The Mulberry Bush Page 7

  Headquarters was not a breed apart, just another herd.

  I never truly belonged to the herd or wanted to belong. But I got better and better at impersonation. Little by little, my doppelgänger came into being, and then became me as I, in turn, gradually became my doppelgänger. In the end I was the role and the role was me. Even the polygraph could not tell the difference.

  At times, it is true, I longed to be myself, to be free to be myself in the presence of a witness—just one. And so I waited for Luz—pictured her, searched for her, talked to her in my mind. Knew I would know her when I found her.

  6

  For five years after I left Moonshine Manor I never set foot in Headquarters—or for that matter, in the United States. Unlike Father, I was sent immediately into the heart of darkness, which in my time was Islam. It was a superb hiding place. My targets were terrorism and terrorists. I lived like a terrorist, under many aliases. I operated alone and reported directly to a single person at Headquarters. I was constantly on the move, sometimes visiting half a dozen countries and speaking as many languages and dialects in twice as many days. I liked the work and to my surprise discovered that I had a knack for it. Despite Fred’s warnings about boredom, I found it unfailingly interesting. True, it involved a lot of wasted time, but what line of human endeavor does not? I liked the danger, which was real and constant. I liked keeping my eyes open and my wits about me during every waking moment.

  Every month, usually in some out-of-the-way retreat in the European countryside, I met my handler, Bill Stringfellow. I had always liked him within limits. Over time my misgivings about him dissipated and I began to regard him with something like affection. As a handler Bill—a former chief of the division I now worked for—was competence itself, never a wrong move or a foolish word. From the beginning of our new relationship he dropped his avuncular manner and treated me as an equal. When we were together, he gave me his full attention. When we were apart I had the sense, even though I knew this was in no way justified or even possible, that he was looking out for me.

  In operational matters Bill made sure I had what I needed and on the whole, gave me my head. He kept his word without fail and to the letter telling me what to do but never how to do it. He knew the craft of espionage inside out, and he was good company—a tonic, actually, because on the surface at least, he was so completely himself. Bill liked to meet at taxpayer expense in Europe at isolated châteaux and schlosses that had been converted into hotels with restaurants that were listed in the Michelin guides. We would arrive at some converted castle separately, meet as if by chance in the bar and for the benefit of the staff and the other guests, mimic taking a liking to each other, then bond like the only two English speakers on a Chinese ship, eat dinner together, drink together, play golf or tennis after breakfast and backgammon after dinner—passions of Bill’s that I could take or leave alone.

  Business—what I had done since last we met and how I had done it, what Headquarters thought I should do next—was conducted on long hikes well out of the range of listening devices. Bill was in his sixties, but his appetite for vigorous exercise was as keen as ever.

  The shop within Headquarters that Bill now worked for part-time, and in his heyday had practically reinvented in its post–Cold War form, was only marginally interested in gathering information. Its mission was covert action—in Bill’s words, its purpose was to make things happen. If interesting information came my way, as it often did in the ordinary course of things, I tossed it into the pot by sending a coded but inane text to a cell phone with a Chicago number. I would never hear whether the information was useful or whether, like most of the millions of snowflakes of fact and gossip that fell on Headquarters every day, it melted as soon as it was touched.

  We did what we did, in Bill Stringfellow’s words, by finding people who wanted to do something that was somehow, even if only barely, in the American interest, and making it possible (money, information, advice) for them to do it. What I mostly did, or tried to do, was find ways to hunt down terrorists like vermin and capture them, or arrange for them to be killed if capture proved to be impractical, as it often did. This involved making friends with their friends, then watching or bribing the friends, and hoping they would lead us to the cell composed of two brothers and a cousin that was thought by its members to be impenetrable.

  Many of these helpers were women. Terrorists tend to regard themselves as monks in the business of providing burnt offerings to the one God, but most are horny young men who can hardly wait for the seventy two virgins that service martyrs in paradise. This led to disillusion among some of the girls who had simply wanted the thrill of screwing a man who might blow himself up or be shot dead by an American assassin. When they discovered that their boyfriends just wanted to get laid before they died and true love was not part of the bargain, they wanted out and in some cases were willing to pay for a visa and an airline ticket to America by betraying the lovers who had tricked them into meaningless sex.

  For the obvious reason that I could not be identified as the nemesis of jihadists and go on living, others did the wet work. Our shop managed a corps of special op types whose specialties were assassination and abduction. When I had identified a target, I asked Bill Stringfellow to call in the troops, and they did the job, almost always in dead of night. They arrived out of darkness and did their work in darkness and then vanished into a deeper darkness, leaving corpses behind and taking drugged captives with them in shackles. I had no problem with this. The martyrs we made were the enemy. In war the objective is to kill the enemy before he kills you. Doing so within largely undefined limits is sanctioned by international law and ancient tradition. I thought that terrorism, in reality, was more a bloody nuisance to my country than an existential threat, but even so, why should it get away with mindless murder and mayhem as if it had a moral right to do such things without consequences?

  Whatever precautions I might take, I knew I could not go on doing what I did forever and live long enough to exact the vengeance that was my purpose in life and in this job. I lived defensively. I kept moving, never remaining for long in any one place. I had no home apart from hotels along my circuit. I never went near an American embassy or a safe house. Usually I indentified the specific targets. No one, after all, told American infantrymen which Germans to kill in World War II.

  Because of my need to travel incognito, Bill Stringfellow supplied me with the necessary genuine-false passports stamped with the necessary visas, along with driver’s licenses and other ID in many names and nationalities. Because many of the passports were issued by minor Latin countries whose obliging intelligence services supplied Headquarters with blanks, I studied Spanish, learning from recordings at first, then working with the Honduran tutor. No one ever questioned my credentials, let alone tested my Spanish, and eventually I knew the language well enough to read Don Quixote and Lorca or answer the questions I was likely to be asked by passport inspectors.

  I never used disguises because they did not work for me, as they invariably did for Sherlock Holmes, and because I saw no benefit in having a false beard ripped off my face by a terrorist or a policeman. Stringfellow, also a skeptic about wigs and fake teeth, told me the story of a Headquarters type who surprised his wife, who had just arrived in the hotel room in a foreign city where they were meeting after a long separation, by walking out of the bathroom naked, with an erection, wearing a full disguise—wig, mustache, eyebrows, false nose, glasses. She shot him dead with the ladies model .32-caliber pistol, a present from her doting father, that she always carried in her purse. Luckily, her husband had a large life insurance policy.

  In the fifth year of our time together, Stringfellow was hit by a hit-and-run driver while bicycling in the predawn darkness on a country road a few miles from McLean. This news was delivered to me in a castle in Bavaria by Father’s enemy Amzi Strange, whom I had never met before and was the last man on Earth I would have chosen to bring me such tidings.

  �
��Broke damned near every bone in Bill’s body,” Amzi said, as if shouting this detail out the window. “Fractured skull, broken spine, broken legs. Died instantly, they said for the benefit of his wife and kids, but no one ever dies instantly. If you’ve ever broken a bone, you can imagine what having a dozen broken all at once must have felt like in his last moments.”

  After delivering this summary Amzi said, “I stand in need of orientation, so I’ve got some questions for you. Stringfellow kept you to himself and went around me to get the director to sign off on your many promotions and citations. What’s your rank now, three-star general?”

  I said, “Let me ask you a question. Who exactly are you?”

  He said, “My name is Amzi Strange. Does that help?”

  “It provides a point of reference.”

  Amzi was the deputy director for operations. In other words, he ran the show. Yet he had come himself to give me the news. Why hadn’t he just sent a lackey? The answer to that question had to be Father. Amzi must have wanted to take a look at the imbecile’s kid.

  I said, “I’m flattered that you took the time to come all this way.”

  “Glad to do it. Let me flatter you some more. You’re a fucking legend. How much of your reputation is smoke and mirrors remains to be determined, but that glowing record is in the files for posterity to wonder over.”

  Watching my face intently, he waited for a reaction, a reply, and when he didn’t get one, rose from his chair, walked to the window, and looked out at the manicured gardens. If I had been carrying a gun I could have shot him in the back of the neck, Lubyanka style.

  He said, “This joint sure is Stringfellow’s kind of place. Old Bill had aristocratic tastes.”

  Then, without taking another breath, he looked at his watch and said, “Get room service on the horn. Order lunch. Light. Tell them to deliver everything all at once.”

  Amzi was another very fast eater. While I was still working on the appetizer he chewed and gulped down everything before him as if he were a machine. He put down his cutlery with a clatter.

  When I looked up from my plate, he waved a hand and, as if I were asking his approval to finish my lunch, said, “Take your time. We’ve got all day.”

  Amzi Strange was a solid, muscular type with a flat belly rare in a large fifty-something man who worked all day at a desk and had no time to exercise beyond hurrying to the men’s room. This was not the only difference between him and Bill Stringfellow. After lunch Bill and I would have hiked for miles in the mountain air, maybe even climbed a little—the Zugspitze and other peaks of the Wetterstein Alps were visible from the castle. Amzi chose to remain indoors in an easy chair.

  As soon as I ate the last bite on my plate and wiped my lips with the napkin, he came straight to the point.

  “I omitted a detail about Stringfellow’s death,” Amzi said. “Have you finished your lunch?”

  “Yes.”

  Amzi said, “He was decapitated. After the car hit him.”

  The picture that flashed in my mind when I heard this was Bill Stringfellow kissing my mother in our kitchen in Budapest. Amzi watched my reaction with open curiosity. What he saw in my face could probably have been mistaken for shock and grief.

  I said, “This is public knowledge? It was in the papers?”

  “No. We had a little luck. A local sheriff’s deputy found him. Why I don’t know, but Bill had his Headquarters credentials on him. The sheriff called us. He doesn’t like reporters.”

  I said, “Did they cut off his head while he was still alive?”

  “The county coroner thought so. Also that he had been kicked around after he was hit by the car, so they must have been seeking information, like where you were.”

  I asked no more questions.

  Amzi said, “You’re looking a little peaked. Take a minute if you need it.”

  I waved a hand: go on.

  Amzi said, “We’re bringing you home.”

  I said, “You are? Why?”

  “It’s pretty fucking obvious. They thought Stringfellow knew where to find you. That’s why they were kicking his broken bones. He left you out in the open for too long. A lot of people including me are surprised you’re still among the living, and I don’t want to upset you, but that may not continue much longer unless we get you out of sight.”

  Virginia didn’t seem to be a safe haven. But what was?

  I said, “What do you know beyond what you just told me?”

  “That’s all we need to know,” Amzi said. “But the stations—more than one—and the French and the Mossad have all picked up whispers that you’re the talk of the jihad. There’s a fatwa out on you. You’re the target of the year. If the bad guys find you, they’ll saw off your head with a dull knife and send the video to Al Jazeera and FedEx the head to us. The whole fucking Islamist movement is looking for you. They could find you tomorrow.”

  There was nothing implausible about this. I had been exposed for half a decade, I had left a trail of dead jihadists behind me, and it was a wonder, really, that I was still in one piece.

  Amzi said, “Speak only good of the dead and all that, but Stringfellow overexposed you because you made him look good, so don’t think you have to hunt down his murderers and any of that crap.”

  I said, “If they know so much about me, why haven’t they done something about me before this?”

  “Because nobody including us knows where you are from one day to the next, and maybe they don’t really know who you really are or what you look like. Where do you live?”

  “Wherever I happen to be.”

  “No fixed abode?”

  “No.”

  “So you live on the expense account?”

  It’s a short distance from the tragic to the trivial. The answer to Amzi’s question was yes, because I was constantly on the move. I waited for whatever he was going to say next.

  He said, “You must have a pile of back pay in the bank.”

  “Assuming my salary and allowances are deposited every month, probably.”

  “You don’t check your balance?”

  “I have no mailing address and I don’t use the Internet and as you know, I haven’t been to the U.S. for a while.”

  “No wonder you’re an object of superstitious awe.”

  I said, “You insist on my coming home?”

  “You bet your ass I do.”

  He groped in a shopping bag and handed me a brand-new, presumably genuine-genuine, blue U.S. passport in my true name. Then he gave me a manila envelope stuffed with brand-new hundreds and fifties, just as Bill used to do. I signed a receipt.

  “You can turn in a final expense account when you get back,” he said.

  “When will that be?”

  “Today, if we wanted to lose your assets, but you’ll have to say good-bye to the boys and girls and hand them over to the next guys.”

  “‘Guys,’ plural?”

  “We’ll split your caseload up among the stations as soon as you tell us what’s going on and who the assets really are. Stringfellow took your secrets to the grave with him. We don’t want them shutting down the whole fucking network because only one guy knows who everyone is.”

  “I’ll be surprised if any of them will want to be handed over.”

  “If they want to keep on getting the money, they’ll cope. All promises made by you will be kept.”

  “Am I supposed to introduce them to the new guys?”

  “It’s customary. They’ve all got your cell phone number—Stringfellow actually shared that with us. They’ll call. When you answer they’ll say, ‘Matt Tannenbaum gave me your number.’ Response: ‘Matt the bookworm? What’s he reading these days?’ Response: ‘Harlequins.’ Any questions?”

  “What am I going to be doing from now on?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. You’re the original round peg and all we’ve got back home is square holes.”

  “So what are the possibilities?”

  “I guess y
ou could impart your wisdom to the rest of us. Sooner or later, we’ll find or invent something that takes advantage of your experience and talent. You should cool off for a while. You’d make an outstanding instructor in the training division.”

  “The Plantation? No thanks.”

  “There’s no such thing as no thanks in this business.”

  “Then this is good-bye, because the Plantation is out.”

  These words came from the depths. I wanted to advance my plan, to penetrate, to spoil, to humiliate. I couldn’t do that by running a classroom at the Plantation and sending dewy-eyed recruits to their capture and death in the abattoir that was the Middle East. Or being reminded daily of the horseplay that had sealed Father’s fate.

  Amzi said, “Simmer down. Obviously you’ll be working in antiterrorism. It just takes a while to figure out where and how. Islamist nutcases are not the only terrorists in the world. New ones crawl out from under rocks every day all over the planet. You’ve got a gift for finding and killing the fuckers. So that’s what you’ll be doing. But you can’t do it in Arabia anymore.”

  He looked at his watch, yawned, and rose to his feet.

  “We’re done,” he said. “I’ve got to get some sleep. I leave right after breakfast. Stay out of sight. Eat in your room. You’ve got a month to clean up behind the elephant before you get on a plane. We’ll talk again when you get home, work something out. I know it’s bad taste to tell a professional like you to watch his ass, but watch your ass.”

  The next morning I checked out of the hotel at six. There in the lobby, waiting and watching for who knew what, was Amzi, sprawled in an easy chair, white skin showing between his ankle socks and the cuffs of his trousers, tiny spectacles perched on his nose. He was reading, or pretending to read, the Süddeutsche Zeitung and did not look up.