The Peregrine Spy (2 page)

“Sorry about…”

“Forget it,” said Dan. “How come you let your license run out?”

“Living in Weehawken’s like living in Manhattan. I don’t need a car, so I let the license slide.”

“But your passport’s okay?”

“Yeah. I may not need a car, but I never know when you folks might give me another chance to jump on an airplane. So I keep the passport up-to-date. But Dan, this time I’m not going.”

“Well, think about that a minute. Since you signed on again, you know what that contract’s like. It’s like a landlord’s lease. Unless you want to try to break the contract, and that’s not possible, they can send you anywhere they want. Besides, you got a great job waiting for when you get back, and some of us have figured out how we can qualify everything you’ve ever done so ten years or so down the road you qualify for a pension.”

“Dan, that’s nice. I appreciate it, but I don’t ever figure to collect any pension anywhere.”

“But all you got do is hang in there with the new job once you’re back and it’s yours for life. You may not care about pensions and security now, but, I mean, you aren’t twenty-one anymore. By the time your kid gets into college and talkin’ about grad school, you may be damn glad to have that two-thirds pension check coming in every month.”

“It’s the kid I’m thinking about, Jake. He’s ready to move down here and live with me. Start junior high down here.”

“The new job fits in perfect with that.”

“I want the job,” said Frank, “but I want it now, not maybe someday when I maybe come back from Iran.”

“Oh, you’ll come back okay. It’s not that dangerous over there. Besides, there’s somethin’ else you should know about it,”

“Wrong,” said Frank. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to know about it.”

“There’s somebody you know over there,” said Dan.

“There’s probably a lot of people I know over there. Half the reporters in the world are over there, and since by now I must know half the reporters in the world, there’s a fair chance there may be a fair number of people I know over there.”

“Funny you should say that. ’Cause this guy’s supposed to be a journalist. For Tass.”

Frank stared at the highway ahead. He said nothing.

“I suppose you can guess?” said Dan.

Yeah, I guess I can guess, thought Frank. Vassily Lermontov. He had begun to grind his teeth and made the effort to stop.

“I mean, there’s not much chance of you running into him,” said Dan. “You’ll be locked up with I-ranian military types all day, and there isn’t much of a diplomatic cocktail circuit over there anymore, and from what I know of his m.o., your old Soviet buddy’ll be running around with the usual cast of left-wing students, but I thought I better let you know he’s over there, because I guess he hasn’t been too happy with you ever since what happened to him in Ethiopia.”

“No, and he wasn’t too happy with what he saw going down in Angola, but we did have some interesting conversations in Rome. And Beirut.”

“I heard he tried to set you up in Beirut,” said Dan.

“Somebody did. Somebody took a couple of shots at me. Lermontov swore it had nothing to do with him.”

Two flimsy cars, thought Frank. And a handgun firing three rounds that shattered a headlight. Not a real effort to kill him. A message, perhaps. But who from? After Ethiopia, Lermontov might have motive enough to kill him. Frank, working closely with Ethiopian journalists Lermontov tried hard to recruit, fed incriminating evidence to Pete Howard, then his chief of station. Pete alerted the director general of Haile Selassie’s personal security agency. Lermontov and five others had been expelled. But in Beirut, where Frank had tried to unravel the assassination of the American ambassador, Lermontov had no cause to send him a message. He wondered, then and now, if someone in his own agency might have, a warning not to come too close to finding out who stood behind the murder of the ambassador, whose opposition to the war in Vietnam had earned him many enemies.

“What can I tell you?” he said aloud. “Actually, Lermontov and I get along pretty well. All things considered.”

“He tried to recruit you, huh?”

“I reported it.”

“Hey, I know you reported it, Sully.”

“And we tried to recruit each other.”

“Don’t get so touchy.”

“I’ve got a right to get touchy. Your CI grunts put me through a lot of shit because of Lermontov.”

“They aren’t my CI grunts. Besides, Counter Intelligence, they’re supposed to be paranoid, right? And the way you and Lermontov keep flirting with each other, they may think you’re in love with him.”

“No. Gray-eyed Russians with short blond hair and thick wrists aren’t exactly my type.”

Especially when they maybe try to kill me. He wondered if he would ever know. But above all, he knew he wanted another round with Lermontov. He suspected that before the day was over he would be a clean-shaven major in—he couldn’t believe it—the U.S. Air Force.

*   *   *

“You must feel like that first time,” said Dan. “Remember?”

“I remember,” said Frank. He’d been the assistant director of public relations at the AFL-CIO, at least in name, but since he’d drafted his first speech for George Meany he had moved increasingly into the president’s orbit, often working with foreign trade union delegations, getting involved with the old man’s pet projects like the American Institute for Free Labor Development and the African Labor Institute. It had been exciting at first, but the dead weight of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and its marble mausoleum on Sixteenth Street soon began to weary him. Like many ex-newspapermen, he still read the industry’s trade journal,
Editor and Publisher,
every week, starting at the back with the Help Wanted ads. That’s where it had begun, with a blind ad in the back of the
E&P
issue of February 12, 1964, that read, “Experienced journalist with some teaching experience and an interest in Africa wanted for a two-year contract. Good salary and many benefits.” He and Jackie had been married less than a year. They discussed it and decided Frank should give it a try.

Frank soon received a call from Patricia Rhoden, president of World Wide Communications. It was only years later that he discovered that someone else—Gus Simpson—got the job they originally had considered him for. Over a year later, World Wide called Frank again about another job, the job that took him to Ethiopia. It was another year before it finally happened. By then, at Pat Rhoden’s suggestion, he had become active in the Washington branch of the American Friends of Ethiopia, and at one of their functions he met Dan Nitzke. Dan had introduced himself as a State Department foreign service officer who had just spent two years in Ethiopia. He was friendly, outgoing, brimming over with knowledge and advice about Ethiopia, unfazed when Ethiopians politely corrected him, and, by the end of a long evening, usually quite drunk.

Frank began getting calls, from the accountant in New York who did his taxes, from his former bosses at various newspapers, from his mother, from the literary agent who’d been trying without much success to sell his short stories. FBI agents had been around asking questions about him.

“Are you in some kind of trouble?” his mother asked.

Pat Rhoden called to ask him how quickly he could wrap up his work at the AFL-CIO and leave for Ethiopia.

“Well, I’ll have to talk to Mr. Meany.’’

“He’s wired. No problem,” said Pat in her brisk way.

Frank held the phone away from his ear and stared at the receiver. Who are these people? he wondered. He heard Pat’s voice. “Are you there?”

“Right here,” he said into the mouthpiece.

“You’ll need about ten days’ briefing here at our office in New York. We have you booked out on the twenty-first. You know about the airline strike. Pan Am’s the only American carrier into Europe, but Juan’s a good friend of ours.”

Juan? Who the hell is Juan? wondered Frank.

Pat must have read his mind. “Juan Trippe, you know, the president of Pan Am, so that’s been worked out. Then it will be Ethiopian Airlines into Addis.” She hammered out details and schedules, the car that would pick up Frank and Jackie at the airport, the apartment that would be waiting for them in New York. “Oh, you and your wife, Jackie, should both resign your jobs as soon as possible. Decide what belongings you’ll want shipped over, what you want put in storage. We’ll take care of all the arrangements.”

It all moved rapidly, according to plan.

On his second day in WWC’s headquarters overlooking the library lions on Fifth Avenue, Frank went into Pat Rhoden’s office and was startled to see Dan Nitzke bounding up out of an overstuffed easy chair to greet him. “Hi, I bet you’re surprised to see me. And boy, have I got a surprise for you.”

*   *   *

“This is Fairfield coming up now,” said Dan. “We’ll be at Motor Vehicle in five minutes.”

“I feel like I’ve been shanghaied,” said Frank. “Again.”

“That day in New York?”

“That day in New York.”

“You should have seen the look on your face when I told you I didn’t really work for the State Department.”

“I can imagine.”

“Boy, were you surprised.”

“Yeah,” said Frank. “You surprised me, all right.” And I surprised myself, he thought.

They raced through the day, pretty much the way Dan had outlined it. There had been a wild, improvisational quality to it all that Frank enjoyed. The professionalism of the Pentagon cover unit impressed him. They were in and out in fifteen minutes with air force documents, including airline tickets and travel papers that identified him as Major Francis J. Sullivan. The photo on his ID card looked just like his unfamiliar, clean-shaven self.

“Without that beard, you look like a leprechaun,” said Dan.

“I want my beard,” said Frank.

“When you retire from the air force, you can grow a beard.”

“How long before I get to retire from the air force?”

Dan shrugged. “Don’t ask me. After the war, I guess.”

Their footsteps echoed down the Pentagon’s endless, rubber-tiled corridors as they left the cover unit. Frank studied his documents. “True name,” he said.

“What did you expect? We don’t have time for all that other mumbo-jumbo.”

“We never do.”

“What’s the diff? You’ve never been blown.”

Their whirlwind day included an hour at Langley with two Near East Division types he’d never met before and a quick pass at the polygraph, including what Frank by now considered a routine rehash of his years of contacts in many countries with Vassily Lermontov.

“Flying colors,” said the technician, who looked painfully young to Frank.

It was Frank’s first time in the headquarters building. All his previous contact had been filtered through the agency proprietary World Wide Communications, the firm that recruited him. The awesome structure, with its multiple rings of security, intrigued him. When he thought of all the odd, messy threads dangling from the edges of his life, he wondered why he had ever been recruited or how he had gotten through the security checks. But he admitted to himself that he’d been surprised by the sophistication of an intelligence agency that had a place for characters like himself—or even Dan Nitzke.

“Will there be contact with the Shah?” he asked the Near East team.

“Absolutely not,” said one old Near East hand, who’d identified himself as Joe. They sat on hard-backed chairs around a bare metal table with a top of highly polished fake wood.

Frank shrugged. “I asked because I spent some time with him when he was on a state visit in Ethiopia in the sixties.”

“Details,” said Joe.

“I was writing speeches for Haile Selassie in those days,” said Frank. “At some reception, he introduced me to the Shah. We got along. No big deal. We talked about jazz, weight lifting. When the Emperor came back from that twenty-fifth-hundred anniversary bash at Persepolis, he told me the Shah asked about me, said I should have come along. I wished I had. I heard it was quite a party.”

“Keep talking,” said Joe. He had close-cropped hair, a ruddy face, thick wrists, and slender hands. “But forget the party you didn’t go to. I want to hear about the Shah in Ethiopia.”

“He asked me to draft his farewell remarks. It pissed some of his people off, but he used what I wrote. We worked out together a couple of times. He was in pretty good shape in those days.”

“He’s a dead man now,” said Joe. “Absolutely no contact. You’ll be useless to us if the people you’re working with get the idea you have a pipeline to the Shah. How much you know about what’s goin’ on over there?”

“I read the papers,” said Frank.

“Well, not a lot gets in the papers,” said Joe. “Shame you haven’t got time to do some reading in on the intel. What we’ve got over there is a situation.”

“We and the Brits have been propping this Shah up on his Peacock Throne ever since 1941,” said Jack, another of the Near Easternites. “World War II. His father was pro-Hitler, and you have to remember that besides all that oil Iran has a long border with the Soviets.”

“And back then,” said Joe, “God help us, the Sovs were our allies.”

“So we and the Brits kicked the father out and put the son on the throne.”

“And we had to do it all over again in 1953,” said Joe, “when the Shah’s lefty prime minister, guy named Mosaddeq, tried to nationalize the oil industry. The Shah hit the panic button, ran off to Rome, ready to abdicate. The agency managed to stir up enough trouble to get rid of Mosaddeq and bring the Shah back.”

“And we’ve propped him up ever since,” said Jack. “Till now.”

“Now we’ve come full circle,” said Joe. “This guy has lost control. He tries to be tough, but he worries too much about, you know, world opinion. Whatever that is.”

“The papers make it sound like he’s been pretty ruthless,” said Frank.

“Fact is, we’ve had a pretty good run with him,” said Jack. “I mean, he may be a mean son of a bitch, but for almost forty years he’s been our son of a bitch, know what I mean?”

“Up until lately,” said Joe. “I mean he’s still ours, but lately the son of a bitch hasn’t been mean … I mean, strong enough. No matter what all these civil rights crybabies and liberal newspapers say about what a nasty bastard he is, fact is he isn’t nasty enough. What we need is a military takeover that will ease out this guy and put his son on the throne.”