their freaks on us. They tried to blow me to bits. The three dead former Support assets in France, well, that was the price you and your friends made us pay for confirming your treason. And now they’ve killed Sam, you fuck. You’ve killed him.”
He clammed up at this part, looking down at the spilled coffee to avoid her eyes. He was wearing leather driving shoes, too-tight jeans rolled up at the hem, and a red sport coat over a white T-shirt with a matching white silk square peeking from the breast pocket. At first she hadn’t noticed the stupid fucking getup. Now she couldn’t look away.
“I helped get him back, didn’t I?” Mac blurted out. “I sure as hell didn’t kill him, Artemis. I didn’t kill any of them.”
Careful to keep the shotgun level, she removed an envelope from her other jacket pocket, dropped it on the floor, and kicked it his way. “You are going to look at those pictures. Every one of them is someone you betrayed. You are going to study the photos like they are the fucking Gospels.”
Reluctantly, he opened the folder. She had most of the pictures from Theo, though he did not know why she had wanted them. The stack began with BUCCANEER, CLAW, Golikov, and CIA headshots of the Kassab triplets. Mostly expressionless for those, she thought, Mac had made his peace with it, dangerous business and all, but he paused at Procter’s blown-apart trailer, and stopped entirely at the first documenting Sam’s murder, one of him sprawled across a blood-soaked bed. “She did it with a knife,” Procter said.
“Enough,” he said. “I didn’t ask anyone to kill anybody.”
She raised the gun. “Not enough. There are more. Keep going.”
He leafed through more pictures, face settling into that blank mask.
And it sent a long ache running through Procter like a blade. There are two of him, she thought; someone else is in there with my old friend. Mac’s thoughts had often been known to her. Not now. She had no clue what he was thinking.
“Feebs have pieced together that the freaks are Peter and Irene Venable, of Dallas, Texas, of all fucking places. Peter got himself killed at my trailer. Theo tells me Irene’s got a few medals, a dacha, and a boyfriend with bushy Slavic brows. High on the hog, ensconced in the dark Russian woods. And this was you, Mac. The chain starts with you.”
“I didn’t do this.” He let the pictures fall to the floor. A few fluttered into the coffee spill. His face darkened. “Why are you doing this for them, carrying their water, Artemis? After all they’ve done to you. Finn fucking Gosford pitched himself as a hero after Afghanistan. He’s a fraud. A huckster mercenary cashing in on our sacrifices. And he fired you, Artemis. He and Debs sacrificed you for their glory.”
Procter spat onto the floor. “We were friends, Macintosh, you and I.”
“Yes,” he said. “We are.”
Eye contact was beginning to disgust her; she had to look up, toward the wall above him. “What’s it been,” she said, “four years since your old man died? Timing works, I’d say. Couldn’t deal with the brute this side of eternity, could you? You never got his approval and you never told him to fuck off, either. So you had to tell him to fuck off after he was gone. How much did the Russians pay you, Macintosh?”
His nose wrinkled. He said nothing.
“You are going to do two things for me,” she said. “Right now. You are going to write a note about what you’ve done. Short, punchy. To the point. I’ll supervise, offer suggestions. And you are going to tell me where you hid the money. Or the diamonds. Or gold. However they paid. Start with the note.” She jerked the gun toward a desk. “Go on, get.”
He stood there, jaw set. He folded his arms across his chest. A whitish paste was forming at the corners of his mouth.
“Do it for Lou,” she said. “You can still save Lou.”
Mac shuffled to the desk. He wrote. Procter thought the second draft was good enough. “Leave it,” she said, rumpling the first draft into her coat pocket. “Get up, there you go. Back to the wall. Now the money.”
It took him a few moments to answer, and when he’d finished she said: “You will add a postscript to the note. Right fucking now.”
“I don’t know it all by heart Artemis.”
“Bullshit. Gambling with Lou’s life over blood money you don’t need? Not so smart.”
His look was now one of pure hate. He stomped back to the desk, scribbled down the information. Sweat was running down his face. He wiped it from his upper lip and hairline, twisting damp palms against his shirt while he wrote. Procter reviewed it, made him repeat it back to her a few times so she could watch his face. But would she have even the slightest hint if he was lying?
“You feel good about the trade?” she asked.
“I didn’t do it for the money, Artemis. Please.” His tone sharpened; his eyes darkened; his face contorted awfully. Then Mac started rambling out a convoluted fucking jumble of justifications: the mess with his dad, a frozen memory of his old man dangling him by his leg until he pissed himself; the failed paintings and Loulou—again he tried to sell the lie that she had no idea. He had turned to explain the cube painting thing behind him, waving his hands, spewing gobbledygook about how as a young man he’d believed art offered hope to the world, but in truth it could only make a statement about destruction. And he was just going on and fucking on, parading in front of his weird painting, and she wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take; it was making her sick to look at him, to hear his voice, to smell him in her nostrils. “Shut up,” she said. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”
His attention twisted between her and the painting. He wiped his shining forehead. “You don’t want to know why I did it?” he asked. “You don’t care?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t.”
Procter muttered something to herself, like an incantation. “In honor,” she said. Then she squeezed the trigger.
The top half of Mac Mason’s head sprayed across the canvas, the last strokes of his masterpiece painted by Artemis Aphrodite Procter in his own blood and brain.
61
LANGLEY / GENEVA FREEPORT MONTHS LATER
Procter was splayed facedown on the bed, her ears filled with the sound of the tattoo gun buzzing. On the backside of her shut eyelids danced their faces and the places they’d died and the people she’d killed to avenge them.
The gun went silent. The tattooist ran a disinfectant wipe over the fresh ink; she heard the crinkle of a bandage wrapper opening. “You want to see?” he said.
Easing herself up, pointing her back to the mirror, Procter looked at the fresh black star and its five bloody points. It joined the other nine in a trail stretching from clavicle to clavicle.
She spoke to Sam through the star, all the things she never did say.
Ten people, nine men and one woman, stood before a vault door inside a nondescript warehouse on the grounds of the Geneva Freeport. The fountain on the lake outside was shooting blue water into an even bluer summer sky, but inside the Freeport the world managed only variations on black and gray. Doors, suits, carpets, curtains, floors: though these buildings housed billions of dollars’ worth of colorful paintings, fine wines, glittering jewelry, and artifacts from antiquity, Lambert hadn’t seen a color since they’d passed under the Swiss flag flying outside. What would have been the largest art gallery or wine cellar in the world was instead shrouded in the secrecy of gray.
Deborah Sweet, Lambert’s boss and the only woman in this motley group, stood behind the gray-suited Freeport managing director in a long hallway lined by banks of double-locked gray doors, each leading to a separate vault. Behind Lambert huddled a pile of Swiss officials, and behind them was a crop of Feebs from Washington and Bern and Geneva, who were not as well dressed as the Swiss but had admirably managed to color-coordinate the gray. Only he and Sweet, the CIA contingent, stood out. Lambert for his navy-blue suit and red tie, she for her form-fitting sleeveless red dress and the chunky blue costume pearls coiled around her neck.
The CIA delegation had been so rushed this morning that Lambert had snatched only a few sips of coffee on the drive to the Freeport from Geneva Base. They’d made him surrender his cup to a trash bin upstairs in the customs offices before visiting the vaults downstairs, and Lambert was now craving a caffeine hit. He had slept so little in the month since the call from Paris had arrived. There had been a time when he’d comfortably managed to drink less than five cups of coffee each day. That world had vanished with the arrival of Mac Mason’s suicide note. Lambert stifled a yawn.
The Freeport director punched his fingerprint onto the pad and swung open a set of doors. The group shuffled into a vault the size of a racquetball court, with shelves from floor to ceiling. They followed the Freeport director to the far end of the room, where he halted in front of a gray metallic box with the numbers 6.24.2 stenciled above a keypad. Lambert recognized the numbers from the transcribed suicide note and the search warrant they had served to the Swiss. The clank of the bolt sliding open carried through the room like a gunshot.
Two boxes were removed from the safe and slid onto a table in the room’s center. The Freeport director opened the first box. Lambert, jostling here and there for a clean view, stole a peek inside. The box was felt-lined and dotted by perhaps two or three dozen shallow pits. Each was filled with diamonds. For a moment no one spoke. Later, Lambert would remember the tomblike silence and the feeling of nausea coiling in his throat.
“My god,” he heard Sweet whisper. “I thought it was a prank.”
One of the stranger reverberations of the Mason affair concerned a woman Lambert had known only by reputation—and it was a colorful one. The most recent entry filed in his mind was that she’d vomited at the Director’s table amid her involuntary retirement. Maybe a week after the trip to the Freeport, Sweet had asked him to contact the woman, a former case officer by the name of Artemis Procter, to invite her to Langley for a meeting. Normally one of his aides would have arranged the logistics, but on Sweet’s explicit instruction, Lambert made the call himself. He began by explaining that the DDO wished to speak with Procter about “the Mason suicide.” Sweet had insisted that he use those exact words when describing the meeting’s purpose. The conversation that followed had been so singularly bizarre that he would later be able to replay it all, word for word:
“Put Debs on the line, then,” Procter said.
“No, no. She wants to speak to you in person. Here at Langley.”
“Just put her on the goddamn line.”
“I . . . I can’t. It’s not that type of conversation.”
“Well, now, that sounds awful.”
“Uh . . . so, could you come up here on Thursday? For a one p.m.?”
“This a practical joke?”
“It is not.”
“Thursday I got work. I’m covering the afternoon Jumparoos and I’m in the doghouse with my cousin-boss as it is.”
“We would be happy to contact your employer and let them know that your presence is requested by the CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations. Obviously, we will cover your travel.”
“Look . . . uh . . . what’s your name again?”
“Lambert.”
“Did we know each other when I was on the inside, Lambert?”
“No. I’m afraid our paths never crossed.”
“Well, look. I have history with Debs and also with Gosford, and it’s mostly variations on a dumpster fire. But if Debs is sincere and wants me to come up to Langley, she will send down one of the Air Branch birds the Seventh Floor groupies use when flying in the States. I am willing to trek up to Orlando International Airport to meet the thing. Willing but not happy about it. That’s my concession. A drive to Orlando. You—”
“Ms. Procter,” Lambert interjected, “we will reimburse you for all expenses. I cannot—”
“Shut—”
“I cannot—”
“Shut up for—”
“Ms. Procter! I cannot. I—”
“Lambert. Lambert. Lambert . . .” She just repeated his name until he stopped trying to talk over her. The line went silent for a few moments. He heard the tinkle of ice into a glass.
“Phew,” she piped in. “Where was I? Yes, the plane. You will tell your master Deborah Sweet that I will not kowtow to Langley unless you send the plane. And this is not about first cabin accommodation and pampering, understand? I’m no prima donna. I’m barely five feet tall, so I don’t give a shit about leg room. And with you allegedly reimbursing my commercial travel, I also do not give a shit about the in-flight liquor charges. No, this is about my firm belief that it is well within the realm of possibility that I will fly to Washington, there will be no meeting, and I will be shafted with the bill. So, there you have it.”
“I would be happy to book the tickets so that you do not incur any personal expenses.”
“Go talk to Debs and call me back when the answer on the plane is yes.”
When Lambert relayed her demand, the DDO’s mouth twitched into an icy smile. Sweet’s grim nod of approval signaled to Lambert that this was the sort of relationship in which minor concessions were extracted only through brutal warfare. Two days later the Bombardier duly collected the Procter woman from Orlando, and that afternoon she was sitting with Lambert outside Sweet’s office. She was indeed short, but it was her hair that struck him. Jet-black, it was the curliest hair he had ever seen. Like a cartoon character who’d been plugged into an electrical socket. Inside the office, the only thing she’d said to Lambert was, “No chocolate muffins, huh?”
Before he could ask her what she meant, Sweet opened the door. He watched the two of them shake hands and stare each other down with some weird blend of disdain and amusement, as if they might stab each other to death and have a ball doing it. The DDO told Lambert to sit this one out. The woman went inside and Sweet shut the door.
The meeting had been scheduled for thirty minutes but went on for more than ninety. Lambert, whose office sat immediately across from-Sweet’s, heard yelling and shouting on two, maybe three occasions. Muffled voices were raised with some frequency. There were brief patches of laughter. At one point he swore he heard the clink of a glass. After the Procter woman had left, Lambert shuffled in to ask the DDO what, if anything, had come from the meeting. Were there to be follow-ups? Taskings to distribute? A hint of vodka floated on the air, and the empty table was decorated by two tiny paper parasols protruding from drained glasses standing proudly in rings of their own condensation. The DDO was seated at her desk scribbling in a notebook.
Lambert, who’d grown accustomed to his boss’s moods and facial grammar, believed the meeting had left her both wildly agitated and thoroughly entertained. The corner of her left eyelid was twitching, a clear relic of her anger. But she was also smiling. It was a genuine, happy smile, and he had the impression that she did not even know she was doing it. He knew she could show both emotions, but he’d never seen her manage both at once. She waved him off. “I’ve got it,” she said.
Less than six months in the DDO’s office, and Lambert was already something of a meeting connoisseur: long and short, large and small, tense and happy, vapid and productive, he had seen it all. Though he knew little of the meeting’s content beyond the DDO’s vague subject line, its apparent chaos and the strange light now pouring from Sweet’s face left him with the singular impression that something weighty had been turned over, and that Sweet and Procter had done the lifting together. He also knew that they had made decisions requiring Sweet to take action. After all, she was jotting down notes in her green notebook, the one she did not share with him.
Lambert saw Procter again about a month later. It was a flyby in the hallway, and he noticed her only because of her spray of hair. She now wore the blue badge of a full-time CIA employee, the lanyard of the China Mission Center, and a look of casual menace. They passed without acknowledgment.
His second sighting came months later during an intramural baseball game, when he was standing in at second base for the Screwdrivers of the Seventh Floor. Procter was playing center field for the Cold Warriors. That game, she hit an infield single in which she nearly bowled over the first basemen while sprinting it out down the line, and Lambert swore that when she slid into second on a hustle double in the bottom of the fifth, she’d gone in spikes up. He’d let the rage pass, remembering the conversation about the plane and the look in Sweet’s eyes after their meeting. In the dugout, though, he had asked why she was playing with Raptis and Monk and the Russia House Cold Warriors, not the Dragons of the China Mission Center.
