Brian Garfield: Checkpoint Charlie

The change in time zones seemed to bewilder Ross. He stumbled groggily when we went along to the shabby export office that housed the front organization for Arbuckle’s soporific East Africa station.

A fresh breeze came off the harbor. I’ve always liked Dar; it’s a beautiful port, ringed by palm-shaded beaches and colorful villas on the slopes. Some of the older buildings bespeak a dusty poverty but the city is more modern and energetic than anything you’d expect to find near the equator on the shore of the Indian Ocean. There are jams of hooting traffic on the main boulevards. Businessmen in various shadings: Europeans, turbaned Arabs, madrassed Asians, black Africans in tribal costumes. Now and then a four-by-four lorry growls by carrying a squad of soldiers but the place hasn’t got that air of police-state tension that makes the hairs crawl on the back of my neck in countries like Paraguay and East Germany. It occurred to me as we reached Arbuckle’s office that we hadn’t been accosted by a single beggar.

It was crowded in among cubbyhole curio shops selling African carvings and cloth. Arbuckle was a tall man, thin and bald and nervous; inescapably he was known in the Company as Fatty. He had one item to add to the information we’d arrived with: Lapautre was still in Dar.

“She’s in room four eleven at the Kilimanjaro but she takes most of her dinners in the dining room at the New Africa. They’ve got better beef.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, you would. Watch out you don’t bump into her there. She must have seen your face in dossiers.”

“We’ve met a couple of times. But I doubt she’d know Ross by sight.”

Ross was grinding knuckles into his eye sockets. “Sometimes it pays to be unimportant.”

“Hang onto that thought,” I told him. When we left the office I added, “You’d better go back to the room and take the cure for that jet lag.”

“What about you?”

“Chores and snooping. And dinner, of course. I’ll see you at breakfast. Seven o’clock.”

“You going to tell me what the program is?”

“I see no point discussing anything at all with you until you’ve had a night’s sleep.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“When I’ve got nothing better to do.”

I watched him slouch away under the palms. Then I went about my business.

The breakfast layout was a nice array of fruits, juices, breads, cold cuts. I had heaped a plate full and begun to consume it when Ross came puffy-eyed down to the second-floor dining room and picked his way through the mangoes and sliced ham. He eats like a bird.

The room wasn’t crowded; a sprinkling of businessmen and a few Americans in safari costumes that appeared to have been tailored in Hollywood. I said mildly to Ross when he sat down, “I picked the table at random,” by which I meant that it probably wasn’t bugged. I tasted the coffee and made a face; you’d think they could make it better — after all they grow the stuff there. I put the cup down. “All right. We’ve got to play her cagey and careful. If anything blows loose there won’t be any cavalry to rescue us.”

“Us?”

“Did you think you were here just to feed me straight lines, Ross?”

“Well, I kind of figured I was mainly here to hold your coat. On-the-job training, you know.”

“It’s a two-man job. Actually it’s a six-man job but the two of us have got to carry it.”

“Wonderful. Should I start practicing my quick draw?”

“If you’d stop asking droll questions we’d get along a little faster.”

“All right. Proceed, my general.”

“First the backgrounding. We’re jumping to a number of conclusions based on flimsy evidence but it can’t be helped.” I enumerated them on my fingers. “We assume, one, that she’s here on a job and not just to take pictures of elephants. Two, that it’s a Seventh Bureau assignment. Three, that the job is to assassinate someone — after all, that’s her principal occupation. Four, that the target may be a government leader here, but not Nyerere. We don’t know the timetable so we have to assume, five, that it could happen at any moment. Therefore we must act quickly. Are you with me so far?”

“So far, sure.”

“We assume, six, that the local Chinese station is unaware of her mission.”

“Why should we assume that?”

“Because they’re bugging her room.”

Ross gawked at me.

I am well past normal retirement age and I’m afraid it is not beneath me to gloat at the weaknesses of the younger generations. I said, “ I didn’t waste the night sleeping.”

He chewed a mouthful, swallowed, squinted at me. “All right. You went through the dragon lady’s room, you found a bug. But what makes you think it’s a Chinese bug?”

“I found not one bug but three. One was ours — up-to-date equipment and I checked it out with Arbuckle. Had to get him out of bed; he wasn’t happy but he admitted it’s our bug. The second was American-made but obsolescent. Presumably placed in the room by the Tanzanian secret service — we sold a batch of that model to them about ten years ago. The third mike was made in Sinkiang Province, one of those square little numbers they must have shown you in tech briefings. Satisfied?”

“Okay. No Soviet agent worth his vodka would stoop to using a bug of Chinese manufacture, so that leaves the Chinese. So the local Peking station is bugging her room and that means either they don’t know why she’s here or they don’t trust her. Go on.”

“They’re bugging her because she’s been known to freelance. Naturally they’re nervous. But you’re mistaken about one thing. They definitely don’t know why she’s here. The Seventh Bureau never tells anyone anything. So the local station wants to find out who she’s working for and who she’s gunning for. The thing is, Ross, as far as the local Chinese are concerned she could easily be down here on a job for Warsaw or East Berlin or London or Washington or some Arab oil sheikh. They just don’t know, do they?”

“Go on.”

“Now the Tanzanians are bugging her as well and that means they know who she is. She’s under surveillance. That means we have to act circumspectly. We can’t make waves that might splash up against the presidential palace. When we leave here we leave everything exactly as we found it, all right? Now then. More assumptions. We assume, seven, that Lapautre isn’t a hipshooter. If she were she wouldn’t have lasted this long. She’s careful, she cases the situation before she steps into it. We can use that caution of hers. And finally, we assume, eight, that she’s not very well versed in surveillance technology.” Then I added, “That’s a crucial assumption, by the way.”

“Why? How can we assume that?”

“She’s never been an intelligence gatherer. Her experience is in violence. She’s a basic sort of creature — a carnivore. I don’t see her as a scientific whiz. She uses an old-fashioned sniper’s rifle because she’s comfortable with it — she’s not an experimenter. She’d know the rudiments of electronic eavesdropping but when it comes to sophisticated devices I doubt she’s got much interest. Apparently she either doesn’t know her room is bugged or knows it but doesn’t care. Either way it indicates the whole area is outside her field of interest. Likely there are types of equipment she doesn’t even know about.”

“Like for instance?”

“Parabolic reflectors. Long-range directionals.”

“Those are hardly ultrasophisticated. They date back to World War II.”

“But not in the Indochinese jungles. They wouldn’t be a part of her experience.”

“Does it matter?”

“I’m not briefing you just to listen to the sound of my dulcet baritone voice, Ross. The local Chinese station is equipped with parabolics and directionals.”