Part 19 (2/2)

Yes, of course, the Easy Way. Drummond used to speak of the easy way, the same way fire-and-brimstone preachers do the Road to Perdition. Charlie would have recognized the words just from the cadence. As always, they sent vitriol coursing through him.

'It's not like I came up with the idea that a person's upbringing has a bearing on his life,' he said.

Drummond tightened his tie. 'There's a point of accountability for everyone. Others have been dealt far worse hands and still found a way to prevail.'

Charlie loosened his tie. 'Like you, you mean?'

'One might make the argument.'

'But you had Grandpa Tony.'

'If you really want to know the truth, Tony DiStephano*'

'Tony Clark, you mean.'

'I do mean DiStephano. Clark' was just part of his cover. He was really an old Chicago mobster in witness protection who we used for messy jobs.'

Charlie sagged in accordance with the feeling that air had just been let out of him. He'd always thought of his grandfather as an oversized teddy bear. 'Beautiful,' he said.

'It could have been far worse. Your actual grandparents were charming, cultured, life-of-the-party Park Avenue sophisticates*'

'Well, thanks for s.h.i.+elding me from that s.h.i.+t.'

'It was an act.' Drummond reddened a shade more than Charlie had ever seen. 'Really they were traitors. They spied for Stalin with the Alger Hiss silver spoon flock. An American war hero spent the last four days of his life hanging from a hook in a Leningrad meat locker as a direct consequence of an encrypted postcard they sent to their handler at the Ministry of State Security. When Whittaker Chambers named names, they were blown. They fled to Moscow, leaving me alone. I was five.'

For the first time, Charlie saw Drummond's inner workings as an a.s.sembly of human rather than mechanized parts. He felt himself beginning to understand him now, and sympathizing. To an extent. 'Then I'd think that you, of all people, wouldn't have left your son alone all the time.'

Drummond wiped his mouth with a sleeve, as if clearing the way for a forceful reb.u.t.tal, when the cell phone chimed.

30.

Six minutes earlier, E. Burton Hattemer had been sitting in a conference room in the Senate Hart Office Building while a staffer enthusiastically detailed a solar-powered, robotic surveillance device that looked, flew, and perched just like the barn swallows prevalent in the Middle East. 'The prototype can be done for as little as thirty million,' she told the roomful of Senate Intelligence Committee members and advisors. earlier, E. Burton Hattemer had been sitting in a conference room in the Senate Hart Office Building while a staffer enthusiastically detailed a solar-powered, robotic surveillance device that looked, flew, and perched just like the barn swallows prevalent in the Middle East. 'The prototype can be done for as little as thirty million,' she told the roomful of Senate Intelligence Committee members and advisors.

Hattemer wanted to say: Christ, that kind of cash could get us ten decent human spies and a hundred times the actionable intel.

Six years on the Hill had taught him that it would be more effective to part.i.tion the sentiment into gentle memos in the coming months when the Appropriations Subcommittee appointed a Robot-Barn-Swallow Task Force, the task force delegated a special panel, and the special panel prepared, drafted, and redrafted its recommendation to the committee.

Feeling his cell phone vibrate, he fished it from his suit pants. The LED flashed a reminder to pick up tulips for his wife at the florist in Potomac.

Hurrying out of the conference room, he said, 'I beg everybody's pardon. I've got to attend to a geriatric digestive issue.' Who here would want to know about that?

The florist*or SOS*message appeared when the switchboard in Stockholm activated a virtually undetectable shortwave band. 'Tulips' was Drummond Clark. Three years had pa.s.sed since Hattemer had communicated with his old friend other than by greeting card. That he would get in touch in this fas.h.i.+on, now, suggested Drummond's life was in peril and that it was an inside job.

Executive Order 11905, signed by President Ford and bolstered by Reagan with EO 12333, banned a.s.sa.s.sinations by government organizations. Yet spies continued to die of the flu, falls from terraces, or boating accidents with far greater frequency than people in other professions, in large part because men and women at the very highest levels of government believed themselves to be above the law or turned blind eyes or deaf ears in the name of the Greater Good*a sorry euphemism, Hattemer thought, for sacrificing ideals in order to mop up inconvenient messes. And that was when there was oversight at all.

For the sake of discretion, he took the stairs down to room SH-219. The two flights hurt like h.e.l.l, or about as much as he'd antic.i.p.ated. He'd been forced to abandon fieldwork when his deteriorated hips were replaced with six pounds of metal alloys, making the constant air and Jeep travel impractical. Still, it took him another two years to hang up his trench coat.

Protected by armed guards around the clock, few places on Earth afforded more secure communication than SH-219. Essentially a windowless steel vault, it blocked electromagnetic eavesdropping and prohibited signals from escaping. Every morning it was swept for listening devices with an attention to minutiae unseen outside archaeological digs. Even the electrical current was filtered.

Hattemer sat at the armchair at the inner p.r.o.ng of the giant, horseshoe-shaped table. On the olive-green wall behind him were the seals of the various intelligence agencies. Before him was a wall of high-definition monitors, the face of a system the Senate Intelligence Committee members liked to refer to as 'state-of-the-art.' In fact, state-of-the-art systems lacked many of its cla.s.sified bells and whistles. A few keypunches could bring him into locked video conference with American intelligence officers operating anywhere from the United States to the United Arab Emirates. He could access all the cla.s.sified computer networks. He could view satellite imagery of just about any place on the planet, either from vast archives or in real time. And if the pictures were inadequate, a program easier to use than text messaging, in his estimation, enabled him to dispatch reconnaissance drones.

He elected to use a device whose listing in the Intelligence Committee budget*'sound reproduction instrument'*always rankled him. It was, in laymen's terms, a telephone.

Drummond opened the cell phone and raised it to his lips, but said nothing.

A brash young woman's voice burst through the earpiece. 'Jimmy, that you?'

'No,' Drummond said, 'Willie.'

'This ain't two-five-two, oh-two-seven, oh-four-four-six?'

'Sorry, ma'am, no. Good day.'

Drummond didn't merely hang up; he disconnected the call by tearing the battery from the back of the phone.

Charlie was mystified. 'What? Was the phone about to self-destruct?'

'We can't use it again,' Drummond said. 'Even when it's off, it emits a signal.'

'Then how will we get the call from your man in Was.h.i.+ngton?'

'That was was him, with more than a little voice alteration interposed between his handset and my earpiece.' him, with more than a little voice alteration interposed between his handset and my earpiece.'

'I may have missed something.'

'w.i.l.l.i.e.s' is a proprietary shorthand for hostiles. When I said, No Willie,' it was a recognition code that signified I wasn't under duress. His ain't' in turn let me know that no one was holding a gun to his head. Good day' was my sign-off that his message had been received.'

'I'm guessing you've left out the part about what the message was.'

'It was the number he said he'd meant to dial.' On the cover of the killers' road atlas, Drummond wrote '2520270446.' '2520270446.'

'So will we need to get another phone to call it?' Charlie asked.

'No, we won't need to make any more calls. We just subtract my distress code' number from it.'

'A billion, five hundred thirteen million, four hundred seventy-nine thousand, three hundred and eleven?'

Drummond did the math on paper. 'Not bad,' he said.

'You spend seven days a week handicapping *'

With a look of either mock dismay or actual dismay*Charlie wasn't sure which*Drummond again wrote out: 2520270446.

1016791135.

This time, he tabulated it as: 1514589311.

<script>