Extreme Denial (3 page)

Decker concealed the tense emotion that made him briefly silent. The assassination of Ambassador Robbins had been the outrage that caused extremely powerful figures in Washington to lose their customary caution and demand that something be done to stop these monsters—one way or another. The covert pressure on Decker’s superiors was the reason McKittrick had attracted so much favorable attention among them. If McKittrick’s contacts could positively identify the terrorists responsible for the assassination, half the problem would be solved. The other half would be what to do with the information.

“Maybe they just happened to be in the area,” Decker said.

“They drove away laughing.”

Decker’s throat felt constricted. “Do you know where they live?”

“Renata gave me that information,” McKittrick interrupted. “But obviously they won’t stay at the addresses forever.” He gestured for emphasis. “They have to be dealt with soon.”

Yet another lapse in tradecraft, Decker noted with concern. Contacts should never know what a handler is thinking. And what did McKittrick mean by “dealt with”?

“Renata tells me they have a club they like to go to,” McKittrick said. “If we can get them all together ...”

6

“What the hell were you doing in there?” Decker asked as he walked angrily with McKittrick after the meeting was over. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Decker glanced tensely around. Squinting from the glare of numerous passing headlights, he noticed an alley and gripped McKittrick’s left arm to guide him away from the area’s clamorous nightlife.

“You compromised the assignment,” Decker whispered hoarsely as soon as he was away from pedestrians. “You gave them your
real name”

McKittrick looked awkward and didn’t respond.

“You’re sleeping with that woman,” Decker said. “Didn’t your trainers explain to you that you never, never, never become personally involved with your contacts?”

“What makes you think I’m sleeping with ...?”

“Your imitation of stand-up mouth-to-mouth resuscitation this afternoon.”

“You
followed
me?”

“It wasn’t very damned hard. You’re breaking so many rules, I can’t keep up with.... From the smell of alcohol on you, I have to assume you were partying with them before I arrived.”

“I was trying to get them to feel comfortable with me.”

“
Money
,” Decker said. “That’s what makes them comfortable. Not your winning personality. This is business, not a social club. And what did you mean by ‘dealt with’?”

“ ‘Dealt with’? I don’t remember saying ..

“It sounded to me as if you were actually suggesting, in front of outsiders, that the people we’re after are going to be ...” In spite of his low tone and the relative secrecy of the alley, Decker couldn’t bring himself to say the incriminating words.

“Extreme denial,” McKittrick said.

“What?”

“Isn’t that the new euphemism? It used to be ‘terminate with extreme prejudice.’ Now it’s ‘extreme denial.’ “

“Where the hell did you hear ...?”

“Isn’t that what this operation’s about? Those bastards will keep killing until somebody stops them permanently.” Decker pivoted, staring from the darkness of the alley toward the pedestrians on the brightly lit street, afraid that someone might have overheard. “Have you gone insane? Have you told anyone else what you just told me?” McKittrick hesitated.

“The woman?” Decker demanded. “You told the woman?”

“Well, I had to introduce the idea to her. How else was I going to get them to do it?”

“Jesus,” Decker muttered.

“Plausible deniability. I’ve invented a rival network.
They
take out the first group, then phone the police and call themselves the Enemies of Mussolini.”

“Keep your voice down, damn it.”

“No one can prove we’re involved.”

“The
woman
can,” Decker said.

“Not when I disappear and she doesn’t have physical evidence.”

“She knows your
name
.”

“My
first
name only,” McKittrick said. “She loves me. She’ll do anything for me.”

“You ...” Decker leaned close in the darkness, wanting to make certain that only McKittrick heard his fierce whisper. “Listen to me carefully. The United States government is not in the business of assassination. It does not track down and kill terrorists. It accumulates evidence and lets the courts decide the appropriate punishment.”

“Yeah, sure, right. Just like the Israelis didn’t send a hit team after the terrorists who killed eleven Jewish athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.”

“What the Israelis did has nothing to do with
us. That
operation was canceled because one of the men they killed was innocent. That’s why
we’re
not in the assassination business.”

“Fine. Now
you
listen to me,” McKittrick said. “If we let those bastards get away because we don’t have the guts to do what’s right, both of us will be out of a job.”

“Noon tomorrow.”

“What?”

“Go to your apartment and stay there,” Decker said. “Don’t do anything. Don’t contact the woman. Don’t go out for a newspaper. Don’t do
anything.
I will knock on your door at noon sharp. I will tell you what our superiors have decided to do about you. If I were you, I’d have my bags packed.”

7

Happy fortieth birthday, Decker told himself. In his bathroom mirror, the haggard expression on his face confirmed how poorly he had slept because of his preoccupation with McKittrick. His headache from jet lag and the choking haze of cigarette smoke he had been forced to breathe persisted. A late-night room-service meal of fettuccine and chicken marsala sat heavily in his stomach. He seemed to have gained a few more lines of character in his rugged features, the start of crow’s-feet around his watchful aquamarine eyes. As if all of that wasn’t enough, he found a gray hair in his slightly long, wavy, sandy hair. Muttering, he jerked it out.

Saturday morning. The start of the weekend for most people, Decker thought, but not in
my
line of work. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt the sense of leisure that he associated with a true weekend. For no reason that he immediately understood, he remembered following McKittrick down the Spanish Steps and past the house where Keats had died. He imagined Keats coughing his life away, the TB filling him up, choking him. So young, but already having achieved greatness.

I need some time off.

Decker put on jogging clothes, tried to ignore the hazy automobile exhaust and the crowded sidewalks, and ran to the international real estate consulting firm that he had reported to the day before, satisfied that his erratic route would keep anyone from following him. After showing his identification, he was admitted to an office that had a scrambler attached to its phone. Five minutes later, he was talking to his supervisor at a similar international real estate consulting firm in Alexandria, Virginia. The supervisor had a scrambler calibrated to the same frequency as was Decker’s.

The conversation lasted fifteen minutes and made Decker even more frustrated. He learned that McKittrick’s father had been informed of Decker’s intentions, probably by means of a phone call that McKittrick had made to his father late the night before (Decker could only hope that McKittrick had used a pay phone and spoken with discretion). The father, not just a legend in the intelligence community but a former chairman of the National Security Council who still retained considerable political influence, had questioned Decker’s own professionalism and accused Decker of attempting to have McKittrick transferred so that Decker could take the credit for McKittrick’s achievement in finding the terrorists. While Decker’s superior claimed that he privately sided with Decker over McKittrick, the fact was that prudence and his pension forced him to ignore Decker’s warnings and to keep McKittrick in place. “Baby-sit him,” the superior said. “Prevent him from making mistakes. Verify the rest of the information in his reports. We’ll pass the information to the Italian authorities and pull both of you out. I promise you’ll never have to work with him again.”

“It’s right now I’m worried about.”

Decker’s run back to his hotel did nothing to ease his frustration. He placed towels on the floor of his room and did 150 push-ups, then the same amount of sit-ups, sweat dripping from his strong shoulders, narrow hips, and sinewy legs. He practiced several martial-arts moves, then showered and put on fresh jeans as well as a clean blue oxford-cloth shirt. His brown leather jacket covered his pistol. His stomach continued to bother him.

8

It was noon exactly when, as scheduled, Decker knocked on McKittrick’s door.

No one answered.

Decker knocked again, waited, frowned, knocked a third time, waited, frowned harder, glanced to each side along the corridor, then used the lock picks concealed in the collar of his jacket. Ten seconds later, he was in the apartment, securing the door behind him, his weapon already drawn. Had McKittrick stood him up, or had something happened to him? With painstaking caution, Decker started searching.

The living room was deserted. So were the bathroom, the kitchen, and the bedroom, including the closets. Decker hated closets—he never knew what might be crouching in them. His chest tight, he completed the search, sat on a padded chair in the living room, and analyzed the possibilities. Nothing in the apartment seemed out of place, but that proved nothing. McKittrick could be in trouble somewhere else. Or it could be, Decker thought for the second time, that the son of a bitch stood me up.

Decker waited, in the process conducting another search of McKittrick’s apartment, this time in detail: in, under, and behind every drawer; under the mattress and the bed; under the chairs and sofa; in the light fixtures; in and behind the toilet tank.

What he found appalled him. Not only had McKittrick failed to destroy his notes after sending in his report but, as well, he had hidden the notes in a place not hard to predict— beneath shelf paper in the kitchen. Next to the names of the members of the group Decker had met the previous night, he found addresses, one of which was for the apartment building into which McKittrick had gone with Renata. Decker also found the address of something called the Tiber Club.

Decker memorized the information. He put the notes on a saucer, burned them, crumbled the ashes into powder, peered out the kitchen’s small window, saw the brick wall of an alley, and let a breeze scatter the ashes. Hunger fought with the discomfort in his stomach. He cut a slice from a loaf of bread, returned to the living room, and slowly ate, all the while frowning at the front door.

By then, it was two in the afternoon. Decker’s misgivings strengthened. But what should I do about them? he wondered. He could go back to the international real estate consulting firm and make an emergency telephone call to warn his supervisor that McKittrick had failed to be present at an appointment. But what would
that
accomplish, aside from creating the impression that Decker was determined to find fault with McKittrick? The guy’s tradecraft was sloppy—Decker had already made an issue of that. So wasn’t it likely that McKittrick had either forgotten or deliberately ignored the appointment? Maybe he was in bed with Renata right now.

If that’s the case, he might be smarter than
I
am, Decker thought. When was the last time
I
was in bed with anybody? He couldn’t remember. Because he traveled so much, he had few close female friends, all of them in his line of work. Casual pickups were out of the question—even before the spread of AIDS, Decker had avoided one-night stands on the theory that intimacy equaled vulnerability, that it didn’t make sense to let down his guard with someone he knew nothing about.

This damned job, Decker thought. It not only makes you paranoid; it makes you a monk.

He glanced around the depressing living room. His nostrils felt irritated by the smell of must. His stomach continued to bother him.

Happy fortieth birthday, he told himself again.

9

Decker had finished all the bread in the apartment by the time a key scraped in the lock. It was almost 9:00
P.M.
McKittrick rushed in, breathless, and froze when he saw Decker.

“Shut the door,” Decker said.

“What are you—”

“We had an appointment, remember? Shut the door.” McKittrick obeyed. “Weren’t you told? Didn’t my father—”

“He relayed a message to me, all right. But that didn’t seem a reason to cancel our chat.” Decker stood. “Where the hell have you been?”

“You don’t
know?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t been
watching
?”

“Make sense.”

McKittrick hurried to the television set and turned it on. “Three different television crews were there. Surely one of the channels is still broadcasting from ...” His hand shook as he kept switching stations.
“There.”

At first, Decker didn’t understand what he was seeing. Abruptly the loud, confusing images sent a wave of apprehension through him. Thick black smoke choked the sky. Flames burst from windows. Amid a section of wall that had toppled, firemen struggled with hoses, spewing water toward a large blazing building. Fire trucks wailed to a stop among the chaos of other emergency vehicles, police cars, ambulances, more fire trucks. Appalled, Decker realized that some of the wailing came not from sirens but from bum victims being lifted onto stretchers, their faces charred, twisted with pain, not recognizably human. Unmoving bodies lay under blankets as policemen forced a crowd back.

“What is it? What in God’s name happened?”

Before McKittrick could answer, a television reporter was talking about terrorists, about the Children of Mussolini, about the worst incident yet of anti-American violence, about twenty-three American tourists killed and another forty-three injured in a massive explosion, members of a Salt Lake City tour group that had been enjoying a banquet at the Tiber Club in honor of their final night in Rome.