Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

But what was the pattern?

Toby had sent me to find out what I could from Vladimir Orlov. I had almost been killed in the process.

For what?

For learning something that Harrison Sinclair knew? Something he was killed for knowing?

Embezzlement, elemental greed, was not an adequate explanation. My instincts told me it was something more, something much greater, something of enormous and pressing concern to whoever the conspirators were.

And if I was fortunate, I would learn it from Orlov.

If I was fortunate. A secret that certain people of immense power wanted kept secret.

And as likely as not, I’d learn nothing. They would release Molly, I felt confident, in any case, but I would return home empty-handed. And then what?

I would never be safe, and neither would Molly. Not as long as I possessed this terrible gift; not as long as Rossi or any of his cronies knew where to find me.

Dispirited now, I left the café and found, on the winding main street, Via Roma, a small store called Boero, whose window displayed ammunition and hunting supplies for this hunting-obsessed region. The cases and boxes in the inelegant display bore such names as Rottweil, Browning, Caccia Extra. What I didn’t find there I managed to turn up in a much fancier hunting-supply store in Siena, a place on the tiny Via Rinaldi called Maffei, which boasted pricy hunting jackets and accessories (for those wealthy Tuscans, I imagined, who wanted to look fashionable while they went out for a day’s sport hunting, or who wanted to at least look like they hunted). Next, I arranged the transfer of a great deal of money from my old Washington account to an American Express office in London, and from there to Siena, where it was given to me in American dollars.

Finally there was enough breathing room — and I had sufficiently collected my thoughts — to place a telephone call. On Via dei Termini in Siena I located an SIP office (the Italian telephone company) where, from one of the booths, I dialed an international number.

After the customary clicks and hums and staticky interludes, the phone on the other end was answered on the third ring, as it was supposed to be.

A female voice said, “Thirty-two hundred.”

I said, “Extension nine eighty-seven, please.”

Another click, and the timbre of the connection was altered almost imperceptibly, as if the call were being routed through some special, insulated fiber-optic cable. Likely it was: from a communications outpost near Bethesda, to a switching station in Canada (Toronto, I believe) and back to Langley.

A familiar male voice came on the line. Toby Thompson.

“The Cataglyphis ant,” he said, “goes out in the noonday sun.”

This was a coded exchange he had devised, a reference to the Saharan silver ant, which is able to withstand temperatures higher than any other animal in the world, as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

I responded: “And they sprint faster than any other animal, too.”

“Ben!” he said. “What the hell are you — where the hell—?”

Could I trust Toby? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, but it was best to take as few chances as possible. After all, what if Alex Truslow were right and the Agency was infiltrated? I knew that the security precautions of the telephone connection, the multiple switchbacks and so forth, would give me more than eighty seconds before my location could be traced, so I would have to speak quickly.

“Ben, what’s going on?”

“You might want to fill me in, Toby. Charles Van Aver is dead, as I’m sure you know—”

“Van Aver —!”

As far as I could divine through the miracle of modern telecommunications, Toby sounded genuinely shocked. I glanced at my watch, and said, “Look into it. Ask around.”

“But where are you? You haven’t checked in. We agreed...”

“I just wanted you to know that I will not be checking in according to your schedule. It’s not secure. But I’ll be in touch. I’ll call back tonight between ten and eleven my time, and I want to be connected immediately with Molly. You can do it; you guys are wizards. If the connection isn’t made within twenty seconds, I’ll disconnect.”

“Listen, Ben—”

“One more thing. I’m going to assume your... apparatus is leaky. I suggest you plug the leaks, or you’ll lose contact with me entirely. And you don’t want that.”

I hung up. Seventy-two seconds: untraceable.

I strolled through the crowds along Via dei Termini, preoccupied, and found a kiosk that had a good selection of foreign newspapers: the Financial Times and The Independent, Le Monde , the International Herald-Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung. I picked up a copy of the Trib and glanced at the front page as I continued walking. The lead story, of course, was the German election.

And a small headline below the fold on the left-hand side of the page read:

U.S. SENATE COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE CORRUPTION IN CIA

Wholly absorbed, I jostled a glamorous young Italian couple, both attired in olive green. The male, who was wearing Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, shouted out some imprecation in Italian I didn’t quite understand.

“Scusi,” I said as menacingly as I could.

Then I noticed the headline at the top left: ALEXANDER TRUSLOW NAMED TO HEAD CIA.

White House sources say that Alexander Truslow, a longtime CIA official who was acting director of the CIA in 1973, will be named as the new director. Mr. Truslow, who heads an international consulting firm based in Boston, vowed to launch a major cleanup of the CIA, which is being rocked by the allegations of corruption.

Things had begun to make sense. No wonder Toby had spoken of a “grave urgency.” Truslow represented a threat to some very powerful people. And now, having just been named as Harrison Sinclair’s replacement, he was in a position to do something about the “cancer,” as he called it, which was overtaking the Agency.

Hal Sinclair had been killed, as had Edmund Moore, and Sheila McAdams, and Mark Sutton, and perhaps — probably — others.

The next target was obvious.

Alex Truslow.

Toby was right: there was no time to lose.

At a few minutes after three in the afternoon I drove up to the stone quarry near where I had spent the previous night.

One hour and fifteen minutes later I was seated in the front passenger seat of a beat-up Fiat truck, pulling up to the main gate of Castelbianco. I was wearing work clothes, heavy blue twill trousers and a light blue work shirt, well worn and covered in dust. Driving the truck was the gangly, dark-skinned young worker I’d met at the bar in Rosia early that morning.

His name was Ruggiero, and he turned out to be the son of an Italian man and a Moroccan émigré woman. Correctly sizing him up as cooperative, pliable, and very susceptible to a bribe, I had found him at the quarry and taken him aside to ask for information.

Or, rather, to pay for it. I explained that I was a Canadian businessman, a real-estate speculator, and I was willing to pay handsomely for information. Slipping Ruggiero five ten-thousand-lire notes (about forty dollars), I told him I needed to somehow get to the “German” in order to talk business — specifically, to make a generous (if somewhat illegal) cash offer for the Castelbianco property. I had a potential buyer; the “German” would turn a quick, easy profit.

“Hey, wait a second,” Ruggiero said. “I don’t want to lose my job.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I replied. “Not if we do it right.”

Ruggiero supplied me with all the information I needed about the renovation taking place at Castelbianco. He told me that a member of the housekeeping staff dealt directly with the quarry, placing orders for marble and granite tiles. Apparently, the “German” was overseeing a rather thoroughgoing renovation; the crumbling wing was being restored with deep green Florentine marble tiles for the floor and granite for the terrazzo. He had hired expert stonemasons, real old-world craftsmen, from Siena.