Angel Eyes (5 page)

And there was nothing Tori could do but hold him, rocking him gently, looking down at him to let him know she was there, thinking of the last line of the Borges fragment he had quoted before.

Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

BOOK ONE

THE SOFT CELL

Men of action are, after all, only

the instruments of men of thought.

-- AFTER HEINRICH HEINE

ONE

VIRGINIA COUNTRYSIDE/LOS ANGELES

"She was meant to be canned-and she was canned."

' 'What you should say is that you canned her.''

"Should?"

"Yes. This is, essentially, what is operative here."

The two men-one younger, black-haired, hawk-nosed, with penetrating blue eyes, the other, older, lanky, stoop-shouldered, with an aureole of cotton-candy hair-paused along the blue-stone path laid out in concentric circles around an immaculately manicured formal English garden.

The late afternoon sun slid in and out of the elhis and alders, catching in its burnished glow a spray of hyacinth here, a twist of ancient vine there. Just behind the men a large Tudor-style stone and half-timber manor house was snuggled in among rustling beech, sheared cypresses, and well-established magnolia.

"I don't understand you," the younger man said. He was dressed in a white shirt open at the neck, the sleeves rolled up to expose his burly forearhis, and blue jeans, the bottohis of which were tucked neatly into blue Tony Lama lizard cowboy boots. He wore a belt studded with silver Navajo conchos.

' 'You don't?'' The older man could have added "That's odd,'' but didn't. He had the face of a born commander: powerful, shrewd, disarmingly gentle in its deceit. Now, however, the fissures of time had scored his sunken cheeks, thinned his hair, unearthed the tic of a railing nerve. Only the eyes retained the full cunning of his youth. They were the eyes of the boy down the block who dared you to climb the tallest tree, to ride the back bumper of the local bus, and, maddeningly, disdained you whether or not you acceded to his dares.

''When I was somewhat younger than you are now,'' the older man said, "I spent a great deal of time with our cousins in London.'' He gestured at the cherry and hawthorn trees, the sea of crihison and lavender azalea bobbing beneath them. "That's where I discovered my love of gardens."

"But not gardening." Russell Slade, the younger man, could not keep the sardonic tone out of his voice. "The Brits love to tend their gardens.''

' 'And so they should.'' Bernard Godwin, the older man, nodded approvingly. his summer-weight Henry Poole hunting jacket was as immaculate as his garden. his sturdy John Lobb country shoes positively glittered in the sunlight. "When one has little space one can call one's own, it is only prudent to mind it as best one can." Godwin swung abruptly around to face Slade;

their eyes locked. It was essential, Slade knew, not to look away, for Godwin would take that as a sign of weakness. "But this is America, Russell, and here space is not a problem. This land goes on almost forever. The cowboys learned that the hard way a hundred years or more ago. But the same holds true today. That's our one absolute advantage over the English, the Europeans, the Japanese.''

"What, our land?"

"Not the land, per se. But, rather, how having land as a natural resource makes us act and react. And it's our one true link with the Soviets." Bernard Godwin never said Russians. It was always Soviets-and there was a vast difference between the two terms. The Russians were only one people who inhabited the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics along with the Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, the people of the Baltic Republics, the Georgians and the Armenians, the trans-Caucasians, the Ukrainians, not to mention the Moslem minorities, who were part of a whole other microuniverse. Godwin had studied them all in depth. So, of course, had Russell Slade; it was just that his conclusions differed from those of Godwin. As long as the Soviet minorities were a collective thorn in Russia's side, so much the better, he believed. Let the Russian government be distracted and drained by internal problehis for as long as possible. Christ, he thought, why doesn't Bernard see how the minorities bedevil the Russian government? The thought of helping to resolve that immensely difficult issue for the Russians seemed absolutely insane to Slade. Glasnost or no glasnost, an off-balance Russia was, in his opinion, a manageable Russia.

"The Soviet people are not, thank God, the Russian people,'' Godwin said now, making his way around a carefully bordered semicircle of variegated pansies. "Each Soviet minority is like a fruit shaking itself free of the central tree. It is time for a forest to grow up in the wilderness surrounding that one tree.''

Russell Slade shook his head. This is a dead issue as far as the Mall is concerned, he thought. Why won't Bernard give it up? He said, ''Does this in any way bring us back to Tori Nunn?''

Godwin fluttered one rather feminine hand; its ridged back was covered with liver spots. "Tori Nunn was your affair from the beginning. She still is."

Slade recognized in that one snapped retort the edge of the boundary he had crossed. He took a mental pace backward onto safer ground. He was prepared to take his punishment like a man. He nodded. "All right. I admit that it might have been a mistake to bring her back like that.''

"It certainly was for Solares."

"Yes. It was a shame to lose such a valuable agent."

Godwin said, "Let me remind you this isn't a baseball game. It isn't a run the opposition has scored against us. It's a death in the family."

So that's why the old man has summoned me to his summer house in the country, Russell Slade thought. Stone and thatch, birds and flowers, all very bucolic. But there isn't anything bucolic about the old man. He's as full of bile as ever.

Slade looked at Bernard Godwin. If he had ever been under the misapprehension that being made the director of the Mall meant it was his to run, here was the proof it just wasn't so.

Bernard Godwin, the man who created the Mall, despite rumors of ill-health and even imminent death, was still in the thick of it. his to command were the unknowable routes to power, and this power continued to hum inside him like a vast engine.

More than anything else, Russell Slade longed to possess this power. Through guile, cunning, and deceit-Godwin's trine of shadow virtues-Slade had risen faster and farther through the labyrinthine ranks of Bernard Godwin's hybrid brainchild-part espionage network, part global think tank-than anyone save the old man himself. There was no one better than Russell to interpret the disjointed data from farflung field operatives and discover the subtle strategies hidden there. Give him one piece of a puzzle, and he would eventually deliver to you the entire picture. Russell was also a gifted administrator, juggling budgets, maximizing men and materiel in a way no one before him had been able to do. Godwin admired those attributes, and had rewarded Slade for them.

But Slade could not help but suspect that the old man was jealous, too. Though his hands were bony with age, gnarled with arthritis, still they refused to relinquish the reins of power. For Slade had the one thing that the old man did not-indeed, could not-possess: youth. Though Slade was at the heart of the Mail, Godwin had yet to divulge to him the last level of his worldwide contacts, the ultimate power that made even presidents defer to him.

The Mall and its godfather, Bernard Godwin, were and always had been laws unto themselves, and this power was what Russell Slade coveted beyond anything else. The time has come, Slade thought as he watched the old man gazing at his sheared English yews. Damnit, render unto Slade that which is rightfully Slade's!

"Russell, let me give you a bit of advice," Godwin continued. "The moment you cannot control the lives and deaths of your field people, you know it is time for you to step down."

''You talk as if this is the first casualty we've had in the field.''

The flapping of that feminine hand again. "Of course we've lost agents before. But in my day they were sacrificed for a greater cause. There was a meaning to their deaths. Everything was planned. Do you understand me?"

In my day, indeed! Godwin was as callous as they come, Slade thought. How quickly will he sever me if the situation gets too hot? Has he already got someone lined up to take my place? By God, I'll fight to the death to keep this position.

Slade understood that Godwin had abruptly distanced himself from the current situation, just as he understood that his own immediate priority was to regain the equilibrium Godwin had stripped from him. Godwin loved nothing better than to prod his people. Pressure, he firmly believed, sharpened the wits and brought out the best in his people-and if it did not, they were severed from the Mall.

Without betraying any of his thoughts, Slade said blandly, "You know, Bernard, it occurs to me that you've been spending

altogether too much time with the administration's spin doctors. Those presidential apologists who call themselves aides love to rewrite recent history, and so do you. I notice that you're deliberately ignoring the losses the Mall suffered at the hands of the KGB's Operation Boomerang."

Godwin grunted "Ancient history."

"Really? Your predilection-dare I say it, borders on obsession?-toward helping Soviet dissidents is all too well documented. It cost us ten good agents, lost to the KGB, who were running the bogus dissident cell inside Russia. The KGB sucked in a lot of people with that scam-including you, the expert's expert on the Soviet Union.''

"That was a bad dream, all right," Godwin said. "I don't mind telling you it gave me some sleepless nights. But in the end, I put that slip down to a temporary loss of my acute sense of cynicism."

Slade, thinking of how cynical Godwin's response was in itself, shook his head. "No, your error was in placing too much trust in your friends over there.''

''In the end, friends are all that make a man a man,'' Godwin said firmly.

"Even in this shadow world of ours?" Slade said skeptically.

"Especially here." Bernard, in the shadow of one of his hoary hawthorn trees, never seemed more mysterious. He had the kind of soft eyes that engendered trust, that completely masked his cynical heart. It was all too easy to believe what he said even when you suspected him of spin control: distorting me truth to suit his purposes. "I don't know about you, Russell, but it's a friend I want at the other end of a three a.m. phone call when my ass is in the fire in Istanbul or Prague or some other godforsaken red zone when the opposition has blown my cover and is closing in, not some operative who may or may not have been turned while I was looking the other way."

He gave Slade a tiny, ironic smile that made Slade's stomach contract. "Sorry," he said in a gentle tone of voice. "I sometimes forget that you have no field experience." A rebuke or simply a reminder of fact? With Godwin it was impossible to tell. "That's the way I came up, because that's the way our shadow world worked in the old days." He grunted. "You have your own areas of expertise, Russell, and believe me, I appreciate all of them. But it's times like these that make me long for the relative simplicity of the past."

"Damnit, I know I made the proper decision," Slade said. ''I was sure that Ariel Solares would bring Tori in. A little honey on the end of the hook, because otherwise I knew, under the circumstances, she wouldn't consider it."

"Of course she wouldn't," Godwin said, pouncing on the opening Slade had given him. "But if you had made her a friend-an ally-instead of alienating her when she worked for you, all this would have been avoided. Tori would be here now, and Solares would still be alive."

The best course when Godwin delivered a verbal low blow, Slade had learned, was to ignore it. Godwin responded to points well made, not to cries of foul. "Solares was to pique her interest with a look at what he was working on," Slade said. "In addition, because there is still a question of her fitness, he was to maneuver her into a challenging physical and mental confrontation. He was meant to look for any deterioration of her skills. The plan was perfect: subtle and psychologically sound. But somewhere along the line Solares must have gotten careless, and someone took him out."

"Solares was your man. You ran him directly. In retrospect, you may agree with me that perhaps, given your lack of experience in the field, that was an error in judgment. It was your call to make, and I didn't interfere. But now's the time to examine your motives. That's why you chose to run him directly, wasn't it? To lure Tori Nunn out of her isolation, to be ultimately in control of her once more.''

"As far as the canning Tori Nunn from the Mall," Slade said, "I recall you gave your blessing to the severance." Immediately, he regretted saying it. In trying to regain control of me conversation, he had walked into one of Godwin's verbal traps.

"I gave you my assent, Russell. Nothing more." The old man refused to give up an inch of territory; he was relentless. ''It was your decision.''

Slade looked at him. "Do you mean to tell me now that you disagreed with it?"

"Are you deliberately missing the point?" Godwin said, neatly sidestepping the kind of answer Slade was seeking. "It was your decision. You made it. Now you must deal with the ramifications."

"What ramifications?" Slade said. "This situation is without nuance."

"Bullshit," Godwin said, leaning toward Slade. "Your relationship with Tori Nunn is all unfinished business. Yes, you made the proper decision with Solares, Russell, but you must see that you made it for all the wrong reasons. The 'situation,' as you choose to refer to it, is fraught with psychological nuance."

"I'll take care of Tori Nunn myself," Slade said angrily. "Okay? Will that satisfy you?"

"I want my director's full concentration on this crisis, that's all," Godwin said soothingly. He paused to allow the tension to dissipate; no one knew how to orchestrate a conversation better than Bernard Godwin. "What have the caretakers come up with?" The caretakers were the Mall's group of forensic specialists who were sent in to analyze "wet work" sites.