Tool of the Trade (6 page)

“Sounds like a cigarette ad,” I said. “Firm and fully packed?” She laughed and dabbed at her eyes with a knuckle.

“I’m
the left-wing nut of the family,” she said. “You’re not even political.”

“No, I’m very political. Have to hide it, of course.”

She shook her head, nibbling her lower lip. “But the gun. You say you don’t do that kind of spy stuff.”

“I suppose it is about ninety percent macho aberration. I told myself I had to be prepared for any eventuality.” I let a little truth leak through: “My childhood, the terrors, that’s all very close to the surface even now. The world is a dangerous place, full of sudden, random death. Even for law-abiding citizens. Like me.”

“You choose the laws you want to abide by, though.”

“Like everyone,” we said simultaneously, and then laughed.

“This is a hell of a forty-fifth birthday present,” she said, smiling. “Learn Russian at my age?”

“You would go?”

She looked at me for a long time, perhaps parsing out a dramatic reply. Finally she just nodded, hard, and began silently crying. I held her for a long time. We changed venue, to the bedroom, and had some fine, slow hours.

For more than a year we’ve had a listening device in Nicholas Foley’s library (and living room and bedroom). It finally paid off in a small way. A negative way. We know we can’t play his wife against him.

Something has come up that rather complicates the Foley situation. It may not be important at all, but we all have a “feeling.”

The first hint of it was his mail. His journals. Twenty years ago he had a brief flirtation with hypnosis and even published one paper on the subject. Then he apparently dropped it completely; at least he’s never done any formal work in it again. Yet he not only still subscribes to the hypnosis journals he took back then, but he also picked up the subscriptions to two new journals that started in the seventies and eighties.

Maybe nothing more than a hobby; his department doesn’t pay for the subscriptions. But it’s not the only
thing that’s a bit odd. In the course of an interview, without any coaching, one of his student subjects related a strange incident: Twice Foley asked him to do absurd things that had nothing to do with the business at hand—one time it was to whistle “Silent Night” (in July) and the other was to pretend to be riding a bicycle. On a third occasion Foley asked him to go back to the dorm and fetch a particular pencil. He refused; Foley claimed to have been misunderstood. He was not asked back.

Those do sound like the sort of things that stage hypnotists use to demonstrate their skills. Maybe he was innocently experimenting with the monotony that accompanies foreign-language vocabulary lessons—that was the context, which is why it surprised the student enough for him to have remembered it twelve years later—but if that were the case, why didn’t he simply tell the subject why he had made the request, rather than try to misdirect him?

I wished we could have transcripts for the past year’s bugs, to see whether anything about hypnosis had come up between Foley and his wife, but of course there was no budget for that. I fast-ran through several days’ tapes, but there was no hint of anything in that direction. They did work together with it a long time ago, before they were married. But a check of her office bookshelves at Boston University reveals nothing interesting. Within a day or two we should have a listing of all the books she has checked out of the university’s library since it’s been computerized. I don’t expect any surprises. (There were no real surprises in the list of Foley’s borrowings we got from the MIT library computer system.) You can never tell, though.

Computers are a boon to this business. More lists.

Foley was waiting for me at the diner, finishing what appeared to be a Bloody Mary. I was perversely certain there was no alcohol in it; at any rate, I’m not a good quarry for that particular trap. One drink and I’m halfway to dreamland. I sat down and signaled for coffee.

We exchanged greetings. “You’ve decided?” I asked.

“Yes, pretty much.” He also righted his cup, and neither of us said anything while the waitress served us coffee and thimbles of ersatz milk and the phrase “witcha ’n minnit.”

“My wife and I discussed the alternatives. We decided the best thing would be to wave a magic wand and make you disappear.”

That gave me a premonitory shiver. “Meaning?”

“We’ve decided not to decide, not yet. We both need more time to weigh it.”

This had not been on the tape. “How long?”

“Nine days.” He blew on his coffee and stared at me over the top, through the steam.

“That’s too long… why so specific?”

“Business trip. To Paris.”

“Out of the question.” He checked his watch, an odd gesture. “You have to decide sooner—and no matter what your decision, we can’t let you out of the country.”

“Why not? If I turn out to be a bad guy, you’ll be deporting me anyhow.” That did make a certain amount of sense. “Why not just send somebody along to keep an eye on me? Why not come yourself?”

“I’d enjoy that,” I said. “I haven’t been to France in years.”

“Would the Agency pay for it?”

“I can put in a request, but I doubt they’ll honor it.”

He nodded. “Well, you could come on your own. Make a holiday of it.” The waitress came then and took our orders. Then, I swear, we started chatting about various places we’d been in Paris, what it would be like this time of year, what his linguistics conference would be like, and what his paper was going to be about—with neither he nor I questioning that we were both going there next week.

After listening to the conversation several times (I had a small tape recorder in my pocket) I’m forced to admit that he did somehow hypnotize me—or in some mild way bring me under his control. He’s a persuasive man, and earnest and friendly, but certainly not what you would call charismatic. It wasn’t the strength of his personality that kept me from bringing up the unpleasant business of what-we-can-do-to-you-if-you-don’t-cooperate. He did something. Next time I’ll be on the lookout, catch him at it. Probably some sort of parlor-trick thing; I’ll have to read up on hypnosis.

There were still a few spaces left on the cheap open-seating flight to Paris that Foley will be taking. I bought a ticket just in case. Maybe I just wanted to see Paris one more time before I die.

That was a risky session with Jacob. I had to be circumspect, assuming that we were being recorded, and not give him any direct, unambiguous orders. But I think it worked. At least several days have gone by and I haven’t yet been arrested, Uzi’d, or pushed beneath a subway train.

I got a memo through interoffice mail, presumably from the KGB, arranging for a rendezvous on Saturday with “Lynn.” He or she was to meet me at two in the afternoon outside the Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge. That would be difficult, since I’d be in Paris. Of course there’s no way I could get in touch with them—other than going down to the Soviet embassy in Washington, which I have always assumed was against the rules. I put a prominent note on my office door saying I would be out of town from the ninth through the thirteenth and hoped the news would get to them.

I shouldn’t have worried. The day before the trip I was hunched over my bicycle, fighting the Kryptonite lock, when a familiar voice behind me said, “So you’re going to Paris, Nikola?”

I hadn’t seen Lubinov in almost two years, and I greeted him with honest warmth. We walked and traded politenesses for a minute while my brain ground through the various possibilities, and finally I decided there was only one safe course.

“Vladimir, there’s a real problem. I may…no longer be useful.” He just looked at me, expressionless. “I’ve been approached by the CIA. They know I have KGB contacts and want me to be a double agent. They’ve threatened me with deportation.”

He squeezed my shoulder and actually smiled. “I’m glad you told me this. Cooperate with them, at least for the time being. Try to gain their confidence.”

“You knew?”

He shrugged. “Let me not say. What hotel are you occupying in Paris?” I told him. “Good. We may have people there who want to be, would want,
will
want to talk to you. My English,” he said, smiling.

“Much improved,” I said. Actually, it seemed about the same as ever, which was odd. He’d been in the country longer than I.

“Yes, of course. And your French? If our representatives must use it?”

“My French is good. I could probably struggle along in Russian if I had to.”

“I should not think,” he said, and stopped. “Well. I will see you next time.” We said good-bye, and he walked briskly down Main Street.

I crossed over to Legal Seafood and sat in the noisy bar nursing an expensive beer, trying to reason things
out Did the KGB have a contact in Jacob’s group? I would have to act as if it were so. Should I take the playing-both-ends-against-the-middle game one step further and tell Jacob? No. Not yet—

And whose side am I on? Besides my own, and Valerie’s?

Could Jacob himself be the double agent? The note on my door didn’t say Paris, but Vladimir knew. Because Jacob knew?

Too paranoiac. Vladimir could have called MIT; the departmental secretary knows where I’m going and would have no reason not to tell anybody who asked.

Still, “tightrope” is more than a metaphor for this situation. I must proceed with extreme care.

I turned on the watch as we approached the security stop on the way to our flight. I took the lead-lined bag out of my carry-on luggage and handed it to the attendant. “Just a camera and film,” I said.

She looked in the bag at the camera and film and nine-millimeter automatic. She nodded and handed it back. I kept the watch generator running as we walked to the International Departures Waiting Lounge. Hot and stuffy; smell of European cigarettes.

We found two isolated seats together. Ninety minutes, plenty of time. When Jacob sat down, I handed him a notebook. “Read this,” I said.

On the first page of the notebook I’d printed:

“This is interesting,” he said. Then he turned the page and started writing. I had to hope we weren’t being watched, a reasonable risk for the return. I did assume that the conversation was going on tape, but hoped that silence wouldn’t be too suspicious. While he was writing, I started the horror novel that Valerie said would keep my mind off the flight. It was so absorbing that I jumped when, an hour later, Jacob touched me with the edge of the notebook.

I took it, and he rubbed his eyes. “Must have dropped off.”

“It’s awfully warm. Up late last night?”

“Oh yeah. Last-minute details.”

I turned on the watch again. “You’ll want to sleep on the plane, then.” He nodded. We talked amiably until our flight was called, then we filed into the 747, and in the process of buckling up he began to snore.

He had written four fascinating pages. Not surprisingly, in some matters the CIA knew more about my life than I did myself—for instance, the actual name of my KGB primary contact is Vladimir
Borachev
; he’s a market analyst for the Soviet trade mission in New York City. My wife’s dossier from the sixties includes suspicion of complicity in burning down an ROTC building; she didn’t go to trial, but that may have been because she was sleeping with the FBI informer.

Of my own amorous excesses he only notes the ones that Valerie is aware of, so they’re probably the result of our apartment being bugged (she does occasionally refer aloud to my checkered past). There is no suspicion of my Social-Darwinism-with-a-gun hobby, or infirmity.

They are on the track of my device, though, at least to the extent of making a connection with hypnotism. A woman who interviewed my test subjects noted that two of them remembered my asking them to do ridiculous things, and they both were dropped from the study soon afterward. She correctly interpreted this as a test of hypnotic technique. Jacob has added his own suspicions.

I read the four pages over again, with mounting despair. There was no going back; no matter what happened, our comfortable life in Cambridge was over. We were going to be compelled either to move to the Soviet Union or to drop out of sight in the “Free” World, eventually to emerge with new identities.

Of course I had given this some thought before. With new identities in the West, neither of us could practice our true professions, and we would go through life perpetually looking over our shoulders, being suspicious of everyone—which would also be true in the Soviet Union, to some extent. But at least in the USSR we wouldn’t have to pretend to be something we weren’t. And I could probably continue my researches, even if Valerie was not allowed to. Abnormal psychology is rather a different line of work in the Soviet Union.

I spent much of the flight thinking about the options within those two limited options. On the Soviet side, Valerie could possibly wind up with an interesting job in intelligence—nothing requiring high security clearance, of course, but something that would take advantage of her being a natural-born American. I remembered my teachers at Rivertown and wondered how many of them were recycled spies or relatives of spies. She might perversely enjoy the work. Or she might have a belated attack of patriotism.

Of course we weren’t limited to the United States if we decided not to go to the Soviet Union. We could obtain citizenship papers wherever we wished to go; my watch is better than any passport. Valerie can get along in French and Spanish, and with our savings we could live fairly well in Spain or Mexico or on some Caribbean island. I entertained that fantasy for a few minutes before realizing that wherever we wound up, we couldn’t afford to be conspicuous. Not with both the KGB and the CIA after us. So we probably had best not stray from the States or Canada.