“And the Company?'
'Maybe, but I haven't heard anything from them either.'
Tina grinned. 'You're still in counseling, right?'
'Exactly.' Simmons got to her feet. 'Okay, let's get this place finished, and if you come across something that doesn't belong here, let me know.'
They spent the next three hours reassembling electronics, picking up broken pictures, and restuffing cushions. It was frustrating work for all involved, and halfway through it, Patrick opened a bottle of vodka for general use. Simmons declined with thanks, but Tina poured herself a tall shot and drank it down in one go. Stephanie watched all of this wryly. She spent most of the time in her own room, repositioning dolls that had been taken from their proper homes. Around seven, as they were finishing, she came out of her room holding a cigarette lighter that advertised a Washington D.C., bar, the Round Robin, at 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.
'How about that,' said Simmons, slipping on a latex glove and turning it over in her hand.
'What is it?' asked Tina, a little bubble of adrenaline rising at the sight of physical evidence.
'Strange, is what it is.' Simmons held it up to the light. 'I know the place-big politicians' haunt. It might be nothing though.'
'That's pretty bad tradecraft,' said Tina. 'Leaving something behind.'
Simmons slipped the lighter into a ziplock bag and pocketed it. 'You'd be surprised just how lousy most agents are.'
'I wouldn't be,' Patrick assured them all, and Tina almost smiled-the poor man was feeling left out.
As she prepared to go, Simmons's phone rang. She took it into the kitchen. Tina caught a momentary, uncharacteristic sound of glee from the special agent's lips. 'You're kidding! Here? Perfect.'
When she emerged from the kitchen, though, she was all business again, and after thanking Patrick for his help she pulled Tina into the hall and told her that, in the morning, she'd be meeting with Yevgeny Primakov. Tina's feet went cold. 'He's in New York?'
'He'll be at the UN headquarters. It's a nine o'clock appointment. Do you want to meet him?'
Tina considered it, then shook her head. 'I need to go to the library, take care of stuff I've let slip.' She paused, knowing that Simmons could see through the lie-the truth was that she was terrified. 'But maybe later, you could… I don't know…'
'I'll give you a full report. Sound all right?'
'Not really,' said Tina, 'but it'll have to do.'
12
Fitzhugh ate at the same Chinese restaurant on Thirty-third they'd ordered Weaver's takeout from. He chose a table near the back to avoid interruptions, and to ponder the Nexcel message he'd received from Sal.
J Simmons sent request at 6:15 PM to DHS acting director requesting license to access bank and phone records of Terence A Fitzhugh. At present, request is under consideration.
Over Szechuan chicken, he tried to think through this. It proved what he'd been sensing, that Simmons didn't trust him at all. It was in her tone, the entire way she dealt with him. Interagency rivalries were one thing, but this level of tension… she treated him as if he were the enemy. And now, she was asking Homeland's director for access to his records.
So he'd nipped it in the bud with a phone call. The request for access, he had been assured, would be denied.
Even so, he felt himself on the defensive, and that wasn't what he needed now. He should be leading the attack in order to control all possible damage by putting away Milo Weaver and ending this investigation.
The passport. That was his trump card. He still didn't know who had sent it. Forensics had only produced a single white hair: Caucasian male, aged fifty to eighty, a diet high in protein-but that described half of the intelligence world. He no longer cared who his benefactor was; his only concern was to wrap up this case before Simmons found a way to ruin all their hard work.
His thoughts were interrupted by a stranger who approached and said in French, 'It's been so long,' reaching out his hand to shake. Fitzhugh, stuck in the mental rhythms of his worries, was caught off guard. Staring up at the handsome, sixty-something face under wavy white hair, he took the heavy hand. Where did he know this man from?
'Excuse me,' Fitzhugh said as they shook. There was something familiar in the face, but he wasn't sure. 'Do I know you?'
The man's smile faded, and he switched to English-not his native language, but spoken in a kind of easy swing. 'Oh. Bernard, right?'
Fitzhugh shook his head. 'You have the wrong person. I'm sorry.'
The man held up his hands, palms out. 'No, my mistake. Sorry to bother you.'
The man walked off, and though Fitzhugh expected him to return to a table, he actually left through the front door. He'd been so convinced Fitzhugh was his friend Bernard that he had come in from the street. French? No-in his accent he'd caught Slavic traces. Czech?
Eleven blocks uptown, on the twenty-third floor of the Grand Hyatt, Simmons was sitting on her stripped bed, typing queries into the Homeland database, looking for the record of a Company agent, Jim Pearson. It came up empty. She tried variations on the name, then sent a message to Matthew, her plant inside Tourism, asking him to check the Langley computers, in case Jim Pearson's records hadn't made the trip to Homeland.
While waiting for the answer, she looked for whatever she could find on Yevgeny Primakov. In the morning, she would meet him in the lobby of the UN's General Assembly building, which, as George had put it, was 'un-fucking- believable.'
Unbelievable, indeed. From what she read on the United Nations site, Yevgeny Primakov worked in the financial section of the Military Staff Committee of the Security Council, with an office in Brussels. An accountant? She doubted that. Was his presence in New York a beautiful coincidence? Or had he made sure to be there in case he was called upon by the United States to answer questions about his son?
She accessed a secure section of the Homeland site, and her searches turned up a skeletal history of Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Primakov, onetime colonel. He was inducted into the KGB in 1959, and in the mid-sixties began his travels. Known destinations: Egypt, Jordan, West and East Germany, France, and England. When the KGB morphed into the FSB after the fall of the Soviet Union, Primakov stayed on, heading a department of military counterintelligence until 2000, when he retired and began a new career with the United Nations.
They had little more on him, though in 2002 the U.S. representative to the UN requested a background check on Primakov. No reason given, and the resulting report was not available.
During the last years, Homeland had been absorbing FBI files connected to terrorism, past and present. It was within this clerical subsection that she found a single sheet on Ellen Perkins, who was convicted in absentia for being an accomplice in two crimes: the 1968 robbery of a branch of the Harris Bank in Chicago, and, in early 1969, the attempted arson of the Milwaukee police's District Seven headquarters. Last spotted in Oakland, California, before disappearing completely.
Given what William Perkins had told her about Ellen-robbing banks in Germany-she was surprised to find nothing else under her name, or under Elsa Perkins. It took a Google search-Elsa Perkins Germany armed robbery-to come across a site dedicated to the history of seventies' German terrorist groups. Baader-Meinhof, the Red Army
