“Fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll talk to you. Get going and make sure you’re alone.”
Spode hung up and went out to the car. Drove out through the alley and made the right turn on Speedway and spent five minutes going through the standard maneuvers to disclose a tail. When he was satisfied he cut south across the city toward Broadway. Street lights made pale pools along the empty streets and at the Broadway corner a traffic light blinked red, on and off. Spode’s nostrils dilated; he was keyed up now, sensing the scope of things.
For three minutes he sat in the darkened car a block from Miller’s house and looked out the long empty street toward the desert. Nothing showed up, in front or in the mirror, and when he was sure he got out of the car carrying the camera and Kemp’s gun.
The lights were on and the drapes were drawn. Miller opened the door, looked past him in all directions and let him in. Miller was bald and slow-moving, but his big round gut was hard as a truck tire. He was only thirty-three or so. He edited a little regional monthly magazine; that was his cover. His editorial office was in the house and that made it handy. He had been divorced five years ago and lived alone. Spode hadn’t seen him in several years but they didn’t take time to cover the amenities; Spode put the camera and the gun on Miller’s desk and said, “Okay, so who is he?”
“We’ll have to make sure. George said you had prints too. On the gun?”
“Maybe, but they’d be mixed with mine. This’ll do better.” Spode dumped the broken piece of shower-stall glass out of his handkerchief onto the desk.
Miller picked up the camera and handled the glass carefully by its edges. “Let me set these up back in the darkroom—I’ve got a dusting-kit back there too. You want to wait or you want to come with me?”
“Hell, I want to talk. I’m coming with you.”
Miller took him through to the back of the house into a small windowless room that smelled of photographic chemicals. “What film you got in here?”
“Tri-X. Most of it’s documents and I’ll thank you not to read them—it’s for my boss. The mug shots will be the last five toward the end. I didn’t use up the whole roll.”
“Okay. I’ve got to turn off the light to transfer it into the tank. Stay put so I don’t go crashing into you.”
The room went dark and Spode stood still. “You still didn’t say who he is.”
“We’re not sure, of course. But it could be Leon Belsky.”
Spode blinked in the darkness. His lips went dry and he licked them. His whisper was hoarse: “Sweet Jesus.”
When the film was in the lightproof development canister Miller switched the light on and dusted the glass shard with powder. “Too bad it’s mottled glass. It may not come up as clear.” But it was coming up; Spode could see the whorls and ridges held by skin oil when Miller blew the excess dust away. “But these don’t look half-bad.” Miller placed it carefully upside-down on the glass carrier of his Xerox machine and ran off three paper prints of it until he had a clear one. “A lot faster than photography,” he explained. “Now we’ll shoot this off to Virginia.”
They went across the hall into the office. It was a maddening clutter of papers and glossy color photos and scattered books. The telephone had a document transmitter attached to it. Miller dialed and got through to Extension Three. “George? Art Miller. Jaime’s here and I’ve got a Xerox of some fingerprints. I’m going to put them on the phone. You hooked up? … Okay, here goes.”
Miller put the telephone receiver down on the transmitter cradle and fed the Xerox sheet into the machine. It would take the scanner a few minutes to cover the whole sheet. Miller said to Spode, “Anything else, Jaime?”
“I got the license number of his car of course, but it was a new Ford and he probably got it from Hertz. He’s going under the cover of Meldon R. Kemp. NARS researcher ID card with FBI colors. Various gun permits and the like from Fresno. I can write it all down if you want but I doubt it’ll lead us to anything.”
“How much did you give him?”
“Nothing much. But he’ll have to act on the hypothesis that I’m U.S. Government and that I’ll find out who he is.”
“So he’s probably clearing out right now. It’s a shame, but there you are. How’d you come up against him?”
“I think I’d better talk to George about that first.”
“Okay,” Miller said without rancor. The transmitter was finished and Miller picked up the telephone. “Got it, George? … Okay, I’ve got high-speed chemicals in the darkroom and we’ll probably have mug proofs for you by the time you’ve run those prints through the file. I’ll call you back. But meantime Jaime wants to talk to you.”
Miller handed him the phone and Spode said, “If it’s Belsky then we’ve got a strange situation here, George, because I ran into him in Congressman Ross Trumble’s house.”
He had made the decision in the car driving over here. If the Agency was going to be involved in this at all they were going to have to know the whole truth, or at least as much of it as Spode knew himself. There was no point manufacturing expedient half-truths because they would only backfire. The Agency wasn’t interested in Senator Forrester’s need for the Phaeton figures; there was no reason for any of this to affect Forrester’s activities. How much Spode would tell Forrester would depend on whether he came up with information of use to Forrester’s case. It was possible this had nothing to do with Forrester and in that event Spode didn’t intend to mention it at all.
So he gave George the whole thing on the telephone and Art Miller was standing across the hall in the darkroom, within earshot, taking it in.
George asked, “What did he seem to be looking for?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was looking for Trumble.”
“In a dark house? With a flashlight and a gun?”
“I don’t know anything I didn’t tell you, George. I’m not holding anything back.”
“Then let’s mull it for twenty minutes and get back to each other when these paper returns are in.”
Spode cradled the phone and sat down in Miller’s office chair and tried to pull the threads together.
He went out to the living room to get on the extension so they could have a three-cornered conference. The photos and fingerprints had turned up positive: it was Leon Belsky, no mistake. It wasn’t the first time Belsky had been in the States but it was the first time they’d spotted him here; the other times he’d stayed ahead and they hadn’t caught up with him until he’d returned to his favorite East European haunts—Prague, Bucharest, Odessa. Belsky was a Control, not a field agent. Wherever he went there was something important.
Spode said, “Look at it. He circles the house, maybe he’s been driving by for hours waiting for Trumble to show up. He sees there’s nobody home. Finally he lets himself in—I assumed he had keys but maybe he’s a good lock man. He had to unlock the alarm system as well as the door. Anyhow he gets in. Assume he’s waiting to jump Trumble. He figures nobody’s home, but he’s a pro and he’s supposedly got his mind in working order, so naturally he goes through the house to make sure it’s secure before he settles down to wait for Trumble to show up. He’s not really expecting to find anybody, so he’s a shade less alert than he might be otherwise, and I manage to get the jump on him. Now we have a little tête-à-tête and I leave. Possibly he’s gone back there to wait for Trumble, but I doubt it—he’s got to assume I’ve reported him, so right about now he’s probably going across the border into Mexico. But we know one thing. He wasn’t there looking for the same thing I was looking for. I was after documents. Belsky was after something man-size. We have to assume Trumble. Anyway whatever Belsky was up to, you’ll probably have to find out at Trumble’s end.”
George’s voice said, “Don’t be so quick to assume he’ll pull in his horns and run for it. He hasn’t finished whatever he came here for. Moscow had something important in mind or they wouldn’t have picked a heavyweight in his class. He knows we’ve spotted him but he’s got a lot of room to hide in. He knows we haven’t got the slightest idea where to start looking for him. We have to go on the assumption that he hasn’t completed his assignment yet and that he’ll try to go through with it; he’s taken risks before, he’s not easy to scare off. So there’s still a chance we can flush him.”