‘us,’ Mr. Tucker. I am turning them over to you.”
“Fine. Me. Why?”
“Because you have time to give them the attention they deserve. You are underused these days, I’m told.”
“If you know that, then you know they could easily be taken off my hands the minute I get back.”
“That would be a great pity and a great mistake. Take my word on this, my friend, even if you are disinclined to believe most of what I say. No one else will have as much interest in these files as you. No one else will ensure that what they contain is properly handled.”
Deriabin extended his emaciated hand. Again, Tucker worried about crushing the brittle bones under that transparent skin, but the old man’s grip was firm.
“This will be goodbye for me,” Deriabin said. “Only remember this, my friend—no man on earth desires as passionately as a Russian. Beware the one who desires too much.”
On the flight back, Tucker had been too exhausted and too drunk to give that or anything else much thought. It was only the next day, picking through the files, that he recalled the Navigator’s words. Who was “the one who desires too much”? he wondered.
Foreign Minister Zakharov, he presumed now. It seemed clear from the content of the files that Deriabin was determined for some reason to derail the man’s ambition by any means necessary—even treason. Zakharov’s rise to power had been nearly as ruthless as Deriabin’s own, but Tucker was aware of no evidence the two men had ever been rivals before now. So what had changed?
Then there was the old man’s apparently drunken commentary on women. His pointed reference to Mariah had been anything but haphazard, Tucker knew. It was to demonstrate the man knew where Tucker was most vulnerable. That, however debilitated the Navigator might seem, he had no compunction about manipulating that vulnerability for his own purposes. And that he was confident Tucker would act on the information in the files.
Well, maybe, Tucker thought grimly. But not necessarily in the way Deriabin expected. Because the linchpin in the Navigator’s scheming, he now knew, was the death in Paris nearly thirty years earlier of an impoverished American author. And if it were up to Tucker, that episode could bloody well remain shrouded in lies.
But it wasn’t up to him.
After Mariah’s call from Los Angeles, he realized the decision might already be out of his hands. Although fame had eluded Ben Bolt in life, it had grown exponentially in the years since his death, pretty much guaranteeing that someone, sooner or later, would stumble on the truth. If not this Urquhart character, then someone else.
Now it was time for damage control.
Still shaken by the eerie timeliness of Mariah’s call, and by hearing her voice for the first time in weeks, Tucker gathered the musty folders abruptly and got to his feet. If they hadn’t called him upstairs by now, to hell with them. He’d go and collect her letter.
Or not.
A rap sounded on his door and the Operations deputy strode in without waiting for a response. “Hey there, Frank,” Jack Geist said breezily.
Tucker nodded. “Jack.”
“Don’t get up on my account.” Geist dropped his lanky frame into a chair on the other side of the desk, giving the cramped office a smug once-over as his legs sprawled out in front of him. “See you got back safe and sound from your trip. Would’ve called you up first thing, but things have been a little wild today.”
“I figured.”
“You heard about this Kurdish business?”
Tucker nodded and sat down again. He was out of the loop, but he wasn’t brain-dead. He’d been in the game long enough to know that any situation making headlines would have the front office running to stay ahead of the breaking-news wave. The morning papers said the Turkish crisis had heated up overnight, with rebel Kurds massing for imminent confrontation with government forces.
“I gather the Russians have sent forces southward through Armenia,” he said.
The deputy grimaced. “Bastards just can’t resist mixing into it, can they?”
“They’ll say they’re looking to protect the country’s soft underbelly in case the situation spills across borders.”
“That’s what they’re saying, all right. Situation’s turning into a bloody circus. The Russians, Iran, Iraq, Greece, Cyprus—all getting their knickers in a twist. And, of course, the usual charges that we’re behind everything, orchestrating the situation for our own nefarious ends.”
Tucker nodded. The truth was less tidy than anybody’s simplistic explanations would have it, but it didn’t change the fact that once again, policy wonks like Geist here had gotten themselves caught on the horns of their own short-sightedness. It had probably seemed like a good idea after the Gulf War to enforce a no-fly zone to protect Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish opponents in northern Iraq. Except now that they no longer had Baghdad to worry about, the Iraqi Kurds were free to come to the aid of their unhappy brethren living across the border in Turkey, launching a full-scale assault on the weakest link in the NATO chain.
“Kind of makes you long for the good old black hat– white hat days of the cold war, doesn’t it, Jack?”
“No kidding. Look, I gotta get back upstairs real quick. National Security Council’s meeting this afternoon, and we’re trying to come up with a position that doesn’t absolve the bloody Turks, who are anything but blameless, but doesn’t piss them off so much they take their ball and go home.” Geist laced his fingers across his flat belly and tipped his chair back on two legs. “So where are we on this Navigator business? Learn anything useful over there?”
He fixed Tucker with the dramatic, piercing stare that was infamous inside the agency for setting younger, less experienced operatives off on uncontrollable fits of stammering. The effect was lost on Tucker, who could out-glower anyone—although he did consider pointing out that the furniture in this crummy office was strictly ancient government surplus and probably not up to the physics of two-legged rocking.
He decided against it. Geist was an ambitious hotshot looking for quick glory, the first to claim credit when an operation went right, and to distance himself when one went sour. If he ended up ass-over-teakettle, it’d be nice payback for the open cynicism he’d shown when he heard that a has-been like Tucker had been handed a personal message from the Navigator.
It was no surprise that, rather than call a meeting of the small committee that had vetted Tucker’s trip to meet the Navigator, Geist had nominated himself to drop in alone for a debriefing. He was hedging his bets—still downplaying the business internally, but determined to stay on top of things in case there was any chance of a major payoff.
“We’ve got about fifteen hundred pages’ worth of what looks to be the genuine article,” Tucker said carefully. “Originals, not copies. I can do the initial examination myself. Eventually, I’ll need a couple of computer people, Russian-language capable, to log it all in and create a secure database I can cross-reference and run against our own files.”
One of Geist’s eyebrows rose. “That all? Sure you don’t want us to take one of the Crays offline and dedicate it to this little assignment?”
Tucker
