The phone rang and it was Alexi.
After assuring him we were fine, I said, “Milt Martin? You know him?”
“I have met Milt at some conferences. He was most powerful man in your last administration, yes?”
“Yeah, well, what would you say if I told you he’s our man?”
Alexi chuckled. “And you are making accusations about me fabricating nightmares. Sean, this is not possible. Martin was your President’s best friend. All policies toward my country were being made by him. And I would most certainly have known.”
That’s when I remembered something. When Morrison had first told me about Alexi, he’d said that Arbatov was always selective in what he provided. If he thought it had to do with his mystical cabal, the information flowed like a river; otherwise, he was a loyal Russian intelligence officer. He’d never given the Morrisons the names of our traitors; he’d picked his disclosures with great care.
So maybe Alexi knew all about Milt Martin. Maybe he knew Martin was the jewel in the SVR’s crown and simply wasn’t going to admit it, even to me and Katrina. And if that was true, his alarm bells would be going off right now, because here he was protecting us, and if we were about to launch off to prove Martin was Moscow’s most valuable spy, well, that would surely compromise Alexi’s standing and future job prospects-and health.
I looked over at Katrina; there was no way in hell I could share that suspicion with her. Like I said earlier, the thing about this world of espionage is you can’t trust anybody. Everybody’s got conflicting loyalties. Even those folks you trust, you can only halfway trust-conditionally.
I said, “Uh, yeah. Listen, why don’t Katrina and I do a little more checking, and I’ll call tomorrow if we find anything.”
That was fine with him, and we hung up. I turned to Katrina and said we needed to go to the hotel’s business center. She gave me a curious look but followed me downstairs. We bought two cups of coffee in the snack bar, then filed inside the business center, found an idle computer, and made ourselves comfortable.
The thing about the Internet is that you can find out a few things about almost anybody, but famous international figures like Milton Martin are open books. I typed his name into Google. com and got 12,753 hits. The only tough thing was deciding which listings were worth reading, because otherwise Katrina and I would be at that computer for two weeks reading entries, most of which were repetitive, and many of which were just silly.
After two hours, here’s what we had: Milton Martin was born on March 7, 1949, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the only child of Mark and Beth. His father had been managing partner of a private equity firm and was worth millions. Milt had been sent to Groton School at the age of thirteen. He’d done Yale undergrad, where he majored in Russian studies and, as already noted, roomed with a future President. He looked like a long-haired egghead in a picture from that period, his nose the only thing that poked out from a mop that actually covered his eyes. He was a good student, except for getting arrested twice for involvement in antiwar protests that turned violent. He ended up doing graduate studies in England, and then went back to Yale for a Master’s, also in Russian studies.
The articles weren’t clear on exactly what he did in the years right after he finished his grad work, but it seemed he was trying to make it as a writer. Apparently it took him seven or eight years to find his voice, because that’s when he published his first best-seller, a book on the origins of the cold war that exposed all kinds of underhanded dealings by the CIA and American military in various places around the world. What was striking about that book, most critics agreed, were the shocking revelations of dirty operations that were supposed to have been among the government’s most closely held secrets. It was widely agreed that he had extraordinary sources. No kidding.
That book led to a series of hearings on the Hill and caused an American President to authorize a bunch of wiretaps to try to find Martin’s sources. When questioned by the FBI, Martin stood behind his First Amendment rights.
His second book was an expose of America’s secret war in Vietnam and Cambodia, again noted by critics for its inside look at operations that were never supposed to see the light of day. This time the inevitable congressional hearings led to a large number of firings in the CIA, mostly of operatives whose names were included in the book, making them useless as clandestine operators in any regard.
Martin’s last best-seller concerned arms control, and in it the author exposed the deep fractures in America’s scientific community, as well as its arms control community, making the hawks sound like Stone Age, bellicose morons who played dirty against the humanitarian altruists who were trying to rein in the madness, and how Russia’s doves were marginalized by the policies of America’s hard-liners, preventing the world from achieving sanity.
He’d never married. His mother died in 1989, and his father in 1995, leaving him a pile of money. He’d taught at five or six universities and was an accepted member of ten or fifteen prestigious institutes and organizations, making him a bona fide member of the Establishment.
All of which begged the big question: Why would Milt Martin betray his country? He was rich. He was wildly successful. He was respected and accepted. I’d met him and he seemed like a decent enough guy, with none of the rough edges or overweening ambition you smell from some folks-like my own client, for instance. So why?
I called the concierge and had them order me a rental car to be charged to the room. Katrina and I picked up our bags and went downstairs to wait. It was five hours to New York City and we needed to be in midtown Manhattan by eight. If we drove fast, we’d just make it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
We needn’t have rushed. Martin’s black limo didn’t pull up to the front entrance of the Society for International Affairs building until 10:00 A.M. Martin, it seemed, worked banker’s hours.
He stepped out of the limo carrying a five-hundred-dollar leather briefcase, wearing his Burberry raincoat, that prominent nose of his the first thing to emerge. He turned around and stuck his face back into the car, told the driver what time to pick him up, then spun around to head confidently up the short stairs and into the building: Mr. Establishment arriving for another day at the money mill.
At that moment, the guy who’d been casually leaning against the building’s wall shoved off and began to walk past him. Martin looked vaguely at the guy but took no particular notice, and in any case wouldn’t have recognized me with my dyed blond hair and glasses, wearing jeans and a bulky parka.
The trick to kidnapping is speed. Shock value counts for everything: You have to dumbfound your victims, traumatize them, make them too senseless to react, too passive to resist.
At the instant we passed, the fingers of my right hand drove directly into his throat. He wasn’t expecting it, but it came too fast for him to put up a defense anyway. One second he was walking upright to the entrance, and the next his throat felt like it was on fire and he couldn’t breathe.
He lurched over and, like a Good Samaritan, I swiftly bent down and slipped an arm around his shoulder to help him. It was New York so a few pedestrians were passing by, barely paying attention. Katrina had been parked down the street in our rental; she came screeching up to the unloading zone in front of the building.
She wore a blond wig, and a fake mustache, and big black-rimmed glasses, and looked goofy as hell, but it was a great disguise. I’d also taken the precaution of stealing a license plate from a parked car, in case anyone saw us and was inclined to report the kidnapping to the police.