Katrina dialed the number and in Russian gave Alexi’s secretary our message. When she was finished, I handed the girl the two hundred bucks, then told her we’d be getting a return call any minute. She smiled and licked her lips, and I saw two of those little silver beads sticking through her tongue. We stood by the counter for twenty minutes watching a procession of young kids dressed almost identically in baggy jeans and oversize sweat shirts, nearly all of whom had dyed hair, tattoos, and earrings or small silver beads punched all over their faces. Katrina fit right in. I looked like a guy who mistook this place for a tofu bar.
It sucked being young in this era. In my day we only had to look like fancified dorks in disco drag. At least we didn’t have to get stabbed and tattooed. I mean, those old disco clothes, you send them to Goodwill and glide gracefully into becoming a fat, balding, middle-aged guy. Just throw out all your old pictures and your kids will never know what a jumbo jerk you used to be. All those holes and tattoos-they’ll know.
The phone finally rang, the clerk picked it up, said, “Just a minute,” then handed it to me.
Alexi’s voice said, “Sean?”
“Yeah, Alexi,” I said, then unloaded the whole story, including the fact that my government was somehow mysteriously implicated.
He listened patiently, then said, “This is something very big happening here, Sean. I would offer to put you in safe house, but this could be compromising. It would be better to be using Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown. My people will book you a room and charge it to our expense. It will be under Mr. and Mrs. Harrington. I will be calling you later.”
I hung up, and then Katrina and I walked down the main drag to the Four Seasons. If you have to go on the lam, this is the kind of place to do it. As soon as we were ensconced in the room, I had room service send up two filet mignons and a bottle of wine. It was on the Russians. Why not?
Alexi called twenty minutes after we finished eating.
He said, “Is everything all right?”
“Katrina and I just polished off a sixty-dollar bottle of wine. Hey, you know what, Alexi? Put some booze in that girl and look out. She’s been climbing all over me, licking my ears, making all kinds of lewd suggestions. You’d hardly recognize her.”
Katrina flung her big purse at me.
“Heh-heh,” I said, but neither of them laughed. I thought it was hilarious.
“Anyway,” I said, “we think we’ve got this thing figured out. What we believe is there’s a real mole in our government that Morrison was framed to protect. You guys do those kinds of things, don’t you?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, “To protect one that is most important, this could be possible. Is very difficult operation to construct, Sean. Is most difficult to match moles with acceptable surrogates. You understand? We have saying about this. ‘The shadow must match the body.’ ”
Now, here’s the thing. I was in an absolutely desperate position. Somebody was trying to snuff me, for some reason my own government seemed to be accomodating that effort, and Katrina and I were alone, without resources or allies, a raft floating in the middle of a murderous ocean. My only hope was Alexi. So let’s see-maintain my pristine personal integrity, or live a few years longer? Exactly.
I said, “Well, here’s what I think, Alexi. I think Mary’s working for this cabal of yours. I think she’s been on their payroll this whole time, convincing the CIA your accusations were wild ravings and protecting the cabal’s existence. I think she’s been filching her husband’s papers. I think whoever provided those papers to the CIA gave only the documents she pilfered from Bill, while the stuff that would’ve pointed at her is still locked away in Moscow.”
“What?” he asked, clearly surprised. “You accept the cabal’s existence?”
“Yeah.”
“And you think Mary is with these people?”
“Nothing else makes sense. I mean, it was Mary who told me it was baloney, right? She was trying to mislead me. And if she’s not working for the SVR, it means she’s working for somebody else in Moscow, right?”
“This would make sense, Sean. This cabal has extraordinary resources and reach. It could be that Mary is somehow connected. I have never considered this. The shadow certainly fits the body, yes?”
The poor guy was so smitten by his phantoms, he was leaping at any thread that substantiated, fed, and justified his paranoia. I felt sorry for him. But not so sorry that I wasn’t willing to exploit it, as the CIA had done for the past decade.
“There’s a way to find out,” I said. “I’m going to have one of my assistants question Bill. He should be able to confirm whether it fits or not.”
The idea intrigued him, and he said he’d call me in six hours to see what turned up. I immediately placed a call to Imelda. I explained our predicament and why I couldn’t set foot on a flight to Kansas City without alerting the authorities. She could, though; so I told her to.
I explained what I wanted her to do and asked her to smuggle a cell phone into her interrogation, and then gave her the number to our hotel room. Then Katrina and I sat and did our best to kill the hours as we waited. We watched an Oliver Stone movie, and we both laughed hilariously, because he was the only guy in the world more paranoiac than us. Katrina asked me about my childhood and I asked her about hers, we talked about politics and sports and college days, and when we ended up discussing our favorite ice-cream flavors we both knew we were in serious trouble.
The phone rang at 11:40 P.M. and I dove across the bed to answer it.
After some opening banter, Imelda said, “Went over the dates with him. Mostly they match, sometimes they don’t.”
What she was referring to specifically were the dates on the documents from the Moscow vault Eddie had provided us. She was showing them to Morrison and asking him where Mary was at those times, how she might’ve gotten her paws on them.
I said, “Okay.”
She said, “Wanta talk to him?”
He came on with his typical blast of selfish, overbearing horsecrap. “Where the hell are you, Drummond? How come you haven’t visited? I don’t like dealing with sergeants. God damn it, I’m a general officer and I’m owed some respect. You’re-”
“Shut the hell up and answer my questions. How do you think Mary framed you?”
“Don’t tell me to shut-”
“Shut your mouth!” I yelled. “I’ve killed three men this morning, and at the moment I’m having visions of flying out there and killing you. This was all because of you. Frankly, you’re not worth it, so if you don’t shut up and answer my questions, I’ll be on the next flight.” Katrina was giving me the evil eye, so I took two deep breaths and tried to calmly ask, “Now, how do you think Mary framed you?”
“I don’t know,” he petulantly replied.
“Yeah, but you’ve now looked at the prosecutor’s key evidence. How could Mary had gotten all those papers out of your office?”
He fell quiet a moment. “She could’ve gotten some of them easily.”
“Not some, damn it… all of them. The President’s and Secretary of State’s talking papers? The blueprints for the technologies denied for export approval? The North Korean talking points? How could she have gotten her hands on those papers?”
“Shit, Drummond, I already told you I never saw the tech stuff, or the North Korean stuff. As for the rest of it, no, she couldn’t have gotten all of it from me. It wasn’t like I was bringing those papers home. She hardly ever visited my office at State or the White House. But I wasn’t the only one handling those papers. Maybe Mary pilfered them from someone else, too. Did you ever think of that?”
Of course I had thought of that. Just as I had thought of the fact that all the White House and State documents had Morrison’s fingerprints on them.