Legends (54 page)
Cleaning away the debris, settling down on the floor with his back against a wall, Lincoln treated himself to a Mars bar and half a container of yogurt. All things considered, he was relieved that he was the one doing the shooting and not Martin Odum. Marksmanship was not Martin’s strong suit; he was too impatient to stalk a target and crank in one or two clicks on the sights for distance and windage and slowly squeeze (as opposed to jerk) the trigger; too cerebral to kill in cold blood unless he was goaded into action by the likes of Lincoln Dittmann or Dante Pippen. In short, Martin was too involved, too temperamental. When a born-again sniper like Lincoln shot at a human target, the only thing he felt was the recoil of the rifle. Staking out the target, taking your sweet time to be sure you got the kill, one shot to a target, Lincoln was in his element. He had owned a rifle since he was a child in Pennsylvania, hunting rabbits and birds in the woods and fields behind his house in Jonestown. Once, packed off to the
Company’s Farm for a refresher course in hand-to-hand combat and firearms, he’d impressed the instructors the first day on the firing range when they’d put an antiquated gas-operated semiautomatic M-l in his hands. Without a word, Lincoln had screwed down the iron sights and fired off a round at the thirty-six-inch target hoping to spot a spurt of dirt somewhere in front of it. When he did he’d turned up the sights one click, which was the equivalent of one minute of elevation or ten inches of height on the target, and fired the second round into the black. He’d notched in a one-click windage adjustment and raised his sights and hit the bulls eye on the third try.
The cold set in with the darkness. Lincoln turned up the collar of Martin Odum’s overcoat and, drawing it tightly around his body, dozed. Images of soldiers outfitted in white headbands charging a stone wall along a sunken road filled his brain; he could hear the spurt of cannon and the crackle of rifle fire as smoke and death drifted over the field of battle. He forced himself awake to check the luminous hands on his wristwatch and the building across the street. Falling into a fitful sleep again, he found himself transported to a more serene setting. Skinny girls in filmy dresses were slotting coins into a jukebox and swaying in each others arms to the strains of Don’t Worry, Be Happy. The music faded and Lincoln found himself inhaling the negative ions from a fountain on the Janicular, one of Rome’s seven hills. An elegantly dressed woman and a dwarf wearing a knee-length overcoat buttoned up to his neck were walking past. Lincoln could hear himself saying, My name’s Dittmann. We met in Brazil, in a border town called Foz do Iguacu. Your daytime name was Lucia, your nighttime name was Paura. He made out the woman’s excited response: I remember you! Your daytime name happens to be the same as your nighttime name, which is Giovanni da Varrazano.
In his fiction Lincoln caught up with the woman as she continued on down the hill. He gripped her shoulders and shook her until she agreed to spend the rest of her life breeding baby polyesters with him on a farm in Tuscany.
Checking the building across the street again, Lincoln became aware of the first faint ocherous stains tinting the grim sky over the roofs in the east. Setting up the kill had been easier than he’d expected. He’d made his way through the alleyways behind Albany Avenue to the yard in back of Xing’s restaurant. Using an old boat hook hidden behind a rusting refrigerator, he’d tugged down the lower rung of the ladder on the fire escape and climbed up to the roof. The bees had long since abandoned Martin’s two hives, including the one that seemed to have exploded; stains of what looked like dried molasses were visible on the tar paper. Retrieving the key Martin had hidden behind a loose brick on the parapet, Lincoln had unlocked the roof door and let himself into Martin Odum’s pool parlor. He made his way through the dark apartment to the pool table that Martin had used as a desk and took a single hand rolled rifle cartridge from the mahogany humidor; Lincoln himself had fabricated the ammunition several years before, procuring high-grade gunpowder and measuring it out on an apothecary scale. Pocketing the cartridge, he picked up the Whitworth and blew the dust off of its firing mechanism. It was a surprisingly light weapon, beautifully crafted, exquisitely balanced, a delight to hold in your hands. This particular Whitworth had originally been his; he couldn’t remember how it had wound up in Martin Odum’s possession. He made a mental note to ask him one of these days. Wiping the weapon clean of fingerprints, he rolled it in one of Martin’s overcoats and slung it across his back. Then, pulling on a pair of thick work gloves he found in a cardboard box, he retraced his steps down to the alley, recovered the shopping bag filled with nourishment that he’d prepared that morning and meandered through the deserted streets of Crown Heights to the massive building with “Carson C. Peck Memorial Hospital” and “191?” engraved on its stone base. Breaking in turned out to be relatively uncomplicated: At the back of the hospital, on the Montgomery Street side, squatters had cut through the chain link fence the demolition company rigged around the property and one of the ground floor doors was ajar. Crouching inside the building to get his bearings, Lincoln caught the muffled sound of a brassy cough rising from the stairwell, which suggested that the squatters had installed themselves in the basement of the building. The ocherous streaks had dragged smudges of daylight across the sky, transforming the rooftops into silhouettes. Massaging his arms to work out the coldness and the stiffness, Lincoln pushed himself to his feet and padded over to a corner of the room to relieve himself against a wall. Returning to the window, kneeling at the sill, he noticed a light in the top-floor kitchen window across the street. The black woman, wrapped in a terrycloth robe, was brewing up two large pots of coffee. When the coffee was ready she filled eight mugs and, carrying them on a tray, disappeared from view. Below, at the entrance to 621 Crown, two Nicaraguan women wearing long winter coats and bright scarves and knitted caps pulled down over their earlobes emerged from the building and hurried off in the direction of the subway station on Eastern Parkway. Twelve minutes later a black BMW pulled up to the curb in front of the tenement. The driver, a tall man in a knee-length leather overcoat and a chauffeur’s cap, climbed out and stood leaning against the open door, clouds of vapor streaming from his mouth as he breathed. He glanced at his watch several times and stamped his feet to keep them from growing numb. He checked the number over the entrance of the building against something written on a scrap of paper and seemed reassured when he spotted the two men shouldering through the heavy door of 621 into the street. Both were dressed in double-breasted pea jackets with the collars turned up. The men, obviously bodyguards, greeted the driver with a wave. One of the bodyguards strolled to the corner and looked up and down Albany Avenue. The other walked off several paces to his left and checked out Crown Street. Returning to the BMW, he eyed the windows of the deserted hospital across the street.
The security arrangements were clearly casual; the bodyguards were going through the motions but there was no urgency to their gestures, which is what often happened when the individual being protected has been squirreled away and the people responsible for his safety assumed that potential enemies wouldn’t be able to find his hole. Back at the BMW, the two bodyguards and the driver were making small talk. One of the bodyguards must have detected a signal on his walkie-talkie because he hauled it from a pocket and, looking up at the closed Venetian blinds, muttered something into it. Several minutes went by. Then the front door of 621 swung open again and another bodyguard appeared. He was straining to hold back two Borzois attached to long leashes. To the amusement of the men waiting near the BMW, the dogs practically dragged the man into the gutter. Behind him a stubby hunch-shouldered man with a shock of silver hair and dark glasses materialized at the front door. He had a cigar clamped between his teeth and walked with the aid of two aluminum crutches, thrusting one hip forward and dragging the leg after it, then repeating the movement with the other hip. He paused for breath when he reached the end of the walkway in front of the building’s entrance. One of the bodyguards opened the back door of the car. In the corner room across the street, Lincoln rose to his feet and in one flowing motion jammed his left elbow into his rib cage as he steadied the rifle on a window sash. Closing his left eye, he pressed his right eye to the telescopic sight and walked up the muzzle of the Whitworth until the cross-hairs were fixed on the target’s forehead immediately above the bridge of his nose. He squeezed the trigger with such painstaking deliberation that the eruption of flame at the breech’s nipple and the bullet rifling out of the barrel and the satisfying recoil of the stock into his shoulder blade all caught him by surprise. Sighting again on the target, he saw blood oozing from a ragged-edged tear in the middle of the man’s forehead. The bodyguards had heard a sound but not yet associated it with gunfire. The one holding open the back door of the car was the first to notice that their charge was collapsing onto the pavement. He leapt forward to catch him under the armpits and, shouting for help, lowered him to the ground.
By the time the bodyguards realized that the man they were protecting had been shot dead, Lincoln, oblivious to the spasms in his game leg, was well on his way to the breach in the chain link fence.
1997: CRYSTAL QUEST COMES TO BELIEVE IN DANTE’S TRINITY
DANTE PlPPEN, A MAESTRO OF TRADECRAFT, HAD POSITIONED himself in a booth at the rear of Xing’s Mandarin Restaurant with his back to the tables, facing a mirror in which he could keep track of who came and went. He sized up the two figures in trench coats who entered the restaurant at the stroke of noon. Both had the deadpan eyes that marked them as flunkies for the CIA’s Office of Security. The one with the cauliflower ears of a prize-fighter ducked behind the bar to make sure that Tsou Xing, who was holding fort on his high stool in front of the cash register, didn’t have a sawed-off shotgun stashed under the counter. Ignoring Dante, the second man, who had the shoulders and neck of a weight lifter, pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen. Moments later he reappeared and planted himself in front of the doors, his arms folded across his barrel chest.
It wasn’t long before Crystal Quest turned up at the door of the restaurant. Coming into the murky interior from the dazzling sunlight of Albany Avenue, she was momentarily blinded. When she could see again, she spotted Dante and started toward him, the thick heels of her sensible shoes drumming on the linoleum floor. “Long time no see,” she said as she slid onto the banquette opposite him. “As usual you look fit as a flea, Dante. Still working out on that rowing machine?”
Dante managed a half-hearted laugh. “You’re confusing me with Martin Odum, Fred. He’s the one with a rowing machine.”
Quest, who knew a joke when she heard one, grinned nervously.
Dante said, “How about treating your bloodstream to a shot of alcohol?”
“Alcohol’s just what the doctor ordered. Something with a lot of ice, thank you.”
Dante called for a whiskey, neat, and a frozen daiquiri, heavy on the ice. Tsou waved his good arm in acknowledgment. Waiting for the drinks, Dante watched Quest toying absently with the frills down the front of her dress shirt. He noticed that the jacket of her pantsuit, like the skin around her eyes, was wrinkled; that the rust-colored dye was washing out of her hair, revealing soot-gray roots. “You look the worse for wear, Fred. Job getting you down?”
“Being DDO of an intelligence entity that has recast itself as a risk-averse high-tech social club is not a cake walk,” she said. “There are people at Langley who do nothing but stare at satellite downloads from morning to night, as if a photograph could tell you what an adversary intends to do with what he has. Hell of a way to run an espionage agency. They’ve slashed our budget, the president doesn’t have the time or the curiosity to read the overnight briefing book we prepare for him, the liberal press climbs all over us for our occasional fumbles. It goes without saying we can’t gloat about our occasional successes “
The Chinese waitress wearing a tight skirt slit up one thigh set the drinks on the table. Watching the girl slink away in the mirror reminded Dante of Martin’s late lamented Chinese girlfriend, Minh. “Do you have any?” he asked Quest.
Crunching on chips of ice, she’d lost the thread of the conversation. “Have any what?” she inquired, successes.
“One or two or three.”
“Like the Prigorodnaia business,” Dante murmured.
Quest’s eyes hardened. “What Prigorodnaia business are you talking about?”
“Christsake, Fred, don’t play the innocent,” Dante snapped. “We know what happened to Jozef Kafkor. We know the DDO provided seed money to the Armenian used-car dealer so he could corner the Russian aluminum market. We know how Ugor-Zhilov, a.k.a the Oligarkh, ingratiated himself with Yeltsin, arranging for the publication of his book, organizing his personal bodyguard, replenishing his bank account. Once installed in Yeltsin’s inner circle, the Oligarkh nudged him into freeing up prices and privatizing the industrial base of the defunct Soviet Union. We know he lured Yeltsin into attacking Chechnya just when the Red Army was recovering from the Afghanistan debacle. We know that for a period of years in the early nineties the individual running Russia from behind the scene was none other than… Fred Astaire. We know she was running it into the ground so that the new Russia rising from the ashes of the Soviet Union couldn’t compete with America.”
The blood seemed to seep from Quest’s cheeks until the only color remaining came from the smears of blush she’d applied during the shuttle flight from Washington. She spooned another chunk of ice into her mouth. “Who’s we!” she demanded.
“Why, I would have thought that was obvious. There’s Martin Odum, the one-time CIA field agent turned detective who specializes in collecting mahjongg debts. There’s Lincoln Dittmann, the Civil War buff who actually met the poet Whitman. And last but certainly not least, there’s yours truly, Dante Pippen, the Irish dynamiter from Castletownbere.”