Checkpoint Charlie (9 page)

“They're wrong,” I told him. “We've developed one.”

“I see.” There was no emotion in Stossel's voice.

“West side, Checkpoint Charlie,” I said, “any time you're ready. We'll be waiting. Come alone, of course.” I smiled when I cradled the phone.

The smile wasn't for Stossel; it was for Myerson.

Stossel came out at eleven forty that night. It was twenty minutes short of the deadline Myerson had given me. There was a satisfying symmetry in that.

Davidson put the handcuffs on him. Stossel was stoic. “How long do I have?”

“You'll be all right now.” We rode toward the airport with Stossel squeezed between us in the Opel's back seat. It was safe to tell him now. I said, “Actually it's a benign poison. It has all the attributes and early symptoms of Luminous Poisoning but in fact it's the reverse.”

“Our doctors told me it was incurable. I had terrible cramps.”

“I didn't give you the poison, Stossel. I gave you the antidote. Like a serum. It contains similar properties.”

“You bluffed me.” He brooded upon his handcuffs. “Of course it was in the vodka.”

“Where else? I told you the weakness would trip you up.”

When I boarded the plane with Stossel I was savagely happy anticipating Myerson's rage. On the ten-hour flight I ate five dinners.

*   *   *

Trust
Charlie

I
SAID
, “Either cover up that mirror or let's meet somewhere else.”

Myerson showed me his surprise, then pained impatience. “For Pete's sake, Charlie. It's an ordinary hotel room. Booked at random.”

“I'm still alive after all these years because I'm a practicing paranoid, all right?”

“For Pete's sake.”

But we went down to the lobby and outside into the African sun, both of us in shirtsleeves against the heat. Myerson sneered at me.

We walked past a rank of ten-year-old taxis. At the open stalls vendors were selling passion fruit and mangoes and coconuts and what-have-you, all of it clustered with flies. We crossed the central square, dodging a spotty traffic of cars and trucks and sagging overcrowded buses; an armored personnel carrier growled past carrying a dozen soldiers who held automatic rifles in casual positions. Two of the soldiers were laughing. Myerson glanced up at the statue of the country's president and his sneer seemed to droop. Pedestrians moved lazily through the noxious smoke thrown around by the ill-maintained vehicles: it will be quite a while yet before Africa becomes pollution-conscious.

Myerson led me through a narrow passage and we emerged at the corner of a stone customhouse that one of the colonial powers must have built long ago. It might have been the Germans or the Portuguese or the English — several nations had claimed the colony at various times; the building itself was too drab to identify its architects. Its walls were overgrown with bougainvillea.

We found a wooden bench under a palm tree. The earth sloped down toward a stone retaining wall that held back the sea — we had a good view across the crescent of the harbor. Coastal freighters were anchored out, lighters plying to and from them; there was a fair crowd of Indian Ocean junks, square sails furled. The saltwater smell was rich, pungent with raw sewage. A few people ambled past us (no one moved quickly in that heat), most of them Africans, some in tribal gear and others in burnouses and Western clothes; the occasional Asian, the even rarer European in flowered prints or khakis or department-store poplin safari outfits.

Myerson favored me with a sour dry gaze. “Will this suit you?” We seated ourselves.

Then he smiled, putting as many teeth into it as an alligator, and I felt alarm.

“I see you've enjoyed your vacation. You've put on at least forty pounds — anything less wouldn't be noticeable on you. I really can't afford to let you off the leash this way. You'll eat yourself to death.”

I was overweight to be sure, and overage for that matter, but no more so than I'd been last time he'd seen me ten days earlier in Virginia. It was just his way of needling me.

I said, “It was a good holiday until you cut it short. I've still got eleven days coming to me.”

“Pull this off and you can have twelve.”

“That tough, is it?”

“Tough? No, I wouldn't say it was tough. I'd say it's impossible.”

“That's the kind I like.” I grinned at him. “Anyway it's desperate enough to get you out from behind your desk for the first time in I don't remember how long.”

He squirmed. “We're both on the line this time, I'm afraid.”

“In other words you've dropped the ball and if I don't pick it up you'll be thrown out of the game. I've expected this, you know. Sooner or later you were destined to foul up. Have you ever considered washing cars for a living? You may just have enough talent for it.”

“Let's save the catcalls for another time, Charlie. This is serious. It could mean my job — and you know what that means to you.”

I did. If he goes I go. They want me out. If it weren't for Myerson I wouldn't have a job. I'd probably have to turn to crime to keep the juices flowing.

He said, “The impossibility is named August Brent. British parents but he was born here and he's a citizen, one of the few. Under the old colonial regime he had a key job in the colonial exchequer. Educated at the London School of Economics. Since independence he's been something like second-secretary to the Minister of Finance, some title like that — he's a white man, after all, they couldn't very well give him a cabinet post, but the fact is he's been running the ministry. Until the terror.”

“And then?”

“When they started terrorizing the Asians and whites a few weeks ago he began to think about getting out. His mistake was in talking to too many people. The government got wind of his intentions to depart.”

Myerson looked out across the harbor. A graceful ketch was leaving under canvas; there was a racket of gulls. Soldiers in fatigues — armed — walked here and there by twos, quietly menacing.

Myerson said, “He was packed and ready to leave. He went out to buy something — airsick pills, something innocuous like that. The soldiers hit his house while he was out. On his way home he spotted them and had time to get out of sight but he knew the alarm was out, of course, and he made for the British Embassy but it was surrounded by troops. He backtracked and ended up on our doorstep. This was a week ago.”

“The American Embassy?”

“Right. He demanded asylum. Threw himself on the Ambassador's mercy.”

“Then they called you in.”

Myerson sighed. “I tried to bring him out, Charlie. I didn't want to disturb your vacation.”

“Sure.”

“I tried. I botched it. Is that blunt enough to satisfy you?”

“I'm tempted to gloat, sure enough.”

“He's still there. In the Embassy. An acute embarrassment to everybody — British, Africans, Americans. I can't guess which of them hate him the most.”

“Is he worth anything?”

“On the open market? Nothing. The inside secrets of the finances of a two-bit third world nationlet — who cares? No. Two cents would buy him.”

“Well, I guess the Ambassador must be a human being. Didn't want to throw the poor wretch to the wolves and all that. And anyhow we'd lose face if we reneged on the asylum. That it?”

“Acute embarrassment, yes. By protecting him we offend our African hosts; but by turning him loose we'd be welshing on a commitment. The British, of course, are laughing their heads off.”

“Why do the Africans want him?”

“He betrayed them and he's getting away with it. They can't have that. They need to prove it's dangerous for anyone to cross them. Charlie, listen — all else aside, there's no doubt in my mind but that if we gave him back to the Africans he'd last forty-eight hours at the outside. An accident, of course.”

The ketch dwindled toward the horizon, hoisting more sail. Myerson said, “It's a dreary mess. The man's of no value, not even to himself. If we do get him out, what of it? At best he'll find some petty civil service job in England. At worst he'll end up sleeping off cheap wine in alleys. Nobody cares about him — nobody needs to. He's a drip. But we have to try, don't we. We have to give him a chance.”

“I suppose. How did you try to get him out?”

“Laundry van. They searched it with bayonets. Pricked him pretty good. In the arm. We managed to hustle him back inside. A couple of shots were fired — no injuries but the Africans were pretty sore about it. They've quadrupled the guard around the Embassy. It's not rifles now, it's machine guns and riot troops. They're searching every vehicle and pedestrian that comes out of the building. You couldn't get a mosquito out of there now. I confess it's my fault — the laundry truck was my idea. We had a private jet waiting. It's only a five minute flight across the border.”

“Is the plane still available?”

“Yes.”

“Then all we have to do is get him to the plane and he's home free.”

“Sure. But if we try again and fail we'll be laughing-stocks from Johannesburg to Cairo. They'll tie a can to my tail. Yours too.”

“Why not just leave him in there until the Africans find something else to occupy them?”

“No good. Every minute he remains in that building he's a thorn in both sides. He could become the flashpoint of a nasty international incident.”

“So we have to get him out safely and soon.”

“Soonest.”

I stood up. “Let's have a look at the Embassy.”

*   *   *

I
T HAD BEEN
Government House in colonial times, built in Cecil Rhodes' time — Empire, the raj, so forth. It had been built to impress. Now it had the slightly gone-to-seed look that creeps up on buildings in the tropics — a symptom of dampness and heat and termites: the lines seemed to sag and things had gone grey in patches and parts of it appeared to be crumbling; possibly it was a trick of the afternoon shadows.

It stood behind a high wrought-iron fence. There were palm trees, flame trees, acacias. Six Doric columns supported the high porte-cochere. American flag. Four marines on duty at the gate.

The African troops slouched at intervals outside the fence. I counted twenty-eight men, a half-track APC, two jeeps and a radio truck; probably there were more behind the Embassy. I said drily to Myerson, “I don't see anything those four marines shouldn't be able to handle.”

“These are hardly the days of the Panay in the Yangtze. But I'll admit there was something to gunboat diplomacy. Tell me, Charlie, did you actually serve under Teddy Roosevelt?”

“Why, I did my boot training under George Armstrong Custer.”

“That's what I thought.”

A dusty bus drew up and decanted a camera-bedecked crowd of tourists, most of them Japanese, a few Americans and Europeans. The tour guide was a little man in sunglasses with a grey beard that looked as if rats had slept in it. From the color of his nose he was a drinking man. He said in a piping German-accented voice, “This way please, follow me,” and led the tourists past the watchful marines onto the Embassy grounds.

I was astonished. “They just come and go like that?”

“Nobody wants to stop them. The country needs tourists desperately and this building's a landmark. Bismarck and Queen Elizabeth slept in it. Not, I assume, on the same night. Actually she was Princess Elizabeth then. They —” he was talking about the tourists now “— only see the public rooms on the ground floor, of course. No access to working Embassy areas. You need a pass, ID and an armed escort to get past the doors. I think the tour groups visit twice a day. I heard part of the old German's spiel this morning. He's pretty good — an old Africa hand, used to hunt rhino with Selous when he was a boy.”

We walked inside and had to clear ourselves with the marine guard. The soldiers across the street watched balefully. We went through the main doors and passed through a series of interior checkpoints and finally entered a comfortable but not very large office whose occupant, like the government-green paint, was drab and in need of a touchup. I knew him vaguely from past acquaintance: Oscar Claiborne, twenty-five-year man, passed over numerous times for promotion, assigned to one backwater job after another. Officially he was some variety of trade attaché; actually he was the Agency's stringer. One look at him and you yawned.

“Oscar, you know Charlie Dark.”

We shook hands. Myerson said to Oscar, “Sit-rep?” He deludes himself into thinking his clumsy use of jargon phrases will ingratiate him with the men in the field. Sit-rep, some years ago, used to be Agency lingo for Situation Report.

Oscar said, “No change. He's in his room lying on his side, nursing the bad arm. Taking things calmly enough, I'll give him that.”

I said, “How bad is the bayonet injury?”

“Superficial. It's healing nicely.” Oscar beamed at me. “Hey, old buddy, how're they hangin'?”

“I'd like to talk to Brent,” I said to Myerson.

*   *   *

A
UGUST
B
RENT
was undersized and sharp-featured and had a cockney look. A monk's fringe of limp sandy hair ran around the back of his bald cranium. His speech was rapid and clipped, the English of a man born in Africa. I liked him well enough; he was too ingratiating but I attributed that to his obvious fear. I was glad to see he wasn't sweating unduly. That symptom is almost impossible to disguise.

We talked for a bit — I wanted him to warm to me. I needed his trust because he'd only go through with it if he believed I could be depended on. The scheme had occurred to me immediately and it was considerably less complex than many I'd essayed.

Oscar Claiborne interrupted us and took me outside into the hall. “Bad news, I'm afraid. They've issued a fugitive execution warrant on him.”