The Mulberry Bush (18 page)

At Headquarters, the flash drive Boris had given me was treated with the utmost caution. The computer techs assumed, as they were conditioned to do, that the drive had been loaded with an undetectable virus or worm or some other as yet unnamed thing designed to infect the entire Headquarters system. The fact that they were unable to detect any such virus or worm in this particular flash drive only intensified their suspicions: If it was undetectable, it must exist. While waiting for them to think of just inserting the flash drive in a cheap laptop off-premises and then dissolving the hard drive in a bucket of acid, I summarized the meeting in Helsinki to a noncommittal Tom Terhune.

He said, “I guess it's a start. Amzi wants to talk to you. But not till he's read the material.”

Finally the flash drive was deemed to be free of viruses and worms or any other insidious threat. I had taken it for granted that Boris was not stupid enough for it to be otherwise, but as Amzi always said, you can't assume a fucking thing. On Thursday he summoned me to his office,
with Tom tagging along as usual—why he tolerated these humiliations I don't know—and delivered an Amzi-style précis of the contents.

The information on the flash drive, he said, had turned out to be interesting. One of the secretaries in the Bogotá embassy had been photographing cables and dispatches and the officers of the station and the license plates of their cars with her cell phone and handing the images over to a Russian case officer who was her lover. She had been driven into the Russian's arms by what she now regarded as the sexual harassment by the political officer she worked.

“She was the PO's Monica and his wife found out,” Amzi said. “Lucky break for her. According to your friend Boris's report, this Russian's got a twelve-inch dick—he's famous for it. Early in his career, so as to maximize his capabilities, he underwent intensive training in its use on a TDY at a sparrow school.”

Tom said, “So what now?”

“Dirty Harry, here, goes to Bogotá after the meeting on Friday.”

Tom said, “How soon after what meeting?”

Amzi said, “How about Monday?” He didn't answer the rest of Tom's question.

I said, “We're meeting with who on Friday?”

“The Director,” Amzi said. “He wants to give you a token of appreciation for your good work. Eleven o'clock in his reception room. Be there ten minutes early. We're done.”

That evening, on the drive home, I called the lawyer in Oregon. He said he would rather not discuss details over the phone. Could I come to Eugene to sign papers and discuss arrangements?

“Why is that necessary?”

“Your mother had certain wishes, so it is not just a simple will,” he said. “Your expenses would of course be covered by the estate.”

“You can't put this in a letter?”

“It was one of your mother's wishes that we not do that.”

In other words, how about a few billable hours at your inconvenience?

I said, “Then you'll have to ignore her wishes.”

I told him I would not be free to travel for weeks, perhaps longer, and to overnight the documents before the end of the day to the lawyer in McLean my parents had always used.

The meeting on Friday in the Director's reception room was short and to the point.

He said, “Good to see you again. And once again, brilliant work and sincere congratulations. On behalf of the president and all your colleagues, thank you.”

The short man materialized at the Director's elbow and handed him a leather box. It was a lot larger than the medal case had been.

Using my first name, the Director said, “I present this to you as a token of this agency's appreciation and admiration for your outstanding work.”

He opened the box and handed it to me. Inside, nestled in velvet, was an exact duplicate of the anthracite-black, custom-made .45-caliber snub-nosed pistol I had left in the trash can in the men's room of the Sana'a airport after using it to kill three human beings—four if you counted Faraj.

I said, “Thank you, sir.”

“Thank
you
.”

He shook hands with me again, very firm grip, and vanished.

“The world's second-most powerful handgun,” Amzi said. “I told you he likes you.”

The short man reappeared and handed me a sealed, blank manila envelope. I opened it when I returned to my office and found a document granting Luz citizenship and a U. S. passport in her name.

I waited until morning to present Luz with her new identity. I didn't mention the .45. It was not a festive moment. She tapped her Certificate of Naturalization, a document that looked something like an enlarged dollar bill that bore her passport photo instead of the picture of a dead president.

She said, “Ugh.”

She struggled to prevent whatever it was she was feeling from showing on her face and lost the contest: disgust, resentment. As far as she was concerned, she was living behind enemy lines.

What else would you expect? She was the daughter of Alejandro and Felicia Aguilar, who in her mind were victims of U. S. imperialism who had died for their political virtue.

She never forgot that, but she did not really remember her heroic parents. Early in our affair she had told me that she could not summon their faces, their voices, the way they smelled. When she thought about them, what she remembered was their absence after they chose revolution over their only child. Tangible proofs of their existence escaped her.

She left the room, leaving the passport and naturalization certificate lying among dirty dishes.

What with the accolades and satisfying Luz's appetites I had not had time to tell her about my forthcoming trip to Bogotá. This did not seem to be the right moment to break the news, and anyway I knew none of the details she would expect to be told.

I had no idea how long I would be in Colombia or what I was expected to accomplish after I arrived—try out my brand-new .45 on the stupid little spy in the typing pool? Order her to break up with her Russian and promise never again to violate the espionage laws? Nail the Russian?

That evening Luz and I dined with one of her Wellesley sorority sisters and the latter's wife in a posh house on Kalorama Circle. Luz and her classmate, a Department of Justice prosecutor, talked about little besides their reunion, scheduled—this had slipped my mind—for the following weekend. The wife, a very tall black woman who had gone to the University of Connecticut on a basketball scholarship, feared that she would be walking into a den of mean girls who would look down on her school and her student aid.

Luz and Portia reassured her—“
Oh, no, never at Wellesley!
”

But how right she probably was.

On my way to the office on Monday morning I visited the family lawyer in McLean at the unusual hour of 7:45
A.M
. His name was Lester Briggs. He was alone in his firm's movie set of an office suite: polished mahogany desks and leather chairs, shelves of leather-bound law books, Persian carpets, portraits of dead partners who looked in the pictures as if they, the partners, were the work of a taxidermist.

Lester Briggs—surprise—was yet another classmate of Father's. They had lived in the same college. As I began to notice when I was about twelve, Briggs's wife had showgirl legs and cleavage and a high giddy laugh, a silly combination that drove Mother to distraction. I hadn't seen him or his sexy wife in twenty years. In those days he had worn the tiny perpetual smirk of the man who had everything and knew he was entitled to it.

He was almost elderly now—mane of white hair, horn-rimmed reading glasses perched on the bulb of his nose. He had learned to suppress the smirk.

He looked me up and down and in a mellifluous voice said, “Amazing resemblance. Have a chair.”

A large loose-leaf binder lay on his desk blotter. He lifted it an inch or two, then dropped it with a thump.

“This is the documentation of the Stanford J. Lucketts Revocable Trust established by your mother's second husband. I am given to understand by her lawyer in Oregon that control of the trust passed to her when Mr. Lucketts died two years after they were married. Just before she died she amended the trust, naming you her successor as trustee. Therefore, complete control of the assets of the trust passed to you at the moment of her death.”

“Why did it take two years for me to find out about it?”

“The lawyer in Oregon couldn't locate you, though he conducted a diligent search which will cost the trust about ten thousand dollars in
legal fees. My advice is to pay the bill and be done with it. I don't much care for the way this firm practices law.”

“Can you handle that?”

“It would be simpler if you just wrote a check. We can send the check to the lawyer. The checkbooks for the trust are in this binder.”

Briggs went on. “You have the same powers over the assets as your mother had when she was alive,” he said. “The trust eliminates the need for a will and avoids probate. It is a well-drawn document. It spares the estate the inconvenience and expense of probate. It is as tidy an arrangement as an inheritance can be. There is nothing else you need to sign except signature forms, which we will notarize and forward to the banks and brokerages that hold its assets. They already know that you are the successor trustee, so you have only to register your signature to do whatever you wish to do with those assets. The total in cash, stocks, and bonds is just under two million dollars.”

I was startled. I said, “How can that be? My mother had no money of her own.”

“Actually, she did,” Briggs said. “Her government pension, of course, and your father gave her the equity in their house and practically everything else they jointly owned as part of the divorce settlement. She liquidated those assets before she went west and invested the proceeds, about two hundred thousand, in U. S. Treasury bonds. She hadn't touched this nest egg. Mr. Lucketts seems to have been pretty well off. The initial value of the trust was well over three million, but she had been drawing down on capital for ten years before she passed away.”

“Lucketts had no children of his own?”

“I don't know. Anyway it's immaterial. They are not mentioned in the trust and have no claim on it.”

“Do you know anything about this man Lucketts?”

“Apart from what I've just told you, no.”

“So what do I do now?”

“Sign the paperwork I've mentioned.”

“That's all?”

“For the moment, yes.” He handed me the notebook. “Read this and follow the instructions. If you have any problems, call me. Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“Children?”

“No.”

“You may want to amend the trust to make your wife or someone else your successor as trustee. Otherwise the residue will go to the IRS when you die. If you need help, feel free to call on me.”

Briggs paused, steepled his fingers, weighed words.

At last he said, “I think often about your father. After the debacle I tried to locate him, I wanted to help, but he had covered his tracks and the investigators could find no trace of him. Of course, he was a professional who knew how to disappear, so that came as no surprise.”

A pause.

After a moment Briggs said, “His life, the way it went, as if there actually is such a thing as malign fate, was a surprise. It baffles me. It baffles everyone who knew him before whatever went wrong, went wrong ….”

I made a gesture.

Briggs said, “Am I upsetting you?”

“There are other subjects I prefer, Mr. Briggs.”

“‘
Lester
,' please. I can understand that, but I must ask you this. Did you see him before the end? Did you communicate?”

I said, “I saw him. As for communication, not really.”

“Too bad,” said Mr. Briggs. “Damned shame, all of it.”

Wasn't it, though?

I didn't tell Luz about the Stanford J. Lucketts Revocable Trust. Three days later I flew to Bogotá. She stayed behind for the Wellesley reunion. I didn't ask whether or when she might be joining me, but on my last
night in Washington we made love from midnight to dawn and she was as enthusiastic as ever.

“Every time,” she whispered afterward, in Spanish.

“‘Every time' what?”

“I die and go to heaven.”

I didn't know whether that was her way of saying “good-bye” or “hello again.” My inventory of uncertainties was growing by the day.

Dwayne Scoggins, the Bogotá chief of station, wasn't a bad fellow, but he was no happier to see me on his turf than his counterpart in Buenos Aires had been. He was a ruddy, unsmiling man who seemed to be holding the invisible barking dog of his exasperation at arm's length.

He said, “I'm in the dark. Why are you here?”

I said, “I speak Russian.”

“Ah-ha. The scales fall from my eyes. You're tasked to seduce the seducer.”

I said, “Something like that. Does the young lady know she's under suspicion?”

“She's not smart enough to figure that out.”

“Has her boyfriend figured it out?”

“If he has, he hasn't told her.”

“We'd know that?”

“We might. Her cell phone and her apartment and her car and her purse and everything else except her IUD have been bugged.”

“Has the Bureau been clued in?”

“Not by me, but diplomatic security, whose case it is, will have to brief the legal attaché pretty soon. I'm curious. How long do you expect to hang around here?”

“I have no idea. It's up to Amzi.”

“And in the meantime, what can I do for you?”

“I'd like to read the product of all those bugs you mentioned.”

“Be my guest. You'll be fascinated.”

Dwayne looked at his watch, rose to his feet, and put on a jacket.

He said, “Gotta go. Melanie will show you where to sit. Do you have a place to stay?”

“I'm at the Holiday Inn.”

Dwayne pushed a button. Melanie appeared. She was an owlish young woman with a voice full of Mississippi—real friendly even if she hated your guts. It was dress-down Friday in the station. She wore jeans, Keds, and a polo shirt with the Ol' Miss Rebels logo. With the exception of Dwayne, everyone in the office, including me, was dressed for a backyard barbecue.

She handed me the file on the suspect, whom I decided to call Sally. In photographs, she resembled a coarser version of the character Sally in
When Harry Met Sally,
so you could understand why the political officer, who was now quite likely en route to Ouagadougou, had forgotten all about the mother of his children when Sally fell to her knees before him. There were no pictures of her lover.

There was nothing interesting in the logs, which consisted largely of transcripts of the taps on her phone and her purse. There hardly ever is. People with something to hide, a broad category of humanity that includes Russian intelligence officers, usually are careful about what they say over the telephone.

The next day I followed Sally when she left the embassy parking lot at quitting time. She drove a centerline-yellow Beetle, so keeping her in sight was not a problem. She went straight home, parked the Bug in its numbered parking space, and went upstairs.

Eating a tuna sandwich from the embassy cafeteria and an apple for supper and drinking a bottle of water and pissing into a plastic jug, I watched Sally's door until three in the morning. I did the same, each time in a different car borrowed from the station's motor pool, the next night and the night after that, catching glimpses of her through the windows of her flat. On the fourth night, at 2:47 A. M., she emerged, wearing a miniskirt. It was raining. She dashed in a clatter of heels to her car and drove away without turning on her headlights, a precaution guaranteed to attract attention. I expected that Sally would soon be stopped by a couple of horny cops who had been hoping that a blond
gringa
in a miniskirt would happen by with her lights off.

Out of necessity she stayed on lighted streets, so I had no difficulty keeping her in sight. There was virtually no traffic, and even though she seemed to be oblivious to her situation, I had to stay way back to minimize the risk of being spotted. My own headlights were on. There was nobody behind me.

I seemed to be the only one following her. After a mile or so, Sally turned on her lights. She drove into a parking lot and pumped the brakes three times, then twice again. A signal! I parked a block away and walked back to the parking lot.

And there she was in the arms of her Russian. They wasted no time on foreplay. No doubt anticipation had taken care of that for Sally on the drive to the rendezvous. The Russian picked her up, slid her onto his rigid penis, which was indeed impressive, and laid her down onto the slope of the Bug's hood.

It was still raining. The Bug's hood was slippery, and all that kept Sally from sliding off was the feature of the Russian's anatomy that Amzi had mentioned. I took some video with sound.

As I watched this pornographic moment through the camera lens, the question was, what to do next? Time was of the essence because Sally would soon be going away for a long time and there was nothing I could
do to delay that. The tryst ended as abruptly as it had begun—elapsed time, seven minutes. Sally, disheveled but happy, drove away. I let her go and followed her lover home. If he noticed I was on his tail, as he surely must have done because we were practically the only two cars on the street, he was too professional to give himself away.

He lived in—or at least entered for my benefit—a large apartment building not far from the Russian embassy. He probably walked to work. I considered bumping into him when he emerged the next morning and starting a conversation—”
That was some crazy blonde in the parking lot, Tovarish!
”—then told myself to stop kidding around and start thinking.

Immediately, so as to avoid running into Sally in the embassy corridors the next morning and having her see my new face—she would likely take a good long look at any new man—I visited the station and identified the Russian from a blurred photo taken on the street in Bogotá. The stuff I had read the day before referred to him by the code name Headquarters had bestowed on him, so I didn't know the cover name he was using in Colombia, only the cryptonym we used in correspondence about him.

Now I discovered he was calling himself Kirill Sergeivich Burkov. The residential address listed for him was the one he had led me to, so it was possible he actually lived there. I composed a report to Headquarters, attaching the feelthy pictures. The camera, a Nikon I had bought with eight hundred dollars of my own money at the Pentagon City Costco, delivered clear video images despite the dim lighting along with a soundtrack that did justice to Sally's aria to delight.

I composed a cable to Headquarters, footage attached, and handed it to Dwayne Scoggins for transmission. He grimaced at the material, and though he clearly didn't like my stalking one of his targets, he voiced no objection.

I asked to see anything about Kirill Burkov that the DAS, the Colombian Security Service, had shared with the station. Melanie brought me the all-but-unreadable handwritten files made by sidewalk men. These
included photographs, blurrier than the ones made with my Nikon, of open-air encounters with a couple of women—both now missing persons—who had worked for important men in the Colombian government. One of these women, a homely plump person in photos, had been the personal secretary of the minister of foreign affairs. The other, younger and prettier with vacant eyes, was the
chica
of a general of military intelligence.

Several of the DAS surveillance reports placed Burkov in a nightspot for singles called El Paradiso in Zona T, the Pigalle of Bogotá, where he trolled for lonely women with interesting bosses. Around midnight I went to El Paradiso, bribed my way in, and found a table in a dark corner. No sign of Burkov. Sex workers of both genders made me offers that might have been of passing interest to him. That night and for two nights afterward, I said no thanks to them all. The bouncers began to look at me as if I might be a candidate for an interview in the back alley. I carried knockout spray and my brand-new as yet unfired .45—after all this was Bogotá, the most dangerous city in the Western Hemisphere. I had no wish to baptize the weapon. On the third night I left early.

As I started the car—talk about coincidences—I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw Kirill Burkov crossing the street, holding hands with a laughing woman. She was a blonde and for a moment I thought she might be Sally, but then she turned her face in my direction and I realized that she looked nothing like her. She got into Burkov's BMW—him gallantly holding the door open for her—ankles demurely together. I followed the car to another deserted parking lot, where the routine with Sally replayed, except this time he seized the hem of the woman's dress and peeled it off over her head before he went to work. The blonde, her face hidden by the inside-out dress, wearing nothing below the neck but sequined red shoes that somehow stayed on her feet, screamed so wildly in her delight that Burkov had to clap a hand over her mouth.

Afterward he drove her home to a very small concrete house on a mean street. The next day I checked out her address. The house was occupied by three hairdressers, so unless the Valkyrie was cutting the hair of an in-the-know Colombian, the encounter had been recreational.

These sightings were leading me nowhere. Though I would have preferred to make do in some other way, I called on Dwayne for assistance. Glumly, he arranged for me to be invited to a reception at the Chilean embassy later in the week. The station had information that Burkov was on the guest list.

I continued to work the case, but all the while my mind had no room for anything but Luz. Five days had passed since we parted and I hadn't heard from her. My brain provided a slide show: Luz's image in the mirror that first day, in the surf in Patagonia, in strips of sunlight that fell through a venetian blind onto her nude body as she slept. On her back under the weight of a man I had never seen in reality.

So much for the aftereffects of lurking around parking lots and seeing yourself in others.

Usually I had no trouble standing alone and unnoticed at embassy parties, but the Chilean ambassadress was a conscientious hostess who introduced me into a circle of South Americans who treated me to the customary remorseless first-meeting grilling into my background and status. Then, one by one, they drifted away.

Soon thereafter Kirill Burkov entered the room. In no time he was deep in conversation with one of the wives, a prematurely gray
jolie laide
with the figure and complexion of a twenty-year-old who seemed to be lubricating by the syllable. Why? Did she somehow sense Burkov's endowment? She held herself and dressed and gestured and enunciated like an aristocrat. Burkov was a peasant: watchful pale eyes with epithantic folds and Slavic cheekbones, and almost no facial expression. Years ago I had read a biography of H. G. Wells, who had an enviable sex life though he was physically ugly. One of his mistresses was asked why he
was so yummy. “It was the way he smelled,” she replied. Maybe Burkov exuded a similar pheromone and women knew in the primitive brain what that meant.

When Burkov broke away from the woman, who kept her eyes on his broad back until he melded into the crowd, I broke away and searched for the Russian. He was nowhere to be seen, but apparently he saw me. He entered the men's room while I was washing my hands, used the urinal, and then stood beside me at the sinks and scrubbed his hands. He seemed to be unaware of my presence. Then he made eye contact in the mirror.

He said, in English, “Hello again. I have a question. Are you a collector of cars or do you steal a new one every night?”

A straight answer seemed to be in order.

“I borrow them,” I said in Russian. “Now I have a question for you. Did you bang that ugly hairdresser for the pleasure of it or to see if someone was watching from the shadows?”

We were speaking to each other's mirror images.

Burkov jerked his head.

“Let's go,” he said. “I'll lead. You'll recognize the car, I think.”