And the goddamn phone rings!
He yanked the receiver from the cradle.
“Hello?”
A sharp intake of breath on the other end.
And then silence.
And a click indicating the caller had hung up.
Santorini wondered why.
He knew he could not go to the apartment.
And will you let me know when you get here?
Her words on the telephone.
He had just tried to let her know he was here, but a man had answered the phone, and he knew that no one but Mother would ever have answered the private line in her apartment, no one but she herself was permitted to answer that phone, this was the simple hardfast rule.
But a man had indeed answered it.
If Mother had answered Sonny would have used her code name at once. Priscilla. The name premised on the s-c sequence, Priscilla Jennings, the s-c buried in her given name. He had no idea what her everyday cover name might be; he knew that whatever name she’d been given at birth was as deeply buried in the archives as was his own. But she’d been expecting a trade call today, and she’d have asked for his code name...
Who’s this, please?
Scott Hamilton.
... and only then would she have proceeded with, “Go ahead, Scott. This is Mother.”
He could not go to the apartment. If she’d been discovered, then going there might put the entire operation in jeopardy.
How did you find it?
In The New York Times.
His fallback position.
He picked up the phone again, dialed the bell captain’s extension, and asked him to send up a copy of today’s Times. The paper came up some ten minutes later. It was already a quarter to four. He opened the newspaper to the Classified ads, and began searching through the Help Wanted columns. The heading fairly leaped off the page.
His eye skipped to the number at the bottom of the ad. He dialed it, and a woman answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“I’m calling about your ad in the Times,” Sonny said.
“Which ad is that, please?”
“For a landscape gardener.”
The s-c sequence.
“Have you had experience in the San Francisco area?”
Repeating the sequence.
“Yes, I have.”
“Do you have references?”
“I worked for Priscilla Jennings.”
“Can you tell me your name, please?”
“Scott Hamilton,” he said.
“I’m Annette Fleischer,” the woman said. “Go ahead, Scott.”
Repeating the name immediately after confirmation of it. The essential double-check. Had she not said the name again, he would have ended the conversation at once.
“I tried to call Mother,” he said, “but...”
“Mother is dead.”
A silence on the line.
Sonny waited.
“Where are you now?” she asked.
“The Hilton. Room 2312.”
“When are you available?”
“I’m available now.”
“Can you come here?”
“Where are you?”
She gave him an address on the upper east side.
“Give me half an hour,” he said.
“I’ll be expecting you,” she said.
He waited.
There was a silence on the line. She was waiting for his prompt.
“And will you be there?” he asked, supplying it.
He would not go to meet her unless she responded correctly.
“You can be sure,” she said.
He had never seen the woman he’d known on the telephone as Priscilla Jennings. His control. Mother. The woman who, he’d been told, would one day awaken him from sleep. The woman who had, in fact, awakened him last Saturday morning.
Now he wondered what she’d looked like.
His new control — if such she turned out to be — was a woman in her mid-fifties, he supposed. Dark brown eyes, a vaguely Mediterranean look about her except for the reddish-blond hair, clipped close to her skull like a medieval archer’s helmet. She was wearing a grey cotton cardigan buttoned up the front over ample breasts. Her dark skirt was festooned with cat hairs. There were cats everywhere Sonny looked. At least ten or twelve cats in the apartment, one of them sleeping on the windowsill, another perched on the upright piano, yet more flopped on cushions or silently stalking the small apartment. Everywhere, there was the faint aroma of cat piss. Mrs. Fleischer poured tea. Sonny listened to the sounds of summer filtering up from the street and through the open window where the cat snoozed. He was thinking that never in a million years would anyone guess this woman was one of them.
“So,” she said. “When did you arrive?”
“This afternoon,” he said.
Not a trace of accent in her speech. She could have been Greek or Turkish, even Israeli, but nothing in her speech revealed a country of origin. Her hand pouring the tea was steady.
“Where’s Priscilla Jennings?” he asked.
“Pardon?” she said, and raised her eyebrows. Faint polite inquisitive look on her face.
“Priscilla,” he said. “Jennings.”
“I don’t believe I know her,” Mrs. Fleischer said. “Milk? Lemon?”
“Lemon, please.”
She caught a wedge of lemon between the jaws of a small pair of silver tongs. She dropped it on his saucer. She passed the saucer to him. He was wondering why she was now denying the existence of his previous control. She had acknowledged her name on the phone — but no, she may only have been confirming the s-c sequence. It was quite possible she knew nothing at all about her. Yet she had informed him that Mother was dead. What...?
“Did you get a chance to sleep on the train?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, and thought suddenly of Elita. And just as quickly put her out of his mind.
“Are you well rested then?” Mrs. Fleischer asked.
“Completely.”
“Completely awake?” she asked.
“I’m an early riser,” he said.
Their eyes met.
She smiled.
“I have your instructions,” she said.
Voice low and steady.
He had been waiting for these instructions from the time he was eighteen. He had come to America eleven years ago, trained and prepared, and had been anticipating these instructions ever since. He leaned forward now.
She opened her handbag. She removed from it a glossy black-and-white photograph, some three inches wide by four inches long. Handing it to him, she said, “She’ll be here for the Canada Day celebration on the first of July. Security will be tight, access difficult.”
He looked at the photograph.
And felt mild disappointment.
Had they awakened him for this? Merely this?
“The celebration will take place at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, are you familiar with it?”
“Yes,” he said.
“The Prime Minister of Canada will be there, of course, as well as the President of Mexico. But Mrs. Thatcher is only your secondary target. Your primary target...”
“Yes, who will that be?”
“... may or may not be present at the dinner that night, we haven’t been able to ascertain that as yet. In any event, you must not do anything to jeopardize your main objective. There’s a possibility you can kill two birds with one stone, so to speak...”
A faint smile.
“... but only if your primary target...”