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The Peregrine Spy
By Edmund P. Murray St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2004 Edmund P. Murray
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6436-8
CHAPTER 1
NOVEMBER 1, 1978
"Sully, have I got a surprise for you."
"I love surprises," said Frank.
Frank Sullivan remembered the first time he'd shaken hands with Dan Nitzke. Clammy. That slick, sticky grip had worked its way into his memory: the touch, the feel of the way the agency had manipulated his life over the past dozen years. He corrected himself. The way I let the agency manipulate my life. He glanced at the hands now twisting the steering wheel of the car Dan drove. I know how that wheel feels, he thought.
Frank had expected to spend a few relaxed days in Washington, finding an apartment, settling into the job that was waiting for him, and getting a new driver's license. Then he'd fly back to New York, pick up his son, and head off for a weekend at the apartment he lived in now, across the river in Weehawken. As promised, Dan Nitzke had met him at the Eastern shuttle baggage chute.
"Got much luggage?"
"Sort of. Two suitcases, a garment bag. I like to travel light, but I figured I'm going to be living here."
"Yeah," said Dan, looking away at the first of the suitcases tumbling out of the chute and onto the conveyor belt. "You'll be living here." His clear blue eyes peered out over his black-rimmed glasses as he glanced back at Frank. "Once this other thing's over."
Frank said nothing. He studied the honest blue eyes that watched him over the thick plastic rims. He remembered the days — and the long nights — when those eyes had been red-rimmed and rheumy and a meeting with Dan meant keeping a bottle of J. W. Dant bourbon shuttling between them across the Nitzkes' dining room table. Since then, Dan had found his way back to sobriety. The eyes were clear now, but the rosacea that pocked his nose and cheeks remained. Frank watched him as they picked their way through the tiny, packed parking lot at National Airport. Dan looked away again. "I'll lay it out for you in the car. Boy, are you gonna be surprised. We got a lot to do today."
Today, thought Frank. November 1, 1978. I better remember the date. This is going to be one of those days my life changed. Again.
* * *
They sped through the Virginia suburbs. Dan talked nonstop, obliquely, with the radio turned high to country music and used car commercials. "We could've got you a license right there in Arlington, but it's always mobbed, so I figured I'd run you down to Fairfield 'cause it's still pretty much country down there and there's never any wait, you'll be in and out in an hour, and then I have to get you to the Triple A to get an international license and then, guess what, over to the Pentagon."
"The Pentagon?"
"Well, it's Pentagon because all the host-country people you'll be working with are military, but before that we have to get you to a barbershop. Hair's got to be shorter and that beard has to come off because — I mean, it might be different if it's the navy, maybe you could at least keep the mustache, but Gus Simpson was in the marines, but the closest military counterpart is a navy commander so we decided Gus gets to be navy, you know Gus, so ..."
"We never met," yelled Frank.
"No foolin'?" Dan's torrent stopped, but only for a moment. A few years ago he would have said, "No shit?"
"What the hell is this all about?"
Dan drove now with just his right hand on the wheel, twisting a thin strand of hair with his left. Though Dan could handle the written word with clarity and precision, Frank had learned with experience to follow his rambling conversations by waiting patiently for signposts. "Well, the third guy, you don't know him, but he has an army background, so that leaves you with the air force officer rank parallel to your grade, which will make you a major, but the air force likes its men clean shaven, and all that has to happen today because you're on the Pan Am 110 flight out of Kennedy tonight."
Frank reached over, touched the hand Dan had on the wheel, and waited for him to stop. "I go along with the haircut and the beard before I even know what the deal is, right? So then you've got me hooked and ..."
"Sully, you're great. Like I always say about you, you're like the old fire horse. You hear that fire bell and you start salivating, ready to get right back in harness."
Too true, thought Frank. Too damn true. A crackling alert to a shooting or a fire over his police radio when he'd started his newspaper career as a reporter. Or another agency call to a dangerous job in a distant place. And he was gone. Determined to do the job and do it right. His own writing put aside. The woman he lived with, the son he neglected, forgotten. It had happened in the past. He did not want it to happen again. But he'd heard the fire bell.
"You were never here," Jackie had said, often, after they split. He knew he'd lost her because of the agency, and he'd vowed he would never inflict himself, or the agency, on a woman again. At least not for more than a night or a weekend or a month. My excuse for screwing around, he called it in cynical moments. Or my fear of getting hurt. Again. Or hurting someone else.
Dan's monologue sped on. "I also gotta drop you off near the embassy so you can get your visa. It's all arranged, but you have to go to the embassy on your own, and you'll need your air force travel orders and Pan Am tickets first. I'll pick you up same corner where I drop you forty-five minutes later. I'll swing by every fifteen minutes. You know that drill."
"You've thought of everything," said Frank, guessing that Dan wanted him to ask what embassy he intended to drop him off at. Frank, suspecting he knew the answer, didn't ask.
"Yeah, well, we had to. Besides, Sully, they really need you on this. Guys like you and Gus. Guys with real news media experience. And Third World experience. There's not much of that expertise left inside. The idea comes straight out of the National Security Council, and I've gotta believe your old buddy Pete Howard had a hand in it. NSC and the agency've been working on this a long time, and then it all kind of jelled in a hurry."
"And you thought I'd go for it."
"We sure as hell hoped so. I know how bad we need you, and some of the bureaucrats we have, they're suspicious of a guy like you because you've never been one of them. In fact, that's going to be a problem because the other guy on the team, I call him Archie because his name is Bunker, Frederick J. Bunker, he's a Mormon, real straitlaced and a real good bureaucrat, but he doesn't know squat about media or much about the field. You'll get along fine with Gus, but it's Archie Bunker you'll have to worry about. You figure out where it is?"
"I don't think I want to know."
"Yeah, but I know you read the goddamn Post and the Times and the Wall Street Journal every friggin' day, so I know you've been reading what's going on, so I bet you figured it out, right? So tell me what you think."
Friggin', thought Frank. Another new word.
Dan turned and watched him and laughed nervously over the loud twang of a Johnny Cash song as Frank spoke the two syllables.
"Iran."
"Hey, I couldn't even hear what you said, I was laughing so hard, but I read your lips, and I knew you'd figure it out."
Frank shook his head and began chanting, "Hell, no. I won't go. Hell, no. I won't ..." Wrapped up in his own reactions, he'd forgotten how Dan had been shamed by his oldest son. He had been a draft resister during the last stages of the Vietnam War.
"The hell you won't, boy." Dan's lips had tightened. He had both hands on the wheel, and his knuckles turned white.
"Sorry about ..."
"Forget it," said Dan. "How come you let your license run out?"
"Living in Weehawken's like living in Manhattan. I don't need a car, so I let the license slide."
"But your passport's okay?"
"Yeah. I may not need a car, but I never know when you folks might give me another chance to jump on an airplane. So I keep the passport up-to-date. But Dan, this time I'm not going."
"Well, think about that a minute. Since you signed on again, you know what that contract's like. It's like a landlord's lease. Unless you want to try to break the contract, and that's not possible, they can send you anywhere they want. Besides, you got a great job waiting for when you get back, and some of us have figured out how we can qualify everything you've ever done so ten years or so down the road you qualify for a pension."
"Dan, that's nice. I appreciate it, but I don't ever figure to collect any pension anywhere."
"But all you got do is hang in there with the new job once you're back and it's yours for life. You may not care about pensions and security now, but, I mean, you aren't twenty-one anymore. By the time your kid gets into college and talkin' about grad school, you may be damn glad to have that two-thirds pension check coming in every month."
"It's the kid I'm thinking about, Jake. He's ready to move down here and live with me. Start junior high down here."
"The new job fits in perfect with that."
"I want the job," said Frank, "but I want it now, not maybe someday when I maybe come back from Iran."
"Oh, you'll come back okay. It's not that dangerous over there. Besides, there's somethin' else you should know about it,"
"Wrong," said Frank. "Whatever it is, I don't want to know about it."
"There's somebody you know over there," said Dan.
"There's probably a lot of people I know over there. Half the reporters in the world are over there, and since by now I must know half the reporters in the world, there's a fair chance there may be a fair number of people I know over there."
"Funny you should say that. 'Cause this guy's supposed to be a journalist. For Tass."
Frank stared at the highway ahead. He said nothing.
"I suppose you can guess?" said Dan.
Yeah, I guess I can guess, thought Frank. Vassily Lermontov. He had begun to grind his teeth and made the effort to stop.
"I mean, there's not much chance of you running into him," said Dan. "You'll be locked up with I-ranian military types all day, and there isn't much of a diplomatic cocktail circuit over there anymore, and from what I know of his m.o., your old Soviet buddy'll be running around with the usual cast of left-wing students, but I thought I better let you know he's over there, because I guess he hasn't been too happy with you ever since what happened to him in Ethiopia."
"No, and he wasn't too happy with what he saw going down in Angola, but we did have some interesting conversations in Rome. And Beirut."
"I heard he tried to set you up in Beirut," said Dan.
"Somebody did. Somebody took a couple of shots at me. Lermontov swore it had nothing to do with him."
Two flimsy cars, thought Frank. And a handgun firing three rounds that shattered a headlight. Not a real effort to kill him. A message, perhaps. But who from? After Ethiopia, Lermontov might have motive enough to kill him. Frank, working closely with Ethiopian journalists Lermontov tried hard to recruit, fed incriminating evidence to Pete Howard, then his chief of station. Pete alerted the director general of Haile Selassie's personal security agency. Lermontov and five others had been expelled. But in Beirut, where Frank had tried to unravel the assassination of the American ambassador, Lermontov had no cause to send him a message. He wondered, then and now, if someone in his own agency might have, a warning not to come too close to finding out who stood behind the murder of the ambassador, whose opposition to the war in Vietnam had earned him many enemies.
"What can I tell you?" he said aloud. "Actually, Lermontov and I get along pretty well. All things considered."
"He tried to recruit you, huh?"
"I reported it."
"Hey, I know you reported it, Sully."
"And we tried to recruit each other."
"Don't get so touchy."
"I've got a right to get touchy. Your CI grunts put me through a lot of shit because of Lermontov."
"They aren't my CI grunts. Besides, Counter Intelligence, they're supposed to be paranoid, right? And the way you and Lermontov keep flirting with each other, they may think you're in love with him."
"No. Gray-eyed Russians with short blond hair and thick wrists aren't exactly my type."
Especially when they maybe try to kill me. He wondered if he would ever know. But above all, he knew he wanted another round with Lermontov. He suspected that before the day was over he would be a clean-shaven major in — he couldn't believe it — the U.S. Air Force.
* * *
"You must feel like that first time," said Dan. "Remember?"
"I remember," said Frank. He'd been the assistant director of public relations at the AFL-CIO, at least in name, but since he'd drafted his first speech for George Meany he had moved increasingly into the president's orbit, often working with foreign trade union delegations, getting involved with the old man's pet projects like the American Institute for Free Labor Development and the African Labor Institute. It had been exciting at first, but the dead weight of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy and its marble mausoleum on Sixteenth Street soon began to weary him. Like many ex-newspapermen, he still read the industry's trade journal, Editor and Publisher, every week, starting at the back with the Help Wanted ads. That's where it had begun, with a blind ad in the back of the E&P issue of February 12, 1964, that read, "Experienced journalist with some teaching experience and an interest in Africa wanted for a two-year contract. Good salary and many benefits." He and Jackie had been married less than a year. They discussed it and decided Frank should give it a try.
Frank soon received a call from Patricia Rhoden, president of World Wide Communications. It was only years later that he discovered that someone else — Gus Simpson — got the job they originally had considered him for. Over a year later, World Wide called Frank again about another job, the job that took him to Ethiopia. It was another year before it finally happened. By then, at Pat Rhoden's suggestion, he had become active in the Washington branch of the American Friends of Ethiopia, and at one of their functions he met Dan Nitzke. Dan had introduced himself as a State Department foreign service officer who had just spent two years in Ethiopia. He was friendly, outgoing, brimming over with knowledge and advice about Ethiopia, unfazed when Ethiopians politely corrected him, and, by the end of a long evening, usually quite drunk.
Frank began getting calls, from the accountant in New York who did his taxes, from his former bosses at various newspapers, from his mother, from the literary agent who'd been trying without much success to sell his short stories. FBI agents had been around asking questions about him.
"Are you in some kind of trouble?" his mother asked.
Pat Rhoden called to ask him how quickly he could wrap up his work at the AFL-CIO and leave for Ethiopia.
"Well, I'll have to talk to Mr. Meany."
"He's wired. No problem," said Pat in her brisk way.
Frank held the phone away from his ear and stared at the receiver. Who are these people? he wondered. He heard Pat's voice. "Are you there?"
"Right here," he said into the mouthpiece.
"You'll need about ten days' briefing here at our office in New York. We have you booked out on the twenty-first. You know about the airline strike. Pan Am's the only American carrier into Europe, but Juan's a good friend of ours."
Juan? Who the hell is Juan? wondered Frank.
Pat must have read his mind. "Juan Trippe, you know, the president of Pan Am, so that's been worked out. Then it will be Ethiopian Airlines into Addis." She hammered out details and schedules, the car that would pick up Frank and Jackie at the airport, the apartment that would be waiting for them in New York. "Oh, you and your wife, Jackie, should both resign your jobs as soon as possible. Decide what belongings you'll want shipped over, what you want put in storage. We'll take care of all the arrangements."
It all moved rapidly, according to plan.
On his second day in WWC's headquarters overlooking the library lions on Fifth Avenue, Frank went into Pat Rhoden's office and was startled to see Dan Nitzke bounding up out of an overstuffed easy chair to greet him. "Hi, I bet you're surprised to see me. And boy, have I got a surprise for you."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Peregrine Spy by Edmund P. Murray. Copyright © 2004 Edmund P. Murray. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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