'All right, people, get out of here. I'll talk to him.'
'Do you need security, Commander?' said an ex-state cop, correctly reading the anger in Bob's body.
'No. He'll see reason. He knows this isn't a pissing contest between him and this team, right. Swagger?'
'You just answer my questions and we'll see what's what.'
The men and women he had vanquished slid out of the room and then Bonson took him into another one, neatly set up as an operational HQ with computer terminals and phone banks. A few technicians worked the consoles.
'Okay, everybody on break,' Bonson called.
They too left. Bob and Bonson sat down on a beat-up sofa.
'I got the name of your Russian.'
'All right,' said Bonson.
'His name was Robert Fitzpatrick, he was affiliated with GRU, according to the Brits. But they don't have nothing on him, what he was up to.'
'Swagger, good. Damn, you are an operator. I'm impressed.
So what did you do with this? Where did you go?'
'You'll find out when I put it all together, which I ain't done yet, but I have some ideas. What have y'all got on this guy? I need to find out who he was or is, what became of him, what this is all about. He had the Brits buffaloed.
They only found out he was operating in their country after he was long gone.'
'Fitzpatrick,' said Bonson.
'Fitzpatrick was a recruiter.
That was his specialty. He was one of those seductive, smooth presences who just gulled people into doing what he wanted, and they never, ever knew he was persuading them. You see, that's what's interesting about him. I don't think Trig was his only project. I think he may have recruited others, and whatever his business with Trig was, it wasn't the main reason he came to the United States.'
'What was he doing?'
'He was recruiting a mole.'
'Man,' said Bob, 'this shit is getting fucked up.
Secret-agent crap, like some paperback novel. I do not want to be a part of this shit. My mind don't work that way.'
'Nevertheless, that was his great gift, his special talent.
We know a little more about him than the Brits--and the timing works out right.'
'What do you mean?'
'For the past twenty years, the Agency has been in a curious down cycle. It seems to have had an enormous fund of bad luck. Every once in a while we smoke somebody out. In the early eighties, there was a guy named Yost Ver Steeg. A little later there was Robert Howard.
Early in the nineties, we finally caught onto Aldrich Ames. And we think, well, that's it, we're clean at last. But somehow it never quite pans out that way. It never does.
We're always a little behind, a little slow, a little off.
They're always a little ahead of us. Even after the breakup, they've stayed strangely ahead of us. I'm convinced he's here. I can feel him. I can smell him. He's someone you'd never believe, someone totally secure.
He's not in it for the money, he's not so active he's obvious.
But he's here, I know it, goddammit, and I will catch him. And I know this goddamn 'Fitzpatrick' recruited him in the year 1971 when he was in this country. And, goddammit, I just missed him that year. I was a couple of hours slow, because your pal Fenn wouldn't roll over for me.'
'So what happened to Fitzpatrick?'
'Disappeared. Gone. We have no idea. He was never serviced out of an embassy, never had a cut-out, any of the classic ploys of the craft. We never cut into his phone network. He was entirely a singleton. We don't know who serviced him. We don't even know what he looks like. We never got a photo. But it is provocative that suddenly all this is active again. Why would that be? Your picture goes in the paper and suddenly they're out to kill you?'
'But my picture has been in the paper before. It's been on the cover of Time and Newsweek. They couldn't miss that. So what's different this time?'
'That's a great question, Sergeant. I can't answer it. I even have a team of analysts working on it back at Langley and so far they have come up with nothing. It makes no sense. And to make it more complicated, Fitzpatrick may not even be working for the Russians, or for the old Soviet communist regime, which is still there, believe me.
He may be working against it now. It's a tough call, I'll tell you, but I guarantee it's simple underneath. Mole. Penetration of the Agency. The notification of your existence, something coming active over there, your elimination to prevent--what? I don't know.'
Something didn't quite add up. There was some little thing here that didn't connect.
