would have to do. She hadn’t slept at all during the flight, using the time, and was glad. She was thinking very differently now, much surer of herself, than she had been during the initial confrontation with Saul Freeman. Wished, indeed, she could turn the clock back for a rerun: she’d thought of a lot of better answers after it was too late. To rebuff Saul-the-Shithead, that was: there was still the confrontation to which she was going, where the in- flight rehearsal-and what she’d brought with her from Moscow-could hopefully be put to better and more effective use. At least she’d been thinking more clearly-leaving things as they should have been left-when she’d spoken to Lestov.
Washington seemed oddly colder than Moscow, although there was a pale sun, but there was a lot more color from the trees on the Parkway and once they crossed the Potomac by the Key Bridge everything appeared much cleaner and people on the sidewalk seemed to move with much more purpose. When she said so to the driver, he remarked that Moscow must be a god-awful place to live. Miriam said it had its moments.
There was an escort waiting for her at the reception desk of the FBI headquarters, which was completely unnecessary because sheprobably knew the building as well as he did, but she guessed it was part of the disapproval she was supposed to be aware of from the beginning. Which she was, but she was not intimidated by it. There was, in fact, still a lot of anger, but well controlled now. She was ready and believed herself prepared to fight back.
Nathaniel Brindsley, the Bureau deputy director in charge of overseas personnel, was a balding fat man whose cheeks puffed when he breathed because of emphysema. He’d transferred to the Bureau after ten years with the CIA, which permanently tagged him an outsider despite his working twice that long at Pennsylvania Avenue. Considering his official title and position, it was also considered unusual that Brindsley had never served outside Washington, not even in a local FBI office within America. Brindsley so snugly fit his chair that Miriam thought the man would have brought it up with him, like a permanent appendage, if he’d politely risen at her entry. But he didn’t. Instead, as she sat in the chair he indicated with an impatient head jerk, he said, “As foul-ups go, you’re scoring ten. And rising.”
“You-and whoever’s pulling the strings-are way ahead. With ten as crisis meltdown, you’re at twenty.” With some irony Miriam estimated she’d been roughly over Yakutsk, crossing Siberia, before she’d properly acknowledged she was flying into a put-up-or-shut-up survival situation, with no second chance. And decided to put up.
“You’re forgetting our respective positions and authority here!”
Committed now, Miriam determined, “Question for question. You’ve forgotten how you were staking me out in the sun: leaving me to sweat with a totally inadequate briefing!”
“You were briefed to the extent you needed to be.”
“Bullshit, Nat! Which you know it is! We got a long-ago secret to keep that way, I need to know what it is. Need to know what I have to hide, if one of the others-too many of the others-come up with it. You sent me blindfolded and naked into the ring, with a target on my fanny. Which makes you a bastard.”
“You swear at me, it’s insubornation. I swear at you, it’s sexual harassment.”
“You try and drop me because I offended some sphincter-stricken cocksucker who considered I was a disposal item, then you-and he-are looking at a lot more than a complaint of sexual harassment.” Hardly any of this was part of the rehearsed script. She might nothave anything more to lose, but this wasn’t put
Brindsley was initially speechless. When he did speak, he said, “You have any idea just how far out of line you are?”
“You tell me-tell me honestly for the first time.”
“You’ve broken every protocol in the book. And then some. Kenton Peters
“And you know what he told me! He told me I was a fall guy. Used those very words!”
The sigh puffed Brindsley’s cheeks more fully than usual. “He doesn’t remember saying that.”
“He knows official telephone conversations to and from the Moscow office are recorded, as a matter of routine?”
The only sound in the room for several moments was the rasping of the deputy director’s heavy breathing.
“I’m going to forget you said that-along with its implications. And remind you whose property any tape is, recorded on FBI material on FBI premises.”
Miriam took the tiny cassette from her handbag and tossed it onto the man’s desk. “Just thought you’d like to hear the conversation for yourself.”
The speed with which the man grabbed the recording was surprising for someone of his size, his hand snatching out to enclose it like a lizard’s tongue plucking an insect in midflight. “This the only copy?”
“With two messages. One that’s on it, one that isn’t.”
“I don’t think I want to hear the second.”
“You do,” insisted Miriam. “And so does Peters and anyone else who thinks they’ve got the lid on whatever it is that has to be locked away forever. There’s too many people-too many chances for the smallest fuckup”-she nodded in the direction of the desk drawer into which Brindsley was putting the tape-“like an ill-considered remark being recorded-for anyone to believe they can control things from a distance of eight or ten thousand miles. This way, the way Peters wants to work and how you’ve been telling me to work, there’sgoing to be something that someone doesn’t know they’re saying or doing and all the demons are going to come out of Pandora’s box and land right in your laps!”
“Peters is sure he’s emptied the box.”
“How can he be?” demanded Miriam, careless of the exasperation.
“It’s his job to be.”
“You going to tell me what it’s really all about?”
“I don’t
“He want me fired?”
“Yes.”
Miriam felt the stir of apprehension, a hollowness. “You going to?”
“You got a good argument against it?”
“Peters sure he’s got the British under control?”
“Totally. Seems they’ve got as much to hide as we have.”
“But he can’t have the Russians …” She extended a cupped hand, closing her fingers. “But I have. Colonel Vadim Leonidovich Lestov, right here in the palm of my hand. You can’t afford to put anyone else on the case, not at this stage. It would be even greater madness than the way it’s being run at the moment.”
Brindsley’s smile was of resignation. “That’s what I told the director, even without knowing about Lestov.”
“What did he say?”
“That we didn’t have a choice but that your future with the Bureau, after this, hangs on the thinnest thread you ever saw. And that you had to be brought all the way from Moscow to be told that in person, so you’d believe it. So tell me you believe it.”
“I believe it.” She was going to survive!
“And don’t you ever again foul-mouth me like you have today.”
“I’m sorry. And I won’t.” It wasn’t Nathaniel Brindsley who was the cocksucker; it was Kenton Peters.
“Another thing you won’t ever do again is communicate outside this Bureau to anyone about anything.”
“I won’t,” promised Miriam. “But Nat, I need more than I’m getting, for all the reasons we’re talking about. It
“That seemed to ring the alarm bell,” agreed Brindsley. “And because the OSS became the CIA after the war, that’s where the records are. Or were. And why Peters is sure everything’s either gone or locked away forever.”
“Who was Henry Packer?”
