Legends (53 page)

“Who’s Lincoln Dittmann?”

“Someone I came across in another incarnation.”

“What do I do when I find the house?” Buy it.

“Why don’t you come with me?”

“I have some loose ends to take care of. I’ll turn up in Jonestown when I’ve finished.”

“How will you find me?”

“Jonestown is a small town. I’ll ask for the gorgeous dish with a permanent squint in her eyes and a ghost of a smile on her lips.”

Stella relished the coolness of the night air. The headlights streaking past led her to imagine that she and Martin were stranded on an island of stillness in a world of perpetual motion. “Do you really remember what happened to you in Moscow?” she asked.

He smiled. “No. A curtain screened off the fragment of my life that I lived under the legend Jozef Kafkor. But what I’ve lost won’t change anything for us. The part of Martin Odum’s life that I want to remember begins here.”

1997: LINCOLN DITTMANN CONNECTS THE DOTS

U.S. Government Printing Office Annex. Harvey Cleveland speaking. How can I help you?” “Do you recognize my voice, Felix?”

“Tell you the truth, no. Am I supposed to?”

“Does a hangar under the Pulaski Skyway ring a bell? A crazy Texan named Leroy was about to shoot you. You jumped a mile when you heard his wrist bone splinter.”

Felix Klick could be heard chuckling into the phone. “Speak of the devil,” he said. “Lincoln Dittmann. How’d you get this number? It’s supposed to be an unlisted hotline.”

“How are you, Felix?”

“Hang on I’m going to scramble this call.” There was a burst of static, then Felix’s voice came on line again, loud and clear. “I’m almost but not quite retired. Six weeks, three days, four and a half hours to go and I’m out of here. What about you?”

“I’m more or less okay.”

“Which is it more or less?”

“More, actually.”

“Your memory coming back?”

“Nothing’s wrong with my memory, Felix. You’re confusing me with Martin Odum.”

Lincoln’s remark startled Felix. “I guess I am,” he admitted warily. “You are… Lincoln Dittmann?”

“In the flesh.”

“Why are you calling?”

“I’m connecting the dots. I thought you could fill in some of the blanks.”

“Tell me what you know,” he said guardedly. “Maybe I’ll hint at what you don’t know.”

“I know what happened to Jozef Kafkor in Prigorodnaia, Felix. He was the cutout between Crystal Quest’s operations folks at the CIA and the Oligarkh, Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov. When Jozef figured out that Quest was part of the Prigorodnaia operation when he figured out she originated the operation he must have threatened to take the matter up with an assortment of congressmen or senators, at which point Jozef was tortured and starved by the Oligarkh’s hired hands, and eventually buried alive.”

“I’m hanging on your every word, Lincoln.”

“You were a counterterrorism wonk before they put you out to pre retirement pasture, changing diapers for clients in the FBI’s Witness Protection Program. I seem to remember you’d been posted to the American embassy in Moscow at one point in your career. Were you in Moscow when they brought in Jozef Kafkor, Felix?”

Lincoln could almost hear Klick smiling. “It’s within the realm of possibility,” the FBI man acknowledged.

“With your rank,” Lincoln said, talking rapidly, leaving precious little breathing space between sentences, “you would have been the top FBI gun at the embassy. You would have picked up scuttlebutt about the DDO running a secret operation via a cutout. When Jozef turned up on your doorstep, it would have crossed your mind that he could be the cutout his physical condition, the evidence of torture on his body, his mental state would have suggested that the DDO operation had gone off the tracks.” Lincoln came up for air. “Why were the Oligarkh and Samat ex filtrated

Felix actually sighed. “They’d been living on the edge for years the Moscow gang wars, the Chechens, certain factions inside the Russian Federal Security Service, disgruntled KGB hands who found themselves out in the cold, Yeltsin’s political enemies, wannabe capitalists whom the Oligarkh had ruined on his way up, take your pick. And then Jozef Kafkor comes on the scene Jozef and his scruples. Quest would have assured the Oligarkh she was the only one who heard his qualms, but the Ugor-Zhilovs, Tzvetan and Samat, must have had their doubts. After all, Quest had a vested interested in lying to them to keep the operation up and running indefinitely. When Jozef was rescued from the grave the Oligarkh dug for him and ended up wandering the streets of Moscow, the Ugor-Zhilovs didn’t swallow Quest’s story that he couldn’t remember the Jozef Kafkor legend. Samat cracked first. He didn’t like the idea of coming to the States. He thought he’d be safer tucked away in a Jewish settlement on the West Bank of the Jordan, so he got himself into Israel. The Oligarkh held on longer, but in the end he cracked, too, and they brought him in.”

“To the Witness Protection Program?”

“No way. He was too important for Quest to entrust to the FBI. Her DDO wallahs created a legend for the Oligarkh themselves and settled him somewhere on the East Coast of America.”

“Meanwhile you had Kastner and his two daughters in your protection program.”

“I liked Kastner.”

“If it’s any comfort, given that you lost him, he liked you.”

“You’re sprinkling salt in wounds, Lincoln.”

“And the day Kastner told you he referred to you as his friend in D.C. that he needed someone to track down Samat, you couldn’t resist tempting fate, could you? I can imagine how the scenario played out after Moscow. Someone like you would have been fascinated by the man found wandering behind the embassy, his body covered with sores. You would have been intrigued by the CIA’s immediate interest in him. You would have been curious to know what happened to Jozef Kafkor after he was smuggled out to Finland. You had friends at the CIA, you would have learned that the Jozef Kafkor ex filtrated to Finland on your watch had been reincarnated, so to speak, as Martin Odum; that this same Martin Odum wound up working as a private detective in Crown Heights. And so you gave Kastner Martin Odum’s name.” When Klick didn’t confirm or deny this, Lincoln said, “Why?”

“Why not?”

“Come clean, Felix.”

“This Oligarkh character and his nephew Samat rubbed me the wrong way. Crystal Quest rubbed me the wrong way I still remember how arrogant she was when the FBI was obliged to turn the Triple Border action over to her. And there is no love lost between the FBI

and the CIA in general. On top of that, there have to be limits. I mean, ruining the Russian economy “

Lincoln said, “How’d you figure it out?”

“All you had to do was look around you in Moscow. All you had to do was catch the smug smiles on the faces of the DDO wallahs assigned to Moscow station. Quest herself showed up several times you couldn’t miss the gleam of unadulterated triumph in her bloodshot eyes. They were involved in something very big, that much was apparent to everyone around. They were transforming the world, rewriting history. And we saw Yeltsin imposing these wild ideas that the newspapers said came from the Oligarkh freeing prices overnight, which led to hyperinflation; privatizing the Soviet industrial base, which left Ugor-Zhilov and a few insiders fabulously rich and the rest of the proletarians dirt poor; attacking Chechnya, which bogged down the Russian military in the Caucasus. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. Demolishing the Russian economy, impoverishing dozens of millions of people so that the United States wouldn’t have to deal with a powerful Russia holy mackerel, it was over the top, Lincoln. So I guess I saw a certain poetic justice for Martin Odum to be the one to track down Samat for the divorce. I guess, in the back of my head, I wondered if Martin’s memory wouldn’t be jogged if and when he caught up with Samat.”

“If Martin’s memory was jogged, if he came to realize that he was Jozef, he would want revenge.”

Felix said, very carefully, “Any sane man in his shoes would.”

“Kastner was murdered, wasn’t he?”

“Probably. The CIA insisted on doing the autopsy. I didn’t like the way it played out it was too neat by half. Martin heads for Israel to pick up the trail of Samat. Kastner dies of a heart attack. And the Chinese girl wearing Martin’s white jumpsuit winds up being stung to death by bees on the roof.”

“You noticed that.”

“I notice everything. So are you going to tell me, Lincoln did Martin and Kastner’s kid, Estelle, find Samat?”

“What makes you think Estelle is involved?”

“Because you phoned me on this unlisted number. It had to come from somewhere. My guess,” Felix added cautiously, feeling his way,

“is that Stella gave the number to Martin, and Martin passed it on to you.”

“Martin found Samat where you stashed him upstate New York in the middle of Amish country. He persuaded him to give his wife a religious divorce. Some rabbis in Brooklyn did the paper work.”

“What happened to Samat after he signed on the dotted line?”

“He said something about wanting to see Russian friends in Little Odessa. That’s the last anyone saw of him, flagging down a taxi and telling the driver to take him to Brighton Beach.”

“Now that Samat’s been found, the case is closed.”

“There’s still the Oligarkh. You wouldn’t by any chance know where he hangs his hat these days?”

“I don’t know. If I did I wouldn’t tell you. On the off chance you can find him, don’t. Remember what happened to Jozef. Touch a hair on the Oligarkh’s head, Quest and her wallahs will bury you alive.”

“Thanks for the free advice, Felix.”

“You saved my life once, Lincoln. Now I’m trying to save yours.”

1997: LINCOLN DITTMANN FEELS THE RECOIL IN HIS SHOOLDER BLADES

THE SANCTUM LINCOLN HAD SUSSED OUT WAS AS SUITABLE AS A sniper’s blind gets. Most of the panes were missing from the window, which meant he could steady the Whitworth on a sash at shoulder height Lincoln shot best standing up, with his left elbow braced against a rib. The window itself was covered with a canopy of ivy that had spread across the facade of the abandoned hospital across the street and slightly uphill from the U-shaped tenement at 621 Crown Street, off Albany Avenue. For a sharpshooter, weather conditions it was sunny and cold were ideal; humid air could slow down a bullet and cause it to drop, dry hot air could cause it to fire high. Lugging the rifle and a shopping bag up the stairs littered with broken glass and trash to the corner room on the fourth floor, Lincoln had removed the thick work gloves and coated all of his finger tips with Super Glue, then set out the bottles of drinking water, the Mars bars and the containers of liquid yogurts on a sheet of newspaper. He knotted Dante Pippen’s lucky white silk scarf around his neck before sighting in the Whitworth. He judged the distance from the front door of the hospital to the sidewalk in front of the tenement to be eighty yards, then calculated his height above ground and the length of the hypotenuse of the resulting triangle. He adjusted the small wheels on the rear of the brass telescopic sight atop the Whitworth, focusing on the crucifix hanging in a ground floor window giving out onto the street. Sighted correctly and fired with a firm arm, the hexagonal barrel of the Whitworth rifled to spit out a .45-caliber hex-shaped lead bullet that made one complete turn every twenty yards could hit anything the marksman could see. Queen Victoria herself had once gotten a bull’s eye at four-hundred yards; she’d been so thrilled with the exploit that she had knighted Mr. Whitworth, the rifle’s inventor, on the spot. Lincoln tapped home the ramrod, working the hand-rolled cartridge into the barrel, then carefully fitted the primer cap over the rifle’s nipple. Finally he removed the brass tampon on the barrel and stretched a condom over the muzzle to protect the barrel from dust and moisture. With his weapon ready to fire, Lincoln crouched at the sill to study the target building across the street from what had once been the Carson C. Peck Memorial Hospital.

Lincoln had made use of one of Martin Odum’s old tricks to find the address that corresponded to the unlisted phone number 718-555-9291. He’d called the local telephone company from a booth on Eastern Parkway. A woman had come on the line. Like Martin in London, Lincoln had retrieved Dante Pippen’s rusty Irish accent for the occasion.

“Could you tell me, then, how I can get my hands on a new phone book after my dog chewed the be jesus out of the old one?”

“What type of directory do you want, sir?”

“Yellow pages for Brooklyn.”

“We’ll be glad to send it to you. Could I trouble you for your phone number?”

“You’re not troubling me,” Lincoln had said. “It’s 718-555-9291.”

The woman had repeated the number to be sure she had it right. Then she’d asked, “What kind of dog do you have?”

“An Irish setter, of course.”

“Well, hide the phone book from him next time. Will you be needing anything else today?”

“A new yellow pages will do me fine. Are you sure you know where to send it?”

The woman had said, “Let me check the screen. Here it is. You’re at 621 Crown Street, Brooklyn, New York, right?”

“That’s it, darling’.”

“Have a nice day.”

“I plan to,” Lincoln had said just before he hung up.

From his hideaway on the fourth floor of the abandoned and soon to be demolished hospital, Lincoln watched a black teenager balancing a ghetto blaster on one shoulder skate past 621 Crown Street. As dusk shrouded the neighborhood and the streetlights flickered on, what Lincoln took to be a group of Nicaraguans in dreadlocks and colorful bandannas piled out of a gypsy cab and filed into the building. Settling down to camp for the night, Lincoln examined the building across the street more closely through the scope on the rifle. All the windows on the first five floors had cheap shades, some of them drawn, some of them half raised; the people he caught glimpses of in the windows looked to be Puerto Ricans or blacks. The entire top floor appeared to have been taken over by the target; every window was fitted with Venetian blinds, all but one tightly closed. The one where he could see through the slats turned out to be a kitchen, equipped with an enormous Frigidaire and a gas stove with a double oven. A stocky black woman wearing an apron appeared to be preparing dinner. Now and then men would wander through the kitchen; one of them had his sports jacket off and Lincoln could make out a large-caliber pistol tucked into a shoulder holster. The black woman opened the oven to baste a large bird, then prepared two enormous bowls of dog food. She seemed to shout to someone in another room as she set the bowls down on the floor. A moment later two Borzois romped into sight and were promptly lost to view under the sill of the window.