Martin’s muscles ached from the effort of keeping his body from sliding off the chair. He strained to bring the interrogator into focus. “Both Mr. Rabbani and Zuzana Slánská described Samat Ugor-Zhilov as a philanthropist—”
Radek emitted a single hiccup. “Some philanthropist!” he cried from the wall.
The interrogator threw Radek a dark look, as if to remind him that there was a pecking order; that birds on the junior end of it should be seen but not heard. Then, angling the sheet of paper toward the light, he began reading phrases from it. “Both Mr. Rabbani and Zuzana Slánská are marketing a French device that corrects the error the U.S. Pentagon builds into the satellite GPS system to thwart rogue missile launchings … Soviet-surplus radar units from the Ukraine … ah, yes, armored personnel carriers from a Bulgarian state-run company, Terem, sold to Syria for eventual delivery to Iraq … engines and spare parts for the T-55 and T-72 Soviet tanks from assorted Bulgarian armaments factories … ammunition, explosives, rockets, training manuals in missile technology from Serbia … spare jet-fighter parts and rocket propellants from an aviation factory in eastern Bosnia. And listen to this: The London prosthesis warehouse and the Prague generic medicine operation are used as clearing houses for orders for an ammunition factory in the town of Vitez and missile guidance systems fabricated in a research center in the city of Banja Luka … payments for items on the inventory were made in cash or in diamonds.” The interrogator flicked the nail of his middle finger against the sheet of paper. “I could continue but there is no point.”
In one of his legends—Martin couldn’t recall which—he remembered taking a course at the Farm designed to prepare agents in the field for hostile interrogation. The various techniques of interrogation discussed included one where the interrogator would invent flagrant lies to disorient the person being questioned. Agents who found themselves in this predicament were advised to hang on to the facts they knew to be true and let the fictions of the interrogator pass without comment.
Martin, his head swimming with fatigue, heard himself say, “I know absolutely nothing about the sale of weapons.”
The interrogator removed his eyeglasses and massaged the bridge of his nose with the thumb and third finger of his left hand. “That being the case, what brought you to Mr. Taletbek Rabbani’s warehouse in London and the Vys
Martin longed to stretch out on the metal army cot in his cell. “I am trying to trace Samat Ugor-Zhilov,” he said.
“Why?”
In disjointed sentences, Martin admitted that he had once been employed by the CIA; that it was perfectly true that he had set up shop as a private detective in Brooklyn, New York, after he left the service. He explained about Samat walking out on his wife in Israel, leaving her in a religious limbo; how the wife’s sister and father had hired him to track down Samat and convince him to give her a religious divorce so that she could get on with her life. “I have no interest in purchasing false limbs or generic drugs. I am simply following a trail that I hope leads to Samat.”
Smiling thinly, the interrogator humored Martin. “And what will you do once you find him?”
“I will take Samat to the nearest town that has a synagogue and oblige him to grant his wife a divorce in front of a rabbi. Then I will return to Brooklyn and spend the rest of my life boring myself to death.”
The interrogator turned Martin’s story over in his mind. “I am familiar with the school of intelligence activities that holds that a good cover story must be made to seem preposterous if it is to be believed. But you are pushing this thesis to its limits.” He rifled through the papers on the desk and came up with another report. “We have been observing people entering or leaving the Vys
“Last time I checked, being an idealist was not a crime, even in the Czech Republic.”
“The American writer Mencken once defined an idealist as someone who, on observing that a rose smelled better than a cabbage, concluded that it would also make better soup. Yes, well, like Mencken’s idealist, Mrs. Slánská’s idealism is very particular—she remains a diehard Marxist, plotting the comeback of the communists. She desires to set the clock back and is thought to be using the considerable profits from the sale of weapons to finance a splinter group hoping to do here in the Czech Republic what the former communists have done in Poland and Rumania and Bulgaria: win elections and return to power.”
It occurred to Martin there might be a way to beat the fatigue that made it appear as if everything around him was happening in slow motion. He closed one eye, thinking that one lobe of his brain could actually sleep while the other eye and the other lobe remained awake. After a moment, hoping the interrogator wouldn’t catch on to his clever scheme, he switched eyes and lobes. He could hear the interrogator’s voice droning on; could make out, through his open eye, the blurred figure getting up and coming around to half sit on the desk in front of him.
“You arrived here from London, Mr. Odum. The British MI5 established that you lived for several days in a rooming house next to a synagogue off Golders Green. The warehouse where Mr. Taletbek Rabbani was murdered the day before you departed from London was within walking distance of your rooming house.”
“If everyone living within walking distance of the warehouse is a suspect,” the half of Martin’s brain still functioning managed to say, “MI5 is going to have its hands full.”
“We have not excluded the possibility of concluding a deal with you, Mr. Odum. Our principal objective is to discredit Mrs. Slánská; to show that she and Mr. Rabbani were in league with Mr. Samat Ugor-Zhilov’s weapons operation; that both the warehouse in London and the defunct train station in Prague were funded by the same Samat Ugor-Zhilov, a notable Moscow gangster who is associated with the Ugor-Zhilov known as the Oligarkh. The object for us is to tie the communist splinter group to Zuzana Slánská’s illegal weapons operation and discredit them once and for all … Mr. Odum, are you hearing me? Mr. Odum? Mr. Odum, wake up!”
But both lobes of Martin’s brain had yielded to exhaustion.
“Take him back to his cell.”
Once, several incarnations back, Dante Pippen had barely survived an interminable bus trip that took him from a CIA safe house in a middle class neighborhood of Islamabad (furnished, for once, not in ancient Danish modern but in modern Pakistani kitsch) to Peshawar and the tribal badlands of the Khyber Pass, where he spent the better part of a year debriefing fighters infiltrating into and out of Afghanistan. The bus trip (Crystal Quest’s notion of how an Irish reporter working for a wire service—Dante’s cover at the time—would travel) had turned out to be a nightmare. Squeezed onto the wooden bench at the back of the bus between a mullah from Kandahar wearing a filthy shalwar kameez and a bearded Kashmiri fighter in a reeking djellaba, Dante had been eternally grateful when the bus pulled up, sometimes smack in the middle of nowhere, other times on the sewage-saturated streets of what passed for a village, to let the passengers stretch their legs, reckon the direction of Mecca and murmur the verses of the Koran a Muslim is required to recite five times a day. Now, slouching on the plush banquette in the back of the air-conditioned double-deck tourist bus, surrounded by well-dressed and, more importantly, well-scrubbed Germans on their way home from the spa at Karlovy Vary, Martin Odum suddenly thought of Dante’s Khyber trip and the memory brought a smile to his lips. As always, remembering a detail from Dante’s past reminded Martin that he, too, must have had a past, and this gave him a measure of hope that he could one day retrieve it. He patted the Canadian passport in the inside breast pocket of his jacket in anticipation of arriving at the Czech-German frontier. This particular passport, one of several he’d swiped from a safe when he was clearing out his office after being dismissed from the CIA, had been issued to a resident of British Columbia named Jozef Kafkor, a name Martin didn’t recognize but found easy to remember because it reminded him of Franz Kafka and his stories of anguished individuals struggling to survive in a nightmarish world, which was more or less how Martin saw himself. Lulled by the motion of the bus and the ticking of its diesel engine, Martin closed his eyes and dozed, reliving the events of the last twelve hours.