“Aside from that fact, yes.” I smiled insincerely. It always made Patrick want to punch my face. “Anyway, you can’t blame me because people want to kill me.”
“I can. The fact that people want to kill you means that they are troubled by your character or actions. And that means you have social problems that are wholly your responsibility.”
I thought Patrick had a point. “I did nothing wrong.”
“Running in a public place with a pistol in your hand? You were lucky you weren’t shot by a cop.”
Simply for the sake of seeing what it would do to Patrick, I wanted to tell him that it got much worse than that, but I decided that confessing I’d killed Abram on U.S. soil wouldn’t work in my favor. “Something else is bothering you.”
Patrick looked at me in a way that always made me feel that he was my surrogate father or uncle. The look killed my flippant posturing.
And rightly so. He was my father’s colleague, secretly gave financial support to my mother after my dad was killed, and had consistently backed me to the hilt even though privately he sometimes told me I was a frickin’ damn liability.
Patrick kept his eyes focused on mine. “You know why Abram tried to take a shot at you?”
I nodded. “Russia’s wanted me dead for years. Turns out Abram’s been loyal to the Russians all along. They used him to get to me.”
Patrick tapped his hand on a telephone. “Yeah, well, we’ve spoken to the Kremlin. Told ’em that one of our own was targeted by one of theirs and that if anything similar happens again we’ll post on the Internet a video we got of a certain senior Russian politician having a good time with a woman who’s not his wife. That should keep Russia off your back for a while.”
“Great.”
“No, it’s not all great, because it’s possible Russia’s not the only one that wants you dead.”
He told me about a man, code name Trapper, who was seized by Agency men in Afghanistan, lied that he was an Indian intelligence officer, said that I was being targeted for execution by unknown terrorists because I’d killed a senior Taliban leader, and escaped from a cell that was deemed to be totally escape-proof.
“Trapper’s vanished,” Patrick said. “I can understand why he fed them the intelligence officer shit; bought him time to escape. But I don’t get why he went out of his way to say you were being targeted. Nor do I know how he got your name. You think there could be any truth in what he’s said?”
“In principle, yes. I’ve lost count of the number of terrorists I’ve killed, including Taliban.”
Patrick smiled, and this worried me. “I got to take precautions. Keep you here until we find Trapper and sort this out.”
“For how long?” I had a sinking feeling.
“As long as it takes.”
The prospect of having to kill days, maybe weeks, sitting in my hotel room was the last thing I wanted. I liked my hotel, but I’m a restless type, and sustained boredom makes me prone to grumpiness and moments of unexplained whimsy. The last time I had nothing to do was a three-week stint in a hotel in Vienna. By the end of that stint, I’d bought two awful paintings and a coat that hadn’t suited me but most certainly would have looked good on Liberace, and nearly thrown my room’s TV out the window because it had shown only one English-language movie and I’d watched it seven times. To this day, I still knew every line in Finding Nemo. “Let me go after Trapper.”
“Can’t afford for you to be taken out by a bunch of bearded crazies. There are some other big projects looming that we need you for.”
“I’ll find Trapper quicker than anyone else, plus I can handle myself against crazies.”
Patrick adopted his cross daddy look. “I’m not taking that risk.”
I could see Patrick’s mind was made up. “I’ll go mad in my hotel.”
“I know. So, I’m thinking we move you to an Agency safe house. Get you off the radar. The place has got a housekeeper, so she’ll be there to feed you and keep you company.”
This was very bad news. There are two categories of CIA safe house keepers: the mothering type who spends every waking hour trying to make you fat; or the haughty type who thinks the house belongs to her and must remain spotless. Both types are always over sixty. “When do I move in?”
“Today.”
Five hours later I exited a taxi in a quiet residential suburb, grabbed my bag, paid the driver, then considered asking him to take me back to central D.C. because the place around me looked like it could be in the top league of the world’s most boring locations. On either side of the street the houses were identical and had manicured front lawns. I discerned no sign of life, meaning everyone was away at work or the occupants of the street were in their eighties and spent all day watching TV. It would have been better if the Agency had housed me in a downtrodden crime zone, because at least then there might have been something interesting going on around me.
But I let the taxi go and walked toward the safe house while deciding that if its keeper was the haughty type, I would make an extra effort to be as messy as possible, and if she was the mothering type, I would lie to her that I’m gluten and lactose intolerant. I knocked on the door, it opened, and I was very surprised to see that the person standing in front of me was a superb CIA field operative.
Her name, one of many but it’s the one I like the most, was Chrissie Lime. Though I hadn’t dared to ask her for her age, I guessed she was about five years younger than me, but despite her comparative youth she had eight years of operational work under her belt plus a degree from Harvard.
“Hi, Chrissie, are you still single?” I wondered why I blurted this question without thinking.
She pretended to look annoyed and responded in her New England accent, “Yes.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You mean that?”
“Not sure. I guess it’s a matter of perspective.” From my perspective I was glad she wasn’t hitched, because I had to admit I’d felt a bit of a feeling in my gut when I’d first laid eyes on her two years ago in Hanoi. She’d been operating under diplomatic cover in the U.S. embassy in Vietnam, recruiting spies and sending them over the border into southern China. I’d been visiting the country with the primary remit to do a review for a nonexistent holiday magazine, with the secondary remit to place a bomb under a car that was owned by a slave trader of children. Chrissie had been my in-country point of contact and the person who would supply me with the equipment I’d need for the job. After I’d turned the trader into a charred corpse, I’d invited Chrissie out for a drink at the Bamboo Bar in the Sofitel Metropole. It had been the unprofessional thing to do because we were supposed to have been keeping our contact to a minimum, but, like mischievous kids, spies sometimes cannot resist doing things that fly in the face of their tradecraft training. I’d sat in the bar, my beer encapsulated by hands that had still smelled of cordite; she’d walked in — tall, slender, black trouser suit, white shirt, shades, dark hair pinned up — and moved across the room with the confidence, charisma, and beauty of a movie star who was about to address a pack of photojournalists. She’d sat next to me, ordered a whiskey, looked me in the eye, and said, “You’re not going to screw me tonight.”
I’d respected that, and in any case it hadn’t been my intention to tempt her into my bed, though the moment she’d told me that option had been off the table I’d felt a twang of disappointment but also a sense of optimism, because the word tonight was time-specific, meaning there was always the possibility of another day. We’d had quite a lot of drinks, and she’d made me laugh by telling me about the time she’d posed as a white Kenyan arms dealer while meeting an Iranian defense attaché in a restaurant in Switzerland that had overlooked the Alps and, for some reason unbeknownst to her, had bizarrely and wholly inaccurately said to him that the vista around them had reminded her of Kenya. I’d made her laugh by recalling the time I’d spent one year making preparations to lure a rogue nuclear physicist to a meeting with me, travelled to Nicosia to have dinner with him in my hotel’s restaurant, had twenty minutes to spare after dressing in my room, put the TV on, and become so engrossed in a live AC/DC rock concert that I’d lost track of time and missed the meeting.