Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

There were various drugs the clandestine people administer their agents to keep them calm and collected, a veritable pharmacopoeia of beta-blockers and anxiolytics and such that over the years had been found to keep field agents calm yet focused. Perhaps this woman was under the influence of something like that. Perhaps, on the other hand, she was preternaturally calm, one of those peculiar human specimens, sociopaths or whatever they are, who do not experience fear the way the rest of us do, and who are therefore eminently suitable for their strange line of work. She had capitulated to me not out of fear, but out of a very rational calculus. She planned, I would bet, to surprise me at a moment when my defenses were relaxed.

But no one is entirely without fear.

Without fear we are not human. We all experience some degree of fear. Fear keeps us alive.

“His name,” I whispered.

I squeezed my finger against the blue metal trigger ever so slightly, but obviously, and told myself that if it came to it, I would without a doubt have to kill this woman.

Max.

I heard, quite distinctly, in that crystalline timbre, one very clear syllable. Max. A name, I assumed. A name that was understandable in any language.

“Max,” I said aloud. “Max what?”

Her eyes met mine, with insouciance, not fear or surprise.

“They told me you could do this,” she said, speaking at last. Her accent was European. Not French, but — Scandinavian? Finnish, or Norwegian...? She shrugged. “I know very little. That was why I was hired.”

I recognized her accent now. Dutch, or perhaps Flemish.

“You know very little,” I agreed, “but you can’t possibly know nothing. Otherwise you’d be of no use. You have been given instructions, code names, and so on. What is Max’s last name?”

I heard, again, Max.

“Try me,” she said with a hint of impertinence.

“What is his last name?”

She replied, pursing her lips slightly, “I don’t know. I’m sure Max isn’t his real name anyway.”

I nodded. “I’m sure you’re right. But who is he with?”

Another shrug.

“Who hired you?”

“You mean, what company name is on my weekly paycheck?” she came back with a smirk.

I leaned closer, until I could feel her breath hot against my face, the Glock still pointed at her, my left hand pressing her against the brick wall.

“What is your name?” I asked. “That I assume you know.”

Her facial expression was unchanged.

Zanna Huygens , she thought.

“Where are you from, Zanna?”

Back off, motherfucker , I heard. English.

Back off.

She spoke English, German, Flemish. Probably one of the Flemish hired killers that the world’s espionage agencies like to employ as freelance talent. The CIA used the Dutch and the Flemish, not just because they were good, but because they had a natural facility in many languages, which made it easy for them to blend in anywhere in the world, to submerge their true identities.

Something else I didn’t understand. A floating phrase, repeated several times: the name the name the name the name

the name motherfucker the name give me the name

the name give me the name

“I don’t know anything ,” she spat out at me, tiny gobbets of saliva stinging my face.

“You’ve been told to get a name out of me, is that it?”

A twitch of her left cheek; a sere pucker of her perfect crimson lips. Then, having considered for a moment, she spoke.

“I know you’re some kind of freak,” she said. Without warning her words began to gush forth, in a prim, singsong Flemish accent. “I know you were trained by the CIA. I know that somehow you have this weird thing, this thing where sometimes you can hear the voices inside the heads of other people, inside the minds of people who are afraid, I don’t know exactly how, or why, or where this thing came from, or whether you were born with it...”

She was yammering, jabbering away almost mindlessly, and suddenly I knew what she was doing.

She was talking nonstop, filling her brain’s speech center with word after word that was probably rehearsed, because if you keep talking, your brain is too busy producing the thoughts that lead to vocalized speech, too busy to be intruded upon, to be read.

“... or why you’re here,” she blathered on, “but I know that you’re supposed to be ruthless, bloodthirsty, and I know that you’re not going to return to the U.S. alive, but I can probably be of some help to you, and please, please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me , I was doing a job, and I didn’t fire directly at you, you’ll notice, please —”

Was she really pleading? I momentarily wondered. Was that fear in her eyes? Had the anxiolytic worn off, or had the stress and terror finally sunk in, and as I inhaled, thought how to respond, she abruptly jammed her hands in my face, her sharp nails grasping at my eye sockets, screaming shrilly, deafeningly, and slammed her knee upward into my groin, all of this happening in one bewildering, frightening instant, and I reacted, a little late, but not entirely too late, by steadying the gun, my bandaged, clumsy finger poised on the trigger, and the would-be assassin jolted my hand, certainly trying to dislodge the gun, but it didn’t dislodge the gun at all; instead, it caused me to pull back instinctively, thus giving the trigger the slightest squeeze, and the woman’s head exploded, and with a liquid sound the air was expelled from her lungs and she sank to the ground.

Calmly, I reached down, frisked her, searching for but not finding any documentation, any papers or wallets of any kind except a small billfold that contained a small amount of Swiss currency, probably just enough to get her through her morning’s assignment, and then I ran.

For a long, awful, excruciating moment, as I searched for Molly in the Grillroom at the Baur-au-Lac, I knew she was dead. I knew they had gotten to her. As had happened once before, I had survived their onslaught but the others had gotten my wife.

The Grillroom is a clubby, comfortable place with an American-style bar, a large stone fireplace, and businessmen sitting at tables lunching on their émincé de turbot. I was decidedly out of place there, bedraggled and blood-spattered as I was, and I drew a number of hostile, disapproving looks.

And as I turned to leave, a young woman in the uniform of a waitress hurried up to me, and asked, “Are you Mr. Osborne?”

It took me a moment to remember that that was my cover. “Why do you ask?”

She nodded shyly, handed me a folded note. “From Mrs. Osborne, sir,” she said, and stood there expectantly as I opened it. I gave her a ten-franc note, and she hurried off.

The blue Ford Granada in front , the note said in Molly’s handwriting.

Munich was dark by the time we arrived, a clear and crisp evening twinkling with city lights. We had retrieved our bags from the left-luggage depot in the Hauptbahnhof in Zurich, and got the 15:39 train, which arrived at 20:09 in Munich’s Hauptbahnhof. There was a momentary fright aboard the train when we crossed the German border, and I braced myself for passport control. There had been plenty of time for our false passports to be faxed to the German authorities, particularly if the CIA put a priority on it, which I would bet it did.

But times have changed. The old days, when you would be startled awake in the middle of the night, your train compartment door violently slid open, a German voice barking: “Deutsche Passkontrolle!” — those days were ancient history now. Europe was unifying. Passport checks were seldom.