“How is he?” Bay asked in German.
The policeman stepped back. “Do you know him, sir?” Although his tone and demeanor were polite, Bay detected wariness.
“He’s Jacob Crandell, a political officer at the U.S. consulate. I work there, too. How is he?” he repeated as he stared inside. Cowboy was no longer leaning on the horn, his body relaxed back against the seat. His head lolled to the side, and his glasses were crooked on his nose, one lens cracked. His eyes were closed. Blood spilled from a corner of his mouth, but oddly he was smiling.
“I’m sorry to tell you, sir, I could find no pulse,” the policeman said. “I’ve called for an ambulance. Please show me your identification.”
Woodenly he took out his wallet and handed it over.
As the policeman wrote, Bay tried to feel the pavement under his feet, the mist against his skin, smell the exhaust in the air.
A second policeman joined the first. “Who is it?”
“Cowboy Crandell,” the first one said. “I’d been wondering what he was up to.” He returned Bay’s billfold.
“Good, then this is an easy case. A traffic accident.”
They did not look at Bay. They did not want to be given another reason, Bay realized.
“Yes, a traffic accident,” said the other. “Very straightforward.”
Bay silently slid back into the crowd and walked away. As the traffic of the Parkring thundered, his mind roamed over the evening, remembering Cowboy’s stories, advice, and gruff kindness. Cowboy had always lived on the edge, which was fine, but then he had died from it as if it were a disease. Still, he had died the way he wanted.
Hell, this is a beautiful antique burg… Operating here is like being inside a museum, punctuated by boredom, of course. The lull before the storm. I used to believe I could die happy in my Jaguar. Now I know Vienna’s the place.
Bay dug his hands into his trench coat pockets and headed back into the Innere Stadt. He passed busy cafés and noisy pubs. People milled on the street, deciding where to find their next dose of gaiety in the gray night. As he walked, he could hear Cowboy’s voice: You have a lot to learn, but I suspect you’re the type who’ll do it. Bay smiled to himself, realizing he was keeping his movements nondescript, just as Cowboy had said to do. With cold fingers he wiped tears from his eyes. Then he glanced covertly around and faded into the crowd.
THE INTERROGATOR by David Morrell
When Andrew Durand was growing up, his father never missed an opportunity to teach him tradecraft. Anything they did was a chance for the boy to learn about dead drops, brush contacts, cutouts, elicitation, and other arts of the espionage profession.
Not that Andrew’s father spent a great deal of time with him. As a senior member of the Agency’s Directorate of Operations, his father had global responsibilities that constantly called him away. But when circumstances permitted, the father’s attention to Andrew was absolute, and Andrew never forgot their conspiratorial expeditions.
In particular, Andrew recalled the July afternoon his father took him sailing on the Chesapeake to celebrate his sixteenth birthday. During a lull in the wind, his father told him about his graduate-student days at George Washington University and how his political science professor introduced him to a man who turned out to be a CIA recruiter.
“It was the Cold War years of the nineteen fifties,” his father said with a nostalgic smile as waves lapped the hull. “The nuclear arms race. Mushroom clouds. Bomb shelters. In fact, my parents installed a bomb shelter where we now have the swimming pool. The thing was deep enough that when we tore it out later, we didn’t need to do much excavating for the pool. I figured handling the Soviets was just about the most important job anybody could want, so when the recruiter finally ended the courtship and popped the question, I didn’t need long to decide. The Agency had already done its background check. A few formalities still remained, like the polygraph, but before they got to that, they decided to test my qualifications for the job they had in mind.”
The test, Andrew’s father explained, was to make him sit in a windowless room and read a novel. Written by Henry James, published in 1903, the book was called The Ambassadors. In long, complicated sentences, the first section introduced a middle-aged American with the odd name of Lambert Strether, who traveled to Paris on some kind of mission.
“James has a reputation for being difficult to read,” Andrew’s father said. “At first, I thought I was being subjected to a practical joke. After all, what was the point of just sitting in a room and reading? After about a half hour, music started playing through a speaker hidden in the ceiling, something brassy by Frank Sinatra, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin.’ I remember the title because I later understood how ironic it was. Another brassy Sinatra tune followed. Then another. Abruptly, the music stopped, and a male voice I’d never heard before instructed me to put the book in my lap and describe what was happening in the plot. I replied that Strether worked for a rich woman in a town in New England. She’d sent him to Paris to learn why her son hadn’t returned home after a long trip abroad. ‘Continue reading,’ the voice said. The moment I picked up the novel, another brassy Sinatra tune began playing.
“As I turned the pages, I was suddenly aware of faint voices behind the music, a man and a woman. Their tone was subdued, but I could tell they were angry. At once, the music and the voices stopped.
“’What’s happening in the book?’ the voice asked from the ceiling.
“I answered, ‘Strether’s worried that he’ll lose his job if he doesn’t persuade the son to go home to his mother.’
“‘Lose only his job?’ the voice asked.
“‘Well, the rich woman’s a widow, and there’s a hint that she and Strether might get married. But that won’t happen if Strether doesn’t bring her son home.’
“’There were people talking behind the music.’
“‘Yes. A man and a woman.’
“’What were they discussing?’
“’They were supposed to meet at a restaurant for dinner. But the man arrived late, claiming last-minute responsibilities at his office. His wife believes he was with another woman.’
“’Continue reading,’ the voice said.”
Andrew remembered listening to his father explain how the test persisted for hours. In addition to the music, two and then three conversations took place simultaneously behind the songs. Periodically, the voice asked about each of them (a woman was fearful about an impending gall-bladder surgery; a man was angry about the cost of his daughter’s wedding; a child was worried about a sick dog). The voice also wanted to know what was happening in the densely textured novel.
“Obviously, it was an exercise to determine how much I could be aware of at the same time, or whether the examiner could distract me and get under my skin,” Andrew’s father said. “It turned out that my political science teacher had recommended me to the Agency because of my ability to hold various thoughts at once without being distracted. I passed the test and was initially assigned to hotbed cities like Bonn, which in those days was the capital of West Germany. Pretending to be an attaché, I made chitchat at crowded embassy cocktail parties while monitoring the voices of foreign diplomats around me. No one expected state secrets to be revealed. Nonetheless, my superiors were surprised by the useful personal details I was able to gather at those diplomatic receptions: who was trying to seduce whom, for example, or who had money problems. Alcohol and the supposed safety of the chaos of voices in a crowded room made people careless. After that, I was promoted to junior analyst, where I rose through the ranks because I could balance the relative significance of various crises that erupted simultaneously around the globe.”