Extraordinary Powers (9 page)

“And Hal is implicated, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Not publicly. Not yet. I don’t even think the Senate has heard these tales. They have heard only that a good deal of money is missing. And so Langley internal affairs has hired me to look into this. To see what Hal Sinclair was up to in the last days of his life. To find out why he was killed. To find the missing money, to find out where it went, who was involved. The investigation must not be done inhouse—the corruption is too rampant. Thus, Truslow Associates.”

“How much missing money are we talking about?”

He shrugged. “A fortune. Let me leave it at that for now.”

“And you need me … “

“I need you to find out what Hal was doing, meeting with Orlov.” He looked up at me, his brown eyes bloodshot, moist. “Ben, you still have the perfect right to say no. I’ll understand. Given, especially, what you’ve been through. But from everything I’m told, you were one of the best in the field.”

I shrugged, flattered and appreciative, but not sure how to reply.

Surely he’d heard tales of my “recklessness.”

“You and I have a lot in common,” he said. “I could tell that about you from the start. You’re a straight shooter. You gave the Agency your all, but you always felt it could be better than it was. I’ll tell you something: in all the years I’ve been with the Agency, I’ve seen its fundamental purpose jeopardized by ideologues and zealots on the left and the right. Angleton once said something to me: he said, Alex, you’re one of the best we have—but the paradoxical thing is, what makes you so good at the work is the fact that on some level you disapprove of it.”

Truslow laughed ruefully. “At the time I denied it till I was red in the face. But in the end I realized he was right. My gut tells me you’re a similar creature, Ben. We do what we think has to be done, but there’s a part of us that stands aloof in disapproval.” He took a deep sip from his water glass and smiled to himself, seemingly embarrassed that he’d gone on so.

He slid the wine list across the tablecloth toward me, as if inviting me to make a selection. “Could you glance at this, Ben? Pick out something nice.”

I opened the leather booklet and looked through it quickly. “I like the Grand-Puy-Ducasse Pauillac quite a bit,” I said.

Truslow smiled and took the wine list back. “What was on the top of page three?” I thought for a second, brought the picture to memory. “A Stag’s Leap Merlot, ‘82.”

Truslow nodded.

“But I’m not much into performing like a circus animal,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I apologize. That’s a very rare gift. How I envy you.”

“It allowed me to coast through any class at Harvard in which memorization was crucial—which included English, history, the history of art … “

“Well, you see, Ben, your … eidetic memory is a real advantage in work like this, an assignment that might well involve sequences of codes and the like. If, that is, you’re still willing to accept. Incidentally, I’m completely amenable to the terms you and Bill worked out.”

The terms I extorted, he meant, but was too polite to say. “Uh, Alex, when Bill and I discussed those terms, I had no idea what you wanted me for.”

“That’s quite all right—”

“No, let me finish. If I understand you correctly—that what this comes down to is clearing Hal Sinclair’s name—then I certainly have no intention to be mercenary.”

Truslow frowned, his expression stern. “Mercenary! For God’s sake, Ben, I know about your financial plight. At the very least, this assignment will give me the excuse to help you out. If you’d like, I can even put you on our payroll as well”

“Thanks, but not necessary.”

“Well, then,” he said. “I’m glad you’re on board.”

We shook hands, as if ritually consummating the deal. “Listen, Ben, my wife, Margaret, and I are going to our place in New Hampshire tonight.

Opening it up for the spring. We’d love it if you and Molly could have supper with us—nothing fancy, barbecue or whatever. Meet the grandkids.” “Sounds nice,” I said.

“Tomorrow possible?”

Tomorrow was hectic, but I could clear some time. “Yeah, sure,” I said.

“Tomorrow.”

For the rest of the afternoon I could barely concentrate. Could Molly’s father seriously have been involved in some sort of conspiracy with the former head of the KGB? Was it possible that he had actually embezzled money—“a fortune,” as Truslow put it? It made no sense.

Yet as an explanation for his murder … it did make a certain sense, did it not?

A knot of tension had formed in my stomach and evidently had no plans to untie itself.

The phone buzzed; Darlene announced that Molly was on the phone.

“What time are we meeting Dee and Linda?” She was calling from some noisy corridor in the hospital.

“Eight, but I’ll cancel if you like. Under the circumstances.”

“No. I—I want to.”

“They’ll understand, Mol.”

“Don’t cancel. It’d be good to go out.”

There was, thankfully, no time to brood that afternoon. My four o’clock arrived punctually: Mel Kornstein was a rotund man in his early fifties, who wore too-stylish, expensive Italian clothes and his tinted aviator-style glasses always slightly askew. He had the distracted, unfocused look of a genius, which I believe he was. Kornstein had made a tidy fortune from inventing a computer game called Spacetron, which you’ve no doubt heard of. If you haven’t, basically it’s a chase game, in which you, the pilot of a small spacecraft, are supposed to elude the evil spacecraft intent on destroying you and then planet Earth. This may sound silly, but the game is a marvel of computer technology. It’s all done in 3-D so lifelike you’re really convinced you’re there—you really feel as if the comets and meteors and enemy spaceships and all that are coming right at you. This is accomplished by means of an ingenious software driver device Kornstein patented, a real breakthrough. Add that to his patented voice simulator that barks commands at you—“Too far to the left!” or “You’re getting too close!”—and you have an explosion of color and sound, all on your home computer. And Kornstein’s company had revenues of something like a hundred million dollars a year.

But now another software company had released a product so similar to Spacetron that Mel Kornstein’s revenues had plummeted. Needless to say, he wanted to do something about it.

He sank into the leather chair at the side of my desk, radiating darkest despair. We chatted for a few moments, but he was not in an expansive mood. He handed over to me a box containing the rival game, which was called Space Time I popped it into my desktop computer, booted it up, and was astonished to see how close a copy it was.

“These guys didn’t even try to be original, did they?” I said.

Kornstein removed his eyeglasses and polished them on a shirttail. “I want to shut the fucking bastards down,” he said.

“Let’s slow down a minute here,” I said. “I’m going to have to make an independent determination as to how close the patent infringement is.”

“I want to screw the bastards,” he said.

“All in good time. Let’s go through each of the claims in the patent, one at a time.”

“It’s identical,” Kornstein said, putting his eyeglasses back on, still askew. “Am I going to have a case here, or what?”

“Well, computer games are patentable on the same principles that govern, let’s say, board games. You’re really patenting the relationship between the physical elements and the concepts behind them, the way they interact.”

“I just want to screw ‘.”

I nodded. “We’ll do our best,” I said.

Focaccia was one of those fabulously hip, vaguely offensive, yuppie northern Italian restaurants in the Back Bay that serve a lot of arugula and radicchio, where all the patrons are young and beautiful and wear black and work in advertising. Between the clamor of voices and the thundering white man’s rap music, the place is deafeningly loud, too, which seems to be another requirement of pretentious northern Italian restaurants located in urban American settings.

Molly was late, but my closest friend, Ike, and his wife, Linda, were already shouting at each other across the table in what looked like a vicious marital argument but was just an attempt to communicate. Isaac Cowan and I had gone to law school together, where he specialized in defeating me at tennis. He’s now got some corporate law job that’s so unspeakably dull, even he can’t bring himself to talk about it, but I know it has something to do with reinsurance. Linda, who was seven months pregnant at the time, is a shrink who mostly treats children.

Both of them are tall, freckled, and redheaded unnervingly similar in physical type and I find them both easy to be with.

They were saying something about his mother coming for a visit. Then Ike turned to me and mentioned a Celtics game we had gone to last week.

We talked a bit about work, about Linda’s pregnancy (she wanted to ask Molly something about a test her oh-gyn was forcing upon her), about my backhand (virtually nonexistent), and eventually about Molly’s father.

Ike and Linda had always seemed a little uncomfortable talking about Molly’s famous father, never sure when they were prying, not wanting to seem too curious about him. Ike knew a little about my work for CIA, though I had made it clear I preferred not to say much. He knew, too, that I had been married before, that my first wife had been killed in an accident, and not much else. Naturally, that limited our conversation at times. They expressed their condolences, asked how Molly was doing.

I knew I couldn’t say anything about what had preoccupied me of late, certainly nothing about Hal Sinclair’s murder.

While we were finishing our appetizers (as a matter of principle, no one ordered focaccia), Molly arrived, profusely apologetic.

“How was your day?” she asked as she kissed me. She gave me a look that was a second or two too long, which meant she was asking about Truslow.

“Fine,” I said.

She kissed Ike and Linda, sat down, and said, “I don’t think I can take this much longer.” “Medicine?” Linda asked.

“The preemies,” Molly replied, medical jargon for premature babies.

“Today I admitted twins and another baby, and the three patients together weighed less than ten pounds. I spend all my time taking care of these critically ill little things, trying to put in umbilical artery catheters, dealing with stressed-out families.”

Dee and Linda shook their heads sympathetically.

“Kids with AIDS,” she continued, “or bacterial infections around the brain, and being on call every third night—” I her. “Let’s leave all that behind for now, huh?”

She turned to me, her eyes widening. “Leave it behind.” “All right, Mol,” I said quietly. Ike and Linda, looking uncomfortable, concentrated on their Caesar salads.

“I’m sorry,” she said I took her hand under the table. Work sometimes strung her out in this way, but I knew she still hadn’t recovered from the shock of seeing that photograph.

Throughout dinner she was distant; she nodded and smiled politely, but her thoughts were obviously elsewhere. Dee and Linda no doubt attributed her behavior to her father’s recent death, which was largely accurate.

In the cab on the way home we had a quarrel, in fiercely whispered tones, about Truslow and the Corporation and the CIA, everything she had once made me promise I would give up forever. “Dammit,” she whispered, “once you start dealing with Truslow, you’re back in that awful game.”

“Molly—” I began, but she was not interruptable “Lie down with dogs and you get fleas. Dammit, you made a promise to me you’d never go back to that stuff.”

“I’m not going back to that stuff, Mol,” I said.

She was silent for a moment “You talked to him about Father’s murder, didn’t you?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t.” A minor falsehood; but I didn’t want to tell her about the alleged embezzlement or the Senate hearings.

“But whatever he wants you for, it has something to do with that, doesn’t it?”

“In a sense, yes.”

The cabbie swerved to avoid a pothole, slammed on the horn, and cut into the left lane.

We were both silent for a moment. After a minute or so—as if she’d been deliberately trying for some land of dramatic effect—she said, too casually, even airily: “You know, I caded the Fairfax County medical examiner’s office.”

Momentarily I was confused. “Fairfax—?”

“Where Dad was killed. To get a copy of his autopsy report. The law states that immediate family members can get copies if they want.”

“And?”

“It’s sealed.”

“Meaning what?”

“It’s not a public record any longer. The only parties allowed to see his autopsy report are the district attorney and the attorney general of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

“Why? Because he’s—was—CIA?”

“No. Because someone involved in the case decided something we already know. It was a homicide.”

We rode the rest of the way home in silence, and for some lunatic reason had another fight after we got back, and ended up going to bed furious at each other.

It’s funny, but now I look back on mat evening with fondness, because it was one of the last normal nights we’d ever spend together, just two nights before it happened.

EIGHT.

That night, the last normal night in my life, I had the dream. I dreamed about Paris, a dream as lifelike as any waking nightmare, a dream I have suffered through perhaps thousands of times.

The dream always goes like this:

I am in a clothing store on the rue du Faubourg-St. Honore\ a men’s clothing store that is a rabbit’s warren of small, bright rooms, and I have lost my way, moving from room to room, looking for the rendezvous point I have laboriously arranged with the field agent, and at last I find a dressing room. It is the rendezvous spot, and there, hanging on a peg, is a sweater, a navy blue cardigan, which I take, as we have arranged, and in the pocket I find, as we have also arranged, a scrap of paper containing the coded message.

I spend too long poring over the message, and now I am late for the phone call I am supposed to make, and frantically, I go from room to room in this wretched store, looking for a telephone, asking for one, unable to locate one, until at last, in the basement of the building, I find a phone. It is a bulky, old fashioned French phone, two-tone, tan and brown, and for some reason it will not work, try after try after try, and then-thank God!—it rings.