“… state of the art, of course,” Darras droned on. “They’re piranhas, these computers. So small, yet so voracious. You feed them and feed them and feed them. They digest everything you feed them.”
Strand listened with his eyes, but his chest was tightening. It was the worst feeling in the world, and he had hoped never to experience it again. It was what the fleeing springbok felt when the pursuing cheetah seemed to read its mind—every feint was anticipated, with every dodge the cat was there… and there… and there.
Suddenly he said, “Alain, I need a couple of forged passports. U.S.”
Darras regarded him. “I need a photograph.”
“Use one of yours. I know you’ve got one.”
“This is costly.”
“I don’t have any choice. And I need dossiers on two other names.”
He took a notepad from his coat pocket and wrote down “Ariana Kiriasis” and “Claude Corsier.” He tore out the piece of paper and put it on the table and again spun it around with his finger for Darras to read.
Darras dropped his eyes to the paper and then looked up.
“You decided to cut yourself off from them.”
“Yes.”
“They don’t know where to find you.”
“No.”
“That was your idea.”
“Yes.”
Darras was almost amused but conquered the impulse.
“You tried to slip away from your own shadow.” Without looking he reached for an olive, but they were all gone. “That’s what I was talking about,” he said, wiping his fingers on a napkin. “The shadow of intelligence work. Once it attaches itself to you, it follows you around on the ground, on the water, up the sides of walls. You try to get rid of it at your own peril.”
“Any problem with the other names?” Strand asked. He looked at his watch, just to let Darras know he had to leave.
“No.”
“By tomorrow.”
“If at all possible. Certainly as soon as possible.”
Strand nodded. “Thank you.”
He pushed back his chair to leave. Darras didn’t move; he was staying. Strand stood, and Darras looked up at him.
“I like you, Strand,” Darras said. “I always thought you were a decent fellow, which is a curse in this business.”
Strand parked the rental car in Largo Fontanella Borghese, a cobblestoned courtyard only a few steps from Toula. For a moment he sat in the car and watched the occasional nocturnal pedestrian drift toward Via Condotti and the Spanish Steps. The steps were a colossal magnet for the tourists, and if you were anywhere in the neighborhood, you were within the pull of that romantic flight of stairs and the pink place of John Keats’s death that overlooked it.
He felt as though he were about to go onstage and had to give the performance of his life. He didn’t know who Mara Song was, but he knew damn well what she might be. His proximity to danger, his sudden realization of his unknowing close association with it over the past several months in the person of this woman, made him light-headed. What had she done? What was she supposed to do? How close had he come—how close was he—to disaster?
He remembered too well the physiological symptoms of fear. It racked the body so thoroughly that hardly any organ remained unaffected. Everything reacted, everything threatened to fail under the stress of it. And in this case the metaphorical ache in the heart was by no means the least of Strand’s anxiety. He had been a fool. Had he really been so out of touch with his benighted past as to believe that he could meet a woman like Mara, a woman who seemed so right to him in nearly every way, and she
wouldn’t
be a player? Did he really believe that he could have a life apart from all those cryptic years? Jesus. He was getting old after all, wasn’t he, and now he could add a deeply felt heartache to the rattling confusion of dread.
He guessed Darras was about right. Strand was like a man who had been a heavy drinker all his life and was now suffering from damaged organs. The past wasn’t going to go away for that man, and it wasn’t going to go away for Harry Strand, either. It would always be with him to threaten him, to despoil even his quiet moments, to remind him that what he had done for nearly twenty years had come at a high cost and that a large part of the debt was still outstanding.
Suddenly the image of Romy, her arms fighting to control the steering wheel, flashed into his mind. He saw her face as she looked back over her shoulder into the spotlight from the car behind her. How horrified she must have been. Had she thought of him in those last terror-stricken moments? Did it enter her mind that he somehow had failed her?
He swallowed the lump in his throat and got out of the car.
The restaurant was long, with a small bar just to the right of the entry with large armchairs and settees. To the left, one descended five steps to the main dining rooms, a series of three of them separated by an enfilade of arches that terminated in a pale terra-cotta wall. The rooms were lighted by lamps that made the stucco walls throw off a warm hazy light and caused the white linen tablecloths to phosphoresce like so many moonflowers scattered throughout the twilight of the rooms.
Mara waited for him in the center room at a table that he guessed she had requested specifically, since it afforded considerable privacy. She had quickly learned of Strand’s demanding preference for a quiet table. She wore a simple black cocktail dress with thin straps and a low-cut neck. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon, and she wore black pearl earrings set in a crescent of diamonds.
He bent over and kissed her, surprised by her fragrance and by the ache for her that mixed so strangely with the grief. He sat down, his chest tightened to the point of collapsing his lungs.
“I’m glad you saw the note,” he said, taking a napkin and unfolding it.
“Couldn’t miss it,” she said, smiling.
“At the last minute I needed a few more books,” he said. The waiter appeared and poured wine for him from the bottle that Mara had already ordered.
They ate dinner slowly, Strand concentrating intensely on trying to pace himself so that he didn’t betray even a hint of uneasiness or preoccupation. It was a greater burden even than he had anticipated, for every time he smiled or tried to make a lighthearted remark he saw Romy’s face looking back over her shoulder at him. Trying to maintain a semblance of equanimity with that image flashing constantly into his mind was torture.
Halfway through the meal he was jolted by the sudden realization that he had made a terrible mistake. He should not have let the videotape out of his hands. After he had viewed the complete tape three times, after he had collected his unraveled thoughts, he had immediately begun the necessary procedures to find Darras. When he’d finally found him, they had agreed on a meeting place and Strand had hurried out of the house—leaving the tape in the machine.
Now that seemed a tragic mistake. What if it wasn’t there when he returned? What if he had let the only proof of Romy’s murder get away from him? Aside from the evidence that it represented, it would be a betrayal of Romy to have let that documentation slip through his fingers. He feared that if he never saw the tape again, eventually, over time, he might begin to wonder if he had ever really seen it at all. Too easily those stark images of the crash might fade from reality into a vivid nightmare, and at some point in a future as yet unimagined he might awaken suddenly in the darkness, sweating, haunted by the question of whether he had only dreamed what had seemed so terrible and so real.
The rest of the meal was excruciating.
It seemed an eternity before Mara’s breathing settled into the unmistakable rhythm of sound sleep. He lay in the dark beside her, exhausted. Though they had had sex—a truly schizophrenic experience for him—his fatigue was the result of nervous tension, not the sex. He really didn’t know if he could do this. He was less resilient than he used to be. This would have been hard in the past, of course, but it wouldn’t have taken so much out of him. It had been only seven hours since he had found the video, but every hour had seemed a full day in itself. The tension and the doubt and the lack of direction had consumed him.
He had to admit that the three years with Romy had been disarming, and as those years had added up, Schrade had receded further and further into the past. After Romy’s death—he was stunned that he had ever accepted her car crash as an accident—Schrade had faded off the screen entirely. Until tonight. Strand was feeling the full strain of the whiplash.
As he waited for Mara to fall asleep, her head on his chest, his arm around her naked shoulders, he replayed the evening minute by minute. Had he given himself away? He sifted through the vocabulary of their conversation and tried to remember her exact facial reactions to everything he had said. Were there subtleties that, in retrospect, were telltale signs of suspicion? Had her eyes lingered on him at any point, or had they turned away as she asked a question that might have been planted to elicit a revealing response? Had she been more reserved than before, or had she been too relaxed, pretending not to notice something in his behavior that had set her sensors tingling?
Then, later, there was the surreal sexual intercourse with her, she who was suddenly no longer Mara. His imagination careened from possibility to possibility. All of this piled on top of his own emotions about her, emotions that had grown and matured during the last three months so quickly and comfortably that he would never have imagined he could have been capable of it. His was a fool’s dismay, precisely the thing he himself had relied on in the past to catch a fool. It was a bleak realization.
Mara’s breathing had been consistent for half an hour. She had shifted in her sleep and rolled over on her stomach away from him, throwing back the sheet so that she was naked all the way down to the two dimples above her buttocks.
He eased out of bed and lifted his robe off a chair and went downstairs. A pale light from the city flooded the room in powder blue as it came in from the courtyard. He could easily make his way around the first large sofa, across the Persian carpet to the black Maillol statue.
The tape was gone.
His ears actually began ringing, and he almost lost his balance. He scrambled through the cassette boxes and put each one into the player, regardless of its label. No luck. He stood still, looking out to the courtyard where the palms were black silhouettes.
Bill Howard sat alone in a room filled from floor to ceiling with electronic equipment: computer screens and keyboards, television screens, deck panels crowded with square and round buttons and toggle switches, red-and-green digital readouts, and black-and-white analogue dials. He sat at a built-in countertop with a notepad, a pencil, and a mug of coffee. Though the room was permeated with the odor of hot plastics and electrical wiring, he was freezing, the thermostat on the air-conditioning system having been turned down low to keep the equipment from overheating.
To Howard’s left was a plate-glass window that looked into the next room, where two engineers worked in an environment almost identical to the one in which Howard was sitting. He had just put on a set of headphones with a pencil-thin microphone attached, leaving his hands free so that he could doodle on the notepad and sip coffee.
He heard a series of stereophonic clicks in the headphones and looked at the engineers through the plate glass. One of them looked at Howard and began counting down through the headphones and then pointed at Howard.
“Hello, Gene?”
Gene Payton was always very polite, and Howard impatiently endured a brief exchange of pleasantries. Then he said, “Well, it’s just exactly what I goddamn thought, Gene. We’ve got a serious glitch in the Strand situation. Bad, bad timing. Kiriasis is afraid Schrade has discovered the embezzlement and is tracking them all down. She swears she hasn’t been in touch with any of them except Corsier. She wants protection.”
Howard stared at the blinking lights and listened.
“No, I acted shocked, stunned to hear what they’d done. If she’s lying and really is in touch with Strand, or even if she isn’t and he gets in touch with her, whatever, if they communicate, we don’t want him to know we’ve known about this for over a year. If he knew that, his mind would go to work on it. We sure as hell don’t want that.”
Howard listened.
“Sure, she wants to know how we’re going to handle it. What we’re going to do with Strand.”
Howard sipped his coffee. The mug was crazed and a thousand servings of coffee had permanently stained it. It should have been thrown away. It looked filthy.
“I told her the truth,” he said. “I said it would depend on who ended up with the money… What?”
He listened.
“No, my hunch is Harry kept it strictly compartmentalized. She’s not going to know much, but we need to find out what she does know. I have to find out if there’s some way we can use her. If we can’t use her, then we sure as hell have to keep her out of the way.”
He doodled on the notepad and glanced up at the engineers in the next room. The one standing was telling the other one an animated story. They were both laughing. Howard tossed his pencil down in disgust.
“Well, we know he’s killing them, for Christ’s sake. I can’t go knock on his door and ask him to please stop because he’s screwing up our little program here. Schrade’s tactics are a lot more persuasive than ours, Gene. I think we’re trying to be too smart for our own good. It’s hard to compete with brutality and goddamn hair-raising fear.”
He listened.
“I know, I know. We haven’t got any choice now but to go ahead and play it out, but I think we need to be flexible here. Schrade’s scattering these people all the hell over the place. They’re either dying or running. My bet is that his harebrained revenge program is eventually going to screw up our own operation. I don’t care how much time and money and planning we’ve put into it.”
He listened.
“Of course Schrade knows where he is. You kidding me?”