"Ma"am, I have satisfied myself on this one issue: I don"t believe no way your son would have killed another human being and I don"t believe he killed himself. I think he was duped by a professional Soviet agent-rather, Soviet in those days. Your son was sort of charmed into-"
"What a quaint euphemism. But I have to tell you I"m aware of my son"s h.o.m.os.e.xual leanings. You believe it was a h.o.m.os.e.xual thing?"
"I don"t know, ma"am. That"s not my department. I only know the result, that somehow he was snookered into a.s.sisting in what was represented as an act of symbolic violence as a way of reenergizing the peace movement. But the Russian operator, he didn"t give a tinker"s dam about the peace movement. He was only interested in your boy"s fame and reputation as a masking device for the mission"s real target, Ralph Goldstein, who was working on satellite topography-reading technologies and seemed on the verge of a breakthrough the Russians felt would put them way behind in the Cold War."
"It was only about murder, in the end. And some other boy was the target?"
"Yes, ma"am."
"So my poor Trig wasn"t even the star of his own murder?"
"No, ma"am."
"Well, he"d been the star of so many other things, I don"t suppose it matters."
"My guess is, he had begun to have doubts; perhaps he even tried to back out, or go to the FBI or something. Possibly there"s some record of his doubts in his missing sketches. But it appears I won"t never see them. He was killed, probably with a judo chop to the back of the neck. That was their specialty in those days. In fact, everybody who saw this agent was killed, at some effort, including another peace demonstrator named Peter Farris, a Marine named Donny Fenn, and later attempts were made on my wife, who had seen the agent with Trig. She was married to Donny Fenn at the time. I believe Ralph Goldstein was killed in the same way. Their bodies were put in the building and it was detonated. It goes down into the books as a violent fool and a math geek. But the books are always wrong. It was something entirely different; kids used by older, smarter, far more ruthless men, then thrown away for a momentary strategic advantage. It was a war, but the cold one, not the hot one."
"The one we won."
"I suppose we did."
"What happened to the Russian?"
"Well, our intelligence people found out a way to turn the information against him. I don"t know much about it, but he"s dead. They had it on CNN. You could see the burned bodies in the back of the Jeep."
"That nasty boy?"
"That one."
"And the man who was trying to kill you?"
"Well, he wasn"t trying to kill me. He was trying to kill my wife. He was stopped," Bob said. "And he ain"t never coming back."
"Were you responsible?"
Bob just nodded.
"Do you know what you are? Sergeant, you"re a sacred killer. All societies need them. All civilizations need them. It is to the eternal shame and the current d.a.m.nation of this country that it refuses anymore to acknowledge them and thinks it can get by without respecting them. So let an old bat speak a truth: you are the necessary man. Without you it all goes away."
Bob said nothing. Speculation on his place in the nature of things was not his style.
The old lady sensed this, and asked for an accounting of the politics of the affair, the details of history. He gave it, succinctly enough.
"Odd, isn"t it? As you"ve explained it, after it"s all counted up and all the accounts are settled, the one party to it all that could be said to benefit is the old Russian communist apparatus. It"s kept them from going under another few years. And who can tell what that"ll mean? The cruel irony of history, I suppose."
"I wouldn"t know about that, ma"am. They were very happy, the intelligence people, that they were able to stop this fellow Pashin. He was their real target. My wife was his, but he was ours, and we got him first."
"Well, anyway: you"ve provided a measure of serenity to my life. My son wasn"t a fool; he was overmatched by professionals, who"ve been punished. Justice isn"t much, but it helps the nights go easier."
"Yes, ma"am. I agree."
"Sometimes you don"t even get that, so one must be very grateful for what one does get."
"Yes, ma"am."
"Now ... I know you weren"t working for me, you were never my employee. But the one power I still have in the world is to satisfy myself through my checkbook. I would very much enjoy getting it out now and writing a nice big, fat one."
"Thank you," he said. "That"s not necessary."
"Are you sure?"
"I am."
"Soon there"ll be college expenses."
"Not for a while. We"re doing fine."
"Oh, I hope I haven"t spoiled things by bringing up money."
"No, ma"am."
"Well, then-"
"There is one thing, though."
"Name it."
"The painting."
"The painting?"
"The eagle after the fight. I don"t know a thing about art and I don"t know a thing about birds, but I"d be honored to have that. It has some meaning to me."
"You felt your breast stir when you saw it?"
"Well, something like that."
"Then you shall have it. Come with me, Sergeant Swagger."
She led him forthrightly out of the room, commanded the old butler to get a "torch"-a flashlight-and led Bob in the butler"s uncertain illumination to the studio. Their breaths plumed in the frosty air. She opened the door, found a switch and the birds flashed to life, still and majestic.
"These are worth quite a lot of money to connoisseurs of the macabre, I expect," she said. "But the eagle ... it"s so atypical, and also unsigned. Would you want a certificate of authenticity? It might seem pointless now, but when your daughter goes to school, it could mean the difference between buying one year at Radcliffe or four years."
"No, ma"am," he said, walking to the painting. "I just want it for what it is."
He stood before it, and felt its pain, its distraught, logy mind, its survivor"s despair.
"I wonder how he got so much into it," she said.
He unscrewed the painting from the easel, where it had been clamped since May of 1971. It was unframed, but the canvas was tacked stoutly to a wood backing.
"I hope you"ll let me pay for the framing," said the old woman. "That at least I can do."
"I"ll send you the bill," he said.
He wrapped the painting carefully in some rags, making certain not to disturb the elegant depth of the crusted pigment, and put the whole package delicately under an arm.
"All set," he said.
"Sergeant Swagger, again, I can"t thank you enough. You"ve made my dotage appreciably better, to no real gain of your own."
"Oh, I gained, Mrs. Carter. I gained."
The team watched him from far off, through night-vision binoculars. It had been a long stakeout until he showed, longer still since he was in there. Where had he been all afternoon? Still, it didn"t matter. Now it was going to happen.
Swagger turned his truck around, pulled out, drove down the lane, and by the time he got back to Falls Road, the number-one van had moved into position, not behind his turn, as amateurs will do, but before it, letting him overtake them, and falling into position from behind that way, without attracting notice.
Swagger pulled around the van, scooted ahead and settled into an unhurried pace.
"Blue One, this is Blue Two," said the observer into his microphone. "Ah, we have him picked up very nicely, no problems. I have Blue Three behind me, you want to run this by management?"
"Blue Two, management just got here."
"You stay on him, Blue Two, but don"t rush it," came the impatient voice any of them knew as Bonson"s. "Play in the other van if you think you"re in danger of being burned. Don"t be too aggressive. Give me an update-"
"Whoa, isn"t this interesting, Blue One. He didn"t do the beltway. He just stayed on Falls Road on the way into Baltimore."
"Doesn"t that become Eighty-three?" asked Bonson.
"Yes, sir, it does. Goes straight downtown."
"But his motel is out at B-W."
"That"s the credit card data. He had something with him, some kind of package. Maybe he"s going to do something with it."
"Got you, Blue Two, you just stay on him."
They watched as Bob drove unconsciously into downtown Baltimore on the limited access highway that plunges into that city"s heart. He pa.s.sed Television Hill with its giant antennae, and the train station, then the Sun Sun, and finally the road drifted off its abutments to street level and became a lesser boulevard called President Street just east of downtown.
"He"s turning left," said Blue Two. "It"s, uh, Fleet Street."
"The map says he"s headed towards Fells Point."
"What the h.e.l.l is he doing there? Is he starring in a John Waters movie?"
"Cut the joking on the net," said Bonson. "You stay with him. I"m coming in; be in town very shortly."
The men knew Bonson and his radio team were in a hangar at B-W Airport, less than twenty minutes south of town this time of night, a.s.suming there was no backup at the tunnel.
Bob turned up Fleet, and the traffic grew a bit thicker. He did not look around. He did not notice either the white or the black vans that had been on him since the country.
He pa.s.sed through Fells Point, jammed with cars, kids, sc.u.m and bars, presumably the shady night town of the city, and kept on driving. Another mile or two and he turned on the diagonal down a beat-up street called Boston.
"Blue One, this is Blue Two. The traffic is thinning out. He"s headed out Boston toward the docks. I"m going to stay on Fleet, run a parallel, and let Blue Three close on him, just to be safe."
"Read you, Two," said the observer in the second van.
There was no way Swagger could tell, now that the van which had been closest to him sped away down another road and the unseen secondary vehicle closed the gap, that he was under surveillance. More important, he exhibited nothing in his driving that demonstrated the signature of a surveillee who"d burned his trackers: he didn"t dart in and out of traffic, he didn"t signal right, then turn left, he didn"t turn without signaling. He just drove blandly ahead, intent on his destination.
But once he pa.s.sed two large apartment buildings on the right, at the harbor"s edge, he began to slow down, as if he were looking for something.
It was a kind of post-industrial zone, with ruined, deserted factories everywhere; oil-holding facilities for offloading by tankers; huge, weedy fields that served no apparent purpose at all but were nevertheless Cyclone-fenced. There was little traffic and almost no pedestrian activity; it was a blasted zone, where humans may have worked during the day, but deserted almost totally at night.
The number-two van was a good three hundred feet behind him when he turned right, down another street-it was called South Clinton Street-that seemed to veer closer to the docks. The van didn"t turn; it went straight, after its observer notified the first vehicle, which had run parallel down Boston, and itself turned right on the street Bob had turned down.
"Two, I have him," said the observer.
"Cool. I"ll roam a bit, then take up a tail position."
"That"s good work," said Bonson, over the net. "We"re going to lose you now. We"re going through the tunnel."
"I"ll stay on him, Blue One."
"Catch you when we get out of the tunnel."
The first van maintained about a four hundred-foot gap between itself and Swagger"s truck, which now coursed down desolate South Clinton Street. Off to the right, a giant naval vessel, under construction, suddenly loomed, gray and arc-lit for drama and security. Bob pa.s.sed it, pa.s.sed a bank, a few small working men"s restaurants, then stopped by the side of the road.
"G.o.ddammit," said Two. "Burned. G.o.ddammit."
His own driver started to slow, but he was exceedingly professional.
"No, just keep driving. Just drive by him. Don"t eyeball him as you pa.s.s him, don"t even think think about it; he"ll feel you paying attention. I"m dropping out of sight." about it; he"ll feel you paying attention. I"m dropping out of sight."
The driver continued at the same speed, while the observer dropped into the seat well, knowing that a single driver was much less of a giveaway signature for a tail job. And he hit the send b.u.t.ton.
"Blue Three, do you read?"
"Yeah, I"m past the Boston-South Clinton Street exchange, just pulled over."
"Okay, he"s stopped. We"re going to pa.s.s him; you come on by and pull off a long way down. He"s on the right. Don"t use your lights. Go to night vision and monitor his moves."
The lead vehicle sped around the curve, pa.s.sed several mountains of coal ready for loading on the right.
He pulled off when he was out of sight of the parked man.
"TWO, this is Three. I"m in position and I"ve got him in my night lenses. He"s just sitting there, waiting. I think he"s turned off his engine. No, no, he"s turned off his lights, now he"s pulling ahead, he"s turning in-now I"ve lost him."
"Okay, he"s gone to ground."