The Second Sight Read online

  ALSO BY CHARLES MCCARRY

  Old Boys

  Christopher’s Ghost

  The Tears of Autumn

  The Miernik Dossier

  The Secret Lovers

  The Better Angels

  The Last Supper

  The Bride of the Wilderness

  Shelley’s Heart

  Lucky Bastard

  Copyright

  First published in paperback in the United States in 2009 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  New York & London

  NEW YORK:

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  LONDON:

  Duckworth

  90-93 Cowcross Street

  London ECIM 6BF

  inquiries@duckworth-publishers. co.uk

  www.ducknet.co.uk

  Copyright © 1974 by Charles McCarry

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be

  reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic

  or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information

  storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without

  permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who

  wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written

  for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0040-6

  Contents

  Also by Charles Mccarry

  Copyright

  second sight

  Prologue

  I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Interlude

  II

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Interlude

  III

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Interlude

  IV

  One

  Two

  Three

  Interlude

  V

  One

  Two

  Three

  Epilogue

  To the Reader

  To Nancy and Pamela

  (RUTH 1:16)

  second sight

  a supposed power by which occurrences in the

  future or things at a distance are perceived as

  though they were actually present.

  Oxford English Dictionary

  PROLOGUE

  BEAUTIFUL DREAMERS

  IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE TO DAVID PATCHEN, THE DIRECTOR OF THE Outfit, that his friend Paul Christopher had been out of the business of espionage for twenty years, or that he had spent more than half that time in a Chinese prison. He still told him secrets. Christopher did not want to hear them. He defended himself against them by pretending to listen to Patchen’s revelations while in fact he thought about the past. Tonight, as Patchen sat in Christopher’s peaceful garden in Georgetown, describing the kidnapping of an American agent in an Arab country, Christopher reconstructed a day from his childhood.

  There wasn’t much to it: On Easter Monday in 1928, when travel by automobile was still a novelty, he had driven with his parents in an open car over the Simplon Pass from Switzerland to Italy. The road had been opened by snowplows that morning, and deep winter drifts still lay on the mountainsides. The Christophers were bundled up against the cold in coats and mufflers, with a fuzzy red rug across their laps, and Paul, warmed by the heat of their bodies, sat between his mother and father under the heavy coverlet. It was a day of brilliant sunshine, and mountain people, whole families with the stunned faces of the rudely awakened, walked dreamily alongside the slowly moving car. They had been snowbound in their villages since October, and now they were bareheaded, with coats unbuttoned, as on a summer’s day. Christopher’s father tried to greet them, “Grüß’ Gott! Good day!” But they did not answer. When the car approached the tunnel through the mountain on the Swiss-Italian frontier, the crowd, thirty or forty men, women, and children, stopped, turned around, and walked back the way they came. “Let’s wait,” Christopher’s mother said. His father backed out of the tunnel, and they sat in the front seat eating a picnic lunch in the sunshine. Half an hour later the people reappeared, walking beside another car. They were very surprised to see the Christophers still sitting in their green Storch at the mouth of the tunnel, drinking cocoa from steaming cups. One of the men detached himself from the group, approached the car, squinted at them apprehensively, and pointed to the dark interior of the tunnel. “Hierdurch Italien!” he said in peculiar gargled German—this way to Italy.

  In the garden in Washington more than fifty years later, Christopher chuckled at the memory.

  “What’s so funny?” Patchen asked.

  “I remembered something from a long time ago,” Christopher replied.

  “Have you heard anything I’ve been telling you?”

  Christopher shook his head. “Sorry. My mind wandered.”

  “Then I’ll start over again.”

  “Don’t bother on my account.”

  “I’m not worried about boring you. I want your help.”

  Patchen believed that Christopher had a gift for puzzles, that he saw solutions that were invisible to others. He also believed that Christopher, in spite of everything that had happened to him, still had a weakness for the Work, as the craft of intelligence was called by the few who practiced it.

  “All right,” Christopher said. “Let me put Lori to bed and I’ll walk home with you.”

  Christopher’s daughter had fallen asleep on his lap. He stood up, carefully, so as not to wake her, and carried her into the house.

  To Patchen this was a strange and disorienting sight. He had known Christopher most of his life, but he had never imagined him as the father of a child. The women he had lived with in his youth, a wife who deserted him and a girl who died for his mistakes, had been too beautiful to play the role of mother. Then, in middle age, after Patchen rescued him from captivity in China, Christopher had married a younger woman, the daughter of a fellow spy, and she gave birth to this child. Christopher stayed home to care for the little girl while his wife pursued a career, going to an office every day, traveling to conferences, fighting off rivals, worrying about money and her professional reputation. Patchen himself was child-less and mostly alone.

  Christopher came back after a long absence inside the house.

  “She woke up,” he explained. “I had to read her a story.”

  Patchen said, “Her mother isn’t here?”

  “She’s here, but it was my turn to read the story.” Christopher’s young wife was a feminist who insisted on the equitable division of domestic responsibility.

  It was almost midnight by the time the two men set off together through the deserted streets of Georgetown. Four hundred people had been murdered in the city of Washington so far that year, and though only two or three members of the white bourgeoisie were among the victims, few went out on foot after dark. They passed Patchen’s house, which lay a few blocks away from Christopher’s, and entered the towpath of the C & O Canal. Patchen held the leash of a Doberman pinscher. The dog, and a heavy pistol he had carried for more than thirty years but never fired, were his only protection in an age in which men like himself were kidnapped or murdered by maniacs every day.

  As they walked, Patchen described the work of a particular maniac.

  “So far this fellow has kidnapped two of our people,” Patchen said.

  “Together?”

  “No, a month apart, one in Jordan, one in Greece. He kept them over the weekend, then left them sitting in a car, alive and well, wi
th a video tape recording what he or she—one of the victims was a woman—had spilled. Both were drugged—sound asleep when we found them.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “From the symptoms, some kind of super tranquilizer, but masked with other drugs given before the victims, if that’s the word, are released,” Patchen said. “The lab hasn’t been able to identify it precisely.”

  “Do you have a description of the kidnappers?”

  “No. The tranquilizer takes care of that. They can’t remember anything, except that it was the most pleasant experience of their lives. Apparently you could have your leg sawed off under the influence of this drug and not remember a thing.”

  “Do they remember being kidnapped before the drug was administered?”

  “No. We’ve tried everything—our own drugs, hypnotism, something called ‘enhanced debriefing.’ “

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s similar to what the Chinese tried on you—hard-nosed moral suasion. No violence, no threats, just insistence on confession for your own good. No sleep, strange hours.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Not very well. We’re not as patient as the Chinese. Or as religious.” Patchen believed that political conviction was the same thing as religious faith. “Anyway,” he continued, “nothing really works. They just don’t remember where they were or who they were with. Evidently they’re injected in the first seconds and the stuff puts them under instantaneously. The woman was hit in a public toilet. The man was walking his dog, half a mile from his house. A spaniel, not a Doberman.” Patchen smiled his gloomy smile. “All they remember after that is being happy and sleeping like tops. Evidently they’re asleep most of the time. It takes days to wake them up completely, and when they do wake up, their minds are blank. We call the operation ‘Beautiful Dreamer.’ “

  “What’s on the tapes?”

  “Everything the victims know. Everything. Not only about the Outfit, but about themselves. It’s stream of consciousness; they go on and on, overjoyed at the opportunity to confess everything. You’d be amazed at the private lives some of our people have. Or maybe you wouldn’t.”

  “The kidnappers don’t ask for ransom?”

  “They don’t communicate with us in any way. They just take our people, flush out their brains, and give them back good as new. Like the Eskimo’s wife.”

  Patchen let his dog off the leash and told it to run. It bounded away down the path for about twenty yards, turned around and ran back to Patchen, then repeated the circuit. The animal was never away from the man it had been trained to protect for more than a few seconds.

  “We don’t know who we’re dealing with or why they’re doing this,” Patchen said. “What do they want? What’s next?”

  “Why should anything be next except another kidnapping?” Christopher asked. “Maybe all they want is information.”

  “That’s what we thought in the beginning. But they don’t seem to be doing anything with the information. They have the names of dozens of assets. Not one has been bothered. We’re still running them, hoping these people will come after them so we can get one of them and give him a dose of their own medicine.”

  “Why do you say ‘them’?” Christopher asked. “Why should there be more than one person involved?”

  Patchen was silent for a moment. Then he gripped Christopher’s shoulder and squeezed. The pressure was painful: Patchen was partially paralyzed on the other side of his body as a result of war wounds, and his good hand was tremendously strong.

  “I don’t think there is more than one thinker involved,” he said. “That’s why I wanted to see what you thought.”

  “Oh?” Christopher said. “Why me?”

  Patchen watched his dog galloping toward them in the darkness. There was an electronic device in its collar; when he pressed another device, about the size of a quarter, that he always carried in his pocket, the animal came. If he pressed it twice, it took up a protective stance. Three times and it attacked.

  “Why you?” he said to Christopher. “I’ll tell you why. Because when I read the files I thought you were back in business. Until this dream merchant came into view, I didn’t think that anybody but you could think something like this up, let alone bring it off.”

  They stopped under a sputtering sodium light. Christopher smiled at his friend. “You can stop worrying,” he said. “It isn’t me.”

  “I know,” Patchen replied. “It’s worse than that. It’s somebody just like you. And he’s on the other side.”

  I

  THE LOVE CHILD

  ONE

  1

  CATHY CHRISTOPHER DISCOVERED THAT SHE WAS PREGNANT AFTER she and her husband stopped living together. Although she had taken lovers in the last months of the marriage, she was absolutely sure that Paul Christopher was the father of her child. Against his will, he had made love to her in a hospital bed in Rome while she waited for the orderly to come and wheel her into the operating room. She had been beaten nearly to death that morning by another man, an Italian film-maker she had slept with half a dozen times without pleasure or emotion.

  No one had ever hurt Cathy before. Her astonishing beauty had always protected her from everything, and after the first blows fell, her conscious mind left her body and floated upward, so that she was looking down on herself being beaten while it was happening. She felt the life going out of her and then coming back as her attacker’s fists thudded against her face and body. His eyes were glazed by drugs. Grunting with every punch, he shouted insults in a mixture of Italian and broken English—American bitch! Pezzo di merda! Stupid whore! Other foreign women, friends of his, were present, watching the beating while they drank spumante and smoked marijuana.

  Afterward, as she lay in the hospital, Cathy was overwhelmed by the fear that she might die in surgery before Christopher ever made love to her again. Her mind had never been as clear as it was at that moment; she had never understood anything so well: he must do this for her before she died and wipe out every trace of all the other men with whom she had betrayed him. She had come to him a virgin. He was the first man she had ever made love to. He was her husband, the only man who had ever had a right to her.

  He was standing beside the bed, looking down at her. She slid her hand out from under the coarse hospital sheet and caressed him. He gasped and recoiled. She threw back the sheet. The shutters were closed but the dazzling afternoon sunlight came through the lattice, so that everything—her perfect legs, the white hospital gown, Christopher’s bewildered face—were striped with light and shadow.

  She struggled with him. Christopher said, “Cathy, no,” and took hold of her wrists to restrain her. A crucifix hung on the whitewashed wall above the bed; nuns hovered just outside the door. Cathy’s nose and the bones in her cheeks were smashed; the doctor said that her spleen was ruptured. He had given her injections, and billows of morphine bore her away from the worst pain she had ever felt. Nevertheless, she knew that it might come back at any moment. A kiss, a noise, anything, could start it up again.

  She did not care. She fought Christopher, twisting her wrists out of his grasp. Sleeping with other men had taught her that her husband was utterly without vice, but she knew that he could not refuse her; he never had.

  “Please, Paul, please,” she said in a voice she did not recognize, “what if I never wake up?”

  He stopped resisting. The pain-killer was so strong, and he was so gentle when at last he did as she wanted, that she hardly felt his weight upon her.

  They took her into the operating room and asked her to count backward from twenty in Italian while they gave her another injection. As she was trying to remember the word for sixteen she lost consciousness.

  Under the anesthesia she dreamed that Christopher, her one true love, was still with her, and she heard herself calling out to him. Much later, she believed that she already knew that she was pregnant.

  I’m happy, Paul, she told him, so happy.


  He never touched her again.

  2

  “MY GOD,” SAID MARIA ROTHCHILD, MOMENTS AFTER CATHY LANDED in Geneva. “Who did this to you?”

  She slammed on the brakes and steered the car off the airport road into a street lined with new houses.

  “I was in an accident,” Cathy said. The sudden stop had thrown her body forward, jarring her wounds; her voice was faint.

  “An accident? With Paul?”

  “No, not with Paul. There’s no more Paul.”

  “No more Paul? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Cathy removed the broad-brimmed hat and sunglasses that she had worn on the plane. More wounds became visible—the broken nose, the discolored flesh, the red puncture marks where the sutures had been removed. Maria’s eyes widened. Behind them, a speeding Mercedes stopped with a shriek of tires and horn. The driver, a bald Swiss wearing new pigskin driving gloves, reversed and then pulled up beside them, shaking a bright yellow fist and shouting. Maria ignored him. She and Cathy had been at school together; she was demanding answers like the house captain she used to be.

  “What kind of an accident?” she asked.

  Cathy heard the question only faintly over the blare of the other car’s horn.

  “A motorbike,” Cathy said.

  “A motorbike? You were riding on a motorbike?”

  “What difference does it make?” Cathy said. “It happened, that’s all.”

  The Swiss in the Mercedes stopped blowing his horn and drove away. Through the windshield they could see huge airplanes lumbering into the sky, landing gear dangling over the pink tile rooftops of rows of identical new gray villas. Each little square house had a window box filled with geraniums and one juvenile linden tree planted in the raw earth of a tiny front yard. Maria waited for a Caravelle to climb out of earshot before she spoke again. Her voice was hostile, accusative.

  “What did you mean when you said there’s no more Paul?” she asked.