The two men shook hands warmly. “Long time, primo,” Benny said. His black eyes were sparkling.
“Six months,” Brook said. “Tangiers, wasn’t it? A great town for a couple of redblooded lechers.”
The Mexican showed his perfect teeth. “How long did we wait? — sixty days? And the guy never showed up. What a waste of the taxpayers’ money.”
“Let’s hope we have better luck this trip.”
“Thees time? I’m not so sure.” His wetback cover-accent sometimes showed when he was telling jokes on himself. “I was all set to go see Mondragon.”
“Who?”
“Juan Mondragon of Spain, in my opinion the greatest torero in the world. He’s fighting in Mexico City Sunday. Who knows when he’ll fight here again?”
“I bleed for you,” Brook said.
“In Sevilla he made eleven natural passes in a row and finished with a magnificent pase de pecho. They awarded him both ears and the tail. Goddam, I’d like to have been there.”
“Come on, Benny,” Brook said. “Today it’s a bear, not a bull. I’ll bet if you ask Levashev he’ll tell you they invented the bullfight.”
Benny said something about the land of the commissars in dirty Spanish.
They rode toward the hills. The horses were moth-eaten and querulous, poor stock. They could have taken a jeep over the dirt road, but Lopez thought it would look better if they seemed to be riding out for pleasure, so they had rented the nags at the shack and corral outside town. He had brought along for Brook a pair of blue jeans, a screaming sports shirt, shiny new boots, and even a Stetson in Brook’s size; he had changed into a similar costume. Two tourists out for a gander at the great Southwest.
“You can see some of the buildings now if you squint,” Lopez said.
Brook squinted.
“It used to be a ranch owned by a retired admiral, of all people. The government bought the spread just to keep Levashev there.”
“Were you in on this from the beginning, Benny? You seem to know a lot about it.”
“You are speaking,” Lopez said, “to one of the in-group, amigo. I am a very important man.”
Brook told him what he was in dirty English. The ranch was clearer now. It looked as if it had grown out of the New Mexican earth. “Pity the poor taxpayer again.”
“Worth every cent,” Lopez said. “Levashev’s their walking memory bank. Every time they need a fact about the other side the General has it. They’re always coming back to him.”
“I wonder what he thinks about all this.”
“All what?”
Brook nodded at the lunar landscape. “Presumably Levashev defected because he wanted to get free. And here he is, a prisoner.”
“Listen, Pete, this Levashev is a realist, like most Russkies. He knows that the minute our side let him loose the KGB would have a killer on his back. He’s got all the vodka he wants, he’s past the age of tomcatting, and from what I hear he’s nursing a real hate for the present commie regime. Remember, he was one of the original Bolsheviks, a pal of Lenin’s. He knows how much the brass at KGB want to get him. He’s perfectly happy here.”
“It’s hard to believe, being stashed away at the bottom of nowhere.”
“The Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce will not like you, señor! What’s with you, Pete? Levashev is an old man. All he wants is peace. Are you putting yourself in his place?”
“Maybe that’s it,” Brook said.
They came to an innocent-looking barbed-wire fence. Brook edged his horse toward it.
“Cuidado!” Lopez said.
“Electrified?”
Lopez nodded. “And a lot more not visible to the eye. This place is like something out of a science-fiction story! Let me lead.”
They followed the fence line until they came to an ordinary-looking gateway with a shack beside it. Before the shack, watching them approach, stood a Mexican in a wide straw hat and dusty work clothes. At least he looked like a Mexican. Brook kneed his horse closer to Lopez. “A leftover from Pancho Villa’s army?”
Lopez laughed. “That’s Shel Rifkin, born in Brownsville.”
“Texas?”
“Brooklyn. The other two in the shack are CIA, too. In case you’re interested—”
“—they’re holding rifles on us. What am I, blind? I thought they were expecting us.”
“They are. But how do they know we’re not Brezhnev and Kosygin in disguise?”
In the shack Brook was introduced to the three CIA men. Rifkin’s companions were also in clothes that went with the terrain. The CIA men checked their credentials, made the standard cracks about the cushy life enjoyed by FACE’s pampered playboys, and why didn’t they resign and join a real intelligence outfit? They also grumbled about having to pull nurse duty in the wilderness — apparently on this assignment agents were not rotated as often as usual — and indulged in other comments that came under the heading of shop talk. But in spite of their camaraderie, Brook noticed, they carried out a minute doublecheck; one even announced their arrival time, to the second, over a powerful transmitter in a corner of the shack.
Brooks and Benny Lopez were given a jeep. They drove for a mile or so along a two-rut road that led across a succession of low ridges and arroyos in a landscape stippled with boulders and scrubby piñones. At last they arrived at the ranch house, which was surrounded by old trees.
Brook looked around. There was no one in sight.
“No guards here?”
“Not where you can see them,” Lopez said with a grin. “They keep ’em out of the way so Levashev won’t be reminded he’s a target.”
A soft-footed Filipino houseman in a white coat led them into a Texas-sized rancho living room. A slight, small old man stood looking out a windowed roor that opened on a patio. His back was to them. In Russia Brook had been surprised at the generally short stature of the populace; he was reminded of it now. The old man wore a gray Stalin-type jacket and carried in his hand what Brook took to be a pipe.
General Levashev turned. It was not a pipe. It was a pistol.
He had the broad flat Mongolian-Turkish look of his Tartar ancestry, with overhanging clumps of cotton for brows and a shock of white hair. His eyes were young and alert; the puffy peasant hand that held the pistol was steady.
Brook was one coordinated linkup of muscles; without glancing at Benny, he knew that Benny was, too. It was automatic, like a knee-jerk. There were moves to make when a pistol was pointed at you and he and Benny Lopez without conscious thought were reviewing those moves just as automatically.
“Peace,” Peter Brook said in Russian; and then he said in English, “Put that thing down, General. You’re supposed to be expecting us. I’m Peter Brook. This is Benigno Lopez. Both of FACE.”
Levashev lowered the pistol. He allowed himself to smile, but without relaxing. Here’s a man, Brook thought, who tastes death every minute of his life. “Good afternoon, gentlemen.”
Brook nodded at the pistol. “You feel that’s necessary, General?”
Levashev must be close to eighty, Brook thought, and his yellowish skin was as unlined as a boy’s. Still, there was a musty aura about him, a smell of old age. It was more than weariness; he looked empty of belief. “A personal precaution,” he said. His English sounded like Gromyko’s, thick and heavy. He shrugged and went to a desk and placed the pistol in a drawer. He did not shut the drawer. “I am told the defenses are impenetrable here. Yet one does not arrive at my age, in this world we live in, by faith alone. So I have insisted on a last defense, in what they tell me is the impossible event that someone should slip through. Nothing is impossible, only unlikely. Forgive me. Will you be seated, gentlemen? Make yourselves comfortable.”