He moved to the door, extending a hand. "Fine food, good cigar, great company. As always. Thanks." "Sure you won't have another wee tot?"
The priest shook his head. "God may be my copilot, but if I get stopped I'm the one who gets the DUI. The diocese frowns on the bishop having to get his minions out of the slammer at strange nocturnal hours."
Lang stood at the door until he heard the chime of the elevator.
An hour later Lang lay on his back, listening to Grumps's snores. Reflections of passing traffic below played across the ceiling like some abstract black-and-white film.
Moses, who was not an Israelite but a king.
Israelites who were not Jews but Egyptians.
The form that had begun to emerge from the fog in Vienna still had no face, but it was getting clearer.
Vienna?
What was the name Shaffer had mentioned?
Bin Hamish in Cairo, a man who supposedly could explain the energy potential of the white powder.
Lang got out of bed and went into the living room, where a laptop sat on the desk part of the Thomas Elfe secretary. It took nearly an hour before Lang found the man he was certain Shaffer had had in mind.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Park Place
2660 Peachtree Road
Atlanta, Georgia
The Next Morning
Lang was on the phone before he was dressed, making airline reservations to Vienna via Paris. When he was finished he called the foundation's pilot and requested he prepare the Gulfstream for the same trip.
Whoever had placed the bug in the condo would not know he had no intention of going to either place.
Showered and dressed, he removed a panel from the back of the bedside table's drawer and removed a passport with his picture and the name of Joel Couch of Macon, Georgia. It purported to have been issued five years earlier by the United States Department of State. Only the picture bore any relation to the truth. In fact, the document had been issued at Gurt's request by the Agency's Frankfurt office three years ago, when she and Lang had both needed to travel under names other than their own. With it were a driver's license, a membership card to a health club, two credit cards now expired, an ATM card, and a wallet-size snapshot of a little girl he had never seen, presumably Couch's daughter.
Ratting the passport against the palm of a hand, he wondered if the intruder who had left the listening device had found the false back of the drawer and noted the Couch name. It was a chance he'd simply have to take.
He drove out of the condo and turned north instead of south toward downtown and his office. Stopping at a branch bank, where he made a substantial cash withdrawal, he drove a mile or so farther and parked the Porsche at Lenox Square, a high-end mall that included a Delta Airlines reservation office. The shopping center's doors were just opening for the day.
He was aware that paying for tickets in cash was sure to invite the attention of the Transportation Safety people, but a search of his baggage and person was the price he would pay for leaving whoever might be watching behind. He was fairly certain the Agency's passport would pass scrutiny both in appearance and in verifying the number.
He would, then, be traveling as Joel Couch, an eccentric who abhorred that most American of conveniences, the credit card.
Ticket in the pocket of his jacket, he stopped at a Starbucks to watch the mall slowly fill. He could see no one who showed any interest in him. He emptied his cup of a liquid that tasted more like confection than coffee, as well it should.
He smiled as he walked out, imagining one of the inner city's panhandlers: "Hey, mister! Can you spare five bucks for a large chilled Kenyan mocha?"
That evening he had dinner at Alicia's. She lived in a small town house in Vinings, a residential community across the Chattahoochee River. It had a past as a semi- rural locale that included a few quaint cottages and a train station. The station was now an expensive boutique. Condos and gated subdivisions, equally indistinguishable, had reduced whatever bucolic aesthetic there might have been to a single rambling clapboard cottage reminiscent of another age. The house had survived only as the site of an upscale restaurant specializing in entrees cooked in fruit jellies.
In jeans and a T-shirt designed to display her figure, Alicia met him at the door. Her hair, shoulder-length, framed her face. A emerald in the shape of a heart sparkled on her finger.
Lang gave her a perfunctory hug. "Don't you look nice! I don't remember the rock."
She let him in, closing the door and holding up her hand for inspection. "Don't usually wear it. It was an engagement ring, only good thing left of a bad marriage."
Lang followed her toward the back of the house, noting tasteful contemporary furniture punctuated with an occasional antique. "So why wear it tonight?"
She stopped so suddenly he almost ran into her. Turning, she took both of his hands in hers. "Because I'm through brooding about a failure. I'm in a new house in a new city and with a man who's fun and entertaining."
"I'm being damned with faint praise? Is that the female equivalent of, 'All the girls like her' or, 'She's a great cook'?"
"I'll bet it's the first nice thing anyone's said about you all day."
"Maybe. But my dog loves me."
She dropped one of his hands and led him to a small deck; a view of Atlanta's skyline serenely floated on a sea of trees. "Single-malt Scotch, if I recall."
He took the sweating glass she was offering. "It's clear to me there's nothing wrong with your memory."
There was an energy between them, the electricity a woman projected when she had something in mind more than an affectionate embrace. In college dorms Lang had participated in the ageless debate of whether a woman decided she would bed a man when she first met him, playing out the event like some sort of drama. Lang never knew the answer, but he had come to recognize the signals when a decision had been made to implement the choice. Tonight, as the saying went, he would get lucky.
The meal, fish poached in a wine sauce with steamed vegetables, would be act one.
Lang sipped a glass of chilled white wine. "A California chardonnay?"
Alicia was peering over her glass. "You can't tell me the vineyard and vintage?"
"I'm not that much of an oenophile."
She put her glass down. "Oh? Then how did you know…?"
"I saw the bottle as we came through the kitchen."
She studied his face a moment. "Do you always notice the details?"
Lang was looking back at her. "I try. You know as well as I do that winning a case often depends on it."
"I have a confession to make."
"I have a friend who hears them professionally."
She shook her head, sending a wave of red hair flying. "You're going to hear this one."
"Do I get to choose the penance?"
"Depends."
"On what?"
"On whether I want to serve it or not."
Lang pretended to gravely consider this for a moment. "So, confess."
"I had a conference call this afternoon, a really boring one with the Justice Department in Washington."
"A bunch of Department of Justice lawyers are tedious? That's not a confession; it's fact."
She waved him silent. "I had nothing better to do than an occasional 'uh-huh' or 'uh-uh' and to play with the computer. So I looked you up on the bar's Web site. There's a big gap of time between college and law school."
Lang tried not to let her know he was getting uncomfortable. "Lots of people try to earn an honest living before they become lawyers."
"True. But I thought about that… that bit of excitement in Underground. Made me wonder if you were involved in something… something shady."
"What criminal lawyer isn't?"
She grew serious. "I used my DOJ creds to get into lists of former government employees. At various times you were listed as being a trade attache, a charge d'affaires, diplomatic researcher, and in charge of cultural exchanges."