Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

“But have you received any threats?”

“None at all. It’s just the patterns that have me worried.”

“Patterns—?”

“Tell me this. Who knew you were coming to see me?”

“Just Molly.”

“No one else?”

“No.”

“There’s always the telephone.”

I peered at him closely, wondering whether the paranoia had closed in on him, as it had done on James Angleton in his last years. And as if he could read my thoughts, Moore said, “Don’t worry about me, Ben. I have all my marbles. And certainly my suspicions could be wrong. If and when anything happens to me, it will happen. It’s just that I’m allowed to be scared, aren’t I?”

I had never known him to be hysterical, so his quiet fear unnerved me. All I could say was, “I think you’re probably overreacting.”

He smiled, a slow, sad smile. “Maybe so. Maybe not.” He reached for a large manila envelope and slid it across the table toward me. “A friend... or, rather, a friend of a friend... sent this to me.”

I opened the envelope and removed an eight-by-ten glossy color photograph.

It took me a few seconds to recognize the face, but the instant I did, I felt sick to my stomach.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. I was transfixed with horror.

“I’m sorry, Ben. But you had to know. It rather settles any doubts as to whether Hal Sinclair was murdered.”

I stared, my head reeling.

“Alex Truslow,” he went on, “may be the last, best chance the Company has. He’s been valiantly trying to rid CIA of this — for want of a better word, cancer — that afflicts it.”

“Are things really that bad?”

Moore gazed at the reflection of the room in the dark panes of the French doors. His eyes got a far-off look. “You know, years ago, when Alex and I were junior analysts at Langley, we had a supervisor who we knew was fudging an assessment — grossly exaggerating the threat posed by an Italian extreme-left splinter group, just so that he could double the size of his operating budget. And Alex faced him down. Called him on it. Even then the guy had brass balls. He had a kind of integrity that seemed out of place, almost bizarre, in such a cynical outfit like the Agency. As I recall, his grandfather was a Presbyterian minister in Connecticut, from whom Alex probably inherited that kind of ethical stubbornness. And you know something? People came to respect him for it.”

Moore took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and massaged them. “Only problem is, I’m not sure there are any others left like him. And if they get to him the way they got to Hal Sinclair... well, who knows what might happen?”

I didn’t get to bed until well after midnight. It was too late to catch the last shuttle back to Logan, and Moore wouldn’t hear of my staying in a hotel, what with the various empty rooms in his house now that his children had all left. So I spent the night in his comfortable guest bedroom on the third floor and set the digital alarm clock for six A.M. so I could get to the office at a decent hour.

About an hour later I suddenly sat up in bed, my heart pounding, and switched on the bedside lamp. The photograph was still there. Molly must never see this, I told myself. I got up from the bed, and, in the bright yellow lamplight, slipped the photograph into the manila envelope and zipped it into a side compartment in my briefcase.

I switched off the light, tossed and turned for a few moments, until I surrendered and put the light back on. I could not sleep. As a rule I avoid sedatives, in part because of my Agency training (one must always be ready to bound out of bed on an instant’s notice), and in part because, as an intellectual-property attorney, the last thing I need during the day is the hangover from anything sleep-inducing.

So I put on the television and looked for something suitably soporific. C-SPAN usually does it for me. On CNN, as it turned out, was a news-talk program, Germany in Crisis. Three journalists were discussing the German situation, the German stock market crash, and the resulting neo-Nazi demonstrations. They appeared to be in rather heated agreement that Germany was in imminent peril of succumbing to another dictatorship, which would present the world with a terrifying prospect. And, being journalists, they seemed quite certain about it.

One of them I recognized immediately.

He was Miles Preston, a British newspaper correspondent. Ruddy-cheeked, a sparkling wit, and (unlike most Brits I know) a fitness fanatic, I had known him since my early Agency days. He was a bright, extremely well-informed, impressively well-connected fellow, and I listened closely to what he had to say.

“Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we,” he was saying from CNN’s Washington studio. “The so-called neo-Nazis who are behind all this violence are just plain old Nazis. I think they’ve been waiting for this historical moment. Look, the Germans finally, after all these years, establish one unified stock market, the Deutsche Börse, and look what happens — it teeters and then collapses, right?”

I had met him during my assignment in Leipzig, having just graduated my training at the Farm. I was lonely: Laura was back home in Reston, Virginia, trying to sell our house so she could join me. I was sitting alone in the Thüringer Hof on Burgstrasse, a pleasant, bustling little beer cellar in the Altstadt, and I was probably looking bent out of shape, nursing a large mug of beer.

I noticed someone standing over me, clearly a Westerner. “You look bored,” the man said in a British accent.

“Not at all,” I said. “Drink enough of this stuff, and everybody seems interesting.”

“In that case,” Miles Preston said, “may I join you?”

I shrugged. He sat at my table and asked, “American? A diplomat, or something?”

“State Department,” I answered. My cover was as a commercial attaché.

“I’m with the Economist. Been here long?”

“About a month,” I said.

“And you can’t wait to leave.”

“I’m getting a little tired of Germans.”

“No matter how much beer you drink,” he added. “How much longer are you here?”

“A couple of weeks. Then Paris. Which I much look forward to. I’ve always liked the French.”

“Oh,” he said, “The French are just Germans with good food.”

We hit it off, and saw each other, for drinks or dinner, a number of times before I was transferred to Paris. He seemed to believe my State Department cover, or at least didn’t question it. He may have suspected I was with the Agency, I don’t know. On one or two occasions when I was dining with Agency friends at the Auerbachs Keller, one of the city’s few decent restaurants and popular with foreigners, he walked in, saw me, but didn’t approach, perhaps sensing that I didn’t want to introduce him. This was something I liked about him: journalist or not, he never tried to pry for information or ask intrusive questions about what I was really doing in Leipzig. He could be blunt-spoken to the point of crassness — a source of much humor between the two of us — but at the same time he was capable of extraordinary tact. We were both in the same line of work, which may have been what drew me toward him. Each of us was hunting and gathering information; the only difference was that I was doing it on the shady side of the street.

Now I picked up the bedside phone. It was after one-thirty in the morning, but someone answered at CNN’s Washington office, no doubt a young intern, who gave me the information I needed.

We met for a very early breakfast at the Mayflower. Miles Preston was as hearty and charming as I remembered him.

“Did you ever remarry?” he asked over his second cup of coffee. “What happened to Laura in Paris, my God, I don’t know how you ever survived it—”